UT: Vouchers Pass With Serious Shenanigans

Utah has joined the ranks of school voucher states with a flurry of fast-track shenanigans that managed to bypass anything resembling a democratic process.

HB 215 was distributed to Utah's House on Monday, January 16. They had a fiscal analysis by Wednesday, got it in and out of the education committee in one day. They had their second reading on Friday morning at 11:09, third reading at 11:14, and passed it at 12:25 and sent it to the Senate.

The bill took the weekend off, then on Monday, it was all aboard the Senate railroad. The Senate education committee had it back to the full Senate later that same day. It was back on the floor on Tuesday, a couple of amendments were quickly brushed aside, and on Thursday, January 23 at 12:09 PM, HB 215 passed the Senate.

And they say legislatures can't get anything done. This was clearly a well-orchestrated and effectively stage-managed piece of legislative force-feeding.

Say what you like about this shifty manner of getting the bill passed quickly before ordinary folks could raise much noise. After all, they've let the voters speak to this issue before and they didn't like how that turned out, what with the defeat and all. Democracy is so inconvenient. Well, at least the bill is--nope, there is no at least. It's a terrible bill.

It provides zero accountability, both in terms of how parents spent the money and in terms of what vendors can sidle up to the voucher trough to grab some of that sweet, sweet taxpayer money. 

As always, the real choice will be up to the "service providers." Students with special needs waive their rights under IDEA. And the bill contains the usual language declaring that the state can't require private schools to alter "creed, practices, admission policies, hiring practices, or curricula."

The education savings accounts will be about $8,000--double the support the state provides per student in the public school system. And because these are universal vouchers, students who have never set foot in a public school, as well as the children of wealthy families who can well afford pricey private schools, will all get their $8K, and public schools will lose a mountain of money before they lose a single student. 

If you're thinking that it sounds as if Utah's GOP wants to gut public schools, you don't have to guess. One of the consultants helping to push this steaming heap of legislation said so. Allison Sorenson was caught on tape 

“I can’t say this is a recall of public education. Even though I want to destroy public education, I can’t say that,” said Sorensen. “The legislators can’t say that because they’ll be just reamed over the coals.”

The bill even includes language that sure looks like it's there to forestall lawsuits arguing that the whole business is just Utah trying to weasel out of any obligation to provide a free and appropriate public education:

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.

However, the bill also requires the department of education to hire an outfit to run the program--in other words, outsource a function of the state government by both developing and enforcing the nots and bolts policies that will guide this giant boondoggle.

And the very worst part-- this was passed with a super-majority, making it pretty much impervious to any actions taken to undo this thing. 

It's very bad news for Utah, and for all the state that are about to be hammered by the well-financed traveling circus that pushing these bills. Taxpayers get to throw their education dollars down a black hole, while public education is defunded and dismantled. 

Vouchers Are Not About School Choice. Here's How We Know.

The new wave of voucher bills being rammed through red state legislatures all demonstrate a truth about school voucher policies-- vouchers are not about choice. They're about peeling people away from the public school system in order to defund and dismantle that system.

What makes me think so? Here it is. Sometimes it's not about what people say, but about what they don't say.

If the concern were really and truly choice for every student, then voucher fans would be addressing some of the real obstacles to school choice.

This door doesn't lead where they told you it would. 

For one, they would be addressing discriminatory and exclusionary policies. Yet when have we ever heard a voucher supporter say, "These discriminatory policies have to stop. LGBTQ+ students deserve just as much school choice as any other students." 

The closest thing we ever get is "Well, then they can start an LGBTQ-friendly school of their own." Yet when that happens, pro-voucher politicians target that school with terms like "perversion." And of course in some states, such a school can never happen because talking about LGBTQ students or Black history has been outlawed. And voucher laws are written to hold the private school right to discriminate as it wishes inviolable.

If someone were serious about voucher based choice, they would also address cost. Vouchers are typically far too small to pay for tuition to top schools in the state. If voucher supporters were really interested in making sure that, as Jeb Bush says, "each and every...student can access the education of their choice," there would be a robust discussion about how to bridge the gap between meager vouchers and expensive schools.

Yet we never hear voucher advocates saying, "We need to find the way to fully fund vouchers so that they provide a real choice to students." Choice advocates like to point at the inequity of the public system--parent choice is limited by their ability to buy an expensive house in a wealthy neighborhood. But the current crop of voucher programs doesn't change that a bit--a voucher offers little to change the fact that how much "freedom" you get depends on how wealthy you are. 

It has been done. But when Croydon, NH set up a school choice program, a voucher-like system that bore the full cost of sending a student to the school of their choice, local libertarians tried to shut it down because they wanted lower taxes. 

Voucher fans love the idea of school choice; they just don't want to actually pay for it. 

If these folks were serious about school choice via vouchers, we would have calls for oversight and accountability. It would make a choice system that much more attractive for parents to know that all the available options have been vetted and screened and will be held to some standards, just like shopping in a grocery store where you can rest easy in near-certainty that whatever you pick, it's not going to actually poison your family. 

And yet not only do voucher fans not call for oversight and accountability, but they actively block it with language that hammers home that nobody can tell vendors what to do or how to do it.

Voucherphiles like to call their system child-centered, but in fact it is vendor-centered, with "protections" for the service providers written into the law, and protections for the students non-existent. Parents are left to navigate an unregulated system of asymmetrical information that favors the businesses-- not the families.

If we were really talking about school choice, we would be talking about these ideas. Choice advocates would be demanding we talk about them.

But we're not.

Vouchers are not about choice. They're about saying, "I'll give you a couple grand to sign away your rights to a free and appropriate public education." They're about using that deal to get one step closer to Milton Friedman's dream of education being a cost shouldered by parents, not society. In other words, not just privatizing the delivery of education, but also privatizing the responsibility for it. 

It's about not having to pay taxes to educate Those People's Children. If at the same time we can use some taxpayer dollars (collected from Other People) to also further some "Kingdon Gains" and fund some private religious schools (just the Right Ones), that's a win-win. 

I'll end with my usual caveat--there are undoubtedly some folks out there who sincerely believe that vouchers are a good way to a pursue real school choice. Believe it or not, I myself can imagine what a true functional and beneficial school choice system would look like. And it wouldn't look anything like what has been ramming its way through state legislatures in the past few years. 

Jeb Bush Weighs In On Florida Voucher Giveaway

Jeb Bush, who helped kick off Florida's long march toward dismantling public education, thinks House Bill 1, a bill to remove any income caps on voucher use, is a swell idea. Here's his press release on the subject:

The right to a publicly funded education is a promise our state makes to every student and yesterday, Speaker Paul Renner and members of the legislature took bold steps to ensure each and every Florida student can access the education of their choice.

Florida stands on the monumental verge of restoring the original intent of publicly funding education – by funding individual students – so each child can reach their God-given potential. HB1 is a forward thinking and important move toward ensuring Florida remains the nation’s leader in student-centered solutions. I applaud Speaker Renner and the Florida House for their vision and leadership in creating this unmatched opportunity for Florida students and families.

There's a lot of untruth in this statement, underlining the level of cynicism behind this pitch to simultaneously defund public education while shooting taxpayer dollars over to private schools. 

Vouchers are not about choice. When Bush says that the bill will 

 ensure each and every Florida student can access the education of their choice

he's simply not telling the truth. LGBTQ students will not be able to have any education of their choice, because schools that want to discriminate them are free to do so. In fact, those religious schools retain the right to reject or push out any students that don't fit their religious requirements. 

Nor will the amount of money in a Florida voucher (around $8K) allow students to "access" the education provided by pricey private schools. Parents who want to attend upscale schools can either take out loans or--well, just not go. Voucher fans love vouchers and school choice--just not enough to have taxpayers actually pay the true cost. 

Nor will students with special needs, who must waive their rights in order to collect their voucher, have a choice of education, unless they want to choose not to have supports in place. 

The notion that this expanded program would benefit students is silly. It will benefit private schools, and it will provide nice rebates to families who can already afford to attend those private schools. It's a new subsidy, a new entitlement, like taking the money taxpayers give to maintain a community park and giving it to rich families to keep their private gardens nice. 

Meanwhile, HB 1 could mean that a whopping $4.6 billion leaving the students who choose public schools, or who are simply stuck there because they are not welcome in any of the "choice" options; a system that will be pushed a bit further down the death spiral. 

ND: Actual Anti-Furry Legislation. Really.

Furry panic has been going on now for over a year, seemingly impervious to debunking and facts and common sense. 

So some legislators got together in North Dakota to protect--I don't know. Something?

I shouldn't make light of House Bill 1522, because the main thrust of this two-page waste of the legislature's time is one more attack on transgender students. The bill defines" sex" as "the biological state of being male and female, based on the individual's nonambiguous sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous hormone profiles at birth." So once again, the state will want to literally check inside your child's pants, and maybe you'd better keep a picture of your child's genitals at birth on file, just in case some cranky parents want to throw charges at your daughter just because she beat their precious Buffy in a track and field event (which is not something I'm making up, but an actual event in Utah).

The bill goes on to say that no school may set up "a place, facility, school program, or accommodation" for a transgender student, and that includes pronouns. If parents consent, and gender-afforming surgery has been performed on the student before this bill takes effect, then the school is allowed to set up a unisex bathroom. Since such surgery is not performed on minors, regardless of what that Facebook post you saw says, this just adds more junk to a junk bill.

Any parent of any child at the school can bring a "civil cause of action" against the school over a perceived violation. The parent can sue for up to half a million in "exemplary damages." See-- save those baby genital pictures for your day in court.

But wait--there's more! Along with not providing "a place, facility, school program, or accommodation" for transgender students, schools may also not cater to "a student's perception of being any animal species other than human." Thereby joining the ranks of legislators who have aimed to prohibit letting yeti's ride unicorns down the main street while throwing golden eggs. 

Rep. Lori VanWinkle, one co-sponsor, told NBC news in an email that "Yes we have people who would like to claim themselves as animals such as cats and dogs." Oh, honey. 

There was a committee hearing yesterday on this slab of baloney tagged as an "emergency measure" that is nestled in among seven bills making various sorts of attacks on transgender persons. There were also bills prohibiting medical transition procedures for people under 18, solving another problem that doesn't exist (unless the problem is that some legislator isn't getting enough press), a bill making conversion therapy okee dokee, and of course protection for female sports. The North Dakota legislature is having a great week; on Monday a bill passed out of committee to ban children from attending drag shows. Glad to know the North Dakota legislature is devoting time to the really important stuff.

KY: Andy Bashear Gets It

Kentucky Governor Any Beshear is one of the few politicians out there who vocally and directly supports public education, and he has stood firm in a state where the legislature is determined to defund public schools. I'm embedding the education part of his message from 9 months ago so you can watch the whole thing, but I want to transcribe for you here his bold and clear statement about charter schools (it starts at about 2:20 in the clip). He's announcing that he will veto the entire charter school bill. 

I'm against charter schools.

They are wrong for our commonwealth. They take taxpayer dollars away from the already underfunded public schools in the commonwealth, and our taxpayer dollars should not be redirected to for-profit entities that run charter schools.

As attorney general, I can tell you the number of prosecutions we had against for-profit colleges, how so many of them took advantage of so many people. And the idea that we would open up that same ability for people to prey on our even younger students is simply not the direction that Kentucky should go. 

And the bill would send taxpayer dollars to charter schools that have boards that are not elected and are not answerable to the people. Public dollars being spent without that oversight. And they're not even required to comply with the same controls and accountability measures as our public schools. 

The answer to concerns about the performance in our public schools lies with actually funding and working with our public schools, not trying to divert money away to folks that you give more flexibility to than the group you're asking to do a better job. 

There's more. You can watch the whole thing here. If you're in Harrisburg, could you run this on over to Josh Shapiro's office and have him take a look?

The Person In The Classroom

Lately, some folks have been online opining about how teachers should be a mysterious black box to their students, not a piece of personal information shared. Mostly, it's in the context of exchanges like this:

Growing up, I don’t recall teachers announcing their marital status & pronouns to everyone.

They’re there to educate.

How is this still a complaint of the Left? https://t.co/s7nZeegZuh

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 21, 2023

In other words, it's okay if teacher gag laws make it necessary for LGBTQ teachers to keep their personal lives a secret, because all teachers should keep their personal lives a secret (not sure what you're supposed to do about being Black in an anti-CRT state). 

For the many millions of us in small town and rural school districts, it is an absurd argument. 

I taught for almost forty years in a small town/rural district. Taught, in fact, in the same school from which I graduated. I was also, during those years, a church choir director, a newspaper columnist, and an active local theater and music guy. Also, the father of two students who came up through that same system. I do not have the time or space to trace through every line of connection that ties all the folks in this community together. Beyond those ties, you simply meet students everywhere--in church, shopping for groceries, at the 4-H fair, walking down the street, buying underwear, any sort of outing with your family. 

In that environment, you share details of your life for a couple of reasons, one being that nature abhors an information vacuum and if your students don't know things, they will either make them up or dig them up elsewhere (e.g. Student to me: "My mom says you were a big weenie in high school"). But also because it is hard for students to get interested in being taught by a robot. 

This does not mean that a teacher should regularly spew their guts over the classroom. But there is no reason to stop being a person when you walk into a classroom, and in small town settings, it's hard to avoid it. 

Also--and I have to believe this is true no matter how large your district--as a teacher you are often one of the small group of adults that students know, and you cannot avoid modeling how adults navigate the world. 

Years ago, in the process of discussing a work, I mentioned that a literary character was probably a hot babe, and one student responded, "Oh, I don't know how Mrs. Greene would feel about that."

There was a brief moment in which some students looked around in mild alarm, and my niece, who was also a student in the class said, "He's divorced." The student who had spoken up absolutely froze.

In that moment, whether I wanted to bring up the subject or not, I was going to show students how an adult could feel about being divorced. Was it something to be proud of, ashamed of? Was it something unmentionable? I was going to model... something, whether I wanted to or not. (FTR, I think I modeled something along the lines of "not shameful, but no point of pride, either, and also not news, so nobody's in trouble for bringing it up.") 

The things people will know about you in a small town teacher world is just mind-boggling. They come from the same families that serve your food, chat with you while you're shopping, sit in the next pew, fix your car, and handle your medical care (one of my Small Town Teacher stories is the time I had my first colonoscopy and the tech was a recent student of mine). It evens out a bit, because students will share things with about home that would make their parents' hair curl, but still. The notion that you could keep your personal life a secret is hilarious.

Likewise, in a small town district, your politics may not be a secret at all (Heck, for years, a social studies teacher in my school was also the mayor of the city). Maybe you can keep your political leanings secret, or maybe ever since your picture ran on the front page of the newspaper waving that sign at that rally, your politics will be pretty well known by everybody who cares to pay attention (and it should be noted that not everybody will care to pay attention). 

What do you do? You model how intelligent people handle political stances in the adult world. You show that you can treat people with whom you disagree as if they are human beings deserving of respect and decent treatment. 

The politics in the classroom debate is getting broader because we have decided that everything is politics. The foundation of our big disagreements about race and LGBTQ issues is a disagreement about what the argument is really about. 

For folks on the right, the understanding is that racial issues in this country were all fixed in the mid-sixties and there is no longer anything to complain about, and that LGBTQ orientations are unnatural and therefor the result of either trauma or trickery. Therefor, any discussions about rights or considerations for these groups is simply a political ploy.

For other folks, "Black lives matter" and "LGBTQ persons deserve to exist and be treated decently" are not political statements, but statements about basic humanity.

Are there limits? Sure. Like everything else in education, it's a balancing act. Requiring students to sign on as active crusaders in your cause is not okay (and most often comes across as "You must pretend to believe X in order to get a good grade in this class," which never serves anyone). 

Look, if a teacher is going to be a person in the classroom (and I think they should), then I think the appropriate stance is this: 

"I am a person, with strengths, weaknesses, biases, opinions, and a variety of life experiences. Some of this may come up in this class, and some may not, but what you need to know as students is that none of it will affect how I treat, teach, or assess you. You will not be picked on or receive a lower grade because you believe X or refuse to believe Y. I will communicate the standards of this class clearly to you, and I guarantee that there are no secret hidden standards that I will use. Whatever you believe or disbelieve, you are safe to be that person in here."

Maybe in a large district you can work in a building where nobody knows anything about you. Maybe you can carefully monitor every word that comes out of your mouth so that you never slip up and drop hints about your life outside of school. Maybe you find a way to never be seen with your family in public. Maybe nothing in your life will ever blow up loudly enough that the echoes make it into your classroom. Maybe you can learn to function as someone who is not actually a full person in your classroom. You sure can't do any of that in a small town district, and imagining trying just makes my head hurt. It's perhaps my own bias and experience speaking, but the whole exercise strikes me as making you a less effective teacher and a very weary human being.

Choice, Vouchers, and the End of Public Education

Doug Mastriano was not out of step with the movement; he was just a bit early.

Mastriano ran for governor of Pennsylvania with the idea that he could end real estate taxes entirely and  cut state funding for public schools to $0.00. Just give everyone a tiny voucher and send them on their way. The idea was far enough out there that the campaign tried to back away from it (without entirely disowning it) and even other GOP politicians raised eyebrows and said, "No, not that."

You slice them off at the knees, right here--

The thing is, this is not a new idea. It has been the fondest dream of some choicers all along. Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, offered a succinct digest in the Washington Post of what Milton Friedman, granddaddy of the not-overtly-racist wing of the school choice movement, thought about the movement and its ultimate goals.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

You don't have to set the wayback machine to find folks saying this quiet part out loud. Utah is one of several red states racing to ram through a voucher bill. Here's Allison Sorenson, executive director of Utah Fits For All, an outfit marketing the voucher plan like crazy; in this clip, she's explaining that the folks who back Utah's plan can't come right out and say they're going to defund public education entirely, that admitting the goal is to destroy public education would be too politically touchy. 

Vouchers are not about choice. Just look at Florida, which has worked to disrupt, defund and dismantle public schools for years, while simultaneously shutting down and limiting what choices schools are allowed to offer. Look at every state's voucher law; they all enshrine a private "education provider's" right to deny and discriminate as they wish, thereby denying choice to any students they wish to deny choice to. One of the biggest limiters of school choice is not the public system, but the private system's unwillingness to open their doors to all these students who, we hear, are just thirsting for choices.

We know what a free market education system looks like--it looks like the US post-secondary education system. Occasional attempts at free-to-all schools are beaten down by racist and classist arguments, along with charges of socialist indoctrination. You get as much choice as you can afford, the private schools only accept (and keep) the students they want, and those who aspire to certain levels of schooling have to sink themselves in debt to get it. Meanwhile, state's slowly but surely withdraw financial support from the few "public" universities left.

Should we enter a world where vouchers flourish and public schools die out, it seems easy to imagine a next step in which politicians either quietly (with budgetary legerdemain) or publicly (by attacking the voucher "entitlements" or asking why people without kids should have to pay taxes to send other people's kids to school) make the voucher payment thinner and thinner, offering advice like the already-too-oft-repeated advice that some folks might want to sign up for one of those Microschools, where a few neighbor kids gather to pull some education off a computer screen. 

It would be easy. After all, instead of a collective such as a teachers union or the collective group of parents and taxpayers rallied around a community's school, the slashers would face a disjointed, splintered bunch of individual parents making their individual way through a broad marketplace. 

Milton Friedman's dream is still alive, and this year it appears that some folks are working hard to get one step closer to it. May they all fail miserably.