ICYMI: Applefest 24 Edition (10/6)

This weekend is the major weekend of the year in my small town. We hang a festival on the small peg of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) having lived in the neighborhood briefly before he hit the road. There's an early breakfast, a big car show today, and yesterday the 5K race, which the Board of Directors ran yesterday (after they ran the 1 mile kids race), with the CMO. I play with our 168 year old town band, there are hundreds or craft and tchotchke booths, lots of food, we close the main street through the center of my very picturesque town, and you run into an endless string of people you haven't seen in ages, along with plenty of strangers, because when the weather is perfect as it is this weekend, well over 100,000 people come to town. I will have logged about 50,000 steps by tonight.

There's also a community theater production every year, and this year I was taking a break, but the trombone player took ill so I got to go in and sight read the part for three performances of Annie. Also, to round out the weekend, all four of us have colds. But the up side is that I've been almost completely off line and, golly bob howdy, you don't realize how toxic it is out there until you take your head out of it and spend time with live humans and sunshine.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying that I don't have a lot for you this week, and you should probably go get some fresh air if it's available where you are. Soon as I post this, we're headed back out.

Only One True God

Thom Hartmann at the Milwaukee Independent on the movement to taxpayers to foot the bill for one flavor of religious fundamentalism.

Kim Reynolds wants to privatize education. Iowa supports public schools.

Former teacher Cheris Mortice gives us a look at the struggle to preserve public education in Iowa.

Ryan Walters' school Bible mandate undermines freedom and faith

Clay Lightfoot at The Oklahoman makes the religious case against Ryan Walters Bible mandate.

'Trump Bible' one of few that meet Walters' criteria for Oklahoma classrooms

Yup. Turns out only a couple of Bibles being published meet the dude-bro-in-chief's definition of an appropriate Bible for schools.

Benson optimistic about repeal of school voucher law

A reminder that in Nebraska, there's a chance to roll back vouchers on the ballot.

Cynical Politicians Try to Frighten Us with Inaccurate Stories about Teachers and Public Schools

Jan Resseger reminds us that teachers are not the monsters certain politicians claim they are.

The Barr Foundation and the Boston Globe “Rig the Discourse”

Maurice Cunningham continues to unravel Massachusetts's example of how owning the press helps you rig the conversation.

Something Bigger Than Me

Jose Vilson talks about recruiting teachers with students and teachers. 

“Union Mouth”

Nancy Flanagan on the nastiness that certain privatizers have grown on line.

Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird

Indeed. The York Dispatch editors comment on the latest Inde[endence Law Center-aided attempt to shame LGBTQ students.

Peggy Jones and the Importance of Public Schools

Occasionally voters in Florida get it right. Accountabaloney highlights one such victory in the heart of Moms for Liberty country.

The AI-in-education conference circuit – what are the vibes?

Benjamin Riley brings word back from the world of the AI-education hustle.

Over at Forbes, I looked at a report about trouble filling teacher positions, and a reminder of the problems caused by centering The Big Standardized Test. 

Join me over on substack and get my stuff in your email to peruse at leisure. 

NPE Launches National Center for Charter School Accountability

I'm a member of the Network for Public Education, a group that does a lot of work in support of public schools in this country. Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch is the president, and Carol Burris is the executive director. 

NPE is not a particularly wealthy organization, with neither a hot line or dark money or union shilling, but it has created a number of reports researching charter schools, voucher programs, and state support for public ed, and they've just launched the National Center for Charter School Accountability. 

The mission is pretty simple:

The National Center for Charter School Accountability provides research and recommendations on increasing transparency and accountability for charter schools.

The NCCSA provides a collection of facts (e.g. 26% of charter schools close by year 5, 35 states allow charters to be run for profit, and 34 states do not require all charter teachers to be certified). An interactive map lets you see what the conditions are in any state, including ratings for the state on charter items like protections for students, and community input. 

The website is a quick, simple resource for some basic information about charter schools in the U.S.

NH: Suing For The Right To Harass Teenagers

New Hampshire is getting a lesson in the real cost of trying to crack down on trans teens. 

Like many other states, New Hampshire has seen many attempts to "protect" girls' sports from trans students. One attempt in 2021 to pass a legislative ban on trans athletes was shot down along party lines.

But in 2024, HB 1205 was passed, "maintaining integrity and balance" in sports by banning transgender girls from playing sports. That law was supposed to take effect this fall, but first the families of two transgender teens sued the state. 

One of the girls asked for a speedy ruling from the federal judge hearing the suit so that she could start soccer practice with her team. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty granted the request with just hours to spare. 

So Parker Tirrell, a sophomore, started the soccer season. 

“Playing soccer with my teammates is where I feel the most free and happy. We’re there for each other, win or lose,” she said in a statement. “Not being allowed to play on my team with the other girls would disconnect me from so many of my friends and make school so much harder.”

As that might suggest, Tirrell has long been accepted as a girl at her school. In fact, she has played on the team in previous seasons. So no problems here, right?

Of course not.  

Tirrell plays for Plymouth Regional High School. When parents of an opposing team from Bow High School caught wind that their daughter would be facing a trans player, they complained to the athletic director. He told them that the court decision tied his hands. So Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote chose another path. According to court documents, they bought some pink wristbands (not the tiny "cause" ones you're thinking of) and Foote wrote "XX" on each. Their daughters asked their teammates if they'd all like to wear the wristbands , but not everyone wanted to, so the team did not participate in this "silent protest." Foote posted on Facebook the night before that he would be attending the September 17 game against Plymouth to show "solidarity."

According to the parents' account, nobody wore the wristbands in the first half, though some other spectators asked for some as well. At halftime, Foote went out to the parking lot to put a Riley Gaines photo on his Jeep's windshield. Fellers already had a "Protect Women's Sports for Female Athletes" poster on his car. Then he and Fellers put on the wristbands for the second half.

School officials and a police officer told the parents to take the wristbands off. There were words. The First Amendment was thrown about. Fellers got thrown out. When others refused, a match official stopped the game and said that Bow would forfeit if they weren't removed. Two fathers were given no trespassing orders and barred from the school grounds, one for a brief period and the other for the fall term. Did the fathers take this moment to cool down and reconsider their actions?

Of course not.

They sued. They filed a federal lawsuit against the Bow School District, the superintendent, the principal, the athletic director, the policeman at the game, and the referee. Fellers and Foote each had some words:

“Parents don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the entrance to a school’s soccer field. We wore pink wristbands to silently support our daughters and their right to fair competition. Instead of fostering open dialogue, school officials responded with threats and bans that have a direct impact on our lives and our children’s lives,” commented Kyle Fellers. “And this fight isn’t just about sports—it’s about protecting our fundamental right to free speech.”

“The idea that I would be censored and threatened with removal from a public event for standing by my convictions is not just a personal affront—it is an infringement on the very rights I swore to defend,” explained Andy Foote. “I spent 31 years in the United States Army, including three combat tours, and the school district in the town I was born in—the one my family has seven generations of history in—took away those rights. I sometimes wonder if I should have been here, fighting for our rights, rather than overseas.”

I will readily admit that transgender athletes raise some issues, and that reasonable people can disagree.

But.

When you're setting out to publicly harass and embarrass a young human teenager, you have lost the plot. When you are arguing that the First Amendment protects your right to make a 15 year old human child feel unwelcome and unsafe, you have lost any right to sympathy.

The lawsuit has been brought by the Institute for Free Speech, a law firm that is based not in New Hampshire, but in DC. They were founded in 2005 as the Center for Competitive Politics. They have ties to the State Policy Network and the Council for National Policy as well as Koch, Uhlein, and Bradley piles of money. Their previous claim to fame is going to court to help establish SuperPACs as a thing. 

Plymouth is a town of under 7,000 people right in the middle of the state. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies there. How did they get connected to a big time DC firm?

Who knows. But the protesters aren't done. Though Foote and Fellers can't attend, the September 24 game drew a host of folks wearing the pink wristbands, including this fine group--

Jeremy Kauffman, an activist withe Free State Project, the storied attempt to engineer New Hampshire's takeover by Libertarians

Rachel Goldsmith, an activist with the FSP who also headed up the Moms for Liberty chapter that put a $500 bounty on any teacher caught violating the "divisive concepts" law

Terese Bastarache, an anti-vaxxer running for public office

Jodi Underwood, another free stater who tried to cut her school district's budget in half

None of these folks live in the Bow and Dunbarton School District. And despite their Libertarian streak, they seem to feel that some folks should not be able to live free. But that hasn't stopped a storm from being unleashed on the district, as captured by Sruthi Gopalakrishnan for the Concord Monitor and NHPR:

Alex Zerba stood before a crowded school board meeting in Bow on Monday night, scanning the seated crowd of unfamiliar faces around her in the Bow High School auditorium.

“We don't want you supporting our girls the way you are,” said Zerba, a parent of a girls varsity soccer player. “You are not a parent of any of these girls on the soccer team. We are asking you to stop your protesting. It is hurting our girls.”

But plenty of actual local residents also demonstrated that they don't get it, like Steve Herbert:

“I'm disappointed in every one of you,” said Herbert looking at the school board members. “You just silenced somebody who had a different opinion. There was nothing wrong. There was no voices, there was no mean words. It wasn't directed at anybody.”

Of course it was directed at somebody. As the superintendent pointed out, the pink bands were not intended to support women in sports, but to protest a specific player, to tell a young human being that she was not welcome, that she was not okay. 

This is the inevitable end of trans panic sports bans-- either a young athlete is attacked, her identity questioned, and her family forced to endure some kind of genital or dna check because the parent of a defeated opponent demands proof. I have never been entirely clear on what the purpose of trans sports bans is supposed to be-- convince young humans not to be trans because they won't be able to play sports? To drive young trans athletes underground? But the actual effect of these bans is quite clear; they result in the harassment and mistreatment of young human beings. 

Yes, I recognize there are many viewpoints and that this is a relatively new issue that we are collectively struggling to deal with. But if you cannot start from the foundational understanding that trans human beings are, in fact, actual real human beings, then you are not going to arrive at any place good. 

AZ: Fighting For Less Accountability for Taxpayer Funds

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona right wing advocacy group, has filed suit against the state because it thinks there are too many rules attached to the state's voucher program. Parents using the education savings account money shouldn't have to show that they've used the taxpayers' dollars for something educational. 

This is a battle that is a predictable crossroads on vouchers' path to their ultimate destination, and it deserves our attention for that reason.

When states started handing taxpayer dollars out as voucher money for families, two factors were always going to come into greater and greater tension.

On the one side, there will be people who want to spend their free money from the government with the minimum number of restrictions. "That money is ours now," the voucher parent argument goes, "so nobody should be able to tell us what to do with it." Look for the word "permissionless" as in "we don't need your permission to do whatever we think is best.

On the other hand, where taxpayer dollars go, calls for accountability are likely to follow. This is particularly likely for school voucher programs, every one of which was created and passed through legislative back doors, often over the objections of the actual voters. So there was always going to be a moment when those taxpayers said, "They spent my tax dollars on what now?" Lack of transparency and accountability are a systemic issue for voucher programs. 

Arizona is a prime example. Way back in 2018 news swept the state that $700,000 of voucher money was spent on items like beauty supplies, sports apparel, a host of other unapproved vendors, all caught only by state audits of the program. Since then there have been $900 Lego sets, Broadway tickets and espresso machines. It made actual news when the Arizona state board actually denied an appeal by a parent to approve use of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to buy three dune buggies (only after an appeal hearing officer okayed the purchase).

Enough of these sorts of shenanigans, and taxpayers are going to want to see some transparency and accountability.  

There are people on the right who already called this one, people who oppose vouchers because in vouchers they see one more way for government to get its sticky hands on the operation of private schools. They're not wrong. Taxpayers may tolerate a private school's desire to teach Flat Earth science or Aryan supremacy or whatever nonsense--until they discover they have to pay for it. Then they start demanding transparency and accountability.

For the Goldwater Institute, a good number of rules to attach would be "none." So they have launched a suit from a couple of homeschool moms who argue that the state should let them buy whatever materials they deem appropriate without tying them to any actual curriculum. One of the moms 

explains that she is “individualizing my child’s educational needs from minute to minute throughout the day,” meaning her curriculum is ever-changing. “It’s been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum,” Velia says.

The other mom, who has nine children and is homeschooling seven of them, complains that the government is putting more requirements "on the list." Goldwater has some other pieces to their argument, starting with the complaint that teachers don't have to prove paper and pencils are appropriate for a curriculum:

As Velia explains: “No other teacher in the state has to provide curriculum for purchasing things for their classroom.” So, requiring parents to jump through the hoop of documenting a “curriculum” for materials that are obviously educational does nothing to prevent abuse of the program beyond the extraordinary lengths parents already have to go to in submitting expense receipts for every purchase.

I believe some actual classroom teachers have some hoops they would love to show you. Then we can talk about what "obviously educational" could possibly mean.

The villain in the Goldwater story is Attorney General Kim Mayes, whose shtick is being a consumer protector. This whole "curriculum" business is just "a cynical, illegal attack on the ESA program, and it's making life harder for parents and children alike." Says one of the moms, Mayes should "actually be supporting ESA parents and children so they can get the education they deserve." In this context, "deserve" is a rather loaded term.

Hayes' office has a response:

The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education. With instances of voucher dollars being spent on things like ski passes, luxury car driving lessons, and grand pianos, it’s clear that providing documentation on spending is essential to prevent the misuse of taxpayer funds. Attorney General Mayes believes Arizonans deserve full transparency and accountability in how their tax dollars are used and will continue to fight for accountability and oversight in the voucher program.”

Goldwater throws out the old "nobody knows the child better than the parent" line, but that's not really the issue here. I know my children pretty well, but that doesn't mean I know best what materials should be used to teach them advanced calculus or conversational Chinese. Knowing your child well does not make one an expert in varieties of pedagogy. 

Nor does "I know my kid, so just trust me that these taxpayer dollars are being legitimately spent" make a really good argument. 

If you want to use the taxpayers' dollars, you owe the taxpayers an explanation of what you did with it. I know that's not the dream of folks like the Goldwater Institute, but this was always going to be the next voucher debate. We'll see which side the court decides to take. 

What The Heck Did Vance Just Say About Education??

Vance just spoke at a Christian nationalist rally in Monroeville (a Pittsburgh suburb), and some of it was about education. We need to look at the whole thing (I'll include the full clip at the end of the post so you can check my work).

The particular section people are buzzing about is kicked off by audience member Rose Owens who introduces herself as a former teacher who currently works at a homeschool enrichment center. She wants to know what we can do to save our schools and our children from socialism. 

Vance starts by complimenting her family, and then launches into the first part of his answer (at about 13:45). I'm going to add punctuation and paragraphs not to make it sound less awful, but to make it more readable:

Some of the stuff that they're teaching in American schools in 2024, that that's not just liberalism that is crazy and we've got to get it out of our schools or it's going to poison the minds of our young people. And we've got to start today in fact we should have started yesterday, and and ma'am what a big part of this-- and I I've tried to understand this I've been a senator for a couple years and I've tried to understand where is all this crazy curriculum coming from and the honest and unfortunate answer is very often it's paid for by tax dollars. 

In other words it's paid for by those of us in this room, and you ask how that happened is is the answer is well the Federal Department of Education pays a lot of money to develop curriculum that goes into our schools. Well, the money the people they give money to are very often some of the most radical organizations in the world that are developing curriculum that is pro- socialism I would say pro- racism that teaches really crazy ideas on gender that we just don't want in American schools. 

And yeah, I mean it has two negative consequences well first of all the American education system used to be the envy of the world rich or poor alike we believe in this country that every person deserves a quality education. Well, now we've got American children who can't add 5 plus 5 but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders, and I think both of those things are related because we're teaching kids radical ideas we're not teaching them the basics. We're not teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic-- the things that every child needs in order to live a good life.  

And that is to your point this creeping socialism in our schools we've got to get it out of there and I think we cutoff the money stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoned in the minds of our kids.

Lots of people are jumping on this to say that Vance wants to defund public education. I'm not sure that's what he said, exactly. In context, I think it's just as likely he meant to offer one more reason that he wants to end the Department of Education-- because it gives money to radical organizations that create socialist curricula that schools then use. I can easily believe that Vance and his buddies want to end public education; I'm not sure even they are foolish enough to say so out loud. 

There's lots else to unpack. The "envy of the world" bullshit that nods to the myth of a golden age of education that never existed. Those golden days were marked by low level of participation, i.e. many many school-aged children didn't finish school, or even come close. There is not point in history when we were beating the world at education. And I defy you to find any public school classroom in the country where a teacher is skipping 5 + 5 in order to teach about 87 genders. Who has time for socialist indoctrination?

Also notable, and problematic because so few people will recognize it as a lie, is this business about federally-funded curriculum development. That's a thing that does not happen, and which cannot happen because it is illegal for the feds to meddle in curriculum (c.f. a thousand arguments surrounding Common Core). Anyone who believes this is welcome to give me just one example of a curriculum that was developed with federal funding and/or distributed by the feds afterwards.

So if Vance wants to defund the Department of Ed to stop it from doing things that it doesn't do, that certainly seems to suggest that he would also target those folks who actually do it. 

There are other edu-nuggets in this discussion. While chatting with Owens about the challenges of homeschooling, he says this, with his characteristic lack of any irony:

Maybe it is the hardest job in the world to homeschool a seven year old.

Just imagine, JD, what it would be like to teach a whole roomful of them.

Vance also makes his plug for choice, noting that Pennsylvania "could have done a better job here" and then states one of the great mysteries of the culture panic choicer crowd:

We need to give every American Family choice and if we give American parents more choices, they're not going to choose socialism. They're not going to choose racial craziness. They're going to choose good education for their children, and that is the best way to cut out this rot in American public education.

 So even though schools board are elected by local voters, somehow those local voters would all quit the local school system if they could. Who has captured these local districts, and how have they done it? There's a culture panic story that says that back in the seventies, when lefties couldn't take over the country, they just took over key institutions and have been enforcing their ideology ever since, somehow. Teacher programs are all indoctrinating teachers (because one can easily convince a 20-year-old to jettison all their beliefs in favor of liberalism) and somehow all the elected school board go along with it.

Or maybe what Vance means is that Real Americans will want to get out of the public system and get away from Those Peoples' Children. 

Vance also recollects that he was "lucky enough" to go to school in the 1990's, when "we told American children that it didn't matter whether you were Black or White or any other skin color, it just mattered what your character was as a person." And even though he went to a low-ranking high school in Ohio, he got a good education. So maybe that Socialist takeover was more recent? Is Vance nostalgic for the Bill Clinton Presidency? 

The 90's are an interesting choice, because the 90's were the time of Outcome Based Education, an idea that sort of sept the nation and which was protested bitterly by culture warriors of the day like Phyllis Schafly and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, who were sure that it was part of a liberal socialist plot that was ruining American schools. So it's possible that Vance's problem is just early-onset Old Fart Syndrome ("Back in my day, we didn't have this ding dangy foolishness"). 

Or perhaps he just adopted an assortment of stances as a tactical maneuver for the election. But this anti-public education stance is in line with the position of the New Apostolic Reformation dominionist folks he was talking to-- public education must either be taken over or taken out. It's impossible how much of this is plain old lying and how much is just because Vance doesn't have a damn clue about how schools actually work. This is not someone I want to see anywhere near the White House.

ICYMI: Helene On Earth Edition (9/29)

My heart goes out to the folks caught in the massive flooding and destruction that kicked off the weekend. That is some scary stuff, and I can't imagine how heartbreaking it is to lose someone to this kind of overwhelming force of nature. Stay safe and hug your loved ones.

A little bit of reading this week. Here we go.

A ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Michigan Advance does an interview with Josh Cowen about his book The Privateers (worth a read). Some good questions in this particular sit-down.

Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know

Jan Resseger looks at yet more research showing that vouchers do not deliver on the promises made for them. 

Poetry and democratic education

This paper by Nicholas Tampio is sitting behind one of those academic journal paywalls, so you may or may not be able to get to it. But it's an interesting topic-- is poetry writing just too impractical and not-on-the-test for schools, or is that an important function being overlooked.

“Necessary But Not Sufficient”

John Merrow weighs in on the topic of cell phone bans in school. Is it enough of a good thing?

Are You an Instruction Geek?

Nancy Flanagan has kind of had it with the yappy bowties out to vandalize public education.

Learning Systems: Shaping the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Bellwether has a trio of papers about AI in education. There's a lot to chew on here, and some doses of reality included. But if you're looking for a comprehensive pile of ideas to burrow through, this might work for you.

PragerU Collaboration Proves South Carolina Is Banning Books

Steve Nuzum looks at South Carolina's continued effort to limit what students can read. 

FLBOE Requests Budget That Doesn’t Keep Up With Inflation… Again

It's as if Florida's leadership doesn't want to fully fund education. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains the details. 

A school choice star is unborn

One of the most thoughtful takes on the current fall of Corey DeAngelis has come from Chris "Citizen" Stewart. Yes, that Citizen Stewart, the long-time school choice advocate. 

The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

From back in July-- Scientific American's editors, of all people, pointing out that SCOTUS is off the rails, and some of their school decisions are on the list.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I wrote about a report that shows that history teachers are not indoctrinating students, and a school district in Florida has buckled to pressure to put their books back on the shelves.

Join me on substack, where Zuckerberg can't take down my posts for no apparent reason. Always free. 

How Can Schools Respond To Racist Incidents

Tishomingo schools in Oklahoma made the news earlier this month when six students decided to celebrate Homecoming with some racist misbehavior. 

It was a simple enough Homecoming activity. "How do you spell victory?" said the signs. Students were to wear black t-shirts and receive random scrabble tiles they would use to make the highest-scoring word. Instead, six white students decided to use their tiles to make the N word, and took a picture of it, and posted it on line. The resulting uproar resulted in canceled Homecoming events. 

I'm well familiar with the teen boy mindset that enjoys the thrill of deliberately transgressive actions (we all are, because a whole lot of boys carried it out of their teens and onto the internet). It comes from two realizations-- one is that words can shock people who take them seriously, as if words mean something, and two is that you can disown the meaning of your own words by declaring they're a goof. Put those two together and you get people who enjoy the power of poking people in the eye with your language even as you discover the liberation of amputating your own empathy. In short, there is a point in teen development (coming somewhere around reading your first Ayn Rand novel) when one gets a kick out of being a performative asshat.

So maybe that's what these six were coming from. But there's no excuse for someone in 2024 not understanding that 1) this act would be really wrong in a non-funny way and 2) the internet is not private. 

I feel for some of the staff. There is a unique kind of gut punch that comes when students make you ashamed of your school. 

But what is a school supposed to do?

Is it part of the school's job to teach students not to act like racist asshats? And how do you even do that? Is it the school's job to help students grow to be decent, civilized human beings, and are we really going to have to argue with people who want to argue that learning to be a decent, well-educated, civilized human being doesn't necessarily mean unlearning racism, or, at a bare minimum, learning to keep your racist asshattery unspoken and unshared?

At many schools, an incident like this might prompt some soul-searching and mission-tweaking in the school district, a determination to address the issue programatically.

But this is Oklahoma.

Oklahoma where HB 1775 was passed in 2021, the first of those anti-CRT "divisive concept" bills meant to forbid teachers from saying The Wrong Thing in class about race. This is where the Tulsa chapter of Moms for Liberty said, sure, teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre, but don't go blaming racist White folks for it. 

Oklahoma is where, to make sure everyone knew they were serious, the state Board of Education under dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters threatened the accreditation of two school districts over lessons about racial bias and cultural competency. And they did it without clear and specific charges, so that districts could wonder anxiously just where the fuzzy, vaguely drawn line actually lies. 

Oklahoma is where Black teachers had to take it upon themselves to teach critical pieces of history on Saturdays, outside of school. Which means, of course, that students like those sic White boys from Tishomingo were not getting the lessons.

This is an issue we haven't successfully discussed or responded to as a country in ever. Do we use education to further certain values because society, particularly a society that includes folks from a whole lot of backgrounds, would be improved by them. Do we do it even some people don't share those values. We have no problem with the question when it comes to values like "work hard" or "be honest," but when it comes to "don't be a racist asshat," we stumble. In the Land of the Free, should racist parents have the right to raise racist children? And does the school have to step aside and let them be?

There's no reason to expect schools to navigate racial issues any better than the country as a whole. Schools exist downhill from the culture, and when the culture includes elected officials who traffic in racist rhetoric, that will inevitably trickle down to schools (and that's before we even get to the non-zero number of racist teachers and administrators).

But I know this--stunts like the one pulled by six White students at Tishomingo are not okay, and schools must find ways to help students do better, and that doesn't include passing laws to prevent children from hearing unpleasant truths about the nation's history.

VT: Court Backs Unqualified Education Chief

Vermont Governor Phil Scott installed an education chief of dubious qualifications over the objections of state legislators. Now the court is covering her butt. 

Our Story So Far

First, a recap of how the state arrived at this point.

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSA was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

 
Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department.

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens.

And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes (okay--one whole day) after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either.

In June, two state senators (Tanya Vyhovsky and Dick McCormack) sued the governor and Saunders for "purposefully circumventing" the Senate' authority to confirm or deny appointments. As reported by Sarah Mearhoff at VTDigger, another news site that has stayed on stop of the story:

“This is now no longer even about the secretary of education,” Vyhovsky told VTDigger in an interview. “It’s about separation of powers and the right of the Senate to do the job that it is constitutionally and statutorily given.”

So now...

Yesterday, the two sides got to speak their piece in Vermont Superior Court in front of Judge Robert Mello. Mello was appointed by Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2010. 

Mello promised a quick decision on Thursday, and sure enough-- he issued his ruling today (Friday).

Judge Mello dismissed the lawsuit:

To the extent that the Senators argue that the Senate’s decision to not confirm Ms. Saunders prevents the Governor from reappointing her, whether on an interim or permanent basis, the court disagrees...When the legislature has wanted to so limit the Governor’s appointment power, it has simply said so.

The reference is to legislative action that specifically forbid the governor reappointing someone to the Green Mountain Care Board after the Senate rejected them. Apparently since the legislature didn't specifically list another time that the governor is not allowed to overrule them, well, too bad. 

What comes next? We'll have to wait and see, but in the meantime Saunders can keep treating the job as hers, "interim" notwithstanding, because there's no sign that the interim is going to conclude any time soon. 

 

Power and Priorities

This week the Washington Post ran a story about the millions of Americans who do not control the thermostats in their own homes. It's a feature of a deal that many folks make-- in exchange for a cut on their utility costs, they let the electric company take control of the HVAC in their home. It's one more way that the US is finding to cope with a demand for electricity that is, a certain moments, outstripping the ability to generate and deliver the needed power. These deals are pretty commonplace; at my folks house, certain major appliances cannot be run during certain mornings of the week.

This is wrapped up in a larger issue--a power grid that is struggling to keep up. Experts have been sounding the alarm for a few years now. Our electricity supply is not infinite, and our ability to deliver electricity is not limitless. 

More humans means more demand, and as demand increases, the grid is more inclined to stumble. 

Which takes me back to the conversation that we aren't having about AI.

We talk a lot about the ethics of students using AI to cheat. We talk about the various techniques and methods for taming the AI beats by embracing it in the classroom. 

But we generally have these conversations as if there is no cost to the choices we make. And that's a false assumption.

Should a family do without heat or air conditioning for part of the day so that a group of seventh graders can cheat on their homework? Should a home go through a brown out so that someone can get AI to generate a picture of Donald Trump riding a unicorn? Should anybody have their HVAC turned off so that Google can generate a bad summary of search results that people ignore anyway?

Plus, you know what happens to a commodity when it becomes more scarce--it becomes more expensive as the folks competing for it bid the price up and up. Are we all going to pay more for electricity so that AI can crank out more mind-numbing content for internet advertisers? Is steady, dependable electricity going to become a luxury item only available to the well-to-do?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of one of America's most alarming nuclear accidents, to help power their AI data center. 

AI is a big part of this, but Crypto also eats an awful lot of processing power. And for people who love their electric vehicle because it runs on cheap, readily available energy--well, that's what folks thought about automobiles for decades. 

And all of that is before we even start to talk about the other rare resource involved, used to cool the server banks that make the magic happen. AI is sucking up mega-gallons of water. 

Maybe clever people and market forces will sort all this out. But I would feel better if we were having an actual conversation about the cost-benefits ratio involved in using precious resources to create state-of-the-art CGI porn and help Junior whip up an Animal Farm book report. AI isn't a lot of things, and one of the things it isn't is free. 

Regulation Via Phone Call

This week Leslie Postal wrote a piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel covering the new edict from the state sex education in Florida must henceforth be non-sex education. 

Florida has told school districts around the state that they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence, according to district officials and an advocate for comprehensive sexual health education.

This is all sorts of a mistake for which future generations of Florida men and women will pay a price, but there is something else worth noticing in the story.

As several folks on Twitter have pointed out, the story indicates in several spots that the state's instructions were delivered via phone calls and discussion. In other words, not via anything actually written down. 

That's a problematic choice in Florida, where the government's most common reaction to complaints over a new law or policy is "You just didn't understand it right." The "don't say fay" law wasn't saying that at all. The book not-really-bans were being implemented so bizarrely and haphazardly because people were misunderstanding it or even trying to deliberately make it look bad. Or that chaplain law, where DeSantis was thrown off by the actual words printed in the law. 

It gets hard to keep reinterpreting rules on the fly when they are actually written down. So why not simply avoid leaving a paper trail at all. Deliver your edicts verbally so that nobody can prove that you said something in particular. "What?! Well, we never. Clearly these folks misunderstood the instructions we gave them." 

Delivering directives verbally also allows a level of tone that the printed word does not. It's a way to go if you don't think a memo is intimidating enough.

If this is the new SOP for Florida's department of education, there are more difficult times ahead for educators trying to do their jobs and keep their butts covered at the same time. Good luck to them playing a political game of telephone.

 

Why These Sex Scandals Matter

I'm old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he's been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn't picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate-- Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren't wasting so much time panicking over other peoples' business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal-- the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose--matters for several reasons. 

For one thing, whenever someone puts on a public display of super-strong beliefs, the question always hangs in the air-- is this person a true believer, or is this all just a performance. As Rotherham writes, "it's not the heat, it's the hypocrisy." At a minimum, the hypocrisy shows us that there are extra qualifiers in their belief system ("Gay stuff is evil and bad-- except when it involves people I know personally"). At most, it shows us that they didn't believe a word of what they were saying and were just launching opportunistic attacks. And if even they don't believe in it, why should anyone else?

But that in turn reveals another problematic layer, which Rotherham touches on here:

As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn’t mean you should.

It is one thing not to feel empathy or compassion for people who are different. But what sort of empathy deficiency does it take to avoid empathy for people who are, in fact, like you? What does it say about you as a human being when your private personal life does not inform your public life in some positive way?

There are layers to consider here. How can we live in an era in which it is so easy to dig into someone's background, and yet vetting seems to be failing so often--particularly when this same culture war story is repeated over and over and over again? What's the bench strength like in the privatizer world-- will a new chief choice evangelist step up soon? 

I don't wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don't wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can't spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

All of these folks are young enough to have a second act ahead of them. Maybe time will pass and their patrons will declare them born anew, and they'll be back at the same old grift. Maybe they will take a moment to look inside and come to some sort of peace with themselves; living a lie is really exhausting. Maybe it's just a chance for the rest of us to practice grace, a quality far too rare in our culture today, thanks in part to folks like DeAngelis.

In the meantime, voucher debates and culture panic will rage on and we will all have to continue sorting out people who want to have serious conversations from those who just want to play games for personal ambition.

Read To Read

Back in high school, our band director offered a piece of advice to us. When someone offers you a gig, he said, take it, no matter what it is. Playing leads to more playing. 

The Board of Directors has been bitten by the reading bug. This is not a surprise; we have read to them daily since birth and still today, even though as wild old second graders, they read independently. They are surrounded with books. There are all sorts of conditions attached to getting items like toys or Pokémon cards, but they get books often. I pulled this same trick with my older two children, the idea being to raise them thinking that of course every livable home has food and shelter and books and music in it. 

So it's pretty cool that they will read, unprompted, as a high-ranking leisure activity.  

But, lordy, the stuff they read. Some of it's pretty unobjectionable (if you have kids in this age group, I recommend the Branches imprint of Scholastic ). The Investigators are a fine time (got that pick from my grandchildren). But they've also latched onto Dog Man and golly bob howdy but those are hard to take, from the sort-of-humor to the failure to observe some basic grammar of comics (e.g. a page is a paragraph). But it's aimed at a particular audience, and boy does it hit that mark.

I don't really care about any of that. Because reading leads to more reading. 

Every one of us who is a reader has the stories. I read every Hardy Boys I could find and then I found out that Nancy Drew mysteries were cranked out by the same syndicate. I read adventures and someone handed me The Lord of the Rings and then someone saw I was reading that and handed me Gormenghast. You get older and you find your own ways to find The Next Book. Some don't click (there was this gorgeous copy of Black Beauty but I could never get through it). Some are hard to find, or were, back in the day. You keep looking. Reading leads to more reading. 

I think of all this every time I come across someone arguing that students must read certain things in a certain, like the libraries where students are only allowed to take out books that are properly leveled, or the yahoos who still insist that reading a graphic novel doesn't count. Reading leads to reading. 

I also think of this when I find people (sadly, sometimes teachers) advocating for audiobooks or summaries or excerpts, which are sort-of-reading, but not actual reading. Skimming and scanning for answers to a dumb question on a pointless quiz is not reading. Drilling discrete "skills" that are supposed to be components that can be slapped together like an Ikea bookshelf to form actual "reading"--those are not reading. 

Do we scaffold, hand-hold, help them get over technical bumps in the road, or otherwise support students as they read? Sure. But not-reading and sort-of-reading do not lead to reading. Reading leads to reading. 

Am I speaking from the place of privilege as someone who was raised in a reading house? Sure. But I am also speaking from a place of 39 years of teaching students, many of whom were not "natural" readers (nobody is a natural reader--we naturally learn to speak but nobody naturally learns to read). If you can clear out whatever obstacles are in their path, from trouble decoding to a lack of background knowledge to disinterest to a reluctance born of a history of failure to etc etc etc and get them to read--reading leads to reading.

Reading programs (scientific or not) can wander into the mistaken idea that the purpose of reading instruction is to get students to score well on reading tests. But reading tests are not the path to reading. Reading-- being on the receiving end of ideas, emotions, and information put into the world in written form-- is the one thing that reliably leads to reading. Do what you have to do to facilitate that, to make sure that students can read successfully. But do not forget that the point is not testing, but actual reading. 

ICYMI: Black Cat Nazi Porn Election Edition (9/22)

Well, that was a heck of a week for news. If you somehow missed it, God bless you--I'm not going to spoil it for you. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

How AI Detection Software Turns Professors into Cops, Tech as Systems of World-Making, and More

From The Markup, an interview with Maywa Montenegro about AI in the (college) classroom. Worth it for just this paragraph alone.

Even if you believe that the machine is learning, your brain is not learning. And you might be in debt—tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—from your education. Do you really want to walk away without having given your brain, your mind and intellect, the gift of that learning, even if it’s a struggle? That blows my mind. Why would we do this? Please don’t.

English teaching, AI and the thermostatic principle

Julian Girdham with what amounts to one quick thought about AI, but it's a worthwhile one for combatting hype.

Why Teens Across the Country Are Acquiring Brooklyn Public Library’s Free Digital Cards

Who's using the Brooklyn Public Library e-card, and why? Kelly Jensen at Book Riot has stories and charts. 

Why ‘School Choice’ is on the Colorado Ballot This Year — and What You Should Know About It

Mike DeGuire with plenty of details and background on an attempt to get school choice enshrined in the Colorado constitution.

Trojan Hearse? A Right-Wing Think Tank Aims to Abolish the Miami-Dade Teachers' Union

I'm not sure I would call the Freedom Foundation a think tank; they're more of a dark money hard right anti union activist group, and at the moment, they have targeted a major Florida union local. Francisco Alverado has the story for Miami New Times.

Alabama teacher poisoned by students, unable to work: Lawsuit

It's like Alabama state and local authorities tried to fine the best way to shaft a teacher who was already in a mess thanks to students. Trisha Powell Crain has the story for AL.com.

Using Learning Science To Analyze the Risks and Benefits of AI in K-12 Education

I don't think I buy everything here, but it covers a lot of ground with some actual nuance and sources, even if it is from the Center for American Progress.

Middle School Prepares Us For Social Science Thinking Too

Jose Luis Vilson is as always thoughtful and personal about education. In this case, some of the special features of middle school.

'Educational' Screens In Classrooms Do More Harm Than Good

Clare Morell at Newsweek suggests that while we're having the big discussion about cellphones in the classroom, we might want to talk about those other omnipresent screens.

School voucher and hospital groups top lobbying spending lists for 2024 TN legislative session

If Betsy DeVos weren't rich, she would sure be broke by now. A breakdown on who's trying to buy their way to policy success in Tennessee.

Exclusive: Watchdog finds Black girls face more frequent, severe discipline in school

Claudia Grisales reports for NPR on a study from the General Accounting Office, and boy these numbers are ugly.

Some Missouri schools arming teachers in the classroom

Yeah, that's going to help. Surprisingly, at least one feature of this program doesn't suck.

Under Tennessee’s stricter school library law, some books quietly disappear

Tennessee has been a big state for panic over Naughty Books, and Marta Aldrich is reporting on how bad it's getting.

Students prefer teacher feedback over AI feedback, research finds

Behind this completely unsurprising headline, some interesting details from a study of AI paper feedback. Reported by Tanya Peterson.

In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools

Want your taxpayer dollars to go to a private religious school so they can build new facilities? Ohio is the state for you. Eli Hager dropped this surprising story at ProPublica.

Can It Be Constitutional for the Ohio Legislature to Spend our Tax Dollars to Help Churches Build Religious Schools?

Jan Resseger is asking the question, and while the answer should be obvious, certain privatization groups would like to pretend otherwise.

Former Oklahoma teacher says board used 'profoundly stupid work of fiction' to justify revoking license

I wrote about the latest news in the saga of Summer Boismier, but since then she's had a few things to say herself. I think it's safe to say that this whole business has not shut her up.

Does expertise protect against overclaiming false knowledge?

A research paper to prove what you already knew-- people who actually know what they're talking about don't try to pretend to know what they don't know, but people who don't really know what they're talking about will extend their expressions of faux expertise all around the block and back.

Turmoil at Lionheart Academy Endangers Charter School

Lionheart Classical Academy was meant to be the Hillsdale toe in New Hampshire, but it has turned out to be a mess that is in danger of financial collapse according to Damien Fisher at NH Journal. But also--

Who is the mysterious Florida-based landlord and philanthropist of a charter school under scrutiny in Peterborough?

Lionheart's troubles include an investor who's also their landlord, who's in Florida and who nobody has really met. Jeremy Margolis in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.

The Haitian Community and What We Teach Ourselves

Jose Luis Vilson again. He's on a roll this week. Here he looks at our problematic relationship with immigration and schools and society.

‘A violation against free speech’ | Penn State removes Collegian newspapers from campus

Penn State is trying to pick a fight with the student newspaper The Collegian. As the father of an alumnus, I am not impressed by the school.

Bomb Threats in Schools

Nancy Flanagan looking back on one of many teachers' less beloved memories--the bomb scare. And here we are again, for even worse reasons.

People thinking without speaking, part three

Benjamin Riley talks to an MIT neuroscientist about language and thinking and consciousness and this may make your head hurt a little, but it's cool stuff.

The Hidden Factors Influencing College Admissions Decisions

Akil Bello really knows this stuff. Here's some real advice about getting into college, from Word In Black. Plus Bello does this really cool thing where he publishes on his blog the stuff that got cut out of the original-- so you can get the rest of that piece right here. 

Watch and Share This Video.

If you haven't yet seen the Schoolhouse Rock style video for Project 2025, Sue Kingery Woltanski has you covered, plus some commentary. 

You can join me on substack for reliable appearances of my stuff in your email inbox.

Does Teacher Pay Matter?

Over at her substack, Anne Lutz Fernandez has an excellent piece entitled "Yes, What We Pay Teachers Matters." Like most everything Fernandez writes, it is absolutely on target (you should be subscribing to her if you don't already) and I just want to underline it, then wave my arms and holler "And furthermore...!"

Fernandez is looking at a new report from Sylvia Allegretto at the Economic Policy Institute that shows, among other things, that the teacher pay penalty-- the gap between teacher pay and pay for similarly-educated professionals-- has been growing over the last three decades to reach an all-time high. The gappage appears to have accelerated in the mid-90s.

Some, like the folks at Reason magazine cited by Fernandez, argue that it's not so bad because blah blah blah shuffling numbers around. But considering averages and other benefits does not improve the picture. 

Fernandez also notes the other perennial argument against paying teachers well-- teachers don't care about money and they aren't motivated by it and boy do my old fart hackles raise at every similar argument posted by someone who also posts that damned stupid "Teachers do it for the outcome, not the income" meme. 

Teaching is nor supposed to be some act of self-sacrifice, immolating yourself so that you can illuminate the lives of students. For one thing, it's not sustainable. It's not even functional, because (as they don't tell you in teacher school), you can give every last atom of yourself and it won't be enough. You will burn out early, and--bitterest of ironies--you won't even be very good at it, because what can a person who has no life of their own teach students about life?

Don't get me wrong-- teaching is absolutely a noble and supremely worthwhile profession of service. But that doesn't mean teachers shouldn't be paid well. 

But paying teachers more doesn't raise Big Standardized Test scores, some will argue (well. instead of "raise test scores" they'll say "improve student achievement" or "increase teacher effectiveness," but that just means "raise test scores"). But nobody who is serious about education will argue that the only and most important function of a teacher is to raise test scores.

The "teacher shortage" is the least mysterious issue in education. Here's Fernandez:

Of the ten states with the worst teacher shortages, the majority have pay penalties worse than the national average. But across the nation, shortages are worst in high-poverty schools, where teachers tend to be paid less. Given that these are the schools serving some of our most vulnerable children, teachers in them should be paid more—a lot more. Instead, we have had decades of chronic underinvestment in schools, particularly in urban and rural areas. This is the case in red states and blue states, as decades of austerity have denied lower-income neighborhoods and towns the resources for decent infrastructure and staffing.

Teacher shortages are both a recruiting and retention problem. The solution is not either/or: Keeping the best teachers requires competitive pay and better working conditions. I’ve written elsewhere about some of the bad ideas going around about how to solve the teacher shortage and about how some working conditions can be improved so teachers can teach more effectively. The only evidence of teachers being paid and treated poorly is not the sound of doors slamming behind them. We should be at least as worried about the effects of teachers working under stress or moving between schools as we are about them quitting the profession.

Exactly. Nor do teachers who are struggling with their professional situation make a great advertisement for the profession. I don't think it's any coincidence that the number of people choosing to enter the profession came about when students graduated from high school after twelve years of test-centered schooling had stripped autonomy from teaching.

Look, nobody enters teaching hoping to become super-wealthy. But money is power and choice. When you're twenty-something, maybe you are less bothered by having less power and choice about things like where you live and what you drive. But eventually that lack of power over your circumstances may start to chafe. And it's one thing to say, "Well, I can manage doing without some nice clothes because I'm doing noble work" to yourself and quite another to tell a spouse or your children that they have limited options because you're teaching.

And while teachers have been losing economic power, they've also been losing professional power. Not that it was ever great for some folks--it's not hard to find teachers who can tell stories of being treated like one of the students instead of like a responsible grown up professional. Add on NCLB and Common Core, both predicated on the idea that 1) schools were packed with terrible incompetent teachers and 2) we'll assume you're one of them until you prove otherwise. Teach to the test. Implement these materials with fidelity. Align your instruction strictly to these standards created by people who 
have never done your job.

Sometimes, money isn't just money. Look at the very rich--they don't need to make a few hundred thousand more because they need to be able to purchase more stuff. But money is a way for them to keep score-- "I made money on this, so I must be right and smart and winning!" 

I'd argue that in the context of a profession that has been stripped of power and autonomy, low pay becomes just one more poke in the eye. That's why increased pay, while it would certainly improve conditions, would not by itself be a complete fix. Paying people more while you keep treating them poorly will not turn the tide.

There are credible arguments that the "teacher shortage" is Not That Bad, though at least in my neck of the woods, superintendents would disagree. Some teachers are making a decent living, and some schools are doing okay with staffing. Some states are doing well at recruiting, and some are doing well at lowering the standards for the profession.

But the teacher pay penalty is one more symptom of two issues that are fundamental to so many of our education debates-- the desire to avoid paying one cent more than we absolutely have to for public school funding, and the desire not to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children. Both of those desires are getting full expression in the privatization movement. 

Better working conditions for teachers would lead to a better education system. Better working conditions lead to more interest in the field, which means school districts can be more selective. Those better working conditions include a broad collection of factors, including better supports, better disciplinary backup, better curricula and instructional materials, better physical setting, and yes--better pay. It could be done. But I'm not going to hold my breath. 

Not Choice, But Capture

There are people who really do support school choice, but over on the right, you will find those aren't really interested in school choice at all, and every once in a while, they say so. Take this post from Daniel Buck, former teacher and current Young Conservative Facer at the Fordham Institute (we've met him before here and here and here). 

This is not fond hopes for the day when dozens of different sorts of schools bloom and everyone can pick the one that best suits them. 

This is not about choice. It'[s about capturing the education system so that young humans can be taught the correct way to behave and think. It's about trying to eradicate a way of thinking and being that folks on the right disapprove of. 

Buck is certainly not the first or only person to make versions of this argument.

Parents Defending Education, an activist astro-turf group, has published viewpoints like an "investigative report" complaining that LGBTQ charters are "indoctrinating: kids at taxpayer expense. More than a few politicians who wave the school choice flag also oppose school choice involving Certain Viewpoints. And there's an absolutely ridiculous piece of "scholarship" from the Heritage Foundation trying to discredit charter schools for being woker than public schools, because choice is supposed to provide a variety of educational viewpoints, except not Those Viewpoints.

For large chunks of the choicer world, the whole "school choice" argument is a smokescreen, a mask, and a lie. There is no interest in any sort of robust educational ecosystem-- just an educational system that is full of their preferred worldview.

When someone like Ron DeSantis or Ryan Walters tells you that he favors school choice and he also favors making illegal all references to certain "divisive topics" and gender stuff, he is telling you that all his talk about school choice is bullshit. 

It's one of those times when you can tell what someone's goals are by what they don't say. A school choice fan who believed what he was saying would look at a city where Woke Academy was next door to MAGA High and say, "Look! This is working just like it's supposed to." Not "We have to either burn Woke Academy to the ground or regain control of it by restaffing it with anti-woke teachers. 

For many pretending to be choicers, the real goal is a two-pronged capture. One hand works at capturing the public system with rules that impose the preferred anti-woke values on public schools, while the other hand seeks to replace the public system with a system that follows only the preferred ideology. Neither of these hands is interested in actual school choice.

There are conversations and debates to be had about the topic of school choice and the topic of ideological "purification" of the country's education system, but it's hard to have those conversations when some folks insist on pretending that they're talking about one thing when they're really talking about something else.