OH: An Unfunded Tutoring Mandate

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that will require schools to provide students with free "high-dosage tutoring" that will be subject to Department of Education and Workforce auditing along with a new professional development program for math teachers. The legislators have not included funding for any of this. Not a cent. It is the very definition of an unfunded mandate.

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“Our educational system must be responsive to the needs of our students,” bill sponsor Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican, said earlier this year during bill testimony. “In this last year alone, we have significantly increased the amount of funding each student receives for their education, provided resources for tutoring services, and made high quality instructional materials available while identifying methods of instruction that most benefit students. If we are unable to say that our students who need the most help are in fact receiving that assistance from their school, then we are putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children.”

Lordy, it's like a word salad made out of some of the most popular baloney talking points. "Putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children." You know, like teachers with their need to be paid for extra hours of work. Mind you, putting the needs of adult politicians to look like they're bravely Doing Something about education ahead of actually supporting that education-- that kind of adults-first posturing is perfectly okay. 

Brenner was a realtor and insurance salesman before he ascended to the legislature in 2019. He has a Masters in Ed in Leadership from far-right Christian nationalist Liberty University. In 2020, he warned that the state was going to become Nazi Germany over the Covid rules. 

The bill at least exempts schools from providing these services for IEP students. 

But it assumes that high-dosage tutoring is a real thing, without noting that it is hard and expensive to scale up. 

This is the story of education a million times-- some legislator gets a bright idea and declares "Let's require schools to fix this" while waving vaguely in the direction of schools. And while this bright idea may require more resources and human-hours, that lawmaker will be confident that this whole new program can be implemented for free. Rick Hess has often said that you can force folks to do something, but you can't force them to do it well. That is doubly true when you make zero effort to provide them with the resources needed to implement the program.

Doesn't matter. Lawmakers will sign the bill (already through the Senate and headed through the House) and congratulate themselves on solving an education problem. For those who, like many Ohio legislators, would like to gut public education, the school's failure to do a great job implementing the unfunded mandate is just more fodder for the "We gave them money and they didn't perform magical pedagogical feats" argument used to discredit and dismantle public schools. 

Would more no-cost tutoring be great? Sure, though I'd rather it were employed in a more useful cause than raising Big Standardized Test scores. And if you are undertaking a program that essentially increases the number of teacher hours in a day while simultaneously lowering the student-teacher ratio--well, if you are at all serious about it, you come armed with a big pile of money. 

The Ohio legislature is not serious about this, but it will be a serious problem for schools. 

But hey-- they're probably pre-occupied with the question of whether or not the state will be allowed to buy the obscenely wealthy owners of the Browns a new stadium with $600 million of taxpayer money. Gotta focus on important stuff that deals with the real interests of adults. 

ICYMI: Top Tenless Edition (12/28)

No top ten list this year, either for the blog or the ICYMI stuff, because A) there are too many posts to sort through and B) the analytics that decide which posts have been seen the most are wildly unreliable and C) sometimes you think a top ten list will be an easy less time-intensive way to get a post done during a busy season, but it turns out that's a snare and a delusion. My hat is off to everyone who did the work to get a top ten list assembled, but it has been a busy week here at the institute, with visits from all the branch offices, and today you just get the usual-- the reading from the week.

AI Conversations Behind Closed Doors

This may be hard to read, but Stephen Fitzpatrick's actual conversations with actual human students tells us about how AI is landing out in the field.

Unhelpful Disruption Rocks Indianapolis Schools

Andy Spears reports on the latest anti-public education shenanigans in Indiana and it's not very pretty.

On Vacations and “Learning Loss"

Steve Nuzum reminds us that the folks really leaning on the learning loss alarm have some whacky ideas about how to address it. 

The ABCs of College Board

Akil Bello connects the dots between the College Board and Glengarry Glen Ross. Plus what happens when marketing masquerades as useful data.

How Florida’s Grinch Privatized Classrooms

Sue Kingery Woltanski borrows from Dr. Seuss. 

Much Ado About Something

More from Sue Kingery Woltanski. This is an important read, because the Florida co-location scheme for getting charter schools free real estate is so awful that your first response is to assume that somebody is making stuff up. They aren't. It's that bad, and even if you aren't in Florida, you need to understand it just in case your state is next.

Choosing Harm Over Help: How U.S. Policymakers Are Turning Against Children

Bruce Lesley  on the many ways in which this country's leaders are turning against children.

Ohio bill requires free tutoring, extra help for students with lowest test scores

It's unfunded mandate time in Ohio, where the legislature wants schools to provide free after school tutoring for low-testing students, but offers no money to pay for it.

Most Depressing Blogs of 2025

I didn't take the time to do a Top Ten list, but Nancy Flanagan did, and while it's kind of a bummer, every one is worth the reading.

'We have to reject that with every fiber of our being': DeSantis emerges as a chief AI skeptic

Did you have "Ron DeSantis comes out wildly anti-AI" on your bingo card? Well, here we are. “Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” he said, and more. 

Over at Forbes.com, a MAGA legislator wants to cut property taxes for anyone who doesn't have a kid in schools. Because who wants to live in an educated country?

A hair late, but I can't wait a whole year to share this new track from Scott Bradlee and Casey Abrams. 

It would be nice to see the subscriber list grow. Join up, for free! 

Merry Christmas Music

We started the day really early here at the Institute, where the Board of Directors is extremely excited about the day and are quite certain that it actually starts at 12:01 AM. I'm not a nap guy, but today...

Here is the annual version of my Youtube Christmas play list, which tries to center stuff that you haven't already heard a gazillion times. 

I also like to share every year my extended family's spotify playlist, curated during Covid Christmas. 

And if you are really a glutton for punishment, try this collection featuring nothing but Jingle Bells. Have a fine day, however you choose to celebrate it or not, because every day should be a fine day.

TX: More Anti-School Choice From The Choice Crowd

Once again, it turns out that school choice supporters are not actually in favor of school choice. This time it's in Texas.

Kelly Hancock was in the chemicals business when he decided to step up his political career from school board member to House of Representatives in 2006. After three terms in the House, he moved up to the Senate. His undistinguished career included his award from Texas Monthly for being one of the worst legislators in Texas in 2017. The 2021 gerrymander still gave him a safer district.

Then in June 2025, he resigned the Senate so he could be appointed the acting Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts by Governor Greg Abbott. He's planning to run for the office for realsies next year.

One of the major points for his campaign? Hancock and his crew will be setting up the taxpayer-funded school voucher program (named the "Education Freedom Accounts Program" because nobody who supports school vouchers ever wants to say the word "voucher"). Hancock has been traveling around the state promoting the taxpayer-funded vouchers and the opportunity for choice.

Only it turns out that choice is not actually okay. The Texas Tribune reports that Hancock asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton if maybe certain choices shouldn't be allowed. Like schools with alleged connections to a U.S. Muslim advocacy group or the awful Chinese. Hancock asked if schools could be excluded if the were linked to a “foreign terrorist organization” or a “foreign adversary.” Hancock is targeting any school hosted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that Abbott just labeled a foreign terrorist group because they want to impose Sharia law. Hancock also claims there are "credible concerns" that one school in the state is owned or controlled by a group of people connected to a person who is allegedly an advisor for the Chinese government.

CAIR issued a statement about the events it hosts, “Know Your Rights” events designed to inform students about state and federal civil rights and protections.

“Hosting civil rights education for students is lawful. So is teaching students about their rights under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” a spokesperson with CAIR Texas said. “Any attempt to penalize schools for learning about their civil rights from an organization Greg Abbott happens to dislike would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”

Well, yes it does. It also, once again, illustrates that many school choice fans don't actually want school choice. We see this pattern repeated. "There should be school choice and religious freedom for all," they proclaim loudly. "Oh, but not for you guys," they add when Certain People try to take them at their word. For these folks, school choice is not about choice-- it's about funneling tax dollars to private religious institutions, but only the correct ones.

This is why religious folks ought to be the biggest defenders of the First Amendment. Because the next step, as we see in Texas and Florida and Oklahoma and elsewhere, is for the state to step in to settle debates about which religious institutions are "legitimate" and which religions really deserve the freedoms (and tax dollars) that are being offered. And once a religion needs state approval to exist, we have some huge problems. Somebody who is upset about the imagined threat of Sharia law ought not to be comfortable using the power of the state to force students to look at the Ten Commandments every day. 

Is everyone who promotes school choice actually opposed to school choice? No-- there are serious real choicers out there, and I have a different set of disagreements with them. But those true ought to be keeping a closer eye on some of their allies who are absolutely anti-choice. It's the anti-diversity, anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd that is bad for all Americans. And Texans.

ICYMI: Hope You're Ready Edition (12/21)

It feels like there are a couple of days yet, but there really aren't-- especially if we hold onto our reserve not to enrich Bezos this year. So let's use this last time to clean the house, pack in the groceries, and finish the laundry. That leaves us free to clear the decks and lower the expectations so we can just enjoy each other. We're only here for a little while; let's make the most of it.

Still got a reading list to look at. Here come this week's nifty reads.

Is Anyone Really Surprised?

It is hard to grasp how profoundly screwed up Florida's education funding is at this point. Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down how just one district's students are suffering from the voucher drainage. These numbers are astonishing.

Rural schools hit by Trump’s grant cuts have few options for making up for the lost money

Annie ma reporting for the AP takes a look at how Dear Leader's cuts are making life difficult for families served by rural schools.

How the charter school industry’s newest scheme could be ‘the death of public schools’

Florida's voucher program isn't the only disaster brewing; the new rules allowing charter school squatters to take over public school property are crazy pants. Jeff Bryant reports.

Take note, Gov. Polis: Coloradans have repeatedly said no to school vouchers

Colorado's governor is gazing longingly at those federal school vouchers. Kevin Welner and Kathy Gebhardt explain why he should really just take a pass on this one.

As 2026 Dawns, Future of Civil Rights Protection in K-12 Public Schools and Higher Ed. Looks Bleak Under Trump Administration

Jan Resseger on the administration's continued whacking away at K12 civil rights.

Alabama state education committee identifies ‘burdensome paperwork tasks’ for teachers

Andrea Tinker in the Alabama Reflector with this interesting little nugget. The state went to identify time-wasting paperwork, and the results aren't surprising, but it's still something that the state was even trying to find out.

As state’s school voucher program expands, legislative oversight committee has not met in a year

New Hampshire is not exactly killing it in the oversight department.

Charter school advocates fear their future at the Labor Department

Charter school fans have started to realize that they are in fact one of the entrenched interests being threatened by the Trump administration. Matt Barnum for Chalkbeat.

Erie School District sues Erie Rise to spur ex-charter school's dissolution, find assets

In PA, when a charter is shut down, its assets are supposed to go back to the district its students came from. In Erie, one closed charter is dragging its feet (and maybe spending its leftovers).

K-12 Indoctrination: Every Accusation is a Confession

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at the many ways that MAGA would like to indoctrinate children into their preferred ideology.

Swimming Below The Surface

Test scores. Vouchers. Security officers. Teachers coached via earpiece. TC Weber as always has a handle on what's going on in and around Memphis.

Empty empathy machines

Thin empathy, thick empathy, the kind of empathy we want teachers to have, and what chatbots lack. Benjamin Riley.

What If Students Want Something More Than AI?

John warner at Inside Higher Ed. "We should stop declaring we know the future and give students the space to figure things out for themselves."

How Black Barbershops Are Helping Boys Fall in Love With Reading

This story ran way back in February, but I didn't see it until it turned up on somebody's "swell stories from this year lists" and it's definitely worth a share.

O Christmas Tree

Nancy Flanagan is not yet convinced that she should buy an artificial tree so that more tree farms can become data centers.

Texas universities deploy AI tools to review and rewrite how some courses discuss race and gender

Well, you knew this was coming. How better to root out that awful DEI than with a soulless, brainless bot?

Silicon Valley’s Fake Christianity Enables Tech Genocide

Excellent interview with Paris Marx delving into our tech overlords and their God complex. Who's the AntiChrist, really?

Your seasonal palate cleanser this week is just the thing to calm the soul.

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Stride Sued For Securities Fraud

Stride, Inc. (formerly K12), the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber charter biz, is the subject of a new class action suit alleging securities fraud. 

The lawsuit is tied to some legal problems that I've previously covered, so let me recap. 

New Mexico Issues

Stride was hired by the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a New Mexico district that covers almost 5,000 square miles, including some reservations. There are 12,518 students enrolled. 48% of the children in the district live below the poverty line. Stride was supposed to run an online program for the district, but when the district checked to see how things were going, things didn't look so good.

* Graduation rates in GMCS's Stride-managed online program plunged from 55.79% in 2022 to just 27.67% in 2024.
* Student turnover reached an alarming 30%.
* New Mexico state math proficiency scores for Stride students dropped dramatically, falling to just 5.6%.
* Ghost enrollments and a lack of individualized instruction further compromised student learning.

At the special May 16 board meeting to terminate the contract, the board was feeling pretty cranky.

The district said that the company is failing to meet requirements outlined in their contract. “This is something we’ve literally been working on since the beginning of the year with stride, and we just finally had a belly full of it and we’re ready to make a change,” said Chris Mortensen, President of Gallup-McKinley Schools Board of Education

The board voted unanimously not just to end the contract, but to seek damages. Stride filed a motion for a restraining order to keep the board from firing them. The court said no.

Mortenson has had plenty to say about the situation. From the district's press release:

GMCS School Board President Chris Mortensen stated, "Our students deserve educational providers that prioritize their academic success, not corporate profit margins. Putting profits above kids was damaging to our students, and we refuse to be complicit in that failure any longer."

Stride CEO James Rhyu has admitted to failing to meet New Mexico's legal requirements for teacher-student ratios, an issue that GMCS suspects was not isolated. "We have reason to believe that Stride has raised student-teacher ratios not just in New Mexico but nationwide," said Mortensen. "If true, this could have inflated Stride's annual profit margins by hundreds of millions of dollars. That would mean corporate revenues and stock prices benefited at the expense of students and in some cases, in defiance of the law."

"Gallup-McKinley County Schools students were used to prop up Stride's bottom line," said Mortensen. "This district, like many others, trusted Stride to deliver education. Instead, we got negligence cloaked in corporate branding."

Stride appears to have dealt with all this by mounting a PR campaign to smear the district's superintendent.  

But you'll notice the charges that Mortensen leveled against the company go beyond a simple "They cheated us" and went all the way to "They are cheating their shareholders." And apparently somebody heard that message.

The Newest Lawsuit

On November 11, Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP filed a class action lawsuit against Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN) and senior executives Donna Blackman (CFO) and James Rhyu (CEO) for securities fraud after significant stock drops resulting from the potential violations of the federal securities laws. Investors have until January 12, 2026 to ask the court to be added onto the case. The suit was filed in the Virginia Eastern District Court.

The suit appears to charge that the complaint filed by the district caused the stock value to drop from a closing price of $158.36 per share on September 12, 2025, to $139.76 per share on September 15, 2025. Then in October, Stride had to fess up that “poor customer experience” resulted in “higher withdrawal rates,” “lower conversion rates,” and drove students away. Stride estimated they had 10,000-15,000 fewer enrollments and predicted a "muted" outlook. That led to a drop of $83.48 per share-- more than half the value.

So, in short, the suit argues that Stride got its great investment results by cheating at its business, and once it got caught cheating, those great investment results went down the toilet. The business fraud facilitated the securities fraud. Folks invested because of claims the company could do a thing when it was just faking doing the thing. Fraud.

Is This a New Problem for Stride?

Are you kidding? Since Stride was founded as K12, they haven't gone a year without some sort of legal problems.

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison, who both kicked in money for K12.

Also investing in K12, very quietly, was the financial giant Blackrock, founded and run by Larry Fink. Larry graduated from the same high school as Milken. Larry's brother Steve is a member of the Stride board, and at one point ran the division of Knowledge Universe. Larry Fink is noted for his privacy about family, and a search for the two brothers’ names turns up only one article— a Forbes piece from 2000 which notes that Steve Fink, in 1984, moved next door to Micheal Milken and went on to become “one of Milken’s most trusted confidants,” a “guy he’s relied on to fix business trouble.”

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12's schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about “the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12 to start a new enterprise.

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors." K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

In November of 2021, K12 announced that it would rebrand itself as Stride.

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride was still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

In 2023, Stride found itself wrapped up in a lawsuit with one of its own division over broken promises and attempts to lie their way out of commitment.

In 2024, analysts at Fuzzy Panda were warning investors away from Stride, saying that, among other things, Stride was lying to investors about how many schools were operating and ghost students being used to inflate enrollment numbers-- in other words, these guys absolutely called it. Later that year, Senator and noted MAGA doofus Markwayne Mullin was in trouble for shenanigans with his Stride stock.

CEO James Rhyu used to be CFO for Stride, and before that had a prolific career as a bean counter for companies like Match.com. I've read a variety of Rhyu depositions, and let's just say he doesn't come across as a straight shooter. Here's an example that captures his style pretty well:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

Is it? Is that a hard question to answer? Because I feel as if even a dishonest-but-correct answer isn't hard to concoct. But that's Rhyu (for a more detailed story of his slipperiness in action, read this).

For Stride, Education Really Isn't the Point

Stride has never really been in the education business. Stride is in the investment business. Just look at the people who founded and have run it-- not an educator in the bunch, but plenty of high-powered and/or shady investment guys. I've talked to more than a few Stride teachers (none of whom want to go on the record) and the picture that emerges is over-worked widgets whose main job is to keep the numbers looking good, because student "success" is an important part of marketing, whether that success is real or not.

So if investors manage to claw back some of their money, I guess that's fine. Stride has proven remarkably resilient when called out on its misbehavior. I suppose a laser-like focus on its main business helps, but we should never imagine that that business is education. 

OK: Court Axes Social Studies Standards

After Ryan Walters decided to officially leave the job he hardly ever showed up for in order to take a cushy anti-teacher union job, leaders in Oklahoma decided that maybe they would like to have someone leading the department of education who was actually interested in, you know, education.

So they tagged Lindel Fields for the job. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. He does not appear to be the kind of guy who will hire a personal publicist and spend his time running off to wag his jaw at Fox.

Instead, he and others have been busy cleaning up after Walters. Given two weeks to decide if he wanted to keep Walters's Trump Bible In Every Classroom mandate, he took one day. He scrapped it. Attorney General Gentner Drummond started digging into where exactly Walters had been flinging money. And by the time Fields showed up, the state supreme court had already put a hold on Walters's beloved new social studies standards. 

The standards were the center of yet more Walters drama. That's probably because they are bad. They feature everything from a mandate to teach the Big Lie about Dear Leader's 2020 election loss as well as other awesome things he has done, plus the usual ahistoric baloney and attempts to insert a particular brand of Christianity into the classroom. 

I would love to say that their badness ultimately proved fatal, but in a piece of poetic justice, the standards have been thrown out by the court because Walters was always very bad at just doing his job. Here's what happened. Walter started the new year with new members on his state board of education, members hand-picked by Governor Stitt, who had finally decided, after having elevated Walters in the first place, that his favorite education dude-bro was a giant PITA who needed some grown-ups to babysit him. So Stitt canned three board members and replaced them with three people not slavishly devoted to Walters's brand of Trump Lite, and Walters was not happy.

So he took the standards that had been out there for public comment, added a bunch of stuff without saying anything, handed them to his board and told them they had to sign off on these push push push. He did not mention that he had changed stuff, and they did not realize that was the case until it was too late. 

As Sasha Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman reported for NonDoc, Walters was not trying very hard to imitate a grownup:

Asked after the meeting why Walters did not at least notify board members of what changed between the initial version of the standards and the final version, Walters declined to give a reason besides saying he made it clear to board members that the version of the standards given to them less than 24 hours before the meeting was the updated and final version.

“I don’t control when Gov. (Kevin) Stitt put these board members on here. That’s what he chose to do,” Walters said. “It was at the very end of the process.”

The court was unimpressed by this passive-aggressive hissy fit. Making last minute changes without notifying the board, especially when those changes result in final document that is substantially different from the document released to the public-- not a winning strategy. 

So the Christian [sic] Nationalist standards are out, and Oklahoma will go back to the standards adopted in 2019. 

And who knows-- maybe the state will eventually finish cleaning up after Walters. Meanwhile, his new anti-union union has enrolled almost 7,000 teachers-- which is not exactly a whopping slice of the 4 million-ish teachers working in this country. 

Parental Roll of the Dice

The death of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hand of their son, is a terrible story. And it reminds me of too many other stories of children who have gone off the rails.

Yes, there are children who are raised by parents who simply aren't up to the task ("better off raised by wolves" we would sometimes say). Like any teacher, I can tell you stories that would break your heart, stories of parents who were simply unable to rise to the occasion of parenthood. 

But there are also the wild card children. Their parents did all the responsible things, gave them a good home, took care of them. Maybe they even grew up in a home with siblings who turned out just fine. And yet, somehow, somewhere, something happened, and that child ended up in a mess. 

Maybe it was something chemical or biological. Maybe just a wrong combination of peers and circumstances. Sometimes we really don't have a clue-- not a single damned clue.

Again, any teacher can tell you stories. Heck, as someone who taught in the same small town for almost forty years, I know stories where two generations of perfectly fine parenting somehow led to a sad and challenging outcome for one child. 

We look for simple explanations. If a child turned out to have big problems, then we blame the parents. If there's nothing obviously dysfunctional about the parents, we start to conjecture and whisper darkly-- there must be something bad going on in that home that we just don't know about. If the child turned out to be troubled, it has to be a parental screwup. 

It has to be something those parents did. Please, God, it has to be those parents. Because if it isn't the parents, if it's some wild roll of the dice that isn't completely under of the responsible humans, then we are all vulnerable. It could happen to any one of us. No no no no no no, no. It has to be the parents. It has to be something they did that I am definitely not doing.

This is where I sympathize with the parental rights crowd's distress. "We did everything right. We kept tight control of this child so that they would turn out the right way. And instead we got this!" I get the urge to cast about for someone or something to blame.

Some folks set the bar for a Child Turned Out Bad a lot lower than others. The child doesn't follow our religion, doesn't respect us the way we want them to, doesn't identify with the traditional gender roles. Others have tried their hardest and ended up with children who have actual challenges and dysfunctions, not just disagreements with their family of origin.

I get that some folks experience a powerful impulse to tighten control over your children, to force them to become the people you want them to be. I even understand how that desire can turn into a desire to control every other person who comes in contact with your child. 

I could argue that trying to exert this kind of control over another human being, even a human being for whom you are responsible, is not morally or ethically sound. But I think it's enough to point out that it is an unreliable approach, a parenting approach that is likely to end in failure. 

I like the work of Russell Barkley, a psychologist whose work is largely in the area of ADHD. "You do not get to design your children," he argues. 

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

Barkley suggests that parents think of themselves not as engineers, but as shepherds.  

You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything--everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them, and what they do, and if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong when in fact the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather you would stop thinking of yourself as an engineer, and step back and say "I am a shepherd to a unique individual." Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog. Ain't gonna happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do, all the time.

And sometimes, for reasons that nobody could have predicted or controlled, the sheep run out of the pasture and get in trouble-- maybe a little bit, or maybe a whole lot. 

Three things to remember, I think.

First, beware of guilt and blame. Parents blame themselves. Others blame them. Okay, sometimes the guilt is earned. But if you are manufacturing guilt, particularly based on some hypothetical alternate universe in which the parent said or did a magic something that Fixed Everything-- maybe a little grace is in order.

Second, remember that sometimes a dark chapter is not the end of the book. As long as it's possible to move forward, there is hope. Some people find their way out of the weeds, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The real tragedy comes when they do something unredeemable; until that happens (and sometimes even after), there is still hope.

Third, beware any person or system that claims that we can keep young humans safe by taking total control of their lives, their environment, their contacts. The fundamental argument for authoritarianism is always an appeal to fear, a claim that "If I have total control, I can guarantee that the Terrible Thing will never happen to you." That version of safety is an illusion; jailers do not keep us safer than shepherds. 

Sometimes the shepherd just isn't enough, despite all of their best intentions and efforts. Doesn't mean we should stop making out best efforts. But my heart breaks for the parents who did the best they could and still, somehow, lost their child to the dark. 

Whole Books and Slow School

Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simple referral to Dana Goldstein's New York Times piece about how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It's a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible). 

The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on "Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here]." Also variations on "Aren't books over, really?" and its cousin "I didn't read any books and I am just swell."

Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it's great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name). 

One problem is the Core's focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn't matter what or how much you read. If today's lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn't matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don't need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.

And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem. 

The Big Standardized Test doesn't just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o'writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work. 

To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.

If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading "skills," then you have to take the time to pursue it.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room). 

And look-- I don't want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it's worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren't even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don't read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy-- "Kids These Days don't remember the old songs and stories any more."

Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial "skills" over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read. 

If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world. 

The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.

Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we'll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.

Zeroing Public Ed

As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.

The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world. 

That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024

I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.

The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.

The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.

The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole "regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers" baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump's education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months). 

It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:

I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.

So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.  

It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education. 

 

Sandy Hook Etc Etc

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend. 

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."

And it wasn't.

"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children. 

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives. 

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.

That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself." 

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence. 

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children. 

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care. 

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry. 

ICYMI: Graduation Edition (12/14)

The CMO has finished another degree because she is both beautiful and smart, as well as exceptionally determined and hard working. The Board of Directors procured a most excellent and very chocolatey graduation cake, which we enjoyed yesterday in honor of the occasion.  

Hope people at your Institute are also accomplishing fine things. In the meantime, here's the reading list for the week.

The REAL Elephant in the Room

Sue Kingery Woltanski continues to provide chapters in the ongoing story of Florida's attempt to pretend that they are not hammering taxpayers by giving away the real estate they paid for (but still making them pay for the upkeep).

Florida's Wild West Voucher Scheme Loses Students, Runs $400 Million Over Budget

Some more details from the disaster that is Florida's taxpayer-funded voucher scheme.

Florida student holding clarinet ‘as if it were a weapon’ sends school into lockdown: report

Mind you, a clarinet in the wrong hands can create some terrible disasters, but this Florida school's super-duper security AI may have gone a bit overboard.

In Wisconsin, health care costs are overwhelming teacher salaries

Wisconsin Public Radio has this report that is just one more different way to illustrate how underpaid teachers are.

Ohio School Boards Association conference reveals growing reaction against vouchers and lawmakers

Just maybe some folks in Ohio have had enough. Denis Smith reports.

As New Hampshire education freedom accounts double, percentage of low-income recipients drops

New Hampshire is one more state where it turns out that taxpayer-funded vouchers aren't really saving poor students "trapped in failing schools."

Are Schools the Problem?

Nancy Flanagan saw the New York Times op-ed about the terrible troubles in the public school system, and she wanted to address some of the conclusions in that piece (which is not on this list because her response is way more read-worthy than the original column).

Charter Schools in a Racist Big Easy

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the history and data from charterized New Orleans.

Accomplishing Project 2025: K-12 Edition

Not for the faint of heart. Anne Lutz Fernandez runs down the Project 2025 checklist for the year, including education.

High Expectations and High Standards: The Chatter is Nothing New!

Nancy Bailey looks at the same old chicken littling that's making a comeback these days. Low expectations! Low standards! Oh nooooos!

Uncertainty and Arrogant Reformers

Larry Cuban talks about the things we know, sort of know, and don't know for sure, and why ignoring those categories makes for bad ed reform ideas.

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

Jan Resseger looks at a report about the conquest of Americas by billionaires, and what that means for education.

Randolph commissioners dismiss entire library board after book controversy

In North Carolina, local government nukes the whole library board because they don't like a trans character in one book.

Three simple steps to take to help protect NYC kids from damaging AI

Sure, Leonie Haimson is writing about New York City, but it's not like that's the only place kids need some protection from AI.

Groups made up of OU professors, college Republicans reject student's religious discrimination claim

A quick news report following up the flap. Spoiler alert: the college Republicans say her paper is terrible and she's wasting everyone's time that could be better spent on substantive issues.

Permission Structures

Matt Dinan on how AI-skeptic professors can still help students write papers.

ChatGPT’s Self-Serving Optimism

Every time soneone takes a closer look at ChatGPT, they find baloney. Here's Vauhini Vara at The Atlantic asking, among other things, what the chatbot thinks "objectivity" means.

Right-Wingers Are Winning The War On Vaccines

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost looks at how the culture panic playbook is being used to make schools less safe for children (but super for diseases).

AI is breakin' the law

The judge told him, "Using AI to bolster your self-lawyering is a really bad idea." He did it anyway. It did not end well. Ben Riley has the story.

I grew up watching these guys. They were the first album I ever bought with my own money. And yes, they were manufactured cheese, but they had their moments.

As always, you're invited to sign up for me newsletter. It's free, now and always. 

The Undemocratic School Primer

There are many ways to divide up the sides of the education debates. One is between those who believe in civic democratic ideals and those who do not.

We're talking about two very different premises, and how they result in entirely different educational approaches.

Premise 1: All human beings have equal worth and are equally deserving of autonomy, opportunity, power, and privilege.

Under this premise, the school system would exist to provide opportunity to all students. Each student would be entitled to the chance to pick a path and pursue it to the extent of their ability. The school system would exist for the uplift of all young humans, and one of our big challenges would be to get resources to all students, regardless of their socio-economic origins. That would include special resources for students with special needs as well as resources targeted for particular cultural and community settings. 

For much of US history, this has been our stated premise, even if we have had a hard time working through the implications of that premise and living up to them.

Premise 2: Some human beings have more value than others, and are more deserving of autonomy, power, and privilege. 

This premise takes us to a very different place. It envisions a society with various layers; some people are destined to be Betters, to live at the top, and others are destined to be Lessers, to serve as meat widgets or other specific functions in society. In fact, it argues, much of the discontent and difficulty in society comes from people trying to live outside their proper roles.

In that world, schools exist not for uplift, but for sorting, to help everyone find and settle happily into their proper place. Betters may learn arts and culture and what we think of as a broad liberal education. But future meat widgets need to learn marketable skills, job skills that will make them useful to their future corporate-boss Betters. Betters get privilege and power because they are entitled to it; Lessers must work and provide value (as determined by Betters) to "earn" every bit of privilege and power.

For Lessers, obedience and compliance are important. For the most extreme cases, children and women are automatically Lessers who are expected to comply and obey. Schools are supposed to reinforce that message, reminding students that they are under the sole and complete control of their parents and must never, ever question that control. It will be good practice for them when they enter the workforce.

Because individuals are of value, everything in life must be navigated on an individual basis. Every person should be "free" to take their proper place in society; to try to "help" them by lifting them above their station or providing them with privileges they haven't earned is wrong, a crime against God and nature, and will (some folks are sure) simply make those artificially uplifted person unhappy and dissatisfied (like all those women who pursued a career instead of taking their natural place as a home-staying baby-maker). 

That emphasis on compliance and obedience also manifests in a belief that there is one true correct answer to all questions, and so education is about transmitting the Correct Answers. That helps teach compliance to an outside authority as well as locking in one natural order with everyone in their proper place. 

When someone like Betsy DeVos argues for school choice as a way for each student to find their proper fit, they're talking about tiers of schools set up to handle the different proper natural tiers of society. Future meat widgets don't need to learn calculus or read Shakespeare. The DeVosian crowd definitely does not mean that there should be all sorts of different schools (like wacky lefty schools or Islamic academies), but just different layers of schools that teach the correct christianist truth appropriate to the place of that set of students in the social order.

For Betters, things go on much as always-- if you have wealth and privilege and power, that proves you deserve wealth and privilege and power, so carry on. For Lessers, the message is that you need to earn the right to even get by in your proper place.

Further complicating matters-- nobody believes that they are a Lesser. It's always Those People Over There.

None of this is new, but these days Betterism believers are enjoying plenty of power, and they are aggressively pursuing all the Lessers that they feel have snuck out of place. LGBTQ people should disappear. Women should get busy making babies. Young human future meat widgets should start working right now. Everyone ought to be properly worshipping the conservative christianist God. People from non-Caucasian countries should get to their proper place, which is Not Here. Everyone should stop invoking "civil rights" to move Lessers above their proper station. Tech world brogliarchs and other Betters should not have any restraints put on them. And schools should be telling students to always obey their parents in all things. 

There's not really any point to arguing that this is all undemocratic-- these folks don't particularly believe that democracy is a good idea. And it's not always easy to talk through the issues with them because some of the words have different meanings; we can all say that every child should get the education they deserve or that is best suited to them, but we mean different things. 

Nor are all school choice fans bettersists. I'm not even sure that some school choice fans really understand who they've teamed up with.

Betterists pose a real challenge to any sort of discussion or debate about education in this country, because they hold a fundamentally different view of the purpose of education, a profoundly different idea about how the country is supposed to work. I have met, personally and virtually, plenty of people I disagree with, but with whom I share some basic values. However, I don't see a bridge to the Betterists and their belief that some people deserve less than others. And I suspect that may be an education policy sticking point in this country for a few years to come. 

The Teacher Who Helped Launch An Entertainment Empire

If you watch the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (I'm a few seasons behind, because my tolerance for ick is limited), you may have noticed a new-to-tv face in the new season. It's a teacher, and she has some great things to say about teaching. Co-creator Ross Duffer explained the casting choice on Instagram

Miss Harris is played by Hope Hynes Love.
She was our high school drama teacher.

High school was rough for me and my brother. But Hope saw something in us we didn’t see in ourselves — and she helped give us the confidence to not only survive those four years, but to move to LA and chase our dreams.

Shoutout to all the teachers out there making a difference.

And please… let’s prioritize the arts in schools. ✌️

How cool is that?

Love is currently the artistic director at East Chapel Hill High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but she taught the Duffer brothers back when she was teaching theater back at C.E. Jordan High School in Durham Public Schools. 

Netflix Tudum interviewed the veteran educator, who explained how it happened:

The boys — that’s my phrase for [Matt and Ross Duffer] — and I have been in touch since they graduated. When Season 4 came out, I was like, “Guys, you’re amazing.” And they’re like, “Oh, thank you so much. We actually thought we had a cameo for you in [Season 4], but it didn’t work out. We had to cut it.” And I looked at my husband, and I was like, “Yeah, how nice are they? This is a lovely lie. They’re so gracious.”

And then — I’m going to say December 2023 or January 2024 — I got a little message from them. They’re like, “Hey, I know you’re really busy, but if you think you can make the time, it’ll probably be in the summer, and can we make it happen? We think we might have a small role for you in the next season. Do you think you could do it?”

I, of course, wrote them back and said, “Boys, listen. Yes, I certainly would make that work. But I have to tell you, you could put me on a stage anywhere in the world, and I’m confident. … But I haven’t done camera work since I put myself through graduate school. Who knows whether I’m up to snuff anymore. You might want to audition me. I’m happy if that’s the process I need to go through, but as long as you promise that you’ll fire me if I suck, as was the contract we had when you were my students, I absolutely trust you. Let’s see.” And they're like, “Yeah, whatever. Here’s the casting director. She’ll be in touch with you.”

I was hedging at the beginning, and they were all in, which is lovely of them.

Love did not actually audition, but she did call in an old acting friend and had to "take my own advice, which is the worst thing as a teacher." Asked what the appearance meant to her, she explained

It’s everything. You always want your students to look back on their time with you as a valuable use of their youth. That the things that they invested in you and your program have served them well. It’s lovely when they reach back and go, “I’m doing this cool thing. Do you want to come see if you think it’s cool?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” Why would that change just because you’re not 16 anymore, and you’re 30? Yes, I want to come see your cool thing. Isn’t that the deal between us?

Isn't that the deal, indeed. I'm also fully impressed by her explanation of her attitude toward educating her students. The interviewer asked if she was surprised by the Duffers' success, but her answer hits at the heart of educating students in any field:

I train all of my students so that if they ever are doing this professionally, they’re ready. I’ve always said, “I don’t teach high school actors. I teach artists who happen to be of high school age.”

What I often say at my beginning level is, “If you never do this, you’re going to learn some skills that will serve you well in your life. And if you do this for forever, I want to start you the way I wish somebody had started me” — with a solid foundation and with an understanding of what this takes and taking themselves seriously. Your work doesn’t [only] matter in graduate school or when you get your first Netflix gig.

The quality of your work and your reputation and integrity as an artist is now in how you’re showing up in class, how you’re showing up every day … how you talk about somebody who gets cast, and you don’t get cast. That’s who you are. It’s not somewhere in the future, it’s now. And you’re not an actor once you get a part on a Netflix show. You’re an actor if you’re showing up, and you’re doing the work every single day, period. You don’t need anybody else outside of you to tell you [that] you are something. You are it if you’re doing it. Full stop.

Yes. And that's true for teaching a writer or a scientist or a welder. One of the worst mistakes schools make is to treat students as if they are children just putting in time before they start the real work of their lives. That attitude excuses treating them as less-than-completely human. Their life isn't in the future-- it's going on right now. And students themselves often need to be reminded of that.

No mention in any articles of how Love's students did on their Big Standardized Test scores.