What Stands In The Way Of School Choice?

To hear some modern reformsters talk, you would think that the major obstacles to a world of school choice and "education freedom" are the public school system and its supporters. But there are significant obstacles standing in the way of a happy world in which families can send students to the school of their choice, and those obstacles have nothing to do with the public school system at all.

1) Cost.

In Connecticut, the average private K-12 school tuition is $23,980; $33,610 for high school. And that's an average. Top private schools cost big bucks just for tuition, and that's before you get to all the other extra expenses. There are schools that have generous aid programs (Phillips Exeter Academy will give you a full ride if your family income is under $75K). 

But the cost of many private schools is prohibitive. You can argue that, well, a top quality education costs a lot of money to provide, but please don't do that if you're also a person arguing that public schools already get way too much money. 

The notion that a voucher with a few thousand dollars will somehow offset this issue is silly. It turns out that some small corners of the world have implemented real choice voucher programs, and they are expensive as hell. This is not a mystery; the amount of money that is barely (if that) adequate to fund one school system cannot be expected to fund multiple parallel systems. 

2) Restrictive admissions.

We've seen it over and over and over. If you are atheist same-gender parents of a child with special needs, good luck finding a school of choice for your child. 

This issue has only gotten worse as First Amendment separation of church and state has been eroded in favor of "I can't exercise my religion unless I'm able to discriminate freely against those with whom I disagree." Education savings account (super-vouchers) bills now routinely include a non-interference clause, promising that just because you accept voucher funds, that doesn't mean you have to abide by any of the rules that government must follow. Carson v. Makin on top of Espinoza make it clear that a religious school can discriminate against some families freely and with tax dollar backing. It is school's choice.

Discrimination on religious and ideological grounds is only the most obvious portion of this. Even in the charter sector, school operators put a variety of hurdles in the paths of families to help weed out the less desirable. An absence of support programs for students with special needs as well as push out programs keep away the students who are more expensive to educate. Cutting costs by not providing transportation or lunch also block access for some students.

Private and charter schools put hundreds of barriers at their doors, restricting just who can gets to have a choice. 

3) Irrational marriage with free marketeering

One of the great unquestioned assumptions of the modern school choice movement is that school choice must somehow be welded to a free market approach. But there's no reason that choice has to employ free market mechanisms, which are themselves in conflict with the idea of choice.

The free market is about picking winners and losers. Every business plan covers the question of "which customers will we serve, and which will we pass on by." Free marketeers argue that the market produces a wide range of options so that everyone has a choice, but reality does not reflect that idea. Take cable television; after a brief initial flurry of wide variety and available options, the various channels have all converged on large sectors of the profitable middle. 

The free market is not interested in outliers and customers who require special attention (unless they have special buckets of money). If the goal is to get a quality education to every child in the country, the free market is notably ill-equipped to do that. 

Worshippers of the free market tend to put the desires and freedoms of operators ahead of the needs and rights of students themselves; this continues to make charters and private schools less appealing to a large portion of their potential customer base.

4) People don't want choice.

People don't want choices; they want what they want. I don't look across the room at my wife and think, "This is the most extraordinary, wonderful woman in the world, and I can't think of a better possible life partner, but I still wish I had choices." When a restaurant offers my favorite food, I'm not disappointed that the rest of the menu isn't appealing.

People call for choices only as a means to the end of getting what they want. Choice has no value to them in and of itself.

The market is never going to push for more choice; it's going to push for That Thing I Want. We can see that in the current culture war landscape. Choicers of the Moms for Liberty type are not calling for more choices in school libraries; they're calling for certain choices not to be available for anybody. Culture war choicers are very clear in advocating for certain choices in education to be available to nobody, and are also clear that certain choices (e.g. Christian prayer) should be the only choice some folks have. Parents opposed to trans students should have a choice; parents of a trans student should not have any choice. Despite the frequent use of words like choice and freedom, it's clear that choice is not really the objective at all.

These four factors represent some of the greatest obstacles to School Choice Utopia, and yet.

We do not hear choicers calling on private to lower costs and offer more scholarships. We do not hear choicers calling on private and charter schools to stop discrimination and adopt more inclusive policies. We do not hear choicers talking about how some of the goals of a choice system could be accomplished inside the public system. We do not hear choicers declaring that a true school choice system can only exist if choices are available for every single student. Nor do we ever hear choicers saying that to achieve this goal, the country must be prepared to increase its spending on education. 

Instead we get a lot of rhetoric about how the public system and teachers and "entrenched special interests" are the big obstacle to school choice. It's as if some school choice advocates are more interested in what they can dismantle than in what they can build. 

How About Merit Pricing?

Merit pay for teachers is the bad idea that won't go away, no matter how many times it fails to produce any kind of positive results at all. 

It can't possibly work. For one thing, merit pay requires profit--the source of a widget manufacturer's bonus is the extra money that the company made selling widgets last year, and public schools never generate extra profits. For another thing, the premise of merit pay is that teachers have a filing cabinet full of sure-fire educating ideas that they are sitting on until the day they are motivated by extra money. Merit pay shares with many reformster ideas the notion that teachers could teach plenty harder if they were just properly motivated and/or threatened.

But merit pay appears to also offer a means to lower personnel costs, and that's always an appealing idea. 

And there's a bit of appeal in the idea, because everyone remembers at least one teacher that they hated. Why should that sucky teacher get the same pay as a great one?

The root problem remains--how do we separate the teacher wheat from the educational chaff? Somebody, somehow, has to make that judgment.

When we say, "Let's pay each teacher what she's worth," that really means "Let's pay each teacher what I think she's worth," and that really means "Let's pay each teacher what I want to pay her."

"I mean," the real reasoning goes, "I'll come up with some way to justify it, maybe even use some numbers or something. But I want to pay this teacher what I want to pay her, and no more."

Sure, I can see the appeal. In fact, it's so appealing, I have a suggestion. Instead of calling it merit pay, let's call it merit pricing, in which those who are paying the bills get to decide how much the bill should be. Let's go ahead and adopt this idea of merit pricing for everything. 

I have a Netflix subscription, but it's just not that great any more, and I happen to think some of the content is lacking merit, so I'm going to set the merit pricing for my subscription at around a buck a month.

My groceries have been a bit more expensive lately, and it's just plain old blah food, so when I check out next time, I'll go ahead and decide how much money to pay--based, of course, on the merit of the groceries I've selected.

Next time I buy a car, I think I'll decide how meritorious the vehicle is, and set a price accordingly. And my next medical procedure--definitely waiting to see how that turns out so I can pay accordingly. Oh--and I am super-unconvinced that there is any merit at all in the parking spaces in town, so I'll be dropping those prices big time. 

Extending merit pricing to all aspects of life, not just how we pay teachers, would be liberating. Well, liberating except for everyone being paid. But they would up their game because there's no doubt that if a product was stuffed full of extra merit, people would spontaneously decide to pay more for it, just because they wanted to, without even being asked! 

It's a mystery to me why there should be such a big overlap between free market believers and advocates for merit pricing, which seems to be all about thwarting the invisible hand and keeping it from setting a price for anything. But then some folks have always been awfully reluctant to let the invisible hand set prices for labor. 

Your All-Purpose NAEP News Release

It's time once again to greet the release of another set of data from the NAEP testing machine, which means everyone is warming up their Hot Take generator. But if, like me, you're getting tired of writing a response to the latest NAEPery, here's a handy news release that will let you mad lib your way to NAEPy wisdom.

The new scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known as The Nation's Report Card, have been released, providing important data about [insert your preferred education policy area]. The recent crisis in [select your favorite policy-adjacent crisis] has clearly created a burgeoning issue of [select whatever Bad Thing you feel will most scare your audience in the direction of your preferred policy]. 

Says [head of your organization], "The new scores provide important evidence that now is the time for [insert whatever policy action your group always supports]. Clearly the [rise/drop/stagnation] in scores among [whichever subgroup cherry picking best suits your point] proves exactly what we have been arguing for [however long you've been at this.]"

[Insert paragraph of data carefully selected and crunched for your purposes. Add a graph if you like. People really dig graphs.]

"This is a clear indication," says [your favorite go-to education expert], "that it is long past time to [do that thing your organization has been trying to get people to do for years]. Clearly [our preferred solution] is needed." [Insert further sales pitch here as needed.]

You can expand on this if you wish, but make sure that you definitely do not--

* provide context for the data that you include

* ever explain that "proficient" on NAEP represents well above grade level; just go with the assumption that it means "adequate" or "on grade level"

* offer perspective from NAEP's many critics

* absolutely never ever reference the fact that the NAEP folks are extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else.

As always, the main lesson of NAEP is that contrary to the expectations of so many policy wonks, cold hard data does not actually solve a thing.

The NAEP remains a data-rich Rorschach test that tells us far more about the people interpreting the data than it does about the people from whom the data was collected. Button up your overcoat, prepare for greater-than-usual pearl-clutching and solution-pitching from all the folks who still think the pandemic shutdown is a great opportunity to do [whatever it is they have already been trying to do]. 

Doug Mastriano's Fake Parental Rights Bill

Last week Doug Mastriano held a campaign event masquerading as a hearing for a parental rights bill so empty and vague that its only possible use could be as a campaign prop.

Mastriano signaled a whole year ago that he was going to wade into the whole "parental rights" thing with his own version of a "legislate the gay away" bill. Soon thereafter, he proposed SB 996, which was turned over to the State Government committee on January 4, 2022. 

And yet, the time to hold a hearing on the bill is just before time to vote for Mastriano or his opponent for Pennsylvania's governor's seat.

The bill itself is a brief nothingburger. The Parental Rights Protection Act is 41 lines long. 6 lines give its name. 16 lines define the terms "commonwealth agency" and "non-commonwealth agency." Section 3 in its entirety says:

(a) General rule.--The liberty of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, care and welfare of the parent's child is a fundamental right.

(b) Infringement.--Neither a Commonwealth agency nor a non-Commonwealth agency may infringe upon the right under subsection (a) without demonstrating that the law or ordinance is narrowly tailored to meet a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means.

In 8 lines, we get the applicability of the law, and two lines to tell us that the law would take effect in 60 days.

The Mastriano campaign has maintained its unwillingness to speak to the press, and so has offered no clarification of the bill's intent or function. But the parade of witnesses at the hearing brought the usual list of grievances--mask mandates, trans student using rest rooms, "pornographic" books in the school library, and "pronoun games."  The bill, absent any specifics, allows all of these folks to imagine that it would provide them some relief, without including any language that opponents could point to as objectionable. 

To the charge that the hearing only invited supporters to testify, it was pointed out that former state health secretary Rachel Levine was invited, but declined. Levine is one of the few openly transgender government officials in the U.S.

More specific parental rights legislation has been proposed in Pennsylvania, such as HB 2813, which follows more closely the national template of other Don't Say Gay bills forbidding discussion of "gender orientation and sexual identity." 

What would the bill actually do? Nobody really knows. Does this mean I can get satisfaction when my kid's teacher shows a Disney movie when I don't allow them in my home? Or when my kid has to use  Chromebook and we are an Apple household? Will I be able to do something if the teacher mentions Jesus or God and we don't do religion at our house? What would qualify as an infringement, and what could a parent who felt the law had been broken do? Call the police? File a lawsuit? Should they report the agency to the proper part of the state government--and if so, which department would that be? What penalty would be imposed? 

Mastriano says the bill would "restore common sense" in public schools. The bill does not offer any explanation of exactly what "common sense" means. 

This is a proposal for a law so broad and vague as to be nearly meaningless, with no enforcement mechanisms included. But it did allow Mastriano's flagging campaign to stage an event in Harrisburg close to election time. 

Federal Don't Say Gay? What are we really not talking about?

Driving LGBTQ folks back under cover or into the closet seems to be the current wave of the storm that started with CRT panic. And the stakes just keep getting higher. Which is why we need to remember what these Don't Say gay laws actually say. 

Florida's department of education has indicated that teachers who "intentionally provide instruction" about gender identity and sexuality will lose their teaching license. Which is nuts enough, but now we've got a proposal for a national law. 

The bill was introduced by Rep Mike Johnson of Louisianna. His previous legislative high points include a bill to allow discrimination against LGBTQ persons. He was on Trump's impeachment defense team, and was one of the 126 House Republicans who signed on the lawsuit to contest the 2020 election results. The bill has been co-sponsored by thirty other GOP House members*

The bill is all about forbidding the use of federal tax dollars on any kind of sexually-oriented program for children under 10 The bill does spell out that nude adults, stripping and "lewd or lascivious dancing" are not okay. The preamble of the bill mentions that drag queen story hour at a library is a bad thing, but what if the drag queen reads a non-sexual story in a non-sexual way? Do the bill's sponsors suggest that when a man puts on women's clothes, that automatically broadcasts sexuality? The bill's official definition lumps many things together:

The term ‘‘sexually-oriented material’’ means any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects

(The bill also includes a definition of stripping, just in case you were fuzzy on that one.)

As is the current trend, the federal bill proposes private right of action, meaning that any person who gets to feeling aggrieved by something vaguely related to the bill can drag someone into court. I guess we'll be living with the Texas Workaround for a while, as conservatives have found it useful to dodge government responsibility for enforcing crappy laws.by deputizing litigious citizens.

One huge problem--for the umpty-zillionth time--is the lumping in of the terms "gender identity" and "sexual orientation."

The Washington Post's Kate Cohen absolutely nailed it in her column about Florida's OG version of this gag law. Speaking of some of the politicians who backed it:

The truth is they don’t bother to use the words correctly because they don’t believe the words apply to them. They seem to think that only gay people have a sexual orientation and only trans people have a gender identity. Which is sort of like thinking that only foreign people have an accent. Or that “ethnic” means any food you didn’t grow up eating.

Opponents of these bills understand their true intent not because we are equally narrow-minded but because the culture we live in still sees “straight” as “normal” and gender as “boy,” “girl” or “made up.” We’re trying to change that culture, but we know it well. We know whom these laws mean to silence or shame. We get it.

A local school in my area is hosting a "Donuts with Dad" event, in which fathers are encouraged to take some time out from work (because, you know, they're dads) and come hang out with their children at school. This not-at-all-unusual event is so loaded with statements about gender identity and sexual orientation (Dads are males, and every child has neither more nor less than one of them, for starters) that, in many other school districts, it has simply collapsed under its own weight. But under the proposed federal bill, I could just go ahead and sue the district over this. 

You can find examples of this kind of thing, easily, every single day. But purveyors of these Don't Say Gay bills are sure that straight, traditional roles for men and women are not gender roles or sexual identities, but just "the way things are" and need no explanation, examination or justification, while everything else is a deviance from what Just Is and therefor must be explained and justified. As Cohen wrote, for some people, only LGBTQ persona have a gender identity or sexual orientation.

Furthermore, if the words mean what the folks who write and support such bills think they mean, then this bill outlaws any mention of transgender folks, as well as any LGBTQ folks. Under this definition of "sexually-oriented material," Peppa Pig episodes with the lesbian polar bear couple would qualify as sexually-oriented material. Anything that a child brought from a home, if home includes a pair of same gender parents, would be sexually-oriented material. By the law's definition, the mere mention of LGBTQ people makes a work sexually oriented and thereby verboten.

Let's roll the calendar back, they say, to the days when nobody had a gender identity or sexual orientation because everyone knew to settle into the default and Cole Porter wrote lovely songs and the Village People made that great song even your uncle can dance to and that Paul Lynde is always hilarious and maybe we could even enjoy some jazz from Billie Tipton with our spinster great aunt and her long time best friend and not ever have to think about that LGBTQ stuff instead pretending that it just doesn't exist, because of course there's only one real way to be in the world, and we all participate in that one way, right? No need to talk about gender identity or sexual orientation ever. Easier to have gags for you than blindfolds for me. 

I'm just sitting here waiting for the first big court case when some parents take a school district to court for using Berenstain Bears to indoctrinate children into certain gender identities and sexual orientations. 

*Representatives Bob Good (VA), Brian Babin (TX), Jeff Duncan (SC), Vicky Hartzler (MO), Doug Lamborn (CO), Markwayne Mullin (OK), Lauren Boebert (CO), Gregory Steube (FL), Debbie Lesko (AZ), Daniel Webster (FL), Ralph Norman (SC), Randy Weber (TX), Van Taylor (TX), Mary Miller (IL), Lance Gooden (TX), Louie Gohmert (TX), Glenn Grothman (WI), William Timmons (SC), Clay Higgins (LA), Steve Womack (AR), Tracey Mann (KS), John Joyce (PA), Scott Franklin (FL), Burgess Owens (UT), Matt Rosendale (MT), Russ Fulcher (ID), Tom Tiffany (WI), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Doug LaMalfa (CA), Andrew Clyde (GA), Michael Guest (MS), and Dan Bishop (NC) joined Representative Johnson in cosponsoring the legislation.

ICYMI: Leaving On A Jet Plane Edition (10/16)

Today I'm hopping (well, more likely, given the state of air travel these days, trudging miserably) onto a plane to travel to Seattle to meet the newest member of the Institute. She's already a month old and I haven't met her yet. Consequently, things are probably going to be quiet around here this week. Here's some reading to tide you over.

Something of a Rut

Blue Cereal Education with a piece that takes an honest look at how it feels when your teaching wagon seems a bit stuck.

Watch out for Ron DeSantis

Okay, if you're a regular reader here, you probably don't need to be told. But Jan Resseger has assembled a list of DeSantis highlights, to be remembered when he makes his play for national office.

Don't say gay is working as intended

The father of a trans child in Florida reports that the new law is just as damaging as you expected it to be. In the Washington Post.

Cry on the Last Day of School, Too

Jose Luis Vilson with a great piece of appreciation for Abbott Elementary and a reminder of why it's the show teachers need right now. 

Lawsuits put school choice on Vermont Legislature’s agenda 

Vermont has had a quiet little version of school choice for a while now, but, as this piece from Valley News explains, the Vermont legislature may have to have a bit of a talk about what happens next.

The true genius of tech leaders

Not about education, but this piece by Cory Doctorow is certainly about some of the folks who think they ought to be running education, and what the true secret of success might be (spoiler: it's not their superior wisdom about everything).

Young people need experiences that boost their mental health

Some unsurprising research results suggest that maybe tens need to get out and do stuff to lead fuller, healthier lives.

Who's left out of the learning loss debate?

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes for the New Yorker about the flap over school closings, learning loss, etc etc, and if you can bear to wade through all of this again, there are some good insights contained.

More than politics

Meanwhile, at Chalkbeat, Patrick Wall points to research that shows that no, school closings and openings were not all about politics after all. 

Inside the Struggle to Rebuild America’s Black Teaching Workforce

At EdWeek, Benjamin Herold takes a look at ab ambitious program to get more Black faces in front of classrooms. 

What next for New York Charter schools?

At Education Next. Yes, I know, but as with his book about Success Academy, Robert Pondiscio has written something worth reading regardless of your stance. 

Meanwhile, I was busy this week at Forbes with three new pieces:

--A look at how the pendulum swings on reading policy, and a new paper by P. L. Thomas that helps clarify the current state of the reading wars

--A look at a cool new data tool that shows what kind of educational opportunity your state offers, and also shows that Pennsylvania has the worst opportunity gap in the country.

--And check out a documentary film about the travails of the Chester Upland school district in Pennsylvania. 

"It's about the passion, not about the paper"

That exceptionally silly quote is from Robert Abel, the Dallas schools Chief of Human Capital Management (a silly job title). It comes from an AP article about the growing move to "ease job requirements" for teachers in many states. You will be unsurprised to learn that Abel has never taught in a classroom; he graduated with a BA in molecular biology and was, somehow, a Vice Principal in DeSoto, TX, three years later. 

But let's not pick on Abel, who simply articulated an idea that is not uncommon. Teaching is all about passion and being called and just, you know, caring real hard. Lots of folks are spouting this line these days, including, unfortunately, people who think they are supporting teachers. But if all it takes is passion, well, then, anybody can be a teacher. Anybody at all.

Doesn't that make sense?

I've been dragged into court. Don't get me one of those lawyers who has gone to school and studied and practice law for years--just get me someone who's passionate about courtrooms and lawsuits and stuff. 

My beloved partner needs a major operation on their spleen. Don't get me one of those surgeons who just has a bunch of papers from some med school--just get me someone who's passionate about spleens and cutting things. 

I mean, we have shortages to deal with. There's a nursing shortage--let's just start hiring people who are passionate about being around sick people. There's a truck driver shortage, but hey--let's just issue big rig licenses to anyone who has ever driven any vehicle and is passionate about traveling. There's a rural doctor shortage--let's just let anyone who's really passionate about working with sick people be a doctor. And there's actually a plumber shortage--let's just hire someone who's passionate about water to do the job.

What could possibly go wrong?

This is the same kind of baloney that some people spew about art, that one just has to feel real hard and art pops out, as if there is not a world of technique and skill and study and practice required to enable that artful popping. 

This is not about "easing job requirements." It's about redefining the job and thereby expanding the candidate pool. Ray Kroc did this for McDonalds by redefining "cook" as "somebody who flips a switch, drops a fry basket, and assembles a product according to instructions." Redefining the job gets you a larger candidate pool, which in turn lowers the cost of hiring or replacing people--you know, that pesky human capital. 

"Passion not paper" doesn't even make sense in this context, because people who are passionate about a pursuit generally direct that passion into action and study and growth. Imagine someone who says, "I am really passionate about playing the trombone, but I don't ever actually do it." 

Teach for America was founded on the premise of "passion not paper," except that only a small percentage of its temp workforce was actually passionate about teaching (as opposed to, say, being passionate about building their resume), and you can spot those people because they actually stayed and did the work to become real teachers. 

So I'm not sure exactly what slice of human capital Abel is talking about, which persons are out there saying, "I am really passionate about teaching, but I have not taken any steps in my life to pursue that passion." If someone tells you, "I feel very passionate about you, but not enough to call or see you or listen to you or spend time with you," are you thinking that person is relationship material?

Look, I'm not about to defend the current teacher prep pipeline as a flawless source of training. Some college teacher prep programs are crap. I also recognize that some schools (like the one in the story that hasn't had a qualified math teacher for a year) face dire situations that demand some kind of solution right now. I believe that programs that create a path for people who have worked in schools as support personnel and have come to love and respect the work can be a plus. And I have known second-career teachers who were good.

Does passion matter? Sure. It's passion that fuels the engine that gives you the strength to power through the hard work, the long practice, the deep study, the acquisition of skill, the will to navigate the crappy days--all the things that get you the paper. Passion, by itself, is not enough.

But I also know that (as the article acknowledges) the new bunch of unqualified pseudo-teachers are not going to end up in schools filled with students from wealthy white families. Redefining the teaching profession so that any warm body can be placed in a classroom is going to have negative effects (exacerbated because these unqualified warm bodies tend to have a high rate of turnover), and those negative effects are going to be felt by students on the bottom end of the socio-economic scale, the students who already get the short end of the stick. They don't need passion and heart and gooey excuses--they need people who know what the hell they're doing and can do it well.