Five Takeaways from "They Came for the Schools"

Mike Hixenbaugh has written a heck of a book about the newest wave of attempts to dismantle America's public schools. They Came for the Schools is centered on Southlake, Texas, the community that turned out to be the cutting edge of harnessing culture panic for political gains (it is, among other things, the district where an administrator famously told teachers to cover both sides of the Holocaust). It's the community that pioneered the "Southlake Playbook," the plan for the far right to take power in a district. 

Hixenbaugh focuses on Southlake, but he also puts Southlake in the national context, showing where this movement spun off into other locales. It's a good read, and I recommend it. Here are a couple of particular takeaways from the book.

Historical Context (Present)

There's a tendency to mark the start of current culture panic at the pandemic years of 2020-2021. But Hixenbaugh lays out a fuller timeline quickly and efficiently.

Barrack Obama is elected President, and a whole lot of white folks get uncomfortable. Donald Trump is elected, and a whole lot of built-up pressure and panic gets permission to uncork. The incidents of racism and abuse in schools climb during the Trump presidency, and schools all over country (including Southlake) start thinking, yeah, we need to address this somehow. George Floyd's murder puts an exclamation point on that idea, but 2020 is also pandemic closings and Trump's defeat, and folks on the far right see conspiracy, loss of cultural relevance and centrality, and a need to grab power before Those People go too far.

As Hixenbaugh describes it, it's a series of reactions, and each culture panic reaction is fueled deliberately by power-seeking opportunists, from birther Donald Trump through culture panic guru Chris Rufo. Hixenbaugh does a good job, through Southlake, of stitching together a fuller narrative of how we got here.

Historical Context (Past)

We've been here before, and Hixenbaugh walks us through some of the other iterations of culture panic. Here's Anita Bryant with the old "I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce; therefor, they must recruit our children."

The desire to silence certain voices, to put cultural and racial minorities In Their Proper Place, to inject certain religious beliefs into school while also sending taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools-- none of that is new. They have always been with us in this country.

Big Fish, Small Ponds

One of the recurring themes, from Southlake to Chester County, is that many of these contentious communities are the homes of people used to operating on a big budget national stage, and when they turn their money and resources to local school board races, regular folks can find themselves suddenly swamped. 

That holds true for individuals and corporations. Hixenbaugh highlights the work of Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that ploughs its resources into backing far right christian nationalists for local school board races and school policy. 

There are some stunning stories here, like the teacher who became a whistleblower on NBC news and found that opponents had access to the kinds of high tech resources needed to reverse the voice-disguising tech that the network had used to conceal her identity.

Relentless and Focused

The Southlake conservatives become a micro-MAGA, demanding absolute purity of those they support and relentlessly hound board members, staff, even students who do not fall in line.

Not only does this bar any sorts of compromise or attempts to coexist, but the culture panic crew shows an absolutely unwillingness to accept any view of events except their own--which is often untethered from reality. Sometimes that means ignoring part of the picture; they are concerned about a school's response to racist incidents, but not the racist incidents themselves. Sometimes it means a striking lack of interest in any nuanced understanding; their opponents are never people who mean well but may have chosen poorly, but are always evil and terrible. Sometimes they just lie. 

It's what always makes culture panic movements both dangerous and doomed. Dangerous because they accept neither reason nor compromise, and because they are never satisfied. No book banning group has ever said, "Okay, now that you've removed these books, we're perfectly happy and we'll stop now." That is also what dooms them. Their demonization of all opponents and their unwillingness to compromise becomes increasingly off-putting to folks outside the panic and debates. And their demand for complete fealty means that they often turn on their own people. 

Politics and Religion

Hixenbaugh lays out how christian nationalism and right wing politics are merged in this culture panic moment. If you aren't paying attention to dominionism yet, this book will help explain why you should. In the meantime, you know what I always say-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

While some of these folks come across as power hungry and selfish, there are also those who appear to have fallen for the seductive song of "the ends justifies the means." I have no doubt that there are many who sincerely believe that schools and the nation would be better off if christian nationalists had the power and public schools were required to push a particular brand of christianity, and that it's a goal so important that it should be pursued by any means necessary. Certainly Rudo and others have called explicitly for a certain ruthlessness.

The trouble with justified means thinking is that, since we so rarely achieve our ends, we are mostly defined by the means we choose. You may decide to use lying and other tools of politics to advance the kingdom of Jesus, but in the end that just makes you a liar and a politician. 

And More

There's a great deal more to Hixenbaugh's book. He does a masterful job of toggling between the local story of Southlake and the big picture nationally. There are some stories of hope here (though not from Southlake itself) and some successful attempts to work to preserve public education as we know it. It's a clear picture of what's driving much of the culture panic and the fight decide what gets taught and who gets to make those decisions. Well worth the read.

Whose Money Follows The Child?

"Let the money follow the child," say choicers repeatedly, but the more honest plea would be "Let your money follow my child."

But that's not how they present it. Take this quote from today's Washington Post piece:

“It’s the parents’ money to use as they see is best,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio. “We don’t necessarily see it as taxpayer money.”

Or the other framing one encounters on the interwebs-- the "I just want to use my money to educate my child as I see fit" version. Corey DeAngelis, choice evangelist, argued in a speech that all families should be able to take "their dollars" to the school they choose. 

Except this is bunk. Let's take me as an example. I have two children in school. I pay roughly $1,000 a year in real estate tax. If you give me my $1,000 back, can I educate my boys with that money? Nope. There is no voucher state in which my money would not have to be supplemented with the tax dollars of my neighbors.

I've heard the counterargument-- the voucher represents a return on my real estate tax dollars over my entire lifetime. Let's check that math. I have a grand total of four children, and in my younger years I lived in places that carried a far lower tax burden, but let's pretend it has always been about $1,000. So let's assume that I pay $1,000/year for 55 years, for a grand total of $55,000. Would that cover 13 years of annual vouchers for 4 children? No, that would be about a little over $1,000/year. 

But hey-- I'm a guy living in a small town area that is technically part of Appalachia, where we have the kind of housing prices that the rest of you only dream of (seriously--if you have a small town bone in your body, you should move here). What if we checked other parts of the country?

Well, in North Carolina the average real estate ballpark tax bill is about $1,663. So that's not going to work much better.

In Texas the average property tax rate is 1.80%, so if you have a $350K house, you'd pay $6,300. That gets us closer to voucher money-- as long as you don't have too many kids. Of course that's an average, so some folks in less pricey housing would be paying way less. In Bandera County, a $150K house would yield $1,755 in real estate tax money. 

We could run numbers for a variety of locations, or we could make a common sense observation-- if the real estate tax money from parents was sufficient to fund the public school system, we wouldn't need to tax any non-parents, which is a point I fully expect non-parental taxpayers to bring up in voucher states in the not-too-distant future.

If this is just giving the parents back their own tax payments, then do non-parents get a real estate tax exemption? Once my kid graduates from high school, do I get to stop paying taxes? Are tax-paying parents given a limit to the number of children they actually get credit for? Where do the taxes paid on business real estate go in all this? 

The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit--that's absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost. 

It's odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the "taxation is theft" crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor's tax dollars on a school that would forbit, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.

Your money should follow my child.

"Just give us back our tax money, and I'll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want," is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school--or getting your neighbors to chip in.

Your money should follow my child. 

Or maybe we could pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children.

Where Does High Quality Curriculum Come From?

Ollie Lovell's blog post is from Australia, but it fits with the ongoing discussion of the value of curriculum in this country. He notes that in a recent discussion about a variety of school issues, he kept coming back to the same place:

The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).

The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.

For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.

Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.

And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.

In all of these instances, the devil is firmly encamped in the details. Does "increase student achievement" mean "raise test scores"? Because that's not my idea of increasing student achievement, and as we've been seeing for twenty-some years, a rich high-quality curriculum is not needed, or even preferable, for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test. Can a HQC reduce workload? That depends on how easy it is to implement, how well it matches the needs of the students and the skill set of the teacher, and how much prep and adaptation it requires. I would have agreed that solid lessons and instruction help with classroom management; I'm not sure that post-COVID we aren't seeing new behavior issues that are more resistant to that solution. And I'm pretty sure this oversimplifies the problems with teacher retention in the U.S. Maybe things are different in Australia.

So Lovell may be overselling a tad, but having a high quality curriculum does matter. I worked most of my career in a district that couldn't quite get its act together on curriculum. We went through many curriculum development cycles, but the district leaders could never quite commit the district resources (teacher release time, paying for extra hours, some useful leadership and direction) to get the job done. 

It was frustrating, and ultimately my department created something we could use on our own. That was also frustrating; one department member didn't feel like following the plan, so she just didn't, and there really wasn't anything we could do about it. And while building admins were willing to recognize that what we had created existed, that didn't keep them from still shooting for that old standby, Curriculum By Textbook, insisting we insert test prep drill, and occasionally unilaterally announcing that a Certain Book would no longer be taught because somebody somewhere might be upset. 

I will skip past the unavoidable eternal arguments about HQC (what is included and who decides) other than to note that they add another level of complexity to all of this.

But Lovell moves on to an interesting question-- if we want some HQC, where do we get it?

Getting expert level resources requires expert level knowledge, the kind that Lovell says is "hard to build." Not only do we need expertise in the content area, but expertise in teaching, and expertise in the audience for the instruction. The standards movement kind of skips past all three, assuming that if one sets certain standards, the content takes care of itself, the specific audience doesn't matter, and the teaching piece is where you blame educators for faulty implementation. The curriculum/materials industry has limited expertise in the first two and assumes that its actual audience is the people who make purchasing decisions in districts, not the people in the classroom who have to deal with it.

High quality curriculum does not come in a one-size-fits-all box right off the instructional materials rack. It is not prepared by some company hundreds of miles away. It is not googled. And it is not, God help us, created by large language model computer programming. The place you are most likely to find the expertise required is among the master teachers in your district.

Even the best instructional materials and curricular design stuff doesn't become an actual high quality curriculum until it receives its final shape from the master teachers who turn it into classroom instruction. This has been a point of frustration for folks who want to fix schools by imposing standards and instructional design-- once it hits the classroom, it is going to be delivered and interpreted by the classroom teacher. Master teachers are doing curricular design and redesign every day. That's the expertise we need to tap.

And as Lovell notes, even if we tap the expertise of the teachers in the district, we hit the time issue. When, exactly, are busy, swamped teachers supposed to do this? And are they supposed to do it for free? 

There can be other obstacles. Our do-it-ourselves program was thin on details because we'd hashed those out in conversation. And that gets to one of the other challenges in building a curriculum--exactly for whom are you creating it? Most of the district-directed attempts we made were not curriculum designed for teachers, but curriculum designed so that administration could have something to show the state. They weren't to help us teach, but to help administrators and bureaucrats prove that we were teaching. 

Or the most insidious curriculum purpose of all-- "I want to know that if you drop dead tonight for some reason, I can hand this curriculum to your replacement and everything will stay right on track in your classroom." It is the education version of "I want you to train your own replacement."

In a district with low trust between administration and teachers, curriculum is collateral damage. Can I trust you to do your job? Can I trust you to let me do my job? I'm going to argue that the loss of teacher autonomy over the past few decades is directly connected to curriculum problems. "I am going to hand you this curriculum in a box, and you will implement it with fidelity or else" is another way to say "I don't trust you to do your job." Fear and control never make a system better than trust and support.

Okay, this is taking longer than I expected. Let's get back to the question--where does HQC come from?

Lovell suggests an intriguing idea

How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?

To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.

I like this idea. It still has some major holes to fill, like what format and organizational scheme should they use? We were several times required to use a format that was basically a response to the Common Core Pennsylvania State standards, so that the result, had we ever finished it, would have been geared to proving to the state that we were checking off a list by "unpacking" and addressing the standards and not giving a teacher direction and support in designing instruction for the year. 

It's one of the great curriculum traps-- a document designed to prove to the state that you're doing your job is not a document that helps you actually do your job. 

I also recognize that multi-school design looks hugely different in a big district where such a program would be inside the district and in an area like mine, where such a program would have to be intra-district. 

I think back to our teacher-to-teacher design work and imagine what we could have done with more time, more support, and more teachers to provide perspective on what works in particular grade levels. We did okay, but with the additional resources, we could have created something really cool and useful for students across the county. If we could have tapped the varied and rich professional experience and research across the county, we could have accomplished so much more. 

ICYMI: Hell Of A Week Edition (6/2)

Yeah, I'm not even talking about what you think I'm talking about. This week kicked off with an ambulance ride to the hospital for my mother (she's doing okay now) and then mid-week a young driver slammed into The Curmudgucation Primary Transport Unit while it was parked in front of the Institute (nobody was injured). So fun times all around.

But we still have stuff to read. No, nothing about That Thing That Happened 34 Times.

Reports Show How Phonics Crowds Out Quality Reading Like Picture Books

Nancy Bailey took some heat for suggesting that Science of reading folks don't dig picture books--not even fun ones. So this week she's back with some receipts.

A Semi-Elderly Teacher’s Reflection on the Digital World and Education

I refuse to accept the notion that Nancy Flanagan is semi-elderly, but her thoughts about the digitized world are spot on.

No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.

The New ChatGPT Offers a Lesson in A.I. Hype

Have you heard about all those cool things the new ChatGPT can do? Well, it can't. And there's an important lesson about technohype in there. Brian Chen in the New York Times.

Judge defends right to teach Beyoncé, strikes down law restricting lessons on race and gender

New Hampshire's license plate motto is "Live Free Or Die," but in recent years, it might as well have been "Think Right Or Else." They had gotten themselves a nice Florida-style "don't talk about race issues" law, but a court just threw it out. Judd Legum at Popular Information has the story.

What Would Religious Charter Schools Mean for Public Education?

From Kevin Welner, an on-the-nose look at the implications of Oklahoma's proposed Catholic charter school. It's in Education Week, but if you have a way past the paywall, it's well worth it.

OSDE Supt. Walters blames Biden after missing out on nearly $1 million grant

Speaking of Oklahoma, let's see what Education Dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters is up to. First, he's blaming that million in missed grant money on Joe Biden. Specifically, for not being aligned with Oklahoma values. 

'Not acceptable': Committees pass ban on OSDE public relations spending

Some Oklahoma Republicans are kind of tired of Walters. Specifically, they are tired of him spending OK tax dollars on PR to increase his national profile. So they are shutting that down. Tom Ferguson at KOKH has the story.

‘He’s the guy that pulls Ryan Walters’ strings’: Subpoena reveals highly-paid OSDE advisor has no formal employment contract

They've also got questions about Matt Langston, Walters' former campaign chief, who now earns a six figure salary, apparently without either leaving Texas or technically being hired for a job that comes with no actual job description. Yeah, it's a lot. Spencer Humphrey reports for KFOR.

Will State Board Rule Allow Display Of The Ten Commandments In Classrooms?

In the midst of other standards-shifting shenanigans, Florida appears to be sneaking some more christianism into its classrooms. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains how.

Florida educators trained to teach students Christian nationalism

Also, in the sneaky christianism department, Judd Legum has the story of some sneaky professional development.

Ohio public schools are releasing kids for religious instruction during the school day. Soon, they could be required to do it.

Speaking of creeping religion into schools, meet the group that's doing it in Ohio--and maybe your state next. 

NC teacher turnover is rising. Why experts say pay alone isn't the solution

No surprises here, but it's always nice to see some reporter catch on, even a little. This time it's Emily Walkenhorst at WRAL.

Uncovering the Cover-up: How Republican Pennridge School Board Directors Secretly Banned Books

Think your district has put a stop to that whole book banning thing? Don't be so sure. Darren Laustsen writes for the Bucks County Beacon about his struggle to get to the truth of how his district was secretly getting rid of all sorts of books.

Survey: Most Wichita teachers don't like where the school district is headed

Wichita teachers like their district and their school, but they see trouble on the horizon. This story from KAKE may seem familiar.

The Siren Song of “Evidence-Based” Instruction

Alfie Kohn doesn't blog often, but when he does it's well worth the read.

Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools: You’re Paying For It, So You Deserve to Know Where Your Money Goes

State Rep. Joe Ciresi explains why cyber schools are a raw deal for taxpayers and students.

For Pa. cyber charter schools, there’s little accountability but plenty of profit

There's a certain pleasure that comes when a mainstream outlet may not be citing you, but it sure feels like they've read your stuff. The Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Inquirer explains why PA cybers are a profitable piece of educational bad news, and taxpayers deserve a break.

Well Funded Public Schools Are Not the Priority of Ohio’s Super-Gerrymandered, Supermajority Republican Legislature

Jan Resseger's stuff is always thoughtful, grown up, and well sourced. You should be subscribing to her blog and reading her weekly.

New Report Documents Obstacles to Educational Opportunity for Young Black Men

Or even twice a week. Here Jan Resseger looks at an important report from the Schott Foundation about one of the great gaps in our education system.

Pennsylvania Treasurer candidate pledges to “fight” school vouchers

You know an issue has penetrated outside the edububble when someone running for a state office that is not education related makes school vouchers part of her pitch.

A Hallucinogenic Compendium

Eryk Salvaggio substacks at Cybernetic Forests. In this post he looks at why large language models like ChatGPT make lousy search engines. Also, a look at the many and varied hallucinations they produce.

At Forbes.com, I look at how Nebraska's GOP is trying to maneuver school vouchers around the state's voters. Oh, that pesky democracy.

Join me on substack. It's free, easy, convenient, and free. 

Universal Vouchers and Privatization

A shift in Florida is being covered, but I'm not sure many folks really understand what's happening. 

Politico reported that Florida school choice programs have been "wildly successful," and both of those words are doing a megacrane's worth of lifting. More to the point, they are accepting the DeSantis definition of success, which is the replacement of a public school system with a privatized one.

“We need some big changes throughout the country,” DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.”

Politico reported on this "success" in the context of many public school districts in Florida shuttering buildings due to dropping enrollment.

Let's acknowledge a couple of complexities here. First, the under-18 population is dropping everywhere in the country. Second, Florida's choice programs are exceptionally opaque, making it hard to know what, exactly, is happening, though there are indicators that, as in other states, a large number of voucher students never set foot in public school to begin with.

Florida's supremely underqualified choice-loving education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., says that all these closings are motivation for public schools. "But what they need to do is continue to innovate and provide programming that is attractive to parents so, on that open competition, they have the best option for those parents to choose."

Florida has long pursued the technique of draining resources and support from public schools, along with imposing a terrible testing system, doing their best to make charters and private schools look better by comparison. And in all fairness, it should be said that some Florida districts have shot themselves in the foot. 

The general trend in Florida has been to pursue Milton Friedman's dream of getting government out of the education business. And in that respect, Florida has been wildly successful.

But here's the important part.

Privatization is not just about privatizing the folks who get to provide education (or education-flavored products). It is about privatizing the responsibility for getting children an education.

Getting government out of education means ending the promise that every child in this country is entitled to a decent education. Regardless of zip code. Regardless of their parents' ability to support them. Regardless of whatever challenges they bring to the process. 

End that promise. Replace it with a free(ish) market. End the community responsibility for educating future citizens. Put the whole weight of that on their parents. End the oversight and accountability to the elected representatives of the taxpayers. Replace it with a "Well, the parents will sort that out. And if they don't, that's their own fault and their own problem."

This is billed as "freedom," and it is freedom of a sort, just like every citizen is "free" to get whatever means of transportation they can afford. You didn't want to depend on a badly used bicycle? You should have thought of that before you decided to be poor.

Except that it's not even that. To make the analogy more accurate, we'd need to imagine a country in which car dealers and bus companies could refuse to sell to you because you don't go to the right church or love the right people or because they just don't want to. 

Parents are free to pursue whatever education options they want for their children. Except that if the voucher won't cover the ever-increasing cost of that private school, and that other private school won't accept your child, and the neighborhood school that would have accepted your child no matter what is now closed. You could always start your own microschool, with a computer connection (hope you have internet) and some adult to hang out as a "coach." 

This is where universal vouchers fall right in line with other modern reform classics-- they propose to solve a problem that they absolutely do not solve.

Part of the pitch has been that poor families should have the same choices as wealthy families. Universal vouchers absolutely do not do that. Like any other sector of the free market, a privatized system provides plenty of great (and over-inflated, shiny) options for the wealthy, and lousy options for the not-so-wealthy. And it does it while chipping away at the one good option that the not-so-wealthy were promised-- a well-resourced public school.

Has the US public school system always lived up to the promise? Absolutely not. But canceling that promise and replacing it with the "freedom" at accept whatever lousy options the market deigns to deliver is not a step forward.

Reformsters have had a lot of success in convincing folks that education is a consumer good provided to families and not a human service provided for the benefit of the entire country. But the other undiscussed feature of the Florida plan is that it disenfranchises the community. It doesn't just say that educating children is no longer your responsibility; the Florida plan says that if you are a taxpayer with no children, you have no say, no power. And if anyone thinks that this won't eventually lead to shrinking voucher amounts, I have a bridge over some Florida swamplands to sell them.

We already know what this mostly looks like. It looks like our privatized health care system, where the people at the top get everything they need, and the people at the bottom skip medication and treatment and, periodically, die. But the health system just kind of grew that way, so nobody had to convince people to give up access to health care. Just periodically holler "No socialism! Freedom! Murica!" every time someone brings up single payer universal coverage. 

Universal vouchers, ironically, do not promise universal education for all students. The traditional public school system does. State by state we are being pu8shed to give up that system without ever having an honest conversation about what's really being proposed. 

Parents Defending Education Goes Anti-Immigrant

Parents Defending Education is primo astroturf, a group of seasoned political communications professionals with the usual connections and deep pocketed backers, pretending to be a grass roots organization.

PDE has come out opposed to Black Lives Matter At School. They are staunchly against choice if it involves choices on the wrong side of culture panic (like a charter school with an LGBTQ focus). Their website notes:

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom -- and for the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

Their main shtick is to encourage people to turn in schools doing naughty indoctrinaty, CRT/DEI/SEL/MOUSE things and, in some cases, aim some litigation at them. Central to this culture panic battle is their IndoctriNation map along with the opportunity to submit an Incident Report. 

The "incidents" include schools with Gay Straight Alliance chapters and "restorative practices." Fairfax County is reported for using terms like "marginalized group" and "protected class." Hosting drag performers. DEI hiring. And more recently, any school critical of Israel in current war. You can search under categories like ethnic studies and critical race theory and affinity groups. All aimed at catching districts, schools, or teachers doing naughty stuff.

But two days ago, PDE added a new category and a new incident report.

Influx of migrants strains public schools in Springfield; schools are struggling to teach and provide for migrant students with no previous education

This is not a typical PDE report of administrative leftiness or some teacher getting all LGBTQ-accepting or anti-racist. This is strictly a complaint about immigrant children in Massachusetts. 

In reviewing thousands of documents retrieved by Parents Defending Education via the Freedom of Information Act, there are indicators that show how this mass influx of migrant families has impacted schools in this northeastern state, particularly in the city of Springfield.

Thousands of dollars in local resources have been allocated to accommodate “newcomer students” and their families. This programming has included training sessions for teachers, administrators, and staff, as well as mental health support and translation services (both written and oral), which have included translating school documents in at least 17 different languages. Additional purchased documents include translation dictionaries for at least nine different languages.

Teachers admit there's an influx. Interpreters for at least six different languages were requested to help with parent-teacher conferences (Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Spanish). Talk about buying translation dictionaries. At least 135 migrant students in one city.

PDE does not critique districts' handling of this influx, so one assumes that the panic here is over all those furriners coming into our schools, and costing us money to educate and care for them. Apparently, on top of the usual culture panic, PDE will now add some Foreign Others panic. There's not even an attempt this panic to undocumented immigrants--this is just any immigrants at all! No recognition that, hey, these new folks might have jobs and be paying taxes. Just "These folks don't talk 'murican and that costs us money and aren't you outraged by that?"

Is it really necessary to explain, again, that immigrants have lifted this country up, and that children, who have no say over where their parents take them, deserve an education because they are young humans and the world will be marginally worse if they don't get one? That yes, this is hard, but that's no excuse not to do it?

PDE is now right up there with the Heritage Foundation, which back in February said Supreme Court decision be damned, let's charge undocumented immigrant children tuition to go to school. Even other conservatives knew this was a pretty odious stance.

I suppose this fits with PDE's general stance of championing intolerance and opposing money spent on Other People's Kids, but somehow this seems like stooping even lower. I guess we'll see whether being anti-immigrant is a big new part of their portfolio. 

KY: A Constitutional Voucher Amendment

School privatizers wanted school vouchers for Kentucky. But they ran into two problems:

1) A constitution

2) Judges who can read the constitution

Lawmakers had passed a tax credit scholarship program, the kind of program where rich folks can send money to a private school instead of paying their taxes. 

Tax credit scholarships are popular with voucherphiles because they allow folks to argue, "Hey, this isn't giving public dollars to a religious school, because the state never touches the dollars in the first place." 

This is not a good faith serious argument. I often explain it this way:

You love a certain brand of pickle. Your spouse says that the family already has some perfectly good pickles, and under no circumstances will they allow you to spend household budget money on your brand of pickles. So you make a deal with your employer; when it’s time to pay you, they will spend $50 of what they would have paid you to buy pickles instead, the give you the pickles and a check that is $50 lighter. Go ahead and tell your spouse that there's no reason to get upset because you didn't spend any money on pickles. Your spouse is still fully aware that the household budget is $50 short.

Section 184 of the Kentucky constitution has some straightforward language about funding education, including:

No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation

Kentucky’s Attorney General, arguing for the voucher plan, tried to assert a reading of the law that allowed for tax credit scholarships. The court replied, “We respectfully decline to construe the Constitution in a way that would avoid its plain meaning.”

“[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition is unconstitutional.

Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes wrote “Simply stated, it puts the Commonwealth in the business of raising sum(s) . . . for education other than in common schools.”

Put another way by the court, “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds, rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

In short, the Kentucky constitution says "No taxpayer dollars for anything other than public schools. And that includes those tax liabilities y'all are trying to sneak behind your backs there."

That was back at the end of 2022. Then, another setback for choicers. A year later, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled against the funding law set up to promote charter schools in the state.

Wrote Shepherd in his ruling, “Whether the charter schools envisioned by HB 9 are good or bad, they are outside the scope and definition of the ‘common schools’ defined by our Ky. Constitution.” Citing the many ways in which the charter law allows charter schools to operate outside of the laws governing public schools, Shepherd concluded

This charter school legislation is effectively an attempt to bypass the system of common schools, and establish a separate class of publicly funded but privately controlled schools that have unique autonomy in management and operation of schools... This “separate and unequal” system of charter schools is inconsistent with the constitutional requirements for a common school system.

Shepherd also pointed to Section 186 of the state constitution, which he quoted in its entirety:

The violation of Section 186 of the Ky. Constitution is even more clear. That provision requires that “All funds accruing to the school fund shall be used for the maintenance of the public schools of the Commonwealth, and for no other purpose, and the General Assembly shall by general law prescribe the manner of the distribution of the public school fund among the school districts and its use for public school purposes.” (Emphasis supplied). To take tax dollars to support these privately owned and operated charter schools is flatly inconsistent with the mandate of Section 186 of the Ky. Constitution.

Frustrated Kentucky privatizers only had one real option, and that option was proposed in January of this year. HB 2 proposes a constitutional amendment that would fix all that restrictive public school language and make it okee dokee for taxpayer dollars to be spent on charter and voucher schools. It's not complicated; the new language says

The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools. The General Assembly may exercise this authority by law, Sections 59, 60, 171, 183, 184, 186, and 189 of this Constitution notwithstanding.

HB 2 will put the new language on the November ballot in Kentucky. The debate is the same old same old-- the GOP says "we need to give poor kids a chance" and the Dems say "So, give more support to the schools that most of them already attend."

Kentucky is way behind the curve on these issues, so much so that journalists include lines like "Advocates of government support for private and charter schools refer to such efforts as 'school choice' initiatives." just in case readers don't know what "school choice" refers to.

Protect Our Schools KY has been launched by public education supporters, including teachers, administrators, and other supporters. Louisville Puiblic Media reported from Perry County.

Sawyer Noe, a recent graduate of Knott County Schools, said the constitutional change would divert funding from public schools.

“Not only are we being asked to allow our tax dollars to subsidize a private education for the select few, but we are being asked to do so at a time when public schools are having to cut critical services,” Noe said.

The actual question on the ballot will be

To give parents choices in educational opportunities for their children, are you in favor of enabling the General Assembly to provide financial support for the education costs of students in kindergarten through 12th grade who are outside the system of common (public) schools by amending the Constitution of Kentucky as stated below?

Here's hoping that public school supporters are able to muster a hefty heap of "no" in November.