AP Promotes Moms For Liberty Myth

The headline was sandpaper on nerve endings. "Moms for Liberty wanted a seat on the school board. Trump gave them a voice in the White House." All the more annoying because this was the Associated Damn Press, who should know better than to uncritically echo the M4L mythology.

To be clear, an influential voice in politics on the state and national level has always been what M4L wanted. As with much of the culture panic crowd, "fighting to win school board seats and end 'wokeness' in U.S. schools" were useful goals for activating some folks, but the AP's summary of M4L-- "what started as a fringe of far-right mothers"-- misses the core of the story.

The oft-repeated myth  is that a couple of Florida moms sat a kitchen table in January of 2021 and decided they'd sell start a group to complain about COVID school stuff. Heck, these Just Plain Moms could even raise money selling t-shirts. This is a lovely story. It is not true.

By 2021, these moms were already well-connected political activists in the state. In 2015, future M4L co-founder Bridget Ziegler co-founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, a pro-voucher alternative to the Florida School Board Association. The founders included Erika Donalds, a former New York investment banker turned Florida Tea Partier, now a high-powered choice advocate in Florida who is CEO of her own charter school company and married to Byron Donalds, rising MAGA star. 

Other folks who would join in leading FCSBM included Anne Corcoran, wife of Florida’s pro-privatization legislator-turned-Education Commissioner-turned chief of New College; Rebecca Negron, the wife of the state senator who helped write the tax credit scholarship voucher bill; and Eric Robinson, former GOP party chair and sometimes called “The Prince of Dark Money.” And also future M4L co-founder Tina Descovich, who was elected to Brevard County School Board with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovich ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. Soon after joining the group, Descovich was its president.

FCSBM operated for a few years, giving out awards and working legislative connections as it ”consistently fought above its weight” to win “key battles on school choice, charters and other hot-button education issues.” But the group ran out of steam, and in May of 2020, Descovich and Ziegler filed for voluntary dissolution of FCSBM.

At that point, Ziegler and Descovich were experienced and well-connected political operatives who had been working at anti-public ed advocacy for years. And they were looking for a new angle. On December 10, Descovich and new MFL founder Tiffany Justice were posting about the launch of the new group; Descovich even had a picture of thirteen women already wearing the group’s t-shirt and displaying their logo.

The speed with which the group launched was impressive. They claimed fundraising by selling t-shirts on Facebook, but that would not begin to account for receipts of a half a million dollars in their first year.

Maurice Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, has been hollering into the void for years, tracked the many benefits that M4L enjoyed on launch. By the end of the January, they had appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show; soon they moved on to score appearances or shout outs from Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room. They threw some massive fundraisers and Cunningham's research found connections to Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and the Council for National Policy. The group's media and political profile erupted quickly.

Bridget Ziegler's husband Christian, a political operative with a PR firm and great prospects in Florida GOP leadership, told the Washington Post that he has been “trying for 20- and 30-year old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.” 

That was in October of 2021, at which point Bridget's involvement had been retroactively deleted from the M4L origin story (this was a few years before the Zieglers ran into trouble for trolling bars for three-way partners).

M4L showed their interest in being national political players from the start, throwing weight behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and inviting big political names to their various conventions (instead of, say, educational experts). They had a brief bump on the local level, followed by a whole lot of people realizing they had better pay closer attention to what kinds of radicals were running for school board. But as their local school board fortunes waned, M4L's national leadership shrugged and moved on, almost as if those contests weren't really the main thing.

These days Ziegler is still making waves at the Sarasota school board. Tiffany Justice landed a cushy job with the Heritage Foundation-- and lost it after just seven months. But she was there long enough to tell ProPublica, “If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place.” Descovich has landed in DC, connected to the current regime and serving solo as M4L CEO. She's the subject of Collin Binkley's interview for the AP.

Binkley spoke to Seth Levi at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the folks who labeled M4L as "extremist." Levi said that M4L "are more interested in platforming extremist voices and policies rather than listening to the American people." And he did speak to Cunningham, who notes that the group is more about political advocacy rather than parental input. “They’re in the White House, there’s no question,” he said. “But they are there as a voice of the organized institutional right wing.” 

And look-- if folks want to throw their weight behind the regime decide to get politically active, that's their right. M4L certainly illustrated one principle-- if you can get people all worked up about a local issue (naughty books in the school library!!) you can get them to the polls in ways that might be helpful. 

But it is frustrating to see media repeatedly go along with the momwashing of these seasoned, well-connected, political operatives, writing about them as if they just sort of fell onto the national political stage rather than getting there through working connections, hoovering up truckloads of money, and calculating the angles. Nobody is writing pieces about Stephen Miller describing him as just a dad who wanted to get involved writing about issues for his college newspaper and now, golly gosh, here he is in the White House!

There is one piece of Binkley's piece that is worth noting. Commenting on the recent M4L lobby-your-congressperson day at the capitol, Descovich offered this:

“We’re not really doing any lobbying for any specific bills at the federal level yet,” Descovich said. “That will come next year.”

 No mention of whether they'll be selling more t-shirts to fund this effort. 

AFC Names Head Of Cash Grab Division

Betsy DeVos's old crew is ready to cash in on federal school vouchers.

The American Federation for Children was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin. But they settled on American Federation for Children because that is meant to contrast with American Federation of Teachers (because teachers are, as we know, notoriously anti-child). 

Their leadership is a clue to their mission. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).

The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Ann Duplessis (former LA legislator and banker), Stack Hock (investment banking and Texas Public Policy Foundation), Edward McDermott (investment firm and BASIC Fund, a California SGO), and Hera Varmah (Step Up For Students). It's a crowd that is even more interested in managing money than in privatizing education. 

AFC has already announced its intention to get in the ground floor of the federal taxpayer-funded school vouchers. The vouchers created under Dear Leader's Big Beautiful Bill are the tax credit scholarship flavor, and as with all such vouchers, there's a middle man. Taxpayers give their completely deductible contribution to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) that in turn passes the money on to students.

But not before they skim off a slice for themselves. The federal plan is still sparse on details, but typically an SGO keeps 5-10% of the money it handles. So lots of folks are getting into the SGO biz, and that includes AFC.

They have announced the man they've hired to run that skimmer for them-- Sean Clifford. They announced:

In his new role, Sean will serve as our primary ambassador and strategist for the scholarship fund, overseeing strategic direction, growth strategy, and partnerships, along with managing the day-to-day operations necessary to ensure the Education Freedom Tax Credit reaches as many families as possible, as soon as possible.

Clifford has been around a few blocks. After interning with the Bush II Council of Economic Advisors, he spent seven years as VP of Baron Public Affairs, a DC PR form that handles clients at "the nexus of politics and business" thereby "liberating innovators from political risk." He went back to school at Wharton for an MBA, then went to Texas for a year at Skills Fund (now Ascent, an education loan outfit). Then in 2018 he founded and led Canopy, the school internet filter company. Then he became an advisor at MonCap, an investment firm, and Chief Strategy Officer at Tikvah, a nonprofit firm that advances "Jewish excellence and Western Civilization through education and ideas." Eliot Abrams is currently chairman of their board of trustees. 

So that's the background Clifford brings to running the AFC Scholarship Fund. 

In an interview, AFC chief Tommy Schultz explained what the fund will be about. The program will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately preserve that power to discriminate.

Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules.

"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which is a hell of a hard thing to assert if your program is not going to include any quality control measures at all--will, in fact, include anti-quality control measures. And be run by a guy who does not have the education background to spot the difference between excellence, mediocrity, malpractice, and scammery. 

But AFC could make bank. They anticipate billions of dollars going into the new SGO systems, and 5% of even a measly one billion is still fifty million. That's a tidy bonus to get when you're pursuing your goal of dismantling public education. 

OH: No More Crossdressing in Front of the Kids

There's has been some social media noise about Ohio's new bill that supposedly criminalizes any kind of behavior that conflicts with your "gender at birth." Maybe. Supporters and the bill's actual language say that HB 249 only makes it illegal to act outside your traditional gender role in front of children. Critics argue that the language is so broad it will eventually squelch every day gender expression. 

The bill updates existing Indecent Exposure laws, and in particular adds a definition of "adult cabaret performance" meaning specifically a performance that is "in a location other than an adult cabaret where minors may be present, that is harmful to juveniles or obscene, regardless of whether or not the performance is for consideration..."

That is followed by a list of specific no-nos, including strippers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, and topless dancers. And then, over above the list of ways that naughty ladies can display their private bits, we get this additional example of an adult cabaret performance:

Performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer's or entertainer's biological sex using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers;

This is nuts. Now, as I read the law, this doesn't make it illegal to simply be a man wearing heavy makeup while walking down the street or holding high federal office. To trigger this law, you have to be a man heavily made up while performing or entertaining (okay, maybe that high federal office example is in jeopardy after all).

Soooo many problems here. Exactly who will be serving in the new Ohio State Bureau of Acceptable Gender Role Markers? Can a lady singer wear pants? How much make-up can a vice-president man wear and still be legal? Can I show a class Some Like it Hot? What determines whether a t-shirt is male- or female-coded? If a male entertainer uses a high-pitched voice in front of a juvenile audience, is that a violation? I mean, as a life-long bass I harbor a little resentment towards tenors, but this seems like bridge too far.

And if these all seem like extreme cases, let me suggest that you ask a high school teacher how many times they have witnessed a hilarious student skit in which high school boys performed and/or danced dressed like girls (perhaps with some balloon "prosthetics"). The answer is, at least for me, "I lost count ages ago." You can argue that this is obviously just harmless youthy high jinks and surely nobody would seriously consider that illegal. The law was just intended to protect youths from the evils of drag queens, and surely nobody would go after the senior football players in the annual homecoming assembly talent show. But we currently have a whole anti-school-outrage-industrial complex, like the (formerly Parents) Defending Education crew whose whole mission is to try to literally make a federal case out of everything they can find in their karen-fed pipeline of Naughty Behavior in public schools. If this bill passes the Senate (the House has already okayed it) I guarantee that sooner or later you will see a story about some public school dragged into court because it allowed the captain of the basketball team to dress up as a cheerleader in front of the whole student body.

The new law would piggyback on the current state obscenity laws, which are an exercise in vagueness.

"Biological sex" is doing heavy lifting here, defined as indicated by "sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth," and deliberately ruling out any individual's psychological or subjective experience, all of which fits an imaginary world in which gender is simple and cut and dried. However, our world is not that world.

This is one of those laws where someone wanted to stop a "problem" that is so minute and undetectable that they decided to just carpet bomb the entire are either because A) they are lousy at writing laws or B) they were happy to get as much collateral damage as possible. Ohio faces many problems these days; none of them are caused by drag queens. 

You can read ACLU Ohio's full response here, or this handy explainer. If you're in Ohio, you might want to get ahold of your Senator and encourage them to spend more time on actual problems. In the meantime, certain elected officials might want to be careful about appearing in the state.

ICYMI: Easter 2026 Edition (4/5)

I remain a big fan of Easter for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it has resisted commercialization. There's a message of redemption that is hard for our culture to absorb, not to mention the idea that death is not necessarily the scariest thing we face. This year I'm also inclined to fantasize-- what if all these right-wing pretend Christians were actual Christians and so worshipped something other than anger and death. That would be something.

So if you also celebrate the day, a Happy Easter to you. And if you don't, a happy day to you, too. In the meantime, here's a list for the week. 

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher

Alexandra Petri is a national treasure, and she came through with this excellent take on Melania Trump's invitation to imagine a future of robot teachers.

Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market.

Sarasota County Schools to cut teachers as vouchers divert millions from district

The Florida plan to shut down public education is right on track. 

White Texans, students previously in private school or homeschool make up bulk of voucher applicants

Zero surprises in Texas, where the newly launched voucher program is mostly not saving poor kids in failing schools, but is instead subsidizing private schools and home schoolers. Jared Edison reports for the Texas Tribune.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?

Nora De La Cour at Jacobin points out that the right has a vision for education, and somehow the Democrats are stuck saying we should go back to No Child Left Behind because maybe those test-and-punish policies won't fail this time around.

The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Turns out one of the things you can automate badly with AI is book banning. Claire Woodcock looks at the story for 404.

Meta and Google Found Liable for Addictive Content Delivery

Two tech giants lost a big case over trying to addict users. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains how the case unfolded and why they lost.

The Greatest Threat To Children And Teens Isn't Social Media. It's Adults

Anya Kamenetz takes a look past the court decisions against social media giants and looks at what needs to come next to protect children. It's not the act currently proposed by Congress.

Boy, 15, dead after shooting his teacher at Texas high school, cops say

A teenaged boy shot his teacher, then killed himself. And we now live in a country where this barely earns a tiny ripple of coverage. 

Ramaswamy: Let's close two essential Ohio public universities that Ohio GOP has starved for 30 years

What the hell, Ohio. How is this guy a serious contender for the governor's office. His latest clever observation-- public universities all teach basically the same stuff, so let's shut them down. Stephen Dyer explains.

The Next Time You Hear a School Leader Say "AI Is Not Going to Replace Teachers, It Will Replace Teachers Not Using AI" Think

John Robinson with a short but--well, not sweet exactly. But he unpacks the subtext of this comment, and it's not good.

Kids Need Rec Sports To Make a Comeback

Gail Cornwall, a mother and former teacher, explains why the evaporation of chances to play sports just for fun and recreation is bad news for young humans. Do we really need to tell ten year olds that they need to pick a sport and commit to it all year round so they can be champions?

Why You Should Become a Teacher

Matt Brady says, "You won’t love it at first. You might grow to. And it might matter more than you think" in a post that reminds us why teaching doesn't entirely suck.

“Meritocracy”

The concept, says Steve Nuzum, quickly begins to eat itself. Even when it is used to combat CRT, DEI, and whatever other culture panic is on the menu this week.

Leandro Thrown Out: A Generational Betrayal in North Carolina

North Carolina has decided that the way to deal with a decades-old court ruling that they are underfunding education is to install some new courts that will throw the decision out. Justin Parmenter explains just how bad this is.

The Invisible Child: How the Supreme Court Erased Children from a Case About Their Own Harm

Whether it's conversion therapy or birthright citizenship, Bruse Lesley argues that the Supremes are being remarkably callous about the actual human children at the heart of the case.

Trump Admin. Continues Demanding and Checking Affirmative Action Data from Universities

Jan Resseger looks at how the current regime is still dedicated to making sure that colleges don't discriminate against mediocre white guys. 

Every Minute Counts—Until It Doesn’t

Nobody captures the nuts and bolts of school district shenanigans like TC Weber. He's talking about Memphis, but many folks from around the country will recognize the steps in this accountability dance.

Miseducative Experiences

The line between the poetry of Mary Oliver and modern AI policy may not be easy to spot, but Audrey Watters lays it out clear as day. 

Superintendent of basketball finalist blasts PIAA: ‘Willful ignorance’

In Pennsylvania, we have a long-standing preview of what it does to school sports when you pretend that private schools who can recruit from anywhere compete on the same level as public schools that draw from their cachement area. One superintendent decided to call the state out on it.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon I offered some suggested questions for folks whose school district wants to get in the AI game. 

At Forbes.com, I looked at some research that shows--again--that grade point averages are better predictors of college success than the SAT or ACT. 

Today, I offer a favorite movement from a favorite symphony. From the Saint-Saens "organ" Symphony, here's the 4th movement. Turn it up, if you can.

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The Local Control Song

Okay, I got around to this a few days late, but I suppose this isn't really an April Fools item. The folks at the National Education Policy Center have recorded a satirical song for our current moment, setting current United States Education Department policy to music. And they've done it without AI. 

Listen, and share with a friend

Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors. 

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops. 

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure). 

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops. 

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not. 

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.  

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas. 

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing. 

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.  

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling. 

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

How Do We Get News to Students

We are two weeks into a new reality in my county-- the local newspaper now exists only as a website, which means a whole lot of folks now have a choice between going online to search out the news from one of two local digital outlets or just patching together whatever from wherever. Or just believe whatever the algorithm sends you on social media. 

So Nancy Flanagan's latest post hit hard ("I read the news today--Oh boy"). 

What do educators do when the students whose intellectual growth they are entrusted with believe things that are false and dangerous—because the influence of the internet has led them there? When the most important content and character-building discussions in school are suspect—or banned? Or when, God help us, the President’s “Special Advisor” suggests that we shouldn’t be teaching undocumented students at all?

What is our moral obligation to the kids we teach, when it comes to truth—and how they form their own opinions and civic engagement?

Truth. That is a tough one, because there is always a divide between those who believe in truth and those who believe in Truth. It shapes how a teacher works in the classroom.

I was in college when I finally realized that English teachers could be roughly divided into two groups. In one group, you have the teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has One True Meaning, and so their job is to impart and transmit that One True Meaning to students (then test them on whether they can repeat it back to you correctly). In the other group, we find teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has a range of possible interpretations, and so their job is to help students learn how to sift and support their way through all of those and present well-supported conclusions of their own.

I am solidly in that second group. It may be the musician in me. There's more than one way to play "Honeysuckle Rose," and there's more than one way to play Hamlet, and there's more than one way to understand The Awakening. This doesn't mean you can just pull any old version out of your butt without any visible support from the work. But I think of these "truths" as a kind of strange attractor, where the variety of answers cluster around particular points, not entirely random, but not locked into a single coordinate, either.

We have plenty of first group people in the education world. The whole classical education movement rests on the assumption that there is One Truth, that a bunch of dead white guys found it, and all we have to do is just keep reteaching it to the youngs. It can become confusing when One Truth folks talk about their love of critical thinking, but what they mean is not "thinking that wrestles with and evaluates a variety of facts and ideas to draw its own conclusions" but rather "thinking that leads to the One True Conclusion."

So education includes this tension between Truth and truth. It's particularly visible in history, where some folks insist it is "divisive" to try to talk about a variety of viewpoints and interpretations, where some folks want to assert that there is just one Truth. There isn't. History is not a string of facts. History is a conversation, an ongoing discussion about what happened, why it happened, what it means, how we understand it. 

News is, of course, just history that's happening right now, and we have a whole network of influencers and news-flavored baloney merchants trying to package it as One Truth immediately as it happens. And that bleeds into the classroom in a variety of ways.

None of this is entirely new. Hearst and Pulitzer and many smaller fish all made a bundle peddling manufactured baloney in newspapers. Even my own small town once upon a time had multiple newspapers--one for each political party's version of events. Students have always brought their own parents' beliefs to school with them. 

But the social media and the algorithm-fueled outrage machine has exacerbated the problem a hundredfold. We're starting to catch up. Meta and YouTube just lost a big social media addiction trial. Instagram and YouTube were found liable for damage to children. Backlash against screens in school is building. But we still have a long way to go. 

When it comes to knowledge of the world around them and what's happening in it, most students are an information vacuum just waiting to be filled, and there is too much garbage too readily available. Much of that garbage is designed to inflame rather than inform, which means that the consumers--particularly the young ones--are emotionally invested in those particular Truths

Schools can continue with "media literacy" and units about evaluating source material, but the actual content of the "news" has to be addressed as well, because it's very hard to make critical judgments when you don't know much about the topic. Civics and current events should be addressed, and students should be challenged regularly to cite their sources and back up their contentions. Teachers have to bite their tongues when the impulse is to simply refute or even ridicule the worst of the ideas students bring into classes. There is nothing more endlessly useless than an argument between two people who believe there is only One Truth and the only thing to debate is which Truth it is. One of the foundations of authoritarianism is "There is One Truth and I-- and only I-- will tell you what it is!"

So a two-pronged approach. One prong: a pipeline of various sources to get actual news and current history into classrooms, including the kind of civics education that everyone keeps calling for. The other prong: deliberately fostering atmosphere and practices for questioning everything. Would it be enough to counteract the outrage machine? I don't know, but it's better than just hoping.