I could not have done this any better myself. I don't really have anjything to add, but I don't want you to miss this.
Monday, February 21, 2022
FL: How To Make "Don't Say Gay" Bill Worse
Florida's HB 1557 is a truly terrible bill that clamps down on any mention or discussion of LGBTQ topics though Kansas actually has a worse bill which would forbid any mention of LGBTQ topics of any sort at all. Perhaps that is what inspired the sponsor of the Florida bill to make matters worse.
Last week the bill picked up 15 proposed amendments, most of which were attempts to mitigate the damage that the Don't Say Gay act would inflict. But Joe Harding, a co-sponsor of the original bill wanted to go in a different direction.
The bill originally tempered its requirement that the school must inform parents of anything going on with the student's mental health or well-being by including the note that the bill wouldn't
prohibit the school district from adopting procedures to withhold such information from a parent if a reasonably prudent person would believe the disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment or neglect as those terms are defined in s. 39.01
Harding's amendment would add to that--
abuse, abandonment or neglect, as defined in s. 39.01, based solely on child-specific information personally known to the school personnel and as documented and approved by the school principal or his or her designees. The school principal or his or her designees shall develop a plan, using all available government resources, to disclose such information within 6 weeks after the decision to withhold such information from the parent. The plan must facilitate disclosure between the student and parent through an open dialogue in a safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment that respects the parent-child relationship and protects the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the student.
So. The reasonably prudent person's judgment isn't good enough--there must be documentation specific to this particular child, and the administration has to go on record essentially declaring the parents abuse risks.
Then-- even if they've done all that--the school still has to out the child to their parents within six weeks. But there will be counseling--well, counseling that prioritizes the parents' right.
In other words, Florida LGBTQ students with difficult family situations would understand that school would also not be a safe place for them to speak up.
This is a truly horrifying awful idea. As others have pointed out, if this becomes a law, LGBTQ children will die because of it. If you're in Florida, for heavens sake, call your elected representative.
Privatization Costs
We've talked before about Donald Cohen and Alen Mikaelian's book The Privatization of Everything, but it's worth returning to in order to underline yet another point.
One of the arguments often pushed to promote the idea of privatizing, of having government farm out a function to private operators, is that it will be a money saver. But time after time, that turns out not to be true.
The challenge with public services is that there aren't that many ways to get money out of them. Privatizers like the word "efficiency," but that too often translates into either pay less or get less. Schools are a fine example; if you want to make money running a school, there are only so many ways to do it. Pay people less. Reduce the number of people you pay. Reduce the services you offer.
We see those idea reflected in plenty of school "reform" ideas. We can replace teachers with "coaches" or "mentors," which would cut personnel costs. We can reduce staff by having really super-duper teachers teach thousands of students. We can replace teachers with software. We could get rid of all materials, practices and services that don't contribute to some narrow-but-numerical measure of "success." We can set up schools that don't offer services to (or accept for admission) high cost students.
Not one of these ideas is about providing a better education for students; they are all about finding "efficiencies," about finding ways to cut the cost of providing the service so that a company can get more money out of it.
I'll say, as I always do, that there is nothing wrong with a business trying to make money. That's part of its basic function. But that basic function makes business incompatible with the running of public services.
There is another related problem, most visible in education-- the amateurism problem. Companies look at a sector like education, and because they don't know the sector well at all (except that, of course, everyone went to school, so everyone is an expert) so they look at it and go "Surely there are inefficiencies we can squeeze to get profit." They assume that there must be a lot of change under the couch cushions, but they've never been in the living room and they don't even know if there IS a couch. I have no doubt that many folks singing this refrain really believe it--but they simply don't know what they're talking about.
The results are chronicled in several privatizing stories in the book. There's the tale of Indiana toll road. Private companies said, "We can totally make a profit with those," and instead they tanked. Then-Governor Mike Pence decided, because reasons, that rather than take the road back, he'd resell it someone else who decided that rather than eat the costs that had given the previous company terminal indigestion, they would raise rates and pass the costs on to the traffic (creating a "shunpike"-- a road that people avoid-- we're trying a similar project in Pennsylvania).
That trick of passing on costs is a common feature of privatization. The book was my first encounter with the forces working to keep taxpayer-funded weather information away from the public. Instead of a weather service app for free, with have a variety of weather "services," all using the weather service data, but "giving" it to us via a commercial enterprise. The added value for users is zero, but the companies have to generate some income somehow. It's a model similar to the rules forbidding the IRS from letting us file income tax without working through some pricey "service" like TurboTax.
Privatization is never cheaper. Municipalities that have sold off their parking systems have screwed the public. Chicago sold off its parking for a $1.7 billion contract for 75 years; the buyers realized a $500 million profit in just 11 years. Imagine just how much cheaper parking could have been in Chicago.
"Business can do the job cheaper," simply turns out to be wrong, time after time. Business either reduces the idea of what the job is supposed to be (in a privatized education world, the job is no longer to educate all children) or they simply throw out the "cheaper" part (note the shift in the school choice world from "we can do it cheaper" to "we need to be paid more").
Sunday, February 20, 2022
ICYMI: Van Gogh Edition (2/20)
Friday, February 18, 2022
MySpace and What Corporations Really Want
This is an old story, but a revealing one. I missed it at the time, but it's worth revisiting.
Back in 2016, Time Inc acquired Viant, an ad tech company--and that was mostly exciting because back in 2011, Viant had purchased MySpace.
If you are of a Certain Age, you remember MySpace as a visually alarming website created for fledgling bands to share their stuff, but which morphed into a -proto-Facebook social media space. It triggered all sorts of relationship drama, as users could select friends to put in their top eight spaces. Facebook soon obliterated it, but it has never really died and has changed hands a few times. These days, it's a music and culture site.
But in 2016, Time's CEO got some chuckles by admitting that he had never even looked at the website before he bought it. But here's the quote that really matters:
The whole point of MySpace is it gave you permission to reach 1.2 billion people. You combine that with the permissions Time Inc. has from its audiences: We reach 250 million adults in the US. We basically reach 80% of the adults anyone is trying to reach with the permissions that we have to reach them and track them and follow them, so MySpace has really been all about permissions.Thursday, February 17, 2022
TN: Another Bad Library Law
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.Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
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.