ICYMI: Abraham Lincoln Edition (4/13)

160 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln had his last full day. It was a full one-- Lee had surrendered just four days before and the war was wrapping up. But 160 years ago tomorrow, he would head to the theater for the evening, where actor and failed oil speculator John Wilkes Booth would shoot him.

We know a few things about Booth in my neck of the woods. The oil boom started here in 1859, and Booth actually lived in my small town briefly. He was an investor in one of the umpty-gazillion speculative oil companies that formed in these parts. His plan, apparently, was to strike it rich and use Yankee money to help finance the insurrectionist cause. He was a minor celebrity in town, by most accounts charming and popular. But his wells didn't come in, and he moved on to his next plan. The wells he had invested in did come in big later, which leads to one of those historical questions-- if the well had come in sooner, would Lincoln have lived? History sometimes turns on the smallest random details.

At any rate, here's some reading for the week. Remember to share!

Welcome to the Ohio General Assembly's Great Legislative Education Robbery of 2025

Stephen Dyer examines the latest piece of Ohio's attempt to become the Florida of the Midwest by siphoning funds away from public schools.

Who will stop them? LAUSD says "Hold my beer."

Jeff Waid gives credit to the Los Angeles school district, which has emerged as one of the districts brave enough to hold the line against ICE.

Attorneys Say It’s Illegal for Trump Administration to Extort Compliance with its Anti-DEI Ideology by Threatening to Deny Title I Funds to School Districts

Not that there's any reason to have doubted, but Jan Resseger has the word from experts on how not legal the extortion attempt is.

Why Book Bans Matter

Steve Nuzum provides another update from South Carolina's attempts to curtail reading. Because that's how you get rid of certain ideas, and maybe even certain people.

Breaking the Spell

Audrey Watters on resistance to AI panic. 

A Maine pole vaulter cleared the bar to win the state title. Waiting below was Donald Trump.

For Chalkbeat, Kalyn Belsha covers the ongoing federal attacks on Maine (because its governor wouldn't kiss the ring).

Strategic Alarm: How Fear is Being Weaponized to Undermine Public Education — and Who’s Paying the Price

Rob Rogers urges us to resist the fear being hosed into education circles and to be especially aware of the threat to students with special needs.

Feds end a civil rights agreement on treatment of Native students, citing DEI

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has been looking into the question of why Native American students in Rapid City, SD, were so much more likely to be disciplined, but under the new regime that investigation will be dropped. Laura Meckler covers it for the Washington Post.

Collective conference myopia

Benjamin Riley went to the ASU-GSV summit and ed tech super-fair, and was pretty alarmed by what he saw and heard there. 

Are Public Schools the Problem or the Solution?

Andru Volinsky asks a basic question about education, and he has some answers from our national past.

A Texas school leader says material about diversity in state-approved textbooks violated the law.

The state's GOP board of education had already stripped all that modern learnin' from the textbooks, but that didn't go far enough for other officials who objected to stuff about vaccines and polio and the United Nations, among other non-medieval items. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica team up again.

New York and the Fight for Truly Public Schools

Jose Luis Vilson considers what puts the "public" in public schools (or keeps it out).

NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not

Jill Barshay at Hechinger has some more news about the cloudy fate of NAEP.

A city responding to a lead crisis in schools reached out to the CDC for help. The agency’s lead experts were just fired

All that DOGEing is working out just great for children. Send it back to the states, indeed.

The Reason We Still Need Conferences

Nancy Flanagan was at the NPE conference last week (and I was lucky enough to get to say hi). Here she explains why these are such a good thing.

A College Professor Teaches High School Classes

In 1960, a college professor volunteered to in a high school for a semester, and boy did he learn some things. Larry Cuban reprints this trip down memory lane that will seem not unfamiliar.

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about Andru Volinsky's new book about New Hampshire's landmark Claremont decisions and the American Library Association's annual report.

Here's another astonishing new video from OK GO. If you're really intrigued by this one shot video, here's a "making of" video. Humans are so amazing. "We made this so that you can feel that."

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Where Do Book Complaints Come From? The State of the Library Report

It's National Library Week, a perfect time for the American Library Association to publish its annual report, a look back at what was happening in 2024, including some striking data points..

Well, you already know what has been going on, but the cover of the report gives a clue. The two find-it-inside headlines are "Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024" and "Censorship by the Numbers."

 

Inside we find a one page intro from Leslie Burger, the interim executive director of ALA. She identifies three major trends from the year-- censorship, AI, and sustainability, which seems to mean how libraries help communities be sustainable. On the next page Cindy Hohl, ALA president, points out the many things that libraries do that are important to communities. 

Then Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, gets three pages to talk about the battle over the freedom to read. Censorship attempts are actually down from 2023 (821 vs. 1,247), but that's still the third-highest number ever. She notes that the numbers don't really capture the degree to which librarians and library workers are themselves weathering attacks and a general atmosphere of fear. She also notes some positive news, like the courts that are overturning bans. And as with many issues, much depends on which state you're in. 

Then we get to the data portion of the report. 

There are the top 10 most challenged books of 2024. No big surprises here. All Boys Aren't Blue leads the list, followed by Gender Queer. Bluest Eye and Perks of Being a Wallflower tie for third. Ellen Hopkins makes the list twice, and John Green's Looking for Alaska is still there. Old classics like Huck Finn are nowhere to be seen.

Next the things you probably only suspected.

Where do the challenges to books come from? Turns out only about 16% come from actual parents. 10% come from elected officials/government. 36% come from school boards or administration. Only 26% are listed as from "pressure groups" like your local Moms for Liberty chapter, but who do you imagine is leaning on board members and elected officials to get in there and ban some Naughty Books. So we've got 72% of book challenges coming from someone other than actual parents. Librarians, teachers, and staff account for 1%.

That 72% represents a major trend. in 2020 only 25% of challenges came from pressure groups (or the people that pressure groups were pressuring). In 2021 that soared to 65%., coinciding with the launch of Moms for Liberty (and right wing crankiness about Trump's defeat, and the invention of critical race theory as an issue). The 72% is a dip from 2023, so I suppose we can hope that's the start of a trends.

While school libraries have gotten most of the attention, in 2024 the public libraries led in the amount of challenges: 55% of 2024 book challenges were in public libraries, with school libraries accounting for 38%. 

What was actually challenged? 76% of the challenges were for books and graphic novels. 6% objected to displays. 6% skipped the complaint and went to vandalism and theft of materials. 3% threatened access to the library by threatening to cut funding, close the library, or blow it up (because bomb threats are still a thing in 2024).

The remainder of the report gets back to the main business of libraries (which is not actually fending off folks suffering culture panic). mantal health. Read to Recovery. NASA workshops. Finding ways to provide access, and just generally being a place where persons can connect with a larger world of knowledge and information with a local center for community. They are figuring out how to cope with AI, and meeting civic responsibilities with broadband and infrastructure, even as they brace for funding hits from the regime of Dear Leader.

I don't know when the report was actually written, but of course the slashing of library funding has already begun, which sucks. I've been a library guy my whole life. When we moved here, we had a library much more easily accessed than when we lived in the boonies. My mom would take us weekly, carrying a picnic basket with which we carted our selections back and forth. Getting to a book store was a rare treat in those days, but the library was always there, and I could sample all sorts of stuff and read my way through huge series. Between the public library and my school library, I had access to a whole world of stuff, and I took advantage. 

When I grew up (ish), I discovered the research section of the library and the miracle of newspapers on microfilm. I spent thirty years reading page after page, scouring the paper for details about our local band and constantly wandering down side trips; eventually a book came out of that. It became enough of a Thing for me that when I decided my honors students needed to do research from primary (ish) sources, the answer was local history, because I already knew what was there. For years, the public library was part of my curriculum. I volunteered to sit in that room on Saturdays and help people find what they were looking for (it was usually a family member).

A public library is a great thing, a community institution that lets every citizen have resources that would ordinarily be reserved only for the wealthy. Makes you wonder why some people are so bent on attacking libraries, an institution whose greatest sin is simply trying to serve as many people as it can. 

PA Tells Trump To Back Off In Slickest Way Possible

Some days I love my commonwealth's current administration.

Here's the sequence. First, the US Department of Ed had a civil rights office, the purpose of which was to make sure that states did not violate student civil rights, which mostly meant standing up for students with special needs and pushing back on Certain Parts of the country where some folks have never really stopped trying to get out of providing poor students and students of color with a fully-funded quality education.

The Trump 2.0 repurposed the same department. They kept much of the language of the original mission:

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But in one weird trick that right wingers like to use, they have reinterpreted that to mean "don't deny any white guys cool stuff that other people get," grouped those naughty behaviors under the DEI label, and tried to back it up by brandishing the SCOTUS decision for SFFA v. Harvard-- the one that struck down Affirmative Action. 

Having decided that simply declaring their new version of the law was not enough, the regime has declared that every state and local district must sign a loyalty oath, saying they have reviewed the regime demand and admit it's a requirement for federal financial support. This is an attempt to get state and local educators to comply in advance, as if the courts have already agreed with the regime's assertion that DEI is actually illegal. 

Many Democrat-led states and districts have pushed back hard. California and Vermont told districts to go ahead and ignore the loyalty oath demands. Chicago's mayor said, "See you in court." 

Pennsylvania has simply employed ju-jitsu or a double-reverse or whatever you want to call it.

First, the latter from Executive Deputy Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer was sent via e-mail, like the regime's demand, because if the regime doesn't know how to manage major pieces of business, we can play that game to.

Second, the PA letter is addressed "Dear Sir or Madam," underscoring the fact that the regime's edict was sent out unsigned. 

Third, the letter affirms that Pennsylvania follows Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1864, always has, always will. So no problem here. It ignores the attempt to re-interpret that language and simply addresses the issue that the feds pretend to raise--whether or not people are following Title VI. 

We'll see how this plays out. Maybe someone at the federal ed department will actually sign a real letter saying, "No, we need you to swear allegiance to our cockeyed new definition of Title VI." Or maybe they will just say, "See, Pennsylvania also agrees to follow Title VI" and pretend that people don't mean two entirely different thing when they talk about Title VI. Maybe they'll get pissy and yell, "No, you have to agree that Title VI only means what WE think it means and not what people have thought it meant for the last sixty years." 

It's not as feisty as some states, nor as subservient as others, but it puts Pennsylvania on the right side of this issue. I do love a display of passive-aggressive non-compliance, and anything that puts MAGA "clarifying" and reasserting their racist intentions is better than the obsfucatory bullshit they've been employing.

"We're just demanding you follow Title VI," they said, pleased with their own cleverness at owning the libs by turning their own laws against them.

"What a coincidence," says Pennsylvania. "We have been following Title VI all along and have every intention of continuing to do so. So glad we agree on this."

We'll see what the next move is. 

Wendell Berry's Rules for New Tech

 Wendell Berry was born in 1934 and grew to be a writer across a wide number of forms, as well as working as an activist and farmer, mostly in rural Kentucky. He opposed the Vietnam War, debated Then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, and published a critique of George W. Bush's post-9/11 strategy. When he was 76 years old, he and 14 other protestors got themselves locked in the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal coal mining (strip mining on steroids). And he's still at it, delivering hearing testimony in 2022. 

Berry came up with rules for things; you may very well have seen some over the years. There are his 17 rules for a sustainable local community, and his 9 rules for consumption, but today I'm looking at his 9 rules for technology. Blogger Ted Gioia reminded me of these rules; Berry whipped them up as a response to friends who were trying to convince him that a computer would be a step up from handwritten copy typed up on a thirty-year-old typewriter  ("Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer," 1987).

The rules have many applications, but they fit very nicely for the conversations we continue to have in education, particular the heavily-pushed AI. So let's take a look.

The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

Part of what is driving the AI love (like many innovations before it) is the dream of replacing expensive teaching professionals with something cheaper. Curriculum in a box appeals to those who want to de-professionalize education, doing for teaching what McDonald's did for cheffing.

AI promises these same folks something even more exciting-- replacing teachers with software that will be cheap and, better yet, never talk back or unionize. 

Is AI really cheaper? We don't know yet; right now, AI companies are trying to conquer the market amazon-style, forgoing making money until after they've planted their flag on the education summit. But at some point they are going to want to make money. Then we'll see the real price.

Probably still cheaper than a human, but then, price paid to the company will be only part of the cost. There's the giant sucking up of electricity, and the blowing through a gazillion gallons of water to cool servers. Plus the cost of students under-educated, because while Musk and Gates can insist that AI can do a teacher's job, they make that claim only because they don't understand what a teacher does or how education works. 

It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

Computers have been taking teacher ed tech in this direction for years, from the giant computer set-up of twenty years ago to the run-everything-from-a-tablet tech of today. Students, however, have been pushed in the other direction. A book, a tablet, and a pen or pencil are far more compact than a desktop, and a netbook barely competes, particularly because the netbook requires plug-in (and the school's network to be working properly). 

Is AI more small scale than a human teacher? I guess they win on that one.

It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

Hoo boy. Enshittification has meant that even things that used to meet this start to fall behind. Is Google better than the card catalog or reference books in your library? Well, it used to be. Now if Google (or dozens of other search engines) even correctly interprets what you have asked, you must scroll past mountains of advertising and paid-for search results.

This is perhaps how AI marketeers keep hope alive, because ChatGPT can do better work than your worst teacher or your worst student (as long as it doesn't present too many flat out errors) but cannot keep up with good teachers and students. 

But "do work" is performing feats of Olympic weight-lifting status here, because, yes, if you think the work is to research and write an essay, ChatGPT can mimic that task. But if you think the work is to acquire and synthesize understandings and insights, then no-- ChatGPT can't do any of those things at all, and its performance of those tasks instead of students studenting means the work wasn't done at all.

It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

Oh, no. AI is gobbling up the power supply and only getting worse and worse.

If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

As suggested above, Berry was not a fan of coal burning for generating electricity. But the shift to solar isn't happening in any large scale way, and certainly not with AI.

It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

We've moved steadily backward on this one in many ways. Computerizing tech creates barriers to repairability, but companies have taken other steps. John Deere infamously led the way by forbidding its customers to work on the tractors that they had bought with their own money. There's your annoying printer that now won't work unless you buy the company's official more-precious-than-hold ink. 

AI adds another level to this problem--not even the people who work with LLM and generative AI fully understand what exactly the computer is doing, nor can they necessarily fix it-- though they do have access to ways to push the tech in one desired direction or another. 

It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

Berry was writing forty-ish years ago, so I'm not sure how he would have interpreted the ability to order and download stuff when it comes to this rule. AI can, of course, be wherever you want it to be--certainly more so than possible or desirable with a human teacher. Though use of platforms has allowed teachers to extend their "presence" to students 24/7.

It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

Not happening. Wasn't happening back when Berry was writing. 

It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

As Gioia writes, "This may be the biggest tech failure of them all." Tech has been written to exploit creators and manipulate users deliberately and sometimes dangerously. And "disrupt" is of course one of the tech world imperatives. Why? Maybe they just want to work out long-lived anger that they didn't get to sit at the popular kids table, or maybe they feel it's their right to rule over the lesser beings whose understanding is so clearly inferior to their own. 

Whatever the case, anyone who has taught for more than one week is familiar with the teacher "training" for a new solution where the undercurrent (sometimes not all that "under") is "You guys are doing it wrong and we are here to straighten you out." 

"Move fast and break things" is the opposite of what Berry's ninth rule favors, but it's a beloved tech-lord mantra. It would carry a lot more heft if the "things" we were talking about weren't the parts of the system that delivers education to young humans. Berry's rules might seem a little quaint, but I don't think it would hurt us much to pay attention to them.

Dangerous Learning and Culture Panic

Derek Black's new book Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy is absolutely worth the read. I've talked about it at Forbes.com in my best fake journalist tones. But I want to go back to the book because A) I heard Black talk about it last weekend and B) this book is damned awesome and I can't say "damned awesome" at Forbes.com.

There many damned cool things about the book. First, there's a clearer picture of the story we all think we know. We tend to think that teaching enslaved persons to read and write was just always illegal and frowned on and that's it. But Black points out that, in fact, there was a point early on when lots of folks taught Blacks to read and write-- missionaries, some who held enslaved folks, etc. 

Shutting down literacy was, as Black portrays it, a response to particular events, led by some extraordinary individuals. That starts with Denmark Vesey, who really deserves an entire book of his own, which should then be turned into a movie. Extraordinary man with an extraordinary life that leads him, eventually, to lead at slave revolt in Charleston. Except that the revolt doesn't quite some off. But the planned attempt gets peoples' attention. Then come David Walker and Nat Turner (all well before the Civil War) with increasingly scary slave revolts.

This is what kicks off a huge culture panic in the South. This weekend Black used the word "paranoia." 

The revolt of enslaved persons is seen as a threat to the South's way of life. And at this point history starts to seem awfully damned familiar. It's not just that Blacks are forbidden to learn to read and write. Southern authorities start clamping down on any sort of avenue for subversive ideas. They try to get Northern states to clamp down on the folks printing subversive pamphlets. They start scrutinizing schools for teachers and textbooks for any hint of Forbidden Stuff, only instead of searching for CRT or gender ideology or divisive concepts that might be indoctrinating their children, they're looking for Northern Ideas. And they tried to guarantee that anything that slipped through would not be caught by enslaved persons. The lesson they took away was that a literate Black person was a dangerous one.

Like our current culture panic crowd, they are searching for something so vaguely defined that it covers a very broad area. But those Southerners achieve something that, so far, is only a dream for the modern culture panic crowd-- they managed to shut down all dissenting views. Black makes the argument that there was a variety of views about literacy and Northen Stuff in the South, but the culture panic shut all discussion down. And as Black said this weekend, once that dissent was silenced, an ugly outcome, even war, was inevitable.

This all illuminates why I stay away from the phrase "culture war." A war implies to combatants both charging the field to attack their enemies. But in the struggle for Black literacy (and I'd argue in our present-day attempts to shut down discussions of race and LGBTQ and Naughty Sex stuff), only one side is trying to attack the other. That other side is just trying to live their lives and make a better future for themselves. But for them to have that future is seen by the combative side as a threat to their way of life. 

There's lots more to find in this book. The story of secret schools that managed to deliver education t0o Blacks even when it was illegal--and dangerous to be caught. Plus the always-depressing tale of how things unspooled under Reconstruction and Jim Crow. 

It's a hell of a book. Black combines deep and thorough research with compelling narratives. I came away with more knowledge about things I hadn't known and a better perspective for things I had known. And the way that this earlier moment echoes our current one gives the book a sharp edge of relevance. If you have not already done so, grab a copy of this book. 

ICYMI: Columbus Edition (4/6)

Greetings from the NPE conference in Columbus, Ohio. It's also  the first time in quite a while that the CMO and I have been out without the board of directors. So it's a great weekend, even if Columbus reminds me very much of a big concrete hamster tunnel run. I've still got some reading for you. 

Naval Academy removes nearly 400 books from library in new DEI purge ordered by Hegseth’s office

Book banning for the military, because if there's anyone we want to have a limited view of the world...

If You Thought Mike DeWine Hated Public School Kids, Wait'll You Meet Matt Huffman

Stephen Dyer traces the source of Ohio's newest school budgeting failures.

Connecting the Dots

Why is Trumpworld so obsessed with education? Jennifer Berkshire has an answer for that question, and a suggestion for edu-journalists.

No Future in Our Dreaming

Audrey Watters spins off the Berkshire piece, plus other bonuses.

Teachers warn AI is impacting students' critical thinking

Ivana Saric at Axios with some of the least surprising news ever.

Will Religion’s Remarkable Winning Streak at the Supreme Court Continue?

Adam Liptak at the New York Times reminds us what's at stake with the upcoming SCOTUS take on a Catholic charter school.

The Battle Over Church and State Could Take Down the Charter School Movement

Adam Laats at the New Republic makes the case that this Supreme Court case is really a lose-lose moment for the charter industry.

Oklahoma Democrats file joint resolutions to disapprove social studies standards

Not that Oklahoma Democrats have a lot of say, but there's a fight continuing in that legislature over the proposed christianist nationalist social studies standards.

Columbus parents, leaders express frustration over student name changes

Columbus schools surprised students and parents with a little comply-in-advance rollback of name use.

West Virginia teachers unions vote to combine and form ‘Education WV’

AFT and NEA merge for the first time in West Virginia, where any little bit of gain in teacher power is a big deal.

Protect Funding for College & Career Readiness Programs—Take Action Now!

Florida is, as always, in the forefront of terrible education choices. How about slashing the heck out of CTE, AP, and a host of other programs? Sue Kingery Woltanski has the details.

So it's 'lawfare' to question paying $80 million to a 'D'-rated charter school?

In Arizona, a failing charter is being shut down, and wining about it. Laurie Roberts offers a blistering op-ed.

Boys

Nancy Flanagan looks at the question of what has happened to boys.

With Trump’s Education Department, Public Schools Can’t Count on Previous Federal Funding Commitments

Trump's old personal policy of stiffing people for their work is now federal policy. Jan Resseger looks at the new normal of the feds reneging on contracts.

Mortal Thinking

Well, this is pretty damn awesome. Audrey Watters and Benjamin Riley together for a podcast.

The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes

Tressie McMillan Cottom for the New York Times with a take that I hope turns out to be the right one (and which pissed off all sorts of techbros on line), which is that AI is just mid.

This week at Forbes.com I took a look at Derek Black's new book, and you should, too. 

Have some George Harrison.

And as always, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, a slightly more reliable way to keep updated in this wonky webby world.

Maybe It's The Racism

I want to return to West Ada because I think there's more to learn here, and not just foir folks in Idaho.

Quick recap. Sarah Inama is a 6th grade world civilizations teacher in West Ada School District (the largest district in the state). She had two posters in her classroom. Here they are.

She was told to take them down. She did. Then she went home, thought about it, and put the second one, the one with many skin tones hands, back up. She's been told to get rid of it by year's end. She took her story to a local reporter, and then all hell broke loose.

We know a lot more now thanks to some stellar reporting by Carly Flandro and the folks at Idaho Ed News, who FOIAed 1200 emails surrounding this. You should read the resulting stories (here and here). I'm going pick out just a few points. 

The district had Inama when she disobeyed the order; the word "insubordination" was used. In my local union president days, the standard advice in situations was "comply, then grieve" because once you refuse to comply, you are insubordinate. Inama's high profile made disciplining her a PR nightmare for the district,  but it also seems the district admins and board couldn't really decide where they wanted to go with this.

Inama was told the poster was divisive, that it was "not neutral," that the problem was not the message, but the hands of v arious skin tones. Teachers shouldn't have political stuff in the classroom.  Inama nails the issue here

“I really still don’t understand how it’s a political statement,” she said. “I don’t think the classroom is a place for anyone to push a personal agenda or political agenda of any kind, but we are responsible for first making sure that our students are able to learn in our classroom.”

And yet many folks within and outside the district saw this as a political issue. How could anyone do that? Meet district parent Brittany Bieghler, who was dropping her kids off the day that parents were chalking the "Everyone is welcome here" message on the sidewalks.

“The ‘Everyone is Welcome’ slogan is one filled with marxism and DEI, there is no need for those statements because anyone with a brain knows that everyone is welcome to attend school, so there is no need to have it posted, written or worn on school grounds,” she wrote. “My family and I relocated here from a state that did not align with our beliefs and we expected it to be different here, but it seems as time goes by, its becoming more like our former state, which is extremely disheartening.”

"Anyone with a brain" might begin to suspect that everyone is not welcome here under these circumstances. And the school board itself couldn't decide what to respond, drafting an assortment of emails that tried to show conciliation to those that were defiant and defensive, including one complaining in MAGA-esque tones that Inama was naughty for going to "new media."

But I want you to look at the offending poster again. The curent Trumpian argument is that all this Marxist DEI naughhtiness is bad because it unfairly elevates people of color above white folks, that white folks are being discriminated against and denied what they deserve. The new Ed Dpartment civil rights office is dedicated to rooting out discrimination--against white folks. But look at those hands, the ones that make this poster controversial. The hands are all the same size, all have the same prominence and weight in the poster. It's not as if the Black and Brown hands are dominating the frame. Is it political to suggest that they are somehow equal? What could explain that?

Maybe it's the racism.

What would be the acceptable alternative? White hands given greater prominence and weight in the image? No hands at all so that folks can imagine whatever relationship between tghe skin tons they prefer, even if what they imagine contradicts the message of the poster? 

Inama has also been the target of district concern trolling, the whole "Of course we agree with the message, but we don't want to see our teachers embroiled in controvefrsy like this" thing. But that's an admission that given the choice between making children feel welcome in your district and maintaining the comfort of racists, your district chooses the comfort of racists. That is not a great district policy, no better than folks who suggested that Black students should not try to show u at newly-integrated sc hools because there would just be trouble. 

The district also says that it took this action because of Idaho's anti-diversity bill, which parallels the anti-diversity edicts comeing out of DC. While the Trump edict on DEI in education has been vague as hell, if this is how it's going to be interpreted, things are going to get extremely ugly. If it's discrimination against white people to admit that people of color exist and have just as much value as white folks--well, what would explain such a viewpoint?

Maybe it's the racism.

There's one more layer here, and the district seems to be missing this entirely. There's a world of difference between never putting that poster up in the first place and taking it down after it was already up. The latter is a pretty explicit rejection of the message, and it makes matters far worse.

West Ada is a bad harbinger of what's to come. If a public school system can't bring itself to say unequivocally, "All students are welcome here, and that means students of every race, religion, and creed" then we are in a bad place. If a school leader can't identify racism when we see it and call it wrong, they have really lost their way.