Feds unconstitutionally shoving school choice down the states’ throats three years ago, permanently associating choice with a racist, misogynist, illiberal reprobate game-show host president, would have be ruinous for the long-term legitimacy of choice. Doing it in the middle of a pandemic and a national reckoning with the legacy of slavery and segregation? Words fail me.
Lots of other arguments against this folly here and here.
Looking forward to the retractions and apologies from all the right-wingers who opposed Common Core on federalism grounds.
Including – gosh, will you look at that! – one of this bill’s primary sponsors.
The arguments against a school choice program imposed on the states by the federal government, including by indirect means, remain as strong as they ever were, and we now stand to lose more from such a move than we would have three years ago, when it would have been merely a disaster rather than a catastrophe.
When the president decided to make the reopening of schools a culture-war football, no doubt with his own reelection in mind and obviously caring nothing about what will serve students well – or even what would be a tactically smart way to increase the chances that schools do reopen – a more skilled politician than Betsy DeVos might have been able to find a way to keep her job without beclowning herself. The threat to withhold federal funds from districts that didn’t reopen was obviously empty. Congress has appropriated the funds, and in spite of Arne Duncan’s best efforts, the secretary of education is not the dictator of U.S. schools. Look how much trouble the administration got into by attempting very briefly to hold up congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine, and in that case you had far fewer people watching (at least in the U.S.!), and you didn’t have one of the nation’s largest and strongest special-interest coalitions on the other side.
I don’t apportion DeVos a huge share of blame for having stumbled in this regard – she’s kept her head down and done good work for much longer than most high officials in this administration. That she has been demonized by all the right people for doing good policy work far outweighs this misstep.
But the new gesture in the direction of turning this flub into the springboard for a federal school choice program, if taken seriously, would be a significant danger to the school choice movement. Let’s hope this is just an inartful way of confusing the headline-writers long enough to make the story go away and not a serious initiative.
Imposing choice on states that don’t want it, including by the constitutional equivalent of crawling in through the air ducts, is a bad idea any time. To do it in the middle of an explosive culture-war meltdown involving everything from how much risk of disease we’re willing to tolerate for our children to how we handle the legacy of our greatest national sins . . . well, words fail me to describe the catastrophic loss of legitimacy the movement would suffer.
Legitimacy matters more than short-term power. Much more. One might even say that legitimacy is just another word for long-term power.
The arrogant child-progressives who have taken over the big ed-reform foundations are not the only people who need a copy of Political Science for Ed Reform Dummies.
Look, I know Jeb did one important thing for school choice over twenty years ago, but at some point when you turn in stuff this dumb, it no longer cuts it to say, “hey, I did you a favor in 1999.”
Jeb is the nominal author of an article on NRO about how states should use funds from a new $3 billion federal education bailout. It’s adapted from a big policy report produced by his organization, which he links to.
Let’s leave aside for a moment that the article calls on states to use this cash to push really big, “transformational” changes, whereas $3 billion cut fifty ways doesn’t actually add up to much as a share of the public school budget (over $700 billion a year nationally). We spent $6 billion on Reading First and got nothing to show for it, and Jeb is now pushing early reading intervention and radical new use of digital learning and a big new “workforce preparedness” somethingorother and payouts to private schools for only $3 billion. Someone said something fifteen years ago about the uselessness of the “buckets into the sea” approach to education reform, but people who have the wrong goals just can’t see past the dollar signs in their eyes.
Where was I? Oh yeah, let’s leave all that aside.
In this article, Jeb once again drops school choice. Last time, at the height of his all-in, head-first dive into Common Core (Hey, remember Common Core? Good times!) Jeb dropped choice from his list of four must-have reforms. But he at least mentioned choice in the article, in a way that sort of suggested it might be a good idea, so long as it bent the knee to Common Core.
This time, Jeb drops choice from the list even when his own organization was trying to put it back on. And he doesn’t even mention it in the article.
The policy report, in one of its four recommended items, specifically recommends protecting, expanding and creating school choice programs. But somehow, between the report and Jeb’s article, this item on support for choice magically transmogrified into “stabilizing private schools.”
A government subsidy for private schools is not school choice, any more than a government subsidy for grocery stores would expand people’s food choices. On the contrary, it would narrow them. Just look at how government subsidies for higher education and medical care have fantastically empowered people with more and more access to more and more viable choices!
And what is Jeb’s argument that government should subsidize private K-12 schools in the same way it has so successfully subsidized universities?
Finally, governors could help to stabilize private schools, which are responsible for roughly 10 percent of America’s K–12 students. Private schools, especially faith-based schools, often operate on shoestring budgets, yet in many cases their students are more likely to graduate from high school and go to college. With the impacts of COVID-19, many of these schools are at a breaking point. Families may have less money to pay tuition, and financial aid will be stretched thin. It’s worth a reminder that these schools are part of our education system. They employ teachers, buy textbooks, and educate students who would otherwise fill desks in public schools. They provide alternatives to parents whose needs aren’t being met by the public schools. Helping cash-strapped parents who were paying out of their own pockets to send their child to a great school seems like a simple way to invest in education — and it would keep a vital and successful part of our education system going well into the future.
Why, they’re part of the status quo! How could we possibly not subsidize them?
He even specifically says that his goal is to support families who were already paying for private school – “parents who were paying out of their own pockets” – as opposed to creating new choices for parents who need them!
The point is not parent empowerment that would incentivize better education. The point is to subsidize the status quo forever.
The real head-scratcher here is that school choice programs are a superior way to preserve private education, even if that’s really all you care about. That shouldn’t be what you care about; you should care about better education, which comes from real accountability, which comes from giving power to parents – and not from any other approach. But if what you care about really is just floating the status quo in private schools, why not argue for school choice programs? Why advocate direct subsidies to private schools that will only kill the one thing that private schools really have going for them to make them attractive and keep them vibrant – the fact that they answer to parents?
PS Figuring out why “subsidize private schools to serve students already enrolled there!” would be a huge political loser, where “empower parents with new choices!” has been the only – the only – long-term political winner in the history of the education reform movement is left as a Political Science for Ed Reform Dummies exercise for the reader.
My latest for OCPA asks why Oklahoma needs one state DOE employee for every four schools:
What do Oklahoma schools get in exchange for all this? Not funding. The state legislature appropriates funds for public schools according to formulas written into the law. Indeed, state funding for education is one of the very few places left in American governance where legislatures still make their own decisions instead of delegating all the hard choices to the administrative state. Oklahoma could fund its public schools with no more than a handful of state employees involved, to gather data and program the check-writing machines.
And before you ask, no, they didn’t make life easier for schools during Coronavirus. They made it harder.
My favorite bit:
It’s not 100% clear to me that schools ought to expend any portion of their scarce labor and budget bandwidth on the vital task of monitoring how many calories are in the diet soda their students drink. But it is clear to me that if there is any question—any question whatsoever—that ought to be settled at the local level in our constitutional order, this is it. If states can control this, we should give up on pretending we still have a constitutional division of powers; it’s diet soda all the way down.
File this under big-budget franchise reboots nobody was asking for. Reuters:
New York will work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” the state’s school system as part of broader reforms in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Governor Andrew Cuomo told a daily briefing on Tuesday…
While he did not provide specifics, Cuomo suggested a fundamental rethink of the classroom was on the table.
“The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom, and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms – why with all the technology you have?” Cuomo asked.
There must be somebody whose word Bill Gates would trust, who could sit him down and explain what’s being done to him.
If not for his sake, for the sake of all the rest of us who have to watch this crap when there’s nothing else on.
If some good Samaritan does decide to take Gates to class, here’s the reading list.
My latest for OCPA considers whether digital learning or homeschooling will see big boosts from the current public health emergency, when millions of parents suddenly found themselves thrust into both these alternative modes of education. Admittedly, it’s a unique moment:
Oklahoma’s largest virtual charter-school organization, EPIC Charter Schools, even offered free training to teachers and schools in traditional school districts. Despite their rhetoric about how “everyone in public education must come together,” it’s a little like watching Nixon sell grain to the Soviets.
But having to do this under emergency conditions is not necessarily giving people a representative experience of what digital learning and homeschooling are normally like.
With a callback to a classic Matt Ladner meme, I argue that while digital learning has long-term promise, techno-futurist hopes for a quick digital-learning revolution remain as overblown as they were ten years ago:
Today, we can see that the edu-futurists—Matt Ladner dubbed them The Cool Kids—were right about the direction, but wrong about the scope. Or, if you prefer, you can say they were wrong about the timing; perhaps technology really will revolutionize the whole education landscape, but if so, it didn’t do it on the timetable The Cool Kids predicted…Models that explain how people behave when they buy copper wire—“the market is a huge bubble right now, it’s about to burst”—turn out not to explain how people behave when it comes to the rearing of their children.
Homeschooling has more to gain from the current crisis, because it will no longer feel weird and abnormal in the same way – people will have looked in the closet and found out there was no Boogeyman in there. But don’t get your hopes up for radical change here, either:
Institutional schooling was not imposed upon American society by some kind of totalitarian regime. Homeschooling is the right choice for some, and perhaps the right choice for more than choose it now. But radicals who view institutional schooling as a false consciousness that everyone will suddenly wake up and realize they never really believed in are a little like the “heteronormativity” theorists who think people are only attracted to the opposite sex because society programs them that way.
Bottom line, education policy is still political, and politics is still the same as it was.
Franchise movies in summer 2021 and street signs in St. Petersburg on Dec. 26, 1991 are also part of the story. Let me know what you think!
We interrupt this Higgython to bring you an opportunity to enjoy making fun of nationalism for just $10. Isn’t spontaneous social coordination awesome?
I’ve spent the last two years designing a card game, Presidents versus Trump. It’s an action-packed, fun-filled, 30-minute game for 1-4 players. The American presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, are so offended by Trump sitting in their chair that they’ve all come back together to kick him out. But while the portal to the past was open, a rogue’s gallery of villains from American history, from Benedict Arnold to Bull Connor, have come back to defend Trump. The battle for the honor of the American presidency is on!
The game is designed and ready; check it out here. What it needs now is amazing art, like the sample cards from our artist that you see here. This game won’t be what it should be until we get this kind of art on all 130 cards. That’s where we need your support.
Head on over to Kickstarter now to check it out, click that button and support us today. Spread the word and let’s make this game happen together. Thanks for your support!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Higgython.
For this year’s Higgy, in the spirit of previous Higgy winner Pascal Monnet and Al winner Pete DeComo, I had been planning to nominate the culprits in this story. It was initially reported that volunteers were being sued by a medical device manufacturer because, to keep breathers at a hospital in Italy working (and thus patients alive) under emergency conditions where there were no other options, they used $1 of materials to 3-D print replacements for valves that normally cost $11,000. But the story fell apart when the reporters followed up.
I was glad that it turned out the company had not in fact sued, or even threatened to sue, the volunteers. But I’ll admit I was also a little disappointed. I wondered whether I could possibly find another Higgy nomination as good as that one would have been.
I needn’t have worried!
Radio Television Hong Kong Reporter Yvonne Tong: Will the WHO reconsider Taiwan’s membership?
WHO Useful Idiot of Durantyesque Proportions Bruce Aylward: [Excruciatingly long embarrassed silence]
Tong: [Waits patiently]
Aylward: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear your question, Yvonne.
Tong: Okay, let me repeat the question.
Aylward: No, that’s okay, let’s move to another one then.
Tong: I’m actually curious in talking about Taiwan as well, on Taiwan’s case…
Aylward: [Leans forward and looks down at his keyboard, as if searching for the Escape key]
[Screen freezes, signal disconnects]
[Tong calls him back]
Tong: I just want to see if you can comment a bit on how Taiwan has done so far in terms of containing the virus.
Aylward: Well, we’ve already talked about China. And you know, when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually all done quite a good job. So with that, I’d like to thank you very much for inviting us to participate, and good luck as you go forward with the battle in Hong Kong.
Here’s the original source, but thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can watch the whole thing in all its majestic glory right here, without even leaving the comfort of your own JPGB. And really, you must watch it to appreciate it in full:
Now, don’t cry “BSDD!” until you hear the punchline.
Punchline? You mean this story gets better? You bet your Escape key it gets better. In fact, the more you know about this story, the better it gets.
For instance: Five days before he became a global laughingstock, Aylward gave an interview to Time in which he said we need to look not only at “places that are recently getting infected [and] places that aren’t infected” but especially at “the places where it all started.” He then immediately mentioned “Europe, North America, the Middle East.”
For instance: The day after he became a global laughingstock, Aylward was still telling Canadian television that China was one of the few countries that had contained the virus. Why learn lessons from your experience when you can just keep charging mule-headedly forward along the same path? What would become of the grand project of a centrally planned society, which is our only hope of salvation, if we learned lessons from experience? (What’s the definition of insanity, again?)
For instance: On March 4, the New York Times ran an interview in which Aylward not only praised the Beijing regime’s handling of the crisis, but said that the number of cases had already peaked in China. The number of people asking for tests daily declined from 46,000 to 13,000. “Hospitals had empty beds.” On March 4.
The Times managed to rouse itself to ask, of the supposedly stellar job the Beijing regime was doing, “isn’t it possible only because China is an autocracy?” Which shows a lot of credulity in accepting the claims about the regime’s performance at face value, as well as an unconscious admiration for autocratic regimes. Thankfully, Aylward was on hand to assure the Times that the Beijing government is not “some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies.”
The reference to eating babies is especially rich. And in case you wondered, yes, there is a connection between the millions of murdered babies in China’s past and the two million Uighurs awaiting execution in concentration camps in its present. The connection is this.
Headline of Aylward’s Times interview: “Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus.”
Appropos of absolutely nothing, I will choose this moment to note that the Times’ statement on Walter Duranty admits frankly that his reporting was a pack of lies designed to whitewash communist mass murder, but it does not contain an apology. The Times also primly notes that the Pulitzer committee has repeatedly declined to withdraw the award, and links prominently to the Pulitzer committee’s statement – which, with titanically inhuman irony, actually absolves Duranty of lying. I can’t decide which is worse.
So at this point you’re all yelling “BSDD!” Right?
For one thing, Aylward’s not making policy. He only has “arrogant delusions of shaping the world.”
For another, it hardly counts as BSDD to help keep Taiwan out of the WHO when Taiwan is actually far better off outside the WHO than in it! They have the spirit of freedom we had when we were a young nation, and seem to be doing just fine without the WHO’s help. They’re actually printing their flag on the masks they produce, so anyone (say, on the mainland) who buys them will have to walk around wearing the Taiwanese flag.
Taiwan is the Tom Doniphon of Asia; the oppressor has more men, and has more guns, and has subverted the legal authorities, and Taiwan just does not give a rat’s ass – not about the oppressor’s bullying swagger, and not about hoity-toity, pointy-headed “civilized” people who talk about peace and justice but disappear when the oppressor walks into the room.
And we’re better off with Taiwan out of the WHO, too. On January 14, WHO parroted Beijing’s claim that there had been no human transmission of the virus, but Taiwan was openly telling the world otherwise as early as December 31. We’re the suckers, for listening to the WHO instead of Taiwan.
But that’s not the best part.
Punchline: Just hours after the exchange with Tong was posted, his employers at the WHO panicked and deleted Aylward from their website.
Bruce who? Bruce WHO? We’re the WHO, and we’ve never heard of him!
You’ll be reassured to know that Aylward is back on the WHO website, and the WHO has issued a statement responding to Tong’s questions. Determining how much credibility the WHO’s answers have is left to the reader as an exercise. But I do believe we can trust the message that they’re sending loud and clear when they decline to say whether Aylward hung up on Tong.
The bloodthirsty tyrants of Beijing are BSDD. The WHO, which has submitted to the control of the Beijing regime and spreads its lies, is BSDD.
But this moron freaks out and melts down the moment he’s asked a question he should obviously have been prepared for – he was one of the WHO’s point people for media on China and Coronavirus, and he gave an interview to a Hong Kong journalist, and he wasn’t prepared for this? – and he ends up scrubbed from his employer’s website. That’s PLDD if anything ever was.
Posted by Greg Forster 
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