How Do We Achieve Effective Classroom Transparency

A Pennsylvania rep just offered up yet another proposal to reveal the inner workings of school classrooms by requiring schools to post textbook lists, curriculum, and lesson plans. It's another one of those endlessly repeating cycles of education, currently being goosed along by the anti-indoctrination crowd.

Because the initiative is coming from a whole host of bad faith actors who are simply looking for ways to intimidate teachers and strip mine school content for any "proof" that schools are teaching something from the ever-lengthening laundry list of complaints that started with That Race Stuff and now includes mentions of sea horse sex--anyway, because that's the crowd pushing this, there's a knee jerk reaction among educators to resist it.

But here's the thing--the desire of parents and taxpayers to know how their children are being taught and their money being spent is a perfectly legitimate desire (that's why it is so effective for the anti-public school crowd to harness it). There have always been, and will always be, some folks who are asking these questions in good faith. Taxpayers fork over perfectly good money for this, and for parents, school is the first significant part of a child's life where the parent must give up control, which is a scary thing. 

It is not enough to say, "Just trust us, and no, you can't see within the black box." Parents and taxpayers are entitled to see.

The challenge has always been how to see effectively and without derailing the process. The Big Standardized Test is a great example of ineffective accountability-- it interferes and warps the thing it's trying to show us, and doesn't even provide a good look at what we're trying to see.

So how do we do it?

Live video?

Some folks want to strap body cams on teachers or live video feeds in the room. I've heard from plenty of teachers who say, "Sure. Let them see how their kid actually behaves in class," and there is a certain appeal to teachers in having a video record to contradict student claims about how the teacher did something mean to them. 

In my teaching days, I would have been perfectly happy to have parents come sit in my classroom, but I'm not sure that would have been fair to the students. The live camera feed idea is a non-starter simply because it is a huge violation of the rights of the other students in the classroom, particularly because to provide any transparency for parents, the video would have to be stored somewhere so they could watch at their convenience (I'm not seeing anybody getting an hour off from work so they can watch their child's fifth period math class). I am not in any hurry to advance the surveillance state, and any such video system would immediately draw the attention of a hundred "We'll monitor student behavior to spot potential problems and academic issues"--oh, wait-- those companies are already at work.

Post it all on the internet?

The more popular plan is some version of the PA bill-- get everything posted on line. The challenge here is the definition of "everything."

Too little, and there isn't any real information for parents and taxpayers. If schools just post textbook lists, that doesn't tell you what is actually in the book or which parts the teacher actually uses. Too much, and you push teachers into a Dilbertized universe where they have trouble getting their actual work done because they're so busy creating reports about their work. Too much also buries parents and taxpayers under a mountain of paperwork that takes forever to sort through. 

There are practical limits as well. If the law demands that I post in August the exact text of the worksheet I'll be using in May, well, I simply can't do it. I could never have posted a year's worth of lesson plans at the beginning of the year, and any teacher who does is either lying to you or is not a particularly awesome teacher. Nor do most teachers' lesson plans look like something other folks can read, but are often in shorthand and language that makes sense mostly to them; a lesson plan posting requirement will also come with a lesson plan rewriting-into-plain-English requirement (except for passive aggressive teachers who simply post plans that civilians won't understand).

It makes far more sense to post materials week by week, as the year develops. Many schools already do some version of this with Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard or Google Classrooms, internet platforms that are used by teachers to communicate with students, but which can be easily opened up to parent access as well. That rollout of material will be far more accurate than an entire early report, and as a bonus, rolling it out in real time means that parents wouldn't need to devote an entire week just to reading through it all. As a bonus for this approach, a lot of teachers just spent some pandemic pause time becoming more proficient at using these kinds of platforms. If school districts wanted to open these platforms up to read-only access for taxpayers, they could do so.

The system will be effective and information-heavy to the degree that it doesn't require a buttload of extra work. Not a month goes by in which teachers are not required to add some new duty prompting them to reply (aloud or silently) "And when am I supposed to do that? What other thing should I stop doing to make time for it." I point this out not to say "Wah, poor teachers" but because the teaching day is a zero sum game that was maxed out decades ago, and if you want something done well, you have to provide people the time to do it. Given the choice between grading papers, prepping lessons, or preparing a report that most parents and taxpayers are never going to look at, teachers are unlikely to drop everything and devote time to getting their lesson plans posted.

There's always talking

There is also an option of actually talking--to teachers, to students, to administrators. E-mail, phones. It can be done.

There will be hard parts

There are people out there who are trying to make political hay out of the threat of Evil Teacher Indoctrinators, and we have already seen multiple tales of them finding indoctrination where none exists. Their intent in demanding teacher scope and sequence and lesson plans and text are clear--they are going searching for indoctrination, and they are going to find it. They will be far louder than the people who dip into the stuff and find it, well, mostly boring. 

There are also people who just don't trust public schools, and no amount of transparency will change that. 

Schools need to be transparent anyway. I worked for some administrators during my career whose reaction to every possible problem was to try to hide from it and build walls. That trick is not only wrong, but it never, ever works.

Will school districts be called upon to justify the presence of some materials in their curriculum? Maybe--but they should be able to do that. Even if the accusers stop listening after they make their accusation, there's a wider audience than that small mob. 

Do it anyway.

School districts need to adopt workable transparency both because it's the right thing to do and because it's the only way to deal with the current manufactured panic. 

There is a cycle of distrust, particularly in high schools, in districts where teachers rarely hear from parents except when they want to complain about something and parents rarely hear from teachers except when their child is in trouble. It's a hard cycle to break, and an easy cycle to exploit. Regular communication helps. Transparency helps. 

The goal of some of these folks is to break things, to make the gears grind to a halt, to keep public schools from working, and in some states and communities, I don't know if anything will stem the tide in the short term. But as long as these folks can point at the school walls and claim that something mysterious and sinister is going on in there, they have an advantage.

Public schools absolutely have to be defended right now, vigorously and vocally. Opponents are doing a good job of shouting down and intimidating other voices. Defenders and school district leaders have to stand up, and it's hard to use secrecy and opacity as tools for defense. 

So open the doors, tear down the walls, and let parents and taxpayers see just how work-a-day, unexciting, and ordinary the inside of a school is. Give them a good look at the sneaky indoctrination of participial phrases and the periodic table. Let them see the ordinary awesome process of student learning. And if some must squawk, let all the public see the diversity and sexy sea horses that they are squawking about. 

In the meantime, may legislatures please not pass one-size-fits-all laws that create busywork for schools without providing real information for parents and taxpayers who actually want it. 

Bipartisan School Choice Is Over

This has been coming for a while. After the bipartisan launch of No Child Left Behind and the desire to advance bipartisan support during the Obama administration (and into the presumed Clinton administration thereafter), a kind of deal was worked out between the right and the left, and school choice was presented as a hybrid that could appeal to both right-tilted free marketeers and left-leaning social justice advocates (profiteers, as always, are both politically agnostic and financially opportunistic).

Strike up a debate about school choice and you were as likely to hear about the power of competition and the free market as you were how school choice would finally bring equity and uplift to children trapped in an inequitable system.

But then the truce began to crumble. Trump and Betsy DeVos didn't help--suddenly certain policies were toxic for lefties. But the fault lines were noted even earlier. In 2016, Robert Pondiscio (AEI) drew some reformy ire by saying out loud that the left and right were not getting along any more. A year and a half later, Kate Walsh (NCTQ) was wondering if the movement had lost its way, citing a new orthodoxy that required reformsters to Be Performatively Sad about certain past failures. 

Many observers have followed this dissolving partnership (Jennifer Berkshire has covered it exceptionally well-- try here and here) looking at the causes. Part of the issue has been that Democrats were always the junior partners; school choice has been near and dear to conservative hearts for generations, while Democrats were brought into the fold more recently. Often they were simply Democrats of convenience, as typified by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group whose creation hedge funder Whitney Tilson described thus: 

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job... In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Democrats came into school choice on the theory that choice would bring improved education results and lift people out of poverty. Technocrats thought disruption--moving fast and breaking things--would revolutionize education. But none of that happened. Years--decades--passed and test scores didn't rise and charter schools didn't provide genius new education ideas and the gaggle of education amateurs running about didn't actually have any great successes and poverty was not erased.

For folks sitting on the right side of the aisle in the school choice chapel, that was not a problem. They could easily pivot from discussing results to extolling the value of choice itself. Freedom, liberty, choice--all are their own reason for being and injecting those qualities into the school system is a net good, regardless of the results.

You can see the effects in recent choice victories. There have been a host of them in 2021, and they are all about vouchers and expanding existing programs and pushing toward the literal holy grail of public tax dollars going to private religious schools. Charter schools were never a right-side priority. Watered-down choice, charter schools were a foot in the door, a compromise with Democrat neoliberals. But true believers like DeVos were never real fans (we forget now that charter advocates were not excited about her nomination, requiring her to make nice when taking office). Charter schools live attached to the public system (like symbiotes or parasites, depending on how you feel about them), while vouchers simply grab sustenance before it ever gets to the public system. Charters look to expand the public system, and have staked their future on demanding to be called "public" (they aren't); vouchers are out to replace the public system entirely, just as Uncle Miltie Friedman envisioned. 

If you want a more official declaration of the death of bipartisan choice, look no further than this recent report by Jay Greene (University of Arkansas now at Heritage Foundation) and James D. Paul (Education Freedom Institute). This report is pretty brutal. "Does school choice need bipartisan support?" might as well be entitled, "Buh-bye Dems: Who needs you?"

"We do not suggest that anyone should be excluded from the education reform coalition," they conclude. "But advocates for choice should be clear-eyed about the types of lawmakers who have historically done the heavy lifting on the house and senate floors." And as the report lays out, those are Republicans. It is not worth it, the report suggests, to craft policy to attract Democrat votes and in the process, lose dependable GOP support. Only three times in 70 did a state legislature need Democrat votes to support private school choice which, the report notes, "has historically been a Republican priority."

Further evidence of which way the choice wind is blowing? Greene and Paul recommend that policies should be designed to "increase the constituency for school choice and reflect the values of legislators who have been responsible for the existence of such programs." In other words, dance with the guys what brung you. And the policies mentioned are vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education scholarship accounts (aka "vouchers, another kind of vouchers, and a third kind of vouchers"). The word "charter" does not appear at all in the report.

Bipartisan school choice is over, and it's going to have an effect on how choicers make their pitch and craft their policies. We'll want to pay attention.

One More Story About The Extra Challenges of School Right Now

This is what educators are up against right now.

Last night was school board night in my county. At one board meeting, the board was subjected to a certain amount of ranting about masks, including assertions that asymptomatic children do not spread the disease. One board member thanked them for speaking out.

Just up the road from me, the Oil City School District was supposed to have its regular meeting.

Two attendees at the meeting wore "Freedom over Fear" t-shirts and refused to put on their masks.

So the board recessed for an hour to allow an attempt to sort out the masking. The two did not leave or relent, so the board canceled the meeting and rescheduled it as a Zoom meeting later in the week. 

Both had attended previous meetings. Only one spoke. Previously, that speaker asserted that covid isn't real. 

That speaker is a high school student.

Fifty one teachers were there to show solidarity as they questioned the board about covid sick day policies; like many districts, this one now requires teachers to use up their own sick days if they contract covid. They didn't get to stand together as a group to address that concern.

And some of them had to be in school today, dealing with that student and others like him.

If we were in a state like North Carolina, how quickly do you suppose the family would turn a teacher in to the state for trying to "indoctrinate" their child into believing that disease that has killed almost 700,000 people in this country is not real, and that he needs to follow the dictates of the state and wear his damn mask? How does this work in a district where the board agrees with the student? And how many students are being told, indirectly or directly, that they should not respect or listen to the educators at their school?

It's one more obstacle thrown in the path of people who went into this line of work because they wanted to teach children.

There is a desperate need right now for parents who do not feel anti-vax/mask/etc to speak up in school board meetings, letters to the editor, and anywhere else. But they can see that speaking up invites attacks, and so a vocal minority is shouting down the rest. And teachers hunker down for another long year, or start looking for the exit.

PA: Cyber School 101

As is often the case in education, some people are just now noticing something that's been going on for a while. In this case, it's the financially destructive and educationally suspect nature of cyber schooling. So I'm going to try to collect the basics here in one post, suitable for sharing with anyone who's just arrived at the party.

Before we start, let me add the usual caveat--cyber schools (or "virtual schools" as they're sometimes called) are a great option for a non-zero number of students. Anecdotally, you can always find a kid for whom cyber education worked. But we're going to look at the larger picture, and there are issues. Sooo many issues.

The basics. A cyber school is a privately operated charter school that exists as an online connection. Students typically are given a "free" computer, and do their school work by logging in and completing lessons online. An online teacher, out there somewhere, checks the student work and may provide some instructional support. In Pennsylvania, a parent can place their child in cyber school at any time for any reason. Reasons range from a program that fits the student needs to a parent who's tired of being threatened with a truancy fine. Many districts also use cyber schools for "credit recovery" aka make-up classes to get enough credits to graduate. Students typically average only two years in cyber school, with many either returning to their home district or just never graduating at all.

Cyber schools are paid with public tax dollars, typically "billing" the student's home district. The costs are huge--Pennsylvania reimburses cybers based on the student's home district's per-pupil costs, and not what it actually costs to educate students via online school. In most districts, a "regular" student might land in the $10-15K range; Tom Wolf's proposal, from reality-based numbers, would give cybers a flat fee of $5,950.  (The numbers are even worse when you look at special needs students, but that's a rabbit hole for another day).

Taxpayers are massively overpaying for bad cyber schooling in PA. The profit margins are huge; cyber charters are rolling in money, while districts get clobbered and research suggesting that poorer districts get clobbered most of all. The cost in tax dollars is huge; in 2016-2017, $463 million in taxpayer dollars went to Pennsylvania cyber charters.

Cyber charters are largely founded and operated by businessmen, not educators. K12 (now Stride), one of the cyber giants, was founded by a Goldman-Sachs investment banker and funded by junk bond king and convicted felon Michael Milken. (K12, like several players in the field, has been caught misbehaving multiple times.) Another major cyber chain is a sub-business of Pearson, the textbook publishing company. 

Results? The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University generally favors charters and choice, but their research results about cyber schools is pretty harsh. Cybers were found not just to be weaker than the home school in academics, leaving students half a year behind in English and a full year behind in math*-- in effect, a student would be just as far ahead to stay home and play video games for a year. In Pennsylvania, no cyber charter has ever met the state PSSA or Keystone testing benchmarks for academic performance

The picture is so bad that in 2016, the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers--people whose whole business is to promote charters--issued a report saying that virtual charters were in big trouble.

Back then, there were 135 cybers operating with 180,000, with the majority in the big three states for cybers-- California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One quarter of the cybers enrolled 80% of all cyber students, meaning that most cyber students were in "schools" of over 1,000 students. Student-teacher ratios in cyber schools can get pretty high, though cybers tend to be pretty coy about the actual numbers.

There are operational issues. Student attendance is just a matter of logging in each day. More can be done--Minnesota actually implemented an aggressive and effective cyber-truancy program. But in PA, we're not doing it.

Oversight of charters is minimal. When Nicholas Trombetta used Pennsylvania Cyber School to funnel $8 million tax dollars to himself, it was federal authorities and not the state that finally caught him. Two years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that of Pennsylvania's 15 cyber charters, 10 were operating with expired charters. Cybers are not even subjected to audits. Multiple attempts have been made by members of both parties to tighten the rules so that cyber charters would be subject to, at least, the same rules as everyone else. But cyber charters lobby hard, and spend plenty of money in Harrisburg (a national pattern). Some states are pushing back against bad cybers, but in PA, there's still no progress.

The pandemic has, of course, given a big boost to cyber enrollment, and they are not above using anti-mask panic to help lift their numbers. Pennsylvania districts do have an option to try to stem the cost-- they can set up their own in-house cyber school, which has the dual benefit of keeping the money in the district and keeping students from falling too far behind academically. 

It's a mess, and it's draining small rural districts like the ones in my area. I often share this factoid--almost ten years ago, my old district closed an elementary school in hopes of saving about $800K. Their cyber school costs that year? About $800K. And to add insult to injury, as school boards try to deal with this large (and unpredictable) loss of revenue by cutting programs, the public slams them for doing a bad job of managing taxpayer money. This primer is for those folks. 

*Measuring education in years and months is extreme oversimplification, but I'm trying to keep things simple here. 

Teaching Lessons from Community Theater

I've been directing school and community theater productions for a long time, and I've learned a lot, much of which directly parallels the work of a teacher in the classroom (there are plenty of ways to frame teaching, but for me it has always largely been performance). Here are a few.

Don't Waste Time Pining for the Cast You Don't Have

In professional theater, you can afford to be picky. In community/school theater, not so much. You get what you get, and that's what you have to build a show out of. You can't try to lead the cast as if they were other people with other skill sets; you have to take them where they are and build from there.

Sometimes this leads to great things you hadn't really planned for. Every community theater director has a tale of gender-switching a role, pretty much always turning a male character female (because way too many roles are written for men, and men are not what you have an excess of in community/school theater). And it turns out that some changes strike cool little notes--for instance, when Belle in Beauty and the Beast has a wacky inventor mother rather than a wacky inventor father, it strikes some interesting deep notes. 

But you absolutely work with the cast you have, not the one you wish you had. And you don't view the cast you have as "less than"-- just different from the one you imagined. Ditto for your class. It's a toxic waste of time to be frustrated with your students because they aren't other students (e.g the awful "Last year's kids didn't do this")

You Don't Do It Alone

I've never worked a show in which I did not desperately depend on the work of costumers, tech folks, set designers and builders, and all the people working hard but invisibly as the show runs. Teaching often looks, and feels, like a solitary profession, but in the classroom you are leaning on the work of other members of your department, your students' previous teachers, the school's support staff, the special ed department, the building administrative assistants, and, if you are fortunate, your administration. 

On stage and in school, you have to learn who you can trust and depend on, and for what, and how much. Building a support network is hugely useful.

Big Ideas Need Practical Support

In community/school theater, it's not just about the actor's performance. You have to answer questions about how we'll build that piece, how we'll light that moment, how we'll store those set pieces off stage (fun fact--the awesome community theater I work in has little wing space and only enough fly space to "hide" something that's no more than seven feet tall). Failing to figure out the nuts and bolts has sunk many a production, and many a lesson. "That will just happen, somehow," is never a plan. Even if you think you've bypassed the problem by staging Our Town or some minimalist production design, you'll find you never really have.

Leave Room for Things To Happen

I've seen directors micromanage shows, telling every actor and every production staff member exactly what to do, detail by detail. It's a rough way to go--it robs everyone else of their agency, and it means the quality of the production rests entirely on the auteur being right about everything, all the time, every time. It also requires the director to exert, even waste, a great deal of energy and power bending everyone else to his will. It creates a toxic environment, an environment that people will walk away from. This kind of thing persists only because of the persistent myth of the awesome genius whose brilliant vision redeems his toxic behavior. 

We have the Visionary CEO model of school management, the goal of "teacher-proof" classes that script a teachers every word and move, and the classroom of the "genius" teacher who demands total compliance from every student. 

All of these are problematic for the reasons given above, but there's one more issue to consider. As a director, I find that when I leave room for actors and crew to create, imagine, extend and just generally fill in the spaces, wonderful things happen. It's a tricky balance-- you can't just say, "Everyone go out on stage and move around the way you feel like moving," but you have to leave some space for what they want to bring to the moment. 

The more one insists on total control in a classroom, the less opportunity there is for real things to happen, for students to bring a direction and energy to the classroom that allows learning to erupt. Doesn't mean the teacher just sits back and does nothing--as with all things in a classroom (and life), balance is needed. Total control does not offer healthy or robust balance.

Success Doesn't Always Look The Way You Thought It Would

If you are adamantly welded to one vision of a scene, you will miss other opportunities that present themselves as you work through the process. I believe this is pretty much a major rule for life, so on stage and in a classroom, it make sense to me that it would also be true. This doesn't mean you can't hold fast to things that you value, but every vision can be tempered with time, experience, and circumstances that you didn't foresee.

In community theater, it's great to have big ideas and to push the envelope of what your space can handle. But it's practical to have a Plan B (and possible Plans C through Z) because maybe that cool set piece won't work properly or something won't get built because the set guy had to spend the week on a family emergency (because everyone in community theater has a job and a life outside of the theater) or your lead won't be able to learn to juggle after all. So you move on to your next plan. And that's okay. 

If You Focus On Your Objective, You Are Hard To Derail

So this weekend, we used fog for our production of the Wizard of Oz, and it worked successfully all week--and then on opening night, it set off the fire alarm. Blaring honks, flashing lights, and the actors just kept doing their thing, and so the audience, with almost no hubbub, sat there. If you know what you're doing, and you keep focused on doing it, you are hard to move off track. True in the classroom as well. I never could quite understand teachers who were flummoxed by, say, an administrator popping in. Keep your eye on that destination and keep pushing toward it.

Everyone ought to do a little theater, on stage or behind it. It provides some useful perspective and some helpful lessons.

ICYMI: Curtain Up Edition (9/26)

 The challenge of mounting and opening a full sized show in the age of covid is--well, in a couple of weeks I'm going to lie down and take a huge nap. And maybe I'm a little behind on my reading. But here's some stuff for this week.

School hasn't changed in 100 years. So saith TFA.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider on the Teach for Awhile version of the popular unchanged education idea...

Whatever happened to the classroom of Tomorrow?

Those of us of a Certain Age recall Apple's big education idea. Larry Cuban looks at where that actually went.

Is the big test headed for the big crash?

Dad Gone Wild with a look at the Big Standardized Test on the ropes.

To achieve educational justice, we need more black teachers

I suspect that there are many areas in which Sharif El-Mekki and I disagree, but I see no flaws in his continued argument that we need more Black teachers in our classrooms. Here he is making it again, this time in EdSurge

Questioning Valor Charters

Cult-style SEL and a big bucks charter chain. Nancy Bailey blogs about what is going on with this set of aggressively marketed charters.

The myth that better schools will reduce inequalities in wealth

Somehow, Larry Cuban makes not one but two rare appearances on this list today. This piece is a thoughtful look at one of the major tensions in education, between public good and private advantage.

Teachers are not okay

Steven Singer talks about wear and tear and stress in the education trenches.

Almost unlocking a mystery of SAT scores

So close. Sooooo close!!

Covering the release of SAT scores this year, WTOP news noted two results and put them right in the headline: 

Va., Md. SAT scores rise, but number of test-takers plunges

It's the "but" that tells us that somehow, they didn't manage connect the dots, which is a shame, given there were only two.

Of course, they mean average test scores rose, and understanding averages is important here. It has always been important when reading the latest stories about SAT scores.

Any high school teacher can tell you-- "Let me pick who gets to take the SAT, and I can give you dramatically higher test scores in just a single year!" Because averages.

This year we measured only 5th and 6th graders for height, instead of K-6, and we find the average height of children in our school has increased. We did a survey of car prices; last year we surveyed all dealers, but this year we surveyed only Lexus dealers, and we find that the average price of a car has gone up. 

We've spent years marketing the SAT's flagship product to all students (in some states, we've snookered the government into requiring it), so as we add students who might not have been inclined to take the test to go ahead and take it, the average score is affected. That's how the results for every sub group can go up even as the overall average goes down. 

Now throw in a pandemic year in which students who are having a rough time just don't take the test, leaving it only to those who are well-buffered from the pandemic (and whose buffering is the same sort of socio-economic background that is an advantage on the test) and voila!! Instant increase in average score.

What we have here is just one more example of why test scores from the pandemic are not worth a thing. They can't be compared to any year, they can't really be normed accurately, and they just kind of mean nothing. But we're still going to be subjected to stories that can't manage to draw a line between two data points.

Critical Race Theory Panic Continues To Widen Its Aim

Moms for Liberty is one of the frontline groups fighting against "critical race theory" and a whole lot of other things. Launched initially as anti-maskers and anti-school closers, they quickly moved on to anti-race stuff. They are another of the groups that has hired some pros and generally displayed available resources that are impressive--even unbelievable-- for just a group of moms.

They're also an excellent example of how "Critical Race Theory" has become an umbrella term, a socially acceptable way to say, "I want all that Black race stuff out of my school."

MFL franchises itself through local activists, like the Tennessee chapter run by Robin Steenman, whose child attends private school but who is nonetheless "fed up with the way the public schools of Franklin, Tennessee are teaching kids about race."

Tennessee is a soft target for these attacks on public education because it has a law against "critical race theory," except of course that hardly anyone throwing the term around has any idea what it means or how one would prove that a public school teacher was teaching it, despite Governor Bill Lee saying that it's un-American.

Steenman sent a letter to the state Department of Education in June accusing Willamson County Schools of violating the state's gag law, but the specific charges are chilling. The Daily Beast reports on an 11-page appendix to the letter, a spreadsheet of all the objections submitted by parents, and they are--well, covering a very broad spectrum

Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)

There's way more in the list of 31 objectionable books. Spanish and Creole words might be "confusing for children." A fictional Civil War book is naughty in part because it depicts "out of marriage families between white men and black women." Someone objects to a book about Galileo because there is no "HERO of the church" to contrast with their mistakes in persecuting the astronomer. Also, there's too much sexy picture of sea horse mating in a sea horse book. 

This is right on par with the York, PA district that "froze" the use of some books (not a ban, nosirree) including books like I Am Rosa Parks by Brad Metzler, a really well-done children's book about her work (he's got a million kid biographies--you can see his work on the PBS Xavier Riddle series). I've read this book to the Board of Directors at least a zillion times, and there seems little to be upset about unless you find it objectionable that a couple of white people are depicted as being mean to her. After student protests (and lots of bad press), York's all-white board reversed the ban. 

But this appears to be where we're headed. Anything that parents or random citizens don't like, anything at all, can now be protested or reported to the authorities. Just say the magic words ("critical race theory"). We're talking broad, wide, stormtrooper-caliber aim, and it would be funny if these wild shots weren't hitting real targets, actual live students and teachers.

If You Have Missed Michelle Rhee...

She Who Must Not Be Named is back, a little.

One of the early examples of how one can parlay two years in Teach for America into a career as an educational "expert," she took over DC schools, launched some advocacy groups, established herself as a major brand (the Kim Kardashian of education reform), and then--poof. Her career turned out to be brief after all. 

Dogged by controversy and revelations about her non-miraculous miracles, she retired to Sacramento with hubby and NBA star Kevin Johnson (who has had problems of his own). She was on the board of Miracle-Gro and a Sacramento charter school run by Johnson (apparently no longer). 

But you can still, apparently, hire Rhee to come speak from around $30,000 to $50,000--less if you want her to speak virtually. 

Somebody has taken her up on that.

Sacramento State has an annual Student Academic Success Day. This year's is coming up on September 27. Entitled "I Fly: Resilient, Relentless and Resourceful," the day is meant "to inform and inspire students and the community to lay out a blueprint of success that fosters lifelong dreams and achievements." It will be an all-virtual event, and will include some awards (Principals and Leaders, A Woman Who Takes Flight, Optimism). There are workshops and sessions and speakers. Three of them. 

The opening session speaker is Kevin Bracy, known as Coach Greatness and a busy motivational speaker. At noon, "leading educational expert, author, and one of the premier motivational speakers in the education arena," Jeremy Anderson.

And, as you have already guessed, the leaders and principals summit keynote speaker is Rhee. 

Her bio for the event is creative. For instance, in writing about her appearance on the public stage as DC school chief, we're told "Under Michelle’s leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years." Except that her work in DC, besides being divisive, turned out to be smoke, mirrors, and cheating. She saw "bureaucratic barriers as a key problem in improving the school system," which is a fair representation of the mindset of the wave of reforminess that Rhee represents, the wave of hubris-infused amateurs who believed that no rules or regulations or other human beings should stand in the way of implementing their genius ideas. 

I suppose that Rhee is a fine choice for a gathering entitled "resilient, relentless, and resourceful," because she has certainly managed to just keep on swinging, even in the face of a single notable success in the field she elbowed her way into. I'm just going to hope that this is a gig of convenience and not an attempt to get back into the ed biz. If you're curious, you can register to zoom in on her address. 

ICYMI: Tech Sunday Edition (9/19)

Yes, I'm directing a community theater production again, and in the time of covid it's quite the adventure. This time it's the Wizard of Oz, and today we enter the final run-up to performance, so if I don't seem to be logging as many hours at the Institute, that's why. But we have reading for today.

Ida's Wild Ride

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider keeps us updated on her Ida-related adventures, and how education in her classroom will prevail.

Separate and Unequal

Bruce Baker and Mark Weber have done some important research about funding and education in New Jersey.

Steve Bannon hopes homeschooling moms will be his new shock troops

The Daily Beast has been watching this political storm brewing. Take with a grain of salt, but pay attention.

Big money in selling charter schools

Carol Burris over at the Washington Post lays out a crazy pants story of how one charter group is all about making big real estate dollars.

How republicans turned school choice into a losing issue

A Jennifer Berkshire piece at The Nation takes us to the Pompeo/DeVos choice pep rally in New Hampshire. I told you this was coming, but she actually went. 

Black educators silenced from teaching America's racist past

Melinda Anderson takes a look at some effects of the CRT panic

School boards and other political targets

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at the current wave of attacks on school boards.

Our Faculty Success Initiative Redefines Everything You Thought You Knew about "Faculty" and "Success"

McSweeney's scores with yet another darkly comic look at education baloney.

School Choice Isn't Uber. It's LulaRoe.

I didn't mean to watch; I really didn't. But my wife started in on the LulaRoe documentary and I was sucked in. Mostly because the founding couple, DeAnne Brady and Mark Stidham are such truly awful people, but they were awful in a way that immediately rang a bell. 

There are some superficial similarities. In particular, the multi-level marketing pyramid scheme aspects of LulaRoe, where the focus is not on the actual product, but on recruiting more people for the organization--that rang a bell (kind of like treating people as if each one was carrying a backpack full of cash). 

But what really resonated was the attitude of the founders. 

DeAnne and Mark talk a lot about freedom and choice. They talk about liberating their members, giving them choices and opportunities in their lives. But when your LulaRoe business doesn't work out, Mark wants you to know that it's your own damn fault, that you didn't work hard enough or have the moral fiber or the hustle and you're making excuses. 

We've seen these people before. They believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this?

Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should.

This is not an idea that translates well to public education, but it is a foundational belief about how the world works, and their ideas about the freedom to rise or fall on your merits echo those of fellow multi-level millionaires, Dick and Betsy DeVos (in fairness, Betsy's money also comes from the manufacture of auto parts). 

It's the Betsy DeVos Education Freedom universe, parents get their vouchers and are cut loose in the marketplace. And if they later come back complaining that they were bilked by bad actors or snookered by a snake oil salesman or left stranded  by a suddenly-closed non-public school or were in a community that the "market" chose to pass by or they simply couldn't make the combo of their voucher and their own money stretch far enough for an effective education--well, as Mark Stidham would tell them, we gave you the freedom and the opportunity and if you didn't make it work out, well, that's on you. You didn't have the virtue or the character or the grit or the hustle to make it work. Stop making excuses. 

Betsy DeVos liked to compare school choice to Ubers, or food trucks. But her worldview is on display in the LulaRoe saga, along with all the broken people and dreams that it leaves behind. 

FL: The Big Standardized Test is dead. Long live the Big Standardized Test!

 As widely noted, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis has had a testing epiphany. "More learning and less test prep," he says, and his right hand education man Richard Corcoran says, gee, testing really is a waste of as lot of time (he only just noticed this during the pandemic BS Test suspension period). Man, that Big Standardized Test is bad news, says the top guys in the state that wrote the book on the cult of testing.

If you follow me over at Forbes, you know I've already written about this. However, at Forbes my job is to be reasonably calm, considered and factual. I come here to the Institute to vent my spleen, and my spleen says that this all smells like a lot of fertilizer. 

Or as a friend of mine put it, Florida is replacing CCSS with B.E.S.T. and the governor now wants to replace FSA with F.A.S.T., and it all will produce C.R.A.P.

The governor's proposal is to replace the Big Standardized Test with progress monitoring. In other words, instead of one big high-stakes standardized test at the end of each year, an unending string of high-stakes standardized tests throughout the entire year. The BS Test would be gone, but all of the high stakes, from the stupid school letter grade rating system to test-based teacher evaluations--that stuff stays. The ability to run down the public education system as a means of marketing Florida's fifty-seven varieties of school choice--that stays. 

So while DeSantis has now disavowed two key pillars of Jeb Bush's reformy policy, the heart and soul--crush public education and sell off the parts--is still firmly in place.

In some ways, F.A.S.T. is worse, because testing and punishing assessing throughout the year means that the high stakes never let up. And assuming that this unending barrage of tests is delivered by computer, Florida would be generating a mountain of student data. That's a lot of money, and it's also an opportunity to start deep and damaging files for each of those students. 

Computer-delivered low-cost high-data-yield competency-based education-flavored products have been a dream of some folks for years now. Now one looks to be taking a shot.

The state government and department of education are already treating this as a done deal (presumably the legislature will do as it's told) and bragging that they are the first state in the nation to go this route. We'll see if the feds think this is an acceptable way to meet the requirements of ESSA. It's going to make some testing company a load of cash, set new standards for data mining, and show new heights in test-centered schooling (every week is test prep week). And it will presumably provide DeSantis a better way to garner some national political 2024 attention (because going pro-covid isn't looking like a winner right now). Of course, Jeb Bush thought he was going to ride education to the White House as well...

But if you aren't paying attention to this story, you should, because when it comes to destructively bad ideas in education, all roads lead us back to Florida. Guaranteed that GOP strategists around the country are watching this and thinking, "Hmmm.... maybe we should try this..."

DeSantis is making a play for it; all the more interesting because he's burned the single BS Test bridge behind him. There's not really any "Oh, I guess the Big Standardized Test is awesome after all" way back. He's committed. Here's hoping nobody else gets encouraged by it.

How To Undermine The Teaching Of Reading

No, this is not yet another salvo in the reading wars, because I don't  care where you fall on the pure phonics -- just take your holistic guess continuum, you have to believe in the power of content knowledge. 

There's plenty of evidence of the importance of content knowledge, though I'm partial to the old baseball experiment, in which it turned out that students have a higher reading comprehension level if you ask them to read about topics where their content knowledge is strong. 

This doesn't seem particularly mysterious. Sounding out words isn't all that helpful if the sounds add up to a word I've never heard before. And my ability to form an educated guess is limited to things I actually know something about. 

Unfortunately, the high stakes testing area has asked us to think of reading as a collection of "skills" that are sort of free-floating and unattached to actual content, as if "find the main idea" is a task that can be completed by a third grader as easily in a paragraph about baseball as in a paragraph about the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. 

And yet the stars are aligned to once again give the short end of the stick to content knowledge rich areas. Worried about getting those test scores back up (because that's how Learning Loss is going to be measured in their neighborhood), administrators are bearing down on reading classes. I have not yet heard of anyone repeating the worst excesses of one former principal in my old district; he took students with low pre/practice test scores and putted them in two math and two reading classes per day and pulled them out of math and science entirely. But plenty of administrators are hurting the cause in other ways. For instance, elementary principals like to stick history and science in lousy time slots-- last fifteen minutes before lunch, last twelve minutes before lining up for buses, only once a week. 

Deciphering words without a connection to content knowledge is not only harder, but it's an unfinished process, like opening a door to nowhere. And not just a door to nowhere, but a door without hinges or a frame. Trying to teach reading without content knowledge is like teaching a student how to open a door with just a door, by itself, lying in the middle of a field. You can teach them the parts of the door and how a doorknob works, but it's really hard to operate the door that way, and not very fun or interesting.  Love of reading, the most desirable outcome, requires an ability to understand and operate the door (decipher the words), but it also requires the door to open up on a world, not a blank nothing. 

Look, tortured metaphors aside, this is an area in which I agree with people I often disagree with in other areas-- when the Board of Directors is ready to learn to read, I want the foundation to be built on tons of content knowledge and vocabulary. I don't give a rat's hairy tushy about their DIBELS scores, and I already know they can pretend to read (If you want someone to provide a dramatic recitation of "Mighty, Mighty Construction Site," I've got your guys right here). When they sound out a word, I want them to recognize it. When they struggle through a text, I want them to have enough understanding of what's going on to use a context to help them. I want them to grasp that the marks on the page correspond to actual Things in the World, and I want their teachers to help them fill their brains up with all the knowledge of all the things.

And not because content knowledge will help them raise their test scores but because the whole point of the written word is to transmit understanding and knowledge and ideas and feelings and insights across space and time, human to human. Content knowledge, rich and deep and broad, is an aid to reading because it is the whole point and purpose of reading. "Reading," whether by decoding or by best-guessing, without any connection to the world, is just a performative school trick that misses the point and purpose of language. Don't shortchange content knowledge so that you can teach reading. Teach children content so that you can teach them to read.

What's Too Controversial for the Classroom

John Wallis was a fresh new teacher, hired to teach drama, world mythology, and speech and debate at Neosho Junior High in southwestern Missouri. He hung a gay pride flag and a sign saying "In This Classroom, EVERYONE Is Welcome." He was told a parent complained, so he took the items down. Students asked why. He explained, said the flag did not represent what he would teach in his class, and went a bit further:

“But I followed it up by saying, ‘If you have a problem with the flag representing me, or students who identify as LGBTQ+, then you can probably find a different class,’” said Wallis. He said that prompted more complaints from parents.

He was then asked to sign a letter saying he would keep his "personal agenda on sexuality" out of the classroom, including no displays of any references to gender or sexuality. 

So he resigned.

Not the first or last teacher to be out of a job over personal beliefs in the classroom, but we're definitely into an era in which it's getting harder to see where the line is. (And we should note that the line's presentation via the press is also muddied up because we can never be certain that we're getting all of sides and all of the details visible at ground zero.)

There are certainly limits to a teacher's speech, both legal and ethical. Legally, teachers are government employees and that means they don't enjoy the full freedom of speech in a classroom as a private citizen on the street. That is exactly why a classroom teacher cannot legally lead her students in prayer--because that would constitute a government endorsement of a particular religious faith. And yes, there's a deep irony in the fact that the same people who want to erode that particular barrier want to erect an iron-clad one around teachers who bring "controversial issues" into the room.

The "How To" for handling controversial issues in an academic way is not all that tricky. I taught American Literature, which means I taught religion, race, gender, etc etc etc, and my basic template was, "I'm not here to tell you whether the osquolots were right or wrong, but I want you to understand how they saw the world and how that affected how they wrote about it." And then I'd make the osquolot case as clearly as I could. 

That seems pretty straightforward, and yet it does not guarantee smooth sailing. For some parents, it will be too controversial to talk about the osquolots at all, as if they had some sort of valid viewpoint. These parents often end up home or private schooling, so that their child never has to encounter an idea that those parents disapprove of. Mostly this story ends with parents learn that it's nearly impossible to raise a child who believes only what you believe.

But that's the academic area. It gets trickier when, like Wallis, and like too many students, you are dealing with topics that are not merely academic. For some non-zero number of parents, a teacher who simply walks into the classroom delivers an unspoken message of "I'm gay and I'm free to walk around and be a teacher in a school" and that message is controversial enough. A non-zero number of parents will find it too controversial is a Black teacher lives their Black life in the classroom in front of students. 

This is the problem with "don't be controversial" directives, pleas to "just teach facts" and "don't push your opinions"--they too often mean "just be in the classroom in the same way you would if you were a heterosexual white person." 

All good teachers know that connecting with students, building a relationship, is critical, which means you have to bring part of your story into the classroom. It's a tricky balancing act. You don't want to be that teacher who overshares, whose students know you were on a date last night and how it went, but you also don't want to be an impersonal robot who apparently gets clicked off and leaned in the closet at night. "Students have to know you care about them" is time-tested advice, but it requires that them to know that you can care about anything. Plus, in some cases you are one of the few adults in their orbit, so you're a bit of a role model; how to have an opinion about something without being an ass is a good skill to model.

Side note: All of this is easier if you live in the district where you teach and students see you out in the community (is there anything as exciting for a young student as discovering that your teacher buys groceries and wears jeans). It's just one more reason that you really ought to live in the district where you teach. End of side note.

LGBTQ students, students of color, students with any number of challenges-- they all benefit from seeing teachers like them in front of a classroom. So do all the other students. And that means seeing what those teachers care about, living their lives. I kept pictures of my family on my desk all the years I taught; why shouldn't a married LGBTQ colleague be able to do the same?

We are stuck in an age of agitated groups, most of them currently on the right. Is there anything we can't raise a fuss about. I was watching an episode of Daniel Tiger yesterday with the Board of Directors, and it was all about sharing when you play with someone, and I realized sadly that this would be controversial content because some folks don't cotton to sharing which sounds a little socialist and in this world you fight for what's yours and you hold onto it. And folks who cry controversy over things like actual facts, rendering science ands history classes an uphill struggle. And folks who think children shouldn't learn anything that their parents don't know or believe. And folks who don't believe in vaccines.

The missing factor in all of these "teacher leaves the classroom" stories is an administration with a backbone. Because it certainly seems as if the answer to "What is too controversial for the classroom" is "pretty much everything." I've worked under controversy-averse administrations, and "don't do anything that will get me a phone call" is a terrible administration policy, especially in times when some folks are intent on whipping up controversy for their own political gains. Drawing that fuzzy, ever-shifting line is part of an administration's job, but they have to have the nerve not to fold to every single parent phone call.

I have no idea whether John Wallis was destined to be a great teacher or not. But I do know that as districts have more and more trouble filing positions, "Go in that classroom, but don't be gay or Black or any of this other stuff on our list in front of the students" is not a great recruiting tool. Nobody's career dream is to be an empty suit. 

ICYMI: 9/12 Edition (9/12)

 9/11 was one thing; what started to happen in this country on the twelfth is something else entirely, but we don't have national days of remembrance about that. Meanwhile, there's plenty to read about in the world of education.

NH "education freedom" accounts cost soaring

NH implemented vouchers; now it's turning out to be way more expensive than advocates promised.

Proctorio's awful reviews disappear

Cory Doctorow takes a look at what's been happening with that horrible monitoring scam software.

How we abolished child labor

Betsy Wood is at The Conversation to remind us that the end of child labor didn't exactly happen because we were feeling all noble. More like the Depression and fears of white slavery.

I Can't Believe I'm Looking at Test Scores

Nancy Flanagan says enough already with the big standardized test scores.

CRT turning school boards into GOP proving grounds

One more piece, this from Politico, about how the right is using critical race theory to bring chaos and recruitment to local school boards.

Having just one Black teacher can change a life

Still an issue (despite how you may feel about Citizen Education) is the low number of Black teachers in schools.

Real children in real time

Eduhonesty looks at the assumption that students are just waiting for the chance to do some school and chomping at the bit to get educated.

Lack of trusted authority is why COVID is kicking our butts

Steven Singer takes a look at how we got here.

Charter schools scary future

Jennifer Berkshire writes in The New Republic about the rightward lurch of the charter world.

When one window closes, another opens

Grumpy Old Teacher on the love of testing and Florida's mistakes.

River Runner

Okay, this is just a cool thing. Put a drop of water anywhere on this map of the US and it will tell you and map the path that drop will take to the ocean

Arne Duncan and Pedagogical Badger Hats

Arne Duncan was at it again, popping up on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show to talk about post-covid education (looking kind of Herman Munster-ish on his Zoom screen). 

Much of his shtick was predictable. Students are months behind (which actually means, of course, scores on the Big Standardized Test are down, we think). We have to meet their social emotional needs, as we accelerate learning (just, you know, teach faster, because teachers have been holding back all these years). 

Zakaria says/asks, the "digital economy" did awesome in most sectors, but in education learning-through-a-screen didn't really deliver. Howcum?

Whatever else his failings, Arne could often say the right thing, and he does that here. Students are social beings, and being unable to have a personal connection with friends and teachers was rough on them. He's also worried about the "missing" 2.5 million students, which he suggests could be a lost generation, and that strikes me as a bit over the top, but reflective of a government bureaucrat attitude that if we don't have official paperwork on a person, they don't exist. But his idea of mobilizing teachers, social workers, etc to go out and find these children and make sure they're okay--that's not a terrible impulse. High touch, not high tech, says Arne of the solution.

Zakaria says that it sounds like there's no room for hybrid or virtually school in Duncan's vision, so now Arne will pivot and pretty much take back what he just said. And this is the part you may have seen quoted.

Duncan suggests, as an example, that we've got all these algebra teachers across the country, teaching just 100-125 kids. 

I think if we figured out who the best, who the Albert Einstein algebra teachers were in our country and rather than teaching 100 students each day, think about if they were teaching 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, and then we could use that class time the in person time, for tutorials and small group instruction. So there are some lessons that we can take and run with.

This is a dumb idea. It's not a new idea--reformsters have dreamed of this world where we pay fewer teachers to teach more students. But this precisely the sort of thing that sounds good to somebody who doesn't really understand teaching at all. I mean, what person imagines that teaching 15 kids in person and teaching 100,000 online are basically the same thing, that any teacher who's good at one will also be good at the other. It's the Duncan crowds same old idea-- teaching is a human engineering problem and once you figure out what buttons to press on the student module, that (plus expectations) will just cause the student modules to learn. 

Duncan says we'll have to make access to equipment and wifi as ubiquitous as electricity and running water (oops--I have some places for him to visit). He nods at "anytime anywhere" learning, but then he pivots back and says that being in a physical school is the way to go. 

Fareed asks what the hope is, and Duncan says we can't go back to normal because normal didn't serve tens of millions of students and I'm now yelling at the screen to remind Duncan that he and his cronies created that normal and this is one of my least favorite Duncan moves--decrying policies that he pretends he didn't have a hand in creating. Gah. Also, he wants to accelerate learning somehow--maybe do away with three months of summer vacation (he's going to blame it on the agrarian economy which is incorrect), or maybe some children get 9 months a year and other children get 11, and longer days and I can't even start on how many ways this is dumb-- NCLB and RttT already gave us the treat of students with low test scores being punished by losing arts and science and recess, but sure, let's take their family time and after school play and summer vacations, too. Great idea, Arne.

After a stop at food, Duncan is on the old "Let's flip this on its head" and make time the variable and learning the constant. "Let's give every child exactly what they need to be successful," says Arne, and "successful" is doing a lot of work there, but not as much as "what they need" because mostly we don't really know--unless we pick a meagre, cramped definition of "successful" like, say, "gets a certain score on the Big Standardized Test."

He's going to bear down on the time thing, saying that "basically" you pass algebra by sitting in a desk five days a week for nine months, and I can personally guarantee you that is NOT how you pass algebra. Arne just wants you to sit there till you "learn algebra" which might be three, four, nine or fifteen months and while I get the mastery learning arguments and agree with many, Arne is unintentionally highlighting some of the structural and tactical issues in trying to make his outcome based/competency based/proficiency centered school actually work. But Duncan wants to take these ideas "to scale" because they could really accelerate progress (except, presumably, for the student who's spending 15 months in algebra class). 

The sardine superteacher, dispensing smartitude over a class of thousands (who can clock out once they pass a check test) is an old favorite. Fans have been pointing to many students who did just fine under the cobbled-together patchwork kluge of virtual learning that schools used last year, and certainly some did (just as a few students do well in cyberschool). But in education we have to be careful about the "some students do well" argument. Really careful.

Some students will always do well. Regardless (or even in spite of) what teachers do, these students will learn. I could tell every student in the classroom to wear a badger on their head, and some students would do just fine. They're bright, and they're motivated. That's why many teachers love to have them in class. It's why colleges and universities are such a fertile source of terrible teaching--because students are there on purpose and mostly motivated to learn (or at least get grades) whatever Dr. Dimbulb is doing up there at the front of the 500-person classroomitorium. 

Duncan is right when he says that human connection is critical to education, in this and in any other fall. But his idea about putting some "Einstein" on a 100,000 student internet hookup is deeply, deeply dumb. But man--the man can still make me yell at a screen. 

Backpacks Full Of Cash

Jeanne Allen's magical phrase, turned into a rhetorical weapon against her and other free market choicers, never seems to quite go away, perhaps because all sides find it an apt description of free-market choice. Right now they're getting ready to load up more backpacks out in LA. Allen was sure that this was a great portrayal of the awesomeness of choice, but I'm not sure we ever thought it through.

After all, in this vision of school, students are couriers. Their job is to carry backpacks full of cash to various vendors and business operators like little pack animals. The backpacks full of cash image unintentionally focuses on what many fans of the free market model are very interested in--easily moved, largely unguarded cash. We could as easily describe students as little foxes or minks, important mostly for the valuable pelts that they carry with them (and from which they will eventually be separated). 

One of the great tricks of free market choicers has been to hide their primary focus in plain sight, and the focus is not education or even choice, but in free marketizing public education. 

And yet, for years, few people stop to ask, "Hey, wait a minute. Why does school choice have to involve market forces? Why do we have to strap money to the backs of children?"

After all, we could offer school choice within a public system. We could offer a variety of different schools in one system. We could (and I'd argue already do) offer a variety of school options under one roof. If legislators believe that public schools are choking in too much red tape and regulation, well, then--get rid of them. Every educational goal that choice fans espouse could be met within the public system we already have. The goals the public system can't meet are the structural ones, the ones that are all about freeing businessmen to pocket some part of the vast stack of money we spend on education. 

Why does a requirement of school choice have to be that private operators must make money from it? 

I get that some folks have a sincere belief that market forces drive competition which drives excellence and innovation. I don't see a lot of evidence in the real world. Success in the market comes through many means other than excellence in products (eg Coke, Walmart, Microsoft), and once market dominance is achieved, market command is used to squash competition and buy up innovation before it can become a threat (eg see above). The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. They compete over the fat middle and leave the outliers to fend for themselves (eg cable tv). Then multinational winners in the marketplace create their own sets of laws, regulations and bureaucracy that any nation's government would envy. 

So I see no benefits to letting free market forces loose in a vital public service. On top of the fact that they don't deliver any of the benefits ascribed to them, they foster this view of students as pack animals tasked with delivering backpacks full of cash. 

There are valid arguments to be made in favor of some version of choice. But none of them require the inclusion of privately owned-and-operated marketeers.

Of course, to offer choice within the public system would require more money. Choice as we're currently doing it requires more money, but various shell games are being used to hide that fact. But here we are in the same old place--we can think of cool things that might make education better, but those things would cost more money, and when it comes right down to it, we don't want to pay that much for the education system (our own kids, sure--but not for Those Peoples' Children). 

So for some folks, the solution is to strap cash to the backs of children and turn them loose so that various business operators can compete at the work of coaxing the cash couriers into one business's doorway. Instead the object of education, the center around which school revolves, free marketeering transforms them into conduits of cash, one more cog in the machinery instead of young humans that the machine should serve. 

Who Is The Protagonist

Friend of the Institutue and religious historian Adam Laats has what I think is the very best take on the "CRT" panic. I've seen him say this a couple of times--here's a quote from a Guardian article:

“The heart and soul of the anti-CRT outburst is this anxiety of the changing protagonists in the story of American history,” said Laats.

That, for me, absolutely hits the nail on the head. It's not just an argument about what the story of America is, or even controversial topics or trying to make white kids feel guilty. On a really gut level, this freak-out is about people who don't want to hear the story as if it were somebody else's story and they were just a bit player.

You can understand the 1619 project that way--as an answer to the question, "What if we told this story not as the story of the United States government or the story of white settlers coming to a new world, but as the story of Black folks." If you've never really grabbed the notion of "centering" someone in a "narrative," these terms work fine as well--telling the story as if X is the main character.

We've seen that narrative exercise. There are a couple of great versions of the Three Little Pigs with the wolf as the protagonist. Gregory Maguire has made an entire career (and inspired a hit musical) out of making different characters the protagonists of stories you already know.

It's more challenging when you make it personal. Every one of us is the bad guy in someone else's story,. and some people never make peace with that in their entire lives. But the history of this country has always had as its protagonists a bunch of white folks. They have gotten better over the years at sharing that stage--but it has mostly always still been their stage. 

As a lifelong English teacher and lit guy, this is a framing that really clicks for me. This is a short post, but I want to put this idea down where I can find it. I expect I'll be using "protagonist" again.

IN: Parents And Their Rights

 Indiana is one of several states that has some version of a Parents Bill of Rights, in their case "released" back in June by the state Attorney General Todd Rokita, a GOP politician who hoped to follow in Mike Pence's footsteps, but couldn't quite make it. AG was kind of his political comeback. Democrats called the Bill of Rights a continuation of his 2024 gubernatorial campaign.

Rokita says, “Education policy and curriculum should reflect the values of Indiana families while meeting the mandatory requirements set forth in law." And in fact this particular batch of rights is mostly about being able to overrule your child's school:

*To question and address your child’s school officials and school board members at publicly designated meetings with proper notice of the meetings provided
*To question and review the curriculum taught in your child’s school by questioning local school boards and school administrators
*To expect that the academic curriculum taught in your child’s school aligns with Indiana and federal law
*To participate in the selection and approval of academic standards for the State of Indiana
*To obtain educational materials and curriculum taught to your child in the classroom
*To run as a candidate for your local school board

Rokita has heard first hand from parents around the state (because these kinds of laws/rules/edicts are always handed down because "some people told me they really want this" and never" because it suits my personal ideology" or "because I think this will be good for getting votes) and they are concerned about "the ideologies being imposed in their child's school curriculum."

It's an interesting stance to come across during Labor Day weekend, a weekend marked by articles reminding us that child labor laws ended the notion that children were the property of anyone--not employers, not parents, not anyone. It's also part of the general picture of education in Indiana, where voucher schools include a variety of schools teaching that evolution never happened, that Black Lives Matter causes racial strife, and that "black immigration" is how all those Black folks got here. Also, even though slavery was bad, "much was done in the name of abolition that was as evil as the institution of slavery itself."

So we end up with this weirdly tilted system where a parent can complain that their child is being exposed to "critical race theory" stuff, even as tax dollars go to private schools that teach the very biased view of history that CRT aims to point out. 

Meanwhile, of course, if you're not a parent, but just a citizen, taxpayer or employer who has thoughts about what students need to learn in order to take a spot as a responsible member of society, you get no say at all. It is parents who get the tools to craft a version of reality that suits them, everyone else be damned. 

Sigh. It's not that I don't get it--at least sort of. You raise your babies and you send them out into the world and you give control of a part of their lives over to people who are not you, and that is scary. But if your world view is so fragile that exposure to any single contradictory viewpoint jeopardizes it, maybe you need to reconsider.