Is It Time For Conservatives To Get Back To Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio was at AEI after the election to wonder if the time had come for conservatives to get back to the ed reform biz. It's an interesting question, partly because Pondiscio has correctly called the winds of change in the past, partly because a new Trump administration is a fine time to consider how "conservative" and "liberal" don't precisely map onto the education debates. I haven't changed my mind about ed reform; I still love public education and disagree with massive critical chunks of the reform agenda. But for purposes of this discussion, that's momentarily beside the point.

Did conservatives go somewhere?

Here's my over-simplified history of the modern school choice movement.

Since Milton Friedman helped birth the modern choice movement, its heart has been small government, free market conservatism--and that has never been enough. At first the only people to run with it were pissed off post-Brown racists. Reagan tried to set the stage with A Nation at Risk, beginning the process of eroding public faith in and support for public schools. 

Skip ahead to No Child Left Behind, a policy project that was either an attempt to improve public education or an attempt to start loosening the bolts so it could be dismantled. Either way, it birthed a new bipartisan movement centered on accountability, standards and charter-style choice (and in barely a whisper, vouchers). 

That coalition required a sort of bargain. For conservatives, an emphasis on market-empowered choice, and for their partners, a promise that choice would be aimed at improving equity in education for marginalized group. That deal was hard to maintain, especially as it emerged that 1) choice didn't really fix America's equity issues and 2) free market conservatives didn't really mind. Some conservatives complained at being pushed out of the coalition, but then Trump was elected and the coalition was pretty much blown apart-- the social uplift side was not going to have anything to do with Trump, but there were some conservative issues as well.

Meanwhile, dating all the way back to the Obama administration, a new anti-public school wave was building, a culture panic fed by opportunists like Chris "Critical Race Theory Is Scary" Rufo and wackadoo scares like the Great Imaginary Litter Box Panic. 

In February of 2022, we could the closest thing to a formal announcement of a new partnership. Jay Greene, who in a somewhat symbolic move left academia to join right-wing activist group the Heritage Foundation, published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." He argued that trying to pretend to care about things that lefties liked such as equity and uplift wasn't helping the cause (also, the growing body of research showed that, academically, vouchers are a losing proposition), so instead, why not throw in with the culture panic crowd.

Which they did. The problem for conservative free market fans is that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in school choice. They have worked for two goals-- a taxpayer-funded public system that is dominated by their values, and a private taxpayer-funded voucher system dominated by their values. So instead of arguments for letting a hundred education flowers bloom and to each their own, Greene went on to cobble together fake research to show that school choice would end wokeism in education. 

So what could be changing now?

Pondiscio sees an opportunity within the election results, specifically the observation that the GOP made big goals in Florida and Texas, two states that have pushed school choice hard. Pondiscio also notes that "Republicans’ 'red state strategy' has been a yielded important victories, particularly passing universal Education Savings Account (ESA) programs in about a dozen states in the past few years."

He also sees the need to try, because (as Pondiscio regularly points out) the vast majority of students are educated in public schools, so walking away from public ed reform is essentially giving the other team a bye. "The majority of American children—future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens—will continue to be educated in traditional public schools for the foreseeable future. Surrendering these institutions to the left would be an act of educational and cultural self-destruction."

There are obstacles and opportunities

It’s also an opportunity for thoughtful conservatives to re-evaluate past missteps and even make amends. That means engaging with public school teachers, a group that has borne the brunt of conservative ire in recent years. As I argued recently in National Affairs, while it’s true that teachers’ unions have often been obstacles to meaningful reform, there’s more common ground between conservatives and teachers than most people realize on a host of issues including teacher training and pay, school safety, student discipline, even curriculum.

Well, yes. It has been a couple of decades, starting with No Child Left Behind operating on the premise that a bunch of teachers were everything wrong and failing in public education, continuing with Common Core premised on the idea that no teachers could do their jobs without careful direction, and all the way up through assertions that teachers are satanic groomers and pedophiles. Not all of that is the fault of conservatives, but is true that conservatives--or anyone else--who wants to work with teachers (and they all should) will have to first apologize and second prove they aren't there to punch teachers in the face again. 

The bigger obstacle is hinted at in Pondiscio's piece. Choicers may have gotten voucher bills in many legislatures, but vouchers were on the ballot in three states and they all lost, decisively. The path to implementing vouchers remains what it has always been-- around the voters and through the legislature.

The presents a problem for conservatives, because the folks in legislatures are increasingly MAGA, and MAGA is not conservative in any traditional sense of the word. Sure, they have some of the language down, but consider, for instance, the Trump MAGA plan for education, which boils down to 1) we want to dismantle the department of education because the federal government should have no control over local schools and 2) we would like to exert total control over what local schools may and may not teach.

Actual Queen of Rumania

One key problem with choice has been accountability. Market forces do not create accountability, certainly not the kind of accountability needed to protect the educations and futures of young humans. Likewise, the argument that we can't "just trust" public schools with all those taxpayer dollars, but handing those dollars to private or charter schools is just fine-- that's not particularly conservative accountability. But MAGA is not real big on any accountability at all, which means more choice legislation that forbids taxpayers from knowing how their money was spent.

That's why I have my doubts about conservatives finding a path back to the heart of education reform, because that path is being guarded by MAGA, and if MAGA is conservative, I am the Queen of Rumania. 

But there is a useful piece of an idea here, because I'm going to argue that you can in education find plenty of conservatives involved in education. The place is schools.

Conservative and liberal and education

I have been surrounded by conservatives my whole life. My grandmother was a staunch GOP legislator in New Hampshire for much of her life, and my father was a faithful Republican as well. My ideas about conservatives come from direct contact, not what the liberal media says about them. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about political labels, and I have never fully understood exactly how political labels track onto sides of education debates.

Free market conservatives are a fine old tradition for conservatives; I think their belief in the invisible hand is sometimes sorely misplaced, but I get it. The supposed leftie allies of ed reform? That never tracked for me. Democrats for Education Reform was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a palatable political package for Democrats. Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates-- liberals? Neoliberals seem like Friedman's nieces and nephews. 

Trying to track a Dem-GOP divide in education seems fruitless, particularly now that MAGA has squeezed most actual Republicans out of their own party. Too many actors are just muddying the waters by using party affiliation to cover their actual affiliation, which is to power and money.

In education, let's instead divide the teams up this way-- Team Burn It All Down and Team Make It Work. 

Conservatives and liberals, nominal Republicans and Democrats can be found on both sides of the debates. But I would argue that "Let's take this time-tested institution and simply trash the whole thing" is not a particularly conservative point of view. Likewise, I think we would find among choice fans both people who want to trash the current system to make room for choice and people who want to use choice to make the system work better. Unfortunately, MAGA and the culture panic crowd are largely Burn It Down--and they just won an election.

As for public schools-- most everyone working in the school wants to make it work better (I suppose it's theoretically possible that there are schools which everyone believes cannot be improved, but I doubt it). Preserve and improve the institution is a fundamentally conservative position, and if you look closely, I believe you'll find that most schools have adopted policies that draw objections not because they are trying to embark on a leftie crusade, but because they believe those policies will help the school work better. Teachers mostly support free lunch and breakfast for students not because they want to promote socialism, but because students are easier to teach when they aren't hungry. 

In other words, education debates can go so much better if folks worry more about the goals and less about which team jersey the policy is wearing.

This is not to say that there isn't a huge divide between the Burn It Down and the Make It Work folks, as well as some huge and definitive differences of opinion amongst the Make It Work crowd. And as with every issue in America these days, the entire field is clogged with unserious people who are simply trying to find an opportunity and angle; red and blue don't matter much to someone focused on green. 

So what were we talking about, again?

Could traditional ed reformsters from outside the Burn It Down crowd get involved in the education debates again? Are there bridges that can rebuilt and fences mended? Can any of it be done while Trump is unleashing God-knows-what over the next few months, and the Burn It Down crowd rules the discussion? And would you like to argue that all I've said is void because you disagree with my definition of conservatism?

Lots of maybe's there, but I do know this-- the last few years we've had lots of really loud reformster voices hollering nonsense. It surely wouldn't hurt to have more rational voices concerned about education rather than politics, and maybe not burn everything down.

ICYMI: Catch Breath Edition (11/10)

I have nothing to add. I can't read any more hot takes about the election (they are mostly crap) and I have just about arrived at the point of getting past grief and getting back to the work at hand. But I have a few pieces from the week for you.

Backward, in High Heels

Nobody is better than Nancy Flanagan at connecting the personal with the professional and even the political. This is a powerful piece.

Stockard on the Stump: Get ready to learn the Earth is 6,000 years old

Tennessee's governor wants him some vouchers. Sam Stockard at Tennessee Lookout has a look at what that might mean.

Florida may be red. But on schools, voters put partisanship aside

Jeffrey Solochek at the Tampa Bay Times breaks down the education issues that Florida's red wave did not carry.

They Bought a Legislature

Josephine Lee looks at the giant mountain of money spent to put voucher supporters in the Texas legislature.

The Invention That Changed School Forever

At the Atlantic, Ian Bogost takes a look at the invention of the school book bag.

“Off Balance” As Classroom Management

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider talks about managing a classroom as a force of nature.

Christian Nationalists and Separation of Church and State

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the work being done to smack down that pesky wall. 

Don't Obey in Advance

Jose Luis Vilson reminds us to keep at it.

What Next?

Steve Nuzum examines Rebecca Solnit's advice that "it's always too soon to go home."

Ending School Vouchers: Finding Hope for Public Schools

Vouchers were defeated at the polls yet again.

Metaphors Describing Classroom Teaching: Command-and-Control or Eating Pasta?

Larry Ferlazzo examines metaphors for management, and it doesn't have anything to do with election, so there's that.

Post Election Reflection: Public Education During Donald Trump’s 2nd Term

Who knows what promises he'll keep and which he'll break, but Jan Resseger reviews what could be coming down the pike.

I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

Betsy DeVos Has Some Thoughts On Trump 2.0

Betsy DeVos, former US Secretary of Education and lifelong rich education privatizer, talked to Alyson Klein at Education Week about the upcoming Trump administration. It's brief interview, but long enough for her to rewrite the past, ignore the present, and fantasize about the future.

DeVos sees the second Trump administration as a continuation of the first, and sure, maybe. She doesn't know what Trump is going to do. I don't know. You don't know. Probably not even Trump, with his increasingly impaired goldfish-like faculties, knows. Sure there's Project 2025, but that's over 900 pages long and he's not going to read it. I can make a few predictions will stage a high-profile round up of immigrants in some city (like Aurora, Colorado), declare the immigrant crime problem solved, and give all the rich folks who depend on migrant labor for their business a wink and a smile. He will take the booming Biden economy and declare it the Trump economy. But who knows-- what he chooses to do next will depend a lot on whose voice he's listening to at the time.

Anyway, Betsy thinks that the time is ripe for the federal tax credit scholarship program that she couldn't sell last time. She still thinks that there is support, not just among members of Congress, but "broadly" because the pandemic opened peoples' eyes blah blah blah. However, despite this supposed "broad" support, she should note that three states had choice and vouchers on the ballot, and in all three states, voters rejected vouchers. And they rejected them hardest in the same states that went hard for Trump. 

But that's okay, Like most privatizers, she's not really counting on that "broad" support.

The environment is completely changed.

I think more members of Congress and [their staff] are more informed about what education freedom really is, and what it means, and how it can actually be implemented through a federal tax credit, not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything.

People don't have to support federal vouchers. Just legislators.

Of course, as folks who work in government, legislators and their staffs are also smart enough to know that this "not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything" stuff is pure baloney. DeVos is proposing a program where taxpayers deposit money in a fund, somewhere, and then get tax credit for it, somehow, and then money from those funds are distributed to private schools, through some process and all of it monitored somehow, maybe even a process for deciding which private providers are eligible. It would have bureaucracy out the wazoo, and add to the federal deficit, too, though I don't suppose anyone cares.

She also sees Title IX on Trump's radar, because there is no panic like trans panic (like all good trans panickers, DeVos doesn't really care about trans men).

She also sees fixing FAFSA as a priority, and she's not wrong. 

But of course top of the list is getting rid of the Department of Education. "De-powered" is her term. She uses the talking point that they just want to push the money out to the states to use as they think best. This talking point never includes the part of Project 2025 where Title 1 funds are supposed to be zeroed out entirely. 

Klein calls her on her resignation after the January 6 insurrection, an occasion on which DeVos did a fair imitation of a woman whose principles include respect for the country and the processes that keep it safe. But she would like to take all that back now. Here's what she said on January 7, after saying they should be highlighting their great accomplishments:

Instead, we are left to clean up the meds caused by violent protestors overrunning the U,S, Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people's business. That behavior is unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.

Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgement and model the behavior we hope they would emulate. They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired today. To that end, today, I resign from my position...

Here's what she told Klein:

If you recall, my resignation was specifically out of concern for putting myself in the seat of young kids and families. There was an opportunity to lead in a different way, to say things at more opportune times. I felt strongly that we had accomplished many good things, and that we should be talking about those things as we left office.

I know that President Trump has a heart for America and Americans. And he has a very tender heart for kids and families who want the best for their kids.

Also, as she has now said several times publicly, she would be "very open to talking" to Trump about coming back (if he backs her preferred agenda). Way to stick to those principles! Not that she'll be invited back-- she was there likely on the pull of Mike Pence, and that plus her January 7 letter probably flunks her on the Loyalty to Beloved Leader test.

She has other folks in mind that would be great for the job. She thinks an ideal would be a governor "who's led their state in reform issues," and I'm trying to think of a privatizing governor who would like to take his career on a side trip through Trump's education department. 

Her advice for the new person is basically "set the same goals that I would." Klein also asks if DeVos has advice for them if they face angry crowds, though I reckon that it would be hard to find someone with less experience dealing with The Rabble than DeVos (an ineptness that scored her a lot of fair and unfair abuse). If DeVos demonstrated nothing else, it was that rich folks used to buying political compliance aren't very good at actual politics. 

DeVos says "change is hard" (by which I think she means "making other people change is hard") and "you just have to be willing to deal with the noise and stay focused on the vision for students." This is doubly hard when you think every other person is just a source of noise. 

 

 

The Handle That Fits Them All

We are already talking about the worst, ugliest, most misogynistic and racist impulses that will be boosted by Trump's election. But for all of us in general and teachers in particular, I'm concerned about one other feature that will be super-charged by this administration.

We are now fully entered into a post-truth society. Folks voted for a Trump who doesn't exist to solve problems that aren't happening.

Yes, I'm solidly on record arguing that there is no such thing as One Truth, but there are truths that have a basis in reality and evidence, and there are views that are based on nothing but fabrication divorced from reality. There's point of view, and there's spin, and then there's just utter reality-divorced bullshit.

Yes, Democrats made all sorts of mistakes; Bernie Sanders pointing out the failure to reach working class people may be on the mark. But to think Trump is the working man's friend requires a head stuffed firmly in an alternate reality. Treasonous Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and to believe otherwise is to accept a big lie. To think he's some kind of genius requires a stretch of miles and miles and miles. Trump stole classified documents and tried to weasel out of giving them back. He's a felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a serial grifter, a misogynist, a racist, a man whose character so lacking in character and honor that the notion of him as a Christian champion makes no more sense than the idea of a great dane teaching advanced calculus. 

I get that some of his support is transactional, that he is such a weak man that he attracts people who figure he can be used by them for their own gains (e.g. I'd bet that much of his right-wingnut christianist support comes from people who see him as a brick that will open the door for True Believers). It's a dangerous game, because Trump is in it for Trump, but at least these grifters have a reality-based picture of who Trump is.

But the vast majority of voters appear to have settled for the lies. Exit polls show they decided on issues like the economy, as if Trump's universally-panned-by-experts plan will "rescue" a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. They worried about trans athletes (because who wants to live in a country where you can't harass young trans persons). And they believe in his victimhood, the idea that all these court cases and charges and all the rest are just Democrats "persecuting" the man who has "give up so much for this country." 

Trump voters could overlook his flaws because they were standing atop a mountain of lies. 

And one lesson from the campaign is that disinformation works, that alternate facts work. And yes, I understand that this is not exactly news, but given our hyper-powered media and communications world, I think we've entered another level. This is a level where folks can decide that consensus reality, facts, standards, science--none of it-- requires even lip service. 

I worried about this in 2016. Never mind the public examples being set about propriety and basic kindness-- how do you teach when the nation's leaders demonstrate that facts are for suckers. Make up your own and just keep repeating them. And it was bad back then, but it feels so much worse this time. The first Trump administration felt like a trial balloon, a first shot at pushing the limits of anti-factualism. But now they can look back at some of the biggest lies ever pushed on the country and see that not only were there no negative consequences, they have been rewarded for it.

There is no need to even try to be tethered to reality. Just pick what you wish was true, and sell it. It's an epistemological collapse, a suspension of any need to have a path to knowledge, because there is nothing to know except what you (or dear leader) wants to know. 

Also, these are a lot of fancy ways to describe a simple thing-- a lie.

In this context, teaching about things like finding text evidence to support an opinion seems quaint. Why discuss whether or not a body of Core Knowledge matters when knowledge itself has been cut loose? Why have reading wars about how to decode and define words when only suckers believe that words have meanings? Why worry about teaching scientific method and how to support an idea when it's obviously simpler to just make up whatever you want to make up?

The answer of course is that all these things are doubly necessary in times like these, that society needs people raised and taught to function in reality based on real things. The Work of educators is now more important than ever.

It won't be easy. This anti-factualism will trickle down and parents will come after teachers and schools for contradicting whatever counterfactuals they prefer (again, not a new thing, but now carrying the imprimatur of the White House). There were many signs on state and local levels that people still value public education and keeping it out of the hands of culture panicked anti-factists; I hope that holds up.

Meanwhile, school choice in the hands of culture panickers will look increasingly like Deliberate Ignorance Academy. Actual old-school conservatives, the kind who actually liked cold hard facts and accountability, are no more welcome in Trumpland than bleeding heart liberals. 

So what do we do?

If you're a teacher, teach. Do the work and stand up for reality. Teach logical fallacies. Teach about how to check for lies and disinformation.

For the rest of us, I have a request that may seem silly or inadequate, but I think it matters.

Resolve to tell the truth. 

I don't mean speak as if you have personally collected stone tablets from God. But speak the truth, as best you understand it, and do it in the face of lies as well.

Lies are toxic, and right now much of our lines of information ecosystem are a toxic sludge. Standing up for truth, and for reality-based means of finding and refining truth may seem like small things. And it's tempting, in an arena choking on lies, to try lies of your own to cut through. There may come a time when you have to withhold truth to keep someone safe. And honestly, it's hard to live in your truth all the time. But it is more exhausting to live in a lie. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes has one of my favorite lines--

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.

So much bad behavior, poor choice, destruction, and just crappy human action requires a disregard for the truth, for reality, to enable it. 

It's not the only thing to be done, not the biggest thing to be done, but it is a thing that every individual can do. Teachers ought to be doing it. People who want to keep their bearings should be doing it. It's always a good idea, but moving forward under a truth-averse administration, it will be extra important. 

Even In A Red Wave, Voters Reject School Vouchers

As has often been noted, school vouchers have never survived being put to a vote. Despite all the noise voucherphiles make about how beloved school choice is among the people, when you actually ask voters if they want vouchers, they say no.

Three states tested that record in this election, and the voters said no yet again.

Colorado tried to amend the state constitution to put in place a right to school choice. The amendment was spectacularly awful, creating the potential for endless lawsuits and unmanageable demands by parents. Even the Christian Home Educators recognized that it was a spectacularly bad idea. 

While Colorado broke for Harris, it also sent wingnut Lauren Boebert back to the House. But it said no to the amendment by about 100,000 votes. 

In Kentucky, choice fans were miffed that the state supreme court could actually read and understand the plain language of their constitution, which says 

No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation

So the court rejected various attempts to use public tax dollars for private school vouchers, and voucherphiles decided they's just have to get the constitution rewritten.

Kentucky went 65% - 34% for Trump, and swept all sorts of MAGA officials back into office. Pretty much those exact numbers went the other way for the amendment, sending it down in flames. 

Nebraska had perhaps the longest row to hoe, as the legislature passed a voucher law in 2023. Voters successfully petitioned to put a repeal of that law on the ballot, so the legislators repealed and replaced it themselves in an attempt to do an end run around voters. So a second petition was circulated, and repeal of the new law was placed on the ballot.

That repeal passed, and Nebraska's voucher law is now toast.

Voucher fans are pointing at spending by anti-privatization groups as the big factor here. But that avoids acknowledging the main problem here, which is that voters do not like the idea of paying taxes to fund discriminatory private schools by subsidizing tuition for the wealthy instead of using taxpayer dollars to fund their public schools. 

Reformster Mike McShane argues that "none of this matters" and that "school choice is still on the march," which is true in the sense that the main tactic of privatizers remains getting friendly legislators to ignore the voting public and just go ahead and create voucher programs. Just look at Texas, where the now years-long fight by Governor Greg Abbott to get vouchers in the state has not hinged on changing the public's mind or arguing the merits of vouchers, but on using a mountain of money to tilt elections so that he can get enough voucher-friendly legislators in place to give him vouchers.

A couple years ago, voucher supporters very deliberately dropped the idea of vouchers being good for academics or equity-- arguments that they hoped would bring left-leaning collaborators into the fold-- and replaced them with culture panic arguments. 

This election was the first test of that strategy. God help us, culture panic yielded the gobsmacking and heartbreaking result of returning the least qualified, most treasonous President ever to the White House and giving him a Congress of MAGA lickspittles to support his every random idea. 

But even the biggest, ugliest red wave in modern history could not wash away voter dislike for school vouchers. Opposition to privatization and support for public schools is a non-partisan position, supported by people all across the political spectrum. 

Teaching Elections and Getting On With Things

In my county, election day means a day out of the classroom for some high school seniors. Thanks to a collaboration between government teachers and local officials, high school seniors serve as poll helpers. It's a win-win--the county needs volunteers, and the students get a first hand look at what a day at the polls looks like. 

Meanwhile, at least one elite high school has offered a day off tomorrow for students who are overwhelmed by the results of the election (spoiler alert: I strongly suspect we won't know the results for a few days) and at least one major university is planning a "self-care suite" with Legos, coloring, milk, and cookies. While it's entirely possible that students will turn their noses up at such offerings, I have to agree that these kind of post-election kinder-care for non-infant humans is a bit too much. 

I am a huge fan of kindness and empathy, but I'm also a big believer that sometimes kindness means encouraging someone to Suck It Up and Get On With Things. 

In the K-16 world, some folks have always suffered from a serious disconnect. In K-12, they want to see students protected and sheltered, kept in a relatively safe bubble. And yet, somehow, the day after high school graduation, they're supposed to emerge from their bubbles and vault into the world as fully-formed adults. 

Conventional wisdom used to be that the bubblers were mostly lefties, but the past few years of culture panic have unleashed on the right the snowflakiest snowflakes that ever flaked. The various laws against discussing "controversial topics" in the classroom have not been aimed just at squelching discussion, but so much as a mention. The worst LGBTQ panic rules are aimed at keeping students from even knowing that LGBTQ persons exist. 

And here comes Daniel Buck (the youngest old man in reformsterdom), writing at The Hill, "Almost a decade into my education career, I cannot fathom a reason that any teacher should cover the election in their classes."

Really? I can think of several, especially the reason that those students will, hopefully, vote in elections. In some cases, they'll do it today. Add to that the problem we have with too many adults whose knowledge and understanding of civics is less than optimal. Maybe with some more studying and discussion of the election, students wouldn't need a safe space to recover from the shock of the actual event.

Buck's point is that teachers are hired to do a particular job, and he's pretty sure that there are clear boundaries to that job.

In the case of classroom teachers, they too are hired to teach specific content, only their patrons are society itself and their charges are a collection of students. They fill a clear, prescribed role: to teach math, American history, or whatever other course to the students in their class. A teacher of ninth grade English has no more business discussing politics than a chef at a high-end Italian restaurant has preparing lutefisk for a diner who ordered pappardelle.

I have to point out that Buck goes off script with "their patrons are society itself," when the culture crowd demands that parents alone are the "customers." I happen to agree with what he actually said-- teachers do work for the community that hires and pays them. And that's why they should be discussing politics, controversial topics, current events, and other features of the actual world in order to better prepare students to become functioning adults in that actual world. None of those subject areas are as cut and dried as Buck (and others) suggests, a fact that he immediately acknowledges in the next paragraph. All school subjects inevitably intersect controversial and timely topics.

Yes, age matters. The approach to any of these topics, including an election, must vary according to grade. 

And there is one group that will be satisfied with only one answer. For some folks (you'll find many of them gathered around the Classical Education banner) there is only One Right Answer-- only one way to understand the issues and features of the world. For them, it's wrong to even acknowledge another viewpoint's existence because to do so is to challenge The One Truth and to invite confusion. Years ago, a colleague set out to teach a unit on world religions. Said one student, "I'm not going to do that. There's no reason to study those other religions, because they are all wrong." 

For those folks, the preferred model of education is a bubble in which only one set of views is presented, which is a challenge once the student enters the actual world. One Right Answer folks have been working hard to build bubbles in the world or, in the case of Dominionists, trying to take command of the world and squash all other views. The sheer amount of energy and effort required to pursue these goals is a clue about the viability of the One Right Answer approach.

Finally, there is one legitimate concern about allowing current events and controversial subjects into the classroom, which is the crusading teach who wants to sell students on their preferred view. I reckon everyone has met at least one. 

In tenth grade, I had Honors History with Miss Anthony, who really wanted us to see the liberal light, to the point of bringing in a local politician to explain why we needed to get out of Vietnam right away. We reacted in one of a couple of ways. Some of us simply argued with her about everything, because it was fun. Other members of the class simply mimicked the point of view she wanted to hear. I'm pretty sure she indoctrinated zero students.

The problem with crusader teachers is not that they successfully indoctrinate students because mostly they don't. The problem is that they don't teach nearly as much as they ought, because students learn to fake a viewpoint instead of learning the content (even young students who aren't fully conscious that they're doing it). Students learn to store a bunch of stuff in their brain in a school basket, the part of their brain that is separate from the part of their brain that deals with the real world.

Buck doesn't want teachers to bring their bias to the classroom. That's a foolish hope, and poor  preparation for the world. Just look at the campaign we're watching enter the new phase--the whole country is steeped in bias, including biases of people who base their conclusions on stuff that isn't even real or true. 

In today's world, keeping bias out of the classroom is like keeping students ignorant of fire and sending them out into a world that is a raging inferno. Can teachers teach an election without bias? Probably not. Can they teach an election without their own bias damaging the lessons? Absolutely.

Bring biases and controversy into the classroom. Bring them all. But you must do one critical thing--you must scrupulously and pointedly make it clear that the room is safe, that nobody will be shamed or downgraded for the views they express. Hand in hand with this is the classroom rule that everyone is treated with respect. 

Your role as teacher is to bring multiple viewpoints into the classroom, representing each as authentically as you can. If I told my students once, I told them a thousand times, "I am not here to tell you these folks were right or wrong, or that you should agree or disagree with them, but to explain as best I can how they saw the world." 

It's not always easy. Some students bring some odious beliefs into your room, but then, so too the country. If they're going to become functional members of a pluralistic society where they live cheek by jowl with people who have different ideas, different beliefs, different ways of understanding the world, then they must have a place to practice doing that. (This is one reason I'm opposed to the idea of a system that lets families withdraw their children to special homogenous isolated silos to get their education).

You don't do this instead of teaching them to read and write and math and understand history and art and all the rest. You do it while you teach all the rest. You acknowledge the controversy even as you Get On With Things. This is the how, not the what. 

The notion that school can somehow stick to just the content and create a completely objective viewpoint-free setting is a snare and a delusion. It cannot be done. 

I'm not suggesting that every lesson every day should be dominated by controversy and viewpoint discussion. I am saying that if we want young humans who can function in a pluralistic society without having to retreat to a milk and cookies room every time there's a big scary controversy and culture clash, then we have to model and practice dealing with current events and controversies in classrooms so that students can better deal with days like today and weeks like the ones ahead of us. 

DC: SEED Charter Is "A Parent's Worst Nightmare."

The SEED School of Washington, D.C. was in the Washington Post yesterday, accused of inaccurate records and wholesale breezing past laws that are supposed to protect students with disabilities.

If the name of this unusual charter boarding school seems vaguely familiar, that may be because back in 2010, they were one of the charter schools lovingly lionized by the documentary hit piece, "Waiting for Superman."

"Waiting for Superman" was a big hit, popularizing the neo-liberal narrative that public schools were failing because public school teachers were lazy incompetents. Every damn newspaper in the country jumped on the narrative. Roger Ebert jumped on. Oprah jumped on. NPR wondered why it didn't get an Oscar (maybe, they posit, it was because one big emotional scene was made up). It helped sustain the celebrity brand of Michelle Rhee (the Kim Kardashian of education, famous despite having not accomplished anything). It was a slanted hatchet job that helped bolster the neoliberal case for Common Core and charter schools and test-centric education and heavy-handed "evaluation" of teachers.

And it boosted the profile of SEED, the DC charter whose secret sauce for student achievement is that it "takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services."

Except it turns out that maybe it doesn't do that after all. 

According to the WaPo piece, reported by Lauren Lumpkin, audits of the school suggest a variety of mistreatment of students with special needs.

SEED underreported the number of students it expelled last year. It couldn't produce records of services it was supposed to have provided for some students with disabilities (most likely explanation--those services were never provided). Federal law says that before you expel a student with an IEP, you have meetings to decide if the misbehavior is a feature of their disability, or if their misbehavior stems from requirements of the IEP that are not being provided. 

These have the fancy name of "manifestation determination" which just means the school needs to ask-- is the student acting out because that's what her special situation makes her do, or because the Individualized Education Program that's supposed to help deal with that special situation is not being actually done. For absurd example-- is the student repeatedly late to her class on the second floor because she's in a wheelchair? Does her IEP call for elevator transport to the second floor, and there's no elevator in the building? Then maybe don't suspend her for chronic lateness. 

Founded in 1998, SEED enrolls about 250 students, which seems to preclude any sort of "just lost the details in the crowd" defense. But as Lumpkin reports, questions arose.

But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.

The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.

“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”

Lumpkin reports that this is not their first round of problems. A 2023 audit found a high number of expulsions and suspensions compared to other charters-- five times higher. A cynical person might conclude that SEED addressed the problem by just not reporting the full numbers. Inaccurate data, missed deadlines, skipping legal requirements--that's a multi-year pattern for the school.

The school is now on a "notice of concern," a step on the road to losing its charter and being closed down (or I suppose they could just switch over to a private voucher-accepting school).

The whole sad story of the many students who have been ill-served by SEED is one more reminder that there are no miracles in education, and no miracle schools, either. 

ICYMI: Mattress Edition (11/3)

I'm playing in the pit orchestra for my old high school's production of Once Upon A Mattress, a show that I have been involved with in one capacity or another about six times now. But the first time, which was also probably my first outing as a pit musician, was in 1974 when I was a high school junior at this same school (when I say "my old high school" I mean both where I taught and where I studented). So this is one of those circle of life experiences. It's a cute score, nice show without a single serious bone in its body. The original Broadway production was Carol Burnett's big break.

It's always good to play, and it's good to watch the magic of theatrically turning marks on a page into a story on a stage. Just the thing for this weekend.

Meanwhile, here are some pieces to read from the week. If you haven't already voted, get out there on Tuesday. and vote for Harris and not that other guy. Then get ready for weeks of attempts overturn the results. It's marathon, not a sprint, but if we want any kind of decent democracy, we'll need to just keep at it. 

Terrified, Outraged, Exhausted

Nancy Flanagan is facing the election with some realistic and exhausted insights.

What to Expect if Radicals Flip Your School Board.

Sue Kingery Woltanski is in Florida, so she should know. A guide to why you should be paying attention to your local board elections, and what happens when you don't.

Tennessee’s costly, disruptive school turnaround work didn’t help students long term, says research

If it seems like you've heard this song before, you have. The Achievement School District is one of the longest-running failed reformster experiment ever, and yet...

Poll: New Orleans parents feel less bad about the school system, worse about charter schools

Speaking of failed reformster experiments, let's see how things are going in New Orleans.

Despite what Trump Says, Project 2025 Will Be His Blueprint for Taking Away Our Freedoms

Maurice Cunningham writes his closing argument for the Presidential election for the Progressive.

'School choice' under Amendment 2 is a transfer payment to wealthiest families

Kentucky should not approve a constitutional amendment allowing for vouchers, explains Brigitte Blom.

How your children's personal data is getting bought and sold without your consent

Yeah, this is still going on. A reminder that the College Board makes a lot of money selling student data.

As Ryan Walters’ Right-Wing Star Rose, Critics Say Oklahoma Ed Dept. Fell Apart

The 74 provides Ryan Walters with some national exposure. Is it bad that he's being exposed as the least competent education chief in the country?

Teachers had ideas for improving education after the pandemic. We failed to listen

Hechinger Report with more old news-- post-pandemic education would have been a great time to actually listen to teachers, but that did not happen.

I’m voting for strong, fully-funded public schools

Barb Kalbach with an op-ed in Iowa. Let's hope voters listen.

Privatized Schools Will End Democracy

If you still haven't gotten your copy of The Privateers, maybe this look inside the book by Thomas Ultican will motivate you.

Open Letter to the SC Board of Education

Steve Nuzum sends a letter about the process of banning books on the state level, because they do that in South Carolina.

Bloomberg Reframes Q2 on MCAS: It is Oligarchy v. Teachers Union

Massachusetts voters have a chance to get rid graduation exam. Some folks don't like that idea, and Maurice Cunningham knows who they are.

Teacher as Classroom Politician

Larry Cuban reminds us that every classroom teacher does politics as part of the job.

On Public Education Policy, the Choice for President Is Clear

Jan Resseger makes her final argument.

There is no Artificial Irony

Benjamin Riley's piece is a little deep and philosophical, but it's also a good look at another way to see the inadequacies of AI.

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at seven lessons about vouchers from The Privateers.

I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

Some Reformsters Just Won't Let It Go

A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.

Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman's career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state's education system. 

Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn't approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.

He became one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

The ASD was Huffman's audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run "district." The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

 Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying, 

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that "top 25%" stuff). Huffman couldn't close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing. 

Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman's WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown's Annenberg Institute found that the ASD "generally worsened high school test scores." It also didn't help on ACT scores and "data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either." Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.

But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They're particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.

So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially-- because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get. 

Huffman likes the "gains" in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests. 

But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were gibing in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then "following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them."

It takes a person whose educational "experience" is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.

Huffman argues we need "strong national leadership around education policy," which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn't happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants "the best basic education for their children." I don't know what to do with that "basic" in there. 

How do we get it?

For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.

God, one of my least favorite forms of management-- management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like "sell more." But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target-- test scores.

Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with "a return to nationwide education goals" along with accountability measures. Ans also, grants for states that "pursue ambitious education reform" as, one assumes, defined by the feds.

In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn't worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man-- it all didn't work the first time, and not just "didn't work" but "did more harm than good."

But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don't have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says "if we just use X, every student will learn Y" they are wrong.

He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).

Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their "responsibility to push school districts toward success," a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world). 

The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into "education expert" on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets. 

God Disapproves Of Bluey

You may be old enough to remember the flap over gay Teletubbies. Well, here comes the critique of Bluey for violating God's gender roles.

There have been, apparently, some complaints from "Christian moms" about sassiness and mysticism in the popular kids show (note: we don't follow the show here, but both of my granddaughters are big fans, and they are both brilliant). And there some thoughtful and positive views of the show on Christian media. 

But over on Align, a website that is part of Blaze Media, we find a different take. Blaze Media is the current version of The Blaze, the right wing outfit that started life as Glenn Beck TV, a pay television station that was Beck's attempt to build a career after Fox canned him (it was 2011, so Youtube was still a baby and Tik Tok didn't exist). TheBlaze was also his right wing website. The channel has wandered around, while giving space to the usual crew of right wing commentators. 

The article is written by Jeremy Pryor, who has run an assortment of christianist businesses, including Family Teams, which promotes families as "teams" with everyone taking a traditional role.

Pryor seems like a pleasant enough person (he notes that people don't think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood "besides a particularly annoying youth group song" and I hear that). But he's got some Strong Ideas about how Bluey represents a new version of fatherhood that "embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father." And Pryor has a problem with that.

God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order.

 Pryor argues that lacking a strong symbolic depiction of fatherhood has left us "untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities."

Pryor's doesn't get too far into what that "objective" vision of fatherhood and masculinity looks like in this piece, though we do get a reference to "the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood." So this modern fatherhood typified by Bandit is all backwards--  

It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions.

Pryor has apparently gotten into this elsewhere, and he does acknowledge that even among Christians, his beef with Bluey is a minority view.

Pryor's argument hinges on a feature of right wing thought. It's the belief that there is One Right Answer to life's big questions (in this case, "what should fatherhood look like") and that this One Right Answer is "objective" and unaffected by human society and culture. A video about raising boys with biblical masculinity includes the tag line "it's NOT a social construct.".

I don't want to go down the rabbit of either biblical inerrancy or cultural views of family roles (as parsed for various classes and cultures and ages etc). But Pryor is following in the footsteps of plenty of cultural conservatives who identify what they are comfortable with in cultural roles and then identify a source (the bible, pseudo-science, their own personal genius) to cement the notion that their personal cultural beliefs are actually the One Right Answer according to [insert authority here]. 

Sometimes this trick is performed in a deliberate, self-serving manner, and sometimes it comes from a sincere belief. My sense is that Pryor is sincere enough, and he seems conscious of how his ideas can be co-opted by folks who are off track. But for these folks, education can be a huge threat.

In another podcast video, Pryor explains that schools can be bad for family teams. "What I will not tolerate," he says, is when the child at school starts to think they are on another team, where they have an allegiance to their peers over their family (aka the process that most teens go through). In other words, daring to think that they have an independent life outside the family, some sort of existence in which they are not subordinate to the (properly masculine) father. 

Family Teams has a ton of videos including ones that point out that girls probably shouldn't go to college, nor should a wife earn more than her husband. There is also remarkably little rhetoric about God Himself. 

I occasionally bring up the 5% rule: 95% of everything is just stuff that human beings make up and then pretend is Really Important, and only about 5% of everything is Actually Important. The trick is that we don't agree on what the 5% is. There will always be folks who not only are supremely confident that they have 5% (or more) that is correct, but that it is divinely ordained by some higher authority and therefor Objectively True. In a pluralistic society, not to mention the school system that serves that pluralistic society, there will always be tension between these folks and everybody else. And they will always be arguing for their own favorite social construct and insisting that it's the One Right Answer straight from a Higher Authority. This particular social construct is problematic because it requires women and children to be subordinate to the "team leader." And that's why Bandit, the animated cartoon father who is too much like a mother, is in such trouble.