Charter School Real Estate Profits

In the movie The Founder, future business giant Ray Kroc gets a piece of advice from financial consultant Harry Sonneborn about his fledgling McDonalds chain-- "You're not in the hamburger business; you're in the real estate business." And that does, in fact, turn out to be a secret of Kroc's success.

A new paper from In The Public Interest shows how many charter school operators have learned the same lesson. 

The purchase, development, and financing of facilities for charter schools has become a lucrative industry, buoyed by public financing and the preferential credit lines and interest rates that come from the semi-public status of charter schools.

Today, while public messaging may tout the alleged popularity of charter schools and supposedly long waiting lists for charter seats, many believe that the profitability of the market—not parent demand—is driving charter school growth.

We've seen many times over the years how it's the real estate aspect of the business that attracts some folks to charter school world. Carl Paladino of Bufalo ran a property development company who favored a technique of grabbing charter school properties and then either flipping them back to the operators or making "leaseback" deals. Paladino most notably got himself on the Buffalo School Board where he could promote charter schools further. 

Paladino's interest in charter schools is not in dispute-- not even by him. On the question of making money from working with charters, the Buffalo City News quotes him: "If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot."

The charter school real estate biz is a whole niche, and it turns out there is a such a thing as "charter school niche brokers" who specialize in "helping charter schools find and acquire buildings."

The real estate returns are attractive enough that investors remain a large part of the charter school sector. If you're seeing a proliferation of charter schools in your area even though there seems to be no educational demand for them, you're likely seeing a push by real estate investors who can make a few bucks off of charter real estate deals, whether or not anyone actually gets educated.

Charter operators could watch wheeler-dealers like Paladino or specialty brokers walk off with a bunch of their money, or they could take the next step of just getting into the real estate business themselves. And as ITPI's report shows, that's exactly what many have done. 

Some charter operators grow a hefty real estate wing. Take the 800-pound gorilla of Pennsylvania cyber schools:

Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) is the biggest cyber charter in Pennsylvania. Launched in 2003, they have also become big property owners and landlords in Pennsylvania.

Back in 2016, CCA bought the former PA State Employee Credit Union headquarters in Harrisburg for $5 million, to replace several leased offices. They planned to use about 90,000 square feet for a headquarters. That’s about half the space in the building. In 2020, they spent $15.3 million to acquire a 106,000 square foot office building in Malvern (the former headquarters of Ricoh USA), and did so with the help of a company that claims to have “developed deep expertise” in working charter school real estate deals. 

In 2021, they bought out one of their landlords. The Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead had originally housed a Macy’s, which was purchased and turned into office space. CCA was one of the tenants, then bought the 140,000 square feet of office space, using almost half the space themselves, and leasing out the rest. 

Said Commonwealth Charter Academy CEO Thomas Longenecker, “During the last few years, we’ve created a complete business ecosystem at The Waterfront. This strategic purchase was the natural step as we continue to expand our operations.”

But CCA hasn't really tapped the full potential of charter school real estate profiteering. Charter Management Organizations (CMO) often operate in a rules-free zone, allowing lucrative self-dealing. 

National Heritage Academies would be one example of how this works. NHA operates 100 schools in nine states, including Ohio, where NHA leases their buildings from Charter Development Company (CDC)--which is a subsidiary of NHA. Ohio's auditor found that NHA was paying (and collecting from itself) some of the highest lease rates in the state. 

Two things to remember in every example of this sort-- every dollar paid (to themselves) for rent is a dollar not spent on educating children, and every dollar was handed over by taxpayers.

Related party transactions can be absolutely mind-boggling, in a "that can't possibly be legal" kind of boggle. Take this example for the ITPI report:

Alim Ansari owned a 3-acre piece of land in Weslaco, Texas that includes a house and a school building. Ansari is the superintendent of that school—Horizon Montessori Public (charter) school, along with three other charters in the area. The superintendent lived in the house, and leased the building to the school, collecting $168,000 a year in rent in 2020. In 2022, he sold the property for $1.9 million to South Texas Educational Technologies for more than twice its appraised value. South Texas Educational Technologies is a charter management organization that now holds almost $13 million in land/property assets and pays its chief executive officer—Alim Ansari—a comfortable six-figure salary (along with, apparently, free housing).

And while it may make sense that someone who opens a charter school might want to take on the job of building it, smell detectors go off when that turns out to be extraordinarily lucrative. Check this account from Craig Harris at the Arizona Republic:

Glenn Way, charter operator, was in debt, seeking bankruptcy, and resigned the Utah legislature after his wife filed a protective order against him. So Arizona, with a well-funded but barely-regulated charter industry seemed like the place for a fresh start. Way launched the American Leadership Academy, soaked in moral wholesomeness. Way's development and finance companies bought the land and built schools, then leased Way's properties to Way's schools. And it worked out just great. Way's companies handed money back and forth and pocketed about $37 million on real estate deals.

Again-- that's #37 million in taxpayer dollars intended for educating students that was not used for educating students.

There is one other way these shenanigans make off with taxpayer dollars. When charter schools close (as so many of them do), who gets the assets?  An example from ITPI's report

In seeking to discontinue their management contracts in 2010, the governing boards of ten Cleveland charter schools managed by White Hat Management filed suit when White Hat refused to provide in-depth financial records showing how the schools’ public dollars had been spent. White Hat’s agreement with the schools required them to turn over 95 or 96 percent of their public funding to White Hat, and stated that, should the schools close or not renew their contract, all the property associated with the school, including facilities, computers, textbooks, and furniture, belonged to White Hat. The schools lost that suit, with the Court ruling that the contract, as written, was enforceable.

Taxpayers can end up paying for the same building multiple times. First, the taxpayers pay for the school district to build it. Then they pay for the charter operator to buy it from the school district. Then, in cases like the White Hat fiasco, they end up not owning the building at all, as the CMO, or some CMO real estate subsidiary, walks off with the building when the charter fails. In the worst of situations, this means that CMOs actually win whether then charter school succeeds or not. 

The ultimate problem with charters getting into the real estate business is that it exacerbates a fundamental flaw of the "run schools like a business" approach of free market based school choice-- if a school is a business, then its interests conflict with the interests of students. Every dollar spent educating students is a dollar not spent enriching the business and its owners, and vice versa. The argument that the free market will punish the business for not spending enough on students is not really valid; in a free market, the challenge for an education-flavored business is not how to provide the very best education for students, but how to find the bare minimum they can get away with and still make a profit. Maximizing profit means minimizing service provided.

That tension is present in all free marketeering of education. But when the most attractive driver of profit is not even the service, but the building the service is housed in, it just makes matters worse.

Read the ITPI report (it's a brisk 8 pages) including recommendations on how to fix some of this. It's worth a look. 

PA: Moms For Liberty Philly Leader A Registered Sex Offender

Back in July, with their big Philadelphia rally coming up, Moms for Liberty still didn't have a functioning Philadelphia chapter. Right now, they're probably wishing that was still the case.

Back then, there was a Facebook group with 45 members (today its up to 121); the administrators were the national group, Pat Blackburn (the national chapter coordinator), and Sheila Armstrong. Armstrong is the woman who shared her personal grief over gun violence at a campaign event with Dr. Oz, without anyone mentioning that she was a paid member of the campaign staff. In April, she launched a new Pennsylvania chapter office of the Black Conservatives Federation. 

So they've been trying hard to find people to lead operations there. And somehow they ended up with Philip Fisher, Jr., a registered sex offender.

Chris Brennan reported the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Fisher is a pastor and (now-ex-) GOP ward leader in Philly "who co-ordinates faith-based outreach for Philadelphia's Moms for Liberty chapter." Fisher is not listed as an administrator on the group's Facebook page.

He said his conviction is the result of a “railroad job” concocted by the political action committee for Lyndon LaRouche, a fringe conspiracy theorist who ran repeatedly for president.

Fisher, who worked for LaRouche’s organization, called it “a cult” and said he was set up while trying to break free.

Brennan also talked to Armstrong, "another Republican ward leader who chairs the local Moms for Liberty chapter;" though the chapter still doesn't have a page on the M4L website, Armstrong is still one of the Facebook page admins. Armstrong says Fisher was a volunteer for the rally, and she was "astounded to hear" about his sex offender status. She might have mentioned that he is also apparently the Head of Communications for Black Conservative Federation for Pennsylvania. She had just run him through the state Department of Human Services for a child abuse history check and it came back negative. DHS told Brennan that "not all criminal convictions involving minors are considered child abuse." 

Fisher is listed on the Megan's Law website. His conviction was in 2012 in Chicago for aggravated sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy when Fisher was 25.

The national M4L organization had not yet offered Brennan a comment. I imagine they have a few choice comments being offered in private. 

I don't bring the story up to condemn them for using a registered sex offender who appears to have kept his status secret from plenty of folks. I just want to note that Philadelphia County is a big place with a lot of people, and yet somehow, even tapped into an organization for Black conservatives, Moms for Liberty can't quite get a local Philly chapter off the ground without this kind of unforced error. There are counties in this state with three and four M4L official leads in their chapter. Not so many grass roots in Philly, apparently. 

VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?

It was a bit of a shock. I picked up my morning paper, and there was an article on the front page touting our school district's PVAAS scores, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania's version of VAM scores, and I was uncomfortably reminded that value-added measures are still a thing. 

Value Added Measures are bunk. 

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM (also known as Something-VAAS in some states) has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

So let's review. Or if you're new-ish to the ed biz, let me introduce you to what lies behind the VAM curtain.

The Basic Idea

Value Added is a concept from the manufacturing and business world. If I take a dollar's worth of sheet metal and turn it into a forty dollar toaster, then I have added thirty-nine dollars of value to the sheet metal. It's an idea that helps businesses figure out if they're really making money on something, or if adding some feature to a product or process is worth the bother. 

Like when you didn't fix the kitchen door before you tried to sell your house because fixing the door would have cost a grand but would allowed you to raise the price of the house a buck and a half. Or how a farmer might decide that putting a little more meat on bovine bones would cost more than you'd make back from selling the slightly fatter cow.

So the whole idea here is that schools are supposed to add value to students, as if students are unmade toasters or unfatted calves, and the school's job is to make them worth more money.

Yikes! Who decided this would be a good thing to do with education?

The Granddaddy of VAAS was William Sanders. Sanders grew up on a dairy farm and went on to earn a PhD in biostatistics and quantitative genetics. He was mostly interested in questions like “If you have a choice of buying Bull A, compared to Bull B, which one is more likely to produce daughters that will give more milk than the other one.” Along with some teaching, Sanders was a longtime statistical consultant for the Institute of Agricultural Research. 

He said that in 1982, while an adjunct professor at a satellite campus of the University of Tennessee, he read an article (written by then-Governor Lamar Alexander) saying that there's no proper way to hold teachers accountable for test scores.

Sure there is, he thought. He was certain he could just tweak the models he used for crunching agricultural statistics and it would work great. He sent the model off to Alexander, but it languished unused until the early 90s, when the next governor pulled it out and called Sanders in, and Educational Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) was on its way.

The other Granddaddy of VAAS is SAS, an analytics company founded in 1976.

Founder James H. Goodnight was born in 1943 in North Carolina. He earned a Masters in statistics; that combined with some programming background landed him a job with a company that built communication stations for the Apollo program. 

He next went to work as a professor at North Carolina State University, where he and some other faculty created Statistical Analysis System for analyzing agricultural data, a project funded mainly by the USDA. Once the first SAS was done and had acquired 100 customers, Goodnight et al left academia and started the company. 

William Sanders also worked a North Carolina University researcher, and it's not clear when, exactly, he teamed up with SAS; his EVAAS system was proprietary, and as the 90s unfolded, that made him a valuable man to go into business with. The VAAS system, rebranded for each state that signed on, became a big deal for SAS, who launched their Education Technologies Division in 1997.

Sanders passed away in 2017. Goodnight has done okay. The man owns two thirds of the company, which is still in the VAAS biz, and he's now worth $7.4 billion-with-a-B. But give him credit, apparently remembering his first crappy job, Goodnight has made SAS one of the world's best places to work-- in fact, it is SAS that influenced the more famously fun-to-work culture of Google. It's a deep slice of irony--he has sustained a corporate culture that emphasizes valuing people as live human beings, not as a bunch of statistics.

Somehow Goodnight has built a little world where people live and work among dancing rainbows and fluffy fairy dust clouds, and they spend their days manufacturing big black rainclouds to send out into the rest of the world.

How does it work?

Explanations are layered in statistics jargon:

Using mixed model equations, TVAAS uses the covariance matrix from this multivariate, longitudinal data set to evaluate the impact of the educational system on student progress in comparison to national norms, with data reports at the district, school, and teacher levels.

Sanders' explanations weren't any better. In 2009, several of us were sent off to get training in how to use PA's version (PVAAS) and among other things, I wrote this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

The basic mathless idea is this. Using sophisticated equations, the computer predicts what Student A would likely score on this year's test in some alternate universe where no school-related factors affected the student's score. Then the computer looks at the score that Actual Student A achieved. If Actual Student and Alternative Universe Student have different scores, the difference, positive or negative, is attributed to the teacher. 

Let me say that again. The computer predicts a student score. If the actual student gets a different score, that is not attributed to, say, a failure on the part of the predictive software. All the blame and/or glory belong to the teacher. 

VAAS fans insist that the model mathematically accounts for factors like socio-economic background and school and other stuff. Here's the explanatory illustration:

Here's a clarification of that illustration:

So how well does it actually work?

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, a leading researcher and scholar in this field, ran a whole blog for years (VAMboozled) that did nothing but bring to light the many ways in which VAM systems were failing, so I'm going to be (sort of) brief here and stick to a handful of illustrations.

Let's ask the teachers.

Clarin Collins, a researcher, college professor and, as of this year, a high school English teacher, had a crazy idea back in 2014--why not ask teachers if they were getting anything of value out of the VAAS?

Short answer: no. 

Long answer. Collins made a list of the various marketing promises made by SAS about VAAS and asked teachers if they agreed or disagreed (they could do so strongly, too). Here's the list:

EVAAS helps create professional goals
EVAAS helps improve instruction
EVAAS will provide incentives for good practices
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very low achieving students
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for students
EVAAS helps increase student learning
EVAAS helps you become a more effective teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to my school
EVAAS reports are simple to use
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to me as a teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to the district
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very high achieving students
EVAAS will identify excellence in teaching or leadership
EVAAS will validly identify and help to remove ineffective teachers
EVAAS will enhance the school environment
EVAAS will enhance working conditions

That's arranged in descending order, starting from the top item, with which over 50% of teachers disagreed. By the time we get to the bottom of the list, the rate of disagreement is almost 80%. At the top of the list, fewer than 20% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed, and it just went downhill from there.

Teachers reported that the data reported was "vague" and "unusable." They complained that their VAAS rating scores whipped up and down from year to year with no rhyme nor reason, with over half finding their VAAS number way different from their principal evaluation. Gifted teachers, because they had the students who had already hit their ceiling, reported low VAAS scores. And while the VAAS magic math is supposed to blunt the impact of having low-ability students in your classroom, it turns out it doesn't really do that. And this: 

Numerous teachers reflected on their own questionable practices. As one English teacher
said, “When I figured out how to teach to the test, the scores went up.” A fifth grade teacher added,
“Anything based on a test can be ‘tricked.’ EVAAS leaves room for me to teach to the test and
appear successful.”

EVAAS also assumes that the test data fed into the system is a valid measure of what it says it measures. That's a generous view of tests like Pennsylvania's Keystone Exam. Massaging bad data with some kind of sophisticated mathiness still just gets you bad data. 

But hey--that's just teachers and maybe they're upset about being evaluated with rigor. What do other authorities have to say?

The Houston Court Case

The Houston school district used EVAAS to not only evaluate teachers, but factor in pay systems as well. So the AFT took them to court. A whole lot of experts in education and evaluation and assessment came to testify, and when all was said and done, here are twelve big things that the assembled experts had to say about EVAAS:

1) Large-scale standardized tests have never been validated for this use. A test is only useful for the purpose for which it is designed. Nobody has designed a test for VAM purposes.

2) When tested against another VAM system, EVAAS produced wildly different results. 

3) EVAAS scores are highly volatile from one year to the next.

4) EVAAS overstates the precision of teachers' estimated impacts on growth. The system pretends to know things it doesn't really know. 

5) Teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) and “highly mobile” students are substantially less likely to demonstrate added value. Again, the students you teach have a big effect on the results that you get.

6) The number of students each teacher teaches (i.e., class size) also biases teachers’ value-added scores.

7) Ceiling effects are certainly an issue. If your students topped out on the last round of tests, you won't be able to get them to grow enough this year.

8) There are major validity issues with “artificial conflation.” (This is the phenomenon in which administrators feel forced to make their observation scores "align" with VAAS scores.) Administrators in Houston were pressured to make sure that their own teacher evaluations confirmed rather than contradicted the magic math.

9) Teaching-to-the-test is of perpetual concern. Because it's a thing that can raise your score, and it's not much like actual teaching. 

10) HISD is not adequately monitoring the EVAAS system. HISD was not even allowed to see or test the secret VAM sauce. Nobody is allowed to know how the magic maths work. Hell, in Pennsylvania, teachers are not even allowed to see the test that their students took. You have to sign a pledge not to peek. So from start to finish, you have no knowledge of where the score came from.

11) EVAAS lacks transparency. See above. 

12) Related, teachers lack opportunities to verify their own scores. Think your score is wrong? Tough.

The experts said that EVAAS was bunk. US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith agreed, saying that "high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms (are)incompatible with... due process" and the proper remedy was to overturn the policy. Houston had to kiss VAAS goodbye.

Anyone else have thoughts?

The National Association of Secondary School Principals issued a statement in 2015 and revisited it in 2019:

At first glance, it would appear reasonable to use VAMs to gauge teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, policymakers have acted on that impression over the consistent objections of researchers who have cautioned against this inappropriate use of VAMs.

The American Education Research Association also cautioned in 2015 against the use of VAM scores for any sort of high stakes teacher evaluation, due to significant technical limitations. They've got a batch of other research links, too. 

The American Statistical Association released a statement in 2014 warning districts away from using VAM to measure teacher effectiveness. VAMs, they say, do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes. Also, VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.

Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.  

They cite the "peer-reviewed study" funded by Gates and published by AERA which stated emphatically that "Value-added performance measures do not reflect the content or quality of teachers' instruction." This study went on to note that VAM doesn't seem to correspond to anything that anybody considers a feature of good teaching.

What if we don't use the data soaked in VAM sauce to make Big Decisions? Can we use it just to make smaller ones? Research into decade-long experiment in using student test scores to "toughen" teacher evaluation and make everyone teach harder and better showed that the experiment was a failure.

Well, that was a decade or so ago. I bet they've done all sorts of things to VAM and VAAS to improve them.

You would lose that bet.

Well, at least they don't use them to evaluate teachers any more, right?

Sorry. 

There's a lot less talk about tying VAM to raises or bonus/merit pay, but the primary innovation is to drape the rhetorical fig leaf of "students growth" over VAM scores. The other response has been to try to water VAAS/VAM measures down with other "multiple measures," an option that was handed to states back in 2015 when ESSA replaced No Child Left Behind as the current version of federal education law.

Pennsylvania has slightly reduced the size of PVAAS influence on teacher and building evaluations in the latest version of evaluation, but it's still in there, both as part of the building evaluation that affects all teacher evaluations and as part of the evaluation for teachers who teach the tested subjects. Pennsylvania also uses the technique of mushing together "three consecutive years of data," a technique that hopes to compensate for the fact that VAAS scores hop around from year to year. 

VAAS/VAM is still out there kicking, still being used as part of a way to evaluate teachers and buildings. And it's still bunk.

But we have to do something to evaluate schools and teachers!

You are taken to the hospital with some sort of serious respiratory problem. One afternoon you wake up suddenly to find some janitors standing over you with a chain saw.

"What the hell!" You holler. "What are you getting ready to do??!!"

"We're going to amputate your legs with a chain saw," they reply.

"Good lord," you holler, trying to be reasonable. "Is there any reason to think that would help with my breathing?"

"Not really," they reply. "Actually, all the medical experts say it's a terrible idea."

"Well, then, don't do it! It's not going to help. It's going to hurt, a lot."

"Well, we've got to do something."

"Not that!"

"Um, well. What if we just take your feet off? I mean, this is what we've come up with, and if you don't have a better idea, then we're just going to go ahead with our chain saw plan." 

VAM is a stark example of education inertia in action. Once we're doing something, somehow the burden of proof is shifted, and nobody has to prove that there's a good reason to do thing, and opponents must prove they have a better idea. Until they do, we just keep firing up the chain saw.

There are better ideas out there (check out the work of Jack Schneider at University of Massachusetts Amherst) but this post is long enough already and honestly, if you're someone who thinks it's so important to reduce teachers' work to a single score, the burden is on you to prove that you've come up with something that is valid, reliable, and non-toxic. A system that depends on the Big Standardized Tests and a mysterious black to show that somehow teachers have made students more valuable is none of those things.

VAM systems have had over a decade to prove its usefulness. They haven't. It's long past time to put them in the ground. 

ICYMI: Light-Up Edition (11/19)

Last night was our light up night here in town, a parade of floats or all shape and size followed by fireworks in the park in the middle of town. It's one of many times during the year at which this place looks like some kind of uber-typical small town. We ride on a truck with the town band playing an assortment of Christmas carols for a huge crowd. Fun times.

Lots to read this week. Remember to share!

Moms for Liberty reports over $2 million in revenue, with bulk of contributions from two donors

Ali Swenson covers this for the Associated Press. Friend of the Institute Maurice Cunningham makes an appearance. And these ordinary everyday totally not astroturf Moms get $1.5 million from two anonymous donors. 

The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore

At the Washington Post, Ruby Cramer takes a deep look into the story of Tania Galinanes, a librarian driven out of her job by Florida's crackdown on books.

How Moms for Liberty and a notorious English teacher exploited a high school student

Judd Legum returns to the story of the Moms for Liberty attempt to get a librarian arrested, and it just keeps getting worse.

Moms for Liberty asks Oklahoma to drop book fair vendor, claiming it’s promoting ‘radical viewpoints, sexual ideologies’

Moms for Liberty has decided to go after Scholastic book fairs in Oklahoma, because books, you know.

Moms for Liberty Cuddles Up to Proud Boys . . . Again

Maurice Cunningham looks at the Moms attempt to claim that they are totally not BFFs with the Proud Boys. Two chapter leaders take the fall, but that hardly scratches the surface.

Moms for Liberty plays the blame game after its big election losses

Ja'Han Jones at MSNBC calls out the Moms for blaming everyone but themselves for their poor election day showing.

“Moms For Liberty Guy” Shows Up at Duval Workshop

They may have lost elections, but they still have friends in high places-- especially in Florida. Sue Kingery Woltanski reports. 

Why a bucolic Tennessee suburb is a hotbed of ‘Christian Nashville-ism’

Bob Smietana travels to Tennessee's Williamson County for the Washington Post. Money quote: "This is some of the most privileged people in the whole United States of America, acting like they’re on the brink of unimaginable persecution."

How Right-Wing Brainchild ‘Universal School Vouchers’ Blow Through State Budgets

Jeff Bryant's latest piece demonstrates how universal vouchers are fiscally irresponsible, blowing up in cost to bust state budgets.

Arizona school vouchers now cover $500 Lego sets? Sweet

Laurie Roberts in the Arizona Republic covers the latest in voucher spending. Not just Legos, but ninja training and ski trips.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott's proposal for school vouchers goes down in defeat

Yep. His latest attempt failed. Again.

These Are The Right-Wing Ideologues Taking Over School Boards

Steven Monacelli at the Texas Observer breaks down some of the connections between the various folks aiming at privatizing Texas education and "capturing" school boards.

State leaders could decide the legal fate of religious charters

Preston Green and Suzanne Eckes break down the legal question behind current charter school debates. Public or private? We may have an answer soon.

The Battle Over Church and State Could Take Down the Charter School Movement

Adam Laats in the New Republic explains how charter fans could rue the day they let religious charters become a thing.

About That Charter School USA Application in St. Tammany Parish

This tale from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider may seem like a local story, but the kind of charter shenanigans on display are worth watching for anywhere.

What House Republicans want to do to public education funding

The short answer is "slash it to the bone." Valerie Strauss has the long answer at the Washington Post.

Trans Boy Returns To Lead Role In 'Oklahoma!' After Outcry At Sherman School Board Meeting

In a pleasant surprise, a Texas school board undid their superintendent's order to can "Oklahoma" and the trans boy who was cast as Ali Hakim. They even offered an apology. Not included in this story-- the super has been removed from supervision of the fine arts program. (At this point nobody has complained that a white kid was cast as a Persian character).

School district increases security after being targeted by hate influencer Chaya Raichik over a joke

Libs of TikTok continues to be a danger of schools and the people in them.

Mark Zuckerberg Got Lost in Terra Mathematica

Dan Meyer with a great piece that's not just about the problems of teaching math, but what's wrong with the whole idea of mastery in learning.

Going for the education jugular

Gabe Hart at Tennessee Lookout explains the classic strategy-- make schools look bad, then aim to privatize.

84% of schools approved as part of Tennessee’s student voucher program are religiously affiliated

Adam Friedman at Tennessee Lookout breaks down the numbers for Tennessee's voucher schools.

New Book Contrasts What Voucher Proponents Promise to the Inequitable Results

Jan Resseger looks into a new book that dissects the school voucher illusion.

Teaching Music in the Digital Age

Nancy Flanagan with some excellent thoughts about teaching music in the digital (or any other) age.

Black teachers are leaving Allegheny County. A new study examines why.

That's in Pennsylvania. You can click through to the full study from Research for Action (a great outfit in PA) but this summary at an NPR station website gives you the highlights. 

Vermont May Be the Face of a Long-Term U.S. Labor Shortage

Wondering why so many states are rolling back child labor laws? This New York Times look at Vermont offers some clues.

Join me on substack and keep up on education stuff. It's free!

PA: District Loses Fight Against After School Satan Club

A little bit north of Bucks County and south of the Poconos lies Northampton County, in which lies the Saucon Valley School District, a district which just agreed to settle up with the Satanic Temple to the tune of $200,001.

I would say that it takes a dumb district to fall into this kind of mess, but on the other side of the state where I live local districts play with this kind of fire all the time. 

Forking over taxpayer dollars and the use of facilities to the After School Satan Club has always been a completely predictable outcome. Yet folks who desperately want to get religion back in school somehow keep thinking that "religion" means "only my religion."

Those folks kicked the door open over twenty years ago with Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

That suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2001. The Good News Club is a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a group founded in 1937 by Jesse Levin Overholtzer with the express purpose of evangelizing children. They claim 109,828 clubs worldwide. In the 90s, a couple decided to establish one of these after-school clubs in Milford, New York, but the school said no based on the stated intent to have "a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson and memorizing scripture." Deeming the club religious instruction (which it totally was) the district said no, and many lower courts agreed. SCOTUS, however, did not. Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy were okey-doke with this (Breyer concurred in part).

And so US school have to provide use of the facilities to after school religious groups.

The Satanic Temple doesn't seem particularly interested in actual Satan worship. But they have adopted a fairly aggressive stance of "well, if you want to play that freedom of religion game, here we come." In their newest enterprise in Texas, they've been arguing hard that abortion is a religious practice of their sect and therefor must be allowed. They are raising money--no kidding-- to fund the Samuel Alito's Mom Satanic Abortion Clinic, which doers in fact help fund abortion services out of New Mexico. 

The after-school Satan Clubs have been launched in a variety of states and schools--specifically schools that opened their doors to The Good News Club. And that includes the Saucon Valley Middle School.

If you read the regular print, it doesn't seem all that scary:

The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religion that views Satan as a literary figure representing a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit. After School Satan Club does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology. Instead, The Satanic Temple supports children thinking for themselves.

They emphasize a "scientific, rationalist, non-superstitious worldview," which I guess does seem at least a bit scary to some folks. But mostly it's that header-- Hey Kids! Let's Have Fun At After School Satan Club-- that really grabs attention. 

In February, the board correctly approved the ASSC request for facilities use. Then someone left a voicemail with the district threatening violence. Then the district canceled after-school activities and a day of school itself. Then the district decided to "review" the ASSC request. Then they denied it because the club had violated a policy against disrupted district activities, including creating a threat against staff and students and anxiety and fear, which of course they hadn't--it was the guy who left the voicemail that did that.

That was a dumb move for many reasons. As Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist points out

The district inadvertently created a playbook for Christian terrorists to follow anytime there was an atheist or Satanic club meeting at a local school. Just call in a threat, mention the non-Christian group as your motivation, and watch the chaos unfold. It was a horrible precedent.

Meanwhile, the phone caller was caught-- it was some dude in North Carolina. The Satanic Temple sued the district, and the judge landed on their side, hard.

Here, although The Satanic Temple, Inc.'s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment's protections must prevail. Indeed, it is the First Amendment that enumerates our freedoms to practice religion and express our viewpoints on religion and all the topics we consider sacred. Though "the First Amendment is often inconvenient" depending on one's perspective or responsibilities, this inconvenience "does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech (Int'l Soc'y for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 1992, Kennedy, J. concurring). "Even in the school setting, a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint is not enough to justify the suppression of speech." Child Evangelism Fellowship of N.J. v. Stafford Twp. Sch. Dist., 3d Cir, 2004)

Would have been nice if someone had thrown those ideas around every time a legislature passed a law against discussing critical race theory, race history stuff, and other divisive concepts.

Judge John M. Gallagher (who is, incidentally, a Trump appointee) cut through the various piddly shenanigans the district had employed to disqualify the After School Satan Club and ordered the district to honor their original resource use agreement and let the club have its on-school-grounds meetings.

That ruling was filed on May 1. 

Since then, a slate of school board candidates ran on a platform of "no more expensive over-dramatic baloney," citing the ASSC lawsuit as one glaring example of how the old majority wasted $1.6 million on unnecessary legal bills. Those Democratic candidates clobbered the incumbent conservatives.

That was last week. Yesterday, a final settlement in the case was announced. The district will not retaliate against any of the folks involved in the suit. The district shall not subject ASSC to any requirements not faced by other clubs (rules about distributing fliers, etc.). 

As for money, the district will pay The Satanic Temple $1 in nominal damages. Their insurance carrier will pay $200,000 to cover TST's legal costs. 

What's next. More After School Satan Clubs, most likely. And if Oklahoma successfully launches the first religious charter school, I expect The Satanic Temple will be right there to apply for a charter, too. 

And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in this country a person will think twice before demanding that religion be put back in schools. 

USED Has A New ABC Dream (But with cool charts)

A recent policy brief from the U.S. Department of Education carries the not-very-poetic title "Eliminating Educator Shortages through Increasing Educator Diversity and Addressing High-need Shortage Areas." It offers much of the same old same, but it includes one feature that makes it a must-bookmark.

What it addresses is rather old news, though it rightfully reminds us that the teacher exodus is not strictly a COVID thing, but an old thing that COVID made worse.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, low wages in the education profession, the high costs of educator preparation, inequitable funding practices, poor working conditions, and other factors contributed to a decline in new educators entering the field and high rates of educator attrition, particularly in schools serving large concentrations of students from low-income backgrounds and students of color.

The department's response is some bureaucratic programmy "call to action" thing called "Raise the Bar: Lead the World," 

Raising the bar means recognizing that our nation already has what it takes to continue leading the world—if we deliver a comprehensive, rigorous education for every student; boldly improve conditions for learning; and ensure every student has a pathway to multilingualism and to college and careers.

When the bar is raised in education, all our nation's students will build the skills to succeed inside and outside of school. Our students will reach new heights in the classroom, in their careers, and in their enriched lives and communities, making a positive difference in the world, for generations to come.

Which is a well-massaged piece of verbage. And it comes with goals cleverly packaged as an alphabetic mnemonic-- ABC, Really.

A is for Achieve academic excellence. That means "accelerate learning for every student" and get those "student achievement levels" (aka Big Standardized Test scores) up to higher than pre-pandemic levels, plus closing opportunity gaps. Also, "develop a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student with high-quality instruction that prepares them to be active, engaged, and lifelong learners." The "also" portion is somehow both aspirational and familiar, like someone asked Chat-GPT to write a summary of every school district vision statement. The first part? Yes, we'll accelerate learning, because everyone already knew exactly how to teach more, faster, but they just weren't in the mood. Closing opportunity gaps? Great goal that nobody has figured out how to accomplish in decades.

Each of these goals has a link to another page of strategies, likewise aspirational jargon.

B is for Boldly improve learning conditions. First goal here is to eliminate the educator "shortage" by "ensuring that schools are appropriately staffed, paying educators competitively, and strengthening pathways into the profession." Sigh. The first part is a tautology-- we will reduce the teaching shortage by making sure we aren't short of teachers. The other two are hard-to-impossible to achieve from the federal level, and in fact the details use the verb "support." 

Second goal is to increase school-based health services for students. Yes, that would be good.

C is for Create pathways for global engagement. This boils down to "make all students multilingual" and is, well--

Ensure every student has a path to postsecondary education and training, including by establishing and scaling innovative systems of college and career pathways that integrate high schools, colleges, careers, and communities and lead to students earning industry-recognized credentials and securing in-demand jobs.

So, college and career ready to be useful meat widgets. Okay, then.

So what is so unmissable about this particular page? Data and charts.

One chart allows you to select a state and see how race/ethnicity break for teachers and K-12 students. I can quickly see that in Illinois, 82% of classroom teachers are white, but only 46% of students are; I can also see that there are more Hispanic/Latino students than Black in the state. In Texas only 53% of classroom teachers are white, but only 26% of students are (and 53% are Hispanic/Latino). California? Students are 56% Hispanic/Latino; classroom teachers are 26%. In addition, this chart breaks down Education Preparation Program enrollment--are there teachers of color in the pipeline (in Texas, yes; in Vermont, no)?. I could go on--this is fascinating and the visual is very easy to take in.

Next we get a chart that breaks down classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, and school leaders. Texas shows only 33% of paraprofessionals are white, and only 49% of school leaders. States like New Hampshire and Maine are just as white as you think they are. 

The third chart breaks down student race/ethnicity within the EPP pipeline by program (traditional, alternative IHE based, alternative other). In Pennsylvania, alternative non-IHE programs have a far higher percentage of future teachers of color; in Texas, it's traditional programs that have a higher percentage of TOC.

Finally, a graphic that shows which teacher specialty areas are hurting in how many states. No surprise-- special ed positions are struggling in 45 states, followed by math and science at 37 each. You can also look state by state to see who's having trouble finding what. 

These charts give very broad strokes, which in many states hides some extreme differences between rural and urban districts, but it's still a quick, clear source of data, most of it from within just the last year or two. You can read through the department saying more or less the right things, or you can just skip to the cool charts and graphs to see what things look like in any state you're interested in.

Secular Education Is Not Religious Persecution

When I was teaching, I did not serve lunch during my class. None of the teachers in the building did. That does not mean that we forbid our students to eat any lunch at all during the appointed time. It doesn't mean that we were somehow suggesting that food is a bad idea, that they would be wrong to eat. It just means we left that part of their life empty and unclaimed, available to be filled by them at the proper time with the food of their own choosing. We can talk about food, about how it operates in society, maybe even talk about our personal preferences. But none of that meant I was going to serve up my preferred dish and demand they eat it. 

When I was teaching, I did not provide matchmaking services for my students. I did not fix them up with classmates or try to steer them to what I judged to be appropriate life partners. That does not mean I was suggesting that they should never date or enter a relationship with anyone ever. It just means that that particular portion of their life was something I left alone, for them to address, or not, as they wished in their own time and their own way. 

The repeated complaint from certain sorts of christianist advocates is that secular education-- education that takes place on the state side of the church and state wall-- somehow pushes "atheism as a state-sponsored religion."

That's baloney.

Secular education, like my lunch-free and non-matchmaking classroom, is education that simply leaves a space for students and their families to fill as they think is best. 

We might discuss religion (as a teacher of US literature, I couldn't avoid it), but as a secular educator, it was never, ever my job to suggest or require that a particular set of religious beliefs are correct. It was never my job to serve up my own faith for them to consume, willing or otherwise. That space, that religious faith-based part of their being, was (like many other personal spaces) theirs to fill as they saw fit. The absence of religion does not mean the presence of atheism.

Why do christianists insist that this sort of secular education is such a terrible threat to religion, some sort of government-enforced atheism?

A generous explanation would be simply that they simply believe so strongly in the correctness of their faith that they can't help but want to push it on others. That they see those who believe incorrectly as reckless drivers racing full bore for the edge of a cliff, and they can't just stand by and let that happen.

Or maybe it's a belief in a collectivist fate, the notion that a nation's citizens must follow the proper god in the proper way or suffer a disastrous national fate. A sort of spiritual socialism.

Or the less generous explanation, which is that they enjoy the power of being the dominant cultural and religious group and they are scared and angry in their bones about losing all that. Even less generous--we're talking about christianists who believe that freedom to exercise their religion must involve freely discriminating against and condemning all those with whom they disagree.

But what I find most striking about all of these is that underlying them is a lack of faith in their faith. These are followers of a tiny god, a god who depends so heavily on having followers train up more believers that this god could not survive without them. Schools should train young believers and fill that space for faith constantly and completely because... what? Because if schools don't do that, young folks would naturally not take to the True Faith? We need to enforce official school prayer and Bible reading because if we didn't, students would never pray nor read the Bible on their own? Because God's authority and appeal are so limited that a non-believing third grade teacher can overpower them?

It strikes me as a meager faith, a faith that needs human-exercised authoritarianism to survive, as if somehow the majesty and grace of God are inadequate to overcome human obstacles. 

Which is an even more problematic idea since a secular, non-sectarian school presents the exact opposite of obstacles to faith. Secular schooling, following the First Amendment, simply doesn't endorse any particular faith, leaving that space open and ready to be filled as the student chooses to fill it in whatever time and manner they choose. It may just be my own faith talking, but I think that space will be best filled by use of heart and mind and free will with which God gifted them, and not by force-feeding from the hands of humans.