Will Public Funding For Religious Schools Ease Culture Wars?

Mike Petrilli, head honcho at the Fordham Institute, has a theory. Maybe, he suggests, spending public tax dollars on private religious schools might actually ease some of the continuing cultures out there. 

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that, as more parents gain access to school choice, including the option of sending their children to religious private schools, we will see today’s education culture wars recede.

I don't think so. Here's why not. 

First, silos don't solve anything. Letting people of differing values retreat to their own separate silo has not ever solved the issue or reduced the conflict. The history of segregation in the US is as good an example as any; it did nothing at all for reducing racial issues and tension in this country. 

We've even tried this out in education before with the post-Brown segregation academies, where some parents were free to pursue their value of "get my kid an education where he doesn't have to be around Black kids." That didn't serve some Americans well, nor did it ease the tension caused by different values regarding race. 

What separate silos do is make it easier to target certain folks. All the Others are over there in that group, so we can easily rail away at them. The second part of the segregation academy movement was for white folks to say, "Now that this school system over here is mostly Those Blach Kids, let's stop funding them." Which they could safely say because their own kids were safely somewhere else in a different silo.

We've already seen that much of the culture panic is animated by folks who are not merely concerned about what values and books and humans persons that their own children are exposed to, but what varieties of human experience everyone's kids are exposed to. Hence the need to make sure that nobody's child can read "And Tango Makes Three." Hense the establishment of a school that centers LGBTQ students immediately becomes a target. 

Since we're talking about religious private schools, there's another problem. You will have noticed that within the Christian church alone, there are a gabillion sects. Thise exist thanks to centuries of doctrinal differences. In short, many churches are not only bad at welcoming pluralism outside their walls, but inside as well. Once our silo is established, then it's time to make sure that everyone inside is pure and in compliance.

And for some fairly vocal culture warriors, choice is not on the table. They will consider the culture wars over when their side has won and all the other sides have been silenced and/or obliterated. These are the allies the choice movement chose, and at some point it's going to bite choice in the butt.

None of these factors will ease the culture wars. In fact, not only will they not ease them, but they will lead to a side effect that nobody wants.

Battles amongst the various silos will escalate. Those will be exacerbated because despite reformster magical thinking, you can't run 15 parallel school systems for the same money that barely ran one ("Our business is running into financial trouble, so the solution is to open a bunch more branch locations" said no corporate operation ever). The religious schools will argue about which other religious schools should be allowed to exist, and they'll all be pissed off that the Satanic Temple is also setting up schools. Politicians will argue that Certain Schools are not run by Real Religions and therefor shouldn't be allowed to operate at taxpayer expense (spoiler alert: already happened). Others will argue that taxpayers shouldn't fund LGBTQ schools (spoiler alert: already happened). And even Petrilli notes that he's rather have some safeguards against schools that are strikingly low quality, though I don't expect any such school to say cheerily, "Yeah, that's us!"

So ultimately, the state will have to either sort it out or fork over a pile of money or defund education of all sorts. One end result is the State Department of Religious Okee Dokeeness, where state bureaucrats decide which religious schools can be certified 100% fresh and which cannot. 

Benefits to society? None. People don't learn tolerance of LGBTQ persons or conservative wingnut persons or persons of different races or religions if they spend their school years in a bubble where they never actually meet any of those humans. 

It is tempting to think that the culture wars will ease when we try to give people the impression that they have won, but the loudest culture war voices have shown us who they are again and again, and who they are are people who don't just want a quiet corner of their own, but to claim dominion over the whole education mountain. 

I love our Puritan forebears. Hell, I'm related to our Puritan forebears. For all their virtues, it's inaccurate (as I told my students) to say the Puritans came to establish a country where anyone could worship the way they wished; they came here to establish a country where everyone would worship the way the Puritans wanted them to. It was the ultimate attempt to solve a culture war by silo, and while in many ways it was better than their brethren's attempt back home to win a culture by killing the king and taking over the country, it ultimately didn't end the conflict. 

In short (okay, too late), public funding won't ease culture wars. It will likely intensify them, and most probably shift the battlefield to state and federal government, where the question of which values get to have their own schools and how much they get paid to run them will be endlessly relitigated. Maybe forever, or maybe until some wise sage discovers that the best way to preserve pluralism and religious freedom is a public school system that is inclusive about students and neutral about religion.  

Taxation Without Representation

America's favorite voucher evangelist and some of his friends stopped by my twitter feed yesterday to share some thoughts about my latest piece for The Progressive and he shared this bon mot

It's true. The public school system also uses tax dollars collected from childless taxpayers. But there's a difference-- a critical one.

It's not a point of hypocrisy. Some folks are going to say that the voucher-loving taxation-is-theft crowd are being hypocrites to say that they don't like paying school taxes except when it benefits them, but I'd argue that their point is more "If we're going to do this thing I hate, let's do it in a les objectionable way" or maybe "Watch me hoist these libs by their own petard." And that's as American as apple pie. 

It is certainly more accurate to point out that vouchers don't just give certain taxpayers their money back. And it is certainly problematic that a voucher system uses money not just from childless taxpayers, but from parents whose own children are not allowed to participate in the voucher system (too poor, too not-religious-enough, too LGBTQ, too low achieving etc etc etc).

But the big critical difference is that in the public system, childless taxpayers get to participate.

They get to elect board members who then decide how those tax dollars should be best used. They get a voice. Their voice may not always dominate, and sometimes the voices that do dominate are, well, not so awesome.

But today is a good day to remember that democratic governance (or a republic, either*) is not defined as "system of government in which I always get what I want." All democracy promises us is a voice. And that's one of the things that a voucher system denies. Private schools do not answer to the public, are not owned or operated by taxpayer-elected boards, and are not required to show the public jack squat about what they do with taxpayer dollars. To really hammer the point home, most voucher laws now come with hands off language, expressly forbidding the people's elected representatives from interfering in private school operation in any way.

One of the things that got us riled up as colonies was taxation without representation--taking our money without allowing us a voice. That denial of a voice to childless taxpayers is an undemocratic feature, and a distinct contrast with the public system which, though imperfect, provides avenues for taxpayers to be heard, to get some representation with their taxation

Undemocratic processes have been critical for school vouchers; no voucher proposal has ever survived a public vote, which is one reason that voucher evangelists have to evangelize to legislators and not the general public. 

It has been a long, slow process to give more Americans a voice since we were founded all those years ago. School vouchers seem like a step back for many reasons, but calling for more taxation without representation is definitely a backwards move.

Happy Fourth of July! Enjoy the day!

*Reminder for all those trying to make a distinction out there that democracy and republic are just the terms derived from Roman and Greek for "of the people."

PA: Bill Proposes $8000 Payoff To Ditch Public School

A new bill in the Pennsylvania Senate is a sort of super-voucher stripped of any pretense, because it simply pays parents to pull their child out of public school.

SB 1280 is short and sweet. Every parent who has a child not in public gets an $8000 payoff from the state.

The payoff comes in the form of a personal tax credit of $8000 per child. That's not an "up to $8000," either:

The tax credit under this section shall be applied against the taxpayer's tax liability. If the tax credit exceeds the taxpayer's tax liability, the department shall issue a refund under the procedures specified in section 346 of the Tax Reform Code of 1971.

In other words, if you  only owe $2,000 in taxes, you get a $6K check from the state. 

Governor Josh Shapiro has signaled that he does not support the speedwalked  bill, which was introduced last week (June 26) and will be considered by the finance committee this morning (Wed, July 3). 

There's no income requirement for eligibility, and unlike other vouchers, there's no requirement for how the money must be spent. It's just $8000 payoff to pull out of public school. It applies equally to private school or home schooling-- just so long as you get your kid out of public education.

Maddie Hanna and Gillian McGoldrick are all over the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer (and Steven Goldrick sent up the alert on Twitter), where they get this on the nose quote:

“We’ve just gotten a signal of what the end of the road is: the destruction of public schools,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. He called the expedited bill the “Episcopal Academy Assistance Act,” highlighting the Newtown Square private school where high school tuition tops $43,000 as one of the expensive schools that could benefit from such a proposal.

True enough. There is no pretense here of helping students from poor families get to better education. There's not even a pretense that this is taxpayer dollars directed at education. It is the baldest version of vouchers yet-- "We will pay you to abandon public education. We don't care what you do about educating your kid. Just get out of public education."

How expensive would this be? There are roughly 275,000 students in private school. Maybe 126,000 home schooled students. So that would blow a $3.2 billion hole in the state budget in a combination of taxes not collected and cash paid out. And that's just if nobody else jumped on the deal.

It's unlikely that the bill would get past the Democratic controlled House, though one never knows, and it's unlikely to get past Shapiro, who previously scrapped a proposed voucher bill.

This is based on the Oklahoma model (sponsor Senator Judy Ward pointed to Oklahoma as an example in the committee meeting Wednesday morning). 

Oklahoma's version was dressed up in lots of pretty language about families and educational choices. The Pennsylvania version is notable for how direct it is. Vouchers have usually pretended to be about "The state wants you to abandon public schools. We'll wash our hands of responsibility for providing a decent education for your child, and in return we'll cut you a check to help defray the costs, a little." 

This drops that whole game. "We'll cut you a check to just walk away from public education," is next level stuff. I want to call it a voucher, but it doesn't even pretend to be that. Just a payoff and an attempt to gut public education while washing the state's hands of even the most rudimentary attempt to help families provide an education. Here's your check, thanks for getting out, and good luck to you.

Mind you, this is Pennsylvania, where we're already looking at a multibillion dollar fix for a school funding system that has been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Maybe Ward figures if we can just pay everyone to leave the public system, we won't have to fund it. I'm not sure that's anyone else's idea of a solution. 

Update-- But I just realized something important. The bill says you claim the tax credit by filling out the app0ropriate line on your tax form, but Pennsylvanian's who make under $33K do not have to file income tax with the state. So much for benefiting the poor.

AI and Disengaging Reality

I'm fully aware that I'm going to sound like an old fart here, but I think much of what AI is promising to deliver is not just an advance in technology, but a lurch in the wrong direction and fundamentally bad in ways that all other technology up until this point was not.

For virtually all of human history, technology has helped us extend our reach, sometimes in incredibly powerful ways. Reading and writing allowed us to listen to the insights and ideas of people separated by time and space. The printed word increased that miracle by a thousand-fold. 

Centuries of advance in various media have extended our human reach. Just think of the ocean.

When my students would complain about the verbosity of authors from an earlier time, I would point out the limitations of the age. Back then, I'd say, the only way to see the ocean was to physically travel to the ocean and look at it with your own eyeballs. Maybe you could see a painting of it, though you could only see the painting if you were physically standing in front of it. So an author who wanted to evoke the ocean would have to do a lot of work to create that picture in the minds of readers who really didn't have much on which to draw. 

Then there came photographs. Then print, so that you could see copies of photographs and paintings. Then movies. Then photographs and movies in color. Then television. The color television, on which to watch the movies of the ocean, or maybe even live broadcasts from the ocean itself. Then the internet and the capability to share depictions or even live feeds of the ocean on a device you carry in your pocket, any time you wish.

The march of media technology has brought the ocean closer and closer to every human being.

Ditto for areas of human knowledge. Go back far enough and you're in an era in which the only way to learn some piece of information is by talking to a person who already knows it. Then writing made it possible for many people to get that piece of information, even if the person who originally possessed that information is currently deceased. The printing meant an incalculably large number of persons could reach out and grab that information, and digitized technology increased the number exponentially. 

Even the internet, for all the demonization and pearl-clutching about Kids These Days tied to their screens, has made it easier to connect with other human beings. Left-handed basket-weaving afficionados can now find each other and share ideas. My daughter and her family are on the other side of the country, and while they can only travel back here a couple of times a year, my grandchildren are growing up knowing my face and voice. 

The long march of media technology is toward increasing engagement, making it easier and easier to find and grasp and grapple with ideas and people and the world.

Media tech has steadily built bridges between individual human beings and the larger world around them. But AI promises something else.

AI builds a wall around the world, then sits on top of the wall and promises to tell us what it sees, more or less, kind of, with maybe some extra made up stuff thrown in.

This is not always a bad thing. If I want to know how many sheep are in my yard, I could go out and count them myself, or I could ask software to count them then report the number back to me. Useful.

But other wall building work is more troubling. I deeply love that for any question that occurs to me, I can google a variety of sources, look through them, learn about the answers to the question. Or I could skip actually engaging with the sources and just let the terrible AI from Google (or Microsoft or whoever) give me a quick summary of whatever it has scraped off the interwebs, more or less, with right, wrong and fictional all dumped into one big stew together.

Or like the ad that promises I can use AI to write up the notes from the meeting. I don't really need to pay attention. In fact, I don't even need to check in at all. Just let the AI monitor the meeting and then get back to me with the notes it compiles. No need for me to engage on my own. 

Or the many AI applications that boil down to "let AI deal with these persons so you don't have to" (or don't have to pay money to hire a human to do it). Los Angeles public schools paid $6 million to have a chatbot talk to students who needed academic and mental health help, building a wall around those students instead of bridge between them and another helpful human. The company just tanked.

In the classroom, I can skip reaching out to engage with the research and materials about the topic I want to teach. Just have AI look at the stuff and tell you what it found, mostly, kind of. 

Or the ultimate AI disengagement-- an AI writes the assigned essay for a class, and then an AI assesses the essay that the other AI manufactured, and no actual living humans engage with anything at all. 

AI threatens to foster a misunderstanding of what research and critical thinking are for. These mutated descendants of Clippy are predicated on the notion that the point is to look for a single answer which one then pours into one's noggin. Research should involve searching, collecting, evaluating, processing, and fitting together the bits of information, a process by which the researcher both fine tunes the results and sharpens and deepens their own understanding. Students have forever attempted to short-circuit that process ("Can't I just find the right answer and hand it in without all this mucking about?"). AI makes that short-circuiting simpler.

Tech and media have made it progressively easier to engage with the world; AI is a big bold step toward disengaging. AI tells humans, "Don't get up. I'll go look for you, and you just sit there and I'll bring you something." AI is not just a plagiarism engine, but a disengagement engine. A tool that moves its users away from the world instead of toward it, and there is nothing desirable about that.

Yes, maybe I am just a cranky old fart. (Okay, not "maybe") and perhaps there are ways that AI can be used to build bridges instead of walls. But my gut-level aversion to AI (and I have indeed played with it) is about this retrograde drift, this movement away from the world, the promise to build walls instead of bridges, the whole "You just stay on the couch and I will pretend to engage with reality for you" of it. I will yell at my own clouds myself, thank you.

ICYMI: Family Visit Edition (6/30)

The West Coast Field Office staff of the Institute have been here this week, and the field agents and board of directors have been enjoying themselves a great deal. It's a party. 

In the meantime, this week's reading list has been prepared for your enjoyment and edification. Remember-- you have the power to amplify voices that you find important.

Louisiana’s New Ten Commandments Law Could Not Be Any More Unconstitutional

Slate's legal team of Mark Stern and Dahlia Lithwick provide some of the best context and analysis for Louisiana's newest attempt to get (certain) religion into the classroom.

Ten Commandments Classroom Tips

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has gathered a few handy tips for teachers who now have to work with the Ten Commandments.

Religious leader wants to display Indian scriptures in Louisiana public classrooms

In a completely unsurprising development, a Hindu religious leader would like to have some ancient Sanskrit manuscripts posted right next to those Ten Commandments. 

Louisiana’s June 2024 Education Legislation

Finally, while the Ten Commandments are getting all the press, Louisiana just passed a whole lot of terrible education law, including a whole lot of culture panic stuff. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the rundown. 

Why “Fund Students, Not Systems” Is a Recipe for Disaster

An excerpt from Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's new book, coming out this week. Read the excerpt. Buy the book.

Inspire Charter School Legacy

Thomas Ultican retraces the history of Inspire Charter Schools, a chain that turned out to be a bit of a money-grubbing scam.

LGBTQ+ librarians grapple with attacks on books — and on themselves

I know we've seen many of these stories, but we should never let them numb us. This time it's a librarian in Idaho.

The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Limits of Long Tradition.

The New York Times goes looking for some perspective on the latest move in Oklahoma, and talks to Adam Laats in the process.

These Researchers Study the Legacy of the Segregation Academies They Grew Up Around

Jennifer Bery Hawes digs into the research covering one of the nation's more shameful school choice chapters.

South Carolina to Launch Biggest Censorship Campaign Yet

Sigh. Edith Olmsted reported for The New Republic, and Yahoo gets it out from behind the paywall. One more state sets itself to crack down on naughty books.

Arizona Shows The Voucher Money Shuffle In Action

Jef Rouner writing for ReformAustin takes a lesson in vouchers from Arizona.

Florida Has The Capacity, But Not The Commitment, To Adequately Fund Its Public Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski paints a picture familiar in many states. The state has money, but spending it on public education? That's crazy talk!

The Triumph of Counting and Scripting

Allison Pugh at Slate writes about a phenomenon all too familiar to folks in education--micro-management.

People thinking without speaking

Benjamin Riley writes about how people think, and how that's a thing that AI can't do.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I looked at what Oklahoma's Supreme Court had to say about a Catholic Charter School ("Don't").

And hey-- join us at Substack, where all my stuff lands in your email inbox for free!

OK: Bible Or Else

After the Pledge and a prayer, Ryan Walters opened the State Board of Education meeting on June 27 with a stern warning. The Board was set to consider taking a license away from a teacher who is accused of teaching "inappropriate"  materials that the state has outlawed. 

The state won't tolerate "activist teachers" and "indoctrination," says Walters. "All individuals need to be aware that actions have consequences, and if you break law, if you break statute, if you break rules, regulations, there will be consequences for those things."

From there, without a trace of irony, Walters moves on to railing against the Oklahoma Supreme Court, a group that specializes in determining whether or not you have broken laws, statutes, ordinances, rules, or regulations, and declares that their ruling that the proposed Catholic charter school broke laws, statutes, ordinances, and the state constitution--well, there should not be consequences for that particular rule-breaking because Walters is sure they are wrong, and therefor he'll be working with the school, lawyers, and parents to make sure that there are no consequences. 

But Walters had another shoe to drop. Rather than be out-christianed by the state of Louisiana (where they just declared that the Ten Commandments must be in every classroom), Walters announced that he was going to forcibly shove a Bible into every classroom in the state. (Because, as Walters will tell you, the Constitution doesn't mention the separation of church and state.)

His pitch is centered on the idea that the Bible is a "necessary historical document" and the "most foundational document used for the constitution and the birth of our country." Walters used to teach AP History, and should know better. "Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom," he declares. He announced that the memo will come out that day, and sure enough, it did. 

Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum across specific grade levels, e.g. grades 5 through 12.

The emphasis on the Ten Commandments is a telling one. After all, the Bible also includes the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes, but gosh, that whole "do unto others" and "blessed are the meek" stuff sounds awfully woke.

I'm also trying to imagine how teachers in the upper grades will manage to work the Bible into every single class. Home ec lessons on unleavened bread? Geometry lessons about cubits? 

And once again, let's note that culture panic support for school choice is skin deep. If a parent wants to send their child to a school without Bible instruction in it, Ryan Walters says, "No, you can't have that choice."

Walters, you may recall, previously called the teachers unions a terrorist organization, and has not exactly extended a great deal of trust to teachers, so it's curious that he would trust each and every one of them to properly use the Bible in their classroom. But it's comply or risk losing your teaching license. How effectively does one evangelize when you're spreading the Bible under duress?

The memo says that the Department of Education "may supply teaching materials for the Bible, as permissible, to ensure uniformity in delivery." Permissible by whom? But once again we arrive at the point where the state is going to tell students how to interpret the Bible. Or maybe teachers will just put their own spin on holy scripture. 

Maybe this will survive the inevitable court challenge, or the legal challenge to include other peoples' historically significant holy scriptures in classrooms. If so, I'm betting religious conservatives will rue the day that the state and its teachers were put in charge of religious instruction of their children. And if you decide, for whatever reason, you don't want the school being your co-parent when it comes to religion, you'd better not try to escape in Oklahoma, because breaking rules and regulations has consequences.

Have Charters Been Captured By The Wokeness?

Pity the poor charter school advocates. Once upon a time they were the darlings of the "school choice" crowd. But then privatizers and the culture panic crowd saw a chance to pursue their true love-- taxpayer-funded vouchers-- and the charter school fans suddenly found that their prom date was already out the door with someone else.

This is not aided by decisions like the Oklahoma high court ruling that A) charters are so public schools and so B) they have to follow the same rules. Granted, SCOTUS may eventually overturn that, but in the meantime, charters were just a foot in the door, and now that privatizers have wedged the door open, they're just going to stomp on charter toes on their way through.

An excellent example comes from the Heritage Foundation, where scholars Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick have issued a Report (aka Blog Post With Professional Grade header) entitled "The Woke Capture of Charter Schools" which uses Woke Panic as a way to discredit charter schools, even as it discards some of the old choicer tropes.

A host of assumptions

To make their argument work, they have to first posit that "woke" is unpopular with parents. Sure, they write, there are some woke-preferring parents out there, but "tend to be a distinct minority." But "past research suggests" that "when parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke." I would be interesting and looking at that research, but we'll get back to that.

Now we're off and running. The anti-woke parent preference is now a given, as in "Given that parental empowerment is associated with less woke education..." They argue that given that given, charters ought to be less woke than nearby public schools. But what we're going to discover that this is not true--that charter schools are in many cases more wokified than their public school neighbors. 

How could such a thing be? Let's consider the possible explanations:

1) The nearby public schools are not actually very woke at all.

2) The instrument used to measure wokitude is not very accurate.

3) You assumption that a parent-driven education market favors non-wokeness is incorrect.

4) Some outside force is forcing charters to be excessively woke. This would also require us to consider

4a) Market forces that should be forcing the closure of schools built on unpopular values-- for some reason, that market dynamic is not working.

Yes, they're going with explanation four. 

Charter schools, on the other hand, might become less responsive to the preferences of local parents if they have to please state authorizers to be established and remain open and if they are overly dependent on national philanthropies to subsidize their operations. Those charter schools may have to adopt woke values to gain permission to open from the public authorities that grant them their charter and to receive funding, especially for capital expenses, from large donors with progressive values.

So here our assumption is that authorizers and charter-backing philanthropists are themselves in with the woke. The report is going to try address a bunch of the assumptions we have breezed past so far, but first, let's roll out the argument that's really being made here, one more knife in the back of the charter movement. Maybe parents choose charters because they are woke, or maybe because the charter offers safety and quality instruction, so the wokeness is overlooked. 

By contrast, policies that permit private school choice with vouchers or K–12 education savings accounts do not require permission from an authorizer for schools to open their doors and therefore are less likely to require capital funds from donors since they often already have school buildings. That means that private schools are typically more directly accountable to parents than charter schools and so are more likely to reflect the values of the families they serve.

Got it? Taxpayer-funded vouchers provide better, more correct choices. Are we going to do some kind of research to establish that? No.

So let's start looking at the foundation beneath some of our assumptions.

When parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke

The writers will now cite some surveys. Heritage itself found that 83% of parents nationwide believe their children's school should “engage with character and virtue.” A large survey of using school choice found that religious environment and instruction made the list of top three factors behind their choice. An EdChoice survey found parents want children to learn to discuss contentious topics in a calm and rational matter, and to become patriotic. Same survey found a majority of parents want teachers to keep their politics to themselves, no naughty books, and no discussion of LGBTQ issues. 

They also cite the USC survey "Searching for Common Ground" as proof that parents mostly don't want various topics discussed, without mentioning that the report's delving into wide gaps between different groups of parents (they especially don't mention that respondents overwhelmingly say they would rather their tax dollars go to support public school than to send a child to a private school).

We could dig into the quality of the surveys performed by people with a definite privatized ax to grind, but the bottom, line here is that if this is meant to support the boldfaced assertion, it doesn't. It doesn't show that, for instance, "character and virtue" are somehow incompatible with wokosity. And it certainly doesn't show that when parents have more control over their children's education, that education is less woke.

Regulations beget wokeness

"Given that markets tend to reflect the preferences of consumers and that most parents prioritize the teaching of values and want schools that eschew “woke” values," the charter school sector ought not to be woke. Except those "givens" are both doing huge amounts of heavy lifting. 

Highly regulated and constrained markets are not as effective as freer markers at giving consumers what they want. 

The charter market is highly regulated and constrained. The authors are going to keep saying this without any particular support other than to nod at another Heritage Foundation report by two of the authors of this one that declared that highly regulated states were more woke than less regulated ones. Missing from both that report and this one is any example of a rule or regulation that fosters all the woke. Exactly what rules and regulations lead to all this wokosity? The authors never say.

Heavy regulations make it more difficult to open and operate charter schools, thereby giving more power to charter school authorizers and philanthropies that help charter schools open. If those gatekeeper organizations espouse certain values, then it should be no surprise when charter schools in states with heavier regulations espouse values that are closer to them than to the general population of parents.

Which "certain values," and how are these values translated into specific rules and regulations. Hard to say. Is it just a sort of atmosphere that hangs over the authorizers and philanthropists? We'll get to that.

The woke atmosphere

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers is all up the wokeness, arguing for social justice and equity and vocally in support of DEI.

The Walton Family Foundation is woke! Who knew? But among its priorities in grant making has been DEI. The WFF even sponsored a drag show.

The Gates Foundation? Those guys have been pushing woke math and critical race theory.

NewSchools Venture Fund? All over the DEI. 

Again, we're cutting so many corners. Is DEI woke? Is it an idea co-opted by corporations and implemented as a sort of BS paperwork exercise? Are the corporate hedge fund guys who animate much of the charter industry all that interested in actual DEI, or will the performative type suit them? 

The writers cite KIPP's decision to be less racist as one sign of creeping wokeness, hinting that it was just to mollify authorizers, because the 500-pound gorilla of the charter school sector needs to worry about such things. They also raise the specter of those various LGBTQ charters that "have a focus on indoctrinating students in radical gender ideology." 

Sigh. This is the classic cultural conservative stance. These things that you say are a problem aren't a problem, says I, so therefor your attempts to address the problems must just be made up excuses to try some political trick. Did KIPP have sincere concerns about its treatment of Black students? Are there reasons for LGBTQ students to want a separate educational environment? Heritage is just going to chalk it up to wokeness.

The irony here is that they already know a way to untangle this mess. Let the invisible hand sort it out. Start a hundred LGBTQ charters; if nobody wants that, then 99 of them will go out of business. The report is heavy on explaining why there are an excessive number of wokinated charters, but it doesn't really address why people choose them and the market supports them. "It's not a fully free market" explains why these schools exist, but not why parents choose them. If the argument is that parents choose these schools for academics or safety, well, that's the market saying that it cares more about safety and academics than it does about wokeness. You can argue that the market wants the wrong things, but the invisible hand wants what the invisible hand wants.

Measuring the woke

So how did Heritage reach the conclusion that charters are more wokinated than their corresponding public schools? By going on line and looking at handbooks and scanning for certain woke words that "signal" wokeness in the school.

They "repurposed" the stuff they collected for the previous report, and found 211 handbooks they could pair with local public schools. That left them with 211 charter schools (out of around 7800) to compare with 211 public schools (out of roughly 97,000). The sampling by state is a bit wonky-- Utah is represented by 16 pairs, Colorado by 14, Pennsylvania by 12. Florida gets 4 pairs, California 3, Michigan 5, and Texas and Tennessee just 1. The authors blame this in part on public school handbook availability and say that's probably not a source of bias. I'm wondering if there's a paper in relating wokeness to being forward-thinking enough to put your handbook on line.

So, searching for the keywords-- diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, restorative, social-emotional, gender identity, and culturally relevant/affirming. The presence of those words is "woke" signalling. Here are the results

Note that they indicate that the ties mostly occur when both schools have zero instances. So one could argue that the results might show that mostly, nobody is wokified.

Or one could argue that such a small, oddly-distributed sampling is not very useful for drawing conclusions about the nation as a whole.

Blaming the authorizers

The report includes a whole section on how NACSA uses its power as a "kingmaker" to push wokeness. I have questions. 

One would be what NACSA board members like Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Kathryn Mullen Upton (Vice President for Sponsorship & Dayton Initiatives, Fordham Foundation) would have to say about the notion that they are out there pushing woke. 

Another would be just how far reaching NACSA's reach might be. For instance, remember that Pennsylvania is 12 of the 211 samples, but in Pennsylvania, charters are authorized by local school districts. In states where elected school boards are the authorizers, do they belong to, listen to, or care about what NACSA has to say? 

Recommendations

Defund NACSA. Cut them off from state and federal funds, and take away their power, such as it may be. Cut the CSP? That sounds excellent; it has blown a ton of money precisely by not being regulated nearly enough to guard against fraud and waste. 

States should have multiple authorizers of charter schools. You know what would make an interesting study? Compare states like Michigan, where authorizers spring up like wildflowers, so much so that charter hopefuls can go authorizer shopping, and Pennsylvania, where elected school boards authorize. 

Charters should get long term charters, and not be subject to closure for things like test scores or what Heritage calls "the preferences of regulators," as if authorizers are out there shutting down charters on a personal whim rather than a failure to perform. How far we have come from the days when charter fans declared that charters were about trading autonomy for accountability. "Set the terms out in the charter, and if they fail to meet them, shut them down," was the old refrain of charter supporters. But then, as this report suggests, Heritage isn't really a charter supporter.

Last recommendation? More vouchers. 

So what have we got here?

It has been over two years since Jay Greene argued that the "school choice" movement should ditch all attempts to appeal to lefty things like equity and social justice and go all in with the culture panic crowd, and he has certainly done that. But that alliance comes with certain challenges, the biggest being that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in actual school choice.

So choicers can try to use this new frame of "school choice should be about having a school available that reflects the families values," but that's not what culture panickers want. They want a system that reflects their values and their values alone. The real consistent market-based, education freedom, school choice stance would be, "Look, choice is providing schools for lefties and conservatives and LGBTQ kids. Isn't that great."

Instead we get rhetoric about "rooting out DEI" and the evils of tax dollars going to LGBTQ charter schools. Culture panickers want one choice--their choice.

This suits privatizers insofar as it undercuts support for public education and makes that easier to dismantle. For that same reason, it suits them to attack charter schools for being too much like public schools. The foot that once propped the door open is now in the way, and just beyond the door is the land of All Voucher Education, with no oversight, no regulation, no accountability to anything except the market (in which they only believe in some of the time). Maybe if they feed the panic over "woke" (which means nothing in particular and everything about a pluralistic society) will help get enough people to rush the door and push us through it. 

There's a whole other missing piece for this research. DEI, SEL , restorative justice, and the other various woken buzzwords they're searching out are so very often signals for which there's no corresponding action. Is a school "woke" if it puts a bunch of wokified language in the brochure, but barely goes through the motions of implementing actual functional programs?

The whole report is a curious exercise in trying to feed that panic by invoking woke and using it to fill the empty parts of the argument. "We should have more vouchers and less public education!" Well, why exactly? "Look! The woke zombies are coming to get your kids! Run away!" But that gets us to a familiar place. In their conclusion, the authors write

School choice should empower parents to obtain an education for their own children that is consistent with their values.

We've done that. It's exactly how we got segregation academies in the post-Brown world.