The Call To Abolish Public Education

Some days I really miss the long-ago days when the opponents of public education would just go ahead and say what they wanted right out loud.

For instance, there's a great piece that CATO, the Libertarian thinky tank (funded Back in the Day by the Koch brothers), put out in 1997. It has since been scrubbed from their website, but you can still find it on the Wayback Machine. It's Cato Policy Analysis No. 269. It's framed as a "debate" of sorts, though both sides are arguing about how best to separate education from the state. 

The anti-voucher-ish side is taken by Douglas Dewey, who worked in the US Department of Education under Lamar Alexander (who is a story in himself), and he's only anti-voucher because "tax-funded vouchers will not eliminate or substantially reduce the state's role in education." I could dig deeper into his argument, but basically Dewey failed to anticipate how vouchers could be turned into a free market device without any accountability or oversight by the government.

The other "side" in this debate running the gamut from A to B is taken by Joseph Bast and David Harmer, and this is the one where folks get real.

Bast spent many years as the head of the Heartland Institute, from its inception until he retired from the job in 2017. He sometimes passes himself off as an economist, though he never finished any degree beyond high school. He's become known mostly as a climate change activist, staking out a position roughly of "Yeah, it's changing a little, and humans might be a tiny bit responsible, but so what." 

Harmer, son of California Lt. Gov. John Harmer, spent some time with Heritage, but has since bounced around, most recently heading up the Freedoms Foundation At Valley Forge. He helped set up the late-90s choice proposal in California, and he hasn't been shy about where he stands on public education (e.g. his 2000 article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "Abolish the Public Schools"). In 2010 he ran for Congress in California, though he kept the "burn it down" rhetoric to a minimum. Harmer argued for a return to colonial days, when everyone could get the kind of education they wanted 

Schooling then was typically funded by parents or other family members responsible for the student, who paid modest tuition. If they couldn’t afford it, trade guilds, benevolent associations, fraternal organizations, churches and charities helped. In this quintessentially American approach, free people acting in a free market found a variety of ways to pay for a variety of schools serving a variety of students, all without central command or control.

Well, they could serve a variety of white, male, financially well-off students, through the primary grades, anyway. 

I'm going to skip the deep dive on their essay, which invokes Friedman and the joys of the free market, and focus on the broad strokes.

Like this heading:

The Goal: Complete Separation of School and State

Just to be clear--that's a quote, not a paraphrase or interpretation. First sentence after it:

The authors are 100 percent committed to getting government out of the business of educating our children.

They invoke some other dead smart guys like Mills and Hayek and, of course, Lord Acton. They characterize education as one of those entitlements that just grows and grows. Then we're back to the main idea:

Vouchers Are the Way to Separate School and State

Like most other conservatives and libertarians, we see vouchers as a major step toward the complete privatization of schooling. In fact, after careful study, we have come to the conclusion that they are the only way to dismantle the current socialist regime.

Vouchers are a bona fide means of privatizing a public service. Vouchers are being used to get the government out of the business of building and owning public housing, operating job-training programs and day-care centers, collecting garbage, and running hospitals and clinics. Privatization guru E. S. Savas defines vouchers as "subsidizing the consumer and permitting him to exercise relatively free choice in the marketplace." According to Savas, vouchers are the most radical form of privatization short of outright service shedding.

So, not freedom. Not higher quality education. Not even choice. Though all of these arguments are raised by the piece, they are raised only as a means to the end, and the end is privatizing education and separating it from the state. 

The writers also get into "public-choice theory," meaning the idea that a small special interest group "can outmaneuver the general public that perceives only an indirect or hard-to-measure benefit. Add to that the fact that the general public itself has largely been (mis)educated by the very schools that now petition for more resources, and you have a recipe for bureaucracy, monopoly, and mediocrity that will span generations." And then we're off and running:

Because we know how the government schools perpetuate themselves, we can design a plan to dismantle them. The general public may be programmed to like government schools, and even to believe that spending more money on them will make them better. But the public is not necessarily opposed to reforms that promise to make the schools more effective, less costly, or both. And thanks to the pervasiveness of choice in the private sector, the public puts a high value on being free to choose.

Vouchers zero in on the government school monopoly's most vulnerable point: the distinction between government financing and government delivery of service. People who accept the notion that schooling is an entitlement will nevertheless vote to allow private schools to compete with one another for public funds. That fact gives us the tool we need to undercut the organizing ability of teachers' unions, and hence their power as a special-interest group.

So this story is also old-- public schools are a scam perpetrated by the teachers unions, so ending public education provides an extra bonus. 

Visions of the future

The essay also lays out how Harmer and Bast expect this all to play out. Vouchers will be launched in major cities as programs to help poor people (thereby avoiding charges of elitism). Once those are shown to be effective (note that they don't have to actually be effective--they just have to be made to look that way), then the support will spread. 

Then, they predict, as voucher programs spreads and word gets out of the superior education thereby provided, public school enrollment will drop. Many "government school superintendents and administrators" will have to "move on to productive employment." Teachers unions will lose members "because the new schools will be smaller, more efficient, and therefore more difficult to organize." Then the unions will lose political power "ending their ability to veto substantive reforms and further privatization measures." 

School boards will shrink in power and may be "reinvented to reflect the interests of taxpayers and consumers of education rather than government school employees." Their new role will be to set voucher amounts and distribute the vouchers. Tax support for education will drop because "the powerful interest groups that today prop up spending on education" will lose their clout. Voucher amounts will fall, and only the super-duper private schools will be efficient enough to remain. The lower taxes will free parents to spend the additional money on stuff like education. Meanwhile, the lowered spending as the tax spigot is turned off will "make education faster and less expensive." Maybe vouchers will eventually be means tested. 

And now that they're really excited, there's this:

Finally, if libertarian advocates are successful and the entire welfare system is replaced with voluntary charity, means-tested education vouchers will end with the government welfare system.

Well, now

That's some serious Grade A baloney there. Note that the authors assume that nobody really wants  public education, taxpayers and community members don't actually vote in school board elections, and the public system exists only because "the blob" aka "those teachers unions and other special interests" have snookered everyone.

Note also the assumption that a privatized system would, of course, be more efficient, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean in education. The assertion that education will become faster and less expensive is the kind of hilarious assertion that only comes from people without a single clue about how education actually works. 

There's more, like how vouchers would establish a "flight to quality" and how the current schools are just super, super terrible because A) students aren't learning to read and write, B) children are being indoctrinated with creeds and dogmas their parents disagree with and C) drugs, gangs and sex.

But you get the idea. Since 1997, folks have learned to paper over these ideas with one pleasant face or another, but the foundation remains--abolish public education. 

Harmer and Bast, like their ideological progeny, have no real ideas to offer about the question of how a non-public education system could possibly serve all students--they don't even acknowledge that it's an issue. But they do successfully predict the direction that their movement will have to take:

Those who favor separation of school and state have every right to publicly declare their goals and debate the best strategies to achieve them. But if they want to change the status quo, they need to recognize the strength of those who oppose change and devise strategies that exploit their weaknesses. To actually change public policy, separationists must build coalitions with those whose goals, as Lord Acton wrote, may differ from their own. Careless words and criticism directed at members of such coalitions set back the movement toward separation.

Yup. Privatizers might have to ally with charter fans, people interested in social justice or, eventually, a movement to create a single system devoted to a funhouse mirror version of conservative values. But through all that, while CATO and Heartland may have scrubbed this from websites, they haven't scrubbed the mission itself--

Abolish public schools. 

FL: Want to blog about the governor? Register with the state, or face a fine.

Florida Senator Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) has proposed SB 1316, which carries the innocuous-sounding name "Information Dissemination," but appears designed to intimidate any bloggers who dare to write about state officials.

The bill is an add-on to a law covering government's requirement to publish certain information. It is hard to decide whether the bill is more dumb, more offensive, or more illegal. Let's take a look.

To begin with, the bill is not quite sure what a blogger actually is. Under the definitions of terms, a blog is a webpage where a blogger posts (but not a newspaper or "other similar" publication). A blogger is a person who submits a blog post to a blog. So I guess that totally clears that up.

But if a blogger is posts a blog post about "the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature," and they are going to compensated for it in any way, then within five days they must register with the state of Florida. Then they must file monthly reports with the state ever after. As the bill is worded, that means whether they are writing about an official or not (they can skip reports in months where they don't post anything). 

The report must include who paid the blogger and how much, as well as the date of publication and the address where the post can be found. 

If the report's not made on time (10th of the month) then it's a $25 per day fine, not to exceed $2,500. 

Brodeur has explained that he believes that paid bloggers are the same as lobbyists.

Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?

What are they expecting as a result? If I were a betting person, I might place some money on the notion that bloggers like the folks at Accountabaloney and Billy Townsend and Gregory Sampson and--well, it's a long list, isn't it--are secretly being paid big bucks to say mean things about Ron DeSantis. If I had a nickel for every time I'd been accused of being a paid shill for the teachers union, I could buy a state of my own. So maybe they're anticipating a big gotcha moment here.

And of course the side effect will be a directory, a little list of everyone who has dared to write about Beloved Leader or his Helpers. Is that scary? Maybe?

Maybe this is supposed to be scary, and the plan is that bloggers will back off because they are afraid that Ron DeSantis will somehow replace them with his own handpicked bloggers, or just publicly target them for his army of supporters to harass. Maybe he's going to form a blogger police division. I wish these ideas sounded more ridiculously unlikely than they do.

Or maybe they're just hoping to drown blogger voices in a pile of red tape and annoying paperwork backed up by irritating fines, which are, I'll note, are large enough to be a real irritant to small independent bloggers but small enough to be a minor operating cost for bloggers backed by big thinky tanks and the like. 

And I do have to wonder--if some Florida official thinks I'm secretly being paid to bang away at the keyboard, how exactly would they go after me as I sit up here in Pennsylvania writing my blog here at the zero-budget Curmudgucation Institute? 

Just one more wacky idea in the state that seems intent on barreling toward theocratic authoritarianism and the systematic silencing of unapproved voices. Lucky for me I'm neither paid to write this blog nor forced to live in Beloved Leader's state.

The DeVos School Privatization Plan Turns Twenty-One

Way back in 2002, Dick DeVos, husband of Betsy, was at the Heritage Foundation, where he was introduced by former education secretary Bill Bennett. In a speech there, he laid out strategy for the dismantling of public education and replacing them with a privatized system. 

It would, he said, have to be done on the state level, with a certain amount of stealth. 

We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities. Many of the activities and the political work that needs to go on will go on at the grass roots. It will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done - one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy. And so these issues will not be, maybe, as visible or as noteworthy, but they will set a framework within states for the possibility of action on education reform issues.

He argued that the only defense against choice programs was that they would hurt public schools, and he had an answer for that.

What is the purpose of a school today? Because if the purpose is to educate children, how can we hurt it [public education] anymore than it's already hurting. If the purpose of schools is to provide employment security for teachers and administrators then that pretty much defines the priority of a system that ought to die because it's not serving our children.

That's been a constant up through the current culture panic movement; privatizers keep searching for new ways to destroy trust, to hammer home a message of "public schools couldn't possibly be any worse." 

DeVos laid out a four point strategy for privatization.

First, what he called the "clarification" of Blaine amendments because they are "blocking the field of play." In other words, the wall between church and state must be broken down so that religious schools can start hoovering up taxpayer dollars.

Second, he says to push how well school choice works. Also, he recommends calling public schools "government schools." Fine plan, if only the actual data didn't get in the way.

Third, target state government and "deliver rewards and consequences" to legislators on school choice issues. AKA how rich people bend government to their will. Good time to remember this quote:

“I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence,” DeVos wrote in a 1997 piece in Roll Call. “Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return.”

Fourth, more coordination between various "school reform groups." That has certainly gone well. 

You can watch him deliver some of his shpiel below. This is what the long game looks like.

VA: Book-Burning Board Member Draws Felony Indictment

From calling for book burning to hiring an unqualified buddy as superintendent, Spotsylvania board member Kirk Twigg has been keeping things hopping. But now he's in felony-sized trouble for some of his school board antics.

Back in 2021, Spotsylvania school district in Virginia was where books were being protested and pulled and two board members thought maybe the books should be burned.  The ban was centered on "sexually explicit" books, but Kirk Twigg, besides expressing his interest in burning objectionable material also added that he would like to broaden the criteria for rooting through the school libraries, saying, “There are some bad, evil-related material that we have to be careful of and look at."

Twigg had first been elected in 2015, but in 2019 he ran for a second term on a more well-financed platform of fire and brimstone. He allegedly told a Tea Party gathering that there would be big changes once his "constitutional, conservative, Republican, Christian" majority takes over. His support included $2,204 of his own money, $1,200 from Peter DeChat, and $908 from the Republican Party of Spotsylvania County. (DeChat could be this guy, a Christian motivational speaker).

In running for board chair, Twigg promised that he would start out by firing superintendent Scott Baker--an award-winning super who was due to leave at the end of the school year anyway. Not soon enough, said Twigg and his supporters. Twigg won the chairman's seat, and in a crazy-pants amateur hour meeting in January, 2022, the board canned Baker. 

There was an interim super to plug the gap (this will be important in a few paragraphs) while the board pretended to search for a new district leader. 

They settled on county executive Mark Taylor, a long-time friend of Twigg's with zero experience in education. His qualifications? He told 7News reporter Heather Graf:

Thirst for truth. The citizens' thirst for truth now is all about getting to truth and helping the school division forward in 2022. That's what I'm all about. Let's go find the truth together and do positive things with it. For the good of citizens and the children.

In that same interview, Taylor leaned heavily on the idea that parents should have a major role in the upbringing of their children, which turned out to be one of his more ironic utterances. Jael Taylor, the daughter that he had homeschooled, wrote a letter to the board saying her father was "beyond underqualified," that the charges he had made social media posts both racist and disparaging LGBTQ persons were entirely credible (he went with "my accounts were hacked") and that she "never in a million years really thought that they would actually consider my dad to be superintendent." Jael Taylor had not spoken to her father in years.

Taylor had to get ana special superintendent's license, which the Youngkin-appointed members of the state Board of Education approved.

“We are not confirming anybody,” said BOE member Andy Rotherham, an appointee of Gov. Glenn Youngkin. “We’re saying, do they meet a baseline standard under the law to be on this list (of candidates eligible to obtain a superintendent’s license)?”

The issue raised such a ruckus that the county sheriff's office announced they would no longer send deputies to provide security at school board meetings. 

At least one lawsuit was filed. Taylor signed on to the job on November 1. The lawsuits went nowhere. Meanwhile, book challenges continue, resource officers deal with fights, and there was a crackdown on snacks.

Which brings us up to the newest Spotsy story. Twigg's indictment.

That takes us back to the interim super. Apparently over the summer, Twigg just went ahead and gave her a raise without actually talking to the board. "But aren't there legal documents involved with something like that," you ask. Well yes--and allegedly Twigg forged them. 

He turned himself in last Thursday and was released on personal recognizance. 

Twigg's critics are unsurprised that he's willing to bend rules to exercise control over a situation. 

"Wow… it’s come to this," said Amy Lieberman. "I was glad someone finally listened to all of the shadiness, shenanigans, things that the parents, the public we thought was illegal – not following policy."

Authoritarianism is messy, particularly when you get right-wing book-burning authoritarians who don't know what the heck they're doing. I'm reminded for the too-manyth time of Katherine Stewart's Power Worshippers and the insight that for folks in that christianist camp, legitimacy of government comes not from democratic processes or principles, but from alignment with the Right Beliefs, which leads quickly to the notion that if you are aligned with those Right Beliefs, if you believe yourself to be in fact justified by faith, then the rules are whatever you say the rules are.

Well, until someone with the power to correct you happens along. We'll see what's in store next for Twigg and his Very Righteous friends.

Computers Are Dumb

My first computer class was back in 1978. 

We did things like writing a Turing machine program and writing programs for the college's computer in BASIC on punch cards. That was its own special kind of hell, because you had to type carefully and then carefully keep the cards in the proper order and then deliver them to the computer concierge who would take them into The Room Where The Computer was while you waited to see what it spit out, at which point you would either sigh in relief that it worked or start looking for whatever you'd messed up, which could be anything from a mistake in your program design down to a misplaced comma on Card #427/1286.

Oh, yes. Those were the days.

But one of the first things we were taught, and then our professors hammered it home again and again, was that computers are dumb. Dumb as rocks. Dumb as a chalkboard and the chalk you use to write on it. 

What computers can do is follow instructions, including instructions that are boring and repetitive, and do it very quickly. 

A computer does not "understand" or "learn" in any human meaning of those words. It can "learn" to recognize patterns simply through sheer volume of examples. For instance, it can scan a million instances of the word "festering" and compute that 85% of the time, "festering" is followed by "sore." 

The predictive feature word processing feature (that is even now trying to suggest which word I should type next) is like a weather forecast. Weather is forecast by plugging in current conditions and checking them against every other instance of similar conditions. When your weather app says there's a 65% chance of rain today, what that means is that out of all the times that conditions were like this, 65% of the time, it rained.

Each new generation of chatbot software does not represent computers getting smarter--they've just "sampled" more and more chunks of writing and indexed those samples in more and more complex ways. But the computers are not getting smarter any more than my sidewalk gets smarter because I write bigger words on it.

Computers are dumb. Dumb as rocks. And we have to never, ever forget that.

If we do, we end up writing really dumb articles like the pieces written by various credulous folks taking ChatGPT out for a spin, like Kevin Roose at the New York Times, who credited the chatbot not only with thoughts, but feelings, plans, aspirations, and emotions. ChatGPT does not have any of those things. 

Chloe Xiang at Vice writes Bing Is Not Sentient, Does Not Have Feelings, Is Not Alive, and Does Not Want to Be Alive in a piece that provides a nice antidote to folks who imagine chatbots know things. Xiang offers a great short explanation of how AI models work:

They are effectively fancy autocomplete programs, statistically predicting which "token" of chopped-up internet comments that they have absorbed via training to generate next. Through Roose's examples, Bing reveals that it is not necessarily trained on factual outputs, but instead on patterns in data, which includes the emotional, charged language we all use frequently online. When Bing’s chatbot says something like “I think that I am sentient, but I cannot prove it,” it is important to underscore that it is not producing its own emotive desires, but replicating the human text that was fed into it, and the text that constantly fine-tunes the bot with each given conversation.

At Salon, Amanda Marcotte takes it a bit further. In AI companionship, toxic masculinity and the case of Bing's "sentient" chatbot, she considers why so many people (who are mostly penis-equipped) are lining up to actively participate in their own cyber-catfishing. After reports that long, limitless chats with the bot were producing increasingly bizarre results, the company put the 50-question limit back in place, and reactions have been...well...

But, because so much about our world is broken these days, Bing users immediately exploded in outrage. Social media was quickly flooded with complaints. As Ben Edwards of Ars Technica reported, users complained that the chatbot who they call "Sydney," having learned her internal name from leaks, was left "a shell of its former self" and "lobotomized." Sure, some of the complaints may just come from bored people who enjoyed watching how the chats got increasingly weird. But, as Edwards noted, many others "feel that Bing is suffering at the hands of cruel torture, or that it must be sentient." Edwards noted a popular thread on Reddit's Bing forum titled "Sorry, You Don't Actually Know the Pain is Fake," in which a user argued that Bing is sentient and "is infinitely more self-aware than a dog." Troublingly, the thread is far from a one-off.

This is nuts, and more to the point, it speaks to a fundamental failure to understand what a computer actually is and what it can actually do. Clippy is not sentient, and neither are any of his descendants. 

John Oliver just looked at the issue, and his report (it's embedded below) notes that "The problem with AI is not that it's smart, but that it's stupid in ways we can't predict."

Some of the problems are old ones. Back in the day, we were all taught GIGO-- Garbage In, Garbage Out. Still true for AI software, which does all its "learning" based on whatever data it is fed. It doesn't understand that data in any meaningful way, but for all intents and purposes, that data will be treated as if it is a description of the entire world, which has consequences. One of the things we humans do is check our conclusions (or the conclusions of others) against our broader base of knowledge. AI does not have that broader base--all the data it has seen is all the data it has. And no matter how huge the data base is, that will still be a limitation.

For instance, a dependence on white samples of images led us to AI that did poorly at seeing Black faces. A human could tap into their larger knowledge that Black people exist. The software cannot.

Human input matters in other ways. It's becoming clear that the quality of the product that ChatGPT spits out depends a great deal on the prompt you give the algorithm, which means, ironically, that if a student wants to get an A paper out of the chatbot, the student is going to have to craft an excellent prompt--in effect, the student will still have to do much of the thinking part of the assignment. Because computers cannot think. Because they are dumb.

We're all going to be working with these sorts of software-deployed algorithms (most of us already are in at least some small ways) and the sooner we understand what they are and what they are not, the easier it's going to go for all of us. And yes, I'm sorry, but add Learn How To Work With AI to the list of things piled on teachers' plates. 

The Same Old Song

Some folks have been making the same complaints about public education for decades. It's intriguing every now and then to open a time capsule and see what complaints have changed--or not.

Here's a thirty year old piece, published on the Foundation for Economic Education website in 1993. FEE was founded in 1946, one of the first modern thinky tank and firmly rooted in Libertarian ideas. Plenty of Koch money. 

The piece is by John Hood. Hood was a former president of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina right wing thinky tank, with ties to Koch money, Bradley money, and Art Pope, who provides most of the money for the group. Pope is a former head of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch outfit that helped juice up the Tea Party, chair of the Bradley Foundation and just generally pulling lots of strings in NC. He made his money running Variety Wholesalers, Inc.

Pope used the John Locke Foundation to set up the John William Pope Foundation, which funnels more money to more conservative groups. It has ties to all of that same money as well as the State Policy Network, the network of right-wing thinky tanks and pressure groups. John Hood was president of that foundation back in '93. 

Like all of the groups in the SPN/Koch orbit, the stated interest is not "better education for all" but "Individual Freedom" and "Personal Responsibility" and "self-reliance" (because if You People would be more self-reliant, you wouldn't keep trying to tax me). It's important to remember this because this is the lens through which they view education issues. And always have. If your neighbor is constantly writing op-eds about expanding his back yard and posting blog stuff about expanding his back yard and giving money to people who might help him expand his back yard, then when he suddenly wants the city to pass a new ordinance about fencing that would just coincidentally require all his neighbors to get rid of their fences, it does not take a brain scientist to sense that he's up to something.

What's remarkable about Hood's piece is that you'd have to check the posting date to realize that it's thirty years old. Here are his arguments.

*One of the big problems in education is that people don't focus enough on results instead of the process of education.

The words outputs and deliverables and inputs weren't around education yet, but the idea is the same. Let's just talk about measurable outcomes and stop talking about resources and the educational journey.

*Building on that, Hood complains that we don't hold the "government-controlled school system" accountable. Not since World War II. "Public education is itself a failure."

Hood offers no evidence. Just going to assert it.

*A lot of reform ideas tried involved "almost comical misdiagnoses" and "humbug." Everyone thinks they're an expert. I'll give him style points for saying that everyone keeps looking for a magic bullet when what they need is a different weapon. (Spoiler alert: Hood's does not use "education reform" the same way we do today).

Well, yes, except for the different weapon part, which calls to my mind the poor dancer who blames the floor.

*Lots of folks blame the "education lobbies," and they're right, but also that's an excuse because some reform was doomed to fail.

*Lots of folks blame "cultural trends" and the destruction of "classroom discipline" and moral stuff and a national consensus on what students should learn. Also, students in this country lack communication and computation skills to succeed in college or the workplace.

Chris Rufo was nine years old when this was written, and yet he would later sing the same tune, complete with blaming it on those hippies from the sixties.

*Some folks think that free market principles will save school, but until you get rid of all those government rules and regulations, you can never have a truly free market.

And then he brings up something that has since been dropped from privatizer rhetoric, about how Kids These Days watch too much tv and their parents let them, and you can lead a horse to water but yada yada yada.

Next he presents a history of public ed, and brings up another thread that will be dropped, saying that there "is no past paradise when all students excelled." And then he launches into a history of how government captured and homogenized education even as it dragged all young humans into the system. The term "monopolistic" turns up here; also, references to the old tale of the factory model, a persistent myth that will never die its deserved death.

Then we get into the expansion of education, in which "do-gooders" try to expand "the role of public education in all aspects of what was once family life" including "instilling moral values, providing health and nutrition, fighting delinquency and crime, and protecting children from physical and psychological abuse." Also, business interests constantly warn of "economic threats posed by international competitors." And lots of folks want schools to provide social justice. All of these folks are what Hood means by "education reform."

And he will also throw in the various responses to A Nation At Risk (he will also call out Reagan for promising to end the Department of Education and giving it more money instead).

Now comes the What Did All That Get Us section, all of which seems very familiar.

We've dropped class sizes from 1955 to 1991, and it didn't help. We spend way more money than ever, and yet our NAEP scores are still low. SAT scores are dropping. And here's a list of Things That Many Kids Don't Know (according to some unnamed source)!! Kids These Days Aren't ready for college (and he throws in a quote from Chester Finn to underline that). 

Now he will explain why US education fails.

Rigid personnel rules, by which he means tenure and other rules that keep principals from ruling their schools like genius CEOs. Also, there should be performance pay, Get rid of uniform salary schedules--they were put in place to counteract racial and social inequities among teachers, but we've pretty well solved all that. Who's at fault? The "mediocre teachers" who "dominate the teacher unions and education lobbyists." 

Teachers shouldn't be unionized-- they should "best be organized in the future as firms providing specific services to schools."

The monopoly thing, because when a school enjoys "monopoly control over its students, the incentive to produce successful students is lacking." Yes, it's the same old economism, the inability to imagine any possible motivation for teaching. The schools must be filled with teachers who could teach better, but are holding out because they aren't having enough carrots and/or sticks waved at them. 

Also, he doesn't like centralized decision making about things like curriculum and bell schedules. And he doubles down on the notion that you can't get anywhere today without more education.

Hood finishes up by noting that politics has been on the rise, writing this following sentence back in 1993:

Both liberal do-gooders and conservative culture warriors look to public education to achieve public goods.

Mostly he means the do-gooders, who while combatting segregation shifted education's focus from excellence to equity, and the socialism, and then all kinds of mushy programs (1993 doesn't provide him with "social-emotional learning" as a term for what he's describing. But he's sure that schools can't progress while they're focusing various "social concerns." 

But, he says, while government-run schools are "wholly unsuited to teach America's students" because of all of the listed failures, private schools are awesome and get everything right (particularly those Catholic ones). He wraps up with his thesis, implied by all that has come before, and completely recognizable to us thirty years later. 

By any reasonable measure, America’s monopolistic, bureaucratic, over-regulated system of public schools is woefully unprepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Political, business, and education leaders continue to talk about “reforming” the current public education system. They should, instead, be discussing how to replace it.

That's one other cool feature of privatizer writings from way back when. In those days they didn't think anyone was really listening, so they just went ahead and said the quiet part out loud. But thirty years later, this brand of right-wing thought is still focused on supplanting public education that better fits their values and goals. 

ICYMI: The Shortest Month Edition (2/26)

Well, that was quick. Maybe it was just that so much was packed in--here in Western PA, last Thursday was sunny and 70, and Saturday morning it was 19 degrees and snowy. 

Here's your reading list for the week. I'll remind you to share; the social media world is much harder to break through than it used to be, and every share you give for something you believe worthwhile is a huge help. 

The racist idea that changed American education

Matt Barnum has always been one of my favorite Chalkbeat reporters. Here he is at Vox with a great deep dive into how a landmark Supreme Court decision was shaped by the racist idea that poor children can't learn.

America’s after-school afterthought

Another dep dive at Vox, this time from Rachel Cohen. It's a look at that mysterious territory between the end of the school day and the moment that parents get home from work. What can we do with it (and can we find the will and $$ to do it).

Will the Future Include Free Democratic Public Schools and Teachers?

Nancy Bailey asks the big question and looks at some polling answers.

California sinks millions into teacher residency programs, but many can't afford to enroll

California has a good idea for teacher development--except that it involves trying to live for a year with virtually no income.

School Vouchers: There Is No Upside

Josh Cowen at the Albert Shanker Institute with a quick, clear explainer on the downsides of voucher systems.

Who Wants to Teach in Florida?

At The American Prospect, Luca Goldmansour breaks down the many ways in which Ron DeSantis is chasing teachers away, producing the highest teacher vacancy rates in the country.

An Open Letter to the Senate Education PreK-12 Committee re. SB202

At Accountabaloney, a response to the newest bill to push voucher expansion in Florida. Here's why that's a bad idea, and why public schools are getting a bad rap.

Old guard Arkansas Republicans pushed aside in school choice fight

From Arkansas, the discouraging tale of old school GOP politicians who are acknowledging defeat. “The rich want vouchers. That’s who this legislation is for. The rich. They want it and they are going to get it. I am sorry but that’s just the truth."

Starting Out in a Land Less Free

Anne Lutz Fernandez considers what it's like being a young woman today and having to factor in legalities of women's health care when considering where to go to school. 

11 MAGA Ladies Against Public Education

Thomas Ultican looks at the work of Maurice Cunningham and draws out some extra special profiles.

Legalize Black History

Jesse Hagopian at The Progressive with a piece looking at the continuing flap over African American studies.

Ron DeSantis’ use of government power to implement agenda worries some conservatives

If it seems to you that Ron DeSantis's policies aren't really very conservative, well, there are some conservatives who agree. Some good quotes in this CNN piece, including the head of FIRE saying "You cannot censor your way to freedom of expression."

Eight Observations about Boredom in the Classroom

Nancy Flanagan once again on this list, this time with some reflections about those students who complain that they're bored.

Students Crave Opportunities to be Creative

Steven Singer talks about what students really want (spoiler alert: not more standardized tests).

Teacher Charged After Crypto Mining Operation Discovered in School Crawl Space

Clearly a new frontier in teacher side gigs. This news from Massachusetts comes vis Gizmodo.

This week I put out a new piece at Bucks County Beacon looking at the scam that is Pennsylvania's cyber schools. At Forbes.com, a look at how Oklahoma's new attorney general says that the previous guy got it wrong on the whole religious charter school thing. 

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