I'm writing this post mostly so I can hang onto this Kevin Kruse skeet forever.
Education has been plagued by the "run schools like a business" crowd since forever. They come in a variety of sub-flavors, from the "Run schools like a business so that I can profit from them" crowd to the "Run schools like they are an extension of my business so that graduates emerge ready to serve me" crowd.
But they all share a childlike faith that running things business style is A) a simple definition and B) the best way to run anything.
But, first, there are many ways to run businesses, and many of them are terrible. In this country, we are living amidst the rubble created by many of the worst methods. And it seems oddly enough that it's proponents of some of the worst management techniques who think their methods should be imposed on education. Pick a genius visionary CEO and let him rule the country like a tin-pot dictator is not a good way to run a business. Squeeze every cent out of the business and put it in your pocket is not a good way to run a business. Cut your product to the bare minimum you can get away with is not a good way to run a business, and yet all are big faves in the "run schools like a business crowd."
Why is it that the RLAB crowd is so rarely, for instance, repeating Edward Deming's insistence that businesses are best run on trust and safety rather than fear and intimidation?
"Run like a business" means many things, and some of them are really bad.
But even in the best cases, RLAB is not well suited to anything that involves the care of actual human beings. Businesses sort. Businesses select people into groups, groups of winners and losers, customers and "So sorry, but you'll need to look elsewhere."
It is no more reasonable to think that the Like A Business is how every endeavor should be managed than it is to think that we should depend on magic pixies to fix everything.
After all, what are the assumptions about what Run Like A Business means? Somebody has to be in charge? It has to make money? Everyone involved has to behave like a cog in a machine and human feelings and commitments must not clog the works? The needs of owners must come ahead of all other needs and commitments? There may be some assumptions that make a certain sense, like "Don't try to deploy resources that you don't actually have." But mostly, no.
Mostly you don't run schools like a business because they are not businesses, and you don't drive a car like a bicycle or play guitar like a piano.
Arizona continues to be a national leader in school voucher fraud.
Even before they opened the voucher program up to universal levels, Arizona was setting examples, like the $700K (at least) of taxpayer-funded voucher money that was spent on clothes and beauty supplies.
But at least that case involved an actual existing child. Last February, Attorney General Kris Mayes announced charges related to a five-person conspiracy (with three of those persons state education department employees) to bill the state for a whole bunch of fake, ghost children who didn't even exist. They raked in over $600K of taxpayer money.
At the time, Mayes called for more guardrails for the system. Tom Horne, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction pooh-poohed her concerns, announcing “I’m going to be sure that we root out fraud and that every expenditure is a valid educational expense.”
And one would certainly think that some of these big ticket frauds, the state would try to create a little more oversight and accountability for the voucher program.
But apparently one would be wrong.
Today, Mayes announced yet another fraud case in which a couple has been charged with 60 counts of fraud, having put in applications for 50 students, 43 of whom do not actually exist. The couple-- Johnny Lee Bowers and Ashley Meredith Hewitt-- apparently did not even live in Arizona at the time. They grabbed around $100K, which they used for "personal living expenses," so this was like their job, what they did for a living.
Horne says, hey, we added an auditor finally to watch over the program. Plus an investigator. Yes, two people to keep tabs on a $800 million program seems like plenty.
Meanwhile, Beth Lewis , executive director of public school advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona had a statement as well.
Arizona’s ESA voucher program is wide open for fraud and abuse — and the Republican majority in the Arizona Legislature has refused to add any oversight or accountability. Misuse and outright fraud will continue to abound until lawmakers add serious guardrails to this off-the-rails entitlement program.
One of the great disconnects in the voucher movement continues to be alleged fiscal conservatives who somehow don't want to watch over how taxpayer dollars are spent when it comes to taxpayer-funded school vouchers. And sure-- with the hugeness of Arizona's voucher program, what's a few hundred thousand here and there?
The free market is supposed to provide all the necessary accountability to the modern choice landscape. Bad actors are supposed to be weeded out when families vote with their feet. No word yet on how phantom feet are supposed to vote, or how the invisible hand is able to wave away fraud. Until those details are hashed out, maybe the taxpayers deserve some actual rules and regulations and oversight.
I'll get to the meat of that argument in a moment, but let's start with the conclusion, because that's what really gets to the foundation of the pro-voucher argument:
Ultimately, education choices should not be based on majority rule.
This is, of course, a very libertarian argument--nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do. Here's the rest of the graph:
It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools – places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds – that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.
And yet, vouchers would compel families to pay for private schools that they find morally unacceptable or which would bar their own children from attending, and which allow no one--not the majority or anyone else-- a say in how public tax dollars are spent.
So perhaps the more complete version of the argument is this-- nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do, but I should be able to make them do things they don't want to do. And if I want their money to help me do the things I want to do, they should be made to give it to me. Or maybe it's "if I'm going to be forced to so something I don't want to do, then other people should be forced to do something I do want to do." Or maybe just "Other people shouldn't be able to make rules that bind me."
The libertarian argument has also run into the same argument since Milton Friedman was a pup and segregation academies were first conceived-- if the thing that some folks find "morally repugnant" is putting Black kids in classrooms with White kids, why should the country fund, support, or accept that?
I sympathize with many libertarian ideas. I really do. I share the distrust of government-imposed solutions, and I still think some of the best features of the US system is those parts that protect us from majority rule's excesses. But when libertarians reject democracy (under the heading of majority rule), they rarely have much to offer in its place other than "might makes right," supplemented with "money makes might," and I remain unconvinced that it's an effective or useful system, unless, of course, you already possess a bunch of might.
Private schools are a way for those with might and money to escape the democratically-operated system. Vouchers are a way to funnel public tax dollars into that system while pretending that we'll open great private school doors to one and all. But that pretense is just that-- a pretense. Voucher laws deliberately protect the ability of private schools to discriminate while also protecting their right to avoid any accountability to the taxpayers.
But I've wandered off into their complaint about how things turned out. What do they offer as an explanation of why they turned out that way.
Colorado they explain away by pointing out that the proposed amendment was both redundant and a sloppy piece of writing that was such a mess, even school choice fans had trouble with it. That's a fair assessment; I don't know what legislative assistant inter n wrote that thing, but it was a disaster waiting to happen, or, as Kevin Welner (NEPC) put it, "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act." I suspect that almost nobody would have been happy if that amendment had passed.
In Kentucky, the argument for the amendment was that it didn't actually create school choice, which is kind of like arguing that just because I want to pack your basement with explosives, that doesn't mean your house will be blown up. Kentucky saw multiple attempts to fund school choice shot down by their courts on the basis of constitutional language, and the amendment was clearly an attempt to remove that obstacle. Public education supporters, whose funding was equal to that of choice supporters, pushed back hard.
Likewise, the Nebraska measure was the result of a few years of trying to dodge the public in order to get vouchers up and running. Opponents outspent the voucherphiles, and those voucher fans want you to know that lots of money came from the teachers union.
In both cases, the on line explanation for the loss has been that voucher opponents used scare tactics and frightened the voters and did lots of posting and ads and campaigning and thereby snookered the voters, which I guess would be a more compelling argument if those same voters had not steadfastly ignored the huge amount of money and media thrown at them in an attempt to make them scared of Donald Trump in the White House. But in both states, Kamala Harris and school vouchers were both hammered.
Voters did not believe that a Trump Presidency was a bad idea; they did believe that vouchers were a bad idea. Campaigning doesn't explain that, unless, I suppose, you think the anti-voucher campaigns were just so much better than the Harris campaign that they should be running future Democrat campaigns.
Voucher supporters have tried a variety of pitches over the years, including "They're academically superior" (they aren't) and descending to the current "They're an escape from the woke evils of public schools" (#1 they aren't and #2 what does it say when you have to tear down your "competition" because trying to make yourself look better has failed). There's also "choice and freedom are just a better way to live" which I think is honest, but would carry more weight if they were railing against the real obstacles to choice-- cost, availability, and exclusionary practices of private schools.
At some point, supporters of modern vouchers could stop trying to put different shades of lipstick on the same old pig. But they probably won't. The tactic of skipping over voters and taxpayers in order to hook up with some cooperative legislators has worked for them so far, and in states like Texas, they've still decided it would be easier to buy a legislature than convince voters.
Kentucky has courts that can read its constitution. Nebraska let's citizens put laws up for referendum. Those two flukes forced voucher supporters to let the voters into the game. It's not a situation we're likely to see duplicated elsewhere, and there's no doubt that voucherphiles will keep trying to get past that whole pesky democracy thing. But because they're flukes, the Nebraska and Kentucky decisions are not likely harbingers of coming attractions. What they are is a reminder that across party lines, across demographic lines, across lines of race and class, voters don't like vouchers, and while voucherphiles can work around that fact, they can't just explain it away.
I'll be honest. This week the Seattle Branch Office of the Institute was in town (including all four grandchildren) and so the more local branch office waws also down here, and the board of directors was on vacation, and the weather was nice, and in the end I spent way less time in front of a screen, so I don't have a lot for you today. But here we go.
I know we're feeling this pinch in my neighborhood. Small colleges trying to save big bucks by cutting programs left and right. It takes a team of four Hechinger Report reporters to cover this story.
Sue Kingery Woltanski hits a critical point here-- it's not just about privatizing education itself, but about privatizing the responsibility for it. Having trouble getting your child an education? That's your problem, not the state's.
Akil Bello is (at least) two things-- a leading testing guru, and the father of an 11th grader. Which means he has a keen eye for the College Board's PSAT baloney.
Politico joins the growing list of news outlets that have noticed that supposedly wildly popular school vouchers were once again soundly rejected by actual voters. Juan Perez Jr has the story.
From Lyz at Men Yell At Me. Not particularly directly related to education, but still a great read about why we need to tell our stories, even in times which do not welcome then.
Christianists continue doing their best to force public education to bend to their brand of faith. In Ohio, legislators are now trying to create a whole new church-issued Get Out Of School Free card.
It has long been an option for schools to release students from school for part of the day to receive religious instruction, and districts have chosen to exercise that option or not as they see fit. The bill proposed on Ohio makes one simple change--instead of "may," the law would read "shall."
In other words, if parents demand their child be released for religious instruction, the schools must comply.
A key focus has been LifeWise Academy, an organization that has been capitalizing on the original Supreme Court ruling by delivering Bible study during the school day. Their focus is called The Gospel Project, and it is aimed at encouraging "true transformation that comes only from the gospel, not from behavior modification." Every session is "doctrinally sound and thorough," though whose doctrine, exactly, it follows is not made clear.
LifeWise is the brainchild of Joel Penton, who was a defensive tackle for the Ohio State football team. He graduated in 2007 (BA in Communications and Media Studies), then after what appears to be a two year gap, Penton got into the Christian Speakers Biz, starting Relevant Speakers Network, Stand for Truth Outreach, and LifeWise Academy, all based in Hilliard, Ohio.
Stand for Truth was an earlier version of the release time Bible study model as well as school assemblies, with a filed purpose of assisting "youth, youth organizations, schools and churches by providing seminars, educational materials, inspirational and motivational materials, books and other programs to help youth reach their full potential."
The LifeWise 990 shows that it is, for legal purposes, a Stand for Truth under a new name, with the purpose unchanged. At SfT, Penton was drawing an $87K salary to handle a million-and-a-half dollar budget. The 2022 990 for LifeWise shows Penton with $41K in salary and $69K in other compensation, while LifeWise is handling $13 mill on revenue (more than double 2022) from "contributions, gifts, grants" and paying almost $6 mill in employee benefits and compensation to... I don't know. The only other paid officials listed are Steve Clifton (COO) with $108K salary and $57K other, and treasurer David Kirkey with $31K salary. Almost $5 mill is listed as other salaries and wages, including program service expenses. They list no lobbying expense, but some mid-six figure numbers for advertising, office expenses, and travel. In all they took in almost $14 mill and spent about $9.5 mill.
LifeWise has expanded to multiple states, and it's their work that the new Ohio bill is primarily aimed at, by requiring every school in Ohio to offer a LifeWise option (or something like it).
LifeWise has not experienced large growth by playing softball. One school board member recounted a story of being approached by LifeWise, first pleasantly, and then with veiled threats about re-election. "As a church, we can't endorse political candidates, but we can educate people." And last summer LifeWise got in a big fight with an Indiana father who volunteered for the group so that he could gain access to their materials, which he then posted on his website. LifeWise took him to court. The parent made a point that ought to be familiar to the culture panic crowd--that parents ought to be able to review the materials that were being used with students. LifeWise has also gone after a man who created a map showing the locations of LifeWise schools.
The Akron Beacon Journal is among those opposing the proposed law, calling it "a dangerous crack forming in the wall that separates church and state."
Release time for religious instruction is a problem beyond simply breaking down the wall between church and state (though that is problematic enough). It also requires school officials to decide which part of a child's education is expendable enough that it can be replaced with religious instruction. Supporters have argued, "Well, they shouldn't be pulled from core classes" which brings us back to the old problem of labeling the arts, recess, even lunch time as unimportant parts of school, despite everything we know about the value of the arts, of free play, and even the social bonds built in the cafeteria. It creates two classes of students and has the effect of holding students up for social stigma based on their beliefs. Not to mention the issue of an outside entity that gives adults access and oversight of children that is not subject to state oversight.
It's a bad idea to force this on districts that don't want it (and not a great one for those that do) but Ohio has shown great determination to make itself the Florida of the Midwest. We'll see how this goes.
At Hechinger Report, Johnathan Gyurko surfaces with a curious proposition. Donald Trump is supposed to be a dealmaker, he says, so maybe instead of getting alarmed, The Left should try cutting some deals about public education. But first, he needs to redefine a few terms.
Gyurko spins off the Network for Public Education's call to arms for heading into an administration likely to herald “a new era of federal hostility toward public schools.” (Full disclosure-- I am a member of NPE).
A threat to public education, indeed, as NPE defines it. But that’s the problem.
The italics are his, because he wants to debate the definition. He says "the political left" has a single definition for public schools-- "district schools governed by local school boards, along with special purpose schools like magnet, vocational and agricultural tech schools run regionally or by state governments."
I don't know if I'm an example of the political left, but that's not quite how I would define public schools, but it doesn't matter for our purposes, because Gyurko is in the weeds in the very next sentence:
This blinkered view excludes 7,800 tax-funded and government-authorized charter schools that enroll 3.7 million children across 44 states and Washington, D.C.
It also excludes another 4.7 million children in private schools, many of whom receive tax-funded services for purposes important to the public.
He writes as if charter and private schools were somehow cast out into the darkness by public school advocates. But they cast themselves out there. School choice have consistently made the fact that they are NOT public schools central to their pitch.
It's true that charters have, at times, claimed to be public schools, making arguments like "They get public funding so they are public schools." You will note that advocates (like Betsy DeVos) have never attempted to extend that argument to voucher-accepting private schools. But charter schools have only claimed to be public when it suits them. Just this week we got yet another example of charter schools refusing to open their records to the state and arguing that they aren't subject to the kinds of transparency laws that govern public schools. The privatizing crowd has tried multiple times to get the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools don't have to follow the same rules as other "state actors," either because they aren't public schools or because, well, they just don't have to.
Voucher-fed private schools have never pretended to be anything other than non-public schools, and voucher supporters have been all in on declaring that they are separate from and superior to public schools, those woke-infested dens of gender ideology and commie teachers. Voucher laws come with carefully-crafted "hands off" clauses, guaranteeing that private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers are still free to discriminate as they wish.
So let's not pretend that charter and voucher schools are not considered public schools for any reason other than they don't want to be.
So how does he want revise the definition of public school?
Instead of focusing on types of schools, we should consider a school “public” when it (1) enrolls and educates any student who wants to go there, and (2) prepares them to be engaged citizens, productive workers, good neighbors and stewards of the planet.
I note quibbles and limits. His definition does not include any sort of accountability, but if you're going to spend public taxpayer dollars, there has to be some form of accountability to the public, and to this day, the choice sector resists that.
It's hard not to notice that #1 disqualifies every voucher program in the country. Gyurko wants to note that attendance zones and real-estate-linked school funding are exclusionary practices, plus elected officials who only pay lip service to parents and community members, and learning standards imposed by experts without input from stakeholders.
It's also hard not to notice that #2 leaves lots of room for interpretation, enough to accommodate the ideas of any christianist white nationalist academy in the country.
But Gyurko wants to offer families a new way forward, and this is where he gets to his cutest ideas-- the negotiating part.
The left should play some offense and propose a transformative increase in federal funding for all schools — district, charter, charitable and proprietary — with a catch.
Dollars would need to be used to end exclusionary practices and to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors and stewards of the planet.
I don't even know where to start, so let's begin with some of the specific "deals" that Gyurko imagines.
For example, could “hardening” schools against mass shootings also get us high-tech, 21st-century facilities? Would we trade vouchers to publicly purposed private schools for a national minimum teacher salary? Can we include patriotism in curricula that also respects everyone, equally? Might we eliminate caps on new charter schools if appointed charter authorizers were replaced with elected officials, thereby democratizing the charter sector?
Hardening for 21st century schools? Do you mean every single school building in America? I have no idea exactly what that might cost, but I'm guessing somewhere between a shit-ton of money and all the money in the world. "Publicly purposed private schools"?? That's not a thing, and our experience with vouchers so far is that no private school is going to take that deal since states already have made them a vouchers-with-no-strings-attached deal. Maybe you could get some pop-up crappy voucher schools that set up shop to cash in, but we already know that produces non-educating junk schools.
Patriotism and equity? Which part of the Donald "I Will Defund Any School With DEI or CRT" Trump administration do you think will sign on for that? Elected charter boards? I think that's a great idea, and I also think that the many folks profiting in the charter business have no interest in making such a deal.
And is there a reason for public education to offer to accept further privatization in hopes of some of these possible returns?
The central flaw in Gyurko's idea is that he is proposing to make a deal with privatizers in which they give up fundamental parts of their business model in return for stuff that they already get from their state government anyway. Or maybe the thought is to force states that have resisted voucher incursions to give up by offering some crumbs in return, but I have my doubts that privatizers would accept his conditions.
The modern choice movement is based on competition with the public system. I appreciate Gyurko's notion that we could have one big public system that embraces many forms of schooling. I've played with that thought experiment myself. But the premises required for such a system are unacceptable to the folks in the modern choice biz.
Public good, true non-profit and not free market? Public ownership, operation and accountability? No religious education? Honest discussion and support for the real total cost? Serving all students? All of those necessities for a public school system with robust choice--every one of them--has been pointedly and systematically rejected by choicers over the past few decades. They reject them either because they truly believe that a market-based competitive system is the path to educational quality for all, or because they don't actually care about educational quality for all as much as they care about profit, about a multi-tier system that keeps lessers in their place, or about pushing their own favored ideology.
My impression is that Gyurko's heart is in the right place, but his head is deep in the sand if he imagines that Dear Leader or any of his underlings are interested in any of these deals. This may be a better pitch than the privatizers longing for the days that Democrats joined a coalition in order to roll over for right-tilted reformsters but not by much. This administration will, in fact, be plenty hostile to public education, and trying to get them to make deals when they imagine they can just take what they want is a pointless exercise.
Year after his stint as secretary of education, Arne Duncan can still push irony so far that it collapses and implodes under its own weight,
Duncan appears in a recent EdWeek piece, one more asking the question, "What can Trump actually do to education?" This particular piece by Alyson Klein was considering how extensively Trump could rewrite curriculum. Klein notes that there are rules against that sort of thing, and that's when Duncan pops up with this-
“They could trample those. They could run roughshod over those,” Duncan said of ESSA’s prohibitions. “There are literally zero schools in America teaching CRT right now. That’s not a thing. It’s not reality.
“But he doesn’t live in reality. He creates his own reality,” Duncan continued. “And so, they can take money from schools and say they are teaching critical race theory. They can just make it up and move it to a state where people support him politically.”
As I've noted elsewhere, we know that Trump could hang on to Title I funding and use it as leverage to extort compliance from the states. We know he could do this because we have seen that trick before. It was a feature of No Child Left Behind, with its "gate all your test scores above or else," and was doubled down by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who declared that states would adopt acceptable standards (with the hint that Common Core would be acceptable) and acceptable standardized tests or else. "Or else" means "or else no money for you." He used Title I funds to threaten California and any states thinking of following them into not adopting his preferred tests.
Why does ESSA have provisions aimed at reining in the Department of Education? Because the one bipartisan agreement that Congress could reach was that Arne Duncan had overreached his authority way too much. And what was his reaction at the time? He told Politico that the department had lawyers smart enough to circumvent any guardrails that Congress erected.
And when it comes to disconnection from reality, we could turn to the part where Duncan wanted to shift special education oversight because "We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to robust curriculum, they excel." In this construction, "excel" is doing a lot of work, but Duncan seemed to think that students with special needs only really specially needed encouragement and expectations.
Or we could discuss the reality of the policy notion that testing would fix everything, that, as we used to say till we were out of breath, weighing the pig will somehow make it grow.
Or we could discuss how, since leaving office, Duncan has repeatedly attempted to retcon his administration and create a new historical reality (here, here, here ).
Look, I don't want to stay mad at Duncan forever, and I have no doubt that the Trump administration is going to do many wrong things to education. But the unrepentant and devoid-of-self-awareness Duncan is not the guy to call him out. Linda McMahon isn't going to "trample" anything so much as just follow a trail that Duncan had a large hand in blazing (and DeVos followed) and if she responds by referencing pots and kettles, she’s not wrong. It's one more example of how some feckless Democrats abandoned public education and set the stage for the far right, and until they fess up and apologize, they aren't credible critics of the coming messes.
Remember the story about the student who used AI to plagiarize a paper, then sued the school for catching him? Benjamin Riley has the story on how that ended up, with spicy commentary from the judge.
I don't often dip into Slate, but when I saw that Adam Laats had a piece there providing historical perspective on what Linda McMahon may have in mind for education, I gladly burned one of my free views, and I wasn't sorry. Nobody puts across "We already tried that and it sucked" like Laats.
In one of the less-surprising reveals of the season, it turns out that Ryan Walters has been hand in glove with the Heritage Foundation, and Fox 25 has more receipts than you have time to read.
ProPublica has created a whole batch of stories about the segregation academies still operating in the South, including one that focuses on how many are soaking up taxpayer dollars via vouchers.
Welcome to the free state of Florida, where voters can resoundingly reject your campaign for board membership, and Ron DeSantis will just appoint you anyway.
It's just the latest brick. Florida has moved past banning courses that are expressly about that woke stuff, and has moved on to removing subjects like sociology from course requirements. As the NY Times line on the post says, "conservatives in Florida have moved from explosive politics to subtler tactics to uproot liberal 'indoctrination' in higher education." The headline (at least right now) is more blunt-- "Republicans Target Social Sciences to Curb Ideas They Don't Like."
The idea of building a wall to keep out Those Others at the border is not just its own policy goal, but a ready-made metaphor for most of MAGA's culture panic reaction.
Build a wall around the minds of people (especially young people), because if we can insure that they never see, hear, read about, or are touched by Certain Ideas then they will grow to be clean and pure and just the way we want them to be.
The wall is built for brute force and fear. We must not allow them to see a certain view of the world, but we do not fight it with reason or argument, with persuasion or discussion. We don't meet that Other View and grapple with it. No, we must build a wall to hold it back, to block it out, to anticipate and search for every little crack through which it might creep. They use the wall because they rely on brute force to suppress those other views, and they do it because of fear. Just a taste, a touch, a look would somehow pollute the young, pollute the culture, seduce generations away from the One True View of the world and our country.
I've known MAGA types my whole life. In religious circles I call the followers of the Tiny God, a God so weak and helpless that He must be protected from disbelievers, from people who do not worship Him properly. He needs the support of human laws, human government, because if He were not soi protected and wreathed in human-made bubble wrap, he would be blown away on the wind. These are the folks who believe the Creator of all that is, the great I Am, the Being who made all and sees from end to end of the great sweep of time and eternity and the universe itself, vast and unknowable-- that God will be seriously threatened if Americans in 2024 vote for the wrong person to occupy a seat in the House of Representatives. That God waits to see if the right person will be elected to an office of secular, earthly government.
That's the kind of fragility we're talking about. Is their Truth so weak that nobody must be allowed to challenge it, that they have no way to answer opponents except to shut them up. Their view of what is Right and True is absolutely and unassailable, except they live in constant fear of having it assailed. And so, a wall. To keep out people with the wrong beliefs, the wrong culture, the wrong background, the wrong ideas about gender, and if not keep them out, at least force them to keep their wrongness to themselves.
This is not an automatic feature of conservatism. Conservatives can absolutely be those folks who watch what appears to them to be dumbassery, call it dumbassery, and stand in opposition to it, patiently waiting to watch it play out, secure in the knowledge that dumbassery always falls apart, always fails to hold up against actual truth and facts and reality. Even when it builds a wall to keep all those things out.
Unfortunately, building the wall comes with extra problems, extra destruction, anguish from grinding human bones to make mortar. And the terrible strain of denying what's out there, of maintaining your view of reality in defiance of the evidence.
Yes, it all goes hand in hand with grasping for power, but power for what? Power to silence the banging of time and tide and reality and the growling beast reminding you that you are dust, that in another blink or two you will be dust again, with nothing left behind but the pieces of a wall and the imprint of your boots on too many necks. It's not wealth and power for joy-- do any of these MAGA wall builders look joyful? How can they be when they are exhausted by the daily efforts to maintain the wall? How can they rest when that hammering rings in their ears every hour of the day and night?
It is one thing to try to build a society up, to try to build the edifices and structures and supports that cause it to more closely resemble the ideal you envision by harnessing the heart and passion and love and bright rising humanity and, yes, even holiness that can lift it up into something a little more shining. It is another thing to try to mold that society by trying to keep all those human and divine forces from being able to act on it. It is one thing to try to bring all the pieces of a society together to create something awesome, and quite another thing to try to subjugate them and wall them up, to say "Only I can create here, and the first thing I will create is a wall that blocks all ideas and wills but my own."
There is no human system of government that cannot be twisted into an ugly and dehumanizing state, and none that cannot be turned to foster all the great beauty that humans are capable of, but certainly some systems tend more naturally one way or another.
We can talk and argue at great length about values and morals and ethics, but some days I can see it simplified to a two-part question-- what are you trying to build, and how are you trying to build it?
Are you trying to build a garden that flourishes and grows and delights in all manner of living things that also grow and flourish, doing it by cultivating and nourishing and lifting up, or are you intent on building a wall to keep out all the parts of the world you don't like so that some sad, meagre little creature can gather power without ever being challenged by anything scary from outside that wall.
That wall-free garden is never going to be all fluffy bunnies and kum-bay-yah circles. Life is rich and complicated and sometimes hard and often contentious. But building a wall to keep away everything that bothers you is never a solution; it's anti-life and anti-human. It's destined to fail, and to sow chaos and destruction as it collapses.
We are in an age of wall-builders, which makes it both harder and imperative that we not build our schools according to their specifications. It's a lousy way to educate young humans. We have to do better. Poke holes in the wall, and bring the world in through every tiny crack.
I first encountered trans folks in the 1970s, trans women who I was in high school with when they were guys. I've had trans students over the years. And if I'm honest, I still struggle with the issue. If one of my own children came to me to say they were trans, I would have all the misgivings-- how do I bless that kind of transition for someone who can't even decide which shirt to wear, who has a different plan for their toys every single day. I hope that I would get to a good place with my child, and throwing them out would not be on the table, but it would not be an easy journey to some form of acceptance. Sitting here right now, I can't say that I know what that would look or feel like.
But I do know this--as difficult as it would be, I can't imagine how an edict from the government or my local school board would make any part of it easier.
Right now we are awash in trans panic. Project 2025 is riddled with it, in every single chapter. Writers of the conservative battle plan will be droning along in boring wonkese and suddenly erupt into lurid purple prose over the threat of trans persons. The GOP spent $215 million on ads attacking trans rights (that, says a civil rights attorney, is $134 per trans person). Moms for Liberty are recruiting heavily on the Title IX loophole that says your district doesn't have to adopt the federal rules if there's a M4L member parent in the district. Everywhere, at all levels of government, folks are passing rules to restrict trans persons' rights.
All policies that attempt to restrict trans persons are inherently cruel and abusive, and not just of trans persons. In response to Nancy Mace's ugly, personal bathroom attack on trans Rep-elect Sarah McBride, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez gets it exactly right:
“What Nancy Mace and what Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters late Wednesday. “Because if you ask them, ‘What is your plan on how to enforce this?’ they won’t come up with an answer. And what it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are gonna want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis and who’s doing what.”
“The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou in front of who — an investigator? Who would that be? — because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
This trans panic has been aimed disproportionately at high school athletes, because any attempt to push repressive policy works better if you attach "for the children" to it. But anti-trans rules open the door to all sorts of abuse. Like the time some disgruntled parents of second and third place winners filed a protest that they wanted the first place winner's gender checked. Or the various times that states have proposed bills that required winning athletes (female, because for some reason there is never concern about trans men) to submit to a barrage of tests to "prove" their gender. Or the nice folks in New Hampshire suing for the right to harass transgender teenagers.
You can ban trans women from sports all day, but in the end, enforcement comes down to demanding that some teenaged girl prove she's a "real" girl by submitting to physical and/or genetic inspection.
I get that there are some concerns that reasonable people can share. Does having trans women with bigger, stronger frames pose a threat to other athletes? I don't know. But does that concern mean that schools should also institute rules delineating maximum allowable strength for athletes? And what does it say about sports like football, in which we know that students are absolutely in danger of serious injuries with long-term effects?
There are real issues to be discussed, but not everyone involved in the discussion is serious. When Nancy Mace says "any man who wants to force his genital into women's spaces" is waging a "war on women," I have to wonder what that means coming from a staunch supporter of President Pussy Grabber.
Pushing trans-restrictive rules for schools may make boards feel good and righteous and play well to the culture panic crowd, but the ultimate result is the abuse and harassment of actual individual live human beings, and while I don't know exactly how I feel about transgender issues, I know exactly how I feel about harassing and abusing live human beings, especially young ones, so that you can score some political points.
Teachers ought to know. Marketers certainly know. Politicians ignore it at their peril.
Repetition works.
There is a tendency among certain brands of humans (I am one of them) to believe that one shouldn't have to explain oneself over and over and over again. One clear and cogent explanation of the point, and that should do the trick. To keep hammering on it is boring, inefficient, and unnecessary. Redundancy is self-evidently Not Good.
But that's not how humans generally work.
Marketers understand this. You boil your campaign down to one simple message, and then you hammer that message over and over and over again until people can't have even a passing thought about thirst without an image of Coke popping into their brain.
It's understandable that some teachers are resistant to this idea-- explaining this idea over and over "wastes" the valuable and scarce commodity of class time. There are many textbooks that are built entirely around the "explain it once then move on" principle of instruction. But it's repetition that gets things to stick. If you're trying to drive a nail into a block of wood (I would tell my student teachers), does it work better to try to drive it all the way on with one mighty thwack, or a whole series of moderate taps?
We know that repetition is effective even in the absence of actual explanation. Does Coke pop into our head based on the extensive evidence the Coca-Cola company has published on the bubbly sugar water's thirst-quenching qualities?
How did "America's schools are failing" become conventional wisdom? Not through any credible evidence. Some folks have just been repeating it for forty years, accompanied by simple illustrations that don't rise to the level of credible evidence but make the statement feel more true. We're far from the top of international test results, they warn, ignoring that we're right where we've already been and Estonia hasn't conquered us yet. SAT scores! NAEP scores! I found this one teacher who said something stupid! Arguing with these is fruitless, because they aren't actual evidence-- they're just illustrations to underline the point, and the point is hammered home by a steady top-tap-tap of repetition.
I don't pay a lot of attention to "science of learning" arguments, which often have as much real-world salience as would an argument about the "science of marriage." But the idea of repetition has recently been bandied about as if it's a hot new idea (these days we're attaching to "cognitive load theory" stuff), and even if someone is announcing they've just invented the wheel, that doesn't mean that wheels don't work. Repetition and redundancy in the classroom absolutely work, even spaced out over considerable time.
I've known people in the education blogoverse who worry about redundancy. "I don't want to write about that because this other person already did" or "I already wrote about this once." Even I, with my noted lack of writing restraint, will sometimes contemplate someone else's piece and think, "Well, I don't really have anything to add to that." I'd argue that this is a mistake, that anything worth saying is worth saying a few hundred times.
There are, for instance, multiple pieces noting that school vouchers went down to defeat in three states even in the midst of a red wave. There should be a million of them. It's an opportunity to connect a clear message ("Voters don't like vouchers and always vote them down") with a clear illustration ("In the 2024 election, three states with strong MAGA support still voted vouchers down"). It's true, and it's important, first, because legislators are repeatedly conned into supporting vouchers because "they're so popular" and second, because the Trump administration is signaling that it wants to impose school vouchers on the entire country.
Defenders of public education should be saying it over and over again-- vouchers are not popular with United States taxpayers and voters. It's not just that they're a bad idea (they are, and should be fought on that basis), but they are an unpopular idea. We have the receipts.
Is educating students with special needs getting expensive for your district? If you're in New Hampshire, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut has a message for you-- "Too bad, Sucks to be you."
Frank Edelblut was a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term NH state representative before he decided to run for the governor's seat. He was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu, son of former NH governor and Bush I White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. Edelblut gracefully conceded and publicly supported Sununu, who then appointed Edelblut to the top education job, despite Edelblut's complete lack of anything remotely resembling education experience.
All of Edelblut's children were home schooled. As a legislator, he backed vouchers and as a candidate he backed personalized [sic] learning. As education high mucky muck, he has continued to back all manner of ed reformster nonsense, including the ramming through of vouchers over the objections of actual taxpayers.
Several factors are in play here, including increased costs for special services and an increased number of students requiring those services-- all mandated and beyond the control of the districts. But the other huge factor is that the state budget for special ed hasn't been boosted since 2021. So the states special ed pie has stayed the same, meaning that school districts get smaller and smaller slices.
You'd think that the state education chief's response would be to ask for a bigger pie, but Edelblut says he just did that in 2017 and 2018. Sure, once a decade or so seems like plenty.
Instead, Edelblut wants the state to consider whether it can provide special education services more effectively and for less money. He said parents and educators frequently tell him they are unhappy with the services provided.
Yes, they would undoubtedly be happier is the district spent less money to educate their child. This is the undying reformster notion that education is somehow riddled with inefficient spending and surely there's a cheaper, better way to do things, as if the system isn't already depending on teachers donating their own money and contributing unpaid hours just to keep their schools afloat.
Edelblut syas he doesn't have a solution (because he's physically unable to ask for more funding?) but he does believe that school vouchers could be the answer, which is just silly. A school voucher does not cover special ed kinds of costs, and it does not mean that the private school of your choice is going to choose to admit your high needs student. Of all the problems that vouchers don't solve, meeting needs of special ed students is one of the problems it doesn't solve the most.
I'm convinced this is the new privatizer game-- instead of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, you have to take any topic or problem and connect it to school vouchers. You don't have to connect it in a way that makes sense or offers evidence. Just tack "but this would be solved by school vouchers" on the end of whatever you're saying. It may be fun for guys like Edelblut to play, but it's the students and taxpayers who lose, every time.
She was supposed to be a leading contender for the top Department of Commerce spot, but she didn't get that one, so here she is leading the Department of Education.
Course, since few had her on their cabinet bingo cards for education, we're now all scrambling to figure out what this might mean. Here are some quick initial thoughts.
Unlike former secretary Betsy DeVos or some of the contenders like Tiffany Justice and Erika Donalds, McMahon has not spent most of her adult life trying to devise and implement ways to dismantle and privatize public education. (And at age 76, she is a decade older than DeVos--one more aging boomer in this administration). I'm not saying that won't be part of her policy objectives. It's just that she won't enter office with a whole suitcase of explosives already packed.
However, that doesn't change the fact that she is completely and utterly unqualified to run the department. She may actually have an edge on DeVos, who had never worked at an actual job, led a large organization, or sold an idea with any technique other than throwing money at people. She spent some time on the Connecticut State Board of Education, so she knows a bit about the bureaucratic ins and outs.
She may represent a hint about which way Trump will jump when it comes to choosing between his goals. He can pursue either 1) the culture panic goal of using federal funds as leverage to force schools to follow culture war edicts or 2) dismantling the department and sending the federal funds out to states as no-strings block grants. Well, #2 was always the less likely (it requires Congress to go along), and McMahon seems like a better fit for #1, though of course her long-time minimal interest in education may mean it's easier for her to walk away from the ruins of the department.
The fact that Trump gave her this position as a sort of consolation prize suggests that, as with his first go-round, he's not all the interested in education nor is it on the top of his to-do list. So McMahon may signal a sort of ill-intentioned neglect, like a toxin in the bloodstream that will get around to fatally poisoning you sometime soon, just as soon as it wraps up a few other things.
No, I don't see any way that this is not terrible. If you squint real hard through your rose colored glasses you might convince yourself that this isn't going to be quite as terrible as some of the alternate realities we can contemplate-- but it's still terrible. Like the rest of his cabinet picks, she will be there to make sure that her department of the government doesn't work and collapses into some configuration of smoking rubble.
Though unlike other cabinet picks, she does not have an actual criminal background [Update--okay, maybe not actual criminal conviction, but some very shady and abusey stuff], an observation that reminds us that Trump has not just lowered the bar to the floor, but has dug a deep hole so that the bar can be buried. It also means she should have a less strenuous confirmation hearing than some of her fellow picks.
Now brace for a few days of wild speculation and bad professional wrestling gags.
Education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters continues to test the line between church and state, as well as testing the line between fulfilling a state job and auditioning for a federal one. No sooner had Dear Leader cemented his return to the power, then Oklahoma's leading pick-me boy was in the news again, for yet another attempt to ram his version of Christianity into classrooms and homes.
First, he announced the formation of the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism (which, if you stop to think for even a second, makes as much sense as the Department of Bicycles and Vests With No Sleeves) which he promises will align with incoming President Donald Trump’s aim of protecting prayer in schools. They'll be going after anyone who dares to interpret the First Amendment to mean that a public school shouldn't be endorsing any particular religion. Like this example:
Walters cited a September 2023 incident in which a Skiatook school removed Bible verses from a classroom at the urging of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which contended it was unconstitutional for a public school to allow religious displays. At the time, Walters said the removal was “unacceptable.”
Note the term "unacceptable," as if Walters is saying the fault is not that they broke some law, but that they personally displeased him. That's the language you use when you want people to understand that we're not talking about the Rule of Law, but the Rule of You.
“It is no coincidence that the dismantling of faith and family values in public schools directly correlates with declining academic outcomes in our public schools,” Walters said in a statement Tuesday. “In Oklahoma, we are reversing this negative trend and, working with the incoming Trump Administration, we are going to aggressively pursue education policies that will improve academic outcomes and give our children a better future.”
Walters followed that up with a mandatory watch party, demanding that all schools show all students a 90 second video, in which Walters announces the new department, complain about the radical left, say they "will not tolerate" the erosion of religious liberty. Also, "we've seen patriotism mocked and a hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers unions." I guess he cut out the part where he says "like the teacher standing next to this screen, who is evil and woke and out to get you, so don't pay too much attention to her today." Again with the "we will not tolerate that," which I guess is the royal "we." No mention of actual laws so far, just the royal preferences. He wants everyone to be patriotic and their religious practices to be protected.
Then comes the prayer. He says students don't have to join, but he's going to go ahead. He folds his hands and bows his head.
Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you've given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions, I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country. I pray for our parents, teachers and kids that they get the best education possible and live high quality lives. I also pray that we continue to teach love of country to our young people, and that our students understand what makes America great and that they continue to love this country. Amen.
And cut. Also, Walters wants districts to send the video to all parents.
Many districts have indicated they will not be showing the video, and state Attorney General Gentner Drummond says Walters has no authority for any such demand.
"Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents' rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights," said the attorney general's office spokesperson Phil Bacharach.
Not the first time Drummond has told Walters to back it up a step. But history suggests that Walters will just ignore and end up in court over it, which won't really matter, because he's already made his points-- people in positions of authority can too lead prayer in school, teachers are terrible commies, that it is people in power and not laws that rule the land, and he's just the kind of guy that Dear Leader should want with him in DC. Undoing the edict doesn't really unring any of those bells, and the fight looks great on the audition reel for the Presidential transition team.
Roughly thirty years ago you could have found me logging onto my Compuserve dial-up pay-by-the-minute service to spend some time on the Prodigy BBS (bulletin board system). Soon the isp's started offering all-you-can-eat pricing. "Well," muttered the old timers, "There goes the neighborhood. We'll be crowded out by basement-dwellers who will just never log off."
Then came faster connection speeds that allowed loading images that looked better than an 8-bit character at a thousand yards. I gravitated to ICQ (an instant messenger program) and the chat rooms (channels, some folks called them back in the day) and made some actual friends (Hey there, #hatrack). Because my daughter was at Penn State, I was an early adopter of Facebook (I skipped MySpace). Found other social havens, like Cafe Utne. Sometimes I would set up an account at a site and it would sit until I could figure out what to do with it (still haven't figured out Pinterest).
Social sites online come and go. There are problems that nobody has fully solved, like how to deal with people who simply want to kick things over and be an asshat, and yet still respect that whole freedom thing. There also seems to be a bit of an attention span thing; after a while, what seemed interesting and new in a site or online person gets old and predictable. I've watched my audience turn over fairly regularly. I don't think I'm pissing anyone off; it's just that if you've been reading me for ten years, I probably won't surprise you any time soon.
The old conventional wisdom was that a social site burns out in about two years. Facebook beat the odds by turning into something else, and Twitter... well, I'm not sure what it's done. I've been telling you for weeks that I've been warming up my Bluesky account, and this week, a whole lot of people made that jump. Millions of people, though still a drop in a Twitter-sized bucket. But my followers there have gone from about 100 to closing-in-on-700 in a week. Meanwhile, my Twitter numbers have been slowly dropping as many people leave completely.
There are lots of reasons to abandon Twitter, including its conversion as of 11/15 to an AI training source. I'm not leaving entirely (there's too much that I still want to see, and I don't deal with the level of abuse and crappery that some do) but I think it's fine and natural that folks do. Meanwhile, Bluesky has drawn enough people to become interesting, unlike certain failed attempts of the past (looking at you, Google+). Hard to know what comes next; the only thing I'm certain of is that it will be something different.
Sorry--that was a lot. Here's some reading from the week.
There were a zillion takes on Trump and the education department this week. Alyson Klein at EdWeek had a good look at one particular aspect of this looming question-- how does he enforce a woke prohibition?
The GOP hammered on trans athletes, and Democrats let them do it. Rachel Cohen digs into the issue, and the Democratic middle-ground proposal that everyone just sort of forgot about. At Vox.
Rebecca Griesbach reporting for AL.com tells the story of how one school district rises to meet the challenge of immigrant children in schools.
At Forbes.com this week, I also did a Trump take, pointing out that a contradiction in his plan means that he will not be able to do all the awful things he wants to. Also, Adam Laats has written a fabulous book about the first failed con-man driven education reform in this country.
Things got busy here at the Institute this week, so I missed posting about this anniversary on Thursday. But I don't want to overlook it for another year.
On November 14, Ruby Bridges was six years old, three months younger than the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education. Six years old.
She had attended a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. The district gave Black children a test to see if they would be allowed to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Six passed. Two decided not to go through with it. The three other girls were sent to a different all-white school; Ruby Bridges would be the only Black student desegregating William Frantz.
Her father was not sure he wanted to put her through that. Her mother argued it had to be done for her daughter and "for all African-American children."
This was three years after the Little Rock Nine were escorted into school by the National Guard. Conditions in the South had not improved. A crowd came out to hurl insults and threaten a six year old child.
"What really protected me is the innocence of a child," Bridges said at an event last Thursday. "Because even though you all saw that and I saw what you saw, my 6-year-old mind didn't tell me that I needed to be afraid. Like why would I be afraid of a crowd? I see that all the time."
But it is still shocking to see pictures of the protests. They made a picture of a coffin, with a Black baby in it, and paraded it around the school. Along with a cross. Bridges was the only child in her class-- white parents pulled their children out, and many teachers refused to teach. The boycott was eventually broken by a Methodist minister, but Bridges still was shunned, her father fired, her family barred from some local businesses.
It's Ruby Bridges portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With." one of his first works after he left The Saturday Evening Post. It earned him sackfulls of angry mail, calling him, among other things, a "race traitor."
There is a common narrative, that in the sixties we pretty much settled all the racial issues in this country and that demands for equity ever since have just been a political ploy to grab undeserved goodies. "We fixed that stuff," the argument goes, "so we shouldn't need to be talking about it now. You sure you don't have some other reason for bringing it up?" It's the narrative that brings us to a President-elect who claims that since we fixed racism in the sixties, it's white folks who have been the victims, and who need reparations.
But here's what I want to underline-- Ruby Bridges is alive. Not even old lady alive, but just 70. Presumably most of the children gathered around that coffin and cross are also alive, probably a few of those adults as well (Bridges's mother died in 2020).
This is not some episode from the distant past. It's not about some form of schooling that belongs to some dead-and-gone generation. The anniversary is a reminder to do better, to be better, a reminder that it really wasn't very long ago that a whole lot of people thought it was okay to threaten a six year old child with abuse and violence. White folks don't need to hang their heads in shame and embarrassment, but neither should they say, "That was people from another time, long ago and far away," as a way to feel better about the whole business. It can happen here. It just happened here. Pay attention and do the work to make sure it isn't happening tomorrow.
