The Failed Engineering Model of Personalized [sic] Learning

This is a remarkable thing-- someone has expressed clearly in a few paragraphs what I have tried to say over the course of multiple posts. The subject-- personalized [sic] learning-- is not remarkable, but the source -- Larry Berger, CEO of Amplify-- is. The following is excerpted from a note that Berger sent to Rick Hess (AEI) which Hess just posted in his EdWeek blog.

Until a few years ago, I was a great believer in what might be called the "engineering" model of personalized learning, which is still what most people mean by personalized learning. The model works as follows:

You start with a map of all the things that kids need to learn.

Then you measure the kids so that you can place each kid on the map in just the spot where they know everything behind them, and in front of them is what they should learn next.

Then you assemble a vast library of learning objects and ask an algorithm to sort through it to find the optimal learning object for each kid at that particular moment.

Then you make each kid use the learning object.

Then you measure the kids again. If they have learned what you wanted them to learn, you move them to the next place on the map. If they didn't learn it, you try something simpler.

...
Here's the problem: The map doesn't exist, the measurement is impossible, and we have, collectively, built only 5% of the library.

Yes.

Berger gets into the specifics of the problems with the map, the measurement and the library, and he further notes that even if all those parts worked, you'd still have to deal with what the live human child actually wanted to learn next.

This failed model for personalized learning grows out of a failed model of learning, the idea that there is a train that runs from Ignoranceville straight to downtown Smartland, and everyone needs to ride a train along those same tracks. In this model, "personalized" just means that we'll let people get on the train at different stations.

True personalized learning is a whole bunch of territory, and everyone sets their own destination and everyone starts from a different place and everyone has their own particular means of transportation. That's why you need a human teacher-- someone who functions as native guide who knows the whole territory, can find people where they are, and can help them navigate whatever sorts of challenges they face on their particular journey.

So why does the engineering model persist? Partly because of the flawed notion of what education is, but also because the engineering model can produce a good ROI at scale. You describe the ideal set-up of map, measure and library, and then, like a designer hawking a ready-to-wear knockoff of a Fashion Week hit, you sell folks the scaled down version. The engineering model may not be achievable, ever, but it is definitely marketable and, until folks catch on, profitable.

Hess: The Promise and New Rhetoric of School Choice

Regular readers know that I have a measure of respect for Rich Hess (AEI) among the reformsters, and today he has published a defense of school choice in US News. It's articulate and thoughtful.

But he's still wrong.

He opens with a concern that we might be arguing too much about outcomes. This is ironic, since the choice movement was launched primarily on the promise of better outcomes, coupled with the assertion that public school outcomes were terrible. Choice was necessary, we were told, to rescue students from failing public schools. But the rhetoric of the choice movement has shifted, and in Hess's piece, we can see the shift before our very eyes. Hess worries that "amidst these energetic debates" about outcomes, evidence, and cost, a larger point is being lost.

While choice advocates tend to talk mechanistically about the results of "randomized control trials" or the failures of "bureaucratic monopolies," the real promise of school choice is its humane, empowering and organic vision of educational improvement.

Choice is not an "intervention" or a "pill."

If we're being honest, the promise of school choice is not that, tomorrow, schools will magically be "better." The promise is that, over the long haul, things like charter schooling, voucher programs and educational savings accounts will create room for individuals to innovate, problem-solve and build. They can empower educators and families to create and choose better schools.

Remember when charter/choice advocates declared that students couldn't wait one more day for public schools to get better. Now that charter/choice schools have discovered they can't make magic overnight (well, except for that one trick where they make a whole school vanish overnight), the urgency has been dialed back.

But central to the new sales pitch is the story of parent empowerment. The new pitch is that if we just put the power in parent hands, the educational world will be better. That's an arguable point-- some parents are awesome, but every teacher has stories of students who would have been better off raised by wolves (my true stories include the father who spent the utility money on beer and the mother who tried to run over her daughter with a car). But let's agree that parents are by and large responsible and concerned.

The problem remains-- choice systems, particularly voucher and ESA super-voucher systems do not empower parents.

More precisely, they only empower parents of Highly Desirable Children. Students with high ability, great test scores, and engaged parents are able to pick and choose the school they want (provided, in some cases, that they also attend the right church, follow a traditional gender orientation, and are born the correct ethnicity). But parents of Less Desirable Children do not get to choose a school to attend, because ultimately in a choice system, it is the schools that get to choose.

Consider what this means, for instance, to a parent of a child with special needs. It is true that public schools often are reluctant to properly meet those needs, and parents end up in court-- but parents end up in court precisely because the law does not give public schools a choice-- they MUST meet the needs of those students. Yes, it stinks that the parents have to go to court, but at least they have the leverage of the law. Any private school can simply show them the door-- if you don't think we're meeting your child's needs, your option is to vote with your feet. Charter and private schools can make their position clear right up front-- "You're welcome to apply, of course, but we don't hire any staff with the expertise to run a program to help your child."

Or consider the article today by Anya Kamanetz, showing how charters have learned to repeat the mantra "I trust parents," but use and manipulate those parents as political tools.

This is not parent empowerment.

When the school has the final say over whether a child can attend, or continue to attend that school, that is not parent empowerment.

A choice system also disempowers taxpayers without children. That means employers, neighbors, fellow citizens, grandparents-- it is the very definition of taxation without representation. Under a choice system, you can be a black citizen paying taxes to support a school that teaches you would be better off as a slave, and there's no place for you to complain about it. Do public schools include some horrifying pockets of inexcusable racism? Absolutely-- but taxpayers have a recourse in those cases. In a choice system, they have none. That is not empowerment.

But Hess is interested in empowering some other folks as well.

The logic becomes easier to grasp if you spend much time talking school improvement with principals or district leaders. Conversations are peppered with phrases like, "I'd like to do this but the contract requires..." or "I'd like to pay them more but HR says..." and "I'd love to move those dollars but we're not allowed." Educators wrestle with inherited rules, regulations and contract provisions that may no longer make sense but which can be extraordinarily difficult to change. Even when formally allowed to act, school and system leaders are hamstrung by ingrained customs and culture.

This is old school charter/choice rhetoric, linked to the Visionary CEO school of school management-- the CEO should be free to do whatever he wants to do. But the absence of rules does not always lead to vitality (ask the other Koch brother William, who discovered that his charter was a financial and organizational mess). There's no doubt that many schools suffer from government mandates that make life difficult for the school-- but then, as some charter/choice fans like to point out, the school isn't supposed to be organized for the convenience of the adults. See above example of parents taking schools to court over failure to meet requirements of state and federal law.

Laws can be changed for public schools as easily as they can be dropped for charter/choice schools-- unless, of course, it turns out that the laws provide important protections for students. The reference to contracts is a red herring-- nobody is operating under a teacher contract longer than a couple of years, meaning opportunities to renegotiate appear often. "Custom and culture" often exist for good reasons (though sometimes for terrible ones).

Few older organizations, in any sector, are good at managing change. Organizations grow rigid with time, which makes it difficult to take advantage of new technology or address changing needs. When we tell educators that the only path to reimagining schools or schooling is to "fix" aged systems or schools, we can put them in a nearly impossible position.

Well, when you talk about anything as the "only" path to better schools, we get suspicious, and certainly no less so when you are not actually educators yourselves. But generally speaking, those of us who work in public education eat impossible for breakfast. It's private and charter school operators who are more likely to say, "This is impossible. Therefor, we are closing up shop."

It's not like school districts never change. They change all the time. But the changes tend to be cosmetic and inch-deep, precisely because bigger changes create discomfort and require painful modifications to existing rules, contracts and routines. This can make it prohibitive to launch a new school or reconfigure an old one.

At least Hess doesn't embrace the ridiculous "schools haven't changed in 100 years" line. But I think he's skipping over something important-- schools are conservative about change because we are working with real live young humans. Ultimately I haven't been railing against the Common Core and the Big Standardized Test because those reforms inconvenienced me or made me uncomfortable or damaged my routine, but because they have been bad for the education of the young humans for whom I have accepted responsibility. "First, do no harm" is an implied portion of my teacherly oath, and these policies have been harmful. Too many days I have been "uncomfortable" because I feel like a surgeon told that the new protocol for heart surgery is to make incisions with a rusty shovel.

Before they can even get started, educators seeking transformative change have to exhaust themselves just battling for permission to act.

I don't disagree with this, and schools often err on the side of timidity. But I'd argue that's not a bad thing. Another way to say "I'd like to radically transform how we do this" in schools is to say "I'd like to experiment on your children." That's not a request to be treated lightly.

School choice makes it far easier to start new schools, which can settle on a clear and coherent purpose from the outset. New schools can adopt the kinds of instructional programs, calendars and staffing models they want without having to unwind what's already there or negotiate with skeptical stakeholders.

School choice also makes it far easier to launch new forms of educational malpractice without anyone in place to say, "Now hold on." And they can settle on a clear and coherent purpose-- or they can not. And as practiced in most states, they can allow any fraud or scam artist to bilk the taxpayers at the expense of students who can never get the wasted years back. And while doing that, they can also strip resources away from the students who are still in public schools (the same students that the charter/choice operators manage not to choose for their schools).

But because school choice is an opportunity and not a solution, its success rests on having the ecosystem in place to cultivate and support good new schools. Since they first entered the picture more than a quarter-century ago, charter schooling and school voucher programs have enjoyed real success, but far less than advocates anticipated. I suspect this is partly because many advocates spent so much energy insisting that choice "works" that they spent less time than they should have focusing on what it takes to make it likely that choice will work.

I sort of agree with this (except maybe the "real success" part), though I would add that in most cases, advocates know exactly what it takes to make charter success more likely-- they just don't like it. They have valued autonomy over accountability. They have placed business concerns over educational concerns. They have put dollars over children. Or they have refused to discuss the true cost of operating multiple school systems. Or they have placed more value on amateur-hour "transformative" ideas over the experience and knowledge of education professionals. Or they have put the entrepreneurial dream ($600 billion dollars just sitting there, ripe for the taking!!) over the public education dream of getting a decent education for every single child.

In the end, the right way to think about choice is not as Dr. Pendergrast's Miracle Salve but as an opportunity to empower educators, entrepreneurs and parents.

The problem is that at this point, only one of the three groups has been consistently empowered by the modern charter/choice movement. The language of empowerment is certainly a better sell than the old language of salvation and rescue, but as charter/choice stands right now, it is no more accurate.

Breaking News: Software Still Can't Write

Chances are you've seen the ads for Grammarly, a service that, at least in the ads, seems to offer the same mediocre writing advice that you can get from the red and green squiggly lines in Word. Can we expect to see Clippy offering to run your HR department soon?

In one ad, it helps a student spot passive voice and a comma splice and a plagiarized section, and so she gets an A+ and the professor writes "wonderful use of words." It's true-- my favorite student papers are the ones that use words! And that damned thing has been viewed almost seven million times. In another, Grammarly helps a man write a come-on text, saving him from using the wrong "its" and the wrong "write." And the one I often get, for the guy who wants to write a message to his new work team, spelling mistakes and thesaurus and all. All in all, it looks like the program could be as useful as hiring a smart seventh grader to look over your stuff.

But this guy (self-publishing Dale) thinks it's swell, as do the commenters on his video, and if you can't trust youtube commenters, who can you trust? He explains that Grammarly offers word choice suggestions, context improvement (yeah, I don't know what that is), grammar correction (presumably it means usage correction-- a common error) and plagiarism detection, which-- well, I mean, if you plagiarized, you already know that, don't you. Either that tool is meant for editors of other peoples' work (and if you're an editor, why do you need the rest of these features) or the tool is to help you see if you've camouflaged your plagiarism well enough to avoid detection. Either way, shame on you.

Scanning through youtube, I also sense that Grammarly has fans among folks whose first language is not English.

So once again, we have the claim that some software can evaluate writing effectively. This claim has always been bunk in the past-- has Grammarly cracked the code?

Welllll......

Jacob Brogan at Slate has been playing with, and as a bonus with his article about Grammarly's security issues, he noted some other issues as well. Grammarly has some lousy ideas about how to "fix" the construction "really important," the software seems relatively easy to stump.

Even Grammarly’s most basic suggestions can still lead users astray. Take this sentence from an article I recently published in Slate: “No matter what he’s wearing, he almost always opts for long sleeves—here in an Apple Store uniform (just one of the team!), there in a plain sport shirt.” Grammarly identifies three possible problems. First, seemingly thrown by syntactical complexity, it suggests that I should replace “there in a” with “there is a,” a change that would be ungrammatical, but that still leaves me questioning my own stylistic choices. Second, it proposes substituting “sports shirt” for “sport shirt,” an acceptable, if uncalled for, alternative. Third, and worst of all, it declares, “The word "plain " doesn’t seem to fit in this context,” and informs me that I should change it to “plaid.” While switching things up might be good for your sartorial style, it’s only going to make your prose more baffling. This is an instance of what I’m tempted to call the algorithmic uncanny valley, that point at which a program is astute enough to recognize that humans often pair "shirt" with "plaid" but not enough to understand that they also do so with "plain."

So no, the key to software that can handle language like a human is still undiscovered. Let's just hope that Grammarly doesn't try to market itself as school assessment software and-- oh, hell. Too late.

Yep. Grammarly@EDU promises "better students, happier teachers" and also says it "fuels academic success." It's trusted by 600 universities, including the University of Phoenix, so you know it's only the best schools that partner up (the full 600 are not listed, meaning that somebody thought that, out of that list, University of Phoenix would be a good one to highlight).

Ask for a quote today. Because while the search for software that can handle human language is not yielding much in the way of results, the search for software that can use baseless promises to generate revenue is never-ending, and often lucrative.

PA: GOP Endorses Wannabe Trumper for Governor

The Pennsylvania GOP has given its endorsement to Senator Scott Wagner to carry the GOP banner against incumbent Tom Wolf.

In many ways, this is extraordinary. Wagner is a one-term Senator who was boxed out of his race-- and then won by write-in vote by an al most 2-to-1 margin. He is Tea Party flavored and much in the Trump style, with some ties to Scott Walker, and he shares Walkers love of unions in particular and the whole democratic process in general. The GOP chose him over House Speaker Mike Turzai and a couple of other also-rans. But it says something about the shift of Pennsylvania's GOP that they are backing for Governor-- over an established pol-- a guy they tried to deny any shot at his current job just four years ago.

Wagner's campaign is founded on the same negativity as Trump's-- his campaign website announces that Pennsylvania is broke and broken:

A dysfunctional political system ruled by entrenched special interests and career politicians has saddled us with enormous debt, high taxes, a weak economy, underperforming schools, and embarrassing scandals. That’s why Pennsylvanians in droves have voted with their feet by moving to prosperous, well-run states.

Wagner claimed an "emboldened" moment after spending time on a plane with Steve Bannon, and he has called Trump a "visionary." But the conservative Washington Times questions whether Wagner is Pennsylvania's real answer to Trump, or whether Wagner is just Trump in his own mind.

In his two state Senate years, he has accomplished nothing headline-worthy that is remotely Trumpian. He did go after a fellow Republican in leadership who he said was blocking anything that betrayed a whiff of conservatism.

In fact, Wagner has spent a lot of time taking shots at his own party's leadership (they weren't confrontational enough with Governor Wolf, he says). His website includes the goal of fixing the bloated PA political system (we have one of the biggest, most expensive legislatures in the country). He wants to slash the money available to legislators and end the revolving lobbyist door, which will be great for wealthy businessmen like Scott Wagner, and a bit more challenging for citizen legislators. Mostly it will pit the governor against a legislature controlled by his own party, though I suppose the PA GOP may turn out to be just a spineless and malleable as the national party.

Wagner has been noted for some bold ideas, like the notion that global warming is the product of more body heat and a planet moving closer to the sun. And he has been outspoken about the cause of poverty-- the laziness of poor people.

But for those of us who care about public education, Wagner is a potential disaster. He is all in for backpacks full of cash following the children wherever their families send them. He is savvy enough to couple this with a call for accountability for all schools that receive public funds, but I call bullshit on this because Pennsylvania has been staring straight at a variety of indicators that our thriving cyber-school sector is a money-wasting scam, and yet the legislature has continued to defend cyber-funding.

Wagner is from the "don't throw money at schools" camp, but that's a hard argument to make stick in a state with one of the worst funding systems in the country. With the state kicking in only a small portion of school funding, our school districts depend primarily on local funding, which means poor communities have underfunded schools. Wagner doesn't have a plan for that.

What Wagner has a plan for is getting rid of teacher unions, ending job protections, and making it legal to fire teachers based on how expensive they are. He also likes merit pay, which in education is always equal to paying teachers less. And he keeps talking about unfunded mandates, but he never talks about exactly which ones he'd like to get rid of.

Oh, and get rid of those pensions, too.

Pennsylvania's political landscape is a wonky one. We have a huge spread between wealthy and poor, and what may be an even huger spread between rural and urban. This is a state that includes Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and my own county with just over 50K citizens and Forest County with fewer than 8,000 people. We're loaded with old folks, and we're currently sort of trying to kind of fix the court-condemned gerrymandering that has given us a legislative majority for the GOP even though we have more Democratic voters. And like every other state, we are not exactly overwhelming with voter turnout (Wagner's write-in victory came with 14% of voters showing up).

So it's never easy to predict what will happen come election time. But I can tell you this-- rural Tea Party Republicans hate hate HATE Tom Wolf, and a drain-the-swamp guy like Scott Wagner will motivate that part of the base. If Dems sit back and assume this guy can't possibly win, Pennsylvania public education will be in a world of hurt come 2019.

ICYMI: The No Particular Edition Edition (2/11)

Time for the weekly round up of things to read, absorb and pass along. I always remind you to share what speaks to you, but I want to remind you to share some things with people outside of your usual assortment of public education fans. I never ceased to be amazed at how people outside the bubble have very little idea what's going on. Make it your goal to educate someone this week. Now here we go.

Co-opted Language

Not fresh this week, but I was reminded of this post recently-- a good quick guide to the language that is being appropriated by the fans of the digital privatized ed reformster camp.

This Teacher of the Year Just Showed Me How Important DACA Is

Just in case you needed more convincing.

Timmy's Cell Phone Plan (Adventures in Standardized Testing)

Yet another clear, concrete example of why, exactly, the Big Standardized Test sucks.

Teacher Response to Cheating Scandal

A FOIA request gets us a look at what the cheating scandal at prestigious Watchung Hills Regional High School looks like from the inside. (Spoiler alert: It looks like teachers being hung out to dry by administration)

Families for Excellent Schools Collapse

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider wrote two pieces this week on the occasion of the FES demise. This piece and this piece remind us just how awful they were (the "families" were 40 individuals).

One Year In: Reflections on the DeVos Agenda

The Have You Heard podcast takes a look back the first year of the DeVosian era. I'm not much of a fan of arbitrary anniversary retrospectives, but this is worth our while.

Is No Excuses Narrowing the Curriculum

This fourth entry in Jersey Jazzman's series on Newark schools is, as always, filled with hard data made clear and accessible and a little depressing. Take a look.

Video: Personalized Learning’s Plan to Replace Teachers?

Travel back to a 2011 Tom Vander Ark speech extolling a glorious future when staffs are cut and computers are the school. There's more than a video here-- lots of explanation and sources.

What Is "Quality" Curriculum?

Nancy Flanagan on Bill Gates' latest silver bullet to fix education.

Denver Schools Are a Dystopian Nightmare

Thomas Ultican with a well-sourced explanation of how Denver (and many other) school district went at wrong.

Too Much Learning

Everyone who has taught for more than ten minutes had heard this question-- why are we studying this stuff?

The question has several siblings-- what's the point of this, when am I ever going to use this, or this is stupid.

In fact, the question is implied by many modern ed reformsters who keep trying to reframe education as job training, so that the only acceptable answer to the question is "because someday someone will be willing to pay you for having this skill," which is a tiny, meager, small-brained conception of education.

As a classroom teacher, you should always be able to answer this question in the specific. If you don't know why you're teaching something, or you don't have a better answer than "because someone told me to," you shouldn't be teaching that unit at all. I warn my own students to think twice about asking The Question because if they ask me, I will answer them. So if they really just want to complain, they should just complain.

But behind the specific answers about specific questions about specific content (quadratic equations, Spanish Inquisition, identifying gerund phrases, etc), there are some larger questions and answers that we should also be able to answer, because they are why we are in a classroom teaching at all. These broad answers speak to our fundamental values as educators in a broad yet personal way. Here's how I respond. It may not be your response, and that's cool, but it is mine.

First, nobody has ever been hurt by knowing too much. I've talked to hundreds of former students and thousands of grown humans, and I have never heard anyone say, "Damn, I wish I hadn't learned so much in school, because knowing a bunch of stuff has really messed up my life." Yes, in fifty years, I have used the quadratic equation very close to never. Yet learning it didn't hurt me a bit, and undoubtedly helped.

How? Well, consider this. Our football players spend a lot of time in the off season working out and lifting weights. Yet they will never play a football game in which play action stops while team members have a leg lift competition mid field. So why spend time on a skill that they'll never use in a game? Because, of course, they're developing muscles that they will use during in a game.

Math builds the muscles that see connections and relationships. Physical activities, whether phys ed or shop or home ec, help us better understand our own physical shells. The Arts help build the muscles of expression and understanding. The Sciences help us better understand how the world actually works (and, in the best programs, how to "know" something). History is our most fundamental human activity whether applied to the American Revolution or Pat and Chris's big fight at the dance-- what happened, why did it happen, what caused it to happen, what will it change about what happens next, and how do the people involved fit in? And English builds the muscles used to understand and communicate all our understanding. None of these are a waste of anyone's time.

There are folks who will suggest that some of this is unnecessary. The whole premise of the test-centered education concept launched by No Child Left Behind is that nobody really needs to learn anything except rudimentary reading and math. Sometimes it's about economics-- some folks just don't want to pay for a bunch of unnecessary frills for Those Peoples' Children. In the case of the corporate wing of ed reform, they would prefer that their meat widgets get any "extra" education because it might give them ideas-- just teach them enough to make them vocationally useful and reasonably compliant.

But if our educational mission (indeed, our human mission) is to understand what it means and how best to be fully human in the world, then what could possibly be "extra" or "unnecessary" learning? It's an educational mission that takes a lifetime-- at best we can hope that K-12 helps set the stage and teach the habits of mind necessary for the long haul.

Frederick Douglass tells the story of Mrs. Auld, a slave owner how at first taught him the alphabet and the beginnings of reading, but then had to learn from her husband that too much education for slaves was a dangerous and undesirable thing. His striking insight is not just that this was an attempt to diminish him, but that in denying him this human growth and connection, Mrs. Auld diminished her own humanity.

Treating any learning as "too much" is always diminishing, and while we can all see examples of people whose lives (and the lives of people around them) suffer because of their own ignorance, there is nothing more striking than seeing a man who deliberately cloaks himself in ignorance, who acquires great riches and rises to one of the highest positions in the world, and yet who is clearly miserable, overflowing with toxicity, because he does not understand himself or the world or how to be fully human in it. Yes, he's dangerous, but he's also a giant object lesson.

Yes, our time is finite and therefor to be spent thoughtfully, with an eye on what return we get from the spending. But do not tell me that there is learning which is simply a waste, useless, or too much. Everything is a piece of the world and human experience, and therefor everything is a piece of the puzzle, and every puzzle piece is worth acquiring. Why are we studying this stuff? Because understanding this stuff-- the world, our humanity, the business of making our way through it-- is everything.

Education Savings Accounts for Dummies

Education Savings Accounts are beginning to crop up all across the country as a new policy tool for education (recently news came that Iowa's GOP was pushing them). If they are turning up in a legislature near you, what do you need to know about them? If you are late to this particular party, here's the "for dummies" version of an ESA explainer:

The Basics

ESAs are vouchers on steroids.

In a voucher system, you might register your child Pat at Flat Earth Academy, after which you or FEA notifies the state that Pat is a student there, and the state shoots your voucher allowance to the school.

But with an ESA, the state gives you an stack of money, perhaps in an actual bank account or maybe on a special debit card, and you go spend that on whatever education thing you like. You could spend it like a voucher to help offset the cost of private school tuition (as with vouchers, nobody is proposing ESAs in amounts that would give poor families a free ride to Snooty Upscale Academy). But you could also spend your ESA money on unbundled education-- a math class from an online vendor, a software based reading program, etc. Maybe you'll spend your ESA on books and a computer for homeschooling.

The specifics vary by implementation and proposal. ESAs are being floated in various legislatures with a variety of different features attached. Think of ESAs as a vehicle that can come with lots of options-- and you want to be paying attention to which options your local version includes. The questions to ask.

Who can contribute?

In some versions, the ESA is "funded" by some version of the per pupil cost in the student's district, and it is just the state that does the funding. But in other versions of ESA, private individuals and even corporations can contribute to the ESA kitty. In the most aggressive versions, this is treated as a tax deduction-- folks can fund an ESA instead of paying their taxes to the state-- this version of the ESA is not only a sneaky way to fund vouchers, but it's also a sneaky way to defund public schools.

Who is really helped?

ESAs are often sold like vouchers-- as a means to give poor students the same choices that wealthy students have. And the problem is the same-- giving students a $3000 ESA will not help them get into a private school with $20,000 annual tuition. It will not help them get into a private school that can reject them for any reason from wrong skin color to wrong academic background to wrong religion.

Is it grandfathered in?

This feature can also be devastating to public schools and local taxpayers. In this version of ESAs, everyone gets an ESA even if they were never enrolled in public schools in the first place.

In other words, if ESA became the law on Monday, on Tuesday hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars would immediately leave the public system and move to private and parochial schools. Public school systems could lose millions of dollars in revenue without actually losing a single student. Even for some ESA fans that's a bridge too far, and some ESA proposals include rules that say the student must have been enrolled in public school at some point. But even then, you can end up with silly rules that basically require students to check in with a public school for six months before cashing out with their ESA.

Is there any oversight at all?

ESAs come with some of the same problems as vouchers-- are tax dollars being used to support a school that teaches that the earth is flat, that the Holocaust never happened, and that slavery was good for black people because they're genetically inferior?

But ESAs up the ante. Can I spend my ESA on single courses? Can I hire a tutor with no actual qualifications? How about a youtube subscription so I can watch Kahn Academy videos more easily? Can I take an "educational" trip to Europe? What if I buy an Xbox so I can play "educational" games? How about buying a car so that I can drive myself to the library? A cruise? Nice clothes so I feel smarter? Are there any limits to how I can spend my ESA? Is there any oversight at all?

This, incidentally, should bother conservatives. ESAs generally come with zero-to-no accountability, meaning that taxpayer dollars are simply collected and handed over to families to do nobody-knows-what with. I don't believe that taxation without accountability is a conservative value.

Does the state shed all educational responsibility?

This is not discussed nearly enough. Pat's family takes the ESA and enrolls Pat in some classes at a charter school, sets up some online studies, and hires a tutor. The charter school goes out of business, the online courses turn out to be frauds, and the tutor skips out after being paid. At this point, does the state just shrug and say, "Look, we gave you your ESA. If you blew it and didn't caveat emptor hard enough, then it sucks to be you. When we gave you the ESA, we had done our part. You're on your own now."

ESAs imply a policy shift-- that the state is no longer responsible for making sure that very child gets a decent education. That's a problem.

Trying to stay caught up

In March of 2015, I wrote a piece suggesting that if we were going to take "the money follows the child" we'd have to accept that the money could be spent on trips or play stations or parties or clothes and food. I was making my point with hilarious hyperbole, but now reality is catching up with me. So I'll quote my own conclusion. Maybe we can just let students have to use or waste on whatever, I said.

Unless of course you'd like to suggest that the taxpayers who handed over that money and the community that collected it have an interest in making sure that it's spent well and responsibly in a way that serves the community's greater good. In which case we can go back to discussing how those needs of the stakeholders--ALL the stakeholders-- are best served by an all-inclusive community-based taxpayer-controlled educational system, and stop saying silly things like, "The money belongs to the student."

ESAs are a terrible idea unless your goal is to further cripple public education, to subsidize the wealthy (with tax dollars collected from everyone else), or to dump the taxpayer's dollars into a deep, dark hole. But they are one of the current ed reform legislative policy darlings, so keep your eyes peeled, ask the right questions, and oppose them when they roll into your state capital.