When You Open Schools To Religion...

 There has been a push for a while now to open public schools to religion, and it has been pushed a variety of ways, such as the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

That suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2001. The Good News Club is a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a group founded in 1937 by Jesse Levin Overholtzer with the express purpose of evangelizing children. They claim 109,828 clubs worldwide. In the 90s, a couple decided to establish one of these after-school clubs in Milford, New York, but the school said no based on the stated intent to have  "a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson and memorizing scripture." Deeming the club religious instruction (which it totally was) the district said no, and many lower courts agreed. SCOTUS, however, did not. Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy were okey-doke with this (Breyer concurred in part). 

And so US school have to provide use of the facilities to after school religious groups.

And so, here comes the next obvious step.

Meet the After School Satan Clubs. 

Religious counter-protesting has a fine history in this country, with such notable groups as the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster. The Satanic Temple is one such group, with their not very diabolical motto "Empathy. Reason. Advocacy." They've run a number of attention-grabbing activities, including declaring abortion a sacred ritual as a direct challenge to the Texas abortion laws.

After School Satan Clubs ("Educatin' with Satan") also seem to be out to make a point. The club is aimed specifically at schools with Good News Club chapters, and as its mission--

Proselytization is not our goal, and we’re not interested in converting children to Satanism. After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us.

We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors.

Their FAQ include an answer to the question why:

The pre-existing presence of evangelical after school clubs not only established a precedent for which school districts must now accept Satanic groups, but the evangelical after school clubs have created the need for Satanic after school clubs to offer a contrasting balance to student’s extracurricular activities.

They have made their point in a handful of districts, where parents have seen info about After School Satan Club and freaked the hell out. 

One Moline parent, who shared a photo of the club's flyer online, received incredulous responses to her post, including this: "Wait what????? How is this even a thing? Who approved this?"

The word "approval" is exactly on point--breaking down the wall between church and school will inexorably lead us to a world in which folks call for government to approve religions. Historically, this has never ended well. Somehow people keep expecting that religious freedom should only mean freedom for their own religion. But when you break down the wall between church and school, you should not be surprised when the Satanic Temple walks through the gap. 

(Someone popping up to explain that this is a super argument for choice in 3.... 2..... 1...........)

ICYMI: It's That Time Again Edition (1/16)

 By "that time" I mean time to once again see who will win the annual contest to twist some MLK quote into the pretzel form needed to support their particular cause. Turns out, every year, that MLK would have supported virtually everything. Yay. Here's your reading list for the week.

In our alarmingly unequal society, public schools by themselves cannot be the great equalizer

Jan Resseger has a look at another chapter from an upcoming anthology about public education. This one's by Kevin Welner and it's a good one.

Sheriff uses grades and abuse history to label schoolchildren as potential criminals

In Florida, they're using a Minority Report style system to violate privacy in the name of catching future criminals

Florida officials tried to steer education contract to former lawmaker's company

Corruption in Florida? I am shocked. Shocked! The Tampa Bay Times has the story

This vested interest in the children's incompetence

Teacher Tom has a particularly insightful post here about how some grown-ups are not great with kids.

Florida bill would allow cameras and microphones in classroom

CBS news reports. Come for the terrible new ideas, and stay to find out what terrible old ideas are already being used in Florida classrooms.

Stitt's education bro tries desperately to repair image

Oklahoma's ed chief is doing poorly. This week he really put his foot in it, and tried some light damage control.

Kids on the "McDonalds track" are living in a rigged system

Laura Bryce writes an op-ed for the Inquirer about the mess that is PA school funding

Down goes Frayser

Gary Rubinstein has long kept an eye on Tennessee's Achievement School District, the special state takeover turnaround system that has never done anything but fail hard. Here's the latest update on this sad history.

The pastor, the speaker of the house--and a Christian Academy educator

Nancy Flanagan looks at the sad, greasy tale of Lee Chatfield

Indiana SB 167

The latest version of one of those bills that wants to make sure that teachers don't teach anything a certain parent might find uncomfortable. Blue Cereal Education takes three posts to break it down-- I'll let you start with the third and work your way backwards.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes, I looked at the special features of South Carolina's voucher bill.

Should Schools Teach The Success Sequence

You know the "sucess sequence." It's the idea that if Young People just do the right things--finish school, get a job, get married, have a kid--in that order, they are less likely to end up not poor. It has occasionally been oversold ("Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!") and the "data" used to bolster it is a little suspicious (like claiming that only 2% of people who follow these rules end up poor anyway--2%?! Really?)

But at the same time, it makes a certain sort of sense, and it's hard to argue that dropping out and having out-of-wedlock babies while unemployed are few people's idea of great life choices. But does it follow that we should, as Rick Hess recently suggested, teach the "success sequence" in school?

I have always had issues with the idea of the success sequence, despite the fact that, as Hess would point out, I followed it myself, sort of. My biggest suspicion is that folks are, once again, confusing correlation with causation. I can believe that the sequence and some level of financial stability go together, but I'm not yet convinced that the causation arow runs from sequence to success and not the other way around. 

Nor is history really on the side of the sequence, given that we are only a generation or two away from the days in which a vast number of Americans did not finish school at all, and yet did perfectly fine. There's also a weird disconnect here for women, who were, for many generations, expected NOT to get a job. They may have been expected to land a husband with a good job, but that's not really the same thing. Nor have good jobs always been available to all people; with a stagnant minimum wage, among other factors, we are looking at a large number of working poor in this country--should they simply consign themselves to never getting married or having children because they can't clear the "good job" hurdle? Hess does acknowledge that many parts of the sequence are beyond the individual's control.

That takes us back to the correlation thing again. Currently the average age for a first marriage in the US is close to 30, which means that folks have to be able to get through a decade or so on their own, though that has changed a lot for women, who up through the 1970s had a median first marriage age of around 20, presumably because they did NOT have to follow the sequence (that age has been steadily climbing since). 

How do we move the sequence into schools? I'm trying to imagine what I would have said to my many students for whom working in high school was an economic necessity. I don't want to imagine students going home from school to announce to their family, "I know why we're poor. It's all your fault." 

Hess links to an article by Philip Cohen who makes a case for why the sequence is bad public policy, noting that costly initiatives to sell the redemptive power of marriage have utterly failed. Of the advice to wait, he says

Success sequencers believe it’s hypocritical to hoard this advice and only dispense it to the children of privilege. But you can’t wish away education, career, and marriage uncertainty or impose order on instability by force of will. If we’re not prepared to guarantee all women the same opportunities as those in my classes have, it’s not reasonable to demand the same attachment to the success sequence that those opportunities make feasible. In the absence of that guarantee, you’re simply asking, or requiring, poor people to delay (until “they’re ready,” in Sawhill’s terms, meaning not poor) or forego having children, one of the great joys of life, and something we should consider a human right.

And he points out the connections between the sequence and race and class

Not coincidentally, the history of welfare politics in the United States is intricately bound up with the history of racism against black women, who have been labeled pathological and congenitally dependent. The idea that delaying parenthood until marriage is a choice one makes is highly salient and prized by the white middle class, and the fact that black women often don’t have that choice makes them the objects of scorn for their perceived lax morals. The framing of the success sequence plays into this dynamic. For example, Ron Haskins has argued that welfare reform was needed to “[change] the values and the approach to life of people on welfare that they have to do their part.” The image of the poor welfare “taker” has a race and a gender in America.

Importantly, Cohen also points out that an attempt to sell the sequence assumes that there are a bunch of young folks out there on the fence, thinking, "Hmm, I can't decide whether I want to be an unwed mother or not." 

But beyond all of that, I can tell you why the sequence will never, ever be adopted as a part of formal education in this country.

Birth control.

The clear, logical implication of the sequence is that teenaged girls should be on birth control until they have reached the proper moment in the sequence. Heck, the success sequence is practically a full-on endorsement of the "I'm not ready for a child yet" case for legal abortion. If you are pushing the sequence as a practical plan for success in life, then it only makes sense to allow teenagers the practical tools that will help them postpone having a child until they're at the right point in the sequence.

Yes, many sequencers like to use the idea to sell abstinence, and that tips the hand of the real idea for many sequencers--that the success sequence is not a practical plan to achieve desired outcomes, but a moral test to see who deserves those "success" outcomes. For some it is another way to make the argument that poor folks are poor because of their own lousy choices, and if you don't want to be poor, make better choices.

As a practical, pragmatic plan, the success sequence could be helpful if we were willing to really back it. Free and easily available birth control starting at the onset of puberty. Raise the minimum wage so that anybody who has a real job has an income good enough to get married and start a family. But as a moral test of worthiness, the success sequence is a dead end. 

Hess is not wrong when he suggests that "we need to focus not only on the structures and externalities that can shape students’ lives but also on what students can do to control their own destinies," though I'm betting you'd be hard pressed to find a school in this country that doesn't. But I think he's overly optimistic when he adds "The success sequence is a compelling, evidence-based, broadly appealing way to do both. In our intensely polarized age, it provides a promising path to talk about opportunity, impediments, and responsibility in a way that may help to span some of our bitter divides." I think talking about it will highlight those divides in new ways, but I'm pretty sure we can all predict that the first set of responses to "So how do we help insure that teenaged girls do not have babies before they're ready?" will find us having old familiar arguments.

VA: Book Burning Fan Now Board Chairman

You may recall the story about Spotsylvania school district in Virginia, where books were being protested and pulled and two board members thought maybe the books should be burned.

Well, one of those guys is now the board chairman, and things are blowing up in a hurry.

The board is a 4-3 board (though those who didn't want to burn the books were supportive of banning them), and the 4-person conservative majority installed Kirk Twigg as the president. 

Scott Baker has been with district in various capacities for years before becoming superintendent in 2012; he won some awards for his superintendenting prowess, but there's a portion of the local populace that are not fans. There's a whole blog devoted to laying out his many alleged sins, but not being hard enough on dirty books has drawn the most criticism in the recent past, along with agitation over school closings.

Baker was on his way out, with departure negotiated for the end of this school year. That was not fast enough for Twigg, who has been vocal in his opposition to various books. The ban was centered on "sexually explicit" books, but Twigg, besides expressing his interest in burning objectionable material also added that he would like to broaden the criteria for rooting through the school libraries, saying, “There are some bad, evil-related material that we have to be careful of and look at."

Twigg promised that, if elected chair of the board, his first action would be to fire Baker effective immediately. Last Monday night, in a meeting characterized as chaotic and contentious, he did just that. He called an unscheduled closed session during the meeting, then came back to announce that Baker had been terminated--before being reminded that the board had to take an actual vote. 

No reason has been given for the firing, but it's Virginia, a right to work state, and no reason has to be given. 

Members voting against the termination were vocal in their opposition. "He has spoken about confidential (human resources) matters in open session. He is constantly using his AOL account to send and read emails throughout school board meetings. He wants to burn books," said former chair Dawn Shelley. Others questioned how this was for the good of students or families in Spotsylvania.

Several news accounts try to capture how off the rails this portion of the meeting was, but you really have to see it to believe it. I'll just put it here.

Talking over each other. No apparent knowledge of any rules of order. It's a mess.

There is, of course, a change.org petition up to remove Twigg, who was elected to the board in 2015 unopposed. In 2019 he ran again, this time with opposition--and a few thousand dollars. He allegedly told a Tea Party gathering that there would be big changes once his "constitutional, conservative, Republican, Christian" majority takes over. His support included $2,204 of his own money, $1,200 from Peter Dechat, and $908 from the Republican Party of Spotsylvania County. (DeChat could be this guy, a Christian motivational speaker, but I can't confirm that for certain).

As you watch the clip above, you'll note that the crowd cheers for Twigg's announcement, and also for the people disagreeing with him. No word yet on the superintendent fill-in. Also no word yet on whether or not the new chair will be scheduling book bonfires any time soon. Interesting days ahead in Virginia. 

Ready for Hologram Teachers?

 One more innovation that nobody asked for, the hologram professor is another idea from the ed tech folks.

Much of the noise seems to be in the post-secondary world where-- well, here's one pitch:

The hologram professor is an innovative educational experience based on “telepresence” and, crucially at this juncture for higher education, it can recreate the natural dynamics of face-to-face environments – by creating a hologram of the lecturer in multiple classrooms at once, offering greater closeness and warmth for distance learners compared with current videoconferencing systems. Knowledge and experiences can be exchanged in real time while students interact and carry out activities in their classrooms.

In this version (from Mexico), the professor stands in front a black background with a standard batch of videoconferencing tools (camera, microphone, speakers)--which is our first clue that we aren't really talking about a hologram at all, but a regular 2D image projected on a "holographic screen." The students sit in their various classrooms, and the professor sees them on monitors. There's also a screen running slides, materials, whatever. This model--a full body live video version of the old videoconference teaching model--is popular in some places.

There are other models out there, most notably models that depend on some sort of augmented reality (AR) headset rig. These could involve actual 3D teachers, the hinted-at catch here being that to actually record a hologram involves multiple camera images being scanned and combined and generally not something that can be done live. So you get a 3D recording, without student interaction.

The first model allows for interactions, sort of, and in one version, the teacher can move around a bit. 

But the bottom line here is that when someone is talking about a hologram teacher they are either talking about A) a fancier version of the same instruction-by-video already available Youtube or B) a version of Zoom with a bigger screen so that you can see the teacher's whole body and not just her face. And to get A, there will be a significant investment in hardware and techs to run the program.

Also, any discussion of this has to include this tweet in response to an article about holoteachers:

President of my college touted this idea in a dept meeting 15 yrs ago. Students will get access to "real professors," he said to a room of living profs. My usually quiet colleague's response? "Ok, before you bring in the hologram, do you think you could fix the clock in 216?"

— Paul Gilmore (@PaulOscarTate) January 13, 2022

So while this is another of those ed tech developments that has been "just around the corner" for twenty-sone years, it doesn't look like anything really useful is showing up any time soon.

FL: When Compliance Culture Replaces Compassion

I don't usually cover these sorts of stories, but I've seen the body cam footage. The mother of the child is plans to take legal action. I don't blame her.

I'm always cautious about stories centered on student complaints about being mistreated by schools. A school's hands are tied when it comes to responding; a student's records are confidential, and so a fuller picture can't be shared. 

But I've seen the body cam footage.

On September 22, 2021, a fight broke out on the campus of Palm View K-8 School (Palmetto, Manatee County, Florida). One 12-year-old student recorded video of the fight on her phone. The administration wanted to confiscate the phone. The school resource officer, a sheriff's deputy, attempted to take the phone from her, first in the cafeteria and later when the child was being detained. Both times she pushed him away. The second time she was dropped to the floor, cuffed, and arrested. 

That's the basic outline of the story.

Let's talk about what the body cam footage from the deputy shows. The raw footage has been shared with me; for obvious reasons I cannot share it with you.

The footage begins with the officer talking with three female administrators. Early on, the officers indicates that he's ready and willing to cuff her and walk her out. One of the women (identified by the paper as the principal) says, "I don't think I want her in handcuffs, but I do want a severe consequence and I want her off my campus." Another of the women agrees that the girl should be used as an example. The officer indicates that "on the street" he would already have arrested her based on the push she gave him in the cafeteria. There's further discussion about handling the students involved in the fight. Then they're back to discussing the student with the video. The principal wants her gone and asks, "She has an IEP. If I do this [pointing at the officer], is she gone?" They are far more alarmed about "she was recording me without my permission," which they seem to think is illegal (it isn't). The girl does reportedly have both an IEP and a behavioral plan.

The officer clarifies to one of the women that he is not there to make an example "but if she becomes an example, so be it." She underlines that they support law enforcement. "Respect for the badge," she repeats. "Respect for the badge."

The deputy goes to the teacher planning room (apparently used as ISS) where she is being held. Mom is then called, and asked to come get her. For the first of several times on the footage, the girl makes a move toward her pocket and the adults move in to prevent it. 

Now the girl just stews. Head down. She actually does a quick phone check, but the officer is apparently not looking. A moment later, the officer demands to see her other hand. After a few minutes, she walks to the other side of the room. The woman in the room asks if she understands why they have to do this. The officer asks if everything is all right at home. Then it's back to "keep your hands out of your pockets" and "I don't know what you have in there. Do you have a weapon in there?" More silence. The woman tells the girl that she's concerned because "if you videoed one of our staff without their permission, you could be charged, and I don't want that." The girl tries to speak up, but the adults roll over her. "Wasn't even no fight," she finally gets to say. "They was just yelling." Her point- "Ain't nobody going to care." Nothing worth posting. She stays leaned up against a study carrel. Her head stays down all this time. And for almost five minutes nothing happens.

29:48: Officer says "take your hands out of your pockets" and approaches the girl.

29:51: Officer "Why are you manipulating your phone?" He's right up to her now.

29:52: Girl "How am I manipulating my phone?" He's right up on her, and she starts to stand.

29:53: Her hand is still in her pocket. The officer grabs her arm with one hand and tries to pull her hand out of her pocket with the other. "Take your hands out of your pocket. She pulls her hand out of her pocket.

29:54: She pulls her arm away from the officer. At this point, it appears that the phone goes to the floor.

29:55: Girl "You just threw my fucking phone. Move!" The officer pushes her back, one arm on her shoulder, one on her rib cage just under her breast.

29:57: She steps back, pushes one of his hands away. He is standing arms out toward her.

29:58: Two handed push on her shoulder.

29:59: The woman says "Stop, stop, stop." Girl moves toward officer.

30:00: Girl steps back and hollers "Moooove."

30:02: Girl moves in and pushes officer.

30:03: Officer "Stop"

30:04: She pushes again.

30:05: Screen blocked by her body. Sounds of struggle.

30:06: She is on the floor. 

30:09: He is putting cuffs on her. She is crying.

It's that quick. 

The aftermath is hard to watch. Her shorts are pulled down; she's standing in her boxers. She will not stop crying. When the second officer joins (walking past a teacher who's berating her students because "the kindergartners have a better straight line than you"), the girl crying uncontrollably, calling for her Mommy. Before they walk her out, they switch her to a different set of handcuffs, demanding that she turn "all the way around" to face the wall and asking if there's anything in her pants they should know about before they search her. The officer repeats this many times, as if he really, really expects her to be carrying something illegal. And he reminds her, when she's starting to cry again, that he will treat her like an adult when she's acting like an adult. They take off her rings and the whole batch of bracelets. 

Then they walk her out, in cuffs, through the campus. They take her headband off and put her mask on as they load her in the vehicle. The deputy is carrying a Black Lives Matter key chain. It will be another half hour or so before her mother arrives at the school.

I've communicated with some folks close to the case. There are other threads of the story to follow, if we had the time and space here. I'm told that since this incident, the girl has been accused of having drugs in her backpack, which she wouldn't let them search because what she did have was her first tampons. The girl is several achieving many years below grade level; some accuse the school of wanting to get rid of her to improve their numbers. This is apparently the first year Palm View has housed 7th and 8th graders; one wonders if they are simply unprepared to deal with 12 year olds.

The girl may be shuttled off to Horizons Academy, a "recovery" school for warehousing problem students. Horizons' student body is 33% Black. Manatee County Schools student body is 20% Black. You have already guessed that the girl in this story is black, and all of the adults are white. And Manatee Schools have had some issues in the past, but let's just stay focused on this incident.

There are so many bad choices made by adults in this situation.

First and foremost--have the administrators of Palm View used a cell phone any time recently? Because you could smash my phone with a large rock, and every video I've ever taken with it is readily available on line where it is automatically backed up. And while we're in servicing them on how phones work, can we please give them some professional development related to legalities around videos.

This is what happens when compliance culture overwhelms a school. Lots of people made bad choices aimed at forcing a twelve year old girl to knuckle under and do as she was told. At many junctures, some of them split seconds, choices could have been made differently to de-escalate, but instead, a twelve year old girl had to pay for all the choices adults made by being marched out of her school in handcuffs because she wouldn't hand over her phone.

This is also what you get when an administration tries to use SROs as muscle. It has been clarified many times that the video issue was strictly a school disciplinary problem, not a criminal one, and the child's arrest was for "battery" against the officer. That means that if the school has simply handled the video themselves and not called in the officer in order to "make an example" and deliver "serious consequences," the battery would never have happened. The officer notes, more than once in the course of the video, that a call for law enforcement to this school is very unusual--why do it for this instance?

You can tell me there's more context here and as I said at the start, I get that there's context to school issues that the school can't bring up. The girl is clearly not a top scholar and maybe not a model school citizen. But there is no context that makes it okay beat down a child like this over a video on a phone. None. The mother says she's prepared to take legal action, and I don't blame her a bit.

It is hard to watch this girl become increasingly distressed and dismayed. In trouble, with nobody in her corner at all, the adults around her treating her like a problem, the entire process dehumanizing and degrading, leaving a child feel powerless and helpless--powerful feelings for children at that age.

In Classroom Management 101 we all learn that you don't corner a student and leave them with no way out. Apparently all of the adults in this situation skipped that day of class. I don't care if a child has pissed you off a hundred times in the past--once you stop treating them like a real, live human being deserving basic dignity and respect, you have lost the plot. Compliance culture, which values children's compliance over their humanity, is always a bad deal in a school, and it is the children who pay the price.

A PA Billionaire And An Initiative To STOP Public Education

The Center for Education Reform is an advocacy group that has never been shy about where it stands on the issue of public education (and the teachers who work there)-- they are not fans. The chairman and treasurer are both investment guys and their advisors are all investment and privatization folks. But the beating heart and voice of CER is Jeanne Allen. Lately Allen has been touting a new program that CER "partners" with, founded by some big money out of Philly.

We've talked about Allen before. She's the founder, president, and chief spokesperson for the Center for Education Reform. She graduated from Dickerson with a degree in political science, then moved on to study political philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She was the "youngest political appointee to serve at the pleasure of the president, Ronald Reagan, at the US Department of Education, then became the ed policy chief at the Heritage Foundation." She earned an Educational Entrepreneurship masters at University of Pennsylvania in a program that offers what I once called "a degree in soulless profiteering." She announced her intention to step out of the president role in 2013, but no successor was named and apparently, she stayed right in place.

Allen is an expert lobbyist and advocate. She knows politics and business. She bills herself as "one of the nation’s most accomplished and relentless advocates for education reform, and a recognized expert, speaker and author in the field." She has no background or experience in actual educating. But she does know how to brand herself. If you want to see her in action, you can watch this 2012 clip, but chances are that by the time she says, "You can't have parent power and have teacher union power" and says "teacher union" with the same tone of voice one would use for "rotting cockroach carcasses," you will want to say unkind things to her.

Allen has a laser-like focus on dismantling public education. It took her about fifteen minutes to get over her initial antipathy toward the Trump administration, and her analysis of the GOP's 2018 losses was that they weren't reform enough. She went to bat for cyber charters when even folks in the charter sector were slamming them. And she called for a full Reagan on the LAUSD teacher strike-- just fire 'em all. More recently she's been making the rounds explaining how covid is further proof that public schools should be replaced by full on choice. (You can read more about her here, here, here, and here.)

Allen has often had access to large piles of money (she once offered a $100K bounty for someone who could teach John Oliver a lesson). Recently she's been touting the STOP Award program, which is throwing around millions. It was created "to honor and advance the work of education providers that continued to perform during Covid." STOP stands for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless.

STOP awarded $1 mill for 2021; now it has launched a $5 million "rescue fund" which was set up to take advantage of the Chicago strike by offering big bucks to private schools that would accept Chicago students--so maybe back to the drawing board on that one (the rescue fund is no longer featured on the CER home page).

The "founder" (the "o" might be a typo) of the STOP Award is Janine Yass, board member emeritus of CER. She founded the Boys Latin Charter School in Philly; she's been a board member for Save The Children and Teach for America. And she's married to Jeffrey Yass.

You probably haven't heard of Jeff Yass; heck, most of us in Pennsylvania haven't, but he's probably the richest guy in the state.

Yass did not get rich the old fashioned way. As a college student in the 70s, he played a lot of poker and did a lot of gambling. In favorable press, the story is that he used smarts and practice and Big Thinking to get good at it, and turned that smartitude into investment billions; some profiles say he started out as a "professional gambler," which strikes me as a fine description of investment work. He and his Susquehanna International don't look for a lot of publicity, but they are huge. In 2018 Bloomberg called the company a "crucial engine of the $5tn global exchange-traded fund market." And Yass has been putting all his money to work.

Yass is one of the major funders of the Club for Growth, an uber-conservative outfit with quite a history of bankrolling reactionary political activity; CFG has this year launched a national push for privatizing education with Betsy DeVos showing up for the kick-off. Yass has also run a bunch of money through the Students First PAC and buddied up with the Commonwealth Foundation. Registered as Libertarian, he sits on the advisory council of the Cato Institute and in 2015 tossed a few couple million to Rand Paul's campaign, which he followed up by backing the Protect Freedom Political Action Committee in 2020, which backed David Purdue, Kelly Loeffler, Madison Cawthorn, and Lauren Boebert. He backed a host of election denialists, including Josh Hawley, though he has apparently expressed some displeasure with their activities on January 6.

Given all that, you will be unsurprised to learn that Jeff and Janine Yass have thrown a lot of money at school privatization. A bunch of money has gone to Students First PAC, which in turn has handed the money off to Commonwealth Partners PAC, supposedly in hopes of having a say in Pennsylvania's governor's race. The advocacy wing of that group says they're all about cutting taxes and helping parents choose alternatives to public schools, goals that fit together perfectly with an agenda of ending the state's obligation to provide education and cutting parents loose (with a modest voucher payment to misdirect the crowd). Yass also supports the Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund which "supports candidates for state and local office in Pennsylvania who are passionate about6 expanding educational opportunity for children throughout the commonwealth." In all cases, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars.

He has talked about his plan to "dismantle and rebuild" Philadelphia schools as a voucher system in which each child would get a $10K voucher (instead of the $16,200 average that the city spends). Jeff and Janine Yass are big donors to the Philadelphia School Partnership, which aims to partner with Philly schools in much the same way that a vulture aims to partner with a dying wildebeast (it's run by an investment guy). Mostly they fund "good seats" in non-public schools.

All of this leads to headlines like "Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pa., is singlehandedly keeping school choice PACs flush." And Yass, like Allen, occupies that far right field position in the refoirmster game that does not even pretend that any of this is about improving or reforming public schools--it's about ending them, and with them the state's tax-funded obligation to provide each child with a decent education. Let parents work it out for themselves, somehow. 

The STOP Award folks must have smelled blood when Chicago teachers walked out, and it may take a few days to adjust strategy now that Chicago Schools have agreed to make some sort of attempt to render their schools safer. But this program is bad news for public education, even as it provides one more ugly example of how some rich folks feel entitled to mess with the lives and educations of the lessers, and to dismantle US public education because it bothers them. We haven't heard the last of this.