Bug-In-Ear Coaching: Why Is This Still A Thing?

You're a young teacher, working hard to get the hang of running a classroom, sequencing instruction, monitoring a roomful of students, tracking the clock, and otherwise managing your role as educational Boss Of The Room. It reminds you of when you first started driving, and it was taxing just to carefully monitor everything that needed to be monitored. Your hands are full and your brain is just this far from overloading.

Clearly what you need more than anything else is a voice in your ear offering back seat driving while you are trying to do your job.

Excellent. Do your anticipatory set, then dance for me.

Somehow bug-in-ear coaching continues to be a thing. EdWeek wrote this puffy promotional piece for the practice just last month. But the practice has been around for a while. Here's an extensive piece of happy talk about it back in 2011-- and it cites sources going back to 1994. The writers at least have the sense to acknowledge that "the virtual coach's role can quickly deteriorate into a Big Brother or a nagging mother." Well, yes. They also advise to keep things short, maybe just using key words.

Coaches advocating for this approach insist that teachers love it, which is not exactly a shocker. It's younger teachers or struggling teachers who are mostly likely to have the bug-ear thrust upon them and who are also least likely to say, "Are you kidding me?" But if you want to read an account of someone who went through it and hated it, here's a piece from Ann Berard, a former charter teacher who decided that she did not want to be "just like Tom Brady."

The students were also perplexed by my new earpiece accessory. "Um, Miss, what’s that in your ear?" they asked. I looked over to the three adults in the far back corner of the room for my scripted answer. "Tell them you are like Tom Brady. Tom Brady wears an earpiece to be coached remotely and so do you," was the response. I never would have said that, and mumbled instead: "But I’m not Tom Brady. No, I’m not Tom Brady." The students, who could hear me, but not what I was hearing through my earpiece, were more confused than ever. At which point I explained to them that I was being trained by the people in the corner who were telling me what to say via their walkie talkie. I’m all for transparency and simple answers to simple questions.

Berard's experience contains some commonly noted features of this type of coaching, most notably the comparison to pro football coaching. However, the new model now calls for the coach not to be in the back of the room, but somewhere else entirely, watching via video camera. Because nothing gives you a real sense of the classroom better than a little monitor cam mounted like some sort of security camera in the corner.

This stuff has also apparently caught on in the UK, where "just like Tom Brady" must not seem quite as compelling, but where officials insist that, unlike in the US, the system is under the control of the teacher and not used as a means of instructing teachers "how to behave in the classroom."

The Big Kahunas of voice-in-your-head coaching is a company called CT3 (The Center for Transformative Teacher Training). CT3 has two co-founders. Co-founder Kristyn Klei Borrero is also CEO. Borrero did at least start out with an education degree from Miami (1995). Borrero was a principal at age 27 and running turnaround charter schools in Oakland and Palo Alto, California. She was also a honcho at Aspire charters in California, the charter chain set up by Don Shalvey (Gates Foundation) and Reed "Elected School Boards Suck" Hastings (Netflix). Aspire is also in the Build Your Own Teachers business.

The other co-founder's name is familiar to most teachers Of A Certain Age. Lee Canter made a name for himself on the professional development circuit with Assertive Discipline, an approach based on taking control of your classroom. But for CT3 Cantor has also developed the No-Nonsense Nurturer program and the Real-Time Coaching model. Both NNN and RTC are registered trademarks, because there's no point in repackaging well-worn materials with a little twist unless you can call it proprietary information.

CT3 was focused on micromanaging teachers to implement CT3's ideas about how a teacher is supposed to teach (here's an account from a coach learning the coaching biz). That gets us to the heart of why bug-eared coaching is a bad idea. When I have "coached" student teachers, I've always been crystal clear about one thing, and they all get this same speech-- "I'm not here to get you to teach like me. You have to figure out how to teach like you."  Teaching is highly personal, and if you pursue it as a career, you will be immersed in it your whole life. That makes it far too exhausting to teach as anyone other than your own authentic self.  Teaching is also a job of relationship, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up, which means the authentic you and not some part your trying to act out to placate the voices in your head.

Are there aspects of teaching that are universal, or rough corners of your authentic self that need to be knocked off before you take over a classroom? Sure. And bug-eared coaching fans say that the instant real-time correction is good because it keeps proto-teachers from practicing something the wrong way. I get their point, but I disagree. Nothing drives home a lesson about "Do not do that" better than a bad student reaction. There's no use in steering a newby away from a baddish idea so that she can later wonder, "Ah, how bad could that have been."

Of course, much of this micro-managing is not about avoiding bad classroom outcomes as much as it's about forcing teachers to conform to the proscribed model of the charter or public school administrator involved. (Mostly, it's charters. Time after time, the happy talk article about "Coaching is so great because it helps us get teachers to do exactly what we want them to" is from a charter school.)  Here's my two cents of advice for any young teacher who finds herself in a school with bosses who want to tell her exactly, precisely how to do her job-- get out. Get out now. 

Does it work? Well, we don't really have a definition of "works," do we. The EdWeek piece says a "growing body of evidence" says yes-- but then it links to the 2011 article which is heavy on "this is what we do" and tenuously light on "here's the evidence." I'm not going to say that I can't ever imagine any situation or teachers for whom it could work, used in certain ways. But I will say that it seems like a terrible idea, that it is often found in conjunction with truly terrible ideas about how to teach (No Nonsense Nurturing deserves its own extended rant), that it is dehumanizing and demeaning and that there are far better ways to help someone perfect their craft. Sit in their classroom, like a real person. Watch them, like a real person. And after the lesson is over, have a conversation with them, like a real person. Because of course when the voice is chirping in your ear, there is no opportunity for conversation or discussion, no chance for the teacher to say "But here was my thinking..." or "But I really wanted to..." Ear-bug coaching is dictation, boss to plebe, not a conversation of equal human professionals. Proponents are going to say, "And that's why we recommend a follow-up conference between teacher and coach afterwards," and I'm going to say, "Just have that conference and skip the remote control ear bossing part." 

There are many bad ideas that won't die stomping around the education space. This is not one of the baddest or biggest, but it's definitely due to be done. 

ICYMI: Actually Nice Out Edition (3/10)

Here's an assortment of goodies to read from last week. I know I say this all the time, but it takes readers to make a piece of writing spread. So always share what you think needs to be shared. Everyone can amplify the important voices, and these days that is super-important.

Winning At Any Cost  

Arkansas gives prize money to its top schools. How far did the charter Haas Hall Academy go to stay on top? Too far, by quite a bit. This is a pretty appalling story.

Cybercharters Widespread Reports of Trouble

This is not exactly a new resource, but I discovered it for the first time this week and it deserves a bookmark. EdWeek has collected numerous reports, sorted state by state, of cybercharter problems.

People Who Regulate Charters Make Millions From Them

This time we go to Utah, where a television news department has discovered that lawmakers writing charter regulations also have a financial stake in the charter industry.

Diverting Funds From Public Schools Hurts The Community

An op-ed in the Palm Beach Post argues that Florida's choice programs are not good for public education.

Lies You Have Been Told About Education Technology

A good set of rebuttals for the "Oh, but you must" crowd.

Strange Things Happening in Newark

In Newark, the state is losing control of the local school system, leading to an assortment of odd other shenanigans. Bob Braun is covering it all.

Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform

The same family that brought us the opioid problem is also working on charters. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been working it all out, and she shows her work.

The Bible Bill

Oh, Florida. A new bill proposes Bible courses in every school. One teacher imagines how the course might not live up to its sponsor's hopes.

What Do Americans Think Schooling Is Supposed To Do?   

We could simplify this is you just promised to read Nancy Flanagan every week.

Arizona Charter Parents Have Nowhere To Turn  

What can you do when you have objections to how your child's charter school is run? Nothing at all.

TX: Charters Don't Want To Serve All Students

The  charter school pitch often focuses on the idea that all students deserve choices, that families should be able to explore options.

Here's the CEO of KIPP Texas, speaking about the big Texas KIPP merger:

We realized our organizations wanted to improve student success across the state and we wanted to create an environment to serve more KIPPsters.

And here's Starlee Coleman, CEO of the Texas Charter School Association (as well as co-founder of SchoolForward, a choice PR firm; policy advisor at the State Policy Network; VP of Communications, National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools; and various high-level positions with the Goldwater Institute), just last fall:

Don’t you deserve the chance to explore a variety of options, just like you have when making other decisions that impact your family’s future?

It turns out that when Coleman says "you," she doesn't actually mean "you everybody." Only certain select "you."

Here she is earlier this week, arguing against a "bad idea" that has "taken root" in the legislature. What is the bad idea? What is she railing against as a threat to charter schools in Texas?

A proposal that charter schools should have to accept all students.

Charter schools in Texas have some pretty cushy deals. For instance, in Austin, charters actually get $1740 more per students than the public system. And charters also have a fun item in Texas law-- they do not have to accept any student who has a record of disciplinary issues.

To read Coleman's piece, one would think we're talking about young felons with a rap sheet a mile long. The restriction is there, she says, because charters don't get the money needed to create special facilities to handle "violent students" (she uses the word "violent" four times in her short op-ed). She wants you to know that 76,000 public school students were in trouble for criminal behavior last year. And if you aren't scared enough yet:

Aggravated robbery happened at 41 traditional public schools last year. It happened on zero charter campuses. "Indecency with a child" happened on 78 traditional public school campuses last year. It happened on zero charter campuses. Aggravated assault of a district employee happened on 53 traditional public school campuses last year. It happened on one charter campus. Gang violence: 95 traditional public school campuses, one charter campus. Guns: 168 traditional public school campuses, five charter campuses.

Is this an argument against the proposed law change, or a sales pitch for charter schools (send your chid here to be safe from Those Peoples' children). Probably both, but as the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Gina Hinojosa points out, it's not entirely accurate, either.

Many charter schools take advantage of state law that allows them to exclude students from enrollment because of any disciplinary history — even visits to the principal’s office. As a result, unlike our public schools, which are required to educate all kids, charter schools can exclude students. Many of the largest charter schools, such as Harmony, Uplift Education, Southwest Key (Promesa) and International Leadership, ask about student disciplinary history on their admission applications. Not only does this practice allow these charters to screen out students, it has a chilling effect on those who might apply.

So if your child has ever so much as been sent to the office for smirking or written up for gum chewing, the charter has a free pass to reject your student.

The ban on disciplinary issues is, really, kind of genius. It sounds reasonable (school safety, you know), but which students are over-represented in school discipline issues? Children of color and children with special needs-- and there's a study to show that's just as true in Texas. So Texas charters get a free pass to discriminate based on special needs and even race without having to say so out loud.

So Texas charters get more money to educate a cherry-picked student body, while the public school gets to educate the students that the charters reject with even less money to do the job. Some examples:

For example, in Austin, students in special education account for 8.3 percent of KIPP College Prep Charter's population. Just down the road at Webb Middle School, the special education population is 19.2 percent — more than double the KIPP number. In Houston, Worthing High, a school that has received media attention for overcoming state testing challenges, is located just six minutes from KIPP Sunnyside. Yet, Worthing's special education population is almost double that at KIPP Sunnyside.

Meanwhile, Coleman says that sure those violent young felons deserve a chance to turn their lives around, but for the safety of charter students, those violent young felons should stay in public schools that have the facilities to handle drug dealers and, presumably, gum chewers.

There's a big discussion to be had here, and God bless Hinojosa for forcing the legislature to have it. But there is also a big, clear, Texas-sized takeaway-- when Texas charters say that every family deserves a choice, that every child should have an opportunity to attend a charter, they are lying. They have no desire to open their door to all students and no intention of doing so unless forced to by law. In Texas (as elsewhere), school choice means that charter schools get to choose which students they want to serve. Whether this bill succeeds or fails, Hinojosa will have exposed Texas charters as the liars they are.

Can HAL 3000 Take Your Class Notes For You (And Is EdWeek Starved For Story Ideas?)

Can a piece of computer software take notes for students in a K-12 classroom?

No.

Okay, we should be done here, but Benjamin Herold, staff writer,  has posted a curious article at EdWeek. The headline (Could Artificial Intelligence Automate Student Note-Taking?) might have alarmed you if you saw it, but I'm going to explain why you can relax. Here's how he leads off:

"I'm afraid I missed the part about fractions, Dave."

Artificially intelligent digital agents are being marketed as a way to automate note-taking in the workplace, raising a big question for K-12:

Are classrooms next?

You'll be relieved to know that nobody consulted for the article thinks that the answer is "yes."

Herold leans on EVA, a digital assistant from a Silicon Valley startup named Voicea (can't somebody give these guys company naming lessons) that can dial into corporate meetings and create transcripts of everything that's said. It can use certain cues to highlight portions, but we're talking transcript here-- not notes. But after explaining the Voicea sales pitch for corporations, Herold notes that  "even Voicea is keeping its distance from the education market." So the company that makes the stuff says "no."

Herold talks to a policy researcher at RAND "who has written about artificial intelligence in K-12. "I applaud attempts to think about applications of technology that can help students take more effective notes and highlight the key takeaways," said Robert F. Murphy. "I just don't know if this particular application is going to provide that." So RAND says "no."

Herold cites new research that suggests that taking notes on a laptop is not so effective, which is... irrelevant to this discussion. But he does spend some time discussing why note-taking on a laptop probably isn't helpful.

He does include the obvious common sense point here-- that the very process of listening and processing and deciding what is most important and physically writing it down-- all of that is why taking notes works in the first place. Plus, it provides a useful set of notes that can be used to study later. Having a complete transcript of everything-- not so much (this is exacerbated by the fact that in a classroom setting, the AI would have a nervous breakdown trying to process all the noise and voices and noise, producing something slightly more useful than that guy who accidentally texted his wife with his voice-to-text on while he was playing trombone).

That processing is critical in note-taking, and absent in the HAL 3000 Note Taker. The student could fall asleep. The student could stay home and send the AI to school. This suggests that the AI is probably not going to enhance learning.

Maybe Herold was just spitballing, or trying to get way out in front of a possible trend, or stuck with a pitch from Voicea and no hook to hang it on. I don't know. I'm just happy to report that as of right now, nobody seems to think this is really a thing.

Why Do Teachers Have Such Lousy Parental Leave?

At Working Mother, Amy Sherman asks a really good question-- It's a Mom-Dominated Profession. So Why Are Teachers Getting the Shaft on Maternity Leave?

Of course, we're talking about US teachers, because we rank at the very bottom of the barrel for developed (or in some cases, even semi-developed) countries when it comes to maternity leave. For all our noise about babies and motherhood and how parenting a small child is one of the most important jobs in the world, as a society, we don't do jack to support people who are actually parenting babies. We could make, as a country, the same deal that we make, for instance, with soldiers-- when duty calls, the employers just have to suck it up and the country makes sure to support them.

Just got home from Stock Photo Hospital

Instead, we leave it to individual businesses to decide how much support they will give parents of newborns (above and beyond the meager FMLA requirement). Some businesses do pretty well. For all their faults, Microsoft has a pretty good set of policies for parental leave. Many of the tech companies do, even though they are notoriously bad at hiring women.

So what does it say that one of the most female professions has uniformly lousy parental leave policies?

My wife and I were fortunate. The twins were born on the day after the last student day of my wife's year (a few days after my last day). As was the case with the woman in Sherman's story, my wife could have had paid leave-- by using up her sick days. This is a ridiculous bind to put new parents in-- what are the odds that a parent of small children will need a few sick days? A few years ago, my district finally negotiated a sick day bank, whereby teachers could "donate" sick days to other teachers-- the first big users were young women with newborns with health issues. Somewhere in administration the complaint was voiced that the intent of the day bank was not to lengthen maternity leave-- well, what did they imagine would happen? You have a staff with lots of young women who A) are starting families and B) have not worked long enough to accumulate a ton of sick days.

But why is this even a thing? Teaching is mom-dominated and child-centered.

Part of it-- a huge part of it-- is money. You're paying somebody who is not doing work, and schools don't have the private-sector choice of just sort of absorbing the new mother's workload until she returns. Somebody will have to be paid to fill in.

And in this day of low substitute supply, that sub may not be optimal. A teacher friend of mine just had a baby; her maternity leave is being covered by someone with Home Ec certification.

Add to that a new wrinkle-- testing. Two members of my old department are taking maternity leave this year, and the timing for the school is terrible in terms of testing. I can guarantee that test scores will dip next year, and it will be strictly because one teacher is home with her new baby instead of in her classroom doing her usual test prep for the weeks before the test.

Local unions share the blame as well. Unions could make parental leave a big issue, but in most cases they lack the will. First, while teaching may be mom-dominated, it's not exclusively mom-occupied, and there are always problems negotiating terms that only benefit some union members (e.g. in almost every local you can find someone single bitching about how they get essentially paid less because they don't have a family on which to use family health care benefits). On top of that, many women aren't willing to demand the union push hard because they feel guilty about the maternity leave-- they know it's going to disrupt their students, inconvenience their colleagues, and probably make their own lives miserable when they return and have to clean up the mess.

In the end, parental leave for teachers suffers from the same old factors-- it's expensive, it's disruptive, and it mostly benefits women. Teachers get lousy parental leave in part because almost everybody in the US gets lousy leave.

School boards ought to be leading the charge. School boards and teacher unions ought to be saying that we know those first months are critical, so we expect our teachers to take a full paid parental leave, because we know better than anyone how early support for a child pays off further down the line, so we're going to set an example-- not only that, but we're going to be vocal in pushing businesses in our community to offer full paid parental leave as well.

I mean, in the education space we've started talking endlessly about pre-K, about early intervention, about starting to give children the support they need from Day One. And yet somehow in all this brave new reformy wave, I have yet to see calls for a really important early intervention-- giving the mother the ability to stay home with her new child without risking the family's financial well-being. So where are the policy wonk voices? Where are the think tank voices?

Could it be that we still worry more about money than children? Could it be that we still think that policies that primarily benefit women just aren't that urgent?

Every time I think about maternity leave in this country, I get angry all over again. We scratch our heads and say, "Gee, how could we give children a better start in life," as we shoo poor new mothers back to work after a couple of weeks because, hey, her employer has needs. No single policy more clearly demonstrates that we value the sovereignty of the business owner, the financial impact on commerce, more than we value children and the women who give birth to them.

We should be demanding better, and education should be leading the way.

Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea

Florida's governor is planning to boost the state bonus program for teachers, even as Denver teachers walked off the job over their district's version of an incentive program. So it's worth taking a moment to step back and remember why teacher merit pay and bonus systems are just a bad idea.

First, they can't work like a private sector bonus system. In the business world, bonuses and incentives are based on a clear idea of success. Whether the definition of success at Widgetcorps this year is "We made a bunch more money" or "We increased the value of Widgetcorps stock this year" or even "We managed to strip a pile of dollars out of Widgetcorps this year," the end result is a pile of "extra" money (the end result, depending on the definition of success, may be a less healthy company, but let's set that aside for now). The bonus deal between Widgetcorps and its bonus-eligible employees is simple--if there's a pile of extra money here at the end of the year, you get to have some of it.

Public schools, on the other hand, don't make money, and school district success is hugely hard to define. More high school graduates? The football team won a championship? The school musical was really good this year? More students really got into Shakespeare? Larger number of students earned welding certification? The school's culture and atmosphere was so healthy that students really love attending? All of these might count as success, but none of them result in a school district ending the year with "extra" money to be split up for bonuses.

Instead, the pile of bonus money has to be pre-budgeted, and then teachers get to compete with each other for a share of a fixed pie. This may not establish the kind of in-house atmosphere you want for your school ("No, colleague, you may not see my materials for how I teach fractions--my child needs braces this year!") We already know this is bad news; this kind of internal competition is arguably part of what destroyed Sears.

"But, see, I think teachers should be paid more, but only the good ones. So I want merit pay so that we only have to give good teachers raises." This is an understandable impulse. The problem is that we have no universal agreement on who the great ones are or how to reliably measure their greatness. Settling that issue would involve a long and complicated discussion that we still haven't had. Instead, policy makers mostly just said, "Use scores from the Big Standardized Test."

Again, we could have a long conversation about the merits and demerits of this approach, but to understand how basing "merit" on standardized test scores affects teacher behavior, all we have to grasp is this-- from a teacher standpoint, judging teacher merit based on test scores is only slightly more reliable that having a horned toad toss dice under a full moon. Basing merit pay on test results divides the teaching staff into two groups who will hear two different messages. The non-English, non-math teachers hear, "You have no control over whether you get merit pay or not." This is not hyperbole; in many regions, teachers have been judged by the test results in subjects they don't teach from students they've never met. English and math teachers also hear the message, "You will be judged on how well you teach to the test." Merit pay based on test scores does not incentivize better teaching.

"Well, what if I want to use bonuses to push teachers in directions that help the district, such a teaching at hard to staff schools?" That was a big part of the goal for Denver, and it hasn't worked. Again, teachers feel at the mercy of forces outside their control (one batch of teachers lost their incentive pay for teaching in a high-poverty neighborhood when new luxury townhouses were built nearby). And a one-time pay incentive does not outweigh a bad boss or building culture.

A teacher bonus system is prone to other problems. To fund that pile of bonus money, districts often lower base pay for teachers. This is not just bad financial news if the horned toad who's tossing dice for your bonus comes up snake eyes; the base pay is what determines your pension, and what you write on applications for loans and mortgages.

And at its heart, a merit pay system is insulting. It imagines a world of teachers who sit at their desk thinking, "I have the perfect lesson for effectively teaching pronouns right over there in my filing cabinet--but I'm not going to get it out until someone offers me a bonus."

Here is a thing actual teachers have all said, more or less, at one time or another: "Today was awesome. I was on fire. The kids were right here, taking it all in. I could see lights going on all over the room as they got what we were doing. I taught the crap out of that unit. I am ready to get back in there tomorrow."

Actual teachers have also said, more or less, this: "Today was a thousand hours long. They wouldn't focus. They wouldn't stop hollering at each other. I couldn't find my rhythm. I sucked. It was awful. If I thought this was what it was always going to be, I'd think hard about quitting."

Here's what no actual teachers have ever said in any way, shape, or form. "Today was awful and excruciating. I was terrible. The lesson was awful. Mind you, I could have had a great day. I could have been awesome in there instead of suffering endlessly, but I won't do it unless someone offers me a bonus."

I would not go so far as to say that teaching well is its own reward, because teachers need food and shelter, too. But teaching badly is definitely its own punishment. No merit pay system--particularly not one based on small rewards for student test scores--is likely to exert more power over teachers than the immediate results in the classroom.

Merit pay for teachers has been tried many times over the last several decades. It never works. It doesn't raise test scores, or improve teacher attraction and retention. It doesn't improve morale. A district can garner better results by spending the money to raise base wages, or to decrease class sizes and provide other supports for classroom teachers.

Originally posted at Forbes.

The $5 Billion DeVos Money Laundromat

You have read by now that Betsy DeVos is finally going to get one of her favorite policy ideas floated past Congress. But what the heck is it, and why is it a problem? To understand, we have to look first at what's been happening in some states.

The financial device we're talking about is a Tax Credit Scholarship, and it's a bit of a clever dodge.

Let's say I'm the State of New West Virkota. The state would like to collect a tax of $100 from Bob and give it to Come To Jesus Academy, but there are rules in place that say that the state can't give taxpayer money to a private religious school. So instead, the state tells Bob that he can give $100 to the Good Neighbor Scholarship Fund instead of to the state, and then the Good Neighbor Scholarship Fund can spend the $100 to pay tuition for some child to attend Come To Jesus Academy. It is a transaction not unlike money laundering, or a fifteen year old paying a college kid to buy beer for him. In Georgia, your contribution can be earmarked for a specific school where "the funds will be equally divided among all approved, eligible students." So, yeah-- it's a donation  to the school, not a scholarship for a student. Georgia can't give Bob's tax dollars to a private religious school, so it just gives Bob credit for giving the money for them.

And it's not just the shadiness of skirting the law. In some states, like Virginia, by leveraging state and federal deductions and credits, you can actually make a profit on your contribution. Here's a wealth management firm explaining how to turn $10,000 into $10,960. The definitive research on just how crazy this stuff gets has been done by Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation  Economic Policy (his name appears in virtually every article that has been written about the Trump-DeVos proposal). Here's a whole paper, or you can catch him in an informative interview here; I advise you to be sitting down while you're reading it. According to Davis, ten states have that little profit quirk, and they aren't shy about saying so:

"When you donate, you will receive both a Georgia state tax credit AND a federal charitable deduction," as Georgia's scholarship organization puts it on its web site. "You will end with more money than when you started, and you will be helping students receive a good education."

DeVos, via Ted Cruz's sponsorship of the bill, wants to up the ante.

Her proposal is a federal tax credit ("neovoucher" is also a word used for these). The price tag refers to the total amount of credits that would be allowed-- and they would be allowed at 100%. Rich folks can "donate" up to 10% of their adjusted gross income; businesses could give 5% of their net taxable income.

So why is this bill a problem?

Conservatives are, in many cases, not thrilled. If your dearest dream was for the Department of Education to go away, giving it another $5 billion program to run does not seem like a step in the right direction. It also looks like an example of federal overreach, the DeVosian answer to Race to the Top. And of course, any time the feds even get near money, they start trotting out regulations and rules and red tape and strings. So this proposal is not necessarily a slam dunk on the right.

The PR for the bill stresses that these scholarships would not take "a single dollar away from public schools and the students who attend them," which is technically true because under a tax credit scholarship system, the government never actually touches the money. But the argument is disingenuous. The federal government is going to be down $5 billion dollars, and that has to come from somewhere. You can argue the finer points all day, but the bottom line is that the federal government would spend $5 billion on vouchers, which means there are a bunch of other things it won't spend those $5 billion on. In other words, it sure as hell is taking $5 billion away from somebody.

Tax credits are a handy device for funding private schools, meaning that they can be not only religious but also exclusive and selective.

It is another way to shift toward a privatized system rather than a public one. DeVos has praised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his attempt to paper over that problem by simply calling private schools "public" and insisting that any school funded by public tax dollars is a public school. This takes us straight into Orwellian baloneyland, a place where we call charter businesses, private religious schools, and the kitchen table where you homeschool your child "public" schools, but somehow the kind of public school that isn't actually open to the public.

And as Adam Laats points out, history already tells us that there are real problems with an education system that depends on the largesse of rich folks to function. It's such a bad system that it drove us to come up with a system that was publicly funded, publicly run, and responsible for educating all of the public. If you want to see what depending on charity, luck and wealth looks like, just look at our medical system, which as Rep. Eric Swalwell observes, runs partly on luck, partly on wealth and partly on jars with sad pictures parked beside cash registers.

This proposal is about what DeVosian choice policy is always about-- getting wealthy folks out of having to foot the education bill for Those People.

Will this bill survive? Diane Ravitch says no, and points out that DeVos has scaled down her plan-- two years ago she wanted to repurpose $20 billion of Title 1 money for the same idea, and the GOP said no. This bill has tried to stave off some of the objections by not (directly and obviously) taking money from public school students, and by making state participation "voluntary" (much as Race to the Top and Waivers were "voluntary"), but it has the same basic problems-- federal overreach, tax dollars financing private, religious schools, and privatization of the public education system. It richly deserves to fail, but if you think your representative needs to hear that, don't hesitate to call him.