NC: Hammering The Teaching Profession

North Carolina continues to slowly dig deeper and deeper holes in which to bury public education and public school teachers. They've just launched another piece of their bad ideas, but in order to look at what just happened, we need a little context.

Our story so far

North Carolina has spent about a decade chipping away at public education. Here' are just some of the lowlights.

NC implemented one of those flunk third graders if they don't as the Big Standardized Reading Test laws. They froze their already-lousy pay schedule for teachers (in NC, the state sets the pay levels) even as that pay was shown to be Very Not Good.. When a report showed charter schools not doing so great, the Lt. Governor ordered it rewritten to look less negative; then a few years later they did the same thing again. Maybe it's because they are a great haven for charter profiteers. They decided to shovel even more public money into the voucher pipeline, while cutting millions from public ed funding (for Democratic areas). They tried to follow the failed Tennessee model of a state-run achievement school district (but it failed). When the legislature tried and failed to end teacher tenure, they told teachers they could have a raise if they gave up their job protections. They've set up rules to enable white flight. NC legislature is one of the ones that decided to fight on the hill of denying transgender bathrooms. And last year the Lt. Governor decided to organize a task force to catch any schools or teachers doing any naughty indoctrinatin' stuff--a state sponsored with hunt. This in a state where county commissioners can take school districts hostage if they don't like what the schools are teaching. And the legislature has been so determined not to fully fun public education that the court finally ordered the state to fork over $1,5 billion to education funding to settle a court finding from 1997 that required the state to stop farting around and fully fund its public schools (which it has been refusing to do ever since).

Yeah, it's a lot.

To the surprise of nobody paying attention, North Carolina has trouble recruiting and retaining teachers. 

In 2017, the legislature created the Professional Educator Standards and Preparation Commission (PEPSC) to make recommendations on how to expand teacher preparation programs, create an accountability system for those programs, and to “reorganize and clarify” the licensure process.. The plan they hatched is not a good one, and it turns out that the commission is just a piece of government theater and the plan was actually hatched by several parties behind the scenes including SAS (the value-added testing folks) and the Sothern Regional Education Board (SREB), which was in turn pulling strings on something called the North Carolina Human Capitol Roundtable. Had teacher Justin Parmenter not turned out to be a dogged and determined filer of FOIA requests, nobody outside of the little theater would have known that the P in PEPSC stands for "Puppet." Buried behind a lot of secretive communication and string pulling, we find this statement:

The overarching goal is to create an outcomes-based licensure system.

In other words, a teacher merit pay system. Not a merit pay bonus system, but an entire teacher pay system based on "merit." 

Okay, so what just happened?

This week PEPSC continued to slow-march its plan, submitting a "blueprint" for the new licensure system to the State Board of Education. The vote to do so was "slim" (and a bit questionable), and while everyone seems to understand that the end game is a system in which "teachers would prove they are effective educators" aka "merit" aka "check those scores on the Big Standardized Test," the blueprint is a not the system itself, but a list of ten "general actions" that is just vaguely formed argle bargle.

That's in keeping with the plan developed by the PR firm hired to new revamped system, and the understanding of PEPSC and its friends, which is that if word of the specifics of this plan get out, and teachers hate it enough to rise up in protest, the plan will be seriously hampered, if not outright killed. It is a reasonable fear on their part, because this plan should be DOA and then killed with fire. So the ten item list seems designed to keep the ball rolling while postponing the day when too many people look at the actual plan (which PEPSC keeps insisting could continue to change, even though it has not changed in any major way since PEPSC's buddies first handed it over). 

Do we want to look at the blueprint?

Sure. Or you can skip this section and jump to the wrap-up. Fair warning--this is kind of dense. I will try to translate as we go. Here are the ten items on the blueprint:

1. Build the professional framework around articulated standards of practice (i.e., INTASC) with clear expectations for progression in attainment of the professional knowledge base. So, standardize teaching.

2. Build analysis and assessment of practice from a base of multiple evidence points in practice with responsible application as to how each informs practice. Standardize the assessment of standardized teaching.

3. Create advanced and lead teacher roles to support teachers in various stages of professional learning, practice, and transition into and through the profession. This is part of the PEPSC plan. Any time someone talks about adding steps on the professional ladder, the question you have to ask is--will they add rungs above the ones we have, or are they going to dig a hole and lower the bottom end of the ladder. In North Carolina, there's another question to ask, but we'll get to that in a second.

4. Build licensure around evidence of attainment of the knowledge base of practice appropriate to the purpose of the license. Again, the main point is to make licensure outcomes based. We don't want to know how well you're trained--did you make that kid's scores go up?

5. Create and adopt valid and reliable tools to analyze and assess practice and its impact on student learning A cornerstone of the professional knowledge base and the ability to make explicit the practices that positively impacts student learning. Teacher quality will be measured by student outcomes. Remember, this whole thing is backed by SAS, the people who invented value-added test crap (EVAAS, PVAAS, etc), a system that has been largely debunked and even thrown out in court.

6. Build on existing assets in identified professional knowledge bases and structures that correlate to positive impact on teacher practice and student learning Including the collaborative knowledge base that exists in EPPs and the partnerships between schools, districts, and higher education. Blah blah blah standardized teaching and VAM.

7. Develop new professional learning tools and structures that give flexibility in access to the professional knowledge base, evidence of having attained it, and evidence of applying it successfully in practice. Gonna retrain teachers because we know how to do that.

8. Articulate clear distinctions across pathway entry points and progression focused on successful entry into the profession and transition to fully autonomous professionals. Open up more "alternative" paths to the classroom.

9. Build and fund a compensation and reward model that reflects the importance and value of the teaching profession, and that attracts and retains people in the profession. 

10. Secure funding to support the infrastructure of the framework as well as its discrete components

These last two (pay teachers well and fund this whole thing) bring us to the question that has to be asked in North Carolina. North Carolina has refused for a quarter of a decade to implement a plan for fully funding its public education system. They have repeatedly implemented pay scales that drag North Carolina teachers backwards. What are the odds that they will really implement better teacher pay and then fund it? 

TL;DR. What does all this say?

This deliberately obfuscatory language appears to hide a plan that is familiar to ed reform watchers. 

Expand your pool of possible hires by lowering your bar until a blind rat could step over it. Shore up your untrained and underqualified people by standardizing the act of teaching so that it's just paint by numbers and educational fry cookery. Pretend that you can measure the effectiveness of that system by using some BS Testing run through a VAM calculator (which just happens to be the proprietary cash cow of one of the backers of the plan). When you find teachers who are good at getting test scores, promote them and make them part of the process of prepping the fresh meat at the bottom of the scale. Pay the few at the top a bit more, and as for the bottom--well, you know what happens to pay when a job can be easily filled by any number of people.

I am not sure where in North Carolina, or anywhere else in this country, you can find people who honestly, sincerely believe that this plan will make the teaching profession in North Carolina more appealing. 

I suspect what you can find are people who believe that a system like this will make teaching positions easier and cheaper to fill.

In either case, the people who believe this plan will work are kidding themselves. The people on PEPSC who voted for it should be ashamed of themselves. Members of the State Board of Education should be pummeled with e-mails, as should all elected officials who come within five hundred feet of public education. 

This is not a plan that will serve anyone well, least of all the students of North Carolina, and no amount of flowery argle bargle and secret meeting and general misdirection is going to change that. Bad news all around. 

Microsoft Gets In The Tutoring Biz, Too

You can tell that something is trending in education land when the Big Guns go out and buy themselves a seat for that trend. Last fall, with little fanfare, Microsoft bought itself a little edu-biz called TakeLessons, which gives Microsoft a place in the online tutoring and education brokerage game.

TakeLessons was reportedly founded way back in 2006 in San Diego and has raised somewhere in the $20 million neighborhood in investments since. The model is something like Outschool, Brainly, and GoStudent. Like Outschool, TakeLessons serves as a sort of broker. Tutors sign up and students sift through the available "course options" to find something they like. "Teach what you love" says the teacher entrance page. "Flexible, affordable learning with top-rated instructors," says the main entrance page. 

Who exactly us rating these teachers? Well, that's kind of unclear. The lessons are largely focused on music, languages, and the performing arts, with some other odds and ends thrown in, including academic tutoring and culinary lessons (though the site boasts 300+ subjects to choose from). It is based in many major cities, and offers a variety of methods-- you can learn via video, online instruction, group or solo lessons, or even set up in person learning.

TakeLessons has some enthusiastic boosters and a whole bunch of unhappy former customers/gig workers (see here, here, and here), though many of those date back to the pre-Microsoft days. The complaints include trouble with a persistent link to TakeLessons on the Microsoft Edge "just opened" screen. Synergy, baby.

Microsoft has been a bit slow to seize the pandemic distance learning and tutoring wave, though LinkedIN is also trying to do a learning thing combined with what they incorporated when they acquired Lynda.com (did you forget that LinkedIN was also owned by Microsoft). There's teams, which some schools used to get through the pandemess. Folks see possibilities here.

The TakeLessons acquisition bolsters Microsoft's reach in edtech. While the company has not disclosed a specific plan for the acquisition, the synergies between Teams, which was used by 100 million students during the pandemic, and lesson provider TakeLessons are difficult to ignore.

For example, TakeLessons could provide custom learning solutions for school districts or other customers. "This acquisition is in response to the growing demand on personalized hybrid opportunities and expands our product offerings to TakeLessons consumers, a leading online learning platform," a senior executive told CNBC in an email.

Of course, that was last September when these dreams were being touted, and as yet, TakeLessons doesn't seem to be positioned to take on the high quality tutoring universe right now, and one never knows when talking about the company that brought us both Microsoft Office tools and the Zune. Lord knows we need a few more players in the tutoring biz. 

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.