Fund Raising and Data Mining

It has started already.

The twins, five weeks into their first year of school, have been given materials for the school fund raiser.

If you are not current in the parenting world, you may hear "fund raiser" and think, "Okay, time to carry that order sheet around and hit up the grandparents to buy a couple of stinky candles." If only.

What the Board of Directors brought home is a sign-up for SchoolStore, a kind of online portal/platform that lets folks buy stuff from a couple of different outlets and a whole bunch of the usual Major Merchants. Each purchase through the program earns the classroom money and the individual student points good for Valuable Prizes. Teachers may also win prizes for their classroom's commercial success.

It's elegant and simple; as the veteran faculty member behind a gazillion fundraising projects, I can immediately see the advantages (no more trying to get the product sorted and out to the customers, no more extorting the public in exchange for cheap junk). 

But there's a catch.

To get started, your child has to sign up at the site, and sign up is not complete until you've given six email addresses to which the company can send marketing emails (that pretend to be from your child--you can even choose from pre-made PS messages like "I love you" and "Thank you for caring." Once you've handed over the emails, you get a code that goes back to school to certify that your child has signed up, at which point they get a cute participation prize (in our case, a little stuffed creature).

Not since political operatives started sending messages that "We need your input on this important survey!" has anyone come up with such a wickedly efficient method for harvesting contact information. That stuff is golden. I worked a couple of summers taking phone orders for a catalog company, and one of the things I learned is that a major source of their income was selling lists of contact information. Of course, companies these days promise they won't "sell" contact lists, just "share" it with their "trusted partners," which is a distinction without a difference. 

And, as you might expect, it's not hard to find folks on line complaining that SchoolStore spams them relentlessly via email addresses that they never personally gave away (also, something seems to be wrong with the site's email opt out feature....hmm...). 

The leverage, of course, is that I start my day with a five year old in tears because his classmates are getting stuffies and he is not. 

I don't fault the school, entirely. The real solution to all this is to fund schools fully and properly so that they don't have to explore other avenues for revenue. On the other hand, I am also wondering if the digital citizenship units have anything to say about being cautious with your own and other peoples' information on line.

So now my wife and I have a choice.

My preferred choice is to skip the whole thing, but that is going to require us to develop some sort of in-house lesson/explanation about all of this, because I'm starting my day with a little boy in tears because every day some of his classmates are getting a participation stuffie and he is not. I suppose we could just wait it out and he'll get over it. In the meantime, the boys have very little experience with computers, so explaining dealing with data harvesting operations is going to be a stretch. Nor am I ready for the "sometimes people in charge are just wrong and you should ignore them," because there's no way that can end badly for five year olds.

I could just make up some email addresses to fill in the six spots, and since, as mentioned, the boys are not particularly sophisticated about computer stuff, we can get away without having to have a talk about the ethics of cheating a cockeyed system in order to get things you want. I'm not ready to introduce "this is unfair, so it's okay to be unfair back" into their ethical schema. Also, since retirement I have enjoyed not being a constant raspberry seed in the wisdom teeth of the system; I thought I'd have longer before we'd get back to that. 

We could just go ahead and fork over the email addresses, but exactly which friends or family members do I think deserve to have one more daily junk e-mail?

I'll share my thoughts, politely, with the school. I get it--this is so much easier and less painful than the old school fund raisers, and funds need to be raised. It would be nice to do it without trying to leverage peer pressure and the littles' love of trinkets, but that has always been an issue with fund raisers. 

It's all a reminder that data is the new oil, and schools are a vast untapped reservoir. We could not make it more appealing to try to breach the boundaries of schools if we had built all the school furniture out of gold. Schools have got to get better at being vigilant, and parents have to pay attention, because the attempts to turn schools into data harvesting operations are never going to stop. 

PA: The Charter Industry Has Ana Meyers' Back

 Ana Meyers had risen swiftly through the world of charter school biz, and even when her career trajectory took a turn for the worse, the charter industry has her back. 

Meyers was the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. She has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse.

Meyers only got into the charter biz with PCPCS in 2017, but she hit the ground running with vocal opposition to Governor Tom Wolf's stated intention to rein charters in and perform some common sense overhaul of Pennsylvania's charter laws. When he said it again in 2019, Meyers expressed her sadness.

“I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvanian’s charter schools [brick-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” states the letter signed by Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, the state’s largest organization representing charter schools.

“I would have thought that a governor who has championed public education like you have over the past four-plus years would know better. I believe that you would have a much better understanding of how charter schools operate in Pennsylvania if you took the time to visit a few of them.”

Well, that's baloney, but it's the baloney that Meyers was paid to sell. And sell it she did--right up until she shot herself in the foot. 

Meyers was an active voice in opposition to Governor Wolf ever since he put charters on notice that there would be more regulation and less gravy train. Can't limit family choices, can't trap students in failing zip codes, etc, Meyers said. She tried hard to sell the idea that PA charters are non-profits (they are, but the management companies that run some of them surely aren't). And she just helped the coalition launch 143K Rising, a PR push to resist attempts to cut charter budgets (something Wolf hasn't actually tried to do, but you have to keep your people scared). And she wasn't very shy about it, calling Wolf "an idiot on so many levels."

The world of charter supporters has long been an alliance between those who see charters as a tool for equity and social justice, and those who want to unleash free market forces in place of "government schools." Meyers' tea party past offers a hint about which group she comes from. But Saturday, May 31, 2020, less than a week after the murder of George Floyd, she put her foot in it.

Avi Wolfman-Arent caught the story and reported it for PBS station WHYY. Saturday, Meyers posted a response to an emergency alert about "violent protestors" in Philadelphia. "None of this is okay," she said, noting that her husband is a retired state policeman, argued that all sectors have some bad apples "including the church." After offering support for the police, she closed with "These protestors disgust me. All lives matter."

When the station called to ask her about the post, it disappeared and an apology was posted. Meyers asserted her support for Black Lives Matters, explained she had not meant the protestors, but the looters. "I did not mean to insinuate that I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” she said. But it's pretty hard to read "All lives matter," any other way.

Criticism from the charter sector was swift. Sharif El-Mekki is a charter principal and heads up a group working on solving the problem of too few Black teachers in the classroom rejected her apology. At least one charter chain "condemned" her remarks. And as of yesterday, she was out of a job. Said the coalition board, "We have determined that new leadership is in the best interests of our member schools and the families they serve across the state." They thanked Meyers for her work, and buh-bye.

If you're thinking it's a shame that a career could be derailed by a single (okay, a couple) thoughtless post, fret not. Meyers was unemployed for a whole month. In August of 2020, she started a new job as the Associate Vice President of Community & Board Relations for Commonwealth Charter Academy. 

Commonwealth Charter Academy started out life as an arm of the Pearson octopus, who bought it from the original investors in 2011. Since then they have branched out into many lucrative fields, like their 

expansive real estate dealings. They also operate the largest cyber school in Pennsylvania. Like all of Pennsylvania's cyber-schools, they do a lousy job of teaching students, but a fabulous job of making money--particularly during the big pandemic boom (in PA, 99.7% of the students who jumped from public school to charter jumped to a cyber charter). They spend a ton of money on marketing, including floats for parades and, believe it or not, the CCA Ice Level Lounge in the home stadium of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. Lots of taxpayer dollars getting burned through. Try to imagine what your local taxpayers would say if they discovered your local school district was spending millions of their tax dollars on marketing, parade floats, and swanky stadium lounges.

So those are the folks that hired Ana Meyers. And the people who ousted her? They just gave her an award.

At the 2022 Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools Conference, earlier this month, Meyers received a Legacy Award for being a longtime advocate of charter schools. From the people who "ousted" her two years ago. The presenter touts her for being a force for charter schools for "over a decade" which scans, I guess, since a decade ago her LinkedIN profile says she was working as Pennsylvania State Director for FreedomWorks ("Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom") and lists one of her many accomplishments as being "responsible for helping pass major piece of Education Reform (School Choice) legislation with the 2012 state budget" aka "Opportunity Scholarships" aka tax credit scholarships. I'm not sure what she was doing for charter in subsequent jobs like her two and a half years at LeadingAge PA which is busy "advancing aging services and quality care for seniors."

Her accomplishments as listed by the presenter boil down to building the market, pulling in more customers, landing grants--nothing about actual education. But if you're good at business, everyone's more than happy to put that one little slip-up behind them. 

Meanwhile, PCPCS has moved on to preparing for the next big event, the CEO Summit; one treat for that is the legislative breakfast for which legislative leaders are invited to come break their fast with business and school leaders. It's "an excellent occasion to reach families, educators, and community partners who collaborate with Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools."  And it will be held at the Commonwealth Charter Academy at 1 Innovation Way in Harrisburg. 

Teaching Gender Roles and Sexual Identities

I know I've said this before, but this time I have a picture.

Forbidding teachers to bring sexual orientation and gender identity into their classrooms is a hopeless cause. Yes, even and especially when talking about K-3 or K-5.

Children's books are loaded with families, which is not surprising--families are a huge part of a child's world. However, every one of those books says something about how families are built. That's why conservatives had a small cow over a married pair of lesbian polar bears on Peppa Pig--because even though their sexual identities and gender roles are not discussed at any length, the mere fact that they exist in the show means that they might shape a child's idea of what is ordinary.

What's ordinary in traditional books? You've got series like the Little Critter books or Classic Clifford (we have not yet dipped into new, improved, tv-derived Clifford), where Mom stays home (usually in an apron) and Dad goes to work. There are more mysterious books like the Llama Llama books, where dad is not in evidence because Mom is the actual caregiver of the child. As a stay-at-home father, I appreciate the occasional book in which it's ordinary for the dad to be staying home, doing the laundry, making the meals, etc etc etc, but they're rare. For that matter, we get pretty excited when we find a book about twins. And you will never see the kind of excitement that you get when a little sees their own name in a book.

Because it's nice to look in a book and see your own life.

Children's literature tells them what is ordinary in a family all the time. It shows them what is ordinary in sexual orientation and gender identity all the time. 

I've made that argument often, but this week I was reminded that it's more than that. Here's a paper that the Board of Directors brought home from kindergarten.

"Bed" rhymes with "wed," as depicted by this nice couple. To be clear, I have no beef with this assignment at all. Do you think this assignment could get someone in trouble in Florida or other states where teaching sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal? Traditional gender identities and sexual orientations are still gender identities and sexual orientations, and we currently teach them all the time. 

Just keep this in mind for the next time somebody says, "But of course nobody thinks we should teach kindergartners about sexual orientation or gender identity."

CATO Misses The Mark On Reading Restrictions

Neal McCluskey, the point man for education at the libertarian CATO Institute, took a quick look at Banned Books Week, suggesting that PEN America is missing the root problem of Book "Bans" (his quotation marks). 

McCluskey opens by noting the PEN America report of book bans in the US, and he has this to say 

To what does PEN attribute the rise? Organized right‐​wingers, including such groups as Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education. PEN is largely correct about the immediate cause, with people on the right increasingly sounding alarms over “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in public schools.

But then he pivots to what has been CATO's refrain on the issue of public education

But as is often the case, the PEN report misses the root cause: public schooling itself, which forces diverse people to pay for, and de facto use, a single system of government schools.

This has been a recurring refrain--that public schools cause conflict by putting people with different beliefs in the same building. McCluskey is a serious grown up and no dope (something I would not write about everybody in the reformy choicer universe), but I always find this argument troubling because it can so clearly be used to argue in favor of segregation. Nor do I believe you can effectively run a country, state or community by simply separating all the people who disagree with each other into their own distinct silos. It speaks to one of the fundamental flaws of Libertarian thought, which is that government regulation and laws ceased, we would have a level playing field and everyone would have a fair shot at whatever goodies they wanted out of life. But for THAT to have a hope of working, we'd have to be able to wave a magic wand so that everyone started life on the same footing, which they don't, because everyone starts life with advantages and disadvantages, and the playing field is, therefor, never ever level. And while I share the Libertarian distrust of a government's ability to make the playing field more level or just, I do not agree with the notion that we should revert to Might Makes Right. 

But I digress.

McClusky says PEN America almost gets it when they note that the problem comes when choices made by librarians or educators are "overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers or even politicians." 

Ironically, PEN calls efforts to get school boards or state legislatures – popularly elected bodies – to remove books “undemocratic.” But that is almost the textbook definition of “democratic,” and for many public schooling defenders democratic control is a crucial aspect of public schooling. The people collectively decide what ideas the newest generation is exposed to.

That said, the PEN report is correct in perceiving a huge problem with elected bodies making decisions about what ideas are off‐​limits to school kids. What if the political majority – or a powerful minority, as PEN asserts about right‐​wing activists – wants to use its power to impose its values on the politically less powerful? That is dangerous. Indeed, a recipe for oppression.

McCluskey gets a lot right here, but by conflating several options, he slides past an important point. Educators and librarians decide what books will or will not be available to students. They do not decide which book students will be forbidden to encounter. Libraries have only so much space, and there are only so many days in the school year, so it is normal and necessary for librarians and educators to say, "We'll get this book and not that book." 

Deciding which ideas the students will be exposed to, deciding which ideas they will have access to, and deciding what ideas will be off-limits are three very different decisions. The first two are a normal part of school; the third is not. And while choice advocates argue that only parents should be able to decide any of these, there is nothing about the first two items that keeps parents from deciding, and no power in the world that can be exercised by school or parents that will make the third possible. 

McCluskey concludes

To protect people without political power government must neither empower experts nor political majorities to decide for everyone what books will or will not be accessible to children.

That's not the power that the anti-book crowd are trying to grab. They are trying to decide what books children will be forbidden to read. No amount of disempowering public schools or actual education experts will change that; these folks have already made it clear that "At least my kid won't have to read that awful book" is not an adequate answer for their concerns. We've already seen places where folks have made it clear that they don't want to see choice schools that cater to Those People.

Deciding what books will be available in a school building does not restrict the rights of students. Deciding that students must be forbidden to read certain books is a direct attack on their rights, and depending on free market forces to defend those rights is a vain hope. 

McKinsey and How To Soak The Customers

It's hard to imagine exactly what an open market for education would really look like, but we can get a scary inkling sometimes by looking at the world of health care.

For instance, the hospital world is loaded with non-profit operations that make a giga-ton of money (that remains untaxed). A recent New York Time piece gives a picture of how hospitals can squeeze blood from stones, with some help from our old friends, the amoral giants of money-grabbing consulting, McKinsey. 

The article focuses on the big challenge of hospitals--patients without money--as it plays out at Providence, one of the nation's largest chains. The Times got ahold of the training materials for a program called Rev-Up, ordered by Providence executives and created by McKinsey.

Training materials instructed administrative staff to tell patients — no matter how poor — that “payment is expected,” according to documents included in Washington’s lawsuit and training materials obtained by The Times. Six current and former hospital employees said in interviews that they had been told not to mention the financial aid that states like Washington required Providence to provide.

One training document, titled “Don’t accept the first No,” led staff through a series of questions to ask patients. The first was “How would you like to pay that today?” If that did not work, employees were told to ask for half the balance. Failing that, staff could offer to set up a payment plan. Only as a last resort, the documents explained, should workers tell patients that they may be eligible for financial assistance.

Another training document explained what to do if patients expressed surprise that a charitable hospital was pressuring them to pay. The suggested response: “We are a nonprofit. However, we want to inform our patients of their balances as soon as possible and help the hospital invest in patient care by reducing billing costs.”

Staff members were then instructed to shift the conversation to “how would you like to take care of this today?”

The Times found that this approach was used even on patients who were entitled to free care. Providence collected a ton of COVID relief money and sits on $10 billion in investment money.  The whole story is pretty rage-inducing, particularly when you get to the parts about people who are ruined by their health care debts. Non-profits measure their charity care; the national average is 2% of expenses spent on charity; Providence currently sits at 1%.

It is not encouraging to imagine this model extended to education in a world in which folks have to come up with their own education for their kids, perhaps with a pittance of a voucher that will only allow them to purchase bare bones education care. Meanwhile, private and voucher schools would be coming up with new and better ways to hustle money out of the customer base. Charter and private schools would be consolidated, gathered into chains owned in some cases by hedge funds and private equity firms that would just squeeze and squeeze  They'd have the pile of money needed to hire world-class consulting firms like McKinsey to get every last drop out of the poorer families (unrestrained by any sort of ethical concerns). 

The future reflected in health care is an ugly one, in which an industry is shifted from serving the needs of human beings to enhancing its pile of money and paying its executives exorbitant amounts of money.

What will happen in a future in which families are required to purchase education on their own, and they don't have enough money to do it, or at least not enough to purchase more than a very basic substandard "product." It's a future I'd just as soon avoid. 

Alito's Time Bomb And Education

Writing for The Hill, Andrew Koppelman outlines a time bomb set by Justice Samuel Alito in one of his opinions, and while Koppelman doesn't connect it to education, I can read this particular writing on the education wall.

Koppelman is a law professor at Northwestern University and the writer of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, so you can see where he's coming from.

The time bomb was set back in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in which SCOTUS found that Hobby Lobby did not have to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees, arguing that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act meant that "religious objectors" were exempt from federal law unless the burden on them "is necessary to a compelling government interest. Koppelman explains the bomb:

There was already an accommodation for religious nonprofits, which used an alternative mechanism to guarantee workers the disputed coverage. If that program were extended to Hobby Lobby Stores, Justice Alito wrote for the court, the impact on its employees would be “precisely zero.”

But Alito did not stop there. His opinion mused that the “most straightforward way” of providing coverage “would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.” He rejected the Obama administration’s claim that “RFRA cannot be used to require creation of entirely new programs.”

That sentence came back to haunt us in this year's case Braidwood Management v. Becerra--that's the one in which employers argued they shouldn't have to provide insurance that covers HIV, contraception, HPV vaccine, counseling for STDs and drug use because that would make them "complicit" in homosexual activity, sex outside of marriage, and drug use. 

The plaintiffs found a friendly Texas judge who invoked the Hobby Lobby decision:

Alito’s dictum was the basis for Judge O’Connor’s decision last week. Quoting “Hobby Lobby,” O’Connor wrote that the Biden administration had not “shown that the government would be unable to assume the cost of providing [HIV preventive] drugs to those who are unable to obtain them due to their employers’ religious objections.”

Boom--no coverage.

In Hobby Lobby, Justice Kennedy had expressed concern that the reasoning could force all sorts of new programs on the government. Justice Ginsberg feared that there would be no "stopping point to the 'let government pay' alternative. Suppose an employer's sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work?"

Or, I would add, suppose their religious belief is offended by students from the Wrong Background or whose parents aren't properly married, or a whole laundry list of reasons to discriminate against students. Kennedy was worried about decisions forcing the government to create new programs, but when it comes to education, the government program is already in place--public schools.

So Alito's time bomb could be used for any sort of "sincerely held" religious-based discrimination that charters or voucher-collecting schools care to impose. "Well, they can always just go to public school," becomes a free pass for any sort of discrimination, bigotry and repression they care to indulge in, and public schools become a dumping ground, resources stripped for choice programs. Not that this isn't already happening (see here and here), but Koppelman's argument suggests one more legal protection for this twisting of the promise of public education.

People of faith ought to oppose this sort of reasoning. When "sincerely held" religious belief becomes a free pass for all manner of misbehavior, it's only a matter of time before religion becomes overrun with scam artists and grifters who find it convenient to suddenly develop "sincerely held" beliefs. Same as it ever was. 

It's not the books that suffer

I've started trying to avoid using the phrase "book bans" or "banning books." Here's why.

I understand that the phrases carry power and punch. They're short and sharp and they have associations; nobody ever thinks that someone who's proposing a book ban is the good guy. For that matter, nobody who wants to ban a book ever says, "We want to ban that book."

But I'd like to suggest a refocus on the language. I don't have a punchy substitute, but I'm tending toward "reading restrictions," and here's why.

A book ban is about a book. We imagine a book being pulled off a shelf, maybe even thrown on a fire.

But the real damage done is not that a book has been shackled. The actual damage is that some human being has been restricted from reading about certain ideas or certain strings of words.

This is particularly true these days in which many of the folks who are trying to restrict student reading rights aren't targeting particular books so much as they are targeting particular ideas or types of people. The specific books being banned are incidental. In many cases, we're seeing something like Texas State Representative Matt Krause's big list of naughty books, which was clearly assembled not because of objections to particular books, but by doing a blunt instrument search for books that contained particular words or phrases and therefor, he presumed, certain forbidden ideas.

These gag laws and moves to restrict aren't about limiting the movement and activity of books; they're about restricting the reading (or more accurately, the thinking) of students. 

While locking up a few books may offend the sensibilities of some, I suspect a larger group of people would be alarmed if we started fitting all school age children with blindfolds and ear plugs.

That's what these reading restrictions and gag laws are all about-- forbidding students from seeing or hearing anything about certain parts of human experience, about the reality of the world as it is today. 

It's not about banning books; it's about restricting the freedoms of children. Yes, as a parent you absolutely set the guardrails of experience around your kids as you see fit. But as soon as you want to limit the freedom of everybody else's children, you're just one more kind of tyrant, one more person trying to exercise authority over others. 

It's not about parental rights when it's about one set of parents infringing on the rights of other parents to decide on the range of experience for their own children (note: the existence of a book does not infringe on your parental right to limit the experience of your own child). 

The term "book ban" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now, collecting a wide range of actions an initiatives. But what unites them all is their real purpose--to restrict students' experience and limit their freedom to read and learn.