Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Curmudgucation on Substack

Over the past couple of moves I've been experimenting with other social media outlets, and I've been pleased with substack. I won't be abandoning the mother ship here, but if you'd like another way to follow along, substack is now an option for not only my posts here at the institute, but notifications when I have something new at Forbes, the Progressive, or other random places. It functions pretty much like the Curmudgucation page on Facebook.

I'm aware that the email feed that I've used since Google ceased doing an RSS feed is suboptimal, and looks pretty mysterious when it lands in your email box. Substack is an alternative to that as well.

I expect to keep the substack offering free, because I don't really need the money, and I'd like to keep things easily accessible here. I'm aware of the theory that says people would value the product more if there were even an optional charge. And I pay subscriptions/patreon thingies for the work of other public ed supporters gladly, so I have no philosophical objections to such things. But I have no idea what I'd offer for an extra value proposition. 

At any rates, no plans to monetize the substack feed. If you want to support my work, just keep spreading it around. Invite me to come talk to your people. Follow some of the people I try to amplify here. (Also, I'm working on a book about teaching writing, so if you're an interested publisher, give me a holler.)

At any rate, if you're interested in another means of keeping up with my work, sign up for the substack. And thanks for reading.





The Choice Rural Students Don't Need

At Fox News, choicers Jason Bedrick and Matthew Lardner appear under the headline, "Why rural students need school choice." What follows is an article that doesn't really answer that question. But then, that's not the real point here. Let's look at what the article says first, and then talk about why it (and other articles like it) exist.

Bedrick and Ladner open with the story of a parent who finds that her child's school is terrible, but thank goodness she's in Arizona where super-vouchers are available. (There will be no discussion of what role Arizona's aggressive work at privatizing education and defunding its public system might have in all this.)

Then we get the narrative that pandemic distance learning causing parents "a rude awakening about the quality of their children's education." And here's a poll result (without links) that folks all like education savings accounts "that would empower families with greater education choice." (Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos had to give up her attempt to get the grass roots to rise up and demand vouchers in Michigan, marking yet another time that vouchers have failed to get support from actual voters.)

But, they observe, you know who doesn't like vouchers? Those "teachers' unions and their allies" who are "doing everything in their power to block families from accessing alternatives to the school district system."

The claim, which Bedrick and Ladner are here to refute, are that choice doesn't benefit rural communities and that choice harms rural districts. They quote the Texas Association of Schol Boards (an unlikely ally of the teachers union) and the Oklahoma former Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

Those two choices are not random or accidental. Texas and Oklahoma are two states where heavily pro-choice governors Greg Abbott and Kevin Stitt have been stymied by representatives from rural areas of the state who point out that A) their constituents lose a lot of education money but get nothing in return and B) rural schools are deeply tied to their communities and don't take kindly to these sorts of shenanigans.

That's what this wave of "rural communities need/want school choice" is about--trying to shout down those legislators (some of them Republican) who refuse to get with the program, to push them into the pro-choice. 

But Bedrick (Heritage Foundation/CATO guy from New Hampshire) and Ladner (Arizona Charter School Association) don't have much of an argument to make.

Availability is an odd hill for either side to battle on. Bedrick and Ladner point out that in Arizona, four out of every five students live in the same zip code as at least one charter school. If one side is arguing that there aren't many rural options and the other side replies, "Well, there might be at least one..." then we're just quibbling over "many." 

Bedrick and Ladner also bring up micro-schools, "a modern reimagining of the one-room schoolhouse" which A) is a generous description of micro-schooling and B) is an option that virtually nobody is trying to pursue for their own children. Micro-schools are just computer-delivered lessons, a small group of students set in front of screens with an adult of some sort in the room just in case some adulty thing is needed. Nobody who has the ability to choose anything else is choosing micro-schooling, but "Let them eat micro-schools" has become the new choicer reply to "But that voucher isn't enough money to get diddly or squat for a child's education." 

And then they toss in "high-quality virtual schools." I live in Pennsylvania, one of the havens of "high-quality virtual schools" (because our funding system makes running a cyber school better than printing money). And they are all lousy. Not one of them gets test scores that beat the state averages (if that's a measure you care about). Even folks who love charters have argued, loudly, that cyber-charters are a mess

Bedrick and Ladner then turn their attention to the fear that choice would damage rural public schools by noting that Arizona ranks high for "education freedom and choice" as determined by advocates who push choice. What does that have to do with the point? They are claiming that with so much choice, if choice were going to hurt rural schools, then "Arizona's rural schools would be falling apart." I suppose one sign of such trouble might be students who feel they have to leave their rural school to get an education, but we could also talk to folks like the head of the Arizona Rural Schools Association Don German who back in 2017 had this to say:

German said legislators, particularly those from rural areas, need to focus more on policy that will help students in rural schools, and stand up against those that are inequitable and disproportionately favor districts in metropolitan areas.

“Local rural legislators are buckling to the pressure put on them by the governor and urban and suburban legislators and end up voting against what is best for rural education,” he said.

“ESAs are not beneficial to rural Arizona because there is no other choice for most students than their local public school, so funding to make it the best possible place for an education should be a priority,” said German. “Results-based funding only works in a totally even playing field for all students and rural students are already starting behind.”

In fact, the disruption, defunding and dismantling of Arizona's rural schools may well connect to a general hollowing out of Arizona's rural places. When your rural school loses financial support (that is too hard to replace with local taxes), that becomes one more reason not to stay in your rural community, which decreases school enrollment, which reduces funding, and rinse and repeat until death spiral fully engaged.

Bedrick and Ladner point to how much rural Arizona NAEP scores have improved, but improvement is easy if you start in the basement. And they repeat an old choicer non-sequitur plus an insult:

Far from being a "rural school killer," education choice policies like ESAs expand educational opportunity for rural families while spurring rural district schools to improve their performance.

Of course, "expanded opportunity" can go hand in hand with killing rural schools. And the insult is the notion, long beloved by reformsters, that teachers in public schools are just sitting on the secrets of learning until they are properly motivated. 

Nor does anything in this piece address the research that continues to show that vouchers have a detrimental effect on student learning (see here, here, and here).

That is a critical omission, because this article set out to tell us why rural students need vouchers. It did not do that. It argued that some critiques of voucher are wrong. It made some assertions that assumed a premise of choice--any choice, even if the choices are few and lousy--is a Good Thing. But Bedrick and Ladner did not, for instance, say "Here are some unique needs of rural students, and here is how school choice is uniquely positioned to meet those needs."

The conservative choicer position is that of all the student needs--  safety, support, health, various forms and content of learning-- the primary need is for choice, and that's the need they're really (maybe only) interested in having met. They're entitled to take that stance, but it behooves the rest of us to focus instead on the other needs.

That's my kindest read. My most cynical read is that conservative choicers are simply one wing of the Destroy All Government So That Wealthy Elites Don't Have To Spend Money On Those People crowd.

Either way, the point of articles like this is to get rural folks and their representatives out of the way of choicer policy. The closing paragraphs starts with "By embracing education choice policies, state lawmakers can deliver on the promise..." which signals the real audience of a piece like this--legislators. 



Monday, January 9, 2023

Supremes Ask Biden Administration To Chime In On Public Charter Skirts Case

Today we veered just a bit closer to having the Supreme Court decide whether charter schools are public or not.

The case is nominally about a charter school dress code, but not really. The dress code, based on an old white businessman's idea of how to preserve chivalry and frail womanhood, is clearly illegal--but only if charter schools are actual public schools. 

Baker Mitchell, a successful North Carolina charter school profiteer, would like to argue that charter schools are not public schools (or "state actors," the fancy legalese term being used in these cases) and that they in fact exist as what one judge described as a parallel school system in a constitution-free zone. 

So, the case is a big deal because since the dawn of the modern charter era, charters have insisted on the right to call themselves public or not based on which descriptor is most convenient on any given day. 

For the record, I agree with Mitchell to a point. We would both make statements that begin with "Charter schools are not public schools..." but from there they would diverge a bit.

Mitchell: Charter schools are not public schools and therefor we should be free to impose whatever rules we feel like imposing, including those that would be unconstitutional if the government did it.

Me: Charter schools are not public schools and therefor they should receive none of the tax dollars collected to fund public education. Or if they want to be public schools, they could observe all the rules that public schools follow. Or maybe legislators could be honest and say, "In order to fund a completely separate education system, we'll need to raise new taxes to pay for it.

You see the difference.

The current decision on the matter comes from the Fourth Circuit which says, "Yes, they are public." Mitchell and his backers do not like that. So we've been waiting to see if the Supreme Court would like to hear the appeal.

Today, they came back with the answer, "Ummm....."  The court asked U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to file a brief expressing the Biden administration's view on the litigation and whether the Supreme Court should take up the matter. 

The school's lawyer says this is a good sign because it means they're taking the case seriously, and lawyers of my acquaintance agree. That also likely means that it will be a while before they get around to it. 

There are all sorts of implications here. Making girls wear skirts seems like a dumb hill to fight on, but if it's ruled a charter can impose this kind of archaic "traditional" clearly discriminatory rule, it's not hard to imagine what other archaic discriminatory traditions could be brought back, particularly given the number of wannabe religious charter operators who are backing the appeal.

So now we wait to hear what the Biden administration has to say, and that's not an easy prediction in this case. Then we wait to see what SCOTUS thinks about what the Biden administration says. Given what we've seen in Carson v. Makin and Kennedy and a host of other decisions from this court, it would not shock me to find us eventually winding our way around to "Charter schools can do whatever the hell they want and the public has to foot the bill for it." And the substitution of tradition for actual law that we've seen doesn't bode well here, either. We'll see. 

Sunday, January 8, 2023

ICYMI: The Normal Edition (1/8)

I always liked this time of year when I was teaching. Things sort of settle in, and the classes land on what will be the baseline for the remainder of the year. Things seem a little more in focus, a little less wildly variable. It is the first time of year that I ever felt there was a normal in my classroom. 

Here's some reading from the week. Remember--you can help spread the word by sharing any pieces that strike you as important. Share them right from the original source. Every little bit helps.

The Absurd Year in Educational Censorship

I'm late with this one, but it's worth a read--PEN America compiles the lowlights from the year in attacks on the right to read. 

What the American Teacher Act Shows Us About Education Now

Jose Luis Vilson has some thoughts about the proposal for a federal minimum teacher salary, and as always, they are smart and worth your time.

“Deja Vu All Over Again”

Retired education reporter John Merrow has some thoughts about where we are, both with teacher pay and the valuing of education.

Saving Public Schools for ALL Our Children in the New Year

Nancy Bailey has some thoughts about concrete actions we can each take to help forward the cause of public education in the new year.

Ohio’s Public Schools Had a Rough 2022 and Face Bleak Legislative Prospects in 2023

If you aren't following Jan Resseger, you should be. Here's a rundown for Ohio of the best and the worst of the last year, and the prospects for the new year.

Florida’s education system is vastly underperforming

Billy Townsend has been trying to get people to hear this for years, and the Tampa Bay Times finally gave him the space. Florida's education miracle is a hoax, a mirage that vanishes as soon as you look what happens after those wonderful 4th grade scores are gained.

“What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There” – Florida’s 8th Grade NAEP Disaster

Accountabaloney with the follow-up to Townsend's piece. More details of the Florida not-remotely-a-miracle.

Florida Gov. DeSantis’s latest oxymoronic school spiel

Valerie Strauss pulls no punches in looking at Ron DeSantis's inauguration speech and its swipes at public education.

An AI that can "write" is feeding delusions about how smart artificial intelligence really is

Gary Smith at Salon with one of the better takes on the GPT-3 writing flap.


Andy Spears provides a full story of the last zany year of Hillsdale and Governor Lee's fractured love affair.

Here Are 5 Book Ban Trends to Watch in 2023

Jonathan Friedman of PEN America with some trends to watch for in the coming year. These are the reading restriction actions we can expect to see.


Nancy Flanagan about what leadership in a school really means, and what its absence hurts.

I didn't put anything up at Forbes this week, but my first syndicated piece hit the world. It's an explainer about education savings accounts--if you're wondering what they are and why you should care, this covers it. 




Saturday, January 7, 2023

California's Creepy Cradle to Career Pipeline

If you thought that we'd moved away from the creepy idea of a cradle to career pipeline in which young humans are unwilling victims of steady state surveillance, then California has some bad news for you.

California enacted the Cradle-To-Career Data Systems Act in 2019. The stated public argument was, as has always been the case with data mining schools and students, something along the lines of "Only by collecting all this data about students can we figure out how to get the aid and supports out to the people who really need it." Or as their vision statement puts it, "The Cradle-to-Career System seeks to foster evidence-based decision-making to help Californians build more equitable futures and empower individuals to reach their full potential."

Sure. The cradle-to-career data pipeline has been kicked around since at least thirty years ago, when Marc Tucker  wrote the infamous "Dear Hillary" letter that laid out a federal-heavy system for tracking every child in this country data point by data point. 

The lion's share of the work on California's system appears to have been done by WestEd, a consulting firm grown out of the old federal regional education laboratory system.

California's version of the pipeline has been praised by the usual assortment of data fans, like the Data Quality Campaign, which thinks California's is a model program that everyone should be following. That's not a good sign.

The Data Quality Campaign has been around a long time in ed reform terms. DQC was put together in 2005 with ten partners:

Achieve, Inc. (www.achieve.org)
Alliance for Excellent Education (www.all4ed.org)
Council of Chief State School Officers (www.ccsso.org)
The Education Trust (www.edtrust.org)
National Center for Educational Accountability (www.nc4ea.org or www.just4kids.org)
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (www.nchems.org)
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (www.nga.org/center)
Schools Interoperability Framework Association (www.sifinfo.org)
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services (www.schoolmatters.com)
State Higher Education Executive Officers (www.sheeo.org)

The scope of California's data collection is staggering. Pre-K enrollment. The L-12 tab includes almost fifty data points (including lots of tests scores). Detailed post-secondary data. Workforce training. Financial aid. Social service "experiences." Employment "variables" including salary information. A batch of personal characteristics data. Data about teacher credentials and the schools the person attended. All of this is supposedly "depersonalized" and kept in a super-secure lockbox.

Who is all this supposed to be for? The system's site says there are three target groups. Students and families will have tools to make it easier to get through the go-to-college process. Unlikely. Educators will be able to monitor student prepping for college and "develop action plans based on data about learning, supportive services and employment." Also unlikely. There's nothing here that will be useful--certainly not more useful just because it's thrown into a hopper with a bunch of other data.

Third come "advocates and researchers" who will get to analyze a bunch of data to "shape policy." That is the only one of the three that sounds likely. Though the cynic in me bets that the process won't be so much "shape policy" as "sift through data top manufacture support for the policy I've already decided I want to push." 

Of course, the really ambitious dreamers in the conception-to-internment game want to see a bigger picture, a world in which young humans are so well described in a data profile (probably kept on the blockchain) that an employer can just order up meat widgets to exact specifications. That was probably one of the driving forces behind Common Core Standards, which could be understood as data tags for assessing, tracking and recording the exact competencies of students. The kind of deep data collecting that a womb-to-tomb pipeline would yield could also be harnessed for social impact bonds, a creepy was to monetize the struggles of human beings

Worshippers in the Cult of Data believe that if they just know everything, they can control everything. Neither side of that equation, neither the knowing nor the controlling, is an admirable or worthy goal. Not just because both are unattainable, but because the attempts to attain them are dehumanizing and destructive. 

California's framework for universal underage surveillance is just getting launched, and you can bet that its backers will have additional great ideas ("Hey, we could give everyone social and emotional tests and then record those in there, too"). There's also a non-zero chance that the assembled data will be used for a variety of unintended purposes, either to generate revenue or because someone fails at keeping it safe. And just wait till someone decides that they might as well imitate Florida's Big Brother Safety Surveillance System, because data-base future crime prevention is awesome. 

The risks are large, the violation is unconscionable, and the benefits are imaginary. Please, God, let it not catch on in every other state. 





FL: Can We Stop Pretending This Is About Choice?

Can we stop pretending that Ron DeSantis and his allies have any interest in choice when it comes to education?

The hits just keep on coming. This week DeSantis packed the board of Sarasota's New College with some far right folks. The headline appointment was Christopher Rufo, the right wing activist who brought us critical race theory panic and who has suggested that we can get to universal choice by sowing universal distrust of the public school system.

But choice is not the point, and for a certain sector, it has never been the point. Ron DeSantis has just become the most obvious example. Taking the liberal and successful New College and targeting it to become the "Hillsdale of the South" is not about creating more choices, and nobody is even pretending that it is. It's about silencing one set of voices and amplifying another set. 

This is not a new trend. The Don't Say Gay law and the Stop WOKE Act are two perfect examples of actions intended to stop one particular set of values and expression and replace them with others. At no point has DeSantis expressed the notion that Florida should have room for people to choose between "woke" and "unwoke" views in education; instead he has been quite clear that "woke" ideas must be stamped out. He's not arguing for a wide variety of choices; he is arguing that his preferred choices should be the only choices.

He pushes the end of tenure for Florida public university faculty, arguing that they develop an "intellectual orthodoxy" is left unchecked, by which he means they get attached to ideas other than the orthodoxy that he supports. DeSantis promised to crack down on "woke" ideology, then called for an audit of money spent on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at colleges.

None of this is about choice. None of it. School choice advocates who hold Florida and DeSantis up as examples of forward-thinking awesome school choice advances are being disingenuous--Florida is on a road to impose a more ideologically focused authoritarian model of education in which only ideas approved by the governor may be included in schooling. 

It's the two-pronged win-win of the culture warriors. Either they dismantle the offending institution and replace it with one of their own, or they take over the institution and install the leadership they prefer. 

There are many levels of irony here, including the irony that a pluralistic school system run by locally elected officials provides far more choices than a system bent to a particular ideology. And many folks have pointed out the disconnect between conservative support for choice in some areas (education) but not in others (reproductive health). But there really is no disconnect, just differing definitions of choice, and a belief that any system of choice should only include the correct choices. Which for the strictest of ideologies (or opportunists playing to the ideologue crowd) is a very narrow set of choices. 

It's not about choice or freedom. It's about restricting the rights and expressions of people you disagree with and expanding the rights and expressions of the people you agree with. The more DeSantis advances his agenda, the clearer it becomes that it has never been about choice at all. 

Friday, January 6, 2023

What George Will Missed About That Charter Case

Apparently it's a thing to try to create enough public noise that you might get the Supreme Court to take on your case, so Baker Mitchell has been all over the conservative mediasphere this week bemoaning a Fourth Circuit court decision from last summer that he and his friends are hoping the Supremes will shortly make a decision to hear. 



Baker's has been singing his sad song in several outlets, and somehow he apparently got George Will to play a remix of the original in the Washington Post. Will is a smart guy, but in this piece he mostly repeated the charter's talking points from the case. If someone comes waving this piece in your face, here's what Will gets wrong (you can get the full background of the case itself here). 

There's an opening salvo of lovable Willian snark-- "If opponents of expanded school choices would devote to improving public education half the ingenuity they invest in impeding competition from alternatives to the status quo, there would be less demand for alternatives."

Then a cut to the chase-- SCOTUS needs to find that charter schools are not "state actors" (aka "not public schools") so that charters can present "pedagogical and cultural choices without being vulnerable to suffocating litigation." Because it would be suffocating to have to constantly grant students their constitutional rights or follow other anti-discrimination laws.

Will offers a quick explanation of what charter schools are, and he's almost entirely wrong. Laboratories of innovation? I dare you to name one educational "innovation" that public schools didn't already know (cream students with supportive families). Publicly funded? True. Open to all? Practically speaking, absolutely untrue, unless you add qualifiers like "open to all who would comply with the school's rules and requirements." This one's extra tricky, because the whole point of this continued legal wrangle is to find charters non-public schools so that they can freely decide which students they will not be open to without having to be sneaky about it. Tuition free? Sort of true, unless you happen to choose a charter where, for instance, parents are required to volunteer a certain number of hours.

Being non-unionized, they are exempt from much of the stultifying micromanagement and uniformity that narrows parental choices.

Nope. For starters, some charter schools have unions, and some states have rendered unions virtually powerless. And Will is using a rhetorical trick to suggest what he knows he can't say, because unions are not the source of stultifying micromanagement and uniformity.

Will characterizes the school at the center of the lawsuit as "classical, traditional-values-based" education and oddly highlights "with attention to manners," as if making girls show their legs is a matter of etiquette. And he repeats the claim that the dress code is parent-designed, which I find unlikely, but it's moot anyway--the lawsuit against the dress code also originated with parents, so that's rather a wash.

The plaintiffs say that the dress code violates the 14th Amendment, Will reports. So does the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Will has a rebuttal for that, which in its entirety is "Really."

Will argues that the basis for calling the charter a state actor are flimsy. Number one is "Charters are called 'public' schools," which is true--and the people who have most often and most vehemently insisted that charter schools are public schools are, in fact, charter school advocates. The have been vocal, vehement, at times pretty cranky about it. But Mitchell and Will would like to pretend that some random person slapped that label on them, rather than the label being argued ad infinitum by an industry that desperately wanted to wrap itself in the mantle of "public" education--but only when it was advantageous to do so.

Will isn't really going to address that point. Instead he's going to point out that public funding does not transform a school into a public actor, and that an action isn't a state action unless the state "compels or coerces it." I skipped law school, but would that mean that nobody can sue a local government for anything ever? Also Will says we've always had private schools, so you can't claim that providing education is "traditionally and exclusively" a government function, and he may have a point there.

He thinks one of the dissents "demolishes" the decision as draping "a pall of orthodoxy over charter schools" whose purpose is to provide "educational heterodoxy," and if that's truly the purpose of charters, then they are largely failing. There's no excuse for stretching the Fourteenth Amendment to "stamp out the rights of others to hold different values and to make different choices," and the school is being picked on for rules "at odds with modern sensibilities," which is an argument that would be right at home in a dissent to Brown v. Board. The dissenter and Will both glide over the fact we're talking about different values and choices about how to treat other people and make them behave, not, as the dissenter frames it, whether to order steak or salmon at a restaurant. In his example, students are the steak and salmon. 

Will suggests that charters are under attack because they are so popular, and this case is just an attempt to strangle them. Next thing you know, Will argues, there will be attacks on single sex charters and charters with anti-trans rules. And then religion will bring up the establishment clause, which seems unlikely since SCOTUS has pretty much gutted that whole wall between church and school thing. 

But Will warns that this is all about crushing "true diversity." Yes, that's where we are--the right to discriminate and treat others in ways generally not allowed by law is now "diversity," another example of the conservative approach of grabbing a liberal buzzword and trying to beat liberals over the head with it. 

Like all of the supporters of the charters in this case, Will skips over the fact that the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools came down hard in favor of the Fourth Circuit ruling. A win for the charter in this case will mean an end of the marketing charters as public schools, and it will raise the next obvious question--if these are not public schools, why are we paying for them with public tax dollars. It will seriously blur the line between charters and voucher-fed private schools, which for those who really believe in charters as something other than a means of defunding public education and getting voucher feet in the door--well, it will suck. 

Will gets it mostly wrong in this piece. But he thinks SCOTUS is going to decide whether or not to hear it soon, and if so--well, maybe they won't decide to set up a parallel school system in a Constitution-free zone, but I'm not going to bet heavily on it.