The Absence of Government Is Not Freedom

I have considerable sympathy for Libertarians. Maybe it's my New Hampshire roots, but I don't have limitless faith in government's ability to do stuff well. But Libertarians and the Free Market crowd are, I think, critically wrong in one respect.

The argument is that removing government and its ability to impose its will by force would bring about greater freedom, that the playing field would be level if not for the heavy hand of government regulation.

But the absence of one source of power simply advantages other sources of power. With government, but even more so without, your access to "freedom" and "choice" is directly related to how much money and power you have. If you are poor and powerless, the blessings of freedom are somehow not so available to you--your choices about where to live, what to eat, how to get around, are all limited.

I've had conversations with local Libertarians (nice guys, pleasant people, good neighbors) who explained that, for instance, that courts and government would be necessary for simple protections. So, for instance, if a big company was dumping toxic waste in your back yard, you could take them to court for violating the law and be protected that way. But that's a fantasy-- it would be you and the lawyer you could afford against the high-powered gazillion dollar law firm. We know how this kind of suit works out, because the two sides do not have equal power. 

For some (I'm thinking Betsy DeVos style conservatives) the justification for this is simple--the belief that it is natural and normal for people to arrive at different stations, different levels of power and money, and that such sorting is a direct result of their own efforts and virtue (effort itself being one such virtue). In other words, rich or poor, you are where you deserve to be. In this view, government efforts to lift up the poor literally fly in the face of nature. Sometimes this is tied to American exceptionalism and the idea that the US is the one place where anyone can achieve anything (with an asterisk indicating that, yes, there were a few bugs in that system but we fixed those in the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s and it's all okay now). 

So for some, it's a matter of "Yes, there is inequality, and that's a feature, not a bug."

For others, it's not that inequality is good or okay, but it can be fixed with more freedom from government mucking about. And maybe--maybe--if there were a magic reset button that put everyone back to an even start, such a thing could be sort of true kind of maybe. Okay, I'm skeptical, but let's move on because it doesn't matter because there is no reset button. If the government were shrunken and drowned in a bathtub tomorrow, massive inequality would still be in place, and vast amounts of power and wealth would be employed to maintain vast amounts of power and wealth. Not freedom.

Somebody always has power. Always. Regardless of the system, the time, the rules. The field is always tilted, and somebody always has the advantage. There is no system that negates this reality.

Part of the genius of the American experiment it is structured largely around the counter-balance against power rather than the assignment and use of it. The Declaration talks about the human rights that are to be protected against whatever threatens them. The Constitution seeks to use checks and balances to keep power from accumulating on one corner of the playing field.

The government's earliest stated job was to protect those without power from those that have it. The mistake of modern hard-right thought is to say, "This fence is keeping all you sheep penned up; we need to get rid of it so that you are free," imagining that the freedom to become a buffet for various predators is somehow a step forward.

Some hard right folks have never quite worked out how this should work. I always believed that Betsy DeVos really did believe that students with special needs, among others, should not be let down. I even believe that she doesn't think education should harbor racism. But she also firmly believed that government should never step in to enforce any such rules, and so she's left stuck in some world where people with power should willingly give up some of their power even though nobody is going to say boo if they don't.

Similarly, free marketeers talk as if they believe that if we take away rules and regulations, the free market will bloom and every parent will have a multitude of choices for their child. There is no reason to believe this is true. People with power and money will have the choices they want. People without power and money will not. People will, as is usually the case, have as much choice and freedom as they can afford to pay for. The market, to the extent that it is unregulated, will be filled with charlatans and fraudsters, and parents, lacking the power that comes with information or the oversight of someone with more power than one parent with a tiny voucher--those parents will be at the mercy of the people who have the power in the marketplace--the vendors. They will have the freedom of leaves on a heaving ocean.

Can government step too far, exert too much overreach, exert too much power in its attempt to counter power? Absolutely, and we can talk about that another day. But it does not follow that the only restriction on a person's freedom is the government. Freedom can be, is, and always has been, restricted by people with more power than you have. Setting government oversight aside is simply abandoning the people without power to the mercies of those who have it.

If there's anything I keep coming back to in education (and most all other issues) it's that balance and tension are everything. It is never a matter of finding the right setting for the machinery of the world and welding it in place; it is always a matter of balancing different opposing forces, straining against each other on a field that is balanced on a pin in the midst of a raging, changing wind. To imagine that banishing government from that field will somehow yield stability and a greater good is a fantasy.

FL: Charter $chool New$

It turned up as an item in the South Florida Business Journal, and the lead tells you just where we're headed.

The campuses of three charter schools in Broward County were purchased for a combined $49 million by a company in Boise, Idaho that specializes in charter school real estate investments.

That just says a lot. Let's look at some details.

The big deal involves--well, several companies. We've got AEP Charter Renaissance. These folks sold a school they bought back in 2017. That charter school was located in a former Target store in Tamarac that had been bought by an investment capital group and a development group for $6.3 million; AEP Charter Renaissance bought it for $22 million. That purchase was part of a two-school deal that merited this kind of language in industry blurbs:

Part of the Colliers team’s successful strategy required educating prospective buyers on each individual Charter Management Organization (CMO) and nuances of each charter school including charter terms, for this asset class considered a special purpose building. 

“This is a highly-specialized asset class which inherently requires a longer and more thorough phase of due diligence,” noted Colliers Senior Vice President and Education Services Group Member Achikam Yogev. “Because of the complexities, charter schools have traditionally sold individually and rarely as a portfolio, but the continued interest in this asset class has paved the way for more creative strategies and more complex deals being done on behalf of our clients.”

By "industry," of course I mean real estate and investment, because none of this has to do with education. At any rate, AEP Charter Renaissance just sold that school (which has somehow shrunk to 85,233 square feet) for $26 million. AEP Charter Renaissance is managed by Charter School Capital, whose CEO and co-founder Stuard Ellis is based in Portland. They serve "charter school leaders, back-office/business service providers and brokers & developers" and they make a lot of money doing it. Also, "AEP" stands for "American Education Properties," of which Ellis is also the CEO. FWIW, his degree from University of California, Berkley (1988), is in Political Economies of Industrial Societies. You can watch Ellis provide a history of charter school capital.

The school that was sold is Renaissance Charter School at University, and while it was owned by a company in Portland, it is operated by Charter Schools USA. It was sold to PCSD Schools LLC, a company that is based in Boise, Idaho, but filed as a Florida LLC in December of 2021. 

PCSD stands for Performance Charter School Development, run by Brian Huffaker, who has worked his way up through the ranks in Hawkins Companies as an accountant. Hawkins is a commercial real estate development and property management company. Hawkins' client list is mostly retail and chain outlets, though they boast of the 700K square footage they have found for charters. PCSD is headquartered in Houston; their Boise branch office has the same address as Hawkins. They call themselves a "national full-service real estate firm specializing in helping new and existing charter schools meet their facility needs." Their website outlines a process by which they can help charters set up a facility, and even offers the option to buy it, and a portfolio of satisfied customers all over the country, including most of our favorite privatization states.

The whole story features two more transactions like this one (though one was actually a money loser), underlining once again that for many folks, charter schools are an "industry" just like real estate investment and malls and setting up a fast food franchise location. Meanwhile, a school in Florida that is operated by a company somewhere else in Florida has been sold by a company in Portland to another company located in Idaho but headquartered in Texas. It's as if all the interested and invested parties aren't really in the education business at all.

ICYMI: So This Is 2022 Edition (1/2)

 Well, here we are. It's almost as if the physical universe is not particularly impressed by our arbitrarily created markings of the passage of time. I remain optimistic, however. Here's the reading list for the week. 

The Coming Troubles of Public Ed In Virginia

Nancy Bailey joins those looking at the incoming administration in Virginia and concludes that it means bad news for those who love public education and student data privacy.

Education Exodus

A news report covering an Oregon study that looks at teacher stress over the past year.

New laws and old

Gregory Sampson takes a look at how the old law of unintended consequences is about to follow a new law covering teacher personal days in North Carolina

Is McKinsey China's weapon against America?

Gordon Change contributes a Newsweek op ed about our old friends at McKinsey and one other consern about their compass-free approach to business.

How Maine is trying to take food insecurity off kids' plates

PBS takes a look at one state's attempt to deal with child hunger

The quiet effort to change Massachusetts' education policy

By now you're familiar with the attempts to gag the teaching of anything related to race--the efforts that involve screaming and noisily ramming laws through. But you may have missed some quieter, but equally scary attempts, like what's going on in Massachusetts.

Lost in the critical race theory debate: the enduring value of the free press

From the Philadelphia Inquirer (beware the limited number of free articles), a new take on CRT panic, and how it threatens the free flow of information that journalism is all about.

A truly patriotic education requires critical analysis of US history

At The Hill, Wallace Stern talks about how to teach true history and face the controversies.

End of the year compilation posts are kind of a pain, but Steve Snyder always does two, God bless him-- the posts that were most popular at his blog, and those that he thinks were most overlooked.

God keeps me and us around

Jose Luis Vilson has had quite the year, and his summation is well worth the read.

And, this week at Forbes, I pointed out that courts in North Carolina have now ruled that charter schools are not public schools--twice. Then we went to Oklahoma and Florida to look at how those states are putting more threat in their teacher gag laws. And finally, asking if we'll ever get school covid policy out of the kluge stage.

Look Back. Look Forward. Breathe.

 I'm not always moved to do a "look at the year" post or a "predictions for the upcoming year" post. A lot of these compilations are meant to be a way to lessen workload at a busy time, but as anyone who has done the work can tell you, it doesn't actually lessen anything.

Plus, the new year is one of those things that we humans made up and then tried to imbue with great weight and importance, as if the next 24 hours are somehow more significant than any other.

They aren't. We draw a line in the sand and then expect the waves to honor it when they come rolling in.

That's more evident than ever this year. Covid will not be marking the new year, just as it failed to mark the last new year. And why should the passing of Betty White on this last day of the year be extra bitter, except that we make it so by drawing the calendar lines where we currently choose to. Almost a century, and all of it well spent.

But I do honor the impulse to stop and look back, look forward, and take a breath at various points in the year. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Why not the New Year, since we've all agreed to more or less do so at the same time?

It has been a rough time for public education. Lots of vultures have decided that the pandemic is their signal to swoop, hoping they can finally hurry along a hoped-for demise and grab a treasured piece of the carcass. Weak, cowardly, and just plain bad administrations have been caught in a troubled time, an occasion that they are unwilling or unable to rise to. Public schools reflect the society of their time, and right now our nation is managing to have the worst response to a public crisis that we've ever had in our history. 

And yet, I feel hopeful about public education. First, much of the general panic is the result of our new media, which creates such a droning buzz that folks now have to scream bloody murder and apocalyptic terror to break through and claim their market share and/or political clout. Turn off the media noise (even if, like me, you're a tiny part of it) and pay attention to the world around you, the people around you, and you can see something of beauty and value in the world. There are things, and people, worth embracing, supporting, cheering. 

That means that going forward, we can find stars to guide us, even if we are surrounded in noise and smoke and an unhelpful swath of human-made fog. And for me, public education will always be part of that. 

It's an amazing thing, an astonishing achievement, and when you consider what we've set out to do as a nation--to provide a decent, elevating, heartening, useful education for every single child in this country--it's no wonder that we've often stumbled. It's a huge undertaking, usually under-supported and under-resourced and yet, still chugging forward. To help every child better understand and grasp their best strengths, to fully become themselves, to learn how to be fully human in the world--that's a bold and beautiful goal, a worthy goal. Nobody--no parent, teacher, child--who pursues that goal should ever be ashamed to rise in that pursuit. 

There are times when the future does not rise clearly to meet us, where the road ahead is obscured and, frankly, a bit scary. But when you've got worthwhile work to do, and when you are focused on lifting up your fellow travelers on this globe spiraling through the infinite dark--that is not a bad thing. There is certainly work as worthwhile as teaching, but nothing I can think of is more so. Never doubt, teachers, that you are doing good work. I know there's a chorus screaming, seemingly daily, that you are some kind of lazy, incompetent slacker who entered the field only because you thought was an easy path to a life of wealth and leisure. Those people are full of it; you are doing important work, work that's worth doing, work that is more valuable than, say, spending your days trying to panic people into giving you power. 

The coming week is looming, unpleasant, uncertain, a school year with no clear finish line in sight and no certain path forward. I don't claim to have any brilliant solutions. But I feel certain of this-- if you can say that you are doing important, valuable work to the very best of your ability, and you are taking care of the people around you with the strength and heart that you have, then you are making good use of the short time you have on the planet, regardless of what numbers show up on your calendar. You and I may not hit a century, may not even get close enough to feel cheated if we come just 18 days short, but if our days are well spent, then that'll be pretty damn okay.

Check the past to see where you've been and what you owe, and look forward to see the stars that guide you. Breathe. Clear your head and listen to your heart. here we go, one day at a time, until they stack up to another year. Spend it doing work worth doing. Happy New Year.

PA: Bucks County Classroom Chill

I've predicted this kind of thing for states that are leaning hard into book bans and teacher gag laws, but here's a perfectly good example of how this sort of thing works right here in Pennsylvania.

The process is simple. 

Step One: You put some threats in place, from fines against the school district to possible lawsuits to just the fact that you have increased the likelihood that some agitated parent will feel empowered to call and complain. 

Step Two: Watch all your most conflict-averse school administrators implement far more repression and silencing within their district than you ever dreamed of.

If you've taught for at least a decade, you know the kind of administrator I mean. Raise your hand if you've ever had some version of this conversation.

Administrator: You have got to stop doing X in your classroom. Parents are all upset and I'm getting all kinds of phone calls.

Teacher: How many phone calls?

Administrator: Well, one. But she sounded really angry.

Teacher: So, how many parents?

Administrator: Look, just stop doing X. That's our new policy.

Sometimes, there isn't even this much discussion. The administrator supervising the junior high at my old district simply pulled two novels from the curriculum without so much as talking to the department chair. 

In Pennsylvania, Pennridge School District (Bucks County) has sent out a memo from the assistant superintendent for elementary education stating, in part,

The district is requesting that library books with content regarding gender identity be removed from the current elementary student circulation.

The books will be reviewed for, among other things, "sensitive topics involving foul language, intense violence, gender identity, and graphic sexual content." If the book is slapped with a scarlet C, then it goes in a special library gulag from which students can only get the books with parental permission. If you are a young person with questions, you can't be allowed to look for answers on your own (well, unless, of course, you have encountered the internet).

One of the first books to be pulled under this policy is Heather Has Two Mommies, which includes no violence, graphic sex, or foul language.

That parental control runs through several district policies. No using a preferred name or pronoun without parental permission. And if a student doesn't tell her parents that she's pregnant, then the school will (no clear word on whether the male who helped create the pregnancy will be likewise turned in to his folks). 

I have sympathy with parents who want to be in the loop of their children's lives, but coverage of these policies turns up an example of a story that every single teacher could have predicted, involving student James Peuplie:

In 8th grade, Peuplie asked his teacher to use his proper name and pronouns. The school then asked his mother and father to come in to discuss his gender identity. His father had not previously known Peuplie was transgender.

“A couple of nights later my dad ended up kicking me out,” said Peuplie. “So we had a really big falling out with a really big argument.”

Peuplie and his father then had an argument where the police were involved. He ended up being taken to the hospital and diagnosed with situational depression.

Every teacher knows a story like this one about an LGBTQ student whose home turned out to be an unsafe place for them to be. This is exactly the spot where parental rights and student rights collide, and it is a mistake to declare that parental rights must always take precedence. Parental rights folks often say that the child does not belong to the school, which is absolutely true, because the child does not belong to anybody--including their parents.

Pennridge has its own little Liberty group that has been busy pursuing goals of abolishing critical race theory, promoting patriotism, and standing up for parental rights. They made enough noise to get the district to fold up its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative, as well as getting some Black authors pulled from the curriculum. That became a winning campaign brag to fuel a GOP sweep of the last board election (theme "Parents over Politicians")

The district is 30 miles north of Philadelphia, with an 85% white student body. In 2018, 225 high school students participated in the national student walkout in response to the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School murders; the students were given detention. The school board vice-president, a Trump supporter, called them "Marxist truant[s]." That same member, Joan Cullen, was in DC on January 6.

Bucks County is also home to Woke Bucks County, now expanded to Woke PA, whose website (complete with eagle head and stars and stripe shield) declares their work "to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, and state policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom--" Their website offers yet another chance to turn in anonymous tips about awful things that somebody is doing. You can turn those anonymous tips in here. Right here. Any tips at all. 

So the district is getting plenty of noisy pressure from one set of parents, and now other parents are also speaking up against the district's anti-LGBTQ message, and the region is politically hot. But that kind of political heat in a community translates into a deep, frosty chill in classrooms where everything remotely approaching an uncomfortable topic is ignored, erased, and silenced--even if that happens to involve the lives of actual students. 

Who Do The Leaders Follow (Twitter Edition)

Warning: If you are completely unimpressed and disinterested when it comes to Twitter, this post is probably not for you.

It was an offhand Tweet that I read, but it got me thinking and checking, and sure enough-- the current Secretary of Education does not follow a single working teacher. Or even, really, a person in education. 

Now yes--before we dig into this, I totally get that social media accounts are most likely run by lowly interns. Not only that, but given what we've seen in previous administrations, it's probably just as well that people in office aren't using social media personally because apparently that's a bad way to run things. 

Still, let's look.

@SecCardona only follows 39 accounts (38 technically, because one of the accounts he follows is his old civilian account--@teachcardona). They are virtually all work-related fellow bureaucrats and administration officials--other cabinet secretaries, etc--plus things like the CDC and WHO, and a couple of news-ish shows (GMA and New Day). 

And while he's racked up 1,547 tweets since February, they mostly read like tweet versions of press releases, and he seems to never actually reply to anything posted by someone else. Which, given the folks he follows, is unsurprising.

So if he's got his finger on the pulse of working educators, it's not through Twitter (which, I hasten to add, is not an indefensible stance because Twitter's overall pulse is kind of thready and bitter). Our secretary of education does not follow any actual teachers.

While I was there, I figured why not check some others.

@usedgov (the Department of Education) is also very businesslike, mostly following other departments, government-related organizations, with a few curves thrown in. The 154 follows include @EdWeekTeacher, @WeAreTeachers, @TeachForAmerica, @TeachtoLead and @rweingarten.

@FLOTUS is a pretty quiet account that follows 5 and has 278 tweets. @DrBiden has been on Twitter since January 2017 and only has 960 tweets. She follows 22 in an odd assortment that includes Cher, Taye Diggs and Tara Westover.

@JoeBiden follows 48 accounts, including some archived one. Mostly political except for Lady Gaga and Chrissy Tiegen. 

AFT president @rweingarten follows almost 4,000 people--it's a very eclectic group, and I don't know how anyone manages to follow more than a few hundred people, but clearly some folks manage. Weingarten has usually maintained a pretty lively Twitter presence. NEA president @BeckyPringle is less plugged in with 631 follows and 2,178 tweets since 2009; it's a small but eclectic group. Both presidents follow an assortment of activists, leaders, and regular teachers.

This is a small data point and not particularly deeply significant (here at the Institute it is not our goal to shake the earth every single day). The education corners of Twitter have their own sets of issues, but it is an easy place to find out what actual teachers are actually saying. That only works if you (or your interns) are there. 

PA: State Argues Great Education Only For A Few

There's a big court case currently unfolding in Pennsylvania court; several school districts and some parents are suing over the state's funding formula, arguably one of the worst in the nation. And one lawyer for the defense is saying the quiet parts out loud.

The central issue is the question of just how much responsibility the state has to provide a quality education for every child. Many state constitutions seem to suggest the answer is "a lot," but when dragged into court over the issue. states often make... other arguments. The Philadelphia Inquirer caught a fairly telling exchange

In questioning the superintendent of a rural school district, a lawyer for Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman repeatedly asked why the state’s academic standards mattered for students entering certain professions.

“What use would a carpenter have for biology?” asked John Krill of Matthew Splain, superintendent of the Otto-Eldred School District in McKean County and president of the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, one of the plaintiffs. Splain had said his district’s scores on state standardized tests in biology and other subjects were not acceptable.:

“What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?” Krill continued.

As lawyers for the plaintiffs objected, asking what the relevance was, Krill said that the trial was about whether Pennsylvania was meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of education.

“The question in my mind is, thorough and efficient to what end? To serve the needs of the Commonwealth,” Krill said. “Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many needs. There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”

So, that's pretty clear. The Senate's lawyer argues that education is meant to provide the state with meat widgets, and that each meat widget should know their place in the scheme of things and settle for however little education the state thinks they need to do that job.

There are layers to this dismissal of the state's constitutional obligation, because thanks to the worst rich-poor gap between districts in the country, the students who are getting shafted, who have the crumbling facilities, the underfunded staff, the inadequate resources--in short the education that Krill is arguing should be Good Enough for future pizza flippers--are the students in poor districts. You know--those poor kids who don't need a real education.

Suits like this have been attempted before. In Michigan, students sued the state for providing inadequate education, and the state used similar arguments--just because the law says the state has to provide education doesn't mean they have to provide a good education. One such case, hinging on "de minimis" (aka "the least you can get away with doing") ended inconclusively (while also providing another demonstration of just how little Betsy DeVos understands about how education works and how vouchers would not serve students in real need). As Rick Hess (AEI) has often noted, you can compel people to do something, but you can't compel them to do it well.

That holds true for states where this legal battle has been won. The court can find that the legislature owes public education more money, but then the legislature can just... not do anything about it. Washington went through this and the court fined the government $100K per day. This year, the court in North Carolina has been wrangling with a legislature that refused to follow a court-mandated spending plan.

So even if you manage to win this kind of case, that doesn't mean things get any better.

At the same time, though, it's really striking to see legislators and their hired guns saying the quiet part out loud--we don't really have a state-level commitment to an excellent education and we don't want to use tax dollars to educate Those Peoples' Children because all we need from them is the ability to serve us pizza and collect our garbage. If they want a great education, they should not have decided to be poor.