Teachers Should Know Stuff

Carl Hendrix is on Elon's cyber-sewer this week arguing that teachers who were trained over the last fifty years have been taught that "knowing stuff is the least important part of thinking," offering a diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy as evidence. 

I'm not going to get into an argument about the taxonomy's virtues or lack thereof, and in the thread, Hendrix acknowledges the idea of knowledge at the bottom of the taxonomy because it's foundational, not least important.

But I will agree that the tide has run away from Knowing Stuff in education. for which we can blame a confluence of ideas. 

One is the foolish "we don't need know stuff cuz we has google" argument, which was always without foundation. It's hard to look things up when you don't know enough to ask questions. And storing information outside your brain just means that it's not available to power your thinking or insights. The ugly cousin of this argument is that AI can just know stuff for us, which is even worse because AI cannot be trusted to get things right, and if you know nothing yourself, you cannot judge when AI is feeding you baloney. The cherry on top is that AI and enshittification have worsened Google and the internet so badly that it is even less useful as a repository of knowledge than it used to be. It is not a safe or accurate place for outsourcing your responsibility to know stuff.

The other is the modern reform movement, especially Common Core. The emphasis has been skills, skills, skills. Never mind knowing what Hemmingway had to say in The Sun Also Rises-- it's time to work on using context clues and inferences. This has always been a crock-- you cannot practice skills like critical thinking without some content to think about. It's not useful to practice chewing with your mouth empty. You can't generate waves without some medium through which the waves move. Knowing Stuff has to come before "skills."

Twenty-some years of teacher training has indeed shifted practicum to the idea of teaching to the standards and developing skills in order to do well on the Big Standardized Test. Most of the student teachers I hosted in my classroom were working from content knowledge they'd acquired in high school. It is, in fact, the teacher training mirror of the problem-- teacher prep in way too many cases focuses on the skills and techniques of teaching while ignoring the actual content knowledge that the teacher is supposed to be teaching.

This is fixable. I know, because my own teacher training fixed it, and could be a model for other teacher programs.

My undergraduate degree was not in education, but in English, because my college (Allegheny College in Meadville PA) used to run a program based on the idea that the teacher should be a content area expert. That came first. I took 1.5 education courses before I student taught (plus one English course designed specifically for teachers). That's the first part.

The second part was exceptional support during student teaching. My supervisor watched me in the classroom usually once a week, often for more than an hour. During student teaching, I took more methods courses. The college had a field office for all of us--and there were only 9--in the downtown Cleveland hotel where we all lived, and we took courses there a couple nights a week. Methods courses taught by working teachers, not college professors. One was a methods course taught by the same person who observed our teaching, so the methods course could include practical discussions of something that happened two days ago in our actual class. 

The third part was an extension of that support into our first year of teaching. To the district, we were first year teachers; to the college we were interns. During that year, more classes at the field office, and more, less frequent, observations by the same person who saw us in student teaching. And then an assortment of Masters-level education courses in summers back at the college, leading to a Masters in Education. 

It was a low-volume, high-cost program, so of course the college eventually killed it. But the model is still a good one. Create content-area experts-- people who Know Stuff-- and then support the heck out of them as they sharpen their teaching edge on the hard stone of actual classrooms. 

Teachers should Know Stuff and be trained in the What of teaching and not just the How. Because all the technique in the world will not help you if you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And yes-- knowledgeable competence is one piece of the classroom management puzzle. Yes, a teacher needs to know some of the How as well-- lots of Hows, really. But so often the How is driven and shaped by the What; I worked with more than a few student teachers who couldn't figure out how to teach a lesson because they literally could not figure out what exactly they were trying to teach (pro tip: downloading some worksheets from an online teacher site, or having ChatGPT whip one up, will not help you solve any of these problems).

Teachers should Know Stuff so that they can Teach Stuff. Everything comes after that foundation is laid.

Thank You, Ed

We lost a giant in the local music community this weekend. I don't really have the words, but I have to try. 

I met Ed when I was ten years old, in his first year in the district. He was my first trombone teacher, and he would become probably the most influential person in my life not actually related to me. I will tell you some stories about Ed and me, but I want you to understand this up front-- I tell these stories not to focus on myself, but because there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who can tell similar stories, because that's who Ed was-- the guy who influenced the course of many students' lives.

From the beginning of my trombone days, Ed gave me permission to play. When I came to a lesson to demonstrate that I'd worked out a "jazzy" rendition of something from the book (nothing like a fifth grader's hot "Go Tell Aunt Rosie") or to show that I could peck out some approximation of a tune I knew, he didn't tell me to straighten up. He told me there was a name for what I was doing and that it was something lots of musicians did (and could I now please play the lesson I was supposed to have worked on). That kind of support might seem like a small thing, but it was very much Ed. "Sure, you can do that."

Some band directors can be micromanaging control freaks; Ed was the opposite. What Ed gave us in band was ownership, and with it, responsibility. "I'm not the one who's going to be out there in front of an audience," he would tell us, and we knew that wasn't strictly true, but we also got the point-- the band was our band and we should do our best not for him, but for ourselves. 

We learned leadership in Ed's band. When you became a section leader, you understood that you were there to help the people in your section stay on point and do their best. An awful lot of what I learned about leadership (and which I ultimately carried into my own classroom) I learned from Ed in band. Work with your people. You can have high expectations without being a jerk. 

Ed was a working musician (what a friend of mine and another of his students calls a blue collar musician) who gigged around with combos playing jazz and standards and whatever the gig needed. "Take the gig," he taught us, "Because playing always leads to more playing." And who doesn't want to keep playing?

Ed was never ego-driven. When it came to stage band (what many schools have because "swing" was too controversial), Ed started us, sometimes stopped us, but in between we were expected to play as an ensemble, holding ourselves together. He didn't need to be out there acting like the leader. 

I can't begin to list all the lessons I learned from Ed. When you make a mistake, just keep going because if you stop and make a fuss, then you've made two mistakes. Suck it up and stay on point. Listen to what the rest of the group is doing. Advice for pit orchestra playing: when in doubt, leave it out.

Band was a place where I felt responsible, accomplished, capable, respected. That was thanks to Ed.

When I ended up teaching in the same high school, Ed was not done nudging me forward. After I was dragged into the musical theater program to help teach the music, Ed was the one who said, "You already know how all these songs go. You might as well direct the pit." He enlisted me as a substitute trombonist for a dance band he played in; later, after the regular guy moved away, I became a regular player. Sometimes I drove us to gigs together (he would give me grief about the turkeys riding in the back of my creaky old Open hatchback) and I enjoyed our conversations in the car together, plus moments like the New Year's Eve when he started to argue on my behalf with the cop who stopped me for turning the wrong way on a one-way street. 

Ed was one of those people who never stopped growing. He took a sabbatical to walk the entire Appalachian Trail. He got himself a pilot's license. He worked as a golf course groundskeeper. He was director of the town band for thirty years and was constantly finding ways to stretch us as players. He was a linchpin of local theater pit orchestras. He sang in church choirs. He was founding member of our regional orchestra. He even overcame his less-than-fondness for traditional "dixieland" jazz to play in a band with his family and mine. 

Ed could be curmudgeonly, but he was never unkind and he was always supportive. It is impossible to overstate how wide and deep his influence has been. Many of his students went on to become professional musicians or music teachers, but many of us are like me-- not a professional musician or music teacher, but busy amateurs for whom music is an important part of life (another lesson I took into the classroom-- you're not just teaching the future majors in your field). 

Everyone has Ed stories. There isn't a musician in this area who hasn't been touched, directly or indirectly, by his work, which of course means there isn't anybody at all in this area who hasn't been touched by his life and work. 

It is hard to imagine the world without Ed in it, even harder to imagine who I would be if I had not known Ed (and, as I said, I'm not the only one). He lived a full, rich life and achieved the most that a teacher can hope for-- to make the world a better place and help his students become their best selves. He leaves a teacher's legacy-- hundreds of people carrying a light out into the world with a flame he helped ignite and feed. He was giant, but he never carried himself like one. Thank you, Ed. 

That's Ed on clarinet, his son on tuba, and his grandson on drums. 

ICYMI: Autumn Arrives Edition (9/27)

Fall arrived last week, along with plenty of other stuff. I'm here playing in the orchestra pit for Mean Girls and handling a bunch of other personal business, and not in Houston where I'm sure the Network for Public Education is putting on a bang-up gathering. But as I learned years ago, you can't be everywhere at once. Plenty on my mind at the moment, but let's just move on to the reading list for the week. Remember, sharing is important.

The Education Dept. hasn't been dismantled. It's become more inefficient, staff say

Spreading the work of one federal department over several other departments with no expertise in that area doesn't improve efficiency!! What a shocker. Jonaki Mehta and Cory Turner report for All Things Considered.

Justice Department Scraps Dozens of School Desegregation Cases

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on the departments important work in not bothering any schools that may or may not be desegregating. 

FOURTH REPORT: Former Alpha School students speak out

Ben Riley continues his reporting on Alpha School, this time with some illuminating comments from actual students and parents.

What We Mean When We Say “Good School” (pt. 1)

Jose Luis Vilson considers what we mean by "good school" by considering the virtues and values that schools can--or should-- display.

The Parent Trap

Parenting is hard. Paul Thomas points out the whole "I know my child best" refrain of the parental rights crowd might not be entirely based in complicated reality. Did your parents know you-- all of you-- when you were 16?

In Praise of The Sage on The Stage

Peter Shull enters the age old debate with a fairly nuanced "both and" argument.

Somebody Is Always in the Teacher’s Ear

TC Weber reports that those folks who "coach" teachers via live earpiece are still in business, and going to work on Memphis teachers.

#1 in Education Freedom Is Not #1 in Education

The Heritage Foundation declared Florida the tops in educational freedom. Sue Kingery Woltanski is here to break down what exactly that means.

The Public Purpose of Public Schooling—A Summary of Expert Thinking

Jan Resseger collects some smart people thoughts about the purpose of public education.

To Dismantle Democracy, You Subvert Public Schools

Audrey Watters tracks the attempts to dismantle public education back through many decades with her trademark blend of scholarship and anger.

Melania Trump Slammed After Gifting Elementary School Kids 'AI Literacy Training' And Tells Them To 'Use' AI Tools During North Carolina Visit: 'This Is Ridiculous'

Mrs. Dear Leader brings some corporate-sponsored AI-flavored tools to some really young children in North Carolina, ignoring a bunch of research explaining why this is a bad idea.

Trump Proposes $810 Million in Education and Health Cuts, Defying Congress

As before, this is not so much a cut as an illegal attempt to simply refuse to fork over the money that Congress appropriated for stuff. 

ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror

Mark Follman at Mother Jones reports on one more ChatGPT horror story. 

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about evidence that school voucher accountability is past due and publicly supported. 

Saying goodbye to summer.

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.