Charters vs. Vouchers

While charter schools and vouchers are both members of the school choice family, they are cousins who only occasionally get along. And as a public school fan, I have a definite preferred cousin.

It may seem like a thousand years ago, but when Betsy DeVos first turned up as an education secretary candidate, some charter fans actually expressed concerns. DeVos felt the need to reach out to charter fans and offer an olive branch. That's because DeVos, like many fans of a pay-your-own-way voucher system, was content to back charters as a way to crack apart the public education system and get the school choice foot in the door. But now that the time seems ripe (conservative judges, GOP legislatures, Espinoza, etc), many erstwhile charter fans are dumping the poor old girl for their true love. 

There are many reasons that charters and vouchers are natural competitors. 

The obvious area is simple competition for market share. Both private voucher schools and charter schools are after the disaffected don't-want-to-go-to-public-school crowd. Voucher-accepting schools have an advantage in competing for the religious school market because they can be more direct and explicit about their religious content. And the super-voucher education savings account systems are aiming to bust things up even more--you don't even have to a "school," but can just pick various education odds and ends from various marketplace vendors. In the marketplace, charters (with their constant insistence that they are public schools) may appeal to less adventurous folks who want to make some changes without leaving the system, but for folks who are all about the choiciness, a fully-realized pay-your-own-way unbundled voucher system like the ones being pushed now--well, for some folks, they make charters look like Choice Lite. 

Voucherfied systems, particularly those that incorporate tax credit scholarship instruments, bring a different approach to the funding stream that does not serve charters well. Let's say that the funding is an actual stream that leads to an actual pond. Traditionally, that pond was used strictly for thirsty public school systems. The charter approach has been to insist that they be allowed to drink from that pond, too. The voucher approach is to interrupt the stream itself, redirecting it away from the pond and off to a hundred other little locations. 

This is in keeping with fundamental differences about how the two policies view public education. The charter concept is at least meant to supplement or expand the public school system; the voucher concept intends to blow it all up. 

I can imagine a world in which charter schools worked. You could do charter schools with local control, appropriate oversight and accountability, and the necessary funding (in fact, some people do). You could set up charter schools without prioritizing on real estate deals and profit-making management organizations. In fact, one of the mysterious tricks of the modern charter movement is the way proponents have managed to make free market profiteering seem like a necessary integral part of charter policy, when there's no real reason for any such connection. Free market profiteering isn't even necessary to deliver "choice," but it seems that for too many proponents, the free market profiteering part is really more important than the choice part. Some free marketeerrs may sincerely believe that only market money dynamics can deliver choice; I see no reason to believe they're correct, but I believe that's what they believe. The fact is, charter schools as originally conceived and as successfully practiced in some places do not have to have anything to do with privatization and the free market. 

But vouchers are another story. I have tried (I love a good thought experiment), but I cannot imagine a world with a voucher system that is not really a pay-your-own-way, two or three tier system (with the vestiges of public education occupying the lowest tier). Charters have adopted and tacked on free market ideology as a tool and a desired outcome, but vouchers cannot be separated from it, because the whole concept of vouchers is about replacing shared societal responsibility for maintaining a common good with opportunities for folks to make a buck. At the same time, the wealthy will still get the education they want for their children, while being freed of any requirement to help foot the bill for educating Those Peoples' Children. And I am unable to imagine--nor have I seen anyone propose--a voucher system that works otherwise.

Legislators have consistently rejected any kind of oversight for vendors in a voucher system, often including specific language that says the state will not tell vendors what to do; New Hampshire's bill has a whole section entitled "independence of education service providers" including the point that nothing in the law can be used to reduce vendors' "independence or autonomy." There are virtually no quality controls in any of these, nor, as we've seen in Florida, any guardrails for the students themselves. Private schools retain the right to accept or reject students at will, nor will meager voucher amounts allow poor students to afford top-dollar schools. The most striking feature of a voucher system remains the dissolution of a state's responsibility to make sure every child gets a decent education. 

Could vouchers be cleaned up? We'd have to create regulation and oversight for all providers, which would simply drive most providers out of the market. The number one beneficiaries of vouchers are private religious schools, and if they can't operate with their fully religious character, they aren't going to play. Tell them they can't discriminate against LGBTQ students, and they will simply take the next train out of voucherville. Regulating a voucher system would cause it to collapse; not regulating it robs students of the free, quality education they are owed.

Bottom line: voucher and charter systems are not the same, and the shift of so many school choicers to the voucher camp is bad news for US education. 

Can You Fool An AI Emotion Reader

As we have seen numerous times, there are software packages out there that claim the ability to read our emotions. Folks are lined up around the block to use this stuff, but of course one of the applications is supposed to be reading student emotions and therefor better at "personalizing" a lesson. 

Does this sound as if the ed tech world is overpromising stuff that it can't actually deliver? Well, now you have a chance to find out. Some scientists have created a website where you can practice having your own face read by software.

The team involved says the point is to raise awareness. People are still stuck on all the huge problems with facial recognition, but meanwhile, we're being surrounded by software that doesn't just recognize your face (maybe) but also reads it (kind of). Here's the project lead, Dr. Alexa Haggerty, from the awesomely-named University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk:

But Hagerty said many people were not aware how common emotion recognition systems were, noting they were employed in situations ranging from job hiring, to customer insight work, airport security, and even education to see if students are engaged or doing their homework.

Such technology, she said, was in use all over the world, from Europe to the US and China. Taigusys, a company that specialises in emotion recognition systems and whose main office is in Shenzhen, says it has used them in settings ranging from care homes to prisons, while according to reports earlier this year, the Indian city of Lucknow is planning to use the technology to spot distress in women as a result of harassment – a move that has met with criticism, including from digital rights organisations.

The Emotion Recognition Sandbox let's you play with the software through your own computer camera. The site assures us that no personal data is collected and all the images stay on your own device. The site lets you play two games. One is only sort of a game, a sort of quiz that drives home the point that one of the things that software can't do is use context to decipher whether the human just winked or blinked.

But in the other (the Fake Smile Game, you pull up your own camera, and try to "register" all six basic emotions-- happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, and anger. 

I found it surprisingly difficult; I only got four out of six, missing fear and disgust. I later got disgust by accident when I was doing something better described as "trying to look at my keyboard when my bifocals were askew." 

I can't overstate how really bad the software was. It had no filter for sarcasm or obviously (to a human anyway) fake expression. I cannot swear that they didn't purposefully use bad software to make their point, and there's always the possibility that I'm just not British enough for it to work well, but watching that computer try and try, slowly, to decipher my face and not doing it very well, I had to wonder how in the world such a thing could, as some have promised, keep up with an entire classroom and provide a teacher with nuanced useful real-time readings of the emotions of students in the room. 

Go take a look and try your hand. Perhaps your face will work better than mine. At any rate, it's astonishing, and not in a good way.

The Book Love Foundation

 Penny Kittle teaches freshman composition at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and has logged a few decades in public school as a reading teacher and literacy coach. She's picked up some NCTE awards, written some books, and generally done pretty well professionally. But for my money, one of the coolest things she has done starts with this story:

I stood in a most perfect bookstore in the Memphis airport one evening smelling the strong scent of Bar-B-Q that permeates the place as I waited for my flight.
​
Under maple bookshelves lit softly by spotlights, I came upon a collection of animal books, not just The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein and A Dog’s Purpose by Bruce Cameron, but Cassius: The True Story of a Courageous Police Dog by Gordon Thorburn, which explores the scenting capabilities of police dogs that help solve crimes.

There were books about training birds, the history of zoos, and endangered species. I could imagine current students who would enjoy each title. This was an intriguing collection placed directly across from classics recommended by those who work in the store. There was a shelf of new fiction, one of psychology and self-discovery, and a section for business books. The store went on and on. You know: a book for anyone who might wander through this place. It’s hard not to pick lovely books up, hard not to stuff my suitcase even fuller. (I did, in fact.)
​
But I also twirled around the room for a moment and imagined clearing out the center shelves in the store and putting in tables, writing notebooks, and students. My classroom should be such a celebration of reading. We need a book for every reader, recommended by readers, shelved by interests and inviting browsing.
​
When I speak to teachers about leading readers they want this place, and I want it for them. Many have contacted me after bargaining with their principals and colleagues to set up classroom libraries and support independent reading.
​
But the truth is, as budgets have shrunk, books and libraries and school librarians have been cut in far too many schools. Books can have an incredible effect on children’s lives, yet there’s only one book for every 300 kids living in underserved communities in the U.S. Students need books - the right books that they can connect with.

It has been almost a decade since she started to do something about it, that "something" being the Book Love Foundation. Since launching, the Foundation has awarded over $600,000 in grants used to fund classroom libraries in K-12 schools all across the US and Canada--and the list of grantees gets bigger every year. The success stories are pretty cool. If you're a classroom teacher, you know the power of being able to turn to a student and, in the moment, hand them a book while saying, "I think this is something you would enjoy." 

The organization is busy (they have podcasts and everything), yet charmingly unslick (parts of their website are still unfinished). But what great work to do. What excellent goals-- to get exciting books, books that students want to read, into classrooms with teachers who can ignite a passion for reading. 

Nobody's getting rich here; the website says 100% of donations fund classroom libraries, and the 990 forms that I looked up confirm that. Nobody is selling their personally branded proprietary reading scheme here. Just getting books into classrooms and pushing a love for reading, as well as building a supportive community for teachers doing the work (plus plenty of resources and research).

I've only recently discovered the group--wish I'd known about them when I was still in the classroom. But I can still chip in to help out. This is work worth doing. 

ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/4)

This is a hard day for the folks at my house. Easter is a big deal, with music and family breakfast and a bunch of things that we will not have yet again this year. But at least this year there's a possible light at the maybe end of a probably tunnel. At any rate, if you need to while away some time today, here's some reading from the week.

How a couple worked charter school regulations to make millions.

Yes, here's another one of these stories. It's almost as if the charter industry is so unregulated and unaccountable that it invites folks to exploit it. This time it's California, the Fresh Start Charter School, and Clark and Jeanette Parker.

Free education is a public good

New Hampshire is ground zero for an attempt at the biggest pay-as-you-go voucher system in the nation. In an op-ed for the Concord Monitor, state representative Linda Tanner lays out why this is bad news.

President Biden's infrastructure plan should include teachers! Here's why.

On her blog, Nancy Bailey writes about why teachers should be a piece of the massive infrastructure bill.

Teaching Black children well is the purest form of activism

Maureen Downey at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reports on a panel about attracting and retaining Black teachers, one of the critical issues of our era.

State leaders hijacking stimulus funds meant for Texas public schools

Oh, that wacky Texas legislature. Something like $18 billion dollars in stimulus money is supposed to be for schools, but they're thinking they'd like to balance the budget instead. From the San Antonio  Report.

Alabama upholds ban on yoga in public schools

Also, you can't say "namaste." The ban goes back to 1993, and the legislature just refused to reverse it, because Jesus.

DC urban parents forum reinforces segregation

I'm going to complain that the Washington Post in its headline shortened the DC Urban Moms and Dads forum to "a DC moms forum." The story looks at some research by Brookings about the forum, and once again, we lift up a rock and find racism crawling out from underneath it.

School District Spending and Equal Educational Opportunity

Shanker Institute teamed up with Mark Weber and Bruce Baker to produce a massive data set showing how much districts are above or below their ideal financial state. Follow the links to the full report, and enjoy clicking on the color-coded map.

Dennis Baxley gets real about Bright Futures funding

The battle about the Bright Futures college scholarship program continues to rage in Florida, where Accountabaloney has the newest on this newest onslaught by America's Worst Legislature

A bold idea for testing: Opt-in

Simple and bold-- let parents opt in to the Big Standardized Test instead of making them opt out. The original story of a district trying this is behind a paywall, but Diane Ravitch has the highlights.

Big increase in Montana's tax credit program

Montana birthed the Espinoza case, back when the state's tax credit scholarship program was about a lousy $150. Now the GOP would like to increase the cap to $200,000.

Black and Hispanic students in Philly 'burbs are disciplined more harshly, put in AP classes more rarely, than white peers.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a new study that shows how education inequity is endemic in the collar counties of Philadelphia.

The villains of education

Nancy Flanagan once again offers the voice of a reasonable grown up, and reminds us that demonizing and ad homineming are not particularly useful in any debate.

Parents Defending Education: Astroturf Goes Hard Right

Parents Defending Education has just popped onto the education policy landscape, and they have staked out their spot in the new battle to inculcate children with the Proper American Values.

They would like to sell themselves as a grassroots organization; there is no particular reason to believe that's true, and I'm going to refer you to this post from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider to see exactly how this group is the product of professional astro-turfers. So take a moment and go read her post before you finish this one. Go ahead--I'll wait.

So Dr. Schneider has laid out who these people are. I want to follow that up with a look at what they're up to. 

The PDE website (which, oddly enough, doesn't include the "parent" part in the URL) prominently lists as a motto "Empower. Expose. Engage." And this explanation:

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom -- and for the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

There's an "IndoctriNation" map, and links to articles with titles like "Illinois school district pays speaker $175 a minute to criticize white people." And at the bottom of the page, an invitation "submit an incident report." This takes you a form for turning in a school or teacher :

If something is happening in a classroom, take accurate notes of what was said, who said it, and the date(s) and time(s). If evidence of the problem appears on a website, in emails, homework assignments, or class handouts, document everything with screenshots or by taking pictures with your cell phone. The more hard evidence you gather, the stronger your case will be — whether the next step is asking the school for a meeting, speaking to a reporter, or speaking to a lawyer.

They also offer a form for filing FOIA requests, to get those schools to fess up to their misbehavior. And just in case you thought "engage" meant to sit down and engage in conversation with the school--nope. The engage page talks about how to fight back against those "woke" activists by writing letters to the editor, writing op-eds, or engage with the media. And the resources are for fighting back against wokeness at public, charter or private schools.

There's also a list of things they've been up to, including filing all sorts of Office of Civil Rights complaints and FOIA requests, including a request in Bainbridge, WA for "all documents related to internal and external staff communications and documentation involving a teacher’s email to parents, canceling the Father’s Day gift activity after viewing it through 'an equity lens.' " Or one in Buffalo for documentation related to use of "The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet." In all, eight actions across the country all filed on March 30.

If there's any doubt yet about what these folks are up to, their press coverage is clear, like this article in the hyper-conservative Washington Times, " 'It's Everywhere': Parents groupd fights left-wing indoctrination in schools" In addition to Nicole Neily, the president with lots of right-wing activist background; Asra Romani, former journalist and violent extremism expert; and Erika Sanzi, education reformster, the group reportedly consults with Chris Rufo, noted anti-critical race theory activist.

PDE is part of a current wave. Rhode Island is considering a bill to outlaw anything remotely CRT-ish. South Carolina is considering mandating schools to use the terrible 1776 commission material. And Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA is launching its own program to train thousands of educators on how to properly boost the USA and free enterprise.

Call it a culture war, or just call it plain old racist baloney, this appears to be the next front in the education debates. It's gaslighting on the same order as the abusive partner who says, "If you report me to the police, you'll be tearing this family apart." It will be argued on two fronts-- one trying to inculcate the belief that America is #1 and the most awesomest, and the other working to silence everyone who says differently. PDE is particularly odious because of its whole "turn in any teacher or school that offends you" approach to chilling conversation and teaching. This is not just astroturf, but astroturf with its brown shirt on. 

Vouchers Are About Abandoning Public Education, Not Freeing Parents

 As the GOP mounts a multi-state initiative to implement vouchers or super-voucher education savings accounts in many states across the country, it's becoming increasingly clear that we've been looking at the voucher movement through the wrong lens (which is to say, the lens that voucheristas have promoted). 

Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it's striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form. 

Think of voucher programs this way.

The state announces, "We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child's education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we'll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck."

It's not a voucher system. It's a pay your own way system. It's a you're on your own system. The voucher is not the point of the system; it's simply a small payment to keep you from noticing that you've just been cut loose.

Freedom and empowerment will come, as always, in direct proportion to the amount of money you have to spend. 

The voucher amount will dwindle. That amount is based on what the public school system spends to educate a child, and taxpayers will shrink that amount going forward as the schools themselves shrink to holding facilities for students who can't find a private vendor to accept them, or whose parents can't afford what the voucher won't cover. And remember, we've seen this movie before-- after Brown v. Board of Education, white families in some states moved their children into private segregation academies, and then they cut public school taxes (because why keep paying taxes on the system that your child no longer uses). 

Vouchers are the tail, not the dog. They are the public-facing image of privatization-- and not just privatization of the "delivery" of education. Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community's. 

We need another term for discussing this family of policies; "voucher" doesn't begin to capture what's truly at stake. I can imagine a world in which charter schools are a viable, even useful part of a robust public education system; it's not at all the world we currently live in, but I can imagine it. But the system that voucher proponents want is absolutely incompatible with a functioning public education system. And it has nothing to do with freedom.

Charters Circumventing Democracy

In some states, charter schools have faced a particularly intractable obstacle--local elected school boards.

That's because in some states, a charter cannot open without the authorization of the local elected school board. This means the local board is deciding if they would like to have the taxpayers foot the bill for opening a new school in the district, which is generally a tough sell. 

Charter advocates have found a few ways around this. One is to throw weight and money behind candidates in local school board elections with the idea that once elected, these individuals will say, "Never mind the taxpayers or the public schools--I want to see more charters open here." The downside for this approach is that there's always another election coming.

More popular, or at least more effective for charter proponents, is to get the law changed. Right now, Florida, Iowa, and Texas are all looking at ways to get that whole pesky democracy thing out f the way of charter school entrepreneurism.

In Florida, the legislature would like to expand the power of universities, so that they can authorize charter schools on their own, with or without the agreement of the local school district. Texas has taken another route by making the State Commissioner of Education the super-powered uber-authorizer of charter schools; only a super-majority of the State Board of Education could overrule him. In Iowa, where the GOP is working hard to make more of that sweet sweet education money available to charter profiteers, the authority to okay charters may end up with the State Board of Education.

If you're wondering what the theories behind these bills might be, what principles lead one state to empower the State Board while another state aims to cut them out of the equation, I believe the principle involved here is "Let's empower whoever is most likely to let charter operators do as they wish."

The modern school choice movement continues to have a problem with local control and democratic processes. I'm not going to argue that such things are infallible; unimpeded local control has given us no end of ugly treatment of the non-white and non-wealthy citizens.

But circumventing democratic processes in order to ease the launching of private businesses fed with public tax dollars is deeply undemocratic. It is literally taxation without representation, presenting local taxpayers with the bill for a school over which they have no direct or indirect control, no say, no list of people they can call to complain. 

Choice has had to circumvent democracy to survive. Vouchers virtually never pass as ballot measures, so now legislatures will ty to install them anyway. Charters continue to get their businesses launched by coming up with ways to circumvent democracy. Beyond the immediate problems of that anti-democratic approach, one also has to wonder--if charter culture is built on the idea that local, democratic voices are to be ignored and overcome, rather than respected and partnered with, what does that tell us about how they will deal with staff and students? If the North Star of the movement continues to be the heroic visionary CEO who isn't held back by any dumb rues and who doesn't have to listen to anyone, what message does that send to the taxpayers, teachers, and students who are among the people who don't have to be listened to? 

Watch for these laws in your own state (they may already be there) and ask-- why should charters be given access to taxpayer dollars when they won't actually deal with the actual taxpayers?