Monday, May 15, 2023

PA: The Culture War School Board Checklist

This is of most interest to folks in my region, but worth noting elsewhere because I'm sure this kind of thing will continue to pop up all over. 

The American Family Association, a longstanding conservative Christian fundamentalist group that mostly works against LGBTQ rights and porn. Founded nationally by Doug Wildmon, now headed by his son Tim. They're big on boycotts, like boycotting convenience store chains for carrying Playboy and Penthouse, companies that advertise in gay magazines, Disney a zillion times for a long list of offenses. 

Their Pennsylvania affiliate, the last time I checked, was the work of two women located in my neck of the woods. Like so many activist groups on both sides, they don't so much have members as subscribers, and they depend heavily on the church network to get their word out. As a local theater director, I've been on the receiving end of one of their public calls for a boycott, and it is better than the best marketing money can buy, so they tend to avoid publicly mounting these campaigns.

They've been busy sending questionaires out to area school board candidates, and the areas of concern will be familiar to anyone who's been following the culture wars:








































Do you support emphasis on phonics? Are you anti-trans? Would you like some "don't say gay" rules? Do you want the feds out of ed? Abstinence only sex ed?  All the classics are here, presented without any nuance or complexity, and focusing on parental rights for only the parents who believe the Correct Things. It's a quick guide to the far right agenda for schools.

If you are in my region, here are the results that AGA got for their response. As one might expect, the slate for Penncrest, where they're already all in on anti-LGBTQ, reading suppression, and the rest of the agenda-- that crew says yes to it all. Other districts in the area can check to see which candidates want to prioritize the suppression of students who don't fit the Proper Mold over fully educating them. 






I do wish I'd gotten my hands on this sooner, as the primary election is tomorrow, but it's still worth look. School districts suffer when these folks get in charge. 












Sunday, May 14, 2023

ICYMI: Mother's Day 2023 Edition (5/14)

Well, that's it teachers. Teacher Appreciation Week is over and now we can go back to the usual everyday levels of appreciation (or the lack thereof). In the meantime, today we will appreciate moms. And while all that appreciating is flying about, here's some reading from the week.


Perry Bacon Jr. at the Washington Post had a must-read column this week, a compact history of modern ed reform paired with a succinct articulation of a positive vision for public education.

Williamson County mom helps launch national campaign pushing back on 'parents rights' groups

Let's start with something encouraging-- a group of moms who are trying to act as a counter-force to some of those other parental rights (for the parents we approve of) groups. By Rachel Wegner in The Tennessean.

Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality.

In Jacobin, Jennifer Berkshire takes a look at Jon Shelton's new book, the Education Myth (my copy is on the way), which takes a look at the notion that education will somehow fix poverty and inequality ion this country (spoiler alert: it won't).

A Charter School Board Member Says The Quiet Part Out Loud

Carl Petersen catches a charter board member talking out loud about the practice of creaming students and only accepting the Right Students for the school (spoiler alert: they do it).

False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate

Phoebe Petrovic at Wisconsin Watch covers a voucher school story that asks if a school can really discriminate in ways that would be illegal for a public school, even as they accept taxpayer money. Can they really suspend two successful, accomplished seniors from activities just because they are in a gay dating relationship? (Spoiler alert: Yes, they can).

A Philly charter school manipulated its lottery to keep kids out, a top administrator says

A Philly charter is also caught cooking the books. Story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so if you want to get the story without navigating the paywall, check out the coverage by the indispensable Mercedes Schneider here. 

A Tennessee teacher planned a Mother’s Day class. Then came the MAGA rage.

Just another one of those stories. As always, chicken administration is a key feature. 

State offices tasked with making Indiana high school curricula more career-centered

Well, here's a new wrinkle. What if taxpayers were to foot the bill for a private business's job training?

The Troubling Focus on Testing Rewards, Testing Pep Rallies, and Test Prep Bootcamps

You already know that most of this stuff is a bad idea, but Nancy Bailey has the research to back it up.

The Black Screen of Agony

Is it a "standardized" test if every student has a different experience, depending on how well their computer works (or doesn't)? Gregory Sampson with some reminders of what this kind of testing looks like at ground level.

Nancy Flanagan asks the question. Do you already follow her blog? Because you should.


From the blog Whatonomy, another meditation on teaching in the age of AI.

The truth is that my immediate thought is that the poem had been written using Open AI’s ChatGPT. This thought was the first arrow. The pain of self-loathing that arose from the entertaining of this suspicion, this doubt was the second arrow. I had recently attended a poetry competition organised by a group of students and I knew that, from this moment on, I would in all likelihood never be able to freely enjoy listening to my students’ recitals of their original work without, from time to time, wondering whether indeed they had written their own work or whether AI had had a grubby, silicon hand in the poem’s creation.


Texas lawmaker lobbies for 3rd graders to be trained to administer aid for gunshot wounds in the event of a school shooting, says report

For your Crazy Stuff That Is Actually Happening file. And you thought that active shooter drills were traumatizing...

Chaplains could be in Texas public schools this fall under new bill

Also in Texas. Because, Texas. 


This story from NBC News is pretty frustratingly rage-inducing, but it's important to understand just how bad things can get when you put terrible people with no real interest in education on a school board. And I call them terrible not because I disagree with their politics, but because of their desire to exercise to slap people down just because they can and because they believe they should be making Certain People hurt. 

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Thursday, May 11, 2023

The Pandemic and The Testing Red Herring

The pandemic exacerbated some of US education's major problems, and that's reflected in the effects on children. Unfortunately, it's also reflected in how we respond to those effects; policies that were a bad idea in "normal" times become terrible ideas in a post-pandemic world.

I have no doubt that learning loss is a real thing, and we need to address it. But I'm afraid that instead we're throwing weight behind Learning Loss instead.

Look, we all know there was learning loss, that students did not get the usual amount of learning and growth done during the pandemic, hampered by cobbled-together distance learning set-ups, general stress, and a disconnection from education in general. 

But Learning Loss is something else; it's a slightly panic-stricken doubling down on the Big Standardized Test, the single biggest policy failure in education of the last thirty years. 

The panic is predictable for many reasons, not the least of which is that the pandemic suspended the Big Standardized Test, which threatens the income of lots of folks in the testing industry. 

There are people who really believe in the importance of the BS Test, who have always believed that we can make the pig fatter by weighing it repeatedly. In the economism-dominated world of ed research, we get the regular assertion that testing results are linked to future life outcomes. Well, not exactly. Test results correlate with future life outcomes. This is not a surprise. Test results correlate with the socio-economic back ground of the students. Future life outcomes also correlate with the socio-economic background of students. 

What's missing--what has always been missing-- is any research showing a relationship between changing test scores and changing life outcomes. We know that if Pat has a high BS Test score, Pat is probably going to have swell life outcomes. What we don't know is this--if Sam was going to get a lousy BS Test score, but the school gets Sam to score higher, will Sam's life have more swell outcomes than it would have otherwise? Probably impossible to prove, but given the fact that we can accurately predict a school's test scores with just demographic data, it's the only question that matters.

Other arguments-- like dropping test scores mean a loss of millions of dollars of income--are based on even flimsier reasoning

The testocrats have pulled off the neat trick of getting people to debate and clutch pearls about BS Test scores without even knowing they're doing it. They do this by using some mathy prestidigitation to turn test scores into days/weeks/months/years of learning. When test fans Tom Kane and Sean Reardon get space in the New York Times to push the panic button over Learning Loss and print charts showing how many years or months students are "behind," all they're talking about test scores. When they and others talk about "catching up" and "making up lost time," all they're talking about is getting test scores back up.

This is a lousy focus, a misguided response that uses a made-up crisis to take attention away from a real one.

I'm partway through Anya Kamenetz's new book The Stolen Year, which catalogs the many ways in which students were pummeled, hurt, beat up, deprived, cut off and generally batted about by the pandemic and our responses to it. 

On the long list of things that students need to deal with in the aftermath, both educational and non, "get test scores back up" doesn't even make the top ten.

We got children being carted into the ER, battered, bruised, bloody, and a bunch of folks are hollering, "First, we've got to get these kids some clean shirts. And maybe a nice hat." 

I get the whole "it's the only concrete data we have, so what else are we going to use" argument. Pro-test folks have been using this argument forever, just like the guy who's searching for his car keys and night under the street light that is 100 feet from his car because that's where the light is best. Is testing data really better than nothing at all? Probably--but only if we approach it is an only-sort-of-accurate tiny slice of a larger picture. In other words, if we discuss them as scores on a single standardized test given to students who are out of practice in taking standardized tests, and not as some magical measure of the complete state of student learning. 

The current state of learning loss (not Learning Loss) is complicated. Beyond reading and math, there are subjects that took an extra hit, like those that require group work (chorus, band) or hands on work (the CTE stuff). And we're seeing widely that many students simply lost the knack for (or interest in) "doing school." Every community was hit differently, with some fielding far more trauma than others.

It's the people on the ground who know the most about what the students in their school need, and once again we run into one of the problems of the testocratic approach-- an attitude of "we don't need to talk to people who are there because we have all these numbers we can look at instead." Which is exactly backwards to what students and schools need right now. 

I'm doubtful that we'll prioritize the needs of students or the parents and teachers who work directly with them, based on our failure to do so when the pandemic was officially on. But "get those test scores back up" is a red herring, a beside-the-point exercise that will make far too many people feel as if The Problem is being addressed and they can stop worrying about it. Meanwhile, resources will be directed for some big herring hunt. 


Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Choice Advocates Argue: How Far Is Too Far?

Amidst all the choicer crowd crowing over voucher victories, there are some other stirrings in the choicer camp, some disagreement about just how far education savings accounts should go. 

Education savings accounts have emerged as the favored form of super-voucher, a stack of money handed to parents to be spent, in turn, on the education-ish product of their choice. In many states it is a deliberately wild west marketplace, with most of the newest laws not just without oversight or accountability, but expressly forbidding oversight by the state. 

It's a hell of a way to throw around taxpayer money, and some of the more seasoned players in the choice world are expressing some misgivings. 

Chester Finn (Big Cheese Emeritus of the Fordham Institute) has expressed concern about the corrosive nature of the culture wars being use to fuel choicey advances:

We’ve known—I’ve surely known—for years now that pure market forces in K–12 (and higher) education do not reliably yield more effective schools and better-educated children. Sorry, Milton F and Corey D and a host of other living colleagues. Too many things go awry in that marketplace, from parents who make bad (if understandable) choices to greedy school operators who don’t care about outcomes, not to mention kids who lack competent adult guides.


Michael Petrelli (Current Big Cheeses at Fordham) has been drawing fire from his colleagues on Twitter by suggesting that maybe "We shouldn't subsidize junk education either, ESA fans." And when Finn expressed his concerns and "wariness" about ESAs, Robert Pondiscio expressed some cautious optimism about the vouchers, seasoned with conservative restraint:

A common talking point among proponents is that ESAs give parents control of their money to customize their child’s education, spending it on private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational products and services. But it’s not “their” money. It’s our money that’s being put under parental control. This is not mere pedantry or a difference of semantics. The cost of education is socialized; we have a shared stake in the education given every child in America and pay school taxes whether or not we have kids in our local school or have kids at all.

This distinction—“their” money versus “our” money—holds the key to thinking about ESAs that may assuage your misgivings, Checker. To my way of thinking, an ESA is not a new form of education funding, it’s a different form of education accountability. States like Arizona, Iowa, West Virginia, and Utah that have enacted universal ESAs aren’t giving parents money heedlessly. They’re making a public policy wager to put accountability into the hands of those who “nurture and direct” the child. They’re betting that parents will discharge their “high duty” with more attentiveness, care, and diligence than the state can possibly provide through its districts and schools.

This is its own kind of choicer heresy--it's a standard claim of voucher fans that we're talking about their money, not anybody else's. And Pondiscio has made his case for ESAs as a sort of middle ground:

These all represent a comparatively nuanced view of ESAs. It's not a view I agree with, but it at least recognizes the issues that surround taxpayer dollars and the accountability for how they're spent. They're a little late coming around, but it's still welcome.

But it's not a point of view shared by other folks in the choice camp. Rufo and DeAngelis are pretty clear about their passion for either burning it all down or converting it to a culture war indoctrination camp. As anyone on Twitter who has run afoul of DeAngelis and his troll army can attest, there's no room for nuance or conversation there.

Over at Permissionless Education, the blog run for Stand Together (the rebranded Koch Trust), Adam Peshek also responds to Finn. Checker's ideas for a “judicious phasing-in and monitoring of universal ESA programs,” where “regulators and managers can set and enforce clear guidelines as to what is and isn’t allowable.” But to Peshek, this just sounds like charters, and he says (very politely) to hell with it. He lays out his own take on the different choicer camps.

On one side of the debate are those who are mostly fine with the structure of education in America. They just want to reform some parts of it. The goal is to increase student test scores, increase graduation rates, get more kids accepted into college. They wait with bated breath for the release of NAEP scores and consider it a position of honor to get a sneak peek before the results go public. There are heated debates about whether Calculus or Data Science should be in the scope and sequence of what high schoolers learn.

It’s a vision that is largely planned by experts to minimize exposure to what they would deem low quality. It’s called controlled choice for a reason.

That's not what Peshek (and presumably his employers) wants.

I support ESAs as a means to an end – to provide as many students, parents, and educators with the tools (financial, regulatory, socially) to create new and unique learning environments that are responsive to their needs — not the needs of regulators or some vague idea of “society.” A great school for one kid may be a terrible school for another, and vice versa.

This echoes perfectly the Koch dream. If you have seen Stand Together mini-videos pop up on your social media, you'll notice a theme-- here's a plucky person working at a job and hampered by red tape. Wouldn't the country work better, Koch argues (as they have for decades), if government just didn't do anything? 

Why should individuals be held back by "some vague idea of society," when it's so much more fun to live in the Land Of Do As You Please (or at least, Do As You Can Afford To Do, Because You Shouldn't Tax Me To Make Up For Your Poorness). 

The aim for some ESA fans is to simply do away with government-managed school, to privatize not just the providing of education, but the responsibility for it. Is it bad for some vague notion of society to have people learning to be great little nazis or to believe in a flat earth? Do children have a right to a decent education that some vague notion of society ought to help preserve and protect for them? In a Koch-style universe, that's not my problem. It's not anybody's problem, except the parents, and if they aren't up to the challenge, that is also not anybody else's problem.

A while back, free market fans made a deal with social justice folks to create a bipartisan vision of school choice. For a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, the election of Trump) that alliance came apart. Now they're tied to the culture war crowd, whose interests dovetail nicely with those of the Libertarian burn it all down crowd. 

It's entirely possible that the traditionally conservative nuance-friendly responsible grown up-ish wing of the choice movement is just going to get rolled over this time. While I know we'll disagree with much about improving education in this country, I'd welcome the continued return of actual conservatives to the conversation, but I'm afraid that, like others, they are going to be shouted down by the Rufo DeAngelis Moms for Liberty crowd (Pondiscio regularly annoys them by pointing out that public schools aren't going away any time ever.) It would be interesting to sit back and watch this all unfold if the stakes weren't so high. 

Tuesday, May 9, 2023

PA: Education Commission Loaded With Red Flags

You may recall that back in February, the court in Pennsylvania declared, after almost a decade of chewing on a lawsuit, that Pennsylvania's education funding system was unconstitutional and they would need to get things straightened out, toot suite. There were not many teeth attached to that decision, and speculation among those of us of a more cynical bent was that the legislature would swiftly begin the process of hemming and hawing and stalling and definitely not doing what the court had ordered them to do. 

So, back in March, spurred by the PA funding lawsuit decision, the state senate's majority whip created a new group-- the Pennsylvania Commission on Education & Economic Competitiveness. The group "will bring together stakeholders from education, business, labor, and government to create a shared long-term vision to redesign Pennsylvania’s education system." Because nothing gets action happening like a good study commission. 
The group certainly casts a wide net, with something like fifty members of the commission and subcommittee, including representatives from the public school world (including teachers unions), the charter world, and the private school world (we have tax credit scholarship style vouchers in PA). 

The commission is supposed to crank out a report in 18 months with 13 bullet points to be addressed that include some real whoppers like "an aligned instructional system spanning early childhood through higher ed" and soothing ones like "a holistic approach to education that prepares students for life after graduation." Here's the whole list:















However, there are definite red flags here. The extreme focus on jobs, as if that's the real purpose of education. Or maybe it's just supposed to be the only/most pressing issue facing education in Pennsylvania. Either way, it's a pretty narrow view to reduce education to vocational training (and doesn't fit with that nice holistic approach goal on the list.

The brief claims Pennsylvania's education system is "antiquated and struggling" and warns "To meet the challenges of an interconnected global economic landscape, Pennsylvania must build a world-class education system to produce a highly skilled workforce."

The senator behind this is his own red flag. Ryan Amaunt started out his political career as Clerk of Courts in Lancaster; before that, the Citadel graduate served as a US Army Captain during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He moved up to state representative, then moved on to the state senate, running on "conservative results." Part of that is "improving our education system with choice and accountability." Amaunt is on the "sexually explicit" content in schools bandwagon, though so far he has stopped short of outright book banning or going after gay penguin books. He opposes abortion rights and has pitched both trans female athlete restriction bills and a version of Don't Say Gay. 

On education, he sounds like more of the same. Back in March when he was proposing the new commission, he wrote an op-ed that played all the old tunes.

Under the headline "Pennsylvania shouldn't fund a broken education system," Aument made the familiar arguments. 

Despite historic increases in education funding, the numbers continue to fall, and more and more employers look to the commonwealth to do something to better prepare kids to become productive members of society.

"We've been throwing soooo much money at education, so where are our bigger better meat widgets?"

Schools are not preparing students for the jobs of today, let alone the jobs of tomorrow, he says. It's the kind of claim that ought to be verifiable by things like vast numbers of jobs unfilled because nobody is qualified to fill them, or vast number of twenty-somethings unemployed because they lack necessary skills. But he's not going to do that.

Our students have been failed not by teachers, but by an antiquated system built over a century ago with goals that are no longer relevant in today’s globally competitive, knowledge-based job market, which we know is prone to rapid change and disruption.

It's nice to try to avoid blaming teachers, though I'm not sure which direction we should point to aim at "the system." And the "school's haven't changed in a century" claim was old and dumb when Betsy DeVos made it. Of course schools have changed in a myriad of ways. Nor has it become clear what the "global competitiveness" charge means, exactly. How will technology helps US citizens compete for low-wage jobs in countries chosen for their lack of regulation? 

Aument cites an international education conference he attended, but he doesn't name it. And he points to the part of the court decision that says money alone won't fix Pennsylvania's equity problems. He does not point to the part that clearly says very plainly that more funding is needed. 

We need effective teachers and principals, a rigorous and adaptive learning system, and an evenhanded foundation of support — all held to the highest standard of excellence and efficiency.

The word "efficiency" is always a red flag, as it usually means "doesn't cost so much." And sure enough, there's also this:

While we must review our structure for funding education, we shouldn’t throw more and more money at a failing system that we know is not meeting the needs of our students or the workforce.

As the lawsuit underlined repeatedly, Pennsylvania's problem with education funding is, at root, the state's low level of support means that local communities must make up the bulk of school funding themselves, meaning that poor districts stay poor, and wealthy districts have lots of cool toys. The political barrier to straightening out PA's equitable funding issues remain pretty simple-- wealthy districts do not want to pay more taxes that will be sent off to poor districts (and that goes triple when the poor district is Philly).

It's not an issue that's unique to Pennsylvania; you will notice that a great deal of ed "reform" starts with the base assumption that we simply can't spend any more tax dollars on public education, so let's come up with cool ways to shuffle the money around differently. The blanket on my bed is too small, but maybe if we chop it up and move it around, it will cover more.

But in Pennsylvania, it's particularly acute already, and now the court decision adds some urgency to a pressing need to appear to pretend to for a group to study a recommendation for thinking about planning to do something about it some day, while also working on how to make the same old non-solutions look like a solution to the court requirements. Wave those flags. 

The End of Ed Reform and a Clue For Dems

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a piece from Perry Bacon, Jr., (whose usual beat is not education), and I cannot encourage you enough to read it. ‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education echoes many points already made by folks in the edu-sphere, but it does so in the context of a quick history of modern ed reform that is as compact as anything I've read. The opening paragraph tells the story:

America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.

Bacon points out the effect of A Nation At Risk in focusing reform on measurables and a bipartisan support for education as an economic fix, as well as putting all the responsibility for fixing racism and its effects on schools "thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted." Racial, economic and education policy all tied up in one package.

That, as virtually everyone has noticed, didn't work. So the GOP has shifted to a policy of burn it all down and privatize the ashes, while Dems are just sort of stuck, unable to articulate much of a vision because they've still got ed reform smell all over them. Bacon gives Dems more credit than they deserve, but he uses the point to set up a real articulation that I really like:

I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.

Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.

They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.

What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.

Not bad.

Reformsters are going to argue (already doing it on the tweeter) that calling ed reform dead is silly because they are currently getting vouchers and school choice bills and gag laws passed left and right (well, definitely right, anyway), and Bacon doesn't answer that directly.

Here's the thing. Vouchers are not ed reform. School choice is not ed reform. And various versions of gag laws and reading suppression rules are definitely not about reform. These are not about reforming the US education system-- they're about dismantling it and replacing it a privatized market-based system.

There was a time when ed reformsters and privatizers were all sort of mixed together (and those of us advocating for public education were right in there mixing them). But privatizers were only interested in ed reform in so far as it helped them sell the idea that public schools were super-failing and needed to be replaced. But the alliance between privatizers and reformsters has slowly dissolved; voucher and choice advocates rarely try to make the case these days that they are going to improve the US economy or lift poor folks out of poverty, and they certainly don't talk about combatting racism now that the culture warriors like Rufo and DeAngelis have sold the idea that any discussion of racism is just one more sign that public schools have to be burned down. 

It is a legacy of the modern ed reform movement that Bacon talks about is the notion that "ed reform" and "anti-public education" are still considered synonyms by many. But actual modern ed reform--the idea that we can test and measure deliverables as a way to create more employable meat widgets and  fix economic and social problems-- is indeed losing steam.

The term "ed reform" is still useful to some, like an arsonist protesting that he's come to your home just to help remodel it. But as a description of the forces opposing public education, it's not accurate. 

Meanwhile, for Democratic politician or the remaining non-MAGA GOP folks who would like to promote some positive vision of public education, Bacon's short description is a fine place to start.

Sunday, May 7, 2023

School Choice and Tuition Inflation

I graduated from Allegheny College, a medium fancy small liberal arts college in NW PA back in 1979 at a cost of about $4,000/year. My oldest child (VP of an Institute Field Office) graduated from Penn State--a state school-- in 2008 at considerably greater cost. 

The cost of college has ballooned by tens of thousands of dollars for any number of reasons, but a popular culprit among conservatives is federal largesse--that the willingness of government to hand out that free federal and state money has encouraged colleges and universities to just raise their rates in tandem. Really, conservatives have been kvetching about this forever-- here's Bill Bennett back in 1987 calling colleges greedy. Bennett's idea, often tested since then, was not that college tuition hikes were directly caused by aid increase, but that colleges and universities could increase their costs and expand their services confident that aid packages would cushion the blow. Hence the Field Office VP's dorm room with internet, a microwave, and a daily newspaper. 


It's not a theory I'm prepared to argue against. College tuition costs are complicated, and colleges themselves, whether institutions of higher learning, sports businesses with some classes attached, or financial institutions with some classrooms in their portfolio, often defy clear explanation. 

All that aside, it's not hard to get the feeling that working up the mandatory financial aid info package doesn't put one in the position of a used car buyer walking on the lot carrying a huge sign listing just how much he has to spend. 

But it doesn't so much matter if I believe it as much as many conservatives believe it. And if they're right, then why are they not expressing concern about similar inflationary pressures in a school choice ecosystem? Because some evidence of just such a phenomenon has cropped up.

The Diocese of Des Moines is raising tuition rates around 7-10%. This is to increase teacher salaries, they say, as well as hiring more staff and maybe increase programming.

In Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, some hefty increases as well (like 40% in one case). Some of the increases will only apply to Catholic school students who aren't Catholic. KCRG reports:

Phil Bormann, who is the Chief Administrator, for Holy Family Catholic Schools in Dubuque, said it’s seeing a “bump” in enrollment at all levels due to the voucher in an unlisted YouTube video. He also said the school will increase tuition over three years to improve the school because of the funds from the state.

“We’re going to be able to leverage some of those funds to improve programming for our kids to do things that we’ve never been able to do in the past,” Bormann said. “...We’re going to be able to pay faculty and staff, even more, a more just wage. This is something I think we all can agree they absolutely deserve. And so these things are going to come in time, but to get there we’re gonna have to make some adjustments to our current tuition model.”

Iowa has universal vouchers for anyone making less than 300% of the federal poverty level, meaning that many families who have already enrolled their children in private schools and paid tuition themselves will get a sweet kickback from the state. In many cases, the $7,600 education savings account voucher will cover more than the tuition.

So with all this free state money floating around, why wouldn't private schools up the ante-- particularly parochial schools, where the church is providing a subsidy to cover some costs--that means an increase in tuition can mean a reduction in the church's subsidy, which would mean vouchers not just directing money to church-related schools, but to the actual church itself. 

I cannot blame the voucher-accepting schools for not wanting to leave money on the table, but I do expect vouchers to create an education ecosystem mimicking colleges. Parents borrowing more and more money for the "opportunity" they believe the "right school" can give their child (provided that child can get accepted into school). Schools using the available money to expand their programs and offerings or profits. And of course the folks on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder being squeezed out of much of the market--unless they're willing to go in serious debt or settle for getting conned by opportunistic profiteers.

Free marketeers argue that the market will correct itself, and that the "forced funding of government schools" provides less freedom than what they propose. It's a puzzler-- the free market education system that sorts students out depending on what they can afford is somehow supposed to fix the free market system of housing that sorts students into districts depending on what their parents can afford. The injection of government subsidies into the college marketplace has caused distortions and inflation and that's bad, but injecting government subsidies into the K-12 marketplace would be a good thing. Of course, the college market is different because not everyone enters it.

It only makes sense to me if I assume that the through line is to get government out of the education biz, so that the well-to-do don't have to pay taxes to fully finance the education of the poors, replacing it with a free market system in which everyone is on their own, free to get their kid as much education as they can afford to buy, with just enough taxpayer subsidy to take the sting out of it and maintain the illusion of freedom.