First, some housekeeping. Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy, a weekly newsletter where I write about education and share a handful of interesting links. My goal, at least right now, is to write about how the US arrived at the current moment in education, a moment where it seems like everything we know and trust about schools is about to go out the window. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, please subscribe. I plan to put up the paywall in early March. If you do not like Substack as a platform, I will be publishing a parallel version using Beehiiv.

[This post was drafted before the Trump admin’s recent executive orders related to education, a topic I’ll come back to later but one that also seems highly relevant to what I am posting today.]

Last week I posted part 1 of Breaking the Charter School Treaty. Drawing on the political science work of David Menefee-Libey, I outlined how conservatives and liberals in the US informally agreed on a limited set of school reforms that became something of a status quo from the late 1980s to 2016. Conservatives gave up their push for state funding of religious schools and full privatization. In return they received school accountability measures and limited school choice embodied in charter schools and strict vouchers. Liberals gave up their push for desegregation and dropped uniform support for teachers’ unions. In return they gained political trust for their management of public education and increases in funding for public schools. When reforms did happen, they were either within the limited school choice umbrella or in a space that wasn’t related to the overall structure and function of school systems, for example introducing curriculum standards or nationwide accountability testing. This state of affairs began to fall apart under Obama, especially because race gained so much salience, but change really accelerated at the start of the first Trump administration. Conservatives saw that the public, upset by two decades of high stakes testing, common core reforms, and federal education policy, were ready to tolerate more radical changes. What had previously been targeted programs for poor minority children to escape supposedly failing schools became broad “backpack” style vouchers where any kid could enroll in any school and the money the state would have spent on that kid in public school went with that kid. In her backpack, so to speak. These programs are new enough that we really don’t know what the long-term impacts will be but if you read on, I’m sure you can guess my expectations.

That’s important background for part 2, The Ohio Model. Conservatives today are moving back to their original positions, the ones they had prior to the Chater School Treaty. Hell, they’re moving to positions they held back before desegregation. We are seeing efforts to let public money fund religious schools and one of the results of broad voucher programs appears to be giving money mostly to white kids. This would exacerbate the already growing segregation (or should it be re-segregation?) in schools because you get more of things that you subsidize. What reporting on the situation with Ohio’s vouchers shows us is that, in fact, this has been the goal all along. Shortly after the treaty went into effect, revanchist conservative forces within our society began looking to incrementally return to their preferred vision of schooling in the United States.

The Ohio Model

Pro Publica/ The New Yorker published an excellent article week outlining the decades long efforts of religious groups and conservatives to implement state funding of religious education. I want to dig into this article in detail because it explains two things. First, we see how the informal charter school “treaty” initially limited the scope of conservative reforms, giving more credence to Menefee-Libey’s analysis. Second, it clearly documents how religious groups, especially the Catholic church, kept their eye on the ball throughout this supposed neoliberal era and pursued their singular goal. I’d hardly rate the Catholic church as neoliberal and it highlights my overall point that neoliberals were useful idiots here, truly working on behalf of reactionary conservatives.

Chronologically, “the movement” mentioned here begins with a problem facing Ohio’s Catholic parochial schools in the 1990s. Although historically one of the largest parochial systems in the county, the church faced declining enrollments and an inability of families to pay the moderate tuitions they charged. The solution was for the church to court friendly Catholic politicians. The article uses some of those politicians’ own correspondence, made available through university collections, to document how the church and these officials pursued a plan to direct citizens tax dollars into church coffers. The plan was, from the start, an incremental one and, from the start, it was masked by language we see as all too familiar today: equity. The initial voucher system was limited to one city where it was meant to help parents of kids in the city’s “failing” public schools choose to place their kids into religious schools by subsidizing their tuition. Notably, conservatives embraced this spending despite seeking to cut state expenditures elsewhere.

No city or state had successfully funded a true voucher initiative because the liberal courts of the 70s and 80s struck them down. But this was the 90s! Scalia and Thomas sat on the Supreme Court by this point and the Federalist Society was deep into its own multi-decade plans to remake the entire judiciary. Note, too, the point that segregation, state money for religious schools, and privatization via vouchers are intimately connected from the start and are now the position to which conservatives have returned.

Content to play the long game, Ohio religious leaders and their allied politicians worked through several iterations expanding the voucher program, each time meeting resistance from Democrats, parents, teachers’ unions, and even more mainstream Republicans. Charter schools were, more often than not, the recipients of funding and expansion, much to the annoyance of parochial schools who sought access to state funds. Eventually, teachers’ unions sued. The treaty wasn’t being upheld. Changes were too big, and funding flowing to religious schools was a clear violation:

This set the stage for a showdown in the US Supreme Court:

Following this ruling, Ohio republicans followed through on the request for expanded vouchers and passed the EdChoice program in 2005. In 2013 the program was expanded again to all Ohioans up to 200% of the state’s poverty line. What had been an “equity” program for inner city youth in “failing” schools was now, nearly two decades later, a statewide program available to the middle class. Importantly, religious schools were able to receive this voucher funding. Charter schools no longer acted as a wall, porous though it may have been, between parochial schools and government dollars.

Yet, even recently, full voucherization still faced many opponents, including from fellow republicans hesitant to see their rural constituents’ public schools harmed without a private replacement — most private and charter schools are near cities. When the religious right sought to expand the vouchers yet again by lifting the income cap to 450% of the poverty line — meaning families making six figures could now receive government funds to pay for religious schooling — they recognized they could not pass vouchers through the regular legislative process. Perhaps they had learned from Kentucky and Nebraska where voters rejected school vouchers?

Unable to succeed via democracy, the church and her allies succeeded via legislative blackmail. Yet, 30 years after those initial correspondences between Catholic bishops and George Voinovich, the mission was accomplished. 90% of voucher recipients are white even though only about 65% of Ohioans are white. This would, it seems, subsidize white flight from public schools to private, a defacto form of segregation. Moreover,

So, not only are the recipients whiter than average, but they are also already wealthy enough to be paying tuition to attend private schools. The vouchers, originally advertised as for poor minority kids, are now primarily for subsidizing rich white kids. While none of the reporting I’ve seen has quantified how much of this money is flowing to religious schools, like the Catholic parochial networks who initiated this whole thing, I have to assume that at least some of the money ends up there. Certainly, religious schools are not prohibited from doing so.

It was Never Neoliberalism

At no point in the Pro Publica reporting do we see discussions of efficient markets, the benefits of competition, or the neoliberal economic logic that supposedly delivers us from social problems. Public “selling” of the program is not some underpants gnome scheme but a simple one-step move: “get your kids out of schools we tell you are failing.” In private, the discussions are about how to 1) get money into religious schools and 2) how to move this from a program for the poor to a program for the middle class and rich. Neoliberalism was only ever a tactic deployed in the service of a long-term effort to roll back progressive successes of the early-mid twentieth century. I’m not 100% sure why this isn’t better understood. Commentators are so good at recognizing the conservative long-game when they look at federal courts, at gerrymandering, and at deregulatory efforts but they seem to miss it when it they look at schools. I think it happens because the charter school “treaty” limited all the action to a certain set of neoliberal efforts. As time went on and those efforts began to harm poor minority kids and damage schools, we believed this was the natural byproduct of neoliberal reforms rather than the revanchist ideological goal all along. Resistance, then, fell along anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal lines but missed the archconservative trendline that now occupies all the positions of power.

Let me propose a heuristic to help us think about this more accurately. Whenever you hear someone advocate for school choice and vouchers, I do not want you to think of them as someone proposing a neoliberal solution or beholden to neoliberal ideology. No, whenever you hear someone advocate for school choice, I want to you place them in the same mental category as someone who tells you the American Civil War was about states’ rights. They are either ignorant or lying to hide the true cause: slavery. If someone is advocating for school choice, they are either ignorant of the true origins and the present outcomes or trying to hide their purpose. SCOTUS just agreed to hear a case about the government funding religious schools directly, instead of the slight fiction that they’re funding the kid via vouchers and he just so happens to go to a religious school. I was not surprised to learn that Trump justice Amy Coney Barrett has a personal connection with the lawyer advising the school in its case before the court on which she sits. It’s a Catholic school, too. How’s that for choice? As we have seen in Ohio and Arizona and Florida and Texas and North Carolina and are likely to see everywhere else these projects roll out, markets and individualism and choice are not the point! The point is to take from the masses and give to religious and private schools for the rich and the white. The point is to redo segregation. The point is to make the US a Christian nation. The point is that you won’t get a choice in paying for it through tax dollars. The point is you won’t get a choice because most kids are not going to be admitted to a private school, vouchers or not.

With the Charter School Treaty gone, there is not much appetite to resist the conservative forces reshaping US education. Certainly, the new Trump administration seems even more intent on demolishing the federal role in education than the last time around. They’re also quite explicit about promoting vouchers and Christian religion in schools while dismantling any program designed to provide opportunities for the poor or minorities. Neoliberalism was only a pitstop on the road to serfdom and y’all need to catch up.

Neoliberalism meets Scholastic Alchemy

If you read the last few posts, it might look like I’m building up to a defense of neoliberalism or, at the very least, trying to let it off the hook for its role in harmful changes to schooling in the United States. That’s not my goal. I simply think that much of what we saw as neoliberalism was just plain old conservatism operating in a political and economic system where their preferred outcomes weren’t yet possible. I wrote a few posts back about what I think Scholastic Alchemy means:

If you’re someone who was generally convinced that neoliberal reforms would produce better outcomes as a matter of inevitable economic principle, I hope you take this meaning to heart. Likewise, if you’re someone who organized your view of the world around resisting neoliberal domination of schools, think more alchemically. I should also say that the view of Scholastic Alchemy allows for hope. Conservatives are not immune to failure and do not have as much a grip on power as they may imagine. School reforms can only be pushed so far before generating some pushback from parents and communities and those of us who care about public education should be there ready to offer alternatives to privatized segregation academies and Christian nationalism.

Links

*NOTE: Not always about education

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seeks to raid schools and deport undocumented children, it’s worth looking at what the rules around education undocumented kids actually are. The first is the 1974 law Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The applicable bit here is that public schools are not required to collect information about students’ immigration status and are not allowed to share students’ personal information with anyone but that students’ parent/guardian. This sometimes precludes sharing info with law enforcement, such as ICE. Courts have interpreted these obligations in a few different ways over the years but, there is an important 1982 Supreme Court case that you should also be aware of, Plyler vs Doe. In 1975 Texas prohibited state funds from going to undocumented kids and allowed schools to refuse to enroll undocumented kids. Someone (a minor, hence the John Doe) sued and it went to the supreme court where the law was struck down as a violation of the 14th amendment.

If you work in a school and questions around what schools should do vis-à-vis undocumented students, you should point out that schools are not required under FERPA to ask if their students “have papers” and don’t have to share that information with random members of the public. You should also point out that the supreme court under Plyler V Doe said schools have an obligation to educate undocumented students. That being said, it seems clear that this will be challenged under the current hyper-partisan conservative supreme court. One thing to keep an eye on is actually the current case around whether the 14th amendment applies for birthright citizenship. If SCOTUS hold that the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to the children of undocumented immigrants or other people of foreign citizenship (like someone on a student visa gives birth here) then you can expect other cases based on the 14th amendment, like Plyler, to be under threat.

I’m hesitant to wade into the “what’s wrong with the boys?” discourse with a full post. I feel like too many people already have a set opinion here and are simply shoehorning new data into a preexisting worldview. I also have a feeling that it is another case of scholastic alchemy where we refuse to see the complexity of what we’re messing with. Still, here’s an interesting write up in EdWeek. The quick version since it’s paywalled is that

• boys have a harder time than girls at sitting still

• boys have a harder time focusing in class

• boys take on fewer leadership roles in school settings

Put together and boys seem to perform poorly in schools. To some extent this is the way sex manifests differently across a child’s development and there’s an argument to increase stuff like unstructured play, more elective options at earlier years, and encourage competition because boys are more extrinsically motivated. Thing is, I have no idea how much of that is truly “hard wired” and how much is socialized and what the relationship between the two is. You know, gender? Add in a world of screen-time distractions and everything else we’re dealing with these days, and you have to wonder if it’s schools at all.

One question I have is more about whether the “problem” is a manifestation of equalizing opportunities for girls in school? We’re all for meritocracy until the girls start taking all the jobs? DEI for boys? Is that where this is going? Like I said, I’m hesitant to jump in until I feel like there are more concrete answers out there.

One thing you’ll learn when you read my stuff is that I like to highlight examples of me being right, or at least accurate, in my presentation of how I think the world works. The Wall Street Journal published a nice little piece about cell phones in schools last week arguing that everyone’s had enough and it’s time for schools to kick all the screens. The article closes,

Gosh, I wonder who sold that lie? Could it have included an overly credulous media who admonished schools for taking a hard line against phones? Maybe like the Wall Street Journal?

EdSurge surveys government data to tell us how enrollment in the 100 largest school districts has changed since the pandemic. Most saw enrollment declines which is not a huge surprise. Demographically, there are simply fewer school-aged kids in the US right now than there were at the peak of millennial school-going. Post WWII Americans had a lot of kids, the baby boom. Their kids, the boomers also had a lot of kids, the millennials. In between there were smaller generational cohorts. One difference, though, is that millennials are have fewer kids than their boomer parents so there’s no post-millennial baby boom.

Tacked onto this secular decline is a shift of people from high cost-of-living states to cheaper states. People are moving from, say, New York and San Francisco to Dallas and Atlanta but they’re also moving to the suburbs, not the cities. So there is also an urban→suburban shift. Finally, a few states have also seen movement from public schools into charter schools, private schools, and home school, though these are much smaller proportionally. The outlier there is Nevada where charter schools have grown by 55% post-pandemic. Parent demand is cited as a factor.

I have a post baking in drafts about disruptions to schooling caused by natural disasters (or maybe I should include all disasters as man made and talk about the many other reasons schools close?). Many schools affected by the wildfires in California started the reopening process this week. Some are in wholly new locations because the original burned down. Some have reopened virtually, hearkening back to the pandemic. The NYT has an article about what it’s like to be a kid in the aftermath of these fires. One thing that comes through is the stark inequality. Some families who lost homes have relocated to vacation rentals - AirBnBs and the like. Some are staying in overcrowded relatives’ homes. Some are homeless. Even so, every one of them has their sense of normalcy disrupted, miss their friends and classmates, and miss their old homes.

I wonder how much of this will be acknowledge by the wider system of education we’ve set up. Do they get an asterisk nest to their test scores indicating the fire? If those test scores drop, does the school get shutdown by the state for its fire-induced failure? Do we need to get mad at these schools and teachers about learning loss, like we did during the pandemic? Do we even bother to calculate the loss of lifetime earnings and subsequent economic shrinkage, or is only when we want schools to look bad and refuse to acknowledge the impact of the outside world? Perhaps my grumpiness is coming though but it’s hard to see kids being hurt and know that it probably hurts their chances somewhere down the line for a full, productive life. Some more than others, sure, but they’re all kids and they’re all affected.