ICYMI: Arctic Blast Edition (2/5)

Best wishes to friends and family living in the land of Holy Scheikies That's Cold this weekend. We have the normal kind of cold here, but Mount Washington has got -109 wind chill (and negative fifty-something air temp without the wind) and that's just not okay. Stay warm. Stay safe.

While you're cuddled up today, here's the reading list from last week. As always, I encourage you to share the ones that strike you as important. It would be great if we had billionaires to amplify our signal, but only one group has that advantage.

Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members

The not-to-be-missed story of the week is the discovery of a large network of homeschoolers aimed at producing beautiful young nazis. Really. As you read this, don't forget that in some states, legislators are trying to set up a system that would result in these folks being subsidized by tax dollars.

Voucher Proponents Across the Country are Winning. What Are the Stakes?

Steve Nuzum lays out some of the stakes (including funding nazis) as voucher movements sweep through several states.

The Far Right Has Used Culture War Politics to Open the Gate to a Vast Expansion of School Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at how the culture wars have been used to energize the voucher push.

I’m a teacher in Florida. Here’s what the DeSantis book bans look like in my classroom

From Andrea Phillips, a heartwrenching piece about what the Florida crack down on books looks like on the ground, and it's not pretty.

UPDATE: Florida Commissioner of Education attacks Popular Information

Judd Legum of Popular Information continues to be all over Florida's book banning. This post includes complaints from Florida's leaders about being quoted accurately. Also: meet the Wokebusters.

Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. schools tell teachers

Hannah Natanson at the Washington Post digs into some details about how the book ban is going, including an explanation of how felony charges ended up on the table. 

Teachers Are Not Meant to Be Martyrs

My Ed Week subscription lapsed when I wasn't looking, so I missed this piece when it ran a few weeks ago. Amanda Slaten Frasier writes this unapologetic defense of teachers' rightful role in education. Come for this closing line: "In short, teachers don’t need a seat at the table. Teachers need everyone, themselves included, to realize that they own the table."

Records show powerful, wealthy funders outside Idaho back school choice campaign

The voucher push across the nation is coming, state by state, from the same set of fake grass roots millionaire funded operators. DeVos, Koch, and Walton are on the march. Here's what that looks like in Idaho.

Behind the 'grassroots' movement for Oklahoma school vouchers championed by Ryan Walters

In Oklahoma, the same batch of carpetbagging astroturfers are at work. Well-researched piece for The Oklahoman, by Ben Felder.

School choice nightmare: Vouchers are endangering the rights of families

Jeff Bryant tells the story of a Maine family that thought school choice would be a huge benefit; instead, it turned out to be a nightmare.

It Takes A Village: Expelling Right-Wing Extremism From Bucks County School Districts

From Cyril Mychalejko at the Bucks County Beacon, a look at the ongoing struggle there between right wing leaders and, well, an awful lot of other people.

Inside the audacious new scheme to erase LGBTQ people from Michigan schools

Judd Legum again. This time with a new group that has a plan for emptying out public schools. Make sure you get to the part where their website's "concerned parents" turn out to be stock photos.

Running a Charter School for Profit Should Be Illegal

Carol Burris at the Progressive with a broad rundown of the latest Network for Public Education report on charter school profiteering.

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

 

Frank Cerabino at the Palm Beach Post with a not-very-encouraging look at how privatizers are winning in Florida.

PA principals and superintendents are much less diverse than the students they serve, according to a Penn State study

Pennsylvania has long had some issues with diversity in education. Ed Fuller from Penn State adds some new data to the discussion.

Texas’ private and rural schools again brace for a showdown on school choice

The Texas tribune explains the showdown coming between privatizers and rural school districts.

'Stand up for kids like me,' trans student tells Iowa senators, but LGBTQ school bills advance

In Iowa, trans kids are speaking out. Iowa legislators don't much care. From the Des Moines Register.

Paul Vallas as Chicago’s Next Mayor?? Talk About a Terrible Mistake.

Paul Vallas has made a career out of failing upward, and now he wants to be the mayor of Chicago. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider offers a career retrospective to help us remember why Vallas shouldn't be put in charge of a one car parade.

Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time

From Ted Gioia, another entry for your ChatGPT file

MAGA parents demand school choice and I can’t wait to say goodbye 

In the Wichita Eagle, Dion Lefler offers a decidedly different take on the loud parental rights movement

Scientists Discover Dangerous Link Between Book Learnin’, Back Talk

The Onion, from a few years back. Seems appropriate at the moment.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I looked at the NPE report on dark money behind parent rights groups, and bad news for teachers regarding new Netflix sharing policies.

I also wrote about how most of the new crop of voucher bills specifically protect private schools and vendors who wish to push a particular faith, teach anti-science baloney, and discriminate against students and faculty. I think it's one of the more important things I've written, so please take a look.

And as always, you're invited to sign up for my substack, a efficient and free way to have my writing delivered to your inbox. 

Bellwether's Big Book O'Data Worth A Look

Bellwether  (formerly Bellwether Education Partners) is an education consulting firm, generally located petty solidly along the American Enterprise Institute-Thomas Fordham Institute axis of education reform. Their huge list of "partners" include those two thinky tanks, the CANs, Teach for America, the Broad Foundation, then 74, the Walton Foundation, American Federation for Children, and a host of other choicey reformster outfits. They have some Bain alumni, including co-founder Mary K. Wells, though co-founder Andrew Rotherham, external relations guy and voice of Eduwonk, is the person you more likely run across on line.

While there is no mistaking their particular bent, this outfit is less about lathered-up advocacy and more about actual facts than some of the brethren (looking at you, current version of Manhattan Institute). Rotherham is on my short list of People I'll Probably Disagree With But I Will Still Make It A Point To Read Them. 

All of which is to lead up to my point, which is that Bellwether has put out a publication that is really worth reading.

Common Ground: How Public K-12 Schools Are Navigating Pandemic Disruptions and Political Trends, by Rotherham, Kelly Robson Foster, and Michael D. Corral is a one-hundred-and-page collection of information from a wide variety of sources. The stated goal is "to help the field separate signal from noise and provide context around various issues and trends affecting the sector." And the report delivers lots of information from diverse sources, a little bit of contextualizing, and no real attempt to dictate what should come next.

Our goal is to provide a clear fact base for discussion about complicated issues. It is not to suggest “right” answers on contested questions. We present a great deal of public opinion data not because we believe the majority position is axiomatically the correct one but rather because understanding the landscape is essential. Reasonable people can and will disagree about the best remedies or policies for much of what we describe here. Instead, we seek to establish a common fact base on the premise that understanding the landscape is the first step toward successfully navigating it.

I'm going to skim the sections so you get a sense of what is in here, but this is not one of those times where I can read it so you don't have to. This is a work that is best dug through yourself (especially if, like me, you're a fan of charts and graphs).

The report starts with an executive summary which is a pretty good wrap up of what's to come. Then we're into it.

School Enrollment

A good timeline of pandemic events, then some breakdowns of enrollment changes. The bulk of lost enrollment was in pre-K and K, but I'm surprised to see that from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 grades 8, 10, 11, and 12 actually gained. The longer schools were closed, the more students they lost, which goes along with larger losses in Blue areas than in Red. Charter enrollment grew as public declined, but (another surprise) Catholic schools have still not made it back to pre-pandemic levels.

And reminder that when looking at polling info, always have your filters on. The report cites an Education Next survey that shows growing support for various school choice options, and I remain unconvinced.

Student Achievement

Some breakdowns here of how open building vs. remote learning played out, and lots of sifting through various testing data, which, as regular readers of this space know, I am unimpressed by. But if you care about that sort of thing, they've got a bunch, and it is handy to see things like the NWEA results separate from NWEA sales pitches.

Student Discipline

This section is gold. The writers take an even-handed look at an issue on which almost nobody is taking an even-handed look. There's a chart looking at reported discipline problems 2009-19 vs. 2019-20 that shows teachers aren't just imagining things. The section places student discipline as a major reason for teacher attrition. It reminds us that student misbehavior echoes a rise in grown-up misbehavior. It looks at how exclusionary discipline techniques and restorative justice techniques are playing out, underlining that this is complex stuff. Many voices are heard here.

Guns and School Safety

This section also does a good job of sticking to the basics while navigating a hot button issue. It tells the story of how people feel about it, the facts of what is actually happening (guns are now the leading cause of death for ages 1-19, but how many mass school shootings there are depends on your definitions), and why nothing gets done. 

Race and Racism

The authors offer a simple summation of events of the past few years. George Floyd's murder leads to more DEI initiatives leads to more tension over those issues leads to the CRT "political catchall" leads to Trump's DEI ban leads to our current mess. 

This section probably includes the most "analysis," and everyone is going to be pissed off about some part of it. On the one hand, as DEI programs spread, "A toxic blend of political opportunism, ideology, and sloppy implementation of DEI work fueled a conservative backlash." On the other hand, they also say, "CRT became a catchall phrase in part through intentional efforts of some conservative activists." And just in case you wonder what they mean, Rufo's infamous tweet is right there on the page.

Polling data shows that CRT panic was unaccompanied by CRT knowledge. One particular telling poll shows that people support CRT as long as you don't call it CRT. And the writers are clear about the problems caused by anti-CRT laws that are vague and difficult to enforce (though on this they do miss the role of giving the public the right to sue any school they think is being naughty). 

They also offer some data to suggest that the disagreement is not as wide or deep as most people think it is, and that other issues are of greater concern.

LGBT Rights

The US has become more accepting of LGBR rights, but there are big disagreements about how that should play out in schools. The report does a good job of breaking down the underlying issues, and if you've been looking for a clear simple source on which states have landed on which policies, there are good resources here. And they end the section with a sobering chart that shows some brutal realities of life for LGBT youth. 

Appendix

Would you like even more charts and graphs and stuff? Here you go.

Bottom line

I'm still unlikely to agree with Bellwether or their many friends about a multitude of public education policy issues. But I like this report. I like its focus on data and information without bashing me over the head with their policy objectives. I like having these various sources gathered in one place.

Mosty of all, I read this report thinking that this is what it looks like when someone on the choicer side decides not to use culture war issues as a marketing tool for choice policies, but actually looks at the real, serious issues that are being turned into culture war talking points. Children should not be shot. Discipline is hard to manage in a society that values violence and confrontation. Race remains a core issue for our culture. LGBTQ students go through a lot of awful crap. 

In short, the issues that directly affect students and the adults who work with them are real issues that affect real live human beings and it is deeply tiring to watch these human beings' actual problems ignored by political opportunists looking for a win for their squad. 

But I digress. This report is free and online and worth your time. Everything is sourced (no mystery data here) and while you not agree with everything in these pages, there's still plenty that's useful and informative. 

AZ: How Do You Make School Grading Systems Worse

One of the more useless ideas to come out of education reform was the school grade--giving each school an A, B, C, D, or F. It's a way to fake a gloss on simply saying that a school is great or average or lousy, and it has the same problem of being hugely reductive. What does an A rating even mean?

Spoiler alert: it mostly has meant that the school gets high scores on the Big Standardized Test. But parents look for so much more-- arts education, sports programs, how "good" the teachers are, which is itself nearly impossible to quantify. 

It's an inherently clumsy metric, like a stick that will only tell if something is five feet, three feet, or one foot long (we'll just round off all other answers) while simultaneously providing no information at all about how deep or wide the object is. It is a low-information metric, but depending no who you ask, the school grades were good for:

Finding a simple way to prove that public schools were failing

Finding a simple way to target certain schools for takeover or conversion to charter

Finding a simple way to targeting some students for a state's School Choice Starter Kit

Finding a simple way for parents to shop for a school

School grades are not really good for any of those because of that whole low information thing. Complex operations require complex measures. Try grading your spouse each day on an A-F scale and see how that works out for you.

And the more dimensions you try to measure, the more reductive your letter grade system, and the more information starved and meaningless your grade becomes.

How could we make it worse? 

This guy

Tom Horne has an idea. Arizona maintains its hostility to public education by putting an anti-public ed guy in the office of state superintendent, and Tom Horne has been exemplary. We'll save his many accomplishments for another day, but let's note this is the guy who helped lead the charge to get Mexican-American studies out of schools. Also, his first act as superintendent was to get rid of the education department's Office of Diversity.

Horne's idea is to have the school letter grades include a rating for how much Critical Race Theory they're teaching. 

“I stand for the philosophy that individuals are primary and race is irrelevant,” said Horne, a Republican. He expects school conversations on race and identity to follow this format, he said.

Horne said his team is still developing a plan for how to best collect information on what schools are teaching and how to include that in the letter grade formula, he said.

Well, yes. If you can't really explain what it is, it will be mighty hard to collect data on how much of it is being taught in each school. Horne believes that social and emotional learning, restorative justice or diversity, equity and inclusion frameworks are all “Trojan horses” for critical race theory, and he swears he's heard first hand accounts of CRT being taught in classrooms. So who knows how much he'll find, or how that will affect a school's grade. One letter grade for each mention of white privilege? 

By no means not the worst thing happening to public education in Arizona, but one more indicator of how far off the rails they have gone.

Michelle Rhee Is Back

Michelle Rhee, the Kim Kardashian of education, the poster child for a decade of reformsterism, is back in action in the education entrepreneur space, and the White House has apparently welcomed her. 

There's no way this could end badly

First, a refresher course

If you're old enough to have memories of Rhee's salad days, you can skip this section. But in 2023, it's entirely possible that some folks will say, "Who?" So here's who.

The very fact that I don't really need to review her story makes part of my point. Rhee was the previous decade's best-known public face of education reform, culminating in that infamous Time cover of her holding a broom. Rhee was the quintessential reformster, a Teach for America product who had put in her time (including the apparently-hilarious incident in which she duct-taped student mouths shut). After her TFA stint, she started The New Teacher Project, a group that brought the TFA philosophy to older folks who had already had a job or two; TNTP morphed into another reformy thinky tank kibbitzing on topics from teacher evaluation to professional development. They made up something called the opportunity myth, but their big hit has been a position argument called "The Widget Effect" which argued that teachers should be paid, promoted, and fired based on student test scores.

This, somehow, led to a job in 2007 as the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Rhee's big breakout role win which she beat the crap out of teachers and administrators alike. Her triumphs were celebrated, her improvements touted as proof of concept for hard-hitting accountability and firing your way to excellence. Except that it turned out that most of her DC miracle was not so much miracle as good old-fashioned fudging and cheating.

And it came with big costs. George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said no other superintendent had wrecked morale more than Rhee. Interviewed by Marc Fisher in 2009 for the Washington Post, Parker pointed to some other issues as well:

Parker spells out what many older, black teachers told me right after demanding that I not publish their names: "I suppose it's not simply racial -- it could be culture. The chancellor said to me, 'Why do people feel they need [tenure] protection if they're doing their jobs?' And I said, 'A lot of our veteran teachers know better.' As African American teachers, they learned coming up that it didn't matter how good you were: Because you were black, you weren't treated fairly. That is the African American experience. And there could be a lack of understanding of the culture of the workforce."

Mayor Adrian Fenty tied his own political future to Rhee's school leadership, and in the 2010 election, the voters said "No, thank you." Rhee was out of a job, but in a true edu-celebrity move, took to Oprah to announce her next move: the launching of StudentsFirst. And not just a launch, but an audacious goal-- 1 million members would raise $1 billion dollars.

That was 2010, the dawn of the decade.

Rhee entered the decade as the quintessential reformster. She possessed no actual qualifications for the jobs she took on, had never even run a school, let alone a major urban district., She championed every reformy idea beloved at the time, from charters to test-based accountability to gutting teacher job protections and, as was the common back then, the notion that the real problem with schools was all the shitty teachers protected by their shitty unions.

Like many of the big names in education disruption in the oughts, Rhee skated on sheer chutzpah. There was no good reason for her to believe that she knew what the heck she was doing, but she was by-God certain that her outsider "expertise" was right and that all she needed to create success was the unbridled freedom to exert her will.

And in 2010, it was working. The media loved her and, more significantly, treated her like a go-to authority on all educational issues. They fell all over themselves to grab the privilege of printing the next glowing description of the empress's newest clothes. She was more than once packaged as the pro-reform counterpart of Diane Ravitch (though one thing that Rhee carefully and consistently avoided was any sort of head to head debate with actual education experts).

For the first part of the decade, it kept working. Students First became a powerhouse lobbying group, pushing hard for the end of teacher job protections. She was in 2011's reform agitprop film Waiting for Superman. LinkedIN dubbed her an expert influencer. She spoke out in favor of Common Core and related testing. A breathless and loving bio was published about her in 2011; in 2013 she published a book of her own. She had successfully parleyed her DC job into a national platform, and done it all as the prototypical pro-reform Democrat.

I wrote a retrospective of her career (from which the above is cribbed), which suddenly evaporated around 2014, when her brand of Visionary CEO leadership began to falter (mostly because it had failed to produce any positive results). She was on the board of Miracle-Gro. She settled down in with husband and former NBA star Kevin Johnson in Sacramento (Johnson had troubles of his own). 

And that seemed to be that.

But Michelle Rhee was not done.

Late in 2021, Rhee founded BuildWithin. According to LinkedIN, her co-founder Ximena Hartstock came on board in January of 2022.

Hartstock worked for Rhee as Deputy Chief of Teaching and Learning in DC, moved on briefly to the DC Department of Parks and Recreation, and then became National Director of StudentsFirst. After two years she left to found Phone2Action, "a comprehensive digital engagement and communications platform for grassroots advocacy, public affairs, and government relations" aka an astroturf astrofertilizing tool (it has since been acquired). And so here she is, teamed up with Rhee.

The pair apparently spent the better part of 2022 ploughing the road. In November of 2022, the announcement went out that BuildWithin was launching with $2.4 million in "pre-seed" funding primarily from Dundee Venture Capital, a firm seeding technology entrepreneurs, along with Black Capital, a fund "focused on investing in underrepresented founders." They also picked up a $7.9 million grant from the Department of Labor via the Apprentices Building America program, one of the top grants in a program that moved a lot of money to many grantees.

What is BuildWithin?

Yahoo finance tried to explain.

The company’s software brings together end-to-end workplace monitoring, learning, task management, and real-time feedback to make apprenticeships scalable. These capabilities help businesses grow their workforce, stay in compliance, optimize salary spend and ensure workers are getting amazing on-the-job experiences.

"At my prior tech company, we had trouble filling our tech roles, so we started an apprenticeship program. We realized that there were a lot of capable people out there who could be quickly and effectively trained to fill technology roles. Many of the team members who went through our program are now working at some of the top tech companies in the country like Google, Uber and Amazon, and others," said Ximena Hartsock, co-founder, BuildWithin. "It was this experience that inspired us to start BuildWithin and create an accelerated path to well-paid technology careers for individuals of any background, geography, demographic group or age. The beautiful thing is that our platform both solves a major talent problem for employers and creates access to new opportunities for job-seekers."

The website puts their motto in huge letters-- "Potential Over Credential"

While not everyone has a degree, everyone has skills and potential. If given the right opportunities and training, anyone can achieve great things.

This sounds very much like the Tear The Paper Ceiling movement, very much focused on getting people into jobs without all the muss and fuss of credentials and degrees and that kind of thing. 

That $7.9 million from the feds is for the company to "recruit a minimum of 10,000 apprentice candidates (through sourcing and outreach partnerships with 150 organizations)." From the grant proposal:

At BuildWithin we have built out significant technologies that allow employers to recruit, select, train, and manage tech apprentices at scale. Through this grant opportunity, we will build upon and expand partnerships and relationships with employers, community-based organizations, institutions of higher education, trade associations and government agencies and create five (5) Tech Apprenticeship Innovation Districts: 1) Sacramento/Bay area, 2) Los Angeles/Nevada 3) District of Columbia/Maryland 4) Northern Virginia and 5) Kansas City, Missouri/Kansas

BuildWithin look to be located in Tennessee, Nevada, California, Virginia, and Kentucky, where the five apprentice innovation districts will be. There's not a great deal of info on their site about the team or personnel or partners. Their LInkedIn page lists forty employees, and though some are "LinkedIn user" others appear to have some tech background, which is good because BuildWithin touts a vaguely described "significant technologies" product, "a software platform that employers can use to accelerate team member productivity utilizing apprenticeships, onboarding & training and upskilling."

The Business Journal boosts the company as a Startup To Watch 2023, and they've been busy. They are in Tennessee because Tennessee just launched the Apprentice Innovation District, and Rhee was there for that. 

All of which explains how we arrived at the point that this popped up on my Twitter feed today:

We are excited to join the White House's efforts to expand apprenticeships across the country #Apprenticeship #FutureOfWork #BuildWithinhttps://t.co/a94YCyOWR9

— Michelle Rhee (@MichelleRhee) February 3, 2023

Is this all for real?

Lordy, who knows. With her roots in Teach for America, Rhee is well versed in the ethic of putting people jobs with minimal, even sub-optimal training. There's no reason to believe that she has the expertise to develop "significant technologies," but maybe some of those employees are able to fill that gap.

On the other hand, Rhee's entire history in the ed biz is of someone who vastly overestimates her own expertise and overpromises what she never delivers (and who never suffers consequences for her failures). 

Maybe this will all work out just great and Lucy will not pull the football away this time. Or maybe the feds are getting conned by one of the great education grifters on her comeback tour. 

GOP Proposes Federal School Voucher (Again)

Here we go again. It's a voucher bill-- the tax credit scholarship variety-- proposed in the House of Representatives.

H.R. 531 was introduced on January 26 by Rep. Adrian Smith (NE-3). Smith's story includes an episode where he was a child running a snow cone stand "and he realized at a young age what overly restrictive government policies can do to American businesses." He's a graduate of Liberty University, a member of the Tea Party Caucus, and an election denier. 

I won't lie--getting tired going up and down these steps

The bill has 26 co-sponsors, including Elise Stefanik, Jim Jordan, Virginia Foxx, and my representative, Mike Kelly. 

We don't have a text for the bill yet, but we do have a title: 

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a credit against tax for charitable donations to nonprofit organizations providing education scholarships to qualified elementary and secondary students.

And we have lots of pretty language to sell it, even if some of it is non-sequitorial.

"Parents – not government – should always have the final say in what kind of education their child receives, no matter where they live or their socioeconomic status," says Rep. Smith, who does not go on to say that this is why public education should be fully funded, nor does he go on to call for an end to exclusionary rules for admission to private and charter schools.

"We must give parents and children every opportunity to pursue the education that is best for them and that puts them on the best path forward from day one," says Rep. Kelly, who also does not call for more funding for public ed and less discrimination in private ed.

“Parents deserve the right to make the best educational decision for their child, regardless of income,” says Dr/Sen Bill Cassidy.

"In America, a child’s race, income, or zip code should never determine the quality of their education," said Rep. Owens. "School choice works because it puts students over systems and empowers parents to choose the academic options that best fit their child's unique needs."

And on and on. Children should have quality education, no matter where they are or how wealthy their family, which is absolutely correct but, I would argue, does not lead naturally to the conclusion "therefor we should give a few of them a chance to choose other schools, provided those schools will accept them." Nor is anyone on this bill going to acknowledge the research that says plainly that vouchers do not deliver quality education to the few students they serve. 

The bill appears to be a re-offering of last year's bill by the same name, offered then by Rep. Jackie Walorsky, an Indiana representative who was tragically killed in a car accident last August. 

The bill offers $10 million in tax credits; in other words, contribute to a "scholarship (aka voucher) organization" and get out of paying taxes to the IRS. It's an echo of Betsy DeVos's failed Education Freedom pitch. The appeal is supposed to be that this isn't government spending, because the government never gets its hands on the money, but the tax credits still leave a $10 million hole in the budget. It's the same sort of arrangement that the courts in Kentucky threw out last year.

As Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center told me last year, “Why not take the $10 billion per year tax expenditure that this bill's authors want to put into these neovouchers and put the money toward educational interventions that have actually been shown to help children, like high-quality preschool, class-size reduction, community schools, and intensive reading and math interventions and tutoring?”

In addition to a bunch of voucher money, the bill supporters promise that it will follow the new trend in allowing private schools and other education vendors who hope to benefit from this money to discriminate and conduct business as they wish. Says the press release:

Uses a limited government approach with respect to federalism, thus avoiding mandates on states, localities, and school districts.

That is undoubtedly good news to some of the bill's endorsers, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Home School Legal Defense Association, Agudath Israel, and Association of Christian Schools International, as well as the usual folks like Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, Jeb Bush's Excel in Education, and Heritage Action. Plus the ironically named Invest in Education Coalition, which, like the rest of these groups, is supporting doing the opposite of investing in education by pushing a program that proposes not to spend money bringing quality and opportunity to education, but to tap tax dollars to support private schools and so spend less on public schools.

This will be the third time in recent memory that this idea has failed on the federal level. But hey-- at least it made some press for School Choice Week. The bill is currently hanging out with the Ways and Means committee, as well as Education and the Workforce. May it never emerge to see the light of day again.

PA: Cyberschools Stockpile Money, State Averts Its Gaze

Part of this story is not news. Last summer, Children First PA reported that cyber charters in PA are banking a mountain of surplus money. Like, huge mountains. How huge?

The fourteen cybers were, at the end of last school year, sitting on $164 million in unassigned fund balances, aka extra money sitting in the bank. Those 2020-21 fund balances were double what they had in 2019-20, and seven times the amounts from 2018-19.

That growth represented ten times the growth of public schools. So, no--it wasn't raining money on everyone.

Nor can it be explained by the influx of students into cybers during the pandemic. The money spiked at ten times the rate by which enrollment increased. 

If you'd like to see that in chart form, here are the charts produced for that report.

Pennsylvania actually has laws about how much unassigned fund balance a school district can carry, on the not-unreasonable assumption that district fund balances are composed mostly of taxpayer dollars, and if taxpayer dollars are going to be just sitting there, they ought to be just sitting there in taxpayer bank accounts, not district ones. Public schools can carry up to 8% of their budget as surplus.

However, there are no such caps for cyber charters. If cybers were held to the same standard as public schools , eleven of the fourteen would have been over the 8% line. The remaining three were over 50% of their expenditures.

The system is not perfect, and public school districts will sometimes game it by parking some of their surplus in "designated accounts" ("No, honest, we are setting $10 million aside for our cafeteria plastic spoon fund"). At the same time, districts have to save up money over time to fund big projects like building repairs and facility updates (because the state will provide bupkus for help). But here's another thing that public schools have to face that cyber charters do not-- actual audits.

Pennsylvania Auditor General Tim DeFoor just unleashed some audit information aimed at twelve districts that, in his opinion, have been a bit greedy with their tax increases and their resulting surpluses. Pennsylvania has rules that cap tax increases in any single year, but some districts game that system, too. So DeFoor wanted to scold these districts.

School districts respond that between special ed costs, pension costs (the state is still fixing its pension investment screw-up from fifteen years ago), and the unpredictable costs of charter schools. 

At DeFoor's presser, a reporter brought up the question of cyber charter surpluses. "Er, um, err--isn't that Elvis?" replied DeFoor.

Okay, not quite. The actual quote was, “We have heard concerns from residents and the General Assembly about charter schools. It’s something we have discussed." There was no explanation of why the cybers didn't get an audit this time, and nobody bothered to bring up the longstanding issue with cybers not being audited much of ever. Tom Wolf had tried to deal with this, but he was unsuccessful.

Imagine. You go to the grocery store, buy a jar of pickles, and you're charged $10. The next time you're in, the store owner says, "By the way, that jar of pickles actually only cost $5." Great, you reply, and you ask if you're getting a refund. "No," the owner says. "Just going to keep it in my unassigned fund balance."

Cybers are sitting on a pile of money that should either be funding education for students or going back to the taxpayers. But as I wrote a year ago, cybers are not subject to the same kind of oversight and accountability that public schools are, and there is no way to characterize this non-regulation as beneficial to students – it is, in fact, the exact opposite.

Read the full cyber surplus report here. 

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.