ICYMI: Is It Still January Edition (1/22)

Is this month dragging? It seems like January is dragging. But it has been a huge week for Good Things To Read, so here's your list.

Old Obstacles, New Opportunities

Let's start on a hopeful note. The opponents of public education in Arizona (and there are many) lost the governor's office. Nicole Wolff at Stories from Arizona explains what some of the benefits could be.

Tennessee bill wants to shift control of third-grade retention back to local school districts 

More hope. Tennessee might actually stop a stupid, ineffective,. abusive third grade reading retention law. Erin McCullough at WKRN reports.

After Bill to Eviscerate Ohio State Board of Education Fails in December, Same Bill Is Reintroduced as SB1 in New Legislative Session

So much for hope. Jan Resseger reports from Ohio, where the GOP has decided that there are too many Democrats on the state board of education, so they'd like to strip it of power and just put the governor in charge.

Constitutional amendment would eliminate State Board of Education

Nebraska, too.

A teacher shortage so acute that students are expected to learn without one

A tremendous piece of reporting from Moriah Balingit at the Washington Post. Rural Mississippi is in trouble. The trouble filling teaching positions may be a regional and local thing, but this is the region and locality where it is really being felt.

Conservative group involved in Central Bucks library regulations some fear as de facto book ban

Turns out that the Central Bucks school district's reading restrictions for students may have been actually co-authored by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a far right group with a goal of making Pennsylvania "a place where God is honored."

A deep-pocketed donor from Pa. is moving onto the national stage. That’s a problem

You may not have heard of Jeffrey Yass (though I have written about him), the richest guy in PA and a huge fan of right wing anti-public ed causes. A group of writers at the Pennsylvania Capital-Star explain why his intention of going national is not good news.

Gender Queer: A banned book review

At Brutal South, Paul Bowers goes ahead and checks to see what the fuss is about, while providing some useful context for that fuss.

The “Learning Loss” Trap

The editors at Rethinking Schools explain how Learning Loss is a tool for yet more reformster shenanigans.

The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession

For you podcast folks, a new installment from Have You Heard. Warning-- it's kind of a bummer. Solid research on the hollowing out of the profession.

Americans want to know what Gov. DeSantis’ definition of ‘woke’ is. He’s not saying

A Miami Herald op-ed (via Yahoo) by Fabiola Santiago calling out DeSantis and his ill-defined lousy beliefs.

Universal Education Savings Accounts, HB1 and the Further Defunding and Dismantling of Florida’s Public Schools

Accountabaloney adds up the cost of Florida's new vouchers for all proposal, and holy smokes!

Conservative America’s New Authoritarianism: “Free Speech as Long as I Agree.”

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the hot new trend among red governors and other right-tilted folks.

Have we really hit 46% grift inflation in per-voucher cost?

Billy Townsend does the best he can with Florida's sketchy data to figure out just how big and bad the voucher impact has become.

Field Trips Gone Wild

Nancy Flanagan with a story of how some folks, poised to jump on public schools for anything they can gin up discontent about, found a way to kill a great field trip. 

What Happened to the 1.3 Million Children Who Stopped Going to School?

Carol Burris at The Progressive breaks down what exactly did or didn't happen to the "missing" children. (Spoiler alert: they didn't all sign up for charter schools).

Few Iowa families will have more choices with GOP ‘school choice’ plan

Iowa is on the list of states where the GOP is trying to quickly ram through an expansive voucher law. Ed Tibbetts at the Iowa Capital Dispatch points out that the choice that the bill promises is an illusion.

If Iowa passes a voucher bill, this guy says he’ll open up a Satanic school

His name is Joe Stutler, and he told a hearing, "Satan wants your money, and I want a piece of this lovely grift action."  He's a combat veteran and a champion troller. Reported by Herman Mehta for Only Sky. 

Community groups call on Marion County to stop approving charter schools

Jasmine Minor at WISHTV reports on calls by community groups (including some ministerial types) for Indianapolis to knock it off already with the continued approving of crappy charter schools.

Anger grows in Virginia city where first-grader shot teacher

An AP story about the school and community where that shooting occurred, providing some useful context and a reminder that the rising tide of school violence is an ongoing problem.

Altoona Area School Board approves AR-15 for school resource officers, “heaven forbid” they need them

It's doubly stupid, because nobody needs more guns in school and of all the guns to use to defend against school shooters, the AR-15 is a lousy choice (you'll notice that police departments do not carry them into shooter situations). 

Over at Forbes, I took a look at Virginia's terrible voucher bills and how to teach in the era of ChatGPT and its ilk.

Join me on substack to get all this stuff in your inbox (for free).

UT: Vouchers and a Cynical Bribe

Utah has jumped on the voucher train as they railroad an education savings account bill through the House, tying it to a call for raises for the state's teachers.

It's not particularly subtle. The language is right here, where the bill says "the amount of the salary adjustment for each full-time educator is:"

(i) if Title 53F, Chapter 6, Part 4, Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, is funded and in
effect, $8,400; or
(ii) if Title 53F, Chapter 6, Part 4, Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, is not funded
and in effect, $4,200.

Utah voters rejected vouchers back in 2007. Heck, the House voted down a voucher bill in February of 2022. That time, folks were afraid that it would drain far too much money from a system that ranks at the bottom in the US for state funding of public schools.

What's a voucher supporter to do? Ram a bill through quickly, so that people don't have a chance to voice opposition, and throw in a bribe so that folks can't oppose it without giving up hush money opposing teacher raises. 

Some days it's just a lot of work to find ways to circumvent that pesky democracy thing.

How about the voucher bill itself? Is it any good?

Short answer: No, it's a money-grabbing nightmare.

All Utah students are eligible, which means that rich families whose students never set foot in public school can still grab some public tax dollars to supplement their private schooling, draining money from public schools while reducing their costs by $0.00. Homeschoolers can hoover up some free state money, too. 

The program will be run by a hired "program manager," thereby outsourcing a government function to a private company.

Families that sign up must waive any rights to "disability service" for their children and give up all rights under IDEA.

There are no educational qualifications to be a vendor in the program, no requirements to check to see if vendors are actually able to do what they say they can do. Private schools do face some minimal requirements. The program manager is supposed to "adopt policies that maximize the number of eligible service providers," one more sign that, once again, this program delegates the development and implementation of education policy to a private company.

But there are, of course, the usual restrictions saying that they are not state actors because they accept state money, and that nobody can require them to alter their "creed, practices, admission policies, hiring practices, or curricula." Bring on the taxpayer funded discrimination and religious education. 

Buried in the bill is some language that comes close to acknowledging what this is really about:

The creation of the program or establishment of a scholarship account on behalf of
a student does not:
(i) imply that a public school did not provide a free and appropriate public education
for a student; or
(ii) constitute a waiver or admission by the state.

In other words, we know that we are cutting these people loose and we are, in fact, trying to weasel out of any obligations to actually provide a free and appropriate education for all the students in our state, so we'd better put in some language to protect ourselves in case anyone wants to call us on our bullshit in a court of law.

This is a bad bill. Sponsor Rep. Candice Perucci wasn't kidding when she said "This is the beginning of us reinventing public education in Utah," if by "reinventing" you mean "defunding and getting everyone out of it so that we no longer have it in any meaningful way." 

No accountability. No oversight. Privatizing the operation of the state's education system. Defunding public education, while funding discrimination and religious instruction. Literally taking money away from students in public school to give it to homeschoolers and private schools.  And trying to throw some money at teachers to sell the whole ugly thing, while suspending rules so that they can rush this by quickly before anyone says anything. Well, I hope folks in Utah who want a public education system say something now. 

FL: Don't Say African American Studies

The list of things unwelcome in Florida schools continues to grow, adding more evidence to the argument that whatever it is the DeSantis administration wants for education, it surely isn't choice. 

The DeSantis administration rejected the new College Board Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. In the letter to the College Board, the Department of Education stated that "the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law." 

The use of the word "inexplicably" here apparently refers to the fact that FDOE did not actually explain what in particular they found objectionable. Not a new trick--you may remember that Florida also rejected a pile of math textbooks for CRT violations and only after being pressed gave a couple of examples of what they were talking about. Though timing it to come in the same week as Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was certainly a bold choice.

The conservative Florida Standard pointed to some likely culprits from the syllabus, including the topics of Black Queer Studies and "Postracial Racism and Colorblindness" and here's Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a known critical race theory user. 

The AP folks say, "Well, it's just a first draft," and it remains to be seen if they will scrub the proposed course of anything they guess is offensive to DeSantis's sensibilities. The College Board is not a group I pujt great faith and trust in to get things right.

In the meantime, DeSantis and his legislature will continue to make sure that school choice can only be used to choose the choices that they approve of. 

In the meantime, Florida is also busy taking Disney to court to keep them from converting Splash Mountain. I'm sure the fact that Disney wants to convert to an attraction centered on their only African-American princess has nothing to do with it.  Nope-- the story has been picked up by many sites, but they all track back to a satire website. So there are apparently some limits.

Is It Really Equity Vs. Excellence?

Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) just published a piece about "The True Enemy of Equity," and while it makes some useful points, it misses a critical issue. 

Petrilli is spinning off a Stephen Sawchuk piece about how "equity" has become a "trigger word" and includes the quote “Equity may be the law, but we don’t agree on what it means.” Petrilli agrees that equity is a Good Thing to which the nation should aspire, and yet...

I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from Americans across the ideological spectrum. A potentially unifying argument might go something like this:

In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blemish on human dignity and flourishing.

Searching for the reason this is not a unifying theme of our nation, Petrilli notes that we know that inequity starts between birth and age 5, so equity work ought to address those years. The left, he says, has been working hard there, though he argues the right can contribute as well, mostly by supporting the "success sequence" (he doesn't use those words, but that's what he's describing--family stability, marriage before parenthood, etc). 

Then, he says, schools have to back that up. "Schools," he writes, "may not be able to overcome all the damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot." And so we arrive at his central point.

Educational equity, then, means providing children, and especially poor children, with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public dollars on the students who need it most.

The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity....

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excellence is the antidote to inequity.

He thinks the solution to Sawchuk's puzzle is this-- that "equity advocates" have turned the notion into a "trigger word" by "arguing that excellence is indeed the enemy."

By their line of thinking, anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or National Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a zero-sum game. Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.

There's no doubt that there are folks out there who, in the name of fairness, want to Harrison Bergeron the hell out of everybody and slap every fast runner in a pair of cement shoes. I met plenty of them when I was in the classroom. But that's only a slice of the issue. The real heart of it is this--

Who gets to define excellence?

Petrilli's own piece includes multiple examples of anti-excellence that are highly debatable, from decisions blocking charter schools to rules that keep schools from retaining their best young teachers to test scores (and the full on baloney flap about Virginia schools that aren't "celebrating" students with a fourth place get-no-prize finish on the PSAT). I don't want to go down a rabbit hole of arguing each of those, but I want to note that, on the subject of excellence, we keep having this conversation:

Pat: The [SAT/exam school/gifted program/etc] is biased and favors students from particular backgrounds. It's not really measuring excellence.

Sam: Why are you opposed to excellence?

I absolutely agree with Petrilli that mediocrity is an enemy of equity--especially when we slap a medal on it and call it excellence.

Look, this is not a new issue. In English, much of what we think we know about the most excellent words to use and the most excellent way to pronounce them is simply because of the belief that the most excellent people in London used language in a much more excellent way than the poor folks out in the sticks. Things like the notion that Latin-based language is more elevated and excellent is an artifact of cultural and historical events.

"Excellence" is inevitably defined by the dominant culture. I'm not arguing that it has no meaning at all, but its meaning is slippery, and if we are not careful, it is a hugely biased and tilted playing field. Excellence can only exist in response to a set of standards, and those standards are always human-made--sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Those standards cannot be treated as if they were plucked full-blown on stone tablets from the heart of a burning bush. 

So I agree with Petrilli when he writes 

John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need to live up to their full potential.

But "get what they need" is doing so much heavy lifting there. 

I also agree that programs like gifted and talented programs should exist (though often they involve giving a select group of students opportunities and supports that all students ought to get). But if that gifted and talented program seems to mostly include certain sorts of students from certain backgrounds, somebody had better back up and take a look at what standards are being used. 

Unquestioned belief in a particular measure of excellence, particularly when that measure is a bad one, can cause a great deal of damage (insert here everything I've said about the Big Standardized Test in the last ten years). But--and here I am agreeing with Petrilli again--that doesn't mean we should never make the attempt to identify, locate, support and celebrate excellence, even as we regularly examine our measures of excellence and the values that we have embedded in them. 

That discussion--what is excellence, how do we spot it, how do we support and celebrate it--is one of those education discussions that will never ever end, and it should very much be tied to a never-ending discussion about equity. 

Should We Tear The Paper Ceiling?

Upon his installation as Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro's first move was an executive order that ended degree requirements for 92% of the state workforce. Effective immediately, about 65,000 jobs don't require a college degree. 

If that strikes you as a big step, let me introduce you to the Tear The Paper Ceiling campaign.

It comes courtesy of the folks from Oppotunity@Work.  The outfit was founded by Byron Auguste and Karan Chopra, and a look at their careers tells us plenty about what kind of operation this is.

Chopra was born in India and grew up in Ghana. In 2014 he made the Forbes 30 under 30 list. He was a software developer at Siemens for a year, and went on to found WAVE (social venture tackling youth unemployment in Nigeria), GADCO (an agri-food biz in sub-Saharan Africa), advises X (a "moonshot factory"), was an advisor for Entangled Group (focused on economic mobility and the future of work), advises the SkillUp Coalition, and currently heads up Cervest (a climate intelligence platform). And back in the day, he spent three years as a consultant with McKinsey.

That may be where he met Auguste, who spent twenty years as a senior partner at McKinsey, before going on to be a deputy director of the National Economic Council under Obama. I'm not going to get into why massive consulting firm McKinsey is a big flapping red flag, but you can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So they founded O@W in 2015 "in part to support and grow TechHire, a White House initiative launched by our co-founder Byron Auguste to connect overlooked communities with technology job openings. We were originally “incubated” as a “civic enterprise” within New America, a think tank dedicated to bringing new ideas and voices into America’s public discourse." One more neoliberal thingy. 

Then in 2017 they turned into a 501(c)(3) with two goals. First, to look for "tech-enabled solutions" to fix the opportunity gap, and second, "rally public, private and nonprofit partners to rewire the labor market." Their stated mission is now just that second one. As such, they tout the STAR worker-- Skilled Through Alternative Routes. And that has brought us to Tear The Paper Ceiling.

TTPC was launched by O@W in October of 2022, with a big fat list of partners. Co-hosts included LinkedIn and the Ad Council and O@W, and the list of 50 partner groups includes Cognizant, Education Design Lab, the Gates Foundation, Google, IBM, Walmart, and McKinsey. 

The campaign is built around a PSA campaign, which is why some of you have been seeing ads for this thing. 

The basic pitch is that there are 70 million STARs out there--people who would be swell hires if not for "the invisible barrier that comes at every turn for workers without a bachelor’s degree. See also: no alumni network, biased algorithms, degree screens, stereotypes, and misconceptions." See, it's just an unreasonable prejudice that makes people who have an opening for a physicist only consider people with a degree in physics. That damned paper ceiling. Or take this florid description of the problem:

Millions of workers with in-demand skills and experience, overlooked for higher-wage jobs because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Companies stuck on a talent treadmill, desperate to build a reliable pipeline of skilled workers. Two allies separated by an insidious and invisible barrier. Now the enemy has a name. The paper ceiling.

Oh, that insidious and invisible barrier put in place by... well, they never quite explain that one. Companies are encouraged to sign a pledge, and STARs are encouraged to sign up for a job placement service. 

What to make of this? How is the College Board partnering with a push to tell folks they don't need college? Why is Walmart in on this when they're not exactly known for demanding that their underpaid meat widgets have college degrees? 

Look, I'm quite certain that there are very valuable workers out there with non-college backgrounds, and I'm also certain that there are plenty of jobs for which a four-year degree is not truly necessary, and when the labor market was stuffed with fresh meat, companies ramped up job requirements just because they could. Who built the scary paper ceiling, if not the people who are doing the hiring in the first place? So encouragement to stop demanding that people be overqualified for jobs is not necessarily out of place.

Given the many corporate players involved, the cynical view of Tear The Paper Ceiling is that this is just one more attempt to enlarge the work force by lowering standards. We've seen plenty of states tearing up the paper ceiling for teaching by enacting various rule changes that allow anyone with a warm body to run classrooms. Some of these partners are here to pitch themselves as Just As Good As College (Google career certificates ought to be just fine for hiring). 

The pitch here is also for "skills-based hiring," which is the employment side of competency based education and its cousin, "ledger"-style cradle-to-career pipeline stuff, where you collect a bunch of "I can do X" badges from wherever you will, and employers can sift through the meat widget database of blockchain-stored digital identities to order up whatever configuration of meat widget skill sets they desire. That seems like the better explanation for why Walmart is in on this. 

It should go without saying that this approach to employment is for the Lessers, and that the Betters will still send their kids to college. Bill Gates did not tell his children, "Just go out there and get some life experience and find whatever job you can by dint of your life skills." But for corporate leaders looking for cheaper and easier ways to fill jobs (and doing it comfortably from far above any ceilings), this could be great. I'll bet you anything that somewhere not far above that torn-up paper ceiling, you'll find other ceilings made of much tougher stuff.

And while nobody at Tear The Paper Ceiling is talking about redesigning education to fit this twisty dream, it looks to be very much a part of how a cradle-to-career pipeline for worker bees would operate, and that has implications for how K-12 would work (at least for some people).

NH: Supporting Vouchers By Changing the Law

New Hampshire's GOP has had a long, rough road to get to the Land of School Vouchers.

Education Savings Accounts, a kind of super-voucher, have been pushed in New Hampshire for several years, championed by Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, a businessman/legislator who homeschooled his children and has long advocated for school choice. Edelblut bowed out of a gubernatorial race with Chris Sununu, and was subsequently appointed to the head education spot by Sununu, where he butted heads with the Democratic-led legislature over many attempts to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education.

Back in 2017, voucher fans came close with SB-193, which proposed Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for the state, handing parents money they could spend on a broad assortment of education-ish expenses. The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. John Reagan, argued that the lack of accountability didn’t matter because he claimed that public schools “can’t explain where the money goes now, anyway.” Edelblut backed that one, too.

In 2020, the GOP flipped both the House and Senate. One of their first orders of business was a new voucher bill. They used the name “education freedom accounts,” an echo of Betsy DeVos’s ill-fated national voucher plan. The state would hand its share of a student’s education funding to a scholarship organization to give to families for a wide assortment of expenses, with loose limits on who could get the voucher, few limits on how it could be spent, and no oversight of the taxpayer dollars.

The hearing for this bill drew 3,800 people to speak, only 600 of whom were in favor. Opponents warned that the cost of the program would be far higher than the $130,000 advertised. Rather than buck the wave of public opinion against the bill, the legislature turned it into a last-minute addition to the state budget.

The vouchers are funded by the state’s Education Trust Fund. That fund was established in 1999 as a result of Claremont School District v. Governor of New Hampshire, a case that resulted in an agreement that the state would kick in a larger share of school funding. (Claremont is also the city where I lived and attended school up through third grade. It's a nice little place.)

And those warnings about a lowball estimate for the cost of the vouchers? Yeah, they were only off by about 18,400%-- the current price tag is $24 million. There are two contributing factors. One was the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity canvassed door to door to make sure that everyone was aware that there was free money on the table, which may be why (factor #2) the vast majority of families taking voucher money have students who have never set foot in public schools in the first place. 

However, New Hampshire's voucher plan has one big achilles heel--the law.

Remember the Education Trust Fund from which that $24 million in taxpayer money has been taken? There are rules about that money, and they include a rule that says the funds

shall not be used for any purpose other than to distribute adequate education grants to municipalities' school districts and to approved charter schools...

Not vouchers. Not  debit card payouts to families for whatever education-adjacent expenses they choose.

And so, it is lawsuit time. Besides the misappropriation of funds in direct contradiction of the pretty clear law point, the lawsuit also raises another issue--one that applies even in states that don't have this peculiar funding system.

The voucher system is administered the Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire. They have the responsibility to determine which families are eligible for the program, disburse the funds, and determine which vendors may be on the receiving end of the voucher money. This company--which is not a government entity-- takes over the functions we would expect from a state department of education, which is the other critical point of the suit.

This diversion of public education funding is central to the State’s goal for the program: removing students from public school systems by using the EFA as a substitute for the State’s duty to provide an education.

Further, the suit alleges, “the EFA program delegates virtually all authority to CSF with no meaningful oversight.” In fact, as is the case with many such voucher laws, it expressly forbids the state to “impose any additional regulation of education service providers.”

So even though New Hampshire has established one of the most expensive voucher systems in the country, with virtually no accountability or oversight, the system is still facing pushback.  So what is a voucher-loving legislator to do? 

How about proposing a constitutional amendment? Here's Constitutional Amendment 7, which is a simple bill-- it just removes one sentence from the part of the constitution that says that money raised by the state for education may not be spent on "the schools of any religious sect or denomination." Yes, New Hampshire taxpayers could have the super-duper opportunity to pay taxes to support religious schools that reject those taxpayers own children for not being the right sort. Seems awesome.

And not that anyone is saying that the lawsuit looks like winner because the law so clearly forbids the spending of Education Trust Fund money on vouchers, but here's HB 440, that just rewrites the Education Trust Fund rules so that it's okay to use the funds to fund the voucher system. The bill actually expands the original rules quite a bit. ETF funds could also be spent on a variety of things, including charter school lease costs and "phase out" grants for school districts. And if it seems like this might get even more expensive, the bill also allows general fund monies to be shunted into the ETF, which is handy way to hide from taxpayers that they are setting up an entire parallel school system, which represents an entire new financial commitment from the state.

There are some other bills waiting to be heard in Concord, including one that would allow local communities to establish their own voucher system. And, of course, there's a bill to broaden the already-broad eligibility requirements for the voucher system, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for even more extra education funding (but still without oversight or accountability). 

My grandmother, who was a New Hampshire state legislator for much of her adult life, started her political career on the school board, and she would have some choice words for this continuing effort to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public education in the Granite State. It's destructive and, more than that, dishonest-- but then, I suppose neither "We want to raise taxes so that we can send more tax dollars to private schools" nor "We'd like to just defund public education and leave you parents to fend for yourselves, but we'll give you a couple grand to shut up about it" would play that well. 

Here's hoping taxpayers in New Hampshire are paying attention. Not that the legislators don't know how to just ignore the public and press on, but there have to be elections eventually and all of these shenanigans would be worth remembering. 

Time To Get Your Copy Of Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door

Perhaps you just didn't get around to it at the time, or maybe you're not one to spring for hardback copies of books (I get it--for extra money you get a book that takes up extra space on your shelf). But if you never got your copy of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, now's your chance, because the paperback edition is now available to order (release date March 7).

The book came out in November of 2020, and in the interim it has become only more trenchant. Every trend and threat identified by authors Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire has only become more pronounced, more active, more shamelessly aggressive.

They end the book with a clear alarm:

The threat to public education...is grave. A radical vision for unmaking the very idea of public schools has moved from the realm of ideological pipe dream to legitimate policy.

The book identifies a four-pronged push against public education (I'm going to crib here from my Forbes review). First, the notion that education is a personal good, not a collective one. Reformers have suggested that public education is not a public service to society, but an individual consumer good, like toasters and automobiles. Therefor, schools “belong in the domain of the free market, not the government.” And while society should bear a minimal cost for minimal education for the poor, education “consumers” should mostly pay their own way. Finally, collective groups like teachers unions need to be quashed, both to allow more “efficiency” in the marketplace and to nullify their political weight.

The rise of vouchers and neo-vouchers, the development of techniques to make education profitable, the rise of computer-centered education, deregulation of the education sector (both directly and via charter schools), the development of reductive school ratings, edvertising, breaking teaching into fast food style Uberized gig work, and the “unbundling” of education so that school itself is no longer even necessary—Schneider and Berkshire trace all of these developments through the various tactics used and successes or failures achieved.

The result is a stark and alarming picture of the movement to dismantle public education (currently getting a further boost from the nation’s pandemic response). But the writers handle all sides fairly and clearly; this is not a book that paints the ed reform crowd as evil monsters, and readers will come away understanding the rationales and beliefs behind various wings of the movement to disrupt public education. These are old ideas, but they have neither gone away nor tired of trying.

This is an eminently readable, thoroughly sourced book that puts all the various threats to public education into a single picture. For someone who is trying to figure out what the heck is going on, or who has heard vaguely that there is some kind of education related fuss, this is a clarifying read. 

And while this book predates the recent rise of critical race theory panic, the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ students, gag laws, and suspension of the right to read, once you understand the ongoing attempts to tear down public education and learn who some of the players are, the current maelstrom makes much more sense. 

Plus there's a new preface, and a bunch more blurbs (including one by me), so there's that to look forward to. Seriously-- if you didn't get around to ordering a copy last time, now's the time to hop on the paperback version.