PA: Penncrest Reading Restrictions May Face Legal Issues

Penncrest School District is located in the NW corner of the state, located mostly in Crawford County. It's a mid-sized (around 3500 students K-12) district that was stitched together out of several very small rural districts. 

They've been in the news because their board has seen fit to try to protect students from Objectionable Books (which seems to mean especially any that mention LGBTQ persons at all). You can get the full back story here, but we'll need to move ahead, because Things have been Happening.

Short version. After expressing social media outrage over a display of LGBTQ books in the school library, a board member proposed a new restrictive policy on books in the library--twice. Folks on all sides spoke up, but the board went ahead with the restrictions. If you've watched any of these dramas unfold elsewhere, you'll recognize some of the features. "But the policy doesn't actually mention gay folks," say people whose other comments make it clear that when they say "sexually explicit" that includes "mentioning LGBTQ persons ever." There's also the usual blurring of lines by which everything that includes a hint of anything folks don't like is labeled pornography, as if all things that mention sex at all ever are always total pornography. 

The high school newspaper caught the district in a moment of self-contradiction. The Facebook posts in which board member David Valesky called homosexuality "totally evil" and suggested it's wrong to suggest it's "okay" became the subject of a lawsuit. Part of the district's defense in that lawsuit was, "Hey, school boards don't have the power to ban books, so there's no threat implied by Valesky's post." That was, of course, before the board decided they totally have the ability to ban books after all.

You could ask the district's lawyer about his argument in that case, but he's quit.

Attorney George Joseph, of the Quinn Law Firm, told the board that their new policy, plus their anti-trans in sports policy, could open them up to some legal trouble. At a meeting, two board members called the solicitor's opinion "a joke," "worthless," and "not even legal." 

In his termination letter, Joseph wrote

Recent actions by the board have highlighted a fundamental disagreement by a majority of the Board with the legal analysis and opinions of our office and, in our analysis, significantly compromised our ability to provide legal ongoing services to the District and to the existing School Board.

He goes on to explain the specific advice that he gave which was ignored and to explain that this is not personal. It's his job to give advice; he knows they don't have to take it, as has been the case in "several such instances."

Nevertheless, I must take exception to the manner in which some individual Board members expressed their disagreement with the most recent legal opinion I rendered.

That expression was "unconscionable" to him. So the board now needs a new solicitor.

They're working on it, sort of. We know that because at this point, they've attracted enough attention that USA Today's legal department is filing Right To Know law requests (because, see, you can do that with a public school), and that turned up emails from board president Luigi DeFrancesco to the Independence Law Center, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a right wing religious advocacy group. 

It would make sense to turn to this group, because Penncrest's new policy appears to be based on a controversial policy in the Central Bucks County School District, and it appears that policy was co-written by an attorney from the Independence Law Center. The lawyer that DeFrancesco reached out to, Jeremy Samek, is the same lawyer who apparently had his hand in the Central Bucks policy.

The Pennsylvania Family Institute website says, under the heading of culture

We believe a flourishing, prosperous culture requires limited government, focused on its chief role to restrain evil and promote the good. This is best described as “ordered liberty,” reflected in Pennsylvania’s motto, “Virtue, Liberty and Independence.”

It's an interesting interpretation of "freedom" and "limited government" and reminds me of Wilhoit's Law, which says

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

While their original law firm has said they'll continue to provide some services for the district until they find a new lawyer or lawyers, the district has put out some requests for proposals from firms. Though at least Valesky made clear his feelings about the legal issues on the same night the new policies were passed.

"If we go to court over it, so be it,” he said, “because at the end of the day we’re standing up for what’s right and for what God has said is right and true.”

I'm sure the story will continue to unfold. Stay tuned. 

McKinsey's Ridiculous Projection Of Learning Loss Damage

From the first mad March moment of 2019 2020, when states decided to shut down schools for a couple of weeks while this whole COVID thing blew over, McKinsey, the 800 pound gorilla of the consulting world, has been all over pandemic's golden opportunity with a variety of ideas about A) sending up alarms about Learning Loss and B) pitching solutions to the disaster they were working so hard to amplify.

Now, in pursuit of Goal A, they've issued a report that is just bonkers wrong. Beyond the usual Just Making Stuff Up part, there is, as Chalkbeat reporter and perennial bad data debunker Matt Barnum pointed out on Twitter, "a total conceptual misunderstanding." 

The general theme of the report is "OMG! The learning losses are only terrible awful but it will take forever and a day to recover from them!!" It is absolutely in keeping with the idea that test scores are like stock market prices and not, say, the collected scores of a group of live humans that changes each year.

The subheading signals the dopiness here: "While two decades of math and reading progress have been erased, US states can play an important role in helping students to catch up."

The New York Times used the same damn dumb idea in their headline about NAEP scores, and it still makes no sense. What exactly has been erased, and from where was it erased? And here comes a chart that I'm nominating as The Dumbest Chart Ever Produced By People Who Make More Money Before Lunch Than I Ever Made In A Year.

Let's talk about this for a second. There is an obvious issue, which is that the rates of improvement are made up baloney. "Reflect historic trends"? Do you mean, the kind of improvement we saw after the last time U.S. schools were disrupted by a major pandemic? You can download the full article and still not find an explanation of where these numbers came from, but you can find the old numbers to confirm that no graph of NAEP scores ever looked like this slow steady climb. 

But not only are these numbers just made up, but they make no sense.

The chart says that 8th graders won't catch up to pre-pandemic scores for twenty-eight years, which means that students who haven't even been born and so presumably have not been affected by the pandemic will still get low scores because of the pandemic !!??!! How does that even work?

The only possible way this chart could be close to conceptually defensible is if your theory is that the pandemic wiped out everything teachers have learned about how to teach in the last twenty years, and it will somehow take them until 2050 to reacquire that knowledge--though we would of course be talking about teachers who haven't even been born yet!! (Sorry about all the punctuation, but it's all I can do not type this post in italics and caps).

This is not how this works. This is not how any of this works. 

There's more in the report that we could pick apart, like the use of the whole "weeks of learning loss" foolishness, a half-assed attempt to correlate learning loss with school closure, and a bunch about how much relief money is still in play, because it wouldn't be a McKinsey report if they weren't trying to market something, and the ultimate conclusion is that districts should really try to fic this Terrible Thing by spending that relief money on The Right Products.

But there's no point in digging deep on the rest because that first chart announces so clearly that the writers of this paper have wandered off down the wrong path. How does this happen? There are four authors, three of whom are supposed to be McKinsey education experts. Of the three, one taught for one whole year for KIPP (then became an education consultant and then went to the Gates Foundation), one put in three years in a DC school (it doesn't say Teach for America, but he did his three went straight to McKinsey), and one has no actual education experience at all). 

It will be really unfortunate if any policy makers or leaders actually take this report to heart. This is why folks who actually work in education mistrust "expert consultants," and unfortunately why some teachers distrust their own judgment because surely an internationally respected major consulting firm couldn't be so wrong, could they? 

Well, yes, they could. Don't be intimidated. 

Koch's Yes Every Kid: Still Selling Privatization

Back in the start of 2019, Charles Koch declared that, all of a sudden, he wanted to work with teachers. Then we got another hint at the end of June when EdWeek noted that the Kochs were going to team up with the Waltons to throw a pile of money-- a great big honking pile of money-- at incubating schools, programs and what-have-them across the country. In that same article, EdWeek noted the creation of Yes Every Kid, "a group that intends to find common ground between groups that typically have disagreed vehemently over issues such as labor protections and school funding."

Yes. Every Kid. (I am going to skip the irritating extra punctuation for the remainder of this piece) was launched at the end of June, including a big piece from AP reporter Sally Ho, touting "hundreds of donors contributing at least $100,000 annually." The goal was to push school choice.

I wrote about it at the time, though at that point they hadn't done much. Charles Koch was a year away from announcing that, gosh, he had just been too partisan and divisive for the country, oopsies, my bad, and turning the Charles Koch Institute into Stand Together Trust, but Yes Every Kid was like a prequel to that rebranding effort. Its website at the time included an uplifting affirmation:

It's that simple. Instead of saying no. We say yes. We're done with negativity. Education reform has been saying "no" for decades. Saying no to educators, parents, and real solutions. Instead, we say "yes." Yes, every kid can learn. Yes, your ideas matter. Yes, together we can make change. We know that if we wait for change to come down from above, it won't be change in the right direction.

Yes, don't wait for things to come down from above, says this website that has come down from a billionaire who wants to drive the education bus despite his complete lack of educational expertise. But this astroturfery is insistent. "Real change has to start from the ground up. We're here as your resource to facilitate conversation." That might be really moving if the very next sentence weren't "We're here to foster a culture of disruptive innovation," which suggests that these facilitaty listeners already have some answers in mind. Also missing-- an acknowledgement of where all that negativity came from. Here is yet another reformy outfit talking about negatives from the past as if they simply fell from space, instead of saying, "Yeah, that was us. Sorry." And here comes the tell:

We want to hear new ideas, new solutions, and new voices. And it can only happen when we listen to the real stakeholders in education: you.

But who is this "we" and why should stakeholders feel any need or obligation to talk to "we" in the first place? This is the same old rich fauxlanthropist baloney-- we're not only going to vote ourselves a seat at the table, but we're also going to go ahead and give ourselves the seat at the head because, yeah, this is our table now. It's so big and generous of you to agree to listen to us, Sir, but I still haven't heard a reason that we should be talking to you.

When we call Yes Every Kid astroturf, that's not based on the usual tricky business of tracking forms and chasing money or junior detective shenanigans. Yes Every Kid has always been up front about being a Koch operation, from the current billing as "part of the Stand Together community" to its first big boss, chairman of YEK Meredith Olson. That appears to be this Meredith Olson, whose LinkedIn page lists her as Vice President, Public Affairs at Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC. She's located in Wichita and has been with Koch since 2005, first as Director, Business Development, then Managing Director, Operations, and now five years in the VP spot. Before that she worked for Shell Oil. Her degrees are mechanical engineering and an MBA.

So how are they doing these days?

Well, in 2019, for some weird reason, they tracked to an address in Michigan occupied by a hair salon. Today they have a proper address in a big office complex at 1320 N Courthouse Rd (Suite 400), Arlington, VA. The building is occupied by a variety of businesses; it's also occupied by the Stand Together Trust (Suite 500), and Americans for Prosperity (Suite 700), the Koch brothers operation that helped create the Tea Party movement. 

The Team is, again, clearly under the Koch umbrella. 

President Andrew Clark is listed as "a veteran of the Stand Together community," which turns out to mean he spent two and a half years at American for Prosperity. Before that, two years with Generation Opportunity, a Koch "sister organization" of AFP that helped fight the Affordable Care Act. Seems to have gotten his political start working as a grassroots consultant for Quayle for Congress. He's a "skilled lobbyist and tactician."

Craig Hulse, executive director, has been a busy guy. He's been back and forth through the revolving public-private door. Staff assistant for Congress, legislative liaison for Nevada governor, state policy advisor in Nevada, Nevada state director of StudentsFirst, director of government relations for Las Vegas Sands, public policy/public affairs manager for Uber, the Ready Colorado choicer advocacy group, state government affairs for JUUL, policy and government affairs for Tesla--most of them for a little over a year. His job is to oversee "the lobbying team with efforts across the United States to direct education and influence campaigns to shape education policy that is open to the free flow of ideas and innovation."

Erica Jedynak is the chief operating officer. Her last job was with Stand Together, and before that Americans for Prosperity, Deputy Chief of Staff in New Jersey legislature, and before than "campaign operative" for a whole lot of campaigns in the greater NYC area. 

There's more of the same. The coterie of National Policy Directors include a guy who touts his experience as a former teacher and, you guessed it, by "teacher" he means two years as a Teach for America temp, before moving on to help run a charter school and then go work for Excel in Ed, Jeb Bush's choice advocacy group. Former politician/pastor with libertarian think tank experience. Various coms professionals and experienced political operatives.

There is nowhere in sight anyone with real experience or expertise in education, but education is not really what YEK is about. It's about moving policies that defund and dismantle public education, a longtime goal of the Koch operation. As former Goldwater Institute operative Charles Siler explained:

Their ideal is a world with as minimal public infrastructure and investment as possible. They want the weakest and leanest government possible in order to protect the interests of a few wealthy individuals and families who want to protect their extraction of wealth from the rest of us. They see private wealth accumulation as a virtue signal because a person can only become wealthy by creating something of exceptional value for the public. In their world view, the more money someone has, the more moral life they've lived, and any attempt to take that money through taxation or other means is a moral issue.

YEK lists its four "policy pillars" as Fund Every Kid, Learn Everywhere, Education Your Way, and No More Lines, all policies about making education the responsibility of parents, not the government. The Koch machine frames this as freedom, but it's the same old voucher goal of defunding and dismantling the public education system and thereby getting rid of another part of government (and its attendant requirement to pay taxes to fund schools for Those Peoples' Children). 

Their press page involves a lot of applauding-- Iowa, Utah, Governor Sarah Sanders, Ryan Walters. It's a privatizer's all star list. They've also whipped up some balonified "research" to suggest that everyone loves them some vouchers. 

But mostly what they've done is perfect the warm fuzzy message that this is all For The Kids and Great Education (though there are no actual educators involved). But if you want the full unfiltered version of the Koch vision, there's nothing like David Koch's run as Presidential candidate for the Koch-funded Libertarian party. They wanted to get rid of a laundry list of federal agencies. They wanted to abolish Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They wanted to get rid of federally mandated speed limits, anti-trust laws, all controls on wages and rents. 

And in true Libertarian fashion, the platform urged the privatization of all schools (with an end to compulsory education laws). 

That's the dream--government completely out of the education biz, with families left to find what they can in a wide-open unregulated market. The dream itself hasn't changed; they just keep trying to put a more appealing face on it. Yes Every Kid is just the latest attempt to find a good sheep suit for that ugly wolf.

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.