PA: The Voucher Bill Advances

A few weeks ago I warned you that Pennsylvania's latest attempt at a super-voucher bill was progressing through the legislature. Last week it took one more step forward.  

HB 2169 is an education savings account bill, a kind of voucher that involves handing parents a stack of money that they can use for any of several sorts of education-flavored items, from private religious school tuition to tutors to education supplies. They can even bank a few bucks to spend for college later on.

I wrote about the bill here, but let me re-hit some of the main points to keep an eye on.

The bill's authors (whoever they may be--the far-right Commonwealth Foundation has certainly been following the bill's progress very closely, and they're part of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing thinky tanks that has been doing the ALEC-like job of creating legislation for states to pass) have followed the usual playbook of starting small. Advocates of the bill have taken great pains to point out that the vouchers are only available to students in failing schools, and that they will only take one-third of public school's per pupil funding (sort of).

Note, however, that by defining "failing schools" as "schools that scored in the bottom 15% on last year's PSSA or Keystone," they are guaranteed access to 15% of the schools, because no matter how well everyone does, somebody is going to be in the bottom 15%. This is standard foot-in-the-door language. Voucher bills always start small, and then just keep expanding.

Also note that the one-third claim is smoke and baloney. The voucher amount will be the state's average cost per-student for the whole state. The "one third" comes from the fact that, on average, the state only provides about one third of school funding, the rest being provided by local taxpayers. So not only will these vouchers stake state funding away from the local districts, but since the figure is based on a state average, about half of all schools will lose MORE per-student funding than they would have gotten from the state. The poorer the district, the worse this is going to hurt.

As with other super-voucher bills, this one provides little protection for either families or taxpayers.

The bill has a clause saying that parents who "engage in fraudulent misuse" of the account will be thrown out of the program. How will anyone know they've done that? The bill requires the Auditor General to "conduct random audits" of accounts annually. How many? Up to the AG apparently. Advocates will tell you that parents will provide ultimate accountability (voting with their feet, etc etc), but it's worth remembering that the parents were not elected by the taxpayers and are not answerable to them. "Just trust them" is never a good accountability plan for taxpayer dollars.

There is no accountability for the vendors themselves. Since the whole rationale of the bill is that students need to escape from their "failing" public school, you'd think there would be some mechanism for making sure that they didn't end up in some failing private school or failing tutor system, but there's nothing at all along those lines. Nobody--not the state, and certainly not taxpayers--will ever know if the students ended up getting a better education than they would have had they stayed put. And if parents discover they've been defrauded of their voucher dollars by some lousy vendor? Too bad. A central premise of all voucher programs is that once the state has handed you some money, you are no longer their problem.

While the bill may not demand accountability of the vendors, it offers them protection. The bill includes explicit language to make clear that the state cannot tell the private school or tutor or other vendors how to run their business. Religious schools can keep on being as religious as they like, and private schools are still free to accept only the students they want to accept. Just because you've got a voucher, that doesn't mean you can pick any school you want. It's up to the school, not the family.

The bill has now passed the House 104-98, mostly along party lines with some turncoats on either side. Call or write your Senator. Complain that the bill robs public schools to pay private businesses, and that it provides no accountability for taxpayers. You can throw in a note to Governor Wolf telling him to veto the hell out of it if it makes it to his desk. 

Nobody Is Pro-Abortion

Here's the thing. Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody's position on the issue is "We need more abortions in this country." Women are not out there thinking, "I hope I can get pregnant so that I can get an abortion again because that was super-awesome." 

In other words, at the heart of one of our most contentious issues is a pretty solid agreement that fewer abortions would be a good thing.

Just a couple of things get in our way.

Most obvious is a disagreement about methods. The thing is, we already know what works and what doesn't. Criminalizing abortion doesn't work. When abortions were illegal, all that meant was that women with resources could get safe abortions, women without resources would resort to back alleys and horrifying self-inflicted abortion attempts, and women facing serious complications (the kind of things that prompt people to say, "Well, surely it wouldn't be illegal in that situation" even though it would be) just died. 

What works is comprehensive sex education along with readily and easily available contraception and birth control. 

But for some reason, opponents of choice are largely opposed to these solutions as well. A report from The 74 shows that 13 states poised to criminalize abortion post-Roe also have no sex ed at all. It's reminiscent of the Rush Limbaugh flap; Sandra Fluke testified in favor of insurance coverage for contraceptives and Rush called her a slut and a prostitute and said that women getting this kind of contraceptive coverage should post videos of all the sex they were having so that "we can all watch."

It's one of the details of the debate that suggest something else is going on.

There is a sincere point of contention at the heart of debates about abortion, which is the question of when a human life begins. Birth? Conception? The truth is that we do not know. We may have really strong opinions, but we have zero evidence to back them up. Personally, I find the idea of a human soul taking seat at conception hard to accept (and it raises some serious questions about my twins, who were not twins until well after conception--so do they share a soul, did the soul sub-divide somehow, or do souls arrive sometime after the fetus hits a certain number of cells?)

But if you believe that life begins at conception, wouldn't taking steps to make sure conception didn't occur make sense?

That's another thing that gets in the way of this debate. All the ifs.

If you thought the tiny life was incredibly important, would you fight for a pre-natal and birthing level of spending and support that would rival our military spending (and all free to mothers)? If you believed that the tiny life were hugely important, wouldn't you be doing something about the fact that our nation has the worst laws for new parent leave? Why, if this tiny new life is so important, does legislation say that the need of a new parent to spend time parenting in those first critical months is less precious that an employers need to get their employees back to work ASAP? 

Put another way-- if abortion is murder, does that mean a society that fails to provide all necessary support for expectant and birthing mothers is guilty of murder? 

And why, if young humans are of such great importance, are we not moving heaven and earth to create the best education and support system in the history of the world?

There are a lot of calls of hypocrisy against the pro-life crowd, and honestly, some of them are disingenuous; the answer in many cases ("why should a woman's autonomy be sacrificed for a fetus") is "because we believe that a fetus is also an actual live human being." 

But there is also a lot of rhetoric that suggests that, for some people, abortion and contraception are just a way for women to escape consequences for having sex (particularly for having sex for reasons other than procreation), and this is about making sure those naughty women don't Get Away With Something. This appears to be yet another great American debate in which we don't talk about what we're really talking about. 

That's particularly troubling this time because of the implications in Justice Alito's leaked opinion, which suggest that LGBTQ marriage and Brown v. Board of Education are also in jeopardy under the same reasoning. It's impossible not to see the opinion as an attempt to roll the clock back--way, way back-- to days when white guys were in charge and women and minorities knew their place. For beleaguered public education, this opens up one more front for attack.

The short version of all this:

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. It will put the lives and health of many women (mostly poor ones) in jeopardy. There are other things we could do that would be far more effective at reducing the number of abortions, but first we have to decide whether we want to reduce abortions or punish women for behavior we don't approve of. 

The decision to have an abortion is rarely an easy one, and often a very rough one. Pete Buttigieg's response to a question about third trimester abortions remains one of the best statements on the subject-- it's a hugely difficult decision, but there is no way the choice would be improved, morally or medically, by having the government step in to dictate the choice. It's a sensible answer and, ironically, exactly then answer I would expect from a small-government conservative.

I'm Not Agitated About Book Bans

First, as angry as we may get, it's not humanly possible to ban a book, really. We keep using the term "ban" as a kind of shorthand for attempts to shoo certain books away from places where they might be encountered by young humans (the same humans who carry pocket computers with internet access to Two Girls One Cup and stills from the Human Centipede--and no, I am not linking to either).

These attempts are doomed. For one thing, a ban on a book has, since the days Mark Twain thanked the Concord Library for banning Huck Finn, a superlative level of marketing that cannot be bought. Try to find a copy of Maus right now. Hell, try to find a non-backordered copy of Everywhere Babies. In my little corner of the world, our local theater was hosting a production of La Cage Aux Folles, and local conservative church people spread the word that this Awful Thing was happening, so of course the show sold out. A few years later I was directing a production of Best Little Whorehouse; having learned their lesson, they again tried to spread word through local churches and didn't send letters to the editor of the newspaper, but the newspaper got ahold of the letter they were circulating and ran a front page story. Do you know how often we get front page coverage of a current community theater production, huge and free of charge? That one time. Priceless. If only conservatives would protest every show we put on.

Second, as a classroom teacher I could play whack-a-mole all day. There's always another book that can take the place of the one you just removed. It's irritating and sometimes costly, but oh well. 

Mind you, as a classroom teacher I'd rather not. I taught more than a few edgy texts in my career, and while I've laid out my approach elsewhere, the key pieces are building trust, providing plenty of context, and respecting the preferences of students and parents who would rather not deal with such texts. If, as a teacher, you clumsily slap your students in the brain with a text that includes items that may shock or alarm, you've earned any serious scoldings you get. 

All of that may only go so far in an age in which people seriously want to yank Everywhere Babies and a book with sexy seahorse pictures. But there are plenty of books. Take one away, and after explaining that "This book right here is one the authorities say you shouldn't be allowed to read" to the students, we can find other books instead.

There are aspects of this banning business that I do get agitated about. 

For instance, weaselly administrators.

Virtually all school districts have, as they should, a procedure by which concerned parents can challenge a particular text. That's important, as is school transparency about what texts are being used. 

But what we're seeing over and over again, in the vast majority of this wave of attacks on texts, is administrators circumventing that entire process. Administrators who just quietly go and pull books from the library, or, as one administrator at my old district did, just announce to teachers "You aren't using that book any more." Or yanking a book because of one phone call. Or fear about a phone call that might come.

All of this points to larger concerns than just the yanking of that text. Every teacher wants to know that administration has their back. Not that administration will back them even when they're wrong, but if administration will stand between them and the hundreds of differing forces converging on classrooms every day. Just like students in a classroom, teachers in a school want to know that there is some sort of order and fairness, and not just ever-shifting winds that change direction at the whims and moods of the person with power. Teachers want to know that they work for someone with convictions and courage to back them up. This kind of fearful reaction to book controversy is bad news for all of that.

Book ban attempts are also agitating as part of the larger landscape of Don't Trust Teachers, which is part of the larger landscape of Don't Trust Anyone Except Beloved Leader. The continued work of eroding trust in schools is bad for schools, bad for children, bad for society at large, but good for demagogues and political opportunists, who don't really care what books we're talking about as long as they can hammer home the message, "Those damned teachers are Up To Something and we'd better catch them and make them pay and pull down the building!"

Teachers work for the public, but pulling a book because of one phone call (or an feared future imaginary phone call) is not working for the public. It's inviting policy whiplash-- if you pull this book today because you got one phone call, will you put it back tomorrow because you get two phone calls going the other way? Should working for the public mean that one parent can decide for all parents what should be taught? Is the mission statement for the district "We will avoid doing anything that might make anyone uncomfortable ever"? Because that's a lousy mission statement for a school.

"But parents should be able to express their concerns about particular texts." Yes, yes they should. Absolutely. And that's why the district has a thought out procedure to do just that. Use it.

If people want to show up at school board meetings waving around lists of terrible books, that is certainly their right. As many folks have noted, calling for a book banning (or burning) is never a good or heroic look. And while I, as a parent, get the impulse to avoid exposing my children to certain images or ideas, trying to control what everyone else can see is different impulse entirely. As media intrusiveness has grown, we have tried harder and harder to raise children in bubbles, and it's not going well.

If you are trying to raise your children in a bunker so that you can retain complete control of what they know about the world outside, you are doomed to failure and will probably do some damage in the process. You certainly can't erase particular books from existence, nor can you identify every single book out there that might challenge your world view. 

There are two ways to deal with problematic, challenging, difficult stuff in the world. You can A) try to build a safe space where you'll never have to face the Scary Thing, or B) you can develop the strength and support to deal with the Scary Thing. Try to raise your children to be strong and capable and wise, and keep the lines of communication open so that they will ask your opinion and advice when they need it. That will be far more effective than fruitlessly trying to play whack-a-mole with books that contain Scary Words and Pictures. 

ICYMI: Late Edition Edition (5/1)

Last week was tech week for the local production of Nunsense for which I'm music director. I also had about 400 essays to read through a couple of times for a county-wide high school essay context I run. And the last two days I've spent in Philly at the Network for Public Education conference. The CMO (chief marital officer) for the Institute and I left the Board of Directors with their maternal grandmother, and we had our first childless outing in a couple of years. As a result of all that. things here at the Institute have been a little slow, and you are getting your reading list for the week a bit late. But you're still getting it, and here we go. 

Also there was a race this morning, meaning we could go stand in the street for a perfect angle.

The education culture war is raging, but for most parents, it's background noise.

If you only read one item on the list, make it this one. A new NPR poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans are not at all ready to come after their teachers with a pitchfork and torch and, in fact, actually think their teachers are doing pretty well. 

Kansas City area district bans teachers from having safe space signs for LGBTQ kids

One more item for the "this is what these gag laws look like on the ground. Coverage from the Kansas City Star.

I'm a gay kindergarten teacher in Florida. These are the questions I'm asking myself.

From NBC, for that same file.

The Best Question During Today’s School Prayer Arguments Came From … Brett Kavanaugh?

Mark Joseph Stern is covering the latest school prayer case that was argued before SCOTUS this week, and yes, though it's no sign that he'll decide correctly, Justice Kavanaugh had the question that cut to the chase. This article also provides a good summary of how the case arrived in front of the Supremes.

DeSantis and DeVos have a school voucher online town hall.

Kathryn Joyce wrote about it for Salon; this link takes you to non-paywalled Alternet copy. Only for the strong of heart.

That Infiniti Commercial

You know--the one with cute kids playing terribly. Nancy Flanagan, retired music teacher, has some feelings about that.

The School Privatization Movement’s Latest Scheme to Undermine Public Education

Kalena Thomhave at In These Times has this great explainer/background piece about education savings accounts--the newest, worstest version of school vouchers.

Texas and its teacher supply problems.

What a mess-- on the one hand, Texas's major teacher-producer turns out to be a mess and gets it plug pulled. At the same time, some genius decides that Texas should make it harder to become a teacher (not to mention trying to revoke licenses for teachers who want to leave a bad job).

16 tricks to stretch out an essay

McSweeney's with some tips that many teachers will recognize.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I reviewed a book about the evolution-in-schools by Adam Laats (spoiler alert--I highly recommend it).

MI: Who's Paying To Force Vouchers?

Betsy DeVos is feeling her oats these days, with a big push in Michigan to finally install education savings accounts--those neo-vouchers beloved by her crowd. Trouble is, her crowd hasn't been able to convince voters to share the love. But because of an odd quirk in Michigan law, the folks at Let MI Kids Learn have a shot at doing an end run around the voters and the governor. Just 8% of the people who voted in the last gubernatorial race can send the petition to the legislature, where it can be voted up or down and the governor doesn't even have a veto option.

So who is backing this play for neo-voucher ESAs in Michigan? Is it a groundswell of grass roots support? Are the common people rising up to back their beloved benefactress and her pet project (last seen as a failed attempt to offer national Education Freedom Scholarships)? 

Nah. Of course not. 

Let's take a look at the Michigan State Department statement for the April quarter and see who's throwing money at this stuff this year (there's more information to be found looking into previous quarters).

Top of the list-- Oberndorf Enterprises of San Francisco (the one in California, not some San Francisco, Michigan, that you've never heard of). Oberndorf Enterprises is a sort of pass-through outfit through which the Oberndorf's donate to some of their favorite things, including school choice. Wiliam Oberndorf is the current chairman of the board for American Federation for Children, the pro-choice advocacy group he founded with Betsy DeVos.

Oberndorf is in for a cool quarter million.

Also in for $250K is John Kennedy, of Autocam Medical, and Michael Jandernoa of 42 North Partners, two names that often turn up with DeVos political giving.

At least they're actual Michigan residents. But big big bucks are coming from DC via the State Government Leadership Foundation, a conservative money-moving operation which just kicked in $250K and $140K, bringing their grand total so far up way over the half mill mark.

Daniel DeVos kicked in $100,000 (that's Betsy's brother-in-law). 

Tony De Nicola also in for $100K. He's with the New York/San Franciso firm of Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe, though he lives in Florida. Richard Haworth (Mackinac Center board) and David Fischer (car salesman), both of Michigan, each contributed $100,000.

The Michigan Guardians of Democracy kicked in $50. GLEP (Great Lakes Education Project) Education Fund, another DeVos organization, contributed work in the form of staff and facilities,. because what good is financing an organization if you can't just redirect them to work for your own project?

Elsa Prince Broekhuizen gave $25,000; that's Betsy DeVos's mother. Mark Murray gave $10K, Alan Hoekstra $5K. Mighty Michigan did some work for the campaign. 

And now we're down to the grass roots. Five guys gave $100. Two people made $50 contributions. Six people chipped in $25, and one person contributed $20.

So, fourteen grass roots supporters this quarter. If this thing becomes law, it will be because a bunch of rich folks backed it, not because of any upswelling from the Regular Folks. Michigan is in danger of providing a graphic example of Oligarchy. Here's hoping it fails.

FL: Big $tandardized Te$ting Not Going Anywhere

There was a brief flurry of excitement last fall when Governor Ron DeSantis and his education sock puppet Richard Corcoran called for an end to Florida's most recent iteration of the Big Standardized Test, the FSA. 

Some folks were happy to hear the news. Others were looking suspiciously at the fine print. And now that springtime has rolled around, it's clear that the folks who were suspicious were correct. High stakes testing is dead. Long live high stakes testing. Shocking as it may seem, Ron DeSantis was just blowing smoke.

FSA has been replaced with FAST, which effectively replaces one BS Test with three "progress monitoring" tests, the third of which carries exactly the same consequences as the old FSA tests, including third grade reading retention and grading the schools.

As the Florida Education Association said when the new law was signed, "This is not what DeSantis promised, and most importantly, it is not what is best for Florida's students," which strikes me as a statement that could just be reissued pretty much every time DeSantis does anything related to education. 

Florida law caps the amount of time students can spend on testing at 5% of the year. This is a silly law; it's a great idea to keep actual hours wasted on testing to a minimum (particularly since the more hours you have students spend staring at the test, the more prone testing will be to generate meaningless results), but the real drain on classroom time is test prep. Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours spent getting students ready for the test--and why wouldn't schools do that when their rankings depend on the results? And don't even open your mouth to tell me "Well, if teachers just cover the standards well the test results will take care of themselves," because you might as well say, "I am a dope who does not understand how teaching, testing or students function." 

So is this transition about anything other than making a meaningless grand gesture to generate good PR with parents? I think so.

Plenty of attention has been paid to how DeSantis manages to attack and undermine public education, and I think that keeps us from fully appreciating how well he monetizes it. 

As Bob Schaeffer of FairTest points out, this the fifth time in about two decades that Florida has revamped its testing.  The much-ballyhooed rejection of math textbooks has shifted the market in Florida in favor of a publisher with former ties to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Likewise. DeSantis's demand for purge of Common Core from Florida's ed standards instantly created a market for new textbooks. (Meanwhile, Florida's results still kind of suck)

FCAT. Common Core. FSA. BEST. Every time Florida revamps standards and/or tests, school districts have to drop a ton of money, and taxpayers get to shoot some more funding to textbook company, software developer, or test manufacturer. How many millions of dollars have Florida taxpayers poured into these overhauls?

Every time Florida switches tests or standards, they help somebody augment their revenue stream. The new shift in testing is not at all what he promised taxpayers, but I'll bet it makes some other folks mighty happy. 

Actors vs. Show Stealers

This is one of those stories that isn't about education--at least not yet.

In the UK, Equity, the actors trade union, is launching a campaign to "stop AI stealing the show." 

They note a whole host of techy-created problems:

Performers are having their image, voice or likeness reproduced without their consent. Or pay.

Contractors are keeping performers in the dark about what, exactly, their rights are in an AI contract. 

There's a whole world of issues beyond the now ever-present use of deepfake and AI technology to create performances by dead actors in big time movies. 

Equity presents some stories like this one:

In the last six months, my voice has been used in huge marketing campaigns by global companies. I don't receive a penny, even though I believe my contract does not allow for third party advertising.

In 2018, I was hired to do a text-for-speech job for a translation app. But in 2020 these recordings were used for the first ever English test-to-speech voice on TikTok, who was not my client.

I used to joke with my students that after I died, I would have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics and be installed on a track in a classroom while recordings of my lessons played. That's no longer a joke--it's an absolutely digitally achievable possibility. The equity complaints remind us that while we're used to seeing dead performers revived on film, techs could do the same thing for the living.

Stories like this remind me of all the times that administrators ask teachers to produce curriculum and lesson plans that are exacting enough that anybody--or anything--could implement them. Can a computer reproduce your classroom performance? And if somebody decided to try to do it, would you have any protections against it?