WI: Pushing For Federal Vouchers

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced way back in September that he would not join in the new federal school voucher program that is part of the GOP's Big Ugly Mess of a Bill, but advocacy groups are being put together to try to sell the vouchers anyway. It's another one of those times to pay attention just in case this is coming to your state soon. 

There is much about the federal voucher program that remains undefined, but we know the basics. It's a tax credit voucher, which means if you've got some money to burn, you can contribute it to funding a school voucher and have that contribution count as paying your taxes. The contribution actually goes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) in a sleight of move that is supposed to make it look as if taxpayer dollars aren't being diverted to funding private schools, but at least one state supreme court has seen through that baloney. 

Evers correctly noted that the federal voucher would be catastrophic for public schools. 

The usual fans of dismantling public schools and privatizing the remains did not care for the governor's decision. "Why so fast," said folks at the right wing Badger Institute (a great name which really ought to be associated with something cooler than a bunch of wealthy guys who would like to not pay taxes). "There's lots of time left to decide, and this is like free money!"

It is not. Your brother-in-law owes you a hundred bucks. You send your spouse to collect it because you need it to buy groceries this week, and they return with fifty bucks and a couple of cases of beer. "Did you spend our money on beer?" you ask. "No, my brother just gave me this instead of the other fifty dollars. So this is like, you know, free beer!" Are you convinced? Or are you just out fifty bucks that you needed to feed your family?

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce really wants that beer, and they have come up with a whole campaign to sell the federal vouchers. If not to Evers (who is not running for a third term and so doesn't have to care about these guys), then maybe the next governor.

Pay It Forward Wisconsin is the campaign, and it tries hard to make these vouchers look swell. There's a certain amount of creativity here-- the actual rules for federal vouchers haven't been written yet, so some of this pitch might best be considered "aspirational" or "loosely interpretive" or even "made up." 

The tax credit allows "you to donate up to $1,700 to the school of your choice." Well, you'll donate it to an SGO, which may or may not be aim that money at a particular school. Some states (like PA) allow any private school to set up its own SGO, and others do not. The law suggests that an SGO has to serve at least two schools; any private schools with multiple campuses could well satisfy that requirement. The federal law suggests that donors can designate the school, but not the student. But that could change when the actual rules are written.

PIFW also suggests that public school students could use the voucher money to fund extras like a tutor or a band trip. Except that, again, the rules haven't been written yet, and no state with vouchers has allowed for this particular use of voucher funds. 

PIFW is accepting "pledges" and notes that "If you don’t have a specific school in mind, Pay It Forward Wisconsin will direct your donation to nearby schools serving students in poverty with a proven track record of improving reading and math proficiency," all of which sure makes it sound like PIFW is positioning itself to be an SGO (SGOs get to keep a slice of the voucher pie, so it can be a profitable business to be in). 

Who's the face of all this? Dale Kooyenga is a GOP politician who is currently serving as MMAC president and the main mouthpiece for PIFW. He's an accountant and private equity guy, as well as an army reserve lieutenant colonel. When he was in the Wisconsin legislature, he helped push a plan to privatize Milwaukee schools. He loves him some private Christian schools, too. 

The idea of redirecting tax dollars to private schools is particular troublesome in Wisconsin, where public schools are stuck under a cap in state funding. 

The pitch captures some of the bizarro world nature of tax credit scholarships. Do you want to support public schools and students? You can take some of your tax dollars and direct them to schools. Or--stay with me here-- you could just pay taxes. PIFW wants to answer the question, "How can I direct my money to help students and schools?" Gee-- if only there were some sort of system for collecting a contribution from every wage earner in the state and then bundling those contributions up and portioning them out to schools. If only there were a way to do that!

But of course what gives the tax credit system value added over regular old taxation is that tax credit vouchers let you make sure that your tax dollars aren't going to support Those Peoples' Children. Let's hope that Wisconsin's next governor shares the current governor's understanding of how bad the federal voucher program would be for education. 

The Coming AI Teaching Assistant Boom (And Cheating)

Matt Barnum (who is, thank God, now at Chalkbeat) just made three predictions about AI in education, and one of them makes my head hurt.

Students will keep cheating? Yeah, that seems likely. AI will not become a super-tutor? No, of course not, particularly given that support for that concept always rests on the old Benjamin Bloom essay about super tutoring that A) involves human and B) is kind of bunk. 

But Barnum also makes this painful prediction: AI will become a ubiquitous teaching assistant.

Lord, but I want this not to be true. I want the woman he uses as an example, a high school English teacher who now uses AI to crank out college recommendation letters-- I want her to be an outlier. I want her to be shamed in her teachers' lounge. I want teachers who use AI to extrude lesson plans to be embarrassed about it and/or to be teaching at a school where nobody ever looks at the lesson plan-- including the teacher whose name is on it. And if a teacher is using their AI "teaching assistant" to grade essays, I want to encourage that teacher to leave the profession immediately.

And yet, in my pained heart, I know those "teachers" are out there. I have no trouble imagining "teachers" I've known who would be delighted about the chance to outsource some of the thinking and effort to some computer program. They're the same ones who used to use Google to find lesson plans. Beyond that, I know how tremendously pressed for time teachers are, so absolutely crunched that the prospect of getting even a half an hour of their day back would be incredibly tempting. 

This is all cheating. 

You know how I know it's cheating? Because all of these scenarios assume that the people on the receiving end of this AI slop will act as if they have received the work of an actual human.

I'm betting nobody is opening their AI recommendation letter with "I am having ChatGPT write this letter of recommendation for Pat McStudent." No, the letter (just like that ChatGPT paper about Hamlet that Pat submitted) is meant to be taken as the work of the human whose name is attached. 

I will predict that AI will kill the letter of recommendation as dead as the follicles on Dear Leader's dome. Admissions officers will shrug and say, "Well, all of these are from some LLM. There's no real point in doing this." And they will look for some other way to find out if a real human who knows the applicant wants to speak up for them. Maybe a phone call. 

It will take students roughly five minutes to figure out if their essays are being scored by a machine instead of their human teacher. What will it do to writing instruction and student growth when students realize that they are writing for an audience of zero humans? I don't know-- but I expect we're going to find out, and I also expect it won't be anything good. If no human is going to bother to read your work, why would you put any human effort into writing it?

Some folks boosting (or contributing to) the coming AI teaching assistant boom talk as if teachers will offload some cognitive labor to the machine, and that will be the end of it. It won't be the end of it. The substitution of AI for human will affect and alter the results. It changes the process, the whole process, from inputs to outputs to reactions to the changed process. The notion that you can just swap out teacher judgment at this one point in the process and nothing else will be altered is naive and foolish. It's like figuring you can swap out mushrooms for burgers at your barbecue, or replace bolts with molded tofu in an automotive assembly line.

To grapple honestly with all this, a teacher would need to stand in front of her class and announce, "I am not going to grade this assignment. I'm going to have ChatGPT do it instead. What do you think?" Or saying, "I can send a letter to the college for you, but I'm going to have ChatGPT write it. Is that okay with you?" And in a nation of three million teachers, there may well be some that are doing so. I hope there are. I hope there are many, soon to be more. Because it's going to take a lot more honesty and soul searching and a whole lot less cheating to get through the advent of AI in education. 

Enshittification: The Book

I've followed Cory Doctorow for a few years now, and was certainly among the masses of people who, when he coined "enshittification," pointed and hollered "That's it!"

What Doctorow has explained is the process by which the once-bright promise of the internet has been turned to crap. And now, rather than hunting down the various articles and posts in which he has elaborated on his idea, you can get it all in one book-- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

The process by which so many services have been degraded is not, he argues, "the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment," but a bunch of deliberate, purposeful choices that people with power didn't have to make. And it has a very clear pattern. Doctorow's simplest explanation of enshittification boils down to four steps:

1) First, platforms are good to their users.

2) Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3) Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

4) Finally, they beconme a giant pile of shit.

Doctorow lays out the specifics by looking at several case studies-- Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. All once brilliantly important; now just a pain in the ass.

There are more details to understand. How competition is killed, and then regulation is also gutted, making it both impossible to enter the marketplace and to police that one monolith controlling the sector. Why everyone wants you to use their app instead of just accessing via web browser (nobody is regulating what they can do on an app with your info or money). Why you aren't allowed to fix anything yourself (because "fixing" might involve third party circumnaigation of what the techno-bros want). And how AI is so very useful for twidlling the dials so that our tech overlords can determine just how bad they can make things without losing customers over it.

There are applications for education here-- read enough about the digital publishing biz and digital textbooks will not seem like a remotely good idea. 

More importtantly, I think that should school choice ever reach a tipping point, it would be ripe for its own version of enshittification, where captured families and gig working teachers and even education vendors could be squeezed dry as investors profit.

But mostly this is a book that helps explain why everything is so crappy, and the broadest definition of enshittification-- actively and purposefully making a product worse so that it will be more profitable-- seems to be everywhere.

Doctrorow has some ideas about how to make things better. The bad news is that making your individual consumer choices aren't high on his list of Likely To Help Actions. The solutions are mostly political and regulatory, and that part of the book is well worth reading as well. This is a book that has an awful lot to say about why we are where we are right now. If you have been following Doctorow on this, you won't find anything new here, but you will find all of his ideas on the topic in one convenient location. An excellent holiday gift for people who are generally angry at the techno-world but haven't figured out what's wrong yet.

What The Success Sequence Teaches

Ohio has decided that all students should be taught the Success Sequence; the notion that students should graduate high school, get a job, get married, and make babies--in that order! And you know this is a swell idea because the Heritage Foundation provides model legislation for this very thing. There's an important lesson in the Success Sequence, but it's not the one supporters talk about.

The sequence has occasionally been oversold ("Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!") and the "data" used to bolster it is a little suspicious (like claiming that only 2% of people who follow these rules end up poor anyway--2%?! Really?)

There's also a causation vs. correlation problem. Do people end up in the middle class because they follow the sequence, or is the sequence easier to follow if you are already in the middle class? Do people who mess up the sequence end up more likely to be poor, or does poverty make it really hard to follow the sequence?

Philip Cohen makes a case for why the sequence is bad public policy, noting that costly initiatives to sell the redemptive power of marriage have utterly failed. Of the advice to wait, he says

Success sequencers believe it’s hypocritical to hoard this advice and only dispense it to the children of privilege. But you can’t wish away education, career, and marriage uncertainty or impose order on instability by force of will. If we’re not prepared to guarantee all women the same opportunities as those in my classes have, it’s not reasonable to demand the same attachment to the success sequence that those opportunities make feasible. In the absence of that guarantee, you’re simply asking, or requiring, poor people to delay (until “they’re ready,” in Sawhill’s terms, meaning not poor) or forego having children, one of the great joys of life, and something we should consider a human right.

And he points out the connections between the sequence and race and class

Not coincidentally, the history of welfare politics in the United States is intricately bound up with the history of racism against black women, who have been labeled pathological and congenitally dependent. The idea that delaying parenthood until marriage is a choice one makes is highly salient and prized by the white middle class, and the fact that black women often don’t have that choice makes them the objects of scorn for their perceived lax morals. The framing of the success sequence plays into this dynamic. For example, Ron Haskins has argued that welfare reform was needed to “[change] the values and the approach to life of people on welfare that they have to do their part.” The image of the poor welfare “taker” has a race and a gender in America.

To further muddy the water, there's a 2021 study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which found those who finish high school, work full time, and get married are less likely to experience poverty, but it doesn't really matter what order they do them. 

There are also several conservative problems with the conservative argument--or, at least the one they openly admit to. For one, the very clear implication of the sequence is that young women should have birth control freely available to them, thereby making it easier to postpone the Making babies step until all others have been completed. But that's not what these folks want at all. Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Society argued the country needs more babies, and the problem is that too many women are going to college and postponing baby-making. 

Which takes us to the other issue for conservatives-- do they really want young women to get a job before they start procreating? Because if the goal is for them to be staying home to make and raise babies, then the job step seems extra. 

So why make teaching the Success Sequence a law? Listen to bill supporter Senator Jerry Cirino:

We have been throwing money at the war on poverty, and where has it gotten us? Not very far. We need better life decisions to be made.

Teaching the Success Sequence is about driving home one idea that is central to right-wing policy:

If you are poor, it's your own fault.

This is central to so many MAGA policies. If you are poor, it's your own fault-- so we shouldn't have a taxpayer-funded safety net. If you are sick, it's your own fault-- so we shouldn't have taxpayer-funded health care insurance. And if you don't have the resources to educate your own children, that's your fault, too-- so we shouldn't have taxpayer-funded public education. 

For many, that is the only real lesson of the Success Sequence-- poverty is the result of making bad choices (and why should I pay taxes to make up for your bad choices). Accident, illness, unexpected disaster, job loss, jobs that don't pay a living wage, a lack of resources necessary to make those Really Good Choices-- those are all just excuses made by folks who lack the fortitude to grab their bootstraps and heft away. But hey- it's never too early to start telling the Poors that their problems are their own fault, or their parents' fault, and therefor taxpayers shouldn't have to help you out. Good job, Ohio. 

ICYMI: Get Out The Vote Edition (11/2)

The vote is coming, and while it may be a sleepy off year in your neck of the woods, in PA, Jeff Yass has decided he'd like to get rid of three not-sufficiently-rightwing state supreme court judges, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping people have paid attention. Locally, we are also looking at a measure to create stable sustainable county funding for the local library system, which you might think was a no-brainer, but instead it has brought the "who needs books" and "no new taxes" and "I don't use it so why should I pay for it" crowd out in force. So we'll see how that turns out. 

In the meantime, here's your reading list for the week.

Florida redeems McCarthyism, anti-communism with classroom guidelines

Proposed legislation favors teaching that "McCarthyism" is a mean word that unfairly stigmatizes swell patriotic Americans. There's more. Yikes. Jeffrey Solochek reports.

Parental Rights or Children’s Safety? Proposition 15 Has the Makings of a Texas Tragedy

Bruce Lesley looks at a Texas proposal that will enshrine parental rights at the expense of children.

Texas Ban on Transgender Course Content Sows Chaos

Emma Whitford at Inside Higher Ed looks at the chaos created by vague rules banning mention of trans persons.

Vouchers are (still) roiling red state politics

Jennifer Berkshire looks at how vouchers are still creating all sorts of conflict among conservative ranks. Among other things, they've finally noticed that vouchers can be used to make taxpayers support Islamic schools.

Teachers Are Using AI to Help Write IEPs. Advocates Have Concerns

Evie Blad at EdWeek reports that some special ed teachers are using IEP writing AI to "reduce cognitive load" aka "save them having to think a lot." Somebody is going to get sued and they're going to deserve it. And nobody is better prepped to call in their lawyers than parents of special needs students.

The Illusion of Learning: The Danger of Artificial Intelligence to Education

Robert Pondiscio with a solid argument about the trouble with AI in education. Yes, I know some readers get cranky when I bring Pondiscio up, but this time you will find virtually no air between his ideas and mine when it comes to this subject.

What a Silent Film Teaches Us About AI

Julian Vasquez Heilig watches a quick silent by film genius Georges Melies, and has some thoughts about AI and learning without learning.

What Rhymes With Nazi? Far-Right Posse in American School Ponzi

If you want to be additionally alarmed about the state of education under the regime, here's Josh Weishart to draw some more uncomfortable parallels.

Christian Nationalists and Texas Public Schools

Thomas Ultican takes a look at how some Texas school districts are getting a bunch o'Bible into their classrooms.

Who ARE these people? Part II

Nancy Flanagan is still wondering where the True Believers in this regime are coming from and what, if anything, schools can do about it.

Banned Together

Steve Nuzum watches a film about book banning shenanigans that he has lived through.

State and Federal Governments Keep Attacking the Teaching of Honest History

Jan Resseger questions the war on honest history (warning: Chris Rufo ahead)

A Voice for Public Schools and Educational Equity

Eleanor Bader interviews Diane Ravitch for The Progressive on the occasion of her new book. Sharp and to the point as always.

Multiple mental models of the mind

Here we are in numerous conversations about artificial intelligence, but what does "intelligence" even mean? Ben Riley can help us get started.

When AI prophecy fails

Cory Doctorow explains the problems that are coming when it turns out that AI can't do all the jobs that firing-happy bosses are planning on.

Federal judges using AI filed court orders with false quotes, fake names

Speaking of which, the Washington Post reports on federal judges who let AI file a bunch of sloppy baloney in place of their own actual human work.

This week at Forbes.com I provided a look at Diane Ravitch's new book. At the Bucks County Beacon, a group issues a report on right-wing bias on school boards. 

There's a fun video series called Jam in the Van-- kind of a twist on Tiny Desk concerts-- and they have some great stuff. Here are the Boogaloo Assassins from 2017.

Sign up for my newsletter and avoid the hassle of social media. Free today and always.

PA: Charter Plans $25 Million Stadium

The Executive Education Academy Charter School of Allentown, PA, has just broken ground on plans for a $25 million stadium. The massive athletic complex will connect to the school and sit on top of a 300-stall parking garage and offer 4000 seats, a press box, and concessions. The field will be turf, be supported by concrete columns and sheer walls, and span 126,713 square feet. 

The complex will be near Coca-Cola Field, home of the minor league baseball team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, with whom the charter will apparently share parking, the result of some protracted negotiations. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission approved this thing. 

You are thinking, perhaps, that EEACS must be one hell of a school, and well, no, not really. According to Niche, the school rates a B-. Its test results are not great-- 36% proficiency for reading and 16% for math. Graduation rate is 95% (which tells us nothing about cohort attrition). There are 1,431 students K-12, and 100% of them are Free of Reduced Lunch students. According to School Digger, the student body is 5.4% White, 17.1 % Black, and 75.3% Hispanic. Allentown's population is 26% White, 8% Black and 60% Hispanic. 

Ironically, Niche says that girls and boys athletic participation is very low. Their football team plays AA ball and had a record of 6-5-1 this season. The Raptors also play AA basketball. 

In short, a pretty run of the mill charter school. Why do they need a $25 million stadium? That's not really clear. 

Some coverage notes that there are even more expensive and expansive stadiums out there at public schools, particularly in Texas and Georgia. Buford High School in Georgia just played its first games in the $62 million Phillip Beard Stadium.

But the Buford stadium came with controversy, with lots of observations about district priorities. But Buford's football team is ranked #9 nationally, and the stadium was actually paid for by the city. 

However, what we really want to notice about the Buford stadium is that the whole business involves decisions by locally-elected officials, both from the city and the school district. If people object to having their tax dollars spent this way, they can make their displeasure felt at the ballot box.

Not so for the EEACS stadium, because like any other charter school, EEACS is a privately owned and operated business-- it just happens to be funded by the local taxpayers, and if they don't like the idea of tax dollars funding a big beautiful stadium, well, too bad.

EEACS started operation in the fall of 2014, and lists four founders. Jennifer Mann, former Democratic state rep, now operating a consulting firm. She appears to have no current office with the school. Carol Trench, who appears to have worked with Philadelphia charter group ASPIRA and is now a Philly principal.

Steve Flavell is a co-founder and currently serves as Chief Operations Officer. Flavell has some actual background in education, but has worked mostly in behavioral health and as an administrator with Success Schools. He's paid around $150K. Robert Lysek is a co-founder who serves as CEO. Lysek appears to have started out with a career in law enforcement in mind (University of Florida), and was even a deputy sheriff in Pinellas County, FL. But he shifted to Camelot Education, founded Success Schools, and has been busy with PA charter schools for a while. 

Lysek was tagged for Pennsylvania's Superintendent's Academy in 2018, and he seems generally to be the public face of EEACS. He's paid just under $200K for his work.

How exactly is EEACS paying for this $25 million project? Currently they have an operating budget, according to their website, of $20 million. 

But this is not their first big athletic project. In March, 2023, they announced that they would be building a 28,000 square foot fieldhouse for around $7 million. For that project, they partnered with the Lehigh Valley Health Network. Announced Lysek:

Our partnership with LVHN is a game-changer for Executive. Besides collaborating, the partnership will bring internship opportunities to our students with a career pathway program, scholarship opportunities — along with in-house expertise that will provide us with athletic trainers, strength and conditioning professionals and medical and mental health programs that will benefit all our students.

No such partnership has been announced for the football stadium.

We can debate all day the wisdom of dropping huge piles of money on school athletic facilities. But at least with a real public school, that discussion can be held by representatives elected by the taxpayers. EEASC gets to throw all these taxpayer dollars around without having to answer to taxpayers at all. 

More Administrators Should Be Scared

I almost feel sorry for Ebony Parker, the former assistant principal who is being sued for a pile of money by the teacher who was shot by a sixth grader.

Parker is in court again because she was told multiple times that the child had a gun in his backpack, and she didn't do anything about it. Parker has already been indicted by a grand jury for criminal charges of neglect and abuse regarding the incidents.

Teacher Abigail Zwerner was shot; the bullet passed through her hand and into her chest. Doctors determined that it would be safer to leave the bullet in place, so Zwerner gets to carry that little memento around for the rest of her days.

But I really do feel almost sorry for Parker, because administrators do this kind of shit all the time. All. The. Time. Parker just happened to lose the lottery.

Ask any teacher. It's likely they can tell the story of some administrator minimizing a concern or dodging a student issue.

This child was talking about suicide. "Well, just keep an eye on him all the time."

This child keeps bullying Janie on the bus. "Well, you know, boys will be boys."

This child screams and acts out every day in class. "Have you tried moving her seat?"

This child keeps calling the LGBTQ student in class names. "Maybe you should call home."

I just this student to the office five minutes ago for disrupting class by throwing their desk at other students. Why is he back in my classroom? "Well, we had a little chat and I think he'll be good now."

This child threw a book at me and hit me in the face with it. "Well, you look okay now. Maybe you should call home."

This child threatened to shoot me and other students in class. ""He was probably just worked up. Keep an eye on it, won't you?"

A good administrator is like a solid roof-- they keep the rain and snow and sleet off the teacher's head so that she can do her job. That includes helping students manage problems that go beyond the teacher's classroom duties.

I am not arguing that every disruptive or troublesome student needs punishment. But they do need some combination of consequences and support, and when administration tries to slough off those needs, when administration just kicks the can down the road, there can be really ugly outcomes. 

I've worked for several administrators whose problem-solving technique was Make Some Ineffective Noises and Hope The Trouble Passes. That's simply not okay. It doesn't provide safety and support for teachers to do their jobs. It also doesn't serve the interests of the students-- not the ones with the problem and not the ones who are in that same class.

I don't wish a life-derailing lawsuit on anyone, but I do wish that lawsuits like this one would scare some administrators into getting out of their cushy office chair and doing their damned job. That includes taking seriously teacher warnings about a threat to the education or safety of students. If you can't do it because it's the right thing to do, do it at the very least because when the worst happens, someone is going to hold you accountable.