Things Milton Friedman Got Wrong

I've been reading some Friedman lately, trying to refamiliarize myself with the intellectual granddaddy of education privatization. I'm fascinated by Libertarian thought, because I think they get some things really right, but it's canceled out by the things they get terribly wrong, and it was the wrongness that jumped out at me from some of Friedman's words. And yes, he's a major figure in economics and I'm a retired English teacher, but if economists can pretend to be education experts, well, then...

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

The great stumbling block of Libertarianism is dealing with racism. As demonstrated in a gazillion different ways from lunch counters to real estate, the market may not care what color people are, but racists operating in the free market care a great deal. Our history is filled with racists being compelled to stop behaving badly by force, and I've never heard a Libertarian offer a convincing explanation of how an unregulated free market would have solved issues like slavery and segregation, nor of how to create a school choice system that does not empower racists and segregationists.

Just as importantly, while the free market may not care what color people are, it cares very much how rich or poor they are. The free market is very good at picking winners and losers--not just among operators, but among customers as well. It is hard to make a lot of money providing goods and services to poor people, and with very few exceptions, the free market prefers to offer poor folks either low quality options or no options at all. The free market is not a good tool for providing poor folks with health care, mail delivery or education. 

Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.

This raises more questions than it answers. What, for instance, do we do with contracts between individuals and corporations? And then there's that word "crimes." Crimes are defined by the folks in power; Jim Crow laws were actual laws. Libertarians seem to have a working definition of real crimes (Friedman, like many Libs, didn't think smoking weed was a real crime), but they're awfully fuzzy. A crime against a person covers what, exactly? Physical injury? Emotional injury? Limiting one's freedom? That one sounds good, except that if I'm poor, that limits my freedom considerably. However, being poor comes in the category that many Libs would call "your own damn fault" and therefore not a real crime. But if being poor is your own fault, then all the injuries to your freedom that come from being poor are also your own fault. Also, if you have no property, then that type of crime has nothing to do with you. The more one looks, the more it appears that government's function is on a sliding scale--the less wealthy you are, the less government is supposed to help you.

The problem with a sliding scale of government service is that it doesn't help much with education and schools; in fact, it pretty much mimics how the free market deals with schools-- good stuff for those who can pay, and subsistence junk for those who can't, with the lower end of the scale always looking for one more corner to cut in order to squeeze out a bit more ROI. 

There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

This is a good summary of why a critical public service like health care or education should not be handled by business. Imagine a school where the leaders' philosophy is "Job One is making money for Educorp. Never let trying to educate these kids get in the way of that." Imagine sorting students (including admitting and expelling them) based on how they affect Educorp's bottom line. 

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

This belongs to that family of quotes where it seems like he's on the verge of getting it. Because concentration of power is a threat to freedom--but government is not the only place that such a concentration can occur. Business and corporations can also gather enough power to be a threat to freedom as well, and wealth will always attract and form men of a different stamp. And when wealth and power become great enough to capture the power of the government, we have another set of issues, and arguing that the wealthy free marketed their way to this kind of power fair and square doesn't negate their threat to freedom.

The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.

Yes, but-- one way to game this system is to drive one party down down down until they can "benefit" from a crumb. "Voluntary" is a fuzzy idea here. If you have engineered a person's choices to the point that they're choosing between crumbs and starvation, then you get a bargain and their "voluntary" choice is not very voluntary at all. 

Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.

"Effective" is doing a lot of work here, but since Friedman believes that taxes should be cut often, for any reason, it seems his effective school would be a cheap one. But he's forgetting a third building block of success--coming from a family that has wealth. That building block is, unfortunately, already well wired into public education, but since the free market values it a great deal, it's unlikely that free market schooling would do anything about it. 

We need a system in which the government says to every parent: "Here is a piece of paper you can use for the educational purposes of your child. It will cover the full cost per student at a government school. It is worth X dollars towards the cost of educational services that you purchase from parochial schools, private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, or other purveyors of educational services. You may add from your own funds to the voucher if you wish to and can afford to.

Almost seventy years later, privatization fans like the Mackinac Center argue that Friedman's idea would be the antidote to things like collapsing schools in which students can hardly be expected to learn. This makes no sense. We'll still have the same public schools we have now--only they'll have even less money to maintain the facilities. Wealthy people will have a taxpayer-subsidized chance to attend the private school of their choice, and those of you who can't "add from your own fund" will settle for what you get. And, of course, these private schools hoovering up public tax dollars would be free to segregate and discriminate as they wish, giving some students even fewer choices. 

There will always be parts of Libertarianism that make sense to me; I am, for instance, a great respecter of government's ability to really screw things up. I also like freedom a lot. But the free market and freedom are not synonymous or even, in some cases, compatible, and the free market certainly doesn't provide high quality for all, nor does it provide any sort of restraint on certain brands of human misbehavior. 

Hillsdale Is Coming To Tennessee. Who Are They?

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee has announced his intention to bring Hillsdale College in to add to the state's charter school program. If you've been watching the religious right, you already know this name. But if you hadn't previously noticed Hillsdale, here's your explainer.

Hillsdale's history starts in 1844, initially as Michigan Central College. In 1853, they moved to Hillsdale, Michigan and reopened under the new name in 1855. The school was founded by Free Will Baptists. It admitted Black students as soon as it opened and it was the second college in the US to let women earn a four-year degree. 

Its first century was marked by growth. The school was no longer affiliated with a specific church, but still declared a strong Christian bent. By the mid-twentieth century, the school had begun to resist federal regulations, including affirmative action, and in 1962 adopted its own Declaration of Independence from  the feds, refusing to take any federal money. 

On 1971, George Roche III became president of the college. He raised lots of money and brought in plenty of conservative speakers, including Ronald Reagan. Under Roche, the college cut itself entirely loose from federal influence. They stopped reporting student body breakdown by demographics and determined to follow their own non-discrimination policy. After they fought that in court, they stopped allowing students to accept federal student loans, providing private assistance instead. 

Roche resigned in 1999 after a truly horrific and heartbreaking episode--he had been conducting a 19-year affair with his daughter-in-law, who killed herself in despair when he remarried.

This was a terrific blow to the college's reputation and fundraising. The college hired as a replacement, Larry Arnn, who still has the job.

Arnn's conservative credentials are impeccable. He's one of the founders of the Claremont Institute, a conservative thinky tank (mission-- "to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life") founded by students of Harry Jaffa (Jaffa was the Goldwater speechwriter who penned the "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice..." line); Hillsdale has a library in named after him. The Institute was quiet for years, but has emerged as a big time Trump booster funded by folks like the DeVos tribe and the Bradleys, and pumping out ideas for selling the Big Lie and the Insurrection.  Arnn is also a trustee at the Heritage Foundation, which at one point offered him its presidency. 

Arnn has been a Trump supporter, and the college has fallen right into MAGAland as well. Or as Politico Magazine put it in 2018

Trump University never died. It’s located in the middle of bucolic southern Michigan, halfway between Lansing and Fort Wayne, 100 miles and a world away from Detroit.

The college uses Trump mailing lists to raise money. They used to sponsor Rush Limbaugh's show. They get grads placed on the staff of legislators such as Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy. In 2017, for some reason, Senator Pat Toomey created a little piece of tax reform that would have carved out a tax treat for Hillsdale alone. Arnn was on the shortlist for Secretary of Education for Trump, when Trump whipped his super-duper 1776 Commission to create some nationalistic education stuff for the country. They don't have a great history with LGBTQ students. Erik Prince (Betsy DeVos's brother) is a Hillsdale graduate.

Hillsdale has a free-to-download 1776 curriculum. Arnn introduces it with "America is an exceptionally good country." And from there... well. Unit I Lesson 1 for K-2 (Se;f-Government or Tyranny) includes memorizing "Paul Revere's Ride" and "No taxation without representation." The lesson comes with a list of "Questions for the American Mind" such as "What is tax? What is it used for?" The story starts after the French and Indian War, and so kind of skips the whole issue of why Britain had accrued a bunch of debt that they wanted the colonies to help with. But that's just one part of 150 years of history that we're going to skip in our determination to assert that US history didn't start in 1619. Another oddity in the unit is that it leans hard on the notion that the colonies declared independence because the British government compelled them to. Throughout all 13 grades, here are only two US history units--one is the Revolution and the other is the Civil War.

By high school, there are many units about politics and civics. A bit of a slant appears here and there-- for instance, the lesson about Reconstruction makes sure to point out that the people trying to give Blacks rights were the Republicans and that the Democrats were the opposition. Their picture of Reconstruction is that it went remarkably well, even though Johnson and Confederate states "resisted" and also "encouraged " bad policy.

If we skip ahead to FDR and LBJ, we get further concerns about how FDR's new ideas contradict the Founders, and how LBJ "attempted to expand once more the purpose of government." In this unit, teachers should "clarify for the students the chief consequence of the New Deal was the expansion and formalization of the administrative state" (and not, say, keeping a bunch of Americans from starving to death). 

The slant of the lessons is one thing. There's also a kind of historical flattening, as in talking about the Founders as if they were a unified whole and not a squabbling bunch of men who strongly disagreed over just about every principle and practice that we now view as Holy American Writ. But there's another pattern that emerges in the materials, noticeable in questions like these:

What is the purpose of government?

What are the principles on which America was founded, and what qualities must American citizens and society exhibit in order to sustain such principles of civic life?

Across all three branches of the federal government, what are the most important designs that the Constitution puts in place to ensure the very best governance, i.e., governance that will be effective at protecting natural rights, representing the majority, and avoiding tyranny?

The through line for most of the materials, for all the noise about critical thinking, is that for every aspect of US history, there's really only one right way to view things. Generations of philosophers may have burned up piles of words trying to define the purpose of government, but Hillsdale knows the answer. This whole package is the very essence of good old "learn the preferred answer by rote and spit it out on command" learning. 

I taught this stuff for decades, and the typical approach is to talk about viewpoints, e.g. "What did Thomas Jefferson's writing in the Declaration suggest he believed about natural law?" But time after time, Hillsdale's lessons fail to distinguish between an individual's views and The Truth. Directions are loaded with "the student will understand" followed by a singular interpretation of history--only it's not presented as one particular interpretation, but the only correct conclusion that the student is supposed to grasp. Hillsdale's curriculum is not loaded with stunning groaners, but it has big fat ahistorical blinders on, and it approaches the topics not with a variety of views or understandings, not with a desire to prompt discussion and an appreciation for varied viewpoints. Instead it approaches historical and civic topics as if the goal is--dare I say it--indoctrination.

If you want to see Hillsdale really letting its freak flag fly, scan through its newsletter Imprimis, with articles like "The Disaster at Our Southern Border" (VP Harris's report is "bunk"), "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax" (Donald Trump was awesome and robbed and Jan 6 has been overhyped as part of a vast conspiracy), and an explanation of inflation that rests on Milton Friedman's awesomeness. All of these, it should be noted, are versions of lectures delivered at the college. 

It should come as no surprise that Hillsdale is home to a lot of privatizing thought about education, like a 2018 piece by Professor Gary Wolfram explaining why schools should be run via the free market. And then-secretary Betsy DeVos made Hillsdale the site of one of her most explicit speeches arguing that schools should be taken back from the government and run by free-market Christianity.

They've had a couple of charter initiatives. There was the Barney Charter School Initiative, started in 2010 to help 20 charter schools based on classical curriculum. The Barney mission statement used to include the goal "to recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” They also turn out to use a religious curriculum. Hillsdale also offers materials that can be used to supplement education plus a whole raft or resources for home schoolers. 

So this is the organization that has a "number of initiatives that align with our priorities in Tennessee," according to Lee spokesperson Casey Black. Lee has talked about the importance of teaching "true American history, unbiased and nonpolitical," but Hillsdale promises neither, with a Libertarian, nationalist approach that hews to one narrow interpretation of history. Lee also claims that "Hillsdale's charter schools in our state will be public secular classical education schools," and while Hillsdale has learned to keep its Christian bent less obvious in its charter schools, there's no question that religion is part of its brand. Per its website:

In the words of its modern mission statement, the College “considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.”

The section about its K-12 program also notes that they provide an education "both classical and American in its orientation" and which "offers a firm grounding in civic virtue and cultivates moral character."

For Hillsdale, the Tennessee partnership is a great deal because, if Lee gets his education savings accounts (neo-vouchers) up and running, Hillsdale can expect to hoover up truckloads of taxpayer dollars. Will the taxpayers get their money's worth?

ICYMI: Important Upcoming Holiday Edition (2/13)

 By which I mean the much-beloved annual Half Price Candy Day, celebrated on February 15th every year. Spend it with someone you love. Meanwhile, here's the reading for the week.

What's behind the right-wing book-ban frenzy? Big money, and a long-term plan

Jon Skolnik at Salon takes a look at the ongoing book ban panics across the country.

Think my South Side high school is a "bad school"? Think again.

A Chalkbeat first person essay from a student in one Chicago's allegedly-bad schools. She offers a different perspective.

It's time to stop the insanity that is killing public schools

The rhetoric is a little overheated, and the contents are mostly familiar, but the source is one of those interesting moments when the education debate penetrates outside the usual boundaries. This is from Baptist News Global.

How the Heritage Foundation became a leader of red meat attacks on public schools

Jan Resseger breaks down some of the details on how we arrived at this CRT-panic induced wave of teacher gag laws.

A Word about the Work We Must Do

Jose Luis Vilson offers some words about the crt panic, and especially about the work we should be doing in response to it.

What do masks do to kids?

Melody Schreiber at the New Republic went looking for the evidence about the detrimental effects of masking kids. She didn't find any.

Meet the Philly teacher who's the namesake for Abbott Elementary

If you've been watching the show, here's the teacher who inspired the show's creator

You thought the Scopes trial was something?

Bob Shepard looks at the coming education shenanigans in Tennessee and the plan to recruit a Christian conservative college to come run charter schools.

The Murky World of i-Ready, Grading, and Online Data

Nancy Bailey takes a look at the issues surrounding i-Ready. If this program has been cropping up in your neighborhood and you're wondering about it, this is a handy explainer.

The Big Lie that keeps the Uber bezzle alive

For the "education should be like Uber" crowd, here's a Cory Doctorow explanation of just how big a scam Uber actually is.

Texas School Censors All of Huck Finn Except the N-Words

Teacher fired for breaking state critical race theory laws after telling students she's Black.

The Onion is on fire this week, so they get two spots on this week's list. 

Also, this week in "Things I Wrote Other Places," a Forbes piece about why lowering the bar to fill classroom spots is only going to make things worse, and a reminder at Progressive that test-based teacher evaluations were a bust. 

Everyone On The Train

The issue of loving the work had come up a few times already this week when this article turned up on my screen.

You may remember the story from 2017. A white supremacist threatens two girls on the Portland rail; three men intervene, and he attacks them with a knife. The youngest of the three, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, was stabbed fatally. As he lay dying in another passenger's arms, he said, "Tell everyone on this train I love them." The article writer picks up there:

These beautiful words stopped me in my tracks when I first heard them. They gave me a directive, a way of being. At my best moments, this stranger’s last words guided where I looked, how I acted, and what I chose to do with my time.

Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche’s mother describes her son’s last words as “the most important thing in the whole process”. Taliesin’s father says that when he heard what his son said, “It was literally a saving grace for me.” They were a saving grace for me, too: they changed my life.

Loving everyone on the train meant I could love people I didn’t yet know. What Taliesin said felt instinctually correct to me yet was simultaneously baffling. It often seems there are impossibly huge chasms between me and others, so how could I love them?

Early in my career, I had a superintendent who liked to tell a story at the beginning of every year. It was a story about a rancher talking to some new horse trainers, and quizzing them about what the very first step in training a horse. They took turns answering and this part of the story changed every year because it didn't really matter--all their guesses about bridles and first skills to train were all wrong. "First," the rancher said, "first, you have to love the horse."

It's not a perfect story (students aren't untrained horses), but the point was clear enough and while we joked about it, we also got it. Caring about the students is the foundation of everything else. 

Not that you need to be all mooshy or syrupy--love and care take a lot of forms, and some of them are rather dry and direct. But the foundation of teaching is care. You teach students to read because you care whether they can read or not. You can teach them a particular skill or piece of knowledge because it's what you're paid to do, or because your boss ordered you to, I suppose, but there's little chance of hiding from the students that you are simply acting out of obligation or coercion rather than genuine care, and it will make you less effective. 

It is certainly one of the hard parts of the gig, because some students can make it awfully hard to care about them. Or maybe it's more honest and fair to say that you and certain students come together in ways that aren't very conducive to a caring relationship. Nor do I mean that you need to be every student's friend, or even that you need to be close--it's hugely important to respect students' boundaries instead. Like everything that matters in education, balance matters. And it's hard to transfer the skill--I am a master of analogizing things, but there is no relationship analogous to the relationship between a teacher and a student.

But here's a big thing I believe about love--it's not so much a feeling as an action and a choice, a commitment (I learned this sort of thing by going through the meltdown of my previous marriage, but smarter people than I have figured it out with less wear and tear). You can choose to love people, and you can do it based on who you are instead of waiting to be inspired by who they are. 

You can choose to love all the people on the train.

This is important these days, because twenty years of modern reform and especially two years of pandemess and CRT panic have worked to drive love and trust out of schools. Since (at least) A Nation at Risk, critics have deliberately ignored and abused the notion that teachers might choose to teach out of love and care, but must instead be threatened with Consequences. From No Child Left Behind through various gag laws, the whispered accusation has been that teachers just don't care about kids, don't care if they learn, don't care if they fail. Some have sold us a model of children as not-yet-people, empty vessels that need to be filled and conditioned and engineered into usefulness, not loved into full humanity. 

All across the political spectrum, we've been sold a grim and loveless picture of schools. Schools are twisted tangles of social issues, of Problems and Deficiencies. Schools are hopeless failures where most fail to learn and teachers only care about using students as indoctrinated tools. Schools stink. Schools are failing. Nothing good or decent or bright or kind or happy is there, and in fact, according to some, that is furthest from the purpose of Whipping Them Into Shape, or training them to be useful meat widgets, to take their rightful place upon the treadmill in pursuit of wages. 

Look, I am the last person to suggest that a big hug and a nice chorus of Kum-Bay-Yah are all we need to make the world right again. Love without works is empty. Caring about people without trying to lift them up is just virtue signaling into your own mirror. And telling someone to practice self-care is pretty much an open admission that they had better care about themselves because you don't; toxic positivity sucks, and I don't want to go there, either.

But caring about the work, loving the horse--that's the foundation of everything else. That means not only does it keep the building straight and upright, but it provides strength and support when the storm is raging. And it is certainly okay to go back to that caring at the heart of the work and revisit it, let it warm you, and remind yourself that it's real, regardless of what the world seems to be telling you. 

The love at the heart of the work doesn't mean you have to use yourself up (I hate that damn candle meme thingy). But it is at the heart of the work. Don't lose your heart, and let it remind you what is bright and beautiful about the work, even when the storm rages. So much of the rhetoric surrounding education (and I'm at fault sometimes myself) encourages us to see it as small and petty and meagre, crabbed figures in a cramped ledger; it's love that helps us remember that the work is bigger than all of us, bigger than everyone on the train. 

When Choice Doesn't Put Parents First

I often say that vouchers and neo-vouchers are not about empowering parents--they're about getting government out of education and giving private operators an open shot at a marketplace.

It's true that I can't know the minds of choice advocates, but I can play the what if game. I can ask, "If X were true, what would that look like?" rather than sift through the details of what is. 

If parent empowerment were really our North Star, then what sorts of things do I imagine we'd see? I think we'd see choicers putting pressure on private schools to be more accepting, arguing that schools that refuse to take students because they're LGBTQ or not born again are infringing on parents' right to choose a school for their children. I think we'd see demands that parents be given some tools for navigating the marketplace, with at least the kind of safeguards that the average grocery shopper has come to expect. I think we'd see protections written into these new voucher/esa laws to cover the risks that a family takes on the open market. 

But instead, the new raft of laws contains protections for the private operators, clauses specifically noting that a voucher-accepting school is not a government actor, that nothing in the law gives the government the right to regulate or oversee what the school does. In some cases, a vendor can be blackballed if they fail to deliver--but there's no corresponding recourse for the families they failed to deliver to. Grifters, liars, incompetents, have-baked outfits that fold up mid-year--there's nothing to protect parents from these folks, and no safety net for parents who fall prey. For families, it's caveat emptor all the way.

What I conclude is that, when push comes to shove, many choice advocates value free market and private entrepreneur autonomy over parent empowerment. Which is certainly a value one can hold; one can, I expect, even believe that without free marketeering autonomy for entrepreneurs, you can't have choice. But then you're talking about a market driven by what vendors want to offer, and not what parents want to choose--which, again, is a policy preference you can certainly have, but it's not the same as the whole parental empowerment narrative that some folks are selling. 

Utah: It's not a voucher bill--it's worse.

Its sponsor says it's not a voucher bill--it's a scholarship. What HB331 proposes is an education savings account, which is a voucher on steroids. There are a few significant differences between the two systems, but they are fundamentally the same thing.

With a voucher, the state gives you a "ticket" to the private school of your choice (if they will accept you). With an ESA, the state gives a pile of money to a "scholarship" organization which in turn gives you a pile of money to spend on whatever education stuff you wish, including, but not limited to, tuition at a private school.

The advantages for choice advocates are these:

1) It makes the free market even freer. With ESAs you don't have to operate an entire school to get a shot at collecting some of those sweet sweet public tax dollars.

2) The scholarship organization adds a level of protection in case someone wants to bring up that pesky wall between church and state. "We did not give public tax dollars to a religious school," the state can say. "We gave them to a scholarship organization." It's a defense familiar to every underage teen who had an older sibling buy beer for them

3) The term "voucher" doesn't have as much success or appeal as "scholarship." Utah voters hated Utah's 2007 voucher law so much that 62% of them voted to overturn it. No wonder none of the sponsors want to use the V word this time.

ESA laws have been popping up around the country, including extreme versions in Alabama and Oklahoma. Each have their own special features--let's see what Utah's bill HB 331 looks like.

Utah's ESAs are indexed to the poverty line--the further above it you are, the less you get. But at the high end (the greatest level of poverty), you get more than the state would have given to your public district. 1,000% of the federal poverty level is the cap.  

To fill out the application form, parents must acknowledge "that a private education service provider may not provide the same level of disability services that are provided in a public school." It also requires that parents acknowledge that taking a scholarship has the same effect as "a parental refusal to consent to servoices." Giving up the right to an IEP is not uncommon in choice programs. Proponents, like Alison Sorensen of Education Opportunity 4 Every Child, basically argue, "Well, yeah, but since you'll be able to pick a school that's a great fit, it won't matter." Thing is-- students with special needs are expensive to educate, and not a financial winner for education-flavored businesses like private schools. If I were one of the many parents of special needs children who have had to fight with public schools to protect my child's rights, I'd be leery to move to a school where I had zero legal recourse if I didn't like how things were playing out. 

Parents must also sign off on "I will assume full financial responsibility for the education of my scholarship recipient if I agree to this scholarship account" which is the closest I've seen to the quiet part out loud--in which the state says, "We cut you a check, and so we wash our hands of you. Good luck. You are no longer our responsibility." This is largely the point of vouchers and neo-vouchers--to get the government entirely out of education thereby ending public education as we know it. The bill also wants you to know that setting up this program in no way implies "that a public school did not provide a free and appropriate public education for a student," because if it did, somebody could get sued.

The bill includes the usual list of eligible expenses, but goes further than some in listing expenses that aren't eligible, like travel unrelated to education (never forget that $700K in Arizona ESA money spent on cosmetics and other sundries). 

The bill also goes further than some by listing some qualifications for vendors that want to get involved in the sales side of the program, as well as qualifications that private schools must meet, including an independent audit to determine their financial viability. Private schools enrolled in the program don't have to have fully certified teachers (a Bachelor's degree and "skills, knowledge or expertise" will do). Also, the school can't make the student sign a contract agreeing not to transfer out during the year. The private school has to resubmit an application if it changes owners.

And the bill calls for annual random independent audits, which is certainly more than several states do.

But it also includes what has become typical "hands off" language, indicating that the state cannot mess with "service providers" by extending its authority over them. The providers "may not be required to alter the qualifying service provider's creed, practices, admission policy, or curriculum in order to accept scholarship fund." So private religious schools can refuse students whose families aren't sufficiently "born again," expel students who come out as LGBTQ, and require whatever religious practices they want on the public dime. In Florida that has made a mess in many ways, but that's Florida. Maybe Utah will be different--religious issues have never been a big deal before there, right? 

Actually, since posting, I've learned on the Twitter that Utah already has a problem with some extremist groups using choice systems to fund their activities; this bill is going to give them even more taxpayer funding while insuring that the state won't interfere with their white supremacist ways. 

The program, called the "Hope Scholarship Program," gets $36 million in its first year ($2 to set things up), and can be grown after that.

As usual with these bills, some of the critical parts are the ones that aren't there. While this bill goes  marginally further than others, it is still lacking any sorts of protections for parents and students in the program. What happens if you run out of ESA money? They signed off on this to get into the program--it's all their problem. And they do have an out, because unlike some ESA/voucher bills, this bill has no requirements for what minimal amount of education the parents are required to provide--which is not great for students. If parents get hoodwinked by a grifter, or left in the lurch by a vendor that shuts down mid-year? Well, in all these cases students can return to public school (though the money that's supposed to follow them everywhere will not follow them back to public school). 

Look, it's a voucher bill, only instead of just signing students up for a private school, it also contains the possibility of paying off various other "providers" of education-flavored products. As a voucher, it drains money from public schools. 

Also--and this isn't discussed nearly often enough--like every other voucher/ESA bill, it completely disenfranchises taxpaying non-parents. Don't have a kid? Then you have no voice in this marketplace. If you think your tax dollars should not be going to support America First High School or Critical Race Theory Central, there is no elected school board for you to go yell at. 

But make no mistake. This is a voucher bill, only worse because it has even less focus and accountability than a straight voucher bill would have. If you're in Utah, call your elected representative and say no. 

Just How Discriminatory Are Private Christian Schools

We've heard--heck, the Supreme Court of the United States has now heard--that private religious schools feel a powerful need to reject and exclude LGBTQ students and teachers. But it turns out that there's an entire industry devoted to recruiting and retaining students for private Christian schools.

Meet Schola Inbound Marketing, a company in Ephrata, PA, that has a mission "to help Christian schools throughout the world grow enrollment and become sustainable using proven marketing, admissions and retention practices that will enable each school to impact their community for Christ and be a blessing to students and parents for many years."

Schola posts plenty of webinars, but one from last December caught my attention, warning schools not to admit the wrong sorts of people. You are probably thinking, "Well a bunch of atheists or Muslims or members of the Satanic Temple wouldn't want to enroll in a Christian school anyway, so what's the problem?" Well, here's the pitch:

A mission-appropriate family is actively committed to your school's mission. When this type family enrolls in your school, you want 2 dozen more of the same type because both the students and their parents enhance the culture of your school. You don’t want to lose them! One of the easiest ways to lose them is by enrolling families who are not mission-appropriate.

During these uncertain times, your school can easily make this mistake! And it’s natural! There are families that look like they are mission-appropriate but could change the culture of your school.

They dub this the rotten apple syndrome, and talk about how to avoid it.

The webinar (which I had to sign up for to gain access, you're welcome) is hosted by Schola pres Ralph Cochrane, a 1995 graduate of Grove City College (if you're from northwest PA, you already know about GCC, the powerhouse school for academically advanced heavily-churched kids). He's a business guy and "entrepreneur" 

So in the webinar, he elaborates on the idea of rotten apples and retention, noting that when public schools got all radical about masks and things, plenty more folks became interested in making the switch to private Christian schools (he also notes that such schools are seeing a loss of teachers who are burning out) and that these new families can "infect" the culture of the school. The big worry here isn't even the infection of the school culture, but the worry that letting these not-mission-appropriate families in may drive out the families that the school does want to keep.

One of the questions he answers is "Should we try to keep everybody?" The answer, of course, is no--some of those students and families may not be mission appropriate (I love that phrase, because it sounds so much nicer that "Christian enough"). He suggests ranking families in tiers, and has a company agent show off a spreadsheet that helps rank them both on how likely they are to return and also how mission appropriate they are "like, they may be really likely to return, but you really don't want them to." Ther are categories offered for mission-appropriateness, ranking families A through F. 

He also wants to address the "elephant in the room"--what if we take a bunch of public school kids and then they turn around and go back to public school because the mask thing is over. You can, he warns, be blindsided by both the new enrollees who turn right around and leave, plus, you can be surprised by the long-time families who are disgruntled because "these new students are ruining it." 

Look, this is absolutely within the rights of any private school. It's part of the point of being a private school. But when we start talking about sending public tax dollars to these schools via vouchers or education savings accounts, it's important to talk about the ways in which these schools are not aligned with the mission of public education. It's not just that they are exclusive in all the ways that make big headlines, but that they have a fairly narrow definition of their perfect student. If you're thinking that you'll have no trouble using your voucher to send your kid to the local private Christian school because your child is straight and is nominally a Christian--well, you may still find yourself nudged out the door because you're just not Christian enough. We talk a lot about the big obvious ways that these schools may discriminate; we should also pay attention to the small, subtle ways.

This is a model of schooling that absolutely does not align with the mission of educating every child in the country no matter what. We should not be connecting that model to public funding without at least talking about the change in mission.