Free Market Is Bad For Education

Imagine that you are in the hospital for a major bit of surgery. As you go under, you notice that there is a big timer next to the anesthesiologist's seat. 90 minutes later, the surgery is under way with just a few minor blips, when the anesthesiologist announces, "Okay, that's it." Then he cuts off the anesthetic. You didn't see the timer hit zero, but you will soon. 

Your health insurance must come from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which has announced that they will pre-determine the amount of time the patient gets anesthetic for the operation, and they won't pay for anything beyond that pre-set time. 

It's the eleventy-gazzilionth reminder that the problem with free market human services is simple-- every dollar spent taking care of the humans is one more dollar that the business and its investors don't get. 

I am not anti-free market. The free market and capitalism have enabled some great things, many of which I happily benefit from. But when free market operators lose their way, bad things happen for all of us. 

Do you miss Sears and K-Mart? I sure do; our community no longer has either, and yours probably doesn't either. This is not because of the internet or economic slumpage or a lack of support from your local shoppers. It's because venture capitalists bought them up and stripped them for parts. This is misguided free marketry, a late-stage capitalism problem of people who have lost all sight of who they serve. 

When this disease hits, the customer is not the people who shop at that business, but the investors. The customers are just resources to be drained of as much money as possible. They are not humans; they are just little backpacks full of cash.

Anthem has become, in Cory Doctorow's very useful coinage, enshittified. They have made their product deliberately worse for purposes of harvesting larger profits. Maybe the backpacks full of money that we are tapping would tolerate just this much less useful service without actually firing us, thereby allowing us to better serve our real customers--the investors.

Twisted free marketry is one thing when we're talking about, say, burgers or surfboards; the business can be made to face the consequences as the public decides it can just do without that stuff (though the last election suggests that when the market starts gouging too much, people other than the investors pay a price). 

But when the "product" is a necessary human service, like health care or education, and you cease to see the humans being cared for as customers and instead view them just as couriers carrying backpacks full of cash that you want to collect so you can give it to your true customers-- well, that's how you get a product that is increasingly enshittified. 

We can already see some of the results. I've talked to cyber-school teachers who complain about being vastly understaffed not because staff is hard to find, but because management figures a couple of hundred students per teacher is good enough. Charter and private schools that refuse to accept students who would require too many resources, keep too much of the money in those backpacks from getting to the real customers.

It's true that public schools make tough choices, but those are based on the question "How much money do we have" and not "How much money can we get away with holding back from what is supposed to be our main mission." 

I don't want to wake up mid-operation, my spleen hanging out of my body, because the insurance company is trying to make its numbers for stockholders this quarter. And I don't want to see students cheated of all the education they could have because somebody's hoping to buy a bigger mansion this fall. 

[Update: Hammered in the court of public opinion, Anthem just reversed its policy. "Honest folks, we were never not going to pay for medically necessary anesthesia," they protested. They did not go on to say, "And we will decide what is medically necessary."]

OK: Walters Wants Superintendents To Be Elected

Ryan Walters has yet another bad idea he wants to push on his state.

Make school superintendents elected officials.

Why? Of course, elected principals were, at one point, a Trump proposal, and Walters has always been determined to show off his MAGA credentials as a devoted follower of Dear Leader.

Walters also has a laundry list of things that superintendents have done of which he does not approve. One superintendent wouldn't suppress books as Walters demanded. That same district had a fund raiser that involved behavior of which Walters disapproved. Another district had a superintendent resign over a DWI, and another district didn't do a good job of handling sexual abuse allegations. He didn't mention superintendents who dared to defy him over things like Bibles in classrooms or those who ignored his decree that his prayer should be broadcast to all students, but I'm betting he has them in mind, too.

How would electing superintendents fix any of this? Unclear, as Walters tries to connect all of this to his favorite culture panic issues. As he told Fox News:

Even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, where voters have overwhelmingly made clear they want the radical progressive policies of the left out of public schools, we continually see superintendents defying their will, ignoring their concerns, and refusing to take action necessary to improve education outcomes while protecting Oklahoma children.

This is on brand for Walters. It's not just the content, the anti-lefty lather, but the formulation. We're not talking about the rule of law, but the Will of the People, which is perfectly embodied by Ryan Walters. Therefor, his will is the people's will, and must be obeyed. Walters argues, as he always does, not for the Rule of Law, but the Rule of Me. 

Like many of Walters's bad ideas, even other Republicans know it's a bad idea. Reported by Alecia Aston and Murray Evans at the Oklahoman:

Rep. Mike Osburn, R-Edmond, a member of the House Appropriations and Budget subcommittee on education, called the suggestion "another example of Ryan Walters’ desire to get clicks instead of improving student outcomes.

"School boards are elected, and they pick the superintendent for their district," Osburn said. "Rather than focusing on outcomes, he’s just trying to sow seeds of conflict with hard-working superintendents, which is simply and unnecessarily disruptive. None of this will bring us up from dead last in the nation in ACT scores and student outcomes. I wish he would focus on the job he was elected to, rather than trying to score political points for who knows what. The voters of Oklahoma and their kids deserve better."

How would this even happen? There's no actual bill in the pipeline yet, though News9 reports that Walters's office says they're writing legislation on how, exactly, this would work and they expect the full text to be released soon.

Walters complains about the "entrenched influence of radical teacher union agendas" and the damned "woke mob" which he thinks somehow pushes superintendents to defy the bright ideas of (some) conservative leaders. It's a bit of a switch from the usual complaint about elections of school board members being dominated by all that union money and influence, and I'm not clear how superintendent elections would, in his mind, escape this pernicious influence.

After you've elected a superintendent based, I reckon, on his political campaigning skills and not his running a school district skills, how does that person work with the duly elected-by-taxpayers school board? Do they still get to hire his staff and assistants, perhaps directing them to thwart him at every turn. And does Walters really believe that voters will elect superintendents based on issues like "Will you pledge to always obey Superintendent Walters" and not issues like "Will you pledge to give our elementary school a new playground" or "Will you pledge to spend more money on the girls' volleyball team." 

What kind of power does this give teachers over their boss when he has to be re-elected and they do not? I am thinking that either Walters has not thought this through, or there is another shoe waiting to drop, one that gives properly compliant superintendents new levels of supreme power over their little fiefdoms. Either way, the whole idea invites new levels of chaos and disruption to school districts. Yet some folks say this whole idea is catching on and that lobbying groups are writing model bills. 

We'll have to see one of those bills to see just how bad an idea this is, but I'm betting it's somewhere between Spectacularly Bad and Good Lord In Heaven Bad. Let's see what his office cranks out, and which legislator is willing to be his courier. 

Is Your Board Working With This Anti-Woke Board Group? Watch Out.

At the beginning of 2024, we noted the launch of one more anti-woke school association-- School Boards for Academic Excellence. They've been busy, and they are attracting some familiar friends. If you have local school board members cozying up, watch out.

They launched with an attempt to seem non-partisan, and their website still trumpets neutral-sounding language. Empowering school boards! A vision that is "focused squarely on academic excellence and student achievement, ensuring that every child, regardless of circumstance, is equipped to reach their highest potential." They believe that "the education of Americaʼs children is not a partisan issue" because Americans "across the ideological spectrum" all want an education system "focused on academic excellence and student achievement." They value "collaboration"! All swell stuff, and totally not one more load of culture panic.

And yet, their first big press was an op-ed on the Fox News website headlined, "New school boards challenge woke bureaucracy that leaves kids behind" by their executive director David Hoyt, who jumped on the claim that the National School Board Association had revealed itself to be all woke just because it asked the Department of Justice for some help with the extreme attacks coming at school board members over the evils of masking. 

The team at SBAE is a batch of right-tilted culture panic veterans.

Board member Lance Christensen is the VP of Education Policy for the California Policy Center, an affiliate of the State Policy Network, the web of right-wing advocacy and pressure thinky tanks. They put big pressure on the state to open school buildings and managed to create some NAACP infighting over charters. They brought a case to get a union thrown out as the bargaining unit in a district, and they run a "parents union" in four California regions. Christensen has also worked with the Reason Foundation and, according to the SBAE site, "was also one of the principal architects of the recent school choice initiative proposal in California."

Board member Ward Cassidy is on staff at the Kansas Policy Institute as the Executive Director for Kansas School Board Resource Center. KPI was founded by long-time Koch operative George Pearson; it hangs with the usual thinky tank advocacy groups like State Policy Network and ALEC. Cassidy served in the Kansas House of Representatives. Way back in the day, he was an actual teacher.

The board chair is Amy O. Cooke, Cooke was CEO of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, a post she took in 2020 after years as the executive vp of the Independence Institute of Colorado. She was also a senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. In other words, an entire career spent in right-tilted advocacy groups. The John Locke Foundation is tied to the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, State Policy Network, Franklin Foundation, Art Pope-- you get the idea. Her LinkedIn profile summarizes her years in Colorado fighting energy policies as "having more fun than the left allows." Her twitter handle is @TheRightAOC.

They've added a Director of Network Engagement since February. That's Jon Russell, who used to be Chief of Staff for Spotsylvania County Public Schools, one of those districts that spent time in the news because of a far right board takeover, complete with a chair calling for book burning and an unqualified superintendent. He also worked for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, another one of those right wing advocacy thinky tanks that belongs to the SPN and advocates to end the ACA and wants Medicare Advantage for All rather than Medicare for All. Russell has also worked for ALEC.

The executive director is David Hoyt. Hoyt has worked for the Heartland Institute, Young Americans for Liberty, America's Future Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and as volunteer manager for Ron Paul's 2008 campaign. He founded Liberty Development (a fundraising service for "liberty-minded" organizations) and the Cornerstone Classical Academy, a classical charter school, in Jacksonville, Florida.

SBAE runs the ideological gamut from A to B. It's as diverse as block of uncooked tofu.

They are aimed at building a network (many states now have these faux school board groups for disaffected right-wingers who want to disrupt stuff, and they are hosting a three-day Education Policy and Training Summit this coming January in Orlando, FL. 

You'll want to get there early, because speaking at the opening reception is Oklahoma's Bible-shoving education dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters. The Opening dinner features Manny Diaz, Florida's qualified-by-ideology-only education chief. 

Speakers include Bill Gillmeister, who started out his career in the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, but in 2012 moved on to the Coalition for Family and Marriage, Renew Massachusetts Coalition, and the Massachusetts Family Institute--all right wing culture panic groups. There's Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Plus Sara Clements, a consultant who used to work for both Step Up for Students (the voucher management company) and Foundation for Excellence in Education, Jeb Bush's choicey advocacy group.

The sessions focus on lobbying, managing board meets, and the art of persuasion. Not much of anything about the actual nuts and bolts of running a school district.

If you can't make it to Florida in January, SBAE has some aids on the site. There's a piece about curriculum guidelines that includes a very specific checklist to use in making sure that the district is in line with the Science of Reading. If someone is coming after your district about SOR, I recomme3nd checking out this list which will show you what they're about. 

As another bonus, it appears that SBAE has partnered up with Jordan Adams. Adams, you may recall, is the guy who started out working for Hillsdale College, helped Florida check textbooks for wokitude, then branched out to a one-man curriculum consulting firm (Vermilion Education). Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler tried to get him a gig with Sarasota schools in early 2023. Later that 2023 summer, Adams took a swing at Pennridge schools in Pennsylvania (part of the constellation of Bucks County schools taken over by MAGA culture panickers). Neither of those worked out, though he at least got started in Pennridge. Adams did get a chance to strut his stuff at the 2023 Moms for Liberty gathering, where he laid out a program for using shock and awe to impose your right-wing agenda once you've been elected to the board. 

His consultant website for Vermillion appears to have gone dark, but now SBAE is offering his curriculum consulting services to its members.

Jordan Adams brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the table. With a background in curriculum development and educational consulting, Jordan has worked with school districts across the country to improve their curricula and enhance student learning outcomes. His approach is data-driven, evidence-based, and focused on achieving.

Well, no. As far as I know, Adams was only hired at one district, started overhauling the curriculum, probably helped cost some right wingers their board election, and then had all his work rolled back.  

SBAE talks about its Network Partners a lot, but is very cagey about who and how many they are. Make of that what you will. But if any of your local board members are cozying up to these guys, prepare yourselves, because this is just more right wing culture panic Moms-for-Liberty-style ideological takeover trying to pass itself off as bi-partisan interest in student achievement. 

Run Like a Business

 

Let’s run the government like a business, drive the car like a bicycle, and play the guitar like a piano

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 6:41 AM

I'm writing this post mostly so I can hang onto this Kevin Kruse skeet forever.

Education has been plagued by the "run schools like a business" crowd since forever. They come in a variety of sub-flavors, from the "Run schools like a business so that I can profit from them" crowd to the "Run schools like they are an extension of my business so that graduates emerge ready to serve me" crowd. 

But they all share a childlike faith that running things business style is A) a simple definition and B) the best way to run anything.

But, first, there are many ways to run businesses, and many of them are terrible. In this country, we are living amidst the rubble created by many of the worst methods. And it seems oddly enough that it's proponents of some of the worst management techniques who think their methods should be imposed on education. Pick a genius visionary CEO and let him rule the country like a tin-pot dictator is not a good way to run a business. Squeeze every cent out of the business and put it in your pocket is not a good way to run a business. Cut your product to the bare minimum you can get away with is not a good way to run a business, and yet all are big faves in the "run schools like a business crowd."

Why is it that the RLAB crowd is so rarely, for instance, repeating Edward Deming's insistence that businesses are best run on trust and safety rather than fear and intimidation? 

"Run like a business" means many things, and some of them are really bad.

But even in the best cases, RLAB is not well suited to anything that involves the care of actual human beings. Businesses sort. Businesses select people into groups, groups of winners and losers, customers and "So sorry, but you'll need to look elsewhere." 

It is no more reasonable to think that the Like A Business is how every endeavor should be managed than it is to think that we should depend on magic pixies to fix everything.

After all, what are the assumptions about what Run Like A Business means? Somebody has to be in charge? It has to make money? Everyone involved has to behave like a cog in a machine and human feelings and commitments must not clog the works? The needs of owners must come ahead of all other needs and commitments? There may be some assumptions that make a certain sense, like "Don't try to deploy resources that you don't actually have." But mostly, no.

Mostly you don't run schools like a business because they are not businesses, and you don't drive a car like a bicycle or play guitar like a piano. 

 

AZ: More Voucher Fraud

Arizona continues to be a national leader in school voucher fraud.

Even before they opened the voucher program up to universal levels, Arizona was setting examples, like the $700K (at least) of taxpayer-funded voucher money that was spent on clothes and beauty supplies. 

Last year, three Pheonix women were hauled into court for making allegedly fake bills for imaginary services for a child. 

But at least that case involved an actual existing child. Last February, Attorney General Kris Mayes announced charges related to a five-person conspiracy (with three of those persons state education department employees) to bill the state for a whole bunch of fake, ghost children who didn't even exist. They raked in over $600K of taxpayer money.

At the time, Mayes called for more guardrails for the system. Tom Horne, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction pooh-poohed her concerns, announcing “I’m going to be sure that we root out fraud and that every expenditure is a valid educational expense.”

And one would certainly think that some of these big ticket frauds, the state would try to create a little more oversight and accountability for the voucher program.

But apparently one would be wrong.

Today, Mayes announced yet another fraud case in which a couple has been charged with 60 counts of fraud, having put in applications for 50 students, 43 of whom do not actually exist. The couple-- Johnny Lee Bowers and Ashley Meredith Hewitt-- apparently did not even live in Arizona at the time. They grabbed around $100K, which they used for "personal living expenses," so this was like their job, what they did for a living.

Horne says, hey, we added an auditor finally to watch over the program. Plus an investigator. Yes, two people to keep tabs on a $800 million program seems like plenty. 

Meanwhile, Beth Lewis , executive director of public school advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona had a statement as well.

Arizona’s ESA voucher program is wide open for fraud and abuse — and the Republican majority in the Arizona Legislature has refused to add any oversight or accountability. Misuse and outright fraud will continue to abound until lawmakers add serious guardrails to this off-the-rails entitlement program.

One of the great disconnects in the voucher movement continues to be alleged fiscal conservatives who somehow don't want to watch over how taxpayer dollars are spent when it comes to taxpayer-funded school vouchers. And sure-- with the hugeness of Arizona's voucher program, what's a few hundred thousand here and there? 

The free market is supposed to provide all the necessary accountability to the modern choice landscape. Bad actors are supposed to be weeded out when families vote with their feet. No word yet on how phantom feet are supposed to vote, or how the invisible hand is able to wave away fraud. Until those details are hashed out, maybe the taxpayers deserve some actual rules and regulations and oversight. 

Trying To Explain Voucher Defeat

At this point, just about everybody has noticed that even states that embraced Trump rejected vouchers, that supposedly-really-popular ed reform that even the Boston Globe, no great supporter of public education, knows have always been rejected by voters. 

So how do voucherphiles explain their most recent defeat. A variety of theories have been floated on social media, all captured pretty well in a piece by Neal McClusky and Colleen Hroncich of the libertarian Cato Institute. 

I'll get to the meat of that argument in a moment, but let's start with the conclusion, because that's what really gets to the foundation of the pro-voucher argument:

Ultimately, education choices should not be based on majority rule.

This is, of course, a very libertarian argument--nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do. Here's the rest of the graph:

It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools – places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds – that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.

And yet, vouchers would compel families to pay for private schools that they find morally unacceptable or which would bar their own children from attending, and which allow no one--not the majority or anyone else-- a say in how public tax dollars are spent.

So perhaps the more complete version of the argument is this-- nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do, but I should be able to make them do things they don't want to do. And if I want their money to help me do the things I want to do, they should be made to give it to me. Or maybe it's "if I'm going to be forced to so something I don't want to do, then other people should be forced to do something I do want to do." Or maybe just "Other people shouldn't be able to make rules that bind me."

The libertarian argument has also run into the same argument since Milton Friedman was a pup and segregation academies were first conceived-- if the thing that some folks find "morally repugnant" is putting Black kids in classrooms with White kids, why should the country fund, support, or accept that? 

I sympathize with many libertarian ideas. I really do. I share the distrust of government-imposed solutions, and I still think some of the best features of the US system is those parts that protect us from majority rule's excesses. But when libertarians reject democracy (under the heading of majority rule), they rarely have much to offer in its place other than "might makes right," supplemented with "money makes might," and I remain unconvinced that it's an effective or useful system, unless, of course, you already possess a bunch of might. 

Private schools are a way for those with might and money to escape the democratically-operated system. Vouchers are a way to funnel public tax dollars into that system while pretending that we'll open great private school doors to one and all. But that pretense is just that-- a pretense. Voucher laws deliberately protect the ability of private schools to discriminate while also protecting their right to avoid any accountability to the taxpayers. 

But I've wandered off into their complaint about how things turned out. What do they offer as an explanation of why they turned out that way.

Colorado they explain away by pointing out that the proposed amendment was both redundant and a sloppy piece of writing that was such a mess, even school choice fans had trouble with it. That's a fair assessment; I don't know what legislative assistant inter n wrote that thing, but it was a disaster waiting to happen, or, as Kevin Welner (NEPC) put it, "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act." I suspect that almost nobody would have been happy if that amendment had passed. 

In Kentucky, the argument for the amendment was that it didn't actually create school choice, which is kind of like arguing that just because I want to pack your basement with explosives, that doesn't mean your house will be blown up. Kentucky saw multiple attempts to fund school choice shot down by their courts on the basis of constitutional language, and the amendment was clearly an attempt to remove that obstacle. Public education supporters, whose funding was equal to that of choice supporters, pushed back hard.

Likewise, the Nebraska measure was the result of a few years of trying to dodge the public in order to get vouchers up and running. Opponents outspent the voucherphiles, and those voucher fans want you to know that lots of money came from the teachers union.

In both cases, the on line explanation for the loss has been that voucher opponents used scare tactics and frightened the voters and did lots of posting and ads and campaigning and thereby snookered the voters, which I guess would be a more compelling argument if those same voters had not steadfastly ignored the huge amount of money and media thrown at them in an attempt to make them scared of Donald Trump in the White House. But in both states, Kamala Harris and school vouchers were both hammered. 

Voters did not believe that a Trump Presidency was a bad idea; they did believe that vouchers were a bad idea. Campaigning doesn't explain that, unless, I suppose, you think the anti-voucher campaigns were just so much better than the Harris campaign that they should be running future Democrat campaigns. 

Voucher supporters have tried a variety of pitches over the years, including "They're academically superior" (they aren't) and descending to the current "They're an escape from the woke evils of public schools" (#1 they aren't and #2 what does it say when you have to tear down your "competition" because trying to make yourself look better has failed). There's also "choice and freedom are just a better way to live" which I think is honest, but would carry more weight if they were railing against the real obstacles to choice-- cost, availability, and exclusionary practices of private schools. 

At some point, supporters of modern vouchers could stop trying to put different shades of lipstick on the same old pig. But they probably won't. The tactic of skipping over voters and taxpayers in order to hook up with some cooperative legislators has worked for them so far, and in states like Texas, they've still decided it would be easier to buy a legislature than convince voters. 

Kentucky has courts that can read its constitution. Nebraska let's citizens put laws up for referendum. Those two flukes forced voucher supporters to let the voters into the game. It's not a situation we're likely to see duplicated elsewhere, and there's no doubt that voucherphiles will keep trying to get past that whole pesky democracy thing. But because they're flukes, the Nebraska and Kentucky decisions are not likely harbingers of coming attractions. What they are is a reminder that across party lines, across demographic lines, across lines of race and class, voters don't like vouchers, and while voucherphiles can work around that fact, they can't just explain it away. 

ICYMI: December Already??!! Edition (12/1)

I'll be honest. This week the Seattle Branch Office of the Institute was in town (including all four grandchildren) and so the more local branch office waws also down here, and the board of directors was on vacation, and the weather was nice, and in the end I spent way less time in front of a screen, so I don't have a lot for you today. But here we go.

‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors

I know we're feeling this pinch in my neighborhood. Small colleges trying to save big bucks by cutting programs left and right. It takes a team of four Hechinger Report reporters to cover this story.

Florida Commissioner Endorses Privatizing The Responsibility for Education

Sue Kingery Woltanski hits a critical point here-- it's not just about privatizing education itself, but about privatizing the responsibility for it. Having trouble getting your child an education? That's your problem, not the state's.

The P in PSAT doesn’t stand for practice

Akil Bello is (at least) two things-- a leading testing guru, and the father of an 11th grader. Which means he has a keen eye for the College Board's PSAT baloney.

Republicans’ big idea for remaking public education hits voter resistance

Politico joins the growing list of news outlets that have noticed that supposedly wildly popular school vouchers were once again soundly rejected by actual voters. Juan Perez Jr has the story. 

The Globe Puffs Up Another Dubious “Science of Reading” Program

Maurice Cunningham is once again right there to call out the Boston Globe for its incomplete coverage of another education scam.

Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform

You thought empathizing with other human beings was good? Silly you. Nancy Flanagan explains.

Public Education: The Bully and the Dream

Yes, Nancy Flanagan again. We're that lucky this week. Here's a reminder to have a dream, not just an objection.

Independent Education Associations

Steve Nuzum with an excellent look at those non-union teacher unions out there.

Who Is Linda McMahon and What Would Be Her Priorities as Education Secretary?

Everyone's asking, and Jan Resseger has some answers.

Do our stories matter?

From Lyz at Men Yell At Me. Not particularly directly related to education, but still a great read about why we need to tell our stories, even in times which do not welcome then.

At Forbes.com this week I wrote about the problems that will arrive if that church-state wall is finally obliterated, and some research about student achievement. 

Come join me (and a few million others) on Bluesky and find me at @palan57.bsky.social.

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