This Case Could Break The Wall Between Church And School

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue case for Forbes, trying to explain why it would be a big deal if the Supremes decided to hear this case. One thing has changed since then-- the court has decided they will hear the case.

This is a big deal. Here's a slightly modified version of that Forbes piece to serve as an explainer for why we need to pay attention.

This summer the US Supreme Court has decided to hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. Its decision will have huge repercussions for public education. To grasp why this case matters and why it's coming up now, there are two pieces of background you need to understand.

Tax Credit Scholarships

Tax credit scholarships are yet another variation on a school voucher program. With vouchers, a family picks the school it wants its child to attend, and the state hands that child's "share" of education funding to that school. The problem is that when a family chooses a religious school (as is often the case), that can run afoul of the separation of church and state in general, and Blaine Amendment laws in particular. The Blaine Amendment was a failed Constitutional amendment that prohibited spending tax dollars on sectarian schools; 38 states adopted it for their own constitutions. It's not an easy law to defend, because it rose out of nativist reaction to immigrant Catholics, even if does fit with the wall between church and state.

Tax Credit Scholarships do an end run around the wall. A business or wealthy individual gives a contribution to a special "scholarship" organization that then hands out scholarships to private schools. The state lets the business or wealthy individual count that contribution as some or all of their tax liability. Think of it this way: I'm the state, and you owe me $100. I am not allowed to gamble, but if you give that $100 to my bookie instead, I'll consider us square.

Rules vary from state to state (in Georgia, for example, contributors can actually turn a profit on the TCS donation). But one feature is constant--whatever money is fed into the TCS represents money subtracted from state revenue. This, it should also be noted, is the model for Betsy DeVos's proposed Education Freedom Scholarships. In all cases, these are vouchers dressed up with fancy accounting.

A Church Parking Lot In Missouri

The other factor here is Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. The case seems like small potatoes; a church in Missouri wanted to apply for a public monies grant to help resurface its playground. It was disqualified because it's a church. The case ended its five-year trek to the Supreme Court in 2017, and Chief Justice Roberts said, "The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand.” This was a big deal because, as Bloomberg noted:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes.

Some of the majority tried to rein in the implications of the case by noting it was a ruling strictly about playground resurfacing. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, however, indicated that they believed that discriminating against religious practices was not okay "on the playground or anywhere else."

Meanwhile, In Montana

Montana's legislature tried to get a voucher foot in the door with the Montana Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which allowed a not-very-staggering tax credit of $150. There was just one problem; the Montana Department of Revenue wouldn't implement the program, claiming it broke the law. The Montana Supreme Court agreed that the tax credit benefited religious schools and therefore broke the rules.

The case has found its way very quickly to the Supreme Court, and the long list of very conservative and religious school choice fans filing amicus briefs lets us know just how much some folks are hoping the Supremes will reverse Montana's own high court. Cato Institute, EdChoice, Christian Legal Society, Liberty Justice Center, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, Georgia Goal Scholarship Program, Alliance for Choice in Education, and former governor Scott Walker are among the many who have been urging SCOTUS to take this case and run with it.

The case matters because it could extend the Trinity Lutheran notion that free exercise beats the establishment clause. The case matters because it could open the door wide to the use of public tax dollars for private religious schools. The court could also drive a stake through the heart of voucher programs aimed at shuttling public funds to private religious schools, no matter how clever and convoluted the voucher scheme may be. That last possibility seems less likely, because, as with many issues beloved by the right, this is an issue that may be facing the friendliest court in many decades. This is definitely one case to watch for this summer.

ICYMI: Now Where Was I Edition (6/30)

Last week I was on an actual vacation, so I'm still getting back up to speed. Here's what I've got for you to read on  this muggy Sunday.

Michigan's School Choice Mess

Jennifer Berkshire took a road trip to Michigan for the Have You Heard podcast, to see what she could learn about the choice system, the local love for DeVos, and the implication for the nation as a whole. This episode focuses on the inter-district choice system they have out there.

Why Many School Districts Are Being Set Up For Fiscal Failure  

Jeff Bryant takes a look at how some systems have been financially gutted. Good reporting here.

What If Teachers Didn't Focus On Individual Achievement

Some really interesting thoughts about how to use a classroom to lift up a community.

Are Today's Children Developmentally Different  

This is a classic from Nancy Bailey that was making the rounds again this week. Still an important read.

AltSchool Finally Bites Dust  

The high tech personalized learning boutique charter chain has finally devolved into the software company it was always destined to be.

What Actually Helps Poor Students

Another article from a few years back. A meta-study about what actually helps students achieve and-- surprise-- it's not computer software.

Things Education Reformers Still Don't Understand About Tests

Jersey Jazzman lays out in plain English some of the fallacies worked into reformer "news" about test results.

Chalkbeat and TFA Propaganda

Chalkbeat Tennessee published a horrendous piece of TFA-as-savior baloney, and Gary Rubenstein is here to pick it apart.

New Koch and Walton Backed Initiatives  

EdWeek reports on some new players in the reformster advocacy game. Forewarned is forearmed.

About That Marshmallow Test

Another study debunks the famous delayed gratification experiment.

Pay for Success Preys On The Poor

A direct and clear explanation of how some see the pay for success movement turning the poor into financial fodder in the surveillance state.

DeVos Backs Corporate Profits Again

If there is one signature feature of a DeVos doctrine, it's that the government should never, ever stand between a business and its revenue stream.

That part of the doctrine was on display yesterday as DeVos officially announced her intention to let for-profit colleges do whatever the hell they want. Okay, that may be an overstatement. What she actually did was roll back the Obama-era requirement that such schools either show that their graduates actually land jobs, or the school would lose access to all that sweet sweet federal money. That was a powerful piece of leverage, because the for-profit colleges focus on veterans and poor folks with the result that a great deal of the for profit college revenue stream comes from the feds, who loan to the students and pay off the schools, guaranteeing that the for-profits get paid and that the students are in hock to the feds.

Rolling back Obama-era protections is problematic because the Obama administration itself did a super-lousy job of riding herd on these predatory schools. At one point, having announced that they were now by golly going to clamp down those outfits, they turned around and bailed out one of the worst. Then, when that outfit collapsed anyway, the feds let them be sold off to a debt-collection agency.

It was after all that foolishness that the administration finally implemented a gainful employment rule. This was also followed by  students scammed by the for-profit agitating to be released from their debts. The Department of Justice requested that the Department of Education simply release the portion of that debt that they held; they refused.

All of that happened before Trump ever descended the escalator to unleash havoc on US politics; it's only fair to note that this is, in many ways, a mess that DeVos inherited and which the Obama administration never exactly showed signs of fixing.

Last week, DeVos was sued--again--by a boatload of students stranded in massive debt. The student position is that they were defrauded and their loans should be forgiven.

DeVos's position about loan forgiveness has been to simply pretend to lose all the paperwork and never process any of the requests to have loans erased. Having ignored the rules for two years, DeVos last year tried to get rid of them, and this week she finally did it.

The USED position is that a combination of transparency (defined as "a  government website that students will have to find and decipher on their own") and caveat emptor is the solution to all of this (though presumably the almost-200,000 debt-loaded students asking for forgiveness will also need a time machine to get any use out of the transparency).

The repeal of the rule will take effect in 2020, and it will remove any sort of useful consequence for for-profit misbehavior. It's perfectly in line with the DeVos doc trine, which says that the government should not interfere in any meaningful way with a business trying to fleece its customers make a profit by marketing baloney offering a service. Since the moment she sat in front of te Senate confirmation hearing, DeVos has been consistent in expressing that she has no intention of putting the protection of students and "customers" ahead of the interests of businesses. This is just more of the same. Ka-ching.

Eight Weeks of Summer: Leaders and Followers

This post is week 3 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

This post will catch me up on this little project. It's an interesting piece of teacher sharing and is also turning out to be a nice antidote to political overload. As always, I'm answering the prompt on behalf of the younger, pre-retirement version of me.

How are you both a leader and a follower in your career?

Of course, every teacher is a leader in her own classroom. But stick around the same building long enough and you can become a leader in other ways. Not that there are tons of leadership opportunities formally given to teachers. Sure, you can be appointed by administration to "The Committee To Implement Any Solution It Likes As Long As It's The Solution Administration Wants" or "The Committee To Create Cool Documents That Nobody Will Ever Read." But somehow, those aren't very exciting.

It's more common, I think, for teachers to grow into unofficial roles, so that you become The Person to see about particular problems and solutions. You can become the person whose judgment other teachers trust on certain edu-matters. In my case, I stuck around that I became The Only Person Who Remembers How And Why We've Always Done That.

But the big problem with teacher leadership roles is that there's hardly any role you can take, any piece of power you can have, that administration can't strip instantly. E.G. I was on a committee that was tasked with leading implementation of PLCs in our school-- until administration decided they wanted different things and suddenly we were not leading a thing.

You might argue that this blogging thing has become a sort of leadership role, but I'm not sure that's accurate. I feel more like a resource than a leader.

Followers matter. There's a whole field of study around the idea of first followers-- that an outside the box innovator is just one crazy guy in left field until a first follower shows up to start a crowd. I've been a first follower a few times, saying, "Hey, look at this. Let's all listen up."

But in the  formal institutional sense, I've worked for very few leaders-- mostly I've just had bosses, and I'm a lousy follower of bosses. I can mimic compliance with the best of them, though I got pretty lousy at  it in the final few years-- but that's not following. Teaching is not a very followy profession-- we're usually just out there breaking trail on our own. So I'll be interested to see what types of following turned up  on this third of eight weeks. (Remember, you can use the hashtag #8WeeksOfSummer to track down all the posts people are writing for this challenge).

Eight Weeks Of Summer: Influences

This post is week 2 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

Well, actually, I'm a week late because I was on vacation where the mosquitoes are stronger than the wifi. But I'm going to stick with the exercise anyway, because I find it interesting.

Here's the Week #2 prompt. As always, I'll answer for my previous pre-retirement self.

What has contributed to the educator you are today?

I'm going to skip over some of the obvious factors, like former teachers who had a profound impact on me, and writers about education who directly affected my thinking about classroom and content. Those are all hugely important, but I think we too often think of the growth of a teacher as a linear progression, that proto-teachers learn from teachers and read about teacher things and take teacher classes and that all leads directly to who they are as a teacher. 


That's fine, but I think there's way more to it than that. Teaching is highly personal work, and it's simply impossible to teach effectively without bringing who you are as a person into the classroom. That doesn't mean teachers should be unprofessional ("My boyfriend dumped me last night, so we're not going to have class today"), but it does mean that all the other things we are matter when we hit the room.

So here are what some of those factors are for me.

Student teaching. Yes, I know what I just said. But for me it wasn't just the pedagogical and content aspects of student teaching; it's that I came from a mostly white small town background and student taught in Cleveland Heights with rooms of almost entirely non-white students. It was a clear signal that there were many things that I didn't have a clue about that I needed to have clues about.

Performing. Mind you, I am not an extrovert, not a stage guy. But I've been playing music my whole life up in front of audiences, and that turned out to be hugely integral to my classroom work. In particular, learning to read the room and sense whether you're doing great or bombing.

And while I have done a lot of different types of performing (three hours of oompah-band for a slightly sloppy Oktoberfest crowd, anyone), my heart has always been in traditional jazz. And here's the thing about jazz-- you need a plan, a beat, a progression of chords, a sense of where you and the people you're playing with are going, but if you have a precise note-for-note plan, you're just sucking the life out of it. If you aren't free and flexible enough to respond to the moment, then you're missing the very best parts, the whole point. That is teaching.

Likewise, I've spent a lot of time directing theater, both music and stage, and that idea-- that you need a direction and a sense of the bigger thing that you're  part of, but you also have to be open to respond and collaborate-- it's there, too. And when you're in charge, you cannot try to micro-manage every second of your cast's performance.

Phone bank. I've written before about my time as a catalog phone order taker. I was lousy at the job, and it underlined for me a lot about the cost of having to show up and do poorly at something day after day. It affected how I treated my lower-performing students.

Marriage, divorce, singlehood, marriage. My own relationship struggles were useful in connecting to the issues of my students and their families. Likewise, parenting made a difference. Not that I'm advocating doing any of these things to build your teaching tool box.  Nor do I suggest that you share the play by play with your students. Just that even these very personal experiences can do a great deal toward building your classroom toolbox.

Dear Teachers: Don't Make Your Lesson Relevant

When I was getting my teacher training way back in the 1970s, we used to hear a great deal about making our teaching relevant. It took me several years of teaching to figure out why that was terrible advice. And it hasn't ever gone away.

It seems to make sense. Connect your lesson on parts of speech to a current popular song. Assign persuasive essays about something the kids are into today. Could we do an essay about the rap? I hear that teens very much like the rap these days.

Looks tall to me.

But the problem is not teachers who are clueless about what a relevant connection might be. That's correctable (I still want back the hours of my life I spent watching The Hills so that I could follow student discussions). The problem is less obvious than the natural consequences of living on the other side of the generational divide.

Nobody says, "Let's think of a way to make mountains tall." And if your spouse says, "I'm looking for ways to make you interesting and appealing," that is not a good sign.

Once you look at a lesson and ask, "How am I going to make this material relevant," you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that's true--if the lesson is inherently irrelevant--then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it's on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything. More importantly, no amount of stapling on pictures of movie stars will convince your students that you aren't wasting their time, and wasting students' time is one of the unforgivable sins in the teaching biz.

Know why you are teaching what you're teaching. Know why the material has value for your students. This is not always obvious, but this is where your expertise in the subject matter is supposed to come in. You're the teacher--you're supposed to know what the connection is between your content material and the business of being fully human in the world. If you don't see a connection, you need to go study and look to find it, or you need to reconsider whether you should be teaching it at all.Those connections don't need to be profound. For instance, I maintain that one of the benefits of being a well-educated person is that you get more jokes. Education makes the world funnier. Some disciplines are about building mental muscles. When I inevitably heard the "when are we ever going to use this" question, my reply was a sports analogy. Our football players always spent the offseason lifting weights, even though no football game in history ever stopped for a bench press competition. The players are never going to use their bench pressing skills, so why bother? Because they would use the muscles that weight lifting built.

Literature connects us to the human attempt to make sense of how the world works (a daily activity for students). The questions of history (What happened, how did it happen, why did it happen, and what will happen because of it) are the same questions that students ask about last Saturday's dance. Math and science help us understand how to build and evaluate facts. We all bathe in the arts every single day. And there is plenty more to unpack about what teachers teach in school. And while students may seem caught up in small, petty things, they are deeply busy figuring out how the world works and how to be in it. There's your connection.

It is easy to get caught up in the details, to miss the forest as we stare at the bugs on the leaves on the branches on the trees. It is easy to get caught up in figuring out how to get another question on a worksheet and forget to ask why you're assigning the worksheet in the first place. This is why part of the summer work of teaching should be not just stepping back and reconnecting with the material, but reconnecting with life out in the world where students live so that we can better see the connections between the two.

"Why are we learning this?" is the question that no teacher should ever be afraid or unable to answer because the answer to that question is the foundation of everything else that happens in the classroom. That's why the answer should always be real and well-considered, not just something we make up.

Originally posted at Forbes

Five Reasons School Takeovers Fail

At the May 22 meeting of the Florida State Board of Education meeting, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and some board members expressed frustration with the state of Duval County Schools. "At what point do you say, ‘Maybe we should put them in receivership. Maybe we should have legislation that allows us to go over there and take over,’ ” he said.

Meanwhile, Ohio is trying to come to grips with a spectacularly failing takeover policy, but progress in the legislature has hit a snag. The House passed a bill that would do away with Ohio's current takeover structure and create a new way for districts to respond to problems-- they've even incorporated the language into the budget. But the Ohio Senate has its own ideas about replacing the school state takeover bill with--another school state takeover bill, featuring a special state "transformation" board.

Since policy writers and thinky tanks first started pushing the idea of identifying "failing" schools, the search has been on for a way to fix those schools. A popular choice has been the school takeover model, where the state strips the local school district of authority and then waves some sort of magic wand to make things better.

The Obama administration used School Improvement Grants as a tool, offering federal funds to schools that were "failing," but those funds came with very strict rules about how they could be used. This is a good example of the Takeover By Puppetry model, in which the local officials are left in place, but they are only allowed to make certain government-approved moves or must only implement consultant-approved steps. The SIG program spent in the neighborhood of $7 billion. USED's own report found that it "had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment."

The more direct takeover approach has also been tried. Tennessee formed the Achievement School District; in this model, the state takes control of "failing schools" and lumps them into a state-run district. The initial promise was that schools from the bottom 5% would be catapulted into the top 25%. After a few years, they were not even close to achieving their, so they rewrote the goal. The head of the ASD moved on to another job. Versions of the ASD have been tried in several states and in cities (e.g. Philadelphia) and in almost all cases, they've been rolled back or shut down because they cost a lot of money and achieve few worthwhile results.

At this point, school takeover is one of those ed reform techniques that has been tested enough times that there's no longer any mystery about whether or not it works. Mostly it doesn't. Here are the most common reasons that takeovers don't turn a problem school into an oasis of success.

1) The Wrong Measure of Failure

How are we going to decide which schools are in need of taking over? The most common answer is by standardized test scores--which is a lousy answer. This bad definition is important because it biases the process in favor of bad solutions. A school may have a hundred problems, but if all we're focused on is the test scores, too may real problems will be unaddressed. Worse, many important elements of children's education will be swept aside to make room for more test prep--the exact opposite of what students in struggling schools need. This is like calling AAA because you're stranded beside the road with three flat tires, a busted radiator, an empty gas tank, and failing brakes--and AAA sends someone to wax the car.

2) The Wrong Diagnosis

Takeover programs focus on school governance. The thesis of a takeover is that the school board, the administration, and probably the teachers, are the root of all the problems at the school. If we just take them out of the way and replace them with shinier people, then everything will just fall into place. Somehow, all these people who work in the district either don't know how to raise test scores, or they just don't care. Resources for the district, issues in the community, systemic lack of support for the school, poverty--none of that is on the table. The belief is that when the old bureaucracy (including unions) is swept away and replaced, preferably by a visionary CEO type who will whip the troops into shape, then everything will run so much better. Often the unspoken premise is, "If we could just run these schools like charter schools..." Here's what Chris Barbic, who was supposed to be the visionary CEO of the Tennessee ASD, said as he was leaving the job:

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment.  I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD.  As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

3) The Wrong Pool of Expertise

Another premise of state takeovers is that somebody in the state capital knows more about how to educate the students in that district than the people who live in that district, that some career politician knows more about running a school than a career educator. The level of arrogance here is Grand Canyon caliber; the takeover model almost never includes a step in which the takeover expert sits down with local folks and says, "You guys know the community, the students, the history here, so I need to listen to you to understand where we are." On occasion he goes through those motions, much like the corporate boss who holds meetings about a decision he's already made because he heard somewhere that's how you get "buy in."

Lorain, Ohio, is a too-typical example. CEO David Hardy is a Teach for America alumnus with a grand total of two years spent in a classroom. Since then he's worked in a variety of education related jobs, but never stayed in one job longer than three years. To even imagine that takeovers have a hope of succeeding, one must imagine takeover bosses who are education experts, who know more than anyone already in the district could possibly know. Who are these education management superstars, and where have they been hiding all these years if not in perfectly good jobs that they have no reason to leave? Too often, takeovers elevate educational amateurs to power they don't know how to use. The newly proposed Senate model sets up a $20 million gravy train for state-approved outside consultants; is there any reason at all to assume these consultants have the necessary expertise?

As for charters, if they did in fact know the secret sauce for school achievement, we'd all have heard about it by now (and some charter operators would be getting rich packaging it). But charters don't know anything that public education folks don't; the secret sauce is more time, more money, and fewer students who don't fit the school's mold.

4) The Wrong Motivation

Too often, school takeover is about turning a public school over to a private charter operator. Former House Speaker Corcoran (whose wife works in the charter sector) reportedly seems miffed that the Duval County Superintendent is unwilling to bring in consultants and/or charters to fix up her schools. The proposed Ohio Senate bill, which switches the state from hard takeovers to puppet-style takeovers, was crafted by a committee that includes representatives of the business sector, a think tank that does charter authorizing business in Ohio, and some other ed reform advocates.

Some systems are stacked in favor of keeping the takeover pipeline flowing. Tennessee used a popular definition of "worst schools" which is "those who score in the bottom 5%." This guarantees a perpetual source of takeover schools, because no matter how your state is doing, someone is always in the bottom 5%. School takeovers can be about a sincere desire to intervene in a troubled district, but they can also be about exploiting a manufactured crisis that cracks open an attractive market for those who want to make money from privatization.

5) The Wrong Timetable

Even if a takeover has settled on the narrow, meager goal of simply raising test scores, takeovers often feature a wildly unrealistic timetable. Changing a school's entire culture, while the slow march of years slowly feeds your students through the system, is a long process. It takes four years to swap out the complete student body of a high school. Takeovers might transform a system in five or ten years. Takeover proposals often call for far less; the Ohio proposal wants it done in two or else the school can be re-taken over by a different model.

The idea that someone can parachute into a district and suddenly reverse years of problems (including problems they ignore) quickly and easily is either naivete or a cynical mask for a hostile takeover. It puts the state in the odd position of saying, "We have known all along how to fix a school district--we've just been keeping it to ourselves while we watch you," when in fact they don't really have a clue. Struggling schools can be turned around, but this is not the way.

Originally posted at Forbes