AZ: Fighting For Less Accountability for Taxpayer Funds

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona right wing advocacy group, has filed suit against the state because it thinks there are too many rules attached to the state's voucher program. Parents using the education savings account money shouldn't have to show that they've used the taxpayers' dollars for something educational. 

This is a battle that is a predictable crossroads on vouchers' path to their ultimate destination, and it deserves our attention for that reason.

When states started handing taxpayer dollars out as voucher money for families, two factors were always going to come into greater and greater tension.

On the one side, there will be people who want to spend their free money from the government with the minimum number of restrictions. "That money is ours now," the voucher parent argument goes, "so nobody should be able to tell us what to do with it." Look for the word "permissionless" as in "we don't need your permission to do whatever we think is best.

On the other hand, where taxpayer dollars go, calls for accountability are likely to follow. This is particularly likely for school voucher programs, every one of which was created and passed through legislative back doors, often over the objections of the actual voters. So there was always going to be a moment when those taxpayers said, "They spent my tax dollars on what now?" Lack of transparency and accountability are a systemic issue for voucher programs. 

Arizona is a prime example. Way back in 2018 news swept the state that $700,000 of voucher money was spent on items like beauty supplies, sports apparel, a host of other unapproved vendors, all caught only by state audits of the program. Since then there have been $900 Lego sets, Broadway tickets and espresso machines. It made actual news when the Arizona state board actually denied an appeal by a parent to approve use of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to buy three dune buggies (only after an appeal hearing officer okayed the purchase).

Enough of these sorts of shenanigans, and taxpayers are going to want to see some transparency and accountability.  

There are people on the right who already called this one, people who oppose vouchers because in vouchers they see one more way for government to get its sticky hands on the operation of private schools. They're not wrong. Taxpayers may tolerate a private school's desire to teach Flat Earth science or Aryan supremacy or whatever nonsense--until they discover they have to pay for it. Then they start demanding transparency and accountability.

For the Goldwater Institute, a good number of rules to attach would be "none." So they have launched a suit from a couple of homeschool moms who argue that the state should let them buy whatever materials they deem appropriate without tying them to any actual curriculum. One of the moms 

explains that she is “individualizing my child’s educational needs from minute to minute throughout the day,” meaning her curriculum is ever-changing. “It’s been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum,” Velia says.

The other mom, who has nine children and is homeschooling seven of them, complains that the government is putting more requirements "on the list." Goldwater has some other pieces to their argument, starting with the complaint that teachers don't have to prove paper and pencils are appropriate for a curriculum:

As Velia explains: “No other teacher in the state has to provide curriculum for purchasing things for their classroom.” So, requiring parents to jump through the hoop of documenting a “curriculum” for materials that are obviously educational does nothing to prevent abuse of the program beyond the extraordinary lengths parents already have to go to in submitting expense receipts for every purchase.

I believe some actual classroom teachers have some hoops they would love to show you. Then we can talk about what "obviously educational" could possibly mean.

The villain in the Goldwater story is Attorney General Kim Mayes, whose shtick is being a consumer protector. This whole "curriculum" business is just "a cynical, illegal attack on the ESA program, and it's making life harder for parents and children alike." Says one of the moms, Mayes should "actually be supporting ESA parents and children so they can get the education they deserve." In this context, "deserve" is a rather loaded term.

Hayes' office has a response:

The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education. With instances of voucher dollars being spent on things like ski passes, luxury car driving lessons, and grand pianos, it’s clear that providing documentation on spending is essential to prevent the misuse of taxpayer funds. Attorney General Mayes believes Arizonans deserve full transparency and accountability in how their tax dollars are used and will continue to fight for accountability and oversight in the voucher program.”

Goldwater throws out the old "nobody knows the child better than the parent" line, but that's not really the issue here. I know my children pretty well, but that doesn't mean I know best what materials should be used to teach them advanced calculus or conversational Chinese. Knowing your child well does not make one an expert in varieties of pedagogy. 

Nor does "I know my kid, so just trust me that these taxpayer dollars are being legitimately spent" make a really good argument. 

If you want to use the taxpayers' dollars, you owe the taxpayers an explanation of what you did with it. I know that's not the dream of folks like the Goldwater Institute, but this was always going to be the next voucher debate. We'll see which side the court decides to take. 

What The Heck Did Vance Just Say About Education??

Vance just spoke at a Christian nationalist rally in Monroeville (a Pittsburgh suburb), and some of it was about education. We need to look at the whole thing (I'll include the full clip at the end of the post so you can check my work).

The particular section people are buzzing about is kicked off by audience member Rose Owens who introduces herself as a former teacher who currently works at a homeschool enrichment center. She wants to know what we can do to save our schools and our children from socialism. 

Vance starts by complimenting her family, and then launches into the first part of his answer (at about 13:45). I'm going to add punctuation and paragraphs not to make it sound less awful, but to make it more readable:

Some of the stuff that they're teaching in American schools in 2024, that that's not just liberalism that is crazy and we've got to get it out of our schools or it's going to poison the minds of our young people. And we've got to start today in fact we should have started yesterday, and and ma'am what a big part of this-- and I I've tried to understand this I've been a senator for a couple years and I've tried to understand where is all this crazy curriculum coming from and the honest and unfortunate answer is very often it's paid for by tax dollars. 

In other words it's paid for by those of us in this room, and you ask how that happened is is the answer is well the Federal Department of Education pays a lot of money to develop curriculum that goes into our schools. Well, the money the people they give money to are very often some of the most radical organizations in the world that are developing curriculum that is pro- socialism I would say pro- racism that teaches really crazy ideas on gender that we just don't want in American schools. 

And yeah, I mean it has two negative consequences well first of all the American education system used to be the envy of the world rich or poor alike we believe in this country that every person deserves a quality education. Well, now we've got American children who can't add 5 plus 5 but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders, and I think both of those things are related because we're teaching kids radical ideas we're not teaching them the basics. We're not teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic-- the things that every child needs in order to live a good life.  

And that is to your point this creeping socialism in our schools we've got to get it out of there and I think we cutoff the money stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoned in the minds of our kids.

Lots of people are jumping on this to say that Vance wants to defund public education. I'm not sure that's what he said, exactly. In context, I think it's just as likely he meant to offer one more reason that he wants to end the Department of Education-- because it gives money to radical organizations that create socialist curricula that schools then use. I can easily believe that Vance and his buddies want to end public education; I'm not sure even they are foolish enough to say so out loud. 

There's lots else to unpack. The "envy of the world" bullshit that nods to the myth of a golden age of education that never existed. Those golden days were marked by low level of participation, i.e. many many school-aged children didn't finish school, or even come close. There is not point in history when we were beating the world at education. And I defy you to find any public school classroom in the country where a teacher is skipping 5 + 5 in order to teach about 87 genders. Who has time for socialist indoctrination?

Also notable, and problematic because so few people will recognize it as a lie, is this business about federally-funded curriculum development. That's a thing that does not happen, and which cannot happen because it is illegal for the feds to meddle in curriculum (c.f. a thousand arguments surrounding Common Core). Anyone who believes this is welcome to give me just one example of a curriculum that was developed with federal funding and/or distributed by the feds afterwards.

So if Vance wants to defund the Department of Ed to stop it from doing things that it doesn't do, that certainly seems to suggest that he would also target those folks who actually do it. 

There are other edu-nuggets in this discussion. While chatting with Owens about the challenges of homeschooling, he says this, with his characteristic lack of any irony:

Maybe it is the hardest job in the world to homeschool a seven year old.

Just imagine, JD, what it would be like to teach a whole roomful of them.

Vance also makes his plug for choice, noting that Pennsylvania "could have done a better job here" and then states one of the great mysteries of the culture panic choicer crowd:

We need to give every American Family choice and if we give American parents more choices, they're not going to choose socialism. They're not going to choose racial craziness. They're going to choose good education for their children, and that is the best way to cut out this rot in American public education.

 So even though schools board are elected by local voters, somehow those local voters would all quit the local school system if they could. Who has captured these local districts, and how have they done it? There's a culture panic story that says that back in the seventies, when lefties couldn't take over the country, they just took over key institutions and have been enforcing their ideology ever since, somehow. Teacher programs are all indoctrinating teachers (because one can easily convince a 20-year-old to jettison all their beliefs in favor of liberalism) and somehow all the elected school board go along with it.

Or maybe what Vance means is that Real Americans will want to get out of the public system and get away from Those Peoples' Children. 

Vance also recollects that he was "lucky enough" to go to school in the 1990's, when "we told American children that it didn't matter whether you were Black or White or any other skin color, it just mattered what your character was as a person." And even though he went to a low-ranking high school in Ohio, he got a good education. So maybe that Socialist takeover was more recent? Is Vance nostalgic for the Bill Clinton Presidency? 

The 90's are an interesting choice, because the 90's were the time of Outcome Based Education, an idea that sort of sept the nation and which was protested bitterly by culture warriors of the day like Phyllis Schafly and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, who were sure that it was part of a liberal socialist plot that was ruining American schools. So it's possible that Vance's problem is just early-onset Old Fart Syndrome ("Back in my day, we didn't have this ding dangy foolishness"). 

Or perhaps he just adopted an assortment of stances as a tactical maneuver for the election. But this anti-public education stance is in line with the position of the New Apostolic Reformation dominionist folks he was talking to-- public education must either be taken over or taken out. It's impossible how much of this is plain old lying and how much is just because Vance doesn't have a damn clue about how schools actually work. This is not someone I want to see anywhere near the White House.

ICYMI: Helene On Earth Edition (9/29)

My heart goes out to the folks caught in the massive flooding and destruction that kicked off the weekend. That is some scary stuff, and I can't imagine how heartbreaking it is to lose someone to this kind of overwhelming force of nature. Stay safe and hug your loved ones.

A little bit of reading this week. Here we go.

A ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Michigan Advance does an interview with Josh Cowen about his book The Privateers (worth a read). Some good questions in this particular sit-down.

Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know

Jan Resseger looks at yet more research showing that vouchers do not deliver on the promises made for them. 

Poetry and democratic education

This paper by Nicholas Tampio is sitting behind one of those academic journal paywalls, so you may or may not be able to get to it. But it's an interesting topic-- is poetry writing just too impractical and not-on-the-test for schools, or is that an important function being overlooked.

“Necessary But Not Sufficient”

John Merrow weighs in on the topic of cell phone bans in school. Is it enough of a good thing?

Are You an Instruction Geek?

Nancy Flanagan has kind of had it with the yappy bowties out to vandalize public education.

Learning Systems: Shaping the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Bellwether has a trio of papers about AI in education. There's a lot to chew on here, and some doses of reality included. But if you're looking for a comprehensive pile of ideas to burrow through, this might work for you.

PragerU Collaboration Proves South Carolina Is Banning Books

Steve Nuzum looks at South Carolina's continued effort to limit what students can read. 

FLBOE Requests Budget That Doesn’t Keep Up With Inflation… Again

It's as if Florida's leadership doesn't want to fully fund education. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains the details. 

A school choice star is unborn

One of the most thoughtful takes on the current fall of Corey DeAngelis has come from Chris "Citizen" Stewart. Yes, that Citizen Stewart, the long-time school choice advocate. 

The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

From back in July-- Scientific American's editors, of all people, pointing out that SCOTUS is off the rails, and some of their school decisions are on the list.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I wrote about a report that shows that history teachers are not indoctrinating students, and a school district in Florida has buckled to pressure to put their books back on the shelves.

Join me on substack, where Zuckerberg can't take down my posts for no apparent reason. Always free. 

How Can Schools Respond To Racist Incidents

Tishomingo schools in Oklahoma made the news earlier this month when six students decided to celebrate Homecoming with some racist misbehavior. 

It was a simple enough Homecoming activity. "How do you spell victory?" said the signs. Students were to wear black t-shirts and receive random scrabble tiles they would use to make the highest-scoring word. Instead, six white students decided to use their tiles to make the N word, and took a picture of it, and posted it on line. The resulting uproar resulted in canceled Homecoming events. 

I'm well familiar with the teen boy mindset that enjoys the thrill of deliberately transgressive actions (we all are, because a whole lot of boys carried it out of their teens and onto the internet). It comes from two realizations-- one is that words can shock people who take them seriously, as if words mean something, and two is that you can disown the meaning of your own words by declaring they're a goof. Put those two together and you get people who enjoy the power of poking people in the eye with your language even as you discover the liberation of amputating your own empathy. In short, there is a point in teen development (coming somewhere around reading your first Ayn Rand novel) when one gets a kick out of being a performative asshat.

So maybe that's what these six were coming from. But there's no excuse for someone in 2024 not understanding that 1) this act would be really wrong in a non-funny way and 2) the internet is not private. 

I feel for some of the staff. There is a unique kind of gut punch that comes when students make you ashamed of your school. 

But what is a school supposed to do?

Is it part of the school's job to teach students not to act like racist asshats? And how do you even do that? Is it the school's job to help students grow to be decent, civilized human beings, and are we really going to have to argue with people who want to argue that learning to be a decent, well-educated, civilized human being doesn't necessarily mean unlearning racism, or, at a bare minimum, learning to keep your racist asshattery unspoken and unshared?

At many schools, an incident like this might prompt some soul-searching and mission-tweaking in the school district, a determination to address the issue programatically.

But this is Oklahoma.

Oklahoma where HB 1775 was passed in 2021, the first of those anti-CRT "divisive concept" bills meant to forbid teachers from saying The Wrong Thing in class about race. This is where the Tulsa chapter of Moms for Liberty said, sure, teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre, but don't go blaming racist White folks for it. 

Oklahoma is where, to make sure everyone knew they were serious, the state Board of Education under dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters threatened the accreditation of two school districts over lessons about racial bias and cultural competency. And they did it without clear and specific charges, so that districts could wonder anxiously just where the fuzzy, vaguely drawn line actually lies. 

Oklahoma is where Black teachers had to take it upon themselves to teach critical pieces of history on Saturdays, outside of school. Which means, of course, that students like those sic White boys from Tishomingo were not getting the lessons.

This is an issue we haven't successfully discussed or responded to as a country in ever. Do we use education to further certain values because society, particularly a society that includes folks from a whole lot of backgrounds, would be improved by them. Do we do it even some people don't share those values. We have no problem with the question when it comes to values like "work hard" or "be honest," but when it comes to "don't be a racist asshat," we stumble. In the Land of the Free, should racist parents have the right to raise racist children? And does the school have to step aside and let them be?

There's no reason to expect schools to navigate racial issues any better than the country as a whole. Schools exist downhill from the culture, and when the culture includes elected officials who traffic in racist rhetoric, that will inevitably trickle down to schools (and that's before we even get to the non-zero number of racist teachers and administrators).

But I know this--stunts like the one pulled by six White students at Tishomingo are not okay, and schools must find ways to help students do better, and that doesn't include passing laws to prevent children from hearing unpleasant truths about the nation's history.

VT: Court Backs Unqualified Education Chief

Vermont Governor Phil Scott installed an education chief of dubious qualifications over the objections of state legislators. Now the court is covering her butt. 

Our Story So Far

First, a recap of how the state arrived at this point.

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSA was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

 
Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department.

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens.

And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes (okay--one whole day) after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either.

In June, two state senators (Tanya Vyhovsky and Dick McCormack) sued the governor and Saunders for "purposefully circumventing" the Senate' authority to confirm or deny appointments. As reported by Sarah Mearhoff at VTDigger, another news site that has stayed on stop of the story:

“This is now no longer even about the secretary of education,” Vyhovsky told VTDigger in an interview. “It’s about separation of powers and the right of the Senate to do the job that it is constitutionally and statutorily given.”

So now...

Yesterday, the two sides got to speak their piece in Vermont Superior Court in front of Judge Robert Mello. Mello was appointed by Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2010. 

Mello promised a quick decision on Thursday, and sure enough-- he issued his ruling today (Friday).

Judge Mello dismissed the lawsuit:

To the extent that the Senators argue that the Senate’s decision to not confirm Ms. Saunders prevents the Governor from reappointing her, whether on an interim or permanent basis, the court disagrees...When the legislature has wanted to so limit the Governor’s appointment power, it has simply said so.

The reference is to legislative action that specifically forbid the governor reappointing someone to the Green Mountain Care Board after the Senate rejected them. Apparently since the legislature didn't specifically list another time that the governor is not allowed to overrule them, well, too bad. 

What comes next? We'll have to wait and see, but in the meantime Saunders can keep treating the job as hers, "interim" notwithstanding, because there's no sign that the interim is going to conclude any time soon. 

 

Power and Priorities

This week the Washington Post ran a story about the millions of Americans who do not control the thermostats in their own homes. It's a feature of a deal that many folks make-- in exchange for a cut on their utility costs, they let the electric company take control of the HVAC in their home. It's one more way that the US is finding to cope with a demand for electricity that is, a certain moments, outstripping the ability to generate and deliver the needed power. These deals are pretty commonplace; at my folks house, certain major appliances cannot be run during certain mornings of the week.

This is wrapped up in a larger issue--a power grid that is struggling to keep up. Experts have been sounding the alarm for a few years now. Our electricity supply is not infinite, and our ability to deliver electricity is not limitless. 

More humans means more demand, and as demand increases, the grid is more inclined to stumble. 

Which takes me back to the conversation that we aren't having about AI.

We talk a lot about the ethics of students using AI to cheat. We talk about the various techniques and methods for taming the AI beats by embracing it in the classroom. 

But we generally have these conversations as if there is no cost to the choices we make. And that's a false assumption.

Should a family do without heat or air conditioning for part of the day so that a group of seventh graders can cheat on their homework? Should a home go through a brown out so that someone can get AI to generate a picture of Donald Trump riding a unicorn? Should anybody have their HVAC turned off so that Google can generate a bad summary of search results that people ignore anyway?

Plus, you know what happens to a commodity when it becomes more scarce--it becomes more expensive as the folks competing for it bid the price up and up. Are we all going to pay more for electricity so that AI can crank out more mind-numbing content for internet advertisers? Is steady, dependable electricity going to become a luxury item only available to the well-to-do?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of one of America's most alarming nuclear accidents, to help power their AI data center. 

AI is a big part of this, but Crypto also eats an awful lot of processing power. And for people who love their electric vehicle because it runs on cheap, readily available energy--well, that's what folks thought about automobiles for decades. 

And all of that is before we even start to talk about the other rare resource involved, used to cool the server banks that make the magic happen. AI is sucking up mega-gallons of water. 

Maybe clever people and market forces will sort all this out. But I would feel better if we were having an actual conversation about the cost-benefits ratio involved in using precious resources to create state-of-the-art CGI porn and help Junior whip up an Animal Farm book report. AI isn't a lot of things, and one of the things it isn't is free. 

Regulation Via Phone Call

This week Leslie Postal wrote a piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel covering the new edict from the state sex education in Florida must henceforth be non-sex education. 

Florida has told school districts around the state that they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence, according to district officials and an advocate for comprehensive sexual health education.

This is all sorts of a mistake for which future generations of Florida men and women will pay a price, but there is something else worth noticing in the story.

As several folks on Twitter have pointed out, the story indicates in several spots that the state's instructions were delivered via phone calls and discussion. In other words, not via anything actually written down. 

That's a problematic choice in Florida, where the government's most common reaction to complaints over a new law or policy is "You just didn't understand it right." The "don't say fay" law wasn't saying that at all. The book not-really-bans were being implemented so bizarrely and haphazardly because people were misunderstanding it or even trying to deliberately make it look bad. Or that chaplain law, where DeSantis was thrown off by the actual words printed in the law. 

It gets hard to keep reinterpreting rules on the fly when they are actually written down. So why not simply avoid leaving a paper trail at all. Deliver your edicts verbally so that nobody can prove that you said something in particular. "What?! Well, we never. Clearly these folks misunderstood the instructions we gave them." 

Delivering directives verbally also allows a level of tone that the printed word does not. It's a way to go if you don't think a memo is intimidating enough.

If this is the new SOP for Florida's department of education, there are more difficult times ahead for educators trying to do their jobs and keep their butts covered at the same time. Good luck to them playing a political game of telephone.