Some Parental Rights Folks Are Going To Have Big Regrets

Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that teachers are not free agents, able to push whatever they wish in the classroom. It is one of the points on which he and I agree; as a teacher, you are hired by the taxpayers, via the school board, to do a job.

It is, like every single thing in education, a tricky balancing act. You are hired specifically to employ your professional expertise and judgment, and because teaching is such a human activity, it takes some regular reflection and self-attention to make sure that your personal stuff doesn't slop over into your professional stuff. 

But no--as a teacher, you are not hired by the community to conduct your own personal crusade. Which is not to say that your classroom practice will not be enhanced by an infusion of your personal passions and interests, while at the same time, students are not there to learn about you and supporting the causes that you support, which is not to say--well, look. It's complicated. For me, the defining line was somewhere right around "Are students' grades or treatment in the classroom being affected by how well they agree with what I believe?" 

I get the impulse to try to get your students to see Important True Things about life and this country. I believe that if you stick to what is true and you give your students space, they will rise and advance in the direction of true things. But in their time, not yours. And when you try to push and make it happen right now--I understand the impulse, but I can't defend it. 

For most of my career, I was paid what was good money for this area, collected from the local taxpayers for the purpose of helping students get better at reading, writing, speaking and listening, which I considered in the context of helping them figure out how to be their best selves while learning what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Teaching is a complicated job because on top of everything else, you answer to a hundred different constituencies. Local employers, your board, your administration, the parents, the students themselves, the taxpayers, the bureaucrats and politicians in various capitols who set various policies--you answer to all of the groups, and those groups are themselves filled with a wide variety of ideas and objectives (even if some Very Shouty Members of the group try to hide the diversity with loudness).

It is that large and complex web of constituents that makes public education such a complicated operation, but that web is also what gives public education its strength.

To understand that is to understand how many parental rights activists are being played. 

For folks who want to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education, that vast web of constituencies means that implementation of the Three Ds has to happen on many fronts, and so the message has all along been focused on pretending that most of those constituencies don't exist. 

Parental Rights groups have been great for this, promoting the fiction that public education exists just to serve parents. 

Take, for instance, the manufactured outrage over one Iowa school board members' comments. Some parents lifted some dudgeon up high because board member Rachel Wall posted this:

The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community.

Wall is exactly correct. I might have edited it to say "not just the parent," but the community includes the parents, so she's covered there. But Moms For Liberty and other Very Shouty Folks, aided by Fox and other parts of the Very Shouty mediasphere, were all over this. Because education is By God a service provided to parents and parents alone. 

If your goal is to dismantle public education, this is great stuff because now, instead of dealing with entire communities, you're just dealing with parents (who, via choicey ideas you can split into singletons). With choice, you cut the whole rest of the community out of the conversation, and that will eventually come back to bite some folks in the butt.

Look. Nobody in education is on a little island. Not teachers, not parents, not students, not anybody. To try to cut them off from the rest of the community education ecosystem is to weaken every part of that system. "I am the Sole Ruler of my classroom," is a stance that ultimately weakens the teacher's role and effectiveness.

And "Parents are the only constituents of education" will do some serious damage down the road. When people try to say, "Everyone has a stake in educating young people" and are shouted down by, "No, only parents have a stake in education," those parents are backing into a buzzsaw.

Because the next logical response is going to be, from taxpayers, "Well, if I am not a stakeholder, then why the hell am I paying taxes?"

Where voucher policies really take root, we can predict the next step. Back after Brown v. Board, segregation academies were the next step, but the next step after that was for all those folks whose kids were either safely segregated in the academies and taxpayers whose didn't have children in school to get together and say, "Why are we still paying taxes for public schools?" We just saw it in Croydon, NH, where some Libertarians looked at a fully-functioning choice system and said, "Why are we paying so much for this."

Vouchers will be rebranded as entitlements. Policy folks will start saying, "This seems like a lot, and I know these folks could get a nice micro-school or software package for way less." Taxpayers will be encouraged to get Very Loud about, "Why are we paying all this money for a system that only benefits us." Heck, some folks will probably trot out all the research about how badly the vouchers work that voucher opponents have already collected. 

And parents who had been Very Loudly declaring, "The rest of you shut up! We're the only true stakeholders!" will suddenly discover that they have no allies, and what has always been true of voucher programs will become even more true--you only get as much "choice" as you can afford yourself (if some vendor is willing take on your child). If they're lucky, they will still have a public system limping along in their community. 

I understand the urge to want things your very own way (if I hadn't already, living with a pair of five year olds would clue me in). But we are all of us like horses on a merry-go-round--the same things that seem to hold us back are also the things that are propelling us forward. But it makes sense to pay attention to the bigger picture before listening to someone who says, "Would you like to just be cut loose from this spinny thing?"

I have lived through that special fear that comes from handing your child over to other people for the whole day. I get that it's real. But the folks exploiting it to simply blast away at the ties between schools and their communities are doing real damage, and I'm hoping that some folks figure it out before it's too late. 

ICYMI: Groundhog Day Edition (1/29)

Yes, it's coming soon. And it already feels like we're living the same day over and over.

For those of you new to our work here at the Curmudgucation Institute, this is the weekly digest of things worth reading from the previous week (just, you know, in case you missed them). These days it is harder than ever to get the word out and to get that word to spread, and part of the work we do has to be amplifying the voices of people with messages worth hearing. If you read it and you feel it, then share it. It's important. 

A decade of scandal at Epic Charter Schools

We're opening with some throwback stories this wek. Turns out that one of the worst thefts-by-charter-school in history was even worse than everyone thought. Beth Wallis at NPR/StateImpact Oklahoma has the story.

Trainwreck For America

Gary Rubinstein was an early Teach for America recruit, and he has kept a watchful eye on them ever since. So when they announced layoffs after one of their thinnest years yet, he had some thoughts.

Pa.’s landmark school funding lawsuit has been going on for 8 years. Here’s where it stands.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette brings us up to date on a lawsuit that might finally actually get somewhere this year. Maybe. If it does, Pennsylvania school funding is in for some upheaval.

Misdirectives

In Lapham's Quarterly, Georgia English teacher Ian Altman writes a really thoughtful and insightful look at some of the real challenges of teaching literature, particularly when it comes to The Standards. This piece is not short, but it is excellent.

A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces

Steven Singer peels back some of the layers of the NWEA-HMH deal that unites a test manufacturer and a edupublisher under the umbrella of a big investment firm. Yuck.

The school choice movement has a voter problem

Christopher Lubienski in The Tennessean points out the many ways that the school choice movement has tried to deal with the fact that the voters don't really want it. Democracy is such a pain.

Missouri lawmakers are slandering teachers while grossly underpaying them

Editors at St. Louis Today call out legislators for keeping teachers under paid and over abused.

Centrist Democratic PAC's Sole Funder Is A Republican Megadonor

Supposed centrist Dems are being funded by Jeffrey Yass, a guy who made his billions playing poker (no kidding) and who is Pennsylvania's staunchest, most well-heeled opponent of public education. What could go wrong?

Parents's Rights Versus Reality

Nancy Flanagan looks past the imaginary picture of life painted by parental rights crusaders.

The basic rights teachers don’t have

At the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss shares a piece by Joshua Weishart that looks at the slow stripping of rights from teachers, leaving them with barely the right to just do their jobs.

Once-subversive plot to dismantle traditional public schools in Florida now central policy

Columnist Frank Cerabino at the Palm Beach Post calls out the Florida leadership's love of school choice, and he minces no words. Vouchers are a sham.

What Does It Mean for Our Children and Our Society that State Legislators Don’t Know What Teachers Do?

Jan Resseger looks into the issues that arise when laws about education are written by folks who have no idea what actually goes on in schools.

Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution

Okay, there's a whole lot on the list this week about various attacks on reading rights. Let's start with Judd Legum at Popular Information, who reports on what's happening in Manatee County, just one of the districts clamping down on books. (For even more on-the-ground stories, follow Legum on Twitter)

Sorry, Twitter, but Florida's war on books is no joke. Ron DeSantis wants to keep kids from reading

Speaking of the tweeter machine, Amanda Marcotte at Salon is one of many who were "corrected" by Elon Musk's totally not-biased correction department. Marcotte has been following right wing education shenanigans with a sharp eye and a really sharp metaphorical pen, and this is no exception.

The Shift In Censorship

Grumpy Old Teacher had a couple of good takes on Florida';s anti-reading initiative, but I picked this one because it cuts right to what makes this new shift different and important. Now in Florida, all books are guilty until proven innocent. Also, the pic with the post is on point.

Hoover schools cancel Black History Month author visit after parent complaint

It's not just books, and it's not just Florida. This story from Alabama shows how one parent was enough to scare a school into canceling an award-winning author's visit. Expect much more of this, as the CRT panic crowd is sure that Black History Month is a CRT thing.

Book Banning Is Getting Worse

Anne Lutz Fernandez opens with "I’ve been very worried about the current wave of book bans. I haven’t been worried enough." From there, she goes on to explain why all the reasons we've been hearing not to get too worked up are not valid. Guilty of some of them myself when this started. This piece makes me wish I'd written this piece.

School librarians vilified as the ‘arm of Satan’ in book-banning wars

You've heard some of these stories already, but Jeffrey Fleishman at the Los Angeles Times has collected a bunch of them, and the full effect is-- well, this is a rough piece to read. 

I'm a Florida teacher who's been forced to cover up the books in my classroom. Here's why I'm suing Ron DeSantis.

Don Halls has been teaching for 38 years. He loves his job, and he's filing a lawsuit. Good for him, all around. 

At Forbes.com this week, I took a look at critical questions to ask about voucher bills, and Maurice Cunningham's new report on dark money and parent groups for the Network for Public Education, which you should read. 

You can get also subscribe over at substack and get all of my usual stuff in your email.

The Magical Thinking of School Choice

While busy implementing super-vouchers to further disrupt, defund and dismantle public education, Governor Kim Reynolds took a moment to tweet this:

 

Education is not a zero sum game!

We can invest in students, provide parents choice, AND have strong public schools. pic.twitter.com/5LVXtolaUE

— Gov. Kim Reynolds (@IAGovernor) January 27, 2023

Well, of course it's a zero sum game. Unless your state has an infinite supply of money, there's a limit to the number of taxpayer dollars you're going to spend on education, and any piece of that pile that you give to one sector of the education environment will absolutely be taken away from other slice.

But this piece of magical thinking has always been part of the modern school choice movement. "You don't have to settle for your one public school system," the sales pitch has gone. "You can have all these other different school systems as well-- and it won't cost you a penny more!!"

Sure. And when a business is running into financial trouble, a common tactic to make those dollars stretch is to acquire and open a bunch more sites. When a family is having trouble taking care of one house, a common tactic is to buy a second house and move part of the family into that house.

The notion that two, three, four, or more school systems can be operated at the same cost as one public system is a fairy tale, a delusion, a trip to the unicorn farm on the back of a dragon carried by break-dancing fairies. It's believing that daylight savings time makes the sun shine longer. 

Occasionally choicers try to pair that fairy tale with the fairy tale of The Public Schools That Waste Money Inefficiently, but you'd have to search far and wide to find a five hundred dollar hammer on school grounds; instead, you'll find teachers in a crumbling room wielding a third-hand stapler that they bought at a Salvation Army and reassembled with some duct tape at home. And at this stage of the game, The Tale Of The Magic Charter School That Did More With Less has been pretty much dropped in favor of The Tale Of The Charter School That Demanded A Larger Slice Of The Pie.

So the choice world hides the extra costs by getting wealthy benefactors to kick in, or hitting up parents for some extra money and/or unpaid labor. Some of the extra cost is simply passed on to taxpayers. That mechanism is admittedly complicated, as laid out by researcher Mark Weber here. Choice can actually raise per pupil spending in public schools, because fixed and stranded costs are spread over fewer remaining students, or because taxpayers put more money into the district to deal with those costs. And it's hard to figure in the "cost" of lost programming. 

It is the least surprising thing in the world to conclude that running multiple school systems costs more than running a single system. But somehow choice supporters can never quite bring themselves to make the honest pitch-- "We believe that every child should have a variety of options for education, and we believe in it so much that we are asking taxpayers to contribute more money so that the choice dream can become a reality." 

Why don't they pitch that hard reality? Because some great things could be accomplished in that reality. Well, free is always the most attractive cost for a program, and it's particularly attractive when many of the people who are driving the bus actually have the policy goal of shrinking public education spending to zero. And there are always those who sincerely believe in the magical idea that budget dollars are infinitely stretchy.  Who knows. Maybe if we close our eyes and wish real hard...

PA: 445 School Districts Call For Charter Reform

Charter funding in Pennsylvania is a miserable mess. Well, it's a miserable mess if you're not running a charter school; if you are running a charter school, Pennsylvania is like Christmas All The Time.

There are several major issues with the twenty-five-year-old funding rules.

One is that charters, for some arcane reason, are reimbursed for students with special needs at the same high rate. Students with inexpensive special needs are a cash cow in this state, simply illustrated by this piece of research from the PA School Boards Association:

In 2014-2015, school districts paid out $294.8 million in special ed supplement money to charter schools.

In 2014-2015, charter schools spent $193.1 million on special ed services.

Another is that cyber-charters are reimbursed at the same per-pupil rate as brick and mortar schools. Of all the advice I haven't taken, I rank a former superintendent of mine, who, on his way out the door, told me to get into running a cyber-charter because "it's easier than printing money." It's similar--except that the money is being drained from actual public school systems. 

Add to that the fact that cyber-charters are mostly not audited at all. Like our tax credit scholarship system, our cyber-school system makes money disappear into a black hole where nobody can see what has become of it. 

There are other issues, such as huge differences between charter rates for different districts. 

Local school districts have noticed. My old district noticed a lot the year that they had a $800K bill for cyber charter students and closed an elementary school building on the theory that it would save about $800K. 

Tom Wolf tried to get the legislature to budge on fixing some of this, but budge they did not. Charter supporters squealed like pigs being pulled away from the trough. Harrisburg is heavily lobbied by the charter industry (after all--charters have plenty of extra money to throw around). 

But in the meantime, school districts across the state have been steadily joining the cause and passing resolutions calling for charter reform. Pennsylvania is a diverse state, and the 500 school districts in the state represent everything from deep MAGA red to wide sky blue. And yet, there are now 445 districts that have passed some version of a resolution calling for the legislature to bring the charter funding rules into the 21st century. Now if only Harrisburg would pay attention. 

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.