Another Anti-Union Teacher Union

Those wacky folks at the Freedom Foundation are at it again, trying to convince teachers to dismantle their own unions. And they have a new high-profile edubro to help.

Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

But now they've added a new feature to the mix. Meet the Teacher Freedom Alliance-- an alternative to those evil unions! It's even Free Market! (What does a free market union even mean? Shut up, you!)

They held a big launch party for TFA (they should have checked to see if that acronym was taken) with special guest ranter, Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters! Walters pointed out that the union fights him on cool stuff like merit pay and signing bonuses. Of course, merit pay has never worked and is usually just an excuse to lower base pay, and signing bonuses are a one-time raise that is useless for things like home loans. But Walters is sad that they draw opposition from those awful unions that he has called terrorist organizations (meaning either they are really awful or Walters is easily terrorized). 

Walters's part of the festivities is a greatest hits collection. Teachers union is on the run! The Left is mad about dismantling the Department of Education (cheers) because they want bureaucrats in DC to tell teachers how to teach math, how they should teach our kids that America's an evil racist country. He even brings up Common Core! Free market, which I guess turns out to mean that the market tells teachers how much they can have. That teachers union-- they don't care about teachers or students. And Trump is great. And we should put the Bible in classrooms. 

Walters has gone all-in on promoting TFA, which has led at least one Oklahoma legislator to ask the state attorney general if it's legal for the state education chief to use state resources to promote this thing. Just add that to the list of Walters's questionable choices in office. Meanwhile, he issues a typical non-statement statement in response as reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman

"Democrats and union bosses are grasping at straws because teachers finally have a real choice," Walters said. "My office will always communicate with educators about their options, no matter how much it upsets the political establishment."

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. The three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA. 

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer? 

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things. 

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative." 

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

That "free, moral, and upright" appears frequently. There's a blog post outlining the benefits of dismantling the department of education ("funding and decision-making authority" will shift to state and local levels, which is at least half right). There's a small assortment of news articles about education, including one from the conservative Illinois Policy website, a harmless Natalie Wexler article, a Rick Hess interview with Daniel Buck, an article from the right wing Daily Caller, and another from the wingnut right Daily Wire.

And you know, there's no reason that there can't be a right wing union for right wing teachers (though this is only the latest of many failed attempts), but their other repeated idea is "Excellence, not ideology."

We support the right of every educator in America to pursue excellence in the classroom free of ideological interference.

Except our ideology, because, you know, that's just "common sense." The fictional narrative is that teachers are too busy teaching Marx and Crazy Left Ideas to ever cover actual reading and math, which is a thing you can only believe if you have never spent any time in a public school. Anyway, by replacing Cray Lefty Stuff with academics laced with Common Sense (aka right wing ideology), we can Make America Smart Again. At the launch party, Withe said that their curricula would teach students “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.”

Now, how deeply they want to actually pursue this is anyone's guess, given that the organization's a wing of a group that has explicitly stated that they want to dismantle the teacher unions, which makes the actual mission of TFA secondary at best.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers. 

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate. 

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it. 

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar. 

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true. 

ID: DEI Panic! Is Everyone Welcome Yet? (Spoiler alert: no)

 Don't give the West Ada School District too much credit yet. If you read past the morning headline (W. Ada considers requiring ‘everyone is welcome’ signs at each school), you'll see that the district is in an indefensible mess.

The story started, of course, with a teacher who decided not to shut up. Sarah Inama, a 6th grade world civilization teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in the West Ada district, went to reporter Brian Holmes at KTVB with her story.

Inama was told by district admins to take down classroom signs. One said "everyone in this room is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, and equal" and the other said "Everyone is welcome here." These, she was told, violate a district policy requiring neutrality. The Chief Academic Officer told her via e-mail that district facilities should respect others' differing opinions. 

And it just got worse. Inama said she was told that the problem was not the message so much as the Everyone Is Welcome sign included graphics of hands in a variety of skin tones. 

Inama took down the signs, went home, thought about it, and put the "Everyone is welcome" poster--the one with the multi-toned hands-- back up the next day. The district gave her till May to get rid of it. The other poster uses some colors of the rainbow, and we all know that rainbows are forbidden in classroom decorations.

Chances are you already knew most of that, because the story blew up nationally, letting the whole country see the shame of West Ada. The district is the largest one in Idaho, serving around 35,000 students. It's a big district to be doing something this dumb.

But they kept piling on the dumb. The day after Inama was on the Today show, the district issued a memo entitled "Ensuring a Consistent and Supportive Learning Environment." They decided to go with sports analogies. The Chief Academic Officer is a like a referee who enforces rules "to ensure a fair and level playing field." And there's this howler--

If one player decided to wear a different uniform, use a different-sized ball, or ignore the rules, the game would lose its structure, creating confusion and imbalance,

 Then news this morning's report from BoiseDev that the Board of Trustees is considering making every teacher put up an "Everyone is welcome" poster-- just without those multi-colored hands. Responding to BoiseDev, a district spokesperson explained:

Regarding the Everyone is Welcome Here posters, the district determined that while the phrase itself is broadly positive, certain design elements have been associated over time with political entities and initiatives that are now subject to federal restrictions

Inama told Idaho EdNews, “That’s appeasing not a political view, but a bigoted view that shouldn’t even be considered by a public school district.”

EdNews asked the district spokesperson about concerns that removing the sign certainly seems like a racist move communicating that students of color are not welcome in the classroom.  The response is pure baloney:

West Ada School District is committed to ensuring that every student feels safe, supported, and valued in our schools. The request to remove specific signage is not about excluding or marginalizing any group of students. Our policies are in place to maintain a neutral educational environment while upholding our commitment to inclusion, respect, and belonging for all.

 The board has been emailing about signage and an "Everyone is welcome here" sign for every school--just one that doesn't have any visual display of some of those everyone's because, you know, some people think they shouldn't be welcome, or that welcoming them is a DEI violation. 

In the meantime, Chief Academic Officer Marcus Myers has been responding to inquiries with a form letter that says in part

While we respect individuals’ rights to express their perspectives, it is important to reaffirm that this situation is not about limiting speech or expression but about ensuring consistency in our classrooms and maintaining a learning environment free from distraction. The district’s policies are designed to provide clarity and fairness for all teachers and students by establishing clear expectations for classroom materials.

Which is all kinds of baloney, because the one thing the district has not been is deliberately clear. I would guess that's because saying out loud "Do not do anything that shows Black and Brown students are welcome is too controversial, so don't do that" or "No non-white people on posters" or "No versions of rainbows ever." 

This is anti-diversity policy in action. Don't acknowledge the existence of non-white people. Don't give the racists and bigots anything to complain about. Everyone is not welcome here, and you must never forget that (but you must also never say it out loud). West Ada is not the only place where it is district policy to say "Everyone is welcome here" (the district already has plenty of diversity diversity posters up), but do not live those words.

Myers also blamed the final decision on the lawyers. That's unsurprising on many levels, except that last fall the district was sued by the families of three students who alleged years of racial harassment and bullying. 

God bless Imana for standing up. Who knows how many thousands of teachers have been through a similar experience but did not feel they could buck their local system. It shouldn't be that big a lift for districts to say "Everyone is welcome here" and then act, in all ways, like they mean it. That should be the bare minimum that anyone can expect from a school district-- not knucklingh under to racist snowflakes.

AI Nightmare Fuel

Remember Diane Tavenner? The Bay  area edupreneur started the ill-fated Summit Charter Chain, got a whole bunch of money and tech from Mark Zuckerberg, watched a whole lot of students and their parents push back hard on her automated-education-in-a-box model, and spun it all off into a non-profit thingy. 

That was back in 2018. Since then, she has been doing all the fun silicon valley stuff, including writing books like Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, chaired the Pahara Institute, started a find-your-career Life Navigation Platform (and app) in Mountain View, and she started a podcast, because of course she did. And it's on The74. And that's what we're looking at today.

Her co-host is Michael B. Horn, a speaker-author with a book blurbed by Reed Hastings. He's a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and he writes blog posts with titles like "Why Tech Didn’t Fix Schools: Applying Innovation and Disrupting the Factory."

Their guest on the episode in question is John Bailey, American Enterprise Institute's AI guy. He has worked under Governor Glenn Youngkin, done some White House stints, vp-ed at Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, Aspen Global Leadership Network. You get the world these folks soak in.

The episode is called "How AI is Democratizing Access to Expertise in Education," so you know we're in for a good time. Let's dig into the transcript, and start by skipping the obligatory introductory shmoozing.

Bailey talks a little about how he ended up in this particular arena, coming from a background in ed tech already.

And if I have to admit, like, I’ve been part of a lot of the hype of, like, we really think technology can personalize learning. And often that promise was just unmet. And I think there was, like, potential there, but it was really hard to actualize that potential. And so I just want to admit up front, like, I was part of that cycle for a number of years. And. And then what happened was when ChatGPT came out in December of 2022, everyone had sort of like a moment of ChatGPT, and for me, it wasn’t getting it to write a song or, you know, a rap song or. Or a press release. It was. I was sitting next to someone with a venture team and I said, what is, like, what is an email you would ask an associate to do to write a draft term sheet? And she gave me three sentences. I put it in ChatGPT and it spit back something that she said was a good first draft, good enough for her that she would actually run with it and edit it.

Yes, ed tech has failed to live up to its hype before, but This Time It's Different (which, coincidentally, is a phrase that is always part of the hype). Bailey found ChatGPT fun to play with, and I agree-- I, too, played several rounds of Stump The Software, myself, but only one of us was invited by corporate to come play with the toys inside. This is going to be "so transformative," says Bailey. "It just feels different." 

So what are the rewards and risks here? Well, the internet "democratized" information access (it also democratized information creation, which has not turned out to be a great thing and has rather messed up the other thing). 

What I think is different about this technology is that it’s access to expertise and it’s driving the cost of accessing expertise almost to zero. And the way to think about that is that these general purpose technologies, you can give them sort of a role, a Persona to adopt. So they could be a curriculum expert, they could be a lesson planning expert, they could be a tutoring, and that’s all done using natural language, English language. And that unlocks this expertise that can take this vast amounts of information that’s in its training set or whatever specific types of information you give it, and it can apply that expertise towards different, you know, Michael, in your case, jobs to be done.

Yikes. Bailey has lost me already. LLMs can pretend to be these things, and do it quickly, but "expert"? I don't think so. You aren't accessing expertise; you're accessing a parrot that has listened to a huge number of experts and also a huge number of dopes who know nothing and the LLM is incapable of telling them apart. At the same time, it's not clear how using ChatGPT is any quicker or more efficient than just googling. 

Bailey thinks it's going to be a great tutor. But no-- a great tutor needs to be able to "read" the student to suss out the exact areas that the student is stumbling over, and do it in real time. Tutoring by algorithm has been the same forever-- give the student a task, check to see what the student got wrong, give the student a new task that focuses on what they got wrong. This is slow, clunky, a blunt instrument approach to teaching. It's the same theory of action behind the earliest teaching machines, and it has the same problems. 1) The machine cannot read the student with any sort of precision and 2) the student is asked to perform for a mechanical audience. At best, the AI might be helpful in generating a worksheet to specifications given by a human teacher. That's helpful. It's not transformational.

I think it’s also going to be an amazing tutoring mechanism for a lot of students as well. Not just because they’ll be able to type to the student, but as we were just talking about, this advanced voice is very amazing in terms of the way it can be very empathetic and encouraging and sort of prompting and pushing students, it can analyze their voice.

I cannot say this hard enough-- the bot cannot be empathetic. It might simulate empathy. Do we expect students to be moved and motivated by a machine that can pretend to give a shit about them? And what, I ask, and not for the first or last time, is the problem being solved here? Is there some reason it's better to have software that can mimic a human interaction than it is to have an actual human interaction with an actual human. 

What will deployment in education look like? Bailey compares it to offices where AI is deployed in "back office functions," like, say, coding. He admits that a back office low risk function would be a better start than, say, having an AI do tutoring and "hallucinating," and I am reminded of the observation that AI is always hallucinating, but sometimes the hallucination accidentally matches reality. 

What does Bailey think a low risk back office education function might be? How about parent communications? And holy shneikies, how is that remotely low risk. On what world does a parent want to hear from their child's teacher's bot, rather than the teacher? 

How about using AI to do scoring and assessments? We've been doing that for ages, and mostly the result is designing the test so that it can be scored by a machine rather than designing it so it measures what we want to have measured. Computer-assessed writing? We've been pursuing that for ages and it still sucks and, like the robocaller on your phone, can only handle responses that fall within specific parameters. 

Teacher productivity tools? Maybe, but people whose lives are outside the classroom seriously mis-estimate what "productivity" covers for a teacher. Teachers are not making toasters or cranking out footstools, and creating lesson plans and assessing tasks-- that's not like working an assembly line.

What are the risks? Well, despite the calls to keep teachers in the loop, Bailey is concerned that tired and overworked teachers might jump to AI, much like they turn to Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers now, So I guess AI doesn't solve that problem. Because an AI lesson plan for reading might not even be based on the science of reading or aligned to your curriculum. He thinks this is much like the concerns about students just improving an essay with a button instead of doing the struggle that is how one learns. And maybe even talking to an empathy-faking AI will cause students to miss the friction of real human interaction, which would be bad. So for a whole long paragraph Bailey made sense in a way that he hadn't up to this point. Because I'm pretty sure everything he just said is the argument against tutoring students and probably also doing the back office stuff for teachers.

Tavenner is also concerned that the increased "efficiency" of AI will reinforce the current model instead of disrupting it all. I think by "efficiency" she really means "speed," which is not the same thing at all (I would rather have my surgeon be efficient than fast).

Bailey agrees that yes, as she has often said, the system and institutions within the system are "remarkably resistant to change." Also, because of that, "technology doesn't change a system." I have a theory about this, but this post is already long, so let me just say that "change" is constantly happening in education, just not the kind of transformation that every person with a piece of ed tech to peddle envisions in their pitch. The key here is utility. Teachers adopt practices and technologies at the speed of light--when they are useful. But ed tech vendors are forever showing up to the construction sight with a case full of butter knives declaring, "This will be a huge help in building houses if you just change the way you build houses. At least, that's what our in-house testing projections say."

AI in education is still a solution in search of a problem. Bailey is going to swing back around to the "access to expertise" idea which is just-- I mean, he is clearly a smart and accomplished guy, but AI bots possess no "expertise" at all and your best hope is they can hallucinate their way to a passable imitation of it. 

[I]f you’re a school principal, all of a sudden you have a parent communication marketing expert just by asking it to be that Persona and then giving it some tasks to do. And if you’re a teacher, it means all of a sudden every teacher in America can have a teaching assistant like a TA that is available to help on a variety of different tasks.

"Variety of different tasks " is doing so much work here, and I know this is a podcast and not a dissertation, but these are the specifics on which his whole idea hangs, and what he comes up with are the vague generalities and things like asking the AI TA , "I see like John and Michael really struggling in algebra what are some ways I could put them in a small group and give them an assignment that would resonate with both of their interests and help them scaffold into the next lesson? That was impossible to do before." Well, no, not really impossible; more like regular teaching. And the teacher would still have to feed the AI the boys' interests and the scope and sequence of the next lesson.

There's some chatter about pricing which is as close a we get to asking if AI in education would be worth the cost to money-strapped schools, and then Horn has a thought he wants to toss out here. So you list bad things like losing the humanity in coaching, he says, and an easy button for writing that "jumps you ahead to the product, but not necessarily the learning and the struggle from it" but what if... and he takes me back to my college days with an analogy from Brewer Saxberg, learning scientist, that Saxberg attributed to Aristotle but I'm pretty sure I learned about studying how pre-literate cultures shifting to literacy.

The idea is this-- when cultures shift from oral tradition to the written word, certain skills get lost, like the ability to recall and recite Beowulf-sized chunks of poetry. "Kids these days," complain the elders. "Can't even remember fifteen minutes' worth of Bede. Just walk around staring at those funny marks on paper all day." 

Horn seems to be suggesting that we're on the cusp of something like that. Here's a real quote:

of these things that might hurt, which are really going to, are they still going to matter in the future or are there going to be other things that we, you know, other behaviors or things that are more relevant in the future? And how do you think about sort of that substitution versus ease versus actually like really, you know, frankly, I think when you talk about social interaction that could be, forget about disruptive, that could be quite destructive.

Interesting, says Bailey. AI is chipping away at entry level jobs, but that means that people are not acquiring the entry level job skills. His example-- legislators don't need an intern to summarize legislation. AI can do it, but then the interns aren't learning to read legislation. So now the intern has to do higher level cognitive functions, which tells me that students who coasted through high school letting ChatGPT do their homework or all the thinky parts of writing are going to be even LESS prepared for entry level jobs that require MORE skills. Bailey understates that there will be a huge strain on the education system, but then he ruins it by citing TIMSS and NEAP scores as if those tests provide any sort of measure of high level thinking. 

And he's back to the cheap expert again, offering that he can't do fancy Excel stuff, but now an AI can do it for him, so "now I could do it," except of course he still can't, and I have to wonder how much it matters that he still couldn't understand what the AI had done on the spreadsheet.

Look, there's a whole continuum here. The tech trend is always toward needing less and less understanding from the user. The first people to own automobiles had to know how to fix every last nut and bolt; now you can drive in blissful ignorance--as long as nothing ever goes wrong.

So maybe you can just count on AI magic and not care what's happening. But I don't think so--particularly because AI can only deliver in certain sorts of situations.

Catch your breath, because there's more nightmare to come. Tavenner wants to talk about the intersection between AI and ed policy. Like, could you use AI to help you decide how to use your ESA voucher money? Bailey says that sounds cool, and gives some examples, and seems stuck on hos the AI could make the "friction" between families and education institutions go better with robot empathy simulations. Let the AI help you figure out what to do with your education, your career, your life. "We're very close to that," says Bailey, repeating the motto of every tech promise of the last decade (self-driving cars have been a year away for ten years). And speaking of old familiar songs--

I think that’s going to be powerful and it’s going to make policy easier. I’m still, until we create more flexible ways for teachers to teach, for students to learn and students to engage in different types of learning experiences, I just think we’re going to end up boxing and limiting a lot of this technology capabilities.

Once we change how we build houses, the power of this butter knife will be unlocked. Because the education system is there to help unlock technological potential, and not vice versa. 

This is what's out there among the thought leaders and people who get excited by tech stuff and don't know much about classroom teaching of live humans. These are smart, accomplished folks. They even seem nice. But they are on some planet far, far away. 

I can offer you one palate cleansing chaser after all that-- two weeks later they did an interview with Ben Riley, who said a whole lot of things that need to be said. Go read, or listen to, that one. 

 

 

Are These The Last Days Of Public School

I know there's not a great deal of overlap between Robert Pondiscio's audience and mine, but this one is worth reading for a non-raving example of how the issues look from the other side.

Pondiscio's "The Last Days of Public School" appeared in The American Enterprise, the glossier, more magaziney outlet for the American Enterprise Institute, and you may not find it encouraging, but it is a fairly sober look at where we are.

The hook he hangs the piece on is the idea of "peak public school," the zenith of the public education, arguing that "A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America." Pondiscio doesn't spend time analyzing the good or bad of that transformation, just the general shape and possible dangers of it.

Some of his observations, such as the fact this revolution "has spurred surprisingly little public discussion" are observations I very much agree with. I might argue that the lack of discussion has been caused in no small part by choicers who very much wanted to stay low and avoid such discussion, but it has always frustrated the hell out of me that we are changing some fundamental assumptions about what the nation's education system is supposed to be and do without really talking about it but instead acting as if we're just getting a new design on slipcovers instead of replacing the couch with a bar stool.

Pondiscio is not soft-pedaling the "revolution"

For generations, America’s K–12 public schools have been largely immune from the disruptive forces that have roiled retail, travel, entertainment, health care, and many other sectors of the economy and culture, but the reckoning has finally come. Public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway.

We may argue the scope and size of this crack-up, and I don't love the word "reckoning" here, as if public schools are at last paying for their sins. But it gets us to this:

The reckoning has arrived. What comes next, and the social and cultural cost of “peak public school,” is a question that demands serious consideration.

Pondiscio provides a short, pointed history of school choice in fewer sentences than I would need to summarize it. He identifies the final straw as Covid and culture wars, and here I will disagree with him. These aren't just crises that happened, but crises that were deliberately harnessed and amplified by choicers who routinely repeated the "parents saw school on Zoom and were alarmed" narrative, but stayed silent when polls showed that parents were largely satisfied with how their local schools handled Covid.

The list of other crises is debatable as well: "historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale." Sort of, in some places, yes, and yes. Of course, we may never know how the NAEP story ends, now that Trusk has fired all the data people.

Pondiscio's culture war account provides an interesting point of view. In his telling, the uneasy alliance of left and right started to crumble when "education reform’s dominant progressive wing began adopting the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students." This, he suggests, is when the culture was came for the reform movement,

I would quibble with bits of that; from out here in the cheap seats, none of the "progressive" wing of reform ever looked particularly progressive (e.g. Democrats for Education Reform, specifically designed to "look" leftish). And I've never liked the term "culture war" with its suggestion that both sides are on the attack, when I see attacking mostly coming from one side only (spoiler alert: it's the side that employs Chris Rufo specifically to find ways to attack opponents). Was the pursuit of "equity" some sort of attack? That said, I've heard before of conservative reformsters stung by accusations from their supposed allies. 

But the next graph sure hits the nail-

Freed from having to make nice with their progressive colleagues, education reform conservatives went all-in on school choice and on the attack against “woke” public schools. A 2021 AEI Conservative Education Reform Network report by Jay Greene and James Paul noted that a significant number of all school choice bills passed in statehouses did so without any Democratic support. A follow-up Heritage Foundation report functionally served the education reform left with divorce papers. The pair argued that private school choice would be attractive to conservative parents concerned about teacher activism and public schools’ embrace of a social justice agenda. They concluded, “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war.”

And as Pondiscio points out, that has worked out well for them. He does fail to note one important point--that public support isn't all that deep, and that every single one of the choice movements victories has been achieved by legislators acting without, or even in spite of, public input.

From there Pondiscio moves on to rewards and risks. We disagree on the rewards, but I appreciater his clear-eyed view of the risks.

If, as seems inevitable, more Americans adopt a “choose your own adventure” style of educating their children, it could exacerbate the gaps between educational haves and have-nots and lead to an even further degradation of social cohesion.

Absolutely. No "could" about it. Because we aren't talking about a school choice movement, but a taxpayer-funded, free market school choice system, a distinction that has gone unquestioned even though neither taxpayer funding nor the free market are needed to implement school choice. But basing school choice on an educational marketplace, we are absolutely guaranteed gaps between tiers based on financial resources (see also: every market good in the country, from cars to groceries). 

Pondiscio is correct in pointing out, "While public schools have largely failed to be the 'great equalizer of the conditions of men' Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy." And also this-- "Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives." Cato Institute in particular has argued the presence of different and conflicting values in public school families is a reason to promote school choice, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how raising students in separate ideological bubbles will bear civic benefit-- especially when some bubbles are the Mercedes Benz of bubbles and others are the used Kia.

As Pondiscio notes, we are sliding into a system in which schools have "few common guardrail." I think it's more accurate to say that some schools (public) have guardrails and others (private and charters) have none. Pondiscio has hopes that choice will allow some students to escape the low-achieving schools, though he acknowledges that leaves even more kneecapped schools and students behind. And the choice system we're growing isn't even particularly well-suited for such "rescues" because 1) quality private school costs are prohibitive and 2) choice laws have been written to privilege the private schools' ability to exclude anyone for any reason. 

Also, school choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options.

Exactly. We're already seeing it. 

Pondiscio gives an on-point look in the rear-view mirror.

In retrospect, the pandemic could not have come at a worse time for traditional public schools. Decades of expensive and intensive efforts to improve public education outcomes at scale have been disappointing and dispiriting. The education reform movement of the past several decades, which began with the youthful, can-do optimism of Teach For America and high-flying urban charter schools, morphed into a technocratic regime of standards, testing, and accountability that proved not just ineffective but deeply unpopular with parents and teachers alike. Even before pandemic-driven “learning loss,” long-term trends in student achievement didn’t match the effort or expenditure devoted to improving student outcomes and closing the achievement gap.

I don't think he'd say it this way, but I will-- the education reformster movement was an expensive bust that wasted money and time, degraded the teaching profession (Teach for America was not so much optimistic and hubristically disconnected from reality), and promoted a fanatical focus on hitting the wrong target-- test scores. And in the process, reformsters (some inadvertently and some absolutely on purpose) eroded public trust and faith in the institution of public schools.

Pondiscio allows that traditional zip-code public default mode education "is unlikely to disappear entirely," but his argument is that "its influence and dominance can only wane."

Have we seen the peak? We do tend to forget that there was a long slow growth, that people who try to call back some golden age of US education are fantasizing. Any trip into the even-barely-long-ago past takes us to a day when fewer Americans finished school, those that did learned less, and the promise of a good education for everyone was only barely acknowledged. We have done great things with our public system, and we have always had room to improve.

The pandemic pause gave us a chance to recalibrate the system and build back better, and we pretty much let that slip through our fingers. Now we've got a system that has been kicked around a bit by reformsters, by choicers, and by opportunistic culture panic grifters. 

Our huge gaps remain in education, mostly between the haves and the have-nots, as well as that great undiscussed divide between rural and urban. Rural communities have always been on the short end of the choice shtick because places like my county, with only a couple thousand students K-12, don't present much of a market opportunity-- and as the baby bust moves through the next decade or so, that will only get worse. Because choice in this country has been tied to free market forces, it will only ever be significant in high-population areas. I'll also go ahead and predict that at some point, taxpayers who have become convinced by the rhetoric that paints school not as a public good, but as a commodity sold to parents-- those folks will lead the charge to cut voucher support and leave even less money in a system that already favors the wealthy. This to me is one of the ironies of school choice US style-- it is perfectly constructed to reinforce and even magnify every wealth-related ill that the public system already suffers from, but without any systemic push to do better.

So things will look different, somehow. Perhaps it will look like a multi-tier system with fancy campuses filled with rich resources for children of the elite, and bare-minimum training boxes for future meat widgets. It almost certainly will look different depending on which state you live in; clearly we already have some states determined to dismantle the public system (hey there, Florida) and some that aim to preserve and support it. Or maybe we'll reach a point where pressure builds to put guardrails on choice schools, leading them to look more and more like the public schools they meant to replace. 

But I'll repeat that there is no going back to some golden age; there never was. If I had a magic wand, there are some developments of the last few decades that I'd erase, but there isn't, and I can't, and if there's one thing I've learned in life, you can only move forward from where you are, not from where you wish you were.

What I hope the very most, the brink that we are teetering on that I hope we can step back from is this--

Let's not agree to a society in which education is a private commodity, and procuring a good one for the child is the responsibility of the parent and the parent alone. Let's not agree to a society in which we have no collective obligation, investment, or responsibility for making sure that every child has a chance to learn as much and become as much as they can. Let's not wash our hands of them and say, collectively, "This child's future is not our problem, parents. This is on you." If that day comes, public school as we understand it will be gone. 

OK: Fake History and Walters Follies

Oklahoma's state slogan has been through a variety of changes, but they may change it to "We rewrite history." Oklahoma has been working on revised standards for history classes in the state for a while now, and just as they got down to the finish line, those standards picked up just a few more objectionable additions.

Sash Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman for NonDoc got their hands on a copy of the proposed standards, and there have been a few changes since the standards were set out for public comments.

The headline-grabbing change calls for high school students to "identify discrepancies in 2020 election results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of "bellwether county" trends."

What's the goal here? If they can get high school students to look over all the "evidence" that failed to convince a single court, maybe they can finally uncover someone who will find in favor of the Big Lie? No, I expect the hope is just to convince a few folks that the Big Lie is true, and 15-year-olds are about the only demographic left with which they have a shot. Easiest to rewrite history for those who haven't read much of it yet. 

NonDoc reports that this change (and many others) were made after the public comment period, and were also not pointed out to the Board of Education before it voted on the standards. 

If course, that might be because the Board is no longer a group of hand-picked allies of Oklahoma's Dudebro-in-chief of Education Ryan Walters. That's fallout from ongoing feuding among Oklahoma's big name GOP politicians. Walters tried to get State Attorney General Gentner Drummond to make some noise about Trump's anti-diversity edicts to support Walters own response, but Drummond, who has often clashed with Walters, called it "manufactured political drama" intended to get Walters more attention. Drummond is running for governor, Kevin Stitt wants to keep being governor, and Walters sure looks like he's running for something (especially now that Dear Leader didn't call him to DC). 

Then Walters decided to require all schools to send him a list of every undocumented immigrant child, and even Stitt thought that was too much ("picking on kids" he called it) and fired three members of the Board of Education. Walters put two of them on a new made-up thing called the "Trump Advisory Committee" because his old BFF Stitt is now part of the "liberal DC swamp."

Which is why it was one of the new members that ended up telling NonDoc, re: the standards changes, "In the spirit of full transparency, I question why this was done in the 11th hour and why no mention of this was made during the presentation at the board meeting."

House Common Education Committee Chairman Dick Lowe told NonDoc that the standards were already "on the edge" because of the overt Christianity references.

That's not the whole of it. The standards have the usual dopey standards features, like the kindergarten standard that calls for kindergartners to read primary and secondary documents and identify the main ideas of the text. But some curious political items just sort of quietly slipped into the standards.

"Identifying major policy issues" became "Explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts including Title 42 and Remain in Mexico policy, consumer and business confidence, interest rates, and inflation rates prior to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Or how about “Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab and the economic and social effects of state and local lockdowns.”

And just in case any upstart history teachers feel the urge to make Infrastructure Week jokes, the sneaky revision eliminated “Describe bi-partisan efforts to address the nation’s infrastructural needs.” Rewrite away!

Unfortunately, at the contentious February 27 meeting of the state board, Walters created the impression of a looming deadline and the standards were improved, sneaky changes unseen.

Senator Mark Mann, a former teacher who sits on the Senate Education Committee, summed it all up for NonDoc.

“Anytime you put nonsense like this out, it does two things: One, it makes teachers worried (…) So they just leave something out and don’t teach it, and then kids aren’t understanding and grasping the concept. Or, they do what a lot of teachers have done, and they just decide, ‘You know what, I can go make more at Paycom. I’m not putting up with this stuff anymore.'”

Yup. State standards are most often a PITA paperwork exercise, and once you see that some of them are nonsense, you fill out your lesson plans to look compliant, and then you ignore the damned things. The effect?

“Ryan Walters, clearly, outside of being a total disaster, has done nothing to help solve the teacher shortage,” Mann said. “He’s added to it because teachers don’t want to work under him.”

This next governor's race in Oklahoma is going to be really interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to see if Ryan Walters has established such a noisy, dysfunctionally high profile that he may be the first state education chief to be an actual campaign issue. It was Stitt who raised Walters up to the state level; let's see how hard he runs away from that. And then, once we see the outcome, we'll see how the Oklahoma state standards rewrite the tale. 

Come Talk With Me About "Choice"

If you are in the NW PA area, I'm inviting you to join me for an evening explainer about school choice.

The school choice world is complicated' even as "choice" policies have spread, the language and technicalities of the school choice biz have become the kind of maze that is mainly understood by folks who spend their days reading through the laws and the bills and the policy discussions. You know-- people like retired teachers who write about education. 

There are so many issues in the wind, from federal vouchers to education savings accounts to the prospect of religious charter schools to (in the case of our state) the annual attempt to pass a new voucher bill (a scary prospect in a state with a Democratic governor who is voucher-friendly). 

So in a couple of weeks, I'll be whipping out some slides and trying to make it all make sense to the average human being who is doing more than swimming in education policy all day.

If you're in the neighborhood, I'll be in the meeting room at the Oil City Public Library on Thursday, March 27, at 6:00 PM. Admission is free and I would be delighted to see you there.

ICYMI: Birdie Edition (3/16)

I spent the week playing trombone in the pit for a local production of Bye Bye Birdie, which is not always my most favorite show in the world, but I love watching the students lay their hearts out on stage. If you don't know the show, it spins off the drafting of Elvis and the hubbub over sending a pop star off to the military while his fans work themselves into a frenzy. But the necessities of casting in high school productions often create intriguing side effects. Like, what if Belle's wacky inventor father was instead her wacky inventor mother? In this production's case, Conrad Birdie is Black. Doesn't change the show in big ways, but it gives it a slightly different flavor. 

At any rate, that show has been the big user of my evenings this week, but I still have a reading list for you. Here we go.

‘We're left reeling': Three Arizona school districts lose millions in federal funding amid push to end DEI policies

Here we go. Somebody used the word equity and now students in three districts will have to pay the price.

Musk's War on Farmers and Hungry Kids

Andy Spears offers quick take on Trusk's attempt to screw children and farmers in one fellonious swoop.

Linda McMahon’s Fake ‘Mission': The States Already Control Education

I've missed Peter Cunningham, a little, sort of. But here he is in Education Week pointing out that the "send education back to the states" rhetoric is baloney.

Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

Jill Barshay at Hechinger tries to unravel the destruction of the whole data wing of the department.

The Strange Bedfellows Fighting School Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire has been on a tear lately. Here she is with more information about how there's a whole load of voucher opponents on the far right.

A School District Rejected a Black Author’s Book About Tulsa for Its Curriculum. Then the Community Decided to Act.

I love it when a book ban is thwarted by regular human persons in a community. Phil Lewis tells the story.

GOP voucher plan would divert billions in taxes to private schools

Yeah, I'm still mad at the Washington Post, but this piece by Laura Meckler is a good summation of the federal voucher plan.

Billionaires Pave the Way for Trump’s Federal Vouchers in the School Privatization Movement

Mike DeGuire provides more information about those federal vouchers. It will not make you feel better.

Private school vouchers: Ohio’s richest families access scholarships

Let's once again see data that vouchers are entitlements for the rich.

AI as School Monitor and Measurement

There is no earthly reason that you should not be subscribed to Audrey Watters newsletter. You get stuff like this:

One of the things that struck me about Dan Meyer's recent talk to Amplify software developers (cited above) is how the constant and repeated invocation of the "factory model of schooling" by various ed-tech entrepreneurs (their investors, their political backers) actually belies their recreation of this very thing: their obsession with efficiency and productivity, with data and measurement. They are the heirs of scientific management, not its opponents.

The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause Remains Central to the Future of Public Education

Oklahoma is going to test it yet again, Jan Resseger explains. 

Texas schools have leaned on uncertified teachers to fill vacancies. Lawmakers want to put a stop to it.

Meanwhile, in regular non-apocalyptic education issues, Texas is still having trouble staffing schools with actual trained professionals. 

A South Carolina public school has learned a costly lesson about why it needs to respect students’ rights

Drag the Black kid to the office and have her disciplined for not stopping for the flag pledge? It's time for another lesson in civil liberties, costing this district $75K.

Florida Lawmakers Push for More Cursive Writing— Why And at What Cost?

Kids these days. They don't even know how to write cursive! Florida is going to fix that, by gum. Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at the plan.

Eve of Destruction: How Close Are We?

I try not to include too much material here about the general mess we face, but we also should not look away. At any rate, here's a useful take from Nancy Flanagan.

This week at Forbes.com, I took a look at a much-deserved setback for Christian [sic] Nationalist Ryan Walters. Also, at Bucks County Beacon, a look at a conservative lawsuit in PA aimed at erasing civil rights for LGBTQ persons. 

Subscribe to my newsletter. It's free, and always will be.

There are several familiar songs in the show, but after playing it a week, this is the one stuck in my head. From the movie, which did a massive rewrite of the stage version, but kept this number.

Paying Student Teachers

Last spring, Pennsylvania launched a program to pay student teachers, and the new budget from Governor Josh Shapiro proposes major increases in funding for that program.

As a certified old fart, I shake my fist at the clouds and mutter, "Back in my day, we paid our college tuition for that semester, just like any other, and did our student teacher thing." As a cooperating teacher, I would occasionally hear one of my sixty gazillion mentees say that they really ought to be paid for doing all this work and bite my tongue so that I did not say, "Child, you have made twice as much work for me while you are here." 

However, I suspect this is one of those "Okay, boomer" moments.

For one thing, my college tuition for my student teaching semester was about $1,300. That included an apartment at the college's field office (then located at the corner of Superior and E. 9th in Cleveland). I don't remember what the cost of gas for our commute was, but a quick google suggests it was about 79 cents a gallon. 

For another thing, Pennsylvania has a teacher supply problem. It's not just that the pipeline has dried up-- the pipeline is actually broken, with many schools having chopped away at their teacher prep programs. If a million high school seniors decided this year that they want to be teachers, there wouldn't be enough college capacity to educate them. So encouraging students to pursue teaching is a double must, both to increase the teacher supply and to coax teacher prep program back to life.

For still another thing, as we have documented at great length, a lot of folks have worked really hard to make teaching just as unattractive as possible, from reducing teaching to the job of implementing canned programs, to trumpeting that teachers are just a bunch of groomers and pedophiles, to telling teachers to strip their rooms of even the simplest of messages ("Everyone is welcome here" must go). 

The program aimed to give student teachers a $10K stipend-- $15K is they took assignment in an underserved school. In return, the proto-teachers agree to work in Pennsylvania for three years. The original funding was for a total $10 million, with an online application portal-- and it was used up within hours of being made available. 

Student teachers themselves called the stipends "life changing." It seems particularly useful for those who are later-in-life students. One such student was quoted by PSEA saying, "I feel seen." 

That's a part of the value of the program-- it treats proto-teachers as if they are special and important. Lots of college students struggle with lots of responsibilities and work while they are studying, and I am perfectly okay with singling out future teachers as deserving a special kind of support, because lord knows we need a new approach to recruitment to replace the old one of Hope We Get Lucky. 

There's a proposal out there to up the funding to the program up to $50 million, and I think that would be money well spent. Pennsylvania needs the teachers. 

Education and Hierarchies

At her newsletter, Jennifer Berkshire has an excellent post this week-- I'm here to say two things. "Go read it" and "Yes, and..."

In "The Brutal Logic Behind Dismantling the Department of Education," Berkshire points out that much of the dismantling is aimed at outcomes like getting fewer students to attend college. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the idea that colleges were captured by crazy left-wingers in the seventies (e.g. Chris Rufo's "Laying Siege to the Institutions" speech) and the notion that going to college is distracting women from the important work of being baby-makers (e.g. the Heritage Foundation's wacky theories). 

Berkshire points to the Curtis Yarvin theory that we need a techno-monarch, and that requires us to demolish the "cathedral,' the set of institutions that make ordinary people believe they Know Stuff and don't need to be ruled over.

But I think the heart of the matter is captured by Berkshire in this portion of the post:

The creepiest story I read this week had nothing to do with education but with the effort to rebuild the US semiconductor industry known as the CHIPS program. Employees in the CHIPS program office have been undergoing a now-familiar ritual: demonstrating their intellectual worth and abilities to Trump officials.

In late February, Michael Grimes, a senior official at the Department of Commerce and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, conducted brief interviews with employees of the CHIPS Program Office, which oversees the grants.

In interactions some described as “demeaning,” Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.

What does demanding IQ or SAT test results from engineers have to do with the dismantling of the Department of Education? Everything. If you start from the assumption that IQ is, not just fixed, but genetically determined, as many Trump intellectuals do, there is little case to be made for public schools that try to equalize outcomes—it can’t be done. Far better to shovel cashes at the would-be ‘cognitive elite’ (an apt description of vouchers for the well-to-do, when you think about it) than to redistribute resources to the ‘lessers.’ It’s a bleak and brutal view of the world and one that holds increasing sway on the right.

I've been talking for years about the idea that Betters and Lessers drive much ed reform. When Betsy DeVos talks about letting parents and students find the right fit for an education, what she means is that students should get the education that is appropriate for their station. No higher education for you future meat widgets!

The underlying idea is that people are not equal and that "merit" is a measure of how much Right Thinking a person does. But the important part is that there are natural hierarchies in the world and to try to lift the Lessers up from their rightful place on the bottom rungs of society's ladder is an unnatural offense against God and man. Using social safety nets or other programs to try to make their lives suck less is simply standing between them and the natural, deserved consequences of their lack of merit-- after all, if they didn't deserve to be poor, they wouldn't be poor. Life is supposed to be hard for the Lessers, and trying to make it less hard is an offense against God and man. And it is doubly offensive when we tax the Betters to fund this stuff.

For these folks, education is not supposed to be about uplift, but about sorting and suiting people for their proper place in society. This sorting could be done more efficiently if the sorting happened before they even got to school, if, in fact, the school system itself was already set up with several tiers so that Betters and Lessers could have their own schools.

I've argued for years that the free market is a lousy match for public education because the free market picks winners and loser, not just among vendors, but among customers. But for a certain type of person, that's a feature, not a bug. The Lessers shouldn't get a big fancy school with lots of programs because all they need is enough math and reading to make them employable at the Burger Store. 

Public schools also offend Betters sensibilities by trying to uphold civil rights. Berkshire nails this:

At the heart of the Trumpist intellectual project is a relatively straight-forward argument. The civil rights revolution in this country went too far and it’s time to start rolling it back. As Jack Schneider and I argue in our recent book, The Education Wars, the role that public schools have historically played in advancing civil rights makes them particularly vulnerable in this moment of intense backlash. It’s why the administration has moved with such ferocity against the most recent effort to extend civil rights through the schools—to transgender students. And it’s why the cuts to the Department of Education have fallen so heavily on its civil rights enforcement role. Of the agency's civil rights offices across the country, only five are still open.

 For some of these folks, civil rights are NOT for every human being who draws breath. Civil rights are only for those who deserve them by merit and by station and by Right Thinking. 

The idea of public education as a means of uplift for every student, undergirded by a system that protects and honors the civil rights of every person simply has no place in a certain view of the nation. And that certain view is currently in charge. 

Kevin O'Leary Gets an F in Education

There are some bad ideas that just won't die, and all it takes is some over-inflated rich guys with a platform to keep them alive.

Enter Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian successful businessman, middling TV personality, and failed politician. He made his big pile in software (SoftKey), tried running for office, did some television reality show stints, and is currently a crypto guy and turns up on Shark Tank. All of that, of course, qualifies him to opine about education over the airwaves. 

He did so on CNN's NewsNight on Tuesday, where he offered his theory about US student test scores.

Why? Unions. Unions that keep mediocre teachers in place in every high school in America when we should be firing them.

Yes, it's the old Fire Our Way To Excellence idea again.  

I would like to fire teachers... and I'd like to pay a lot more to the teachers that advance Math and Reading scores that push our system forward... We have broken the system long ago through unions.

And also

The lowest paid person in America that deserves a lot more money is a great teacher... and we can't in the system of unions in America, we keep mediocrity festering. We're destroying the education system.

Well, this should be easy to test. The states that have the weakest teacher unions should have the best paid and the highest scores. States like Oklahoma and Texas and the Carolinas and Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana and Florida and Georgia-- oh, I see a pattern here. Low pay, low test results. Apparently when you stomp on unions, you don't get instant school awesomeness. 

How do we find these mediocre teachers to fire them? We've been over this before-- using tests as a measure creates all sorts of problems, from trying to measure student growth on through using math and reading scores to judge teachers who don't teach math and reading. 

And if we do fire teachers, how easy is it to just go pick some new ones off the Excellent Teacher Tree? 

O'Leary also reinforces the odious notion that the whole purpose of schools is to crank out math and reading scores, which is a giant honking to show that he understands neither assessment nor the whole purpose of education. 

I graduated from teacher school in 1979. and one thing has never, ever changed-- the level of confident assumed expertise of some folks because they went to school. What has changed is the degree to which media outlets aggressively feed them baloney, confirming their worst guesses. But our problem in education is now the country's-- how to make progress with people who don't know what they don't know, and who know with utter certainty some things that just aren't so.

Ed Department: Worst of All Worlds

For a while this morning, CNN was running a curious quote from Neal McClusky, Education Guy at Cato Institute. 

If [Trump] says, 'We're going to have a 50% reduction in staff,' there is reason to be concerned about how the system will work: Is that enough people? We're going to learn whether or not they can do the job with fewer of them.

Some folks pounced on that quote (which seems to have since disappeared from the story) as "proof" that Cato wanted government to work after all, but as McClusky reassured his Twitter followers, he was as adamantly against the department as always (true that--say what you like, but McClusky is nothing if not consistent). 

But his comments on the halving of the department shows how MAGA can have the worst of all possible worlds.

McMahon has reiterated that her intent is to dismantle the department entirely, and I have argued that this would get in the way of the Truskian goal of using funding as leverage to force school districts to comply. Except that I may have given them too much credit, because one of the big piles of money that they have to use as leverage is IDEA funding, and it turns out that McMahon isn't even sure what IDEA is, as she revealed to Laura Ingraham. “Well, do you know what? I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for, except that it’s the programs for disabled and needs [students].”

So I suppose asking for a detailed list of which positions were cut and how it was determined that they were excess-- yeah, never mind. What we've seen at this point is "a bunch of everything."

But if they can cut the department to the point that it can't do its jobs, that's nearly as good as dismantling it. Especially since it sets up an argument before Congress of "Look, the thing isn't working anyway, so you might as well dissolve it."

I have spent plenty of time bitching about the department, which has birthed one dumb idea after another while simultaneously failing to aggressively pursue the objective of making sure all children get the equitable chance for education they're entitled to. But this is not a move that can even pretend to be about doing a better job (nor, to be fair, has anybody pretended that's what this is about). The Department put many education-related grants under one roof rather than requiring districts and states to go paper chasing different pieces of the government for their pile of money. And the department offered protection to students whose rights to a non-sucky education were threatened. Plus bonuses like teacher training assistance, which is also axed.

So now we move to keeping those functions in the department, but requiring the department to do it badly, a sort of enforced inefficiency. 

McMahon represents a different brand of uninformed incompetence from Betsy DeVos. DeVos was so bad at her job, she couldn't get much of anything done. McMahon doesn't know what she's doing--but to just smash stuff up, she doesn't have to know much. "I want a new computer," says your child, and you reply that they already have a perfectly good one, even if it's a little slow and doesn't work exactly the way they want it to. So they smash it with a rock. "Can I have a new computer now?"

Presidents Musk and Trump have gone after any piece of government that is about taking care of others, especially if it's got plenty of money lying around that could be used to prop up private corporations. It seems unlikely that anyone is going to rescue the department of education any time soon.

Money, Lies, God, and Education

Want a guide that helps make sense of our Christian [sic] nationalist moment, including education. Katherine Stewart has published it.

Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism came out in 2019, but it is still essential reading for our current moment. One line that really hit me when I read it was this one:

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

In other words, it rejects democracy. And as I read her new book, Money, Lies, and God as the current regime started tromping through government, it occurred to me that it's not just the legitimacy of government that depends on alignment with a particular set of values-- 

It's the legitimacy, value, rights, and humanity of individual persons that depends on adherence to the right doctrines.  When President Musk says that empathy can destroy civilization, when MAGA trot out dehumanizing language like the R word, it's one more sign that some people don't matter. 

Ideas like universal civil rights, the kind of thing we're in the habit of assuming as given, are not accepted by these folks. Bizarre ideas like the Trumpian inversion of civil rights and discrimination make sense if you assume that only some people have rights and only some people can be discriminated against because only some people are aligned with proper values and only those people are entitled to civil rights. Of course, only those people deserve to be in charge, to rule over those others who, because of their spiritual and ideological failings aren't fully real humans.

Remember this, and everything else makes sense.

In the new book, Stewart lays out four elements of the Christian [sic] nationalist mindset. (She also spends a couple of chapters on education-- I'll get there). Stewart argues that it's not so much an ideological checklist, but this set of views that characterizes the movement.

First, the belief that America is going straight to hell. We are surrounded by evil powers that threaten everything we care about. Every election is apocalyptic, every opponent an existential threat. I recognize this from the many loud complaints about Joe Biden. I would characterize the Biden presidency as a return to the tradition of mediocre white guys in charge, but for folks in the movement he was such a huge agent of satan, and he is still invoke to fuel that fearful reaction.

See it to in the narrative that education has been "captured" by Godless socialist lefties who have installed pedophiles and groomers in every classroom, waiting for the chance to de-penisify your sons. 

Second is the persecution complex. White Christian (particularly men) are under attack, besieged and put upon. Stewart cites a survey in which the vast majority of Christian nationalists say that white folks experience just as much or more discrimination as minority groups. She also argues that it's not so much economic anxiety as status or culture anxiety that drives the movement (though I can see how money serves as a stand-in for status).

Third is the notion that Christian [sic] nationalists have a "unique and privileged connection to this land." The insistence that this is a Christian nation, and therefor tied to Christian roots, means that it makes sense to them to insist that the Bible be in classrooms and prayer in schools. People who are aligned to the correct set of values and beliefs are entitled to rights and privileges that other people are not.

The fourth piece of the mindset that "Jesus may have great plans for us, but the reality is that this is a cruel place in which only the cruel survive." So what others may seem as punitive policies of unnecessary and deliberate cruelty ("the cruelty is the point") are not so much an expression of anger and hatred as a desire to force people to see the world as it really is. What some see as a deliberate attempt to make life shitty for others can be, from the Christian [sic] nationalist mindset, an almost-kind attempt to tear peoples' blinders off so they can see and deal with the world as it really is-- shitty.

Put those four together and you get the look at how these folks tick, and once again, it's not because they are stupid and/or evil. It's not a new set of views-- the Puritans would nod along with most of this and, as I would tell my 11th grade students, if you wanted a mindset that would equip a group of people to survive and persevere the nightmarish conditions that those first pilgrims faced, you couldn't do much better. Southern colonists might have been sustained by the promise of wealth and independence, but the Massachusetts crowd could rest secure in knowing that live is always a cruel struggle, but as people with a special connection to God, they would take their place at the top of this particular mountain. Now their descendants are pissed off that a bunch of people who don't even have that special connection to the Correct God are being carried up to the top of the mountain via an easy trip that they haven't even earned by being Right People.

Stewart looks at education. She gives a section to a pretty thorough look at how Moms for Liberty leverage the idea that Moms have "special moral authority" (even if the Moms are seasoned political activists). She also takes a look at the crowd that argues that since school prayer was abolished, schools have become "temples of secular humanism" that teach, as Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters, atheism as a secular religion. Stewart attended a M4L gathering, and those pictures are stunning. Stewart has a sharp eye, an ability to spot the moments that really capture and illuminate the larger picture.

Stewart says there are two basic types of groups undermining public education-- the Proselytizers and the Privatizers. Both have powerful backers, and Stewart has done an exhaustive job of locating and naming names. They share a desire to dismantle public education as it is and repurpose the funding for religious organizations and private schools, all intended to bring up students who believe their preferred brand of religion and/or their preferred brand of conservative politics (because part of the persecution they suffer under is a society that indoctrinates children into Wrong Thinking, so if they can just capture institutions, they can properly indoctrinate children in Right Thinking. to which millions of teachers say, "Good luck with that").

Again, not new. Stewart quotes Jerry Falwell from 1979, dreaming of "a day when there are no more public schools; churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them." She also nods back To Milton Friedman's 1955 paper that laid the groundwork for the idea of education not as a public good, but as a consumer item that gets bought and sold on the open market where consumers get what they can afford. If they can't afford much, well, life is cruel and human beings aren't equal and if you got the short end of the stick, that's your problem.

As one member of the Ziklag group explains, the goal is not to "just throw stones," but to "take down the education system as we know it today."

In Mr. Lancaster's System, Adam Laats talks about how early 19th century reformers wanted a school system to help deal with all those naughty children out on the streets. I wonder if the future imagined by some of these folks would take us back around to that concern, or if the wealthy this time would just build higher walls for their gated communities.

Stewart's book is well-sourced and pulls apart the many layers and differences within the many parts of the movement. She has done a ton of leg work and interviews, resulting in a book that is illuminating and instructive, if not particularly encouraging. But these days there's a lot of noise and smoke and not-particularly-useful theories about what is happening and why; this book brings some much-needed clarity to our difficult moment in US history. For folks whose focus has been mostly on education, this helps put the education debates in a wider context. I strongly recommend this one.