The Long Haul

So, some things will happen today. People will be voted into office, and some of them will bring good news for public education and some will bring not such good news. In some cases the choices aren't all that encouraging (there is no pro-public ed candidate for governor in PA--just bad and way worse) and some choices that should seem clear cut probably aren't (Ryan Walters is a posturing tool, a fatuous dudebro who shouldn't have a hope of getting elected, but it's Oklahoma, so we'll see). 

But before we start sorting through the results (and the challenges to results), I want to remember a few things.

Most of all, I want to speak in favor of the long haul.

This is what the folks over on the right have always good at. The long march toward dismantling public education arguably stepped of with that made-to-order condemnation of public ed, A Nation At Risk, and there's been a slow steady tread in that direction ever since. High stakes testing, by which we can "prove" that public schools are failing. Bad top-down standards, by which we hobble public ed and sow distrust of it. Continued attacks on schools for teaching Bad Things, by which we further convince folks that public ed cannot be trusted. Charter schools, by which we move the Overton Window to where the idea of multiple many-tiered privately owned and operated schools don't seem so far fetched. (And some of this has been on the move since long before even A Nation at Risk--some of these folks are very patient). 

All of these (and others as well) were pushed and supported by some people with a sincere belief in their value, but the anti-public ed crowd made use of the opportunity that was presented. Because opportunism is a critical element of the long game.

Consider the central irony to the Moms for Liberty push to get their kind of folks on school boards around the country. Justice and Tescovich were both school board members elected for their pseudo-conservative credentials; then once the voters saw them in action, the electorate rejected them. The M4L was hatched.

One need look no further than the 2020 election to see how folks on the right can make the most of what they're handed by keeping their eyes focused far ahead. Trump's defeat could have crushed the movement, a decisive drubbing of a sitting President by a candidate who did not exactly represent the Democrats A game. The GOP could have banished MAGA to the hinterlands and quietly licked their wounds; instead, the Big Lie has become a huge rallying cry, a generator of energy that is driving a ridiculous number of votes to terrible candidates today. 

Some folks are lazy in victory and resigned in defeat. Others keep their eye on the goal, hitch up their pants, and keep playing the long game of a slow steady march toward their goal. It has worked for a variety of issues on all sides of the spectrum.

Defenders of public ed can--and should-- do that, too. 

I know it's tough. For one thing, there are far too few elected officials in our corner standing up for public education. For another, the ballsiness of the attacks can put one back on their heels (did Moms For Liberty really just say they wanted to ban a book about seahorses for being too sexy??!)

There's a lot of work that needs to be done. Educators need to be vocal. Allies need to be vocal. That means being vocal about the aspirations and values of public education as well as being vocal about the need for real solutions to real problems. 

Being vocal also means being repetitive. "American schools are failing" did not gain a foothold in the culture because of any well-reasoned arguments or a single effective speech or a careful presentation of supporting data--it entered the culture through the sheer force of repetition. It was repeated so often that people began to accept it as a piece of conventional wisdom that they were sure they heard somewhere. Repetition, repetition, repetition.

It means putting ideas out there to "just lie around" until the moment comes to pick them up. Voucher fans were able to seize the pandemic moment because the idea of vouchers, the shape of voucher bills-- even after years and years and years of repeated defeats, the whole package was already put together and ready to go at a moments' notice. 

Elections happen, elections matter, and elections have consequences, but in and of themselves they are rarely the beginning nor the end of something. They bend--sometimes dramatically--the trajectory of a policy or an idea, but that trajectory continues after the election is over and the New Guy is in office. It is an epic mistake to, in the wake of an election, declare either, "Well, we've won so now we can relax" or "We've failed, so time to go home." 

Education exists at the intersection of a myriad of ideas and goals, always in tension with each other, always pulling and pushing in a dozen directions. There is no victory. Nobody ever wins because the debates and wrassling are never over. Nobody ever loses, either, but some give up.

When I started teaching, the prevailing idea (which I shared) was that public education was a stable world, an institution that pretty much everyone supported and mostly left alone. You entered teaching thinking you could just go to your room, shut the door, do your job, and that was enough. By the switch of millennium, the model was more like guerilla warfare-- you did your job, but you had to be prepared to be feisty and agile enough to do it in spite of many people that should have been your allies. 

We're somewhere else now. If you work in public education, you should be a vocal advocate for public education. Beyond doing the work, you need to stand up for it. 

Nothing about that will change in the next 24 hours. Those who want to dismantle public education will still want to dismantle public education, and defenders of public ed will still have to find ways to thwart them, while keeping their eyes on the long game.

It's not complicated. A publicly owned and operated system that provides every single child a quality education that helps them as they strive to become their best selves while learning to be what it means to be fully human in the world. Not a system that only serves some. Not a system that indoctrinates young citizens with a cramped and meager vision of their nation, their history, their own potential, their humanity and the humanity of those around them. 

This seems (in fact, I think it should be our custom on the occasion of every election) like a good time to revisit Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem from 2021. You can read the full text here, but I'll remind you of how it finishes:

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

VA: More Youngkin Snitch Line Fiasco Unspools

Glenn Youngkin figured he had been elected as the Parental Rights governor, so it must have made sense to keep attacking public education and the teachers who work there. 

He started right in with an edict that schools should not teach anything "inherently divisive," one more anti-CRT law so fuzzy, subjective, and poorly-conceived that it will chill teaching of any subjects that anybody might object to. The text is spectacularly vague, and though it contains a list of some "divisive concepts" that are specifically naughty, its reliance on that "divisive concept" language guarantees that schools across the state will have no clear idea what exactly is forbidden, and so administrations not in the mood for a fight will simply instruct teachers not to talk about race, gender, or pretty much anything that might upset anybody. Is evolution divisive? History of the Civil War (particularly in Virginia)? My students were pretty divided on whether Lady MacBeth is a redeemable character or not. In fact, we used to stage debates, but I suppose those are inherently divisive, too.

To insure that the decree carries maximum power to intimidate and silence teachers, the governor has followed the lead of states like Texas and Florida and instituted a means for parents and community members to turn in any teachers for being naughty. As he explained in one interview:

For parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected, where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools. We’re asking for input right from parents to make sure we can go right to the source as we continue to work to make sure that Virginia’s education system is on the path to reestablish excellence.

Brown shirts and cultural revolution posters are optional.

James Fedderman, the head of the Virginia Education Association called the tip line "poorly conceived" and "designed to intimidate educators simply trying to do their jobs," which sounds about right.

But the fails have just kept on coming. By February, the tip line had been a spoof on SNL ("You know you're racist when you call the cops about a Black character in a book.") and was being flooded with fake tips. Virtually every education group in the state was calling on Youngkin to take back his executive order and shut down his snitch line. It was failing hard enough that Youngkin was using half-baked legal arguments to keep people from seeing just how bad it was, because Freedom of Information is a pain when you have information that makes your big snitch line idea look dumb.

Last week the wrangling over the freedom of information requests was finally settled and the snitch line turned out to be just about as useful as anyone could have imagined. 

One woman used it to send a compliment every day about individual teachers while she spent 34 days recovering from hip and back surgery. One parent complained about district-offered tutoring because it was "a potential path for unknown perverts." One complained that gender identity concepts were in some family life classes. There were book ban requests and masking complaints.

There were also some complaints about teaching "Arabic numbers." A high school senior complained about how his teacher was teaching Beowulf. Many were complaints about violations of special ed laws, including those from Kandise Lucas, an advocate for students with special needs. Lucas sent roughly 160 emails. Another parent sent 23 emails to argue for reinstate accelerated math options in his district. 

The total number of emails released was 350. Virtually every email writer noted that they never got a response from the Governor's office. And it appears that many not-very-serious submissions were not released. 

Youngkin was still touting the tip line last week, despite the fact that it was actually shut down back in September as tips just kind of "dried up." It's almost as if this attempt to root out Critical Race Theory throughout Virginia turned up nothing. Kind of like the whole thing was just a political stunt.

American Oversight still has a lawsuit in progress to unveil the rest of the snitch line's submissions.

Youngkin is not the first to try this stunt, or to get this result. North Carolina's Lieutenant Governor gave it a shot and turned up mostly nothing serious, though they tried hard to make a meal out of their nothingburger, 

Let's hope that tomorrow's elections bring enough defeat to this kind of baloney that we see fewer elected officials staging attacks on teachers as political stuntery. 

ICYMI: Vote Vote Vote Edition (11/6)

It's time. The races in your locality may or may not be apocalyptic in scope, but they certainly matter, and it's a little embarrassing every time America, the great shining beacon of Democracy, somehow can't get its own citizens to get off their butts to cast a vote. So do that. Thanks.

Now for this week's reading.

Are national ‘parental rights’ groups making decisions in your local school district?

Michigan Advance is one of several news outlets looking at how Moms for Liberty and other similar outfits are working to commandeer local school boards. 

The right-wing groups fueling school board wars

The New Yorker (warning--paywall) also takes a look at how these groups are trying to grab control of school boards coast to coast. 

New Documents Show ALEC Targeting School Board and Other Local Races

And if you're not alarmed enough already, Alyssa Bowen at the Center for Media and Democracy reveals that ALEC, the great grabby bill mill, is also in on this game.

Angry Right-Wing Moms Are Trying to Have Librarians Arrested by “Constitutional Sheriffs”

How far are the Moms for Liberty willing to go? How about getting the local sheriff to arrest librarians with naughty books. From Jessica Pishko at Salon.

Small-town students would pay for high price tag of school choice

In Oklahoma, the spectre of a voucher bill is haunting rural schools, which will get hammered if such a bill becomes law under newly-elected choicers (like the hugely unqualified Ryan Walters). From the Tulsa Woirld.

NC Supreme Court issues much anticipated rulings on education funding, environmental protection

In North Carolina, a case involving school funding has been twisting its way through court for decades. Another big step forward came this week.

A ‘Texas miracle’ brought us No Child Left Behind. Here’s a new one.

Texas loves its educational miracle. Trouble is, when you look closer, they turn out to not be very miraculous. The story is at Valerie Strauss's Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.

If today’s GOP baffles you, consider what motivates its base

At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin looks at the results of the Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Survey and what they tell us about white evangelicals in the US.

Solutions stories that aren’t puff pieces

Nice piece by Kate Rix about how to create stories based in some actual research (and so, it's also a guide to how to spot them as a reader).

Advocates Launch "Freedom to Read" Coalitions Across South Carolina

Paul Thomas passes along some good news about the fight for readers' rights in South Carolina

Preston Green: Charter Schools Must Be Regulated

Yes, I almosty never link to Diane Ravitch here on the theory that if you're a regular here, you probably didn't miss it. But this account of Preston Green's talk about the need to regulate charters is one you definitely shouldn't miss. 

Can A.I. Write Recipes Better Than Humans? We Put It to the Ultimate Test.

Some researchers at the New York Times decided to let AI put together a Thanksgiving dinner. Add this to your file of "AI Is Not Ready for Prime Time" stories.

Over at Forbes, I wrote about how to handle the likely presence of AI writers in your classroom.

In other news, I've launched in substack. You get the same stuff you get here at the mother ship, delivered to your inbox, plus anything I run over at Forbes or the Progressive or who-knows-where-else. I'm not abandoning anything else--just trying to provide more options. And there's no charge. So feel free to let me clutter up your computer one more way.

Social Learning and Back To Basics

I just came back from Muffins in the Morning, a special program in which parents are invited to come have some breakfast with their kids before the start of the school day. It's an evolved version of the old "Donuts with Dad" concept, in which schools assumed that fathers were less involved in their children's lives and would therefor benefit from being lured to school with pasties. It was a well-meant program larded with all sorts of assumptions about gender roles and sexual identities and would, of course, now be illegal in Florida and other similar states. 

But I digress. 

The Board of Directors enjoyed their muffins and apple slices, but mostly they enjoyed seeing their classmates. This is standard stuff. On any given day at dropoff they will get excited about seeing and greeting a classmate even though they're going to see them in about three minutes anyway (the extra level of charm comes because kindergartners' preferred manner of saying "hi" is a big hug). 

Watching the boys in their element reminds me just how very social the whole experience of school is for students.

At my old school, the day starts with the roaming of the halls, a social ritual in which students roam or stand with their friends so they can start the day with their friends. If you've got a home base (band kids, yearbook kids), you go there to catch up with the same people that you were texting with six hours ago. You organize your lunch around seeing your friends. Your main concern about your new schedule is who you have classes with. You plan your path between classes based on seeing friends. 

For students, the social aspect of school is not some disconnected extra--it's central to the whole school experience. And it absolutely will affect the academic elements.

Students check out in class when they're pre-occupied and upset about a fight with their friends. And the amount of academic disruption caused by interpersonal drama! Lordy (and, for the record, teenaged LGBTQ drama is just as dramatic as straight cis drama). A major--if not THE major--reason that students dropped out to home school or private school was not some sort of academic concerns, but issues like not feeling like they had any friends at the school. 

None of which means that teachers and staff should be actively trying to manage or engineer this stuff (I've said my peace about formal SEL instruction), but to imagine that you're going to set your classroom high on a mountain where it will never be touched by the waters of students' social lives is a foolish dream. It rains everywhere, and sooner or later everything gets wet.

I think of this every time somebody (who invariably does not work in education) declares that we should get Back To Basics and just teach the three Rs and not mess with any of that other stuff. 

For students, the social aspect of school is inextricably bound up in the school experience. Folks who imagine that the way school works is that students show up, sit down, and go about their daily learning tasks like good little meat widgets on an assembly line are living in some kind of fantasy world. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works.

I am not arguing that every academic class should come with a group therapy session. One of the valuable things that teachers can model is how to go about setting aside your personal stuff and getting on with Doing The Work. But if you think school can somehow be conducted without any personal and social aspect of student lives intruding, I have bridge built by unicorns over a swamp to sell you. And if you think that you can eliminate some of the social and personal stuff by telling some students that their type of person doesn't exist and is never to be mentioned, I am going to give you your change from the bridge purchase in Monopoly money. 

I am not saying that formal SEL instruction should supplant academics. But dealing with soft skills and social skills and the tools for being a human being in the world is necessary to get to those basics, and insisting that a school should address the three Rs and nothing else is like insisting that a school is only about classrooms, not doors, and therefor a school should be built without any doorways at all--just walls. Before you can sit in a classroom, you have to navigate your way into it, and for that, doors are as necessary as the rooms themselves. 

It is, like virtually everything in education that matters, a constant shifting balancing act. Anyone who tells you that one end of the pole is the only end that matters is selling something, and it's nothing very helpful. 

School Choice and Switching Costs

The current kerfluffle over the Elon Muskification of Twitter marks roughly the eleventy billoionth time that an on-line platform has provoked a bunch of people to say, "That's it. I'm out of here." Every person has their own individual breaking point, that point at which the ethical problems of the service/platform/brand/store in question outweigh the utility you get from using them. 

Online businesses are very aware that users (aka "the product") are a fickle lot, and so they have taken many steps to increase the cost of switching to another service.

Mark Zuckerberg didn't give us free, vast cave of photo storage out of the goodness of his heart; he did it because it vastly increases the switching costs of leaving Facebook-- you've either got to leave your entire photo collection behind or spend a vast chunk of time porting it out. When it's time to get a new phone, you probably only look at options that match the Apple v. Android choice you've already made because switching over would just be too much of a mess. Heck, while I've often regretted my choice to use this blogging platform instead of WordPress, I stay because the thought of what it would take to switch over gives me a massive headache.

None of this has to be the case. Moving photo files from one storage facility to another should be a piece of cake. There's little practical reason that music files couldn't be compatible across various players, nor any technical explanation for why it takes so many extra steps to move any file out of the Google universe.

But the folks who operate these businesses have deliberately made leaving their fenced in compound difficult, so that you won't. Switching costs make life more difficult for users for the benefit of the business. Switching costs are put in place p[recisely so that users will be reluctant to vote with their feet.

The version of school choice that's been sold for the last few decades is welded to the idea of free market business, almost as if the main idea was not to provide students with educational choices, but to give the free market access to the educational marketplace. That has a variety of side-effects that I've talked about before, but it also brings with it huge switching costs for students and their families. 

The market forces argument ("Well, if the school isn't good, families can just vote with their feet") ignores switching costs entirely. But those costs, particularly in the middle of a school year, are large. The classes that you didn't complete may not be offered in a new school, or may be at a completely different point in their progression (Common Core was supposed to fix that issue, but on that point, the Core was a complete, utter and deserved failure). Vast piles of paperwork need to be completed, application processes navigated, all new schedules with unfamiliar courses to be sorted out. And as every Facebook and Twitter rebel well knows, the additional switching cost of leaving behind friends and familiar faces.

For a voucher-fied switch, add on actual financial costs of switching. 

None of that is necessary to create a choicey environment.

Consider my old high school. In my years there, I taught students who went on to work in blue collar trades, attend ivy league schools, become doctors, lawyers, attend trade schools, attend community college, work as professional musicians--okay, just imagine a list with every possible future for students, because we did that. Just about every choice that a student could want to make, we made available. 

And they could exercise those choices with virtually no switching costs. Same school, same routine, same friends, different classes (some of them), different educational goals. 

It's just not that hard. In her book After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor talks about some seminal school-within-the-school charters that have been pioneered--again, with minimal switching costs.

Because switching costs are primarily about protecting business interests, and because modern reformsters have insisted that school choice must be linked to markets and business, we end up with switching costs that actually make school choice less accessible and less helpful for students. We have a charter choice system that seems designed to advance the interests of charter businesses rather than those of students. Switching costs are just part of that problem. 

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.