After a few years of false starts, this week we finally had a contractor here to refurbish the Institute's front porch, which was about a century old and getting a little spongy. The new deck should be able to support several small moose in a hot tub (though we have no such plans). It also requires entering and exiting through the back door, but is otherwise a pretty exciting development here. Another week of work ought to finish the job.
Meanwhile, it's time for the weekly reading list. If you're new around here, this is a weekly compendium of posts that I think are worth your attention, but which I did not get around to discussing in a regular post during the week. My recommendation is always to read and then share, from the original source, anything that strikes you as worthwhile. The one thing we can all do is amplify the voices that we think should be heard, so do your amplifying!
Maurice Cunningham heard that a Massachusetts representative had not heard from anyone opposed to legislation to mandate the Science of Reading, so he wrote a letter to correct that impression.
Another deserved loss for Walters. These are the standards that are loaded with Christian stuff as well as requirements to teach students that the 2020 election was filled with questionable irregularities.
Texas says the Ten Commandments have to hang in every room. Teachers are coming up with creative ways to deal with this baloney. NBC News has a report.
Jennifer Berkshire interviews Johann Neem who, in the wake of Mahmoud v. Taylor, thinks the courts are getting pretty close to declaring public education a violation of the First Amendment. Warning: this piece will not give you warm feelings.
From Canada, more AI nonsense. It took a committee 18 months to complete this report, and it still contains a bunch of AI slop.
Artie Shaw retired several times from the band business; he didn't love it. But he was good at it-- probably the only big band leader who never made a bad recording.
Feel free to sign up for my newsletter-- all the bloggy stuff I crank out, in your inbox for free.
Meet the Civics Education Coalition, a group put together by the federal Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon, who firmly believes that education should be sent back to the states, where the federal government will do all in its power to make sure the states do what the feds want them to do.
Past the imperative banner of "Know America. Love America," the America 250 Civics Education Coalition is a collection of all the top names in right wing anti-public education advocacy. The forty groups include America First Policy Institute (founded by Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow with McMahon as their founding chair), Turning Point USA (Saint Charlie), Hillsdale College, Alliance Defending Freedom (conservative christianist legal shop), Center for Education Reform, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Leadership Institute, Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, and PragerU. Somehow Bety DeVos's American Federation for Children is not here, but the shadowy secret Council for National Policy is.
Leadership includes co-chairs Erika Donalds and Ben Judge and some other MAGA worthies. I could dig into all that, but to really get a feel for where we're headed here with a video that went up just two days ago and packs a whole lot into just 1:35.
A lighthouse with an American flag flying nearby on a rocky island, with dark storm clouds and lightning flashes in the distance.
"American education was once a shining light guiding generations."
As the stern-yet-concerned male voice delivers that line, we flash between the lighthouse and images of
1) black and white picture of students in a classroom, a couple of hands raised
2) another classroom, this one in color but still clearly 1950ish with students standing, hands on heart, mouths open as they salute the prominently featured US flag
3) a fairly simple drawing of a cross on a hill
4) flag flying (in black and white)
5) students standing hands on hearts outside, another black and white image
"Built on faith, heritage, patriotism."
1) Students in a classroom, eyes closed, hands folded in prayer. Teacher stands nearby head bowed.
2) Black and white photo of some inscription; the visible words are "After God had carried/ and ?ee had by/ provided necessaries"
3) The cover of some edition of Who's Who In Ameria
4) A flag, followed by students standing and pledging
5) Fuzzy image of two young men dressed up on what might be some kind of campus but could just be a big lawn. This might be the most mysterious image so far, unless I'm supposed to recognize these guys.
6) Image dissolves with a hint of flame. Oh no! Danger!
We are twelve seconds in. We have seen an assortment of old-timey school images featuring a bunch of white students. Religious imagery is featured, but only images of a certain type of religion.
This is the worst kind of ahistoric nostalgia. What exactly do these folks miss about the fifties and early sixties? Could it be the widespread racial segregation of schools? Or was our education a shining beacon in 1965 when only 49% of people 25 and over had graduated from high school (today it's 91%)? Maybe they're thinking fondly of the days when the top marginal tax rate was 94%. Maybe they are waxing nostalgia about 1957 and Sputnik, which so awakened the US to the declining quality of our education system that an entire National Defense Education Act was passed to invest tons of resources in schools.
Now the music and narrator tune grow darker, because we must talk about what ended those golden shining days.
"But over the past 60 to 70 years, that brilliance has been dimmed. A great institution has been crumbled from within."
1) A partially folded flag on a shelf in an empty classroom
2) Helmeted police confront protestors. Oddly, they choose the split second when a cop pushes a protestor.
3) On a street, a vehicle is on its side
4) American flag hung upside down. Some young men stand nearby.
5) Black woman with an afro at a microphone. Neither Google nor I recognize her, but she's the first Black person to show up in this video.
6) Woman taking a drag on what is probably one of those evil maryjeewanna cigarettes
7) The light in the lighthouse goes out.
8) Someone sits alone on big wide steps. We are then inside a structure as stones collapse and fall apart.
"Overtaken by those who teach hatred for America, false revisionist history, and division."
1) Bill Ayers (not identified0 on BookTV
2) Smoke pours out of building
3) Some headlines about Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground member who was later hired by Columbia University as an adjunct prof. The most prominent headline is "Clueless at Columbia: Turning Terrorists Into Profs" from the New York Post. Nothing about turning insurrectionists into high government officials.
4) Very quick flash of burning flag
5) TV report of Columbus State Community College removing statue of Columbus.
6) At the moment that "revisionist history" is spoke, a 1619 project image.
7) Hat that says "America was never great."
Now cue a Barrack Obama quote over "Georgetown University hid religious symbols at White House request." Obama says "from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," while we see in quick succession
1) Critical Race Theory
2) Satanic Temple After School Satan Club
3) A phone video shot from back in a classroom and there is something on a screen that just looks like some big colored stripes. I'm not sure what is supposed to be awful about this. Watching art in class?
4) Someone holding up cover of Gender Queer
5) Kids lined up at door to something, with someone dressed like a clown at the door? I see some rainbowish colors so maybe these are supposed to be evil gay clowns?
6) Some drag queen story hour
Notice that none of these items are about the actual quality of education, but about complying with the preferred cultural norms of the right.
Screen goes to black. We are thirty seconds in.
Someone in silhouette comes through a door, American flag and lightning behind her. It's Linda McMahon, but we aren't ready to reveal that yet.
"Now, on the 250th anniversary of our nation, the Department of Education, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, and partners across America are reigniting that light, restoring understanding, and returning education to the states where it belongs."
Now the cuts come more slowly and less hectic, the music more heroic and punctuated with Terminator 2 style percussion. The narrator's voice is steeled with determination.
The still-unrevealed McMahon starts up the steps. Figures on a stand in front of a huge screen with 250 on it. A classroom bathed in light. Another where the lights are coming on. A flag sticker on a window. Government buildings in DC with audible helicopter, because this is an action movie (not showing how empty they are after being DOGEd, because now that MAGA are installed, government is heroic again). Teacher stands in front of class, hand on heart (chalkboard behind her says "renewable resources" so that might have been a mistake). Quick cuts of classrooms of students in classrooms, then, on a classroom door window, the America 250-- Know America. Love America. logo. School. Building flying flag. Open book with some Revolutionary War picture. Kids standing with hands on hearts doing pledge. Hand drawn picture of flag. Workmen repairing Statue of Liberty's crown. And a hand in a work glove is cleaning off a giant lens. Child looks out car window, wind in hair. Classroom with actual student of color-- the first we've seen. Some more hopeful children, including one in cowboy hat. Polishing flagpole. Flag. Kid coming home. Another child of color. Classroom with the word "excellence" on a poster. Drone shot of playground.
Light coming on in lighthouse. We're at 58 seconds.
"For this was once the shining light that inspired the world. And under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary McMahon (WWF announcer shouting "that's Linda McMahon") that light will be restored to guide our students and our nation into a brighter American future."
Recap of old timey students, the "Liberty" over the Statue of Liberty." Trump with a Presidential edict. Shot of Trump and McMahon. And now we see that it is McMahon who climbed up there and fixed the lighthouse light. Yay! It lights up again as the WWF announcer cheers. Some small children. Trump signing something. McMahon and the light again. Light beaming into classroom. Small child raising her fist in front of the Statue of Liberty, which is certainly an interesting reinterpretation of the statue's pose. A light on the flag on a person's garage. Trump in front of some people in caps and gowns. A kids book-- "We the People." Student in classroom looks up. Spotlight on flag in front of building. Close-up of small hand on heart (a child's, not Trump's).
And, just because, a shot of a map marked with the Gulf of America.
Graduate. Flag patch on sleeve. Student with backpack. McMahon hugging some woman. Fighter planes over the White House. Lighthouse with clear weather. Phew. Everything is going to be okay because McMahon climbed up there and polished some glass.
Trump's voice "Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours."
American flag sticker and America 250 sticker on classroom door as Trump speaks. Then ten seconds of the Civics Education Coalition logo.
Look, I expect a certain amount of patriotism-flavored nonsense for the 250th birthday. But this goes far beyond that.
This is nostalgic for a selectively remembered time that never was. And it's not about education. It's about fuzzy memories of a time when people knew their place and never disagreed with People In Charge. And it's about the very weakest, most fragile, most false form of patriotism.
Imagine that the person of your dreams says, "Yes, I can love you and be with you, but only if you're perfect." First, that's a heavy condition to lay on love. Second, it means that they don't really love you, but just some made up imaginary version of you.
So we get this fixation, this fragile country-love centered on the notion that history is uncomplicated, our past is without nuance or complexity, and anyone who says otherwise is Very Naughty. This approach is also deeply disrespectful of young humans, assuming that they cannot handle complex emotions or complicated stories about their country's past. Instead they must be carefully spoon fed a sanitized and imaginary version of their country's history, as if they couldn't possibly handle the notion that one can love something and still see its faults, that one cannot hold the reality of what something is in one hand and one's hopes for what that thing could be in the other.
I presume that we can expect the Department and its forty special friends to whip up some sort of nationalistic curriculum, and that once again conservatives who think the department should be eliminated will be unable to resist the impulse to use federal power to tell state and local educators what to do (despite the illegality of that move). I suppose that you will have to wait, depending on your state, to see how forcefully your state leaders will insist that you inflict this baloney on students.
It's too bad. I love this country, and wouldn't trade it for any other. And I can love it with an ever-evolving. rich and robust understanding of what it is and what it has done. and that seems like a so much more vibrant, enduring and rich way to love something than to forced to carry around an unexamined fragile construct composed of brittle dreams and fragile imaginings. A love of country that can be examined and enriched seems so much more desirable than something you are commanded to carry that must be protected from any question or examination.
Erika Donalds has long been a leading face of school choice in Florida, even as her husband Byron has risen through the GOP to become a major political player. Now a new story dug up by Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows how Donalds is a model of how folks in the charter school world can make a bundle.
The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.
Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.
Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members-- Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.
Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.
In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported paying Erika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.
But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”
State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.
Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima's flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to "deficiencies" in accounting.
As with many such charter and education management organizations, the Optima brand is a twisty set of relationships, with OptimaEd, the Optima Foundation, and Optima Management services all part of the empire. Bredderman further uncovered an address connection between OptimaEd and Optima Management Services with Quest Educational Foundation, which is run former state education chair Tim Brady and Ed Morton, former chair of Florida Gulf Coast University Foundation. Quest operates the Freedom Institute of Collier County, a private school that markets to home schoolers.
In December 2023, Erika Donalds tweeted an endorsement of the Freedom Institute’s “customized homeschool hybrid experience for high school students on a path to economic freedom,” and touted it to her followers as a “great option” for their state-funded education savings accounts.
But it turns out (thanks to more digging from Bredderman) that the Optima family of businesses are in turn controlled by a company called "Onesto, LLC" whose sole owner is Erika Donalds.
The privatization and profiteering community is pretty cozy in Florida, and it's a real model for how a web of interconnected businesses (and legislators) can stay opaque while sucking up piles of taxpayer dollars. But in the meantime, Donalds is the co-chair of the new conservative right wing civics coalition.
Yes, there are a few advocates hanging on, and a zombified shell of the movement shambling about like the last remains of Common Core support among thinky tanks. But the movement is dead.
The second term of Donald Trump has unleashed what was only barely leashed before. When Jay Greene announced that it was time for the movement to embrace the culture wars, it was like announcing that it was time for a sheep to embrace a t rex. It was never going to end well for the goat. Greene himself had already had himself sheered and outfitted for a dino suit, leaving school choice in his rearview mirror as he joined up with the culture warriors of the Heritage Foundation, who have zero interest in school choice.
Oh, they still use the words some times, but mostly because they not quite ready to announce the new cause yet. But the cause is not school choice. It's school capture.
We really shouldn't call it a culture war at all. "Culture war" suggests two equally aggressive sides. But public schools and other folks on the side of traditional values of liberal democracy didn't ask for this any more than the Ukraine asked to be invaded by Russia.
So let's call them culture raptors.
And the culture raptors have actually been pretty straightforward. Chris Rufo has used the words "school choice," but what he has described repeatedly and in detail is the capture and conversion of schools (along with other institutions). At no point has he pretended that the goal is a system in which a broad variety of choices flourish. Betsy DeVos and her "find a school that is the best fit" shtick are so six years ago. Now we want schools to reflect the correct white Christian nationalist values.
It is becoming increasingly unsubtle, like the calls to fire any school employee who didn't mourn Charlie Kirk properly. When the top officials in our country announce that there is no uniting with the Left, that groups that promote any improper language or politics must be rooted out and destroyed--what do you think that means for schools, public, charter or private?
Daniel Buck, designated Young Conservative Face previously at Fordham and now at AEI, laid it out pretty clearly in a tweet a year ago: "Conservatives need to start thinking about, building, and regaining control of our education institutions after school choice becomes the law of the land. Won't do much good if all charter and private schools are stocked with teachers, curriculum, and policies out of ed schools." In other words, choice isn't about, you know, choice so much as its about making schools vulnerable to takeover.
What happened to the old champions of choice? Old school reformsters like Chester Finn have been trying to push back a tad, suggesting that maybe the culture wars and even free market affection are obscuring the goal of providing American children with a good education, and that some accountability and oversight might be useful, Rick Hess just, politely, called out Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters for his creation of an ideological litmus test for teachers, but Walters has been clear all along that his only interest in "school choice" is as a fig leaf to cover his aggressive imposition of his own brand of christianism on schools, complete with state-selected Bibles. Mike Petrilli, Finn's successor at the Fordham Institute, just started a substack with this goal--
My hope is that this newsletter will re-start the ed reform conversation. I say “re-start” because I’m old enough to remember a time when there was a real conversation among those of us involved in reform—from the left, right, and center—about what was working, what wasn’t, where to go next, and what the whole point of our movement was really about.
That wistful nostalgia sure reads, to me, like an acknowledgement that the new crowd of culture raptors have no interest in school choice, quality, or conversation.
Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio is writing a substack about bridging "the gaps between education practice, policy, and research" and generally making schools work better. Democrats [sic] For Education Reform have dwindled in size and influence and are still trying to coax Democrats to come to the choice table, using old arguments currently gathering dust at that empty table. Even Neal McClusky, the CATO ed guy whose support for choice has always remained consistent, spends plenty of his social media time pointing to Trump education activities and saying, "Yeah, you shouldn't do that."
I'm not suggesting that any of these folks are any less interested in school choice than they ever were. But they do seem to have noticed that in MAGA world, school choice is a dead issue. The term has been co-opted just as effectively as Rufo co-opted "critical race theory," and now "school choice" means that everyone gets a choice of schools that push a particular brand of Christianity. When the Greg Abbott , the Texas legislature, and the state's attorney general declare that every classroom must display the government-approved version of the Ten Commandments, but not any other religion's texts, what kind of "choice" is available.
Look, I'm not opposed to the general idea of school choice. I've even explained many times how I think we could do it. I don't think school choice works as a free market-based idea, but right now, the "school choice" culture raptors are talking about a whole other thing-- you can have your choice of a public school that features their preferred ideology, a charter school that features their preferred ideology, or a private school that features their preferred ideology. That ideology would include the state-approved religion. The new system would also recognize that people do not all have the same value, so those who are entitled to power and privilege get a "better" school, and future meat widgets get the training they deserve (and women get ready to make some babies).
None of the culture raptor discussion of school choice has anything to do with school choice. The conversation is now about the ideological capture of schools, universities, and a variety of other institutions. If the actual school choice movement isn't dead, it's at least hiding in a cave, a victim of identity theft, waiting for the day it will be safe to come out again.
Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) has started a substack of his own, and it only took the first full issue for me to disagree with him.
Petrilli takes issue with a piece from The74 from Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman, two English professors who correctly point out the role of the Big Standardized Test in squelching a love for reading. Petrilli puts the article under his "fail" heading, noting
Yet another article blames testing for taking the joy out of reading in high school English class—even though the state testing footprint at that level is minimal.
The state testing footprint at that level is minimal??!! I'm going to wave my 39 years in the classroom around here, spanning as it does the period before and during the rise of the BS Test. Mike, let me explain to you why I don't believe the testing footprint is remotely minimal.
Maybe you are thinking that the actual time spent testing is minimal, in which case we can debate the meaning of "minimal" in this context. I'll concede that the test does not take more than a handful of days out of the year.
But it's not the actual testing that does the damage.
You may recall that under No Child Left Behind, the goal was to have all students scoring at or above grade level (so, above average) by 2014, a goal that everyone in education immediately recognized as not humanly attainable. But the law was passed in 2001, so politicians argued that A) sure it was, B) someone would fix it before that happened, and C) they were going to be out of office by then, so not their problem.
The curve of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) was set so that for the first years the upward curve was slow and modest, maybe even attainable. Then as 2014 approached, the curve headed straight up a cliff. After 2010, there would be only two types of school districts in this country-- those that were failing and those that were lying. Meanwhile, failure meant public shaming ("Your school is In Need Of Improvement"), possible privatization, and possible funding cuts. That inevitable failure and the high stakes attached to it loomed over every decision that districts made in those years.
My own district was not unusual in how it handled things. At first we had some slack, and while we teachers fretted, administrators assured us that if we just did our jobs and taught well, the scores would take care of themselves.
After a couple of years, it became clear that such was not the case, and so administrators developed strategies.
One of the basics of assessment design is that you get the best measure by assessing what you teach, the way you teach it. Let's say you've practiced carrying pigeons in a bucket for two weeks; if the assessment is to carry weasels in a backpack, you've introduced extra variables, and you won't know if performance is related to students who relate very differently to weasels compared to pigeons, or if they encounter a whole different set of challenges with backpacks compared to buckets. Test what you teach.
The flip side of this is that if you don't get to design the assessment yourself, you can increase the odds of student achievement by matching instruction to the assessment. And in the face of the Big Standardized Test, that is exactly what schools across the country have done.
The BS Tests' handling of reading assessment has several significant features. Short excerpts from larger works. Multiple choice questions. And no time for reflection or digging in-- pick that correct answer RIGHT NOW!
A whole new, lucrative industry appeared dealing with test prep materials. Our instructional materials budget was shifted to test prep workbooks, all following a similar format. A reading excerpt no longer than a single page, faced with a short set of multiple choice questions that we were assured were very much in the BS Test vein. Like many teachers across the country, we got our marching orders which were to incorporate these practice books into our classes. What should we cut to make room for them? Well, the practice books would be so much more effective than reading through entire books. Do you really need to read the entirety of Romeo and Juliet or Lord of the Flies? And so our reading content was shifted to test prep.
Worse, the really heavy emphasis at test prep was aimed at students who were "at risk" for getting too low scores on the BS Test (as determined by the two pre-tests given during the year). The effective result of that targeting was that the students who were least likely to read entire works on their own had less-to-none of that experience in school. Double true if there was an administrator like our middle school principal who decided that at risk students would have double math and double reading instead of history and science.
So for an entire generation, "reading" was not the act of picking a book and diving into a world or subject that grabs your interest, but a parade of short disjointed excerpts that you learned to "read" not for enjoyment or understanding but to pick out the answers for multiple choice questions.
Can you argue that this was all the result of administrators and classroom teachers making bad choices? Maybe. Certainly the best administrators protected their schools form all this nonsense, but that required some guts because everything in the state and federal system pushed schools towards these bad choices. Can you argue that the joy of reading was free to thrive and survive through other avenues? Sure. But I'm still going to blame the Big Standardized Test for killing not only a certain amount of the joy of reading, but also a certain amount of reading competence, because we know that a background of content knowledge is also an important factor in reading proficiency, and you don't build up much of a body of knowledge bouncing back and forth between disconnected context-free reading excerpts. And one of the things that builds a joy of reading is feeling competent.
Mike, you can see why I didn't just leave this as a response on your post. I hope you can also see why, for someone who lived and taught through the rise of high stakes Big Standardized Testing, I don't consider its footprint remotely "minimal." We'll leave the other ill effects for discussion another day, but I remain certain that the single quickest and most effective reform we could deliver for public education would be to simply do away with the BS Test (both in its One Time and Mini Tests All Year) format. Good luck with the substack.
We have a curb market in town. Once a week in the fall, local farmers and some other folks bring their wares to town and you can buy some fresh produce. Yesterday I took the board of directors up town and we got a big bag of apples (among other things) which they then snack on for the rest of the--well, a bag usually lasts two days.
The boys don't have screens of their own, and they are not allowed to piggy back on their grownups' screens. The use chromebooks at school, which I'm not delighted about, but at least it's a closed system where they can't just roam. Their mother and I can live with that.
Among the lessons from the murders this week is a simple one-- pay attention to what your sons are doing on line. Both killers this week were apparently radicalized by hard-right nihilistic groyper crap on line. I taught teenagers for decades, and I'm plenty familiar with the teenaged male impulse to be transgressively shocking, but folks on the interwebs have taken this impulse and fed it into something more monstrous. If you're a parent, pay attention.
Dana Goldstein at the New York Times looks at a newly released study that shows that vouchers are raising tuition, spurring growth in religious schools, and mostly benefitting families that were already private schooling. If I did it right, this should be a gift link.
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune take a look at Texas charters, where the students aren't doing so well, but the administrators are making money hand over fist.
A Portland, OR, Catholic school threw a student out when they learned the parents were a same-gender couple. Now they are losing a bunch of other students as well.
I don't really want to write more about Oklahoma's dudebro-in-chief of education, but I don't want this piece from Nuria Martinez-Keel at Oklahoma Voice go by, either, because as awful as Walters is when it comes to ideological baloney, it's worth noting that he's also awful at the basics of doing his job.
Publisher Denny Taylor is writing an education newsletter these days; this is part 3 of a four-part series that looks at what some rightward folks are doing to influence reading instruction.
Paul Bowers on listening to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loop on September 11. I'd never heard about the work before, so I learned something from this thoughtful meditation.
In Adam Becker's must read book about our AI overlords More Everything Forever, one chapter opens with futurist Ray Kurzweil's plan to resurrect his father. 50 boxes of his father's possessions, his letters and music. AI will send some nanobots to extract DNA from the grave. Nanobots will extract memories from Kurzweil himself. AI will put it all together and a program will reproduce the father's behavior, even in situations that he never encountered in his life.
"Ultimately it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father," Kurzweil claims. "You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live."
So much yikes. But my first thought was that, maybe--maybe-- it will seem to you like your father was there, but it certainly won't seem like that to him.
AI "resurrection" is alarmingly commonplace, to the point that it only attracts attention when it crosses a new threshold of eww, as when Jim Acosta interviewed an AI construct of Joaquin Oliver, a student killed almost eight years ago in the Parkland school shootings. The interview happened with parental permission, I guess partly because it helps promote their gun control advocacy, but also, as the father said, so he and his wife could hear their son's voice again. Which is different from giving him the chance to speak again.
AI avatars of real people are disturbing. Schoolai caused a stir by unleashing an AI avatar of Anne Frank for classrooms as just one of their offerings of zombie historical figures for the classroom. In fact, there are now more outfits offering AI avatars for student use than I can even delve into here. Some are especially terrible; Wisdom of the Ages lets you chat (text only) with some big names of history, and within the first sentence, the Einstein avatar was talking about "he" rather than "I." Their "Adolph Hitler" also lapsed quickly into third person. Humy offers a Hello History app that promises all sorts of "engaging historical simulations" and an "in-depth and personal interaction with the historical figure of your choice." And don't forget the company that offers you the chance to take a writing class taught by a dead author.
There are numerous problems here, not the least of which is simple accuracy. One historian noted that the Anne Frank avatar was reluctant to say anything mean about Nazis. Imagine if PragerU trained its own set of historical avatars, giving students the chance to see and hear a realistic simulacrum of a colonial enslaved person explaining why they actually kind of enjoyed being enslaved.
Historical simulations are nothing new, from movies to that person who dresses up as Lincoln and visits your third grade class. But those simulations come with a built-in distance. It's just a movie, and nobody thinks that guy with the fake beard is really Lincoln come to life. But AI avatars promise to be easily mistaken for the real thing.
The idea of using AI to resurrect dead loved ones really brings home the inadequacy of this whole exercise.
The premise of Kurzweil's resurrected father and the Olivers' resurrected son is that they know enough about their lost family members that they can faithfully and fully reconstruct them. I have my doubts. With a famous historical figure, maybe the many scholars who have pored objectively over that person's life have unearthed enough information that we could reconstruct a fully detailed and nuanced portrait of the person. Maybe, but I doubt it.
But I double doubt that for ordinary people. I've known my parents and my children for a long time. Am I arrogant enough to imagine that I know them so well, so completely, that I could perfectly reconstruct them?
No, what I know about them is my own impressions, my own feelings, my own memories of my own perceptions of them. But that's as much about me as it is about them.
There is, of course, a whole industry set up to let you "resurrect" your loved one. It's creepy. And it does not give the departed another chance to talk to you-- it only gives you another chance to talk to them. Except it doesn't really do that because they are not there. The AI does not bring them back; it takes your own memories and impressions and pushes them into a screen.
Chatting with a bot is playing ping pong with yourself. The software extrudes a probable string of words, but you do all the work of injecting meaning into them.
When you face an AI avatar for a famous person, you are likely facing a mask that has been slipped over someone's software expression of their own particular agenda wrapped around an incomplete and shallow imitation of a real human waiting for you to respond by giving that silicon golem meaning. But when you use the technology to create an avatar built out of your own incomplete memories, you are simply talking to yourself. You have not given that person another life; you have only given yourself another way to imagine they are still here.
None of this is the same as talking with another living human who is actively trying to convey meaning and intent to you. In real life, projecting your own ideas into another's words gets in the way of actual communication, of actually reaching to understand. In the world of chatbots, your projection is necessary for the "conversation" to continue; you have to take care of both sides.
Narcissus gives us "narcissism," currently on the list of Top 5 Favorite Amateur Diagnoses. But the story of Narcissus was of a person who sat by a pool of water, gazing at his own reflection and imagining it was another person, until he eventually melted away. We would do better to try to hear and see and understand the live human beings who are still around us than to sit down by the silicon pool, gazing into a reflection that we imagine is another actual human.
There's a theory out there that allowing families to sort themselves into separate schools based on shared values and ideologies would be a good thing. It's a bad idea, a dangerous idea, and we are exposed to the evidence all too often.
It's not the polarization of American politics-- it's the surge of a particular idea of how to deal with it.
While we like to talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were some sort of fully unified body, they disagreed on many issues (including whether or not we should be a single country or not), and much of the shape of our Constitution and early history comes from those opponents figuring out how to launch a country that included all of them.
Abraham Lincoln famously included many of his political enemies in his own administration, forcing them to work together.
These days, a prevailing idea in politics is that the way to deal with people who oppose you is to silence them by whatever means at hand. Don't like the election results? Storm the capital and force the government to erase the vote. Don't like the idea of LGBTQ persons? Simply erase all references to them. Gerrymander districts so that your opponents' votes don't matter. When people say things you don't like, bully and threaten them into shutting up.
Right now we have a President who fully believes in making his opponents shut up and disappear, who has regularly called for violence against people who bug him. We're certainly not the only culture to suffer from this mindset, that it's okay to try to brutalize Those People into silence, and Trump's list of strongmen he admires is a quick guide to other leaders who subscribe to the same notion.
Combine the ideas that 1) you deal with people who disagree with you by silencing them and 2) God wants you to have a gun; the result is predictable political violence.
So the idea the world and this country would be better places if we gave young humans fewer chances to practice co-existing with other human with whom they disagree.
I recognize there are a host of intertwined issues here, including outrage machinery, amoral leaders, feckless politicos, a media environment that is fifty years behind the curve, and an overabundance of fear and hatred. I also recognize it gets complicated to talk about because not all sides carry equal weight of responsibility. And lord knows that we need to work on that whole gun thing.
But damn-- it couldn't hurt to operate schools and classrooms on the premise that there are people around that you dislike and disagree with but you still have to find ways to coexist with them because vanishing or silencing them is not a real option. It can be a tough sell, because many students are coming out of homes where the message of silencing those with whom you disagree is sold hard. And what is the anti-DEI movement except a push to silence the voices of people who disagree.
But if schools don't do it, where else can young humans hope to pick up the message that while you may believe that certain people are really really wrong and you may not like them or approve of them, you still need to coexist with them somehow.
There is a particular odious brand of commentary, a sort of cousin to the standard Kids These Days laments, which explains that the Youngs are unhappy and poor because they just make bad choices. These are simultaneously stupid and awful, and yet, we just had another one drop.
"We are coming into a new reality where … a lot of people won’t own a house in their lifetime. That is just the reality," Gurner said. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”
When asked if he thought that young people may never own a home, he said, "Absolutely, when you’re spending $40 a day on smashed avocados and coffees and not working. Of course."
Gunner started his first business at age 19-- with a $34,000 loan from his grandfather.
The genre also includes all those articles about how to live frugally written by trust fund babies.
Joel Kotkin writes about urban affairs for right-tilted outfits like The Daily Beast and The Spectator as well as being connected to the Civitas Institute and the Manhattan Institute. He's also a 73-year-old boomer. In 2012, he wrote an almost-reasonable piece for Newsweek about millennials calling them Generation Screwed and explaining the many ways in which boomers had messed things up for them.
But last month he dropped a sort of sequel for The Telegraph entitled "The young would be less screwed if they started making better choices," and Golly Bob Howdy but it is a piece of work. It's worth a look because as long as the youngs are getting this kind of advice (what in the pontificating biz we call "bad" or "silly") we can expect their generational stress level to stay high. Kotkin starts out well enough:
In the United States, the basics have been evident for some time – low rates of marriage and property ownership, and diminishing demand even for educated workers. Overall, notes the Financial Times, under-40s are less conscientious, more neurotic and less agreeable than previous generations. The political ramifications can already be seen, from the swelling numbers of socialist hipsters in New York’s “commie belt” to the angry, alienated incels living in parental basements, mostly in suburban and exurban areas.
We should sympathize with this crowd, he advises, but hey-- every generation deals with Stuff (and he offers a list that includes Depression and World Wars alongside the Civil Rights movement and sexual revolution). So-- "if millennials and their successors, the so-called Gen-Zs, want to get ahead, maybe it's time to stop complaining and start changing." I get that up to a point-- if the world is covered in crap, you can complain or you can get a pair of hip boots. You could also work to make the world less craptastic. Maybe you would be a bit testy about getting advice about how to deal with the crap from boomers who didn't have to deal with any such crap at all.
But what is his advice? Well...
First, move. If only he had just stopped there--
The first step is to move. People have been gravitating away from expensive, elite-controlled areas throughout history; the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all products of this kind of aspirational movement. Indeed, America’s great national myth, Manifest Destiny, was shaped by people who left the East Coast for the opportunities west of the Appalachians.
The United States was settled by people trying to get away from expensive elites? "Expensive" is doing a lot of work here for a period in human history in which the gap between rich and poor was way narrower than it is today. But Australia??!! Australia was a penal colony that criminals were sentenced to colonize. I don't think they were getting away from expensive elites.
"Go where the jobs are" is not a hot new idea, but Kotkin seems to be suggesting that the youngs make a cultural move and get away from "hipster socialists backing Zohran Mamdani" and "various left-wingers on the Pacific Coast." Are small towns a good alternative to pricey cities? It certainly is my preference, but as a long time small town resident, I can tell you that life is great here-- if you can find work that pays well enough to support you.
Next, Kotkin plugs his own version of the success sequence.
As numerous studies have found, both homeownership and marriage are key elements for success in life, leading to higher incomes, less child poverty and probably higher fertility rates.
"Are key elements" is doing a lot of work here, as we are reminded for the gazillionth time that correlation does not equal causation. The notion that homeownership leads to higher incomes is just bizarre. If there is one thing buying a house does not do, it does not lead to increased income.
Finally, Kotkin suggests making better career choices. He suggests that "follow your passion" is bad advice. Maybe skip the college route and go to a trade school.
So, millennials, move to a small town, become a plumber, buy a house, get married, and you will become wealthy, your life will be great, and we won't have to listen to you bitch any more.
If all of this does not make clear Kotkin's dismissal of harsh realities and his general contempt for millennials, check the final paragraph, where he explains what he thinks millennials are doing instead of bootstrapping and right-thinking their way out of despair:
Taking these steps may not be as appealing as living by the beach, indulging in singular fantasies, accessing pornography, or working in a protected job in government or a non-profit. But if attitudes don’t adjust to reality, the next generation will be forced to depend on the generosity of our increasingly parlous state for their sustenance. Then they really will be permanently screwed.
Yup. It's not that we've priced a huge chunk of the population out of the housing market, or that jobs don't pay well enough to build a life (just ask all those folks saying we shouldn't raise the minimum wage because it's not supposed to support a person), or that our systems are increasingly hostile to young parents trying to raise a family. It's because Kids These Days are a bunch of porn-watching slackers who won't face reality. I agree that someone here seems detached from reality, but I'm not sure it's the porn-watching slackers.
What I do know is that K-12 education needs to be talking about a variety of ways for students to make their ways in the world, because "work hard, get good grades, and things will fall into place" doesn't ring quite as true as it used to. We can argue about how true it really is, but to newer generations it doesn't feel true.
And perhaps more disheartening is the underlying message of the attitude typified by this piece. We've gone past the good old American "If you work hard, you'll be able to get ahead in this world" and onto something darker, something along the lines of "You are living on the narrow edge of disaster and failure and one wrong move will tip you over the edge, and managing that balancing act is all on you and you alone." It fits in a culture that is currently being reorganized around the idea that freedom means never having to care about or concern yourself with any other human beings, but it's rather scary and alienating for some of the youngs.
Charter and vouchers schools are excellent at turning public dollars into private wealth. But they can also be excellent at converting public dollars into private assets.
Let's consider this example from, of course, Florida.
The charter school in Leon County opened in 2012 as Governor's Charter, a for-profit charter. Then-governor Rick Scott was there to help cut the ribbon, as well as Democratic Congressional Candidate Al Lawson. But the school was already butting heads with the Leon County Public Schools. According to WFSU, the public school system had to take the charter to court to get some basic information like how many students had enrolled. The K-6 school had 560 students enrolled in that first year in the shiny new building, tucked in between a housing development and a big pond.
Within a few years, the charter had expanded to K-8, but enrollment did not keep up, dropping to under 250. It had a grade of C from Niche, and a steady line of Cs and Ds from the state. By 2023, it was still getting complaints from the Leon County School District, which charged that the school was out of compliance with its contract on at least 9 points, including just basic sloppy stuff like no attendance taken for many students and failure to submit documents for Title I Grant reimbursements-- a bit of a problem for a Title I school.
That complaint was filed in April 2023. In July, the school announced that it would get a new name and new leadership. The Tallahassee Democrat and reporter Alaijah Brown have been all over this story for years reported that the new principal of Renaissance Academy would be Precilla Vaughn. Vaughn has a BS in secondary education from Florida State, and a Masters in educational leadership from American College of Education, an on-line for profit college based in Indianapolis. Vaughn had ten years of experience, all within the Charter Schools USA network. Reported Brown:
“We are thrilled to have Ms. Vaughn as our new leader at Renaissance Academy,” Charter Schools USA’s Florida State Superintendent Eddie Ruiz said this week in a news release. “She ushers in a new era in our school with a rebirth and renewal that gives our students new opportunities for growth."
Last spring the Renaissance Charter in Leon County announced that it would be closing because they had leased the property to Tallahassee Preparatory Academy. Too bad, 242 students, but the charter business is a business (specifically, it is very often a real estate business) not some philanthropy with a mission to take care of children, so see ya later. Teachers were told they could apply for a job in the new school or see if CSUSA had a place for them somewhere in its network.
The switch from charter to private is not an unusual one. A private school can grab taxpayer money with far less oversight and accountability than even the minimal amount that charters must deal with. Tallahassee Prep will not have to negotiate a contract with the Leon School District.
"This is what I feared the most," Hanna told the Tallahassee Democrat. "These mom-and-pop private schools opening up their doors with no accountability whatsoever and cherry-picking students."
Sure enough. TPA is pitching itself as a STEM school, but it won't have resources for students with disabilities or for whom English is a second language-- those kinds of services aren't "built into the business plan." Also, students who don't score high enough on the state end of year exams in math and English Language Arts may not be able to get in or stay in.
But the Leon County School District has not given up yet.
In July, the district started looking at legal action against Renaissance Charter. If the "public charter school" was closing, then its taxpayer-funded property was supposed to revert to the district. CSUSA declined to even provide a list of its assets.
The lawsuit didn't happen (lots of expensive trouble, decided a board majority), but then another bomb dropped. TPA was supposed to open in August. And it just... didn't. The education service provider for the school, Discovery Science Schools, told the Democrat that it was "inadequate enrollment."
The building is 63,000 square feet. When it was brand new in 2012, its sale price was listed as $11.3 million. That price would have been paid by the taxpayers, but as one board member noted. Brown reports:
"The property is not ours. It belongs to Charter Schools USA. Even after the former occupant’s school was closed, the property did not revert back to the Leon County School District," School Board member Darryl Jones chimed in on social media.
"We do not have any jurisdiction to collaborate on anything relative to that property. Millions of dollars of technology and furniture and equipment paid for with taxpayer dollars locked in that building. Sad state of affairs."
This is just one of many such examples of this grift being run since charters first appeared. It can be even worse; in some states, the charter school may buy up an old school building, which means that taxpayers foot the bill for building the school, and then taxpayers foot the bill for the charter buying the school from the district.
In Pennsylvania, cyber charters are seriously overpaid, which has allowed Commonwealth Charter Academy (the 800 pound gorilla of cyber charters in PA) to spend nearly $100 million just on real estate. Sometimes they buy (a huge former Macy's near Pittsburgh) and sometimes they build new property (about eight miles away from where I am sitting right now). It's all done with dollars that taxpayers gave them to educate students, but instead it is going to create a real estate empire. And though that empire was paid for with taxpayer dollars, the taxpayers don't own a bit of it. CCA could decide tomorrow that it would like to get out of the school business and instead go into the lease and rental business, and that would just be tough luck for taxpayers.
It's a sweet deal to be able to get the taxpayers to buy you some property, particularly when they gave the money for a different purpose. Watch for it in your community.
This week I brought home a new keyboard, this time with keys that are lit up. It's delightful. The office desk lighting situation here at the Curmudgucation Institute has never been particularly awesome, and sometimes I have felt as if I were typing in the dark on faceless keys; this just makes life so much easier. I bet I'm even slightly more accurate now. So we all win.
Cross country season has started, and the board of directors had their first meet yesterday. They would happily join the Olympic tag team or anything else that allowed them to run full out for long periods of time. They had a respectable time for their first outing and had fun, too. It was almost worth waking up at 5:30 AM.
I will also take this moment to exhort you to contact your elected representative, because lord knows there's a wide assortment of things that Congress could be doing to make itself more useful during the current regime. They need to hear about it, from the crazy-pants death cult running Health and Human Services to the attempt to slash the ed department into oblivion to the use of armed forces against our own citizens to--well, you know, it's a lot, and they need to be hearing about it all day every day.
You might not even know what TRIO is, but for a very long time it has been helping many folks get a degree who might otherwise not have made it. But it helps a lot of people who aren't white, so Dear Leader says it has to go. Michael Vasquez reports at Hechinger.
In the face of encouragement to work AI into his practice, Marcus Luther of The Broken Copier doubles down on doing what works for humans in a human classroom.
This piece at Vauhini Vara is not so encouraging, though it does contain further details about the Alpha school grift that is drawing so much glowing press elsewhere.
Jennifer Berkshire looks at a great antidote to the balonified happy talk about New Orleans post-Katrina-- a new book from New Orleans parent and activist Ashana Bigard.
Well, I'm not sure everyone considers it "abuse" as much as "a fair chance for the right people to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars." But Sue Kingery Woltanski goes into some detail on how Florida's vouchers are designed for abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Jennifer Berkshire again, this time in The Baffler. She's always an excellent tracker of political currents, like the mysterious right wing turn against corporate influence in education.
Linda McMahon, current Secretary of Education, has headed out on a fifty state tour to help invent the wheel, proclaim the value of oxygen, and promote plans to have the sun rise in the East.
Okay, the actual tour event is called "Returning Education to the States," because that's what Trump and McMahon have decided needs to be their brand right now. Here's the official website blurb:
President Trump has tasked U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take the lead on one of his most momentous promises to families – returning education to the states and equipping all parents to choose an excellent education for their children.
Secretary McMahon has embarked on a fifty-state tour to empower families and hear from students, teachers, and leaders on best practices in their own communities.
Thing is, the states were already in charge of education. McMahon underlined this by making one of her first stops in Oklahoma, a state that has amply demonstrated it will damn well create its own education policies regardless of what federal authorities or people with a lick of sense have to say. Education Dudebro-in-Chief has overseen a variety of policies including First Amendment-violating directives to teach the Bible, launching the nation's first Catholic charter school, and trying to strip teacher licenses for disagreeing with him. At no point does he seem to have felt the need to assert states' rights, because he apparently feels perfectly free to impose his own ideas on the state's education system. In fact, there's an irony here in that Walters has actually tried to align his state's educational system with federal priorities, from calling for schools to teach the Big Lie of 2020 to testing teachers for wokitude as part of a partnership with the right wingnut propaganda folks at Prager(not really a)U.
But here's the thing-- he could do things like turn the state's social studies standards into a right wing christianist nationalist baloney-fest because the control of such things already rested with the state, just as it always has.
There is no "returning" education to the states-- the feds are already forbidden to tell the states what and how to include in their educational programs.
When it comes to K-12, the feds have two jobs. One is to distribute funding to help level the funding playing field for students who are not so wealthy or who have special needs. The other is to make sure that the civil rights of students are not violated, that there are no more Dorothy Counts stories, no more stories of students who are underserved because they come from the wrong family or neighborhood.
So in addition to making it clear that they don't really want to do either of those jobs (cut budgets to the bone and operate on the premise that the only group subject to discrimination is white Christian folks), the current administration is going to performatively shed itself of the job it never had-- directing education in the states.
Granted, it's not unheard of for the feds to use the levers they have to try to get around the laws forbidding them to direct state education policy. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were all about trying to get around the law and strongarm state education departments, and Betsy DeVos couldn't resist the levers of power.
But a simple "we're going to follow the law" would cover that.
Instead we get this bizarre little tour, the spectacle of McMahon simultaneously declaring "I'm not going to tell you what to so" while also saying "Here are the things you're doing that I approve of."
So the tour has actually been McMahon visiting school choice-related sites, like celebrating with Parents for Education Freedom in North Carolina, charter and private schools in Florida, or shmoozing on Fox and Friends with Gov. Sarah Huckabee. She has touted literacy and career training which are fine things that a "send education back to the states" federal education department should have nothing at all to do with. Likewise, the federal government has no legitimate role in states school choice policies, but she's pushing the heck out of those as well.
The tour page is also a bit muddled-- the tour supposedly kicked off in Louisiana on August 11, but the map counts a Nevada visit from April.
That's fine. Bureaucratic baloney and wandering around the country to make mouth noises about your preferred policy are fine traditions of the office. For all her aspirations to be a radical new kind of secretary, McMahon is shaping up to be one more disconnected bureaucrat with an agenda that is at once undesirable and incoherent. One part Arne "Bossy Clueless Amateur" Duncan and one part Betsy "Who Cares About Public Schools" DeVos. "Don't let me tell you what to do, but let me tell you what you ought to do."
In this country, states have the ultimate responsibility for their own education systems. They don't need the federal government's permission to shoulder that responsibility, particularly from someone who says that her job is to eliminate her job. This tour will supposedly extend to all fifty states, but it looks to me like this series of meetings could be an e-mail.
