FL: DeSantis Grabbing Power Over School Boards

The first shoe almost--almost--made sense when it dropped.

First  the Marjory Stoneman Douglass School Safety Commission determined that Broward County school leaders had done a lousy job of following effective security policies. Because, of course, they certainly weren't going to find any issues with the easy access for guns and ammo for the shooter. Thump.

I care this much.

That was 2019. But other shoes were going to drop, and the next one was the unusually-convened Twentieth Statewide Grand Jury, which later recommended that board members be suspended due to "incompetence, neglect of duty, and misuse of authority." Thump. 

So last week, Governor Ron DeSantis decided to "suspend" four Broward board members from office. That (thump) gave DeSantis the appointment of five members of a nine member board in a Democratic-leaning county. But it turns out that he was suspending them over a broader scope of actions:

The governor said "students continue to be educated in unsafe, aging, decrepit moldy buildings that were supposed to have been renovated years ago. These are inexcusable actions by school board members who have shown a pattern of emboldening unacceptable behavior, including fraud and mismanagement across the district."

This is a three-fer for DeSantis. He gets to look like he's all about Protecting The Children, while tossing out some elected Democrats (effectively silencing the voters who elected them), and furthering the whole "public schools can't be trusted" narrative. Plus, he avoids doing anything like sending resources or money to help alleviate any of these issues. He just sends in some more of his crew to take over. (For an extraordinarily thorough look at the Broward issues, read this piece from Kathryn Joyce)

And there are still more shoes. Although the latest shoe dropped on Monday, it seems to only just now be making it into the press. And by now, I mean Friday afternoon when nobody is paying to much attention to plummeting footwear. 

That grand jury report painted a target on four other school districts, giving the state department of education a reason to send letters to those districts asking for in-person meetings due to the "gravity of the issues." The districts are Duval, Orange, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach (Broward got a letter, too). 

“We have reason to believe that some of the policies and actions the grand jury found are ongoing and require immediate action,” all five letters dated Monday say.

Gee. What immediate action could they mean? Rushing assistance and resources to the district? Or maybe having the governor personally take replace the democratically elected boards with his own people? Thump.

It would be the next logical step in Florida, where virtually every state-level education position has been filled with an anti-public ed privatization fan and he's filled the advocacy space with more of the same, plus the Moms for Liberty campaign operation. There isn't much left to do except take over the local boards (which, writer Billy Townsend correctly notes have been stripped of much of their power already). So why not go after five of the six largest districts in the state? Why not go after school districts like Duval and Miami-Dade and Orange that have dared to defy him before? 

DeSantis has also been trying to do it the old-fashioned way--by getting his hand picked, governor-backed candidates elected. That was successful in many places, including Miami-Dade. But it didn't work everywhere. And really--isn't it easier and quicker to just throw out the board members you don't like and replace them with people from your own team, democracy be damned?

It has long been fashion on the far right to accuse Democrats of using school shootings as a tool to grab political power, so there's a certain ironic genius is DeSantis flipping the script and using the Parkland killings as an excuse to go after school boards. And even if (and it's a big, size 15 if) DeSantis 's concern is real and the districts are dangerously lax in "security," whatever that might mean, is having the government replace a duly-elected board the best way to fix that problem? Better than, say, help and resources from the state? Is this the situation that meets the threshhold of, "Yeah, we'll just have to override democracy now"?

Give DeSantis credit for his multi-tasking skills; both dismantling and taking over public education at the same time. If I were a parent in Florida, or just a person interested in living in an educated society, I'd be plenty worried about what will happen to the tattered remains of public education in Florida if DeSantis manages to consolidate his control over every level of it. Thump. Thump. Thump. 

Project Veritas, Naughty Educators, and Choice

You've probably heard of Project Veritas, a right wing activist group that specializes in gotcha, often marked by deceptive and misleading editing aimed at making Democrats and liberals look bad. Apparently they've decided to get take aim at education for a bit, because they've released two pieces this week aimed at making some administrators look bad.

First we get an assistant principal in Connecticut revealing his anti-conservative, anti-Catholic hiring bias. And while Project Veritas is known for deceptive editing, it's hard to imagine a context in which any of the following is not problematic:

Boland dubbed Catholics “brainwashed.” When asked what Boland does when he finds out that a candidate is Catholic, he said, “You don’t hire them.”

Or, on the subject of slipping politics into the message

“Believe it or not, the open-minded, more progressive teachers are actually more savvy about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention their politics,” Boland said. “They’ll never say, ‘Oh, this is a liberal or Democratic way of doing this.’ They just make that the norm.”

As I said, while this may have been twisted, I can't imagine a context in which either anti-Catholic hiring practices or selling your personal political beliefs as the norm are okay. Jeremy Boland is now on administrative leave while the district figures out what the heck to do with this. 

This, you may say, is why folks need school choice--so they can get away from this kind of public school misbehavior. But hold on just a minute-- because our second Project Veritas video comes from an administrator at Trinity School.

Trinity School is an uber-excellent private school in Manhattan. Niche rates it the #1 private high school in New York as well as the #1 Christian high school in New York. It has an impressive list of successful alumni (John McEnroe, Rudy Giulliani's daughter, Larry Hagman, the Ziff Davis heirs and, awesomely, a co-founder founder of Troma Studios). 

And they have a sneaky naughty administrator. She's on video saying she would never book a Republican guest speaker and complaining about white male students.

“Unfortunately, it’s the white boys who feel very entitled to express their opposite opinions and just push back,” Norris said. “There’s a huge contingent of them that are just horrible. And you’re like, ‘Are you always going to be horrible, or are you just going to be horrible right now?’ Don’t know.”

When asked if there was any saving Republican white guys, Norris responded: “I don’t know. I think they need to go. I think they’re really awful people. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of with my white students that are rich. I’m like — do you ever have to deal with this? They’re so protected by capitalism. It makes me sad.”

I can, in fact, imagine a context in which this would be less awful, but it's still not a good look. IOW, they may have made this look worse, but I can't imagine a world in which it doesn't look bad.

But beyond the cringe factor, this wrinkles up the whole school choice narrative. Because with school choice, everyone is supposed to enjoy the privilege of the rich, who can pick whatever school is the "best fit" for their kid. Except here is this elite, expensive school, and we're hearing (and not for the first time) that, beyond an extreme example like this one, such places can be plain old woke, biased, in the grip of political correctness, not right wing friendly, and not about to change to suit any kind of market forces, either. 

So what's a choice fan to do? Is the message here, "If you want a good education, you just have to suck it up about the other stuff?" Is it that private schools need to be regulated like public schools so that this kind of bias can be regulated into oblivion? Is that all that baloney about how public schools are a place of constant ideological battle that only school choice solve--that's actually not true?

There's only one kind of school that's allowed to chuck objectivity and balance out the window and advocate for whatever ideology it prefers, and it's not the public kind. 

I do not want to see an education system that discriminates on the basis or religious beliefs or political orientation, and we do not get there with unregulated, unaccountable school choice. 

IN: More Taxpayer-Funded Discrimination

Indiana's private school voucher program is going great guns, last year shoveling $241.4 million to private schools, and nearly all of the 330 schools grabbing those taxpayer dollars are religious schools. 

In the 21st century conception of religious liberty in the US, we've been learning two things:

1) You can't practice your religion unless you are fully subsidized by tax dollars.

2) You can't practice your religion unless you are able to fully discriminate against the people you want to discriminate against.

3) "Your religion" actually means "your particular brand of christianism"

Okay, three things. 

We know that the private schools being funded by public dollars discriminate. We know that SCOTUS has now reaffirmed that "right" multiple times (try here or here)

We know all that. And here we go again. 

This week, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis cannot be sued by a teacher who was fired, per the archdiocese command, from a teaching job at a Catholic high school. His firing was because he was in a same-sex marriage. The case has spent some time bouncing around before hitting the state supreme court. 

Joshua Payne-Elliot married his husband in 2017. The archdiocese in 2019 forced all Catholic schools in its control must fire any such employees (Payne-Elliot's husband was also canned under the edict after his school put up a fight to retain him); the school had actually renewed Payne-Elliot's contract three times after becoming aware of his relationship. Payne-Elliot had taught world languages and social studies at Cathedral High School for 13 years.

The decision rests on the church autonomy defense (and so never gets to talking about freedom of expression or the ministerial exceptions) and quotes several precedents. Justice Slaughter's opinion opens with one such quote:

Religious freedom protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution encompasses the right of religious institutions “to decide for themselves, free from state interference, matters of church government as well as those of faith and doctrine.” 

Also

“No power save that of the church can rightfully declare who is a Catholic. The question is purely one of church government and discipline, and must be determined by the proper ecclesiastical authorities.”

Which would seem to underline the idea that a Catholic school is more about being Catholic than about being a school. Which--well, they've said that before. Back in 2012, when the archdiocese was quite excited about the new voucher program, there was this in a Catholic Review article:

“Vouchers will not change the mission or purpose of our Catholic schools,” said Ron Costello, superintendent of Catholics schools in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. “Parents who enroll students in our schools need to understand that we are Catholic first and schools second.”

Nevertheless, a story in the archdiocesan newspaper of Indianapolis reported that most of the Catholic schools in the archdiocese were "committed to participating in the state's voucher program."

It's all about the separation of church and state, you see:

“This is really important example of properly having separation of church and state properly understood, because when you have an archdiocese or some other church body, giving instruction and guidance to a religious school, that’s one of its ministries,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s very important for it that the government doesn’t insert itself into that dialogue and relationship between the church and its ministry and the way it’s working out its faith and living its faith in its religious schools.”

Government is, however, cheerfully invited to insert its money into the relationship between the church and its ministry. 

This is where we are on voucher policy. Give us your money, and leave us alone so we can treat people as well or poorly as we wish. 

Indiana's program had stalled, but like many others, experienced a pandemic expansion. The expansion has also been fueled by Indiana's steady relaxing of its rules. Originally started as a program to rescue poor children from failing public schools, the program will now offer vouchers to a family of five making $172,000. Students no longer have to have ever set foot in a public school. And the fact that voucher schools are no better (and possibly worse) than public schools isn't bothering policy makers, either. And now we go from little regulation and oversight to actually forbidding any regulation or oversight. 

Should Catholic schools be able to run as the church wishes them to be run? Sure. Should the taxpayers foot the bill for that private enterprise? Nope. I can hope that this case will keep wandering upward through the courts, but there's virtually no reason to hope that SCOTUS would decide against the archdiocese or insist there be limits to the church's freedom to openly discriminate on the taxpayer's dime. 

Annual NAEP Panic (COVID Edition)

It's back. The annual-ish exercise in trying to read test-driven tea leaves that is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), undeservedly called "The Nation's Report Card." 

The NAEP results are a data-rich Rorschach test, telling us far more about the people interpreting the data than the data itself (in fact, the biggest lesson of the NAEP is that data doesn't actually settle a damned thing). 

But this year we get a bonus-- the NAEP Pandemic Finger Pointing Edition! Yay.

News outlets are mostly sticking with bare bones reporting (with the exception of the New York Times, which we'll get to in a moment), like the Washington Post's headline over the AP story "Reading, math scores fell sharply during pandemic, data show." 

But on the Tweeternet, plenty of folks are pouncing with the argument they've just been waiting to make. Here's Tom Bevan, head guy at right wing Real Clear Politics--

Randi Weingarten and all of the members of teachers' unions who fought tooth and nail to keep kids locked out of school are responsible. https://t.co/wy3VkV788w

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) September 1, 2022

You know this story already. For some reason, a couple years ago the teachers unions closed down US schools and kept them closed for no reason at all. Certainly not because there was a pandemic killing people and information about how to handle it was sparse and the feds said "Hey, you're on your own. Figure something out." I don't want to wander too far down this rabbit hole, other than to note that if teachers have the power to shut down the country, you'd think they'd use it for other things, like getting money and resources. And the "lazy teachers don't want to work" explanation would make more sense if remote pandemic school weren't actually twice as much work for teachers as the in-building type. And I am tired of people on all sides ascribing various sinister motives to people who were mostly scared and trying to do the best they could in a frightening and life-threatening situation, and lacking dependable information, lots of people made lots of different decisions and for heavens sake, is it that hard to exhibit a little kindness and empathy even if it's not politically expedient?

Or, in shorter terms, yes, the choices about schools open or closed was made politically, but if you're ignoring the context--a pandemic that killed over a million Americans--you're being deliberately obtuse.

Anyway, the NAEP is going to get us that again, blaming the score drop on forced distance learning (where children had to stay at home and learn via computer) and blaming forced distance learning on the teachers unions. Ironically, some of this will come from some of the same people who promote things like microschools (where children stay home and learn via computer). 

The absolute worst headline of the day (and it was by God up at 12:01 AM, presumably when the press embargo ended) belongs to the New York Times. Let's take a look, because this captures so much of what is wrong with journalism's coverage of test scores:

The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading

What the heck does that even mean? Whose progress, exactly? This is talking about test scores as if they are toaster production numbers, as if they are a politician's poll numbers, as if test scores are like the stock market, as if schools are a modern capitalist enterprise that must "produce" bigger numbers each year or else it's a failure, as if the pursuit of test scores can be bent to standard horse race coverage. 

Are they suggesting that schools lost "progress" in pedagogical technique, that the pandemic somehow knocked schools back to functioning as they did twenty years ago? Teachers forgot everything they learned in those two decades?  The nine year old students have somehow rolled back to -11 in their learning curve? That this is not a blip caused by a singular and unprecedented interruption of schooling, but some kind of reset, some time traveling blip. Dammit--does this mean my retirement has been rescinded? And could there be any other explanation for the drop in score?

The story (not the headline--never blame the newspaper headline on the writer) is by Sarah Mervosh, and it calls for all the clutching of pearls. Test scores post pandemic are now down several points to where they were twenty years ago. Which is bad because...?

The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on.

Must they? Are the consequences powerful? Have we, for instance, tracked the generation from twenty years ago and found that those test scores are indicative of a generation of failures, haunted forever by their crappy NAEP scores? Because previous research suggests that plenty of low-NAEP score students do just fine. But we're going to pull some more scary quotes:

“Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grade, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education inequality.

“The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids,” she added. Being so far behind, she said, could lead to disengagement in school, making it less likely that they graduate from high school or attend college.

But correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation. 

More importantly, that correlation is what happens in normal times, which the last three years have not been. Are student now dumber than they used to be, or did these students not get quite as much formal learning done because there was a pandemic going on? Or should we conclude that less formal schooling meant less formal test prep training, and that smart kids who would have been successful may not have tested up to par, but will recover and do fine? 

And more more importantly, does raising test scores raise life outcomes? (Spoiler alert: no research says that it does).

I'm not saying that last option is certain. I am saying that coverage routinely ignores it, because--and this has never ceased to be annoying--journalists insist on accepting standardized test scores as valid and useful proxies for student achievement (and that artificially created benchmarks somehow descended from heaven on stone tablets). There is simply no reason to believe that they are, but they're numbers and easy to work with and sound really official.

Nor has there been any context given to today's numbers. Back in 2019, head of NCES Peggy Carr was saying this: 

“Since … 1992, there has been no growth for the lowest-performing students in either fourth-grade or eighth-grade reading,” she said. “That is, our students who are struggling the most at reading are where they were nearly 30 years ago.”

Nor are we taking much notice of the fact that these are just 4th grade scores, and a lot of things happen between 4th and 12th grade to those scores (like in Florida, where they utterly collapse year after year).

One thing does remain true, albeit unsurprising-- schools that serve poor students, schools that are under-resourced, show far lower scores than other schools. I predict that once again this year policy makers will look at that data and conclude everything except, "We should get more support and resources to those schools."

Not that some folks don't have ideas. Mervosh talked to Martin West at Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the board that oversees the test, and it turns out he knows how to solve the problem of educational inequity in this country. Dr West said "that low-performing students simply needed to spend more time learning, whether it was in the form of tutoring, extended school days or summer school." 

“I don’t see a silver bullet,” Dr. West said, “beyond finding a way to increase instructional time.”

That might not be the silliest thing I've ever seen from a college professor of education, but it comes damn close. 

Oh well. Let's move on to the next part of the annual ritual. Pearls will be clutched. People will claim the data proves the things they always argue for anyway. No actual action will be taken. And the storm will pass. And teachers will go back to teaching students as best they can, including meeting them where they are.  Happy NAEP.

Help A Classroom Today

If you have ever thought it would be nice to chip in a little something to support our work here at the Institute, then please stay with me through this post. Because I'm going to ask you to take help some teachers start off the year via Donors Choose.

Yes, I am in absolute agreement that in a just and proper nation, Donors Choose would fold up and waste away because no teacher would need help buying supplies and resources for their classroom. I mean, imagine a country where Donors Choose was for the army, or a doctor's operating theater, or a Congressperson's office.

But we live in this nation as it is right now, and right now, teachers can use the help. So if you are big on supporting teachers, here is a real, concrete way you can help out. You could also contact your local school, or a teacher in it, and ask, "What can you use?" But Donors Choose makes it easier, and I am going to make it even easier still. Here are some projects to choose from. Scan the list, pick out one you like, and chip in.

Sound It, Build It, Stamp It, Write It

Full disclosure--this is the teacher for one of the twins. She's looking to add letter beads and write and wipe boards to help grow some literate littles. 

Getting Comfy With Our Feelings

Full disclosure again--this is the other twins' teacher. She's looking to add some flexible comfy seating for small group work.

Ukuleles

Okay, last disclosure. This is a friend of mine who would like to add a set of ukuleles to her elementary music classroom, which would be extraordinarily cool.

All Hands-on Math

A second grade classroom in Arizona is looking to beef up math instruction with some manipulatives, dry erase boards and a bare bones tablet. I figure anyone teaching in Arizona can use a boost. 

A Cozy Reading Spot

I'm a sucker for reading furniture for the littles, and this kindergarten classroom needs rugs for the littles to sit on. And they're in Florida, which means they can use all the help they can get.

Musical Literacy and Quality Literature

Ms. Kochel out in North Dakota is looking to add some books that connect songs, images, art, and reading, which strikes me as an absolutely delightful idea.

Decodables for Littles

Yeah, it's a symptom of how messed up school funding is that this reading specialist in North Carolina is looking for decodables for her PreK-2 students.

I could go on all day, but for today let this be enough. None of these are big ticket projects, and every little bit helps. Or you can search around on Donors Choose. Amazon has a similar program, but I can't bring myself to send more money their way. 

These are all real, concrete ways to help real, actual classroom with actual students in them. As the new year starts, it's worth lending whatever kind of helping hand you can. This is something I regularly do; as a retired teacher in PA who lives a pretty simple lifestyle, I think it's important to give back, and this is one way to do that. I encourage you to join me in finding ways to help classrooms and teachers do the work. 

Quiet Quitting Versus Quiet Firing

The "quiet quitting" thing is not news to teachers. In teacherland, it's called "working to the contract" and it is an alternative to striking that can still bring a school district to a grinding halt.

My old district, like most, depended on teacher volunteer hours. Heck, for years, the school schedule depended on the assumption that teachers would stop by the office to pick up mail and memos before their actual report time arrived (at which time we were expected to be in our room with students). 

I call "quiet quitting" a bad euphemism for "no longer donating free work to an ungrateful boss." 

The problem for teachers, of course, is that when they stop donating hours, the person who most immediately suffers is that teacher. "I am NOT going to do any preparation of paperwork and handouts outside of school, and then tomorrow I can just.... not have the materials I need to run class." Or maybe "I'll just never grade any papers outside of school hours and  so students can just get their assignments back ten weeks later when the feedback will not serve any educational purpose, and I can just assign two essays this year, accomplishing next to nothing." Yeah, that'll show them.

The job is built wrong, based on the assumption that if the teacher isn't standing up in front of students, the taxpayers aren't getting their money's worth. So they only way to do a decent job and maintain your professional self-respect is to donate the extra time needed to get the work done.

If that weren't enough, this post popped up today, courtesy of Bonnie Dilber on LinkedIN. Here's the opening section:

The "Quiet Quitting" thing is funny to me. I think the real conversation should be around "Quiet Firing" as it's rampant.

You don't receive feedback or praise.

You get raises of 3% or less while others are getting much more.

Your 1:1s are frequently cancelled or shuffled around.

You don't get invited to work on cool projects or stretch opportunities.

You're not kept up-to-date on information that is relevant or critical to your work.

Your manager never talks to you about your career trajectory.

My first thought was that yes, that would suck. My second thought was that this, for teachers, is pretty much every ordinary day.

Feedback or praise? No, just one badly designed teacher evaluation thingy, often rushed through in May with an administrator who is swamped but is required to get these done.

Raises of 3% or less? In a good year, maybe.

Face to face meetings? Does eating lunch with a couple of colleagues in fifteen minutes or less count?

Cool projects? Stretch opportunities? Maybe you get a chance to set up something yourself. Teachers do get lots of squeeze opportunities (Here's a new unit we would like you to squeeze into your 180 days of instruction.)

Up-to-date information? Get your own. And maybe we'll let you know about new district policies before you read about them in the newspaper. Or maybe not.

Career trajectory? Granted, teaching is a career where you start in the middle and then slowly rise to the middle, but still--imagine a teaching job where your boss talked to you about your development as a professional on a regular basis. "Imagine" being the key word.

I read this post and thought, "Holy smokes-- so teachers are regularly treated in a way that the private sector would consider a form of firing??!!" 

You may have a teaching job in which some of these don't apply. I had a good boss or two who actually avoided some of this quiet firing stuff. But I'm afraid too many of us totally recognize this pattern, or maybe just get it on some gut level.\

There are probably other quit things that apply to teaching (for instance, Quietly Treating Grown-up Professionals As If They're Untrustworthy Children), but for right now, these two seem like plenty.

Mastriano Is Flailing On Education

Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has a plan for education. Or at least, he had one. But the campaign appears to be trying to some damage control on the fly.

It was not a good plan. It was not even a complete plan. What we know about the plan so far is this-- cut real estate taxes to zero, replace that revenue source with nothing, give everyone a voucher (for far less than their district currently spends on each student). 

PSEA took a look at his original proposal-- to cut per pupil spending from $19,000 to $9,000 or $10,000. They made the generous assumption that he would leave alone local non-real estate tax and federal revenue, and figured what that would mean in cuts. Roughly $12.5 billion, or about a third of what is currently spent on education in the state. PSEA has an interactive map on which you can look up how big a cut your local district would get. In the case of my old district, for example, it would be a cut of almost $12 million--about 35% of the local budget. And that's without any projections of students leaving for the many--well, actually, just two-- private (religious) schools in our area. 

Mastriano has been responding, sort of, to the PSEA report. 

First, he walked back the initial figure from a March interview (Mastriano, like the rest of the MAGA crowd, does not talk to traditional press). Now he has a video saying the new funding level will be an "average" of $15,000 per student. He still hasn't offered an explanation of where that money would come from since the state gives districts far less than 50% or 75%.

Then the Friends of Doug Mastriano, a PAC pushing his candidacy, and Mastriano himself started to push back directly against the PSEA report. Like this:

This is the epitome of the non-response response. PSEA is telling lies? What are they, exactly? If that $12.5 billion figure is not correct, then what is the actual correct one? 

The Mastriano campaign has several times pushed back by saying, "I just voted for a big increase in education funding" which is rather beside the point, like arguing, "How can you say I'm kicking this puppy?! Didn't I just buy it a chewy last week?" It's not exactly a secret that Mastriano thinks that too much money is being spent on education, so it's not clear why he would want to pretend it isn't true (unless maybe someone in the campaign remembers how Tom Corbett lost his shot at a second term over cutting education by a single billion dollars).

Supporters also point at this poster:

Several Mastriano memes feature this photo of him shaking the hand of this giant child, but it's the list of policy ideas that is supposed to be the sell here. It leads with "maintain current education funding levels" and "levels" is doing a lot of work here, because Mastriano has been abundantly clear that he does not want public schools to get the same amount of money they currently get. But perhaps he's decided that the whole chop funding plan isn't playing well, so maybe rewrite.

Mastriano's campaign does seem to be scrambling. When I wrote this piece three days ago, the campaign website promised a "Property Tax Elimination Task Force." The current version of his plan page (which has had its address tweaked, breaking all previous links to the page) has moved that portion of the plan from "education" over to "revive the economy." But it's still there.

Mastriano continues to tout responses to the full menu of far right grievances, victim complaints, and demands for a safe space. He'll ban CRT (though he has yet to provide a single example of CRT being taught in Pennsylvania). He'll keep schools open. He'll keep "biological males" out of female sports. He'll have a parental rights law.

But in place of the kind of plans he's been touting for months, Mastriano's website now promises

Shift funding to students instead of systems by establishing Education Opportunity Accounts for parents

"Shift" is the key word here, replacing his longtime insistence that he can just cut spending across the board with the standard voucher promise that we'll just turn school funding into education savings accounts, a kind of neo-voucher that hands some taxpayer money to parents and wishes them luck (and provides no accountability to the taxpayers who footed the bill. Mastriano also promises to pump up Pennsylvania's already-existing tax credit scholarship program (a program that lets corporations fund private schools rather than pay taxes). And yet he is still promising to cut real estate taxes to zero, thereby removing the primary source of school funding in Pennsylvania. 

The giant holes in his plan remain. Local real estate taxes account for more than 50% of local school funding (far far more in some cases), so even the reduced funding levels that Mastriano has talked about will require some other source of funding. 

Nor does he discuss the issue of different funding levels for students. Will students with special needs get bigger vouchers? How much bigger-- will they be funded according to the public school system, which recognizes different levels of need, or will they be funded according to the charter system, which funds all students with special needs at the highest level no matter what? Because if it's the latter, a bunch of families with simple reading or speech issues would get a huge windfall--and Mastriano's program would need even more funding from somewhere.

No local sources of funding means the end of local control. Education savings accounts without any transparency or accountability are an invitation to waste taxpayer dollars. Oh, and you may have noticed that he wants to create a "Heroes to Teachers Program," presumably mimicking his buddy Ron DeSantis's plan to put veterans and their wives in classrooms with or without any qualifications. 

It's almost as if Mastriano really doesn't know what he's talking about.

That would fit. Mastriano is running a campaign built to appeal to a butthurt base. One website motto is "You've been shut down, locked out, and unheard," a message that is clearly aimed at only certain portions of the electorate (the ones who used to have "F@#! your feelings" signs in their yards, but whose own feelings are apparently much more tender). So it makes sense that his whole "cut regulations, stop crt, fix elections" shtick would include an emphasis on Rufo-style "You can't trust public schools, so we need to both clamp down on them and defund them. 

But somebody at the campaign must have remembered that everyone gets to vote in the general election, so Mastriano is now doing this strange dance where on one hand he continues to promise and end to taxes and funding for public education and on the other hand he insists that funding for education will be just fine and vouchers will be awesome. 

Doug Mastriano deserves to lose hard, but his Christian nationalism anti-abortion MAGA appeal is going to play well in some parts of the state. Even, sadly, among many of the teachers whose jobs will be lost under his education plan. This is going to be a scary couple of months.