OK: The Legislature Puts Ryan Walters In A Box

Ryan Walters was a spectacularly bad choice for Oklahoma State Superintendent, but the voters elected him anyway. Now the legislature--including and especially some fellow Republicans--are putting a leash on him. 

Walters established right off the bat that the new office would not reduce his affection for petty political anti-public ed antics. Just in the last week he decided to order that the portraits highlighting the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame be removed from the Oklahoma State Department of Education building. It pissed a lot of people off.

The stated reason was to remove the Hall of Fame in order to put up pictures honoring parents and students, though nobody seems to believe that there's some kind of critical shortage of wall space. And Walters, always willing to add gasoline to a fire, issued a statement:

All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.

Walters has also proposed a new rule barring any school districts from having books with "sexualized content" in libraries K-12. This would go beyond the usual "pornography" definition into vague territory, but the rule would be used to downgrade a district's accreditation because of "willful noncompliance." 

"Downgraded accreditation as a violation for vague rules" is a touchy subject in Oklahoma, a state where two school districts had their accreditation reduced because of alleged violation of Oklahoma's spectacularly vague anti-CRT law which allows for such downgrade without anything resembling due process by the state board that is now loaded with Governor Stitt appointees.

And the new sexualized content rule was only one of Superintendent Walters's bright ideas. He has also formally proposed a rule to require school staff and teachers to out children to their parents, disclosing “any information known to the school district or its employees regarding material changes reasonably expected to be important to parents regarding their child’s health, social, or psychological development, including Identity information.”

So a whole bunch of new rules that could be used to threaten a school district's accreditation.

All of which was enough to push some Republican lawmakers to slap a legislative leash on Walters.

Calling it a direct response to the newly proposed rules, Rep. Mark McBride proposed a bill to defang Walters and the state board.

“The Legislature, and not just the state superintendent and a board that has no common education experience, should have input on schools’ accreditation status,” McBride said.

HB 2569, as amended, declares "a moratorium on additional accreditation rules approved and imposed upon school districts by the State Board of Education without specific legislative statutory authorization." In other words, no more sudden knee-jerk rule changes from you or your rubber stamp squad without legislative approval.

As reported by Rep. John Waldron (co-author of HB 2569) on the Twitter machine today, the House Education Committee landed pretty hard on Walters. I'm going to paste some of this thread here for your edification.

Further down the thread, after a poster says it's great that McBride recognizes "how dangerous and destructive Walters is to education," Waldron replies, "We all do." 

It's not the biggest victory ever, but it is a nice reminder that not everyone is 100% all in on the Stitt-Walters program to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public ed. Just, you know, 87% or so. Stay tuned. 

ICYMI: Road Trip Edition (2/19)

Also known as what happens when your spouse finds deep discount same day hotel room rates-- we're away from the Institute headquarters at the moment. But I've still got some reading from the week, perhaps to while away the President's Day hours tomorrow,

There's No Merit in Merit Pay

Paul Thomas looks at the new South Carolina merit pay idea (and by "new," I mean "not very new"). A nice tight explanation (again) for how merit pay is a failed idea.

Florida Teacher Is Fired for Posting Viral Video of Empty Classroom Bookshelves

Yeah, that guy who posted the video of the rows and rows of empty shelves has been fired. He's unimpressed.

With Apologies to John Denver, She's Leaving on a Jet Plane, Who Knows When She'll Be Back Again

TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild is the king of tracking all the various connections between people minding the Tennessee education store and their real gig--soaking education for $$ and dumb ideas. Here's more of that.

How public schools can stop wasting millions of dollars

At Valeries Strauss's Answer Sheet at the Washington Post, David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs, and Margarita Pivovarova explain how much benefit we could get out of dumping the texting industry from education.

The Gaslighting of Teachers Continues

Steve Nuzum dismantles some South Carolina gaslighting of teachers.

Case for Kansas school vouchers riddled with misleading statistics, cherrypicked data

Liz Meitl is an English teacher and public education advocate in Kansas. In the Kansas Reflector, she points out some of the gaping holes in the state's voucher proposal.

American teens are unwell because American society is unwell

There were lots of reactions to these findings this week, but this piece by Kate Woodsome in the Washington Post is a good one, though not very uplifting. Time to get our collective acts together.

Will Restrictions on Teaching ‘Controversial’ Issues Target Science Classes?

Spoiler alert: of course they will. But Sarah Schwartz at Ed Week takes a look at some of the specifics behind this next wave of assaults on public ed. 

Neoliberal Education Reform Paved the Way for Right-Wing “Classical Education”

Nora de la Cour at Jacobin with some thoughts about how we got here and how Barack Obama and Ron DeSantis are linked.

Taxpayer swindle: More states should not seek school vouchers

This piece, in The Hill of all places, pulls no punches: "School vouchers are a taxpayer swindle that fails to raise achievement while eroding public schools and the principle of equal protection under the law outlined in the U.S. Constitution."

Parents know best — except when they don’t

At the Answer Sheet (Washington Post), Kevin Welner points out that sometimes, parents are not the best judges of what makes good education, putting him, weirdly, on the same page as Chester Finn this week. What a world.

The other thing locked classroom doors keep out

Jamey Melcher, writing for Chalkbeat's First Person column, points out some of the things that are lost in a school when security starts taking over and locked doors and empty halls become the norm.

Child Labor Has Made a Comeback

Yup. The latest big headlines just scratch the surface. Terri Gerstein has the story at Slate.

The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools

This is a long, deep read, but what a picture Mimi Swartz paints of the Texas attempt to dismantle public education. The "if you only read one thing" on the list this week.

Robbing From the Poor to Educate the Rich

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire in The Nation look at the reverse Robin Hood nature of the new voucher programs (like Iowa's). It's a lousy deal for public schools and taxpayers alike.

The CLT Exam

At Grumpy Old Teacher, Gregory Sampson looks at the test that Floridians are supposed to consider as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. You will not be shocked by what he finds.

At Forbes.com, I took a look at an Iowa bill that wants to redefine obscenity and send teachers to re-education camp. 

And as always, you're invited to sign up for my free substack, where you get all of the usual stuff (except sometimes for the fixed typos that I don't spot until too late, but hey).

OK: Catholic Church Proposes Religious Charter

Last December, Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor issued an opinion stating that in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, he believes that the SCOTUS would "very likely" find unconstitutional the state requirement that charter schools be non-sectarian. The Catholic Church is wasting no time testing that theory.

The church has proposed a virtual charter--St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, named for a sixth-century catholic bishop and scholar, who is patron saint of the internet (a "saint who can help us find what we need as well as protect us from the darker side of the World Wide Web"). The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City collaborated with the Diocese of Tulsa made their pitch on Valentines Day, with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board expected to make a decision April-ish. 

Brett Farley is the executive director of Catholic Conference of Oklahoma says, Oh, hey, it'll just be a regular charter school, nothing to see here:

We’re not talking about establishing a religion through religious charter schools. All we’re talking about is an anchor carrying values and principles and virtues, so forth, as we’re already doing in our schools.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the state is buying that. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has already popped up to point out that Oklahoma's charter law says you can't do that religious charter thing. 

And Michael Scaperlanda, the Chancellor of Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, says, "I think Attorney General O’Connor's opinion was a very good opinion of the current state of constitutional law and why St. Isidore and other charter schools are not public actors and not state actors." In other words, when the dust clears, we are totally going to have a religious charter school.

While SCOTUS has already cleared enough ground for this to happen, they could conceivably blast the church-state wall further if they rule on Peltier vs. Charter Day School, a case nominally about a sexist antediluvian dress code but which hinges on whether charter schools are really public schools or actually private non-state-actors (and therefor free from government regulations).  

Inside religious circles, folks are pretty damned excited. In a piece in First Things (which claims to be America's most influential journal of religion and public life), the authors make their real case:

The premises of St. Isidore’s application are clear and straightforward. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the “free exercise” of religion and so prohibits anti-religious discrimination by governments. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in last summer’s Carson v. Makin decision, “a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” Accordingly, the justices ruled, it was unconstitutional for Maine to exclude “sectarian” schools from a program that helped pay the private school tuition of kids who live in rural areas without government-run schools. By the same token, the Oklahoma attorney general’s letter correctly reasons, a state may not open up a charter school program—one that permits private entities to accredit and operate a wide variety of schools—but exclude otherwise qualified schools simply because of their religious character or affiliation.

And lest we forget, the folks busy tearing down the wall between church and state would like to keep a door there that only swings one way.

Note that St. Isidore’s argument is not that secular, civil governments in the United States may or should operate religious enterprises. After all, the First Amendment also protects religious freedom by outlawing religious establishments. Under our Constitution, religious and political institutions and authorities are distinct. They may and often do cooperate, to be sure: Governments have long funded religious agencies’ healthcare and social welfare services, asylum resettlement and anti-human trafficking efforts, and schooling and research. What our “separation” of church and state means, though, is that secular governments do not decide matters of religious doctrine or interfere with churches’ religious affairs.

In other words, the First Amendment is there to keep government from messing with then church, but the church should be free to mess with government all it wants, including hoovering up those public tax dollars while performing government functions (like school), but not with any government rules and regulations being applied. 

In other words, they like the part of the wall that serves them, but only that part.

The formal, clear erasure of any sort of rules, any manner of regulation or oversight, means that we are inching (well, actually, footing or yarding) towards removing any sort of meaningful distinction between charter school programs and vouchers. Either way, the already extraordinarily wealthy Catholic Church will be able to collect government subsidies for its private religious education system, drawing taxpayer dollars even from taxpayers whose presence within its school walls will be forbidden. 

OK: A Triggered Voucher Bill

I have read many, many voucher bills, a truly thankless task because they are numbingly similar, displaying about as much variation as pages from an old hand-cranked mimeograph machine.

But in Oklahoma, I have found something legitimately new. A voucher bill (one of several ed disrupt, defund and dismantle bills out there) that doesn't just provide a trigger warning, but an actual trigger payoff. 

The bill is courtesy of Senator Shane Jett, who does not look like a frail snowflake, and yet... Perhaps he's worn out from trying spending his years pushing bills to ban CRT and SEL and who knows what other letters of the alphabet.

This education savings account style bill has all the usual accoutrements, like the laundry list of education-adjacent items ending with "any other damn thing you can get past the agency we hire to run this for us." It has the special hands off rules so that the state won't try to interrupt education vendors when they are discriminating against LGBTQ folks or performing religious indoctrination or teaching kids how to be wonderful nazis.

But it has something those other voucher bills don't have.

Triggers.

By the rules of SB 943, two groups of students are eligible for the Oklahoma Parent Empowerment Act for Kids (PEAK) vouchers. Students who live (or whose parents work) in a county with more than 10,000 people, and students who live in counties with fewer than 10,000 people but who attend school in a Trigger District.

What, you ask, is a Trigger District? It appears to be a district that does anything that could trigger a right wing culture warrior. There's a list of triggers, which starts out with some three violations of Oklahoma's Title 70, including don't do gender/diversity training. Then things take a turn. As God is my witness, I am not making up any of the following triggers that can trigger conservatives into putting the school on the trigger list. The exact language is any district in which the following are "advocated or tolerated."

Instruction in gender identity and sexual orientation including instruction designed to promote gender confusion (Are there such things? When I taught I used some materials that usually promoted some other kinds of confusion, but I never came across a deliberate gender confusion unit).

Possession of books which contain obscene material as defined by Section 1024.1 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes. So if the district even "tolerates" someone carrying a dirty book around. Smartphones are still okay, I guess.

Curriculum which is sexual in nature, except as provided for in Section 11-105.1 of Title 70 of the Oklahoma Statutes (that's sex ed).

The presence of any school employee or volunteer engaged in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries. So maybe dressing up as the school mascot is still okay if the student isn't getting into it too much?

Climate change ideology including, but not limited to, disparaging the oil and natural gas industry or the agriculture industry. No saying mean things about oil, gas or agriculture. Unclear whether or not you can make fun of their silly counterfactual advertising. 

Curriculum promoting social and emotional learning.

Curriculum promoting animal rights activism.

Instruction that disparages the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The next time there's a school shooting, don't say mean things about the guns involved. 

Ideology that encourages efforts to defund the police. 

Curriculum promoting a Marxist ideology including, but not limited to, violations of Section 1266.4 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes. That's the one that says it's bad to try to overthrow the government or conspire to do so, which is an odd thing to pair with an anti-Marxist trigger, since the most recent attempt at "the overthrow, destruction, or alteration of, the constitutional form of the government of the United States" by use of "force or violence" did not involve Marxists. I am also curious about how many card-carrying Marxists are rattling around the rural counties of Oklahoma, using their copies of Das Kapital to bat away tumbleweeds.

It's a pretty impressive list, and I feel as if it could have been extended with some other important trigger items.

The presence of any school employee or volunteer who says aloud that Hunter Biden's laptop is "not a big deal."

Curriculum that suggests that all racial issues in the United States were not solved by 1964.

Curriculum or instruction calling the United States a democracy and not a republic.

Any instruction that suggests that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.

The presence of any school employee who says "Happy holidays" during the month of December.

Curriculum that teaches that all of Shakespeare's female characters were original portrayed by male actors.

Landscaping school grounds in such a way as might promote them as a landing area for Chinese spy balloons.

The presence of any employee or volunteer who responds to any of the above complaints by suggesting that the complainant needs "to put on their big boy/girl pants and get over it," and it counts as a double trigger if they fail to use the correct gender of the large pants that are supposed to be put on.

The hiring of a baseball coach who is in favor of the designated hitter rule.

There are undoubtedly more (see you in the comments) because somehow the folks who used to complain about liberal snowflakes and put up "F#@! Your Feelings" signs are now just loaded with feelings, and not just feelings, but feelings that are easily bruised and hurt and triggered. How did the party of cold, hard facts somehow become the party that cannot give up the story of furry students in schools, a thing that--and I cannot stress this enough--did not actually happen anywhere at all ever.

And let's not lose sight of what this bill does-- it pays folks for being offended. "Dear State of Oklahoma. There was a student at my child's school with a copy of "And Tango Makes Three" and the school did not punish that child, so this is clearly a trigger district. Therefor, I would like you to send over my pile of voucher money right away."

This is a silly bill, and I can only hope that it gets the kind of mocking it deserves, even if that triggers somebody. 

KS: Hilarious and Sad: A Teacher Speaks Up

I want to show you footage of an awesome piece of testimony before the Kansas legislature's budget committee on the subject of Kansas's entry in the school voucher fad turning up across the nation. HB 2218 has all the usual features of these things, the basic "Here, we'll give you a chunk of money that you can use to buy an assortment of education products" approach is here, plus the usual promise that vendors are free to peddle whatever they like without fear of government oversight of any sort.

That last part is important because part of the lead-up to this cookie-cutter bill has been an embrace of the far right strategy of scorched earth culture war, demonizing teachers and undermining trust in public education, just folks like Chris Rufo and Jay Greene (neither, incidentally, from Kansas) have been encouraging, so that the troops are hearing "school choice" as code for "schools where people will taught good proper christianist education the white way"). 

Committee chairwoman Kristey Williams, a former teacher from rural Kansas ought to know better, but she clearly doesn't, as noted by columnist Clay Wirestone, who calls out her "joyous expression of nihilism" before writing, "She and fellow Republican committee members appear committed to undermining the public education system that serves a half-million children — and razing the future of our state along the way."

So that's what high school English teacher Dr. Liz Meitl was preparing to testify for the fifth time, a process that she described to me as saying what you have to say and they either ignore you or go on to mischaracterize what you said. And, she said, "I think I just kind of cracked."

The result was this following bit of testimony.

(You can stop watching after she finishes-- my Youtube skills are limited)

Dr. Liz's testimony has been a bit of a TikTok hit, and she followed up with a print version of the modest proposal. 

The total lack of oversight and regulation, combined with the financial incentives, create an almost irresistible opportunity for those of us with an agenda for our state’s future. Teachers’ dedication to Kansas’s public schools and serving every student will certainly mean almost nothing when we consider the possibilities offered via this legislation.

Meitl's road to this moment really captures much of the education world in the past few decades. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in English and was going to serve with the Peace Corps in a middle eastern country; then 9/11 happened. She started teaching, but then marriage and kids happened and it did not make financial sense for her to work. A mentor convinced her to go back to school where she developed both her PhD and a desire to get back in the classroom. But then COVID hit. 

In the meantime, Meitl has been politically active, fighting for public education with middling results. She expresses frustration with politicians who treat teachers like the cause of student struggles rather than the folks who work on the front lines to help students. "They have demonized the hell out of us." 

It seems likely that the heavy irony in this testimony failed to move the committee, but God bless her for giving it a shot and giving voice to the frustrations that teachers feel. The real tragedy here is that, as Meitl pointed out, teachers who care about education may actually have to do this. "It is," she said, "both hilarious and sad." 

One Choice Fan Taps The Breaks* On Vouchers

It's an interesting day when I agree with Checker Finn (at least a little bit). And Finn's piece today is kind of extraordinary.

Chester Finn Jr. (b. 1944) is one of the Old Guard of reformsterism, long-time cheese-in-chief of Fordham, VP of the Maryland Board of Education, frequent scolder of Kids These Days, champion of charter marketing, fellow at Stanford's right-tilted Hoover Institution, common core cheerleader, and a figure of standing in the whole AEI-Fordham axis of reforminess.

And this morning, in the Thomas B. Fordham website, he's expressing concern as he writes "Why I’m wary of universal education savings accounts."

As we've noted, the ESA brand of school voucher is having a moment, including the "universal" variety, and if you think you've noticed some problems with these, well--so has a guy who is well-ensconced in the school choice world.

Consider me wary, particularly of the free-swinging, almost-anything-goes version of universal ESAs. I’m a long-time advocate of school choice and, over the decades, have lauded many versions of it....

Yet I’ve also lived through enough school-choice enthusiasms to conclude that doing this right is not quite as simple as empowering parents. With three decades of experience with charter schools under the country’s belt, we’ve learned a few things. At least I have.

Here comes his list. And he's not wrong.

Start with the fact that even good parents often make dubious education choices, choices that ill-serve their kids in the long run.

Finn wishes parents would always choose schools that "maximize children's future prospects" by inculcating skills, knowledge and values. Yet parents choose for things like location and are "sometimes  beguiled by the claims and advertisements of shoddy schools in search of pupils." Yes, Mr. Finn, sometimes the free market involves a lot of scam artists and fraudsters using shady marketing to sell their shoddy wares. I am not sure how, exactly, a guy who has spent so much of his life claiming that market foirces would improve education has only just noticed this issue, but here we are.

We can (and should) push for more rights and decision-making for parents, but let’s not be naïve about what will result, much of it good for kids, but some not. Too many of today’s “schools of choice”—charter, private, and district-operated—have mediocre-to-awful outcomes and aren’t racking up solid gains, either, yet they’re full of kids whose parents selected them.

It's true. And there's more.

Sadly, we must also acknowledge that some kids have lousy, absent, or overwhelmed parents, some of them addicted, abusive, or simply oblivious. That’s why we have—for better and worse—Child Protective Services, the Milton S. Hershey School, and much more. Again, it’s important to empower parents and give them choices—but there needs to be suitable backup when parents don’t exist or can’t or won’t take responsible action. Mostly that means operating quality district public schools as the default for kids whose parents aren’t choosers.

I can tell you stories. Every teacher can tell you stories. But we'll come back to this in a moment.

Turning from demand to supply, we need to recognize that, when lots of money is floating around, some folks will grab for it by starting shoddy (but lucrative) schools, filling board and staff with friends and relatives, leasing a facility at exorbitant rates from themselves or their cousins, and deploying nothing that resembles a coherent curriculum. This potential hazard is well understood by sophisticated ESA supporters, but may not be clear to hyperventilating lawmakers. But they can reduce the risks by setting criteria for schools and insisting that whatever agency licenses them engages in due diligence and regular audits.

And Finn sees some other problems as well with the new universal brand:

the “windfall” effect when tax dollars are used to pay for private school tuitions that well-off parents (which does not include many private-school families) were already paying for on their own; the possibility that entrepreneurs will set up shop in wealthy areas where parents can “top up” the ESA dollars while ignoring communities with greater need for good education options; and the use of ESA dollars by parents to purchase things with, at best, a hazy relationship to K–12 education—tickets to amusement parks, trampolines, and such.

Yes. Accountability and oversight are necessary. Again, this comes from a guy who has for decades argued that the parental power of choosing with their feet is all the accountability that the market needs. But it's not, and it never has been. 

Now part of Finn's concern is that this unjudicious behavior threatens to damage the brand, to give the school choice movement a black eye. But I think there's more going on here.

Finn finds himself boxed into a corner where he has to acknowledge the need for oversight. He notes that public policy can't stop parents from making bad decisions, and he's absolutely right. But what policy can do is make sure that most of the available decisions are not bad ones. Even if you believe, like Finn and his marketeer crowd, that education is best understood as a commodity to be sold and marketed, that doesn't mean we do away with oversight. Nobody wants to shop in a supermarket where the food for sale may or may not be toxic. Nobody wants to buy cars knowing that the brakes may or may not work and the car may or may not blow up. 

I think there's something else going on here as well. 

The school choice movement has allied itself once again with people who have fundamentally different goals. The universal voucher crowd is not interested in school choice; they are the culture warriors, the CRT panic crowd, the christianist nationalists who want a school system of their own, a system that enshrines and inculcates their values and ideas and which collects plenty of tax dollars. They are happy to either "take back" the public system or dismantle it; either is fine. The legitimacy of a school (and a government) is, for them, based on how closely it hews to their ideas. They are not interested in choice, and they are not interested in preserving a public system that welcomes and supports all children in this country.

Finn-style old school choicers believe in choice. They believe in a free market and its ability to serve everyone what they want, with a public school system as a sort of safety net, a place for, as Finn puts it, those whose parents aren't choosers. Finn's free education market won't be for everyone; Mike Petrilli (Finn's successor at Fordham) once argued that charters and choice could be lifeboats to get "strivers" away from Those Other Students. It's a view of education that sees schools as a means of sorting students, a place where the cream can rise and the others can prepare to be useful meat widgets. 

For that vision to work, there have to be many schools of many types serving many different groups of students. That's not what the culture warriors want; they want one system, devoted to the One True Word, and the devil take the rest. 

Finn's vision, as he acknowledges in this piece, needs a marketplace that is not choked with junk and fraud (my impression, right or wrong, is that Finn always assumed that providers could be trusted to conduct themselves in a gentlemanly and upright manner and he's a bit put out that some folks have appeared to be willing to stoop to such unseemly behavior). The culture warrior iteration of vouchers brooks no oversight, because that would just involve the government stepping in to say that you can't teach your religious beliefs or discriminate freely against your long list of people against whom you must discriminate in order to fully practice your faith. 

There are many things not to like about Finn's vision, not the least of which is that it fails to explain how the safety net of a public system can be maintained while shoveling all that taxpayer money away from public schools and into all the various alternative systems you've set up. 

But ultimately what Finn describes in this piece is all the ways in which classic free market choicers and culture warriors disagree about what should come next in education policy. Finn would like a genteel shift to a well-ordered system of privatized choice and a public safety net for the leftovers. The culture warriors would like to burn everything down and build their own system. And in this alliance, it's the burn-it-down crowd that has the political power of the moment, and I'm curious to know just how much Finn understands that he has been setting up their arguments for decades. I mean, he may not like this mess, but he sure helped make it. We'll just have to wait and see how long the alliance lasts and when it finally breaks.

*Yes, I know. I was shooting for clever by using "breaks" to go with the breaks and cracks in the choice alliance. It has become clear that I missed clever and hit plain old misspelled. One more reminder that it's usually best to avoid being clever.

AR: Governor Sanders Has A Very Bad Plan For Education

Arkansas Governor Sanders has compiled a Greatest Hits album of ideas to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education in her new Arkansas LEARNS plan. Here are the highlights.

Early childhood ed

Early childhood ed will now come under the Department of Education, which will have the job of managing all federal grant money for ECE, licensing, and maintaining a website for families with pertinent information. That will include "accountability" scores that will be based on "ratings indicative of child outcomes" and God Only Knows what the heck that means. But there will be a bunch of locally controlled "early childhood lead organizations" (GOKWTHTM) that are going to "create alignment among the community's public and private providers and agencies." So local control, but not, or something.

Early literacy

Everybody has to get on the Science of Reading bus. Do I think the Sanders administration has a deep, full understanding of SOR? I do not. But plenty of folks on the right have found SOR as one more cudgel with which to club public education. Also, phonics are conservative?

The state will be hiring 120 literacy coaches for low-performing schools. The schools will, clearly, be judged on performance, but the coaches will be judged on student growth. 

Students who don't pass the 3rd grade reading test are eligible for up to $500 to hire a tutor. If that doesn't work and they still fail the test, they don't pass 3rd grade. This is a terrible, abusive policy, and it doesn't even do any good (except for politicians who are promising to get tough with those slacker eight year olds. Also, they'll be sure to loop parents in on how things are going, because parents' rights are super-important and parents know their kids best, except for third graders who don't pass the standardized reading test--those parents don't know jack and they get no say in this.

Numeracy

If a third grader "falls behind on math" (GOKWTHTM), there will be an intervention plan. And parents will be notified.

Tutoring

Arkansas is going to have a High-Impact Tutoring Pilot Program, "which will fund high-impact tutoring services and providers. Because everyone agrees that High Impact Tutoring is awesome, even if they aren't sure what it is exactly. But if you claim the folks at your company do know, you can make some money on it.

Career Readiness

This has several facets. One is that schools will ask businesses what kind of meat widgets they'd like to have and set up programs to train meat widgets for them, identified by special career-ready diplomas. The Arkansas Workforce Development Board will collect a ton of data on "student outcomes" so the programs can be tweaked. As you work through the rest of the plan parts which involve a clown car full of alternate education systems, ask yourself how anyone can possibly track it all.

Eighth graders will have to pick a diploma pathway; in other words, declare their major. They can change it later, but only with parental approval.

Also, 75 hours of community service, which always sounds like a great idea until you're the community service organization dealing with "volunteer" workers who don't want to be there.

Transforming Schools

Must be a misprint, because what they actually mean is literally privatizing schools. Any local school board can just hand a school over to a private company or charter school (I know--redundant). The state might even throw some money in to sweeten the pot. That's right--not money to help the district improve the school, but money to help convince a company to take it over, aka to pay someone to privatize the school.

School Facilities and Transportation

Cops, everywhere, in every school. And somebody playing the part of School Safety Expert gets to make consulting money every time a new school is built.

School Safety--Training and Support

Schools will "establish a behavioral threat assessment team," so, a future crimes bureau (GOKWTHTM). This is one of those areas where the right falls all over itself because A) there should not be intrusive surveillance by the state and B) there should be total all-seeing surveillance by the state in order to stop Bad People. 

The other piece of this is that it's a Harden The Target approach to school safety, as opposed to making any sort of attempt to reduce the threats or, God forbid, touch anyone's precious guns.

Sexual Abuse Prevention and Education

Sigh. There will be absolutely no discussion of any sex stuff before fifth grade, but there will be a K-12 program incorporating "age-appropriate curriculum materials on the detection, intervention, prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse." There will be ways to make sure that "any substantiated allegation, arrest, or charge, involving a teacher" is reported to the state, and teachers will be trained to deal with abuse. 

Educator Workforce--Teacher Pay

Minimum teacher salary will be moved from $36,000 to $50,000. Does $50K sound like a good starting salary? Does it sound like a good salary to make for the rest of your entire teaching career? Because with that $50K salary comes the end of all steps for years of experience or a Masters Degree. Arkansas teacher pay is so lousy that a $50K salary might actually represent an increase in career earnings, even though inflation will steadily whittle it away. Also, three more days in the school year.

And no mention of where the money for this is going to come from in a state with an administration bent on cutting taxation to bathtub-drowning proportions.

Surely that can't be the whole thing, you say. Well...

Educator Workforce--Teacher Incentive Pay

"Eligible teachers" (GOKWTHTM) might get an annual bonus of up to $10K. Maybe for extra duties or mentoring. It'll be measured with the Value Added Model, aka That Thing That Has Been Widely and Thoroughly Debunked. A Texas court rejected it. Even reformy Oklahoma booted it. VAM only provides direct scores for Reading and Math, so other teachers get rated based on scores of students they never taught. VAM systems are an absolute nightmare, a scam that evaluates teachers no better than reading warts under a full moon. 

The section refers to "this fund" which suggests that the available money for teacher bonuses in any given year will be finite, meaning that teachers get to fight each other for a limited slice of a limited pie. There will also be a program for some loan forgiveness for teachers in "critical shortage" areas (but not the "ineffective" ones). 

Also--and this is not nothing for a young teacher starting a family--bonuses don't count when you're applying for things like mortgages.

Paid Maternity Leave

Credit where credit is due. Up to 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. That's not perfect, but it's far better than our embarrassing national standard of nothing.

Teacher Academy Scholarship Program

Study to teach in a subject area or geographic area that really needs you and get a scholarship. 

School Board Authority

Yeah, there's going to be less of that. Superintendent contracts must be submitted to the state. Personnel, including teachers, will be hired based on "performance, effectiveness, and qualifications." Principals get to hire and fire.

Teacher Fair Dismissal Act

It takes balls to eliminate something calling for fair dismissal, but Sanders has got them. "This will allow schools and districts to make personnel decisions that are best for children and eliminate unnecessary red tape." Well, sure. It will also allow schools and districts to make personnel decisions based on petty, political and personal reasons.

AR Children's Education Freedom Account

Here comes the education savings account voucher system. All the usual features for funneling public tax dollars to private vendors, phased in over three years. Shockingly, she actually proposes that a vendor could lose eligibility if it "demonstrates a lack of academic competence," which is pretty tough talk compared to most voucher programs. But the program still appears to demonstrate the usual lack of accountability or oversight that distinguishes these voucher boondoggles.

Charter Schools

No cap. No local to approve or not. State will speed up renewals. And the taxpayers will be pumping money into a fund created to help charters buy or build facilities.

Indoctrination and CRT

The Secretary of Education will review Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

Cool. Since CRT does not conflict with that principle, there should be no problem. Ha. Just kidding. Arkansas will continue to work hard to keep that Race Stuff out of schools.

Course Choice

Remember unbundling, that beloved idea of choicers in which students would get their various courses from various vendors. Arkansas wants that. The state will keep track of all the available courses, and students can get whatever courses from wherever, somehow. GOKWTHTM.

Good Lord

It's all the hits. Teachers get no job security at all, and no raises, ever, either. Any kind of choice is okay, and taxpayers will fund it. Meat widgets for business. Total accountability to monitor for Bad Things, but total freedom for Folks On Our Side. 

It's a disaster, an attempt to run the 3D playbook (disrupt, defund, and dismantle) all at once. It's as if whoever wrote this for her originally handed it in saying "Okay, here's a plan to roll out in stages over the next several years" and she just said, "Nah, let's let 'er rip all at once." 

This plan would be a disaster for public education in Arkansas, a state that is not exactly at the top of the heap to start with. Here's hoping folks in Arkansas can beat it back.