NM: 10 Year Struggle To Fix Funding

Pennsylvania is the most recent state to be declared in violation of its obligation to properly fund education, but it's certainly not the only one. And looking at others can be instructive about how well it works to use the legal approach to forcing fair funding . (Spoiler alert: not great) Let's look at New Mexico.

Their tale starts in 2014, with Wilhelmina Yazzie and her son Xavier. Xavier got straight As at the Gallup-McKinley school, but his results on national standardized tests suggested that maybe he wasn't actually in tip top learning shape. Maybe that's because the school lacked funding, teachers, tutors, computers, and enough textbooks to allow students to take them home to study.

Yazzie couldn't get a satisfactory response from school administrators beyond "we're doing the best we can with the resources we have." So she sued the state of New Mexico for not sufficiently funding education. In particular, the suit said, the state is failing to provide for students from poor economic backgrounds, Native American student, ESL students, and students with disabilities. It was failing to make students college and career ready.

Yazzie's suit was folded in with a similar suit from Louise Martinex, and thus was born the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit.

That suit until its fifth year, 2018, Judge Sarah Singleton handed down a ruling. The thing is 76 pages long, but the outcome was simple enough--the court declared that the state was doing a lousy. 

Singleton explicitly avoided telling the state what it should do or where it should find the revenue. But she also was clear that the current method of starting with last year's budget number and arguing about whether the legislature felty like spending more or not, without once considering the question of how much money was actually needed to get the job done-- that method was not okay. 

Which is kind of remarkable when you think about it. We are pretty much used to the idea of education budgeting based on what officials feel like spending without ever, ever having a conversation about what is needed to do the job. It's an aspect of education reform that nobody ever talks about. 

At any rate, Singleton gave the state a deadline--have the public education department develop a plan to Do It Right by April of 2019. So the legislature came up with a plan that fixed the whole thing. Ha! Just kidding. The state asked the court to throw it all out, claiming that it had totally met the demands of the judge's ruling--the court said no. In some pointed words.

The state cannot be deemed to have complied with this court’s order until it shows that the necessary programs and reforms are being provided to all at risk students to ensure that they have the opportunity to be college and career ready. There is a lack of evidence in this case that the defendants have substantially satisfied this court’s express orders regarding all at risk students. The court’s injunction requires comprehensive educational reform that demonstrates substantial improvement of student outcomes so that students are actually college and career ready.

Well, yeah. In 2019 New Mexico was still 50th in graduation rate, and the Chance for Success index was D-plus--and last among all states. 

The state dragged its feet and embarked on a series of draft action plans to do... something. Here's a really comprehensive look at all the argle bargle and draft planning from 2022. 

Lots of various features had begin to take shape. In hopes of fostering some community and culturally responsive teaching, the PED called for Equity Councils for both public and charter schools. The job was to "implement a culturally and linguistically responsive framework to prepare students for college, career, and life by supporting their identity and holistic development, including social, emotional, and physical wellness." These, predictably, got a lot of pushback. And still, not much is actually happening.

Now it's 2023, and there was a summit in June by the Institute of American Indian Education on the subject of "So What The Heck Is Happening With That Lawsuit That Was Decided Five Years Ago?"

And now this month, New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez wants his office to take over the state's response, citing a "frustration with the lack of progress over the past five years." 

Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, whose administration has been in charge since 2019 (so that attempt to get the courts to let them off the hook is on her) responded via spokesperson by saying, "Hey, we created some agencies and sent more money to local schools. Maybe you should go get on those local schools' cases about not spending the money well." They have in fact increased spending by, maybe, $3000 per student, which moves New Mexico all the way up to 36th place in the nation. 

But that's just money. The actual plan for how to boost education for the most disadvantaged students in New Mexico is still a draft in the PED computers. Meanwhile, conservatives continue the old complaint of "We're spending more money but scores aren't going up." As if five years or increased spending (with a pandemic smack in the middle) should be enough to turn the whole thing around.

Yes, New Mexico has charter schools (98 of them, with 25,000 students). The legislature even just handed them piles of money for building. That hasn't fixed things. Open enrollment--they have that in some locations. New Mexico has no state subsidies for private choice, though some folks would sure like them. 

What New Mexico has is a clear directive to get adequate funding its schools, even if that means wealthier residents have to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children, and no apparent political will or interest in actually getting the job done. And really--if this were something the state's leaders cared about, simply knowing that they were at the bottom of the barrel in most educational indicators would have been more motivational than some court directive. And now Yazzie/Martinez is approaching its tenth birthday with no end in sight.

New Mexico's issue is the same issue as Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, etc etc etc. If state leaders don't feel particularly compelled to treat education as an important priority, can a court order really change that? I'm reminded of Rick Hess's insight, from another context, that you can use rules and regulations and, I suppose, court orders, to compel people to do something--but you can't make them do it well. Particularly if they don't want to. 

After all, there's nothing to keep legislators from making quality, well-resourced public education for all students a major priority and crafting budgets that reflect that priority. Any legislature could do it any time they wanted to, and they wouldn't even have to wait for a court order. 

ID: Fake Superintendent Fails To Get Real Certificate

It's an encouraging sequel to a discouraging story.

Back at the beginning of the summer, the West Bonner School District board decided they wanted to hire Branden Durst as superintendent, which was a hell of a choice because Durst is not just unqualified--he's spectacularly unqualified.

His LinkedIn account lists 20 "experience" items since 2000, and Durst seems to have bounced quickly from job to job until 2006, when he was elected as an Idaho State Representative for four years. Then in 2012 he was elected to the state senate, a job that he held for one year, until the press twigged to the fact that he wasn't actually living in Idaho (he blamed it on Idaho schools). He did all that as Democrat; in 2016, he switched his party to the GOP.

Then independent consultant, a mediator for a "child custody and Christian mediation" outfit. Then an Idaho Family Policy Center senior policy fellow. IFPC advocates for the usual religious right causes, but they have a broader focus as well: "To advance the cultural commission." They see the Great Commission in a dominionist light-- the church is to teach "nations to obey everything Jesus has commanded." And they suggest you get your kid out of public school.

Durst's current gig is with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right tilted thinky tank that wants to "make Idaho into a Laboratory of Liberty by exposing, defeating, and replacing the state's socialist public policies." The run a Center for American Education which, among other things, maintains a map so you can see where schools are "indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense." They recommend you get your child out of public school.

Zero education experience. 

2022 was not a great year for Durst. After the Idaho Senate failed to advance the parental rights bill that he was promoting, Durst confronted Senator Jim Woodward with enough aggressiveness that Woodward called the cops on him. After blowing off a meeting with GOP leadership, Durst blasted senators on social media. The Senate GOP majority wrote a letter condemning Durst for "spurious attacks against members of the Senate, meant to coerce votes and influence elections." In a press release, GOP leaders condemned Durst and said his actions "demonstrate egregious conduct unbecoming of anyone, especially a former legislator and current statewide political candidate."

The "candidate" part refers to Durst's run for the office of state superintendent. He told EastIdahoNews, “Parents are tired. They don’t feel respected or trusted and they want some real change in their school superintendent. They’re all talking about the same things. They want to stop the indoctrination that’s happening in their schools, they want to (be able) to make decisions for their kids." He ran on three priorities-- end common core, stop critical race theory, and school choice ("fund students, not systems"). He came in second in the GOP primary, losing to Debbie Critchfield by about 25,000 votes. But he did well in Bonner County.

The proposed contract had some crazypants features. Only a board supermajority could fire him. District would provide a legal counsel for Durst and his wife. Plus a vehicle, a housing allowance, and meal service.
 

The board's choice was bizarre. The district has been through three superintendents in one year. The interim superintendent was Susie Luckey, who has spent nearly four decades in the district as teacher and principal (and a previous National Distinguished Principal). She was the other candidate considered for the job--the one that the board didn't hire.

Said one board member via email to The Spokesman:

“He has a vastly superior understanding of the legal, financial, administrative, and educational philosophy aspects of the job,” Rutledge wrote, adding that Durst is popular among Bonner County voters and “has the broad support of the nearly 13,000 residents of our district.”

The reaction was immediate, with the public showing up at the next meeting to say "What the actual hell?"

But Durst's hiring was contingent on getting some kind of emergency super-special superintendent papers from the state. Boise State, where he got his MBA, sent a letter from the head of the college of education to say that she couldn't recommend him for a certificate.

By August, Durst hadn't actually applied for the emergency cert because something something the state board, and was preparing to fight with the state over the whole thing. Promising that the whole business had much larger implications, something something Constitutional Crisis! In the Bonner County Daily Bee:

“That’s really what this is about. The constitutional crisis is now an unelected board — it was appointed by the governor in the executive branch — can tell any (school) board in the state of Idaho whether or not they’ve done something, even if they haven’t done it,” Durst said.

And the Idaho State Board of Education said no.

Durst, the board said, did not meet any of the five requirements to serve as a superintendent. Not one. Not even the "four years of full-time certificated experience working with students while under contract with an accredited school" one. Not the minimal two years of college teacher training. Turns out that being a christian nationalist isn't a qualification for leading a school district.

Furthermore, having reviewed the law, the board decided they couldn't actually issue emergency certificates for administrators, a thing they've done three times since 2015, including--awkward--Susie Luckey in her stint as interim super. That was different, said the state board spokesman, because Luckey held teacher and principal papers, while Durst's situation is "unique" because he doesn't have any qualifications at all.

Durst has taken all of this with the quiet grace and dignity for which he is known. On his blue-checked Twitter account, he has complained that something smells. "...this was a discriminatory act by a board run by those with a political axe to grind. They will be held accountable for their discriminatory actions."

Discriminatory? The state board is mostly (7/8) appointed by the governor, and Idaho's Brad Little has not exactly shown himself to be a raving liberal; plus he has both CRT and Trans bans to his name. But Idaho, like Oklahoma, is one of those states where the Democratic party is so weak that Republicans are forced to fight with each other. Bryan Clark at The Idaho Statesman had this to say about Durst, who they called a "serial political entrepreneur" in June when he was trying to establish his "own little kingdom."

The unifying thread is overwhelming personal ambition. The causes change, but what’s been constant is Durst’s belief that he should be given the power to implement his ideas, whatever they are that week.

There has been a second constant as well: failure.

Maybe Durst will hold somebody accountable for... something. But in the meantime, West Bonner schools are without a superintendent, and while that is undoubtedly a hindrance, Durst probably would have been worse than nothing. This tiny district of around 1,000 students, located in the Idaho panhandle, may want to consider just why it has so much trouble recruiting and retaining superintendents. In the meantime, Durst can go look for his twenty-second job. 

Politics and Public Education

When it comes to education, are you on the Right or the Left? Are you liberal or conservative? GOP or Dem?

And what do any of those questions even mean?

Full disclosure: I'm not an close student of political taxonomies. I most often vote Dem, but not always, and I'm often not very happy about it. In the education debate space, I've often been labeled a progressive, but I'm not honestly certain what that means, exactly. If I were going to claim a label for myself, it would probably be humanist (but not the evil secular type). 

The political landscape in the US has been pretty clearly mapped out when it comes to Dem vs. GOP. But when you look more closely, that doesn't always map out perfectly. NY favors Democrats--as long as they act a lot like Republicans. In Oklahoma, everyone is a Republican, but we've seen some big fights between members of Your Father's GOP and the MAGA GOP. This stuff shifts around over time ("We are the party of Lincoln" is the dumbest argument the GOP ever makes for itself). 

But when it comes to education in general and ed reform in particular, mapping out the political labels against the various reform positions has always been difficult, and remains so.

Take Common Core. Was that supported by either the Left or the Right? Jeb Bush thought he was going to get to the White House running on education in general with a good dose of national standardy CCSS, and he had to slink away from the Core. The Obama/Duncan administration backed the Core, and the teachers' unions climbed on board, too. And everyone who supported the Core took heavy fire from their own side of the political spectrum (and blamed them on the other side of the spectrum).

Charter schools? Fans on both the Left and the Right, and actually the Far Right only ever cared about them as a way to move the overtone window. Once vouchers were seriously in play, many on the Far Right lost their charter love.

Then we have all the people and groups that don't really map onto Left/Right or GOP/Dem. Democrats for Education Reform are a fine example of reformsters masking as liberal Democrats, but while they considered Republicans their "natural allies," I don't really know how they vote. Michelle Freaking Rhee was a Democrat. And while much of the attack on public education has come from the GOP on the right, conservatives also include the people who have a natural inclination to preserve and protect established institutions, like public schools. And where do we put the people who complain because school ought to be teaching cursive and Latin and generally operating like they were Back In My Day? 

And to further muddy the waters we have neo-liberals, those folks who believe that everything works best when it is taken away from government and operated by private business. Neo-liberals can dress up as either party since they support both important social services and having those services provided by some private business. Then we have Libertarians, who oppose government doing much of anything and favor dismantling public education. 

The Free Marketeers are mostly from the right. The folks who argue that to achieve social justice and upward mobility is through a complete re-creation of public education come mostly from the left. Many GOP politicians have attacked public education. Democrats may not have attacked as often, but they seem to lack the language or will to defend it. 

Bottom line. When you say you want to have an education conversation with people on the right, left, and middle, I have no idea what that might actually mean. It could be a roomful of people who all want to dismantle public ed, or a bunch of people who want to protect and preserve it. 

Saying someone is on the right can be shorthand for a reformster (I've used it myself), and yeah, if you're wearing a MAGA cap, I can probably guess where you are on education, but at the same time, saying someone is on the left regarding education is meaningless. 

When all is said and done (actually, while it's being said and done), I'd rather talk about the thing itself rather than trying to figure out what accurate political label I should put on the thing. Bad education policy is bad education policy, wherever it came from. The map of positions on public education does not map at all perfectly onto the map of political tendencies. 

Building a Bridge To Nowhere

So now we get the Building Bridges Initiative. What is it? The short answer is the same old reformy stuff in a pretty new wrapper. The long answer follows. I apologize in advance for how much inside baseball this is. But let's wade through together. 

Who put this together?

The year-long initiative was headed up by the Fordham Institute and Democrats for Education Reform, and the website says repeatedly that it collected a group of education advocates from Left, Right and Center. 

This is probably a good time to bring up the old quote from a DFER founder about why they used "Democrats" in their name:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Between the original participants and the signatories of their work, I'm hard pressed to find anyone from the Center or the Left. There are faux liberals like DFER and Keri Rodriguez, but actual center or lefties? Not so much. 

We could argue about who amongst this crew represents the Left or Center, but getting into that actually created such a huge digression here that I'm just going to discuss politics and public schools in a separate post. The short version is that education privatization--the three Ds of disinvest, discredit, and dismantle-- has always been a project of the right.

This initiative runs the full gamut of education advocates from A to B. There isn't a single traditional public education advocate here. It['s an impressive roster of reformsters--50CAN, PAVE, E4E, New Schools Venture Fund, NPU, CRPE, PIE-- the list goes on, and we haven't even gotten to the folks who signed on to the finished product. There are, of course, no actual educators in sight.

The report says that the participants "shared, debated, disagreed, and ultimately found common ground" and I'm not entirely clear on what they would have disagreed about. The report does have many camel (horse by committee) moments where they've taken the same old reform idea and translated it into other less-triggering language, or created one of those formulations where the door is open for people whom like the policy but plausibly deniable for those who don't.

This may represent an attempt to mend fences with the social justice wing of school reform? Rebranding reform? Reclaiming some ground for the grownups in the reformster ranks who are getting worried about the far-right burn-it-all-down shenanigans of dudebros like Rufo, DeAngelis and Walters (none of whom show up here)? That would be an interesting development.

So what's in the report?

The report is entitled "A Generation at Risk." Get it? Like "A Nation at Risk" It starts right out chicken littling pandemic Learning Loss, including that baloney about how today's students will make less money because their test scores are lower. Also, mental health issues are up, which is at least a real issue.

A few years back (approximately 2016), the free market reform wing split up with the social justice wing. School choice was good in and of itself, even if the results were lousy for marginalized communities, they suggested. Also, with Dems out of power, they no longer needed a liberal (or at least neo-liberal) friendly pitch about choice would lift up marginalized communities. They did not say that part out loud.

But now here we are, declaring in bold blue font

And we are not doing nearly enough, especially for students from marginalized communities.

The list of "key values" also seems aimed at the social justice wing. 

The fundamental belief that every student has a right to fulfill their utmost potential and a conviction that our schools and society should be doing much more to make this aspiration a reality.

A belief in public education as a critical player in preparing citizens to effectively participate in our democracy and as a critical engine of social and economic mobility in America.

Deep respect for the role that educators and parents play in supporting student success.

No so much deep respect for educators that they are invited to the conversation.

So this report is going to be aimed at addressing current student needs and building a better system for the future, which is an admirable pair of goals that pretty much everyone agrees with. However, the devil is driving the details bus, so let's see what exactly they want.

Building a more responsive educational system for the future.

The current system is old and calcified and unable to react to change, they say, and not built for the purposes for which it now is needed. A claim made mostly by people who don't actually work in schools. How can we make the system more responsive?

Be student centered! Give parents and families "true information, power, and agency to understand, support, choose, and advocate for their children’s education in a real and actionable way." AKA more school choice. Also, define success more broadly, which sounds great--let's scrap the Big Standardized Test--and "enable a broader set of providers—inside and outside of schools—to play a role in meeting our students’ needs." So, let students get badges of learning any old where and let vendors offer education piecemeal and let children work and count it as education.

There's some juiced-up language that just restates the old "competition will push schools to do better" idea. And--alert! alert!--a note that some choice policies like magnet schools and charter schools don't go far enough.

Building the conditions for the system of the future.

School boundaries are often tied to segregation practices like redlining let's redraw school district boundaries to fix that. Ha! Just kidding. The report suggests allowing choice across those boundaries. 

Get rid of "seat time" model, but use mastery learning instead. And not just old school mastery, but giving students credits for "work, internships, caregiving, outside courses" because ed reform has taken the position of being in favor of child labor.

This next one is a good example of how this report reads. What they actually wrote is "Modernizing school-finance arrangements and enacting weighted student-funding formulas and other systems that empower families with financial resources to drive extra dollars to the students who need them most and allowing flexibility for resources to be spent inside and outside of schools in ways that best meet the needs of students" which is a fancy long-ass sentence way to say "the money should follow the child" with a tiny modification to suggest that maybe some children should be followed by more money.

More partnerships with private sector, including letting experts come in to teach.

New approaches to attracting diverse teacher force (Sharif El-Mekki of Center for Black Educator Development was on this committee) and "redesign" of teacher and principal roles, all of which could mean anything.

Lots of R & D to figure out what works. Collect lots of student data. 

The report says that lots of places are already doing a lot of this, so I guess this part was not written by the same person who, in the last section, called public schools old and calcified and unable to change.

Building for the current generation of students.

Back to pandemic panic. Did you know that the pandemic revealed there are inequities in the system? Yes, surely nobody was pointing out such things before 2020. Also, this baloney: "the very nature of the pandemic response revealed how the current system is centered on adult issues, not student and family needs." The response showed "how rarely evidence- and data-driven decision-making are used." Also, the system was revealed to be "rigid and unresponsive to individual students needs and family preferences." 

That is a lot of bullshit to cram into one paragraph. Schools and teachers killed themselves-- figuratively and literally-- finding ways to respond to a pandemic, with limited data and guidance from authorities. Schools fed students, delivered lessons by computer and by hand, and generally made decisions based on what the community wanted. Which may be why parents were largely happy with how their schools managed the whole thing. 

As always, the false narrative being hinted at here (those damn teachers closed the schools even though we all knew they didn't need to and then they sat on their hands while the learning just fell out of students' heads) is useful to make one more pitch for choicier choice.

The report pitches five ideas for "addressing immediate needs." 

Set goals for recovery and report on them clearly and accurately. The set goals part every educator already knew, thanks. The clear and accurate reporting? Sure. We've never yet come up with a way to data-ify learning that policymakers and actual educators agree means anything useful, but sure, let's just do that some more harder.

Make sure schools use "evidence-based strategies and interventions." First, "evidence-based" isn't nearly as clear cut as one might thing. Also, they suggest more PD. Also, more tutoring. Just get some money off the money tree, then go to the tutor tree and hire a bunch of tutors.

Rethink how time and staff are used. Again, precisely the sort of thing that a bunch of people who don't actually work in schools are ill-prepared to address. They offer the North Carolina plan as an example, which is a bad sign because the North Carolina plan is a pile of hot junk. Really. 

Evaluate emerging innovations. Check new stuff to see if it works. Not a radical idea. All that's missing is who and how and where the money will come from.

Make it easier for students to drop back in, if they dropped out. Fair enough.

Building together.

This is the uplifting wrap-up, addressed to "you," which begs the question of what audience is intended for this report. There is a call for less shouting and more dialog, a call that reformsters have been issuing periodically for at least a decade.

For too many years now, the education debate has been taking place inside echo chambers, in shouting matches, or not at all. It’s our intention to interrupt that dynamic.

Maybe so. I have certainly had numerous useful conversations with people on the other side of the education debates. But this document, like most of reformy discourse, does not involve a very wide range of opinions, and no meaningful representation of a classroom perspective. 

The report ends with a call to "find someone in the education sector" particularly someone with whom you disagree, and invite them to talk. It even offers some suggested questions, which in the spirit of dialog, I will answer:

How can we do right by this generation of students?

Teachers ask this question every day.

What might these ideas look like in our given state, district, or school?

It's an excellent question--but actual educators have been trying to tell reformsters the answers for years and have been roundly ignored and dismissed.

How can we get the education conversation unstuck?

Real answer? Examine your premises and values. Also, offering the same old ideas in new language won't help. Also (you already know this), stop talking to the same people. Also, stop treating the conversation as a messaging opportunity. Also--and right now this matters a whole lot-- your edududebros and their Moms for Liberty friends have no interest in getting any sort of dialog unstuck. 

How can we work together to spark bold and lasting action and change?

See, there you are operating from an unproven premise. Are bold and lasting action and change what's called for? Any teacher who's been in the classroom for more than five years will tell you that one of the ongoing problems in education is that every other year (or every single year if you've got an overzealous administration) someone tells you that you have to change everything to implement this hot new silver bullet that will change and fix everything. Until the next one. 

So are we at the end?

Still here? Good for you. You can check out the signatories list, which is entirely populated with all the usual reformster and choicer folks (though, again, absent the firebreathing wing). 

But the report itself is a polished-up version of the same old reformster ideas, some of which are in danger of becoming just as "old" and "calcified" as any public school. This report is pretty, and maybe it is going to patch up some of the reformy alliances, but I doubt that it will advance the education conversation much. It's a fine, shiny addition to the stacks of attempts to leverage pandemic panic into some kind of education policy initiative. Also, these days one can appreciate reformsters who are acting like grownups, though I'm not sure they can be heard over all the hollering from the kids' table. 

The Default Is In Ourselves

"It's perfectly fine that those people exist. But I don't like it when they shove it in my face." 

"Yes, they're entitled to rights just like anyone else, but why do they have to ram their lifestyle down our throats?"

I have heard these sorts of sentiments a gazillion times expressed regarding persons who are not white, not straight, not Christian. The puzzling part is that, when pressed for examples of this alleged shoving and ramming, the speakers point to works or events that have themes such as "racism is still a problem" or "LGBTQ persons exist." Look, there's a Black mermaid! Oh no--there's a completely conventional rom-com that involves two same-gender leads! 

What's particularly ironic is that much of this outrage is backwards. The conservatives who argued for gay marriage got it-- much of this represents folks adopting mainstream values. It's not the conventional being disrupted, but marginalized people being co-opted.

But still--all this talk about being assaulted by some agenda. Complaints that certain things or people are being "normalized." The reactions seem so out of proportion to what they're reacting against.

Here's how I make sense of it. Defaults.

You sign up for new online software, and you're asked to set up an avatar. The program gives you a default avatar; if you want anything different, you have to make changes yourself. 

We have mental default settings for persons. Folks who write or create have for much of history had defaults for characters.

It's easy enough to see. Think smurfs--the default is a "regular" smurf, young, male, average intelligence, clean shaven, generally bland and undistinguished demeanor. Then the creator starts messing with the defaults--this one is smart, this one is old, this one wears glasses, this one is cranky. And this one is a girl. 

Or that classic puzzle-- a child and his father come in to an ER, and the doctor says, "I can't operate on this child. He's my son." Once upon a time that was a stumper, because everyone's default for "doctor" was male. 

Or there's an episode of the Dick Van Dyke show in which Rob Petrie becomes obsessed with the idea that his child might have been switched with a different child in the maternity ward. Finally he tracks down the other couple with a similarly named child and invites them over. The door opens, and the other family turns out to be Black. The audience roars, because it is so completely unexpected that characters on a tv would be Black when the default is so clearly white.

I could go on and on, from Marvel fanboys angered by female heroes to things as fundamental as the old rule that the single personal pronoun defaults to "he." The point is this.

The default requires no changes. If a writer uses the defaults in a story, then no actual choice is made. As any high school theater director dealing with a surplus of female actors and a surfeit of males, classic musical theater is filled with characters who are male, but don't have to be; the writer just went with the default.

But if the character varies from the default--white, straight, Christian, male--then that represents a conscious choice. At least that's how it feels to some conservative audiences. "You could have left that character as a natural default, a white straight male Christian, but you changed it." 

Anything different from the default represents a deliberate choice. You deliberately chose to make that character Black or LGBTQ or female, the reasoning goes, and therefor it feels as if you're shoving it in my face. 

Folks who think of themselves as tolerant can also fall into the default trap. "I don't see color" is another way to say, "I just treat everyone as if they are still on the default setting" or "I assume that underneath, everyone's self is based on the same default settings as mine." I can look past the differences of the other people because they aren't a foundational part of their identity, but just surface overlays of the default.

And when people can get most cranky is when they sense that someone is trying to change the actual defaults, to suggest that white, male, straight, Christian is not the default setting for all humanity, that there are other ways to be that exist as their own baseline and not in some sort of relationship with an imagined default. This is why a simple "LGBTQ persons exist and are ordinary" is seen as "shoving" because it's an attempt to change the default, to suggest that LGBTQ can exist as a sort of normal and not some degraded version of the True Normal. Some get cranky about "identity politics," sensing that it says something about having different identities that are not just simple skis placed over the default.

Why do we create default notions of what a person is? Heck if I know, though we've always separated ourselves into We People Over Here and Those Others Over There. We want to belong and we want to know that we're not Others. We soak in culture that tells us what the defaults are (and now get frustrated as culture splits and centers on a variety of different defaults and so we get grumpy and complain can't we all just be Normal Americans, like that's a thing). 

Why some of us are so resistant to the rich varied nature of human existence and experience I do not know. Humans have never handled that aspect of existence well. But education has an obligation to try.

We've learned in schools to discard some defaults. No teacher who's half-alert assumes that every student has two parents who are together in a family where everyone shares the same last name. We can do better. 

Students are always busy finding, examining, determining, and getting comfortable their identities. They need a better message from schools than "You're just a slight variation on this standard default human identity" or "You're so far from the standard default human identity that you're basically broken and possibly unacceptable." And that means that some of those students (and their parents) who are aligned with the old standard default will feel that something is being taken from them, that other ways of being human are being forced on them. 

Other ways of being human exist. Schools have to acknowledge that; students have to know that to successfully navigate the world. Telling people who live in the desert that rivers exist is not forcing water on them, nor is it demanding that the whole world be flooded. We can do better. We can expand our library of defaults, and be better for it. 

NH: What Ever Happened To Croydon's School Budget Slasher?

You may remember Jody Underwood and Croydon, New Hampshire. It's a story worth revisiting, because it tells us what may be down the road for some of the most extreme MAGA education policies.

The tiny town of Croydon was the scene of more than one big dustup over education. A few years ago it was the scene of a move to push school choice in the state. Underwood and Angi Beaulieu were among the advocates who pushed for a voucher system which allowed students from tiny towns like Croydon to have tuition paid to a school of their choice. In fact, the vouchers-for-some bill was called the Croydon Bill, and Governor Chris Sununu came to Croydon to sign it in 2017.

This was a true voucher program. Not a "here's a couple thousand bucks, good luck finding a place to get your kid an education" program, but a mechanism by which local taxpayers footed the full bill for an education at any public or private school they could get into (that included the school in nearby Claremont, where I started out life). It was not cheap; the taxpayers in the 800 person town paid $1.7 million for a local K-4 school and vouchers for the older students (80 students in all); it's more than they spend to run the town. 

Then, in early 2022, at a low-attendance annual town meeting, Jody Underwood, the school board chair, recognized her husband Ian from the floor, and he moved to cut the budget to $800K. The motion passed, and suddenly tiny Croydon was up in arms.

The Underwoods are part of the Free State Project, founded in 2001 with the intent of moving 20,000 Libertarians to New Hampshire with the hope that they might have an outsized influence on the small-population, liberty-loving state. Free Staters have been successful in landing elected offices in New Hampshire, even at the state level (most elected offices in the state are unpaid). Granite State Matters just released a paper about the FSP's progress dismantling democracy in New Hampshire. 

The Underwoods came to Croydon in 2007. Before moving, Jody had worked for the Educational Testing Service, and before that a researcher for NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as the Lead Learning Scientist for Intelligent Automation, Inc--that's Blue Halo, a company that works in the defense industry sector, and she has some legit credits in the AI world way before it was cool. Ian was a "planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researcher for NASA," a certified hypnotherapist, a "fourth generation wing chun sifu," as well as director of the Ask Dr. Math program. 

The Underwoods were ahead of the far right privatization movement. Asked how students were supposed to get into schools with $10K, Ian Underwood suggested that microschools like Prenda would be good enough. They had moved from "don't all students deserve the same sort of choices as rich families get" to "there are voucher choices that will be perfectly good enough for poor kids." I'll underline this point again--the Very Libertarian Underwoods had tried to cut the legs out from under, not a traditional public school system, but a true voucher-driven school choice system.

Thanks to a semi-obscure law, the opponents of the budget cut mustered the town and reversed the cuts by a vote of 377-2. 

After I wrote about the Croydon upset, Jody Underwood contacted me. She was not happy. She denied that she had ever known what her husband was going to propose, and she was furious with her opponents who, she felt, had lied and cheated to get the budget cut reversed. As Ian explained in an angry blog post, democracies are a big problem. Ian resigned his selectboard seat in August of 2022 by letter; the reading of the letter was applauded.

So what has Jody Underwood been up to in the 16 months since the budget cut lived its brief and unlamented life?

Almost immediately, citizens circulated a petition to remove Underwood and Aaron Mckeon from the board. The petition was non-binding (you can't petition elected officials out of office in New Hampshire, which seems like a smart rule). Other voices from the budget cut side called for an end to acrimony.

But apparently there was still some acrimony hanging in the air, because back in March, Underwood found herself running against old school choice ally Angi Beaulieu, who was pretty clear about why she felt the need to run. “Somebody needs to step up and protect what we worked so hard for with school choice,” she told the Valley News. “I wasn’t fighting for school choice to take money away from public schools.”

Asked by the Valley News what her plans were, Underwood offered this:

“It’s to move into the 21st century,” she said of her plans. The old ways haven’t worked, and too few children are meeting the standards set for them.

She was still certain that the true majority of Croydon voters support the idea of cutting education costs, which is in keeping with the far right notion that they represent the true heart of the country and they only ever lose because of nefarious shenanigans by their opponents. She also complained that "we've been supporting teachers as a jobs program for a very long time."

Three guesses how the election turned out. 

Beaulieu won 229-36. The town also voted, narrowly, to expand the board from three to five seats.

However, Underwood has landed a new gig. As an education reporter. 

Not just any education reporter. Underwood's new gig is with the Eagle Times. The news outfit (they are a website with few-days-a-week print editions) traces its roots back to the early 1800s in Claremont. They combined, merged, closed their doors in 2009, then reopened under ownership by an outfit in PA.

Then in 2022, Jay Lucas bought them. 

Lucas is an entrepreneur and business consultant. Graduated from Yake in '77, Oxford in '79, and got his MBA and law degree from Harvard in '82. He worked for Bain in the 1980's, the created the Lucas Group-- "a corporate strategy consulting boutique - a 'mini-Bain & Company' - focused on the specialized needs of Private Equity investors and corporate clients." He's from Newport, NH, and at some point he headed back home. He was a member of the NH House, and won the GOP nod for governor, then promptly lost to Jeanne Shaheen. He has been pushing various initiatives to make Newport a better place, and that includes the Sunshine Initiative which includes Sunshine Communications LLC.

That happened about the same time he bought the Eagle Times.

Lucas is a big positivity guy, who regularly writes op-eds for his newspapers like "Winning starts with beginning" and "The positive power of 'no'" The Eagle Times coverage is pretty small town vanilla, but just the editorial titles give you a sense of the publisher's philosophy. 

That publisher is Richard Girard, who had a radio show for six years out of Manchester. He's worked in politics and  has run for a variety of offices, but only ever successfully for a school board seat, where he's been a critic of oh-so-many things. He's plenty conservative; he ran his senate campaign pro ed-choice, anti-CRT, anti-abortion, and pro-gun. His two most recent editorials for the Eagle Times are "Closing Schools Was Foolish, Not Cautious" and "PragerU Isn't Indoctrination"

In short, this seems like a fine home for Underwood.

So far she's contributed a special report on the second Croydon post-election school board meeting (eight people in attendance) and the first two pieces in a series about how the pandemic hurt schools. 

The first piece focuses on Croydon schools, which represent a spectacularly tiny sample. The school has two classrooms--K/1 and 2-4. The principal teaches the 2-4 and the other teacher handles special ed. So it's not clear what is to be learned by studying their collective test results. But what Underwood arrives is the notion that it's that damn Fountas and Pinnell and what we need in here is some science of reading stuff. 

The second piece focuses on New Hampshire as a whole. Her point is that Covid didn't really seem to hurt New Hampshire achievement levels, but reading instruction is in terrible shape anyway. She is particularly bothered in both pieces by the fact that around half of students test as reading below grade level. She does not say whose idea of grade level she's talking about, but since many are based on the median score for students in that grade, a hefty portion of students must be below grade level, just as a large number of Americans are below average height. But she's upset that half of students are below grade level no matter what instructional methods are used. What can I say-- almost half of Americans have always been below average height no matter what changes we make to diet and exercise in this country. 

Six more installments are promised for this series, so Underwood has some work lined up here for at least a few more weeks. Whether she can make a go of this educational correspondent gig remains to be seen, but once again she's in tune with the conservative work, where every piece of activism turns out to be an audition for conservative media.

Report: The Flaws In Charter Funding Research

You might be old enough to remember the days when part of the charter school pitch was that they could do more with less. That gave way pretty quickly to "Why should we have to do more with less?" And ever since there has been a steady drum beat of "reports" and "studies" asserting that charters ought to be getting more pf that taxpayer money. 

In a new paper for the National Education Policy Center, Mark Weber, educational finance expert, takes a look the problems with the "research" that pro-charter thinky tanks and faux academic departments. "Evaluating Research that Alleges Funding Disparities Between Charter and School Districts" is an excellent summation of the problems that have been repeatedly pointed out over the years. It's a worthwhile read, even if the title seems scary; NEPC is absolute aces when it comes to rigorous, legitimate research expertise, but sexy titles are not their thing.

Weber notes that third party reviewers have often called these folks on their errors, and while they have occasionally addressed the issues, "they have retained core deficiencies in their methods" with the result that "they continue to report large funding 'inequities' where none exist." Weber diplomatically skips over the question of whether this core deficiencies result from ineptitude or deliberate misrepresentation.

Here are the research flaws that Weber addresses.

Inadequate documentation of data

Not everyone reports financial data the same way, so that some deliberate steps are needed to deal with comparing apples to oranges. That means that sources for data have to be transparent, and it requires extra legwork to check your work. That means any attempt to compare public schools and charter schools will have limitations. Weber points out those limitations won't be fatal to research, but they necessitate a full explanation to the audience of where the numbers came from and how they were arrived upon. If you're going to tell me that you can make more applesauce with a pile of oranges than with a pile of apples, you need to show your work. In detail. Otherwise I might suspect you're juking the stats behind your back.

Misunderstanding of financial transfers

The first time I came across this criticism of some charter "research," I thought maybe I was misunderstanding, because nobody could seriously do this. But this "misunderstanding works two ways.

One. This deals with how public schools pass through the funding for charters. East Egg Public Schools get $1,000. Eggly Charter gets $250 of that for its students. That $250 gets counted twice, both as the public funding and the charter funding. Or, to put it another way, the public charter is counted as having $1000 when it actually ends up with $750. 

Two. The public system pays for things that benefit both public and charter (e.g. in California, food and special ed services). So some of that money is being spent on charter students, but it is only counted by these researchers as being spent only on public school students. 

Those two tricks misunderstandings would be enough to create "research" that "proved" that public schools were spending more per pupil than charters.

I'm not saying that Weber is being excessively generous in calling this a misunderstanding, but I am saying that when the misunderstanding was pointed out to researchers in a previous piece of research, they did not stop doing it.

Invalid conflation of individual schools and school districts as units of analysis

Weber argues that "the most relevant unit for school finance is the district." Charters function as single-school districts (though I'm curious how charter chains could be handled), but studies tend to compare single school to single school. 

That creates another data problem, because some district expenditures are attributed to the entire district as a whole, not individual buildings. That's not an insurmountable barrier, but Weber says researchers skip the work required by simply pretending that district-wide expenditures can be divided out as per pupil spending--except that this is generally wildly inaccurate, as districts may dispense some of that funding by methods other than simply per pupil.

Invalid comparisons of student populations

Huge amounts of spending disparities come down to students with special needs (particularly since public schools have many and charters have hardly any). So if you're going to break down per pupil spending, you need to look at what kinds of students the spending is aimed at. A school of 100 high needs students will spend more per pupil than a school with 100 regular students (and we know that public schools tend to be the former and charters tend to be the latter).

I'll note that if you're in Pennsylvania, it gets even wackier, because public schools sort students into different tiers of special needs, but charters are reimbursed as if all special needs students are the same. 

Invalid comparisons of the functions of charter and district public schools

Weber says that one report tries to make a distinction between purpose and work of schools in order to make the argument that, hey, public and charter schools are both for educating the public, so we should be comparing the money they take in, their revenue, rather than how they spend it. 

But, Weber correctly points out, they aren't set up for the same purpose. Public schools are set up to educate everyone, which means they have to have the revenue necessary to deal with all manner of student needs. It also means that public schools much maintain excess capacity, while charters can cap admissions. Some school districts are also set up to provide community services, adult education, and a variety of other purposes that involve revenue that is not spent on K-12 students.

Unaccounted for charter revenues

Public schools get money from the taxpayers. Charter schools, in many cases, get money from philanthropists. 

Charter proponents sometimes try to equate revenue from cafeterias and facilities rental with philanthropic giving. But the examples from public schools involve people paying for the costs of a service; philanthropists are not paying for anything (unless, I suppose, charter fans want to talk about specific services they provide their philanthropic donors).

Taken one or two at a time, or all together, these factors raise large questions about the accuracy of any comparisons between charter and public school funding and certainly have to be considered before accepting any claims that charters are put upon and underfunded. As Weber notes, charter advocates have cranked out many "reports" that suffer from these flaws. There may be conversations worth having about charter funding, but they aren't worth having if they aren't based in reality.

In the meantime, you can check out the full paper at NEPC. It comes complete with examples of various papers filled with these flaws, as well as explanations of how the flaws could be avoided. We can only hope that charter advocates take some of that advice to heart.