Pre-K And The Long Haul

You may remember a study from Tennessee that suggested that pre-K actually led to worse results for students further down the road. It was a little alarming, and lots of folks tried hard to come up with an explanation, because it looked like the worst results happened to the poorest kids. Threw a major monkey wrench in the whole Universal Pre-K Will Bring Equity To Education thing.

Well, just hold on there for a second.

Now there's a study from Oklahoma that suggests that you just have to take a longer view to find the benefits. A brand new study find that preschool grads were way more likely to go to college, either right after high school or within a year or two. Here it is, summed up nicely:

“Don’t give up on the protagonist until the story is told,” said William Gormley, a professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University and co-director of its Center for Research on Children in the United States, which has overseen much of the Tulsa research. “This is a classic story of a big bounce from pre-K in the short run, followed by disappointing fade out in standardized test scores in the median run, followed by all sorts of intriguing, positive effects in the longer run, and culminating in truly stunning positive effects on college enrollment.”

There are more studies that are roughly in line with this new one. What's still missing is an explanation. Various explanations being offered include:

The parents who are likely to send their kids to preschool are the same ones likely to send their kids to college. It's just a Family That Values Education thing. Researchers think they can kind of sort of adjust for that, and still find that preschool improves college chances, probably, kind of. But they can't come up with any clear data for Head Start grads.

The preschool program could actually help with both attitudes toward and attainment of education. But if that's the case, why the big dips in the intervening years?

I have a theory.

You are growing a tree, and you decide to start measuring it with a measuring stick that you came up with yourself. You measure and measure with your made-up measuring stick, and find no signs of growth--in fact, at one point you find the tree has shrunk. The finally, you measure the tree with a regulation yardstick, and find that it has grown far more than your previous DIY measurements. 

You are trying to boil a pot of water. You measure the water temperature with an instrument that you came up with yourself, and it consistently tells you that the water is 45 degrees. Then, thirty seconds later, you see the water is boiling.

You can reach two conclusions here:

1) The stuff that I'm measuring is behaving in strange, mysterious, and counter-intuitive ways. We will have to figure out what is causing this strange behavior.

2) My DIY measuring instruments are crap. I should throw them away.

In other words, despite decades of insistence to the contrary, Big Standardized Test data is not predictive of college attainment. 

The data is largely junk. First, the tests are not good. Second, before the tests can collect useful data, students have to care.

It's the same thing with the infamous middle school dip, the drop in scores that schools experience from their 8th grade test takers. It has baffled districts and led more than a few to change their district organization so that 8th graders are folded in with either higher or lower grades, thereby mitigating the results. It's a mystery. Why do 8th graders lose so much learning?

The mystery can be solved by the two step process of A) meeting middle school students and B) watching them actually take these tests. You will not find any group of people who are more tired or taking the damned test and more likely to be unmoved by what the olds want from them. If you want to measure middle school educational attainment, you could not devise a worse system than giving them a Big Standardized Test after giving the Big Standardized Tests for the previous seven years of their lives. 

We get sign after sign that the Big Standardized Test does not measure what we want it to measure, but we keep ignoring them.

I'm a fan of pre-K done right, so hooray for some research supporting that, I guess. But I wish we could learn some of the other lessons hinted at here. 

PA: Court Ruling Is Not A Victory For School Choice

This week, a ruling by Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer declared that in the state of Pennsylvania, “students attending low-wealth districts are being deprived of equal protection of law.” The state's famously inequitable funding system was found to be unconstitutional. 

The suit has been kicking around for a decade, and the decision is, as one of the lawyers working on it said, "an earthquake." The governor and legislature are now required to work together to come up with a new funding system.

What happens next is not clear; it could be anything from fully funding the public schools of Pennsylvania to a lot of stalling and foot-dragging to procedural shenanigans to using a combination of feigned deafness and various pretend solutions to keep the clock running forever. These are all techniques that have been used in other states that faced similar court decisions (North Carolina's legislature has been ignoring a court order to fix their broken funding for something like 25 years). Lots of mystery lies ahead.

Weirdly, the decision has been applauded by some folks on the anti-public ed side. 

Nathan Benefield, regular speaker-upper as VP for the hard right Commonwealth Foundation, offered these insights:

“The only way to ensure that ‘every student receives a meaningful opportunity’ is for education funding to follow the child,” Benefield said. “Students that are trapped in their zip-code assigned school—especially in low-income and minority communities—often have no alternatives when their academic or social needs are unmet. Only by giving every student direct access to funding for an excellent education of their choice can we meet the court’s new requirements.”

Rep. Seth Grove, the GOP rep from York and Republican Appropriations Committee Chair, tweeted 

Commonwealth Court Judge just ruled we need more school choice in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to ensure every child has the same opportunities no matter their zip code! Huge school choice victory!

Grove even included a screen shot of the decisions final two-page summary (the whole decision is 786 pages long), which means he had ample opportunity to see that he was cheering counterfactually. Maybe he hadn't had a chance to scan all 786 pages, but it's a pdf, so searching terms is easy.

The phrase "school choice" appears twice. Once to indicate that Philadelphia has it (p. 328) and once to indicate that one witness believes the Philly charters are swell (p. 348). 

"Backpack funding"? Zero. "Voucher"? Zero. There was ample representation of charter schools as witnesses of fact for the legislative side--in other words, they tried to bolster what turned out to be the losing side. "Money follow the student"? Zero. 

In other words, not a single concrete piece of evidence that this decision in any way supports school choice.

Granted, the suit is good news for choicers, because more money for public schools means higher per-pupil spending which means charters get to rake in more bucks. But this decision does not suggest choice as an answer to the larger funding problem.

The decision, in fact, reaches a conclusion that choicers resolutely avoid. Because Judge Jubelirer does agree that no child should suffer in a lousy school in their zip code, and she has mandated that the state must take steps to make sure that no school in any zip code is lousy. This is a much different solution than "Give each child an inadequate amount of money so that a few who are able to be accepted by a private school can get out, leaving everyone else behind in a even-more-underfunded public school." Different because, unlike the choicer solution, it makes actual sense. 

Jubelirer was exceedingly clear that additional money would have to be part of the solution, and that simply shuffling the same old inadequate amount of money around would not cut it. Since shuffling the same old inadequate money around is the preferred model for the modern school choice industry. 

As Benefield put it, he was grateful that the judge was not "mandating more money to a broken system." Well, no. First of all, her decision had some clear ideas about why the system looked broken, and those ideas had to do with a lousy funding system. Second of all, the ruling itself suggests the options for reform are “virtually limitless,” and don’t have to be “entirely financial." That's clear language is clear enough. If help me buy a car and I ask what I owe you to even us up and you say, "Well, it doesn't have to be entirely financial," I don't think "Oh, so it's free, then" is the response you're looking for. 

The fact that Benefield is so excited about the prospect of further defunding public schools does not mean that it's what the judge said.

Choicers can squint real hard as long as they like. This ruling is not some sort of victory for school choice. It may well result in some nice windfall profits for them. They should probably just be happy with that. 

USA Still World's Worst For Parental Leave

It's for the kids. Our children. 

I'm pretty sure you can't call yourself a politician or a policy education thought wonk leader if you don't invoke the children. And if you're a conservative, you must also invoke parents and parenthood as a sacred calling, to be revered and protected.

How do we know that this mostly a bunch of bovine byproduct?

Because the USA still has the world's worst parental leave policy.

Shut up, kid. You are not our problem.

I was reminded of this when a few folks noted the 30th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act. The Washington Post headline captures the moment well-- "Once revolutionary, still inadequate." Petula Dvorak gets right to it from the jump:

In most American states, it is illegal to separate a puppy from its mother before it’s 8 weeks old.

Also in most American states, the average working mom is separated from her baby 10 weeks after delivery.

Our nation is hostile to families. Look at your inbox, social media feed or the GoFundMe site to see just how cruel:

And then follows a parade of terrible pleas for GoFundMe and sick day bank help from new parents struggling with the demands of new parenthood.

It is everywhere, all the time, often in ways that typify how we think of the Miracle Of New Life as an unwelcome interruption to the Real Business of Life. At my old district, we instituted a sick day exchange, allowing teachers to give their sick days to other teachers. Administration was upset that so much of the exchanging involved female teachers staying home with their new infants. It had apparently never occurred to them that in a staff dominated by young women that A) maternity leave would be one of the major asks and B) that the crappy minimal unpaid leave offered by the district wasn't enough. 

But it's everywhere. Parental rights are super-duper important, but get the hell back to work ASAP and get that kid in some kind of Day Care (which isn't going to be subsidized because that's your problem, not anyone else's). 

If you want the facts, the US is worse than every other major nation, by a lot. The only major nation in the world with no paid parental leave. The only nations as bad as ours are a couple of tiny islands (and actually, I'm working from a 2014 report, so those others may have improved in the interim, leaving us alone at the bottom of the barrel).

It's nuts. It's doubly nuts that the while some employers step up, the teaching profession is toward the bottom of the barrel in the nation that is at the bottom of the barrel. Want to make sure your newborn gets a good start in life? That's great, but we're short subs and you've used up all your sick days now (because that's what sick days are for because we still treat pregnancy and birth like they are some damn disease) and we're short of subs, so get your ass in here. You know-- for the children. Just not your children. And heaven help you if your infant comes into the world with some health issues. Heaven will have to help you, because our government will not.

Bring the issue up, and you will inevitably hear the same thing--it would put undue stress and strain on business owners. Which tells us everything we need to know about the relative importance of business owners, mothers, and children. We can spend a literally inconceivable amount of money on "defense," but not on parental leave. Politicians even line up to support universal pre-school, because plenty of people smell a chance to make money supplying that need. But something like, say, a federal fund that pays for a decent-size parental leave for every new parent? Crickets, cause that's just crazy talk.

Yes, this gets me cranky. It's such a blindingly obvious piece of hypocrisy, a nation's leaders screaming "We like children as props and excuses to do things, but we'd rather not spend money to actually take care of them." Yes, paid parental leave is hard--so hard that EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD HAS FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO IT!

Okay, I'm calm now. In a nation where we worked hard to say that "Hey, higher education is your own problem" and some of us are trying hard right now to convert K-12 to a "Hey, that's your own problem" system, it's no surprise that our reaction to small children is the same--"Hey, that's your problem." But the continuing attempts to pretend otherwise just make me tired.

It's no wonder we passed the anniversary of FMLA rather quietly. It's nothing to brag about, and our parental leave policy remains the shame of our nation.

And if you're a politician, I don't want to hear about how much you value children and family unless you can also tell me about how you have worked to get a paid parental leave policy in this country. 

Vermont Moves To Restrict School Vouchers

Vermont, much like Maine, has long had school vouchers. It's a system that makes sense in a state where many rural communities do not have schools of their own. Instead, those students get tuition paid to the school of their choice. That program has, in the past, never included private religious schools.

That was working fine until Carson v. Makin, the case in which the Supreme Court declared that if Maine is going to have a school voucher program, that program has to include private religious schools as well. 

The ruling has obvious implications for Vermont, but Vermont has an extra wrinkle-- a constitutional clause that says residents can't be made to support religious practices with which they disagree. 

Now a bill has been proposed to fix the problem, and it represents one of the first attempts in any state to actually slap restrictions on an existing voucher program.

S.66 is an attempt to more closely define how the vouchers may be used. "Sending districts," those that have no public schools of their own, would designate up to three schools for their students to attend. Those schools could be other public schools or select private schools that meet certain state criteria (these can be in or out of state). There's an exception for Vermont's four historic academies-- a set of long-standing private schools. Also, schools that have special programs for serving students with special needs would also be allowed as choices over and above the district's designated schools.

This is bad news for many of the private schools that have done well under the former system.

"S.66 would completely dismantle a system that has successfully delivered high quality educational opportunities for rural Vermont students for over a century,” the Vermont Independent Schools Association said in a statement emailed by Mill Moore, the organization’s executive director.

But Sue Ceglowski, executive director of the state school boards association and a member of the Education Equity Alliance, says “Our position is that taxpayer funds should be administered in a way that is equitable, accountable and transparent."

The old system in Vermont may well be missed, but the tough truth here is that no matter what, it is going away, either to be replaced with a system that requires taxpayers to foot the bill for private religious education, or a system like the one proposed in this bill. This was always one of the possible outcomes of the Carson ruling--that states would more tightly control any voucher programs in order to maintain accountability for voucher schools and protection for taxpayers. It will be interesting to see if Vermont's model catches on there, or anywhere else.

What Trump 2024 Tells Us About The Politics Of Education

I just finished transcribing Trump's education screed for 2024. You can read that, and my reactions to it here, but in this post, I want to talk about what Trump demonstrates about the political discourse around education, about what the folks who want to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education have that the defenders of public education do not.

I do not imagine that Donald Trump has more than the barest understanding of what he's saying in his education policy videos, if that. His writer has strung together a bunch of the prevailing language and talking points in the right wing education space. At least5 I assume it was a writer, or a team of writers, but actually, it could just as easily have been ChatGPT, which simply takes the language that is already out in the world and remixes it.

And that's all his speech is-- a remix. 

And he's not alone. We hear the same education policy word salad from politician after politician. I have talked to more than a few pro-public ed activists who express frustration because when they talked to a politician, those politicians had little actual understanding of the actual issues. Pro-public education activists are bringing pointy little facts to a talking point artillery fight.

The thing is, folks taking a right wing position don't have to either know or care what they're talking about.

A well-oiled machine regularly generates, polishes, and disperses talking points on any number of subjects. Think tanks and advocacy groups come up with some angles to pitch, and then it's run through the media outlets, talking head after talking head, like rocks through a stone polisher. 

So if someone jockeying for office or power or just some press decides that Issue X is hot right now, he doesn't have to do research or dig into the issues or try to get a handle on anything. The language is already right there, ready and waiting. Field tested. All he has to do is pick it up and use it. 

I'm convinced that one big reasons Democrats are by and large such terrible defenders of public education is that they have lost the language. The drum starte3d beating thirty years ago with the made-to-order hatchet job of A Nation at Risk. Way back in the No Child Left Behind days, they gave up the language or pride and accomplishment when it came to public education, and just kept on giving up more and more of it. I'll never forget Dennis van Roekel's betrayal as NEA president, responding to criticism of Common Core by saying, "Well, then what would you do instead," as if the implicit Core assumption that schools were failing couldn't possibly be challenged. 

And of course by the time of Obama-Duncan, Democrats had completely given up the language of support for public education and adopted the conservative language of attacking the institution. The detente between free marketeers and social justice folks and neo-libs required everyone to adopt the language of disrupt, defund and dismantle. When Trump ascended, it sort of hit Dems that maybe they needed some sort of language to oppose his policies, but they simply didn't have any. They still don't, and in many cases, they have no real will to. 

How many political leaders are actually studying up on the issues they address or run for office touting? I have no idea, but my sense is that it's not most, probably not many, and barely even several. Nor do I think any of them have a bunch of time to be taught the issues, particularly when the issues are complicated.

That Democratic fecklessness isn't limited to education, of course, but the loss of language around the support of public schools is particularly noticeable. And I'm not sure it gets fixed easily. In the meantime, anyone who wants to run for office on the far right can get a quick sheet of tested talking points emailed to him and be ready for a hard-hitting video full of nonsense soup. 

Trump 2024's Education Plan

Yes, you've seen bits and pieces quoted, And I have misgivings about giving this any more air, but folks laughed Trump off in 2016, and we know where that got us. 

We have to pay attention because 2024 is shaping up to be a year in which GOP candidates compete to see who can beat up public education the worst (and Democrats stand there just kind of tongue-tied). 

So on January 26, Trump released a video manifesto of education, and I'm going to run through the whole thing, because every single point is a radical threat. You can watch it yourself if you want to check my work, but I don't recommend it.

Trump just leaps right in and starts doggy-paddling through a deep vat of nonsense soup

Schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs. Here is my plan to save American education, restore power to American parents.

First, we will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children. We're not going to allow it to happen.

Next I will direct the Department of Justice and Education to open civil rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination. That includes discrimination against Asian Americans. 

The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings and in many ways it's resembling an established new religion--can't let that happen--for this reason my administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution--that's simple.

It's a little staggering how this all boils down to using the power of the federal government to stamp out things that folks on the right don't like. And he's pulling from lots of grievances floating around the right wing-o-sphere right now, from the schools in Virginia being hammered over a made-up scandal (schools failed to quickly notify students who fell in the fourth tier "commended" category for National Scholarship because, allegedly, those also rans are Asian) but it got traction on Twitter. The whole idea of saying schools teach some kind of secular religion and thereby violate the establishment clause is silly--doubly silly since the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that free exercise trumps establishment every time, and therefor even if schools were found to be teaching such a religion (violating the non-existent Judeo-Christian tradition), by current reasoning, it would violate teachers free exercise rights to make them stop.

But he has just barely begun to get scary.

Additionally, on day one we will begin to find and remove the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the Federal Department of Education. And that also includes others--and you know who you are--because we're not going to allow anybody to hurt our children.

Hunt down those guilty of thought crime.

Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power. I will have them fired and escorted from the building and I will tell Congress that any Appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the President's ability to remove defiant employees from the job. It's all about our children.

Does anybody in the Department of Education have unchecked power? And if so, what exactly have they been doing with it? Well, the unchecked power is supposed to belong to Trump. And I hope we've all learned enough to avoid saying, "Well, Congress wouldn't let him..." because they rolled over for him in 2016, and that was before Congress was packed with insurrectionists.

I will veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. We will keep men out of women's sports. And we will create a new credentialling body that will be the gold standard anywhere in the world to certify teachers embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but very simply to educate them.

Pretty sure the effort to weaponize civics is a DeSantis thing. And don't indoctrinate kids--just teach them that our way of life is the One True way and properly patriotic citizens don't think otherwise. But no indoctrination, which is guess is only indoctrination when it goes against Beloved Leader's desires. 

Finally, I will implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education:

One, abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 so we can remove bad teachers and adopt merit pay to reward good teachers we want great teachers in our schools.

Two, drastically cut the bloated number of school administrators, including the costly, divisive, and unnecessary diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy. 

Three, adopt a parental bill of rights that includes complete curriculum transparency and a form of universal school choice.

And four, implement the direct election of school principals by the parents. It's all about the parents for their children. More than anyone else, parents know what their children need. If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to vote to fire them and select someone who will. This will be the ultimate form of local control. Our country has frankly never had anything like it or let's say for at least the last fifty years.

The first three are such pandering baloney. Number four is extra-silly. It is not the ultimate form of local control, because all the local taxpayers who are not parents get no say. Of course, if we gave parents and taxpayers the chance to elect a representative council to handle such matters, like a board, related to the school. Lord, this is such a dumb idea.

As the saying goes, personnel is policy and at the end of the day, if we have pink haired Communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem.

When I'm President, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say. We will get back to teaching reading writing and match called arithmetic and we will give our kids the high quality pro-American education they deserve.

But no indoctrination.

We spend more per pupil than any nation in the world by double. We're going to keep spending the money, but we're now going to get our money's worth. We're at the end of every list on education, and yet we spend the most. We're going to change it around. We may spend the most but we're gonna be tops in education no matter where you go, anywhere in the world. Thank you very much. 

There is a sequel to this--26 more seconds about those teacher credentials.

As part of our new credentialling body for teachers, we will promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique. I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States Government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.

I'm surprised he didn't say "assigned at conception." 

I can remember when conservatives thought government should keep out of peoples' lives; now they don't even support keeping government out of peoples' pants. 

This is some totalitarian "we must all love the fatherland and trust Beloved Leader" shit here, and if you don't think it's scary already, take a stroll through the Youtube comments to see all the people who can't wait to have the country dragged back to the white christianist 1950s of grandpappy's imagination. Parts of this are just boilerplate copied from the actvists already at work, but the parts about rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies, about rooting out and eradicating people who Believe Bad Things are legitimately scary.

Doubly so because none of this has been thought through and so the attempt to turn it into real policy could be so much worse. Triply so because Ron DeSantis may feel the need to up his own totalitarian game to push past Trump. It's still a long way to the primaries, and I'm afraid these are going to be really rough times for public education. 

Congressman Proposes Turning Title Funds Into Vouchers

We already looked at one federal school voucher proposal. That one was based on Betsy DeVos's freedom scholarships, which were based on tax credit scholarships (instead of paying taxes, you can send a kid to private school). 

But that wasn't the only federal voucher plan to show its face in late January. Senator Mike Lee brought back another perennial favorite-- the Children Having Opportunities in Classrooms Everywhere Act (CHOICE). 

Lee (and his co-sponsoring buddy Senator Tuberville) is one more choicer starting from a solid premise and then carefully avoiding what follows. "Where you live should not determine your child's education," he argues, and he is 100% correct. I agree with this premise. Yet, I do not agree that it somehow leads us to "therefor, some small select group of students should be given an opportunity to take advantage of a system that has been repeatedly proven to deliver lousy education results." 

Let's not "save" just a few students, and let's not "save" them by having them waive their rights to a free and appropriate education. 

Alas, this is never where choicers are going with this point.

Lee's voucher bill is different in its plan for financing this tiny, leaky lifeboat that will only allow certain students aboard. Lee's idea is to simply redirect all the Title money.

The bill is pretty short and sweet. Here's the critical part.

FUNDS TO FOLLOW THE STUDENT.

(1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law and to the extent permitted under State law, a State educational agency shall allocate grant funds provided under title I, subparts 2 and 3 of part B of title II, and titles III, IV, V, and VI, for the purposes of ensuring that funding under such titles follows children, to the public school the children attend or for the expenses described in section 529(c)(7) of the Internal Revenue Code of 3 1986.

The money would go to private schools and home schoolers, and as always, the bill explicitly states that "Nothing in this section shall permit, allow, encourage, or authorize Federal or State control over non-public education providers." So no telling those Nazi homeschoolers that they can't use their flat earth textbooks. 

Probably not a bill destined to accomplish much of anything other than continuing to hammer on the overton window and further normalize the notion that aid for the most vulnerable can be turned into a scythe for cutting them loose and ending government services for them.