How Vouchers Bust State Budgets

One of the consistent features of voucher programs is that they grow, sometimes rapidly, to suck up huge chunks of the state budget. Nobody understands this better than Arizona's Governor Katie Hobbs. She posted this memo on the Dead Bird app yesterday:

Hobbs has rung this alarm bell before. Back in July, her office noted that the price tag for the state's education scholarship account voucher program would be over $943 million, leading to a $320 million shortfall. And that doesn't just represent moving money from public schools to voucher programs. Hobbs says that the vouchers benefit 8% of the state's students, but account for more than half of the state's education spending.

How can that be? And why is it happening in other universal voucher states as well?

Two simple things.

First, universal vouchers expand the pool of students that the public pays for. Let's say that West Egg High School has 100 students, and East Egg Private Academy has 20. After universal vouchers become a thing, five public school students take their vouchers and head for EEPA (five others applied and EEPA refused to take them). At the same time, all 20 EEPA students--who have never set foot in a public school--also sign up to get their vouchers. 

So, pre-vouchers, taxpayers were covering the costs for 100 students. After vouchers, the public is footing the bill for 120 students. Costs go up. Arizona opened up universal vouchers, and the vast majority of applicants were families with students already in private school. True in Iowa and Florida, as well.

Second, pro-voucher folks consistently under-estimate what the cost of the program will be (in New Hampshire they were off by over 11,000%). This is puzzling, since the question involved is "If we offer free government money to everyone who homeschools or has a child in private school, how many do you think will take it?" and that doesn't seem like a hard one to figure out.

Universal ESA vouchers like those in Arizona and Florida add a whole other level. Unaccountable voucher dollars disappear into a void, paying for all sorts of extras like big screen TVs and Disney tickets. Meanwhile, we're seeing private schools in places like Des Moines raising tuition costs because vouchers mean they can do it to increase their own revenue (increasing tuition is also a great way to keep Those Peoples' Children out). 

This is how a program billed as rescue for poor families becomes an entitlement for wealthy families. And it's a reminder that a voucher pitch claiming that vouchers will somehow save tax dollars is just not true, no matter how many times voucher advocates repeat it. 

Looking way down the road, I expect this will lead us to a battle between different flavors of choicers. For those who like vouchers because they are one step on the road to getting government completely out of education, the long term dream is a world in which few or no tax dollars go to education, and families have to scrape together what they can afford on their own. Those folks are going to reach a point where they want to shrink voucher sizes. But for those who like the idea of turning on the state money faucet and flooding private religious (okay, Christian) schools with free tax dollars, voucher shrinkage will be an unwelcome change that they will fight tooth and nail.

That's some years away, but we've seen previews. Croydon, NH, had a true voucher program that paid full tuition to send any student to the school of their family's choice, public or private. It was expensive, so the local Libertarians tried to scuttle it by reducing the money by half. 

But that's further down the road. Right now we are on track to see more Arizona-style financial issues for states that decide to go all in on vouchers for everybody. If states are smart enough to pay attention, the lessons are there. Voucher programs inevitably grow, as advocates and legislators (but never the actual voters) try to open the money faucet wider, and as the programs grow, they become increasingly expensive. 

Hess, Duncan, and the End Of National Ed Reform

Back a month or so ago we had a call from the Building Bridges Initiative and their "report" on education reform, signed by education reformsters running the gamut from A to B. 

Now, as a sort of sequel, we had an hour-long confab with Rick Hess and Arne Duncan about the future of bipartisan ed reform. Or rather the lack thereof. Especially the lack thereof. I watched it so you don't have to, and while Arnie does not exceed expectations, this is my favorite intellectually honest version of Hess.

Moderator Erica Green (New York Times) says we're looking at the landscape since 1983, and we are currently standing at a "new inflection point." She also says we've seen reform efforts throughout the years that tried to answer that "call to action." But no bigger call to action than three years ago "when the nation was literally at risk," which is a fun way of acknowledging that A Nation At Risk was overblown hype. Green says she will argue "to the ends of the earth" that children bore the brunt of the pandemic. Now, she says, "we're back on autopilot." 

So she opens with "What happened to the sense of urgency?"

Hess calls out Congress as a clown car. "So much of what passes for leadership has become performative." What gets rewarded is the people who do things to get attention and not those "who slog away." The easiest thing in the world, he says, is to have big flashy ideas and new exciting innovations, and the hard thing is to show up every day and make good decisions. "We spend a lot of time rewarding people who talk in ways that sound exciting and that has distracted us mightily." I wish he defined us more precisely, because he's saying things that teachers, who have tried really hard to avoid all the reformy distractions, can relate to mightily.

He pivots to absenteeism and bullying and unsafe schools and we have lots of labels and initiatives but not much stomach for seeing things through. 

Duncan thinks we're adrift. He wants to have clear goals in education. "We always debate small ball stuff." Oh, Arne. 

But I'm going to interrupt here because both have touched on what I think is critical, and why their idea of education reform is flagging--

Education issues are specific and local; ed reform wants to be broad and national. 

Showing up and doing the work is specific and local. Issues like absenteeism and bullying and etc etc etc are specific and local. National Ed Reform has insisted that solutions can be scaled, that we can have an idea that will fix education in 50 states. It has repeatedly run aground on that premise (Common Core is only the most spectacular example).

Okay. Back to the talking.

Arne doesn't see anyone talking about big bipartisan nation-building goals or strategies to attain them or data about who's making progress. Because, as we've repeatedly seen, Arne learned nothing from his time at USED.

Duncan wants to know, for instance, which ten districts are doing the best at recovery from covid. He will never know, because there's no way to quantify that. And it doesn't matter, because the approaches are largely specific and local.

Hess suggests a less rose-colored view of the Clinton-Bush-Obama years. Groupthink allowed people to hide a lot of bad ideas. You go, Rick. So he's for productive conversation and finding places to agree and "where we disagree, let's disagree like grownups." 

Hess: Campbell's Law has just eaten our lunch over the last twenty years. He uses that to complain about grade inflation and fake grad rates and I wish he'd dig a little deeper, but he points out that Duncan's desire for data is doomed because it's hard to trust the kinds of instruments that are being used to gather data. Yup. Can we cancel the Big Standardized Test now, please?

Green winds her way past nostalgia for when groups were fighting through robust debate and now we've got fracturing and teachers in trouble for what books they teach and maybe we need to redefine what ed reform is? Are graduation rates and test scores and NAEP scores just "a relic of a different time?" And I'd say, well, "relic" suggests there was some golden time in the past when they were useful. Maybe instead ask "Are we finally willing to admit that some of that reformy baloney failed?"

Hess says maybe that time of reform was an atypical time. Hess argues that 1983-2013 was a big time for accountability and teacher evaluation and most of our history has been arguing over books and history to teach. I don't know--in the late 70s my professors were talking about the accountability pendulum. But the culture debate has been eternal. Hess adds that families may not be thinking about school reform the same way. "If they ever were," I'd like to add, crossing my fingers that Duncan doesn't bring up disappointed suburban moms again.

Duncan wants everyone to agree on goals and actually points out that different locations would have different ways to achieve those goals, highlighting once again the huge disconnect between the words that come out of his mouth and the policies he championed.

Duncan says that parents got left behind during COVID, which is some Grade A bullshit on several levels. Parents have said they were largely happy with how their local district handled things. Then he's back to his old chestnut that parents don't really know how well their students are doing. "They think everything's okay, but it's not." He wants to measure stuff.

Hess asks Duncan what his goals are, and it's the same old thing--preK, third grade reading, grad rates, college rates.

Green is back. She wants to know who "we" are, too. Who is supposed to lead all this?

Duncan says top down and bottom up. Mayors. Governors. Senators. Parents should beat down doors. When he was in DC he was critiqued for going too fast, but he believes he went too slow. He doesn't have an answer. Everyone. He feels that nobody is really agitating for the things he wants (Hmm... what might that mean). He wants voters to hold politicians accountable for school stuff, but it doesn't happen. He has no thoughts on why not. Weirdly enough, school boards do not appear anywhere in this answer.

Green asks Hess--who is the great convener here? And is it possible?

Hess tells the story of how NAEP was created to give governors incentive to step up. 

Green calls back to a "really excellent" Mike Petrilli op-ed in NYT, which must be his No Child Left Behind nostalgia piece. She asks if we're just not saying the quiet parts out loud "like we did in A Nation at Risk or NCLB" and ho boy-- I don't know about the quiet parts, but A Nation At Risk certainly said some made up parts out loud.

Hess says ANAR was pretty crude. NCLB "was so insistent that we knew what worked and if we collected test scores and held schools to the fire then kids would do better." That was misleading about what we knew about what worked and how well we could trust the measures, and it cut parents out of the equation by saying it was "schools and schools alone and there are no excuses" He offers an illustration-- if the pediatrician says my kid is a little heavy and we should lay off the snacks and I take the kid home and open a bag of doritos, we don't say the pediatrician is bad. Which sounds very much like the kind of story that hundreds of teachers used back when reformsters told us we were whiny excuse-making babies back during NCLB. 

Hess gives credit to NCLB for changing a culture of parent blaming, but now superintendents and principals are afraid to tell parents to take away cell phones and supervise homework and get to school. And we never did talk about that honestly in any of the big reforms.

Duncan moves on to absenteeism as an example of nitty gritty roll up your sleeves that he thinks people don't have the appetite for. 

Green is still upset that we told kids their whole lives that school was the most important thing, but we opened bars first (not for the first or last time, I think that people who do/report policy work in DC or NYC desperately need to take a long out of town sabbatical). Also, she's concerned that during the shutdown many young folks got jobs and started their lives. I get the concern over the message that schools (and students) aren't really the most important thing, but that not-so-important message has been constant from long before the pandemic, communicated clearly through funding and all those politicians who don't run on education because there are no large numbers of education voters. Honestly, folks--talk to more teachers, whose morale is battered daily by this basic fact of life in this country. 

But she's worried that maybe we should just say that the system that is supposed to be so important is "fractured." But she's pushing back on Arne's idea of telling principals to go find their kids.

Arne says some stuff, but I'm going to pick out the assertion, again, that if kids get a better education, they will make better money, because this ignores other economic realities. Minimum wage jobs will still pay minimum wages, even if they hire someone with a college degree, and what we learned in the pandemic is that there are lots of working-poverty wage jobs that we absolutely want to have filled, and if every student in the country got a college degree, those jobs would still exist and still pay poorly. Put another way, advanced education gives you a better shot at coming out ahead in the competition to avoid poverty wages, but competition will still exist and some people will still lose.

More talking. Agreement that pandemic responses were bad. 

Hess says education needs to be reconfigured and fixed. Also, Hess thinks the book ban discussion is dishonest on the ALA and PenAmerica side. Parents have the right to be heard, but not to dictate. We are dismissive of parent concerns, but are reluctant to tell them to monitor smart phones.

Green pushes back a bit--everyone is climbing on educators to Get These Kids Caught Up but also legislators saying "If you use this book we will fire you." What do we do with that?

Hess shoots for nuance in a short space--12th graders should be able to read Bluest Eye, sixth grade libraries shouldn't have graphic sex in them, there has to be honest discussion and professionals have to acknowledge some legitimate parental concerns. But the whole debate has become performative.

Duncan characterizes the book debate as a rabbit hole and total waste of time and energy. "Their phone is going to corrupt them long before any freaking book." He looks a little sleepy. But he thinks they're spending more time scaring parents than actually pursuing educational goals is a waste. No argument here. "It's a devastating lack of leadership." Well, I doubt it. Not sure what kind of leadership would have stopped M4L and the MAGA crowd.

Green asks again who leads a breakthrough. Duncan reiterates the point about having conversation and honest debate, but that's not really an answer. Give parents real info. He has a real insight here--what's happening on the NAEP? "That's what's happening on the state level. That's not my kid. Who the hell cares?" Real parent empowerment by giving them real information. I cannot begin to describe how much heavy lifting "real information" is doing here, particularly since it is also laden with the premise that parents are currently given fake information.

Hess stumbles for a bit--honestly, it seems like this conversation is sucking all the energy out of the room--but arrives at the idea that one lesson of NCLB is that parents compare what they know about their kid and their school to what a single standardized math and reading test says, and they pick what they know first hand. "I trust my eyes, not your fancy data points." I'll note that in twenty years, reformsters have never come up with a good response to that, nor have they paused to consider that this widespread response might tell them something about their fancy data points, like the data collected isn't all that great, or that it represents such a tiny sliver about what parents care about in their schools that it's useless. Duncan is the poster boy for "If people really understood the situation, they would agree with me," an approach that almost never works and which, in the reformster movement, leads to the difficult to manage position of "Parents should be entrusted and empowered even though they have no real understanding of what's going on."

Hess contextualizes choice here. Pre-pandemic, it was mostly about rescuing students in bad urban schools. The post-pandemic explosion he sees as driven by a desire to give all families more choices. I'm not fully convinced; the post-pandemic explosion of vouchers and neo-vouchers hasn't been a grass roots movement, and these bills still aren't being passed democratically by voters. They are almost exclusively coming because right wing folks have captured legislatures and are feeling emboldened. Certainly there's been some noise on the ground to help this process along, but that's only a small piece of it. And of course it depends on the state or district.

Hess also argues that choice (citing DC) leads to parents paying closer attention. That's an interesting notion.

That gets us to the Q&A and I'm not going to sweat that (Duncan says yay mastery learning, and talks like a Republican about how much money has been sent to schools and where's the accountability), because we can note a couple of things here.

One is that neither one of these guys, at least one of whom is pretty smart, don't have any thoughts about how the old reformster coalition might reform. It won't, and I can think of at least two reasons.

One is that reform in the Clinton-Bush-Obama mode was largely a national undertaking, a series of attempts to set national policies that would have national effects. But the pandemic underlined, twice, that most education issues are specific and local. Building closures, teacher expectations and duties, attempts to cope--the discussion brough these issues up without noting how widely they varied district to district. Education issues are specific and local. Education issues are specific and local. 

The choice crowd already knows this. That's why they're hammering states (and calling for the federal ed department to be shuttered) and calling for their people to get in there and commandeer school boards. The most extreme of this crowd is not even really interested in choice, but in recapturing with both diverting tax dollars to private (Christian) school and pushing the religious agenda into public schools. And this dovetails nicely with those who still want the Friedman dream of dismantling public education and making schooling a commodity that each family is responsible for procuring on their own. 

Those folks have left the old reformster crowd in the dust. The bipartisan movement that they're nostalgic for is done. Of course Duncan and Hess can't come up with any names for leadership forward; as Hess correctly notes, the big names are all busy making noise for clicks and attention and money from big contributors. They're also, it should be noted, angling for cushy platform gigs with advocacy groups and think tanks. I imagine that when MAGA education dudebros like Rufo and Walters and DeAngelis look back at the Clinton-Bush-Obama era they might think, "Well, it was nice that they kind of broke some ground for us, but they are dinosaurs, tinkering around with scalpels. It's up to us to get out the flamethrowers and do what must be done. They're history. We're the future, and we don't need to form coalitions--we need to bend people to our will."

The modern reformster movement, as much space as I spend writing about it, is dead. Much of what it wanted--high stakes testing, charter schools, nationalized standards--is now part of the education status quo. As this conversation shows, one of the reasons they can't muster a new coalition is that there really aren't any goals to rally around. Duncan's four goals are not matters for national policy, and they're not particularly clear or specific anyway. And as they sadly note, the angry Moms and the performative flamethrower guys have all the attention anyway. 

Re: Microschools and the hype cycle

Last week I wrote a brief explainer about microschools, and it prompted a response from Travis Pillow. I love me some thoughtful back and forth on the interwebs, and I want to respond to his response. 

Pillow started out as a reporter in Tallahassee and has since gone on to work at the Center on Reimagining Public Education (CRPE), Jeb Bush's ExcelinEd, and Step Up For Students, the company that does the go-between money-handling for voucher programs. He's their Director of Thought Leadership these days.

In his response, Pillow properly places the recent history of microschools in the context the pandemic, back when learning pods were a thing. CRPE was big on them at the time, and there were plenty of situations in which they were hugely helpful (there were also some bizarre outliers, like the literal country club pods). Pandemic pods were a pretty direct solution to an obvious problem--school buildings that were closed.

Pillow argues that in the pod process, families discovered other benefits. CRPE did its own survey and found that teachers had way more flexibility and supportive relationships with families, which we could chalk up to really small class composed of handpicked students. Pillow cites a "more humane environments in big and small ways (like getting a snack whenever you'd like).

Also, "adults from more diverse backgrounds, like parents or community volunteers who loved working with kids but lacked a teaching certificate, found new opportunities to share their passions." That strikes as a mixed bag, but mostly it reminds me that the microschool movement in many ways resembles the re-invention of the local school district.

After noting that many folks went back to the advantages of "conventional" schools, Pillow offers an answer to my question of "what problem does microschooling solve?"

But other families latched on to the growing array of microschools that, at least for the educators who created them or the families who used them, solve any number of the problems plaguing public education: youth mental health is in crisis, teacher morale is flagging, voluntary community associations are desiccated, students are often disengaged if they’re showing up at all, bonds of trust between schools and families are fraying.

I have some big questions. Nobody seems to know how many microschools are operating. In 2022, EdChoice cited the CRPE estimate that around 1 to 2 million students were in microschools, which strikes me as the kind of huge number I would expect from folks who want to push microschools as a policy solution. 

But Pillow talks about teacher-created microschsools, and I'm super-curious about that concept, because my gut says that such microschools make up a tiny percentage of the total microschools out there. After all, from a teacher's point of view, microschools would present a challenge when it comes to salary and benefits. It's gig economy work, with all the drawbacks that come with it. The State Policy Network (that right wing network of right-tilted thinky tanks and advocacy groups) likes microschools, and they acknowledge three flavors-- 

Provider Network-- a chain operation like Prenda that will help local folks set up their own "franchise"

Partnership-- a host partner, like a employer, local government, non-profit or church, works with a technical partner that handles the actual providing of the school parts.

Independent-- basically a 21st century one room schoolhouse, "created by an individual, team, or a group of families"

Like the elusive teacher-run charter school, teacher-created microschools don't seem to make up much of the landscape. I'm genuinely curious about how many microschools there are and who started and runs them, but I doubt that anyone is likely to have that information any time soon. 

But back to Pillow:

It takes a special kind of cynic to imagine the current blossoming of small learning environments where teachers are free to realize their peculiar vision for what learning could look like and partner with families to make it happen is the brainchild of a few voucher advocates.

There is a lot to unpack here. I may, in fact, be a special kind of cynic. But I'm not sure microschools are in fact environments in which teachers are free to realize their peculiar vision. As I said, I'm not sure there are that many teachers involved. If by "teachers," Pillow means "any person who has been put in charge of a bunch of students," then maybe he's right, but that also suggests a very broad range of peculiar visions. There is a whole oversight and accountability to taxpayers piece missing from microschools. 

That said, I do not imagine that microschools are the brainchildren of a few voucher fans.I have no doubt that if I toured a bunch of them, I would find that some, as Pillow argues, full of plenty positive energy, because I strongly suspect that microschools are useful when they are a local solution to a local problem. But I remain convinced that the continued attempts to promote them as a policy solution, which just happen to come mostly from voucher fans, is an attempt to co-opt the idea as a way to plug a policy hole. 

Vouchers overcome very few of the real obstacles to school choice (tuition costs, private school selectivity and discrimination, location), but microschools allow everyone from Betsy DeVos to the State Policy Network to wave these problems away by saying, "Well, everyone can set up a microschool!" When Croydon, NH, libertarians tried to defund an actual, functioning school voucher program, microschools were presented as the solution. 

I am delighted that Pillow includes Gartner's Hype Cycle. His theory is that microschools are heading into the Trough of Disillusionment, and I think he has a reasonable assessment of some of the challenges they face, like financial stability, reporting student outcomes, special ed, and transportation, but when he adds "other essential infrastructure that ensures they’re accessible to all students" I have questions again, because microschools by their very nature are not about being accessible to all students, but setting up something local for a select group of local students. 

If he means that we should find ways to make microschools available everywhere, I think he hits another problem. Microschools may work for very specific, very local situations, but that's what they're good for. They aren't scalable (it's right there in the name). This problem I'd argue, is at the heart of the end of "education reform" as a national movement--all education problems are local and specific and attempts to scale solutions on a national level are problematic.

I’m willing to bet that anyone who actually visited these learning environments, or spoke to the educators who worked there, would come away with their cynicism punctured and a belief that these bottom-up efforts are getting so much attention precisely because they’re positing novel solutions to countless different problems facing young people and the public education.

I bet I'd be impressed by some of the work that's going on in some microschools. My cynicism is reserved for folks who intent on co-opting the movement into a way to prop up their ongoing attempts to dismantle and privatize public education. 

Ed Tech Can Be Useful

I have discovered an ed tech creation that actually looks kind of cool.

I should probably preface all of this by noting that this popped up on my feed because Zuck's algorithm thought I'd like to see it. So, not the result of some PR pitch. In fact, sadly, I have to note that we are in the wrong country to have access to this tool.

Not for nothing that this ed tech application comes from a former teacher. But I think it could, maybe, conceivably save teachers time. And it's cool. Here's the quick simple pitch from the BBC version of Shark Tank, a show called Dragon's Den.

Mark Mate appears to be still in business, albeit in the UK. The capabilities of the program are somewhat greater than the creator show in his pitch; you can see more in his "guided tour" and honestly those greater capabilities sound to me like the things that end up putting more time suck back into the product. But I will note that, as someone who answered the question "Hey, Mr. Greene, what does this thing you wrote here say?" roughly sixty gabillion times, I can see other benefits.

As one of the dragons noted, there's nothing here that exactly breaks new boundaries or requires amazing new techno-breakthroughs. That's probably because it was developed by a teacher who was trying to solve a teacher problem he actually had rather than creating a tech-innovative break-things product that requires teachers to completely change how they work. 

Sadly, this is unavailable in the states, though I suspect that it wouldn't be that hard to rig. In fact, I'll wager that somewhere there are some enterprising tech-savvy teachers who have come up with a similar sort of hack. Mark Mate is not the kind of thing that causes earth shattering changes, and it would be great if more ed tech was like that-- not earth shattering, but able to solve an actual classroom problem instead of creating one.

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/7)

Every year on the first weekend in October, my small down turns into a huge fair or festival or whatever you want to call it. Our hook is that Johny Appleseed lived in these parts briefly very early in his career. But for three days we pull out all the stops, people come from far and wide, including people coming back because at this point it's the unofficial Homecoming for the town. There's a 5K race and a car show and bands play and crafts are sold and food is eaten, and because the Institute is located in town, we do it all on foot (which is great because parking is a challenge). We cloze the schools on Friday and we close the main streets on Saturday and Sunday. It is a small-town-a-palooza. Always the first weekend in October; you can start making your plans to come on over next year.

In the meantime, I have some reading for you from the past week. Remember, sharing is caring.

People Power Vs. the Far Right Education Movement

At the Progressive, Glenn Daigon interviews Skye Perryman about how to fight back against the folks who would undermine public education.

What's behind the national surge in book bans? A low-tech website tied to Moms for Liberty

A team at USA Today looks at the website that is a major resource for many of the book banning folks out there.

A fight over religion and politics is roiling a Texas school board election. And 'it's gotten ugly.'

How ugly can the christianist right wing movement to "take back" schools get? Texas ugly. Scary ugly.

ESA Parent Advisory Board member calls for more accountability

Breaking does some of the ESA voucher spending in Arizona. Including a breakdown of which schools and programs are getting some taxpayer money.

Walters told Congress TPS had ‘active connection’ with China. His staff was told the opposite.

Shocking, I know, but it turns out that Ryan Walters kind of fibbed when he was raising the alarm about Chinese commie infiltration of Tulsa schools.

Onward, Christian Charters

Remember how Tennessee Governor Lee was going to get the state 50 Hillsdale charters, and then then he backed off (because Hillsdale president Larry Arrn said some dumb things). Well, he's pretty much back on track. Andy Spears has the story.

This Guy Used to be my Congressman. Now He Wants to be my Senator.

Nancy Flanagan looks at Michigan politician Mike Rogers, yet another example of how some GOP moderates suddenly get infected with MAGA virus.

Controversy Has Not Been Resolved Over Ohio Legislature’s Effort to Undermine State Board of Ed’s Power and Politicize Education Governance Under Governor’s Office

There's still an attempted power grab going on in Ohio. Still. Jan Resseger can bring you up to speed.

Rural Schools are the Epicenters of Rural Life

Jess Piper wants to remind us that defunding rural schools hurts more than education.

Moms for Liberty attempt to remove books from Charlotte high school fails

Juston Parmenter reports a success story from North Carolina. 

FWIW Florida has not banned “To Kill A Mockingbird”

Sue Kingery Woltanski has some good news--not every book on the Most Banned list is actually banned in Florida. The bad news is the partial list of books that actually have been banned.

If you'd like to get all my stuff (including the weekly roundup) direct to your email, just sign up for my substack, which includes everything from this blog plus anything I put up elsewhere, and it's completely free.

My Testimony For The PA House Education Tour

Yesterday I had the privilege of being called to offer testimony before the state House Appropriations and Education Committee's Education hearings (they're doing a state tour this month). I'll tell you a little bit about the experience, and share my testimony.

I have been anxious about this since a legislator's staffer asked me to do it. I've talked to classrooms full of students, and I've done presentations in front of fellow professionals, and done pretty well. I enjoy it; call me any time to talk to your group. But this was not that, and I was nervous about trying to hit the right notes in front of Important People. I saw the agenda and the other presenters on tap and flashed back to the old George Gobel line about feeling as if the rest of the world is a tuxedo and you're a pair of brown shoes.

The hearing had been scheduled on the assumption that the legislative session yesterday morning would be brief. It was not. The staffer sent out an email about the postponement, which arrived while I was en route, so I didn't get the memo till I arrived. The hearing started about two hours after the original time. 

I got to pass the intervening time with some other folks there for the hearing. Met a guy whose work I very much admire and had an excellent long conversation with someone with whom I share some disagreements, and heard some great stuff from other presenters, and that was probably worth the time it took me to haul my butt down to Pittsburgh.

Good thing, too, as it turned out. After the first panel went, it was time for my set of four separate testifiers, of whom I was the first. And just before we started, the chair said that in the interests of time, he wanted us all to boil our testimonies down to five minutes.

At that point, my brain, already a bit on edge at the prospect of my very first hearing testimony, blew up. The staff member who had recruited me said it was typical to give about fifteen minutes of testimony. I had spent a week editing and compressing and even rehearsing so that I had it all down to a trim twelve minutes. Five is considerably less than twelve, and I had roughly two seconds to work on the new edit, which is not to say it was impossible. After 39 years in the classroom, I should have been able to do it.

Instead, what came out of my mouth was--well, I don't really know exactly how it turned out, other than some kind of word salad, as if the papers in front of me had been run through a wood chipper. To top it off, I was asked one question, and despite the fact that I fully anticipated the question and had thought about how to answer it, I fluffed it. 

So in the end I did not cover myself with glory and I almost certainly did not change any hearts and minds. I met some interesting people, and I gained some first-hand understanding of a process which will no doubt come in handy in the unlikely event that I'm ever called upon again, but any time you learn something is time that's not wasted. 

My original trim twelve minutes exists somewhere in the record in its original form, I figured I'd share it with you here, as it more or less exists in some alternate universe in which my brain did not collapse. Warning: Twelve minutes is a lot of words.

Good afternoon, and thank you for allowing me to speak before you today.

My name is Peter Greene. I retired after 39 years as an English teacher, with 38 of those years spent in Franklin Area Schools up in Venango County. It’s the same district that I graduated from. My two older children went through that system, I have a pair of twins passing through now, and my wife teaches in a neighboring district, so I have many stakes in Pennsylvania education. For the past decade I’ve been writing about education; my works has been in the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and Education Week. These days I write regularly about education for Forbes.com and The Progressive, as well as my own blog.

I’ve spent a lot of time tracking and studying education policy trends across the country. Pennsylvania does a pretty good job, and Pennsylvania teachers do a good job as well.

How do we do better? Today I’d like to focus on meaningful accountability.

There are few policy decisions that have had a more toxic effect on education than the advent of high stakes testing. Reducing the impact of Keystone and PSSA testing on teacher evaluations was a step forward. It would be even better to reduce the weight of those tests to zero, including taking them out of the assessment of school effectiveness.

The PSSA and Keystone exams do not provide useful data to classroom teachers. The information that they supply comes too late and too vague to be helpful, especially because teachers are forbidden to see the actual questions that students had trouble with. Nor do the results provide information teachers didn’t already have. No teachers are looking at Keystone results and saying, “I had no idea that this student was having trouble with the material.”

Twenty-some years of high stakes testing has twisted education out of shape. Administrators and teachers should be making curriculum and instructional choices based on the question “will it help us provide all students with a full, effective, well-rounded education,” Instead, too many schools have been asking “Will it raise test scores?”

 

 

In my own subject area, testing has been particularly corrosive. Teachers spend much of the year on test prep, which means practicing taking that particular kind of test. The test does not involve reading whole works and then reflecting and digging deeply into the ideas, but reading a short excerpt without context and answering a handful of multiple choice questions quickly—right now—That’s the test, so that’s what students practice. Short excerpts of context-free readings have replaced study of full works, and that’s a big loss to students.

We can hold local administrators partly responsible for these kinds of choices or for the over-scheduling of practice tests, but state policy has pushed them by putting too much value on these tests.

Do we need accountability for schools? Absolutely. But these high stakes tests don’t provide it.

An effective assessment is a tool built for a particular purpose, and that’s the purpose it serves. A really good Philips head screwdriver works great for putting in Phillips head screws. It does not work for slotted screws, and it doesn’t work as a tape measure or a router or a saber saw. To create a solid accountability system, it’s necessary to answer the questions accountable to whom, and accountable for what? The Keystone and PSSA systems have tried to be accountable to everyone for everything, and to do it in a manner that looks at just a tiny slice of the education picture.

The best metaphor I’ve read for the high stakes system is someone is searching for the car keys at night in a darkened parking lot. They’re looking around under the streetlight, even though they dropped their cars fifty feet away in the dark. Asked for an explanation, they say, “Yes, I know the keys are probably over there, but the light is so much better over here.”

Truly measuring educational effectiveness is hard, though there are scholars out there working on how to do it. Pennsylvania’s tests can generate numbers that look like hard data. Does that data reflect the full rich reality of a school? Do they measure the effectiveness of the school or the achievement of students or teachers? No.

 

Confronted with the idea of cutting the high stakes from these tests, supporters will argue, “Well, without the tests, how will we have accountability? How will we get a picture of how well schools are doing.” My reply is, “You aren’t getting that picture now, and you’re doing damage to school in the process.”

Teachers just don’t want to be held accountable is another argument we hear, which is simply not true. Teachers like accountability, but real accountability, and right now the state is still looking for its keys under the streetlight.

High stakes testing has also produced a basic dishonesty in discussion about accountability. Too many people keep using the phrase “student achievement” when what they actually mean is “student score on a single standardized math and reading test.”

One other important point—while we know that test scores correlate with student socio-economic background, no research has ever shown that increasing a students’ test score improves their life outcomes.

There has been so much discussion about making up for educational opportunities lost during the pandemic. Removing high stakes testing, or at least the high stakes, would instantly give schools and teachers additional weeks of time in the school year, and it wouldn’t cost a cent.

High stakes testing has also been damaging by feeding the notion that schools are failing, buttressing the case for some alternatives to public schools. I urge you to resist those arguments. In particular, I’m asking you to resist the continued push for more school vouchers in Pennsylvania.

The most recent version of the Lifeline Scholarships vetoed by the governor, and the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program passed by the Senate are certainly more restrained voucher programs than we’ve seen in previous years or in some other states.

We don’t have a lot of voucher experience in Pennsylvania beyond the  Educational Improvement Tax Credits (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credits (OSTC), and we don’t know much about how those are working because so little accountability is attached to them.

But we do know a lot about how vouchers work in other states, and we need to pay attention to those examples.

For one thing, we know that voucher programs tend to expand, even when they start as small as the most recent voucher proposals in Harrisburg.

Programs typically start on a small scale with the argument that they are just to rescue a few students living in poverty and attending so called failing schools. States start with a traditional voucher that pays tuition at a private school and then expand to ESA vouchers that give families money to spend on any number of education-adjacent expenses.

States start with caps on eligibility, including caps on family income and requirements that the students be moving out of public school then the program expands toward universal vouchers. In the past two years six states have expanded their programs to universal ESA vouchers, meaning tax dollars can flow to any student. That means that a wealthy family that never enrolled their students in public schools can still collect taxpayer money. This kind of inevitable expansion turns vouchers from a rescue for the poor into an entitlement for the rich.

Consequently, voucher programs also expand in cost. In New Hampshire, a voucher program was sold to the legislature with a projected cost to the state of $130,000 per year. Two years later it was almost $15 million and rising. That rising cost can hit families as well. In Iowa, when the voucher system was expanded, many private schools immediately raised tuition costs.

We know that without sufficient state oversight in place, vouchers often give rise to pop up schools. Rent a store front in a strip mall, advertise your school or service, market hard to collect a batch of enrollments with their voucher dollars, provide substandard service, and go out of business—the average life span of these schools is about four years. Proponents will argue that this is just the market working, that families are providing accountability by voting with their feet. But that comes at the cost of a year or more of a child’s education. If we are concerned about the time lost due to pandemic closures, surely we must be equally concerned about keeping fraudulent and incompetent actors from wasting irreplaceable years of a young person’s education.

Fortunately, the pop up voucher schools do not dominate the voucher market place. We know that the vast majority of vouchers are used in private religious schools, including schools whose stated mission is not to educate students, but to bring them to Christ.

We know that many of those schools teach questionable content. The war between the states wasn’t really about slavery. All Muslims hate America. Satan created modern psychology. Humans and dinosaurs lived together. All taught in some private schools receiving taxpayer dollars.

We know that those private schools often discriminate. Among the private schools accepting vouchers across the nation, we find those who will not accept students with special needs, or LGBTQ students, or students with an LGBTQ family member, or students who are not Christian. We find schools that will only accept students who don’t listen to secular music, who are born again Christians, or who have born again Christian parents. One school in North Carolina does not require teachers to have a license, but they do have to demonstrate their relationship with Jesus by speaking in tongues. All in schools receiving taxpayer dollars.

Not only do states not step in to stop such taxpayer funded miseducation or discrimination, but most voucher bills are now written with specific clauses saying that those who accept voucher dollars are not state actors and that the state may not in any way interfere with how the school operates or teaches. Both the most recent version of the Lifeline and PASS vouchers include that language.

Voucher programs promise school choice, but in fact, the choice is the school’s, not the family’s. Families that  do not meet the school’s requirement, or whose voucher still won’t cover the tuition cost, get no choice, and their public school will have even fewer resources to meet their needs. Draining public school funding for a voucher program is not the way to fix Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional school funding system.

There are other accountability problems with vouchers.

A voucher system disenfranchises taxpayers who don’t have children. If you have no school age children, you have no say in how the taxpayer dollars in that voucher are spent. There is nobody for you to hold accountable. And because vouchers move the purse strings from your local elected school board to officials in the state capital, local control is lessened. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis found that four private schools have programs he disapproves of, so he cut off their access to vouchers. Those parents have no recourse.

Vouchers avoid accountability to the voters. No voucher program has ever passed a public vote in a state. Voters reject the idea of using tax dollars to fund private religious school tuition. These days supporters call vouchers scholarships because the term voucher tests poorly with audiences. So voucher fans try other ways, despite resistance.

In Texas, where rural legislators of both parties recognize vouchers as a threat to their public schools, Governor Abbott is holding a special session to try, again, to force passage of vouchers. In New Hampshire, a voucher bill was proposed, over 3000 people showed up at the capital to argue against it. So the legislature withdrew the bill, and slipped vouchers into the budget instead. That’s the very opposite of accountability to the voters.

Vouchers dodge accountability to parents. The voucher deal is simple—the state tells parents here’s a few thousand dollars. Now making sure your child gets a decent education is your responsibility, not the state’s or the community’s. For the cost of a voucher, the state absolves itself of any accountability for that child’s education.

It is absolutely true that every child deserves a full, rich education, no mater what they zip code or family’s resources. But school vouchers do not get us there.

It is true that Pennsylvania has not always perfectly met its promise to provide a quality education for every child, hence the recent court order for better funding. But the solution is not to buy out families’ claim to that promise with a small slice of taxpayer money and say, “Go navigate an unregulated marketplace on your own. If you’re unable to get into the school you want, or your child ends up in a substandard private school, that’s your problem.”

Of course, education is not their problem alone. All of us depend on and benefit from a strong and accountable public education system, and that’s where I hope legislators will direct their efforts. Thank you.

 

 

Microschools for Dummies

While they've been kicking around for a while, microschools keep popping up in school choicer rhetoric. So if you're wondering what, exactly, microschools are about, and why privatizers like them, here's your explainer for the day.

Says the Microschools Network website, "Imagine the old one-room schoolhouse. Now bring it into the modern era." Or imagine you're homeschooling, and a couple of neighbors ask if you'd take on their children as well. Or imagine you're cyberschooling with seven kids in your kitchen. Or imagine you wanted to start a tiny pop up school. 

The website offers these five characteristics for the current microschools version.

An intentionally small student population,
An innovative curriculum,
Place-based and experiential learning,
The use of cutting-edge technology, and
An emphasis on mastering or understanding material.

In other words, invite a couple of neighbor kids over and have them gather around a computer to be taught by whatever whizbang algorithm-directed "personalized" software you've licensed to provide the educational stuffings for your microschool. Some adult is handy as a "guide," but the computer frees you from the need to actually be able to teach anything. As one company puts it, you can be a guide because "caring about people and being passionate about learning are more important than transcripts, certificates and pedagogy."

So why do it this way? The pitch includes ideas like microschooling will "allow students to take deep dives into subjects that they’re passionate about" and extend the learning "beyond the physical confines of the school" (aka "somebody's home"). Some of the pitch is what anybopdy wants from any school:

Students are encouraged to focus on mastering subjects and understanding why they’re important within a broader context, rather than on trying to get a good grade.

Why are microschools better able to provide that than any other educational model? What exactly makes mastery learning, a long-time subject of discussion in education, especially fitted to microschools? That's a bit of a mystery. Technology! 

Some of the rhetoric is just about trying to transform a bug into a feature:

In order to meet your student's needs through a customized learning journey, students of multiple ages may be grouped to learn together in a classroom. This model allows students of different ages to learn from each other, gaining a holistic understanding of the topics.

In other words, if the seven students you've gathered are of wildly different ages, don't worry--the software will handle it somehow. Also, when your teenager is complaining about being stuck in writing class with a couple of ten year olds, just tell him that this is allowing him to gain a holistic understanding of the topics.

Sift through miles of rhetoric and you find lots of language that looks exactly like what fans of public schools say about public schools (and, to be fair, what fans of private schools say about them). I can't find a claim anywhere that seems like a unique educational benefit that only microschools could offer. 

Many microschool cheerleaders are like Kelly Smith of Prenda, who is an education amateur who got excited about seeing students get excited about learning stuff, as if he's the first person to discover this amazing phenomenon. Prenda is one microschool company that hit the jackpot a couple of years ago by becoming the official microschool of New Hampshire. 

Microschools have plenty of fans. Tom Vander Ark, a techo-reform cheerleader who's been making a living at it for quite a while--he thinks microschools are a Next Big Thing. Betsy DeVos has been sending microschools some love. And Prenda itself got a healthy shot of investment money from a newish Koch-Walton initiative called VELA Education Fund. Headed up by Meredith Olson (a VP at Koch's Stand Together) and Beth Seling (with background in the charter school biz), the board of VELA is rounded out by reps from Stand Together and the Walton Foundation. VELA "invests in family-focused education innovations."

Which raises the question--why do all these choicers love microschools so much. Especially since microschools' dependence on computer tech makes them closely resemble the kind of cyber school and distance learning that have been so widely disdained post-pandemically?

The answer is that microschools plug a hole in the Big Choice Picture.

When someone asks hard critiques like "This voucher you're offering me won't cover the cost of any private school" or "When this voucher program guts public school funding, families in our rural area will have no choices at all" then microschools are the handy choicer answer.

Can't get your kid into a nice private school with your voucher? Well, you can still pool resources with a couple of neighbors, buy some hardware, license some software, and start your own microschool! Microschools allow choicers to argue that nobody will be left behind in a choice landscape, that vouchers will not simply be an education entitlement for the wealthy. (Spoiler alert: the wealthy will not be pulling their children out of private schools so they can microschool instead). 

In other words, microschools do not solve any educational problems. They solve a policy argument problem. They do not offer new and better ways to educate children. They offer new ways to argue in favor of vouchers. Well, all that and they also offer a way for edupreneurs to cash in on the education privatization movement. 

The rise in voucher pushes in legislatures means a rise in talk about microschools to plug the hole in voucher policy, and that's why some folks are trying to give them their fifteen minutes. I'm not convinced that isn't about fourteen minutes more than they deserve.