NY: Police State High School Is On Line

A while back, I wrote about Lockport, NY, where for some damn reason, school officials had decided that what the district really needed was facial recognition software watching the students. As with most expansions of the surveillance state, the excuse was the old "This is for your own good."

Facial recognition and tracking software will add an unprecedented level of security at the schools. District officials have decided locked entrance doors, bullet-proof glass and sign-in registers at the front desk are not enough.

Baloney. Back in 2018, official were promising that this would just be keyed to a database of Naughty People so that the school would know if any of them approached. It would totally not include photos of students. Well, not unless, you know, unless there's "a good reason."

Parent Jim Shultz fought the move, even published an op-ed in the New York Times. The picture he paints is not flattering for the district. After Sandy Hook, a security consultant approached the district with the offer of a free threat assessment and -- surprise-- suggested some pricey upgrades. For just $1.4 million the 4,400 student district could purchase the Aegis software suite from SN Technologies. "A lot of money," said the district. "You can use the grant for technology education under the 2014 Smart Schools Bond Ac t," he said. The security consultant, Tony Olivo, pocketed a nice sum mfor his own firm, CSI Risk Management ($95,450 a year for five years was negotiated, but nobody will say what he ended up with). Shultz said the district had one public meeting about this-- in August.

The state okayed the system, but held up flipping the on switch until some protocols were in place and in the fall of 2019, it was still not online. Olivo has been busy repeatedly portraying Aegis as awesome but not scary. Meanwhile, SN got in a legal battle with BrainChip, the company that actually created the software.

By January of this year, Schultz was still ringing the alarm, in particular noting that the pricetag had grown to $2.7 million. From an op-ed he wrote for the Union-Sun Journal:

For those who have forgotten the details, here is a quick refresher. In 2014, New York voters approved a $2 billion Smart Schools Bond Act to support technology education programs for our children. Other districts invested their money in things like faster internet and new computers. Lockport listened to a sweet-talking salesman and spent our money on high-tech surveillance cameras. The district boasted that ours would be the first schools in the nation to have them. Superintendent Michelle Bradley gushed that they were “above and beyond.”

In reality, however, the project is a $2.7 million boondoggle that has made our children and teachers less safe, not more. The whole plan was based on a salesman’s fairy tale — that the district could predict in advance who a school shooter would be, put his photo in a magical data base of bad guys, and then use the high-tech cameras to spot him if he showed up at any of our schools. But if the assailant wasn’t someone predicted in advance (or if he bothered to cover his face with a $10 mask from Walmart), then the multimillion dollar system would do absolutely nothing at all.

The sketchy Canadian company pitching this system knocked on the doors of school districts all across Western New York desperately trying to find a first buyer. There was a good reason that other districts weren’t interested — they knew it was stupid. But the Lockport district took the bait, at our students’ expense.

"Sketchy Canadian Company" would be an excellent band name.

There are other scary factors, things the software supposedly can do, but, golly whiz, Lockport won't be using those capabilities, like tracking who gos where when-- and with whom.

But today's New York Times announces that the system will finally be turned on and the district is now proudly surveilling the hell out of evildoers.

It's a story one would expect from Florida, where the response to horrific mass murder of school children has been, "Let's increase the surveillance of school children."

And as always, if you think the worries about surveillance are overblown, just take a look at China and the kinds of things they are doing there right now. You might also want to be aware that China is taking point on education via artificial intelligence software.

None of this is comforting. None of it should be acceptable. Every member of the Lockport School Board (which voted unanimously to go ahead with this) should be ashamed. Here's hoping that Lockport's experiment with its children goes so badly that it serves as an example to everyone else.

Eli Broad Goes To Yale

This ran over at Forbes back in early December, and in the Christmas rush I just forgot to port it over here to the mother ship for those of you who don't read me at Forbes. So it's not fresh, shiny news-- but it still matters.

Billionaire Eli Broad has long worked to impose business solutions on U.S. education, believing that education has a management problem, not an education problem. As one Broad fan is quoted in the Washingtoin Post, “You think a superintendent is like the lead principal or lead teacher for a school district, but you have to think more like a CEO of a major corporation." It’s not unlike the belief that a private sector CEO doesn’t need to know about the industry in which he’s working—he just needs to be a good CEO. 

Broad is a bit of a scrapper who has described himself as a “sore winner.” He has backed his version of education reform in many ways, from pushing a plan to put half of Los Angeles students in charters schools, to making big money pushes for his favored LAUSD board candidates. His foundation disperses money to many of the big ed reform groups, and in 2014 he approached former Arne Duncan aide Peter Cunningham about creating a sort of war room rapid response press outfit to get the reformer point of view out there (Education Post was the result). The Broad Foundation has been one of the “Big Three” funders of education reform, just behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. The foundation aims to “advance entrepreneurship” for education, favoring business models over traditional democratic ones; they literally wrote a handbook for closing down and replacing public schools. 

Perhaps most central to Broad’s vision for remaking U.S. education is the Broad Academy. Created in 2002, and part of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, the Academy was an unaccredited training program for CEO-flavored school system leaders. Much like Teach for America, which Broad has also supported and which has produced many Academy “graduates,” it’s a training program that has existed deliberately outside of the traditional programs that prepare educators and education leaders. Unlike a traditional graduate school program, the Academy has had no faculty and meets for just for a few weeks (now five, originally fewer) per year.

The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work. Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.”

How have Broad graduates fared in the real world of education? Many of the most familiar names are familiar precisely because of their level of failure. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled (and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure. Broad has at times shown tight control over his folks; in one infamous case, John Covington left his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad, now in his mid-eighties, is not getting any younger. The Center was finally accredited in 2015. In 2017 he announced his retirement from his foundation. And this week, the news that the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation was giving $100 million to the Yale School of Management to establish the Broad Center there, moving his program from LA to ivy halls; it’s one more sign of his philosophy that the Academy’s new home is a school of management and not in a department focused on education.

There’s little to point to in the last twenty years that would suggest that a slightly trained educational amateur who “thinks like a CEO” is a good bet for running a school system well. Broadies have certainly found their way to positions of power and established lucrative careers for themselves, but there is little evidence that they have benefited students. Whether Broad is hoping to buy a veneer of legitimacy for his program or is trying to secure a legacy through the program, the case for treating school districts like businesses still hasn’t been made, and it says something about that argument that the Broad Center has focused on “urban” schools and not the school systems of wealthy communities. Yale is a well-regarded school, and $100 million is a lot of money, but that does not mean that the Broad Center is a good idea.

USED Pitches Privatization To Wyoming

Mitchell Zais, Deputy Secretary of Education, last week visited Wyoming to stump for school choice. He wrote for the Wyoming Parent his version of the department's sales pitch for Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom vouchery program. Wyoming parents (and taxpayers), this is a bit of a snow job. Let me explain.

He opens by recognizing that humans are individuals, so that he can say this:

So why does American education group students by age, and expect them to learn the same material, on the same schedule, pretty much in the same way?

This guy

The answer is: they don't. In fact, they so much don't that about a decade ago some folks launched an audacious plan to make everyone learn the same stuff (you know-- kind of a common core) on the same schedule and the education establishment hasn't stopped kicking back about it since. Zais knows this-- he opposed the Common Core when he was head education honcho in South Carolina, and if he already thought that everyone in education was operating in lockstep, why would he bother? No, walk into any school and even in the Core era, you'll see differentiation and tracking and a host of ways to accommodate the individual nature of students. Perfect? No-- but then the private schools that he's touting here aren't known for broad ranges of tolerance, either.

Then he launches into that old favorite-- US schools are failing and costs too much. And test scores.

"Costs too much" is an interesting critique from a guy who's background is military. But the rest is the same old baloney.

We do know that American education is not working. Too many students are falling farther and farther behind, despite the fact that taxpayers spend almost $13,000 per year per student. And yet, despite ever-increasing spending that’s near highest in the world, results are, at best, flat. We’re not in the top ten in any international ranking. In fact, we’re 37th in math in the world. We’re outpaced not only by big competitors like China and Russia, but also by countries like Estonia, Finland, and the Netherlands.

We don't know that US education is not working, nor am I sure what he means by students falling "farther and farther" behind (English teacher note-- I think he means "further" unless he's talking about a decline in track and field skills). We're not in the top ten ranking on that one standardized test that is mostly bunk, anyway, but we never have been anywhere but mid-pack. And as always, the missing piece of this argument is the same-- if we get a low PISA score, so what? What connection has anyone made between a nation's score and anything?

Then it's on to the biggest slice of baloney in the promotion of this program-- parent empowerment. The pitch here is that parents know better than any bureaucrat what school fits their child best. That assumes a few things that can't be safely assumed.

First, it assumes that the only stakeholders in school are the parents. They aren't. All taxpayers pay school tax because all of society benefits from having well-educated folks in it. Next, it assumes that parents will be making their choice in a world of clear, plentiful information about the choices, and not a world of noisy not-entirely-accurate marketing for these private businesses. And finally, it assumes that they have a choice. All you have to do is look to Florida, where this same system is already in place, and see how that works. The schools that enter this program are private schools, and they retain their right to discriminate as they wish. So, in Florida, if your child is LGBTQ, you definitely do not have your choice of school.

Then we get to the slick weaselly part of tax credit scholarships:

Our proposal does not rely on any taxpayer funds already allocated to public school students, nor does it create a new federal education program.

Tax credit fans like to brag that no public tax dollars are spent, and this is technically correct, because the government isn't used as a pass-through. Instead, donors pay into a scholarship fund instead of paying their taxes. The government never touched the money, so we can't call it government money with government cooties. However, every dollar given to a scholarship fund is a dollar less that is paid in taxes. The $5 billion that DeVos wants to "inject" into these scholarship brokerage organizations would be a $5 billion hole in the budget. Which means taxpayers either get $5 billion less in government services, or taxes are increased to fill the hole.

So it is true that these programs don't cost public taxpayer dollars, but they do come at taxpayer expense.

And watch Florida as the private donors exert leverage over programs by pulling out or giving more money. Ultimately, someone will decide whether it's okay for private schools in Florida to discriminate against LGBTQ students, and that someone won't be the government or local voters and taxpayers and it certainly won't be parents-- it will be the donors. This is what privatized education looks like-- schools that depend on keeping wealthy patrons happy.

As for the "no federal education program"-- well, only if the program is completely unsupervised (which I suppose is not inconcievable). Somebody on the state or federal level has to check on the scholarship organizations-- the ones that collect donor money and hand out scholarships-- and certify them as legit or not. Since DeVos envisions these funds as usable for homeschooling or transportation or remedial coursework, someone is going to have to manage a list of approved vendors. And it would be nice if there were the occasional audit.

Education Freedom is about giving private schools the freedom to profit at taxpayer expense, no matter how religious or discriminatory they are. It's about the freedom of rich folks to get out of paying taxes and, as a sort of bonus, being the big hands on the levers of education policy. Meanwhile, the public system is starved of more and more resources.

This is where we are-- the US Department of Education making a concerted effort to undermine the public education system that they are theoretically charged with watching over. Wyoming--and all of us--would be better off without this.

I Shot An Arrow Into The Air

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
                -- "The Arrow and the Song" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rick Hess recently wrote an EdWeek post offering four insights about education policymaking, and as if often the case with Hess, I started to write a reply in the comments section and then it got too long and so here I am. Here's a quick recap of his four ideas--

This might end badly

Media has fostered a funhouse-mirror sense of policy. The journalistic (and internet) tendency to reduce everything to good guys and bad guys has obscured the degree to which many sides are occupied by decent people with honorable intent. Hess perhaps underestimates the degree to which politicians in this age have fed this beast with their scorched earth devotion to winning, no matter what the cost.

Policy is driven by the brokers and bridge-builders. Bomb throwers have their place, observes Hess, but they aren't the ones who Get Stuff Done. It's a fair observation-- Betsy DeVos's general ineffectiveness as a Secretary of Education could well be explained by notting that she is a bomb-thrower in a bridge-builder's job. On the other hand, her boss is the quintessential bomb-thrower, and it hasn't slowed him down much. And there's another huge caveat here-- where are you building those bridges? Because ab bridge between two differing ideas that are both wrong is not a helpful bridge.

Effective change-makers listen more than they talk. Hess's explanation, coming after a few decades of modern ed reform, is worth a full quote:

Academics and single-issue advocates love to show up with recommendation X or the results of study Y and tell policymakers and school system leaders what they really need to do. Frequently, these fervent declarations are unaccompanied by a familiarity with why things currently look like they do or what it would take to follow their advice. It turns out that leaping into complicated, long-running policy discussions is a lousy way to convince people who've spent months or years wrestling with these questions; it seems less helpful than presumptuous.

That's a quick an explanation of why most of modern ned reform has landed with a big, fat thud as you'll find anywhere.

Evidence rarely changes minds, but it still matters. It is true that humans in general are resistant to evidence contrary to what they already believe. But education policy discussions are notable for a really huge amount of bad, specious baloney evidence. Start with anything that equates "scores on a single narrow standardized test" with "student achievement" or "teacher effectiveness." One of the challenges of education is that it involves a whole lot of really important things that are nearly (or completely) impossible to measure. But some folks are so deeply hung up on a need for "data" to do anything that we now have a cottage industry in creating and measuring proxies that don't measure anything worth measuring, no matter how much you massage them or how much verbiage you bury them under.

Which brings me to the point that I find screaming out of all four of these other points.

You know who has the best evidence of how policy actually works out in the classroom? Teachers.

You know who is virtually never involved in policy discussions? Teachers.

This remains one of the most infuriating things about the modern ed reform movement. For the moment, never mind the disrespect implicit in the exclusion of teachers from policy discussions-- it's just an ineffective way to do policy. A bunch of policy experts gather around with a bunch of political policy makers, usually in a comfy lounge paid for by some corporate sponsor or other, and they start shooting arrows over the wall at the schoolhouse on the other side. Then thay have a spirited argument about where the arrow landed-- but they never talk to the people who actually work in that schoolhouse.

It's like engineers who decide to add a feature to the drive train in a car, but never talk to anybody who actually drives the car they remodeled. It's like medical professors who create a new procedure, but never talk to a doctor who has used that procedure.

This is the story of Common Core. A small group of amateurs get together and decided, without talking or listening to actual teachers, that national standards were needed. They cobbled some together without input from actual teachers, and then they got a really rich amateur to help them push it. From conception through implementation, the Common Core machine kept teachers out of the room (and no, getting union leaders to buy in later doesn't count). You know why so many teachers initially dismissed it as The Next Big Thing? Because every Next Big Thing comes with a dozen features that, in the first ten minutes, an actual teacher can look at and go, "Well, that came from someone who was never in a classroom."

But it is the lesson that reformsters have resolutely refused to learn. Every single epiphany about a flaw in the program has been something that teachers had already been screaming for years-- but nobody in these policy discussion was listening. Common Core? We'll just say teachers helped write it and they''ll never know the difference. High stakes testing? Ignore them-- they're just upset that our superior amateur intellects have figured out a way to catch them screwing up. Charter schools? This is a cool idea, only instead of having seasoned teachers run them, let's set them up so that the teachers don't have any say in what goes on. "Teacher"? If everyone's so hung up on that label, let's just come up with a way to give our trusted amateurs that label.

Again, I'm not ranting (this time) about the disrespect or devaluing of teaching. I'm ranting talking about an approach to policy-making that is geared for failure. I'm talking about policy discussions being held by all the folks huddled in the back seats, hunched over maps and compasses and when the actual driver of the vehicle starts hollering, "Hey, folks!" because she can see what's in the road ahead, they just shush her until the bus hits a tree or sails off a cliff and then, even then, they decide the flaw in their system was that they didn't hold the map correctly.

And no-- involving a few carefully vetted teacher voices doesn't count-- particularly if you have no intention of actually listening to them. And reformsters-- you have to police yourselves, because while some of you, I believe, are decent human beings interested in bettering the education world, some of you are money-grubbing parasites who want to keep teachers out of the room because teachers will kill their pitch and hurt their ROI.

Education policy discussions are filled with far too many people who have no idea where their arrows land or what they hit. It is one of the most Kafka-esque features of education policy. I pull a lever, and somewhere that I can't see, something happens. But I don't actually go and look, and I don't actually talk to someone who is an eyewitness to that end of the process. It makes no sense.

Media can make a funhouse mirror of policy discussions because so few of those discussions are informed by actual classroom teachers (and journalists mostly don't talk to them, either). Policy may be driven by bridge-builders, but without teacher voices, they'll build those bridges between two bombed-out bomb-thrower citadels. Effective change-makers may listen, but they'd do better if they were listening to teachers. And evidence does matter-- but most of the real evidence about education is collected daily by classroom teachers. Accept no substitutes.

Every thinky tank policy shop political office etc etc etc should have a bank of many, many teachers. Hell, I'd accept it if the bank included lots of retired teachers-- we aren't so busy any more. It would take a while to build this bank, because teacher trust has to be earned. Every panel discussion, every conference, that discusses policies that affect the inside of a classroom should include people who work inside a classroom (and not just ones that are vetted for friendliness). Who knows? It might actually save us more wasteful misguided education fiascos.

ICYMI: Sportsball Sunday Edition (2/2)

Human beings are funny creatures. Today we'll celebrate the prognostication of a giant rodent, invest a gazillion dollars in a sportsball contest, and get all excited because our date-labeling system will cough up a palindrome today (spoiler alert: every date-- every last one-- only comes around once). But in the meantime, there are things to read.

An Open Letter to Preschool Homework   

From McSweeney's, a look at homework for preschoolers with characteristic wit.

Four Things You Need To Know About Education Policymaking   

Rick Hess (AEI) at EdWeek offers four fairly solid observations about how the sausage is made, even if he does skip the one about how policy conversations should be informed by people who can talk about how that policy lands in the classroom.

Why Private Equity Keeps Wrecking Retail Chains 

This would have nothing at all to do with education, if private equity and hedge funds weren't so interested in getting into the charter school biz. But they are, so here's a cautionary tale.  

In Indiana, School Choice Means Segregation  

The Kappan looks at some research showing that Indiana school choice program, which has ended up looking a lot like a white flight program.

Schools Are Killing Curiosity  

From The Guardian, this is a depressing read. About the time a researcher watches a teacher tell a student, "No questions now-- it's time for learning" you know this is a sobering piece of work.

Journalist with education message white America might not want to hear  

Maureen Downey with a look at Nikole Hannah-Jones and the issues of integration.

Don't be fooled. Tax credits for private school are about dismantling public education .  

The education writer at the Lexington Herald-Leader, Linda Blackford, lays out the truth behind tax credit scholarship programs.

Not Burnout, But "Moral Injury" of Doctors  

This WBUR piece is about doctors, but teachers will recognize the issue-- the toll it takes when malpractice is mandated, rules are too restrictive, and resources are too scarce.

Two Decades of Havoc  

Education scholar Yong Zhao synthesizes criticism of PISA, the international assessment regularly used as proof that US schools are failing compared to Estonia, Singapore, etc.

Parent Resistance Thwarts Local Desegregation Efforts  

The AP (here picked up by WTOP) writes about one of the big obstacles to desegregation--  white folks who don't want to let Those People into "their" schools.

More Students Are Homeless Than Ever Before

Laura Camera at US News with some depressing data.

It's GPAs Not Standardized Tests That Predict College Success  

Nick Morrison at Forbes lays out the latest research that shows--again--that high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than the SAT or ACT.

Michigan schools revolt

Michigan has a third grade reading retention rule that is kicking in, and many schools are prepared to circumvent it by any means necessary.

Anti-LGBTQ: Follow the Anti-evolution Road

Adam Laats is a historian who knows about both education and conservative Christianity in the US. The struggle over LGBTQ students in private religious schools reminds him of another time the religious right stood up against the mainstream.

Charter School Funding: Time for lawmakers to fix a flawed system  

The editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette backs the governor on charter funding reform.

Education Reform Has Failed America  

Diane Ravitch hits the central points of her new book in a piece for Time magazine.

OH: More Voucher Nonsense

I've frequently kvetched that a central fallacy at the heart of school choice is the notion that several parallel school system can be run for the cost of one. "Why," I ask, "can't politicians have the cojones to just say they think school choice is so important that they are going to raise peoples' taxes to pay for it?"

Well, the legislature of Ohio (motto "We want to be Florida when we grow up") is coming really close.

You will recall that Ohio school districts are facing an explosion in costs as they enter the next phase of the privatization program. Phase One is familiar to most of us--you start out with vouchers and charters just for the poor families who have to "escape failing public schools." Phase Two is the part where you expand the program so that it covers everybody.

Well, Ohio screwed up its Phase Two. Basically, they expanded the parameters of their privatization so quickly that lots of people noticed. The number of eligible school districts skyrocketed, and that brought attention to a crazy little quirk in their system, as noted by this report from a Cleveland tv station:

We analyzed data from the eight Northeast Ohio school districts that paid more than $1 million in EdChoice vouchers to area private schools during the 2019-2020 school year as part of the program.

Those districts include Akron, Canton, Cleveland Heights-University Heights, Euclid, Garfield Heights, Lorain, Maple Heights, and Parma City Schools.

Out of the 6,319 students who received EdChoice vouchers, we found 4,013, or 63.5%, were never enrolled in the district left footing the bill for their vouchers.

Yep. That means that at the moment this kicks in, the district loses a buttload of money, while its costs are reduced by $0.00. This means that either the local school district cuts programs and services, or it raises taxes to replace the lost revenue, effectively calling on the taxpayers to help fund private school tuition for some students. I wonder how many legislators who helped engineer this are also opposed to plans from Democratic candidates to provide free college tuition at taxpayer expense?

The legislature has been running around frantically trying to-- well, not head this off so much as slow it down just enough to reduce the number of angry phone calls their staff has to take. Nobody seems to be saying "This is a mistake" so much as they'e saying "Doing this so fast that people really notice is a mistake." Someone cranked the heat on the frogs too fast. Meanwhile, this weekend was their last chance to get this fixed before next year's voucher enrollment opens, and they have decided to punt because everyone is getting cranky.

Is this at least going to help some poor folks? Well, the proposal is to up the cap to 300% of poverty level. That's $78,600 for a family of four. So there's that.

And Betsy DeVos has joined the fray, apparently invited by some pro-choice legislators to help out. Actually, behind the scenes legislative arm-twisting is the one part of her job she has experience with, so she may help. Meanwhile, reformsters argue that it's no big deal and it's the public school systems own fault for not keeping these voucher-users enticed to public school, though given the number of vouchers being used at Catholic and other religious schools, I'm not sure how, exactly, the public school was supposed to compete.

It's a big fat mess (here's the meat of the mess in four handy charts), but I want to underline again that part of it is that the Ohio legislature now wants taxpayers to help foot the bill for private school education, for some people, including those who were never ever in a public school to begin with.

Time has run out for a neat fix. Stay tuned to see what ugly mess they end up with. Meanwhile, Florida yesterday showed that they still know how to boil those frogs-- yesterday they expanded the reach of their voucher program while reducing state oversight of it.

FL: Another Voucher Problem (And Not The One You Think)

When the Orlando Sentinel revealed that many Florida private schools-- eighty-some of them!-- were both receiving taxpayer dollars and openly discriminating against LGBTQ students, it was not exactly news. Rebecca Klein had the same story on a national level at Huffington Post back in 2017. Voucher money goes to religious schools, and some religious schools discriminate against LGBTQ students (and teachers).

But sometimes a particular story hits at just the right moment and suddenly draws a huge reaction. That's apparently what happened this time, because the backlash against Florida's tax credit scholarship program has begun (tax credit scholarship programs, you may recall, are the programs that let wealthy donors fund their favorite private school in place of paying their taxes).

Two huge banks-- Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank-- have indicated that they would no longer contribute to the Florida program (Step Up for Children) funding the vouchers.

We have reviewed this matter carefully and have decided to no longer support Step Up for Students. All of us at Wells Fargo highly value diversity and inclusion, and we oppose discrimination of any kind.

We have communicated with program officials that we will not be contributing again until more inclusive policies have been adopted by all participating schools to protect the sexual orientation of all our students.

This may seem like great news. I'm not so sure. Here's why.

First, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third are both based out of state-- Wells Fargo in San Francisco and Fifth Third in Cincinnati. So you've got major school funding coming from entities that are not particularly local.

Second, and more importantly, this is uncomfortable news about how exactly is in charge here. It's great that these patrons are flexing their funding muscles in a good cause, but what if they weren't? What if they were tying funding to demands that the schools be less inclusive?

This whole business is a reminder that tax credit scholarship programs put schools at the mercy of their wealthy patrons, and even if the private voucher-accepting school were locally owned and operated, now they face the prospect of having their purse strings held by some corporate mucky-mucks on the other side of the country.

And the business about how voucher programs "empower" parents and students because now they can exert market pressure by "voting with their feet" turns out to be high grade baloney, because the feet that matter most are the ones attached to the people who write the big checks. Folks running private schools who get their school into a program like this will rue the day. I imagine some in Florida are ruing it right now. The purse strings are held by folks who aren't accountable to parents, voters, taxpayers or anything but their own business interests, which may or may not align with education.

And lest we forget, this is the same program that Betsy DeVos wants to operate on a national scale as Education Freedom. It does not empower parents; it empowers rich folks who want to avoid taxes and who want to have a big fat say in how certain schools are run.