SCOTUS Okays Restrictions on Teen Girl Athletes

The Supreme Court has upheld the Idaho and West Virginia bans on trans girls in school sports.

This means trouble for all teen girls playing sports, and we haven't seen the end of the legal attacks.

The ruliong establishes that states may institute such bans. But they did not answer the question, "Do states have to ban trans girls from athletics in order to protect Title IX." We can fully expect that there are already people working to put that question in front of the court.

In the meantime, this ruling will do plenty of damage on its own. 

For trans girls (and it's always trans girls, because the culture panic crowd never gets excited about trans boys-- do they think that becoming a male is admirable but giving up male-hood in order to become a girl is terribly wrong) this means that no matter what they've been through to make gtheir decisions, no matter how widely accepted they are by their peers, the school must deny their identity and bar them from activities that give them joy and connection in their lives. A bunch of grownups have gotten together to look a teeneger in the face and call her names and deny her life. That is messed up.

But anti-trans laws have impact far beyond the tiny number of actual teen girls affected. Let me offer an example or two.

Here's a story from Utah about one of the results of the state's girls track and field competition:

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

Congratulations unnamed female athlete! For your dominance in your sport, you win the chance for the state and your school district to dig through your records to prove that you have always been a girl. 

That's what a trans ban gets you-- any female athlete who is too strong, too dominant, too good, or just too butch, is now subject to a challenge from any disgruntled parent whose daughter lost (second, third, toed for fifth, whatever). 

Ohio almost had an odious bill when the House advanced the Ohio version of a Save Women's Sports Act that allowed losers to burden winners not just with the burden to prove their adequate femaleness, but to do it by way of testosterone levels, dna testing or "participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy." Congratulations on your win, Bethany. Now, the state needs you to submit to a little physical exam.

That goodness Governor DeWine saw through to the real issue here:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

Other states are not so lucky.  Oklahoma and South carolina did get a Save Women's Sports Act passed into law. That one gives any female athlete who thinks she's been boxed out or beaten and deprived of benefits to sue the school, and she's got up to two years to sue. Oklahoma's law doesn't offer any guidance about how the school is supposed to defend itself in court and what demands for "proof" they can place on their athletes. 

And that's before we evenb get to states with laws saying that students must dress in ways the People In Charge deem appropriate for their "gender at birth."

Or take the Ted Cruz anti-trans ad from 2024. The ad shows images of female athletes at a track meet, while a caption says his opponent U.S. Rep Colin Allred has "voted to allow boys in girls sports." How messed up is this ad? Let's count the ways.

1) The track meet is taking place in Oregon.

2) Despite the implication of the caption, the girls are not trans.

3) Nobody with Cruz's campaign asked for permission to use the girls' images.

Anti-trans laws don't just declare open season on trans teens--which would be bad enough--but also declare an open season on all teenage girls. 

We'll see if subsequent decisions make this situation even worse. As of right now, it's bad enough.

 

Ten Federal Voucher Myths

Jorge Elozar, head of Democrats for Education Reform (a group started by hedge fund managers to convince Democrats to support education privatization), has been lobbying hard for the federal voucher program, with most of their talking points gathered into a single post here offering ten reasons that the Dems should not repeal the federal vouchers; the list corresponds to the reasons DFER thinks Democratic governors should sign on.

Let's look at the list.

1. It helps public school students.

Note that this is different from the claim that it helps public schools, which is slightly more honest than Elorza's suggestion elsewhere that public schools might benefit from this. 

But as usual, the list of expenditures includes things that public school students should and do provide, like transportation, special education services, and career training. This only makes sense if the public schools somehow manage to off-load some services to federal funding, which would be bad news for local control and for students who need those services. But it would be good news for those policy leaders looking for ways to dismantle public education and sell off the parts.

2. It Can Bring Significant New Resources Into Public Education

Again, the hint public school systems will benefit from these programs. But come on- if the feds really wanted to inject funding into public schools, it would be far easier to just offer tax credits for supporting a public school. A complicated set up with "scholarship granting organizations" is only useful if you are trying to launder public money so that you can legally give it to a religious organization.

"Scholarship organizations can support services that school districts often struggle to provide at scale, creating new educational opportunities without requiring states to raise taxes or cut other programs." Again, if this were an actual goal, the feds could devise much better ways to do it. Instead they are busy closing down the Department of Education and promising to send education back to the states, by which they mean sending back responsibility for funding any programs the feds don't like.

3. It Helps Close the Out-of-School Enrichment Gap

So federal vouchers will get poor kids SAT coaches and violin lessons? Maybe. But I'm waiting to see regulations that actually limit voucher use to non-wealthy students. Otherwise, I expect that these vouchers will follow the common pattern of mostly supporting families that are not wealth-impaired.

4. It Advances Democratic Priorities Like High-Impact Tutoring

Maybe that is a Democratic priority? It shouldn't be. Two-sigma tutoring is a fabrication, a snare and a delusion that has been thoroughly debunked. 

But even if it weren't an exercise in unicorn farming, please note the usual privatizer shift here, turning beneficial tutoring from something the system provides for everyone into a commodity that you are free to shop for on your own. This is right in line with the choice movement-- "Your child's education should be your responsibility, not society's. But here's a little voucher check to take some of the sting off when we wash our hands of you."

5. It Expands Opportunity for Students With Disabilities

Again, why are we touting a system based on the idea that families of these students should have to go find necessary services on their own. If only there were a program, like a federal program-- a sort of  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and if only that program were fully funded. I bet that would be a far better solution than handing parents a check and saying, "Good luck! Buh-bye!"

6. The Fiscal Impact Is Small Relative to the Federal Budget

Compared to the massive trillion dollar holes blown in the budget by this administration, the amount that this will add to the deficit isn't so bad. So...yay?

DFER skips the other financial impact, like the estimate from American Federation for Children, a severely pro-privatization group, estimates that $300 per child will have to be spent marketing the tax shelter part of this program to convince people to contribute. 

7. It Represents an Investment in America’s Future

Does it? DFER argues that we should welcome throwing more money at education. "The ROI from helping a child learn to read, master algebra, recover from pandemic learning loss, or access specialized support far exceeds the program’s cost," Elorza writes, without asking why the importance of these programs might call for an actual federal investment instead of a tax shelter that is designed to help public tax dollars flow to private schools. Did you forget that was the purpose of the federal voucher program? Elorza is glad you did.

8. It Is Popular With Voters

You know a good way to find out what voters want? Let them vote on it. Except they're not going to do that because school vouchers have never once been voted into place by voters. Voters, given the choice, have rejected vouchers every time. Which is why they are rarely given the choice. Every voucher program in this country was birthed by legislative shenanigans.

You want to show me how popular your program is? Don't show me the results of carefully crafted polling questions. Let people vote.

9. Democrats Need a New Direction on K-12 Education

This one is just whacky. "Ten years ago," says Elorza, " Democrats were the undisputed party of education." I will not dispute for a second that the Democrats lost their claim to be an education party, though I would say that it happened a lot sooner than ten years ago. Ten years ago would be when the GOP started pushing the exact same policy that DFER is arguing for today. 

How did they lose their education mojo? By listening to people like DFER and pushing policies like test and punish, privatization, and generally offering right wing policies with a blue towel draped over their shoulder. But DFER was founded explicitly to perform the "inside job" of getting Dems to fall in line with the privatization movement, and they have been consistent ever since, repeatedly trying out versions of "If you were a true and smart Democrat you would totally want to back school choice." And also "Public schools suck because of the evil teachers union." 

Do the Democrats need a new direction in education? They surely do, but following the privatization policies of Betsy DeVos is neither new nor win Dems education plaudits.

10. Democrats Should Be the Party of Opportunity

To be clear, Elorza is arguing that the federal vouchers expand educational opportunity. The questions he skips are: what kind of opportunity, for whom, and at what cost? Watch this bit of misdirection:

Families are asking for more options, more support, more tutoring, more enrichment, and more help for their children. The FSTC provides all of those things.

This skips over the most important question, which is what would be the best way for the feds to provide those things? Because this isn't it, and to pretend that this program, carefully designed as a tax shelter than funds private schools, is somehow a big boon for public schools and public school families is baloney. 

The DFER argument is like saying, "Yes, an AK-47 assault rifle will let you mow down a bunch of fleshy, vulnerable human beings, but let's not be hasty. You could do useful things with it, too, like cut down shrubbery or open a door you accidentally locked. Really, I don't understand why you don't fully embrace the AK-47 bush trimmer."

Elorza also throws in a bonus myth-- governors should opt in "to keep resources in the state." In that construction, "keep" is doing some heavy lifting, since we are talking about redirecting funds that were already bound for the bottomless money pit that is DC. 

DFER is presenting a backwards-engineered argument. They start with the policy they want to pursue; now they've searched for an argument, landing on "This will solve Problem X" rather than start with Problem X and asking what a good solution for that would be. DFER wants to dismantle and privatize education, and federal vouchers are set up to further that cause of converting a shared societal responsibility into an individual shopping problem.

None of this, unfortunately, means that more states won't sign up for some free federal money. The bare minimum we can hope for is some actual guardrails and restrictions on how the money would be used. Maybe even an actual out loud conversation about the steady erosion of the country's promise of public education. But I don't expect any of that from DFER.  

Chris Rufo and the Anti-Fact Right

For some damn reason or other, Ezra Klien decided to interview Chris Rufo for his podcast and his New York Times column. It's not a very pleasant read, but it is a window into the thinking of the culture panic crowd. I'm not going to walk you through the whole thing, because it's hot and humid and I don't want to spend a second more with Rufo than I need to.

Klein is harkening back to another piece by Rufo, and pulls up Rufo's rejection of the old "facts don't care about your feelings." I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were particularly committed to facts. But Rufo's reply (which employs the royal "we") calls this a "rationalization for losing" before flipping it entirely on its head.

But look, while we should have the facts on our side, and while we should use logic, by itself, it’s insufficient. And, in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion — much more on the field of abstract argumentation at the top.

Screw the facts. Rufo's argument here recalls JD Vance explanation for telling lies about Haitian immigrants:

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

This is, of course, a critical part of Rufo's strategy, all the way back to the days when he announced that he would simply use his own definition for terms so that he could harness everyone's bad feelings about things they don't like:

The goals is to have the public read something crazy in the news and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'

Klein moves on to question Rufo's argument for more conservative use of "agitprop." That's usually a term to refer to bad propaganda, points out Klein. But Rufo makes a distinction that really deserves our attention:

If you’re conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it’s bad. My point is that’s not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful.

Not a word about how one determines if a cause is "good and true and beautiful." In other words, propaganda is good for my side, and bad for the other side. Time to roll out Wilhoit's Law one more time:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This can apparently be expanded to include not just codified laws on the books, but more universal laws like "tell the truth" or "don't bullshit people."  

Rufo argues that persuasion is just rhetoric, and "rhetoric at an industrial scale" is propaganda. And that's a Good Thing if deployed in service of Our Side and bad for Your Side. Which is as good an explanation of why, as a culture, we go through periods when we are drowning in bullshit. I get the reasoning-- we are in pursuit of a Good and Noble End, so using any means at our disposal is Good. It's a seductive view; it's also wrong. Because we rarely get all the way to our ends, so it tends to be our means that define us. 

Rufo argues that his guiding "telos" is the restoration of the principles of our republic" which he defines thus:

You want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue and, in particular, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization.

AKA white nationalism. It's the right wing conservative culture project-- a nation in which the dominant culture is white, male, Christian, straight, healthy, and wealthy and all others sit in the back where they belong, subservient passengers. 

Some parts of the MAGA world seem to believe that such a goal is actually achievable, that we can somehow regress to the 250-year-old past (except, of course, that those folks were trying to look forward and imagine a better way to be a country-- so maybe MAGA would skip that part). That goal is unattainable, so the MAGAs and the Rufos are ultimately defined only by their means, and their means lack honor and integrity and simply focus on flooding the zone with bullshit.

How much damage to society is done by these tactics. Rufo once claimed that "You have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good" and "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust." But what do you get in a society, particularly a post-facts society, when you sow so much ruthlessness, brutality, and distrust? 

I try to imagine how Rufo's ideas would translate to a classroom. Should the teacher use whatever it takes to whip students into a passion for the content (as long as, of course, it's the right content). What would a school look like if a central principle was that facts just don't matter as much as a narrative, and the narrative should be judged not on accuracy but on how well it advances "good and true and beautiful" ends. And what the heck does something "good and true and beautiful" look like if facts don't really matter.

Rufo might argue that all of the above is about political stuff and that within the schoolhouse walls there should be no politics--just truth and beauty and the classic thoughts of great dead white guys. But if the goal is to prepare students to become useful members of society, and society is built on political gamesmanship, how the heck do we make that connection?

Rufo has always displayed some honesty about his intentions and tools, but he also does things like later in the interview when he argues that because Trump wiped out DEI policies and the Department of Justice has "taken a buzz-saw to so-called disparage impact doctrine (which means that a policy is only racist if the writers explicitly announce their racist intent) so therefore "you can make an argument that liberty, equality and virtue have been restored." So, "liberty, equality and virtue" mean, apparently, "white folks are in charge." 

I just don't know how "there are opposing sides and you need to do whatever you can to win--but only if you're on the side that deserves to win" can be transferred onto a school. Or maybe I do and I'm just reluctant to wrap my eyes around such an ugly vision. 

Showing Students They Matter

I very much appreciate a recent post by Ella Meisner at Edutopia. Meisner is a classroom science teacher in Austin, TX, and she reports on a gathering of former students. They didn't turn out to all be budding scientists, but...

But during our catch-up conversations, I heard a surprising sentiment: Top of mind for many former students was how a class made them feel, as opposed to the content they learned or even the grades they earned.

She cites a book by Jennifer Wallace--Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose-- and its mention of four pillars for a sense of mattering, and talks about implementing those pillars in her classroom.

This is not simply some warm fuzzy soft skill idea-- for students it's a quick step from "I don't matter" to "It doesn't matter whether I try to learn anything in this class or not." MY former students would laugh at the idea that I was some warm, fuzzy teacher; my class was focused on getting them to Know Things and being able to Do Stuff. That kind of attention is, I'm certain, part of how you convey to students that they matter-- by underlining that it matters if they succeed.

Meisner breaks down the four pillars.

Significant: Helping Every Student Feel Seen

Meisner has her own way of delivering Attaboys to her students, including weekly awards. I'm not an awards fan, but I agree that being seen is enormously powerful for students. Why do some students seem to actively seek out negative attention? Because it may be negative, but at least it's attention. They get to be seen.

Not to belabor the obvious, but the first step in making your students feel seen is to, you know, see them. See them as human beings and not problems or obstacles or just one example of a particular type. In English class, it was easy to give assignments that allowed them to show some of themselves. Being seen doesn't need to be a matter of something formal or carefully planned; it can happen in plenty of small moments that can flow naturally if you see them and talk to them like they are human beings.

This, incidentally, is why it's best to call them by their chosen name. To refuse to do so is to explicitly refuse to see them. Anti-trans laws are bad education policy because they state very clearly "We refuse to see you.

Appreciated: Valuing Students for Who They Are

Meisner says the idea here is to value students for more than just their performance on class-related tasks. In my small town district, this meant things like going to see the students play a sport or appear in a play. It was one of the benefits of being an extra-curricular advisor-- getting to see students function in other settings, and I was always surprised/disappointed at the number of teachers who never attended other stuff.

Seeing students in other contexts in which they may be far more confident and capable than in your classroom can be transformative. Once a year, I took a yearbook photographer and staff member to our version of a CTE campus where I got to see students who struggled in my classroom really shine operating heavy equipment, building a house, or providing home health care. 

Depended on: Helping Students Feel Needed

As Meisner points out, this can be one of the values of group work (and, again, extracurriculars). I feel like elementary teachers have an edge here; my sons feel like a crucial part of their classroom when it's their turn to take a classroom "job" like door minder or lunch counter (insert nostalgic stories from the days of cleaning chalkboard erasers).

Invested In: Showing Students You Care About Their Well-Being

Meisner includes end-of-year notes here. One of my sons' teachers just sent home a thank you note for an end-of-year gift they gave her (and picked out themselves), and while I wouldn't say it will change the course of their lives, it made an impression on them (more so because it comes at the end of a year in which each of these pillars has been a factor). 

Of the four, this is the one that veers closest to an important line-- the one between "showing interest in student's life" and "mind your own damn business." Not every student wants-- or needs--you to invest in them, and sometimes a great sign of respect for them as a human being is to allow them to set their own boundaries and respect them. You can offer to hear if something's up, but if they don't want to talk about it, back off. Showing you care doesn't mean being intrusive. 

Meisner cites the old “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care," and honestly, that saying always makes me cringe. Not just because it requires some sort of overt display of caring, but because--well, I don't need them to care how much I know. I just need them to grasp that the world will be a better place if they leave my class with more understanding and skills than when they entered it. I don't need them to be impressed with me; I would like them to be impressed with themselves. 

Still, for teachers in the field, this framework is not a bad one for a little summer reflection on how you interact with students. 

ICYMI: Penny Carnival Edition (6/27)

 Last night I marched (well, rode) in an Independence Day parade, something I have done for fifty-some years. Friday was the big penny carnival in town, for which the board of directrors is almost, but not yet, too old to really be entertained. This week I'll play in a special concert as part of my city's week-ish long celebration of the Fourth. I'll host the annual cookout in my backyard, followed by some trad jazz jamming. I like this holiday, regardless of what's going on elsewhere, because the government is not the country any more than a set of headlights drive the car. 

Here's the reading list for the week.

Tennessee increases private-school voucher vendor contract by $356M

There is a pile of money to be made by the groups that administer voucher dollars, and in Tennessee that pile is about to become mountainous. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.

Catholic Diocese of Cleveland misleads public about EdChoice

Stephen Dyer keeps trying to explain the realities of funding in Ohio, which becomes more of an uphill climb when certain parties keep pushing out inaccurate information.

School Voucher Advocate is Largest Single Donor in Tennessee Gov's Race

Jeff Yass is putting some of his fortune behind Marsha Blackburn's race for Tennessee governor. Andy Spears reports.

LA Lawsuit Challenges Shifting MFP Dollars to Teacher Stipends

Louisiana's teacher stipend-based sideway raise is the center of legal maneuvering. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains.

TN school to pay $10K, rescind suspension over social media post

A Tennessee private school tried to punish a senior for coming out as gay; she took them to court and now they have to pay. Angela Latham reports.

Legal experts speak out on idea of NV religious public charter schools

Including NPE's Carol Burris. The National Education Policy Center published a brief explaining how states could help draw a line between church and state.

Trends in Local Teacher Supply Since the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Teacher Job Applications

The trends uncovered by this working paper are downward, all across the board.

We Can’t Give Up on Teacher Diversity

Sharif El-Mekki does cite the untrustworthy National Council on Teacher Quality here, but his call for more Black male teachers still makes sense. In Education Week.

Bernadette Wilson and Right-Wing Candidates Proudly Embrace Anti-Public School Agenda

In Alaska, Mathew Beck reports, Moms for Liberty still draw plenty of obeisance from GOP candidates. The details are not encouraging.

Understanding NAEP: A Reader

Paul Thomas provides some useful sources for unraveling the data from NAEP. 

How to Get Students to School? Stop Driving them Out!

Nancy Bailey has some thoughts about the general panic over "chronic absenteeism." Maybe schools could stop doing some of these counter-productive things.

Broken Ribs, Broken Narratives, and Why I Still Don’t Trust the Test

TC Weber fell down and hurt himself, but his stay in the health care system gave him a chance to think about things like the Big Standardized Test, and he's ready to share those thoughts.

Like I said, Testing is Bullshit

Jeff Waid also has thoughts about the BS Test, stirred up by Ross Wiener's NYT op ed. 

Comparison of Florida’s Major K-12 (Publicly Funded) Education Options

Sue Kingery Woltanski offers a handy chart for comparing the major publicly funded education options in Florida. Nice and clear. 

Your tax dollars funding fast cars and tuition breaks for millionaires

Stephen Dyer points out that taxpayers are now helping private schools turn a profit (and buy cool cars).

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization

Emily Bendar and Nanna Inie give some practical advice about how to talk about AI without contributing to the impression that it is a living, thinking entity.

The United States Is the Only World Cup Nation Without Maternity Leave

Liz Plank reminds us that there is one respect in which the US lags all other World Cup competitors.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon I looked at the proposed reform bill for the state's long-time voucher program. 

This selection doesn't really require an explanation.

Choice for the Right Families

The choice system and the public system have two fundamentally different missions, and sometimes the choice crowd forgets itself and makes the difference explicit.

Take this webinar. It came to me in an e-mail blurbed "Attract the right families," and promises to introduce a three-step framework that will help schools "define their value, identify the right families, and guide them toward increased student enrollment."

The webinar is about marketing and features two marketing executives-- Amanda Duitsman for FlexPoint education, a cyber curriculum company, and Ashley Reyes for Florida Virtual School. That makes sense in a country in which school is inextricably welded to free market dynamics. It's not an anomaly; there's a whole industry out there like Schola Inbound Marketing with its promise to help Christian schools recruit "mission-appropriate families" and avoid the "rotten apple syndrome."

The free market does an excellent job of sorting out winners and losers, not just among vendors, but among customers. A business makes choices about which customers it wants to serve, and which ones it doesn't. This makes sense for restaurants or automobile dealers. No restaurant thinks it has a mission to feed every person in its area; it picks and chooses which customers it will serve.

We see this philosophy in the modern choice sector. Charter schools (like Success Academy in NYC) use a variety of obstacles and tests to shoo away families they don't want to serve. Voucher states write the laws to preserve a private school's "right" to reject students for any reason (or none at all). 

Choice fans will try to counter this argument by claiming that public schools aren't open to everyone either. But that glides past a fundamental difference in approach. The public school system says that the government has an obligation to provide your child with an education. The free market choice system says that society at large has no obligation to provide you with anything; it's your job to go find some vendor willing to educate your child. 

In that world, the public schools become holding pens for the hot potatoes that no private or charter school wants, a struggling system starved for resources and without much of a constituency to speak up for those schools.

There's one other irony in the "but public schools don't admit everyone, either" argument. The argument is that families are sorted by housing costs, and that's not wrong, but it also means that free market forces in the housing sector create educational inequity. And the solution to that free market effect is... the free market? The free market in housing has, in some times and places, been warped by prejudice and discrimination-- most notably the practice of redlining. Yet some choice advocates insist that private schools should be able to indulge in an educational version of redlining.

Attaching free market forces to education incentivizes schools of choice to be careful and selective about which students they admit. A free market choice system rejects the principle that we have a shared responsibility to make sure that every child has a decent education and replaces it with the notion that the responsibility belongs solely to the family, and that family will have to hope that they are deemed a desirable family for a school of choice to enroll. For the "right" families, choice; for the rest, good luck, caveat emptor, and here's hoping your local public school is still open.

Stop With The NCLB Nostalgia

Some reformsters just can't stop longing for the days of No Child Left Behind, particularly the test-based accountability component. Reformy Rahm Emanuel thinks there's political gold to be mined by harping on the issue. Mike Petrilli's substack includes spirited defense of NCLB, echoing Arne Duncan's misty-eyed insistance that we quit when we should have doubled down. 

The narrative is that after NCLB started and brought test-based accountability that made schools just get better and better for about a decade, and then things just started to stall about the same time that Congress replaced NCLB with the less stringent ESSA. That was 2015. 

Petrilli and others have been reacting to a New York Times piece from Ross Wiener, and while it gets some things wrong, he's right on the mark with this:

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

The narrative of NCLB doing swell things until America lost its nerve and bailed does not reflect any reality I lived through. I was classroom teacher of English in those years. Let me tell you the story of NCLB and test-based accountability that I remember. 

When NCLB testing first hit, we received it initially as one more fiddly piece of government paperwork. But early on, there were some troubling signs. 

One was how it trickled down through the bureaucratic infrastructure. NCLB came to us as a state policy; back in those days we didn't expect that kind of micromanagement to come from the feds and it took us a while to catch on to the real source of these policies. We were also used to state trainings that tried to convince us to buy in, the hope that we would nod and smile and adopt the policy like we'd thought of it ourselves. But in the days of NCLB, that changed; no more friendly convincing, but instead a steely-eyed "You can get with the program or get rolled over."

But the program was nuts. While NCLB was "launched" in 2002, very little trickled down to the classroom for five-ish years. My region didn't get our first training in Value-Added measures (PVAAS in PA) until the fall of 2009, and it was absolutely alarming. I wrote about that training at the time in my regular newspaper gig (I wasn't a sophisticated blogger yet) and said, in part, this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

This came just as local district administrators were waking up to the coming NCLB disaster. The required annual improvement on test scores increased slowly at first, but the last few years of NCLB included incredible demands for test score improvement, culminating in 2014 in which 100% of all students in every school were supposed to be "proficient." Every classroom teacher in the country knew this was not possible, but any time one wanted to bring this up to The People In Charge, they simply spat back, "Well, which children do you want to leave behind?" 

Legislators and bureaucrats may have operated on the belief that of course Congress would change the law before 2014 arrived, but they failed to do so, and actual schools had to operate with the knowledge that by 2011 or thereabouts there would be only two types of schools-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. 

That unmeetable deadline had multiple effects. For one, there's something very demoralizing about feeling that legislators have set you up to fail. And of course that unmeetable deadline provided the leverage for Obama/Duncan to push states into Race to the Top (or RttT Lite) and the Common Core, with its accompanying message of "Teachers are doing a terrible job, so let us tell you how to do the work." Boy, we were hoping that Obama was going to make things better; that did not happen.

But why did test scores go up for a while, and then... not?

The early approach to the tests was hopeful administration directives. "We'll revisit our curriculum to make sure it's aligned, and then if you just do good teaching, the tests will take care of themselves." That was combined with practice testing and the kind of test prep that is aimed at teaching students how to take that kind of standardized test.

Then came targeting. Schools sorted students into three groups, usually with the aid of the practice test. Group A: These students will do well enough on their own. Group B: These students are unlikely to do well enough ever. Group C: These students are close enough to the line that with some extra work we might be able to drag them over. Group C got extra test prep. They were taken out of study hall and, in some cases, even taken out of music or art or science or history so they could spend extra time getting ready for the tests. 

This was the infamous period in which schools used a simple metric-- Is it on the test?-- for deciding what mattered and what didn't. And for a while it worked, though it came at a cost to other aspects of education. Schools even altered districts structures in an attempt to get the notoriously-low-scoring 8th graders under the same roof as some other better-scoring grade,

But all of these fixes could only do so much. By 2015, an entire generation of students had learned how to take these tests-- there was nothing to be gained in scores there. Nor is there any good fix for one major obstacle-- making students actually care about how they do on a test that is boring and has zero stakes for the students themselves. And of course, painfully for those of us teaching English, a shift from teaching whole works to drilling dumb short excerpts with multiple-choice questions to better mimic the tests.

Schools were in the grip of Campbell's Law, and teachers were shoved into a Dilbert-esque world where we had to take a bunch of time away from doing the work in order to create reports on how we were doing the work. 

So here's my narrative. In 2002, the was an attempt to reorganize the entire education system around standardized reading and math tests. It took about a decade for the reorganization to be fully implemented and for the schools to rebuilt themselves around the new normal. That adjustment period looked like an increase in test scores (which way too many people continued to treat as if they were a perfect proxy for educational achievement), but once the system was rebuilt around testing and students and teachers adjusted to the new status quo, and once they were settled into the new normal, test scores settled into a new equilibrium with the usual dips and bumps that every classroom teacher is used to seeing year to year (because students vary from year to year and test scores do not represent some ebb and flow of a singular body). 

By the way-- the pandemic undoubtedly resulted in teachers and students achieving less than in an ordinary year, but the testing dip also represents schools spending less time to test-taking prep because instructional time was shortened and schools chose to use that precious resource for education rather than testing. 

There are so many reasons not to go back to the days of NCLB, not the least of which is that it made the cynical assumption that education could only be improved by using threats and punishment. My question for every reformster arguing that we need to bring back testing and consequences-- at your workplace, do you only try to do your job well when you are sufficiently threatened by your bosses?

Some reformsters are going to argue that NCLB totally got real test score gains for Group Z. My response is a request to go do a follow-up study on those folks and find out if having a raised test score resulted in improved life outcomes. Because if the only desired goal of raising test scores is to have raised test score, I do not-- and I can't stress this enough-- give a shit.

NCLB and the attendant text-centered accountability movement gave a gut-kick the morale of the teaching profession as we were forced to understand that most of the people who we thought were supposed to have our backs actually viewed us a problem. Test-centered accountability has proven toxic to schools and education. And secondary effects are appearing, because a whole generation has been raised thinking that The Test is the main point of school, resulting in fewer people choosing the profession while those that do choose it come into it with some narrow, meager ideas of what the job is about.

I don't have a lot of trust of the Science of Reading movement, but I do appreciate the reform voices that are saying, "Look, teachers want to do well, so let's help them get the tools to succeed" as opposed to "Let's threaten teachers some more so they'll take out the secret magic lesson plans they've been hiding and start doing better." I know which message was more consistent with NCLB (right down to the implication that it was teachers who were leaving children behind). 

I have no doubt that the whole history looks different when you have a mile-high view informed mostly by spreadsheets. But on the ground, in classrooms, NCLB was a mess and test-centered accountability was destructive and not particularly helpful. Nostalgia for those days is misplaced. Test-based accountability was worse than inadequate, and after two decades, we should know better.