KY: DeVos, Bevin, Loving Vouchers, Hating Teachers

Betsy DeVos took her Education Freedom Voucher Tour to Kentucky, and things went just about as well as you could expect.

Secretary of Education DeVos has been crisscrossing the country in an attempt to sell her $5 billion voucher plan. Her latest stop was Kentucky, a state that has achieved a sort of choice limbo; there's a charter law on the books, but the legislature has so far refused to fund it, and so there are no charter schools.

But school choice has a friend in Governor Matt Bevin, a former investment manager and Tea Party fave who has oodles of ideas about privatizing education in Kentucky (including that stupid "retaining third graders who score low on a standardized reading test" idea). What doesn't Matt Bevin like? Well, see if you can pick up the subtle dig here.

Matt Bevin has had it with you. All of you. 

After the big education summit with Bevin, DeVos, and some other folks (more about this in a bit), Bevin was asked why the meeting did not include a single solitary human being who actually works in public education-- not a teacher, a principal, a public school leader. His response?

The people here care about the kids. Every single person who sat around this table cares about the children. Not about funding. Not about territory. Not about power. Not about politics. They care about parents and they care about students.

Okay, so it wasn't subtle at all (and if you watch him say it, there's no softening via context, either.)  All those people who actually have dedicated their adult lives to working in public education do not care about students. They're just in it for the money and the power.

So other than this rather dickish slam at public education folks, what came out of the day?

Well, that meeting gathered state officials including Wayne Lewis (Education Commissioner), Hal Heiner (Board of Education Chair), Derrick Ramsey (Education and Workforce Development), and Aaron Thompson (Postsecondary Education). Then throw in  representatives from EdChoice Kentucky, Catholic Conference of Kentucky, Kentucky Public [sic] Charter Schools Association, and Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

Does it seem that the deck is stacked? Well, here's more. You might think that the Kentucky Public [sic] Charter Schools Association might be an odd organization to exist when Kentucky has no actual charter schools. But it exists, and though its website gives little clue about who it is exactly, its 990 forms indicate that it has existed with a paltry budget of a few thousand dollars. Only three years of forms show up (2014, 2015, 2016). In 2014 and 2015, the chairman of the group was Wayne Lewis, now the education commissioner, and a hard-core charter promoter. In 2016, no chair is listed; the top name is Milton Seymore, retired Ford exec, Baptist pastor, and for a time, Kentucky Board of Education chair appointed by Bevin. Gary Houchens is also a KPCSA member and Bevin Board of Education appointee.

DeVos was there to encourage the folks at the table to "keep at it and keep fighting" even though they had suffered some "frustrations" (aka "defeats").

DeVos also took some actual questions afterwards.

She and Bevin framed the "opportunity" for workforce development (train those meat widgets) and pointed out that Democrat reps should be pushing this because education is totally not political (said the governor who has pulled all the political levers he can get his hands on to push his education policies, which are, in fact, business policies. Pro tip-- privatizing public education is a political act.

Asked to address the issue of how vouchers drain resources from public schools, DeVos skipped her usual answer ("It totally wouldn't") for a different non-answer. First, it meets the needs of kids who don't fit in public schools. Unless, of course, their needs are expensive adaptations or ELL needs or behavioral needs, etc. Second, "in every state" where charters have been installed, results in public schools "get better right along with" the chartered students. Except that, of course, not all charter students do better, and research certainly doesn't indicate that public schools near charters get better in every state. So, not actually an answer, and not actually true.

Another reporter asks about full funding for IEA to benefit students with special education needs, and DeVos starts with a non-answer then pivots to a spectacular tale about Florida and how their choice programs have allowed families to "customize" the education of those students. You can watch the clip at the bottom of this post, complete with Bevin's two-pointy-finger angry non-answer regarding the exclusion of public education folks. Also, is it just me, or does Bevin always look like he wants to punch someone? Judge for yourself in the clip.

Some public ed folks did have some thoughts about the summit:

"Today’s meeting was nothing more than a photo-op for a failed governor and a failed education secretary who refuse to listen to those who may disagree with their proposals," the Kentucky Education Association said in a statement. "In November, Kentucky voters can decide if they want two individuals like Bevin and DeVos who never attended public school to make policy for their children’s futures, or do they want local educators, school board members, superintendents and parents looking out for what’s best for their neighborhood school"

That seems like a fair assessment. Stay tuned for the next stop on DeVos's Doomed Voucher Proposal Tour.

Creating More Defective Children

This has always been a dangerous side effect of educational certainty. If I'm absolutely certain that my program is awesome, my pedagogy is flawless, my materials are on point, and classroom is just generally perfect-- and yet some students are not learning-- well, there's only one possible explanation. The student must be defective.

The defect effect appears to be cropping up in a new place. As reported in EdWeek, a new report published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that children who turn five the month before kindergarten starts are, as a group, being over-diagnosed with ADHD.

"Our findings suggest the possibility that large numbers of kids are being over-diagnosed and overtreated for ADHD because they happen to be relatively immature compared to their older classmates in the early years of elementary school," said study author Timothy Layton, and assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

Relative immaturity is one factor to consider here. But why would this start cropping up in recent years; why wouldn't the relative immaturity of August babies be so well-known and widely recognized from the last century of schooling that schools would simply set an earlier cut-off date? In Pennsylvania, 78% of school districts make the cut-off September 1. There is some anecdotal reporting of increased redshirting but the study above suggests that perhaps there should be more.

Are we looking at a correction to bad education policy being made at the grassroots level.

In other words, if kindergarten is the new first grade, are more parents concluding that 6 is the new 5. As we crank up kindergarten to be more academic, more sitting, less playing, less child-friendly, it's not surprising to find that more students are being diagnosed (probably incorrectly) with ADHD and more parents deciding their child isn't ready for the rigors of kindergarten just yet.

Is there harm in such an adjustment? Hard to say-- there can be issues with not getting out of high school until you're eighteen. But any problems caused by this new shift could be addressed by any district-- let first grade be the new first grade and let five year olds be five year olds. Developmentally inappropriate schooling will always generate problems, but this is a situation where the solutions are easy and readily available.

Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

During the recent House hearings, Betsy DeVos was confronted with some of the results of the Network for Public Education study of federal dollars going to charters, a huge number of which have closed or never even opened. She was unmoved:

Let me first comment on the study you’re referring to. I’m not sure you can even call it a study. We’re looking more closely at it of course, and anything that is truly waste, fraud, or abuse we will certainly address. But the reality is that the study was really funded by and promoted by those who have a political agenda against charter schools. And the other reality is that there are currently over one million students on wait lists for charter schools in the country. So, we want to see more charter schools, not fewer. More students that can access options that are right for them, not fewer.

This week Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris of the NPE wrote an open letter to DeVos further detailing some of the fraud and waste. Here's a collection of 109 charters in Michigan that took federal grant money and closed, or never opened at all. They amount to over $20 million in federal money that is simply gone with nothing to show for it (remember, this is only looking at the charter grants issued by the Department of Education-- if we start looking at all charters funded through various state and philanthropic money, the list gets much longer). Ohio, California and Louisiana are other bad examples. Ohio flushed away over $35 million-- 40% of the federally funded charters failed.

None of this is likely to matter to DeVos. Like many free market true believers in the reformster world, she is going to view the closing and churning of charters as a feature, not a bug. This is how the market they envision is supposed to work-- schools are opened, some thrive, some fail, the failed ones close to be replaced by some other enterprising entrepreneur. It is, I think, one of the great ironies of hard right conservative Christians like DeVos-- on the one hand, they reject the notion of biological evolution, but on the other hand, they absolutely believe in survival of the fittest. Propping up a failing business goes against the law of nature.

That's why the hearings also included an exchange with Senator Jack Reed about infrastructure. He points out that there are school buildings that need to be rescued and updated and mentions his plan to invest 100 billion in infrastructure, to which DeVos replies:

Well I think it’s an interesting proposal. A very costly one at that. I think what I would actually advocate for is giving more students and more parents more freedom and choices to find the right fit for their child’s education. I think we are going to make more progress and have more gains in student achievement if students are able to find schools and education environments that work specifically for them. 

Don't bail out the struggling public schools. Let them fail. Betsy "Public education is a dead end" DevVos has certainly tipped her hand before, and Valerie Strauss picks out what might be the critical quote of the hearing:

“We need traditional public schools to be held to the same accountability standards" as charter schools.

Which pairs up with this another response to the NPE report:

When you have experimentation you are always going to have schools that don’t make it and that is exactly as what should happen. They should close. And let’s also look at how many traditional public schools have closed because they are not doing well for their students.

I don't think DeVos is attempting a "Nanny nanny boo boo-- public schools close a bunch, too." Because very few public schools close compared to charters, and I think she knows that. I think her point is, "Very few public schools close and that's further proof that they're bad and wrong." When she says public schools should be held to the same accountability standard, she means that public schools should be subject to Death By Foot-based Voting. All parents should be able to walk away from a public school and take their money with them. That's her premise and her message; the unstated assumption is that right-thinking Godly parents will beat feet out of public school faster than an Amway rep racing a Mormon missionary to your front door.

It's also worth noting that this all fits with the idea of a portfolio approach, that latest growing-in-reformster-popularity governance model being pushed by the City Group. Under a portfolio model, charters and public schools are lumped together in a group that operates charter-style, with features like a universal application that lets the system sort out the students. The portfolio is supposed to churn, just as you would regular add and remove investments from your financial portfolio depending on their performance. Schools, both charter and public, would be shut down, opened up, transferred to new management, and otherwise churned. That churn could be based on "performance" indicators like test scores, but it could also be based on market share-- how many feet vote for or against.

This is one of the area where choicers have a fundamental disagreement with public education advocates. For public schools, stability is a basic foundational value. The school is a community institution, and like all institutions, part of its values comes from its continuity, its connections to tradition, the past. It means something to people to see their children and neighbors all passing through the same halls, having the same teachers, being part of a community collective that stretches across the years. For free market Reformsters, anything that gets in the way of their idea of free market mechanics is bad; there should be winners and losers and the market should judge their worth, ruthlessly culling the weak and undeserving.

Reformsters know they have a hard sell. That's why they don't try to use this as a selling point ("Don't forget-- the school your child chooses could close at any time due to market consitions! Isn't that awesome!") That's why they are adamant about calling charters "public" schools-- because it lulls the customers into believing that charters share some of the fundamental characteristics of public schools, like stability and longevity. They (e.g. Governor DeSantis of Florida) also want to hold onto "public" because the change to privately owned and operated market based schools is the end of public education as we know it; it truly is privatization, and almost nobody pushing these policies has the guts to publicly say, "I propose that we end public education and replace it with privately owned and operated businesses, some of which will reserve the right to refuse service to some of you, and all of which may not last long enough to see your child from K through 12."

The person who almost has the guts to almost say this is, ironically, Betsy DeVos-- the person charged with taking care of the public system that she would like to kill. What a wacky world we live in. So don't expect her to be moved by all the waste of tax dollars paying for failed or fraudulent charter schools; every time a charter school closes, a free market reformster gets their wings, and Betsy is a-fixin' to fly.

The Charter Effect On Teachers

Unions, we have been told, have a deleterious effect on  teachers, forcing them to accept lousier deals than they could get in a free market where they each negotiated their own deals. In such a market, schools would compete for teachers, bidding up the salary offers. Teachers could negotiate from a place of strength. No teacher would ever want a union ever gain.

I confess that there was a time when I thought this might be true. Long ago, I thought that whatever their flaws, charter and choice systems would turn popular and successful teachers into sports stars, with schools throwing money and cars and lord-knows-what-else at them.

There were several factors I didn't reckon with, the chief one being the degree to which the charter industry would view teachers less like LeBron James and more like Pat the fry cook. I didn't foresee that charterpreneurs would imagine a system where the teacher was just a fleshy bot, a particularly lifelike animatronic content delivery device with a shelf life of only a few years. I failed to realize that a teacher's ability to walk away would be overshadowed by a school's ability to fire teachers for any reason at all.

Over the years the anecdotes kept rolling in to show me how wrong I was. But there was also some actual research, like this report from Public Source in Allegheny County PA (the county that surrounds Pittsburgh). I missed this report when it came out two years ago, but it's worth looking at now.

Public Source did a separate report about charter staff turnover. The turnover is high, and that's destabilizing for students, but charter operators have generally considered it a feature, not a bug. Is it related to teacher pay and job security? That's the question Public Source asks in this report.

They actually start with the question "Will charters and cybercharters honor Right-To-Know requests?" and the answer was mostly, kind of. But that was the data the report had to work with.

So do charter teachers in Allegheny County enjoy high wages, driven by competition? The answer is no. Charters are not filled with teachers who jumped ship from public education because someone waved big money at them. The report did find a correlation between teacher pay and student results, so there's that. But it also found that charter teachers could expect to make less money than their public school counterparts. Median pay for charter teachers was about $10,000 less than the public school teachers in the county.

Charters offered some explanation for low teacher pay, including the idea that charter faculty are mostly newbies, just starting and so gettin bottom dollar (so I guess the old reformy refrain about how fresh, new teachers are better to have than old, crusty teachers does not inform pay scales).

But some charters are coming up with creative ways to handle turnover...

To improve teacher retention at Propel Schools, financial incentives have been added in recent years, said Superintendent Tina Chekan.

They include pay bumps at the five- and 10-year thresholds and bonuses for teachers who participate in the Teacher Career Pathways program through which they seek ways to have impact beyond their classrooms by helping to coach or train colleagues.

So a pay scale that you move up as you stick around. Also, extra pay for extra duties. That is completely not revolutionary, and as noted before, seems to fly in the face of the reformy notion that zippy young teachers make a better staff than crotchety old ones. It's almost as if experience with the school population combined with the stability the school gets from staff continuity- it's almost as if that stuff has real value.

The study also found some charter staffs deciding that they did, in fact, need a union. Not just for issues of pay, but "the lack of job security and the desire to have a voice on issues like curriculum and best practices." As noted by said Carol Mintus, who served as the union president at the former PA Learners Online Regional Charter School [PALO].

When you have teachers who fear day after day for their jobs, they are not able to put the energy into teaching that they need to. If teachers aren't secure, eventually it's the kids who suffer.

The report does not mention the other issue here; if charters are the school of last resort, the school where teachers go to work when they can't find work elsewhere (and remember-- we're in the middle of a nationwide teacher shortage), what does that tell us about the quality of charter schools?

The golden age that charters were supposed to usher in for teachers still hasn't appeared; all indications are that we should not hold our breath.

Guns Headed For The Classroom

Of all the bad ideas.

I know there are folks who believe in their heart of hearts that arming teachers will make schools safer, or that putting armed police in the building will be helpful. But there are so many bad signs.

I want to believe that school resource officers can be helpful. Earlier this month, a school shooting was likely averted just up the road because students at the school felt comfortable enough with the SRO to turn in the students who were planning the attack.

But when I see stories like the one of the Chicago cops dragging a sixteen year old student down a flight of stairs, or see the video of a Florida cop body slamming an eleven-year-old, I have to conclude that sooner or later, some child is going to be killed in school.

I have even more misgivings when I see what a rush some states and districts are in to put guns in the hands of teachers.

A school district in Ohio apparently just decided that teachers should be able to carry in school after a three-day twenty-seven hour training. Three days. That seems like... not very much.

But that's still better than Oklahoma, where a bill just came out of committee to allow teachers to have guns in their classrooms with zero-- that zip, nada, none-- hours of training. Previously the state allowed only those withe peace officer or armed security guard certificates to carry, and those require 240 hours of training.

The potential for disaster here is huge. Were I still teaching, I'm not sure that finding out my neighbor was packing in the classroom next door wouldn't have me dusting off my resume. Guns in the hands of untrained amateurs in my building would be a deal breaker, on par with an unshielded nuclear reactor in my closet.

If you think I'm overreacting, consider this list of firearm screwups in just the last five years, courtesy of Giffords.org.

A gun was found unattended in an elementary school bathroom. No, not that other time. No, not this time, either. This time when it was left over the weekend.

A teacher was helping students do cartwheels when a loaded pistol fell out of his waistband.

A teacher lost it in a road rage incident, then took the other person's phone at gunpoint. Then he took the gun to school.

A kindergarten teacher came to school with a loaded gun. Oh, and she was drunk.

A student took a security guard's gun out of its holster.

During a lockdown over a false report, a security guard accidentally fired his gun.

A teacher unintentionally fired a gun in class. A student was hit in the neck by bullet fragments.

A sheriff's deputy unintentionally fired his gun in a classroom. The classroom was empty, but the bullet passed through the wall and hit the teacher next door in the neck-- fortunately not hard enough to break skin.

A school custodian thought he's caught kids trying to break in; he chased them down and pointed his gun at them.

While breaking up a fight, a school security guard pulled a gun on a student and threatened to kill him.

While a security guard was trying to subdue him, a student reached into the holster and pulled the trigger, firing the gun.

A wrestling coach got in an argument with a thirteen-year-old wrestler, then pulled a gun on him in the restroom.

A school resources officer committed suicide by gun while students were in school.

A teacher locked himself in an empty classroom and fired shots out the window.

This is just a fraction of list collected by Giffords.com.

Guns in schools-- even in the hands of trained professionals-- are an invitation to trouble. Arming teachers is a bad idea, and unlikely to be of any help in worst-case scenarios. The window of opportunity is tiny, the chance for collateral is huge, shooting accurately in high stress situations is hard, and the confusion on the scene, particularly as police arrive, just makes things worse. And for the whole rest of the year, you have a firearm in your school. Teachers have to be aware of all the many things they usually have to be aware of  while keeping track of that gun at all times.

Guns in school do not make people safer. They have the potential to make problem situations worse, they are a constant hazard to all students sand staff, and they will not even help should an active shooter situation occur. The price is too high, the payoff too low. To make things even worse by arming teachers with zero training is hugely irresponsible.

Melinda Gates Achieves Peak Epic Cluelessness

Sigh. Melinda Gates seems like a nice lady who means well, but her recent interview at the New York Times Magazine is a master class in how living in a very wealthy bubble can leave you out of touch with the rest of the world and an understanding of your place in it.

It starts in the very first paragraph.

“There are absolutely different points of view about philanthropy,” says Melinda Gates, who, along with her husband Bill, heads the charitable foundation that bears their name, aimed at increasing global health and reducing poverty. Its endowment, at $50.7 billion, is the largest in the world. “But we’re lucky to live in a democracy, where we can all envision what we want things to look like.”

Well, we can all envision what we want things to look like, and then become in a political process to support and elect leaders who then work within a democratic-ish government to pursue that vision. Only a few of us can use our vast wealth to completely circumvent the entire democratic process to impose our vision on the rest of the world.

This woman.

David Marchese, who I'm betting has read Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All,  opens the door wide for Gates to consider one of the deeper issues of modern philanthropy by asking, "When you meet with other wealthy philanthropists, do you find that anyone is grappling in a serious way with their own culpability for problems, like growing income inequality, that are at the root of issues they’re trying to solve?" Do you get that it's very possible that you are spending money to amelliorate conditions that you have created?

She whiffs.

There are absolutely people thinking about this. Then there are others who, no, they’re comfortable with how they act. But one of the reasons the Giving Pledge has been so important is that in some countries — in India, in China — we’re starting the discussion about philanthropy. I will say that of the 190 who have joined the Giving Pledge so far, some of them joined because it looks good. But I’m stunned by how many visits we’re hosting at the foundation now with philanthropists — not even billionaires, millionaires — asking us: How did you think about philanthropy? How did you do it?

Nope. The question is not "Should rich folks give back" but "Should rich folks look at changing the system that made them unreasonably rich to begin with."

But Marchese will give her another chance, and makes his real question pretty clear:

When you’re in Giving Pledge meetings, would it ever fly to ask people not just to give more but to take less?

She is not having it:

Look, there are going to be lots of points of view in the room about that topic. But I think you frame it as: What do we want for our democracy? How do we want the country to look and act and be 50 and 100 years from now? I will tell you that many people in that room want better outcomes for low-income people in this country. They want to see things get better

Note the term "low-income people." Not "people who end up with the short end of the short end of the stick because we've rigged the system so that some of us get most of the stick to ourselves." No, the "low-income people" suggests that their poor status is part of their nature. You can't change it by, say, distributing the spoils of industry more equitably to begin with; you just count on wealthy people to make those low-incomers a little more comfortable. You know, so "things" can get "better.'

Also, what I want for my democracy is to not see it circumvented and stage managed by rich people, thanks.

And Marchese, God bless him, is not giving up:

One of the recurring criticisms of large-scale philanthropists is that they aren’t interested in any redress of the economic systems that create inequality. But in order to rectify inequalities, doesn’t a radical rethinking need to happen?

And Gates again completely rejects the question:

Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes.

Nope. That is not a radical rethinking. Gates thinks it is because, she notes, many of the places they hang out tougher taxation is not a popular idea. But redistributing income is not the issue-- distributing it differently in the first place is. But the philanthropic dream here is for low-income people to somehow get a better deal without the rich having to give up their spot at the top of the heap. You really need to read Winners Take All.

Marchese gives up and moves on to ask Gates about her privilege, and she replies with some borderline bizarre observations that--well...

You have to be in the community with people who don’t look like you. When I read about a shooting, maybe in the south side of Seattle, I’m not living the experience. Whereas if I have a friend who’s a person of color, they most likely are living that experience or know somebody who was part of that community.

So... all Black people in Seattle know each other? All Black people in Seattle have experience with shootings?

Also, she wants to people to feel comfortable in her house, even with all the art and hugeness, so she's willing to wait in her yoga pants and unmadeup face while they pet the dog and -- sorry, I can't get over the "person of color" shooting experience thing.

Also, they watch tv. And it bugs her that tech people think that an app can solve anything, which is a useful insight, particular if she were to make the leap from "app" to "technocratically engineered system."

Gates's book included some revelations about her past in an abusive relationship, and here she is insightful enough to understand that there are women in the world going through things that are far worse.

Then it's on to politics. She notes that the current administration is problematic (Bill Gates told Chris Hayes that he had to explain to Donald Trump that HIV and HPV are not the same thing, twice), but luckily Congress still controls a lot of the process "so we are working with Congress more than ever." Imagine the level of privilege involved in being able to talk about Congress as just another organization that you work with.

You remember that line about how being able to disregard politics is a sign of privilege? Gates explains that she doesn't get involved in, say, financing candidates for office who support Roe v. Wade because she doesn't want to be out in a particular political "bucket," which would interfere with her ability to build coalitions and work on stuff. Though she doesn't say so, it seems this is just one more way in which the democratic process is an obstacle to implementing her vision.

Gates also apparently doesn't count the political money they spend to push their education agenda; for instance, the over-a-million spent to push charters in Washington state.

Marchese re-raises Peter Singer's question about the value of a human life versus a $100 million home.

We certainly spend money on ourselves. You see it in the house that we built. We won’t have that house forever, though. I’m actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500-square foot house.

But they do think about this stuff. Like, they decided to stop using bottled water and just get it out of the tap.

So we try to live those values as much as we can and do the best we can. But the one thing that I want to be really clear is that a vast majority of the huge funds that we have, these billions of dollars, they are going back to society.

But again-- the question of giving those dollars back is not nearly as interesting as the question of why they should have them in the first place, giving this couple the power of a small country and letting them decide how that power and money will be used. Marchese asks about when that downsizing will happen, and she doesn't know, but probably after the last kid is out of the house. Of course, the foundation will keep them coming back to Seattle part of the year, "But I assure you, if we decide to spend six months somewhere else it will be in a smaller house." Which I guess is rich person downsizing-- your second home is smaller.

Then we get to education, where Marchese suggests that maybe their work there has been inherently antidemocratic and that they've spent money in a way that "maybe seems like it's crowing out people's actual wants." But once again, the view from Gates Mountain is... different.

Bill and I always go back to “What is philanthropy’s role?” It is to be catalytic. It’s to try and put new ideas forward and test them and see if they work. If you can convince government to scale up, that is how you have success. But philanthropic dollars are a tiny slice of the United States education budget. Even if we put a billion dollars in the State of California, that’s not going to do that much. So we experiment with things. If we had been successful, David, you’d see a lot more charter schools. I’d love to see 20 percent charter schools in every state. But we haven’t been successful. I’d love to say we had outsize influence. We don’t.

Plenty to unpack here, starting with a nice clear statement of goals for charter schools-- 20%, or one charter school for every four public schools. Then there's "try and put new ideas forward and test them," which rather glosses over the fact that we are testing these ideas on human children. The entire national education system is suffering through the goop that is Common Core-- an entire generation-- and it's just an experiment. And the idea that Gates doesn't have outsize influence is so counter-reality that one hardly knows where to begin. Name anybody-- anybody at all-- who has had as much influence as a private citizen on public education. There is literally an entire cottage industry, paid for with Gates dollars, that does nothing but promote various Gates-favored reformster ideas.

Marchese presses her on the outsize influence thing, and she has an example that doesn't prove her point;

I went and met with a group of three dozen parents in Memphis. We thought we had a good idea for them. They were having none of it. So we didn’t move forward.

Let's think about this. The parents were able to show influence by influencing Gates. In other words, Gates was still the major actor in this example. That's not what no special influence looks like. No special influence looks like "We went to Memphis and nobody would even meet with us. We try calling officials and they won't even answer the phone. We e-mail top education movers and shakers and they don't even respond." That's what no special influence actually looks like-- you know, like a teacher.

Also, Gates thinks a lot about contraceptives.

Melinda Gates is no dummy, so it's hard to understand how she can have such huge blind spots, but here's modern philanthropy in all its glory. There's no question about the inequity of the situation-- of course we're super-rich and those people aren't and there's no reason to think about why that is or how we're helping to create it. There's no question about our right to operate as a privater, unelected government-- hey, we're just regular folks trying to impose our vision on the world, just like anyone else. We have no special great power and therefor no great responsibility. Also, we'd like experiment on your kids with a few ideas we have.

FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that's futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message-- "That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block."

Congratulations. You live in Florida.

Florida's elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a "public school system." I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, "I did not throw that pencil at Chris" even though he watched me watch him do it.

The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We'll put Swampland Charter right here.

Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them-- they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state-level neglect. They stepped up to solve the problems the state caused.

Last week, Florida GOP legislators pooped out a proposal to stop all this locally controlled self-reliant bootstrapping (because, you know, conservatives hate local control, self-reliance, and bootstraps, apparently, now). The bill, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee led by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, says those local districts must hand over some of those tax dollars to charter schools or the state will just cut their state funding even more.

This is just nuts on so many levels. In addition to pissing on the conservative values of local control and self-reliance, this also thumbs its nose at one of the traditional arguments for charter schools-- that competition will make public schools up their games. I'd call bullshit on that point, except that's exactly what happened here-- with their ability to compete hamstrung by Tallahassee tightwads, these local districts found a way to be competitive, including competing for teachers in the midst of Florida's well-deserved and completely predictable teacher shortage.

This is legislative thievery. This is as if lawmakers bought their own restaurant and then imposed a tax on all other restaurants so that no matter where you eat out, the legislators' restaurant gets paid.

Tallahassee isn't even trying to be sneaky. The message is clear; they want charter schools to get the money, and public schools to get the shaft.

Meanwhile, the tax increases were passed for very specific amounts earmarked for very specific purposes, and if charters get to take a cut, the full amount of money won't be there, leaving local authorities to figure out, once again, how to overcome the state's inflicted financial challenges. And don't get any smart ideas about other taxation avenues; the state wants local sales taxes to now be approved by a two-thirds vote rather than simple majority.

It's thievery, and it's one more step toward the goal of turning Florida into a state with no public education system, but plenty of education-flavored opportunities to make a private fortune out of public dollars. And it would just be a mark of shame for the state alone, were Florida not Betsy DeVos's idea of how a privatized, voucherized is supposed to be set up.