While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
An important idea to bring up, now that districts are looking for things to cut.
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stop defending. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stop defending. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2020
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."
Don't. Just don't.
First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.
Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.
There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.
Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?
Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.
Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.
In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.
Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.
Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.
My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.
Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.
Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.
Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."
Don't. Just don't.
First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.
Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.
There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.
Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?
Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.
Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.
In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.
Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.
Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.
My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.
Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.
Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.
Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Home Stretch (7/26)
I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.
If everything went according to plan, I should be getting home today. So let's wrap up this rerun festival with a random assortment.
Stop Defending Music
The most viewed post here on the mother ship, as well as the one that has brought the most requests for reprints. Why we should stop trying to make excuses for music education.
Teacher Diversity Matters
The teaching field is mostly white ladies. That needs to change.
The Myth of the Hero Teacher
Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.
River To Classroom
One of the privileges of living in a small town on the river.
If everything went according to plan, I should be getting home today. So let's wrap up this rerun festival with a random assortment.
Stop Defending Music
The most viewed post here on the mother ship, as well as the one that has brought the most requests for reprints. Why we should stop trying to make excuses for music education.
Teacher Diversity Matters
The teaching field is mostly white ladies. That needs to change.
The Myth of the Hero Teacher
Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.
River To Classroom
One of the privileges of living in a small town on the river.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Post #2000
This is the 2,000th post on this blog, which coincidentally goes up just two days after the three year birthday of this blog.
I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagine that many moments in which somebody thought it worth the bother to read what's here, and it has been humbling to have so many people reach out to say that something here has made an impression.
And as always, I consider the readership of this blog to be a measure of how many people really care about the world of US education. As of today, these are the top ten posts on the blog:
Stop "Defending" Music
So Sorry, Minneapolis Teachers
FL: Attacking Children and Teachers
North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off
Directory of Anti-Teacher Trolls
FL: District Officials Lose Their Damn Minds
Obama's Testing Action Plan Sucks
Teacher "Shortage" Coast to Coast
[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists
A Not Quitting Letter
Three years ago I was just starting to understand what the heck was happening, and I was able to educate myself thanks to the work of bloggers who came before me, and over the last three years I've seen other bloggers step up to help get the word out.
It's a great time to be a writer, a time in which the power of the word has been amplified again, a time in which an English teacher from a small town (and with a budget of $0.00) can reach out to a national audience about topics that really matter.
I started this first to organize and collect my thoughts, then progressively to vent my frustrations and amazement at the crazy things that are happening to one of America's most important public institutions. I never imagined that I would end up reaching out to so many people, and the lesson there, for all of us, is that we need to do what we can to get the word out and to keep getting the word out. Thanks for reading. Now I have to go get started on #2,001.
I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagine that many moments in which somebody thought it worth the bother to read what's here, and it has been humbling to have so many people reach out to say that something here has made an impression.
And as always, I consider the readership of this blog to be a measure of how many people really care about the world of US education. As of today, these are the top ten posts on the blog:
Stop "Defending" Music
So Sorry, Minneapolis Teachers
FL: Attacking Children and Teachers
North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off
Directory of Anti-Teacher Trolls
FL: District Officials Lose Their Damn Minds
Obama's Testing Action Plan Sucks
Teacher "Shortage" Coast to Coast
[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists
A Not Quitting Letter
Three years ago I was just starting to understand what the heck was happening, and I was able to educate myself thanks to the work of bloggers who came before me, and over the last three years I've seen other bloggers step up to help get the word out.
It's a great time to be a writer, a time in which the power of the word has been amplified again, a time in which an English teacher from a small town (and with a budget of $0.00) can reach out to a national audience about topics that really matter.
I started this first to organize and collect my thoughts, then progressively to vent my frustrations and amazement at the crazy things that are happening to one of America's most important public institutions. I never imagined that I would end up reaching out to so many people, and the lesson there, for all of us, is that we need to do what we can to get the word out and to keep getting the word out. Thanks for reading. Now I have to go get started on #2,001.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Common Core Now Loves Inertia
It is by far the weakest argument presented in favor of the Common Core (well, the weakest argument that is not, like "written by teachers" or "internationally benchmarked," based on fabrications and falsehoods). It is the argument that we must stick with Common Core because dropping the standards would be too costly and disruptive.
This argument has been around since CCSS support started to erode. One of the first signs that Louisianna Governor Bobby Jindal and his state superintendent of education John White were growing apart was White's spirited proclamation that dumping the Core testing would throw teachers into a "state of chaos."
Within the last month, two more states have given voice to plaintive cries of "stay the course!" The Hechinger Report presented "Tennessee Common Core Backtrack Leaves Teachers Stranded" which includes several concerns about the Volunteer State's backtracking (a de-Core-ifying augmented by the departure of reformster Kevin Huffman from the state education commissioner position). Tennessee's back-transition leaves teachers straddling both old and new standards. Said one teacher, "I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it's only fair that they're assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they're instructed." Not to mention the additional mess the discombobulated assessment creates in a state that is still all in on VAM, using test based bad data and magic formula voodoo to evaluate teachers.
Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant is making noises about reclaiming Mississippi's educational autonomy and dumping the evil federally over-reaching Core. Some teachers are quoted as being not happy.
"I don't think we've been teaching the standards long enough to tell if it's going to fail," said Robin Herring, a fifth-grade teacher at Eastside Elementary in Clinton. "It really scares me that if we stop in the middle of what we're doing that we're just going to move backwards."
It's not that I don't think these folks have a point. But all of this seems... familiar, somehow. Look at the following quote:
"The education of ... children should not be 'politicized' in this way. This is not about what is best for students or best practices in education or even based on proven research, but rather more political rhetoric based on taking advantage of the latest buzz phrase or issue of the day and today it just happens to be 'Common Core.'"
Quick quiz. Were those words spoken by someone opposing the Common Core a few years ago, or someone defending the Common Core today?
Answer: someone defending Common Core today. But you weren't sure, were you?
Yes, it makes a mess when you change an entire system quickly and with little foresight and planning. Yes, it's unfair to give Big Important Tests on material that's not actually being taught. Yes, it's bizarre to implement programs when we don't even know if they work. Those objections to quickly booting out Common Core are valid today, just as they were when they were raised regarding the implementation of the Core in the first place.
When we were implementing the Core, we were all about blowing up the status quo. We were fighting inertia. We were building planes in mid-air and anybody who complained was just a tool of the establishment. We werer throwing out standards that had been rated higher than the Core because we needed to move forward, and do it quickly (even if we had no earthly way of knowing whether forward was really forward). People who complained about moving too quickly, testing too unfairly, throwing out programs and materials without reasons-- these were just people who Didn't Get It. Back in those days, disruption was necessary. Disruption was good.
Now, suddenly, disruption is bad. Inertia is to be revered and respected. We have no proof-- none-- that Common Core is working, but we shouldn't disturb it or throw it off course.
This has been a repeated pattern for reformsters. They used political gamesmanship, emotional leveraging, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors to install the Common Core, and now that those tools are coming back to bite them in the butt, they want to change the rules of the game. "You're making this too political," cry the people who used insider political power plays to get their agenda in place. "You are being too disruptive," complain the people who treated disruption as a virtue when it served their purposes.
It's too bad we're not having more of a conversation about Common Core's (lack of) virtues, but that was a choice reformsters made five years ago. Those who live by the creative disruption must die by it as well.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
This argument has been around since CCSS support started to erode. One of the first signs that Louisianna Governor Bobby Jindal and his state superintendent of education John White were growing apart was White's spirited proclamation that dumping the Core testing would throw teachers into a "state of chaos."
Within the last month, two more states have given voice to plaintive cries of "stay the course!" The Hechinger Report presented "Tennessee Common Core Backtrack Leaves Teachers Stranded" which includes several concerns about the Volunteer State's backtracking (a de-Core-ifying augmented by the departure of reformster Kevin Huffman from the state education commissioner position). Tennessee's back-transition leaves teachers straddling both old and new standards. Said one teacher, "I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it's only fair that they're assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they're instructed." Not to mention the additional mess the discombobulated assessment creates in a state that is still all in on VAM, using test based bad data and magic formula voodoo to evaluate teachers.
Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant is making noises about reclaiming Mississippi's educational autonomy and dumping the evil federally over-reaching Core. Some teachers are quoted as being not happy.
"I don't think we've been teaching the standards long enough to tell if it's going to fail," said Robin Herring, a fifth-grade teacher at Eastside Elementary in Clinton. "It really scares me that if we stop in the middle of what we're doing that we're just going to move backwards."
It's not that I don't think these folks have a point. But all of this seems... familiar, somehow. Look at the following quote:
"The education of ... children should not be 'politicized' in this way. This is not about what is best for students or best practices in education or even based on proven research, but rather more political rhetoric based on taking advantage of the latest buzz phrase or issue of the day and today it just happens to be 'Common Core.'"
Quick quiz. Were those words spoken by someone opposing the Common Core a few years ago, or someone defending the Common Core today?
Answer: someone defending Common Core today. But you weren't sure, were you?
Yes, it makes a mess when you change an entire system quickly and with little foresight and planning. Yes, it's unfair to give Big Important Tests on material that's not actually being taught. Yes, it's bizarre to implement programs when we don't even know if they work. Those objections to quickly booting out Common Core are valid today, just as they were when they were raised regarding the implementation of the Core in the first place.
When we were implementing the Core, we were all about blowing up the status quo. We were fighting inertia. We were building planes in mid-air and anybody who complained was just a tool of the establishment. We werer throwing out standards that had been rated higher than the Core because we needed to move forward, and do it quickly (even if we had no earthly way of knowing whether forward was really forward). People who complained about moving too quickly, testing too unfairly, throwing out programs and materials without reasons-- these were just people who Didn't Get It. Back in those days, disruption was necessary. Disruption was good.
Now, suddenly, disruption is bad. Inertia is to be revered and respected. We have no proof-- none-- that Common Core is working, but we shouldn't disturb it or throw it off course.
This has been a repeated pattern for reformsters. They used political gamesmanship, emotional leveraging, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors to install the Common Core, and now that those tools are coming back to bite them in the butt, they want to change the rules of the game. "You're making this too political," cry the people who used insider political power plays to get their agenda in place. "You are being too disruptive," complain the people who treated disruption as a virtue when it served their purposes.
It's too bad we're not having more of a conversation about Common Core's (lack of) virtues, but that was a choice reformsters made five years ago. Those who live by the creative disruption must die by it as well.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Monday, September 9, 2019
Online Pre-K Continues To Spread Like A Big Stupid Plague
So this article pops up on my screen-- the Hechinger Report's Bracey Harris asking "Can 15 minutes a day of online preschool help prepare a child for kindergarten?" I might have suggested a rewrite on the headline, something along the line of "Why in the name of all that's holy are you putting a four-year-old child in front a screen and subjecting her to kindergarten prep software!"
Look, I'll warn you right up front-- long time readers of this blog will not find me saying anything here that I have not said before, but 1) I'm pretty sure most of this should be repeated daily until it sinks into certain skulls because 2) this is a terrible idea that stands on the shoulders of other terrible ideas and every time it shows up wrapped in uncritical boosterfluff like this I get the kind of angry that I can best work off by hammering these keys. I am even going to bold things, because dammit, I've got a pair of two-year-olds napping fifteen feet away from me, and this bullshit has got to stop.
Focused on Mississippi, Harris's piece contains most of the classic features of what is unfortunately becoming a genre. For instance, a mis-framing of the problem--
Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.
If most of your state's five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, then it is the kindergarten program that is messed up. It is not a small child's job to get ready for school-- it is the school's job to get ready for that child. It is not the family's job to meet the needs of the school-- it is the school's job to meet the needs of that family.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind and its bastard cousins and children. One of the effects of the accountability movement has been to turn schools upside down, to flip the school student relationship. In the flipped relationship, the school (and the state) need students to be generators of reliably high test scores, and so, in the accountability-flipped school, we do not ask students, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Instead we ask each other, "How can we get these kids to cough up an acceptable score?" And part of that answer has been, consistently, to try to get to them sooner, to start them ASAP, so that we can get them ready for the third grade literacy test that gets them ready for the state-issued reading and math Big Standardized Test and so on and so on. Can't let these little slackers just sit around and play and waste time and stuff-- we need to get them ready so that kindergarten can be the new first or second or third grade so that we can get them more ready sooner even though there isn't a damned bit of evidence that getting more ready sooner has any beneficial long term effect whatsoever but plenty of evidence that it's bad for the children. But hey-- as long as we can squeeze some good scores out of them.
This particular article is plugging UPSTART, an online program that started out in Utah, where it did the double duty of providing some semblance of pre-school at much lower costs than backing actual pre-school would have cost, as well as pushing what money the state did spend into the coffers of a Utah company in the district of the legislator who sponsored the bill adopting UPSTART for the state.
From there it has spread like poison ivy, especially to corporate-reform-friendly states like Ohio and Indiana. It's currently in 532 districts and independent schools. The program itself is essentially Personalized [sic] Learning for very tiny people. From their website
UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.
The program (and the computer that delivers it) are free, courtesy of UPSTART's many partners, which include the New Schools Venture Fund, TED, Comcast, Intel, and Raspberry.
The Hechinger piece is a classic fluff sandwich-- about 2/3rds of the way down, an opposing view is given one sentence before we get back to the happy fluff about this awesome idea. The opposing view that Harris scoots past is a statement issued jointly by Defending the Early Years and the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood that seriously lambasted this practice (and which Hechinger did cover at the time). Harris mentions that "some experts" have misgivings, but makes no attempt to report those concerns in detail or examine their validity. The statement offered plenty of research and reports to back up their objections; here are must a few of the highlights:
"All children should have access to high-quality, fully funded preschool," said Diane Levin, Professor of Early Childhood Education, at Boston University's Wheelock College. "Online ‘preschool’ lacks the concrete, hands-on social, emotional and intellectual educational components that are essential for quality learning in the early years. Further, online preschools are likely to exacerbate already existing inequalities in early education by giving low-income children superficial exposure to rote skills and ideas while more privileged children continue to receive developmentally sound experiences that provide a solid foundation for later academic success.”
“Allowing tech companies to push online preschools will lead to further marginalization of low-income families who already lack access to high-quality affordable child care,” said Dr. Denisha Jones, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Trinity Washington University and DEY Advisory Board member. “If the parents of Silicon Valley won’t put their own children in online preschool, why would we think this is good for other people's children?”
You should read this part, too:
Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.
All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.
Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.
Utah did a study of its own, asserting that UPSTART raised some BS Test scores, and isn't that what you're most hoping for when you hand your tiny human over to the care of a school system? I could spin off into a rant about the BS Tests, but let's leave it that there is no reason to believe that higher tests scores, particularly for elementary students, say anything at all about the child's future-- and even reformsters know it.
I dream of the day when the folks who work at UPSTART suddenly look up and say, "My God! What the hell are we doing?!" Then just shut everything off and walk away, turning out the lights behind them. But of course, as suggested above, they are not the only players in this stupid game. Search for online pre-k and you can find plenty of vendors like ABCmouse, which offers online reading activities and for the love of God-- just get the kid a book! Dolly Parton will send your child one book a month for free, a real actual book that you can hold in your hands and read to your little while she is curled up in your lap! Or there's Time4Learning, which will start your little out with a software program:
The interactions (verbal instructions, interface buttons, graphics, and format) are designed for pre-readers with an early learning level of attention, fine muscle control, and vocabulary. It is designed so that, after the first session, a child could use the program on his or her own with minimal adult supervision
Excellent. I can just tell my four year old to go play on the computer on his own. What an excellent learning experience.
Yes, the argument is going to be that this will reach children who don't have access or finances to go to pre-school, that this can be a resource for isolated families, to which I say this is like saying there are families that don't have access to enough nutritionally rich food, so let's mail them all cases of diet soda and arsenic. Yes, this targets families and children who need something-- but what they need is not this. Nobody needs this.
Modern education reform has spawned plenty of awful things, but plunking three and four year olds in front of a screen-- even for just fifteen minutes a week-- so that they can get ready for kindergarten is one of the worst, most glaring signs that some folks have totally lost their way and that the search for more revenue streams knows no shame.
 |
| Stop farting around and get to work kid |
Focused on Mississippi, Harris's piece contains most of the classic features of what is unfortunately becoming a genre. For instance, a mis-framing of the problem--
Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.
If most of your state's five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, then it is the kindergarten program that is messed up. It is not a small child's job to get ready for school-- it is the school's job to get ready for that child. It is not the family's job to meet the needs of the school-- it is the school's job to meet the needs of that family.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind and its bastard cousins and children. One of the effects of the accountability movement has been to turn schools upside down, to flip the school student relationship. In the flipped relationship, the school (and the state) need students to be generators of reliably high test scores, and so, in the accountability-flipped school, we do not ask students, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Instead we ask each other, "How can we get these kids to cough up an acceptable score?" And part of that answer has been, consistently, to try to get to them sooner, to start them ASAP, so that we can get them ready for the third grade literacy test that gets them ready for the state-issued reading and math Big Standardized Test and so on and so on. Can't let these little slackers just sit around and play and waste time and stuff-- we need to get them ready so that kindergarten can be the new first or second or third grade so that we can get them more ready sooner even though there isn't a damned bit of evidence that getting more ready sooner has any beneficial long term effect whatsoever but plenty of evidence that it's bad for the children. But hey-- as long as we can squeeze some good scores out of them.
This particular article is plugging UPSTART, an online program that started out in Utah, where it did the double duty of providing some semblance of pre-school at much lower costs than backing actual pre-school would have cost, as well as pushing what money the state did spend into the coffers of a Utah company in the district of the legislator who sponsored the bill adopting UPSTART for the state.
From there it has spread like poison ivy, especially to corporate-reform-friendly states like Ohio and Indiana. It's currently in 532 districts and independent schools. The program itself is essentially Personalized [sic] Learning for very tiny people. From their website
UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.
The program (and the computer that delivers it) are free, courtesy of UPSTART's many partners, which include the New Schools Venture Fund, TED, Comcast, Intel, and Raspberry.
The Hechinger piece is a classic fluff sandwich-- about 2/3rds of the way down, an opposing view is given one sentence before we get back to the happy fluff about this awesome idea. The opposing view that Harris scoots past is a statement issued jointly by Defending the Early Years and the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood that seriously lambasted this practice (and which Hechinger did cover at the time). Harris mentions that "some experts" have misgivings, but makes no attempt to report those concerns in detail or examine their validity. The statement offered plenty of research and reports to back up their objections; here are must a few of the highlights:
"All children should have access to high-quality, fully funded preschool," said Diane Levin, Professor of Early Childhood Education, at Boston University's Wheelock College. "Online ‘preschool’ lacks the concrete, hands-on social, emotional and intellectual educational components that are essential for quality learning in the early years. Further, online preschools are likely to exacerbate already existing inequalities in early education by giving low-income children superficial exposure to rote skills and ideas while more privileged children continue to receive developmentally sound experiences that provide a solid foundation for later academic success.”
“Allowing tech companies to push online preschools will lead to further marginalization of low-income families who already lack access to high-quality affordable child care,” said Dr. Denisha Jones, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Trinity Washington University and DEY Advisory Board member. “If the parents of Silicon Valley won’t put their own children in online preschool, why would we think this is good for other people's children?”
You should read this part, too:
Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.
All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.
Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.
Utah did a study of its own, asserting that UPSTART raised some BS Test scores, and isn't that what you're most hoping for when you hand your tiny human over to the care of a school system? I could spin off into a rant about the BS Tests, but let's leave it that there is no reason to believe that higher tests scores, particularly for elementary students, say anything at all about the child's future-- and even reformsters know it.
I dream of the day when the folks who work at UPSTART suddenly look up and say, "My God! What the hell are we doing?!" Then just shut everything off and walk away, turning out the lights behind them. But of course, as suggested above, they are not the only players in this stupid game. Search for online pre-k and you can find plenty of vendors like ABCmouse, which offers online reading activities and for the love of God-- just get the kid a book! Dolly Parton will send your child one book a month for free, a real actual book that you can hold in your hands and read to your little while she is curled up in your lap! Or there's Time4Learning, which will start your little out with a software program:
The interactions (verbal instructions, interface buttons, graphics, and format) are designed for pre-readers with an early learning level of attention, fine muscle control, and vocabulary. It is designed so that, after the first session, a child could use the program on his or her own with minimal adult supervision
Excellent. I can just tell my four year old to go play on the computer on his own. What an excellent learning experience.
Yes, the argument is going to be that this will reach children who don't have access or finances to go to pre-school, that this can be a resource for isolated families, to which I say this is like saying there are families that don't have access to enough nutritionally rich food, so let's mail them all cases of diet soda and arsenic. Yes, this targets families and children who need something-- but what they need is not this. Nobody needs this.
Modern education reform has spawned plenty of awful things, but plunking three and four year olds in front of a screen-- even for just fifteen minutes a week-- so that they can get ready for kindergarten is one of the worst, most glaring signs that some folks have totally lost their way and that the search for more revenue streams knows no shame.
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Twelve Education Activist Groups (Including Moms For Liberty) Make Southern Poverty Extremist List
The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued its "Year in Hate and Extremism" report for 2022, and some familiar names from the world of "parental rights" are on the list. It's some kind of new world when activism in the public education space can get you this kind of attention.
SPLC frames the rise of these groups as a "reemergence of the attack on inclusive schools" and position the current culture war panic in the long history of such panics.
The attacks following the Brown decision were not the beginning of the so-called parental rights movement, and it certainly was not the end. Going back to the 1920s, the U.S. has witnessed ebbs and flows of white, cisgender, heterosexual groups battling public education.Regardless of the time period, most attacks against public education have been reactionary and rooted in racism, from the fight against integration after Brown v. Board, to the so-called school choice movement, to the latest attacks on inclusive education.
This was not the first or last time claims of government overreach would be used as a protestation by these groups. It has become a common theme in iterations of anti-student inclusion groups over the decades.
SPLC says that 2022 saw the filing of 84 "anti-student inclusion bills"
Moms for Liberty
This is the inclusion that made headlines, and the report gets into some detail with the group's activities, noting "Like the mothers of massive resistance before them, Moms for Liberty is ready to fight tooth and nail to preserve the unseen but understood caste system existing in their public schools and communities."
Moms for America
M4A could have been M4L-- after all, they've been around for almost twenty years without ever getting quite the traction that M4L got within weeks. They do have some star power attached, like Kevin Sorbo's wife and Rebecca Fredrichs. But they don't quite draw the press attention for their full-throated opposition to "CRT". They helped support the Stop The Steal rally on January 6, and they hang out at CPAC. Their last high-profile action was--well, remember the People's Convoy that was going to circle DC and really show somebody something? M4A had a purple truck in that.
Army of Parents
Army of Parents is based in Loudon County, VA, which has been the hot spot for lots of school controversy (that's the place where the bathroom sexual assault was misrepresented as a transgender issue and not handled particularly well by the district). Elicia Brans, a co-founder who was activated by COVID concerns (no masks, open schools), has charged Loudon Love Warriors with threatening her. Co-founder Erin Roselle Poe told The Federalist "We've got to get the evil out of the schools."
Courage is a Habit
Education First Alliance
North Carolina group that set up a whistleblower program to "help fight woke indoctrination." President Sloan Rachmuth is an "entrepreneur-turned-journalist and activist"--she's also a coms professional. Anti-indoctrination, anti-naughty books, anti-trans. Rachmuth also heads Pen and Shield, a nonprofit newsroom.
Education Veritas
"Education NOT Indoctrination." Atlanta-based group opposing "obsession with race, equity over merit, unpatriotic attitudes, hyper-sexualization" in pursuit of "pure, non-political education." Also, "teach history, not hate." Don't want "Anti-white CRT" or "sexual orientation nonsense." They appear to be aimed at private schools in particular. Links to explainers from Prager U. It's not really clear what they've done or who they are.
No Left Turn In Education
Launched by Elena Fishbein, a doctor of social work from Gladwyne, one of the uber-rich Philadelphia suburbs who got upset when her child's school adopted some culturally sensitive programming in the wake of the George Floyd murder. They've been linked to violent school board protests and toxic rhetoric and hollered loudly when the Department of Justice suggested school board opponents might want to tone it down a bit. "Black bigotry towards whites" is a "very real problem," she said. You can see lots more of their rhetoric here.
More from Loudon County. Led by Scott Mineo, Third Way studied the group and found "inflammatory tone" and made up baloney, QAnon style.
Mineo also claimed in the press and on his website that teaching CRT is explicitly “anti-white,” that CRT is “poison,” and that the CRT “lifecycle” is “infiltration, transformation, and indoctrination.”
They were very busy in the election that got Virginia Youngkin as a governor.
Parents Defending Education
Everybody who looks at this outfit finds the same thing-- a group of seasoned right wing political operatives pretending to be a grass roots organization.
Parents Rights In Education
Against "destructive polarization." Concerned about "viewpoint discrimination, comprehensive sexuality education, radical gender ideology" etc. The head honcho is Suzanne Gallagher, a previous chair of the Oregon GOP (who was forced to step down) and "sales and marketing expert." Worried about sexual indoctrination in schools, including the claim that teachers are using porn as a teaching aid.
Purple for Parents Indiana
In Indiana, Purple for Parents is Jennifer McWilliams, a former teachers aid who quit over SEL programming and went on the right wing victim circuit (I have her story here). The Purples started in Arizona as a response to Red for Ed and as an offshoot of a Patriot group. They've also cropped up in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the main group's Facebook page wants you to know that June is "Groomer Awareness Month."
Parents Involved in Education
Founded in 2000 as a South Carolina group, now gone national, this is one of the older groups. Their mission: "to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates." ("Parental rights come from God--not the government.) With an advisory board that includes Sandra Stotsky, Joy Pullman, Michelle Malkin, and Christel Swasey, these folks are heavily anti-Common Core. Sheri Few, the head honcho, ran for Congress in 2017 with what The Root called “a series of ads that might be the most racist, homophobic and craziest campaign ever.” She's also a producer of their film, "Truth and Lies in American Education" which is aimed at the more current panics like America and racism, gender stuff, and the fear that public schools are teaching socialism. Agenda 21!! Special appearance by Kevin Sorbo's wife! It's the true story of young mother April Few, who is converted from skepticism about the Big Plot. She is Sheri Few's daughter-in-law.
That's the list.
We could ask why these and not some others (why, in particular, only the Indiana wing of Purple for Parents). There's a wide range here, from well-financed full size groups to what appear to be one or two-person operations, from experienced comms professionals to amateur goofballs.
But they all have a few things in common, like a long twisty path of interlocking connections with each other and other groups. But mostly they all share a powerful desire to recapture schools for parents--but only certain right kinds of parents. And they now each have a spot on the SPLC map.
Purple for Parents Indiana
In Indiana, Purple for Parents is Jennifer McWilliams, a former teachers aid who quit over SEL programming and went on the right wing victim circuit (I have her story here). The Purples started in Arizona as a response to Red for Ed and as an offshoot of a Patriot group. They've also cropped up in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the main group's Facebook page wants you to know that June is "Groomer Awareness Month."
Parents Involved in Education
Founded in 2000 as a South Carolina group, now gone national, this is one of the older groups. Their mission: "to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates." ("Parental rights come from God--not the government.) With an advisory board that includes Sandra Stotsky, Joy Pullman, Michelle Malkin, and Christel Swasey, these folks are heavily anti-Common Core. Sheri Few, the head honcho, ran for Congress in 2017 with what The Root called “a series of ads that might be the most racist, homophobic and craziest campaign ever.” She's also a producer of their film, "Truth and Lies in American Education" which is aimed at the more current panics like America and racism, gender stuff, and the fear that public schools are teaching socialism. Agenda 21!! Special appearance by Kevin Sorbo's wife! It's the true story of young mother April Few, who is converted from skepticism about the Big Plot. She is Sheri Few's daughter-in-law.
That's the list.
We could ask why these and not some others (why, in particular, only the Indiana wing of Purple for Parents). There's a wide range here, from well-financed full size groups to what appear to be one or two-person operations, from experienced comms professionals to amateur goofballs.
But they all have a few things in common, like a long twisty path of interlocking connections with each other and other groups. But mostly they all share a powerful desire to recapture schools for parents--but only certain right kinds of parents. And they now each have a spot on the SPLC map.
Sunday, February 22, 2026
ICYMI: Ice Jam Edition (2/22)
My area made some national news this week when the ice started piling up on the Allegheny River and threatening communities. We can watch the river out our back window, but if it ever rises high enough to touch the house it would be signs of a waterpocalypse. We used to have bad winter floods in the region-- a epic ice jam and flood 100 years ago went on for three months-- but a large dam and some smaller bits of technology have made the area safer. It's one of those things where you don't think about what is keeping you safe because the result is a bunch of Not Happening.
Plenty to read this week. Here we go.
Defending the Promise: Public Education and the Fight for DemocracyGreg Wyman has been writing a series celebrating traditional public education. This new entry looks at education and its struggles with recent policy decisions.
Jan Resseger looks at one of those bad ideas that just won't die.
Really hoping this is a trend. The Independence law Center has been peddling anti-LGBTQ policies to school boards across PA. It is great to see someone firing them.
Nancy Flanagan looks at new sex ed revisions in Michigan, and why the feds have decided to go after them.
Ten Commandments could go up in Tennessee public school
More performative anti-religion religious law, this time in Tennessee. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.
Parents are opting kids out of school laptops, returning them to pen and paper
The Impacts of Immigration Actions on Students and Schools
No Public Funds for Secular or Religious Charter Schools
Top teachers’ performance drops in high-poverty schools, showing school context is key
How One Rural District Used College Students to Keep English Learners in School
“The Time Had Come to Find My Work”: Diane Ravitch’s Authentic Autobiography
Immigration trigger bill would require Tennessee schools to track, report student status
“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility
Earn the Seat: What a School Board Is — and Why Mine Failed
A New National Reading Panel? It Depends
120 Champions and Defenders of Children: The Lawmakers Who Show Up for Kids
Vouchers' growth will be their demise
Can We Please Stop it with the AI Woo-Woo?
Ten Commandments could go up in Tennessee public school
More performative anti-religion religious law, this time in Tennessee. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.
Tyler Kingkade reports on a trend that is, I suspect, maybe not that much of a trend, but still worth reading about.
Steve Nuzum has some info on how the immigrant crackdown is affecting schools in South Carolina.
Shawgi Tell reminds us that some folks really want to start religious charter schools, and it's a really bad idea.
One persistent neo-liberal idea is that we can pluck good teachers out of one school, plug them into another bad school, and magical test improvements would ensue. This was always a dumb idea, but as Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, we now have research to prove that it's a dumb idea.
Lauraine Langero at EdWeek reports on a school where college students come mentor English Learners-- and it seems to be helping the dropout rate in this Virginia school.
The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reviews Diane Ravitch's memoir. If you need one more opinion to convince you to get a copy, here you go.
Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat reports on an ugly law being considered in Tennessee. Should schools be forced to help the government target immigrants?
ProPublica put a whole team of reporters on this story, and it's a tough read. (It's also apparently the reason ICE goons have been confiscating children's letters)
Have school board elections in your district lost the plot? Matt Brady looks at the problems in his own district caused by people who don't understand the assignment.
Should we try having a national reading panel again? Maybe, says Nancy Bailey, but only if we avoid some of these major problems.
The First Focus Campaign for Children has issued its annual report on which legislators are doing right by young humans. Learn more (and see if your Congressperson made the list).
Stephen Dyer explains the quirk in Ohio's legal debates over vouchers. They have to stop looking like they are funding a second, unconstitutional school system.
UT Board Policy Asks Faculty to Avoid ‘Controversial’ Topics in Class
Teacher-centered vs. student-centered instruction: mitigating the socioeconomic achievement gap through differential access and returns
In defense of stochastic parrots
The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper
University of Texas joins the list of colleges offering vaguely worded bans on Bad Language. Inside Higher Ed has details on this baloney.
It's an academic paper with some dense language, but it concludes that teacher-centered instruction may be superior to child-centered. Wade through at your own risk.
"Large language models are useful," says Benjamin Riley, "and that's the problem." Lots to unpack here.
If your school district has made a deal with Amazon, or is planning to, you might want to look at this research that shows just how much Amazon is shafting government bodies and school districts who have made this deal.
John Warner asks for an end to baloney-pants over-hype on AI.
Two pieces are out at Forbes.com. One deals with Arizona's latest voucher reform battle, and the other with how Kentucky's supreme court shut down yet another charter funding scheme.
Sign up for my newsletter. It's free.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
There Really Is No Superman
Though personally I always wanted to be part of the Doom Patrol (original flavor, not modern artsy version). But there's no Doom Patrol, either.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Couple Days Off
I have just returned from a few days on a lake in Maine with my lovely wife. We had a window of opportunity and cause to celebrate (my wife will be back where she belongs—in a classroom—come the fall), so we hopped in the car and headed north for some r & r.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
Friday, October 25, 2024
Outing LBGTQ Students
One of the culture panic hills one which some folks want to battle is the issue of schools outing LGBTQ students to their parents. The culture panic crowd is not only in favor of it, but they demand it, and quite a bit of perspective is being lost over the issue.
Take this from a recent Helen Lewis piece for The Atlantic--
Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”
Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed.
A kernel of truth? Letting children pick their pronoun or bathroom is akin to performing what Trump called "brutal" surgery on children.
Parents Defending Education has a whole collection of outrage-stoking stories of schools with policies that allow students to decide whether or not they want information about their status to be shared with their parents.
Here's just one example-- a story from New Hampshire, where a school allowed "radical LGBTQ group" GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance) to run a professional development center.
GLSEN was founded in Massachusetts by two teachers; in 1994 it branched into other states. Their goals have been centered around making schools into "the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve." For the culture panic crowd, GLSEN is a promoter of "gender ideology" aka "acknowledging that LGBTQ persons are, in fact, human beings."
But GLSEN told staff things like this:
Although it may be hard to believe, there are students whose emotional and physical safety were jeopardized when school staff outed them to other students and even family members
And that, we're meant to understand, is self-evidently terrible, a crazy thing to tell teachers.
Except that it's the truth. Here's a graphic taken from a report by the not left-wing Bellwether Partners.
None of these are great, but consider the homelessness statistic-- more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ young persons experience homelessness, and that's going to be mostly due to being thrown out of their home. Also, LGBTQ youths who feel supported at home reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who didn't feel that level of support. And the picture surely hasn't improved since the pandemic pause.
So we need to ask-- what is the point of an out-to-parents requirement, exerted through either local school regulations or state law? What is it that supporters of such regulations want to achieve?
Lots of these folks seem to believe that LGBTQ persons never occur "naturally," that LGBTQ folks are made, not born, through some combination of indoctrination, seduction, and peer pressure. So perhaps the idea is to create more social pressure to just not "choose" to become LGBTQ. This is a technique that has never worked in the history of LGBTQ persons (which coincides with the history of the world).
In some cases, the aim seems to be to assert control over children, as if they are a piece of property belonging to the parents. No, the child does not belong to the school. The child also does not belong to the parents, nor to anyone else, because the child is an actual live human being. It is a normal and natural thing as a parent to worry about the twists and turns your child may go through growing up. As old as stories about changlings, the visceral fear that your beloved child may be mysteriously replaced with some stranger. But "if my child has to tell me they think they're LGBTQ, then I'll be able to make them stop it" is not a winning plan.
But a non-zero number of parents react by trying to overpower their children and forcing them to become the person those parents want them to be. (see also "children going no contact")
Separate from them are the folks who want to overpower other peoples' children, as if government power can be used to force LGBTQ persons into nonexistence.
Supporters argue that these rules are about protecting parental rights, but which rights are we talking about. The right to control your child? No such right exists. The right to erase a child's privacy and step over any and all boundaries? The right to know everything about your child? It's a weird dance that the far right does--when the child is a fetus, its rights are supposed to totally overrule the rights of the parent, but once born, the child loses all rights to the parent.
Whatever folks on the right think mandatory rules will accomplish, the actual results are not hard to predict. Children who feel safe and loved and supported at home will continue to freely share information about themselves with their grownups. Those who don't feel safe at home will quickly understand that they are not safe at school, either. So young people who are at a vulnerable time dealing with difficult questions of identity and their place in the world will be further isolated in world where social media makes teens more vulnerable to all manner of awful stuff.
I have no doubt at all that there are schools and school personnel out there who, in their desire to help, are over the line on these issues. But making wholesale outing of LGBTQ students without any concerns or safeguards for the rights--and safety-- of that student is irresponsible and, sometimes, dangerous. The rules have to treat those LGBTQ persons as real human beings and not faceless threats to a traditional gender orthodoxy. We have to do better.
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Children Are People
During his town hall on education, far-right-light Governor Glenn Youngkin was pressed on various issues of trans children, and in response, he echoed a sentiment that keeps appearing in these parental rights debates (though not always quite so clearly):
Children belong to parents. Not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.
Well, no, Children are human beings, not chattel.
But the humanity of children often seems at question in much of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation from culture warriors these days. New Hampshire is yet another state considering legislation that could require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents. Meanwhile, the well-funded advocacy group, Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] has released a list of 6,000 schools that, they charge, have policies to "hide" trans student status from parents. And the hot new wave in anti-LGBTQ student bills are Birth Name bills, requiring schools and school staff to address students by the names and pronouns on their birth certificates without written parental permission.
What all of this has in common is a disregard for the agency and independence and humanity of the students themselves.
The scenario often darkly hinted at is one in which school staff somehow convince a student that they are LGBTQ, and tell them they had better not tell anyone at home about it.
But the far more likely scenario is one in which a student comes to a trusted school staff member to talk about their identity while begging the staff member not to tell parents. This conversation may occur during the highly charged time when the student is struggling with a new understanding of themself, or it may occur in a more standard school drama context (the girl who asks for advice dealing with her girlfriend but "I can't talk to my folks about this because they would freak").
Anybody who pretends that these moments are easy to navigate and can be handled by a cut and dried set of rules is kidding themselves. Students, especially teens, play with their sense of identity an awful lot, and sometimes it's temporary and sometimes it's not. Students are sometimes terrible judges of what they can expect from parents and sometimes they are excellent judges. Parents are sometimes great at supporting their children's growth into independent adults, and sometimes they are not, at all.
As with many hot button issues, folks are dealing from different premises. If you believe that LGBTQ identities are unnatural, that LGBTQ identities are made, not born, then you will react to news of your own child's LGBTQ identity by wanting to know who made them that way, and schools are the most obvious place to look. If you believe that LGBTQ persons are born, not made, then your main concern will be how to protect and gird them for a world that is often hostile--and that hostility can start at home. We know that LGBTQ children go through a lot. It seems simple enough to want them to go through less, but different premises yield different solutions to the problem ("stop being LGBTQ" versus "put protections for the child in place").
The ideal situation is parents who are loving and supportive of the child, though that situation can be less ideal in states where the parents of LGBTQ persons are stripped of their legal rights to make certain decisions for their children (because parental rights apparently involves only certain parents in some states). A school can't hide any of this information when the child is loving, accepted, and open with their parents.
Put another way, there is no situation in which the school hides information about LGBTQ students from the parents; there are only situations in which the school and the child keep the information from parents.
The school's decision has to be based on two factors. One is the question of possible abuse of the child. Some commenters say, "Well, the law doesn't have to worry about that because the laws already require school staff to report abuse." But that's abuse that has already happened. "We're going to tell your folks, and if they beat you and throw you out, then we'll just report it," is not a great plan. But figuring out what possible abuse may or may not happen is not an exact science.
The other factor is that schools must balance the rights of the parents with the rights of the students. The disturbing part of so many of these laws, so much of this rhetoric, is that the rights of students are absent from the debate. This has become an ugly part of the new idea that schools serve families and not all of the community--the notion that teachers are simply hirelings whose primary purpose if to extend parental reach in exerting their will over their children.
None of this is simple to sort out, and there is no doubt that sometimes schools get it wrong, that staff, well-meaning or not, make some bad judgement calls.
But any solution that treats children as property rather than people is not going to help. Any solution that enshrines parental rights but ignores students' rights and safety is not a real solution. Students are trying to figure out who they are, and they are trying to figure out how their identity is going to affect their relationships with the people around them. The people around them can help by being mindful, thoughtful, and extending grace to the students and to each other.
Sunday, April 5, 2026
OH: No More Crossdressing in Front of the Kids
There's has been some social media noise about Ohio's new bill that supposedly criminalizes any kind of behavior that conflicts with your "gender at birth." Maybe. Supporters and the bill's actual language say that HB 249 only makes it illegal to act outside your traditional gender role in front of children. Critics argue that the language is so broad it will eventually squelch every day gender expression.
The bill updates existing Indecent Exposure laws, and in particular adds a definition of "adult cabaret performance" meaning specifically a performance that is "in a location other than an adult cabaret where minors may be present, that is harmful to juveniles or obscene, regardless of whether or not the performance is for consideration..."
That is followed by a list of specific no-nos, including strippers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, and topless dancers. And then, over above the list of ways that naughty ladies can display their private bits, we get this additional example of an adult cabaret performance:
Performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer's or entertainer's biological sex using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers;
This is nuts. Now, as I read the law, this doesn't make it illegal to simply be a man wearing heavy makeup while walking down the street or holding high federal office. To trigger this law, you have to be a man heavily made up while performing or entertaining (okay, maybe that high federal office example is in jeopardy after all).
Soooo many problems here. Exactly who will be serving in the new Ohio State Bureau of Acceptable Gender Role Markers? Can a lady singer wear pants? How much make-up can a vice-president man wear and still be legal? Can I show a class Some Like it Hot? What determines whether a t-shirt is male- or female-coded? If a male entertainer uses a high-pitched voice in front of a juvenile audience, is that a violation? I mean, as a life-long bass I harbor a little resentment towards tenors, but this seems like bridge too far.
And if these all seem like extreme cases, let me suggest that you ask a high school teacher how many times they have witnessed a hilarious student skit in which high school boys performed and/or danced dressed like girls (perhaps with some balloon "prosthetics"). The answer is, at least for me, "I lost count ages ago." You can argue that this is obviously just harmless youthy high jinks and surely nobody would seriously consider that illegal. The law was just intended to protect youths from the evils of drag queens, and surely nobody would go after the senior football players in the annual homecoming assembly talent show. But we currently have a whole anti-school-outrage-industrial complex, like the (formerly Parents) Defending Education crew whose whole mission is to try to literally make a federal case out of everything they can find in their karen-fed pipeline of Naughty Behavior in public schools. If this bill passes the Senate (the House has already okayed it) I guarantee that sooner or later you will see a story about some public school dragged into court because it allowed the captain of the basketball team to dress up as a cheerleader in front of the whole student body.
The new law would piggyback on the current state obscenity laws, which are an exercise in vagueness.
"Biological sex" is doing heavy lifting here, defined as indicated by "sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth," and deliberately ruling out any individual's psychological or subjective experience, all of which fits an imaginary world in which gender is simple and cut and dried. However, our world is not that world.
This is one of those laws where someone wanted to stop a "problem" that is so minute and undetectable that they decided to just carpet bomb the entire are either because A) they are lousy at writing laws or B) they were happy to get as much collateral damage as possible. Ohio faces many problems these days; none of them are caused by drag queens.
You can read ACLU Ohio's full response here, or this handy explainer. If you're in Ohio, you might want to get ahold of your Senator and encourage them to spend more time on actual problems. In the meantime, certain elected officials might want to be careful about appearing in the state.
Saturday, April 6, 2024
A Useful Public School Support Resource
"I know I read something about that somewhere."
It's a pain (believe me--one that we at the Institute are all too familiar with) to know that you know something, but can't locate the source. Or wish you knew more, but can't find a handy clearing house for the information you need. Particularly if yours is one of those states where some legislators are whipping up some speedy back door voucher bill.
So here's one useful answer. The Partnership for the Future of Learning has created a website at TruthinEdFunding.org that provides a wide assortment of resources in a library organized by topics. History Rooted in Segregation. Types of Vouchers. Discrimination. Accountability. Drain Funds from Public Education. And more.
There are links to studies and data as well as graphics and personal stories. You can also filter through the resource library by a set of more specific tags.
The website is the result of a partnership between about 25 organizations that are all in support of public education-- Network for Public Education, Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy, Florida Policy Institute, In The Public Interest.
So if you are looking for a place to find a bunch of useful resources to use in defending public education in your state against vouchers, or just some tools for educating friends and neighbors and journalists (and legislators) who haven't quite caught on to what's happening, this resource is for you. Stop and browse, and return from time to time because new stuff is being added regularly. One of the most useful websites I have come across (and putting up this post insures that I'll always be able to find it).
Friday, February 16, 2024
Administrators and The Big Chill
The Washington Post just covered a Rand Corp. report that provides unsurprising data: 65% of K-12 teachers restricted their instruction on "political and social issues." The paragraph that really jumped out at me was this one:
Teachers’ most common reason for curtailing some forms of education, the report found, was their worry that school or district leaders would not support them if parents expressed concerns — and teachers working in politically conservative areas were more likely to censor themselves.
In fact, the Rand report found that the percentage of teachers self-censoring was double the percentage of teachers working in a state that has actual restrictive laws forbidding woke DEI CRT race gender divisive concepts etc etc etc culture panic teaching.
I don't know if the culture panic crowd figured this out or stumbled across it, but either way, culture panic has hit on an important tactic-- all you have to do to get a big chill is scare the administrators.
Far too many administrators operate from a simple vision-- a good day is a day on which the phone doesn't ring. And if it does ring, the easiest way to get the problem to go away is to make the teacher stop doing whatever it is that made the phone calling parent sad.
This is not a new problem. Every teacher knows stories of that administrator that folded like a wet paper bag when a parent called. Most teachers have given that advice to a parent: "This is what we need to do next for your kid, and I can try to get the ball rolling here, but things will happen much faster if you call the office."
But culture panic has raised the amount of background noise and added to the list of possible offenses. So in states that don't even have Don't Say Gay laws, administrators are making teachers take down any room decorations that some parent might think are just too gay. Administrators are having staff meetings to deliver the message, "I hear that parents out there somewhere are freaking out over CRT/DEI/LGBTQ stuff, so do us all a favor and just don't come near any of those topics ever."
And in way too many districts, teachers already know that when push comes to shove, they are working for administrators who will not have their back. They've already adjusted their classroom style accordingly (e.g. adjusting disciplinary requirements because they know that when it comes to problem students, they are on their own), so steering away from the new list of Controversial Stuff is just more of the same.
It's a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it's a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it's a luxury that many teachers don't have. The Rand findings are just a reminder of that unpleasant truth. Administrators set the temperature for a building; if those classrooms are extra chilly, the problem lies in the front office.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Testing Minorities: Hard Lessons for Public Ed Supporters
How can they do that? Don't they realize they're just hurting themselves? Don't they realize that their actions will make it harder for them to get what they want?
No, I'm not repeating what some folks say about the riots in Baltimore.
I'm talking about what some public education supporters say about the advocates for civil rights and students with disabilities who support the Big Standardized Tests.
The word keeps coming out of DC-- the BS Tests are unlikely to go away, and one reason is that those advocates absolutely support testing and much that goes with it. And many of us who advocate for public education keep scratching our heads and declaring ourselves confused, mystified, even angry.
And yet, as Baltimore becomes one more place in America to erupt in acts of violence and rioting and fighting and ugly anger (all well covered by the news outlets) as well as equally passionate outpourings of love and support and desire to seek justice without destruction (which make much less compelling television, so you have to scan the internets for those)-- as all that happens, we get it. We express our carefully parsed feelings of condemnation for the destruction, but support and understanding for the frustration born of systemic racist abuse and oppression. So we post the MLK quotes and the Langston Hughes and all the ways we know to say that we get it.
And yet we remain mystified about the support for testing.
I have been as guilty as anyone. But today I heard myself talking about Baltimore with my students, saying something I've said a gazillion times-- people want to be heard, and if they don't think they are being heard they will keep raising their voice until they are, until they can't be ignored, even until they are screaming. If you want it to stop, you have to listen. Really listen, without making excuses or defending yourself, until they're done. And the longer you haven't been listening, the longer you have to listen before the conversation can get back to a place of equilibrium.
Even if you are absolutely certain you are right, you still have to listen.
The supporters of testing have told us, repeatedly, why they want the BS Tests-- because they are afraid of their children becoming invisible, forgotten, warehoused, ignored.
Supporters of public education have often failed to listen. Often. Oh, I've explained all the reasons that BS Tests aren't the answer, the ways in which I think they have been misled. This is not in your best interest. We even accuse leaders of their organizations of having taken enough Gates money to cloud their judgment. None of that shows that I have listened.
You know who's done a good job of listening? Reformsters.
Co-opting the language of civil rights is not just about co-opting a movement. It's about using language that shows that they hear the concerns.
Supporters of public education can't just say, "Trust us," because the history of public ed is not one to inspire trust. We have marginalized people. We have ignored people. Stacey Patton's blistering piece in Dame is a reminder that, to some folks, it certainly looks like many white folks didn't get fully exercised about educational injustice until it came to their schools. For some of us, the experience of reform been, "We were doing perfectly okay on our own, and suddenly these guys swooped down and tried to take everything over." For others it has been, "We were struggling with a failing system, and suddenly these guys swooped down and promised to make things better."
In my desire to protect and preserve the promise of public education, I can forget sometimes just how badly US public education has sometimes served poor and minority students and their communities.
It's not enough to say, "Those guys are not looking out for you." We can't just point out what reformsters do wrong. We have to talk about what we'll do right, what we'll do differently from the past.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Lots of public ed supporters get the social justice piece, too, and lots of social justice fighters know full well who and what the reformsters are. And while it's my style to write in a "we" voice, I don't want to presume to speak for people who are not me. But I am remembering that when people are behaving in a way that seems senseless to me, that's on me-- there's always sense to it, and if something seems senseless, that's because I haven't listened or looked well enough to find the sense.
The reformster use of civil rights language gets traction because there are real concerns and issues that need to be addressed, and many of us are not addressing them. In the last several days I heard many public ed advocates reacting to the news the leaders who support testing by saying that we need to get to them, to find out who they are, to get them to understand. I'm thinking we also need to listen to them, hear them, understand them.Yes, I know there are opportunists all around on all sides. But you can't take advantage unless there's a need to take advantage of, and I, for one, am someone who too easily slips into attacking the problem instead of helping to look for the solution.
Reformsters have made promises. They may have been cynical promises, designed for marketing show, but they've made them. While many of us speaking out for public education may not have the kind of power that the reformsters do, that does not mean we cannot fight for promises of our own. And we can certainly listen.
Nothing I've said is meant to suggest that reformster programs are not piles of baloney. But in the rush to point out how baloney-like they are, it's important not to also suggest that the concerns of the poor, minority, and special needs folks are baloney, too.
No, I'm not repeating what some folks say about the riots in Baltimore.
I'm talking about what some public education supporters say about the advocates for civil rights and students with disabilities who support the Big Standardized Tests.
The word keeps coming out of DC-- the BS Tests are unlikely to go away, and one reason is that those advocates absolutely support testing and much that goes with it. And many of us who advocate for public education keep scratching our heads and declaring ourselves confused, mystified, even angry.
And yet, as Baltimore becomes one more place in America to erupt in acts of violence and rioting and fighting and ugly anger (all well covered by the news outlets) as well as equally passionate outpourings of love and support and desire to seek justice without destruction (which make much less compelling television, so you have to scan the internets for those)-- as all that happens, we get it. We express our carefully parsed feelings of condemnation for the destruction, but support and understanding for the frustration born of systemic racist abuse and oppression. So we post the MLK quotes and the Langston Hughes and all the ways we know to say that we get it.
And yet we remain mystified about the support for testing.
I have been as guilty as anyone. But today I heard myself talking about Baltimore with my students, saying something I've said a gazillion times-- people want to be heard, and if they don't think they are being heard they will keep raising their voice until they are, until they can't be ignored, even until they are screaming. If you want it to stop, you have to listen. Really listen, without making excuses or defending yourself, until they're done. And the longer you haven't been listening, the longer you have to listen before the conversation can get back to a place of equilibrium.
Even if you are absolutely certain you are right, you still have to listen.
The supporters of testing have told us, repeatedly, why they want the BS Tests-- because they are afraid of their children becoming invisible, forgotten, warehoused, ignored.
Supporters of public education have often failed to listen. Often. Oh, I've explained all the reasons that BS Tests aren't the answer, the ways in which I think they have been misled. This is not in your best interest. We even accuse leaders of their organizations of having taken enough Gates money to cloud their judgment. None of that shows that I have listened.
You know who's done a good job of listening? Reformsters.
Co-opting the language of civil rights is not just about co-opting a movement. It's about using language that shows that they hear the concerns.
Supporters of public education can't just say, "Trust us," because the history of public ed is not one to inspire trust. We have marginalized people. We have ignored people. Stacey Patton's blistering piece in Dame is a reminder that, to some folks, it certainly looks like many white folks didn't get fully exercised about educational injustice until it came to their schools. For some of us, the experience of reform been, "We were doing perfectly okay on our own, and suddenly these guys swooped down and tried to take everything over." For others it has been, "We were struggling with a failing system, and suddenly these guys swooped down and promised to make things better."
In my desire to protect and preserve the promise of public education, I can forget sometimes just how badly US public education has sometimes served poor and minority students and their communities.
It's not enough to say, "Those guys are not looking out for you." We can't just point out what reformsters do wrong. We have to talk about what we'll do right, what we'll do differently from the past.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Lots of public ed supporters get the social justice piece, too, and lots of social justice fighters know full well who and what the reformsters are. And while it's my style to write in a "we" voice, I don't want to presume to speak for people who are not me. But I am remembering that when people are behaving in a way that seems senseless to me, that's on me-- there's always sense to it, and if something seems senseless, that's because I haven't listened or looked well enough to find the sense.
The reformster use of civil rights language gets traction because there are real concerns and issues that need to be addressed, and many of us are not addressing them. In the last several days I heard many public ed advocates reacting to the news the leaders who support testing by saying that we need to get to them, to find out who they are, to get them to understand. I'm thinking we also need to listen to them, hear them, understand them.Yes, I know there are opportunists all around on all sides. But you can't take advantage unless there's a need to take advantage of, and I, for one, am someone who too easily slips into attacking the problem instead of helping to look for the solution.
Reformsters have made promises. They may have been cynical promises, designed for marketing show, but they've made them. While many of us speaking out for public education may not have the kind of power that the reformsters do, that does not mean we cannot fight for promises of our own. And we can certainly listen.
Nothing I've said is meant to suggest that reformster programs are not piles of baloney. But in the rush to point out how baloney-like they are, it's important not to also suggest that the concerns of the poor, minority, and special needs folks are baloney, too.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)