OH: A New Definition of School Choice (Moving the Goalposts Again)

Around 200 school districts in Ohio sued the state over its voucher program, a program that funnels a billion dollars (give or take a few million) to private schools (most of them religious). Last summer, the Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page, ruled that EdChoice is mostly unconstituttional. That, of course, triggered an appeal (and some special legislator crankiness) and that appeal seems to have triggered a whole new definition of school choice.

The Institute for Justice, one more education privatization law shop, has been working on the state's case, and after the Franklin County decision they were pointing at Simmons-Harris v. Goff, an old case that supported a different version of choice. They also mentioned the argument that the parental right to direct a child's education requires a school choice system. And the state has also been claiming that having two separately operated but equally swell school systems is totally okay. Because "separate but equal" has always been a winning argument in education.

The Ohio 10th District Appellate Court panel of judges heard arguments from the parftioes (the school district count is now up to 330) and seemed to notice a problem with that whole "parental rights" argument. 

Parents don't actually get to choose.

Judge David Leland posited hypothetical gay parents of a student living in a rural area with just one private school. The school could reject that student, and then parental choice available would be... what?

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“All the parents do is apply to private schools,” Leland said. “The schools are the ones who make the choice. They’re the ones who decide. Unlike a public school … the public schools have to take everybody. That’s the requirement in public education so that everybody in society would have an equal opportunity to get a good education and grow to the extent of their ability.”

That's when the state floated its new definition of school choice:

Stephen Carney, an appellate lawyer with the Ohio Attorney General’s office, argued that parents nonetheless have a choice in applying. That’s why it’s considered school choice, he said.

Got it? Parents have a choice of where to apply, and that's school choice. 

First, that's silly. I have a choice to apply for a mortgage for a multi-million dollar house. That's not the same as being able to choose that house. 

Second, if that's what school choice means, then everyone in the state already had school choice before any voucher program was ever started! Every parent in the state always had the ability to apply for their child's admission to any private school. 

This is not what anyone ever thought school choice promised, though it is an accurate definition of what it delivers. 

It's one more reminder that the voucher crowd is not actually interested in school choice, because they consistently avoiud addressing the actual obstacles to parents who want to choose a private school-- tuition cost and discriminatory policies. EdChoice is not about providing actual school choice; it's just about finding ways to funnel public tax dollars to private mostly-religious schools. 

If the 10th District panel upholds the ruling against, that will simpoly grease the wheels carrying the case up to the state (mostly-GOP) supreme court. Can't wait to see what arguments the state uses there, but I'm betting they'll keep the wheels on those goalposts.

 

PA: Cyber Charter Sues State To Maintain Truancy Loophole

Late last year, Pennsylvania's lawmakers finally passed some much-needed cyber charter reform. Commonwealth Charter Academy, the 800-pound gorilla of PA cybers, has sued to try to escape some of the consequences of those new rules. 

One of the long-time dodges of cyberschool in PA has been as a dodge for chronically truant students. Is your kid skipping so much school that truancy officials and the court have gotten involved? Just sign him up for a cyber charter, where the attendance rules were loose (students didn't even have to appear on screen) and requirements for enrollment were frictionless. Just sign up and voila!-- that nasty truancy problem magically vanished.

Anecdotally, I can tell you this was a regular occurrence-- a student who was frequently absent with parents getting annoyed at phone calls from school would disappear entirely, until word would come that they were now doing cyber. That rarely ended well for the student, which was not a surprise-- take a student who can't muster the motivation and discipline to handle traditional school shifts to a model that depends entirely on the student's discipline and motivation to succeed? The vast majority of my cyber-departures either returned a year later, woefully behind, or simply never finished school at all. There are many problems that can contribute to chronic truancy, and cyber charters solve almost none of them.

The new rules add friction. Now a student with chronic truancy issues may not enroll in cyber school unless a court rules that such enrollment is in their best interests.

CCA went looking for this fight. In March their board voted to go ahead and enroll over 600 students marked "habitually truant" by their districts and two weeks later filed the suit, claiming that the law is unconstitutional. But now they get to generate press releases about how 600 students are "in limbo" while waiting for a decision even when the actual story is that CCA violated the law by admitting those students in the first place. 

As reported at PennLive by Oliver Morrison, other cybers are more heavily affected than CCA. But CCA is the big gun and has the financial weight and advocacy staff to take the state to court. So now the court will get to decide whether or not to reinstate the cyber charter truancy dodge. 

The Culture Panic Disrespect for Parents and Children

Two stories just broke, and both underline a feature of the culture panic crowd-- a disrespect for both children and their parents.

In Wisconsin, the school board of Watertown voted to silence the high school band, forbidding a performance of “A Mother of a Revolution!” is a 2019 composition by Omar Thomas. It was commissioned by the Desert Winds Freedom Band to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Thomas wrote that the piece "is a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha ‘Pay It No Mind’ Johnson." The work is an instrumental piece with no lyrics.

The controversy was, of course, that the piece referenced an LGBTQ activist. Now, the board, which in the past two years has been commandeered by the culture panic crowd, already had a "controversial issues" policy (aka "Don't Say Gay") in place, carefully framed as protection for parental rights. Teachers are supposed to give parents a chance to opt out of anything that might contradict their religious beliefs. The band director at the school informed parents of the piece via letter last October, and gave the option to opt their child out of the piece. Three students were opted out; two later changed their minds. 

Parents had ample opportunity to express themselves, and when the board decided to vote on censoring the piece less than a week before its scheduled performance, more parents and students spoke up, rather loudly, right up through last night's very contentious meeting.  

But as we have seen time after time after time, the "parental rights" crowd is only interested in the rights of certain parents. Parents who express support, acceptance, or just, you know, acknowledgement of the existence of LGBTQ persons-- those parents' rights don't matter so much. The board voted 7-1 to ban the piece. (You can listen to the piece, just under 5 minutes long, and decide how gay you think it sounds.)

At one point in the meeting, you'll hear board vice-president Sam Ouweneel remind board members "This is a perfect example of what everyone sitting at this table ran on, which was ending indoctrination in the classroom and ending radical curriculum." No word yet on whether the board will also forbid the works of Tchaikovsky and Cole Porter.

Yes, yes-- indoctrination. Because students' brains are like putty in the hands of adults. Children are dopes.

What else explains moments like Representative Virginia Foxx's response to a letter from a fourth grader who wrote her a letter as part of a class assignment. Ten year old Christian Mango researched and wrote about electric vehicles and his proposal for a tax rebate for buying one. His mother shared the response from Foxx, which was generally condescending, until it became insulting:

Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you. While I will never be able to know, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.

Foxx, who sits on House Committee on Education and Labor, has long had a bug up her ear about "indoctrination," though she usually picks on public schools. Mango is a student at a private Christian school.

Her assumption here is clearly that the child is a dope, incapable of forming any of his opinions on his own. Nor did she feel the need to include any of his parents in this communication. The note became public when his mother showed it on Instagram. Christian’s mother praised his educators as “amazing teachers who are lifelines for these kids,” and told Foxx that “teachers don’t deserve the contempt and disrespect you have shown.”

The culture panic crowd consistently commits a cardinal sin-- assuming that everyone who disagrees with them is either evil or stupid. They hold onto the notion that there is One Truth and only people who embrace that One Truth deserve respect, attention, or a voice. They are a callback to Wilhoit's Law: 

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

That may not be all conservatives, but it certainly fits the culture panic crowd. 

And children? Children are chattel. "Children do not belong to the government," they declare, meaning "they belong to their parents." They are property, to be arranged like furniture, and if the living room couch is in the wrong place, well, someone must have moved it because the couch certainly has no ability to move itself. 

It's frustrating and (as shown in Watertown videos) anger-fueling. Can we trust young humans to take in a full range of information about the world, trust them to sort through it all, and respect their freedom to build their own model of the world? Not if the culture panic crowd has anything to say about it. 

Cashing in on Federal Vouchers

The federal voucher program birthed by the Big Beautiful Boondoggle Bill aims to spread a lot of money around, and folks are already getting ready to hoover up a share of the taxpayer-funded largesse. The tricks is to set up a Scholarship Granting Organization.

What's an SGO again?

Tax Credit Scholarships are a way to launder taxpayer dollars before funneling them to private, often religious, schools. To hand the money taxpayer to government to private school would be illegal, so instead, the money goes from taxpayer to SGO (instead of the government) to private school. That shifting of the taxpayer's liability from government to private school is totes legal (except in Kentucky, where the courts are smarter than that). 

So the SGO collects the money and hands out the vouchers, and in between, it collects a handling fee, typically between 5% and 10%. 

SGOs can make some money on the state level, though in many cases they exist just to funnel taxpayer dollars to a particular private school. But the idea of a federal voucher system creates some big possibilities.

There's a wild range of estimates for how much money will be involved in federal vouchers, from $51 billion down to $3 billion. But no matter who turns out to be correct, a 10% will be mean there's a hefty stack of money in play for SGOs on the national level. All the more motivation for voucherphiles to get in on the financial harvest.

American Federation for Children 

As we have noted before, the DeVosian national-level privatization advocacy group is already setting up their own national SGO and teaming up with Odyssey, an outfit that promises "an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. AFC's announced plans that involve serving as an SGO for SGOs-- a national feedline for ambitious state-level SGOs. And look-- nobody yet knows what the actual rules and regulations are going to look like. Will this kind of SGO-to-SGO pipeline be legal? Better question-- will SGOs get to skim off a fee at every level, so that the piece of pie is whittled away as it moves down through the privatization funnel?

But AFC plans give you an idea of how much money is in play-- they are spending $10 million just to publicize and prepare the ground for the launch of federal vouchers. When you can spare a cool ten mill just to launch your new program, you know you're expecting some hefty ROI.

Center for Christian Virtue

State players are also planning to upsize. The Center for Christian Virtue has been active in Ohio since the days of 1983 when it was the more for Citizens for Community Values. Back in 2024 they won an award from the Heritage Foundation that they planned to use "to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system."

They've been quite plain about being on a mission to replace public schools with private Christian schools, including helping churches set up such schools. But with the federal voucher program, they have announced their intent to go national by taking its state-level SGO, the Christian Education Network, and sending it out into other states. 

“Families are searching for both excellence and biblical values in education, so this program creates a critical pathway forward,” said Troy McIntosh, Executive Director of CEN. “It gives parents and grandparents a choice they may not have thought possible, and provides Christ-centered schools with new financial resources."

And for just 10% of the take, they will provide that.

MyChurchSGO

Even if you aren't a state or national player, you can still play along! Meet Richard Poljan and MyChurchSGO. In fact, I'll let him introduce himself, because otherwise you might think this is a parody video.

Yup. God's new gold mine.

Poljan has put up several of these videos, and they aren't exactly pulling in the big views. He's a hard man to track down, but he appears to be working in Fowler, Michigan, a small town NW of Lansing (be sure to visit Chester's Chicken while you're there). Richard "Buddy" Poljan appears to have no actual education background; his LinkedIn says he put in a couple of years at Hillsdale, then got a degree at Michigan Technological University before embarking on a career as an industrial engineer, currently with EFI Global, the "fire, environmental, and engineering experts." Looks like he played some college football. And he's served on some GOP local leadership groups.

MyChurchSGO has a website up, though it doesn't seem to be quite finished. Poljan does get the basic pitch here-- you can give $1,700 to the government or to your favorite church school. Also, don't have too many rules or parents will go to some other SGO. Also, to churches he says, "Get free money from the Government and bring in lots more revenue for your Church." Finally, "Get your SGO up and running," Poljan urges, "so that you can help kids make it to heaven."

But it's been six months, and Poljan's operation doesn't seem to be exactly taking off, and it does seem that bush-league start-ups like his will mostly get swamped by the big state and national SGO operations. Still, expect plenty of similar small time pop-ups to try to get a piece of that God's big new gold mine. 

ICYMI: Mothers' Day 2026 Edition (5/10)

A Happy Mothers' Day to those who are able to celebrate. There are many reasons not to want to join in today, and if that's you, then may the day pass with a minimum of hurt. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Remember-- if it speaks to you, share it.

Teachers! Appreciate Them Now. They Soon Could Be Gone!

Wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week with Nancy Bailey's list of the many ways that corporate reformsters have tried to make the lives of teachers miserable.

Is Moms for Liberty paying local chapters to attend monthly Zoom calls?

Moms for Liberty continue to fudge the definition of "grass roots organization." Kate LaGrone at WPTV reports that the Moms need a little help getting people to show up for meetings.

Voucher programs fail rural schools

The Economic Policy Institute explains why taxpayer-funded voucher programs are especially hard on rural school districts.

Congress Is Broken and Unpopular: Here Are 12 Reforms Children and Families Need

Bruce Lesley outlines some reforms that the current lousy version of Congress could pass to make life better for children and families.

The Blueprint for American Censorship

Mrs. Frazzled with some useful history on book banning in the USA, including Anthony Comstock.

Bill Lee's School Funding Formula Leads Tennessee to the Bottom in School Funding

When Tennessee's not busy making sure that voters in Memphis don't matter, they are making sure that they spend as little as possible on schools. Andy Spears explains.

Another death in the AI-in-education family

One more crappy AI educational "aid" appears to have bitten the dust. So long, OpenAI Study Mode. Benjamin Riley has the details.

Education Privatization Propaganda Worsening

Thomas Ultican is bugged by all the billionaires still trying to sell vouchers.

One Big Beautiful Bill’s Child Tax Credit Still Leaves America’s Poorest Children Far Behind

It's been a year and we still haven't tracked all the ways the big dumb bill is sticking it to the non-wealthy. Jan Resseger explores some of them.

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

A research paper at The Lancet. And yikes.

Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts' High School English Essays

From Mark Paglia at McSweeney's. “Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.”

It was a busy week at Forbes.com

- A guide for Teacher Appreciation Week gifting

- A complaint about the use of "student achievement" when what researchers mean is "test scores"

- A school district in Wisconsin wants to keep the band from playing a piece dedicated to a trans activist.

My mother always liked this song when we were all younger, so this goes out to her today.

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CO: Polis Says Legal Discrimination Is Okee Dokee

What does it take to a nominally Democratic, openly gay governor to vote for taxpayer-funded discrimination? Apparently just some "free" federal money and a legal baloney excuse.

Governor Jared Polis has opted Colorado into the federal school voucher program. He even leaned on the Democratic lawmakers in his state to keep them from requiring voucher recipients to follow the state's anti-discrimination laws. 

Polis attended a voucher party thrown by Invest in Education, a advocacy group led by a bunch of out of state hedge fund guys (so you know education is their top priority), and explained that this was totally legal and okay, using the same rationale that led us to the baloney sandwich that is the tax credit scholarship approach to funding.

See, if Bob Gotbux handed his $1,700 to the government, and the government handed it to a private school that discriminated against some students for being LGBTQ or the wrong religion or having bad haircuts, that would be illegal. But if Bob hands the money to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) and they hand it to the discriminatory school, that's totally okay. 

This is fairly transparent bullshit. 

My spouse tells me I'd better not spend our household money on beer. My brother owes me a hundred bucks, I tell him to just give me fifty bucks and two cases of beer. Will my spouse say to me, "That's okay, because you didn't actually buy beer with the money you were supposed to collect." I don't think so.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky saw through the tax credit scholarship dodge what that state's legislature tried to defend it in court. “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.” Further “[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition violates the law.

Peter Murphy, who is the vice president of policy at Invest in Education, offered his two slices of baloney. “Every non-wealthy child in this country is the potential beneficiary,” Murphy said. “And what this law also does is it puts more control of a child’s education in the hands of their parents, including public school parents.”

That is, of course, a carefully hedged lie. Every parent cannot benefit because every private school that wants to suck up some of this "free federal money" can reject any student they wish to reject. Right now, Colorado is involved in a Supreme Court case about two Catholic preschools that want to be to collect state taxpayer dollars while rejecting LGBTQ families from their service.

But Polis told the dark money crowd that he doesn't think the state should decide which organizations are "worthy" (which is of course a different word than "legal') and went on “When you give $100 to any charity, it can be a church, it can be something that discriminates. It can be pro-gay or anti-gay. It doesn’t matter.” But of course, in his hypothetical, I get to decide whether or not I want to give money to a discriminatory group, which is different from deciding that the state can pass on taxes it was owed to that same group. And if discrimination manages to skirt the law, well, then, that's perfectly okay. 

The federal voucher program is simply federally-funded discrimination, a chance for the government to transfer its tax liability to private schools without holding them to any sort of anti-discrimination standards. It's the government spending what were supposed to be tax dollars on activities that only benefit a selected few. 

Watch for more of this, as pressure is put on other Democratic governors in hopes that they can be tempted with free federal dollars and a bullshit argument. 

Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?

Matt Yglesias has touched off social media discussion of one of the great zombie ideas of education-- the idea we should pay more for the best teachers. So let me explain, again, why this is not a great idea. 

I will admit up front that I did not read the full post because A) it is behind a paywall and B) Matt Yglesias is kind of a tool. 

Problem #1: "Best"

Modern ed reform has been obsessed with the idea of identifying high-quality teachers and low-quality teachers with hopes of getting more of one and firing all of the others. So folks have been working on the problem for twenty-some years-- and they haven't come up with anything remotely useful. 

There was the travesty that was VAM/VAAS sauce, a system that promised to translate the low-quality data from the Big Standardized Tests into data about which teachers were awesome (or not). The idea was that magical maths would allow us to figure out what a student would have scored in some teacher-neutral parallel universe, and then whatever difference there was between the imaginary parallel universe student score and the actual this world score-- that difference was either to the credit or blame of the teacher. It was always a bizarre idea, and that was even before we got to the question of how to use that score--based on math and reading test results-- to evaluate teachers who didn't teach math or reading (or, in some cases, even that student).

Anyway, that was one of our brightest ideas about how to find the "best" teachers, and it was (and, unfortunately in some states today, is) a terrible idea. 

We can all agree there are good teachers and not-so-great ones. We just can't agree on who they are. Pick out the teacher at your school who you think is most obviously awesome; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was awful. Pick out a teacher you think is obviously awful; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was one of the best they ever had. 

Maybe we can agree that there can be broad agreement on the very best and the very worst doing the work. That still leaves the vast middle. When I was in the classroom, I would say I was pretty ok, but I don't imagine I was "best." How do the pretty ok teachers do in world where teachers are paid according to their best-ness, and how would we parse out the various gradations of pretty ok-ness?

Nor should we discuss a teacher's quality as if it's an immutable quality. A teacher's work varies over time, influenced by a variety of factors. Personal stuff. The students in the classroom. The acquired skills over time. The material given to teach. Did I teach every month of every year at the same level of pretty ok-ness? Absolutely not. Really, it's not as accurate to say I was a pretty ok teacher as it is to say I usually did pretty ok work. 

In short, figuring out which teachers are "best" is a huge challenge. It makes far more sense to talk about doing the best work, but even then, we're talking about measuring the almost-immeasurable (particularly since some of the outcomes we're talking about don't become visible for years after the work is done. 

Does this mean we shouldn't talk about how to do the best work? Absolutely not. But trying to tie large stakes to it will not help.

Problem #2: Schools are not businesses

"We should reward the good people and fire the bad ones-- just like in the business world," say fans of this model whose brains have conveniently failed to retain examples like Enron and Donald Trump and every mediocre business guy who kept falling upwards while hardworking high-quality working stiffs lost their jobs. 

But even if we accept the meritocratcic business world fairy tale, there's another important way in which public schools are not businesses.

Public schools do not make money.

Consider how merit pay works in the business world. "We collected an extra pile of money this year," says CEO Gotbux, "So to show our gratitude to those of you helped us make that extra money, we are going to share some of the extra money with you."                                            

But public school districts don't make money. There is no extra profit to share with the folks doing the actual work. 

So merit bonuses can't work. And for the same reason, merit pay is a problem. 

One of the reasons many school boards like the current pay system is that it makes the payroll costs for the coming year very predictable. That's helpful, because the revenues are also pretty predictable; school districts don't expect sudden windfalls of revenue. School districts are dealing with a finite pie, so it's helpful to know ahead of time exactly how many slices they have to cut that pie into.

Try to imagine a school board going to the taxpayers and saying, "Evaluations are done, and we have so many teachers with top-quality ratings this year that we will have to raise taxes to meet our payroll obligations." Yeah, that's not happening. 

What's much easier to imagine is a district saying, "Here's the budget. We can afford five Best Teachers this year." Which actually is a lot like business. And if the Best Teacher ratings are set by factors that the school can't control, like test scores? Then expect the district to say, "Congratulations to all 157 teachers rated Best this year. Your merit pay bump will be $2.98." 

With a finite pie, the end result must be competition among teachers for a slice. That means the very thing a school would hope for will not happen.

Principal: Mrs. Teachwell, you have been very successful teaching students about binomial fricatives, so I'd like you to share your techniques with the rest of the department.

Mrs. Teachwell: Not on your life. My kid is going to need braces next year. 

Maybe the board or the state will kick in extra money to sweeten the Best Teacher pot. But there is one other popular way to get the money for merit bumps-- take it from the base salary of everybody else. 

Look, Robert Pondiscio has a point when he observes that with 4 million teachers, most are going to be regular folks and not superstars, and trying to get 4 million superstars is not the path to better schools. Figure out how to help every teacher to do better and best work (pro tip: a system that punishes them for being less than superstars is not the way). Extra pay for the Best does not further that goal. It just turns schools into teacher Thunderdomes.

Problem #3: The Premise

Merit-related proposals too often assume that teachers already know the secret of how to be Best-- they're just waiting for someone to either threaten or bribe them. This is both insulting and nonsensical. 

And if the premise is that this approach will retain teachers, ask yourself how likely it is that teachers will be enticed by a system that rewards them for random "data" or for factors beyond their control (like which students they get to teach).

Some supporters on the dead bird app follow another old pattern-- they don't so much want to reward Best teachers as they want to punish bad ones. The parity can rankle, and believe me, you can find teachers in any school building in the country who say, either quietly or not-so-quietly some angry version of "I can't believe that person gets paid the same as I do." A teacher who isn't getting the work done is supremely irritating to the teacher who has to clean up after them.

But whenever someone talks about getting rid of all the Bad Teachers, I am reminded of an observation from W. Edwards Deming, to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, there are only two possible explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it or you killed it. Either way, you are looking at a management problem.       

I get it.             

There is something hugely enticing about the idea of a pay system that rewards excellent teachers (and doesn't reward less-than-excellent teachers). It is a great concept, but the devil is in the details-- and any such system is all details. And the critical details remain unsolved puzzles.