TX: More Ten Commandments Baloney

Texas was one more state passing a law to mandate the display of the state-approved version of the Ten Commandments. That law was challenged, and U.S. District Judge Fred Biery blocked the law; Texas AG Ken Paxton asked the full 17 judges of the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit the case and overturn the decision. This week they found in favor of the law. "It doesn't violate the First Amendment at all," declares the court in a ruling that depends heavily on some really special reasoning.

Paxton and the state used the tired old talking point that this isn't a religious thing-- they're just "honoring a core ethical foundation of our law" that's an important part of the nation's history and heritage and anyway there's no such thing as the "bogus" separation of church and state, which (you may have heard) is a phrase that does not appear in the Constitution (much like the Ten Commandments).

Anyway, the full court went by a slim majority for Paxton, the decision written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan.

First the court disposes of the Establishment Clause. And boy do they dispose of that.

If you've been following the dismantling of the wall between church and state, you may recall that Kennedy v. Bremerton, the case of the coach who wanted to lead prayers on the 50 yard line-- a case that SCOTUS decided by actively ignoring facts-- put a final stake through the heart of the Lemon Test, a three-pronged test for whether or not someone was violating the Establishment Clause (legal scholars have assured me that Lemon was not really used, anyway, but let's move on). This new decision makes it a point to dance on Lemon's grave and then announce the new test of the clause--

In place of Lemon, courts now ask a question rooted in the past: does the law at issue resemble a founding-era religious establishment?

In other words, is the state trying to "establish" a religion the same way that the King of England established the church of England. Colonies in the 1600s achieved religious uniformity through civil power. If we don't see "laws compelling attendance at the official church; laws controlling doctrine, worship, and governance; laws punishing dissenters; laws exacting religious taxes; and laws deploying churches for public functions," then there's no infringement of the Establishment Clause.

The Texas law doesn't "tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship" and it doesn't punish anyone for rejecting the Ten Commandments. It rejects the plaintiffs' argument that putting the decalogue up in a classroom is inherently coercive. "Not so," says the glib-ass judges. The law doesn't require religious observance. So, no Establishment Clause violation, because this law doesn't all look like the Church of England in the late 1700s. 

The plaintiffs had a go at using the historical argument themselves, saying there's little evidence that schools had a "tradition" of posting the Ten Commandments. But that, says the court, is a whole other thing. The plaintiffs try to argue that "if a practice does not fit within some historical tradition, it violates the Establishment Clause," but "that does not follow." See (stay with me here) if something has a root in 18th century tradition, then it is okay, but just because it doesn't have a root in tradition, that doesn't mean it's not okay-- so argues the court.

Meanwhile, in states across the country today, simply allowing students to be exposed to a rainbow on a classroom poster is considered too intrusive and might offend some people's religious beliefs. 

Anyway, that's the new rule according to this court-- the state can endorse, publicize, support, pick religious winners and losers, and expose students to as much religion as it wants, as long as it doesn't start punishing anyone for disagreeing. 

What about the Free Exercise Clause?

The plaintiffs brought up Mahmoud v. Taylor, the SCOTUS case that involved parents who wanted to opt their children out of being exposed to books with gay stuff. The plaintiffs likely felt that Mahmoud's foundation of "parents should direct the religious upbringing of their own children" applied here, but the District Court gets around that, mostly by misrepresenting Mahmoud.

The case rested on the idea that being exposed to books with gay characters would disrupt the educational instruction of parents (the decision also rested on misrepresentation of those books as well). But the district court sees something far more sinister. "Those materials were deployed by teachers with lesson plans designed to subvert children’s religiously grounded views on marriage and gender."

But nobody is making the students recite, believe, or "affirm their divine origin" (a phrase that I think assumes a fact not in evidence), the court believes the plaintiffs didn't prove that the law "substantially burdens their right to religious exercise."

There's lots more (Duncan uses a footnote to take issue with Biery's "creative" opinion). I'm going to just pick a few moments.

In a concurrence, Oldham argues that maybe the plaintiffs don't even have standing because this is textbook "offended observer" stuff:

From top to bottom, the idea is that the plaintiffs (1) worry that they will one day see a poster; (2) worry that they might find that poster offensive; so (3) they invoke federal jurisdiction for protection from potential, hypothetical future offenses.

This is, I guess, totally different from being offended that somebody might some day ask you to make a cake for a gay wedding.

The dissent pushes back on some of the legal arguments. Kennedy did not throw out Stone or the Lemon test, and it was plenty clear that it “observed” the “heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools.” The case established a concern about exactly the kind of coercion that SB 10 represents. Put a poster of commandments in front of impressionable children (with the directive that the poster be visible from any place in the room) and you have coercion. And it is true that SCOTUS went out of its way (and far from reality) to argue that the praying coach was praying privately and personally and not exerting any coercion on his players, suggesting it would have been coercive otherwise.

Oh, there are pages and pages of legal argle bargle here, papering over a decision that joins some Texas leaders in saying, "We want to promote our brand of Christianity to be the dominant religion in this state." And as always, I will argue that this kind of stuff is bad for everyone, that religion is not improved when the state tries to edit sacred texts and commandeer and control expressions of faith. 

In that spirit, let's wrap this up with the opening of Judge Leslie Southwick's separate dissent. 

What is not part of my dissent is a rejection of the importance of searching for faith. Religion, though, is a matter of the mind and the heart. Faith cannot flourish when it is forced. A poem voices my concern and, I humbly offer, that of the First Amendment:

The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed. 

A worshipper raised his arm. 

“Hearken! hearken! The voice of God!” 

“Not so,” said a man. 

“The voice of God whispers in the heart 

So softly 

That the soul pauses, 

Making no noise, 

And strives for these melodies, 

Distant, sighing, like faintest breath, 

And all the being is still to hear.” 

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, Lines xxxix (1895), reprinted in The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane 41, 41 (Wilson Follett ed., 1930). Like any effective poetry, these lines can give different meaning to different readers at different times. In this opinion, they capture for me that government promotion of religion in every classroom is simulated lightning and thunder, compulsorily seen and heard.

LA: Betsy DeVos Would Be Pleased

One of the ideas beloved by right-wing folks and pushed unsuccessfully by Betsy DeVos in her Ed Secretary days is the idea of block grants. 

Title I and all the rest of those federal Title Something funds go to states with strings attached. Spend this money to help English Language Learners. Spend this money to help rural schools. Spend this money to help poor kids. It's such a pain-- wouldn't it be better, the reasoning goes, to just hand the states a big pile of money and tell them to use it for whatever strikes their fancy. Code word: flexibility.

For some states this seems like a swell idea. They could spend the block grants on school vouchers. They could spend it on things other than Those Peoples' Children, which you may recall was kind of a problem in many Southern states for-basically-ever. The block grant approach would work nicely for anyone who believes A) I have no responsibility to take care of other people, particularly the poor ones and B) the only really oppressed group in this country is white guys. 

The current regime has tried in a couple of budgets to get at least some of these federal grant monies turned into block grants and/or dust. But there is another way.

Louisiana's Department of Education has asked for a waiver so that they can implement a "consolidated allocation plan." It would provide flexibility, by taking a bunch of federal programs, like money for English Language Learners, and rural schools, and schools that serve poor kids, and putting all those monies into a big pile that the state would dole out according to its own priorities. It would also pass some of that flexibility to local districts so that local officials could also decide which students not to serve to benefit from flexibility.

It would allow strategic alignment across programs! Fiscal efficiency! Enhanced innovation! Back to basics! And if those aren't enough magic words, the state also throws in improving student achievement in ELA and mat and early childhood leading to kindergarten readiness.

Oh, and expanding education freedom by "cultivating a more robust array of educational choices beyond high-quality traditional public schools, encompassing options like public charters, non-public institutions, and home-study programs." Also, this classic-- "Students should not be mandated to attend failing schools simply because of their zip code," a popular privatizer sentiment that is never ever followed by "And that's why we are committed to making sure that every zip code is served by an excellent school." It's kind of like "This building is on fire, but instead of trying to put the fire out, we're going to get a few people out of it."

There's a lot of argle bargle in this 34-page request, but the bottom line is the state saying, "Can you just give us our grant money in a big bucket and let us spend it on whatever strikes our fancy without any rules or regulations, and by the way, we like a lot of the same public ed dismantling policies that you guys in DC like these days."

Will Louisiana get its waiver to allow for this? I am not prepared to predict what DC will do, and right now the federal proposal for 2027's education budget has already been run through a pack of sharptoothed gators. Let's hope Louisiana doesn't get their way. 

Indianapolis Schools Have Been Privatized: What Cities Are Next

After over a decade of whittling away at opposition, the Mind Trust of Indianapolis has managed to privatize the entire public school system of Indianapolis. On March 4, the governor signed HB 1423, which creates the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation is a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. The IPEC will be the super-boss-daddy of all Indianapolis schools, both public and charter. It looks a lot like the old portfolio model, which Mind Trust has been pushing and expanding in Indianapolis for years. The model is based on the idea of an investment portfolio, where you keep juggling investments in and out of the portfolio depending on how well they pay off. 

The portfolio model is about obliterating all the "old" bureaucracies, which includes all the rules and regulations and guardrails, replacing them with some central batch of unelected overlords to manage the portfolio, closing and opening schools, moving resources around as they see fit.  It also automatically elevates charter schools to equal footing with public schools, with access to the same pile of public taxpayer dollars as public schools, which is why you find the portfolio model pushed by charter folks. Another way to think of it is as a forced "merger" between public and charter schools. (Longer explanation here.) So that's Indianapolis now.

Mind Trust used a pretend hurricane to put IPEC over the finish line. I wrote about it at the time, and you can catch up by reading here. But the bottom line is that Indianapolis schools were just subjected to a hostile takeover. IPEC's nine board members are appointed by the mayor with statutes to determine the corporate board’s membership: three come from the Indianapolis Public Schools [IPS] board of commissioners–which still exists, three from the charter school industry, and three with administrative and financial expertise. But as Jeff Hagan notes at In The Public Interest, four members are from the charter industry. And the chairman is David Harris, who founded the Mind Trust-Indianapolis, the folks behind this whole thing.

 

Thing is, Indianapolis is not the end of it.

Mind Trust gets a big chunk of its money from the City Fund, an outfit that was established to funnel money to groups trying to push charter schools. It was founded by Neerav Kingsland, one of the guys who helped charterize New Orleans after Katrina. The group collected mountains of money and started using it to juice up privatizers. In 2018, Matt Barnum reported for Chalkbeat that the group planned to make the portfolio model "normal," by spreading it to 40 cities in 10 years. By 2020, Barnum was reporting that City Fund had handed out over $110 million.

In December of 2018, Barnum reported the cities that the fund had targeted, and the groups they were funding to do it.

That list included the Mind Trust in Indianapolis.

Also on the list:

RootED in Denver. RootED is now teamed up with Denver Families for Public Schools. On their board is Ethan Gray, a City Fund "partner" who was previously a vice-president of Mind Trust and a founder-CEO of Education Cities, another outfit pushing charters. DFPS, like virtually all of these groups, talks about its support for "public schools" but actually means "charter schools." The head of RootED in 2018 was Nate Easley 

City Education Partners in San Antonio. Their current board president is Chris Barbic, best remembered for his attempt to make Tennessee's disastrous Achievement School District work. He is currently a City Fund "partner." Their CEO Dalia Flores Contreras taught for a couple of years before launching a career in charter administration, from UNO to KIPP. At Pahara Institute she's listed as a fellow, a "visionary CEO."

RedefineED in Atlanta. Patrick Dobard is the City Fund partner on their board. 

The Opportunity Trust in St. Louis. The Newark Charter School Fund. In Nashville, they were just giving directly to charter schools. 

That was in 2018. If we take a look at other current "partners" on their staff, we find:

Dorsey Hopson, partner on the advisory board of the Memphis Education Fund, which also includes Holly Coleman of the Hyde Foundation and David Mansouri of SCORE. Their Board of directors is led by Darryl Cobb, president of Charter School Growth Fund.

Gary Borden, previous leader at California Charter Schools Association. Borden lives in Oakland, where he serves on the board of Black Pine Circle School.

Jessica Pena, previously with Education Cities. Now in Philadelphia.

Naeha Dean, previously with Camden City Schools. She founded the Camden Education Fund, where she is now the City Fund  partner on the board, as well as the board of Mind Trust. 

Kameelah Shaheed-Dialo, formerly with the Mind Trust and a leader in their privatization push.

Maura Marino, formerly CEO of Education Forward DC and a managing partner at New Schools Venture Fund. Former charter teacher. She's now on the DC Public Charter School Board.

There's more, but you get the idea. Meanwhile, their four person board includes former Teach for America CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard, Enron millionaire John Arnold, Walton Foundation education program director Romy Drucker, and Netflix gazillionair and school board hater Reed Hastings.

Indianapolis is just the tip of the reformy iceberg. Mind Trust is a reformy octopus with its tentacles in multiple cities and a willingness to squeeze slowly for years if necessary. IPEC is bad news for Indianapolis schools, but it's a model for what could be happening in other cities around the country. 

A Big False Assumption About AI In Schools

Over on the dead bird app, you can find the AI Being Dumb account, an invaluable source. It recently highlighted the Andon Labs experiment in letting AI run a store. Two items of note. One is that the AI hired humans to do some of the work (though it didn't tell them when to show up). The other is that folks started using Google Reviews to try to get the store to stock products, like $260,000 worth of paper clips, tungsten metal cubes, barrels of oil, or 413,793 KitKats. 

This highlights one of the assumptions of every discussion about AI tutors and AI paper graders and AIs in place of humans in education. The assumption is that once we replace the human actor with an AI agent, everyone else will keep interacting with the AI agent as if they were still dealing with the human. 

That's a silly assumption, particularly in a school setting. Students do not even treat humans like other humans. Part of September is the annual Testing Of The Classroom Boundaries as well as te annual Mapping Of The Expectations. Students conduct these activities, sometimes augmented by the Existing Reputations of the adult humans, and use the collected data to make their choices for the remainder of the year. All of this testing and mapping is conducted withing each student's personal rules for how one treats other human beings.

This is part of the rich web of human relationships that support and enrich education. The AI-in-education crowd seems to think that one can swap out any human node of that web and replace it with a bot and nothing important will change.

For the moment, I don't want to focus on the dehumanizing of a human activity and dynamic. I want to focus on this question-- how will young humans act when they find themselves educationally yoked to a robot instead of a human. Expect a couple of effects.

Erasing ethical boundaries. Most humans operate on the assumptions that we owe other humans a good-faith attempt to communicate honestly. Yes, lots of people violate that assumption, but the fact that te boundary exists is why we have a whole language about lies and dishonesty that describes the transgressive nature of not making that good-faith, honest effort. But what do we owe a bot? Is there any reason to make a good-faith honest human effort in responding to or interacting with a non-human bot?

This may seem like esoteric philosophical noodling that young humans would not waste a minute pondering, but I assure you they get it on some level. Why do schools spend so much time hooting and hollering at the onset of Big Standardized Test season, trying to connect the test to students' relationships with their teacher and schools? Because students on level understand that they don't owe any good-faith honest effort to whatever faceless unknown buraucrats are behind the BS Test, so schools figure they'd better activate student's connection to teachers and school. "I know you don't owe it to Pearson or education reformsters to give this an honest try, but how about doing it for Mrs. Swellclass and the East Egg Battling Chickens?"

Do you think a student will give the same size and shape of effort to a bot that they would give to their beloved human teacher, or even their sort-of-don't-mind human teacher? Some will decide to see how entertaining bad-faith efforts can be; what kind of baloney will the bot accept? All will figure out how to deal with the bot-generated pressure to create human-crafted AI slop. They may fight back, give in, try to outsmart the bot, but only a few will keep trying to do their best as if they were working for a human.

It is worst for any instruction or assessment that involves writing. Writing is impervious to objective evaluation; everyone who grades writing assignments does so with their own set of biases in place. Another AI falsehood applies here; decades of fiction and years of marketing have primed us to think of robot intelligence as perfectly objective, strictly factual and "true." It is not. It reflects whatever biases are progremmed into it (and it has some, deliberately or not). You can barely swap out human for human without changing the definition of "good" writing; you certainly can't swap out human for bot without blowing up the definition entirely. 

There are a hundred bad assumptions and built-in problems with AI in education. But we have to include the way proponents ignore the effect AI will have on how folks interact with the school. Parents will not treat your AI slop letter the same way they will treat a human note. Students will not complete assignments for the AI the same way they would for a human. Taking the human out of human interaction matters, and the people who don't admit it are just too busy trying to sell some education-flavored slop.

ICYMI: Sumter Edition (4/19)

This past week we sailed past the 165th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, yet one more example of a piddly thing tipping a country over into major problems. By coincidence, I was reading Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest, which covers the period between Lincoln's election and the attack on the fort. It's a good read, and like all of his books, does its history homework even as it reads like a novel. There were many striking things to note, not the least of which is once again the degree to which enslavers really thought they were the good guys, and weren't just angry about having their economic system threatened, but were really butthurt about being treated like they were in the wrong. They couldn't have been more upset if some Northerner had called them deplorables. It's also striking that the 19th century outrage machine, primitive though it was, performed the very modern trick of getting the South upset over their certainty that Lincoln, if elected, would outlaw slavery on day one. And of course, the belief that all men are not, in fact, created equal; some are more entitled to power and privilege than others and that's how a proper country should be run. That's a through line for many folks in American history, and the guiding principle of the current regime (along with the related idea that the Betters should not have to take care of the Lessers). 

Good book. Worth a read (particularly if you are someone who has to teach Mary Chestnut diary entries). 

Here's the week's list.

Ten Commandments law is ‘distortion,’ ‘appropriation’

Rabbi PJ Schwartz calls out Alabama's new Ten Commandments In The Classroom law as distortion, appropriation, and just not right. (Also, that whole "Judeo-Christian tradition" thing is baloney, too.)

Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the timeless question recently asked-- again-- by EdWeek.

Missouri's Parental Rights Bills: Treating Children as Property

Bruce Lesley examines a Missouri version of the Parents Rights bill that strips children of rights and protections and instead views them as property like a toaster or a couch.

RIP Khanmigo & Edtech Industry Dreams of AI Tutors

Matt Barnum's piece about Sal Khan sure unlocked a lot of feelings. Dan Meyer here comes to bury Khanmigo, not to praise it. Really.

Sal Khan’s Coming for Higher Ed

Is it time to stop piling on Sal Khan. No, it is not, most especially because his newest bad idea is to replace higher education.

‘Whoa, What Are You Doing Here?’: Why This Professor Subs in K-12 Classrooms

EdWeek runs a piece from education professor Nathan Stevenson, who writes about doing what every single education professor ought to do-- get into an actual K-12 classroom.

Highlands County faces the harsh realities of public funding across the state being diverted to religious and private schools

Florida continues to gut its public schools to fund the private, and it is making real problems for the public system. Eileen Kelley reports for WGCU.

Sorry, Stephen Miller: Immigrant kids have a right to an education, too

Raul Reyes at The Hill argues that Miller is wrong and cruel for his crusade against educating immigrant children.

Doctors and education experts who studied AI’s impact on the young call for a 5-year moratorium in schools

A call to just hold our cyber-horses. Including friend of the institute Leonie Haimson.

EdChoice ESA voucher study does not back up its claims about misspending

12News has been digging deep into the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher system, and choicers have been trying to defend the voucher scheme, but as Joe Dana points out, the EdChoice defense doesn't hold up.

'I feel like we were used': Some Moms for Liberty leaders resign, claiming group’s focus has shifted

Tampa Bay 28 has the completely unsurprising story of how many of the grass roots supporters of Moms for Liberty are feeling as if they were just used for props in a political game. 

Ohio taxpayers directly fund more private than public school districts

Ohio's GOP dreams of being the Florida of the Midwest. Stephen Dyer explains how the education funding system is completely upside down.

An illustrated guide to resisting "AI is inevitable" in education

Ben Riley offers this handy guide. With pictures! Just the thing for the next time some yahoo tells you that AI in schools is inevitable and "here to stay."

Trump Administration Persists in Multi-Pronged Attack on D.E. I. and Civil Rights

Jan Resseger tracks some of the many steps taken by the Trumpers to roll back civil rights protections for everyone except oppressed white males.

Reading the Tea Leaves

Jennifer Berkshire continues to collect the evidence that voters actually want to protect public education from the worst politicians.

AI-Powered Tractor Startup Burns Through a Quarter Billion Dollars, Fires All Employees in Epic Implosion

AI tractors were going to transform agriculture. Instead, they transformed a lot of money into dust. I don't suppose anyone is going to learn a lesson here.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I looked at a report about Wisconsin's trouble with teacher retention, and a Senate bill intended to undo federal vouchers. 

This song kicks hard, but I think it's extra impressive performed live.

More Edu-AI-Robot Ideas

While nobody seems ready to jump on board with Melania Trump's silly robot teacher idea, some folks just can't help trying to tweak it a little. The results are reminder of just how little the AI Bot revolution has to offer schools. 

Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Dale Chu (who calls Trump's idea "dazzling," so you know we're off to a bad start) says it's hard to imagine schools using robot teachers "so long as human teachers are available." But what about some other stuff?

Maybe it would be "plausible" to use humanoid robots for jobs that are hard-to-staff, low-paying or "more transactional in nature." For example, "In most districts, school support staff (e.g., cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, playground monitors) represent a substantial share of school employees."

So, a robot lunch lady? Lunch room monitor? Playground monitor? Good lord, how would that even work? Is it really an improvement for a child to get their lunch from a robot-powered vending machine? And if there is a robot that can pick up the subtle clues that shit is about to go down on the playground or at a cafeteria table, that robot could be put to work on far more sophisticated and important tasks. AI has not yet demonstrated any sort of ability to read the room. 

And bus driver??!! Seriously? Self-driving automobiles are still short on safety and dependability-- how much more complicated is the job of a school bus, with its large ungainly body and the need for multiple stops. I suppose we can replace a custodian with a Roomba, but I can't help feeling that, again, the work is a little complicated for a robot.

Plus-- and this matters a lot-- these jobs all represent another level of student support, another layer of adult humans that students get to interact with as they do the daily work of learning how to be fully human in the world.

"To be sure, a robot that can monitor a hallway, supervise a lunchroom, or assist with routine logistics may not be ideal," says Chu in a sentence that should end with "may not actually exist." But his argument is that robots are "arguably better than leaving those functions, understaffed, unsupported, or shifted onto already stretched teachers." Unspoken is the rest of his argument-- that placing inadequate robots in those roles is arguably better than spending the money necessary to attract and retain humans for these jobs. 

The odd thing about this article as that Chu knows this is all wrong, and he knows why:

At the same time, caution is warranted. Schools are social institutions that help shape norms, relationships, and a sense of community. The presence of adults in hallways, cafeterias, and playgrounds contributes to a culture of supervision, care, and belonging that cannot be easily replicated by machines. Replacing too many human roles risks eroding the very fabric that makes them work. 

And then this--

The same logic that makes robots attractive in moments of scarcity can, if applied too broadly, lead to a gradual hollowing out of human institutions. What begins as a practical response to labor shortages can, without discipline, evolve into a default preference for automation, even in contexts where human interaction matters most.

So maybe Chu is just constructing a very subtle straw man so that he can make a point about automating education:

However far the technology advances, the image of a robot instructor entering a classroom captures both the appeal and the limits of the idea. It is easy to imagine machines layered into the routines of schooling, especially where tasks are repetitive and predictable. It is far harder to imagine them displacing the relationships at the center of teaching and learning. The more likely future in education is not one in which robots replace humans, but one in which they remain peripheral tools—useful in discrete ways, but never central to how children are taught or how schools are run.

I'm not so sure it's easy to imagine for people who actually work in schools, but of course that's not the Fordham audience. Maybe Chu is just trying to sneak up on them. Maybe the audience is supposed to be alarmed by the future he posits in the beginning. But I am afraid too many people will only read the first half of this piece when it's the last few paragraphs that include the actual points worth listening to.  

 

Schools' Unpaid Labor Pains

So this week, I was the asshat.

A local school district shared a digital poster advertising some job openings. I shared it with a glib comment on Facebook, and then other folks piled on. And then the person who made it joined in, and she was hurt. The poster was something she had put together over the weekend, on her own time. And she is someone who has been a professional colleague of my wife. So I know that she's a dedicated educator. So, yeah. I had forgotten Rule $1. 

I had also forgotten the rule about being clear, because I never meant to shame her. I meant to shame her district, because while I didn't know who exactly had created the poster, I was pretty sure I knew that it was a person who was not specifically hired to do that work, nor given the time, support or pay to do it. And I was correct. 

But isn't that the dynamic in education way too often. Some educator takes on a task they feel needs to be done. Administration provides no time to do the work, no serious compensation for the work, no support or resources for that work, and then somehow, when the results are less than perfect, everyone including the person who was trying to do the job, assumes that any critiques of the result should be and are directed at the person who did the work rather than the district that sent them out to try to get it done. The district tapes a pair of paper wings onto an educator's back, shoves her off the top of the building, and then folks gather around to critique her crumpled form. Or--almost worse--give her an award and a heartwarming news profile focusing on her heroic work flapping those paper wings. But nobody asks the district, "Why the hell were you making her try to fly off the building with paper wings??!!"

You can see it in every single discussion of every single school-related issue. 

We have umpty-zillion studies and anecdotes to tell us that time needed for administrative stuff is a big issue for teachers, a major stresser in the work. We dither and discuss as if the solution is some mystery. Restructure the profession? Or maybe magical AI assistants! But the obvious solution is to provide teachers with the amount of time required to do the amount of work they're given. 

EdWeek's 2022 survey found that the median number of hours per week worked by teachers was 54 ish. There isn't a school in the country that wouldn't grind to a halt if teachers worked to the contract-- in other words, only worked the hours for which they're actually paid.

And there's the other extra unofficial duties that teachers take on. Every building has lead teachers, whether they are titled and paid or not. There are the people in the building who coordinate things like cards for birthdays and getting well and condolences. There are the people who are the unofficial It helpers. For years I was The Guy Who Runs Graduation Rehearsal and Ceremony, and I had the job because I inherited it from the last person who had it. It wasn't official or compensated, but there I was because somebody had to do it, and I didn't mind because I loved my school and the traditions connected to it. 

And that's all on top of the extra classroom work itself. Special Ed teachers and their mountains of paperwork. English teachers up till late because they have a stack of papers to grade. The most fundamental hard part of teaching is that you do not have enough paid time to get the job done; to do the job even sort of the way you know it needs to be done, you will have to volunteer hours.

Schools function on all those volunteered hours. It keeps things cheap, and administrators like it because it takes one more flaming possum off their desk. But if you are one of the people providing this unpaid labor, you really need to be motivated by your love for the school because otherwise you'll start to wonder about how unimportant this job must be if nobody is providing resources or support to get it done.

The digital era has provided more new examples. Your district should have an active and professional online and social media presence-- and the district should be both paying someone and also proving that person with hours in which to do the job. Some staff member shouldn't be left to do it for free during lunchtime or on weekend afternoons. (Odds are that the charters, cyber charters, and voucher-accepting schools you're competing with have hired someone to do the job.)

What I should have posted was something like "Well, this is a good try, but why hasn't the district hired someone to handle this kind of work?" We should be yea-anding these discussions. "Yes, Mrs. McTeachlady did a fine job on that project, and what is the district going to do to provide her with resources, time, and support to do it next time?" God bless the people who try, and shame on the people who let them struggle on their own .

The answer to all of this will always be A) money and B) convenience. "We could do this the right way, but it would be hard, and cost money!" Meanwhile, in the background, we have the usual chorus of folks saying, "Well we spend more and more on education, and yet test scores don't go up, so we should spend no more." I have a response for all these people, but I have already broken Rule #1 once this week, so it will have to wait.