When the State Takes Over Religion

Tennessee Republicans want the state to join the club of states pushing the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms. It's a move that ought to set up alarm bells in Christian churches all across the state.

House Bill 47 uses the standard dodge for justifying this violation of the First Amendment-- the Ten Commandments sold as a "historically significant" document.

Louisiana has similar dopey law on the books, currently being challenged in court as unconstitutional (which it is). Texas also currently requires to post the decalogue in classrooms, and that's in the courts, too.  Indiana is trying to run a bill through its legislature, though like Tennessee, it's trying to hedge its bets by making the posting of the commandments voluntary rather than mandatory, because maybe if you violate the First Amendment just a little on a local level, it's not quite so unconstitutional (spoiler alert: it's still unconstitutional).

The loophole that states try to fly through is one that suggests that if you teach Bible stuff for a secular purpose, that's okey dokey. Hence the repeated technique of calling to post the commandments next to documents like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (presumably none of the supporters would be cool with a caption reading "Post THIS violates THAT"). Tennessee's bill just includes the Ten Commandments in a list of other documents.

Violation of the First Amendment? Absolutely. But Christians ought to be alarmed. 

This is the state telling people of faith how best to understand their own sacred texts ("The Ten Commandments handed down by God are just like the Constitution written by humans"). This is, in fact, the state telling everyone what the sacred text actually says (there are, in fact, multiple versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, and any state-approved version is also a state-edited version). 

And this is the state playing religious favorites. In Louisiana, the Hindu community said that if we're posting "historically significant" scripture, the Bhagavad Gita belongs up there, too. Expect other religions to do the same (and probably the Satanic Temple, too), requiring someone in state government to declare which religions are or are not "historically significant." In the case of Tennessee, the law's list includes "and other significant documents," meaning the local school board is going to get to make big decisions about both religion and history. There's no way that can end badly.

Folks who applaud these kinds of bills always imagine that their own version of religion will be the winner, that their version of faith will be ascendant. They should develop better imaginations. Giving the state the power to pick winners and losers in the world of religion is just dangerously dumb. It has never ever in history worked out well, which is undoubtedly why the framers were so committed to keeping government out of religion. 

I wish I knew who said this originally, but I'll keep repeating it-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. Laws like the ones proposed in Tennessee and Indiana ought to have everyone lined up in opposition, and Christians ought to be in the front of the line. 

WV: Removing Accountability From Private Schools

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they've been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million. 

With that kind of money on the line, you'd think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know-- so the taxpayers know what they're getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.

SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order-- with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here's the list of rules slated for erasure:

* The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.

* The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.

* The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.

* The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.

* Since there's no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.

* The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, "the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens." Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal. 

So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.

The bill does add one bit of new language:

As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.  

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes. 

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as "No accountability at all." A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I'm guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test. 

Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we'd get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the "hard data" showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools-- but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against. 

This is not about choice. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it's about making sure those schools aren't accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It's another iteration of the same argument we've heard across the culture--that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it. 

We've been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off-- the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn't what's being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death. 

Think of the Children

"We're doing this for the children" has been one of the most often-used excuses for bad policy ideas. "The education system puts adult concerns ahead of children's concerns," has become a golden oldie among folks who want to put their own adult goals ahead of children's concerns.

You would imagine, for instance, that putting children's concerns first would mean schools operating with accountability and oversight so that children's right to a quality education are protected. If you believe in choice, then you might want to defend a child's ability to choose by guaranteeing that vouchers provide a full cost of tuition, that schools are forbidden to discriminate against students, and that enough quality control is in place to insure that students can choose safely. Those guards for student concerns are not only not in place, but are actively rejected. 

The real tell is that old favorite, "Children do not belong to the government." That's true as far as it goes, but the problem appears when someone, for instance the Washington Senate Republicans, say the second part of the statement out loud--

Your children do not belong to the government, they belong to you.

Well, no. Your children do not belong to anyone. They are not chattel or domesticated beasts of burden or toasters. They are live human beings, and as such, nobody's property. 

But some "conservative" folks don't see it. These are the folks who are already working from a world view that says some people are more valuable, more deserving of power and wealth than others, and way too often for them, children are another brand of others, useful only as potential future Correct Believers or meat widgets. 

We have to ban books because being exposed to any mention of sex, however slight, might damage their tender psyches. We can't teach about slavery because it might make the white kids feel bad (though couldn't the white kids choose to identify with the white folks who stood up against slavery). Children are the reason that certain adults should be allowed to narrowly confine what can and cannot be taught. That way they can grow up to be the kind of adults that current adults desire them to be.

Oh, and when it comes to life-saving vaccinations, it's more important to honor the vaccine-averse desires of adults than protect the health of the children.

They can never just say, "You should stop doing that because I don't like it." No, they're only speaking up in order to save the children.

Children are also useful as bargaining chips and leverage.

Every teacher who belongs to a union that had to throw its weight around has heard the argument. You can't strike, teachers, or even just work to contract, because that would hurt the students. Would it hurt the students to go to a school that has reduced resources, a disrespected staff, and a hiring policy of "If you can't find a decent teaching job anywhere else, settle for us here at Lowest Bidder School District"? It surely would. But maybe we can guilt the staff into shutting up about it.

Or take the new Heritage Foundation report, Saving America by Saving the Family, which includes the whole "desires of adults over the needs of children" shtick, and then goes on to spend 164 pages explaining how government should not meet the needs of children unless the desires of adult conservatives are met by the children's parents. 

Bruce Lesley (First Focus on Children) has an outstanding post breaking down this report, but we'll touch on some highlights here. For instance, the part where they note that the income loss that hits poor parents on the birth of a child-- but you can't give poor parents more money to cover that period because it would be "akin to a guaranteed basic income that would discourage work."

The Heritage report plainly gets that "early investments in children have high returns," yet they spend time explaining why certain people who make The Wrong Choices shouldn't benefit from those investments. Does that put adult concerns ahead of children's needs? Of course it does, but hey, the kids should have thought of that before they chose parents who didn't match the Heritage ideas of proper parenting. (Lesley suggests that Heritage is trying to do the very sort of social engineering that they often rail against, but I'd bet they simply see themselves as trying to return society to its proper factory settings.)

This is not a new argument. We are the lousiest nation in the world for parental leave, and the reason why isn't particularly complicated-- the needs of employers rank higher than the needs of babies. 

But we're about to see children used as a prop for yet another campaign. Meet Greater Than, a new campaign that declares "Real progress means putting children's needs ahead of adult desires." Doesn't that sound excellent? Can you guess what the real goal of this new campaign is? Here's a paragraph's worth of a hint from their website:

When marriage was redefined in 2015, parenthood was too. Once husbands and wives became optional, mothers and fathers became replaceable. But for a child, their mother and father are never optional, they are essential. Children need both a mother and a father to provide stability, guidance, and the unique love only a man and woman can give. No adult desire or ideology can change that.

 Yup. The folks who want to roll back Obergefell, the Supreme Court decision that recognized same-gender marriage, are proud to declare "We are the Defenders of Children." Their core allies include Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Colson Center, Family Research Council and Them Before Us. They have other allies on the national and state level. I noticed them because of an announcement that they were being joined by Pennsylvania Family Institute, the group that has worked hard to get anti-LGBTQ policies into schools. Said Randall Wenger, the PFI attorney who has personally worked to make the lives of LGBTQ children more difficult and to thwart the best intentions of their supportive parents:

I'm part of Greater Than because, since Obergefell, our laws have increasingly treated family as an abstract idea rather than a lived reality for children. We've experimented with new definitions while drifting away from the one model that has consistently supported human flourishing-- a child raised by his or her mother and father. Greater Than brings that essential truth back into focus.

The list just keeps getting longer. We have to defund, dismantle, and replace public education in order to save the children. We have to carefully control what children see and hear in order to save them. We have to create a multi-tiered education system to save the children. We have to force folks to maintain traditional families to save the children. We have to stamp out gay marriage to save the children.  

And yet. As amazing as that list is, I am even more amazed by the things that don't make it onto the Save The Children list. 

We don't have to require parental leave that insures parents are right there for the earliest months (or even years) of the child's life. We don't have to require vaccinations whether parents want them or not. We don't have to work to provide the economic supports and systems that help a young couple raise a child. We don't have to make child care affordable for parents. And we certainly don't have to direct Defense Department-sized funding and resources to make public schools fully capable delivery systems for excellent education and other supports. 

It's absolutely true-- we need to be very careful about putting what adults want ahead of what children need. But if you want to warn me about this issue, maybe show me some sign that you are part of the solution and not part of the problem. 

ICYMI: Arctic Edition (2/1)

Punxsutawney Phil will be lucky to even get out of his hole tomorrow, let alone see a shadow. Hope you are staying warm wherever you are. It has been a cold, ugly week, and folks are writing about many things besides education, and Lord knows there are many aspects of the current state of our nation that demand our attention. But there have been many pieces of education news happening in the background, and the mission here at the Institute is to keep some focus on them. So here we go with this week's reading list.

Editorial: Snub of Linda McMahon puts Fairfield parents on right side of history

Linda McMahon was canceled in Connecticut. Her History Rocks tour was supposed to stop at an elementary school in Fairfield. Parents said they'd rather not. The Hearst Connecticut Media Editorial Board says the parents got it right. 

DeSantis seeks to supplement Florida school vouchers with federal tax plan

Jeffrey Solochek at the Tampa Bay Times reports that DeSantis is not only opting in on federal vouchers, but wants to pile them on top of Florida's state vouchers so Florida parents can double dip. 

The Fault Line in American politics?

Nancy Flanagan considers a stunning little bar graph showing how states' education data lines up with its voting habits.

Snow Day

Audrey Watters considers snow days and, as always, a host of useful links to articles.

I try to answer the "So what?" question

Stephen Dyer has been prying apart the details of Ohio's messed-up funding system. Now he takes a step back to look at the whole picture, and possible solutions.

Trump Drops DEI Case Appeal. Is He Really Giving Up?

Jan Resseger looks at some of the journalist reactions to the regime's abandonment of their appeal over that anti-CEI Dear Colleague letter. 

After almost two-year wait, education advocates call on Supreme Court to rule on Leandro

The Leandro case in North Carolina is one of the very first cases in which the state was sued to force proper funding of education. It is also a demonstration of how plaintiffs can win such a case, resulting in the state doing not a damn thing for decades. So maybe the court can rule on it some more? James Farrell at WFAE is reporting.

Two School Districts Sue, Claiming Alaska Is Failing Its Constitutional Obligation to Fund Public Education

Alaska is getting its own version of the Leandro case. Good luck with that. Emily Schwing has the details at ProPublica.

State Board of Education poised to require Bible readings for public school students

We're talking Texas, where the state is getting ready to set a whole list of required readings that are very white and male and which include a bunch of Bible stuff. Erin Davis at Spectrum Local News.

Reynolds introduces bill supporting public charter schools as demand increases

Remember when one of the selling points of charters was that they would save taxpayers money by being more efficient and less expensive. Well, in a move that surprises nobody who was paying attention, the governor of Iowa now announces that charters are being picked on because they don't get all the taxpayer dollars that a public school gets.

Virginia Lawmakers Consider Standards for Private School Coupon Schemes

Andy Spears reports that Virginia might actually be preparing to resist federal school vouchers.

Moving Special Ed to HHS Will Treat It Like a Medical Problem. It’s Not

Chantal Hinds and Kings Floyd make the argument that special education should not be the purview of Health and Human Services. Honestly, the argument that RFK Jr shouldn't be in charge of anything at all should be sufficient, but if you want some more reasoning, this article at The 74 has you covered.

Senate Republicans fast-track universal open enrollment bill to House; could become law in weeks

The New Hampshire legislature is fast-tracking a bill to create open enrollment. Ethan Dewitt reports for New Hampshire Bulletin.

Trump administration finds California’s ban on ‘forced outing’ of students violates federal law

Because the feds are all for forced outing of LGBTQ students to their families. Eric He at Politico.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to turn teachers into informants against their students

That issue may be decided by the Supreme Court. Ian Millhiser provides good information on the case. the context, and the background. 

To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to AI

Well, you knew this was coming. It's the AI-powered cheating arms race. Tyler Kingkade reports for NBC News.

At Forbes.com this week, I took a look at Bernie Sanders' response to the federal voucher program.

This week's music is from a little-remembered film. Dr. Seuss wrote the movie (The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T) and it did not turn out nearly as well as one might have hoped, but it still has delirious production design and a set of nifty songs. Hans Conried sings this one.

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Reading Boring Books

EdWeek just ran a long complaint about assigning boring books in English class, carrying some extra heft because it came from a school district superintendent. Erich May is currently superintendent of the Brookville, PA, school district, which is just down the road from me, which I guess means some day I may get the chance to meet him and tell him personally how far off the mark I think he is. 

He trots out the opening lines of The Scarlet Letter, the Nathanial Hawthorne warhorse and calls it ugly. And Wuthering Heights, too. And any author from then or before. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spencer, Browning, Blake, "and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s." May says he doesn't "mean to reject the canon," but instead suggests we should "leave the canon to the English majors." 

May wants us to understand that Kids These Days have dumped books in favor of screens. May argues that "we are losing the Battle for the Book because teens and young adults are not reading books." 

For high school English teachers, the job used to be teaching students to read things that are rigorous and complex. But it is no longer a given that they will read at all. Now more than ever, the priority for high school English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read.

May says we should be getting comprehension, literary analysis, interpretation and evaluation to students, but those goals are "more important than reading any particular piece of literature." 

There is, he asserts, "no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays" when there's other stuff out there that teens "would be more likely to enjoy." Oy.

I'm not unsympathetic to his point. Particularly with students who read little on their own, it's important to give them something with a good hook. But if we leave the canon to the English majors, where will the English majors come from?

More importantly, May, who taught English for about six years back in the Oughts before embarking on a series of administrative jobs, seems to be missing understanding of the English teacher's job. 

Annika Hernandez offers a good set of responses.

* English teachers mostly already emphasize modern works (if they teach complete works at all).

* An English teachers job is not just to assign works that students will enjoy most. Imagine, I'll add, that we told history teachers to teach only the parts of history that students like, or phys ed to teach only the games students already play, or band and choir directors to teach their ensembles only music they already know. Imagine if we told math teachers to teach only the interesting stuff.

* English class is not simply for teaching skills and the content with which the skills are taught doesn't matter. This skills-centered approach has been a huge bust for the past twenty-some years.

* The classic parts of the canon are not just for (probably snooty) elites.

May writes as if "assign" means toss the book at the students and wish them good luck. That's not the gig.

The job is to show students why a work is interesting, and to help them find their way into it. Sometimes that means helping them navigate difficult language. Sometimes that means helping them look for compelling ideas or themes. It always means pointing out the features that make the work compelling and interesting.

The Last Bookstore-- a must-visit in LA

This has always been a challenge for teachers, and one of the reasons that a narrow required reading list creates problems. I was required to teach Julius Caesar for a decade or so, and it took me years to find a way to sell it (How far would you go if you thought someone near you was about to be the next Hitler? How often has your life gotten derailed because you misread signals?). But there were also works that I was always excited to teach. We talk about teachers with "infectious" enthusiasm for a topic, but a closer examination will show that the teacher "infected" students by serving as a native guide to the territory. That's the gig. 

Please note-- the gig is not to "make" a work interesting. If you don't know what is interesting or compelling about it, you can't "make" it interesting, you shouldn't be teaching it. And the list of works that teachers find interesting and compelling will vary from teacher to teacher. 

My old teaching colleague finished a year with seniors by studying Paradise Lost. She loved that work so much that seniors would spend the last part of the school year--after their grades were set, after their diplomas were ensured, after their college admissions were guaranteed, even after they were released from a requirement to come to school at all-- would sit in her room and work feverishly on their final Milton project. I could never have done that unit in a million years-- I neither know nor love the work well enough.

On the other hand, one of my teacher boasts is that I got a group of non-college bound seniors completely absorbed with MacBeth, to the point that they confidently judged the AP seniors' MacBeth project. 

You prepare the ground. You introduce the ideas. You walk them through the hard parts and difficult language. You show them what is exciting and engaging about a work. On top of that, you also show them that there are different types of works out there, different cultures and styles and views of How The World Works, and that just because they don't like Dickenson, it doesn't necessarily follow that they will hate Browning. You can even teach them that just because they hate something, that doesn't mean it's awful, and that as sentient carbon-based life forms, they get to choose what they read. I always found it was supremely liberating for all of us in a classroom for me to say to a student, "I know you don't like this, and that is cool. Give me some time to explain why some people do, and then we'll move on to the next thing." Permission to dislike a work of literature without being told you have somehow failed is a magical thing. 

Every teacher has their own personal canon, and they should be making it wider and deeper every year, and certainly "does this have anything to say to my students" is an important question to be asking. And occasionally, when you are handed a work to teach that you find initially boring and uninteresting, you need to dig deep, do some homework, and find the hook. That's important, too, because sometimes "boring and uninteresting" as code words for "hard and confusing" and working through those barriers will help you as a teacher understand the barriers that your students are facing.

You're teaching not only reading and literature and culture and different ways of being human; you are also teaching how to be interested in something. That's work worth doing. 

American Federation for Children Ready To Cash In On Federal Vouchers

States continue to line up for the new federal school vouchers program, and Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children is ready to make the best of it.

The vouchers are a feature of the Trump's Big Beautiful Bill; they're a tax credit scholarship set up where you can contribute to a scholarship [sic] grant organization (SGO) that manages the voucher money, and in return you get to stiff Uncle Sam for 100% of what you contributed. It's a dollar for dollar tax credit; there is no more generous tax dodge anywhere in the tax code.

Individual taxpayers can only donate up to $1,700, which will make racking up the big bucks a challenge in some states. But AFC thinks they've found a way around that.

AFC, you will recall, is a right-wing organization, well-connected to the DeVos family (Betsy had to quit being the chief of AFC in order to take the education secretary gig). They pushed hard for school privatization via "choice" for many, many years. Current CEO is Tommy Schultz, who has been with AFC for almost a decade.

Schultz went on the David Webb Show (Webb is a right wing talking head) to explain what AFC has in mind.

Webb notes that "as a scholarship granting organization" AFC is putting "real muscle" here.

Schultz explains the "transformational" tax credit scholarship bill allows people to donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and get a "dollar for dollar tax credit." If you owe the IRS $2,000 in taxes, he explains, just give $1,700 to a scholarship organization and only owe the feds $300. Which is true, but doesn't leave any more money in your hands than you were going to have just paying your taxes. Schultz is pitching that as a reduction of your tax liability. This is not a surprise-- this will be and has often been the pitch, because it's more appealing than "You can personally add to the government's deficit." 

That will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately preserve that power to discriminate. 

Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules. 

"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which, again, is baloney, because if that were the actual goal, one would call for vouchers big enough to cover tuition costs or require voucherfied schools to accept all students or demand oversight and accountability to insure that participating private schools were, in fact, best.

Oh, and tutoring, too, Schultz adds, because choicers are trying hard to sell the possibility that these federal voucher funds might be used for tutoring. Because if people who have no intention of moving their kids out of public schools can be convinced that they will gain something from this program, maybe that will broaden support for it.

Why is AFC getting into this. Schultz says they really want to scale the fundraising that this will unleash. "Our scholarship entity will be acting as a platform for other scholarship groups that they can tap into." A small, state-based SGO might be able to scrape together a few million in $1,700 increments, but AFC thinks they can sweeten that pot considerably, first by throwing $10 million into a "donor awareness, and marketing and acquisition campaign" to help scale the program "all across the country."

What does that even mean? Will this giant SGO focus on fundraising for smaller SGOs, and will that result in AFC having a controlling interest in the voucher program for many states? Will AFC have unlimited freedom to contribute as much as they want to state programs? Schultz doesn't explain more; AFC press materials indicate a partnership with Odyssey which is a company that...well...is

the only provider in the country that offers an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. Our best-in-class technology connects families with school choice programs that provide funding for school tuition and eligible educational resources that align with the unique talents, gifts, and needs of each student.

Everyone uses the word "scale" a lot. Webb says, "Again, real skin in the game" and I'm not sure whose skin in which game he means or who has been putting fake skin in there.

Webb talks about "guardrails against abuse." He swears he's a school choice OG, but there are good and bad charters and magnets and ideological, too; "it's not just about private and public." There isn't really a question here, but Schultz takes a pause and leaps in.

What this program, like state programs before it, is going to do is put "funds in the hands of families" and "really, the most accountable way to implement any policy at the state or federal level when it comes to education is to not have the bureaucrats involved." This is just dumb. The notion that parental response will be sufficient to keep private and charter schools from fraud and mischief and general incompetence has already been disproven many many many many times. Private and charter schools only have to snooker a small slice of the market in any given year, so losing "customers" is no big deal-- certainly not a motivator for higher quality. But more importantly, if we depend on parents saying, "Well, that year was a bust. We're not going back," then we are throwing away a valuable year of a child's education so that market forces can magically take effect.

I don't know if Schultz is one of those people with a childlike belief in a magical invisible hand of the market, or if he's just blowing smoke because he's one of those folks who thinks business titans shouldn't have to answer to anyone, including government. Either way, his assertion is baloney.

But he will double down. When you see parents choosing the best schools for their sons and daughter, he argues, you really see a flourishing marketplace, including better test scores and lower incidences of fraud (like the bad stuff that has crippled our public education system for 30 or 40 years, he adds). He does not offer a specific example of this magic, because no such example exists. But he will rant about the public system, rail about low test scores (schools with no students proficient, he says, ignoring what "proficient" means). He cites Florida, Ohio, and Indiana as places with "booming" school choice ecosystems going on and it's true they have lots of unregulated unaccountable choice in those states, but nothing to suggest that it's helping education at all (also, bringing up Ohio in the context of fraud-free education is a bold choice). 

The claims just keep piling up. Taxpayers are saving money. Kids are getting better educational outcome with all the research. These are not true statements. Marketplace competition makes things better, because parents can vote with their feet. Feet-based voting does not help anything, and smart market-loving economists like Douglas Harris have explained why the free market does not fit with education. 

But Schultz is going to roll right through the usual talking points. These new vouchers will really help the schools, like the Catholic schools, that are trying to help lower and middle class families. He did make a mistake there and talking about helping schools instead of helping kids, but that really is one of the points of choice-- to funnel public taxpayer dollars to private schools. And we already know, in state after state, that vouchers are mostly serving well-off families whose kids were already in private, mostly religious schools. The "We'll save the poor kids" story is inspiring-- it's just not reality.

Webb wants us to remember that anyone can donate to the federal voucher program, not just parents. Schultz agrees. Call your tax professional and learn how you can get in on this. There will be other national SGOs besides AFC (count on it). "Every single American can become a philanthropist," Schultz says. "By giving us their money," he does not add. "This can bring billions of dollars off the sidelines," he says for about the third time, so we should note that this money was not going to sit on the sidelines, but was going to help the federal government pay its bills. 

By the way, we spend a lot of money on education and the test scores didn't go up, so we need to send money to unaccountable unregulated schools to make a better future for America. "We are the best, most free, most prosperous nation in the world," Schultz says, but if we have a mediocre education system, then boo. How we got to be the best nation in the world with that mediocre education system is a mystery he does not address. Also unaddressed-- how SGOs typically get a 5% to 10% cut of the money they handle. 

What Ever Happened To Snow Days

As I type this, the Board of Directors here at the Institute is having their second Flexible Instruction Day of the week.

As in many places, we kicked off the week with a snow-piling blizzard and moved immediately from there to intense cold. And as in many places, it provides a chance to reflect on the choices that districts make.

To begin with, we're seeing a result of the choice to start school early. In sprawling rural districts, that means students standing at the bus stop at 6:30 or even earlier. So sometimes that means a two hour delay just to give the sun time to come up and the temperature to get into tolerable levels.

We're also seeing the difference between district approaches to what a canceled day means.

No districts in my county use distance learning for snow days. For one thing, everyone hated it during the covid shutdowns. For another, these rural districts include too many students who do not have access to a reliable internet connection. "Remote instruction" during the shutdown meant teachers (like the Chief Marital Officer here at the Institute) spent part of their days hand delivering printed packets to homes. 

My district's Flexible Instruction Days are simple enough. Back during the first week of school, students were given a big folder with five Flexible Instruction packets inside. When a FID is called, I pull out the next packet and the boys do the work. Here at the Institute, I check their work and they fix any mistakes; I cannot guarantee that level of oversight is present in all homes. The packets take maybe a half hour and involve a smattering of each subject area. Having been created by teachers back at the beginning of the year before meeting the students and intended to be used sometime during the winter, if ever, the packets are not exactly loaded with rigor. But once the packet is completed, the student has the rest of the day for traditional snow day activities (right now the Board of Directors is battling with Pokemon cards).

For the district, the beauty of this system is that the day will not have to be made up. It provides roughly 0.02 % of a real school day, and yet counts for the whole thing, which, at a minimum, seems intellectually dishonest.

Meanwhile, some other districts do not allow for Flexible Instruction Days-- it's get the students to school or nothing. Their opposition to the idea is hard to explain, but I suspect it's leftover from Covid, when some local boards totally bought the idea that the shut down was an evil teacher union plot, and so they'd be damned if they would ever be tricked into any form of remote learning ever again. So when they cancel school, students get a true snow day, and lose a day of vacation later in the year.

Does it make a difference? My strictly anecdotal survey suggests that Flexible Instruction Days make it easier for the district to just go ahead and call things off. This week, everyone called off on Monday. But while my district has called two Flexible Instruction Days since, the most other non-FID districts have done is call one or two two hour delays. 

Is it better to have a traditional snow day? Hard to say. Historically we are more likely to call school off over temperature than over snowfall, which means students are mostly trapped inside rather than soaring over Rockwellesque snowdrifts with their sled-shaped plastic sheets. One might argue that the act of going through the motions of a pretend work day while nature has dropped a pile of chaos on the world is good prep for the work world, but I've never been a fan of the Your Life Is Going To Suck Later So It Might As Well Suck Now family of school policies. 

FID is either the best of both worlds (You get some education-flavored stuff with plenty of time left over to play) or possible the worst (Neither a true day off or a functional day of education). Maybe we should stop trying to have pretend school and just suck it up, admit that nature has beaten us, and get an actual day of school in later.