ICYMI: Here Comes Monday Edition (9/10)

Two weeks into school and we're now getting to our first actual Monday, and it will be 9/11, a date that now has no particular significance for anyone in school or college. This is one of the challenges of history--as events slide into the rearview mirror, a divide grows between people for whom they are a huge deal and people for whom they are simply old stuff that one hears about second or third hand. How do you convey to the following generations just what a big event something was to live through? 

Well, I don't have answers, but I do have your weekly dose of Stuff To Read.. 

Disney tickets, PS5s, and big-screen TVs: Florida parents exploit DeSantis' school vouchers

Judd Legum of Popular Information got a look inside the private Facebook group where Florida's voucher parents share tips about how to use their bundles of taxpayer dollars. It's jaw-dropping stuff.

School Vouchers Are Dysfunctional by Design

Sarah Jones, writing for New York magazine, responds to Judd Legum's piece about the uses and misuses of Florida vouchers. It's a great piece, and it gives us this line:

In the Facebook posts, parents treat the program like it’s their private candy jar. They’re right: It is.

If Teachers Are So Important To Student Achievement, How Are Your Teachers Being Developed Professionally?

It's professional development season, and Rann Miller has some practical advice for districts about how to make PD less sucky and more useful.

Give Teachers More Money

Nancy Flanagan noticed that the last PDK poll showed a lot of support for this idea. Could it be that post-pandemic, we've noticed that an awful lot of people are underpaid (and some are over-rich).

Important New Publication Explores How Inadequate School Funding is Intertwined with Race and Segregation

Jan Resseger takes a look at the edition of Poverty and Race guest-edited by Derek Black, and finds plenty to pay attention to about how race and segregation are tied to how we do school in this country.

State public education funding’s teachable moment

The courts have declared Pennsylvania's school funding system unconstitutional. Now what? And how might it affect issues like buildings that are barely functional? Come visit a Philly school.

“Some of our teachers can't teach because of a freezing building … We can't even plug in air conditioning or a computer without a plug going out,” Sax said. “All the kids here are watching you,”

Teaching in Pennsylvania’s Unconstitutional School Funding System

Speaking of which. Steven Singer talks about what it looks like in the classroom.

The Never-Ending Pursuit of "Scientific Instruction"

Paul Thomas offers some history and perspective on the problems with bringing "science" into teaching. 

Keri Rodrigues Lolling in Fox Love

Keri Rodriguez may not be an actual liberal Democrat, but she plays one on tv. Maurice Cunningham, dark money expert, reminds us where the National Parents Union and its leader actually come from.

NEPC Review: Think Again: Is Education Funding in America Still Unequal?

The Fordham Institute published a paper this summer declaring that the educational funding inequity problem was all fixed. Now, writing for the National Education Policy Center, education funding expert Bruce Baker explains just how much water the Fordham paper really holds (spoiler alert: not so much).

How anti-government ideologues targeted Wisconsin public schools

Ruth Coniff takes a close look at the attempts to undercut public education in Wisconsin and the work of such anti-public ed folks as Moms For Liberty and reform bro Corey DeAngelis

Voucher school expansion hurting public schools

Brief but pointed commentary from the news director of WIZM

A DeSantis Speech Too Dangerous to Teach in Florida

At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer points out that Ron DeSantis's attempt to address the murder of three Black Floridians runs afoul of his own rules about suppressing wokeness.

How to Reduce Gun Violence? Teachers Share Their Ideas

Larry Ferlazzo's column at EdWeek presents some thoughts from actual teacher about reducing gun violence. Spoiler alert: none suggest that arming teachers is the way to go.

‘I Was Not Done': How Politics Drove This Teacher of the Year Out of the Classroom

Madeline Will at EdWeek talks to Idaho's 2023 Teacher of the Year, and the story of how she was driven out of the classroom by the wave of culture warriors.

Largest Oklahoma school districts to opt out of lesson plans with conservative advocacy group

Ryan Walters can partner with PragerU all he wants, but that doesn't mean that school districts have to go along with it.

US ‘university’ spreads climate lies and receives millions from rightwing donors

If you want to know a little more about PragerU, the Guardian did a great explainer this week.

Research file: We watched every PragerU Kids video. Here are the lowlights. 

If you really, really want to know more, a team at Media Matters watched the whole library. A useful resource, even as it is a lot to take in.

Learning Loss

JD2718 blogs a response to the New York Times' latest anti-public school baloney.

The Supreme Court’s Fake Praying Coach Case Just Got Faker

I wrote about this story this week, but Mark Joseph Stern at Slate did a great job with it and highlighted a few details that I did not. 

Just Who’s Running the Show?

Tennessee is a state that really captures the effects of having ed reform run by a bunch of carpetbagging amateurs with more loyalty to their chums than the state's students and taxpayers, and nobody captures that web of baloney better than TC Weber, who does it some more this week. What a web.

Plausible Sentence Generators

In Locus, Cory Doctorow tells the story of his encounter with ChatGPT. It's full of insight and his usual entertaining style, and if I didn't already love it for "plausible sentence generator," I would love it for "In the bullshit wars, chatbots are weapons of mass destruction."

At Forbes this week I wrote about the widening perception gulf between local parents and everybody else. 

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