AL: A Proposal To End State Support Of Public Education

State Senator Del Marsh proposed this week the "ultimate" school choice bill, the "Parents' Choice Bill," (SB140) a super-education savings account. But that's not what it really is.

This is an ESA in its fully realized form-- every Alabama family gets every cent the state would have spent on educating their child (about $6,300 last year) and they can use it to pay for educational whatever--public school, home school, private school, tutoring, online classes, whatever. 

Marsh is a longtime champion of disinvestment in Alabama public ed, having pushed charters and charter expansion in previous years (he also co-sponsored a bill to make bribery of legislators by lobbyists legal).

This is a big deal, a bill that changes the rules for education in an entire state, but coverage so far has been light (the bill was supposedly going to be filed yesterday) and details. 

One early complaint is that the bill would cost the state about $420 billion in education funds. Alabama Education Association executive director Army Marlowe also called out the bill for its lack of transparency and its generosity to private operators:

Senator Marsh’s “Parent’s Choice Bill” should be called exactly what it is – “No Vendor Left Behind “ – a shell game of a voucher program to divert money from Alabama’s community schools. There is a complete lack of transparency regarding this egregious bill by rushing it through committee this week. Regardless of whether Senators have been given the opportunity to study the bill, by filing it this week and expecting it to not only be in committee, but to be voted out of a committee is mind blowing. A bill of this magnitude that would result in more than $420 million cut from the Education Trust Fund rushed through committee without the opportunity for at least a week of scrutiny by the public and the media makes you wonder why Sen. Marsh is in such a hurry to move this bill.

Yes, this bill would eat a ton of taxpayer dollars, and yes it would gut the public education system in Alabama. There is one other huge effect that comes with voucher-style bills that seems to be rarely discussed--it ends the state's involvement with and support of its children. 

In an online interview, education lab reporter Trish Powell Crain points out that this is bigger than charters or vouchers. "It's the ultimate 'here, take the money and parents, you go decide how you want to spend this money to educate your child.'"

Yes. "We've given you a check, and we hereby wash our hands of the whole education thing." The ultimate form of voucher is not about empowering parents. It's not even about making vendors a bunch of money. It's about getting the state out of the education business, about cutting parents and children loose. It's about ending the collective commitment to and responsibility for educating the next generations.

There are always critical questions to ask about oversight in these bills. Who will make sure that the money is actually spent on legitimate educational expenses? Who will watch out for the interests of the taxpayers?

But equally critical are the safeguards for families, and ESA laws typically have none. What supports will be in place for families that don't have the time or resources to search for the right vendors (and who will make sure those supports are reliable)? What if a parent's money runs out? What if parents find their choices severely limited because the various edu-vendors won't accept their child? What if one of their vendors closes shop mid-year, leaving the child stranded? What if the vendor turns out to be a big scam because the state hasn't properly vetted the eligible vendors? What happens if parents find that the Marketplace is not for them, but in the meantime the local public school has collapsed from the money gutted from it? 

The bill is being rammed through the legislature this week, and if it becomes law, it will face the hurdle that many such laws have faced--getting parents to actually use it. Watch to see if, in Alabama, Americans for Prosperity repeats its successful tactic from New Hampshire, where they went door to door to hype the new voucher program, boosting participation big time. 

I didn't have Alabama in my pool for where the voucher end game would be first tried, but here we are. Watch and learn and, if you're in Alabama, call your legislator today.

 

Alarming Pre-K News

New research is problematic news for the world of pre-K. 

We've long known that a good pre-school is not a magical jump start that guarantees your kids will end up in the Ivy League, and advantages tend to fade within a few years, but new research from Vanderbilt's Peabody College suggests the reality could be far worse. One of the authors puts it bluntly:

“At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said Dale Farran, a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, director of its Peabody Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

The researchers looked at 2,990 children enrolled in Tennessee's voluntary state-funded pre-K program. By the end of sixth grade, those students were doing worse than their peers--academically, behaviorally, all the -allies. They were even more likely to end up in special ed. The study compared the students who were randomly selected for the program to those students who applied for the program, but didn't get in. So a pretty clean basis for the data.

We're looking at pre-K students from the 2009-2011 years, so there's a real possibility that much has changed in Tennessee's pre-K program (in fact, changed because of earlier findings from these same researchers). But the question remains--what the hell happened?

The short answer is that nobody knows.

Possible culprits? A heavy-on-academics program that attempts to pack the littles with studying scholastic stuff instead of just going outside and playing. But other experts argue that it's a lack of coherence, and that there's just too many pre-K programs that are higgledy-piggledy; standardize some academic rigor, these experts say. I say these experts are full of it."Possibly the problem in Tennessee is not with pre-K, but with K-6 and how it treats children who went to pre-K" says co-director Steven Barnett at the National Institute for Early Education Research (Rutgers). We know that "adverse childhood experiences" have long term negative effects--were Tennessee's pre-K programs somehow providing plenty of ACE  (for example, doing stupid worksheets and cramming academics). Another theory is that Tennessee's pre-K programs just aren't very good, but even if that's the answer, it's pretty alarming to learn that "not very good" is actually worse than nothing at all.

There are lots of blanks to fill in here, and I can't do that at the moment because the paper is behind a paywall and won't be released until January of 2023 (presumably academics can spend that year complaining that the public doesn't pay enough attention to research). So there are details I don't know--for instance, what exactly did the group that didn't get into pre-K do instead--home school? another pre-K program? nothing at all? 

And we know that other results are out there. Research about Head Start shows positive outcomes, and a recent study in Boston found benefits all the way up through high school graduation.

Meanwhile, state pre-K programs are struggling with the impact of problems going all the way back to the funding collapse of 2008 through the loss of students during the pandemic (and the corresponding loss of funding). At the very moment that we need to take steps to save these programs, we need to know what about them (if anything) is worth saving and what form they should take. This new study raises some huge questions that really, really need answers. 

Brace Yourself: There's A Movie Coming

"Parents’ School Revolt About to Get a Jolt With Groundbreaking Documentary" reads the headline, andf if that's not enough of a signal, here's the lead in the news release:

The COVID-19 pandemic has at least one silver lining—revealing the truth to parents and teachers about America’s public education system.

And this explanation of why this documentary had to be made.

For years, most government-funded schools have been pursuing a political agenda of anti-American history, divisive Critical Race Theory, explicit sex education and gender theory for children as young as kindergarten. These assaults on children’s innocence have often been deliberately kept secret from parents. These radical curricula during online learning triggered a parents’ revolt in California, Colorado, Virginia, and across the nation.

The upcoming documentary is entitled Whose Childre Are They? and it will use "brave teachers, emboldened parents, impacted students and frontline experts" to reveal "how schools are bombarding children with age-inappropriate sex education and indoctrinating them with political and social ideologies without their parents' knowledge or consent."

This coming from Parents United America, another parental rights organization. 

We are the parents and we are united! We will stand together for our rights to raise our children and be the primary authority in their lives. Our children do not belong to the government, the schools or society.

There's more in that vein (plus "non-partisan"). Its website provides little information about who they are, though there are links that let you send them an e-mail, your story, or some money. The founder, however, is Deborah Flora. 

Deborah Flora is currently running for a U. S. Senate seat in Colorado, facing a primary with seven other GOP candidates. She likes phrases like "common ground of common sense" and is targeting the "political indoctrination pervading our schools." She's made a Fox news appearance as a "Colorado mom." In her campaigning, she repeatedly stresses that she is a small business owner and a mom, and that's a nice folksy background, but if you're wondering how a small business woman and mom ends up producing a slick documentary, the answer is that there's more to her story. 

Flora is also a former Miss Colorado and a second runner-up Miss America in 1990 (her talent was playing the flute). She graduated at the top of the Meadow School of Arts at SMU. She completed a BFA in Salzburg (opera, flute, acting), then went to Denver Seminary. She had a show on the Salem Radio Network, and she started a film production company with her husband called Lamplight Entertainment. They've produced a number of films, but the one you're most likely to have heard of is the well-regarded Lt Dan Band: For The Common Good about Gary Sinise and his globe-trotting, troop-entertaining band. 

Her husband and partner is Johnathan Flora, a vet who served with the 82nd Airborne and was Director of Marketing for WWF for a time. His stuff talks about "working with" high powered Disney stuff like the Marvel movies, but that appears to be mostly on the promotion and marketing side--he's done a ton of that.

Not sure why Deborah Flora the candidate is hiding her light under a bushel; maybe she fears that a good Hollywood resume doesn't play in Colorado. But none of this is particularly secret or hidden. At any rate, this accomplished couple is behind Whose Children Are They? It's not going to be an amateur production.

The one big name attached to the project is our friend Rebecca Friedrichs, the plaintiff in an anti-union court case who has parleyed that into a career as a right-wing teacher union basher and rolled right on into anti-masking and critical race theory panic. Her presence here tells us plenty about what to expect from the film. On the film's official website, there's a link to Friedrich's organization, For Kids and Country (and it really is her organization--their 2018 Form 990 shows the only two officers are Friedrichs and her husband), which features many stories of brave teachers who were abused by the Evil Teachers Union. Some of those same folks appear in the movie trailer. 

The film will show in certain theaters only on March 14; tickets go on sale February 4 and are available from Fathom Events, which categorizes the film as "inspirational." 

Update: Somebody has put a ton of money into this, because now that the tickets are on sale I can see that over 700 theaters are booked for this. It is most definitely coming to a theater near you.

So if you hear about the movie, this is what's up. And you can watch the trailer, although from the first words ("Public education has gone off the rails.") you'll be able to gauge what you're in for. Critical Race Theory! It's racist! Teaching sex acts! Students aren't proficient! Radical agenda! Exploited children! And an unironic repetition of that title question, which supposes that children must belong to somebody.  I'll attach the trailer, but you've been warned. This is not the rhetoric of people looking for dialog or redemption; just a little scorched earth.

TX: Governor's Attack On Teachers

Governor Greg Abbott has decided that he needs to step up his attack on teachers, proposing some new rules to undercut teacher authority and autonomy, because he wants to "make clear that parents are the primary decision makers in all matters involving their children." So here comes his Parents Bill of Rights.

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, for one thing, that means jumping on the Krause List Of Naughty Books bandwagon by setting up mechanisms for banning all books with "overtly sexual" content. In fact, he's ready to see any instances of making "pornography available" in public schools referred for "prosecution to the fullest extent of the law." This all comes, of course, on top of the usual directives that students should not be subjected to anything that makes them feel discomfort-- none of that race stuff for Texas students. 

And just in case that doesn't seem hard hitting enough, Abbott wants any teacher who's caught with naughty books to be stripped of their license, lose their pension, and be placed on a do not hire list for public schools (it's not clear if this list would also apply to charter and private schools).

No word yet on whether Abbott intends to shut down the internet for all minors.

Also, in a bizarre new slant on "parental rights," Abbott wants parents to be the final arbiters of whether a child passes or fails. This is kind of nuts. "Yes, my child failed Algebra I, but I want them in Algebra II next year." Most teachers who have been in the classroom for more than ten years have probably seen this happen without the force of law (just the application of parent force on a boneless administrator), and it never ends particularly well. On the one hand, the student lacks the base necessary to succeed at the next level; on the other hand, the student now understands that passing the course is not really necessary to move forward.

And as a slab of icing on the cake, public school districts would be required to do marketing for charter schools and other "alternatives." 

Just to be sure all of these grand ideas really stick, Abbott intends to fly his ideas as a state constitutional amendment. 

None of this seems likely to help fix Texas's problem finding teachers to fill vacancies. But the target here is not helping Texas education, but in helping Abbott's reelection campaign. If he has to step on public school teachers to get back to the governor's mansion, that's apparently okay with him, 

Transparency As A Chaos Tool

A remarkable feature of Critical Race Theory panic is that we were told, early on, what was being done, and why. You've seen this quote multiple times, but let me remind you:

Well, here we go again.

In a series of tweets this month, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has been instrumental in drawing opposition to racial sensitivity training, said shifting from pushing bans on teaching critical race theory to pushing curriculum transparency bills is a “rhetorically-advantageous position” that will “bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency.’”

“The strategy here is to use a non-threatening, liberal value — ‘transparency’ — to force ideological actors to undergo public scrutiny,” Rufo said.

Rufo's Manhattan Institute and the Goldwater Institute, whipped up sample legislation that various states have been following, and we're seeing these bills pop up everywhere. They're mostly identical to this one out in Utah or the one that got vetoed in Pennsylvania.

It's an odd time to be pushing such a thing; thanks to technology, classrooms are more transparent than ever, with learning platforms like Google Classroom putting every piece of daily work in a classroom on display where any parent can see it. And of course transparency is important; I have not met in my lifetime a teacher whose position was, "Nobody can ever know what we do in here." Because teachers do their work with students, and expecting students to keep the workings of a classroom secret is just as foolish. Also, teachers and schools have a responsibility to the taxpayers that pay the bills.

But all of that is only important in a good faith discussion about transparency, and that's not what's happening right now. Reading through dozens of accounts of these bills and the rhetoric pushing them, I find two groups emerging.

Group one consists of the people who are just certain that Evil Teachers and their Commie Union are secretly practicing all sorts of nasty indoctrination on students that they are bent on covering up, and only by forcing transparency will we be able to catch these evil doers and put a stop to them. As Rufo put it, "With curriculum transparency, every parent in the country can become an investigative reporter and expose any school that promotes racialist abuse." Do note the use of the word "abuse," which is also used in plenty of the anti-crt report-your-teacher-to-the-state laws out there (eg Virginia). 

(Rick Egan/Salt Lake Tribune) Doesn't she look happy?
President of Utah Parents United

Group two consists of folks from the old education disruptors crowd. The pandemic has been a great time for some of them; think of all the years they wanted to manufacture an education crisis, all the work that went into boosting high stakes testing in order to manufacture proof that schools were in crisis and collapse, and now COVID comes along and hands them the disaster they always wanted. Everyone is stretched thin and tense an overtuned banjo, so you just come along and pluck on some parents and trot out time-honored classics about how schools are going to steal your children's minds, and boom-- you've got chaos and destruction even more compelling than a hurricane.

I'll add the usual caveat--not all reformsters. I'll remain convinced that there are people in that crowd with a sincere concern about public education. And yes, there are probably some people in there with a sincere concern about school transparency. But right now they are all taking a back seat to folks who believe that, as Ron Johnson observed, it's not society's responsibility to take care of Other People's Children. Education should be an open marketplace where folks are free to make money however they can, and parents fend for themselves without the government backing them up, protecting them, or giving them more than an ever-shrinking token payment to cover expenses. To achieve that dream, first the current version of public education must be swept away, so anything that sows chaos, distrust, and destruction, is a welcome tool.

Is there a worthwhile, even important, conversation to have about transparency in education? Absolutely--important and never-ending. But the conversation that's being forced on education right now is not that conversation. This is just more chaos and confusion, one more tool for dismantling the public education system. This is a conversation that won't even produce any useful transparency beyond what we already have. It'll just give teachers one more reason to feel piled on, distrusted, accused, and burdened with time-wasting baloney, and it won't matter if some get fed up and quit, because for some folks, anything that further busts up public education is a win. 

ICYMI: Book Banning Edition (1/30)

 So that kind of blew up as the issue of the week. What a whacky time to be alive! Here's some stuff to read, because reading is good.

Incidentally, if you are new around here, this is a regular Sunday feature, in which I collect stuff from the previous week that I found worthwhile and interesting. If something here strikes your fancy, I strongly encourage you to amplify it and share it through your usual channels.

What we lose when we mistake the market for the public

Jan Resseger looks at the damage created by treating education as a free market commodity, and how Ohio has demonstrated that very damage.

How picking on teachers became an American tradition

Adam Laats at Slate, providing a useful historical perspective to the new wave of teacher attacks and surveillance. We've been here before.

Idaho's Teacher of the Year calls for changes in standardized testing

And he does it in front of the state house education committee. And he gets it right.

Efforts to ban CRT now restrict teaching for a third of US students

EdWeek takes a look at a new UCLA study that gives some hard data about just how bad the new trend in teacher gag laws has become. Bad.

Gag orders for teachers are becoming our new McCarthyism

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer talks to some folks about how bad it is out there. Informative and infuriating.

A Texas GOP candidate's new claim: school cafeteria tables are being lowered for "furries."

Yikes. From Texas Monthly, a look at just how far out these folks have become. Incidentally, the candidate in question alko "works with" the local Moms for Liberty group.

Amazon paid for a high school course. Here's what it teaches.

Vice has this story of big tech co-opting education, and it's just about as bad as you would expect. 

Students slam school board over book review order

Of all the live action responses to banning activity that cropped up this week, this is one of my favorites. This 11th grade honors student has some words.

Massive corporate tax break in PA lacks basic accountability

Like many states, Pennsylvania has a tax credit scholarship program. But there is virtually no oversight. The Philadelphia Inquirer counts the many ways that nobody is paying any attention.

Dark money fuels Michigan school privatization campaign

Maurice Cunningham, the dark money expert from Massachusetts, takes a look at the Michigan version for the Detroit Free Press

New Hampshire teachers push back against lawmakers' efforts to regulate instruction

Seacoast online looks at teacher pushing back against New Hampshire's damn fool loyalty law.

7 ways teachers aren't treated like other professionals

From Stephanie Jankowski at Bored Teachers, a list that will strike teachers as all too familiar.

The shift from CRT panic to demands for transparency

Remember how Chris Rufo explained exactly what he was going to do to use crt as a tool to attack schools (and Democrats)? Well, he's doing it again to explain why transparency will be the next weapon of choice. NBC News has this story.

Success Academy extends its 75% attrition streak

Gary Rubinstein keeps an eye on the big star of NYC charterdom and finds that one secret to its success remains chasing away every student who might make it look unsuccessful.

How to learn nothing from the failure of VAM-based teacher evaluation

Schools Matter offers a short, clear lesson in how to study something, learn that it has failed, ad draw exactly the wrong conclusion anyway.

The 850 books on the Krause list

This is a repeat, but unfortunately, as more and more districts use this list as a reference, it's worth pulling this close analysis of the 850 books out again, because it is a really bad list.

Meanwhile, in What I Wrote For Forbes, this was the week that Ed Voters for Pennsylvania unveiled what they'd learned from 3500 pages of cyber school marketing invoices. Enough money spent on marketing to run a small school district.

Banning Books Is Dumb

Let's set aside, for a moment, the problems with trying stifle thoughts and ideas and the moral and ethical issues involved, or the heavy irony of people who say they hate cancel culture but want to cancel some authors. Banning books is just dumb for some very practical reasons.

Want to make something popular? Ban it.

This has been true forever. Mark Twain took out newspaper ads to thank the people who banned Huck Finn because they helped make copies. When our local scolds got up in arms about a performance of La Cage Aux Folles, it sold out. Today, after news spread of the banning of Maus, it was suddenly on the best-seller list again. No high school teacher with half a brain ever tells students, "Do not do X." Never, for instance, say, "I don't want another peep out of you guys," because you know what the next sound you hear will be. 

This is the 21st Century.

I keep thinking that the current wave of book banners will be really upset when they hear about the internet. Smart phones! Snap chat! Tik tok! There are so many avenues for children to access whatever content they want to find that there could be nothing less productive than pulling a book from the school library. That's before we even get to publicly available stuff like streaming Squid Games (of course, that's only violence, which is somehow less distressing to folks). Trying to control all the media paths to your own child is a major challenge, but trying to control them for other people's children is just folly. You will fail.

And the effects of exposure are...?

For the life of me, I can't find research showing any kind of trauma or damage coming from reading books that some parents disapprove of. Nothing. And we've been at the whole Objecting To Books thing for a while--back in the late 18th to early 19th century, lots of folks were pretty sure that reading novels was Very Bad for women. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 to make everyone aware that comic books were going to lead to all sorts of juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. And yet after all this time, zero evidence that reading causes trauma or delinquency.

And the thing is, one of the features of a book is that the moment something alarms or even just discomfits you, you can instantly disengage--not like a movie or video. 

This quote

From a student objecting to a book ban in Texas

I'm simply going to say that no government—and public school is an extension of government—has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys.

Using children as an excuse

The whole "protect the children" thing sure seems at times just to be a dodge, that some folks like to use the children as an excuse to ban things that they want to ban for everyone. Here's a god rule of thumb- if you are worried about protecting the children when it comes to naughty books, but not so much when it comes to the effects of poverty and racism and hunger and illness and gunfire, and if you nod your head when politicians say things like “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children," I am going to suspect that you are using children as an excuse to ban what you want to ban.

This is not a trust-building exercise

Book banning sends a message to your kids, and the message is "You cannot be trusted and are probably just one bad page turn away from turning into a terrible person." Maybe that's an approach t9o parenting that you want to try. I don't, and I wouldn't really recommend it.

Even worse is sending the message to some children that Their Kind is not welcome and Their Kind should just stay quiet and not let anyone know who they really are. Imagine how destructive that message could be. Imagine how destructive that message will be if you have one of Their Kind growing up in your very own home.

You can't control other parents.

Seriously. One of the weird aspects of the current parents' right spasm is the parents saying, "I will decide what is right for my child, and also what is right for other parents' children, because I should have absolute control over my child's life but also that privilege only belongs to right-minded people who agree with me and not those crazy parents over there." 

Yes, there are moral and intellectual and ethical arguments to be made against book banning, but let's face it--this is another argument in which everyone thinks they're on the side of the angels. I feel certain book banners are wrong, but I am equally certain that they are doomed to utter failure, because dumb ideas tend to fail.

And no, this does not mean I'm totally cool with exposing my four year olds or my grandchildren to a steady diet of porn. We have some house rules about what kinds of things they do or don't experience, but those are our rules for our house and I have no interest in imposing those rules on everyone else. And if difficult things emerge, we will sit down and talk about them, because a far more effective technique for dealing with difficult or distressing or unfamiliar stuff is, rather than trying to block it all from your child's life, instead to equip your child to deal with it, and sit with them and talk them through it. Listen to them; a lot of what may freak you out they will simply find boring for years--until they don't any more--so pay attention. This is how you deal with books and music and, for that matter, your neighbor's pro-Trump F-bomb flags.