CO: A Bonkers School Choice Constitutional Amendment

While other states are stumbling over constitutional language that aims public dollars at public schools (e.g. South Carolina and Kentucky), voucher fans in Colorado have proposed a constitutional amendment that comes up for a vote soon. And it is a ridiculously ill-conceived and hastily crafted mess.

The language is simple enough-- here's the whole text, originally known as Initiative 138 and  Amendment 40, now known as Amendment 80. . 

SECTION 1. In the constitution of the state of Colorado, add section, 18 to article IX as follows: Section 18. Education - School Choice

(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION.

(2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.

The proposal comes from Advance Colorado, a right wing anti-tax, let's shrink government until we can drown it in the kitchen sink, kind of outfit. They're headed up by Michael Fields, who previously headed up the Colorado chapter of the right wing Koch brothers astroturf group Americans for Prosperity, then became AFP's national education policy leader. Then on to Colorado Rising Action where he kept his interest in education. Back in 2012-14 he spent two whole years as a Teacher For America product in a charter school. 

Advance Colorado was founded in 2020. Their leadership team also includes former state GOP chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown.

The amendment has also drawn support from House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, who is also a "fellow" with Advance Colorado. The actual filing came from Fields and Suzanne Taheri, a former official with the Secretary of State's Office, a former candidate, and former Arapahoe County GOP chair.

Why does Colorado, a state that has long offered many forms of school choice, even need this? Supporters of the amendment are arguing that they are trying to enshrine and protect choice, just in case those naughty Democrats tried to roll it back some day (Colorado's Dems once tossed out the pro-choice, not-really-Democrats Democrats for Education Reform). And though they aren't saying this part out loud, the amendment would be a great set-up for school vouchers.

The language proposed is, however, strictly bananapants. And I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the people who would most regret passing this amendment would be those who support it.

Let's say I want to send my low-achieving, non-Christian child to a top-level Christian school. Let's further presume that I can't afford even a fraction of the tuition cost. Does this amendment mean that the school has to accept them, and that the state has to foot the entire tuition bill? Wouldn't any answer other than yes be denying my constitutional to equal opportunity to access a quality education and my constitutional right to direct my child's education? Does this mean that to have full access the state must also transport my child anywhere I want them to go to school?

What if East Egg Academy has far more applicants than it has capacity? Must it scratch its entire admissions policy and use a lottery instead? 

The major obstacles to school choice are not state policies. The major obstacles are, and have always been, cost, location, and the school's own discriminatory policies. Virtually all voucher policies are set up to protect those discriminatory policies. Wouldn't an amendment like this require those to be wiped out? 

Wouldn't this language amount to a state takeover of all charter and private schools? 

And that's not all. Wouldn't this amendment also allow parents to intrude into every classroom. If I have a constitutional right to direct my child's education, does that not mean that I can tell my child's science teacher to stop teaching evolution? Or start teaching evolution? Can I demand a different approach to teaching American history? How about prepositions? And how will a classroom teacher even function if every child in the classroom comes with a parent who has a constitutional right to direct their education?

You can say that's silly, that "obviously" that's not what the amendment means. But that's what it says, at least until some series of bureaucrats and courts decide what exactly "direct the education of their children" means.

Kevin Welner (National Education Policy Center) has it exactly right-- "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act."

Supporters say this doesn't establish a right to public funding of private schools, and I suppose they're sort of correct in the sense that this does not so much establish a right to public funding of private schools so much as it establishes an obligation for public funding of private schools as well as obliterating private school autonomy. Unless, of course, some judge steps in to find that the language doesn't mean what it says, which is, I suppose, not impossible.

Nobody on any side of the school choice debate should be voting for this amendment. It's exactly the kind of lawmaking you get from people who have wrapped meaning in particular rhetoric for so long that they have forgotten that the words of their rhetoric have actual meanings outside the meanings that they have habitually assigned them. Here's hoping the people of Colorado avoid this really bad idea. 

ALEC Has A New Voucher Push

ALEC has set a new goal-- 25 by 2025. That means having 25 states adopt school voucher programs by the end of next year. To push that goal, ALEC has a new initiative called the Education Freedom Alliance, and it is a scary crew.

Who is ALEC?

The American Legislative Exchange Council is a bill mill. It brings conservative legislators and conservative business folks together to write legislation that the legislators then take back to their states. They used to be fairly under the radar, but for the last decade, folks have been catching on. 

ALEC was co-founded by Paul Weyrich, who also co-founded the Heritage Foundation. The group was launched in 1973 as the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. Their interests extend to pretty much every area of legislation, and that includes an Education and Workplace Development task force.. They get piles of funding from the Bradley Foundation and Charles Koch, and you can spend hours traveling down the ALEC rabbit hole. They have many goals, including huge ones like rewriting the Constitution and just generally turning America into a right wing paradise. 

Who are their partners this time?

Teaming up as leads on the EFA are the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and the Job Creators Network.

Job Creators Network was founded by Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder. Herman Cain had a hand in it, too, though JCN later disavowed him. They have big ties to Rick Berman, a "win ugly" anti-union media guy who specializes in front groups. Their CEO, Alfredo Ortiz, had a hand in helping pass the tax cut bill in 2017. They were big on reopening school buildings during COVID, and helped promote hydroxychloroquine. Funded by small businesses? Unlikely. 

The Committee To Unleash Prosperity is cut from similar cloth. Founded by Arthur Laffer (the Laffer Curve guy) and Stephen Moore, both ALEC stalwarts, along with Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow. Moore is the founder of Club For Growth, yet another right wing budget-killing activist group of rich folks. Their goal was to "take over" the GOP fundraising and drag the party far right; they have been reliable Trump allies. Moore has been in a variety of thinky tanks, including CATO and the Heritage Foundation.

The CUP website says of its Executive Director that he "keeps the trains running on time." 

So this is ALEC teaming up with a couple of other right wing outfits. And though this is not news, I will point out that none of these groups has the slightest bit of expertise in actual education. Just saying.

Besides the three coalition leaders, there's a whole list of partners, including American Federation for Children, Americans for Prosperity, Center for Education Reform, EdChoice, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Kansas Policy Institute, James Madison Institute, Parents Defending Education, Reason Foundation, Stride, and yes every kid. It's a Who's Who of privatizers (and a pretty good list of people who abandoned the charter and school choice cause once they smelled a chance to go full voucher).

So what's the plan here?

There's nothing new in the rhetoric from EFA. Here's the welcoming paragraph from their home page:

The Education Freedom Alliance believes public education dollars can and should follow the student, not the system. Our current “one-size-fits-all” system of public education simply does not work for every student or every family. While there are plenty of students who do perform at their highest level in their local public school, every child is unique, and states should provide parents with options for their children to thrive through policies promoting education freedom.

It's the current voucher pitch-- we're no longer trying to sell them as refuge for students stuck in "failing" schools, because we now know that the data shows that vouchers aren't better at all. And voucherites have fully adopted the goal of universal vouchers because A) it gets them closer to full privatization and B) rich, well-connected people make way better political allies than poor people.  

There's an assortment of "updates" aka PR pieces for the cause that reflect another key tactic-- to go after vouchers state by state. "Fighting for parental rights and education freedom--one state at a time" is in bold font on their page. Voucherites in Congress haven't given up--the House just advanced yet another bill for national vouchers (also ALEC-spawned). But it's likely doomed like all the previous attempts, and EFA's state-by-state strategy may also be a recognition that the election in November isn't necessarily going to result in a friendly administration. IOW, ALEC may smell some Trumpian flop sweat.

If you're wondering whether or not you're on ALEC's voucher hit list, there's a map. There are all the states where they hope to install universal vouchers by the end of 2025. In some cases, the efforts are already under way, and in others they have tried over and over. 

Of course, in zero cases do they plan to achieve their goal by putting it to public vote, because when taxpayers choose, vouchers lose.

But that's the scary part--because crafting and passing legislation that favors their priorities is what ALEC does. They have the connections, the pipelines, the money, and the experience doing this sort of thing, and they've lined up all the privatization heavy hitters to help out. It's one more reason to get involved in the upcoming election and to pay close attention to what your legislature is up to. Privatizers believe their time has come, and they are ready to push hard.

Why Do State Report Cards Stink

Morgan Polikoff (USC Rosier School of Education, FutureEd) and some folks at the reformy Center for Reinventing Public Education along with the Data Quality Campaign wanted to put together a report on what state report card sites had to say about pandemic learning loss trajectories. 

What they found is what lots of us could have told them-- the state school report card sites kind of stink.

The report itself is pretty brief. Do state sites provide longitudinal data? Only a few provide it, and not in any manner that is easy. Most commonly they provide Big Standardized Test data, graduation rates, a few other odds and ends, again, not always easy to find. 

And "Overall, state report cards were remarkably difficult to use." Sometimes technical issues. Sometimes too much data in unwieldy format, and some just damned near impossible to navigate. I'd add to the list sites with a whole lot of edu-jargon that parents will need to translate. Add on top of that that most of the sites are hard to locate in the first place. In the process of writing about education for over a decade, I have often gone looking for information about particular schools, and not once has a search engine directed me to a state's report card site.

In his frustrated take over this adventure, Polikoff asks the right questions. For instance, "who is the intended user?" Is there an audience for these sites? One theory, favored by some reformy types, is that parents trying to pick a school will head to these sites to shop for a school. But most of the information that a parent would want is just not there at all, and maybe some folks should finally release the dream that parents will choose schools based on Big Standardized Test scores (and not sports programs or location or who else has kids going there).

It's that same childlike faith that transparency and data will drive the education marketplace towards excellence, which is doomed because A) excellence in education defies transparent data collection (BS Test results are not it) and B) that's not how the marketplace works, anyway.

I'm not sure there is any audience for these sites at all. It's the kind of thing I think of as a library publication--something that puts down information that needs to be stored somewhere, because it's important and the odd researcher or historian may want it at some point. Like the big 19th century history of your town, or your family genealogy, or a book of instructions for household plumbing repair. It doesn't have an audience in the usual sense of the word, but it's information you put somewhere just in case someone needs it.

If there is an audience for these sites, it would probably be some federal regulatory office that gave states the impression that they would be held accountable for some assortment of these data. So like a lesson plan-- somebody told you you have to do it, but that doesn't mean they (or you) are going to look at it. Perhaps a state could use this information to actually direct assistance to schools, and certainly some states have used public school performance data to target those schools for privatization. But do either of those processes require an actual state report card website? 

Is there an audience at all? I checked Pennsylvania's Future Ready site on a traffic checking site and found that it averaged 737 visits a month since April. Florida, a more volatile education state, shows around 950 per month during that time (and 4% of the traffic is from India). Now maybe if we drill down into pages within the site, we find better results. But should state functionaries be putting in much effort for that kind of traffic. Or should they be trying to drive traffic there to justify its existence? 

So Polikoff's last question, based on an observation made by some members of his committee.

Are state reports doomed to be compliance exercise?

Well, yes. Yes, they are. Compliance exercises are the special hallmark of state governments, especially in areas like education where politics demands answers but actual meaningful answers are hard to come by. And as Rick Hess has observed, while it may be easy to make someone do something, it's hard to make them do it well. Particularly when it's unclear why you're doing it.

The Weightlessness of History

We Americans are extraordinarily gifted at throwing off the weight of history. If it didn't happen to us, it didn't happen. As we move through the years, events start to shift and fade from our collective memory.

Sometimes its surprises, even alarms us, as we watch the major events of our own lives circle the memory hole for the generations that follow us.

I think about this phenomenon every September 11 as teachers across the country try to somehow convey to students the importance and impact of that day. In 2022, almost 25% of the population was under the age of 20, meaning 9/11 is some distant noise, a thing that adults like to talk about and it seems to bother them, but it's about as real as D-Day and the Tet Offensive. Yet somehow teachers are supposed to get it all across to students, even as today's media landscape is occupied mostly by the Presidential debate and Taylor Swift's political endorsement (make your bets now on which will have a greater effect on the election). 

What are teachers supposed to convey? What are the lessons of 9/11? Why do we want young people to remember it?

I think some of it is really basic-- this happened and it was awful and we want to make sure that everybody gets it. There is something in trauma that seeks confirmation, an acknowledgement that the awful thing really did happen.

In fact, I think part of the appeal of 9/11--well, I hesitate to call it nostalgia, but there are always a few people who express that they miss the moment when Americans all came together. Often that's expressed as a moment of patriotism, and that was certainly part of it, but I think the root of that moment was that, for just a day or two, we shared an actual consensus reality. We all agreed on what had happened and how we felt about it. 

Now, what we wanted to do about it was another matter. Everyone bought an American flag and stopped badmouthing the President. But also, right up the road from me, a man waited in a high school parking lot to accost a student after school because she was vaguely Arab-looking. 

And very shortly, the consensus reality broke down, and we've felt a little sad about that ever since.

9/11 anniversaries are a reminder that one of the rarely discussed functions of schools is to build that consensus reality, to give a generation common narratives. It's a task that is increasingly challenging. We've got politicians now who don't just promote a spin on events, but insist on narratives that aren't even based in reality. We've got a whole movement promoting the idea that we should let folks send their children to schools differentiated by the different narratives that they teach and promote, consensus reality be damned.

It's not a simple balance to strike. Some of the consensus reality if 9/11 was not true, and insisting that everyone agree to one unchallenged, unexamined consensus version of reality is central to authoritarianism. 

It's our challenge as humans. We are limited, limited in time and space and experience and perception, and feeling the reality of events outside our direct experience is hard. Sometimes, the result is trivial (if you weren't in a theater seeing Star Wars for the first time in the summer of 1977, you don't really get it). Sometimes it's larger (if you haven't been through divorce, you don't really get it). And sometimes it is fundamental to our identity and understanding of the past (what is the story of our nation's founding, really). 

It's part of our fundamental struggle as humans-- how do we bridge the gap between what we feel and know in our own bones with the feelings and knowledge of other humans. How do we convey the narratives of the past in any meaningful way? Can we give the world and its history some real weight, enough to tether ourselves to it? Can we do it before that past becomes so weightless that it simply floats away, lost to generations yet to come?

Language is our tool. That's why we make young humans learn it--because it is the main tool to bridge the gap between themselves and everything and everyone else (not because it helps get high scores on a Big Standardized Test). It is how they grapple with the question of how to be their best selves, to become fully human in the world. That's education. Some of us may feel all of that a bit more sharply today, but it's the mission every day.  

PA: Public Dollars For Private School Psychologist

It's not just vouchers: public taxpayer dollars can be directed to private schools through a variety of paths.

For instance, in Pennsylvania, public tax dollars are used to fill a gap in private school services.

Passed in 1974, Act 89 created funding streams specifically for providing psychology services for private/nonpublic schools in Pennsylvania. Per the state department of education website:

Act 89 evaluations occur at the request of the nonpublic school and with parent consent. Evaluations may include reports on students’ academic ability, academic achievement, social/emotional development, and behavior. The Act 89 evaluation, however, does not determine a student’s eligibility for IDEA services.

The psychologist is hire through the state Intermediate Unit (in PA, these are regional offices of the state department of education), and it is the IU that determines what exact type and scope of services are provided.

One can argue that the state would take on providing these services as a way of making sure that students don't skip through the cracks just because they are attending a private school. But the effect is that of reducing costs for the private school (which, as always, may discriminate as it wishes and in ways that public schools may not). It's a public subsidy for a private school that gets to play by its own rules on the public dime. I suppose it's also a good deal if you're a school psychologist who doesn't want to deal with public school students.

This isn't Pennsylvania's private school subsidy. In the commonwealth, any public schools that provide transportation for their students must also provide transportation for private and charter school students in their district, which is handy for students but constitutes one more publicly funded subsidy for private and charter schools.

It's not just about the vouchers. There are many ways to have taxpayers help fund private schools.

The Other AI Problem

Let's imagine that rather than instead of typing on a keyboard in the classroom, pulling up answers effortlessly from some unseen, students had to do something else. 

To get to the source of their "assistance" teachers had to load them, just a few at a time, into large three-miles-to-the-gallon coach bus that would take them fifty miles to the "assistant."  Along the way, the bus would pass over a major body of water, where it would dump the contents of the rolling indoor outhouse into that body of water. All so that a few students could get some help with a writing assignments or math instruction or just plain have someone do the assignments for them.

There's been much written about the intellectual, pedagogical, artistic, and philosophical issues of generative AI, which is all important when considering the mental impact of AI.

But maybe we should spend some more time talking about the actual physical impact on the world.

The amount of electricity used to power generative AI is literally incomprehensible. Researchers estimated that creating little old GPT-3 consumed 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity and generated 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the equivalent of 123 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year. And that's just to set it up, before users actually started getting it to do its thing. Or before its keepers give it its latest update. Or consider this from an article published just last year at Scientific American:

But a peer-reviewed analysis published this week in Joule is one of the first to quantify the demand that is quickly materializing. A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.

It's remarkable how few specifics are out there. The training phase and the asking-it-to-answer-a-prompt phase don't take the same amount, but how they compare seems fuzzy (writers seem to feel that the asking for response stage uses more). Besides sucking up electricity, which is not an infinite resource, that sucking has implications for the gases generated by meeting the need to produce more power. According to NPR, Google says its greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over 5 years primarily because of AI data centers. 

Here's a chart from Earth.org that provides a little perspective:

That bar for AI (the way taller than any other) represents only the training phase. If cars and people flying in private jets bothers you. generative AI should positively freak you right out.

Jesse Dodge, research analyst for Allen Institute for AI (founded by Paul Allen, so not tech haters), told NPR that a single query will use the electricity that could light one bulb for twenty minutes, which doesn't seem like a lot until you multiply it by a million times a day. That is way more than, say, a typical search--though of course tech companies have baked their AI into search functions, so you're generating an AI prompt all the time whether you want to or not. Some researchers advocate for solar power, but that doesn't solve all the problems. 

It's not just the electricity and the carbon footprint. Data centers require huge amounts of water to keep cool. Cindy Gordon writing for Forbes says that the centers consume "significant" water, evaporating about 9 liters of water per kWh of energy used. AI's projected water usage, says Gordon, could hit 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027. That's on top of the water "withdrawn" for hydroelectric generation of the power that AI needs. 

Right now, all of this is kept behind a curtain, out of view of the average AI user. But if we are going to use computer magic to answer prompts like "Write me a five page paper about Hamlet" or "Whip up my lesson plans next week," we really ought to understand the cost. 

It's not just that generative AI doesn't produce magic results--it doesn't use magical techniques to get those results, either. 

ICYMI: Privateers Edition (9/8)

Josh Cowen's book The Privateers is coming out this week. I've already got my copy, and you should get a copy of your own, because the book has a lot of insights into the voucher debates as they currently stand.

In the meantime, this week's reading list is a particularly good one. Let's see what we've got here.

The fight over vouchers is an existential battle for America’s public schools

Linda Blackford at the Charlotte Observer has an interview with Josh Cowen about the book (pro tip-- you can just x out of the request for your email address and just read the op ed).

How a Fifty-Year-Old Supreme Court Decision Fuels School Segregation Today

You know all about Brown v. Board, but how much do you know about Milliken v. Bradley? It's a decision that continues to enable segregation today. Here's a great explainer by Halley Potter at the Century Foundation.

What I saw at the Moms for Liberty summit: a diminished and desperate group

Olivia Little and Madeline Peltz went back to the Moms for Liberty summit this year, and what they saw does not bode well for that crew. Little writes about it for Media Matters. 

Trump (Momentarily) Talks Education at M4L Summit

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at Trump's brief lurch into education stuff at the M4L summit. 

Donald Trump’s Incredible ‘Transgender Thing’

At the M4L summit, Trump made some crazy-pants claims about the "transgender thing." Elaine Godfrey takes a closer look for The Atlantic.

GOP Attacking Trans Kids

Thomas Ultican looks at the question of where parental rights start to strip children of their rights.

The Dark Money Defunding Rural Schools

Maurice Cunningham is an expert tracker of dark money in the education world, and this excellent piece collects everything he's dug up so far about our favorite parental rights' groups. This is a must read. From Barn Raiser.

5 Things Teachers Need to Know, According to Larry Ferlazzo

I don't know if these are things to know exactly, but Larry Ferlazzo at Ed Week shares five good education ideas, including on for $10,000.

How Metallica Is Helping Front Range Community College Students Get Jobs

Machael Mazenko reports for Westword about how the heavy metal titans have spent $10 mill on trade education.

Republicans pushing Christianity into public schools are hitting resistance — even in red states

Turns out lots of folks know this is a bad idea. Andrew Atterbury and Juan Perez Jr report for Politico.

‘A personal political gimmick’: Oklahoma superintendents say no to Walters’ Bible directive

More details from Oklahoma, where StateImpact sent out a survey of superintendents for even more details.

Appeals court rejects long-running pregame prayer lawsuit involving Tampa high school

It's a complicated case involving standing and a new state law and announcements at championship games. It also includes a rough judicial opinion regarding the likelihood of this coming up any time soon: 

“Hope springs eternal but standing cannot be built on hope,” the opinion said. “With all due respect to the Cambridge Christian Fighting Lancers, there’s nothing to suggest that the team’s participation in a future football state championship is imminent or even likely.”

Why thousands of Florida students are not being taught sex ed

Judd Legum at Popular Information explains why Florida's attempt to micro-manage sec ed has resulted in the program simply disappearing from some schools.

The Madness of EdTech: All or Nothing Options

Emily Cherkin guest posts at Nacy Bailey's blog about the frustrating half-assery that is ed tech in so many schools.

Texas schools are hiring more teachers without traditional training. They hope the state will pay to prepare them.

There's a lot to grasp here, but let's start with this stat-- almost 40% of Texas new hires were uncertified. That's in public schools. Charter schools are closer to 60%.

Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests

Jill Barshay looks at some totally unsurprising research at The Hechinger Report.

Why AI Isn't Going To Make Art

This essay at the New Yorker by Ted Chiang is worth burning one of your free peeks behind the paywall. It's thoughtful and well-crafted and helps to articulate the unease that so many feel but can't explain. Love what he does with the idea of intention. Another must read for the week.

What do you notice, what do you wonder?

Benjamin Riley looks at some of the visionary AI work being done in education, and ew...

The Democrats Are Finally Running a Teacher. What Took Them So Long?

After decades of sucking on education, the Democratic Party might get its act together. Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire walk us through the history for The Nation.

AZ State Board Says No to School Voucher Dune Buggy Purchase

Turns out there are actual limits, sort of, to what Arizona will let you spend your voucher superbucks on. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the story.

What Do Parents Know About Public Education?

Reformsters argue that parents need more information about schools. Nancy Flanagan suggests maybe there's a better idea.

Keeping the Dumpster Fires Burning

TC Weber provides a history of ed reform leadership in Tennessee and golly bob howdy but it's a sad and winding tale. But instructive, too.

We Don't Have to Get Over It

Like every teacher, Jess Piper has been through some awful active shooter training. 

Over at the Bucks County Beacon, I looked at a new study showing that cyber charters are especially damaging to Black and Hispanic students,