Kansas School Founder Wants To Run Iowa

Sometimes I follow up old post subjects, but this time was special. I went to follow up on a wealthy Koch-related private school in Wichita, Kansas, and what I found was a guy running for governor of Iowa.

Back in 2018, the Wonder school was launched by Charles Koch's daughter-in-law, a recognizable iteration of the Rich Person Has Big Insights About Education model of edu-preneurship. 

“I’m mostly just a mom that’s passionate about education for her kids,” said Annie Koch, 33, a mother of three children, ages 5, 3 and 3 months. You start to realize, ‘Actually, my kids spend more time at school than they spend with me.’

The really wealthy Koch daughter-in-law teamed up with Zach Lahn, whose star began to rise when he was just a college student, bouncing from campaign to campaign to earn his stripes as a seasoned GOP operative. He ended up working for the Koch-backed astro-turf advocacy group Americans for Prosperity as Montana state director, where he drew press for the bone-headed move of declaring that "millions of Montanans" opposed Medicaid expansion, which is quite a claim for a state that only has a million residents.

Lahn then moved to the Koch's Youth Entrepreneurs program. How did he end up qualified to run a school? He and his then-wife had kids (ages 4 and 3). Anyway, he said, "We're not inventors. We're just parent catalysts." Lahn's "aw shucks, I'm just a regular guy" shtick compared with a certain not-from-around-here quality would turn out to be very on brand.

The Wonder school will seem familiar to anyone who has A) looked at these rich school launchers for a while or B) recently followed the deep dive into Alpha schools. 

Wonder touts itself as an alternative to a strawman version of public ed, claiming that such schools are regimented and focus on memorization and "testing of rules and facts" through "worksheets just like our grandparents used." Like a factory. 

But at Wonder, students will "work collaboratively like at Google or Facebook," a claim that would be a real hoot for people working under shitty conditions for those companies. But hey-- at Wonder everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. In fact, there are not actual teachers-- just "guides" (like MIT students). They are organized into four studios for different age groups (Wonder started as 3-11 but now handles ages 3-18). Enrollment, according to Niche, is 90, with 33% of graduates going on to college. But they are a bargain, with highest tuition at $10,000.

 

The day at Wonder starts with a morning Socratic Discussion, the morning focuses on Core Skills, and then after lunch, the afternoon is devoted to Quest-- "hands-on work, team-building challenges, sciences, coding, entrepreneurship, art & music, history." 

Financially, it appears that Wonder is a disaster. It has run a deficit for five of six years, and the Lahns have plugged the gap with their own previously-Koch money to the tune of $4.5 million, as reported by Tim Carpenter at Iowa Starting Line. 

Prenda, Alpha School, Altschool -- over and over we get the same tale of a wealthy education amateur who has a sudden epiphany and realizes they know how to do school so much better than the "professionals," and then proceed to re-invent the wheel with the added insight that all those wheel professionals screwed up by not making the wheel flat on one side. 

But while other edu-preneurs settle for starting a business (or getting guinea pig children to start one for them) Lahn has higher aspirations.

First, let's get the tea out of the way. Many, many, many, many people on the interwebs would like to tell you a story about the working relationship between Annie Koch and Zach Lahn. What we know for certain is that around late 2019, they divorced their respective spouses and married each other. Now, it's a fool's game to pretend to know what happens between people in their personal relationships, but the divorce draws attention because Lahn didn't bring a lot of money into the new marriage, but Annie brought some Koch money with her.

In 2024, Annie Lahn bought a home near Wichita as her primary resident, then sold it to an LLC for $1. Why does anyone care? 

Because Zach Lahn is now running for governor of Iowa. 

Wichita, as you may recall, is not actually in Iowa. But Lahn has been running hard, with a $3 million war chest, $2.5 million of which he loaned to his own campaign. Lahn's campaign was endorsed by former U.S. representative Steve King actor Rob Schneider and Turning Point Action, but not Donlad Trump, whose endorsed candidate Lahn beat in the GOP primary.

Lahn is running as the "Iowa First" candidate despite the many questions about where he actually lives, including journalists finding that he still lives in Wichita and flies into Iowa for campaign events (Lahn is a pilot). He bought his great-grandmother's farm in Belle Plaine, where he lived as a child. And he is, amazingly enough, running as a political outsider. From his website:

Zach Lahn is not a politician but another Iowan like you. He is a father, farmer, and a businessman. He is 6th generation Iowan, his own biggest donor, and does not answer to large corporations or special interest — only to God, his family, and the people of Iowa.

 "Seasoned political operative" doesn't make his list of occupations. He has secured support from Trump and connected himself to MAHA--the MAHA  Action PAC gave the campaign a million bucks.. He has interviewed with Jordan Peterson, and the school's website used to call the founders "fans of Elon Musk" and "fans of Jordan Peterson." Those references have since been removed. 

His education platform opposes "indoctrination" and says the governor "must be the #1 advocate for public school kids." Make public schools "good so they are competing with private schools." 

Poll averages put Lahn around 4 points behind Democrat Rob Sand, so who knows how this will play out. But it would be the first time that somebody goosed a major political career by using Koch-flavored money to start a half-baked private school. 

Anti-Democracy In America

The through line for MAGA politics is simple enough. Some people are better than others, and everything wrong with this country can be traced to efforts to lift up people who do not deserve to be lifted up. 

Poor people are poor because they deserve to be poor, and policy efforts to lift them up are bad and wrong (so axe the social safety net). Some people have less power and status because they don't deserve to have more power and status, and policy efforts to give them more power and status are wrong (so wipe out DEI and deport all the people who don't deserve to be here). And if you find the policies of the Trump-Kennedy health department baffling--well, some people deserve to get sick and even die and it would be best for society if disease were allowed to get the weak and undeserving out of the herd.

And education? As we've noted before, the fact that current school choice policies will create multiple tiers in society, a multi-level system that sorts folks into their "rightful place"-- that's a feature, not a bug.  

Because some people are better, more important, more worthy of power and privilege than others.

In the new book Country of Lords, Kim Phillips-Fein takes us back through the history of the US to show that these anti-democratic ideas have always been with us. Even as Thomas Jefferson was penning the words 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Plenty of our founding fathers were plenty afraid of the lower classes. Gouverneur Morris (a less-lauded founding father) wrote that if they gave votes to people without property "they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them." John Adams was worried that there would be civil unrest caused by people getting the poors all worked up about their alleged new rights; the rich, he argued, are people too, who should not suffer violent social upheaval. Adams wrote that the poor were "destined for labour" while "the rich, by advantage of education, independence and leisure are qualified for superior stations." He did not write suggestions for making those advantages available to all. 

In this Adams was in tune with the southern states, where colonists had come to establish a new sort of aristocracy, with the same social levels found back in Europe.

By the mid-19th century, of course, these ideas about who was or was not entitled to treatment as a human being (let alone an equal one) were well under way. We remember Stephen Douglasa as that guy Abraham Lincoln debated, but oh boy-- he had some thoughts. Phillips-Fein points out that, like many, Douglass was okay with a variety of laws because he did not believe different races were equal. It's a point worth remembering today-- the idea of the Rule of Law, that the same rules should apply to everyone, only makes sense if you believe that all people are equal, that nobody is any better than anyone else.

Phillips-Fein spends some time with William Graham Sumner, a popular Yale professor who pushed hard for the intellectual arguments for inequality.  His ideas were influential then and recognizable today.

Central to his principles was an absolute rejection of empathy, sympathy, and social obligation. For Sumner, the central fact of life was competition, and the winners deserved and in fact needed to have control over the economic resources of society.

The social Darwinists rejected any and all attempts to equalize society, labeling such efforts as "evil socialism" and an attempt to buy the votes of the undeserving. Wrote Sumner in 1883

[A] drunkard in the gutter is where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.

The fact that someone had great wealth was proof they deserved it. Folks like Sumner thought hierarchy was an essential part of liberty, just as modern anti-democrats argue that people are most free when they are allowed to remain in their proper place (see also: every argument saying women lost liberty when they entered the workplace instead of staying home). 

Not all of these folks rejected any social obligation. Phillips-Fein offers Andrew Carnegie as an example of someone who believed that the different classes had an obligation to each other-- but they still needed to stay in their proper place. Not a way of thinking that has disappeared; think Betsy DeVos and her belief that students should get the education that is a good fit for them, i.e. best suited for their class in life.

And religious folks were right there with these ideas. Phillips-Fein cites a sermon from Baptist preacher Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, in which he points out that we should sympathize with "God's poor" but still remember that "there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else."

The dawn of the 20th century saw the rise of what Phillips-Fein calls utilitarian racists. There was a tremendous fear of the country being "polluted" and "corrupted" by many immigrants of the wrong sort. "They were not only committed to segregation," she writes, "but obsessed with law and order and afraid of immigration, especially of Eastern European Jews and Italians." Journalist Theodore Lothrod Stoddard (whose mother had pulled him out of public school to keep him away from mill workers' children) wrote about the threat of the "Under-Men." 

He and others railed against the romantic fantasy of equality and egalitarianism, a fiction being used by evil conspirators who wanted to use it to seize power. Popular eugenicist Madison Grant wrote "The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Stoddard, in his hugely popular 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization, explained that the reason race mattered was because it assigned people their proper place in the economic hierarchy. Democracy, he would later point out, was never intended for a nation "breeding freely" with the wrong sorts of people. In another piece of writing, he was still more blunt. 

Our Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal; this is not true. It says this is self-evident; this is absurd.

None of these racist anti-democrats, she points out, were fringe thinkers. Stoddard was a best-selling author. Others were what we would now call "thought leaders." It may be that only the rise of Hitler and German Nazism tarnished their ideas enough to shut them up, for a while. 

In the post-war country, Phillips-Fein turns to corporate anti-democrats like the influential Frederick Winslow Taylor, the man who brought "efficiency" to the industrial world. Taylor's whole approach rested on inequality, on the idea that some people were to be the brains of a company, while others needed to take their place as meat widgets on the factory floor, supervised and micro-managed and surveilled so that the machinery of the factory could run smoothly. They were Lessers in the same way that Amazon warehouse workers are Lessers today, their humanity ignored so that they can give their sweat and blood to the company (cheaply).

Thus setting the stage for her chapter "Market and Meritocracy," in which we find that maybe we can find some Betters in unexpected places. Let's give students a Scholastic Aptitude Test so we can further sort the deserving from the undeserving. Once again, some folks decide the purpose of education is to sort the deserving meritorious from the undeserving chaff so we can get the deserving up into the higher classes where they belong. Wrote John Gardner, who headed up the Carnegie Corporation (Andrew's philanthropic outfit) and would later be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Johnson, "Every educational system is, among other things, a device for sorting people out."

And of course here comes our old friend Milton Friedman, whose assertion is that the free market is an excellent mechanism for sorting the deserving winners from those who deserve to be on the bottom. I've discussed these ideas at length elsewhere.

Bringing us up to the technocrats, and we are all living through their ideas about equality. As Phillips-Fein explains it. "Society would--they argue--be less chaotic, more orderly, more just, were it governed by an all-powerful CEO, a businessman-king, in a manner similar to the revolutionary start-ups of Silicon Valley." 

It's a model reminiscent of the reformster wave of twenty-ish years ago, and it also fits MAGA and their devotion to Emperor Dear Leader.

There's a lot to absorb from Phillips-Fein's book, which is both comforting and alarming-- we are not living through something brand new, but by the same token, there's no future in which it is eradicated forever. We have been fighting for the most basic premise of our country for 250 years, and it has never gone away. It is one of the central ironies for a country chock full of ironies-- a major portion of our citizenry and leaders simply reject one of the premises on which the country was founded. 

Given this 250-year-old debate, it is no wonder that settling on and pursuing a clear mission for schools remains outside of our grasp. Are all of our students deserving of the same worth and regard, or are they best served by a system that fits them for a particular role that suits their future status. Do we need to provide the best possible education for every child, or do we need to provide the education that best sorts them out and prepares them for their proper place in life? Schools live down hill from the culture, and the culture can't decide what it believes, and all that contention flows right into schools. I know what I believe about the equal value of all humans, but this book is a reminder of the many ways my countrymen have--and continue to-- disagree with me. 

Court Slaps Down Anti-DEI Ed Cuts

In 2025, the Trump administration put through an education budget that slashed the living daylights out of education. Some cuts were sneaky, combining various items into one item that was to be funded by less than the combined total of the previous separate items. Others were just axed entirely.

The cut programs included some teacher preparation items, like the teacher-supporting grant programs like the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) program and teacher and school leader incentive grants. The explanation offered in the Department of Education's budget request was "Elimination of this program is part of the Administration’s overall effort to restore fiscal discipline and reduce the Federal role in education." The other explanation was that these programs had too much DEI, focusing too much on "divisive ideologies," one of the great bullshit phrases of this administration. Divisive how? Dividing what from what? Because I'm pretty sure Dear Leader has some pretty divisive ideas of his own. 

But last week, the legal challenge to the cuts from eight states finally received a ruling from US District Judge Angel Kelley, who said the cuts were “arbitrary and capricious." Says the judge, the administration can't even define DEI.

As The Hill reported, 

“Rather than confining the Directive to actions that are traditionally understood to constitute discrimination, the record instead reflects that Defendants terminated grants with topics such as ‘acknowledging … racism’ and ‘anti-racism’—activities expressly undertaken to oppose discrimination,” Kelley wrote.

In other words, she rejected the administration's bizarro-world position that the real discrimination happening in this country is against white guys, and any policy that centers some other group is discriminatory and illegal.  

Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Education Department, said, “Taxpayer dollars should support preparing teachers for meaningful student learning, expanding the pipeline of high-quality teachers, and retaining top talent — not funding divisive ideology or racial preferences.”

The lawsuit had previously been before a different judge who called to stop the cuts, but the Supreme Court, in one of their special We Don't Have To Explain Ourselves rulings, lifted the injunction.

Kelley's ruling is only one step in a longer journey, as the states will have to take a lawsuit to the Court of Federal Claims if they want to recover any of the money that the feds cut. So good luck with that. Will it affect next year's budget? Stay tuned. 

On Reactions To That Nikole Hannah-Jones Piece

Apparently everybody anywhere in the education orbit is whipping through the Nikole Hanah-Jones piece in which she recounts the story of sacrificing her daughter's schooling on a matter of principle, and coming to regret it. She could have gotten her child into an upscale New York school. Instead, "Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black." Leading to the moment when her teen asks her if she knew the schools were "that bad" when she enrolled the daughter.

The discourse around the piece has been loud, and ordinarily I don't use my perch as a well-regarded C-level blogger to add to what more widely-read writers have to say. But I've been struck by several things that haven't turned up in much of the reactions, so here are my thoughts, in no particular order.

1) NHJ is describing a challenging decision that has been made a gazillion times by less famous people who didn't get as much attention. It has been an issue as long as we have had schools-- if you have the privileged ability to get your child away from a less-than-optimal school situation, do you use it, or are you betraying the people who don't have your privilege? But while I have definite ideas about the policy issues involved in school choice, I would never expect a parent to do anything other than what they think is best for their child. 

2) I get tired of discussion centered on the New York City school system, a system that by virtue of its size and complexity and politics (there are about 300,000 more students in the NYC school system than there are human beings in the state of Wyoming) is not an example of anything but itself. There isn't a single district in my entire state that can learn anything from NYC schools. Put another way, I see no more reason for my local district of 1,800 students to receive constant national attention than there is to pay that kind of attention to NYC's system. 

3) Much of the discourse rightly centers on the problems of a system that is highly segregated and which provides the least resources to the non-wealthy and non-white. It would be lovely if NHJ's piece opened up a meaningful discussion about those issues but, predictably, it has not. Instead, everyone is saying what they always say, yelling "Aha!" and rushing to make their usual arguments. Some of these arguments are dumb-- family exit from a school is exactly what should happen because that would make schools like this one better, except that, of course, the threat of exit already exists for that school and yet it has not been spurred to greatness by market forces. Some of the arguments are broadly correct, but not particularly helpful-- yes, racism certainly fuels the segregation of students and resources in the city system. But I haven't seen a single reaction today that made me think "Well, that's a useful new tack" or even "Nice to see someone nuancing their position." Mostly (mostly) just a hundred variations of "I told you so and now I will tell you so again."

4) NHJ's story underscores the importance of engaged and caring teachers, supportive staff, and parents who are willing to engage and push the school. And it also shows the ways that school choice segregate students not only by class, but by ability. NHJ writes, "Because they serve students who have been educationally neglected long before they arrive at their doors, schools like Unison are often faced with no good choices."

5) And while everyone fires off simple-answer responses to the piece, one of the educators that NHJ talks to says

“There’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once. We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who’ve not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed. And they understand all of it, and they understand none of it, all at once.”

And while many commenters have flattened NHJ's raw and honest examination of her position, if you actually read the piece (and you absolutely read the piece and maybe skip most of the pieces about the piece), at the very end you find this  

Black children in New York’s schools, and this nation’s, are as segregated now as they were a decade ago, two decades ago, three. And in profound ways, we’ve actually moved backward, with a federal government that no longer gives even lip service to integration but instead is weaponized against it.

We desire to be let off the hook by these realities — that we tried and we failed; by the shamble of decades of halfhearted efforts; by how insoluble it is to achieve equality in a nation with our history. Instead of fortifying our determination to fight for integration, we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent.

But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.

 

ICYMI: Neighborhood Reunion Edition (9/20)

My family moved down here from New Hampshire when I was 9; our new home was on a street at the back of a development, and I grew up there with an assortment of other kids playing four square and just generally hanging out harmlessly. My best friend back on Beech Drive was a guy with whom I collaborated on a variety of shenanigans. Then while we were at college his family moved away, and we have had little face to face contact since (yay, internet). But this weekend he's in town for his 50th high school reunion, and we got together this morning. 

So while I can play the old fart card and waggle my fist at clouds and how Kids These Days don't appreciate the simple joys of playing with balls and chalk and other carbon based life forms, I must also praise the modern technology that makes it so much easier to maintain and revive connections to the people in our lives. If only our tech overlords weren't so committed to making it worse.

Got some reading for you this week. Remember to share.

Florida’s New Education Commissioner Doesn’t Want Government to Run Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports on the new Florida education honcho, who is pretty unabashed in his desire to do away with public schools as we know them.

Natalie's volleyball team cut 40 girls. They didn't find another sport: they found their phones

Jenny Anderson at "How to be brave" tells the story of one youth athlete who found a way around the mess that is youth sports these days.

The $75k-a-year private school encouraging kids to go viral on Twitter

Ben Riley's take on Alpha School has, among other things, highlighted the old school model of how blogging and journalism go together. You remember-- a blogger hits a story and then "regular" press picks it up. Sometimes it's subtle (I've seen more than a few instances of reporting that eerily echoes something I've written) and sometimes the reporters call you up and then build on your work. Here's Ezra Wallach at the San Francisco Standard expanding on Riley's work.

Slop schools

And here's Will Austin's piece that originally ran in the Boston Globe. Lots of folks have something to say about Alpha now.

Click Here to Comply

Nobody better than Audrey Watters to remind us just how not-a-new-idea Alpha Schools are

Helicopter Parenting May Be Doing More to Kids’ Brains Than You Think

Robyn Shulman at Inc. looks into some research that shows the ways in which helicopter parenting is Not A Good Thing. 

Music Class and Showing Up: What Eight Years of Rhode Island Student Data Tell Us

Bob Morrison reminds us that research shows a strong link between arts participation and regular school attendance.

Inside the Outrageous Collapse of a ‘Montessori Ponzi’

I wrote about these folks a while back, and they are still a failed grifty nightmare. Claire Suddath covers the story quite thoroughly for the New York Times.

School choice proponents say it offers families more options – but those don’t always extend to immigrant students

William McCorkle and Beth Lloyd at The Conversation explaining yet again that school choice doesn't work for everyone. How about immigrant students?

Mississippi school district released from federal desegregation order after 50 years

Chris Williams reports for Fox9.

Educational Guilt

Nancy Flanagan responds to the people who thinks that teaching should just be the process of dropping facts into brains. 

I’m a Writing Tutor at Harvard. The College is Failing Us.

Many excellent lines in this, for example, "The College is actively demonstrating that it would rather cut what’s hard to measure than defend what’s hard to replace." Well worth a read on the question of whether it's a great idea to replace human beings with AI.

US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say

Your "just how stupid is AI" story for the week. This is the CNN story that supposedly got them kicked out of the White House.

Some very cool swing.

Does McMahon Want To Let Teachers Teach?

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced this week (September 17) an initiative from her old buddies at the America First Policy Institute-- the Let Teachers Teach Coalition-- which appears to borrow from the Moms for Liberty playbook.

The headline at Fox News is "Pro-Trump group leads new coalition to undercut teachers unions." The America First Policy Institute is an advocacy outfit formed in 2020 as a sort of holding pen for Trump admin folks and other MAGA. McMahon served as a leader in that group for years. As for education--well, AFPI produced a paper in 2023 that rejects the notion of any sort of collective responsibility for educating all children argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That message is very much at the heart of the dismantling movement, which is all about a policy of "I'll take of my own kids and what Those People do is not my problem."

Currently, the chairman of the board is Larry Kudlow, with Greg Sindelar (of the Texas Public Policy Foundation) as interim president and CEO. They also have a bunch of sub-chairs, including Kellyanne Conway (Chair, American Child), Riley Gaines (Chair, America First Athletes Coalition), Bobby Jindal (Chair, Healthy America), and Erika Donalds (Chair, Education Opportunity and leading Florida privatization activist). Besides McMahon, nine other AFPI "alum" are in the current administration (including Pam Bondi). We could dig deeper, but you get the picture-- this is a big bucket of Trumpian MAGA stew. 

For all that, the rollout of LTT includes lots of rhetoric that doesn't sound so bad. Here's Erika Donalds announcing the new "coalition"

Great teachers enter the classroom to educate, inspire, and prepare the next generation, and often end up taking the blame for rogue school boards and woke mandates that they had no say in. The Let Teachers Teach coalition will elevate the voices of educators who believe in scholarly achievement, parental partnership, and putting students first. I am honored to be a part of this work to empower teachers and restore excellence in American education.

And that doesn't sound too bad if you aren't familiar with the rhetorical vocabulary of the MAGA crowd.

The mission, as listed on the coalition web page, is also pretty tame sounding:

Build a national coalition that elevates the voices of teachers and equips educators to drive change where many of the policies affecting their classrooms are decided, at the local school board and district level

 The policy priorities are okayish. For instance:

Reward Teacher Excellence

Advance local and state policies that recognize great teachers, expand opportunities for professional growth, and promote classroom discipline, school safety, strong academic standards, and student achievement.

Merit pay remains a dumb idea that has eternal appeal to some folks, despite the fact that it mostly doesn't work. And these priorities are starting to sound familiar, albeit anodyne.

Reduce Bureaucracy Burdens

Fight back against district-level mandates that take teachers away from teaching, reduce unnecessary paperwork and administrative burdens.

Sure, who doesn't love that idea.

Restore Classroom Freedom & Civics Education

Empower teachers to lead their classrooms and work with local school boards to keep political activism and divisive ideology out of the classroom and embrace civics education through a patriotic perspective.

Oh, well, now the dog whistles are getting louder. "Divisive ideology" is anything that disagrees with MAGA ideology (except that, or course, MAGA ideology isn't "ideology," it's just "common sense truth"). Political activism isn't, say, demanding release time for Sunday School classes or stamping out displays of anything with rainbows or crusading for book bans. Ideology certainly isn't demanding that only a "patriotic" view of history be presented.

And as long as they're letting the mask slip, there's this fourth policy priority

Put Teachers Before Unions

Ensure teachers, not political organizations, are the leading voices in school board, district, and state policy decisions affecting their classrooms and careers.

As long as these folks have been around, the refrain has been "teachers are just swell, it's those damned unions that are terrible," as if teacher unions have somehow grown up like mold, and not actually including real teachers at all.

LTT also prioritizes "local action." The whole thing is very Moms for Liberty, from the pretense of "we're just here to help" through the idea of imposing their view of education by harassing one local school board after another. While smiling, because LTT also seems to have taken the M4L lesson of trying not to say mean or obviously cranky things-- at least for a year or two until you get tired of pretending to be happy warriors.

The coalition will, they promise, identify districts that can be targeted by Founding Teachers and AFPI state chapters. Example: maybe a local teacher wants to incorporate "civics education" into the curriculum and-- wait, there's some district that doesn't incorporate civics education? Nor have a means for teachers to address curriculum development? But this district apparently has a school board that does make curricular decisions, so the LTT will take the issue straight to them. I wonder if this hypothetical involves a particular type of civics education.

LTT will give teachers training and tools to "take a problem from the classroom to local community leaders" which, I guess, is different from the political teacher activism we want to stamp out.

LIT will build local coalitions around teachers "advocating for change." For example-- and I am not making this up and I think maybe someone forgot for just a second to keep this pitch bland and seemingly harmless-- maybe a teacher wants to "push against a vaccine mandate at a board meeting."

LIT wants to "replicate policies that work" aka "cart pre-constructed model policies to various states for implementation."

LIT wants to "train teachers to become ongoing education-policy voices in their communities." Testify before school boards, connect with policymakers, speak to media, organize other teachers-- you know. Become political activists.

LIT is as if Moms for Liberty and the Freedom Foundation had a baby. I would not be surprised to discover Rebecca Friedrichs hiding around here somewhere. 

What is this a coalition of, exactly? That's unclear (as is what a Founding Teacher might be). But it smells as if this is meant to be one more anti-union, like Ryan Walters' Teacher Freedom Alliance and a dozen others that have come and gone because that trick never seems to quite work out. LTT differs slightly in that it is more focused on turning MAGA teachers into crusaders on the local political level, much like Moms for Liberty tried to weaponize a bunch of cranky moms. Or like Parents Defending Education used to want to weaponize MAGA parents to help them find lawsuits to file (and then decided to drop "parents" from its name).

In short, LTT smells like old wine in new skins, like another activist group that has been Frankensteined together by committee, a new recombined version of the same old parts in hopes that maybe this time it will actually work. Because underneath this is the hope that there is some great untapped mass of MAGA teachers who are just dying to rise up against the evil leftists indoctrinating and gender-swapping students. 

But we should not let this go without noting that if McMahon really truly wanted to make it easier for teachers to do their job, if she really wanted to cut through red tape and bureaucracy--well, she is sitting in DC with a big pair of scissors right there. Instead of dispersing Department of Education functions to other departments, thereby exponentially increasing the amount of federal red tape involved, so could combine and simplify those functions. She could rise up against the Big Standardized Test, a policy imposition from DC that has vastly increased the bureaucratic, curricular, and policy obstacles in the way of every classroom teacher. She could let go of her school choice fetish, a policy goal that both decreases the resources available for every teacher to do their job, and simultaneously fosters an atmosphere where teachers must be part-time salespeople. 

In short, the biggest tell that LTT is a big bunch of baloney is that Linda McMahon hasn't done a thing in the last umpteen years to suggest that helping teachers do their jobs is anywhere near the top of her list of policy goals. 

The Administration Roof

A manager's job is to create and maintain, as much as possible, the conditions under which their employees can do the very best work. 

That holds true for school administrators as well. 

The main function of school administrators is to create the conditions in which teachers can do their very best work. If education is work that goes on out skies that are, some days, spewing forth rain and sleet and snow. it is the administrator's job to be the roof that keeps the weather off the teacher's head so that the teacher can, in turn, do their job for the benefit of the students.

The Discipline Roof

Every teacher has the job of running an orderly and safe classroom where every student who wants to learn is able to. But to do so requires administrative backup. 

Last week, the New York Times asked who will enforce the new AI rules and concluded "probably teachers." Except teachers know exactly how this will go-- just like every other tech policy n(e.g. putting limits on phones). Some student will challenge the teacher and refuse to comply, or some parent will call in to protest the implementation of the policy. At that point, one of two things will happen-- the building administration will back up the classroom teacher, or the building administration will fold. If they fold, teachers will have slim-t-none chance of ever enforcing that policy ever again.

Likewise, when a student is sent to the office, every student in that classroom learns a lesson. The lesson is either 1) the rules are firm and you break them at your peril or 2) there are no consequences to crossing the line. They learn what the real rules of the school are as opposed to what the rulebook says.

Many teachers point to ideas like treating misbehavior as communication or systems that emphasize restoring and supporting problem students, but none of these more empathetic approaches are incompatible with consequences for misbehavior, nor are they incompatible with protecting the educational rights of the rest of the students in the classroom. You need both. A school with no consequences is impossible to teach in, but a school focused on a culture of compliance breeds resentment and rebellion. As with so much in education, balance is needed. But it takes building administration to pull it off.

The Parental Roof

There is a special kind of demoralization that comes with working in a building where any decision you make in the classroom will be automatically overruled if a parent calls the office. I have worked for principals whose main policy was aimed at avoiding any parent phone calls ever. When you work in a setting in which parents always take precedence over classroom teachers, you start self-editing. The chilling is palpable and real, as is the sense of powerlessness (raise your teacher hand if you've ever told a parent, "I agree this is a problem, but you should make the phone call because they will listen to you far more than they will listen to me.")

This has only gotten worse as the MAGAfied "parental rights" movement has convinced parents that they should loudly demand that every detail of curriculum should be subject to their approval and revision. 

Parents should absolutely be involved in their children's education, and their legitimate concerns should never be ignored or minimized by the school. A good administrator knows when parental concern approaches harassment of the classroom teacher, and a good administrator backs his people (that includes taking the teacher's word that the perfect child who "would never do something like that" did, in fact, do something exactly like that). 

The Staffing Roof

There's a prevailing myth that teachers rush to protect bad teachers. Wrong. Nobody wants bad teachers in a school less than the other teachers who have to work with them.

W. Edwards Deming, the management genius, had an invaluable observation about dead wood in an organization. If someone in your organization is dead wood, he pointed out, that means they were either dead wood when you hired them, or you hired them and then "killed" them. Either way, dead wood is a management problem.

As an administrator, you support your teachers by hiring capable teachers to work with them. That means hiring processes that don't depend on mere luck. That means providing the time and resources and time (yes, I did that on purpose) for meaningful mentoring; many teachers start out as neither awesome or awful, and it's the support they get at the beginning of their career that will make the difference. 

If a teacher is failing to perform well, it's an admin's job to deal with that. Help them get better, and if you can't, make the case for removing them. People like to bitch about union's "protecting" bad teachers, but all they are doing is requiring the district to follow due process-- and that is administration's job. As I've said since my days as a union local president, "Behind every bad teacher who keeps her job is an administrator who isn't doing theirs."

The Time Roof

Without knowing a thing about your school, I will absolutely guarantee this-- no teacher in your building has enough time. 

So. Do. Not. Waste. It.

No meetings that could have been emails. No meetings with the full staff that should have been a meeting with one or two specific staff members. 

Time is the most precious resource your teachers have, and as an administrator you should preserve it as if it were diamonds and gold. That includes protecting their time from lengthy meetings or requests just to "talk to their class for a few minutes" and from disruptive announcements during class time. I'm not saying there's never ever a good reason to take some of their time, but make sure it's a damned good reason. 

The Administrative Roof

Sometimes, some of your fellow administrators are the problem. Maybe it is a special department head on your same level who is trying to commandeer some of your people for her special project (and boy howdy-- one of the under-discussed factors that makes special ed an unappealing field is having to work for two not-always-in-synch bosses). Maybe one of your colleagues has been unleashing directives as part of a resume-building exercise (that will fall apart shortly after they move on to their next job). Maybe your district has a superintendent is an untrustworthy SOB whose technique for downsizing staff is to try to make certain targeted teachers as miserable as possible. Maybe one of your administrative colleagues is just really bad at their job. 

Those folks have power over teachers that those teachers are poorly equipped to combat (particularly if your union is also largely powerless). Whether you want to or not, you are going to have to choose a side in a fight you didn't start or look for. Yes, the choices you make are going to affect your career (probably why you are polishing your resume). It sucks, and teachers may sympathize with your plight, but they still want to know whether they can trust you or not. 

Some buildings are also hit by Central Office Syndrome, a condition in which the people who work in the main office start thinking that the work that goes on in that office is the main work of the district. This doesn't result in just an annoying attitude that communicates to teachers that when they ask for support they are interrupting Important Work; it also results in policies where classroom teachers are asked to take on extra duties in order to make life easier, more streamlined, for the front office. 

The Policy Roof

When No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and the Big Standardized Test shambled onto the scene, administrators placed themselves somewhere on the Collaborators spectrum. On one end were admins who said, "We are going to redirect all of our resources to meet these policy demands. New aligned teaching materials. Weekly data meetings. The key question for all decision-making will be 'will it improve test scores?'" On the other end were admins who said, "Do the best teaching you know how to do and don't worry about any of this other stuff." 

How much Common Core messed up your school depended almost entirely on your local admins. They might have stayed devoted to providing a full education for every student, or they might have used practice tests to identify on-the-line students who then lost recess and arts and science and history so they could sit in extra math and reading classes all day. Those kinds of choices were entirely local, and they told every teacher a great deal about what their administration truly valued-- compliance and appearances, or actual education. 

We don't talk enough about the role of bad administrators in school problems large and small. Schools weather a variety of storms, both broad national ones and noisy local ones. In any case, it's the job of administrators to maintain the roof that keeps the classroom teachers warm and dry enough to do the best job they can do. It's not a fun job, to be up there working in the rain (that's why admins get the big bucks). But without that roof, teachers are at the mercy of the storm.