ID: Pushing Vouchers Again

Idaho is a GOP stronghold, but it has so far resisted the idea of school vouchers. Governor Brad Little has announced that he would like to change that.

Idaho has charter schools, and their public school system has implemented the most obvious solution for the old "education shouldn't depend on your zip code" complaint by allowing students to attend any public school in the state (though transportation is no small barrier in Idaho). 

The barrier against taxpayer-funded school vouchers has been Republicans. When the Education Savings Account bill failed in 2023, it hit a wall of GOP legislators who actually remembered some traditional GOP principles. As the Idaho Stateman reported:

“It’s actually against my conservative, Republican perspective to hand this money out with no accountability that these precious tax dollars are being used wisely,” said Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls.

Senator C. Scott Grow complained, "I have absolutely no clue what the dollar amount is on this.”

Citing the explosive growth of programs like those in Florida and Arizona, folks pointed out that the program could get pretty expensive, pretty fast-- and no oversight of how that was spent was included in the bill.

That failure undoubtedly shaped the program that Little proposed in his state of the state address.

Little declared, "Just like we do with every taxpayer dollar that is spent in government, we will ensure there is oversight in school choice." Any school choice measure must be "fair, responsible, transparent, and accountable." Also, he declared that "it must not take funds from public schools." He set the cap for the program at $50 million.

Little's speech came hours after just such a bill was announceed by Representative Wendy Horman at a pro-voucher event sponsored by the Mountain States Policy Center, yet another right wing thinky tank advocacy group tied to the State Policy Network and ALEC. Hornan has pushed for vouchers before, parroting the "civil rights issue of our time" talking point. 

Horman told that crowd that she intended a voucher law with no income limits; every family, no matter how wealthy, can have taxpayers subsidize their private school. According to the Idaho Statesman, Gorman said she's proposing tax credits of $5,000 for families whose children were not in public school. The proposal appears to be an education savings account style voucher, allowing families to spend their tax credit on any number of education-adjacent expenses. 

The tax credit is a familiar dodge that allows politicians to say, "No funds will be taken from public schools." Because the money never gets into the government's hands. But the credits still blow a hole in the government budget. The Kentucky Supreme Court struck down just such an arrangement; “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” 

It remains to be seen if this can fly. Huge areas of Idaho have no private schools at all, and resistance to taxpayer-funded vouchers is still strong. In a debate with Horman last month, Rod Gramer, former president of Idaho Business for Education, it’s an “existential threat” to public education and “the most expensive government handout in the history of the United States.”

The End of the Public Cyber-Square

It's time to let go of the idea that the internet will provide some sort of public square.

The latest wake-up call came from Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that Meta's already barely-existent and largely ineffective moderation system would be scaled back to even less (best coverage of the day-- The Guardian researching the watch he was wearing). There are still some standards in place, sort of, but mostly Zuck has signaled that he wants to be part of the anti-fact MAGA world. 

Mostly folks are missing that this flap is another sign of how far Facebook has strayed from its original promise. My Facebook days go all the way back to the era when you could only get an account as a student or parent of certain universities, so I can tell tales of the days when Facebook allowed you to stay in contact with friends and family. It was ingenious. You told Facebook whose posts you wanted to see, and Facebook showed them to you. 

It was an internet public square of sorts, a place you could go and be assured you'd see people you knew and wanted to stay connected to. You could find old friends and, in the case of teachers, former students. 

But that didn't last. Instead of simply showing you what you asked to see, Facebook started shoving other stuff at you, showing you what someone else wanted to see. The public square started to grow a thousand billboards and snake oil salesmen. Enshittification set in as Facebook tested its limits. How many people will leave if we tweak this feature? How much will people pay us to have their content shoved in front of everyone's eyeballs? How much violation of privacy will people tolerate as we mine their profiles in order to make our advertising sales better targeted? 

And so now we have the Facebook that we only sort of use, a stream of spam and ads that can't be trusted because nobody vets them, interspersed every ten posts or so by the stuff we actually want to see. If you use Facebook much at all, your reaction to the Meta announcement is a bit meh, because chances are you've had a post taken down for no discernable reason even as you scroll past blatant lies. 

Twitter, the other contender for a public square designation, has become President Musk's private playground. I love Bluesky, but it's not going to be the new Twitter, and it's the best in a long line of sad, failed attempts to create a new internet public square (Google Plus, anyone?). And let's not even start on social media accounts of people who are not actually people; AI is going to make us nostalgic for old-fashioned sock puppets; at least those fake people were real people.

It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release.

There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win. 

Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have. This is part of wearing your big boy and big girl pants in the grown up world-- most of the tools and services available to do your work involve dealing with sub-optimal people and companies. You have to make your choices and decide which compromises you can live with. Does the benefit you get outweigh the problematic nature of the tool you're using? Corporations will give us what they want to give us; it has always been up to us to sift through that for the things we can use.

I can scroll past the baloney on Facebook to keep in touch with people who matter to me. This blog is published on blogspot (owned by Google) and also on Substack, both of which are in some ways problematic. But it lets me do part of my work and be part of a network that, sitting here in a small town, I would never have otherwise connected with. On the other hand, I won't use AI images to spruce up the blog because the environmental, ethical, and reality-eroding costs are not worth making the blog marginally more pretty. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, which is its own little pang, because those calculations will hasten the break-up of the public space as people peel off to their separate new places.

It sucks that enshittification has been accelerated by a second Trump administration. It can feel like community is breaking down just as we need it, that our ability to build a consensus reality based on, you know, reality, is being broken down at the exact same moment that people who want to attack it are coming to power. It sucks, but there it is. Sometimes you wake up in Interesting Times and there's nothing really for it except to suck it up and do the work.

Teachers are especially well-prepared to deal with these sorts of times. It's pretty standard operating procedure for classroom teachers to find ways to do their jobs despite a lack of support from the people who are supposed to support them. For most of my career, I called teaching a guerilla job, a job in which you have to work around your administration and, increasingly, around the state and federal bureaucrats and politicians who seem to devote far more energy to making your job harder than helping you do it.

Many states have been hostile territory for public education for years; now, the whole country will become more hostile. But there was never a golden age when national politics were noted for boosting and supporting public education. 

So find your support network. I notice that many folks are patching one together out of several platforms, and that makes sense-- social media diversification protects you from the sudden collapse of any one platform (hasta la vista, Cafe Utne). But in the meantime, it's probably time to let go of the dream of some social media platform where everyone gets together, asshats are muted, and all the communicating you want to do can be done freely and safely at one URL. No corporation was ever going to be a reliable arbiter of the truth, and now they've at least said out loud that they don't intend to try. Let's get on with it. 

The Free Market In A Small Town

I live in a small town in a small town region. A little over 6,000 in the city, somewhere around 50,000 in the county. We're in northwest Pennsylvania, about halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, so not the kind of brutal isolation that a small town in Nebraska or Montana experiences.

We were fairly wealthy once upon a time 150 or so years ago, we were the heart of the oil industry, and our cities are still marked by some of the buildings that our local wealthy folk erected. But that was another time. We are not some sad and hollowed out disaster of a town. We have a functioning arts community, plenty of outdoor recreation, and some community festivals that light up the region. People move here because we are in many ways the picture of that idealized small town life that is part of how we Americans view ourselves.

We are, in short, probably better off than the average small town.

But there are too few of us, with too little money, to make us a very attractive market, and when you aren't a very attractive market, the invisible hand of the free marketplace just kind of waves at you on its way to some place a little more lucrative.

Much of what has happened here is a familiar story. A mall went up many decades back and kneecapped the downtown stores. Then Walmart came and kneecapped the mall. I would love to avoid giving the Waltons any of my money, but for many goods there are no alternatives here. Other than, of course, Amazon. 

If I want to "ethically source" some items, it becomes a chore. I don't know if you've shopped much at Walmart, but what I find remarkable is how little selection they actually offer. I needed a toaster-oven. They had only a couple of choices, all too similar to the one I bought from them the last time and which turned out to be largely useless. We have lots of nice little shops in the area that can sell some nice stuff, but not toasters, so I hopped on line to hunt down an acceptable toaster which I would have to select based on pictures and descriptions because I cannot see it or heft it. This is exponentially less annoying than trying to shop for shoes for my non-standard feet. After days of research, I find the item, and I even order it from someone other than the House of Bezos, though I can't be certain I didn't just give money to some different awful person. And I'm also aware that shopping for a more-ethical option is a privilege that not all my neighbors can afford.

The free market does not like places without a lot of money. You can shoot me messages about the latest thing proper lefties are supposed to boycott, but chances are there isn't such a place within fifty miles (Starbucks? Fat chance). 

We at least still have a hospital (through a bizarre fluke involving a lawsuit and a story too long to tell here). My niece lives a few towns over in a larger city that as of the new year has no hospital at all. We still have a large unit in the county, a wing of Pennsylvania's leading health care behemoth, but it is inadequately staffed with a group of folks who are trying their damnedest to compensate for their employer's neglect and disinterest.

For folks who are sure that the free market can do a better job than the United States Postal Service--well, UPS and FedEx have closed their customer facing offices here, so if you want to send something with them, you'll have to prepare and tag the package yourself before leaving it on a table at some pick-up spot (that you'll have to find by searching on line). As always, private carrier deliveries will only happen in town-- if you live out in the boonies, the delivery companies will hand your package to USPS to complete the delivery.

We have some nice local restaurants and for chains, just the basics of fast food. We have a small airport, but no commercial flights any more. We have may shops in town, many of which are "hobby shops" run by people who are more attached to the idea of running a business than making a living at it. 

When I think about the free market true believers and their approach to education, I wonder if they really understand how little the free market could accomplish here. Our local Catholic school system has shrunk to nothing but a single K-6 school. There is a private Christian school that controls costs by replacing teachers with computers. 

There are just over 5,500 students in the whole county. Cyber charters regularly bleed off a couple hundred of those (though that is often temporary). Like most small town areas, folks here consider the schools a big part of the community identity. And almost all of those schools are Title I schools, meaning that families aren't sitting on big piles of money they can spend for a quality private school (if such a school were available locally). 

I don't hate the free market, and it has done some mighty nice things for this community. But the free market likes marketplaces flush with cash and customers, and most small town and rural areas aren't. This is Dollar General territory, a store whose whole business model is "If we give folks with few alternatives the very bare minimum of service and product quality, maybe we can turn a profit."

That is not the business model we need for education. We already know that it's not working for health care--spotty-if-at-all, minimally capable service. Turning education into a free market, you're-on-your-own consumer good will not serve us well. If the goal is going to be providing the best possible education for every child in the country, the free market is uniquely unable to pursue that goal. 

Come visit us here. It's a beautiful place to live and work and even be a tourist. I'll give you a tour and show you the sights. But don't ask us to depend on the free market to get us top quality education for our children. 

Your New District Chatbot

You'll see these stories popping up all over, and if the story isn't about your district, chances are it will be stoking some administrators Fear Of Missing Out. But the FOMO seems sadly misplaced.

Greenwich Time ran its story by Jessica Simms about the Greenwich School District's new chatbot under the headline, "Meet Greenwich Public Schools new chatbot who won't say why the district got rid of tacos at lunch," and that's the closest it comes to taking a critical look at this Connecticut school district's addition of a cutesy chatbot. 

Does a story about a chatty LLM website mascot have to take a critical look? Yes, it does, because every story about "AI" should be reckoning with the question. "Is this worth the power, ecological and financial cost?" (Also, will it fail disastrously and compromise student data in the process?) "Does it have a cute avatar attached" probably shouldn't be near the top of the list.

The GPS website has a cute chat invite in the bottom corner, not unlike the standard help-chat box on many sites (all of which trigger, for persons of a Certain Age, Clippy-related trauma). It greets you-

My name is G.P. Sleuthhound and I am relentless and stubborn on a scent. I serve as the Greenwich Public Schools chatbot.
As my name tells you, I can do one thing better than any creature on earth: track down the answer to your question on our website.
How can I help?

The district's director of communications says the department is loaded with dog lovers, and bloodhound is on point, so there we are. G.P. even has a little deerstalker hat. According to the district, the chatbot is "a more advanced search bar," except that LLMs don't make particularly good search engines. Also, this product is confined to the school's website, which means the job doesn't require a particularly clever search engine any way.

The district is using AlwaysOn, a company that promises turnkey chatbots for districts. The company was founded in 2021 and "sponsors" many states' Public Relations Associations (like California's version). Located in Newport Beach, CA, its name guarantees that it is hard to track on line. Its LinkedIn profile says it has 2-10 employees. 

AlwaysOn was founded by Teddy Daiber. Daiber graduated from Brown University with a degree in economics (and some history on the Lacrosse Field, including big time private high school play). Daiber was an analyst at Barclays, worked the commodities desk at Citi, the started founding things. In 2014 it was Poolit, an online content save-and-share outfit, then in 2016, Head of Customer Success for Informed K12, a workflow automation operation for schools. 

In 2021, he was launching his new business. The Oct/Nov 2021 issue of the Palm Springs Unified School District news letter announced a new chatbot for helping navigate the website, including some quotes from Daiber, listed there as the CEO of Otto Technologies. At that point, the product was Otto Chatbot, launched in the spring, with PSUSD as one of its first customers. Daiber and district admins are excited about how the product helps people find information on the website (which begs the question, "How much of this would be unnecessary is more school websites sucked less?")

An awful lot of the pitch does seem to be about being able to search the website for information. Here's what the AlwaysOn website says about the chatbot-search engine distinction: 

Website search is just a keyword search with no intelligence and limited data. Search doesn’t improve over time and is completely dependent on what words you use in your search. Search lacks conversational or discovery features that create a great customer experience, and all the work is on the stakeholder to sort through the results to find the best information.

Chatbots use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to interpret and understand what exactly a stakeholder wants when they ask a question. Chatbots organize and return the best answers and information. Chatbots also automatically improve from each interaction, work in multiple languages, and provide insightful analytics on the most popular questions and topics.

A chatbot can "interpret and understand exactly what a stakeholder wants when they ask a question"??! That is some powerful magic indeed. 

The company is clear on where the chatbot can search (just your school site) but not so clear on how and on what content the bot has been trained. It is clear that it does not save personal user info, but collects general info with an aim to analyze what people are trying to find out.

Attaching the AI label to this dedicated search program invites users to imagine capabilities that it doesn't have. Simms looked through questions that have been asked and found items like "why did they get rid of tacos" and "who does the most work at GPS." The chatbot couldn't answer those. 

I tried the chatbot out myself. "When were Greenwich schools founded?" I asked. "Various times," G.P. replied, then went on to provide the info about just one school, plus info about the founding of the town. I asked who the youngest staff member is. The chatbot replied with a bunch of excerpts from the website that included the word "youngest." I asked it "who teaches the highest level of English" and it replied "The highest level of English is taught by Certified English Language Learner (ELL) teachers in Greenwich Public Schools." All of its answers come with a link to the location on the website where it found its answer.

I asked it if Monday's lunch will be delicious. It told me that this month the cafeteria is featuring "delicious zucchini." I asked it to write me a limerick about kindergarten. It gave me a list of excerpts from the website that list the word "kindergarten."

Yeah, this "chatbot" turns out to be not very good at interpreting and understanding what the user really wants, and mostly functions like a mediocre search engine. But it does let the school district declare that it is right out there on the cutting edge with some of that AI stuff that is supposed to be so cool, even if the cutting edge looks a lot like search engines from five years ago. 

AlwaysOn and Greenwich schools just happen to be the ones that crossed my screen-- there are loads more of these things out there. School districts with a bad case of FOMO teaming up with vendors who have figured out that AI is a great marketing tool. You remember when Common Core was The Big Thing and every publisher slapped "Common Core" on their same old stuff because it helped with marketing? The AI revolution in education feels a lot like that.

It would all be kind of cute and amusing if AI weren't using up money and electricity and water and computing capacity that could be put to better use than creating an image of a bloodhound with Sherlock Holmes fashion style. Keep an eye open in your neighborhood. 

Special note to journalists. It took no special ton of time or effort for me to find the background for AlwaysOn or try out its capabilities, and only slightly more regular effort to be slightly informed about AI stuff. Please make those efforts, and the next time someone shows up with a Gee Whiz press release or pitch about some AI-in-education awesome sauce, please exercise a little critical examination and research. Because if all you're going to do is take in what they say and just push it back out again, I know a digital bloodhound that can do your job.

ICYMI: Back To It Edition (1/5)

So much for the holidays. Now we all get back to it, whatever your personal "it" might be. Personally, I'm trying to pick up the banjo more often. Not my primary or even tertiary instrument, and as a banjo player, I'm a pretty good trombonist, but there's great value in stretching. 

My other "it" of course is reading and writing, and this week we're back to a big list of stuff (including some catch-up reading). Here we go--

"Back in my day, teachers used to grade the essays..."

Marcus Luther looks at the human dynamics of grading essays. As a bonus, he also breaks down the standard outline for AI-in-education articles.

Federal judge declares sections of Arkansas’ library obscenity law unconstitutional

That would be the part that threatens to throw librarians in jail for dealing in Naughty Books.

Why Standardized Tests Fail.

Brad Johnson on LinkedIn with a good and brief explanation of why the Big Standardized Test is not such a great thing.

College for some

Comrade Chris (yes, really) on the uneven application of the "college isn't for everyone" advice.

Blaming Low Wages on Bad Schooling Is a Neoliberal Myth

Nora De La Cour reminds us how that classic neo-liberal baloney works, and why it is, in fact, baloney. At Jacobin.

Are Charter Schools Singing "Kumbaya" With A Knife In Their Hands?

Carl Petersen has his doubts about the new warm, friendly charter advocates in the Los Angeles school district. For one thing, they seem to lie a bunch...

A North Texas high school locked up cellphones. Here’s what happened

Talla Richman does some deep diving for the Dallas News looking at how one district has made out with its cell phone ban.

If We Can't Blame Teachers Unions For Terrorism (Yes, Really!), Then The Terrorists Will Win

Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette adds some context and biting analysis to education dudebro and all-around tool Ryan Walters' latest insult of the public schools he's supposed to be leading.

I asked dozens of teachers why they're quitting. Their answers are heartbreaking.

Annie Reneau does some interviewing for Upworthy, and what these departing teachers have to say will not surprise you, but it's still a bummer.

TIASL Best Blogs of 2024

Nancy Flanagan recaps some of her favorites from last year (she also says some nice things about me) and every one of them is worth a reread.

School Choice Is Not What It Sounds Like

Carol Burris explains for The Progressive audience what privatization is really about-- privatizing the responsibility for education.

Right-wing Oligarchs and Education

David Pepper looks at the complaints by our billionaire overlords about the quality of US workers and asks just what they've done to education that might explain their troubles.

Mark All as Read

Audrey Watters questions the AI support that comes from the cult of efficiency-- why read a book when AI can summarize it so much faster.

II Hands II Heaven, A Reprise

Jose Luis Vilson has always been a stellar example of what someone can accomplish if they stop thinking of themselves as "just a teacher" and instead drives forward with all the talent and commitment at their command. Here's his reflection on the most recent parts of his journey. 

The Outlier Story: How Education Journalism (Almost) Always Gets It Wrong

Paul Thomas delivers a refresher course on how fostering a constant sense of crisis helps fuel some of the worst folks in ed reform, and how journalists have been complicit.

Newspaper Opinion Page Prints Online Charter School Propaganda

Jan Resseger catches the Cleveland Plain Dealer publishing cyber charter advertising as an op-ed.

Blatherskites

Greg Sampson has some thoughts about the folks who insist that teachers have seized education and taken it away from parents.

The role of knowledge in the age of AI

Benjamin Riley has a conversation with Bror Saxberg, and it's worth it just for this paragraph.

As you’ve often argued, the point is that if knowledge is not in your head, then it is not usable to you. What’s more, with complex interconnected content that is new to your brain, it's going to take real work to "move it in" to working memory for creative thought. We do not have Matrix-like download capacities (yet)!

Educators worry as Tennessee's new voucher plan could divert funds from public schools

The privatization push is on in Tennessee.

Large Language Models (misnamed AI) are Not Intelligent

Akil Bello has been playing with LLMs, and he's not yet impressed with their Taco Bell-like effects.

A Scarcity Perspective

Andru Volinsky asks whether your state is budgeting from a frame of scarcity or enough.

Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies

If you missed the story-- Meta unleashed some LLM faux humans on Instagram, chaos and hilarity ensued, and they sort of backed off a little. There's a lot out there about the flap, but this CNN piece gives a pretty good summary,

Wall Street declares war on the Associated Press

Matt Pearce explains how Gannett and Reuters are coming after the last great journalistic source that isn't organized around profit.

It’s Christmas for the elephants as unsold trees are fed to the animals at Berlin Zoo

Well, it was a good week for the Berlin elephants. 

At Forbes.com, I looked at a new paper that looks at how states could defend their charter sector from discriminatory factors (and privatizers can protect their operation from the Constitution). 

Join me on substack and get all my stuff for free in your email. It's cheap and easy!

Ramaswamy, Reading, and the Ed Department

DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't know a lot about a lot of things, including education. 

He has decided to be excited about the NAEP 8th grade reading scores and proposes a solution on(on X, where all important policy is discussed) in response not to an actual look at NAEP results, but to an overheated tweet from Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

This is a 5-alarm fire & President Trump’s vision to dismantle the Department of Education is the first step to fixing it. The federal bureaucracy has wasted boatloads of taxpayer $$ while impeding the success of our students. The statistics below are downright brutal.

The operating theory for Trump's new administration is that we just give all that money back to the states, something or other good would happen. Ramaswamy has simply hit on Steps 1 and 2 of formula that privatizers have used successfully many times. 

Step 1: Announce giant crisis!

Step 2: Announce that X will be a solution (do not offer proof)

Step 3: Implement solution.

Step 4: Do not collect follow-up data (because it keeps showing that your solution didn't work)

Step 5: (Optional) If someone accidentally did collect data, dismiss it and/or move the goal posts.

But even Nat Malkus at the pro-privatizing American Enterprise Institute can see there are some flaws in Ramaswamy's formulation.

If it weren't for the Department of Education, we wouldn't know the statistics that he's citing about how many students are proficient at reading.

The Trumpsters want what privatizers have always wanted-- they want all that sweet sweet taxpayer education funding liberated from strings that determine how it can be spent, the better to direct it to their favorite pockets. There's no reason to believe that such a liberation would result in higher Big Standardized Test scores (and no reason to believe that such higher scores would improve the lives of individuals or the nation). But that's not really the point. 

Anyway, one can say that ending the department would improve reading scores as easily as one can say that wiping out unicorns and robins would improve reading scores. Under current rules, it would take 60 senators to dismantle the department, and neither President Musk nor Chief Bittle-washer Ramaswamy has that kind of support. 

NY: Whitney Tilson Wants To Be Mayor

Whitney Tilson is the very model of a modern major reformster. And now he wants to be mayor of NYC.

Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.

Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He helped launch KIP and Teach for America. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.

Well, he's not just a backer of Democrats for Education Reform--he's a founder who made a certain tactical decision to put the D in DFER. Leonie Haimson has a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…"

In public, Tilson has liked to portray himself and his very rich friends as scrappy underdogs, fighting against Entrenched Powers, characterizing this group of exceptionally wealthy and well-connected folks as "outmanned, outspent, and outgunned," which sounds inspirational albeit unrelated to any reality I'm familiar with. He shmoozes with his peers-- the wealthy and well-connected-- and heads up an annual big money poker tournament to raise money for Education Reform Now, the funding wing of DFER. 

Tilson announced his entrance into the race for New York City mayor around Thanksgiving with, among other things, a sixteen page letter outlining why the 58-year-old former hedge fund guy is the man for the job. Like much of Tilson's globe-trotting, rich-shmoozing life, the whole exercise is loaded with reminders that the rich are different. 

My candidacy is audacious, to be sure. I’ve never run for elected office, have little name recognition and haven’t yet built out my team. 

But there is a clear path to victory, given the current field of candidates and voters’ anti-incumbent, anti-establishment mood, as I outline in detail below. 

I’m running to win, of course, but no matter what, I’m going to have fun. If my campaign gets any traction, I’ll take a lot of fire, but that’s okay – I have thick skin, am not angling for higher office and can’t be cancelled. Best of all, I don’t have to engage in any phoniness to maximize my chances of winning. I’m just going to be who I’ve always been: a big-hearted realist who’s always looking for the best ideas; a person who loves to engage in and fight for important things; and, most importantly, a leader who isn’t afraid to speak uncomfortable truths and take on entrenched interests.

Well, sure. Retired guys should cultivate a fun hobby.

For those who do recognize Tilson's name, there will be some recognition of much of his nominally-Democrat, aggrieved and besieged rich guy approach.

Tilson identifies two problems holding NYC back. One is the "corrupt, wasteful and inefficient city government" which he calls "the blob," which has always also been a popular reformster name for all the people working in education who won't do what reformsters want them to do. Tilson also blames "far-left zealots" who want to tax and spend, say mean things about the country, focus on identity politics, engage in performative wokeness, think capitalism is evil and "focus on how the economic pie is divided rather than how to grow it."

But honest-- he knows he sounds GOP-ish, but he's really a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat located on the "sensible left." He's pro-union (well, he never used to be pro-teachers union, but whatever), pro- Social Security, pro-healthcare, including women's. 

He has a list of six things to fix, with specifics (it's a 16 page letter). He'll cut crime by 50%. He'll fix the housing crisis. He'll cut "out-of-control" spending. He'll prioritize citizens over non-citizens. And he will, of course, improve schools. How exactly? 

Ensure that there’s a high-quality teacher in every classroom and that every family has multiple options for a great school, including high-quality charter schools, whose numbers shouldn’t be capped at an arbitrary level.  

In collaboration with parents and teachers, we will identify the schools that are failing our children to the greatest degree, declare a state of emergency in each one and take drastic measures to improve them. 

Expand after-school and summer programs so all kids are learning year-round.  

Our youth are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and self-harm due to social media. To combat this, I will forbid smartphone use in all schools and ban social media accounts for anyone under the age of 16. 

Tilson is emblematic of much of the terrain of education reform and US politics in general. As a reformster, he continues to support right-wing and neo-liberal policies, and "Democrat" reform policies continue to look pretty much like right-tilted policies. As a mayoral candidate he could be running as full MAGA except that he is "deeply committed to full acceptance and rights for the LGBTQ+ community." 

Tilson has committed to regular Zoom meetings with whatever voters want to join him. And he continues to maintain a big-time belief in himself and his ability to straighten out everyone else. And hell-- he's easy enough to look at. 

Does Tilson have a shot? Who knows-- but as long as he's having fun I guess that's enough. And I don't know that any mayoral candidate would be good news for NYC schools. But if such an education candidate exists, he is surely not Tilson.