Taxonomy of Education Disruptors (2022 Edition)

First of all, I wish we could retire the term "reformers" as a catch-all, because it's no longer truly applicable. Much of what reformsters pushed is now status quo (e.g. high stakes testing), which means that I'm technically an advocate for education reform. Meanwhile, many folks whose predecessors were ed reformsters are no longer claiming that mantle. 

The world of ed reform was never a uniform unified whole. Alliances between folks with different aims, folks with different styles of advocacy, even alliances between unprincipled opportunists and sincere true believers have always marked the reformster territory, and many of those alliances have not stood the tests of time and changes fortunes (not to measure the Trump administration). 

So what does the landscape look like now? Here are some of the groups of education disruptors out there these days. 

The Data Miners

This group has always been part of the picture, and it's important to remember that they have not gone away. They used to have lots of vocal allies, but they have learned to keep a lower profile. But behind every single digitized, computer-delivered education program is a whole industry excited about the data that can be thereby collected. The dream of conception-to-casket pipeline of data still lives. 

Every time a digitized education tool shows up, someone should be asking what will happen to the data it collects. How will it be kept secure? How will it be shared? Pro tip: "We will only share the data with trusted partners" is a weasel-word answer that means "We will do whatever the hell we want." Another pro tip: The data that is being captured from your five year old today? Nobody anywhere on planet earth has the slightest clue what will become of that data twenty years from now. Question every digital tool that your school proposes to use.

Charter School Advocates

Pity the charter school advocates. When vouchers were off the table, charters had the support of a lot of folks who hoped they would be a Next Best Thing, a foot in the door. But now that vouchers are having their day in state legislators, Freedom Fans have left charters behind. Which is not to say that there isn't strong support for charters; they're still a great way to get your hands on taxpayer dollars, and there are still those who believe that charters are the best way to lift some students out of underfunded, under-resourced public school systems. 

But charter supporters are in an awkward spot. They've long pretended to be public schools except when it suits them not to be. SCOTUS may soon rule on this distinction, but in the meantime, charters' desire to be "public" puts them in the path of those who want to burn the public system to the ground. The charter movement is where most of the people who actually want school choice can be found these days.

The Fighters for (Some) Parents Rights

First they wanted schools open and masks put away. Then they went after a straw version of critical race theory, which somehow expanded to include anything about race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. You've heard about Moms for Liberty, but they are just one of the more visible groups of culture warriors. You've heard of Betsy DeVos, but she's just one of the more visible rich elites backing this play. 

It's easy to mistake these people for choice fans because they use some of the rhetoric and they back vouchers. But this group is not interested in school choice. Instead, they would like to commandeer and/or tear down the public system. Their dream appears to be a world in which getting an education for your kid is your own problem; your child will be entitled to the best education you can afford for them. Vouchers will take a bit of the sting off self-serve education for the poors (but not enough for them to afford top schools), and provide a nice kickback for the non-poors. The government will not be allowed to tell vendors what they may or may not do, what religions they may push, what people they may discriminate (though culture warriors will work hard to eradicate all choices of which they do not approve). And government will not be forcing me to pay too many tax dollars to educate Those Peoples' Children. 

Implicit in this crowds' beliefs is that only certain values should be represented in education. They are not pro-choice, just as they are not pro-democracy. Education (and government) are legitimate only when they align with the Right Values. And the political opportunists allied with this movement are busy convincing anyone who will listen that public schools are aligned with all the wrong values and can't be trusted and so must be abandoned, dismantled, and replaced with an unregulated free marketplace-- no matter what other families and parents want.

Voucher Advocates

See above. Voucher advocacy is largely reduced to its true final form--a desire to defund public education, remove government from any and all education policy, and reduce education to a commodity that citizens must procure on their own. The key problem with selling that was answering the average citizen's question, "Why would we want to do that?" The [Some] Parents' Rights movement has provided an answer for that question, so voucher fans are going for it.

Techno Education

The pandemic did not help the cause of computer-delivered education business, but it's still around because A) we are pretty sure that the youngs think computers are really cool, B) computer-delivered education answers the question "What kind of education am I supposed to get for my kid with this tiny little voucher," C) software is cheap and doesn't unionize and so would solve all our HR problems and D) collecting that data!

Free Marketeers

The reformy movement used to include lots of people who said that choice must be pursued because it would bring with it better student achievement, more equity, better results for everyone, and some folks still try to make those points from time to time, but after twenty years the data simply doesn't support any notion that choice makes life better for students, nor does it save money, nor provide any of the other benefits.

As those arguments have worn away, some choice advocates have fallen back to what is, I think, a more honest argument. They believe that choice is, in and of itself, an important value that should be part of the education landscape regardless of outcomes, because it's just right. 

However--and I've long puzzled over this--that invariably comes with a belief that choice must be yoked to some sort of free market mechanisms. The free market is a lousy match for any critical human service. It's not evil; it's just a bad match for any system that needs to deliver an essential service to all members of society. 

Science of Reading

Want the emperor of the universe to force everyone to use SOR in their school, because whatever they're doing its's probably terrible and wrong. Do not engage. Just walk on by.

Test O Crats

They emerge every time that new test results are released. We've made some progress here; after the last NAEP test results were released, some folks actually managed to discuss them without using phrases like "student achievement" or "school effectiveness." But the spread of Learning Loss as a marketing term over the last year tells us that there are still people insisting that the only purpose of schools is to get students to crank out higher test scores. It's particularly appealing to folks who think anything that matters can (and must) be measured (makes me wonder how they measure family success at home), and to people who want to market a solution that can move those numbers.

Nothing pushed on education since the days of A Nation At Risk has done more damage to actual education than high stakes testing. It should be fought at every possible level, from pointing out that the pursuit of test scores has not improved anything to demanding that people say "raise test scores" instead of "improve student achievement." 

Improve student outcomes

There are days when I think that maybe, just maybe, the disintegration of the education reform movement has left room in the center for people who actually want education to work, and by "work" I don't mean "raise test scores" or "creates entrepreneurial opportunities for education-adjacent businesses." I mean "help students learn and become their best selves while growing in understanding of what it means to be fully human in the world." 

Crazy hopeful talk, I know, but I like to think that there's a possibility that supporters of public education and people who have been associated (through personal preference or by employment) with the reformster movement could have productive conversations, precisely because some of the most destructive disruptors have moved farther afringe. Kind of like planting a garden in pasture after a wildfire has come through. 

I think there are people out there who actually want to do the best by students and aren't just saying so to back their latest political or marketing play. I know being cranky is on brand for me, but I've always been a hopeful kind of crank.

This isn't the full range of disruptor out there (prediction: within twelve hours of posting this, I will realize there's a group I need to add). And as the education debates have atomized all over the country, your local experience will vary (some folks are up to their neck in anti-freedom groups like Moms for Liberty, and some are not). 

PA: Anti-Union Halloween Trick

Well, they aren't subtle, anyway.

Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY

That's from the flyer that Freedom Foundation's Ohio office (yes, Ohio) sent out to teachers union members in PA for Halloween. 

Freedom Foundation is one of several active anti-union operations in the US. FF is all about fighting unions, specifically "government unions" who represent "a permanent lobby for bigger government." They've opposed pay raises for state workers, pensions, and health benefits. They want to liberate "public employees from political exploitation."

If you're getting a sense of what their actual mission is, a fundraising letter from August of 2015 makes it plain:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. You can get more of this message from the work of CEO Tom McCabe. The goal is to neutralize unions as a political force, specifically as a force to counter the "shrink government till it's small enough to drown in a bathtub crowd." The group's funders include the Bradley Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust. They're connected to ALEC, the corporate legislation mill, and the State Policy Network, a network of conservative advocates and think tanks.

The newest flyer argues that teachers should leave the union because it didn't get them pay raises that match the current rate of inflation (a curious argument from folks who certainly don't want teachers to get that large a raise). There's a simple detachable postcard to send to their office (again, in Ohio, even though the organization has a Pennsylvania office). It's nominally addressed to the PSEA president and includes a reminder that by Pennsylvania law, you are absolutely entitled to all the benefits of union membership even if you don't belong to the union. 

This kind of thing started roughly five seconds after the Supreme Court ruled on Janus, the case that established that members of government worker unions should not have to pay even a fair share. Groups like Freedom Foundation have filed numerous suits to get the home and email addresses of government employees, including teachers, precisely for this purpose. Heck, in the summer of 2018, Freedom Foundation sent folks door to teacher door to try to talk teachers into quitting the union. 

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (heavily supported by the DeVos family), For Kids and Country (launched by Rebecca Friedrichs who rode point for the failed pre-Janus lawsuit), and Speak Up For Teachers, launched by the Center for Union Facts a dark money group run by union-buster Richard Berman have all taken a shot at separating teachers from their union. 

Ironic that the pitch includes a reference to vampires, because the 2018 round of this anti-union push reminded me of just that.

There's a scene in many vampire movies. Someone (usually not the hero) is holding a vampire at bay with a cross. The vampire locks eyes with him. "You don't need to do that. You are perfectly safe from me, and I know that cross is just starting to feel heavy. Heavier and heavier. Why don't you just put it down." And the camera closes in on our intrepid human-- will he put the cross down?

Look, I'm the last person to argue in favor of unquestioning loyalty to PSEA, which occasionally pulls a bonehead move. But being your own union puts you on the same wisdom level as being your own lawyer. I'd love to live in a world in which management is so benevolent and altruistic that teachers don't need any representation; I would also love to live in a world in which I got back all my hair. But here we are in this world. And no--the assorted 'alternative" organizations do not provide anything like the coverage and protection of the actual unions. 

And while the decision to become a free rider of the union can be criticized on ethical grounds, I'd also point out the practical problem with depending on rainstorm protection from a big pavilion roof even as you are sawing away at the supports for that structure. Getting people to quit the union is, first last and always, about weakening the union. If you think that would be great, simply look at the states where unions have been neutered--less job protection, les pay, less voice in the profession. 

Meanwhile, in other states, Freedom Foundation is spreading lies about what teachers do in school. These are rough times to be without a union if you happen to be in a state with teacher gag laws that forbid you from mentioning sex, gender, race or "controversial topics"--and in a week or so, we'll learn which states are about to join that club. It would be a shame if a teacher had to face these kinds of attacks without any kind of organization to help support them. 

Groups like Freedom Foundation do not have teachers' interests at heart. They just want to use every tool at their disposal to make unions go away. 

MI: Tudor Dixon is a bad choice

Let's get one thing straight--no matter what she says to the contrary, Tudor Dixon is not in favor of school choice. 

Dixon is the gubernatorial candidate heavily backed by the DeVos family, and they aren't really in favor of school choice, either.

School choice implies a world in which students can select from a wide variety of educational options. But that is not where privatizers of the DeVos strip have been steering us. As I've argued before, the public school system isn't even the major obstacle for a true choice system.

But like our Puritan forefathers, these far-right folks are not interested in a nation in which everyone is free to learn as they wish. They would like to see an end to public education because they see it as not aligned with their values (and it takes their money to educate Those Peoples' Children). What they want is a system in which their own values are ascendant. 

Consider this one example-- Tudor Dixon complaining that her child was accidentally exposed to a book about divorced people. 

Dixon complained that her daughter had checked out a book "about having two different homes" and how the very idea of divorce "caused an unnecessary anxiety."

"Why was this something she was just able to pick up off the shelf?" Dixon inquired.

Dixon is unclear about who, exactly, experienced the anxiety. It's almost as if her own adult concerns are being placed ahead of her daughter's right to read a book.

This is the tell. Over and over again, we see that some choicers actually believe that certain choices should not be available to anyone, including other peoples' children. In New Hampshire, Libertarians attacked a robust school choice program because they just didn't want to spend that much money insuring that other peoples' children had all those choices (let 'em get microschooled on the computer). In Alabama, a school choice politician ran a campaign attacking a charter school set up to serve LGBTQ students. And every single attaempt to ban books is about trying to limit the choices of other peoples' children. 

So Dixon is right in line with that crowd when she calls for parental choice--but not for the parents who want to choose things that Dixon doesn't approve of. 

Meanwhile, incumbent Gretchen Whitmer asked the right question in their final debate last week:

Do you really think books are more dangerous than guns?

I should get to carry a gun. You should not read books about nasty divorced people.

Dixon's education proposals are cut and pasted from privatizers across the nation. She supports a Don't Say Gay law that limits students' and families' right to hear about the varied forms human life takes (and which fails to understand what it actually says). Anti-trans athlete laws, a solution in search of a problem that, of course, removes choices from Those Parents. A nationalistic and inaccurate history program that makes sure students only learn the "right" history. And vouchers, so that parents can give up the right to a free, quality education in exchange for a small voucher, the better to create a system in which people are free and entitled to get as much education as they can afford--and no more. 

Dixon is a bad choice for folks who care about education in Michigan. If you're in Michigan, get out and vote for Gretchen Whitmer for governor (and for state board of education candidates like Mitch Robinson) who will help maintain actual public education for students and families in the state. 

ICYMI: Spooky Spooky Edition (10/30)

We're back, and with election season ramping up, there's plenty to read about. Education is opn the ballot in many states--get out there are vote for it. In the meantime, here's some reading.

Anti-LGBTQ Groups Are Helping Enforce a ‘Book Ban’ Law in Florida

To help schools deal with gag laws and book bans, the governor has appointed a panel of people in favor of book bans. This should work just great.

Exclusive: Moms for Liberty Pays $21,000 to Company Owned by Founding Member’s Husband

You may remember that M4L quietly mothballed one of their three founding members, perhaps because of her close marital ties to the GOP establishment media machine. But as financial detail emerge, we learn that ties to that media machine were maintained with $$$. From The 74, which remains, despite the rightward tilt of its opinion side, a decent source for actual news.

Teachers say the future of education is on the ballot in Oklahoma midterms

Education is on the line in Oklahoma, as Ryan Walters, an unqualified privatizer runs to be head of the state's education department. Here's what PBS had to say.

Sec. Ryan Walters plans to 'eliminate' an educational accountability commission he leads

Walters, as the current secretary of ed (which in OK is different from the head of the ed department) chairs a committee that is concerned with many of the things he says he's concerned about. But he's never been to a meeting, and his goal appears to be to eliminate the committee. From Payton May at OKCFox.

Walters wants to destroy public ed in Okla. All he needs is your vote

At OKC Free Press, George Lang lays out the stakes. Walters is a bad news dudebro.

Can we tell a different story about campus speech?

You may have heard about a dustup at Penn State over a Proud Boys co-founders "speech." Don Moynihan has a much clearer picture of what was happening--and what it tells us about far right tactics.

What does Argo’s closing mean for Pittsburgh’s robotics future?

A reminder once again that the capabilities and future of AI have been hugely overhyped, as the soon-to-be-awesome world of self-driving cars continues to evaporate. Kris Mamula at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Covid-19 “Leave No Crisis Wasted” School Plan that Failed…for Now

Nancy Bailey looks at back at the moment that computerized ed fans thought they were about to have their Katrina moment. What happened, and what do we watch for next?

Church and State

Nancy Flanagan writes about the separation of church and state and why it's a good thing. 

There Are Just 90 LGBTQ School Board Members. Half Were Threatened, Harassed

The 74 again, passing on a report about how things have been going for the mere 90 LGBTQ school board members in the country.

I'm a teacher. Here's why I don't care about the NAEP scores.

Jay Wamsted at EdWeek with one of the best takes on the NAEP flap from this week. 

PROOF POINTS: Several surprises in gloomy NAEP report

Jill Barshay at Hechinger with a dig into some of the details of the NAEP data. 

Despite what you hear, parents aren't in charge of schools. That's a good thing.

Brian Dickerson at USA Today with a somewhat contentious take on the whole parental rights thing. 

Public Schools Aren’t Godless. Ask the Christians Who Feel Called to Stay.

From Ericka Andersen, writing for Christianity Today, another angle on the culture wars. Maybe all Christians don't actually hate public education. 

Meanwhile, over at Forbes I wrote about how to claw back some time for schools to make up any lost ground. 

Also, I'm now on substack. You can go to my page there to sign up. It's free and just one more way of staying up to date with whatever I'm yammering about.

Do Charters Damage The Teacher Pipeline

Well, this is an odd little piece of research.

The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH), aka Doug Harris, the guy who brought us all that research saying that all-charter New Orleans was hunky dory, has produced a new report looking at how charter schools affect the supply of teachers from university-based education programs. 

Short version: in cities, when you get more charter schools, you get fewer teachers coming out of college and university teacher prep programs. Harris finds that elementary, math, and special ed suffer the most. .

This would be an excellent time to remember that correlation is not causation (here's the awesome spurious correlations website to remind us that, among other things, cheese consumption rises with the number of people killed by being tangled in bedsheets, and swimming pool drownings rise and fall with Nicolas Cage film appearances). 

So charter schools and the teacher pipeline might very well have absolutely nothing to do with each other. We need to be clear on that right up front.

But if they are connected, what could explain that?

Harris and his co-author Mary Penn don't have an explanation for the connection, which they first noticed while doing their New Orleans research. 

The National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools offered a rebuttal. Part of it was just a silly tautism-- there are fewer teachers coming out of traditional programs because there are fewer persons entering programs. And then this:

Although charter schools are a convenient scapegoat for the report author, they are simply not the cause of the nation’s teacher shortage. Given the dire labor shortage, we as a nation need to be open to alternative certification and preparatory programs that attract talent from untraditional sources and provide teachers for the classrooms that desperately need them. Charter schools seem to understand that point.

Especially cranky words from a group that actually sits on the REACH advisory board. 

So what could the connection be? NAP[S]CS hints at it as they profess their love for teachers from "alternative" routes. Charter businesses like teachers without traditional training, and they like temps with a high turnover (like Teach for America). Alternative path teachers tend to leave sooner, which suits charter businesses just fine. And that can have consequences.

No profession recruits its own members quite like teaching. Prospective teachers get to watch the profession for thirteen years. They have all that time to watch and think, "Wow, that looks awesome" or "May God forbid I ever wind up in that job." 

So what might the effect be of watching a steady parade of mediocre beginners who never stick around to become mature professionals? Particularly in a charter where the teacher's job is to simply implement the program they're handed. Just how fun does reading a canned curriculum look? 

I also wonder--charter heavy urban areas tend to be cities where the public system has been beaten down to help sell the charter system, so that teachers in public schools are also laboring harder, in an atmosphere larded with too much disrespect and non-support. None of which makes the profession look particularly attractive. 

As I warned, those two trends (charters up, teachers down) could be the result of some other factor entirely, like Nicolas Cage movies, but it's not that hard to imagine what a plausible link might be. Charters are the point of the spear in a general move to devalue the teaching profession, and a lack of interest in that profession would certainly be a predictable result. 

Economists Should Not Be In Charge

It's long past normal for economists to pretend that they have the answers for issues in education (and to be wrong pretty much every time). But a post/twitter thread from Cory Doctorow today puts that in the context of larger problems with economism. What is economism?

Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, "economism," views us as slaves to "incentives" and nothing more.

Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all "non-market" solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they're begun, due to the "incentives" of the individuals in the government.

Doctorow in particular cites an article by Timothy Noah ("May God save us from economists") in tracing the growing influence of economists. In particular they note the growth of things like cost-benefits analyses that involve putting a price on human life. Which is, I learned today, mandatory for all major regulations. IOW, an economist has to sign off on everything in DC.

There's this lovely snippet from the airline biz:

For example, economists convinced Carter to deregulate the airlines and turn legroom into a commodity that you pay extra for. That was the brainchild of then-chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board Alfred E Kahn, an economist, who cheerfully declared "I don't know one plane from another – to me, they are all marginal costs with wings."

Economists find monopolies "efficient." 

Doctorow turns to a 1944 work by Kartl Polyani that has given birth to a view of five areas in which economists mess up. See how many of these you recognize from the education reform ideas of the past couple of decades.

I. Excessive reliance on models, which is a big problem because economists' models largely don't work.

Noah rejects the comparison of economic forecasting to weather forecasting: since 1984, economic forecasting has incorporated 20,000 times more variables with few improvements, over the same period, the time horizon for weather forecasts has grown from a few days to a few weeks ("Hurricanes no longer surprise us. Financial crises still do").

II. Underreliance on data. For all the yammering about data and numbers and models, economists largely ignore actual data. Doctorow cites the classic Ely Devons quote--

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

In education, we've been subjected to talk about the cold hard outputs of deliverables, based on a testing system whose validity is based on unicorn wishes and fairy dust. And, of course, the actual expertise of teachers who swim in education data daily has been dismissed and ignored.

III. A rejection of society.  

At the core of economism is a rejection of the very idea of society ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). The only way to understand our lives is to model us as individuals, making individual choices and expressing individual preferences. Economism gives short shrift to how individuals affect one another.

This is, for some, inextricably bound up in the concept of market-based school choice, merit pay, and a few other choice ideas. Schools--both students and faculty--must be understood as atomized individuals, and the fact that unleashing market forces for some would weaken the system that is meant to support all is simply irrelevant. Economism is the principle of "I've got mine, Jack" as a guiding light.

IV. A failure to understand "irrationality."

For economists, anything that is not done in self-interest is irrational. Every problem is addressed from an angle of "what would this person do to get the maximum personal benefit," and anyone who doesn't appear to be acting on that question is irrational. Even if a vast number, even a majority of people, don't follow that guide, they are still considered irrational by the economists, who do not stop to think that maybe observing how people actually behave might be useful.

This "irrationality" could also often be called "ethics" – for example, the decision in various "ultimatum games" to punish selfish people, even if it means getting less for yourself. You can view this as "irrationality" if your sole conception of human motivation is "how do I get more for myself?" But you can equally say, "I don't like people who betray the social contract and I am prepared to go with less if it means punishing them."

But by insisting that ethics are irrational, economism can actually do away with them. Michael Sandel's 2012 book "What Money Can’t Buy," offers examples of things that you shouldn't be subject to market forces, like concierge medical services. A decade later, these have gone from examples of the unthinkable to actual products.

Yeah, we can name a few of those. Like education, where economism insists that if we create "competition," education will get better because people will all pursue their own self-interest. Teachers must be coerced--bribed with merit pay or, more often, threatened with punishment--in order to get them to produce the "product" of education. 

This is the great economism blind spot--there couldn't be any possible reason for teachers to pursue a particular path other than self-interest. In the worst cases, this comes with a darker side--since teachers became teachers despite the fact that teaching is a lousy way to pursue economic self-interest (aka get rich) it must be because their limited abilities put more lucrative paths out of their reach. 

And since ethics aren't really a thing, there should be no issue in setting up incentives for educators to follow unethical paths. But high stakes testing, a very economist approach to running education, incentivizes all manner of unethical behavior, from cutting meaningful education in favor of test prep all the way up to just plain cheating. And the notion that competing for merit pay would make schools function more poorly by stifling cooperation--that's just an unfathomable mystery to economics man.

V. The prejudices of economism.

Well, at least they aren't hypocritical. Doctorow cites findings that economist live like "economic man" by "pursuing self-interest at the expense of cooperation." They give less to charity and are the least racially and gender-diverse of all disciplines. Says Doctorow

It's one thing for a profession to be so different from the majority – but when that profession has elevated itself to the final arbiter of all regulation and government, its narrow composition and ideological blinkers start to tell.

For instance, it is ill-suited to redesign a system that is fully diversified as our population.

Economism has permeated too much of ed reform in the past few decades, not just in assuming that the only rational approach is to pull the levers of self-interest, but in measuring everything based merely on its monetary measure. The notion of "value-added" measurements, as if schools are comparable to assembly lines cranking out toasters. The idea that education's goal is to give students skills whose worth is measured by a future employer's willingness to pay for them. The data-centric notion that students should accumulate competency based badges so that employers can simply pull up a database and search for employees that meet their exact specs. The very idea of "efficiency." The idea that Milton Friedman, the ultimate example of an economist who knows nothing about education but whose vision of education is treated like it was inscribed by a finger of fire on a stone tablet. 

None of these ideas enhance education--at least not if we believe that education is about helping young human beings become their best selves as they learn what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Economism is a sad, cramped, meager view not just of education, but of life itself, and yet in many ways we have let it take over the country. Read Doctorow's piece and the links in it. You may not agree with all of it, but it's definitely worth a think. 

Voucher Damage in One Graphic

The voucher argument is that if the money just follows the students, everything comes out even. Public schools lose money, but they also lose students, so no biggie.

There are some obvious problems with this--can you run four schools for the same money that ran one school? Remember that time that your school district was cash-strapped, so they addressed the problem by opening more school buildings? That's right. It never happened.

But there's another reason that this is bunk, because in many states, vouchers are not being used by students exiting the public system, but students who are already gone. We've discussed this before, but here's a handy graphic to make it even clearer.

In other words, the vast majority of vouchers are going to students who were never in the public system in the first place, so the public system has its operating funds cut by a big chunk, and its operating costs cut by $0.00. 

The graphic comes from the National Coalition for Public Education, a group that goes all the way back to 1978 and collects lots of other organizations. They have some excellent materials citing real research about vouchers (as opposed to the "research" created as marketing tools by voucher advocates. They've even got some handy downloadable materials just in case you need something to hand to your local elected officials.