ICYMI: Under Water Edition (7/12)

It has been a week. Maybe we'll talk about it some other time. But I still have a reading list for you.

I Asked My Students About AI Again

Marcus Luther talked to his students about AI. Maybe that tidal wave isn't coming.

The Real Cost of Fifty Years of Policy:

Greg Wyman puts the last several decades of education reform in context.

What Schools Can’t Do

David Larabee reprints a speech from 2009, and it is taking perhaps a broader view than classroom practice, but boy dose some of this really hit. Like:

we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides. Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal.

And also:

Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles. If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them. They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper. Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene.

There's plenty more where that came from.

AI: The Trust-Breaker

Matt Brady examines the effects of AI use on the trust necessary for schools to work.

Where's the Science?: Not in Think Tank Reports or Reading Legislation

Nobody has critiqued the Science of Reading movement more relentlessly that Paul Thomas. Here's his reaction to a new "report" from the National Council pn Teacher Quality.

‘Wasteful and extravagant’: Here’s what Utah auditors found digging into the first year of school voucher spending

Utah's new Arizona-style voucher program seems riddled with Arizona-style abuse and fraud. Reported by Carmen Nesbitt for the Salt Lake Tribune.

The GOP-created university civics centers aren't popular. They want to require attendance.

Ohio set up university centers to combat liberal bias, but students weren't interested, so now the GOP, champions of the free market, will just force everyone to attend. Morgan Trau reports for News 5 Cleveland.

Let AI Burn

If you like your anti-AI arguments brutal and uncompromising, Ed Zitron is your guy.

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

Nancy Flanagan on the recycling of old education ideas.

Arizona students with disabilities fuel rapid growth in billion-dollar ESA voucher program

What do you suppose would happen if you set up your taxpayer-funded vouchers system to incentivize a diagnosis of special needs? Craig Harris reports for 12 News.

Families hoard ESA funds as Arizona public schools face low funding, records show

Arizona's taxpayer-funded vouchers are also piling up big money stockpiles for some parents. Craig Harris again.

Teachers in Michigan school district can pick from 32 phrases or face legal review over classroom posters

How stupid can the attempts to police teacher posters get? Pretty stupid. Lily Altavena at Chalkbeat.

Big Changes to Federal Grants Are Coming: What They Could Mean for Schools

Much of the boring routine funding from the feds is about to be disrupted. Marl Lieberman at EdWeek reports.

“One Big Beautiful Bill” Has Already Begun Damaging Children’s Well-Being: It Will Only Get Worse

Jan Resseger looks at the worst side-effects of that thing.

AI Data Centers: Greed Rather Than Need.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the threats coming from data centers.

Teens Arrested for Breaking Into High School With a Homemade Plasma Cannon

Are you worried that Kids These Days just aren't as ambitious or creative as they used to be? This is a story for you. Luis Prida at Vice covers a North Carolina story.

This week at Forbes.com, I took a look at how Arizona is one step closer to imposing actual accountability on its taxpayer-funded voucher program. 

A video artifact-- a medley from the cast of the then-current musical Hair, on Ed Sullivan. Asks your parents (or grandparents) what's going on here. 

The Federal Religion Commission on Education

The federal Religious Liberty Commission just coughed up its 224-page report, and I'm not about to shovel through the whole thing here, but it does devote a whole chapter to education, and that's worth a look for what it tells us about the MAGA view of education.

Much of the report is taken up with some anecdotes from students who allege various versions of being picked on in/by schools for their faith. One fifth grade student was "forced" to read a book about transgenderism to his kindergarten buddy, and this qualified for testimony because somehow being anti-trans is a Christian belief. One student was denied the right to wear a covid mask with "Jesus Loves Me." One student was denied the right to thank Jesus in his graduation speech. One girl's attempt to sing a Christian song in the school talent show. One girl wanted to pray with friends in a corner of the cafeteria and was denied. And one more student was subject to antisemitic bullying.

The stories are dramatically embellished (when the graduating student went ahead and thanked Jesus anyway, everyone clapped, teachers embraced him, and the principal cried). Sure. And we'll never know just how quiet the cafeteria prayer really was. But while the trans book story is complicated, the other stories, if accurate, are stories of students whose rights were, in fact, violated by their school. 

They are anecdotes. The commission might have included others, like the story of the kindergartners who wore hijabs to graduation and were held up for abuse by the President of the United States. There are undoubtedly other anecdotes that bend the other way; take my own former superintendent who routinely opened elementary graduation ceremonies with a Jesus prayer, or my former student whose fourth grade teacher who pressured her to convert from Judaism to Christianity. 

The commission deals with the anecdotal nature by offering a blanket observation that the "story is not an isolated event." 

That's fine-- providing a compelling narrative is how folks do the commission testimony thing. But what's more notable is the principles outlined to provide context for the narratives.

The commission offers the now-familiar tale of how institutions have been captured by the Bad Guys. For a century, they assert, teacher training institutions "have increasingly framed education not as the transmission of intrinsic moral truths, but as a vehicle for ideology-driven social transformation." 

Well, now. "Social transformation" has arguably always been the point, as in transforming society by trying to make everyone numerate, literate, and knowledgeable. "Ideology-driven" only makes sense as analysis if you remember, as implied by this construction, that "ideology" only refers only to ideology followed by Those Guys, while our ideology is actually "truth." Either way, it's a stretch. Virtually every teacher I've ever known or worked with mostly had a classroom ideology of Can We Please Learn This Content. Though I'll bet you can find a few ideologues of every flavor in classrooms here and there about the country (there are over 4 million teachers, guaranteeing at least one of everything you can imagine). 

But what really strikes me is the commission's idea of what schools are supposed to do--

The transmission of intrinsic moral truths.

That's a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting, but dovetails with the notion that the world is all absolute truths, probably already figured out by some dead Greek and Roman guys. Once grasped, the truths allow for no negotiation, discussion, and certainly no revision (see also the argument that we don't need to respect all religions because everything that's not Christian is just wrong). 

They go after John Dewey (though I'll bet you that there aren't 25 teachers working in 2026 who could name two things Dewey believed) and accuse him of this kind of stuff:

He proposed that schools create an “embryonic community life,” where children would be taught primarily not how to think or explore truth, but to develop habits useful to the state, such as cooperation, shared purpose, and democratic citizenship.

Dewey gets charged with re-characterizing schools as "a vehicle for ideologically driven social progress." Again, I think his offense here is not going after "social progress" so much as letting the incorrect ideology have a say. 

Their example is sex ed. After the sexual revolution of the sixties (the decade when everything went to shit for these folks) schools started teaching sex ed and exposing young kids to discussions of sex (bad, because otherwise young humans would not have ever heard about sex). Also, they taught birth control instead of abstinence, which is bad, because schools should prioritize politically correct over actually works.

The commission argues that "ideological current has too often left little room for students who hold traditional religious convictions, such as the belief that God created man and woman, that moral truth is real, or that America—though imperfect—is not fundamentally evil." Maybe not so much "left little room" as "didn't allow these beliefs to occupy a central place over all others." And I'm not sure how beliefs about America qualify as traditional religious convictions (even if, as they apparently mean, only certain religious traditions count here). But humans have a historic tendency to confuse their own personal beliefs with the Will Of God.

The report positions all this debate of the First Amendment as a battle over culture:

It is part of a larger cultural struggle over whether schools will form children in the moral inheritance of Western civilization or in a newer creed that often treats historic religious belief as something backward, suspect, and even harmful.

"Form children." Yikes. (I refer you to Russell Barkley's contention that we are shepherds, not engineers.) And historic religious belief has, at times, been backward and harmful, and remembering that ought to inform any discussion of the First Amendment and what the founders had in mind.

But from there we're on to the argument that some sort of hostile secular religion displaced "the 2,000-year canon of Western moral and religious tradition" (the writers are careful not to explicitly argue for Christianity by name, but they might as well have). 

This is a bogus argument and always has been. Public schools have no official position on vegetarianism. Their only mandate is to offer an assortment of healthy choices and the freedom to pack a lunch from home. Likewise, the First Amendment mandates that religion not be on the menu of what schools offer, leaving students free to practice as they wish. There is no such thing as "secular religion," rather, "secular" is what is left when you remove all the religious parts. 

We can find three issues in the commission's complaint.

One is that some schools, over-zealous (or afraid) about church-state separation take steps to squelch student religious expression when they should not. School officials should not lead a religious prayer at graduation, but if student speakers want to thank Jesus, they should. Admittedly, the line is sometimes tough to spot-- if a student, as part of a school project, chooses to paint a religious image, that's probably okay, but if the painting is on the wall of the school, the issue is fuzzier. 

Second is the part they try to avoid saying out loud, which is the belief that White Christianity should be the dominant culture in America, and that should start in school. 

Third is the notion, repeatedly taken into court, that one cannot fully exercise one's religion unless one is free to inflict it on others. That includes financing that exercise with public tax dollars and discriminating against certain Others. This goes hand in hand with having a dominant position. 

Some folks will absolutely regret it if they ever win these debates. For one, they will find themselves swamped with people who want to claim a religious free-money-and-no-rules card. For another, the inevitable result will be government commandeering and regulation of religion-- you know, like setting up a federal commission to oversee religion in this country. The First Amendment is just as much about protecting the church as it is protecting the state.

The commission offers all sorts of recommendations. Some involve providing more guidance about First Amendments, which isn't a bad idea depending on whether or not the training is related to the actual language. "Know Your Rights" posters for school. Sure; posters really work in school. Set up a portal so that people can report naughtiness on line. Sic the DOJ on those naughty schools. Get behind courtroom support for the transparently unConstitutional laws requiring Ten Commandments displays. Also, school choice. They don't bother to explain why they want it; they just want it.

Nothing here you wouldn't expect from a commission headed up by Dan Patrick and including Ben Carson, Dr. Phil, Franklin Graham, Cardinal Tim Dolan, Paula White, and Todd Blanche. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

A New Bot-enhanced Assessment Approach

I have spent plenty of time over the years tracking the fortunes of a high-capacity clown car of computer software that promises to grade those student essays. Labeling the variously inadequate programs AI just adds a new level of marketability to this unholy monstrosity, a piece of Schrodinger's software that is simultaneously totally as great as humans and also just about to be perfected within the next two years (going on twenty years).

I just came across a new model that promises speed, efficiency, validity and reliability.  Welcome to No More Marking.  Or maybe don't welcome it.

The company serves all the English-speaking world after spawning in the UK, headed up by Daisy Christdoulou. And her Clever Idea is called "Comparative Judgement."

The idea is deceptively and seductively simple. It's hard, goes the argument, to make absolute judgments. If someone walks into your room, can you judge whether they are tall or not? But comparative judgements are easier for human brains-- if two persons walk into your room, you can tell pretty quickly which one is taller.

So what if, instead of reading a student essay and trying to decide whether it was a 94 or 88 or 91 or whatever, you looked at two essays and decided which one was better. Wouldn't that be quick and simple? And if you had multiple teachers working through the same essays in the same way, wouldn't you have tons of data?

This sounds not bad until the first five seconds you spend thinking about it. Oh, but then...

If I used this technique on student height, I could probably generate a pretty good arrangement of students from tallest to shortest. But I still wouldn't know squat about how tall they actually were. Any kind of non-generalized collection of students (a kindergarten class, a group of pro basketball players) would give me particularly unhelpful results. And if the students are very similar in height, suddenly the judgment isn't so easy, and the results are nearly meaningless.

Part of their solution is a "powerful statistical model" involving some fancy maths that generate raw scores that are turned into other scores. Is the result valid? Well, the site tells us "Human Comparative Judgement is the gold standard of human decision-making. It is supported by an extensive research literature." So, you know, there you go. The other part of the solution appears to be a large sample size.

This is also another one of those tech labor transfer systems, because before any of this can start, someone has to feed all of the essays into the computer program. That can include scanning handwritten copies. You'll have to be sitting at a screen to use this. And of course results don't come back until at least one other human scorer runs through the essays, but while you're waiting, perhaps you can go ahead and be a second reader for someone else's essay stack. Are we saving time yet?

The company insists you are. 30 essays would take you two hours the traditional way with a rubric, but with human comparative judgement, you can cut that to an hour. Why are you so much faster reading every essay without a rubric? I don't know.

Don't worry, because we can save time another way, and you knew this was coming. What if some--or even all-- of the "readers" were AI programs? The company suggests going 90/10-- 90% AI and 10% human. 100/0 is of course an option.

Sigh. Okay, the premise of the whole CJ biz is that it's easier and faster for a human to judge which essay is better than it is to evaluate an essay. But that's human beings. It's not clear if the AI in the loop is doing comparative judgements or just offering the usual crappy robograding assessments; the language hints that it's the former, but it's not really clear. If it's the latter, that's bad news because bots are bad at assessing writing, but trying to figure out which of two essays is "better" seems like a whole other level of judgment that AI is not equipped to perform.

If you want to give students the impression that their teacher actually read the work she assigned to them, then you voice-deliver some comments and the AI will spruce that up and attach it. 

For the American market, the company offers three national writing assessments. You can throw in a multiple-choice grammar test. The company says they are also teamed up with The Writing Revolution, which isn't encouraging.

The company insists that they are valid and reliable and, hey, the program lets you see where the humans and the AIO disagreed. Christodoulou has a substack, but after digging through the company website I was too grumpy to dig any more. Okay, I looked at one post that made the argument that if an AI comes up with results similar to a human, it must be valid. I've heard this a zillion times, and to me it is an indictment of the degree to which human teachers have been herded into mechanical rubric-centered assessment. All you're telling me is that robots are pretty good at imitating humans who have been trained to imitate robots. 

Christodoulou asks some good questions (will knowing they're writing for an AI affect how students write), and she clearly knows that some buzzy items like Bloom's 2 sigma study is bunk. Christodoulou also acknowledges elsewhere that students really care about what their teachers think, and the simple "final product" of a grade is not enough. They've been at this model for a decade or so, so I'm going to assume good intentions. But the site doesn't offer any insights into what standards or training the AI is programmed with, nor the question of how the company deals with the inevitable AI bias and lying about what it has "read." 

CJ is an interesting approach, or at least more interesting than the typical "AI so smart grade your essays quick just like human teacher" pitch. But I remain unconvinced. 

Video: Arizona's Model Voucher Program (How Not To Do It)

More Perfect Union is an advocacy journalism non-profit that has scooped up awards for some of its video pieces about major issues-- and they have now taken a swipe at taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

The piece-- We Investigated The Biggest Government Fraud In America. You're Paying For It-- focuses on Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program. The video looks at how this barely-regulated program manages to waste a ton of money on things that shouldn't be purchased with taxpayer education dollars (and guess how much you can spend with your voucher and be automatically approved). 

Josh Cowen, who makes an appearance in the video, notes that Arizona's program is the "gold standard for what not to do and how to do what not to do," and yet it is considered by many voucher fans as the gold standard. 

Watching the video will take barely 17 minutes out of your day. The video is also an excellent primer for folks who are just now trying to figure out what the fuss is about. 

ICYMI: Another Tech Sunday Edition (7/5)

Now that we've cleaned up after the Fourth, it's time for yet another tech Sunday with community theater. This time I'm pit conducting for a production of Disney's The Little Mermaid. Like many of the staged versions of Disney films, it has way more music and a tweaked story that corrects some of the ick from the original film, which was in fact awesome but still, the whole "give up your life for some cute guy you saw once" was kind of off, along with the helpless damsel ending. Anyway, community theater is always fun, so this should be a delightful week, kicking off today with orchestra practice.

Hope things are cooling down. My old high school was supposed to be marching in the Philadelphia parade for the Fourth, and it was canceled for heat. Fortunately-ish, my friend and former colleague the band director got the word a bit before he was supposed to be loading students on the bus. May we all enjoy better weather soon. 

Here's some reading.

Beware the Reading Proficiency Numbers Game: Florida Edition

Paul Thomas encourages us to look a little more closely at some of the goals of the SoR crowd.

Massachusetts Should Reject Trump's K-12 Privateering Scheme

After DFER chief Jorge Alorza published a piece encouraging Massachusetts to sign up for federal vouchers, Maurice Cunningham and I teamed up to write a rebuttal. 

 

What School and District Leaders Need to Know Before They Invest in AI

I spotted this a bit late, but Stephen Aguilar published a piece at The 74 that provides a good checklist of things for districts to think about before unleashing AI.

AI Can’t Fix the Student-Motivation Problem

Bots aren't great teachers! Surprise! Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing lay out the details.

How Good Teachers Get Broken

Matt Brady offers some explanation, with details you may recognize from your district. Note: he also explains how to do better.

Financial Nonsense

Audrey Watters talks about leaving the free stage of AI, and what it will mean to districts and companies.

Keeping SCORE

After some thoughts about the Fourth, TC Weber takes a closer look at SCORE, the very influential reformster group with an awful lot of say in Tennessee education

Children Are Increasing in the South: Their Champions Aren't

If you thought there was a terrible national fertility crisis, surprise-- not in the South. But Bruce Lesley points out that means we're getting the most children in the part of the country least prepared to help them.

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at new report from the Shanker Institute that underlines what teachers already know-- they need more time to implement your latest genius improvement program.

If you need a little chaser from your holiday music and explosions, the Muppets have you covered.

Can We Have a Nonpolitical Patriotic Moment?

We have done all the usual Independence Day things in my community. We had a parade, and last night the town band I play in delivered our usual pre-Fourth concert in the park featuring mostly marches, a salute to veterans of all service branches, Stars and Striped Forever, and the Carmen Dragon America the Beautiful.  

Attendance was down for most events. I have no idea why, though a crowded local calendar and punishing heat are undoubtedly factors. There's been noise about the lack of enthusiasm about the 250th, and as someone who well remembers the Bicentennial, I agree that the excitement level is far lower. However, as a student of history, I can also tell you that the 150th in 1926 was no great shakes, either. 

Who knows. 1976 was a moment in which the nation was bruised and recovering, looking for a reason to celebrate that after a lot of testing of our institutions and character, maybe we could focus on what was great about the nation. Right now we're in the middle of the newest test, and celebration may seem premature. Maybe it's because much of the national celebration has been hijacked for a MAGA rally. Maybe corporations are now so multi-national that throwing business weight behind a celebration doesn't make sense to them. Who knows.

Look, our country is a complex mess, and it always has been. The Founders were a fractious that agreed on very little. The actual war effort was a slog because some states refused to help pay and many, many men refused to join the fight (some by not signing up and some by running away as soon as bullets started flying). The Constitution was a second attempt, and it's partly because some states stayed home and had a hissy fit that the thing even got across the finish line. We are a democratic nation that has always included citizens that don't believe in democracy, just as we have always housed--right through today-- a bunch of folks who vigorously reject the Declaration's assertion that all men are created equal. We set up a collection of ideals around which to center a country, and we have spent 250 years arguing about how or if to try to live up to them.

But the ideals part matters, because that's a different animal than centering a single human leader. When you have Dear Leader in charge, people are measured not by competence or merit, but by loyalty. We are currently living through the demonstration of what you get with government built on loyal dopes. 

We are also living with the illusion that everything is politics. It's not too complicated-- when Dear Leader has an opinion about everything, then every opposing opinion is painted as politics. And really, there's a whole class of politics-oriented folks who also think that everything is politics.

It is true that for some folks, politics has shaped the context that they move through. But that doesn't mean they have to live their every waking moment maneuvering with politics and power. If we had remembered that, we could have had a nice party for the 250th. Instead, so much is polluted with politics and the related impulse that we will not be able to leave a good life until Political Goal X is achieved. 

But the saturation of politics also matters because our current moment in politics is mostly negative. The easy way to get people to donate is to point at something and holler that it's a threat. You can hear the desperate grasp for another Big Scary Thing in Trump's address yesterday trying to get us all excited about scary communists. Meanwhile, my inbox is filled with people who really need my money to combat the threat of MAGA. 

Some days you would think we lived in the scariest damned country in the world, and while I think that's problematic for many reasons, I do worry that we are passing it on to another generation, raising them to think they are growing up in some sort of combat zone (which is not only not helpful for them but is insulting to people who live in actual combat zones). 

There is much to love about this country, much to appreciate, and certainly, for most of us, a great deal to be thankful for. Are we the greatest country on Earth? It's a very American thing to want to be able to rate ourselves Number One, but it's a distraction. Can we be great, allow our people to be great, and accomplish great things? We can, and we do, and often it is far removed from politics. And we should be grateful for that.

The saddest lesson of this administration is its demonstration that you can grasp for power and money, that you can get your hands on some of the most powerful levers on the planet, and have it do nothing to sooth the gnawing in your soul. You can radically change your circumstances to acquire more power and wealth than most people can imagine, and you will still be your same old miserable self, empty and chased by inevitable mortality. Miles of words have been written about what Trump lacks, but one obvious item is an authentic love of country, and a less obvious one is a sense of gratitude. 

There are many things in my life because I was born in this particular time and place, and I have t9o be grateful for that. If we don't impart some sense of gratitude in our children, we are missing the boat. This is part of the point of school clubs and sports, the not-always-admirable pitches for school spirit-- learning to be part of something bigger than yourself, and being grateful for what that something gives you in the range of possibilities and achievements. You did not make yourself, and you should be grateful for that (and that gratitude should move you to pass it on). 

I hear the bitching about not feeling Fourthy because That Man is the President. Well, the President is not the country. The country is far bigger than any set of elected representatives or bureaucratic bozos. It is a collection of humans, and that means it's a big messy thing, forever balancing love for our best angels and a desire to clean up our worst impulses. That balance is never perfect, but we should reject any views that A) call for unreasoning unquestioning love that insists everything is perfect or B) call for a total rejection of everything the country is and does as evil and wrong. Both of those views are incorrect (and people who take one of the views will always insist that anyone who disagrees with them at all must be part of the other group), and they are usually political in nature.

Should we teach students to be patriotic? Certainly, and that should include the idea that being patriotic means be willing to question and challenge when we think the country is wrong. There's an important idea there-- that you can love and honor and respect something or someone even as you recognize and challenge its bad choices. Certainly it will be a useful concept for life and connecting with employers, friends, and partners. If your own child came home claiming that their partner was the most perfect human who should never be questioned, you'd be alarmed. If your child came home with a partner that they constantly denigrated and put down, you would also have concerns. Patriotism is complicated-- like every other relationship in life.

Tonight some family and friends will come over. We'll eat some food, and then a few of us will play some traditional jazz for the rest of us (and for neighbors) and then the city will set some fireworks off over the river that runs past my back yard. It will probably be too hot, and it might rain, and my food may or may not be awesome, and the playing will involve some bad notes but I will be grateful for all of it.

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.