Let's Have Education Choice: Part II (How To)

Could we have educational choice? Could we create a system in which students and families could find a best fit? And could we do it based on principles that, unlike modern school choicer ideals, honored the principles of a public school system for all? 

In Part I I took a look at the premises that we could follow (and which differ in important ways from the premises of modern school reform). Now let's consider how we could do it.

Schools within schools 

The easiest way to do education choice is under one roof. Choice under one roof in particular lowers student switching costs to pretty much nothing. It's hugely disruptive for students to switch schools entirely, with big costs socially and emotionally. New routines, new friends, new sets of rules. But in even the most traditional of schools, students can switch from a college-bound class to a vocational track class with just some paperwork and a schedule change.

Schools within schools have been done. New York City did teacher-led schools within schools in the 1970s (read about it in Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars), and that was accomplished in a time when nobody knew anything about how a charter school or a school within another school could work.

Besides making education choice easier for students, it helps manage costs by allowing the sharing of resources, from cafeterias to special area teachers. And it allows the schools to have different emphasis and cultures. Like many serious education programs, it requires leadership with vision and a willingness to trust the separate school within the school. I expect that many administrators, like the folks who sunk the program in NYC, would have a hard time resisting the urge to control the school within the school more tightly.

Schools within districts

Oh, heck. An education choice system could have charter schools in it, but--. District owned and operated. Led by actual educators. In their own space. Accountable to the elected representatives of the taxpayers. Not run for profit, either directly or indirectly. 

The classic refrain was that operation of schools had to be taken away from the districts because they were failing so terribly. But after twenty years, and every conceivable configuration tried, we know that charter schools don't generally do any better than traditional public schools, and in many cases quite worse. When they do get better results, it's not because of any special miracle sauce, but because they can select families, add extra requirements, or focus on test scores. Turns out that visionary businesspersons and wealthy edu-preneurs don't know any special secrets about education that are denied to educators.

This model would also allow for specialty schools similar to the magnet schools used in some districts. "But those schools don't take all students," choicers say. "How is that not just what you complain about with current charter and voucher schools." The difference is the district level. When a charter or voucher school washes their hands of a student, it's the same effect as a district tossing that student. It says, "Get out. Finding a school that will educate you is now your responsibility." But if Pat is rejected by the East Egg district's Basket Weaving Academy, the district's position is "We don't think the basket weaving academy is the right fit for you, but we recognize that we still have an obligation to provide you with a decent education somewhere somehow."

Somehow, the original vision for charter schools--teacher led, district accountable, innovative--was immediately replaced with the notion that charter schools should be privately owned and operated, and we've rarely stopped to question it since. But we could have charter schools within districts, with none of the fraud, scammage, instability and shenanigans that have marked charters over the past few decades.

Co-operative schools

Here is my smallish, ruralish county, we have offered a school choice for those who want to pursue a vocation. Nowadays we call these programs CTE, but 60-some years ago the school was set up as a Vocational-Technical School. It's a school where students can learn welding, automotive trades, building trades, food prep, home health care, and some other options. The choice is available to students at any of the several districts that run the school.

Structurally, the CTE school has its own board, which is composed of representatives of the elected school boards of the sending districts. It is an extension of those public districts while still being operationally autonomous. Students attend for a half day and spend the other half day at their "home" school for core subjects. Some seniors spend all or part of the half day in work study programs, a sort of internship. 

Programs are sometimes shifted in response to regional employment shift, and many of the instructors are experienced professionals in the fields in which they teach. 

It's a choice that's available to all students, and it doesn't require some sort of private ownership and operation to function. The existing traditional public schools have run this education choice program for over sixty years. Given demand, interest and commitment, there's no reason the model couldn't be used for schools with other sorts of emphasis. Simply have districts work across district lines.

The problem of district boundaries

School segregation creates a host of problems, not the least of which is that the segregation of students is usually accompanied by the segregation of resources. Public education has a history of not dealing with this well, but the modern choice movement hasn't done any better. Since the days of post-Brown segregation academies, some folks have seen school choice as a useful tool for segregation. And segregation academies demonstrated a one-two punch-- first get all the white kids out of public school, and then defund the public schools. 

Today, we also have gerrymandered districts, created by a variety of mechanisms (including district secession). Education, like every other societal program in our history, butts up against folks who just don't want to spend their own money to take care of Those People. Attempts to blur those district lines are routinely met with concerns about "lowering standards" and "student safety" and a dozen other ways to say "we don't want Those Peoples' Children" mixed in with our own. 

This is, and has always been, one of the major obstacles to education choice. Because there is always an element of "My choice for my child's education is to make sure that your child does not have the choice of being educated with my child." That's a hard thing to structure your way past; doubly hard because there is no structural version of education we can create that the wealthy can't use money to escape.

This is perhaps the single biggest obstacle to education choice, and I don't know how to absolutely conquer it. When choicers complain about how tying school funding to real estate locks in an economic and class element, they are not wrong.

So what could we do?

We completely eradicate the connections between local real estate and funding by using a different funding stream or by doing funding 100% on the state level. But there's no funding stream that eliminates a connection to wealth, and giving all the purse strings to the state seems like a recipe for all sorts of disaster. 

We could fatten the revenue stream, by using sales tax or some other revenue generation tool to fund schools on top of local real estate, thereby making up the shortfall that poor districts face. In other words, we could address the segregation of resources directly. This will push all the buttons for the folks who say "Don't take my money to go spend on Those People." But a part of the solution has got to be creating schools that people don't want or need to "escape." 

We can render district boundaries porous and easily crossed instead of jealously guarded. That doesn't mean we require a school to accept infinite incoming transfers, but it does mean that no schools in this larger education choice ecosystem get to put unrelated restrictions on transfers. And we can stop allowing small privileged neighborhoods to "secede" from their district. We could even redraw district maps on the state level to un-gerrymander them. And then, with a collection of shared co-op specialty schools, schools within schools, schools within districts, and an ability to cross district lines--all managed by the public school districts instead of some patchwork mess of public and private operators and concerns--we could do better. 

Accept there will be limitations

Not every desire for education choice can be met. You can't have a school that caters to the one family that wants a basket-weaving-centered school that is built for left-handed students and runs onlyu by consensus with a strong devotion to classical values. Not every school can be brought up to the level of resources enjoyed by the schools of the wealthy, because they will always have money to spend over and above whatever the system provides. And local control and ownership in the form of an elected school board will always have limitations because school boards are nuts. 

I'm a huge fan of local control, but local control comes with some real risks. Thing is-- I don't believe a giant mountain of rule-making on the state or federal level works. There needs to be oversight, especially of areas such as civil rights. But creating laws that try to govern, say, reading curriculum on the state is a bad idea. I don't care what instructional approach you're talking about--mandating it is a mistake.

So I'm not pretending that my rough model points the way to a perfect future that solves all the education choice issues. But neither free market-driven school choice nor burn-it-down and capture the ashes for God culture warfare move us one step closer to a better direction, and they do a lot of damage in the bargain. 

The Three Stumbling Blocks

There are three fundamental issues that stand in the way of choice.

One, people don't want to pay for it. The cheapest, most efficient version of education is not one with multiple schools. 

Two, some people are committed to a model of "I get my choice, and Those People do not." 

Three, some people are highly opposed to paying for an education for Those Peoples' Children.

Those will always stand in the way of real education choice. 

But it is possible to have real education choice in a public education system (in fact, in large and small ways, some places already have it). But we have to start from a better set of premises, and be deliberate about facing the stumbling blocks. It's not as sexy or shiny or profitable as market-based choice, but I'd bet it would do a better job of delivering education to all children in the country. 

ICYMI: Outdoor Overture Edition (10/22)

Today I appear in concert with the local orchestra, subbing in for the trombonist who is also the piano player who is also the piano player for the orchestra. My high school band director always told us that playing leads to more playing, so don't trap yourself in a little box, and that has been good advice forever. But that's just the tip of the time-eating iceberg this week, so the list is not as hefty as some. But still some worthwhile reads from the week. Remember to share them on whatever social medium you're using these days.

M4L Continues to Post Misleading Information

Add the Moms to the list of people who misuse NAEP results. Bookmark this post from Sue Kingery Woltanski, who provides the links to some of the now-standard debunking of the now-usual baloney about NAEP proficiency (no, it's not the same as on grade level)

Having chaplains in schools is bad for students. Leave mental health care to professionals.

From USA Today, some mor folks who want to point out that the Texas plan to put chaplains in school (and amateur, untrained ones at that) is a dumb plan.

Plumbers are training as substitute teachers so full time teachers can protest a bill

Meanwhile in Texas, help from an unexpected source for teachers pushing back against Abbott's voucher plan. From All Things Considered on NPR

HB 1422 Cyber Charter Reform – A Bipartisan Call to Get it Done

A Democrat and Republican agree-- cyber charter is long overdue in PA.

Scholastic's "bigot button"

Judd Legum at Popular Information looks at Scholastic's gift to bigots--with just one touch, they can get rid of book fair books about non-white non-straight persons.

As Texas lawmakers consider school vouchers, does spending public dollars on private education work?

Spoiler alert: No. Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle breaks it down.

Band Director Quits and Other Evidence of Pandemic Aftermath

Nancy Flanagan with a sweet-yet-scary story from West Virginia

Where’s Evidence from The Reading League’s Corporate Sponsors?

Look at all these sponsors for Science of Reading stuff! Do any of them have evidence that their stuff works? Nancy Bailey takes a look.

The Number of School Apps To Keep Track of Will Be the Death of Me

At Parents, Melissa Willets has so many feelings about the barrage of techno-assistance that schools throw at parents (and teachers).

On Philly trip, U.S. education secretary assails vouchers like those backed by Shapiro

Miguel Cardona says some harsh words about the vouchers that some folks are still trying to pass in Pennsylvania. Good for him. In Chalkbeat.

One More Time Around the Mulberry Bush

TC Weber once again with lessons from Tennessee in how the players can change, but the games (and the players behind the players) remain the same.

It’s Time to Watch for the Next Step in Ohio State Board of Education Lawsuit

Jan Resseger has been following this Ohio business, which seems very wonky, but is all about the anti-public ed folks trying to consolidate power.

Reproductive rights advocates: You can’t trust Carolyn Carluccio

This is mainly for folks in PA, where a supreme court election involves a candidate who is trying to hide her very anti-abortion agenda. It's an object lesson for everyone, but a ringing alarm bell for Pennsylvanians in the next election.

Meanwhile, at Forbes I break down the latest chapter in the continuing GOP-on-GOP battle over the nation's first religious charter school. At the Bucks County Beacon, a deep dive on the plans of the Hillsdale-trained amateur who's rewriting their curriculum. 

Also, substack me!

Let's Have Education Choice: Part I (Premises)

Here's the thing that you might not expect from me-- I like the idea of choice in education. A big part of my opposition to Common Core grew out of my belief that one size never fits all in education. I also completely get the idea that parents will sometimes wish that they had another choice for their children. 

I even agree that there's a certain inevitability to school choice. Since the first walkman was manufactured, since cable tv first exploded, we have been splintering into a culture where fewer experiences are shared and more are selected. I think this shift creates some real problems, but that toothpaste is not going back in the tube, and it seems unsurprising that people who have become used to personally curating most aspects of their life experience would want to extend that power to other aspects, including education.

So why am I constant critic of the modern school choice movement? 

Because, I think virtually everything about the actual modern school choice movement is not aimed at actual choice in education. Some of it is simply the counterproductive result of bad premises, and the rest is just a smokescreen for the goal of dismantling public education entirely.

So if we truly wanted to have choice in education (which is really what we want--"school choice" is itself a loaded misnomer), how could we do that?

The foundation of modern school choice is a set of faulty premises. Can we build something on a better foundation?

I'm going to tackle this in two parts. First, let's consider the premises on which we could build a program that serves students, families, and society as a whole. It's at the premise level that choicers and I part ways, so we need to sort that out first.

No Free Market

I think the free market is swell. I'm a fan. But the free market is incompatible with public education.

The free market is a perfect mechanism for sorting; it selects winners and losers both among sellers and buyers, and sometimes it takes years to do it. 

The goals of public education is not sorting students and schools into winners and losers; it is to equip every student to--well, I'm not even sure what "win" means in an education context, but the idea is to help each student become his or her best self, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world, to give them the tools for a satisfying and productive life. 

Making schools and students compete for resources simply ensures (and excuses) that some will not have the resources they need. That is incompatible with public education.

Likewise, making education a marketplace commodity does not serve students. As we see with healthcare and with some of the for profit edu-businesses out there, commodifying education means that the interests of the business owners are directly in conflict with the interests of the people the business is supposed to be serving. 

The modern school choice movement has pulled off a neat slight-of-hand trick by treating the marriage of school choice and free marketeering is a done deal, not even up for discussion. If we are serious about education choice and quality for all students, the free market does not belong in the picture.

Public ownership and operation

This goes hand in hand with the previous point, but it needs to be said. Public schools should be publicly owned and operated. The school, both the building and the bulk of its contents, should belong to the taxpayers, and that school should be overseen by and accountable to elected representatives of the taxpayers. 

Is that system perfect? Not at all. It's in many ways the worst possible system, except for all the others. 

No religious education

Public tax dollars should not be used to support religious indoctrination. Period.

For one thing, the wall between church and state protects both sides. Once taxpayers are footing the bill for education, it's a short step to government deciding which religion deserves which pile of taxpayer money.

The absence of religion in a school setting is not equivalent to pushing some sort of atheist agenda. The fact that your folks are not trying to fix you up with a date does not mean they are pushing you not to date anyone at all. 

Total cost

Another false premise of modern school choice is the notion that it can all be done for the same cost as the current public school system. This is a silly idea.

Multiple schools increase costs. No school district (or business) facing a budget crunch ever said, "Our best strategy here is to open more schools." Multiple schools mean duplication of services, administration, etc. You cannot run several parallel districts for the same money that you used for one (doubly true in all districts where the one district is already underfunded). 

A choice system needs excess capacity. Otherwise, every student would be locked in place until a number of students with complementary shifts could all be organized to shift at once. The excess capacity need not be infinite (and therefor infinitely expensive). But there has to be enough slack in the system that students can move. 

Those capacity questions will be hard to navigate. If a district is committed to providing a particular choice, how much are they willing to spend to keep the choice available even if a low number of students are selecting it? That's never going to be an easy call.

Serving all students

The system must serve all students, with certain rare exceptions for extreme situations. That doesn't mean that all education options must be open to all students. But no school district should be able to say, as charter and voucher schools do now, that a particular student is not welcome and not their problem. 

Vouchers don't just privatize the work of providing education, but the privatize the responsibility for providing it. There have always been a hefty number of folks in this country who really dislike the idea of paying for Those Peoples' Children's education (or housing or health care or food). Vouchers are the wealthy's way of saying to Those People, "Here's a couple of grand--now go get your own education and don't bug me about it again." 

Modern school choice at its most severe calls for a shift in the basic philosophy of public education, turning it from a public good and shared societal responsibility into a private good and personal responsibility. It becomes a commodity that some people can afford and some people can't. Perhaps a voucher combined with pop-up schools or computer-fed microschools allows folks to get a bare minimum, or maybe they just wrack up the same kind of debt we now associate with college. 

Our current promise of a good education for every child in this country has been imperfectly realized, but at least it exists. Many modern school choicers would erase it entirely. I don't accept that premise.

So, if we accept all those premises, can we have education choice? That's what I'll try to answer in Part II. 

OK: State Issued Prayer And True Threats To The Church

Oklahoma continues it unsubtle slide into theocracy, with this memo from State Superintendent Ryan Walters issues this week:

It recommends a moment for students this week, and offers a "sample prayer" for them to pray during that moment. Some educators are pretty cranked up about this, as well they might be. There are many reasons to be bothered by this memo. I'm going to focus on just one.

Walters also issues a warning to districts this week that he'd damned well better not hear about any school that folds to pressure (in this case, from some unnamed "secular organization" in Wisconsin. The group, he charges, is opposed to the Constitution and is pushing "state-sponsored atheism." also, Walter says, "I feel pity for these woke, elitist lawyers who have decided that there is no greater calling in life than to make sure teachers aren't practicing their Faith." 

I have to observe, once again, that this guy once taught history. You'd think he would know better. 

I would also think that he's smart enough to know that "this school will not promote a single religious view" is not remotely the same as "this school suggests you become an atheist."

The implication here (and many other Walters pronouncements) is that instead of state-sponsored atheism, we should have state-sponsored Christianity. 

Which is a terrible idea.

For Christianity.

Seriously. At least the voters of Oklahoma elected Walters as chief education honcho. But nobody at all elected him a religious authority. Nobody gave him the authority to craft prayers for all the children in Oklahoma. 

The folks who crafted a wall between church and state did so not just to protect the state from the church, but to protect the church from the state, at least back to Henry VIII declaring, "I'm now the head of the church and I'll be telling you what God wants you to do." When you mix religion and politics, you get politics. When you make politicians the voice of the church, you get political pronouncements cloaked in religious garments.

We get led back to this time and again by Worshippers of the Tiny God. Their conception of God is of something small and weak. If God is not being explicitly promoted by humans in particular settings, their reasoning goes, then human beings will become atheists or humanists or maybe even something worse. If institutions leave an empty space where religion can go, so that folks may fill that space in according to their own faith, Worshippers of the Tiny God see atheism, because their conception of God is so small and weak it can not overcome silence. 

It is a special kind of theocratic hubris-- "God is great and powerful, but God cannot work in this world without Me to do the heavy lifting. God needs my protection, because otherwise these other humans would somehow chain God into silence and ineffectualness. Good thing I'm here to make this part of the world safe for God."

Walters, and other like him, who claim to be preserving some sort of American tradition, are doing the opposite. 

Imagine it's Sunday morning. You're in church, and during the service a local politician, an official with political authority, gets up and announces, "I have written the prayer for you to use today, and every Sunday." 

Imagine it's a Wednesday morning, and your child is called into a school assembly, where an elected official announces, "I have brought an official prayer for all of you students to recite today."

Does that feel like religious liberty? Does that feel like citizens being allowed the freedom to worship as they choose? 

You cannot put the weight of the state behind religious worship without also giving the state some say over what form that religious worship will take. People who want to put prayer into public school are advocating a choice that is not just bad for schools, but bad for the church as well. They should be among the loudest voices telling Ryan Walters to knock it off. God does not need nor benefit from Walters self-aggrandizing "help."

ICYMI: Bad Week For The World Edition (10/15)

As social media continues to demonstrate its brokenness, I encourage you to be hugely cautious about what you repost, amplify, or just plain believe. It's a bad time for fraud and fakery. Currently I'm testing the waters at Bluesky and Threads (I gave up on spoutible) and I'll be happy to see you there. It's just hard to spread the word these days, and there is so much word to be spread. Here's some reading from the past week.

Moms for Liberty: Where are they, and are they winning?

A bunch of people at Brokings did a truckload of data crunching to generate a picture of where M4L is busy, and how they're doing. Very worthwhile read.

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

Justin Parmenter reports on one attempt to ban some books, and how it was handled by the district.

Tennessee charter school commission takes marching orders from Lee in privatizing schools

In Tennessee, one more tool the governor uses to push charter schools over local objections.

Charter CEOs Collecting High Salaries, Benefits and Bonuses

Great piece that includes a breakdown of charter CEO salaries in Philly area (including how many students they are actually working with). So much for the whole "choice will save money because public schools spend too much money on administrators" argument.

Texas Took Over Its Largest School District, but Has Let Underperforming Charter Networks Expand

In Texas, public schools that underperform must be taken over, but charters are free to stink as much as they want to. From ProPublica

Charles Koch's audacious new $5 billion political scheme

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria at Popular Information. When you're really rich, you can order up your own tax loopholes, and then use them. Makes it easier to keep pushing the privatization of public ed.

Nonprofit near Kansas City seeks to become ‘epicenter of the school-choice movement’

Annelise Hanshaw at the Missouri Independent writes about Stanley Herzog, one more rich guy who wants to retool the US, including expanding "Christ-centered K-12 education."

Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn’t go as planned.

Matt Barnum has moved on from Chalkbeat; he's taking a job as an ed reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I'll miss him, and I'll hope that he brings a little more quality to that operation. In the meantime, here's one of his last pieces, looking at the tale of Zuck's attempt to fix education, and how it didn't work.

A transgender student, her crusading mom — and an English teacher caught in the middle

"A teacher turned my child trans" says a parent. Not the story at all, says the child, the child's father, and the teacher. This is a gut punch of a story from a pair of reporters for NBC News, thoroughly reported.

Moms for Liberty meets its match: Parents in this swing suburban district are fighting back

Amanda Marcotte at Salon does a great job of pulling together the full story of the attempt by MAGA Moms to commandeer Pennridge Schools, and how that has energized an opposing group.

The Mystery of Ryan Walters: How a Beloved History Teacher Became Oklahoma’s Culture-Warrior-in-Chief

Linda Jacobson at The 74 digs into the mystery of how Ryan Walters transformed from a respected history teacher into Oklahoma's performative MAGA dudebro of education. 

Substitute teachers are in short supply, but many schools still don't pay them a living wage

Somebody at CBS noticed that there's a sub shortage, and they put Aubrey Gelpieryn on the story. 

Sylvia Allegretto Documents Large and Persistent Teacher Pay Penalty

Jan Resseger looks at the annual report on the teacher pay penalty, the amount of money teachers could have earned if they had used their college education in other fields.

Why what looked like good news for charter schools actually wasn’t

Last summer CREDO cranked out a report that "proved" that charter schools get better results than public schools. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post has put together all the pieces that show how those conclusions were not really accurate.

Testing for Perpetual Education Crisis

Speaking of unwarranted conclusions, Paul Thomas writes about the latest round of chicken littling over ACT scores.

Whatever Happened to School Dress Codes?

Larry Cuban takes a look at the world of dress codes, including some lowlights from, a GAO study.

A Shameful History, Part 3

Jess Piper's series on teaching the hard history looks at the lynching of Raymond Gunn. 

Of Clear Eyes and Pure Hearts

Tennessee is going to revamp its school evaluation system. TC Weber is skeptical.

Has F.A.S.T. Testing Lived Up to Its Promises

You may recall that Florida was going to fix the problems of time-consuming high stakes testing by using a new system, with more testing. How has this been working out? Sue Kingery Woltanski has the unsurprising results.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in My School Orchestra

John Bohlinger in Premier Guitar. He could just as easily have said band, but the idea is sound.

At Forbes, I wrote about the successful attempt in Nebraska to make the government put vouchers to a vote. 

Join me on substack. It's free!

Dear Voters: Please Pay Attention

It's an off year, with mostly just boring things like school board seats and judgeships up for election. Maybe some local municipal stuff. All really dull. 

I am begging you. Please pay attention.

Over the past couple of years, I have ploughed through story after story about local school boards that had acquired a new ultra-conservative majority that proceeded to do everything from firing superintendents and central office staff to creating new policy to rooting out imaginary CRT and various Naughty Books to going after the budget with a meataxe. 

These actions are often followed by community outcry, sometimes productive but often to no avail. And  they all tell a similar story about how things got to this point. 

People weren't paying attention. People just kind of slept through the board election. People didn't bother to vote because they assumed the usual reasonable people would win in a walk. 

People tend to imagine that who actually sits on the school board doesn't matter that much. Unless there's some pressing local issue like bus stops, sports uniforms, or a teacher contract under negotiation, folks assume that board members fungible, that they can be swapped out without much effect on anything. Heck, in regions like mine, it's not unusual to have too few people running to fill all the seats, which really helps reinforce a habit of ignoring board elections.

If there's anything to be learned in the last decade, it's that elections have consequences. 

When it comes to school boards (and courts), there are a whole bunch of folks who are involved in a concerted, and often well-funded effort to commandeer these positions (whatever "well-funded" means in your neck of the woods). There are christianists who want to insert their religion into the public sphere. There are MAGA members who want to gut the curriculam and replace it with their own. There are culture warriors who want to tear up the rules by which your district operates and create their own. There are dominionists who want to take back schools. There are people who want to root out "indoctrination" (aka "making students aware of anything these folks disagree with") and replace it with "proper thinking" (aka "making sure students are led to believe what these right-thinking folks believe"). 

What's more, at this point many of these folks understand that saying out loud that they are, say, Moms For Liberty endorsed or running specifically to get their personal faith made school policy--that might not be a winning campaign, and it might be best to keep the quiet part quiet. At least until after you've won. And when it comes to judgeships--well, in Pennsylvania we have Carolun Carluccio running for State Supreme Court, heavily financed by Jeff Yass and carefully scrubbing her materials of reference to her strong anti-abortion stance.

If you assume that how (or if) you vote on a school board election (or judge) election doesn't really matter, I am here to tell you that you are deeply and truly wrong. It may take some legwork and study to figure out who's who (and if you have done that work, please share it), but it is far easier to do this kind of work before elections than it is to try to protect your school district from duly-elected vandals. 

If far out there candidates are elected because a community knows what they stand for and elects them, that's one thing. But when radicals are elected because the community is napping, that's a big mastake with serious consequences.

Please pay attention. 

TX: How Bad Is The Newest Voucher Proposal

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is finding democracy a huge pain in the butt these days. Democratically elected legislators will not let him have his way, so he has called the legislature back once again to consider his dream of education savings account vouchers, or else. He has threatened to primary rural GOP House members who (once again) thwart him. He is holding teacher pay hostage unless he gets his way. He is not, it should be noted, taking his voucher proposal to the voting public (because the voting public has never approved a voucher program).

In short, he is pulling every lever of power he has at his command in order to circumvent any sort of democratic process.

That's an appropriate tactic for installing vouchers, which themselves short-circuit democratic processes. Vouchers disenfranchise taxpayers with no school age children; in voucher world they get no say in how their education tax dollars are spent. Vouchers cut local elected school boards out of the funding (or defunding process). 

And despite all the talk about education freedom for families, vouchers create a system in which schools--not families--get to choose who has access to the best education. 

When we look into SB 1, the latest voucher proposal that has already sailed past the state senate to the rocky waters of the house, where Texas voucher bills go to die, we find most of the usual stuff. A little more auditing of parents than some bills, but no real oversight or accountability for "education service providers," who require no serious vetting to get on the pre-approved vendors' list.

Modern voucher bills routinely include a hands off clause, a promise that they will be allowed to conduct business as they wish, with no interference by the state. Don't want the state bringing up pesky issues of discrimination or teaching that dinosaurs and humans strolled the earth together about 4,000 years ago.

SB 1 includes hands off language, and very specific language at that. Starting out with the usual language about how accepting voucher money does not make the recipients state actors (a phrase that has caused some legal choice trouble in the past). Then, under Sec. 29.368, we get very clear:

A rule adopted or other governmental action taken related to the program may not impose requirements that are contrary to or limit the religious or institutional values or practices of an education service provider, vendor of educational products, or program participant, including by limiting the ability of the provider, vendor, or participant, as applicable, to:

(1) determine the methods of instruction or curriculum used to educate students;

(2) determine admissions and enrollment practices, policies, and standards;

(3) modify or refuse to modify the provider’s, vendor’s, or participant’s religious or institutional values or practices, including operations, conduct, policies, standards, assessments, or employment practices that are based on the provider’s, vendor’s, or participant’s religious or institutional values or practices; or

(4) exercise the provider’s, vendor’s, or participant’s religious or institutional practices as determined by the provider, vendor, or participant

Note in particular item 2-- nobody can tell the private school how to decide which students to take, or not. Religion, behavior, grades, hair style, family background, basically any damn thing that the school wants to offer as a reason not to accept a particular student is untouchable by the state. And I'm pretty sure that they could get around any pesky federal rules about race. 

For the moment, let's look past the issue here of quality, of a law that would require taxpayers to support a school that does a lousy job, that discriminates in ways that most Americans would find odious, that is a transparently crappy school that taxpayers have no say in funding. Oh, and that requires students with special needs jettison their rights at the schoolhouse door.

Let's look past all that at the central pitch of the fans of SB 1. 

From Mandy Drogin the head of the Texas branch of Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children lobbying group, lobbyist, and previous Heritage Foundation event planner:

With today’s announcement, Governor Abbott has made clear that Texas will prioritize student-centered educational policies that ensure that money will follow the student to any school their parents choose – this includes high-quality public schools, public charter schools, private schools, and more.

Except, no, it won't. It will prioritize private-school-centered policies which will allow private schools to pick and choose, as they wish, from among the applicants (who may or may not be able to afford the gap between their voucher amount and private school tuition). It will prioritize private-school-centered policies that allow taxpayer subsidies for students who were already in private schools.

If these people were serious about school choice, they would address the real barriers to getting students into their choice school--cost and discrimination. But they won't. 

By allowing taxpayer subsidies to go to students who were already in private schools (aka could already afford it), SB 1 funnels dollars collected from low-wealth taxpayers to subsidize wealthy families, even as it empowers private schools to refuse to admit any of Those Peoples' Children. 

It's bad policy. Here's hoping the state house once again holds the line, no matter how hard Abbott tries to twist their arms.