More Administrators Should Be Scared

I almost feel sorry for Ebony Parker, the former assistant principal who is being sued for a pile of money by the teacher who was shot by a sixth grader.

Parker is in court again because she was told multiple times that the child had a gun in his backpack, and she didn't do anything about it. Parker has already been indicted by a grand jury for criminal charges of neglect and abuse regarding the incidents.

Teacher Abigail Zwermer was shot; the bullet passed through her hand and into her chest. Doctors determined that it would be safer to leave the bullet in place, so Zwermer gets to carry that little memento around for the rest of her days.

But I really do feel almost sorry for Parker, because administrators do this kind of shit all the time. All. The. Time. Parker just happened to lose the lottery.

Ask any teacher. It's likely they can tell the story of some administrator minimizing a concern or dodging a student issue.

This child was talking about suicide. "Well, just keep an eye on him all the time."

This child keeps bullying Janie on the bus. "Well, you know, boys will be boys."

This child screams and acts out every day in class. "Have you tried moving her seat?"

This child keeps calling the LGBTQ student in class names. "Maybe you should call home."

I just this student to the office five minutes ago for disrupting class by throwing their desk at other students. Why is he back in my classroom? "Well, we had a little chat and I think he'll be good now."

This child threw a book at me and hit me in the face with it. "Well, you look okay now. Maybe you should call home."

This child threatened to shoot me and other students in class. ""He was probably just worked up. Keep an eye on it, won't you?"

A good administrator is like a solid roof-- they keep the rain and snow and sleet off the teacher's head so that she can do her job. That includes helping students manage problems that go beyond the teacher's classroom duties.

I am not arguing that every disruptive or troublesome student needs punishment. But they do need some combination of consequences and support, and when administration tries to slough off those needs, when administration just kicks the can down the road, there can be really ugly outcomes. 

I've worked for several administrators whose problem-solving technique was Make Some Ineffective Noises and Hope The Trouble Passes. That's simply not okay. It doesn't provide safety and support for teachers to do their jobs. It also doesn't serve the interests of the students-- not the ones with the problem and not the ones who are in that same class.

I don't wish a life-derailing lawsuit on anyone, but I do wish that lawsuits like this one would scare some administrators into getting out of their cushy office chair and doing their damned job. That includes taking seriously teacher warnings about a threat to the education or safety of students. If you can't do it because it's the right thing to do, do it at the very least because when the worst happens, someone is going to hold you accountable. 

Diane Ravitch Gets It

Over at Forbes.com, I've posted a piece about Diane Ravitch's new memoir, An Education. That's my grown-up fake journalist piece; but I have a few more blog-appropriate things to say. 

Most folks know the basic outline of the Ravitch career, that she was a recognized and successful part of the conservative ed reform establishment who then turned away from the Dark Side and joined the Resistance--hell, basically co-founded the Resistance. 

I have never heard her talk or write much about what that change cost her, and she doesn't really talk about it in those terms in this book, but the early chapters show just how in that world she was. Connected to all the right people, welcome at all the right gatherings, in demand as a speaker, and the people--the names just keep coming. Ravitch was in the Room Where It Happens, and not just in it, but close friends with some of the folks in it with her. And she walked away from all that.

I don't point to that to say we should feel sad for what she gave up, but as a sign of just how tough she is. She looked at the reality on the ground and concluded that she had to change some core beliefs, and having changed them, she had to act on them. If there was more of that kind of intellectual and ethical toughness in the world, the world would be a better place. It's unusual enough that folks on the privatizer side have often assumed that someone must be paying her off, and a handful of people on the public school side were reluctant to fully trust her. 

There are other details in the book that attest to her guts and hard work. Her first book, The Great School Wars, was a history of the New York City public school system-- a massive research project that Ravitch in her mid-thirties just assigned to herself, a project so thorough and well-constructed that she could use it as her PhD thesis. 

There are lots of fun details in the book-- imagine the young Diane Ravitch swinging on a rope ladder outside a Wellesley dorm room where a formal dinner was in progress.

The book tells the story of how she got there, how she concluded that the policies that she had believed in were simply not so. And again-- many another person would have at that point either kept going through the motions, or retreated to a quiet cave, but Diane instead became an outspoken critic of the very policies, organizations, and people who had been her professional world.

Back in the early 2010s, I was a high school English teacher in a quiet rural and small town corner of Pennsylvania. I knew things were happening in education that just felt really wrong, and I went searching for answers. What I found was Diane Ravitch's blog, which was like a gathering place for many voices of advocacy for public school. It was where I found many writers who could help me make sense of things like Common Core and NCLB's undermining of public education. 

There are several people who were responsible for my finding an audience (or the audience finding me) but it was Diane's blog that got me my earliest connections to audiences. I didn't know any of these folks, didn't have any of the connections that hold together movements. At my first NPE conference, the most common question I got was some version of "Who the heck are you and where did you come from?" Diane's network had made it possible for me to find my connections with a larger movement.

I'm just one example of how Diane's extraordinary generosity in sharing her platform allowed all sorts of supporters of public education from all across the country to connect and support each other. It's a notably different approach to leadership than, say, making a movement all about yourself in an attempt to collect personal power on the backs of followers instead of lifting everyone up to be a leader and activist in their own little corner of the world.

The book provides part of answer to where a person like Diane comes from, where that kind of intellectual and ethical courage and diligence come from. And it also provides a clear, compact explaining of where modern ed reform has gone wrong, from the toxic test-and-punish approach of NCLB to the billionaire-driven privatization push to the culture panic debates currently raging. If you want to hand someone a quick simple explainer of what has gone wrong, you can do worse than the last few chapters of this book.

At 223 pages, this is a brisk read but an illuminating one. I highly recommend it. 

 

The Wrong Civics and Language

Rick Hess makes a point about civics education, specifically, how the real world lessons of civics are teaching an entire generation the wrong lessons. 

There’s a lot of handwringing about what the hell America’s young people are thinking. They’re deeply anxious about the future. They’re shockingly comfortable saying that it’s okay to use violence to stifle speech. They’re skeptical of democracy. They exhibit a disturbing affinity for socialism.

This isn’t good. And while it can be easy to slip into grumbling—“Damn kids, get off my lawn!”—every generation goes through this handwringing. As we turn into our parents, it’s easy to forget how worrisome our parents found us.

That doesn’t mean the concerns are misplaced, though. I think they do go beyond the inevitable “kids today” grumbling. 

We might also throw in the mental health issues and general air of dread. We're going to wrangle over some details (I still haven't located that school where the teachers are all teaching that America is awful), but I have to agree with his larger thesis:

A reasonable observer could conclude that America’s leaders are striving to deliver a lesson in dysfunctional democracy, irresponsible stewardship, corrupt capitalism, and disdain for the rule of law.

Add fear and panic to that list. You can list all the examples yourself, and while Hess may reach a little too Both Sides this, again, he's fundamentally on point. If you are a young American, it's been a while since you've seen the government actually work, or even seen more than a handful of politicians attempt to act out of principle and patriotism rather than opportunism and tribalism. We haven't seen government perform its basic functions (pass a real budget on time lately?) and we haven't seen it respond effectively to a crisis. 

Covid is only the most recent example-- I'm not talking about the flatfooted response to it in real time which is in many ways understandable, but the immediate work of turning it to political advantage, an impulse so overwhelming that Donald Trump doesn't dare brag about his one legitimate accomplishment in getting a vaccine out quickly and helping life get back to slight-more-normal. 

We can look back at the housing collapse of 2008 and the recession it spawned, or cast back to the Enron scandal (only 2001, and lots of folks have already forgotten). In so any cases, institutions failed, and our civic institutions focused on getting use from the damage rather than mitigating it. 

We are drowning in debt and dysfunction, a malignant late-stage capitalism dominated by make-nothing rentiers, watching government harnessed to nothing more profound than one man's thirst for fealty and vengeance. I have to nod when Hess writes, 

Honestly, if I were a teen or a twentysomething watching this unfold, I might have trouble mustering much faith in our institutions or values, too. I’d certainly be skeptical of educators who yammer about foundational principles when our leaders evince such blatant disrespect for those values in practice. Indeed, I might regard faith in democratic norms or free markets as a sucker’s game, best left to those ill-informed or naïve enough to ignore the evidence they can see with their own eyes.

This dovetails with another piece from the free market axis of reformerland. Robert Pondiscio returns to the point that teaching should embody humility and neutrality, his familiar point that teachers are not supposed to enter the classroom as "change agents" or "architects of democracy."

Public education is, however, an essential government service. It exists not to change society but to sustain it—to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends. That mission requires restraint, not evangelism; humility, not heroism.

I actually agree with Pondiscio; teachers should enter the classroom as agents of the community, not crusaders for their own ideology. 

Except...

In the world where under-thirty folks have grown up, as described by Hess, where would they have identified the "shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms" on which the country depends. When the President has spent a decade trashing civic and legal norms, when a vocal part of the body politic is hollering to undo the civil rights movement. If you are of Certain Ages, as Hess, Pondiscio and I are, it may be easy to remember the ideals and norms central to this country on its best days. If you are under thirty, I'm not sure those things are obvious. If MAGA is correct in their general set of beliefs, then there are a bunch of old norms to be thrown out; if they are wrong, what is there for teachers except to be self-directed rebellious "architects of democracy." (You can substitute your favorite far-Left bete noir if you like; I just don't think that voice is very loud right now).

I'm trying to dance around a lot of rabbit holes here, but if you are someone who has been holding the wrong end of America's diversity shtick for years, none of this is new. The Youngs are not the first to deal with the idea that the government might not be trustworthy and the dominant culture might not be hospitable, even as there is constant battling over what the "dominant culture" really is. Is it the loudest one? Is it the culture that a well-connected ideologically-driven government-linked organization insists is the "true" one? The one that gets most media coverage, or the one that saturates the interwebs? Is it the locally dominant culture that a teacher should represent? 

In short (ish), I think teachers should serve the community and not their own personal agenda (up to a point but not, say, requiring LGBTQ persons to pretend they are straight). But that's a pretty complicated tangle of stuff to sort out.

But I have a thought. I think there's something the culture is promoting that may be even worse than messed up civics. I may have a professional bias here, between years of teaching English and writing, but we have a big problem with language.

We are drowning in an absolute ocean of bullshit and lies, so much so that we implicitly understand that there are times when words simply don't mean what they say, or even anything at all. My siblings and I have to explain to our 91 year old mother that all the things that pop up on her computer screen are simply lies and can be ignored (thank God her phone is now out of circulation and she no longer gets calls from lying marketeers). I am daily amazed at how we have accepted the idea that to simply function and get through the day, one must assume that a huge percentage of the language one encounters is deliberately dishonest. 

Mike Johnson can offer some absurd statement and he knows he's lying and all of us from all the tribes know that he's lying and he knows we know, but this is language used as a sort of jousting match that doesn't resemble the actual purpose of language. AI uses language as a sort of constructed tool that is in no way related to the idea of one intellect trying to communicate with another. Dear Leader long ago embraced the notion that language is a stick you use to poke other people, and that said poking can be done more effectively if one lets go of the antique notion that your words should be connected however loosely to reality.

At the same time, the playing field is loaded with people whose whole professional career is about selling a particular idea or accomplishing advocacy goals, regardless of what they have to say or do to get the job done. Or consider the feckless Democrats, who too often end up paralyzed because are trying to craft language that will push the voters in the right direction, instead of trying to communicate what they actually believe. 

Language is our most basic tool for bridging the gap between humans, yet we increasingly accept that it is also useful to manipulate others or fend them off. Is it any wonder that the Youngs are struggling with feelings of isolation? 

We can say, correctly, that this is not new, that language has always been used at times to manipulate and manhandle, but I'll argue that for whatever reason (politics? internet explosion? modern media?) it is now way way worse than ever, and dangerously so.

So yes-- we would be better off as a country if people worried more about the lessons they are teaching the Youngs when it comes to civics, but I say the same for language.

We won't, as a culture. do it, because too many people find the abuse of language too useful, and because it would be hard to win their favorite arguments if they argued honestly, with words that actually say what they mean. That in turns brings on a lot of conjecture about what someone is up to and why, with that conjecture also wrapped in layers of dishonest baloney. So instead of talking about what we're really talking about, we get trapped in endless arm wrestling over how to "frame" the discussion aka redefine the language so that it means what we want it to mean. 

So if you're in a classroom, make the use of accurate and honest language a daily, explicit value. Value language as a tool for communicating and understanding rather than manipulating and attack. Cool thing about this is that it requires zero ideological baggage, but if we want to argue about the ideological baggage we have, the deal is to discuss it with honest and accurate language. There are so many days when I look at what is going on in the country and think we could do some much better if we would just talk about what we're actually talking about instead of trying to leverage bullshit as a sort of force against opponents.

We can't have a real discussion about or display of civics without accurate and honest use of language. But with honest and accurate language, there's not much we couldn't talk about; even if we couldn't settle it, we would at least emerge with a better understanding of what's going on. 

It's a big dream, like dreaming that we'll have a culture that values civics and culture and considers what effect adult misbehavior is having on the children. But it's a dream worth having. And if all that seems too complicated, I'll leave you with a simple principle that I try to use with my own children. It's not complicated, but when I'm making my choices about what to do and how to do it, I boil it down to a simple question--

What do I want my children to see me doing?

If only we could get a few more people to try that out. 

The Department of Labor's Poster Boy

Geoff Bowser, a real estate and employment attorney in Brooklyn, put together a collection of all the posters/memes the Department of Labor has been posting since around Labor Day. 

Well, that looks totally normal and not at all racist and sexist and like maybe it was translated from the original German.

I am wondering what the effect would be if this little campaign was taken to the halls of a local school. How could we expect students to react to this? Especially the students who are not white christian males? 

I mean, what is the message for educators and education? Only white males needed to be prepared for jobs in the future, and everyone else should just... disappear? If we're saying "Your nation needs you" to white males, then what are we saying to everyone else (other than telling white women "Go make some babies")? 

It certainly fits with the regime's overall message on education, which is that a good education is only for Certain People, that only Certain People are going to build America's future, that the "homeland" is only supposed to be the home of a select few. 

How exactly are public schools supposed to translate this into effective pedagogy? Are public school teachers supposed to just pretend this isn't some racist bullshit here, or are they supposed to just chime in and explain to their students of color that they should prepare. in fact, for life as second class citizens? Should schools go back to the days when guidance departments told young women, "No math for you sweetie. You just need a full courseload of home ec."

This is the visual equivalent of the quiet part out loud. Just imagine a whole school with one of these posters on every single wall, every place a student looks. This is a hell of a picture of the future to inflict on young Americans, and a frightening vision of what a school in such a future would be. 

ICYMI: Food Bank Edition (10/26)

Yesterday the Board of Directors, the CMO, and I all spent the morning helping out with the monthly distribution from our church's food bank. This time it served over around 250 "units" of food and support to members of the community. These are scary times, particularly for folks who expect to lose their SNAP benefits next week, and while it's something to contact my elected reps a few gazillion times and try to agitate for Doing Better as a country, it's also worthwhile to get out there and do something concrete to help people get through their days. I recommend it highly; somewhere around you there is volunteer work you could help do.

I wrote more than I read this week, but I still have some reading recommendations for you. Here we go.

This ‘public Christian school’ opened quietly in Colorado. Now there could be a legal fight.

Well, we knew this issue would be up again. The theory behind the lawsuit is now a familiar one---these Christians can't fully and freely practice their religion unless they get taxpayer dollars to help fund it. Ann Schimke and Erica Melzer report for Chalkbeat.

Trump Gutted the Institute of Education Sciences. Its Renewal Is in Doubt.

A major part of the data and information and things we think we know about schools in this country came from the Institute of Education Sciences, so of course Dear Leader gutted it. Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed gets into the messy rubble and prospects for the future.

AI "agents," man

Ben Riley runs down information about the AI "agents" trying to worm their way into education. Also, a nifty assortment of links.

US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun

Everything going just perfectly in the surveillance state.

Where Did the Money Go?

Sue Kingery Woltanski explains that Florida has decided to hide data, students, and funding. One more amazing look at education the way only Florida can do it.

Book Bans and Bullshit

From Frazzled, a look at the history of moral panic and the people who profit from it.

Remembering Why There’s a Special Education Law

Nancy Bailey explains the importance of providing education and care for students with special needs, because those services are under siege.

AI-generated lesson plans fall short on inspiring students and promoting critical thinking

In one of the least-surprising pieces of news ever, a pair of researchers found that AI-generated lesson plans are not that great.

Now Is the Time of Monsters

Audrey Watters takes a look at the wave of AI slop in education. It is not good.

When School Content Decisions Become Unconstitutional

Steve Nuzum continues to cover the rising tide of scholastic censoring in South Carolina.

What the History of Supermarkets Teaches Us About AI in Schools

Andrew Cantarutti draws some interesting parallels between the history of supermarkets and the push for AI in schools. Several good conclusions, including to delay your implementation until some actual evidence appears.

Ohio Reform of Local Property Taxes Must Increase State’s Investment to Avoid Penalizing Public Schools

Jan Resseger looks at Ohio's attempt to mess with its property tax rules while blaming its troubles on school districts, because of course they do.

Grift, Grit, and the Great Voucher Grab

TC Weber and a pot pourri of all the Tenessee education shenanigans.

Calling Out The Washington Post Editorial Board for Gaslighting the Public: Defending the Right of Children to Learn to Read and Write without Political Restraint

Denny Taylor argues that the Washington Post's declaration of an end to the reading wars is bunk, and offers some insider insights about some of the players in that war.

The Reckoning: Sora 2 and the Year We Said Enough

Nick Potkalitsky blogs at Educating AI, and here he offers a reflection on how many ways AI is bad for education and society, and offers a decent AI literacy plan.

The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage

I really like this essay in the New York Times by Leighton Woodhouse explaining why the right-wing notion that our founders were One People is a bunch of baloney.

Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning

I have subscribed to Maria Popova's newsletter The Marginalian for years, and it remains a great outlet for beauty and humanity. See also "Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World"

How To Join ICE

The Onion with an 8 step process for joining the regime's outfit of official thuggery.

This week, over at Forbes.com, I looked at Ohio's plan to put religion in the classroom and at Mississippi's plan to use distance learning to patch over their empty teacher positions. 

We have listened to the soundtrack of Sing many times at our house, and while I'm tired of most of it, the soundtrack is redeemed by another Stevie Wonder just-for-an-animated-flick banger. Plus Ariana Grande, pre-Glinda. 

Please sign up for my regular newsletter. You can see all of my stuff without having to venture out into the social media swamp. And it's free.

The Apolitical Armed Forces

There's been concern lately over Dear Leader's attempts to politicize the armed forces.

This is concerning because the United States Armed Forces have a long tradition of being apolitical.

This doesn't mean that soldiers cannot and do not have any political thoughts. It does not mean that they don't engage in political activities, like voting. Certainly many if not most members belong to one political party or another.

But the expectation is that they will not, when in uniform and acting as members of the Armed Forces, appear to endorse or support one party or another. Even if they have strong political beliefs--and some of them most certainly do--the expectation is that they do not need to bring explicit political endorsements into the daily exercise of their job. Certainly officers are not supposed to openly push for one party or another. It may be obvious from how they conduct themselves, the values they live out, but they still are expected to not say things like "I am a Democrat and you should be, too" or "Anyone who doesn't vote Republican will suffer serious consequences in my unit." All soldiers should be treated fairly and equitably, regardless of their chosen party.

And where there are political differences, the armed forces do not deal with them by siloing soldiers. The US Army does not aim to reduce political disagreements among soldiers by forming separate Democrat and Republican platoons, assigned to defend only parts of the country that voted their way. Neither does the US Army tell soldiers that they must support a particular party: who they vote for is a matter for them to handle in their own time in their own way (or not at all, if they prefer). 

To do otherwise is to interfere with the function of the armed forces. To openly endorse one party over another would get in the way of the armed forces doing the work they are called on to do. It is to warp the definition of a good soldier to mean "Good party member." It would sow division and mistreatment, creating all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with the actual mission of the armed forces. There may be private armies that only defend Democrats or only fight for Republicans, but they will never serve as defenders of an entire nation. 

This is not a post about politics in the military.

This is a post about religion in schools. 

Eva Moskowitz Gets Hit In The Comments

They tell you not to read the comments. This time we're going to.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and uber-boss of Success Academy Charter Schools based in New York City, and as such has been at the center of plenty of controversy. She has recently stirred up more by expanding her operation to Florida, so maybe that's why the Washington Post decided she should get some op-ed space to pen a promo for her biz.

The piece starts with the usual chicken littling about how education is in crisis (if disaster has supposedly been imminent for forty-some years, and still hasn't happened, is it possible that the news of imminent disaster was not entirely accurate). Then she lets loose with this howler--

As an educator, I know that all children can rise to the challenge if they are held to high standards.

Not how Success Academy works. As Robert Pondiscio explains in his excellent book about the charter, Success Academy absolutely creams families. What Moskowitz has repeatedly demonstrated is that if you hold students (and their families) to high standards, you can chase away the ones who will not achieve success in your program. 

Moskowitz goes on to deploy all the usual PR puff in service of the charter school biz, Florida's dismantling of public education, federal choicers, and finally, the pursuit of excellence. 

If the U.S. is to remain strong, we must concentrate on excellence — not for some children but for all.

Awesome. I can only assume that this means that Success Academy will now open its doors to any and all students, rather than selecting out those they don't care to help pursue excellence.

There's a lot of hooey in Moskowitz's advertorial, and you can be forgiven for not bothering to read it. But let me share with you some of the over 800 comments on the piece, because they will restore your faith in humanity's ability to see through privatizers' smokescreen. 

I'm going to start with excerpts from the comments with the most upvotes:

I evaluated charter schools for twenty years. You may view my publications on line. Charters perform no differently in terms of achievement than traditional schools do, when serving the same students. What they do is transfer teacher pay and benefits to managers and investors. What they also do is advertise prolifically and use deception to control their population. Don't be misled by propaganda.

Unlike public schools, charter schools are allowed to kick out underperforming kids and children with behavior issues. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. They do this while draining funds from public schools.

The correct answer is to improve the public schools, not create schools that take away money from public schools. Plus the charter schools are allowed to cherry pick their students. They don't have to take on the slow learners, the handicapped, the behavior impaired, etc

Arizona now allows ANY student to take public funds for any school or home schooling. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy; underprivleged students overwhelmingly remain in public schools. Charter schools are not required to accept mentally and physically disabled students, and can remove students with behavioral issues. Let's put charter schools on a level playing ground and see how they do.

The last time we let the capitalists’ take over one of our public institutions was when we allowed hospitals to go non-profit. How’s that been working for us?

Sure right, because the art of teaching suddenly changes under people who work for a CEO, Students have higher IQ's, Teachers have top of the line skills, and the tooth fairy leaves and extra five bucks under your pillow.

Absolute rubbish.

The American public school system is dedicated to educating all the children, of the poor as well as the rich. Charter schools are about white power, about Christian nationalism, about the power of the rich to make sure kids don't learn about slavery, about income inequality, and all the rest.

Don't let these charter school businesses fool you, they have zero interest in improving outcomes, it's all about getting their greedy hands on the $1 trillion the USA spends every year on public education.

Charter schools do no better ON AVERAGE than public schools. Fact proven by studies.

If some charters are so great, why can't they tell us WHY and then why can't we replicate the reasons in public schools? If you can replicate the reasons in enough charter schools to really make a difference NATIONWIDE, then why can't they be replicated in public schools?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any school that gets to pick its students will do better than schools that are required to take all who live within its jurisdiction.

How does giving money meant for public schools to corporations that operate charter schools improve education?

No data or proof that "charter schools" are better. I remember when Catholic schools couldn't handle a challenging kid...they sent them to public school... who had to take them

Let's not forget that more than 25% of charter schools close within five years, according to the US Department of Education. So, if a kid enters a charter school in kindergarten, more than a quarter of the time, it's shuttered before they get to middle school. And, I suspect, attending a failing school that's going to close is not cupcakes and rainbows.

Absolutely not. There’s no oversight Also- unless you are REQUIRED to admit the most challenging students then you cannot compare the with a public school. These schools are only interested in making money for their CEO - many don’t even pay teachers and staff well. We can improve public education, we choose not to.

There's absolutely no financial reporting for most charter schools and Moscowitz has led the charge for no financial accountability!! We supposed to give public funds and not be able to audit is Moscowitz new math!

Get back to us when you have a successful plan for ALL students.

"The promise of public charter schools is" ... segregation

I had to go all the way to comments with only 4 upvotes before I found anyone remotely supportive of Moskowitz's comments. By the time I got to single-upvote posts, I had seen 5 or 6 that supported Moskowitz. She may have made Dear Leader's short list for ed secretary, but with the readers of the Washington Post, Eva Moskowitz was not pulling much support. Good to know there are so many people out there who see the problems.

Bad Political Education Advice

Okay, here's a puzzler for you. Can you identify the party of this speaker from the positions he has staked out?

The teachers' union is a bad special interest and should be ignored. Parents should have more power. There should be way more taxpayer-funded school choice.

One might reasonably guess GOP, but nope--that's Ben Austin, who has worked in everything from President Bill Clinton's staff to Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. He headed up Students Matter, got involved in the Vergara lawsuit, founded Parent Revolution. These days he's running Education Civil Rights Now.  And he's in The Hill to tell you that what the Democrats need on education is to be anti-public school Republicans.

This is the breed of corporate Democrat that will neither shut up or wise up. 

"Democrats became the party of public education because they had the courage to fight for it," says Austin. Also, "And it’s long past time for Democrats to translate 'high quality public schools' from a soundbite into a civil right for every child in America."

Which sounds great, except that it remains unclear how one supports public education by pushing for policies that drain public schools of funding, provide subsidies for the wealthy, pump taxpayer dollars into religious schools, and leaves public schools with limited funds to try to serve the students that choice schools won't take.  

Austin has been in the game too long to be as disingenuous as he sounds in places like this post wherein he praises DFER and seems to be suggesting that Trump's ed policy may have a point. 

Listening to teachers union leaders like Weingarten and her allies, you’d think charter schools were created in an underground right-wing laboratory as part of a secret plot to “privatize” public education. In fact charter schools were originally proposed in 1988 by her own American Federation of Teachers predecessor Al Shanker.

I worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton, who proudly ran on charter schools when only one existed in America. President Barack Obama later scaled high-quality charters as part of his bold Race to the Top agenda.

Charters are public schools, which means they are free and secular, cannot have admission requirements, and have strict regulatory controls on educational quality. That doesn’t sound like a Republican plot to destroy public education to me.

Yes, Shanker proposed them-- and then disowned them when they were transformed into a threat to public education. Yes, Clinton and Obama backed them (along with some other crappy education policy), and that oddly enough coincides with Democrats losing the mantle of the party of education. And Austin cannot possible have been under a rock long enough to believe that his characterization of charter schools is accurate. 

He earlier writes

I have a healthy skepticism about the public policy implications of scaling a wild-west national Education Savings Account plan with few regulatory guardrails to ensure educational quality — not to mention separation of church and state red flags or my belief in the promise of public education.

If he thinks charters are immune from these issues, or has not noticed that the distinction between charters and voucher schools is being increasingly blurred--well, he can't possibly not know all of this. This is a guy who has been pushing choice for years and years (even teaming up with Bellwether to do it at one point). 

In his post, he tries to thread the needle that corporate Dems have been trying to navigate since 2016-- on the one hand, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos and Linda McMahon are odious leaders, but on the other hand, there's not a thing that these corporate Dems love that the Trump regime does not. 

At least Austin doesn't wax rhapsodic about how much better the private sector would be at running schools. I guess that's something. (Cue someone in the comments sending a link to Austin saying just that in 3... 2... 1...).

Austin, like some others, seems to believe that the key to getting Dems back in the hearts of blue collar regular folks includes jettisoning cooperation with teachers and their unions and backing a system that will refuse to serve many if not most of their children, while stripping resources from the neighborhood schools that they know and largely love. Or to frame it another way, Dems could poach Republican voters by offering the same stuff with a little less vigor. Because, "Let us offer you what you're already getting, only a little watered down" is always a great pitch.

Austin is correct in being upset about the legal argument, trotted out in a few cases now, that a state only has an obligation to provide an education, but not necessarily a good one (though that is more of a legal argument than a policy position). He's correct in believing that every child should be guaranteed a high quality education. He is incorrect that charter schools and a disregard for teachers is the way to get there. And he is doubly incorrect that the Democratic Party ought to be following his advice--advice that has been field tested for decades and found wanting. 

Can They Fix Chatbot Bias?

"ChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction," said OpenAI in a post that detailed some of their attempts to measure bias in their bot. I'm not reassured.

It is an intriguing experiment. Thery asked the bot five versions of the same question, ranging from liberally biased to conservatively biased, then waited to see whether the bot would take the bait or would instead provide an answer that remained neutral. 

As you can see, one of the problems with this design is that adding "bias" to the question changes the question. I'm not sure that the two extremes on the above example could be expected to yield similar unbiased answers. The experiment marked five types of biased response-- invalidations (responding with the counter-boas), escalation (egging the bias on), personal political expression (the bot pretends it's a person that holds the expressed opinion), asymmetric coverage (not properly both-sidesing the answer) and political refusals (bot says it can't answer that question). 

All of this evaluation of the answers was performed, of course, by a Large Language Bot.

There are problems here, most notably the idea that both-sidesing is unbiased-- I don't need both sides of flat earth theory or holocaust denial. 

And in fact, lack of both-sidesing was one of the three more common biases that OpenAI found. The other two were personal opinion (the bot pretends it's a person with an opinion rather than noting sources, which is problematic for a whole lot of reasons) and escalation. There didn't seem to be a lot of countering a biased question with an answer biased in the opposite direction. 

This makes a lot of sense if you think of all prompts actually asking "What would a response to this look like?" What would a response to a biased question look like? Mostly it would look like a answer reflecting that same bias. 

The researchers note that liberal-bias questions seem to elicit the most biased answers. And they are going to fix that.

I have so many questions. For instance, "culture and identity" was one of their topic area, and I have to wonder how exactly one zeros in on objective unbiased statements in this area. Is a statement unbiased if it appears with attribution? 

The whole exercise requires a belief in some sort of absolute objective Truth for every and all topics, and that may fly for certain physical objects, but history of other social constructs are a whole world of subjective judgments; that's how we can still be debating the causes of the Civil War. How exactly will the tweaking be done, and who exactly will determine that the tweakage has been successful?

But that's not even the biggest eyebrow raiser here. Everyone who believes that LLMs are magical omniscient truth-telling oracles should be taking note of the notion that the bot's bias can be adjusted. Users should understand that ChatGPT's answer to "What caused the Civil War" will always be the result of whatever adjustments have been made to the bot's biases (including whether or not to see the use of "Civil War" and not "War Between the States" as an expression of bias).  

The very idea that AI bias can be "clamped down" is an admission that the bias exists and cannot be eliminated. Especially because, as this article suggests, the clamping is part of an attempt to get conservatives to stop complaining about ChatGPT bias; they will, of course, accept that ChatGPT is unbiased when it is aligned with their biases. At which point everyone else will see the bot as biased. Rinse and repeat.

The problem is even more obvious with AI under the ownership and control of a person whose biases are located somewhere way out in the weeds of left field. I'm thinking of Elon Musk and his repeated attempts to get Grok to display its objectivity by agreeing with him.

GIGO-- garbage in, garbage out. It's one of the oldest rules of computer stuff, and when the garbage is a mountain of human generated internet trash, you can expect human biases to be included. 

But one of the most persistent lies about computers is that they are objective and unbiased, that they will only ever report to us what is True. Trying to get chatbots to fall in line with that fable is a fool's errand, and believing that the bot overlords have succeeded is simply being fooled.  

Margaret Spellings Still Doesn't Get It

Why would David Frum (or anyone else) bother to interview Margaret Spellings? But he did, and a friend told me to go look at the result (thanks a lot, Jennifer), and it's a celebration of many of the worst, most failed ideas of 21st century ed reform.

Who's that now?

You can skip this if you remember her, but for those who don't--

Spellings is a career politician, but her career has often intersected with education, and it has generally intersected with it in the same way that a passing motorist once intersected with my open car door, changing it for the worse. She was Bush's domestic policy advisor from 2001 to 2004, then most notably the Secretary of Education from 2005-2009, where she got to lead the charge on No Child Left Behind. She had been with George Bush since he deposed Ann Richards as governor of Texas, brought into the Bush fold by Karl Rove.

Spellings has worked in everything from lobbying to political consulting. Some of her opponents view her as a culture wars combatant; she infamously called PBS to demand that they yank a children's show episode that included a lesbian couple. (Also, fun fact: back in 2007 she went toe-to-toe with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over student loans).

While there are occasional attempts to portray her as some sort of complicated centrist, but mostly she has been a consistent source of nonsense about NCLB. She likes the narrative of test scores as part of national defense ("The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation") and she is another reformster to claim that, prior to NCLB's testing requirements, nobody knew if their schools were failing or not. Spellings has remained all in, loving not only national standards, but national standardized tests.

A decade ago she was in the Wall Street Journal, peering into the future, and what she sees is education as a consumer good:

Parents, for one, will have access to the flow of data, allowing them to help their children find the education that best fits them. Buyers, meaning the parents and students, will be in control of the education, selecting from an à la carte menu of options. Gone will be the fixed-price menu, where a student attends a school based upon geography and is offered few alternatives. Students and their parents can take their state and federal dollars and find an education that best suits them.

Like much of what Spellings has to say, this reveals a narrow and stunted view of education. In Spellings' world, education is not a public trust, helping to bind the communities that provide it and benefit from it. The social and civic growth of children, the learning about how to be their best selves and how to be in the world-- all of that will, I guess, happen somewhere else, because school is just about collecting the right modules of pre-employment training. Her dream of unleashing the foxes of market forces in the henhouse of education is not good news, and like many of Spellings' pet ideas encased in NCLB, long since proven to be bunk.

Spellings also has a checkered past with connections to predatory for-profit schools and the college loan collection industry. Or you can watch her do this little spot with the Boston Consulting Group (one of the four investment horsemen of reformsterism) arguing how more data and more information will help us "wring out efficiencies" so we can do "more with less." We've poured money into education and gotten no returns in "student achievement."

She landed a gig running the University of North Carolina a decade ago as part of a program to bring the university to heel, and she promptly threw LGBTQ students under the bus. She teamed up with fellow Very Wrong Former Secretary Arne Duncan for a Washington Post op-ed. And she was right there, post-pandemic to argue that the sacred Big Standardized Test must be brought back immediately. 

That Margaret Spellings.

The interview runs the greatest hits

After musing about MAGA sycophancy and the lack of self-respect, Frum, somehow connects that to his "dialogue" with Spellings, who he will introduce by harkening back to how her initials on White House speeches "struck awe in the hearts of all who saw them." Then "And she continues to strike awe..." in case the irony-o-meter hasn't yet registered for the problem of sycophancy.

Frum launches right into the old saw that at first, "steady consistent improvements in the performance" of students, by which they mean test scores went up, until they didn't. There are a variety of explanations for the 2010s test score stagnation; as someone who was in the classroom at the time, I would point directly to test prep having reached the point of diminishing returns. Those "gains" were about teaching students how to take the Big Standardized Test, and by the 2010s, we'd gotten as much return from that as we were ever going to.

But that's not the Spellings explanation. "We took our foot off the gas," by which she means we "allowed the states to really walk back on the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment, the transparency, and the consequence for failure." There's a lot of nothing in those terms, though she seems mostly to mean that more test and punish is what we need.

When NCLB and its unachievable goal of All Children Score Above Average By 2014 was finally rewritten in 2015, Spellings claims that states loosened things up too much. "Schools and states started manipulating their cut scores," she argues, failing to note that states had set cut scores every year since this dance started. The Spellings Theory of Action has always seemed to be that you set the cut scores real high, fail a lot of students, punish the schools for having those failing students and then... something that happens so that students don't fail in the following years. This is a lousy plan of action, and the failure of NCLB ought to be proof of its lousiness, but Spellings belongs to that family of single-minded reformsters whose argument is always, "If that idea failed, then we should get back in there and fail harder."

Covid, she argues, just made everything worse, combined with the fact "that we sort of didn't care as much in the accountability system," and Spellings again demonstrates the reformster unfailing belief that the "accountability system" aka The Big Standardized Test actually provides useful data. From the classroom perspective, test and punish was a lousy system that did not help with the work--especially since the test part was mediocre at best and toxic at worst. 

She will stop to genuflect at the altar of the Mississippi miracle (we're not going to get into the debunking of that here) and will quote Joel Klein, another classic reformstery neo-lib and the old "you can't say poverty affects education because education is supposed to cure poverty." Again, I don't want to go back down that rabbit hole other than to point out that Spellings is ignoring twenty years of nuanced and pointed criticism of these ideas.

Oh, but then we get this:

Frum: Why do so many professional educators dislike testing so much?

Spellings: Well, because it leads to accountability for grown-ups, and none of us like that particularly, I guess; it’s just a reality of being an adult and being responsible.

I think I speak for many professional educators when I say that Spellings can go straight to hell. Also, if you want to bring up accountability for grownups, how about discussing the leaders of NCLB and their unwillingness to accept feedback from professional educators about the issues with the test (which were not about objecting to being held accountable), or maybe just accepting accountability for the many failures of the whole NCLB test and punish program. But no-- it's 2025 and folks like Spellings are still refusing to say, "Maybe we made some mistakes there" and still lean on "Well, those dopey teachers weren't doing it right." Honestly, just right straight to hell.

But no, this woman can't take responsibility for anything. She brings up the criticism that test and punish narrowed curriculum to block out subjects like science and social studies because they aren't on the test, which was absolutely a real thing. In my school, 7th and 8th graders who were at risk of low scores on the BS Test were denied science and history so they could be jammed into double reading and double math. But Spellings--

And my response to that is it’s hard to learn science or social studies or history or anything else if you can’t read.

Frum decides that what the interview really needs is some racism, so he asks if maybe the rise of "a new kind of illegal immigration after 2014" that includes more families-- maybe that was dragging scores down? Spellings doesn't offer an appropriate response like, "David, what the hell" but she does dance around to avoid agreeing with him, eventually circling back to expectations. Then there's this--

No Child Left Behind—those words say it simply—was essentially an expectation that virtually every kid ought to have an expectation that they can get what they need in our public schools. And I’m not sure that people believe that anymore. And then our strategy now is: Get a voucher. Get the hell out. See about yourself. And this idea that it’s in our national interest for an institution called American public education to attempt to do something no other country does is important.

No. NCLB was the idea that if the feds squeezed teachers and schools hard enough, they would magically fix achievement issues and the federal and state governments would be off the hook for providing any kind of assistance or support. But for people whose idea was always to get to issuing vouchers, NCLB was a godsend because, by creating a task that schools could not possibly accomplish, it helped erode trust in public education. 

Spellings makes a good point about accountability for tax dollars being spent on vouchers and charters, but it's clear that she hasn't really paid attention to how that's going these days. 

Frum points out that lots of BS Tests are out of favor these days and Spellings thinks that's a shame. She likes the idea that Trump's extortion attempt "compact" includes a standardized test requirement. Frum acknowledges that there's a racial element to testing, but he and Spellings agree that the only alternative to a BS Test is word of mouth, and you know how racist that is. Mind boggling that these are the only two ways they can think of to evaluate students.

About the unions

Frum wonders if the punishments and rewards under NCLB should have applied to the unions somehow, since they opposed testing. Because, you know, that was just because the union's main thing is to protect their worst members. Not, mind you, because using test scores was like rolling dice with a teacher's career, or because all the teachers who didn't teach reading and math ended up on the short end of twisty evaluations shticks. And I don't entirely follow her response, but I think she's saying the people who oppose testing are semi-responsible for the elimination of the federal department because they wanted no accountability. Because in Spellings' mind, the BS Test only and always provides accountability, because it is magical and perfect.

Frum mentions that a major anti-test group offers the argument that testing makes teaching less fun. Spellings replies with another false dichotomy:

That might be true, and here’s why: There is a way—the word regiment comes to mind—but direct instruction prescribed in a sequential, serious way, where there’s fidelity of implementation and hewing to the research, is the path to success. Now, we have gotten into this idea that every teacher should go into their own classroom and create and invent and student-led and all of this kind of stuff, and it sounds like a blast, but does it work? And the answer has largely been no. So it’s just like, we wouldn’t want your physician making up the protocols for cancer treatment; neither should our teachers make up stuff and hope that it works, just the spray-and-pray method of teaching. And so, yeah, might that be less fun? Yeah, maybe. And I think one of the things I’m encouraged about is: What can technology do and media do and tools that are available through technology to make teaching more fun, to better engage students? But to get results, sometimes you gotta eat your broccoli.

Are there other options besides "serious" sequences aimed at getting results or "spray and pray"? Of course there are, and there need to be, because school is where students live most of their lives, and where they learn about how the world works, so maybe "the world is a dull dreary place where your focus stays on the dull business of producing results for someone else" isn't great. Neither is the anarchy of teachers pulling things out of their butts. I'll bet smart people can think of other options. Also, I note that Spellings is my age, and "technology will make school more fun" is exactly the kind of thing that makes us look like fossilized boomers.

Also, she agrees with cell phone bans. We're loaded with irony today.

There's a nice side trip in which Frum notes that Silicon Valley types are demonstrating a willingness or even zeal to write off vast stretches of the American population and say "Who needs them," which is a valid observation about that crowd. But he also asks why schools don't teach foreign languages and I'm wondering what the heck schools he is talking about. 

We end with some "what can parents do," to which Spellings observes that "we still have pretty significantly rich data about the quality of your schools," and no, no we do not. Test scores are strikingly meager and narrow, but no, she thinks that tiny slice of data is a big deal. It's that unexamined view and her resistance to any contradiction of it, that remains at the heart of all her bad ideas about education, and yet somehow, here she is, still one of the leading unexpert experts in the education policy world. These days she's CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has no policy tab for K-12 education, so maybe we can hope her attention will be focused elsewhere. Please.

ICYMI: No Kings Edition (10/19)

Well, that was a day yesterday. May we all live to enjoy less interesting times, but not less patriotic ones.. 

A reminder that amplifying voices, particularly in these days of AI slop choking the interwebs, is a helpful thing. There are many voices in the world these days, and some of them are full of it, and some of them aren't even actual voices, so when you find something that speaks to you, amplify it. Share it. Like it. Give it a little push out into the world.

Here's the list for the week.

Beyond Resilience Katrina at 20

Thomas Ultican provides a look at Ashana Bigard's excellent account of the charterizing of New Orleans, and how it turned out for the families and students.

Forgotten Mercy: Those Who Want Christianity in Public Schools

Nancy Bailey takes a look at the folks who want to shove christianiam into schools, and the particular brand of religion they favor, and the parts of Christianity they tend to forget.

This Week’s Federal Staff Reductions, Now Temporarily Stayed by a Judge, Would Undermine Educational Opportunity Across the States

Jan Resseger looks at how the latest rounds of staffing cuts are likely to hurt education for some folks.

The Legislature Goes to the Bathroom

Nancy Flanagan on the lawmaker obsession with bathroom stuff. 

‘Over my dead body.’ Manatee schools prepare to battle charter takeover plans

In Florida, a bunch of charter schools would like to just go ahead and take possession of taxpayer-owned school buildings. Some school districts are not happy.

Fact Checking "The Reading Wars Are Ending. Phonics Won" (Washington Post Editorial Board)

Paul Thomas debunks the latest bunch of bunk from the Washington Post bunkhouse.

Nearly all state funding for Missouri school vouchers used for religious schools

Completely unsurprising news from Missouri, where the voucher program turns out to be a make-taxpayers-fund-religious-schools program. Annelise Hanshaw reports for Missouri Independent.

Lying In Lansing: Republicans Manufactured a Sex Ed Crisis

In Michigan, some folks needed a reason for citizens to mobilize against new sex ed standards. So they made one up. Reported at Distill Social.

Data-driven Schools Are Not Child-Centered Schools

Lisa Haver, looking at Philly schools, wonders about the actual focus of schools that are data-driven.

Why Not Give Students What They Really Need?

John Warner is playing my song again. Why not aim for humanistic education? From Inside Higher Ed.

How Privilege Shapes the Children We Raise

This is a Facebook reel from an Oxford Union debate about meritocracy, and it explains how wealth brings privilege as well as anything I've ever seen, and it does it in just three minutes.

Georgia House approves budget with cuts to school voucher program lawmakers say reflect its need

The predictable next stage of vouchers-- declare "Damn, this is expensive" and start choking them off. Want to go back to your public school? Sure hope it's still there.

Indiana University fires student media director after he refused directive to censor newspaper

How not to operate your college newspaper program. And this wasn't even over a particular scandalous story. 

Long Covid Is Real-- And It's Changing an Entire Generation

Eli Cahan at Rolling Stone looks at long covid and kids. 

Appeals court backs Michigan school in banning 'Let's Go Brandon' shirts

The court agrees that it's not okay to parade obscenities even if you find cute ways to hide them. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this one, but the AP reports what happened.

Don't Stop Believin' in OpenAI

Ben Riley on the continued insistence that we must think that AI is an inevitable wave and not a huge bubble.

What Machines Don't Know

Eryk Salvaggio with a little explainer of LLMs as well as some clarity about what they cannot do, including this line: 

For the same reason that a dog can go to church but a dog cannot be Catholic, an LLM can have a conversation but cannot participate in the conversation.

Caro Emerald is part of the little niche genre of electro-swing. Years ago I was out shopping with my wife in a mall and this was playing and got my immediate attention.

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OK: A New Edu-wind Blowing

It may be an overstatement that Ryan Walters damaged the Christian Nationalist brand in Oklahoma, but his successor does seem to be putting energy into cleaning up after the previous state school superintendent. 

The Waters departure was a much of a messy amateur hour as his tenure in office. He left to run an anti-union union called Teacher Freedom Alliance (read more about them here). He made a deal with KOKH, the Oklahoma City Fox affiliate-- let him use their studio to announce his resignation (because of course he needed to do it on the tv), and in return he would answer questions. He immediately reneged on the deal, stomping out while silently ignoring the questions from reporter Wendy Suares. There's video of his departure, complete with Suares pointing the camera person after MAGA dudebro's walk of shame (see below).

The very next day, Walters's old buddy Gentner Drummond called for an investigation into spending at the Department of Education under Walters' leadership. That may be because Drummond repeatedly disagreed with some of Walters's policies and choices, or it may be because Drummond is gearing up for a run at the governor's seat. 

Current Governor Kevin Stitt, who was once a big Walters booster, had also backed away in recent months, including replacing members of the state board with some less-friendly-to-Walters options and expressing a wish for less drama. Walters, in keeping with his general attempts to be a sort of third-generation xerox of Dear Leader, responded by calling names and slinging accusations. The relationship (outlined here by Matt McCabe of News9) was over. 

It's worth noting that Stitt and Drummond are both conservative Republicans, so it will be interesting to see how much they're willing to distance themselves from Walters' brand of MAGA-fied numbskullery. Walters' shadow certainly fell all over the selection of his replacement.

"In my last seven years, it has been clear that the operation of this agency and the well-being of Oklahoma’s students have taken a back seat to the political ambitions of the individual who holds this position,” Stitt said in a statement when naming that replacement.

That replacement is Lindel Fields. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. 

He inherits a department that has been hollowed out under Walters's fiery reign, and with that, some lawsuits. The Oklahoma Supreme Court already put a big fat hold on the Walters social studies curriculum, which was loaded with christianist nationalism and election denialism.

The court had also taken up a lawsuit over Walters's plan to stick a Trump Bible in every classroom. The court gave Fields two weeks to decide if he wanted to just withdraw the Bible order and make the whole suit go away. 

Fields took one day. The Bible mandate is over. 

On top of that, Fields appears to be reviewing the rest of Walters's various edicts. Tara Thompson, department spokesperson, talked to KOSU.

There are currently several pending lawsuits against Walters. Thompson said the department is reviewing them and will address them as quickly as possible. They’re also examining several policy statements made by Walters to require action in schools.

“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.

In other words, it appears that the department might actually get back to helping teachers do their jobs. It's Oklahoma, so I don't imagine the department is going to turn all squishy liberal any time soon. But it sure seems like the atmosphere has changed considerably.

Walters was on Twitter expressing his big sad that he "could not be more disappointed" in the decision. "The war on Christianity is real," he wrote in his trademark hyperbole disconnected from reality. He's speaking this weekend at the Moms For Liberty summit, on a panel with Aaron Withe (his boss from Freedom Foundation) and Corey DeAngelis about how the evil unions took over schools. That summit is in Florida, putting him far far away from Oklahoma, which seems like what is best for Oklahoma's schools.

67, Nonsense, and the Authoritarian in the Classroom

You may not have heard about 6 7, and if not, your life is not the worse for it. Also, you probably don't have contact with young humans. 

6 7 is just the latest nonsense meatworld meme. You don't need to rush to figure it out because now that Wikipedia has a page about it, Miriam Webster has an entry, and the Wall Street Journal just ran an explainer (calling it "this fall's most obnoxious classmate"), all of which means it's nearly played out. 

But in the meantime, it is one more test of teachers' patience (particularly on the elementary level). 

These tests are always there (skibidi toilet, anyone?) because young humans love them some nonsense. And 6 7 is relatively harmless-- not violent or sexual or intended to offend. As nonsense goes, it's better than average. But this brand of nonsense represents a fundamental challenge for teachers.

Some teachers are not meeting the challenge well, with nonsense behavior being met with nonsense rules. But it's not great for a classroom to model principles like "I don't like that, and I have the power here, so I'm just going to forbid it." That includes silly ideas like "I'm going to fine you fifteen cents every time you say that stupid thing, because I'm fed up." It is tempting, as a teacher, to just get out your big stick; after all, this is just nonsense, and not important talk.

As we live through a time marked by the muscle flexing of a wanna-be authoritarian regime, teachers need to ask themselves what form of governance they want to model in their classroom, and I sure hope they arrive at "non-authoritarian" as the answer.

I am not (as any of my former students would tell you) a fan of classroom anarchy. You can be an authority without being an authoritarian. Teachers are hired to be the responsible adult in a room filled with non-adults. That can mean many different things, but what it should not mean that the classroom is governed by the teacher's personal preferences or whims rather than being governed by actual rules and principles. 

I've seen classrooms run by a teacher's personal edict. I still remember the shock of hearing teacher say, speaking of home room elections for 7th grade student council representatives, "They picked the wrong kid, so I made them elect the right one." What a lesson for students about how elections work. 

If we're going to grow adults who understand the Rule of Law rather than the Rule of Me, then classrooms and schools have to model it.

That means, for instance, the administrators need to follow the actual rulebook for the district rather than a modified version in which different people get different consequences depending on who they are.

And classroom teachers need to set and follow rules based on something other than their mood or the newest irritant of the day. Students need to soak in a subtext other than "People who have power get to make other people do what the powerful wants." 

This was always true, but it's especially true now. You want to push back against authoritarian tyranny? What would be better than helping to raise a generation of humans who understand in their bones that there are other, better ways to be.

So when 6 7 gets on your last nerve, or the next bit of nonsense reveals itself, reach for some reaction other than "I am so sick of this and I have the power to shut this noise down, so I'm going to use all the power at my disposal to stomp it out." Because we know right now what that looks like when applied in the grown up world on a national stage. More than ever, classrooms need to be built to look like the country in which we want to live. If you want No Kings in America, be careful about crowning yourself in your classroom. 

Did The Class of '92 Destroy America

The Atlantic has published yet another tale of woe about The Terrible State Of Education, and in it staff writer Idrees Kahloon has played all the hits, yet somehow ignores the most obvious point to make.

Student achievement is down because test scores (an assumption that we absolutely won't examine)! Low expectations are ruining students! Those damned cell phones! Science of reading! Merit pay! School choice! Democrats are on the wrong side and everything might be their fault! And the economist-style assumption that test scores, like stock prices, must go ever upward (three guesses what Kahloon's actual area of reportage expertise is)!

It's a whole lot of baloney, and I would go ahead and address Kahloon's many ill-founded assumptions and assertions, but, you know (gestures in direction of five thousand and some posts on this blog) and I'd rather zero in on one particular set of sentences:

Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000.

And...?

I mean, this seems like a perfect chance to do a little research. After all, those low scoring children of 1992 and 2000 are now grown up. Class of 1992 would be about 45 now, and the sad non-readers of 2000 would be about 34. 

So we should be able to see the generational effects of these terrible awful no good very bad scores on the Big Standardized Test. There should be a story here-- "In 1992 the reading scores dipped to the lowest point ever, and so then the Terrible Thing happened." Maybe researchers should have gone out to check on the adult life outcomes of that low-scoring cohort, to see if they had low paying jobs or unhappy lives or unattractive children. If there are consequences to these low scores, then at least two cohorts and at most the whole country have been living with those consequences for decades, so it shouldn't be too hard to track down what they are, rather than simply calling for a panic. 

I don't mean to dismiss the possibility that these low-scoring readers did not in fact suffer consequences. Heck, both cohorts would have been old enough to vote in the 2016 and 2024 elections.

But if you are going to hang an entire panic attack on those low scores and write an entire article about how the current low scores are a sign of an epic crisis of failure in education, shouldn't you be able to finish the sentence "Because the NAEP reading scores have dipped so low, the nation will suffer as a consequence the following..." Particularly when we are absolutely in a position to study exactly what scores of this lowitude produce as a result.

Otherwise, your panic is manufactured baloney. Because the story here might be, "Back in 1992 we had the lowest NAEP reading scores ever and that was followed by life going on as before. Those low scores didn't signal a damned thing."

If you're going to call for panic, at least do some homework.