What Is The Real Promise Of School Choice

AEI hosted a pep rally for the DeVos $5 million scholarship tax credit, and afterwards, Rick Hess put up the latest entry in AEI's 60 second that "reminds" us of the "real promise" of charters and choice:

Thank you to @BetsyDeVosED, @KellyannePolls, and state decision makers for a great conversation about Education Freedom Scholarships today! In any discussion about school choice, it's important to remember its *real* promise. @rickhess99 explains #In60Seconds pic.twitter.com/Q0ADrHom9S

— AEI Education (@AEIeducation) October 1, 2019

Yes, apparently the real promise of choice is that it will empower educators to start up schools where they can do their thing. This has to be the six gazillionth tweaking of the charter argument, and one of the least convincing to date. [Note: Hess wrote after I posted that he has been making this point  for a very long time. That would make him, by my count, the only one, but it would still mean that this is not  a new tweak after all.]

After all, the argument for the longest time was that choice was necessary to rescue students from failing public schools and the failing teachers who failed there. Hess says that the real promise of choice is not higher math and reading scores, but  of course that was exactly the promise of school choice; if it was not a real promise it was certainly a marketing promise. These score-raising  charters would be staffed by Teach For America folks, or other alternative path folks, because public school teachers were not desirable. One selling point for many charters has been that they are teacher-proof-- the charter system's program is set in cement, sometimes scripted, sometimes enshrined in computer software so that the teacher is just a coach.

Feeling empowered yet?

There have been other real promises of charter schools articulated. Mike Petrilli was willing to say out loud the promise that charters would allow strivers to get away from Those Other Students. And as study after study showed that choice didn't raise scores, some advocates switched over to the idea  of a moral imperative for choice; iow, it doesn't matter what the educational effects of choice might be, because parents should be free to choose. Lately, that argument has been given a religious spin. And while not many put it down anywhere outside of tweets and conversation, do not underestimate the number of people who simply want to see "government" schools crushed (and those uppity teacher unions with them).

It is hard to think of a choice or charter program that has made any attempt to empower teachers. "Empower teachers" in a charter setting usually means "free them from evil union rules that interfere with their freedom to donate an extra sixty hours of work of free" or "liberate them to be paid poorly." Instructionally, charter and choice schools often are less likely to give teachers power and more likely to put them in a straightjacket. Teachers who have any objections to working conditions are scolded for putting  adult concerns ahead of the children's interests; unsurprising from a movement that has been dominated by education amateurs who belittle the expertise of actual teachers.

While I am sure that there are good individual examples here in there, if the empowerment  of teachers has been a major purpose and theme of charters and choice, I missed it somehow.

This new rationale is not completely out of left field for Hess, who wrote The Cage-Busting Teacher about how individual teachers could break loose and become forces for educational good wherever they are. But it's important to note that in the video, Hess is talking about "educators" and not "teachers,"and by current standards, anyone who wants to get involved in the education business can call himself an educator. Heck, put in two years with TFA and you are suddenly an education policy  expert.

In fact, one piece of the video is not new at all. Hess notes that these reformy educators hit a "wall" created by government officials, central offices, school boards, and the community. It's an odd but familiar complaint-- "I want to launch my new edubusiness idea but all these stakeholders are acting like they have some kind of stake in this, like they've been elected or hired to watch over public education. They are harshing my entrepreneurial buzz." But with a Secretary of Education devoted to dismantling public education, and who considers business interests the most important interests of all,       it's a timely complaint.

Actually, on reflection, it's possible I'm not being fair here, and that Hess is actually talking about what has truly been the first and foremost real promise of school choice all along-- the promise that businessmen, hedge fund investors, and any other entrepreneurial education amateurs will finally be given a way to tap into that giant mountain of taxpayer education money, a way that will circumvent elected officials, government regulation, and the judgment of actual education professionals.

Are School Vouchers A Path To Religious Freedom?

Let me make a confession-- I am not at all unsympathetic to many Libertarian beliefs. I am wary of government involvement in many arenas, and the bigger the government, the warier I am. Additionally, I know some Libertarians personally, and they are perfectly nice human beings. But when you start turning general Libby philosophical notions into specific policies, particularly in areas where my exercise of my liberty crashes into your exercise of your liberty-- well, that never seems to work out well-- or even consistent.  At a minimum, I find some of these conclusions puzzling.

Let's take the new Libby talking point on school vouchers, as articulated in many venues by CATO Institute's Education Guy Neal McCluskey. 

The argument that to have "equality under the law," religious folks need to be able to fully exercise their beliefs, including sending their children to a private religious school, and so taxpayers should fund vouchers for just that purpose. 

This is a close cousin of the argument that this administration has put forth in a variety of forms, which boils down to this: if your personal faith says you should discriminate against certain classes of people, but federal law says you can't, then federal law should step aside for your personal beliefs. This point of view has scored a victory or two, and it's important because it marks the first time that the battle between the free exercise clause (you should get to exercise whatever religious beliefs you hold) and the establishment clause (the government should not choose a side in the world of unending religious debates) is being decided in favor of the exercise clause.

You have, of course, always been free to send your chid to a religious school. What's new here is the argument that the government should pay for it. 

I'm confused at finding this argument coming from conservative Libby folks. These are the same folks who like to characterize taxation as theft, but in their support of vouchers, Libbys are saying that citizens should be taxed so that their neighbors can practice their religion. Imagine telling a community of right-wing Trumpian Christians that their property taxes will be used to send children to an Islamic school, or Southern Baptists discovering that their tax dollars will be supporting the local Catholic school. This does not require a great deal of imagination, as part of how we got here is the outrage of religious taxpayers being riled up (sometimes honestly and sometimes at the prodding of those who would like to weaken public schools) that their tax dollars are going to a public system that allows the study of Other Religions (aka the not-Christian ones) or Transcendental Meditation or evolution. Good heavens-- just watch this administration go after colleges just for saying too many nice things about Islam.

Their argument is that they don't want their tax dollars to support a school that doesn't teach the things they agree with-- but a voucher system will not change that one iota. The public system is ideally religiously neutral, and yes, I know it is not always successful in that regard, but at least the ideal is there. A voucher system with no religious restrictions allows, even requires, your Christian tax dollars to be sent to a school that  explicitly teaches that your faith is wrong. 

Beyond that, a voucher system also gets government in the business of religious oversight. It's possible, I suppose, to have a voucher system with no oversight at all in which parents are handed a government check that can be spent on private school tuition, textbooks, an X-box, or a used car. We could have a system where the government just gives the money away, no questions asked. But again, that seems to have been one of the objections reformy folks have to public schools in the first place, and I think, "Just give us your money and don't ask where it's going" is unlikely to fly with folks interested in accountability.

So at a bare minimum we get a system in which a government agency asks, "Are you going to spend  this on something legit? Is this place a real school?" When then Catholics, the Free Methodists, the Muslims, the Satanists, and the Pastafarians are fighting over limited resources and are each struggling to prove that they're a real school that is entitled to voucher funds, how exactly is the Government Bureau of Legitimate Religious Schools going to make that call? And why would anybody want them to??

It is a measure of how narrow-focused and how assured of their own supremacy that Christianists are that they tend to imagine that breaking down the wall between church and state would only unleash Christians in the public square, and not also every other religion and anti-religion to fight for space in that same square. Nor are enough people of faith conscious of the fact that the wall between church and state protects the church just as much as it does the state.

I always expect Libertarians to struggle with religion-related issues; after all, Libertarian Patron Saint Ayn Rand thought religion is for dopes. But I am sincerely puzzled that Libbys would advocate for any of this. I expect a certain amount of "Anybody should be able to educate their kids any way they want," (even though I'd argue that as a country we have a stake in making sure that everybody gets an education based on the strongest current body of knowledge we have available). But when you add on "and taxpayers should foot the bill," I'm just sincerely puzzled to find Libertarians and other righties cheering. They didn't  want to pay for anyone's health care; why would they want to pay for their education?

There are plenty of other reasons to oppose vouchers without religious restrictions, including the tendency of such schools to discriminate in ways that are, and should be, illegal. That's before we even get to questions about accountability,  both financial and academic, as well as the sheer financial inefficiency of trying to pay for multiple school systems with the money that wasn't enough to fund a single system. 

Maybe Libbys like this idea for no reason other than it punches another hole in public education. I generally think of Libertarians as more intellectually honest than that, but I have a hard time seeing why they would be interested in pushing federally-subsidized religion. Yes, parents chose, sort of (is there any better  marketing hook than "Give us your voucher dollars or your child might go to hell"), but taxpayers, those poor abused victims of the government pay. It's a bad idea for so many reasons, reasons that cover such a broad range that some of them should be visible no matter where you sit-- even if you sit way over on the right.

ICYMI: Show Weekend Edition (9/29)

Last weekend was a family wedding in State College, so I did not get this weekly digest done. This weekend I open the local production of The Music Man that I'm directing, so things are a little busy at this house. But I'm still collecting a few good reads for you to read (if you haven't already). Remember to share.

Litigating Algorithms Beyond Education  

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley went to a conference to talk about VAM and heard about the widespread use of similarly bad algorithms all across society. It's not just education, and it's not pretty.

How To Keep Teachers From Leaving The Profession  

From the Atlantic. The secret is in the URL title-- teachers need other teachers to succeed.

How The Bush Foundation Wasted $45 Million Attacking Teachers 

The story of how one more bunch of rich amateurs set out to remake education and failed.

Immigrant kids and a town's backlash    

When the bus driver is against immigration. This is a well-reported piece from the Washington Post  that captures many of the tensions created by large immigration  in small towns.

Another School Leadership Disaster  

Jeff Bryant has been taking a look at the lucrative pipeline that puts less-than-awesome candidates in administrative positions.

Blinded By Science  

Nancy Flanagan looks at how throwing around the "s" word doesn't always work out well for educators.

That Stanford Study That Links Achievement To Money  

There were several takes on that study this week (including mine), but I don't think anybody did a better job with it than Jan Resseger.

Media Coverage of Science of Reading 

Would you like a handy reading list for prying apart the latest round of reading warfare? The ever-erudite Paul Thomas has you covered.

Stand For Children Messing with LA Elections 

Why and how is the Oregon-based reformster group messing with Louisiana's education business? The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has tracked it all down.

Digital Ed Has a Cheerleading Problem  

Rick Hess clues us in on what we already know-- digital ed tools are often a snare and a delusion and a sad web of false promises.

The Myth of the Behind The Times School Is Wrong  

Yeah, we already knew this, too. But it's nice to see somebody say so.

Do Districts Actually Want Black Male Teachers?

At EdWeek. Actions speak louder than words.

More Money, Less Oversight for Ohio's Charters  

Short but sweet-- well, not sweet, exactly-- blog post from 10th period. Ohio is a mess.    

Betsy DeVos, The Musical  

Yes, that's a real show, sort of. Have You Heard had the creator of this nifty musical on the podcast (Jennifer Berkshire actually saw a performance) and this is your must-listen item of the week.

A Good Teacher Is Not Like A Candle

I just hate this kind of thing.

First of all, is there any other profession that has to put up with this. Substitute "lawyer" or "plumber" or even "doctor" for "teacher" in this meme, and it just sounds dumb. "Nurse," maybe. (Hmm. What do nursing and teaching have in common as professions. Could it be that they're not commonly associated with testosterone?) We don't expect any other professionals to consume themselves in order to do their jobs.

Second of all, notice the use of "it." For the simile to really track, "it" should be "she," but as soon as we put it that way, the ickiness of the analogy becomes more obvious. Really? Do parents say, "I expect my child's teacher to consume herself in order to educate my child?"

If we walk into our child's classroom in March and find a teacher who is exhausted, worn down, barely functioning, do we think, "Excellent. This is going just as it should." Do we expect a teacher to somehow become a new, fresh candle every fall and be a burned-out stub every May, or do we expect this self-immolation to occur over the length of the teacher's career? If so, is the expectation that the burned-out husk of a self-consumed teacher should just die promptly after retirement, having been fully self-consumed?

This is a close relative of the hero teacher myth, and it shares the notion that someone becomes a teacher out of some outsized level of nobility and self-sacrifice. And there are all sorts of problems with this baloney.

One is that, of course, someone who is teaching out of noble impulses of heroic self-sacrifice couldn't possibly be worried about making a living wage or having decent benefits. It's people who buy this sort of baloney who get all pearl-clutchy over teachers who want a decent contract, as if the desire to be able to support a family is sullying their noble calling, distracting from their "personal mission." This model becomes an excuse to take and take and take from teachers-- their money, their time, because, hey, you want to give your all to the kids, right?

More importantly, this is the kind of crap that saddles young teachers with a huge pile of guilt. Six years ago I wrote a piece that is still the most-read piece I've ever written. Here's part of what I said:

The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:

There is never enough.

There is never enough time. There are never enough resources. There is never enough you.

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual's instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

You know all this, but you can also do the math. 110 papers about the view of death in American Romantic writing times 15 minutes to respond with thoughtful written comments equals-- wait! what?! That CAN'T be right! Plus quizzes to assess where we are in the grammar unit in order to design a new remedial unit before we craft the final test on that unit (five minutes each to grade). And that was before Ethel made that comment about Poe that offered us a perfect chance to talk about the gothic influences. And I know that if my students are really going to get good at writing, they should be composing something at least once a week. And if I am going to prepare my students for life in the real world, I need to have one of my own to be credible.

If you are going to take any control of your professional life, you have to make some hard, conscious decisions. What is it that I know I should be doing that I am not going to do?

The blazing candle of self-immolation encourages young teachers to think, "I'm so bad at this. Last night I could have stayed up till three grading papers, but I fell asleep on the couch instead. And I never should have told my husband that I'd go on a day trip with him and the kids this weekend-- that's time I could be getting planning done. Maybe if I go in Monday at 4 AM and get a head start, I can fix this..."

Teachers either grow out of this mode of thinking, or they leave teaching.

This is no way to model being a responsible adult for the children in your classroom (many of whom may know no other adults that aren't family). This is no way to do your job well. This is no way to live your life. Yes, teaching a job that requires you to employ everything you have, everything you know, every tool in your ever-expanding tool box. But it most definitely does not require you to consume yourself-- in fact, it requires you to NOT consume yourself. You exercise and work out and give your sweat and blood to get stronger, not to destroy your physical self. You study and read and discuss and ponder to become smarter and, God willing, wiser, not to break down your mental faculties.

For heaven's sake, don't be a candle. Be, I don't know, a tree. Grow stronger and taller and as you do, provide the shade that helps a garden grow by you. Or be a river that swells and flows and feeds into other waterways. Or be a bird that collects twigs and branches to build a strong, nurturing nest. Or be a sack of cement that becomes a part of a strong foundation, or become a tube of toothpaste, or a diesel engine, or a waffle.

Or you could, you know, be a human. Just a regular human being using the skills and knowledge that you have acquired (and continue to acquire) to help young humans better understand the universe around them and their own best selves and how to be fully human in the world. Do that. Do that while accepting and embracing the limits of your own humanity even as you stretch against them so that you, too, can also grow into your best self while being more fully human in the world-- the whole world and not just the world inside the walls of your classroom.

Do that. Because you are person and not a frickin' candle.

Stanford: Opportunity And Testing Baloney

Look, it's not that I want everyone to stop any discussion of Big Standardized Test scores at all forever (okay, I might, but I recognize that I'm a radical in this issue and I also recognize that reasonable people may disagree with me). But what I really want everyone to stop pretending that the BS Test scores are an acceptable proxy for other factors.

But here comes a new "data tool" from Stanford, and watch how EdWeek opens its piece about the new tool:

An interactive data tool from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University creates the first database that attempts to measure the performance of every elementary and middle school in the country.

The data set not only provides academic achievement for schools, districts, and states around the country, but it also allows those entities to be compared to one another, even though they don't all use the same state tests.

No.

No no no no no NO no no no hell no. The tool does not measure the performance of every school in the country, and it does not provide academic achievement either. It allows folks to compare the math and reading scores on the BS Tests across state lines. That's it. That's all. It's a clever method of comparing apples to oranges, but that's all. Academic achievement? It covers two academic areas, and not very well at that.

(And while I'm ranting, let me also point out that schools do not perform. Students, teachers, staff, other human beings-- they perform. Schools sit there. If we start talking about performing schools, before you know it we start spouting dumb things like "low-achieving schools have a large number of low-scoring students" as if that's an analysis and not a definition.)

But maybe this is a press and reporting problem. What does the tool claim to actually do?

We’re measuring educational opportunity in every community in America.

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University has built the first national database of academic performance.

That's not promising.

The tool actually provides three "measures of educational opportunity" and those are 1) average test scores, 2) learning rates, and 3) trends in test scores. And the explanations are-- are we sure this thing came from Stanford?

You may, for instance, wonder what the heck average test scores have to do with educational opportunity. Here is the short explanation on the front page of the website:

The educational opportunities available in a community, both in and out of school, are reflected in students’ average test scores. They are influenced by opportunities to learn at home, in neighborhoods, in child-care, preschool, and after-school programs, from peers and friends, and at school.

"Are reflected" is weasel language, meaning "probably has some sort of connection to." It might be useful if the project looked at what provides, for instance, opportunities to learn at home. But we're just going to go with "every single thing in the  child's environment has some effect on her test scores, probably."

Learning rates are, of course, growth scores, which the report says "are a better indicator of school quality than average test scores." The notion that student growth is at least as important as raw scores is not new, but I'm going to once again get on my high horse about this indicating school quality. That is only true if you think the mission of a school is to get students to do well on a poorly designed standardized test of reading and math. Is that the sum total of school quality? Nothing else you an to consider, like other non-math and non-reading programs, or safe environment, or caring teachers, or even good facilities?

And trends in test scores?

Tracking average test scores over time shows growth or decline in educational opportunity. These trends reflect shifts in school quality as well changes in family and community characteristics.

And this goes back to my point above-- if you change the population of a school, you change the "school performance" because "school performance" is really "student test scores."

These explanations of how these three methods of massaging test score data tells us anything about educational opportunity or academic achievement or school effectiveness-- they may seem perfunctory and thin, but that's all we get. We are just meant to accept the notion that a score on  a standardized math and reading score gives us both a full picture of how well a school is doing and as a measure of the educational opportunities available to students. Just how magical are these Big Standardized Tests supposed to be?

All of that said, there is a ton of data here available in interactive map graphic form. That data is just about standardized test scores, but there are still some interesting things to see. For instance, Florida absolutely sucks in student growth of scores, which is ironic considering Florida's huge BS Test fetish. Arkansas is also pretty lousy, as are Kansas, North Carolina, Alabama, and Wisconsin. They also thought to run average test scores against SES for districts and lo and behold, there's the same result that we've confirmed over and over-- the direct correlation between poverty and test scores.

Is some of that test data stuff worth discussing? Maybe, but not if we're going to insist that those scores are somehow proxies for much larger, broader concepts like school effectiveness or for nebulous concepts like educational opportunity. If we are going to have useful, meaningful discussions about education we have got to--  GOT TO-- stop pretending that we have data that tells us things that it absolutely does not tell us.

RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo

RAND Corporation, with its vision to be "the world's most trusted source for policy ideas and analysis." regularly contributes to the total thinky tank output of material that wants to be viewed as "a report" or "research" or "a study" or "a paper," but is more like an op-ed or blog post that has put on a tie and juiced up its vocabulary.

This week they cranked out a new one entitled "Reimagining the Workforce Development and Employment System for the 21st Century and Beyond." Its scope is fuzzy and wide, like a wooly mammoth that has overindulged in pizza and beer, and while it doesn't lay all the blame there, it does take some shots at K-12 education, and in doing so manages to tick off plenty of the boxes on the Reformster Talking Points Bingo Card.

Authors with no actual background in education? Check, check, and check. (For bonus points, two of the three are economists.)

Bloodless gobbledeegook? By the truckload. For instance, the authors note that during childhood "people make decisions about schooling and other aspects of human capital acquisition." Yes, I often think back fondly to when I sat down with my children to discuss their human capital acquisition. Them was the days.

21st century skills? Yep. Employers are "struggling to find workers with 21st century skills that go beyond routine cognitive skills and stock academic knowledge to capture competencies in such areas as information synthesis, creativity, problem-solving, communication and teamwork." Wait-- those are 21st century skills? Really? Communication?? Because it makes me wonder how humanity survived all the previous centuries. On the other hand, I know feel like my colleagues, my college teacher program, and I were all forward-looking savants, given the fact that we were talking about all these things well before Y2K was a bug in a shortsighted programmer's eye.

Schools haven't changed in the last [fill in your favorite time frame here]? Yep. What the reportish thing calls "the current approach" is characterized as "a linear pipeline from kindergarten through 12th grade education to possibly college and then a job" and it hasn't changed, despite "technological change, globalization, and important demographic changes."

Half-baked ideas they read about somewhere? Sure. Hey, isn't gamification a thing? Wouldn't schools better if they did that?

Pitch for personalized learning that goes on forever? Yep. The need to keep training throughout "lifecourse" is necessary because employers need workers to acquire new skills, though not necessarily through any fancy college-type stuff. Quick micro-credentials (yes, check that box off, too) that you can shop for yourself online-- that's the ticket.

Because many jobs of the future don't exist yet. Sigh. Matt Barnum has made a side job out of tracking these kinds of bogus claims, which used to hover around 65% but have been inching up into the 80s. Bottom line: nobody has any idea how many of which jobs will or won't exist in the future.

Education is really expensive! Our current funding model makes us sad, and we would like a new one where if we have to chip in money, at least we get a return (like owning part of the student's work life once they finish-- seriously, they're called "income-sharing agreements"). Also, computers really ought to make the process cheaper. And we like vouchers and other things that at least let somebody profit from all this money we're spending on meat widget development.

Talking about the K-12 education system as if its only purpose is to provide properly-machined meat widgets for corporate overlords? That's kind of the whole point of the reportish thing. This view of education goes hand in hand with the view that education is simple training-- you acquire some skills, some bits of knowledge, and you are trained to do something in particular. But now corporations can't find the selection of meat widgets that they want-- we need a new system.

Data and evidence-based practices? Yes, the system should run on data, using practices that "support monitoring system outputs and outcomes..." And of course all remedies that the data leads to should be scaled up. And information should flow freely (by which we mean information about our company and our meat widgets-- don't be publishing the CEO's home address and phone number).

System thinking? Sure. The reportish thing wants to point in the direction of a system, a technocratic solution that will push meat widgets through a pipeline like toasters through a toaster assembly robot. It's that same old cradle to career pipeline that is supposed to do things like ensure "timely and appropriate matching and rematching of skilled workers with jobs to which they are well suited over their time in the labor market." Phrases like "The framework articulates the overriding goals of the system..." make it seem as if there are no actual humans making these decisions-- it's just The System. Which brings us to...

Most notable is the degree to which this reportish thing and its recommendations are dedicated to absolving business itself from any responsibility whatsoever for helping deal with the issues of the 21st century workforce. For instance, this explanation of the "increased risk on some workers" notes that in today's economy "with the apparent growth of nontraditional work arrangements, such as freelance and contract employment, certain workers are less likely to access the features associated with traditional wage and salary jobs, such as well-defined career ladders and access to fringe benefits to buffer the risks associated with health care needs, accidents, injuries, disabilities, and the business cycle." You or I might think that the next logical thought is "Maybe corporations and businesses should try to do less screwing of their workforce so that people who don't have the good fortune to be born into wealth can have a better shot at a better life. But no:

This places more of the onus on workers to anticipate changes in job requirements, take on the risk associated with poor health or saving for retirement, and bear the cost of job training or retraining.

And nowhere in their discussion of The System that they recommend, do I see anything that suggests that a push for more moral or ethical business leadership might help with some of this. The closest the thing comes is some emphasis on making sure that The System enhances equity, by which it means providing an opportunity for people of all races and backgrounds to become meat widgets that are pleasing to the employers. No, we need a system to help meat widgets better meet the needs of corporate overlords, whose needs are not to be questioned. Hey, they're just responding to market forces and the economy as they must-- it's only the Lessers and future meat widgets who have to make actual personal choices for which they bear responsibility.

It's a discouraging read, but since it advocates for vouchers and choice, it will be lapped up by Certain People. There really isn't anything new here, but an outfit like RAND can put the old wine in fancy new skins. Well, maybe not wine. More like koolaid.

NH: Failing To Learn From Charter History

I have a soft spot in my heart for New Hampshire. I was born there, and much of my family lived there. My grandmother was a legislator for ages, and many of my relatives are still in the state.

So it's a bummer to see the state fall into reformy mistakes.

Earlier this year, the state announced that they were going to grab some of that free federal money to embark n a five-year mission to seek new charter schools and boldly repeat mistakes where many have gone before. The state intends to double the number of charter schools by adding about 27 new charters to the 28 current one.

Also, this iconic scene no longer exists.

The state is getting $46 million in federal taxpayer money specifically to help with charter start-up costs. It's an interesting stance for a heavily GOP state; consider the website for Live Free And Start "an initiative of the NH Tech Alliance, is working to make New Hampshire an even better place for innovative businesses to start, grow and succeed." They have lots of ideas about how to fund you new business; none of them are "hit the federal government for some bucks." The federal grant program is certainly not the only government grant program for starting a business, but it's an odd thing for free-market sink-or-swim conservatives to support.

What makes it even worse to support is the amount of money in this business tart-up fund that has been flushed away. I'll refer you, once again, to the report from the Network for Public Education that lays out how many many many many millions of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted on charter schools that closed quickly or, in the worst cases, never even opened. I suppose the state can take the  position that the money being wasted on't be theirs. But coverage raises the usual  question of just how much free market dynamics really truly play into charter schools. Here's one charter operator making an observation:

“It is impossible to start a charter school if you don’t have those federal start-up funds," she said. "At the end of the day, you need to find a space for your school, you need to populate it with furniture and materials, you maybe need to do a renovations on the space, and when you sign a lease, you have to put money down on that lease.”

How is this different from any other business? If you don't have enough money to open a business, the market says you either borrow the money or you go home, because if you don't have enough money to open the business, you don't open the business.

NH has an additional problem; the state department of education has one person responsible for overseeing the charter school sector. That does not seem destined for success. But the DOE is a big fan of charters, though they don't offer much compelling support. Here's DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, a venture capitalist who got the job as part of some political horse trading and who likes a variety of privatizing ideas. Edelblut has no background in education other than profiting from it, so he's reduced to reform boilerplate when lauding the grant:

New Hampshire charter schools have not only provided excellent educations for Granite State students, but provided a model for innovation and education improvement for the nation. Every kid deserves an educational environment in which they can thrive. Charter schools provide a valuable alternative for students who need one.

Oh, baloney. Name one "innovation" that has come out of a New Hampshire charter and spread through the education world. Explain what kind of alternative these schools provide other than an alternative method of shuttling public tax dollars to private businesses.

And as history tells us, many of these mighty engines of imaginary innovation will suck up tax dollars and then fail to ever educate a single person. Not sure the Granite State will really benefit from that.