Category Archives: Education / Youth

Charters Aren’t Vouchers

The media recently reported the results of a recent study of schools in Indiana and other states, and found that children attending public charter schools had better learning outcomes than those in traditional public schools or voucher schools.

When I saw the headlines, I cringed–not because of the study’s findings, which seem credible, but because I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten people reading those reports don’t understand the difference between charter schools and voucher schools–and it’s a critical difference.

Charter schools are independently run public schools that are granted greater flexibility in their operations than traditional public schools. (Theoretically, at least, that flexibility is in exchange for greater accountability for performance.) In the Indianapolis Public School system, leaders at these schools have independent control of policies and academics while still being part of the public school district. 

Because they are public schools, charters are not allowed to charge tuition. They are not allowed to teach or favor any religion. And importantly, since charter schools are public schools, they are constrained by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, gender, socioeconomic status, previous academic scores, or special education status.

Vouchers–as I have explained repeatedly on this site–are very different. Voucher programs send public money–tax dollars– to private schools to offset the tuition charged by those schools. A vast majority of the private schools that accept vouchers are religious, and a vast majority of students employing those vouchers use them to attend religious schools. Furthermore, virtually all of those voucher schools discriminate on some basis–either limiting enrollment to members of a particular faith, excluding students with special needs, or–in several high-profile situations–excluding gay children, or children with gay parents. 

There are problems with charter schools, particularly with those that have contracted with for-profit entities to manage them, but those problems differ substantially from the issues presented by voucher programs. Vouchers weren’t developed in an effort to improve education; they were meant to be “work-arounds.” The First Amendment, along with many state constitutions, prohibits the use of public funds to support religion or religious institutions. Voucher proponents argued that the millions of tax dollars going into the coffers of religious schools are “really” going to the parents, and that the parents are individual citizens who should be free to spend those dollars to send their children to the school of their choice. (And I have a bridge to sell you…)

Courts bought that argument.

The study found that students who attended charters  in Indianapolis had somewhat stronger educational outcomes than those in either traditional public schools, or in IPS “innovation” schools, which are a different type of charter. (Numerous studies have found that children attending voucher schools do no better–and often do more poorly–than similar children attending traditional public schools.)

Indianapolis students in poverty who attend charter schools showed stronger academic growth in math and similar growth in reading compared to the state average, according to the study. 

CREDO’s own metric for comparison also found that students at Indianapolis charter schools gained more days of learning in math and reading during a typical academic year than similar students at traditional IPS district schools and innovation charter schools within the district. Other comparisons in the study include:

Black and Hispanic students at charter schools had stronger academic growth in math and reading compared to Black and Hispanic peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student groups in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

Students in poverty at charter schools had more learning gains in math and reading compared to their peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student group in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

No matter what type of school English Language Learners in Indianapolis attend from the study, they show similar learning gains in reading and math.

The theory behind charter schools was that their greater flexibility would allow them to experiment with curricula and other aspects of the educational environment, and that successful experimentation could then be “imported” into the traditional public schools. According to the linked article, that is precisely the approach being taken by the IPS Superintendent.

I do welcome the study–and for that matter, all evidence of what works and what doesn’t– but I’d be a lot more enthusiastic if i wasn’t convinced that it will be intentionally mischaracterized to support voucher proponents’ efforts to defame and de-fund our public schools….

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Addressing The Civics Deficit

I spent a considerable part of my academic career focusing on what I described as the civic deficit. Soon after joining the faculty–and especially when I taught undergraduate classes–I came face to face with students who had obviously gone through both elementary and high school classes without learning even the most basic outlines of American history or government.

An exchange with an undergraduate first acquainted me with the extent of that civic deficit.

I taught my classes through a constitutional lens. We studied the Bill of Rights and wrestled with questions about how those rights should be understood and applied today. I often introduced discussion of the First Amendment’s Free Speech provisions by asking students questions like “What did James Madison think about porn on the Internet?”

Obviously, the response I wanted was something along the lines of “James Madison never imagined a communication mechanism like the Internet”–which would then lead to a (hopefully nuanced) discussion of how today’s courts should apply the values protected by that Amendment to a world the founders could never have imagined. So I was taken aback when a young woman–a junior in college–responded to that question with a puzzled question of her own: “Who’s James Madison?”

I went home, had a very stiff drink–and for the ensuing 18 or so years, focused a major part of my research agenda and advocacy on civic education.

I relate this story because I am finally beginning to see evidence that others share my concern–and my firm belief in the importance of civic knowledge.  The New York Times recently reported that businesses in the U.S. and Europe have recognized the existence and significance of the deficit, and are engaging in efforts to fill the void left by inadequate schooling.

The article began by describing a German worker’s experience with online conspiracy attacks, and the subsequent eight-week program that helped her deal with the misinformation. The program was offered by her employer, described as a “multinational recruitment firm with 3,500 employees in Germany.” The company said the project was part of its own aim to “strengthen democratic values and make their employees more resilient.”

Across Germany, several hundred companies have taken part in such workshops, and similar classes are being held in other Western countries, including the United States. Businesses are finding they need to bolster their employees in the face of increasingly vitriolic political debate. Seminars on civics and democratic principles — such as the importance of voting or recognizing the dangers of disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech — have become a way to ensure healthier relationships at the workplace, and in society at large. In addition, reports show that economic growth is higher in stable democracies, and liberal border policies allow companies to attract skilled immigrants.

The instruction has benefits for employee performance; according to representatives of the companies. They say that giving employees basic knowledge of democratic principles and factual underpinnings helps them “recognize and respond to hate speech and misinformation” and “has made employees more self-assured in doing their jobs.”

Groups like the Business Council for Democracy and Weltoffenes Sachsen in Germany and Civic Alliance or the Leadership Now Project in the United States organize workshops like the one Ms. Krüger took part in, provide research and webinars, and support civic education and get-out-the-vote efforts — all of it nonpartisan. Most are nonprofit organizations, backed by independent foundations or a group of businesses that rely on their political independence as a selling point…

A key principle of the workshops was that they be voluntary for employees, said Nina Gbur, the organization’s project manager. They also have to be ideologically neutral, and not target any group or members of a given political party.

What is encouraging is growing recognition that the health of business depends upon the health of democracy.

“Democracy is the basis of our entrepreneurial activity,” said Judith Borowski, managing director of Nomos, which offers its employees civics workshops. “And if we no longer have democracy, then the basis for our entrepreneurial activities will also be very curtailed.”

Authoritarianism is facilitated by ignorance–the ability of political extremists to twist facts and misrepresent history in order to play on citizens’ fears and prejudices.

In Germany, media literacy has been a critical issue, while programs in the United States are frequently focused on teaching employees about how the government works and voting rights. But their basic premise is to empower employees to understand how their actions, both in and out of the workplace, affect the political climate and, ultimately, their own jobs.

These programs are very good news. So is the movement to expand civics education in the schools.

We have a very long way to go…

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I’d Have Sworn This Was Satire

This isn’t satire. I kid you not.

The DeSantis administration has proposed a rule for Florida’s public campuses that would prevent the teaching of issues “that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs.”

Back in May, DeSantis signed into law Senate Bill 266, banning the state’s public colleges and universities from using public funds to “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.” But the law, which took effect in July, never defined those terms, instead leaving that up to the Board of Governors that oversees those state schools. Now the board has done just that. In draft regulation obtained by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the board proposes that the ban apply to all campus programs and activities in which the college or university “endorses or promotes a position” on “topics that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs, positions, or norms.”

This idiocy is the logical outcome of redefining education as job training–a belief near and dear to contemporary Republican hearts. Just crank out worker bees–and for heaven sakes, don’t let them learn anything from our human history of deeply-contested political, ideological, moral or religious theories and beliefs!

UnderS.B. 266, Florida’s public colleges and universities are prohibited from offering general education classes that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or that include “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” The law also bars public higher education institutions from using state or federal funds for activities or programs that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion”—making Florida’s anti-DEI law one of the most restrictive of the dozens of such laws introduced across the United States. A DeSantis press release announcing the bill’s signing declared it is meant to “prevent woke ideologies from continuing to coopt our state universities and state colleges.”

I have a proposal: rather than this tortured effort to describe matters that will now be forbidden on campus, just reduce the bill to its essence: “Education will not be allowed.”

Think my snark is an over-reaction? Just look at the draft resolution:

In addition to defining “social issues” as “topics that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs, positions, or norms,” it defines “political or social activism” as “any activity organized with a purpose of effecting or preventing change to a government policy, action, or function, or any activity intended to achieve a desired result related to social issues, where the university endorses or promotes a position in communications, advertisements, programs.” “Diversity, equity, or inclusion,” meanwhile, “is any program, activity, or policy that promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals, or classifies such individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

As several pundits have observed, today’s GOP is the party of projection: the Florida effort to control what is discussed in the state’s classrooms is precisely the “indoctrination” that they pretend is occurring under “woke” auspices.

How does one teach the Crusades or the Reformation or the colonizing of America without noting the religious beliefs that polarized people living at those times? How do you teach philosophy without examining the contending perspectives of the philosophers, or discuss the role of women in politics without reference to the social “norms” that originally denied women the franchise? 

Are efforts to prevent rape on campus evidence of “differential treatment” of women? Speaking of “evidence,” what does evidence that a university is “promoting equity” look like? (I always thought “equity” meant fundamental fairness–I guess we don’t want that on campus….)

Education is typically defined as the process of acquiring knowledge and developing the powers of reasoning and judgment. Education may also extend to the acquisition of specialized skills needed for a career or profession, but it is usually understood to require the development of critical thinking, differentiating it from mere job training and from indoctrination.

DeSantis is well on his way to destroying higher education in Florida.

He began with attacks on New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college that was forced to alter its curriculum and programs. DeSantis installed conservative ideologue and education foe Christopher Rufo as a member of the college’s board of trustees, and together they worked to “remake” New College, which immediately lost more than a third of its faculty–a fact DeSantis hailed as permitting the “replacement of far-left faculty with new professors aligned with the university’s mission.”

I don’t know what that mission is, but it sure isn’t education.

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Shades Of Texas

Back before the Internet and e-books, when school textbooks were hard-back volumes printed by educational publishers, Texas had a wildly disproportionate influence on the lessons those books conveyed. Even then, Texas was an anti-intellectual wasteland, but because of its size–and the need to standardize publication of schoolbooks nationally– it had an outsized influence on what went into the nation’s textbooks. (I often think we should give Texas back to Mexico, but they probably wouldn’t take it…)

Today, of course, school districts have access to a wider variety of educational resources, so the minority of Americans who are firmly opposed to giving children an accurate understanding of history or science have pursed a different tactic: educational vouchers. Vouchers–as readers of this blog are aware–allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private–almost always religious–schools, a large number of which use textbooks that are even less accurate than those once influenced by Texas.

Time Magazine recently reported on the most widely-used of those “textbooks.”

The report began by noting that the singer-songwriter who wrote the controversial “Try that in a small town” shouldn’t have been so surprised by the outcry the song triggered. After all, he’d attended a religious school that used

textbooks produced by Abeka, a publishing company that has long been part of the effort among conservative institutions to teach an airbrushed version of history—one that presents a narrow vision of a heroic, Christian, capitalist America. For the most part, these books have been limited to private schools and homeschools, though the founders of these networks always hoped to influence public life…

Abeka’s roots go back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, which pitted evolutionary science and expert academic knowledge against local control and religious dogma. After the trial, which produced reams of journalistic mockery of conservative religion, prominent fundamentalists like Bob Jones Sr. decided that America needed a new kind of educational institution, one free from the influence of mainstream academic expertise. He founded Bob Jones College in Florida (now Bob Jones University in South Carolina) to provide white conservative Christians with a “fighting base.”

Eventually, even Bob Jones University was deemed too “progressive” by religious fanatics, and a network of white-dominated private religious schools grew rapidly.

These schools promised to maintain prayer and traditional teaching. Most importantly, they promised a refuge from court-ordered desegregation efforts. These schools needed textbooks that would teach the lessons that parents who opposed such measures wanted their children to learn.

In response, Abeka expanded its publishing efforts. The company eventually published original textbooks in every subject, for every grade. The goal was to provide an alternative kind of curriculum, one that—in the words of one Abeka leader in 1979—would teach students to cherish the Bible, “master the three R’s,” maintain a healthy “respect for authority,” and develop “pride in America.”

As the Time article notes, Abeka textbooks teach a history that is “dramatically distinct from mainstream books.”  They omit the violence that doomed Reconstruction, instead explaining that it failed because many formerly enslaved people were “not prepared for political responsibility.” “The book does briefly note that “some Southern whites used illegal methods” and “terror tactics,” including forming the KKK. Yet, that mention of white terrorism is buried within an overall message of white victimhood.”

In 2019, Abeka’s texts were used by a majority of America’s 1,689,726 homeschooled students plus nearly three-quarters of a million students in conservative Christian private schools. It isn’t just Abeka–Hillsdale College and PragerU, among others, produce wildly slanted versions of America’s history, and have been making inroads in even public schools in Red States.

And it isn’t just history: textbook publishers serving these Christian voucher schools also produce anti-Darwin, anti-evolution. “science” books.

In 2010, NBC reported that Christian-based materials that omit any mention of evolution had come to dominate the home-school education market; that year, that market was more than 1.5 million students. As the article notes, most home-school parents want a “Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation.”

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”

That is the worldview being supported by Hoosier tax dollars that have been siphoned off and sent to “voucher” schools by Indiana’s legislators.

And we wonder why educated people leave Indiana…

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Life, Liberty, Language

Depressing though it is, I have to give MAGA Republicans credit for their ability to (mis)use language–their talent for appropriating/twisting the usual meanings of words in ways that resonate with with Americans who–for whatever reason–don’t stop to unpack what is actually going on.

We’ve finally gotten to a place where most Americans do recognize that many of the people claiming to be “pro-life” are actually only pro-birth. To be genuinely pro-life would require support for feeding, clothing and educating the children who emerge from those wombs; it would require support for women’s health, and recognition that interventions needed to save pregnant women’s health and lives should be determined by doctors, not politicians.

And I won’t even address the inconsistencies of those “pro-life” zealots who favor the death penalty. (I once challenged a colleague who was pro-birth and pro-death penalty; his response was that criminals had “forfeited” their right to continue breathing…)

Now, of course, we have “Moms for Liberty.” Liberty is another one of those words that has taken a real beating from the crazed MAGA crowd; I was particularly fascinated by the lunatics who claimed that wearing a mask during a pandemic in order to protect their friends and neighbors from disease violated their rather peculiar definition of “liberty.” These were almost always the same people who want government to dictate women’s  reproduction and trans children’s choice of bathroom.

Let’s just say their definition of “liberty” is highly selective..

The most recent group to misuse the term is “Moms for Liberty,” and like most theocratic and autocratic folks, “Moms” misuse the terminology. Their real motto ought to be “Liberty for me but not for Thee.”

The Brookings Institution recently issued a report on those self-righteous moms. The report included the fact that the Indiana chapter had been in the news for featuring an Adolf Hitler quote in its newsletter.

That quote–which they hastily withdrew after considerable attention to it from local media–would seem to confirm the description of the group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which identifies Moms for Liberty as a “far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement. The group grew out of opposition to public health regulations for COVID-19, opposes LGBTQ+ and racially inclusive school curriculum, and has advocated books bans.”

Moms for Liberty is an antigovernment organization founded in 2021 by former Florida school board members, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. Current Sarasota County, Florida school board member, Bridget Ziegler, was also a co-founder. She has since left the group, leaving Justice and Descovich at the helm.

Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the “woke indoctrination” of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group’s views. They also use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.

SPLC followed that description with a list of quotes from members, and–assuming you can stomach the vitriol–you really have to read what the actual “moms for liberty” have to say. It’s incredibly hateful. They seem especially fixated on the notion that gender dysphoria exists, calling it a “mental illness,” but the animus extends far beyond gay children; one “mom for liberty” threatened to shoot a librarian. (I guess “liberty” doesn’t extend to our right to read books these fearless warriors disapprove of…)

SPLC reports that the “social media accounts and real-world activity of the national organization and its chapters” is filled with antigovernment and conspiracy propaganda, and especially with anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender identity diatribes. The group also opposes  inclusive curricula, and is firmly anti-public school. (In case you hadn’t noticed,  teachers’ unions are the devil’s handiwork…)

I began my professional life as a high-school English teacher, and I continue to believe that words have meanings–both connotations and definitions. Among the multitude of problems we face in our effort to create and maintain a government that functions properly and respects all of its increasingly diverse citizens, communication is key. And key to our ability to communicate is our use of accurate language.

I don’t know how “pro-life” people who don’t care about the lives of children once they’re born–or the lives of women experiencing dangerous pregnancies– define “pro life.”  I’m pretty sure “moms for liberty” haven’t the slightest notion what “liberty” actually means.

Along with everything else we need to do, Americans really need to reclaim the English language…

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