Progressives and the DeVosian Embrace

In yesterday's New York Times, Conor P. Williams tackles one of the thorny problems of current reformsterism-- how do you hold onto some of your favorite charter school narratives now that the odious Trump and troublesome Betsy DeVos have planted their flag in your territory.

It's a good question, one that alleged Progressives have had to wrestle with ever since the last election stripped them of the cover of a nominally progressive President. But Williams' answer is lacking.

This guy. Yes, he has kind of a Kirk Cameron thing going on.

That's not surprising. Williams is a youthful PhD serving as senior researcher in New America's Education Policy Program. New America is a thinky tank with ties to Google, and they like school choice. Wiliams' PhD is in government from Georgetown, he writes for folks like the 74 and the Daily Beast. His bio usually touts his years teaching first grade in Brooklyn; you will be unsurprised to learn that he put in two years with Teach for America at Achievement First's charter school in Brooklyn. He has a specific interest in dual language learners, which is probably part of what led him to Hiawatha Leadership Academy, the school that he features in his NYT piece.

Williams shows his bias right off the bat, saying that Hiawatha runs "some of Minnesota's best public schools for serving such students." The link takes you to a six-year-old article, and as usual, "best" doesn't mean anything except "high score on the Big Standardized Test." And Hiawatha does not operate public schools-- it runs a charter school chain, and charter schools are not public schools. Calling charters "public" schools continues to be a way to obscure the problems of a privatized education system while giving charters the gloss of public school values which they do not possess. If "financed by public tax dollars" is the definition of "public," then Erik Prince operated a public security company and most defense contractors are public corporations. Charter schools are not public schools; their leadership is not publicly elected, their finances are not publicly transparent, and they do not take every child that shows up on their doorstep (which is one way they are able to achieve outstanding test results).

Williams point is that lefties should love Hiawatha because it's helping low-income children of color succeed. But there's the whole charter thing:

Progressives have long been open to research suggesting that well-regulated charter schools can extend educational opportunities to historically underserved children. But many also worry that charters foster segregation, siphon funding from traditional public schools and cater to policymakers’ obsession with standardized tests.

Williams' phrasing signals that he knows the research is pretty weak sauce. And he is correct to note one of the problems with the charter savior narrative-- what is the cost? Doers "saving" mean that we sacrifice a full education so that poor kids can be hammered with test prep every day? And do we "save" ten children by stripping necessary resources from 100 others?

And the new big problem, notes Williams, is that the embrace of Betsy DeVos, who loves choice and charters (although I'd argue that she loves charters only insofar as they help prepare the ground for vouchers) makes it hard to support charters and be a progressive.

Now let me take a side trip here. I'm not very concerned about political labels. I loathe the proicess by which we say, "Your position on cheese doodles shows that you're a mugwump, therefor you must be against water polo, because that is the mugwump position." Believe what you believe, support what you support, and ignore the labels-- that's what I'd prefer. But the story of school reform in general and charters in particular is the story of a conservative policy trying to masquerade as a bipartisan movement. Folks love to connect charters to Albert Shanker, the teacher labor leader, because it gives charters a lefty shine-- but Shanker's idea of charters was something else entirely, and when he saw what was happening, he turned his back on the whole thing. Charters couldn't really get going until neoliberals pretending to be progressives showed up, providing cover for privatization of public education by wrapping it in lefty language (and yes, some people did and do believe what they were saying, I know). As Wiliams puts it, "during the Obama administration, tensions over charter schools among progressives were manageable." The advent of Trump and DeVos just screwed up that whole game.

Williams tries to recast this as a personality thing-- Trump and DeVos are so "disliked" that some liberals "automatically reject" their ideas. What he doesn't is address is any of the substance of the arguments against (or for) charter schools and the privatization of American education.

Williams makes a case for Hiawatha, and captures the problems within the school in the Trump era (what does one tell a mostly no-white class of fourth graders when they ask "what does Make America Great Again mean?"). But what he doesn't address is the question of what the real nature of Hiawatha's "success" is, and what it costs (hard to do since they haven't graduated a class yet). Is there anything to learn from Hiawatha, or is the lesson here the same old one-- that with a more selective group of students and a bunch of extra money, you can accomplish more in a school?

Williams also tries to draw some sympathy for charter school teachers.

This puts the country’s many thousands of charter-school teachers in an odd place. Most come to this work to provide underserved children with a better shot at educational success, but now they’re increasingly branded as corporate stooges selling out public education by critics who challenge charter schools’ right to exist. These teachers shouldn’t have to answer for Ms. DeVos’s incompetence or wonder if there’s room for them in the future of progressive education politics.

This strikes me as a bit disingenuous. First, I don't know anybody who calls charter teachers "corporate stooges." In many cases, they are underpaid corporate victims, working without any job protections under lousy conditions for people who treat them like disposable widgets that must follow orders and stay in their place, or else. Second, many charter school teachers are not exactly teachers. Like Williams, they may be TFA temps who already know they're not sticking around for anything close like the five-to-seven years it takes a teacher to get really good. Or they are non-teachers in charters that are allowed to hire under special rules that allow them to put any warm body in the classroom. In other words, many thousands of charter-school teachers are already in an odd place.

And here's a pro tip-- if your plan is to "liberate" students by oppressing the people who work with them, you probably don't qualify as progressive.

Williams wants to argue that just because DeVos now wants to embrace charters, charter fans who came for the progressive argument shouldn't run away. But I'm not sure how many charter supporters were actually progressives, or whether progressives should have run away anyway (and conservatives, too, for that matter). Why isn't he exhorting progressives to throw their weight behind stronger support for public education? Should we be worrying about how well charters actually work instead of how they can best be lined up with one political agenda or another? Or should we start a discussion about the toxic effect of politics on education, with a eye toward getting politicians, amateurs, bureaucrats, dilettantes, and over-funded thinky tanks out of education entirely and hand it back to actual professional educators. There are a lot of questions worth asking hinted at in Williams' piece, but I'm not sure he really gets to any of them.

ICYMI: Graduation Day Edition (6/3)

Today our seniors graduate. Our ceremony, when the weather permits, in the park in the middle of town. I've been stage managing the business for over twenty years, and this was how I wanted to go out-- getting one last set of graduates through. In the meantime, here are some worthwhile things for you to read and share. Don't forget to share. What gives these folks a voice is when you share.

North Carolina's New Charter Bill Is a Warning

Jeff Bryant reports on the North Carolina charter bill, which opens the door to deliberate segregation.

Minneapolis Public Schools Ghosted

Sara Lahm shows what it looks like when a major city decides to phase out its public education system

What and Who Is Fueling the Movement to Privatize Public School

A good primer on what is driving much of school reformy stuff

The Racism of the New Orleans Miracle    

An interview with Ashana Bigard, a N.O. mom, on how things are going.

How Mexican Teachers Unions Are Pushing Candidates to the Left

Imagine a country where the teachers union has a major effect on politics. Well, there is one-- right next door.

Vouchers Still Don't Work    

Yet another study shows voucher students falling behind.

Success Academy Finally Takes the Algebra II Regents-- and Bombs  

The best school in the whole wide world runs into trouble, again.

Asking the Right Question about Personalization  

Rick Hess passes on some more critique of the edu-flavor of the year

Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom

From Brain Pickings. A brief but excellent post to end the week.

Crashing Tests

Yesterday's Dallas News reports that Texas has an even bigger testing screw-up on its hands than previously believed. Education authorities in Texas first believed that a mere 71,000 students were affected by computer crash issues during the high-tech administration of the STAAR test. But as stories have rolled in, it becomes apparent that things were far worse.

Educational Testing Services, a grand old corporate handler of testing, had a miserable time with these tests, with servers throwing students off the test or barring their path. This is the third year ETS has had the contract, despite the less-than-stellar showing in 2016.

Now my autopilot hits a cop car while I eat a donut. Cool!

Texas is not the only state having issues. This year, New York's English test malfunctioned for many students. Tennessee has been trying for years to make the online testing thing work, but they keep failing. Florida had its own share of connectivity issues for years.And let's not forget classics like the Ohio tests that were incorrectly graded. Or the states where the testing computers were under cyberattack. The list of technofails is long.

And I still have fond memories of Pennsylvania's experience in online testing-- the short form is that a few hundred thousand students logged on, and the test immediately ground to a halt. It was almost as if someone on the state level said, "Meh-- that doesn't look like a lot of bandwidth, but let's just wing it." So now we do our testing with pencils.

There is something superstitious about how we treat our tech; we ignore the many many many many many times it lets us down, and we focus on the times when it accomplishes that one thing. But if we're going to attach high stakes to these tests, then they should work every time, not just most of the time, probably.

Tesla has been leading the auto industry in autopilot disasters, leading company spokespersons to unleash this bit of advice:

When using Autopilot, drivers are continuously reminded of their responsibility to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle at all times,

In other words, when using the autopilot, don't use the autopilot.

The dream has been to have all of America's students log on and take the Big Standardized Test, but it keeps not happening. And every technofail sends to students the message that the BS Test is not ready for prime time, that it can't be trusted, that it's a waste of their effort and attention. After all, if you're not ready to handle your part of the job, why should I treat my part of the process with any care or concern.

It's not clear why the BS Test needs to be given on the computer. The test is not complex, and scoring a multiple choice test is not exactly the toughest clerical task you can give a teacher. I suspect that one of the main reasons for BS Testing on the computer is that taking tests on computers is really cool, and the digital natives (the ones who listen to the rap music) will be excited to do it. I'm pretty sure that none of these is true.

Does it make more money for the test manufacturer? Well, they've gotten rid of printing and distribution costs. If it isn't making them a bunch of money, they're doing something wrong.

Do paper and pencil tests have issues, too? Sure. Pencils break. Paper rips. On the other hand, one live teacher hardly ever loses or miscorrects hundreds and thousands of tests.

But does it also make the test easier and more accurate for the students? No reason to think so. But computerizing does make it easier for education "leaders" and bureaucrats to see the numbers and scores (all of which are largely meaningless, but oh well). If the online test offers no more utility or benefit to the students, why use it? I suspect the answer is that the benefits are not for the students at all, but for the people who have decided they will monitor school progress via spreadsheet. The computer tests aren't for children and they aren't for teachers-- they're for administrators and bean counters, for people who want to see education as the state would see it.

And they've been in such a hurry to see those data that they haven't checked to make sure that every test actually works the way it's supposed to.

Betsy DeVos Becomes Arne Duncan

So here's the story. A Secretary of Education becomes frustrated with Congress because the august body of legislators can't get its act together to reauthorize/rewrite a major piece of law that governs an entire sector of education. So the frustrated secretary digs into their bag of tricks and decides, "Hey, by using my control of certain regulations, I can basically implement the rules that Congress won't."

"Oh, now who's a naughty secretary?!"

This, of course, is the Arne Duncan story. Congress wouldn't get off its collective keister to fix up the Elementary and Secondary Education Act known, at the time, as No Child Left Behind (and several other less friendly names). So Duncan leveraged the penalties that states faced under NCLB, held some money hostage, and used his agency's regulatory powers to legislate new rules for ESEA, an act that, ironically, united Congress in a bipartisan desire to spank Duncan and that desire, in turn, led to the reauthorized ESEA/NCLB, now known as ESSA.

Many conservatives, including the DeVosian ones, were pretty angry at Duncan for trying to legislate from a department in the executive branch, but now they face a conundrum.

Because that story is no longer just Arne Duncan's story. It's now the story of Betsy DeVos.

From Erica Green in yesterday's New York Times:

The top Republican on the Senate Education Committee effectively killed on Thursday all hope for a highly anticipated overhaul this year of the law governing the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, paving the way for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to wield her deregulatory power

Lamar Alexander blames the Democrats. Patty Murry says, no, the Dems want to "reauthoirize the Higher Education Act as soon as possible."

Virginia Foxx (let's not get me started on Foxx right now) has a nifty version that gives for-profits and religious institutions free rein, but even though the bill has passed the House Education Committee, it will never survive the Senate. The GOP only has a one-vote lead, so a pandering-to-the-base bill won't pass. See? Elections do matter.

Since Congress can't get their act together, DeVos is simply going to go Full Duncan and obtain the results she wants through regulatory power.

She has announced a sweeping regulatory agenda that seeks revisions to key academic measurements in the existing law, as well as changes to eligibility requirements for nontraditional programs like “competency-based education” to obtain more federal financial aid. Competency-based education makes the acquisition of specific skills — not just test-taking and attendance — key graduation requirements.

The department has also proposed to review what defines “regular and substantive interaction” between faculty members and students in programs where students are not physically present in classrooms, and to review the “credit hour,” which is used to measure progress toward completing a college degree. Colleges have complained that the credit-hour rule is too prescriptive.

DeVos will also delay by two years the rule that says online programs need approval from the states in which they enroll students.

All of this is consistent with DeVosian goals of privatizing, monetizizng, and generally de-schoolifying education. So there's no news there. She wants it to be easier to make money selling education-flavored products to post-high school students. People should be able to make a lot of money vending education-flavored products to students, and that means getting the states, the accreditors, and the Ed Department (you know-- all those nosy people who might hold you accountable for selling an education-flavored product that is not actually crap) out of the way.

This is all an extension of what DeVos has been doing and has been saying she will do. What's novel is that she has decided to use Duncan-style tools to get the job done. This has been one of the Big DeVos Questions since day one-- would she hold true to her promise to keep USED's hands off the levers, or would she be unable to resist the temptation to use the power she has to get the results she wants.

Now we know the answer.

Arne Duncan was wrong when he tried to legislate by way of department regulations, and lots of people called him on it. Now let's see if they'll do the same for Betsy.

Space

By the end of the day, I will not have a classroom.

I have one more duty to complete (I'm basically the stage manager of graduation on Sunday), but today is the last regular school day of my career. I'll scrub my classroom of every last trace of me, then hand over the keys and go home.

Of all the retirement moments that I've had to wrap my head around, this is turning out to be one of the tougher ones. Because I'll no longer a classroom, a teacher space of my own.

We probably should talk about space more often in education, because if there's one thing nobody in a school has, it's personal space. Teachers talk about closing the door and doing their jobs, as if that would somehow create a private space, but when a teacher closes the door, she's shut herself in the room with a whole batch of students.

Personal space, often defined by walls or even partitions, is a major status marker in most workplaces. It just doesn't come up often in education because almost nobody has any. Administrators get offices. Guidance counselors and other staff that require privacy for the students they work with get offices. Teachers get a desk. In a classroom, that they share with students. When teachers are forced to carry their stuff from room to room on a cart, that marks them clearly as the bottom of the food chain.

I've often argued, only half-jokingly, that districts could get away with lower pay for teachers if they gave each teacher an office-- even a cubicle-defined space.

Our lack of private and personal space is partly about being accessible to our students. Teachers aren't supposed to be able to say to students, literally or figuratively, "Go away. I'm not available to talk to you right now."

But it's also one more not-very-subtle way that teachers are de-adulated, treated like children, and put in a less-than power position in schools. It's one more signal-- "You are not in control and you don't have the real power here." Teachers try to fight back by bringing in objects, putting up decorations, even window treatments, to mark our territory as our own. But the smartest teacher knows better than to put something she really values in her classroom where it's vulnerable to any errant student or to any of the many, many people who have ready access to the room. Our district once employed a principal who, after teachers had left for the day, enter their rooms and check through the contents of their desks. She wasn't trying to catch anybody misbehaving-- she just wanted them to remember that there was not one inch of space in the room that they could call their own. In some districts, teachers will not be able to work in their rooms over the summer because they won't be allowed to keep their keys-- another way that districts hammer home that teachers are just guests in the building, but the space is not theirs.

It is one of the things that separates teachers from other professionals. Doctors have offices. Lawyers have offices. Teachers do not.

And yet we get attached to the little space we're given, enough that I actually feel a pang that I will no longer have a designated personal space in this building. Time to move "create a home office" up the retirement to-do list.

Always

We use the word "always" a great deal, and we're frequently wrong.

We say "we always eat chickpeas at Christmas" or "we always eat cheese for breakfast" or "we always set our keys on the ottoman." None of that is true, because as human beings, we don't "always" do anything. We are finite beings, and everything we do, we do a finite number of times. When you say, "We always did X when we were kids," you're really stretching things, because you weren't a kid for very long, and everything you did, you did a very countable number of times.

That may be why "always" is so easily used in school. Here's the transformation of a program or practice in school:

1st year: That crazy new thing we're trying.
2nd year: That new thing we did last year.
3rd year: That thing we usually do.
4th year: This thing is pretty much a tradition.
5th year: We have always done it this way forever.

As the Designated Old Fart in my building, this was one of my basic functions-- you tell me the traditional way we do some thing, and I'll tell you when we started doing it and why that seemed like a good idea at the time. That's the kind of institutional knowledge you lose when DOFs like me retire.

I suspect there's a certain comfort in talking about things we always do; it's another one of the ways we paper over the limits of mortality. But we don't always do anything. Some things we barely do a few dozen times. But we haven't always done them, and at some point, we shall stop doing them.

So anyone who says that we have always done a certain thing a certain way in public schools is just full of it. There's a whole trash heap somewhere piled high with things we used to do and no longer bother with (I just came across an old lesson I used to teach on how to use the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature). Waiting to go onto that heap is another mountain of practices that we currently think are indispensable. That sits right next to the stack of things that we're doing this year because we did them last year.

It's not that I don't appreciate the value of history and tradition and the tests that only time can administer. Hell, shortly I'm going to leave to play in a concert with a 162-year-old town band. But we have to be careful that we don't allow the shine of past practice to hide a hollowness, and because that shine fools lots of folks, we have to be careful about what we let acquire it.

This is one of my criticism of charter schools-- by trying to claim the mantle of "public" schools, they are trying to appropriate the shine and glamour of a tradition that they are not part of.  Better they should just admit that they are something else and sink or swim on their merits.

And this is one of my criticisms of public schools-- that we too often get caught up in comfortable ruts.

It's important to remember that time is fleeting and fleeing. Our students may talk about what they always do, but whether we're talking final exams or asking a person to prom or celebrating the first day of school, our high school students only do those things four time. Four times! Each one a bit different. Each one unique.

The other problem with "always" is that it lulls us into believing that we have a million chances to do some things, to get some things right. Since this is always happening in an unbroken string that leads over the horizon, we have plenty of chances to get it right the next time, or even just pay attention the next time. We don't. This thing won't always happen. In fact, as far as you know, it may have just happened for the very last time (which is not always a bad thing).

I'm not suggesting that we should load students down with the heavy knowledge of their terrible mortality (though if you don't think some aren't already carrying that weight, you aren't paying attention). But if we carried that weight a bit for mindfully ourselves, perhaps we would be less inclined to waste their time (or ours), and we might better model an appreciation for life that would color their own.

Every day, every moment, one thing is certain-- we won't always be here, in this place, with these people, doing this work, walking through these moments. None of it will always be here. Breathe, Pay attention.

PA: Pushing Super Vouchers Again

Some Pennsylvania legislators are bound and determined to sell vouchers to the state-- and not just regular vouchers, but super-duper awesome vouchers, complete with poison pill for public schools.

Wait? Isn't This Old News

Well, yes, it kind of is. The bill is SB 2, Education Savings Accounts for Underperforming Schools, and it has been trapped in the legislature's (Anti-)Education committee for a while. It was up for a vote last October when it was still a terrible idea, but it failed, once again, to get out of committee.

But you know the old saying-- when life gives you lemons, trade them for pop-tarts. Erie County GOP Senator Dan Laughlin has been a staunch opponent of the bill and the one vote that kept SB 2 from making it out of commitee; this is not surprising, has Erie public schools are a good case study in how school choice and bad policy can gut a public school system. But in December, Laughlin switched to the Community, Economic and Recreational Development Committee, and he was replaced by GOP Senator Rich Alloway.

Alloway is his own kind of special. Recently he came out in favor Armed Volunteer Civilian Militias to "harden" schools and prevent shootings. Because any shmoe off the street who wants to walk around schools with a gun will be a big help.

Oh-- and Alloway is one of the co-sponsors or SB 2. Which explains why it has now made it out of committee and will come before the Pennsylvania senate in the not-too-distant future.

What's Super-Duper About It?

Vouchers are a policy idea that will not die; let's just give every student a check and let them enroll at whatever school they want to (and let's not talk about the fact that they don't really get to decide because top private schools are expensive and all private schools are free to accept students or not for whatever reason).

But many reformsters see another end game. Why bother with school at all? Let students purchase an English class from one vendor and a math class from another. Get history lessons on line paid for by your educational voucher card account.

ESAs make that splintered version of "education" possible. Instead of saying, "Here's a tuition voucher to pay your way to the school of your choice," the state says, "Here's a card pre-loaded with your education account money. Spend your special edu-bucks however you want to."

What Exactly Is In The Bill?

SB 2 is a measly sixteen pages; I'll read it so you don't have to, but you could read it yourself easily enough. There has been some fiddling with the bill since it first shambled into the light of day, and most of the fiddling is not major stuff. But here are some highlights.

Some Fun Definition Stuff

I always enjoy the definitions portion of bills. Okay, not really, but it's an interesting place to see some assumptions laid out.

For instance, "low achieving public school" is a school that ranks in the lower 15% of PA schools. This is great for voucher fans, because even if every school in Pennsylvania was super-awesome, there would still be a lower 15%.

Incidentally, that 15% is measured now not on the annual assessment, but on the annual state achievement test-- which means we now have a new definition of what the PSSA and Keystones are supposed to be (spoiler alert-- they aren't really achievement tests). The law also allows other tests that the state may later foist on schools will count.

The bill also specifies that the lower 15% of public schools will not include charter schools, cyber-charters, or vocational technical schools. That's important for reformsters because just one page later, the definition of "public school" is "a school district, charter school, cyber charter school, regional charter school, intermediate unit or a vocational-technical school." In other words, the law enshrines what we've seen frequently with charters-- they are public schools when it suits them to be, and not
public schools when it suits them not to be.

Who Can Play

One of the problems with many voucher systems is that they funnel tax dollars to private schools via students who were never in the public system to begin with. In other words, vouchers could bed law on Tuesday and on Wednesday, millions of dollars would be sucked out of public school systems without the movement of a single student. Every student who was already in private school anyway would suddenly get a state subsidy.

The newest version of the bill tries to clamp down on that a bit. Previously your child was not eligible for an ESA unless they had spent at least one semester in public school ever. Now that student must spend at least a semester in public school "preceding the establishment of an education savings account."

One fun detail-- once you are in the ESA system, it follows you wherever you go. If you move to a new district area, you still get your edu-bucks, only now they're taken from a school that wasn't even "failing." As I read it, this has two troubling implications. Imagine these scenarios.

Pat attended a "failing" elementary school, so Pat's family signed up for edu-bucks (which came out of the "failing" school's budget. When Pat grew up, it was time to go to the district middle school-- which was NOT failing. But they will still lose the money associated with Pat, who can continue to grab vouchers.

Wobblebog High had a bad couple of test years and lost a few dozen students (and a half million dollars) to some cyber charters and other edu-scammers. Now WH has turned itself around. But it doesn't matter. Those few dozen students get to stay in the voucher system, and WH still has to contend with the hole in their budget.

What You Can Spend Your Edu-bucks On

This hasn't changed. Edu-bucks can be spent on

1) Tuition and fees charged by any school

2) Textbooks or uniforms. Do I suddenly sense many private schools getting interested in uniforms?

3) Fees for tutoring or "other teaching services."

4) Fees to take a "nationally norm-referenced test." So edu-bucks for SAT.

5) Fees for purchasing a curriculum or instructional materials required to administer same. So edu-bucks can finance your homeschooling. Or your cyber-math class.

6) Special services for students with special needs. I have a bad feeling about this. "Too bad if your child isn't getting necessary and mandated services-- we gave you a voucher and if you screwed it up, well, we've done our part. You're on your own."

7) Other valid educational expenses approved by the department. So, you know, depending on the department's occupants, pretty much whatever.

A Few Guardrails, Sort Of

There are some restrictions. A private school can't be caught giving kickbacks to parents, and they can't be caught charging voucher families more than they charge others.

And there's a whole section about audits and penalties if you get caught trying to game this system.

However, there are also specific requirements that the edu-bucks come with no strings attached. "No commonwealth agency may regulate the education program of a participating entity that accepts a payment from an education savings account..." The program does not "expand the regulatory authority of the State." So the state is specifically forbidden to hold edu-buck funded schools to the laws and regulations that govern public schools.

This has always been a huge problem with ESAs-- deliberate zero oversight. Your tax dollars could be funding a white supremacy curriculum or a flying spaghetti monster religious school and you would not know and the state would not say "Hey, wait a minute!" to the education provider.

In fact, no edu-buck accepting school or program can be required to alter their "creed, practices, admissions policy or curriculum to accept school age children " whose parents have edu-bucks in hand. In other words, as some of us keep saying, this is not a school choice program at all, because the choice ultimately rests with the school, which can reject your child for being the wrong race, the wrong religion, the wrong gender orientation, or for having special needs of any kind.

ESAs allow public dollars collected from taxpayers to be used to discriminate without restraint against some of those same taxpayers. That's not okay.

So The Problems Are...?

A lack of oversight. If a family decided to spend ESA money on an X-Box, is there any agency that would 1) notice they were doing it and 2) tell them not to? The amount of oversight required for such a program would be huge-- unless you just wanted to hand over all those taxpayer dollars and not make any attempt to check up on them.

Enshrining discrimination. The law is clear-- if you're running, say, a segregation academy, and you want to hoover up some of that sweet taxpayer cash, the government is expressly forbidden to tell you that you have to stop discriminating first. The same is true if you are running Flat Earth Elementary School-- no gummint agency is allowed to tell you that you have to shape up and stop teaching falsehoods if you want to get your taxpayer dollars.

No real choice. Even if you sincerely believe in the power of choice to improve education, this is not choice. Just because you have a fistful of edu-bucks, that doesn't mean that any school has to accept your student. Students will not choose schools; schools will choose students.

The primary beneficiaries will be people who were doing just fine. No poor families are going to get their children into Fancypants Prep with a voucher that pays only a fraction of the tuition costs.

The further destruction of public education. Yes, this will draw money away from the support of public education (you know-- the place where the vast majority of students go to get an education), and that financial gutting is bad. But ESAs also set the stage for the destruction of the very idea of school, replacing an important public institution with an assortment of vendors hawking various edu-flavored mini-competency badges.

And ESAs also set the stage for government abdicating its responsibility for providing a decent education for all students. Caveat emptor, baby-- we gave you a voucher and if somehow that didn't end up with a decent education for your kid because you were scammed or defrauded or just unable to navigate a confusing marketplace, well, hey, that's your problem. The state's responsibility ended when it handed you your stack of edu-bucks. Of course, in such a system, the wealthy will do just fine, secure on a cushion of their own wealth. It's the poor, with their tiny margin for economic error, who will suffer. But hey-- we gave them a voucher.

What To Do?

PA SB 2 is headed for the Senate floor in Harrisburg. You need to locate your senator and explain to him why this bill is a bad idea. Get your friends and neighbors to also explain. This really needs to not be a law. This is a bad idea; the assault on public education should bother progressives, and conservatives should be bothered by a bill that proposes using taxpayer dollars with no accountability in sight.

P.S. If someone is in agreement that this is a lousy idea for a law, you might note that Governor Tom Wolf has promised to veto it, and the Governor Wanna-be Scott Wagner is a co-sponsor.