Uniformity Clauses, School Choice, and Undergrad Musings

Grove City College is just down the road from me, a school that has long enjoyed a reputation for producing excellent engineers as well as being somewhat conservative. I'm talking small-c conservative, the kind of school where young women supposedly went to earn their MRS degree. An activity for decades was to go to the lobby of the womens' dorm and have some room buzzed, then when the co-ed appeared in the lobby, the boys would rate her appearance with Olympic-style score cards. Hilarious. Friends, family, and untold numbers of former students have studied there; I've been the co-op for several student teachers from their program. 

Grove City is heavily endowed (lots of Pew/Sun Oil money there), which allowed it to make one of its few marks on the national scene, the case of Grove City College v. Bell. GCC's point was that since they accepted no federal dollars, they shouldn't have to fill out federal paperwork to show compliance with various policies (e.g. Title IX). The feds said, "Oh no-- since some of your students get federal aid, you fall under our umbrella."

GCC lost the lawsuit, so they simply stopped letting students use federal aid dollars and instead replaced all federal aid dollars with private supplemental $$. The feds passed a law to help plug some of the holes that the case revealed, but GCC was out from under their thumb. That was back in the 1980s. 

Somewhere in the last decade or two, Grove City College because a Conservative college. In 2017, PA Senator Pat Toomey raised a ruckus by adding a carve-out in a tax bill meant to exclude from taxation the endowments of colleges that don't accept federal funds; it was widely seen as a benefit for Hillsdale College (the Very Conservative Religious College beloved by the DeVos family), but of course it also worked for Grove City College as well. 

In 2005, the college set up its own thinky tank, The Center for Vision and Values, but in 2019 they stopped pussyfooting around and renamed it the Institute for Faith and Freedom. Lawrence Reed, a leader at the Mackinac Center, the Foundation for Economic Education, and former State Policy Network president, is a Grove City grad. The college launched its new Center for Faith and Public Life by signing on Distinguishing Visiting Fellow Mike Pence.

In 2009, GCC launched a relative rarity-- a law journal for undergrads. It had three purposes: 

to prepare students to succeed in law school by equipping them to become better readers, writers, and researchers; to expand the influence of Grove City College by distributing a scholarly publication; and to establish relationships among students, staff, faculty, and friends of the College.

The journal has published on a variety of issues, from abortion to the struggle between Libertarianism and Fusionism for control of the GOP. There's even a piece in Vol. 12 by Reed himself, a bit of a history lesson about Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. There are even radical theses, like the piece that argues that Milton Friedman didn't understand the Great Depression at all. 

The newest issue (Vol. 15) includes pieces by folks who are not connected to GCC, including the co-authors of the piece we've finally worked our way around to.

A. Caleb Pirc got his BS in Business Administration: Entrepreneurship from Liberty University, then went on to Regent University School of Law. Lili Pirc graduated from Pusch Ridge Christian Academy, then earned a BA in History from W.A. Franke Honors College (that's University of Arizona) before heading to Regent University School of Law. Regent University is a private Christian school in Virginia Beach, founded in 1996. Sam Alito and John Ashcroft have served on the faculty; Kristen Waggoner, the lead counsel on the Masterpiece Cake Shop, is an alumnus. 

Mr. and Mrs. Pirc both graduated in 2024 (yes, they're married). Now they've produced a "note" about how uniformity clauses might affect school choice programs-- "A Time for Choosing: The Impact of Uniformity Clauses in State Constitutions on School Choice Programs."

The authors posit that, having been frustrated by the Supreme Court's continued demolition of the wall between church and state, choice opponents will turn to "their new tactic to undermine school choice programs: uniformity clauses."

State constitutions use a variety of certain terms (laid out efficiently in this piece from the Education Law Center), including "thorough and efficient," "general," and "uniform." What they all have in common is a certain level of vagueness, and the Pircs' note hinges on that. We'll get there.

Right out of the gate, the authors' scholarship is suspect. The introduction's first sentence asserts that over the part few years there has been a "groundswell of parents concerned about the influence of the education system upon their children." The source? An article by DeVos's favorite voucher evangelist Corey DeAngelis in the right-wing Washington Examiner. They are moved by "the prevalence of harmful ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology" plus the "politization" of things like learning to read. No acknowledgement here of how such things came to be such a controversy (like, maybe, because certain privatizers deliberately stirred them up in an effort to sow distrust of public education), nor any data to show exactly how much of the parenting public was actually upset.

The authors dismiss state constitution restrictions on using public funds for religious purposes, saying that Espinoza and Carson "foreclose" this argument, and they may turn out to be right (at least as long as the current SCOTUS is in place). They point to other non-religious arguments made against choice programs, citing "The State Constitutionality of Voucher Programs: Religion is Not the Sole Component" by Preston Green and Peter Moran (Published in the Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal way back in 2010). 

Green and Moran list three non-religious provisions, leading with uniformity provisions "which require states to provide a uniform system of public schools."

Pirc and Pirc point out, not unfairly, that courts and legislators are a little fuzzy on the whole "uniformity of what" question. Uniformity of funding? School structure? Curriculum? Pirc and Pirc find that last one particularly scary--what if the state forces private voucher schools to follow the same curriculum that voucherphiles want to escape. I'm enjoying the image of, say, segregation academies forced to let Black folks in. We'd bette4r take a closer look, say the authors.

But first, a history lesson.

The modern school choice movement may date to the 20th century, but the authors assert that "parents’ ability to direct their child’s education existed long before then" and back when the nation was founded, "parents chose where and how to educate their children," which is certainly an interesting read on an era in which education was only available to sons of wealthy white families, or Puritan children who were required to attend the local religious school, and everyone else had no particular choice. This is a historical observation on par with Betsy DeVos's assertion that HBCU's were "pioneers" of school choice. 

It was a complicated time, but it surely didn't resemble a choicers utopia. But there's a footnote here, so there must be some legitimate source for--never mind. They're citing Milton Friedman. Then they claim that this heyday of parental choice was diminished when "the Common Schools movement catalyzed the proliferation of government schools."

They toss out some other examples of fledgling choice programs, then shines a spotlight on the Friedman's and their inspirational intellectual support for so many choice programs. "There are too many examples to list here," say the Pircs, which I suppose is why they complete skip over the post-Brown rise of school vouchers as a tool for reinstituting school segregation. 

The note considers three examples of uniformity clauses in action. 

Wisconsin's courts decided that the uniformity clause just meant that students had to have the opportunity to "attend a public school with uniform character of instruction," therefor charters were okay because students still had an "opportunity" to get that uniform education if they chose to.

Florida's uniformity clauses are more of a ceiling than a floor, say the Pircs, and the courts found that public funds may be used only for public schools. As we all know, Florida has successfully worked around that limitation via vouchers that pass public funds through third party parties. 

Idaho has a uniformity clause, but nobody has used it to challenge choice yet. Idaho's courts have established that there is no fundamental constitutional right to education. Idaho followed Wisconsin in deciding "uniformity" refers to curriculum, not funding. 

The Pircs float a couple of their favorite arguments here. First, "there is no system more uniform than one that gives each parent the same amount of dollars to spend for each child’s education, as a voucher system does." Which is a bit like arguing that if we give everyone in Pennsylvania a voucher amount for housing, everyone in the state will live in the same housing, whether they are rich or poor or live in Pittsburgh or Barkeyville. 

The Pircs also want to use the new SCOTUS appeal to history argument, and their historical argument is that centuries ago, Americans had school choice by parents. They do protest that choice programs "do not aim to turn time back to the pre-common school proverbial dark ages that required families without access to a school to scrounge up an education from the crumbs of the earth for their children" but instead offer parents access to both public and private schools. 

Except that of course they do not. First, private schools retain the right to accept or reject students (or families) based on religion, sexual orientation, or, in some cases, any reason they wish. Even clearing that hurdle, barriers of transportation and cost remain (particularly when private schools increase tuition to match voucher availability). Second, the drain on public schools can erode the public choice that is supposed to be there for all students.

The authors are writing this note ultimately to offer advice to choicers. Take a look at your state's uniformity clause, they say, and find out what the courts think it means, especially if it might mean that choice schools have to match public school curriculum. But they note confidently

For almost all states, the question is not whether school choice programs are constitutional but rather how to write them so that they are so.

 The Pircs also quote a central point from Komer and Neily:

Uniformity clauses, they argue, were designed to ensure that public schools possessed certain minimum characteristics, not to impose a limit on the “educational innovation and creativity” of legislators in executing their constitutional duties. “If a state chooses to go above and beyond that constitutional requirement, a uniformity provision should not be a bar.

There's yet another problem here-- the assumption that choice is somehow "above and beyond" the public system. But research has shown pretty conclusively that vouchers are mostly "below and behind" in their results for students. Nor have choice programs involved any notable innovation or creativity other than finding ways to pander to agenda that, as with those segregation academies, have little to do with education and lots to do with bias and culture wars. 

The Pircs offer one last point-- no system should preclude parents educating their child outside of the government system, and they try to assuage the fears of those choice opponents on the far right who see such programs as extending the power of the government. Do it right and that shouldn't be a problem, say the Pircs, who, I'll remind you, are fresh out of a lifelong education in strictly private Christian environments and so can more easily imagine havens walled off from the government, yet somehow fed with taxpayer dollars for which taxpayers don't want accountability. 

It's a tiny piece in a backwater journal, but we'll see if yet another argument for funneling taxpayer dollars to private institutions has legs. 

Musk's Robot Co-Teacher

The amount of sheer crap being cranked out to promote "AI" in education is staggering, a veritable Mauna Loa of marketing puffery masquerading as serious account of What The Future Holds. 

Take this piece from Carl Williams, who is listed as the "creator" of the article, which is just one of the 28 articles that Carl "Definitely Not An AI" Williams has "created" for Tech Times in the last week. It contains this very special sentence:

However, just like any tool and technology, AI can be used as a force for good in education.

Yessir-- any tool and technology can be a tool for good in education. Staplers, rocket boosters, chicken de-featherers, aglets, AK-47's-- all forces for good in education. Thanks for that insight, "Carl."

But at the top of our ed tech Krapatoa, we must make room for pieces like this one-- "Could Elon Musk’s AI Robots Save A Troubled Education System?" 

Classrooms where routine tasks are handled by a humanoid robot could soon be a reality. With 44% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. feeling burned out “often” or “always,” advanced AI robots could offer much-needed support.

This is one of many reactions to Tesla's "We, Robot" robopallooza which featured the humanoid robot Optimus. 

These robots, along with similar technologies, have the potential to integrate into various aspects of daily life, including educational settings, potentially revolutionizing how we approach tasks and combat issues such as teacher burnout.

The robot will cost between $20K and $30K, says Musk. "It'll basically do anything you want. So it can be a teacher or babysit your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of, it will do." Sure. Because mowing the lawn and teaching a human child are pretty much in the same class of activities. Writer Dan Fitzpatrick shows how little somebody (maybe himself, maybe Tesla's copy writer, maybe Musk himself) understands about teaching.

Could Optimus change how classrooms operate? As a teaching assistant, it could handle tasks like preparing materials and supervising students during activities. This could reduce the administrative burden on teachers, allowing them to engage more with students. In special needs education, Optimus could provide personalized instruction and physical assistance, improving the learning experience for students requiring extra support.

Yes, because if there's anything that would be easy to script AI programming for, it's teaching students with special needs. There is no reason to think that LLM have cracked the code of authoring teaching materials, nor is there any reason to think that housing an LLM in a human-ish body would somehow improve that capability and not add a whole other series of potential failure points to the tech. But I admit to wishing just a little bit that I could watch all the hilarity and chaos that would come from a Tesla robot trying to supervise a roomful of students, even the ones too young to consciously conclude "If no human being thinks I'm important enough to stay here and work with me, then why should I bother to work-- or behave-- at all?"

Fitzpatrick says he knows of a school that has the stack of money set aside to spend on this monstrosity should it ever appear on the market. Fitzpatrick also says that it's "important to note that the actual implementation of Optimus in classrooms is still theoretical." Rather like Tesla's self-driving cars. 

You may remember that the last time Musk trotted out a "robot," it was a guy in a suit (as hilariously lampooned by John Oliver). The staged roll-out of Optimus has many folks saying it sure looks as if the robots are just remote-controlled cyber puppets. 

Look, sometimes Musk's people do good work; the space-geek child within me is pretty squeed out that Space X managed to catch a booster rocket. But that strikes me as a hell of a lot simpler than programming Robby the Robot to teach American literature to sixteen year olds, let alone perform an imitation of human movement while doing it. It speaks to one of the most common issues of ed tech-- it's created by people who have absolutely no clue about what teaching actually involves. And this idea layers on other questions-- people mostly hated learning in isolation via screens during COVID, but would they like it better if the screen read itself to you and get up and walk around at the same time?

It's the modern ed tech pitch. Instead of "Here's a thing that the tech can actually do, right now, that will help you do your job" or even the old "Here's some technology that will help you do your job, if you will just go ahead and change the way your job is done," this pitch is the hard sell-- "This technology is inevitable, so you might as well get on board now." 

It's a display of childlike faith that tech execs still think that the threat of inevitability still carries weight. Musk alone has a long list of unmet promises ("Autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year" he said, in 2019). 

Fitzpatrick, however much he salts his cheerleading with "could" and "potentially," is in need of some serious restraint in his speculation.

These robots could significantly alter how we educate our children in the next decade or two. They could support teachers and provide personalized learning experiences, potentially leading to higher success rates and improved student well-being. Learning to live and work in collaboration with such technology will be an essential skill and introducing this at school could better prepare younger generations.

Sure. They could also perform surgery and pilot jumbo jet liners and become sandwich artists at Subway. But maybe, possibly, those highly complex activities will turn out to be too much for them, and also, why? Other than the possible chance for businesses to save money by firing humans, what problems does this solve? Also, "could better prepare younger generations" for what? Having to work with software than other human beings? Is too much human interaction some sort of problem that needs to be solved? Having reached a new near-consensus that smartphones should be kept out of the classroom, should we now insert a smartphone that can walk and talk?

Educators, policymakers and tech developers need to collaborate to thoughtfully integrate robots like Optimus into educational frameworks. As this technology advances, the question remains: Are we ready to embrace a classroom where robots and teachers work together to inspire the next generation? What do you think about the potential of robots like Optimus in education? Are we ready for this next technological leap in our classrooms?

Educators, policymakers and tech developers do not need to "collaborate." Tech developers need to stand back, shut up, and try to learn about teaching and see if they can identify some problems actual teachers actually have that tech could actually solve instead of showing up with their favorite solution and demanding that educators "collaborate" with them to help them crack open a market for their product. What me to "embrace" a human-robot classroom partnership? Then tell me what problems in education a robot would solve other than the problem of "How do we sell more of these robots?"

Of all the promises one could make about one's pretend hypothetical AI robot, why bring up education? What is it about education that is constantly leading amateurs to imagine that teaching is a simple process, easily reduced to simple algorithm-friendly steps and measurements? As long as there have been schools, there has been a steady parade of people who are sure they have invented--or at least come up with the concept of a plan-- a device that will revolutionize education by solving problems that they imagine need to be solved.

What do I think about the potential of robots like Optimus in education? First, I think that so far even Optimus is not a robot like Optimus. It's an idea, unrealized and poorly defined and lacking any specific capabilities that could be useful. The idea itself seems to me like a nightmarish, expensive, non-useful idea, but maybe when there's an actual robot that actually does teaching stuff, we can renew this conversation. 

In the meantime, if the tech sector could create a printer that works the ways it's supposed to even 95% of the time, that would be way more classroom help than an imaginary robot.

ICYMI: End of Season Edition (10/13)

We've reached the end of the Board of Directors' first season as cross country runners. As guys who would run all the time anyway, cross country turned out to be just the thing, but now we're done for the year (except for the pizza party tomorrow evening). So that was a fun new adventure, and we're all better for it. 

I have some things for you to read from the week. Remember that sharing the original source helps everyone, and amplifies the message. We can all be amplifiers.

Local private schools announce tuition hikes nearly a year after the passage of Iowa's school choice law

Reported by Kaelei Whitlach for Iowa's News Now, the news that private schools in Idaho continue to use voucher money to crank up school tuition. Happened last year, happening again this year. 

Nevada Asked A.I. Which Students Need Help. The Answer Caused an Outcry.

Troy Closson at the New York Times on one of the dumbest uses of AI so far. Sure, let AI decide which schools need aid to help educate at risk students, and keep the algorithm for making the decision a mystery.

How one hurricane-impacted school district pivoted to relief efforts after the storm

In North Carolina, one school turns out to be the backbone of the community.

Superintendent Ryan Walters' legal fees surpass $100,000 amid multiple lawsuits

Education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters has many distinctions racked up, and it turns out that this kind of public dysfunction doesn't come cheap. Congratulations, Oklahoma taxpayers.

Nine Reasons Why Standardized Tests and Grades Shouldn’t Necessarily Match Up

Nancy Flanagan talks some sense to the "teacher grades don't match standardized test grades because teachers stink" crowd.

Breaking the Public Schools

Jennifer Berkshire takes another big picture look at the dismantling of public education. 

Ohio’s capital budget quietly funded private school construction. Now, a national group is investigating

Ohio found a new way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. Now some folks would like to know a little more about this scam.

Restricting Education in Florida.

At Accountabaloney, Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at the stifling of education in Florida-- including hurting the chance of Florida students to be accepted by college.

Trump Just Took His Project 2025 Promise a Step Further

The New Republic looks at what Trump has to say about how what exactly he'll replace the department of education with, and it is more whackadoodle than you think.

Why an end-of-the alphabet last name could skew your grades

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at something you may not have even considered. Sire, a human classroom switches up the name order, but computerized instruction always puts the WXYZ crowd last, and it turns out that may cost them.

In a State With School Vouchers For All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them

Zero shocks here as this ProPublica piece explains one more way that voucher dollars mostly benefit the already-wealthy.

More on Walton and Barr Stakes in Voices for Academic Equity

Who's really behind those parents pushing policy? Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham connects the dots.

Elite colleges accused of price-fixing to make divorced parents pay more

And the College Board is behind it. Um-frickin-believable. Even if your deadbeat spouse refuses to help fund their child's college education, some schools will make you count their resources anyway. Danielle Douglas-Gabriel at Washington Post.

As teachers, we see the MCAS graduation requirement doing more harm than good

In Massachusetts, there's a big battle going on against the Big Standardized Test. Here some actual teachers make their case.

Framing the MCAS Opposition: “Business Community” or “Parents”?

Speaking of that debate, Boston media have unleashed some serious baloney on the argument, but Maurice Cunningham is not fooled.

Private school vouchers opposed by more than half of Pa. voters, poll shows

Turns out when you ask voters a question about vouchers that describes them accurately, the majority of voters are noy fans.

Amid parent complaints and national scrutiny, South Western School District boards up bathroom windows

From the York Dispatch. Our old friends at the right wing Independence Law Center tries harassing LGBTQ kids and got caught.

Teachers are Dangerous to MAGA

Anne Lutz Fernandez peels back some layers in the MAGA attack on teachers. It's not just a culture war.

Only a Harris-Walz Administration Would Protect Equity and Inclusion in the Public Schools

Jan Resseger makes her case for Harris-Wals on education.

The Return

After a long hiatus, Audrey Watters is back to the ed tech beat. It's a very welcome return. If you haven't been reading her other space, Second Breakfast, you should hop on there for great pieces like Luddites Win. There is nobody any better at writing sharp and incisive pieces that connect all the dots.

Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist

Rob Schenck was a major player in the Christian nationalist movement. He trained rich folks in shmoozing Supreme Court justices. He walked away, and this powerful piece in Mother Jones tells the story of how he reclaimed his faith by dropping the politics.

Meanwhile, at Forbes.com, I looked at the storm brewing around Oklahoma's religious charter school.

Check me out on substack. It's completely free. 

When Schools Are Businesses

Tech writer Cory Doctorow writes a lot these days about enshittification, for instance in this piece that spins from Prime's continued addition of advertising to the content you thought you had already paid for. The explanation isn't complicated:

The cruelty isn’t the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.

There's a lot to read about digital rights and chokepoints and music and videos and books, and there are some implications for education there (like, what happens when IP rights destroy your ability to use or adapt materials in any way other than that proscribed by the manufacturer, or require you to use standardized tests in ways that are not useful for you, but preserve the company's IP), but I want to focus on one aspect of enshittification-- the state where your "victory condition" is “a service that’s almost so bad our customers quit (but not quite).” As he explains:

The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn’t that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over.

But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it’s shooting for “keeping customers so angry that they’re almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite).”

So imagine this principle becomes a guiding principle for charters or voucher schools that are aimed at turning a profit, either directly or by the companies that run them. There is, as we often note, a zero sum problem there-- every dollar spent on students is a dollar that doesn't go into the company's bank account. 

Things would be hunky dory to start, with the choice school working hard to make customers happy. But the thing about schools is that the switching costs are large, so the point of "so angry that they're almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)" is a bit further along than for say, ordering books. Switching to buying books at bookshop.org rather than amazon is easy (and you should do it). Pulling a child out of class in the middle of the year and leaving behind friends, activities, academic processes-- that's pricey. 

Choicers love to talk about how market forces will create accountability because schools will work hard to keep those families delighted. This is a delightful fantasy, but the fact is that choice school-flavored businesses only have to keep families just happy enough. And choice schools have a couple of advantages over amazon. One, there's the human tendency to convince yourself that the choice you've made is great (choice-supportive bias). Two, choice schools only need to capture a small slice of the market to be successful. 

Someone is going to say, "Well, the same enshittification applied to public schools." It does not. There is no profit to be wrung out of public schools. If I skimp on materials for my classes, neither I nor anyone else get to pocket the savings. Administrations may be motivated to keep expenses down because the public won't give them the money to do more, but there is nobody calculating "I bet I could cut calculus classes, bank the money I would have spent on them, and no families will be upset enough to bail." It's a different calculation. If you give a public school more money, it goes to operating the school, but if you give an edu-business more money (or extract more money by making your product worse), somebody pockets it. 

Doctorow's ideas about enshittification explain a great deal of what sucks about the world we live in and why the invisible hand is not your friend. I hope it doesn't come to explain more about how education works.

Three Lessons from Management Guys

The Algorithm shows me a lot of stuff about management, and I encourage it because I'm fascinated by the issues surrounding management because 1) I think so many problems in this country are caused by plain old bad management and 2) the overlap of management stuff and classroom teacher stuff is fairly large and useful.

This clip gets better the longer it goes. It's Ben Askins, one management stuff guy, reacting to another management stuff guy clip, and they go through three things I want to touch on.

Asking questions.

This has the most limited use in a classroom. I am not a 100% inquiry learning guy-- many times it is quicker and simpler to just go ahead and explain the concept that you're trying to teach than forcing students to stumble around in the dark. Even  if you want to be the Guide on the Side rather than the Sage on the Stage, well-- do some guiding. If you are not in a classroom to share greater knowledge and understanding of the content, why are you there?

That said, if you simply hand students every answer every step of the way, they get mentally flabby and don't retain as much as you'd like. So the questioning approach has value.

Non-punitive accountability

Part of getting students to own their screw-ups (both academically and behaviorally) is to expect that accountability but at the same time not beat them up over it. That wrong answer they just offered does not have to prompt an expression or tone that suggests the student is a dope. Decoupling academic performance from their intellectual ability or worth as a human being avoids a world of hurt and trouble. And really, it's just basic respect for their humanity. Bonus points if you demand they show the same grace to each other. It's fundamental to making a classroom a safe place (I'm pretty sure it's the solution to the Great Cold Call Debate-- cold calls in a safe and respectful classroom aren't a big deal). 

A safe classroom doesn't mean a classroom in which a wrong answer is as good as a right answer, but it does mean a classroom where the students who gave those different answers are treated with the same respect. It's okay to be explicit; my response to wrong answers was sometimes, "No, that's wrong. But you are still ok, and you will still go on to lead a full and happy life." 

Same principle holds true for behavior issues. I have often told my Miss Gause story. She was my elementary music teacher, and one day she caught me in the back of the room mocking her conducting arm flapping. She called me up to the front of the room and paddled the flap right out of me (it was 1968). But what stuck with me was not the paddling, but the aftermath-- there was none. She didn't go on to treat me like some Bad Kid who would forever live in the shadow of that bad behavior. To put another way, the immediate consequence was the only consequence; too often teacher "consequence" for misbehavior is a lingering disrespect for the guilty student.

Fostering creativity and expression

Finally the point that if you tell your people you want them to "think outside the box" but you are "bellowing at them by 9:15 because of some tiny mistake" you will get zero creativity or innovation.  Same for the classroom. If there is only one right answer, and it is your answer, and all others will be shot down mercilessly, then your classroom will not be about exploring ideas or finding ways to express them-- it will be about trying to divine and reproduce the teacher's preferred answer.

This is doubly deadly in an ELA classroom. If you want students to express themselves freely, if you want them to practice forming and developing ideas and interpretations, then you have to support them in their attempts, no matter how far into the weeds they get. For students, every attempt to complete an assignment, respond to a question, participate in a discussion--that's taking a risk, and as the teacher, you get to manage how much of a risk that might be. If you want students to take risks, you have to make trying and coming up short an unintimidating prospect. 

This is so important in a classroom, where students are not just learning how to spit out the Right Answer, but learning how work out a Right Answer on their own. 

SCOTUS Won't Take On Parent Protest Lawsuit

You will recall, back what seems like a thousand years, folks like Chris Rufo whipped some counter-factual frenzies about the supposed presence of Critical Race Theory in public schools, with a side of masking and LGBTQ panic for good measure. 

This led to some parents absolutely going off the rails in school board meetings. This in turn led to a bunch of school board members (who in the majority of districts are simply citizen volunteers who did not sign up expecting violence and death threats) getting scared and sending up flares for help. Which led to the National School Boards Association asking the Biden administration for some kind of help.

That request included the unfortunate choice to liken the most extreme protestors to "domestic terrorists." The NSBA backed that bus right up and apologized, but anti-public school folks smelled blood and decided to press on the attack. In the process, folks on the right sort of fuzzied up the use of the phrase "domestic terrorists" so that in many retellings, it was Merrick Garland who was using it, even as he sicced the Department of Justice on parents just trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

That counterfactual narrative was useful for stirring up outrage, and that in turn led to a lawsuit back in 2022. The plaintiffs were an assortment of parents from Loudon, VA, and Saline, MI, and the law firm was the American Freedom Law Center, a Christian conservative shop that proudly went to fight against "lawfare."

The suit itself was not based on actual reality. In their press release about the suit, AFLC charged the "AG has pejoratively designated these parents and private citizens as ‘threats’ and ‘domestic terrorists,’" (he hadn't) and "that he was calling upon the FBI and federal prosecutors to use the overwhelming power of the federal government’s criminal justice system to target those parents who dare to publicly criticize the local school boards that are indoctrinating their children with a harmful and radical left-wing agenda disguised as school curricula" (nope, just the violent and death-threaty ones).

The plaintiffs kept losing all the way up to the Supremes, and I suppose they had reason to be hopeful, given that SCOTUS has been willing to overlook facts in order to hand victories to christianist folks before. 

But the Supremes passed on this appeal, so the lower court ruling stands, despite arguments citing authorities like an article in the Washington Examiner. The arguments for the AG pointed out some of the holes in the case.

Petitioners only have standing to sue if they show that Garland's memorandum targeted actions they were expecting to take. The memorandum was very clear that it was focused on "threats of violence and similar unlawful conduct." So unless the petitioners intended to break the law as their way of complaining, the memorandum had nothing to do with them. 

At no point does the AG actually call the petitioners "domestic terrorists." To that point, "Neither the Attorney General’s memorandum nor the FBI email refers to petitioners at all, much less brands them with any labels."

Some of the government's arguments are disingenuous, like the "just because we're collecting information and making files, that shouldn't be intimidating anyone." But there is also the reality of what happened next. The DOJ received (as of March of 2023) 22 reports of threats against school officials, and only six of those were referred to local authorities. So the massive crackdown on parents who just wanted to yell at board members about CRT programs never happened. Kind of like the Obama then Biden program to take away everyone's guns. 

At any rate, it looks like maybe this particular legal flap is over and done with. 

Curriculum As Foundation

I've had a tab open since July, an interview of Robert Pondiscio by Chris Herhalt looking at one particular chapter of the Hoover Institute's retrospective on the modern reform movement, which dates that movement to A Nation at Risk. That's one of the many bad signs about the tome, and there's plenty to disagree with, but I think curriculum is worth discussing.

Part of Pondiscio's shtick has always been one particular point: 

As I like to say, you go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. It’s just math, right? If you need four million of anybody doing anything, a number that large means a normal distribution of human talent.

I think you still have to take great care in how you say that. I was a teacher. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I think teachers are less than capable or cannot be trusted to make curricular decisions. If I said that, no one would listen, and rightfully so. The point is, we’ve made this job too damn hard for the teachers we have.

I'll admit that this point often raised plenty hackles for me, particularly back in the days when the modern reform message included "All educational problems are caused by the many, many terrible teachers in schools, so let's find them and fire our way to excellence." The terrible teacher theory was embraced by many sub-species of reformsters for a variety of reasons. For those who wanted to see teachers unions disempowered, firing a whole lot of teachers seemed like a good way to further that cause. For those who wanted to push school choice, it was one more way to sow distrust in public schools. For textbook manufacturers, it was good hook for selling a "teacher proof" program in a box. For technocrats, it dovetailed nicely with their belief that the whole system needed to be standardized, with all those messy individual human teacher variations smoothed out. Put all those together, and you got reformster ideas like hiring anyone with pulse to implement teacher proof programs as efficiently as a MacDonalds' fry cook. Or the undying idea that we can just find the super teachers and stick them in a classroom with a couple hundred students.

So when Pondiscio says you have take care in how you make the "teachers are only human" point, he's on the mark. 

I can quibble a bit. I do think the talent distribution for teachers skews toward the top of the bell curve because it is really hard to go into a classroom and suck day after day. The students will make your life miserable and drive you out the door well before any administrator ever gets around to putting you on an improvement plan. (On the other hand, given the huge number of underqualified teachers in class room these days-- roughly 7% of the teaching force-- maybe he's right).

The reformster theory of action for years was to use a big stick and threaten teachers into excellence, as if teachers all along knew how to be better but were just holding back until someone put the fear of God into them.

TLDR: A Nation at Risk ushered in an atmosphere in which teachers felt so besieged that it became hard to have a conversation about how they could be better.

But on this point I agree with him:

Any reasonable chance at improving outcomes for kids requires taking a good hard look at the demands that we make of the four million men and women that we have in our classrooms.

That list of demands is huger and getting steadily huger. Has been for years. Is there a problem in society that we want to see solved? Let's give it to the schools to fix it! Some of this makes practical sense-- schools might as well handle lunch programs because school is where students are at lunch time. Dealing with students issues stemming from trauma and difficult homes and societal problems etc etc etc-- we can say that shouldn't be the school's problem and teachers should "just teach," but when a student comes into the classroom, she brings all her baggage with her into the school and it will be hard to "just teach" her until we somehow find a way to help her set that baggage aside.

The thing Pondiscio believes can be lifted off teachers' backs is curriculum. However "the sun will go out," he says, "before we have a national curriculum in this country." So never mind that idea. 

I wish more folks would give up that dream. Waves of reform-- No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and decades of the Big Standardized Test can be understood as attempts to influence/control local curricula from DC, while circumventing the Constitutional prohibition against federal curricular meddling. But that's like trying to trim a bonsai shrub with a dull scalpel toed to the end of a forty-foot pole. Worse, so many of these attempts were steered by people who knew far too little about teaching. And yet in too many places, the Big Standardized Test became the de facto curriculum.

There is no doubt that being a teacher set adrift in a classroom with no scope or sequence or coherent materials just sucks, increasing the mental load of teaching by a hundredfold (I speak from experience). I'll also argue till my eyeballs dry up that a scripted, detailed curriculum (on Tuesday, at 9:15 a.m., the teacher will say "Today we will study the prepositions that begin with the letter b") is a straightjacket that kills any hope of excellent teaching. 

But I agree that all roads lead to curriculum. It's an important piece of teacher support as well as coherence across the system. It improves instruction, gives teachers room to breathe, and even helps with classroom management (step one in classroom management is to know what you're doing and do it with purpose). 

So what features does a curriculum need to make a good foundation for a system?

Content matters.

Here's a point on which Pondiscio and I have always largely agreed-- you can't teach reading as a set of discrete and transferable skills that exist in a vacuum, somehow apart from the actual content being read. Content and the background knowledge it fosters are critical for reading. But the standards movement and its Big Standardized Test have moved us in exactly the opposite direction, to the point that tests often feature topics about which students are unlikely to have any background knowledge (ancient Turkish political systems for elementary students) in an attempt to rule out background knowledge as a factor when testing for "skills." 

Pondiscio argues that a coherent and consistent body of knowledge can be part of the glue that holds us together as a society. That's a valid point. But it also helps build a ladder for learning. When I taught 11th graders Heart of Darkness, we could open up all sorts of new ideas by looking back at one of their 10th grade novels, Lord of the Flies. 

Flexibility.

This summer Auguste Meyrat wrote a piece for Real Clear Education entitled "How to fix the problem of rogue teachers" (in which Pondiscio is quoted on some adjacent issues). Part of the solution for "rogue teachers" is not to create a system that requires them to go rogue to use any of their own professional judgment. 

This is yet another education issue that requires a delicate balance that has to be checked and adjusted every day for the rest of forever. There is no set it and forget it. For an English class, that means the list of works needs to be revisited every year or two. It may mean a curriculum that leaves a spot for the teacher to fill as they best judge.

Two stories. One of my teaching colleagues regularly finished the year with her 12th grade honors class by studying Paradise Lost, culminating in a trial in which they had to argue whether or not Milton had successfully justified the ways of God to man in the work. The trial was run by one of the county judges, and the jury was a combination of teachers, former students, and local attorneys. Only someone with her love of Paradise Lost and with connections to local legal establishment could have pulled it off. Her seniors came back after their official school days were over just to work on this, and underclassmen begged to go watch. It was hugely successful on a variety of levels. Should it have been dropped so that we could adopt a different curriculum "with fidelity." Should her successor in the job have been forced to do the unit, despite not having the tools?

One unusual year, I had a group of fifteen-ish 11th graders, of whom nearly a dozen were either pregnant or parents. My reading and writing units ran on a great deal of discussion, and while every year the concerns and interests of the students are a little different, for that class, they were really different, and it affected the work that I assigned. These were not college-bound students, but they were not the kind of students for whom their life was some vague thing waiting off in the future. They were focused and interested in the things that mattered to them. Should I have been chained to a static curriculum that required me to say, "Sorry, I know you care about that, but we don't have time for it." 

Pondicsio says that it's universal for teachers to dismiss "boxed curriculum" as something that "won't work for my kids." I don't know about that. I expect more of us say something along the lines of "that won't work for all my students all the time." A district hires a teacher for her professional skills and judgement and her own body of knowledge. It seems like a waste not to give her room to use it, just as it seems a waste for her to just wander off into the Land of Do As You Please. Like I said, an endless job of balancing.

The flexibility is doubly important if we're talking about a state-level curriculum. A curriculum that is going to fit urban schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as rural schools in my county cannot be too narrow and inflexible to fit both.

Weather the Storms.

There are no new debates in education. The phonics debate has raged for almost as long as there has been print; "reading wars" is plural because there are so many of them. I was in my forties before I learned that the math world has a couple of camps, including the pure math camp (students need to understand the theories and principles behind the math) and the practical camp (just get the right damn answer). Think theoretical physicists versus engineers. 

Is Shakespeare in or out? And if he's in, should he have the dirty parts removed, because we also argue infinitely about keeping Naughty Books out of school. Who else should be in or out of the canon? Pondiscio is a fan of E. D. Hirsch, but not everyone digs Hirsch's particular canon.  Should special needs students be mainstreamed or have dedicated classrooms? There are business-based educationists who think schools should be strictly focused on preparing meat widgets to be useful to them. And all this is before we get to all the folks whose idea of curriculum is loosely based on What I Learned When I Was In School. I am regularly told, once folks discover I'm a teacher, that it's just awful that schools don't teach Latin or cursive any more (two subjects I am perfectly happy to see fade into obscurity). And I'm an English teacher who sees no value in teaching grammar as anything but a very specific tool for reading and writing. And when it comes to writing, I cringe at curriculum like Philadelphia's new sentences then paragraphs then essays program, a step back to decades past.

I could go on, but you get, I hope, the point--education includes a few hundred pendulums all swinging back and forth, goosed into action every time someone announces, "I know what's wrong and I know what we have to do to fix it!"

A solid curriculum must be able to weather all of these storms, surviving the wrenching back and forth. Way, way, way too many educational ideas are based on the premise, "Once X is implemented, all students will learn Y. X is right, so this debate is decided and will never be opened again." That trick never works. And it's a huge pain when a pendulum swings and leadership decides, "Well, we need to scrap the whole thing. Again. So we can pursue the next Big Education Miracle." 

This is part of why flexibility matters-- if the curriculum is too static and unbending, it will eventually break. 

Teachers in the loop.

If a curriculum is simply done to the people who have to implement it, it is doomed. 

My district, like many, went through regular cycles of "curriculum development," in which teachers were (sometimes) invited into a conference room, where our job was to come up with the correct answers for building a curriculum (aka the answers that someone else had already decided on). It's kind of amazing how rarely the product was not even finished, less amazing how rarely they were actually used.

Most teachers are also familiar with the program adoption in which someone comes in to explain that if you just change everything about how you do your job, this New Thing will be great. I have noted often how over the course of my career, the state's program presentations shifted from earnest attempts to get us to buy in over to "Shut up and do as you're told." 

The most useful curriculum I've had was developed by my department, on our own, because we wanted the kind of help that a structured scope and sequence would provide (I suppose we were what Rick Hess would later call "cage busters"). But we were a seasoned group with plenty of tools and a willingness to devote the time up front that would make our lives easier down the road. One advantage was that it was really easy to tweak and alter the curriculum as needed.

My experience is not possible in all situations, but teachers have to be part of the process somehow. That includes regularly asking them questions such as "Is this working?" and "What do you need to support using this?" on top of the usual supports for training and materials.

Bottom line

The ultimate measure of a curriculum is not its ideological purity or its alignment with the education fad du jour or, God forbid, raises test scores. The measure is "Does it help the teacher do a good job?" I freely admit that "good job" is doing planet-scale lifting here. Nevertheless, it's the measure that matters because it points us back at the flexibility--the beginning ordinary mortal teacher needs different supports than the seasoned veteran teacher.

When it comes to teaching materials, programs, policies, etc I was always a pragmatist-- things that help me do the job are good, and things that get in my way are not. A curriculum that is solid enough to provide a foundation for work and a framework for daily instructional decisions, but loose enough to allow me some freedom to adapt to the students in front of me and adaptable enough to change with reflection and shifting time-- that's a curriculum worth having.