In some states, like Idaho and Texas, we're seeing some conservatives remember that being conservative doesn't really go along with handing over taxpayer dollars with no oversight or accountability, and so it makes sense that folks on the right would oppose school vouchers, particularly in the currently popular form in which the government throws tax dollars at families to spend with no questions asked.
But it turns out that there are pother folks on the right who don't like the school voucher idea.
New American is a seriously right-tilted publication. It features articles like one explaining why Jesus was no socialist and another celebrating the return of the John Birch Society (with whom they're affiliated) to CPAC. They've got a whole opinion piece about how government school is terrible because it quashes young genius, thereby supporting the old theory that if you keep going rightward, you eventually reappear on the far left.
The money should follow the child, they said in the early 1990s. That way, they said, parents will have “school choice.” Fund students, not systems, went the common refrain. This will introduce more “competition” in the quasi-monopoly education sector, they said. And it will give parents the ability to choose the education that best aligns with their priorities.
It all sounded so great that parties from across the political spectrum agreed to give it a try. Even conservative-leaning American think tanks such as Heritage were impressed, trumpeting the policy as a model. But then, in an instant, all genuine choice was abolished with one “education reform” law fewer than two decades after “school choice” was approved.
Suddenly, private schools taking public money were ordered to teach the radical government curriculum, including the gender-bending extremism. All had to participate in national testing, too, ensuring that all schools taught what the government wanted taught. With public money there must be “accountability,” they said.
Perhaps even more troubling, supposedly Christian private schools were ordered to stop all Bible reading and prayer during school hours. In the same legislation, homeschooling was banned. Homeschoolers were forced to flee the nation, with armed police grabbing some children, such as Domenic Johansson, as families desperately tried to escape “school choice” to freer nations.
In short, all genuine and meaningful “choice” was abolished in one fell swoop — all under the seductive guise of “choice.” Somewhat ironically, perhaps, the alleged effort to offer alternatives to government schools ended up turning all schools into government schools.
Now--twist--that's supposed to be what happened in Sweden, but Newman offers it as a warning. And by the way--the whole vouchers-as-a-trap strategy was laid out by UNESCO!
And the Public-Private Partnership model? That's something widely supported by "global elites." In fact, did you know that the Nazis did something similar, using money to rope in private schools.
In other words, “private” schools will become government schools once they take government money — regardless of “their ownership.”
Even some popular figures on the right can't be trusted.
The dangers of the approach advocated by DeVos and DeAngelis become obvious merely by examining the programs. This year, powerful lobbyists and Florida Republicans introduced House Bill 1 to open up the floodgates of government funding to homeschoolers and private schools. The original draft of the bill would have made tax-funded “Family Empowerment Scholarships” available to basically all students in Florida, including homeschoolers and those attending private schools.
But, as always, there was a big catch: In exchange for government money, the students receiving it would be required to take government-mandated tests aligned with Common Core, with results reported to authorities. The families would also be required to meet each year with a “choice navigator” to determine the educational “needs” of their tax-funded child. The aid was to be distributed by a government-aligned “non-profit” organization that received grants from Florida’s leading LGBT extremist group even as it was seeking to impose its “woke” agenda on Christian schools.
Do you get it! Common Core!!!
You can't trust any of these people. "Trojan Horse-type situation" says Lieutenant Colonel E. Ray Moore (Ret.), founder of the Exodus Mandate ministry to get Christian families to abandon government schools. "When we reach for the money, the handcuffs go on."
CEO Robert Bortins with Classical Conversations, a prominent organization providing classical Christian education to homeschoolers nationwide, highlighted this argument. “I think it is very basic. Who pays for it? If it’s the government and outside of God’s design it will not yield good outcomes.”
Newman doesn't acknowledge the very specific language that voucher fans have included in their bills to cut all strings tying the money to the government. He does like the idea of tax credit scholarships, if you're paying for your own child's education. Because over on the far right, children are an awful lot like chattel.
Rather than looking to government for help and other people’s money, Americans must return to the biblical principle that children are the God-given responsibility of parents — not Caesar or even one’s neighbors. This is true not just in terms of feeding and clothing, but in education, too. No one should feel entitled to seize money from his neighbor for the “education” of his children. Taking wealth from one’s neighbor by force is wrong, even if it is being spent on an otherwise noble goal.
There's a lot of blather in this piece, but it's a good reminder that neither the pro- nor anti- voucher camps are unified in their visions, values, or concerns.
Sarasota has been the center of so many Florida shenanigans, and now it appears they're going to show one more way for christianist conservatives to commandeer a school district.
Prologue
It is. for instance, the board with just one Democrat. That member, Tom Edwards, is a gay man who has been accused during public comments of being a "lawbreaker," a groomer, and "a threat to the innocence of our children and the rule of law in our great state." It happened once; the board chair did not stop it, but later apologized--and then failed to stop it the next time it happened, resulting in Edwards walking out of the meeting. Edwards, who just announced his intention to run for re-election to his seat, a feisty move as he is on Governor Ron DeSantis's hit list of school board members that the governor will campaign to unseat (because that's what rational, humane governors do).
The vocal member of the public doing the attacking has alleged ties to Moms For Liberty, so perhaps she feels extra emboldened that the head of the Sarasota board is one of the founders of Moms For Liberty.
The Players
That's Bridget Ziegler. Ziegler squeaked out a victory for Sarasota School Board in 2018. Ron DeSantis thinks she's swell. And she's married to Christian Ziegler, who decided not to run for re-election to a county commissioner seat because he'll be busy helping his wife and DeSantis each run their own campaigns (that and new rules that would have made it harder for him to win).
Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post that he has been "trying for 20- and 30-year old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me." That was in October of 2021, when Ziegler's involvement had gone quiet; Tim Craig at WaPo reported that Ziegler's wife was "loosely" connected to M4L--not that she was a co-founder of this group that emerged to accomplish just what Ziegler had long searched for a tool to accomplish.
Bridget Ziegler just acquired a right-wing majority in the 2022 elections; their first move was to force out the previous superintendent. And while a search for a replacement is under way, it appears that Ziegler is handing over major portion of the operation of the district to a consulting form wioth deep roots in the christianist right.
The Consulting Company
Tuesday afternoon, the board was supposed to vote on a contract with Vermillion Education, LLC (but that vote has been postponed until April 18). If their website seems a little sparse, that's because they have only been operating for a few months. Their promises and principles are suitably vague-- I mean, here's the whole pitch as of today--
The address Vermillion lists on the contract proposals is a single family home (1640 square feet) in a residential neighborhood of Hillsdale. And their personnel--well, so far, it looks like one guy.
That guy is Jordan Adams, fresh from Hillsdale. There's a lot of story with Hillsdale (here's a short-ish version or get into it more heavily with a whole series of articles), but the current version is a private right-wing christianist college whose head, Larry Arrn ("Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon"), is the same MAGA-fied guy who headed up Trump's 1776 Education thingy (and said teachers are the dumbest). They've provided a platform for a lot of school privatization and taxpayer subsidies for private christian school rhetoric from heavy hitters like Betsy DeVos and Christopher Rufo, all arguing that government shouldn't be running schools--churches should.
Hillsdale has long had a charter school initiative called the Barney Charter Schools, and more recently they've been behind the launch of many "classical" academies around the country.
Jordan Adams is a Hillsdale grad ('13), which means he was a Hillsdale student when they were launching the Barney schools, and eventually became their Associate Director of Instructional Resources. I'll let you draw your own conclusion about his fitness for the role:
“I mostly focus on the history and Latin curricula, figuring out how things are taught in a fourth-grade or eleventh-grade classroom,” said Adams. He looks forward to experimenting with more accessible resources for teachers: “When you’re a first-year teacher, you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of what you’re supposed to be teaching. You don’t have time to sit down and read a long text about teaching. But maybe if there’s a short video that is clearly titled and easy to access, you might conceivably watch it while you’re making dinner.”
If only there were a place to go where you could study teaching so that you knew what you were doing on more than a day by day basis. Adams's original undergrad plan was to work at a think tank, then he went to grad school for a Masters of Humanities. One more educational amateur rediscovering the wheel. But apparently reinvented it well enough to move up to interim director of curriculum for the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, a job he was holding back in October of 2022.
Adams is no longer listed in any current capacity as employed by Hillsdale, though there is no peep about his departure. Not sure what we can make of that.
The Contracts
So what exactly does Ziegler want to sign this fledgling company to do? The two recent contract proposals (the ones that were going to be approved today) aren't super-specific. One consulting contract for a district improvement study lists a lot of the how, but the what is mostly in subparagraph 2:
So, basically all the things that parental rights transparency don't say stuff laws are directed at.
The other proposed contract is for "board services" covers
So, basically, if Sarasota ever hires a new superintendent, that person won't have a lot to do.
The board services contract is a mere $4,820 per month, which is pretty damn cheap for someone overseeing all the work of a school district. And all of this--reviewing programs, curriculum, overseeing hiring, checking out all contractors, and running the board's PR--all that is supposed to happen in a mere four months (commencing immediately). So this new consulting firm is going to get the whole district up and running in time for next fall. For just under $20K. Maybe Adams is not a one man consulting firm, but if not, exactly whom will he hire with that kind of money?
And he's going to be busy, because the district-wide improvement study, both research and writing, is supposed to take just sixty days. The good news for Adams is that the contract says the costs of that study are TBD.
Also notable in the study is that Adams will report directly to Ziegler.
So does anybody know why Sarasota is considering this?
So why, anyway?
Ziegler has not responded to press requests for comment on the Vermillion contract, so coverage has focused on comments she made at the meetings.
She said during last week’s workshop that Vermilion could help staff navigate the “challenges and issues” that happen when “components of certain types are finding their way” into curriculum and programs the district uses.
“It’s an impossible burden on our staff,” she said. “I wanted to bring it forward and present it to the board...I don’t have a specific scope of work.”
WTXL has been covering the story. They couldn't get comments from Jordan Adams or "anyone from Vermillion." Ziegler told them before scooting away. The closest thing to a clear explanation came during a board meeting, when Ziegler brought up hiring a board consultant.
"To have someone to help us with certain things when it comes to keeping us away from the fire," she said at one point. Referring to the many political flaps of the board, she added, "It's been distraction after distraction, and I don't want to continue that."
Asked by WTXL reporter Katie LaGrone how exactly she heard of Vermillion, Ziegler didn't really say. She "works in education circles" and "certainly it was brought to my attention."
After the meeting, LaGrone asked Ziegler if she understood that given Adams and Hillsdale's history, this move "might look a certain way."
"My focus again, whether it looks that way or not, is about getting the distractions out and making sure that our instructional materials for all our students is appropriate and in line not only to the standards but to the expectation of our families." But isn't asking a rep from a notoriously right-wing outfit a bad idea? "Why is it a bad idea to even consider how can we take pieces of that that would align to our mission as a public education institution that would not imply indoctrination of anyone's ideology but get back to the core classical components of academics. I think it's worth looking into, and it sounds like the board also agrees."
How exactly was Vermillion going to do this? "This is very beginning, early discussions," Ziegler told LaGrone before scooting away.
"Frankly, " Edwards told LaGrone, "I was waiting for something like this." In talking to reporter Chris Porter, Edwards expressed other concerns.
“The public is having the same confusion I am experiencing — but then again, I am not in their inner circle,” he said about the other board members....This has not ever been workshopped. There has been no discussion by board members … no exchange of ideas. There’s been no public comment. That, to me, is not transparent,” he said.
What's actually happening?
Either Ziegler and her crew think Adams can pull off a speedy miracle, or one of a couple of other things is true:
1) None of the parties involve know what the heck they're talking about.
2) Adams already knows the answers he's supposed to come up with and he will arrive with a suitcase full of Hillsdale classical education supplies that he will "recommend" the district adopt quickly (maybe more quickly than they will hire a superintendent, who ought to be overseeing these sorts of things).
3) Hiring a consultant to implement christianist right-wing programs gives Ziegler and her crew some insulation. In other words, you reduce the "distraction" of objections to your political agenda by claiming, "Well, I didn't say that...." and waving in the general direction of your consultant.
There are mysteries to be solved. If Adams left Hillsdale in hopes of striking it rich in the consulting biz, this isn't getting it. Maybe he thinks he's on a mission from God, or maybe he's just working some kind of deep cover shtick for Hillsdale.
Maybe this is just proof of concept in a friendly district and what we're seeing is a new model of how Hillsdale can colonize local school districts, and all those board candidates that Ziegler has traioned are taking notes. That just means Sarasota needs to buckle up and the rest of us need to pay attention. Stay tuned.
This is a critique of a pronouncement from Education Secretary Cardona, with a special twist ending. We're going to Raise The Bar: Lead The World.
That's the title, a thing stripped of any poetry or sense, of some new initiative thingy that the United States Department of Education is embarking on. Secretary Cardona rolled it out in a "major address." And if you're wondering what, exactly, they're talking about--well, let's drill down into the language of the announcement and see what we can find.
The press release is appropriately vague, speaking of "global engagement" and making "a call to strengthen our will to transform education for the better, building on approaches that we know work in education" and a "collective will to challenge complacency." The department tweet is even more obtuse, exhorting that "we must step up, seize this opportunity & maximize the potential of our students, our schools, and our country." It all seems vaguely familiar.
This new--well, I guess we call it a "direction" which I suppose is less definitive than an "initiative" but more focused than a "general inclination"-- thing comes with three "focus areas."
Achieving Academic Excellence
Accelerating learning for every student
Deliver a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student
Boldly Improve Learning Conditions
Eliminate the educator shortage for every school
Invest in every student’s mental health and well-being
Creating Pathways for Global Engagements
Ensure every student has a pathway to college and career
Provide every student a pathway to multilingualism
A, B, C--get it? The actual goals are about as generic as one can get, with nary a specific actionable item in sight. I'm not even sure what "global engagements" are. Do we want our citizens to outdo workers in other countries? Bring the jobs back here (as if that is in worker control)?
The speech, like the press release, really really wants you to know that the American Rescue Plan includes a "historic" $130 billion thrown in the general direction of schools.
What we do need is a collective will to fight complacency and status quo in education with the same passion we used to fight COVID. We need the same spirit of unity and bipartisanship we had in the first two months of the pandemic, when we looked past red and blue, and tapped into our humanity, courage, and American spirit.
That's a bold choice of comparison, because education is still dealing with people whose passion is to fight against the fight against covid, a passion that they have indeed transferred to education itself. "No masks" and "No vaccinations" shifted pretty quickly to "No naughty books" and "No telling kids to be nice." He says at one point that culture wars aren't the answer, but maybe he doesn't get where they're coming from. Nor does getting nostalgic about a period that was a two-month blip in the larger narrative seems unlikely to yield help.
But I really take exception to the "complacency" line. I know a lot of teachers, and while they might be described as tired, beleaguered, passionate, overworked, committed, professional, and doing their damned best, I can't say I know many that are "complacent."
But from there we move on to the ABC's of this new thingy.
Academics? We get this baloney:
As much as it is about recovery, it’s also about setting higher standards for academic success in reading and mathematics. It’s unacceptable that in the most recent PISA test, an assessment which is done internationally, our students scored 36th place out of 79 countries in math.
Bringing up our rank on the PISA is an automatic disqualifier from the Take Me Seriously derby. We have always ranked low on the PISA, and nobody has ever correlated that performance with anything. We always get beaten by Estonia. So what? If you want to convert education to a Prepare for the PISA model, it could be done--all you'd have to do is give up any pretense of actual educating.
What specific academic advances does he have in mind? "Science of literacy" and "strong decoding," and I'm not going to get into the reading wars because (spoiler alert) winning the reading wars and teaching students to read are two different things. Financial literacy. High standards aka stop grade inflation. STEM. Pre-K. And this bold stance:
It means that we pursue good pedagogy in a well-rounded education that includes and embraces the Arts—and reject a school experience that is narrowed to only what is tested.
It tells you something about the last twenty-some years of government edumeddling and general bullshittery that it's even a thing that a statement by the secretary of education saying that "good pedagogy" is a thing we should pursue.
We need to recognize once and for all that standardized tests work best when they serve as a flashlight on what works and what needs our attention – not as hammers to drive the outcomes we want in education from the top down, often pointing fingers to those with greater needs and less resources.
This is a true thing. Federal education people should say it, and they have, many times. It's a fine thing to say, but if it is not immediately followed by "And so we will call on Congress to end federal mandates for standardized testing as a measure of school effectiveness, teacher quality, and student achievement," it doesn't mean a damned thing. Especially when it's coming from the guy who defended the BS Test at a time when it was clearly a waste of valuable time and resources.
Then we're on to better learning conditions. Cardona calls for better mental health supports, with more counselors, somehow. More professional development on trauma informed practice (because one more PD session will totally take care of that). Let’s not have pandemic amnesia and forget how schools closed because they did not have enough teachers.
Yeah, too late on that pandemic amnesia thing. Teachers are important and we should pay them more, he says, with various rhetorical flourishes. The administration is ready to throw a bunch of money at teacher development and retention. Higher salaries. Career ladders like Master Teacher and Teacher Leader. Cancel college debts. Actually listening to teachers and respecting their opinions. These are all nice ideas that we have heard before (though admittedly not in the previous administration, so thanks for setting that bar low, Secretary DeVos).
Pre-K through college connection. Career and technical education. Watch for the rollout of a "new pathways initiative" which will "include very specific plans on how our high schools should be evolved to meet the career and college pathways of today and tomorrow." Micro-credentials. Career pathways create options.
This cradle to career stuff will help our graduates "compete on a global stage," and whenever I hear that magical phrase I want to know if A) better educated widgets will somehow cause corporate bosses to bring back jobs to the US and B) what sort of education prepares students to compete by agreeing to live on subsistence wages. Cardona seems to love the cradle to career model; I've complained about his support before.
Also, multilingual stuff is good.
Then it's the big finish, including something Cardona cribbed from the Betsy DeVos playbook. In a list of parallel structures exhorting folks to join in:
If you believe that it’s worth taking a few lumps as we challenge the protectors of the status quo in education: join me on this journey.
What status quo, and which protectors? Seriously. Because one status quo I can think of is the continued use of the Big Standardized Test, and that piece of status quo is protected by the federal government. So go ahead and get started on that one, will you?
The speech and the thingy that it introduces seem like the usual lukewarm bowl of unflavored oatmeal, and in a way, I guess that's okay. Here's a bit from early in the speech:
We have seen shiny silver bullets from the federal level promising to “fix” education. We’ve seen big initiatives with clever names that promise everything, only to fade away after the sense of urgency is over.
That’s not what this Administration is about.
This Administration is about substance, not sensationalism in education. It’s about real solutions to complex issues, informed by real experience – with an unrelenting focus on the instructional core.
Okay, I'm not sure that it's clear what the heck this administration is about when it comes to education, but the idea here is sound.
Any Secretary of Education who stands up to say, "Hey, here's a Great New Thing that will fix education in this country" is full of it. Doesn't matter if the Great New Thing is National Standards or a Big Standardized Test or a federal grant competition/bribery system or even Freedom Scholarship Vouchers--anyone who thinks they have a silver bullet for education is full of enough fertilizer to turn the moon brown.
The speech that I would most trust from a Secretary of Education would be one that admits that there's nothing special or exciting that the feds can do, other than make it possible for states to support teachers in doing the work.
That's the big secret of education. Doing the work. Getting good people to do the work, and then removing as many obstacles and providing as many supports as possible. We've lost our way educationally in this country by a sustained bipartisan effort to do the inverse--providing obstacles and removing supports. The federal government has treated teachers with distrust and tried to micromanage them, and bot directly and indirectly empowered the very people who want to put obstacles in the path of public education.
It's not drudgery. It's not a grind. But the work is slow, steady, unglamorous work, and every attempt to turn it into drama of operatic proportions just gets in the way. The work is about relationships, and though teacher-student is a relationship different from others, it still thrives not on the Grand Gestures but on the daily maintenance.
It's not just that I'm not looking for fireworks from the bully pulpit in DC-- I distrust them. And while I find nothing in this bland compendium of committeefied bureaucrat-speak to get excited about, I can't imagine what a secretary of education could say that would excite me.
But do you know how I know for absolute certain that Raise the Bar is a nothingburger?
Here's the twist ending. Although the tweet that brought it to my attention went up March 31, the press release and speech about Raise the Bar happened back in January. And since then...?
“I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”
In that interview he went to actually say some stuff, like calling out bogus culture war baloney. In an op-ed run in Florida, he actually pointed out that parent's right rhetoric was just a fig leaf for a push to defund public schools (a point on which I'd say he's exactly correct).
“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”
He added: “If we’re not standing up for our students, who will? I feel it’s time.”
In other words, let's get all this crap out of the way of doing the work. I would take one education secretary like this over a hundred of the kind that pump out oatmeal like Raise the Bar. It remains to be seen if he can sustain it, or if we're just going back to oatmeal.
It has been a miserable mess of a week. Nationally we have had to repeat our usual gun violence in school dance, which always feels dark and draining and casts a pall over most everything else.
Here at the Institute, it has also been a week. My parents needed a hospital visit for a variety of challenges, and the cherry on top was a positive COVID test. They are vaccinated and so doing well, but my sister has been quarantining with them, which means heaven will have to build an annex for her crown in order to fit all the stars that belong in it. I have two siblings who are both absolute bricks, so we tag team our way through these things. Meanwhile the Chief Marital Officer of the Institute is away at a library convention, and as you read this, I'm off helping my oldest son, his wife, and my granddaughter move into new digs. So we are just roaring our way into spring here. Also, power outages.
It is just a time, and the readings for the week tell us that many people are having a time all over the country. Let us all just keep keeping on.
Sandra Jones writing for Our Schools with a report on how the defeat of one voucher bill shows what's wrong with education savings accounts, and why even some conservatives oppose them.
Conor Friedersdorf misses a lot of the fundamental issues involved in this piece, but it still provides a pretty vivid picture of what the takeover of New College looks like on the ground. It's in the Atlantic, so beware the paywall.
Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, has harnessed an awful lot of anger about right wing culture war stuff lately. Here she focuses on policies that have given individuals the ability to dictate to everyone.
Dahlia Lithwick looks at the apparent disconnect between the far right's interest in defending students from books, but not from guns. It's important to remember, she points out, that they don't believe in public education in the first place.
Valerie Stauss at The Answer Sheet (Washington Post) hosts Cassie Criswell and Diane Horwitz to talk about the many reasons that Paul Vallas is the wrong choice for Chicago's mayoral election.
Jonathan Chait at the New Yorker is absolutely wrong about charter schools (but then, his wife works in the charter industry), but that means he's more than willing to point out the problems with voucher support. That makes this article both a good critique of the politics of vouchers and an interesting peek inside the charter-voucher rivalry.
Okay, so to read this you have to navigate one of the most annoying paywalls on the internet at The Nation, but Jennifer Berkshire is there with the tale of the Claremont Institute.
From US News-- the school shootings are not the worst of it. But we already know some things that help because (spoiler alert) it's not equally bad everywhere.
Does it seem like the parental rights movement is a bit hostile to children? Philip Bump at the Washington Post picks on a new Trump thread that may be part of the same narrative.
One of the effects of parental rights laws is turning the three R's into reading, 'riting, and records requests. It's the perfect tool for harassing the heck out of districts. The Washington Post has this story.
Bill Hangley, Jr., is a free lance writer who worked the education beat in Philadelphia, and as such he has some thoughts about the charter scene in Philly as reflected through recent episodes of Abbott Elementary. I'm pleased to present his guest post on the subject.
America’s school-choice lobby can relax: when ABC’s Abbott Elementary returns this Wednesday [April 5], the plot will hinge on teacher qualifications, not charter school takeovers.
That’s good news for a community that’s used to being taken seriously – very seriously. Wherever charter supporters go, they usually have friends to defend their interests. But the choice lobby wasn’t represented in the Abbott writers’ room. Nobody stood in the way as the hit sitcom raked charters over the comedy coals, presenting them as cynical, counterproductive, and even absurd.
Unsurprisingly, the charter lobby didn’t like what America saw. “No one likes being vilified,” said Debbie Veney of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “It’s pathetic … to criticize the schools that succeed,” tweeted Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform.
As a journalist who covered Philadelphia’s charters for years, I expected to see people like Veney and Allen vigorously defend their industry. That’s what they’re paid to do.
I just wish somebody would pay them to take a good hard look in the mirror. Because as merciless as the sitcom’s portrayal of district-charter relations may have been, to me it looked far more accurate than charter supporters care to admit.
And I saw the real-life versions of the charter takeover featured in Abbott’s recent episodes. The sitcom version was funny. The real-life version was downright cruel.
It was brutal. Parents were asked to choose between imperfect schools they knew and blue-sky promises from well-dressed “providers” they’d never met. The resulting campaigns were every bit as impassioned and intrigue-riddled as any other Philadelphia election. I did my best to cover them fairly, and interviewed countless parents. Plenty were willing to consider a charter, for plenty of reasons.
But the question that came up most often: “If our school’s not good enough, why don’t they just fix our school?”
I had no answer, and the School District of Philadelphia never really did either.
That’s what rings the most true for me about Abbott’s charter episodes: the underlying absurdity of offering “choice” as a solution to an underfunded system. How do you fix one school by opening another? Especially when the old schools have to pay for new ones?
Think about it: no other government service is run that way. Nobody offers “trash collection choice” or “police choice.” Nor do prosperous suburban school districts choose “choice.” They choose to invest in their own schools, not open new ones run by somebody else.
But America’s choice lobby isn’t used to being laughed at. Which may explain the bitter edge to the tweets from Allen, who accused Abbott creator Quinta Brunson of hypocrisy: “attended charter schools her entire education.”
In fact, Brunson went to a public elementary school in West Philadelphia, and a now-closed charter high school. “You’re wrong and bad at research,” Brunson tweeted. “Loving something doesn’t mean it can’t be critiqued.”
So Brunson could easily dismiss Allen. But Philadelphia cannot easily dismiss its charters or their impact. The city’s 83 charters now educate about 65,000 students – almost enough to fill Lincoln Financial Field. They have powerfulfriends in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, including deep roots in parts of Philadelphia’s Black and brown communities.
How deep? Consider the recent Board of Education forum for Philly’s mayoral candidates. None significantly challenged charters’ role, and several embraced potential charter expansion, including having charters serve as neighborhood elementary schools, like the fictional Abbott.
Take Maria Quiñones Sánchez, who helped launch a charter: “We cannot tell parents, wait until we fix the whole system.”
Or Cherelle Parker, whose home turf in Northwest Philly is a charterstronghold: “We will not have an us-versus-them strategy.”
Or Derek Green, a former charter board member, who wants an “independent authorizer” to award charters, not the school district: “Parents do not believe that there’s not bias in the approval.”
Or Rebecca Rhynhart, who was serving under Mayor Michael Nutter when a Renaissance charter takeover collapsed amidst allegations of corruption and cronyism: “We can’t wait till the neighborhood schools get up to the place where every parent is comfortable.”
Even Helen Gym, a relentless charter-policy critic but also a charter founder, said she’d concentrate on strengthening District-run schools: “I don’t mind choice, but my focus is public schools.”
So charters may disappear from Abbott’s scripts, but in Philadelphia, they’re here to stay.
And now that America has seen charters’ bad side, how will the sector respond?
Sadly, my experience says the charter lobby won’t do any of those things.
Instead, it’ll probably keep lobbying for more charter schools. And if charters are on TV, they’ll lobby TV. They’ll be calling executives and advertisers to complain. And I can guarantee that somebody is hiring writers to gin up a pro-charter sitcom. I bet it’ll be full of union jokes. And I bet it won’t be funny.
Bill Hangley, Jr. can be found on Twitter @hangleyjr
When Google decided to drop its feed subscription app for Blogger, it was a sad day. I had hoped that the app that I replaced it with would be useful, but my frustrations with it continue to grow. The emails it sends out are unrecognizeable as coming from this blog, and virtually all useful functions require me to pay.
On the other hand, the substack experiment is working out well. It's free, it shows up in your email with a subject line that actually lets you know what it is, and I can use it to send out everything I'm publishing, not just the stuff from here at the mother ship.
Shortly the signup box for the old email app will go away, though I presume the subscriptions will continue until that service gives up its internet ghost. But I want to take this moment to encourage you to sign up for the substack. It's free, it works, and it will keep you up to date on the regular posts here (including the weekly digest), plus whatever I post at Forbes. com, The Progressive, and the Bucks County Beacon. It's quick and simple.
When history closes the book on Betsy DeVos. it may well determine that she did the least damage to public education during the handful of years she was officially overseeing it.
Since she left DC (making a belated attempt to throw Trump under the bus on her way out), DeVos has been doing what she has done most of her adult life-- use money and influence to try to replace public education with a privatized, voucherized, taxpayer-funded-private-christianist-school, system that operates as a free market commodity unaided by the government.
In Michigan, she tried hard to ram through a voucher bill, even trying to buy up enough support to circumvent the Democrat in the governor's mansion. She failed (thwarted once again by a system that allows any old citizen to vote and not just the righteous and deserving ones). She published a book that I'm sure somebody somewhere read (I'm not going to read it for you--DeVos has lived rent free in my head so long that I could probably write her book for her).
She has, in fact, dispatched her American Federation for Children all across the country (complete with head cheerleader and the left's least favorite mean girl Corey DeAngelis) to help goose the push for vouchers.
I've been collecting clippings. In Nebraska, she spent big to push vouchers (AFC's Nebraska affiliate chief said their fighting the teachers unions that want "to protect their education monopoly" which I guess is why they collected billionaire money out the wazoo). AFC and their affiliate have been funding their friends in Missouri. They have been financing the way-right crowd in Oklahoma as well as in Texas--both states where it has been necessary to lean extra hard on rural GOP legislators who correctly see vouchers as a threat to their constituents and their beloved schools. There's also been some griping among conservatives who remember that giving taxpayer money away with no oversight or accountability is not really on brand for traditional conservatives.
Georgia. Iowa. Idaho. DeVos has been busy. The sudden eruption of voucher bills is not some oddly coincidental local phenomenon, but a full court press for the nation. Way too many folks are seeing it as a local fight, when it's really a collection of coordinated carpetbaggers (or in DeAngelis's case, one with what must a ton of frequent flyer miles).
Unfortunately, only a handful of journalists have noted the bigger picture. Here's Tyler Kingkade at NBC News managing to both A) spot the DeVos handprints all over various states and B) correctly identify her favored voucher bills as private school subsidy bills.
DeVos is certainly not the only person throwing millions and millions of dollars around to try to stamp out public education as we know it. Here's Connie Matthiessen at Inside Philanthropy trying to sort out all the dark money from the various proponents of school vouchers--it's both impressive and scary.
Both of those pieces, as good as they are, miss the full story of DeVos, calling her "Trump's former Secretary of Education," as if her career in defunding and privatizing public education started in 2016. Not even close. She has spent decades as a right-wing, christianist crusader. Her ineffectiveness (and ill-suitedness) in office were predictable, given her traditional method of operation has been blunt, hardball politics. Aid her in her crusade, and you have her substantial financial wind in your sails; refuse her, and find yourself primaried and cast out.
I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return.
As I've conceded in the past, I may project a bit too much with DeVos. But she's my generation, and I've known lots of folks like her (well, in every respect except the filthy rich heiress part). People of faith sometimes talk about being in the world, not of it, and I think it probably drove DeVos a little bit crazy to have to pretend to go along with little godless people and follow their silly godless rules.
Everyone who watched her leave office and thought, "Now that this big dope is out of office, we've seen the last of her" just hadn't been paying attention. It was easy to dismiss DeVos as a dope, but she wasn't. She was just a woman who was stuck in a job she was unqualified for in every important way. But the job she had before that--crusader for kingdom gains wielding a big fat sword of money given to her by God because she deserves it and will use it to His Will-- is the job she has prepared for and practiced her whole life. And now she has that job again.
She's got a strategy, a vision, a personal hired army, and a pile of money that would make Scrooge McDuck drop his flappy jaw. She is not going away any time soon, and it would be a big mistake to stop paying attention to what she's up to, because she is absolutely not done.
