Killing public schools

One comment I hear every time budgets for public education are discussed is, "You can't fix the educational system by throwing money at it."

This pisses me off on a variety of levels.  First, there's the sense that funding public schools is randomly "throwing money," as if it's inherently irresponsible to provide adequate resources for educating the next generation of citizens.  Implicit in this is that schools will just waste the money anyhow, that school boards spend their time looking for frivolous ways to spend their state and federal funding.

The worst part, however, is that this convenient and glib little quip ignores the truth of a different adage: "You get what you pay for."  If you want to obtain and retain quality teachers, ensure that they have manageable class sizes that optimize student success, and give them the resources they need to deliver top-quality education, you have to pay for it.

And it's not like if you refuse to spend tax money to fund schools, then somehow the money magically stays in your pocket.  Taxpayers will pay either for supporting schools, or for the consequences of a generation of poorly-educated, disaffected young adults whose career choices are constrained by a lack of opportunities in public schools, or who have chosen to go to college and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that will take decades to repay.

All of which is why the proposed federal education budget is such a travesty.

The Washington Post calls this "Trump's education budget," which is a little doubtful, given that Trump gives every impression of having never written anything longer 140 characters, much less an actual budget proposal.  The specifics, honestly, have Betsy DeVos written all over them.  The Secretary of Education is a staunch believer in federal funding for private and religious schools -- which she refers to as "school choice" -- and for cutting damn near everything else to the bone.

Here are a few of the provisions of this proposal:

• cutting a total of $10.6 billion from the overall budget for education
• cutting funding for college work-study programs by half
• cutting over a hundred million dollars from programs supporting mental health services and programs providing enrichment, honors, and advanced coursework in middle and high schools
• ending a program to provide student loan forgiveness for college graduates who work in public service
• cutting $168 million from grants to states for career and tech programs
• cutting $72 million from programs for international education and foreign language training
• cutting $12 million from funding for the Special Olympics
• cutting $96 million from a program for adult literacy instruction

On the other hand, it:

• expands support for charter schools and private and religious schools by $400 million
• adds $1 billion to programs to push school districts to adopt "choice-friendly" policies

"It’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education," DeVos said.  "Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts."

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

DeVos, of course, is in no position to make that kind of judgment.  She has never worked in a public school, did not send her children to public school, and her main claim to fame, education-wise, is pushing a program in her home state of Wisconsin that funneled $2 billion to private and religious schools despite peer-reviewed studies showing that these programs do not work.  And the situation in Wisconsin is by no means unique -- other states have tried voucher systems, and by and large they have been a dismal flop.  Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times gives one example:

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana’s expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program.  Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program.  In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

So let's take those results, and make them national by mandate!  That'd be a great idea!

It doesn't take an expert to recognize the terrible effect that such a diversion of funds has on schools.  You'd think this would be enough for even the most diehard supporter of "school choice" to say, "Oh.  I guess I was wrong, then."

But no.  Data, facts, and evidence have no impact on a doctrinaire ideologue like DeVos, who honestly doesn't seem to give a damn if public schools fail.  In fact, if by her actions public schools do decline, in her mind it will just prove what she's claimed all along; that education in America is in a tailspin.

 Look, I've worked in education for thirty years.  It's not that I think we're perfect.  There's wastefulness, there is misspent money, and I have long decried the increasing focus on trivial content and preparation for standardized tests.  But the solution is not to cut funding to the bone.  Faced with revenue loss, public schools have only one real choice -- reducing staff.  Most of the rest of the line items in school budgets are earmarked or non-discretionary -- school boards have no choice in whether to include them.  The only big-ticket item that boards actually do have control over is salaries.  But since the salary per teacher is set contractually, there's only one option: lay people off.

Which means higher class sizes, cutting of electives, and loss of program.

Not that DeVos would ever admit this.  But look at the actual results of voucher programs and charter schools, nationwide -- not the spin that DeVos puts on it, but real numbers coming from studies such as the ones described by Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times article linked above.

The conclusion is unequivocal.  And the budget being proposed will, if passed, be a death blow to the schools that can withstand it least -- poor, overcrowded, inner-city schools.

Remember that next time you see Betsy DeVos smile her smarmy smile and say that she's pro-child.

The end of the experiment

Have you heard about House Bill 610?

Introduced by Representative Steve King (R-IA), H.R. 610 is called the "Choices in Education Act of 2017."  Here's the short description:

The bill establishes an education voucher program, through which each state shall distribute block grant funds among local educational agencies (LEAs) based on the number of eligible children within each LEA's geographical area. From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses. 

To be eligible to receive a block grant, a state must: (1) comply with education voucher program requirements, and (2) make it lawful for parents of an eligible child to elect to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the state or to home-school their child.

Already there should be some alarm bells ringing, and I haven't gotten to the really bad part yet.  This voucher system allows tax money to be funneled to private institutions (including religious schools), and yet establishes no standards that those institutions need to meet in order to receive these "block grants."  So that's right: your tax dollars might go to support a school where children are taught in science class that the Earth is 6,000 years old and dinosaurs went for a ride on Noah's Ark.  In North Carolina, a voucher program even funds schools that have explicit conditions for religious adherence for a student to be considered for admission.

Further, the bill sets no guidelines for money being provided for homeschooling.  Note that I am not against homeschooling per se: I know several homeschooling families who have made that choice for excellent reasons, and whose children turned out well educated (better educated, in fact, than the average public school student).  However, I've also known families in which kids were kept home out of suspicion or paranoia, and in one case resulted in an eleventh grader finally re-entering public school -- with a fourth-grade reading level.  So simply giving money to homeschoolers for "appropriate educational expenses" without specifying what is meant by "appropriate" is seriously thin ice.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Not only that, the idea of replacing current public school programs with a voucher system has a proven track record of abject failure.  A study in 2016 of voucher-funded private schools in the Milwaukee area found that 41% of those schools failed.  "I do not mean failed as in they did not deliver academically, I mean failed as in they no longer exist," said Michael Ford of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who was lead author of the study. "These 102 schools either closed after having their voucher revenue cut off by the Department of Public Instruction, or simply shut their doors.  The failure rate for entrepreneurial start-up schools is even worse: 67.8 percent."

These results are mirrored in other states -- Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all seen significant problems with voucher programs, including loss of funding to public schools and dubious results in terms of student success, retention, and college acceptance after graduation.

But as I said, I haven't even told you about the worst part yet.  The Choices in Education Act of 2017 explicitly repeals two bills -- the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the No Hungry Kids Act of 2013.

Let's start with the first one.  The ESEA is a wide-reaching piece of legislation that focuses on equal access to education regardless of disability or socioeconomic status, and mandates school accountability, professional development, and support of educational programs.  Provisions include providing financial support to schools serving students from low-income families, assisting schools with the purchase of textbooks and library materials, funding bilingual education and English as a Second Language curricula, and creating or maintaining enrichment programs such as classes for gifted and talented students, Advanced Placement programs, and education in the arts and music.

The No Hungry Kids Act should be self-explanatory, but let me use the description from the bill designed to repeal it:  The NHKA establishes "certain nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (In general, the rule requires schools to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat free milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat, and trans fat in school meals; and meet children's nutritional needs within their caloric requirements.)"

Yes, you understand all this correctly: the Choices in Education Act of 2017, if passed (and it seems to have widespread support), will trash both of these laws entirely.

One of my education professors in my long-ago teacher training program at the University of Washington called the last 120 years of American public schools "an experiment to test the radical hypothesis that all children can, and deserve to, be given equal access to education."  Through much of our history, this hasn't been the case.  If you were wealthy, your kids got to go to school; if you were not, they didn't.  The result was that poverty was effectively hereditary, and so was all that goes with it; poor access to health care, shortened life span, exploitation in the form of child labor, low-paying jobs with awful working conditions waiting for kids when they become adults because they've been trained for no better.  This bill, should it become law, will tear down an edifice that (while certainly far from ideal) has come closer than humanity ever has to giving all children, regardless of gender, origin, race, religion, or socioeconomic status, a chance to break the fetters of institutionalized class stratification.

This bill is still in the early stages, and it's not too late to fight it.  Call your representatives.  Let them know that should the Choices in Education Act of 2017 become law, it will result in irrevocable damage to our education system.  Tell them that the proposed changes aren't supported by the empirical data, and will accomplish little but program cuts in already-cash-strapped public schools, and further weakening of the wall between church and state through diverting public tax money to religious institutions.

Let them know that the public school system could use reform, but destroying it entirely will have repercussions that will take generations to undo.  Our educational system isn't perfect, but it's an experiment in social equity that can't be allowed to fail.

The end of the social experiment

In case I needed another reason to be glad that I'm only a few years from retirement, a few days ago President-elect Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education.

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of photographer Keith A. Almli and the Wikimedia Commons]

It would be hard to find a less qualified person.  It is debatable whether DeVos has ever set foot in a public school.  She did not attend one as a child, nor did she send her own children there.  She does not have a degree in education, nor has she ever taught, even in a private school.  Her sole connection to schools is her near-rabid support of vouchers, which would funnel money away from public schools and into private (including religious) schools.

It's worse, however, than a simple lack of qualifications.  The Acton Institute, where DeVos is a board member, recently published a piece called "Bring Back Child Labor: Work is a Gift Our Kids Can Handle" which included passages like the following:

Operating out of a justified fear of the harsh excesses of “harder times,” we have allowed our cultural attitudes to swing too far in the opposite direction, distorting work as a “necessary obligation of adulthood,” a gift too dangerous for kids.  Working from these same distorted attitudes, the Washington Post recently published what it described as a “haunting” photo montage of child laborers from America’s rougher past. 

The photos surely point to times of extreme lack, of stress and pain.  But as Jeffrey Tucker rightly detects, they also represent the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities, and setting the foundation of a flourishing nation, in turn.

The author, Joseph Sunde, was the recipient of a firestorm of criticism over the article, so he changed the title to remove the "Bring Back Child Labor" part, and appended the following disclaimer:

Given the recent attention drawn to this post, permit me to clarify that I do NOT endorse replacing education with paid labor, nor do I support sending our children back into the coal mines or other high-risk jobs, nor do I support getting rid of mandatory education at elementary and middle-school ages.

No?  So what does "Bring Back Child Labor" mean?

What is the most maddening about all of this is that the majority of students I teach do work, and I see the stress that they deal with trying to juggle school, homework, job, extracurricular activities, and family obligations.  The idea that kids today are lazy whiners who need a return to some 1920s-style discipline is a convenient falsehood for those who want to gut the public school system.

DeVos and the Acton Institute are deeply invested in what amounts to defunding public education.  They focused for a time on Michigan, trying to push a "school choice" agenda there (an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful), showering huge amounts of money and gifts on Republican candidates in exchange for their support.  Detroit Free Press writer Stephen Henderson denounced DeVos as engaging in "a spending spree that would swell to $1.45 million in contributions to the party and to individual candidates by the end of July," adding that "in Michigan, children’s education has been squandered in the name of a reform “experiment," driven by ideologies that put faith in markets, alone, as the best arbiters of quality, and so heavily financed by donors like the DeVos clan that nearly no other voices get heard in the educational conversation."

Michigan Board of Education President John Austin, in an apt if somewhat mixed metaphor, said that "It’s like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, and hand-feeding it schoolchildren...  DeVos’s agenda is to break the public education system, not educate kids, and replace it with a for-profit model."

And if you needed anything else, there's also a good likelihood that she's an Intelligent Design Creationist.  She grew up in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church; her parents, Edgar and Elsa (Brockhuizen) Prince, are major donors to the Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council;  and her husband, Dick DeVos, came right out with "teach the controversy" bullshit when he was running for Michigan governor in 2006:

I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design — that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory — that that theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.

By the same argument, I suppose teaching students alchemy in chemistry class and astrology in physics class would "expose them to more ideas, not less."

And funny how whenever one of these clowns tries to ramrod ID or creationism into public school classrooms, they always say that "many scientists" are in favor of it without telling us who these scientists are.  "Cite your sources" apparently doesn't carry any weight in politics, for some reason.

So in the next four years -- assuming DeVos is confirmed, which is likely given the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House -- look for a further siphoning of funds away from public schools, more emphasis on draining resources and talent from poor inner-city schools, and more efforts to hamstring science education.  I've taught for thirty years, and I've weathered some ups and downs in that time, but I can't recall a point at which I felt so genuinely pessimistic about the future of public education.  In a purely selfish sense, I'm glad I'm retiring, probably some time in the next five years, and can get myself right out of this mess.  But it breaks my heart that this great social experiment in educating all children, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or religion, may be coming to an end.

Breaking news: The Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution!

Will Rogers once said, "If you find you've dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging."

This is a lesson that has apparently yet to sink in for some young-earth creationists who decided to get together and write a science textbook -- an endeavor that, in so many ways, resembles a bunch of ten-year-olds trying to stage a Broadway musical in their back yard.  (Source)

This particular crew turned out a book called Biology for Accelerated Christian Education, Incorporated, and (of course) the book harps continuously on the ideas that evolution is a great big lie, and that the Earth is only six thousand years old.  The consensus of thousands of trained research scientists is irrelevant in the face of the revealed truth of Genesis; in fact, there are hints of a huge anti-Christian conspiracy, funded by the secular left and (once again, of course) backed by Satan himself.  So far, all of this is fairly yawn-inducing, but for two things.

One of them is the new twist of using the Loch Ness Monster to disprove evolution.

I couldn't possibly make anything this bizarre up.  Here's the relevant passage, which I present here verbatim:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

In another lesson, the writers mention that a Japanese whaling vessel "caught what appears to be a small aquatic dinosaur."

So, what we have here is one mythological view of the world being used to prove another mythological view of the world, which would be funny except for the second thing: ACE-sponsored textbooks, including this one, are being used in some charter schools in Louisiana, which means that government-funded vouchers are being used to pay for this curriculum, and to teach it to children -- if you can call this teaching.  There you have it, folks: your tax dollars at work.

One thing that I was unclear on, however, was how Nessie (if she does exist) bears any kind of relevance to the truth of young-earth creationism.  Suppose dinosaurs did survive until the modern era; why does that mean that evolution is false?  Here's how it's explained by Jonny Scaramanga, an anti-fundamentalist activist who was subjected to an ACE curriculum as a child but fortunately came out with enough of his brain intact to be able to escape: "The 'Nessie claim' is presented as evidence that evolution couldn't have happened. The reason for that is they're saying if Noah's flood only happened 4000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.  If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That's their logic. It's a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters."

Unsurprising, given what else they believe.  But as tortuous logic goes, this one beats anything else I've heard.  Having dug themselves into one hole -- abandoning the principles of scientific induction in favor of a Bronze-Age mythology for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever -- they continued to dig until they reached the further substratum of cryptozoology.  The horrifying thing is the number of people who are happily willing to join them in the pit, the government officials who are eager to fund the digging process -- and the thousands of children who are being dragged down there involuntarily in the name of "choice in education."