The Federal Religion Commission on Education

The federal Religious Liberty Commission just coughed up its 224-page report, and I'm not about to shovel through the whole thing here, but it does devote a whole chapter to education, and that's worth a look for what it tells us about the MAGA view of education.

Much of the report is taken up with some anecdotes from students who allege various versions of being picked on in/by schools for their faith. One fifth grade student was "forced" to read a book about transgenderism to his kindergarten buddy, and this qualified for testimony because somehow being anti-trans is a Christian belief. One student was denied the right to wear a covid mask with "Jesus Loves Me." One student was denied the right to thank Jesus in his graduation speech. One girl's attempt to sing a Christian song in the school talent show. One girl wanted to pray with friends in a corner of the cafeteria and was denied. And one more student was subject to antisemitic bullying.

The stories are dramatically embellished (when the graduating student went ahead and thanked Jesus anyway, everyone clapped, teachers embraced him, and the principal cried). Sure. And we'll never know just how quiet the cafeteria prayer really was. But while the trans book story is complicated, the other stories, if accurate, are stories of students whose rights were, in fact, violated by their school. 

They are anecdotes. The commission might have included others, like the story of the kindergartners who wore hijabs to graduation and were held up for abuse by the President of the United States. There are undoubtedly other anecdotes that bend the other way; take my own former superintendent who routinely opened elementary graduation ceremonies with a Jesus prayer, or my former student whose fourth grade teacher who pressured her to convert from Judaism to Christianity. 

The commission deals with the anecdotal nature by offering a blanket observation that the "story is not an isolated event." 

That's fine-- providing a compelling narrative is how folks do the commission testimony thing. But what's more notable is the principles outlined to provide context for the narratives.

The commission offers the now-familiar tale of how institutions have been captured by the Bad Guys. For a century, they assert, teacher training institutions "have increasingly framed education not as the transmission of intrinsic moral truths, but as a vehicle for ideology-driven social transformation." 

Well, now. "Social transformation" has arguably always been the point, as in transforming society by trying to make everyone numerate, literate, and knowledgeable. "Ideology-driven" only makes sense as analysis if you remember, as implied by this construction, that "ideology" only refers only to ideology followed by Those Guys, while our ideology is actually "truth." Either way, it's a stretch. Virtually every teacher I've ever known or worked with mostly had a classroom ideology of Can We Please Learn This Content. Though I'll bet you can find a few ideologues of every flavor in classrooms here and there about the country (there are over 4 million teachers, guaranteeing at least one of everything you can imagine). 

But what really strikes me is the commission's idea of what schools are supposed to do--

The transmission of intrinsic moral truths.

That's a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting, but dovetails with the notion that the world is all absolute truths, probably already figured out by some dead Greek and Roman guys. Once grasped, the truths allow for no negotiation, discussion, and certainly no revision (see also the argument that we don't need to respect all religions because everything that's not Christian is just wrong). 

They go after John Dewey (though I'll bet you that there aren't 25 teachers working in 2026 who could name two things Dewey believed) and accuse him of this kind of stuff:

He proposed that schools create an “embryonic community life,” where children would be taught primarily not how to think or explore truth, but to develop habits useful to the state, such as cooperation, shared purpose, and democratic citizenship.

Dewey gets charged with re-characterizing schools as "a vehicle for ideologically driven social progress." Again, I think his offense here is not going after "social progress" so much as letting the incorrect ideology have a say. 

Their example is sex ed. After the sexual revolution of the sixties (the decade when everything went to shit for these folks) schools started teaching sex ed and exposing young kids to discussions of sex (bad, because otherwise young humans would not have ever heard about sex). Also, they taught birth control instead of abstinence, which is bad, because schools should prioritize politically correct over actually works.

The commission argues that "ideological current has too often left little room for students who hold traditional religious convictions, such as the belief that God created man and woman, that moral truth is real, or that America—though imperfect—is not fundamentally evil." Maybe not so much "left little room" as "didn't allow these beliefs to occupy a central place over all others." And I'm not sure how beliefs about America qualify as traditional religious convictions (even if, as they apparently mean, only certain religious traditions count here). But humans have a historic tendency to confuse their own personal beliefs with the Will Of God.

The report positions all this debate of the First Amendment as a battle over culture:

It is part of a larger cultural struggle over whether schools will form children in the moral inheritance of Western civilization or in a newer creed that often treats historic religious belief as something backward, suspect, and even harmful.

"Form children." Yikes. (I refer you to Russell Barkley's contention that we are shepherds, not engineers.) And historic religious belief has, at times, been backward and harmful, and remembering that ought to inform any discussion of the First Amendment and what the founders had in mind.

But from there we're on to the argument that some sort of hostile secular religion displaced "the 2,000-year canon of Western moral and religious tradition" (the writers are careful not to explicitly argue for Christianity by name, but they might as well have). 

This is a bogus argument and always has been. Public schools have no official position on vegetarianism. Their only mandate is to offer an assortment of healthy choices and the freedom to pack a lunch from home. Likewise, the First Amendment mandates that religion not be on the menu of what schools offer, leaving students free to practice as they wish. There is no such thing as "secular religion," rather, "secular" is what is left when you remove all the religious parts. 

We can find three issues in the commission's complaint.

One is that some schools, over-zealous (or afraid) about church-state separation take steps to squelch student religious expression when they should not. School officials should not lead a religious prayer at graduation, but if student speakers want to thank Jesus, they should. Admittedly, the line is sometimes tough to spot-- if a student, as part of a school project, chooses to paint a religious image, that's probably okay, but if the painting is on the wall of the school, the issue is fuzzier. 

Second is the part they try to avoid saying out loud, which is the belief that White Christianity should be the dominant culture in America, and that should start in school. 

Third is the notion, repeatedly taken into court, that one cannot fully exercise one's religion unless one is free to inflict it on others. That includes financing that exercise with public tax dollars and discriminating against certain Others. This goes hand in hand with having a dominant position. 

Some folks will absolutely regret it if they ever win these debates. For one, they will find themselves swamped with people who want to claim a religious free-money-and-no-rules card. For another, the inevitable result will be government commandeering and regulation of religion-- you know, like setting up a federal commission to oversee religion in this country. The First Amendment is just as much about protecting the church as it is protecting the state.

The commission offers all sorts of recommendations. Some involve providing more guidance about First Amendments, which isn't a bad idea depending on whether or not the training is related to the actual language. "Know Your Rights" posters for school. Sure; posters really work in school. Set up a portal so that people can report naughtiness on line. Sic the DOJ on those naughty schools. Get behind courtroom support for the transparently unConstitutional laws requiring Ten Commandments displays. Also, school choice. They don't bother to explain why they want it; they just want it.

Nothing here you wouldn't expect from a commission headed up by Dan Patrick and including Ben Carson, Dr. Phil, Franklin Graham, Cardinal Tim Dolan, Paula White, and Todd Blanche. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

A New Bot-enhanced Assessment Approach

I have spent plenty of time over the years tracking the fortunes of a high-capacity clown car of computer software that promises to grade those student essays. Labeling the variously inadequate programs AI just adds a new level of marketability to this unholy monstrosity, a piece of Schrodinger's software that is simultaneously totally as great as humans and also just about to be perfected within the next two years (going on twenty years).

I just came across a new model that promises speed, efficiency, validity and reliability.  Welcome to No More Marking.  Or maybe don't welcome it.

The company serves all the English-speaking world after spawning in the UK, headed up by Daisy Christdoulou. And her Clever Idea is called "Comparative Judgement."

The idea is deceptively and seductively simple. It's hard, goes the argument, to make absolute judgments. If someone walks into your room, can you judge whether they are tall or not? But comparative judgements are easier for human brains-- if two persons walk into your room, you can tell pretty quickly which one is taller.

So what if, instead of reading a student essay and trying to decide whether it was a 94 or 88 or 91 or whatever, you looked at two essays and decided which one was better. Wouldn't that be quick and simple? And if you had multiple teachers working through the same essays in the same way, wouldn't you have tons of data?

This sounds not bad until the first five seconds you spend thinking about it. Oh, but then...

If I used this technique on student height, I could probably generate a pretty good arrangement of students from tallest to shortest. But I still wouldn't know squat about how tall they actually were. Any kind of non-generalized collection of students (a kindergarten class, a group of pro basketball players) would give me particularly unhelpful results. And if the students are very similar in height, suddenly the judgment isn't so easy, and the results are nearly meaningless.

Part of their solution is a "powerful statistical model" involving some fancy maths that generate raw scores that are turned into other scores. Is the result valid? Well, the site tells us "Human Comparative Judgement is the gold standard of human decision-making. It is supported by an extensive research literature." So, you know, there you go. The other part of the solution appears to be a large sample size.

This is also another one of those tech labor transfer systems, because before any of this can start, someone has to feed all of the essays into the computer program. That can include scanning handwritten copies. You'll have to be sitting at a screen to use this. And of course results don't come back until at least one other human scorer runs through the essays, but while you're waiting, perhaps you can go ahead and be a second reader for someone else's essay stack. Are we saving time yet?

The company insists you are. 30 essays would take you two hours the traditional way with a rubric, but with human comparative judgement, you can cut that to an hour. Why are you so much faster reading every essay without a rubric? I don't know.

Don't worry, because we can save time another way, and you knew this was coming. What if some--or even all-- of the "readers" were AI programs? The company suggests going 90/10-- 90% AI and 10% human. 100/0 is of course an option.

Sigh. Okay, the premise of the whole CJ biz is that it's easier and faster for a human to judge which essay is better than it is to evaluate an essay. But that's human beings. It's not clear if the AI in the loop is doing comparative judgements or just offering the usual crappy robograding assessments; the language hints that it's the former, but it's not really clear. If it's the latter, that's bad news because bots are bad at assessing writing, but trying to figure out which of two essays is "better" seems like a whole other level of judgment that AI is not equipped to perform.

If you want to give students the impression that their teacher actually read the work she assigned to them, then you voice-deliver some comments and the AI will spruce that up and attach it. 

For the American market, the company offers three national writing assessments. You can throw in a multiple-choice grammar test. The company says they are also teamed up with The Writing Revolution, which isn't encouraging.

The company insists that they are valid and reliable and, hey, the program lets you see where the humans and the AIO disagreed. Christodoulou has a substack, but after digging through the company website I was too grumpy to dig any more. Okay, I looked at one post that made the argument that if an AI comes up with results similar to a human, it must be valid. I've heard this a zillion times, and to me it is an indictment of the degree to which human teachers have been herded into mechanical rubric-centered assessment. All you're telling me is that robots are pretty good at imitating humans who have been trained to imitate robots. 

Christodoulou asks some good questions (will knowing they're writing for an AI affect how students write), and she clearly knows that some buzzy items like Bloom's 2 sigma study is bunk. Christodoulou also acknowledges elsewhere that students really care about what their teachers think, and the simple "final product" of a grade is not enough. They've been at this model for a decade or so, so I'm going to assume good intentions. But the site doesn't offer any insights into what standards or training the AI is programmed with, nor the question of how the company deals with the inevitable AI bias and lying about what it has "read." 

CJ is an interesting approach, or at least more interesting than the typical "AI so smart grade your essays quick just like human teacher" pitch. But I remain unconvinced. 

Video: Arizona's Model Voucher Program (How Not To Do It)

More Perfect Union is an advocacy journalism non-profit that has scooped up awards for some of its video pieces about major issues-- and they have now taken a swipe at taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

The piece-- We Investigated The Biggest Government Fraud In America. You're Paying For It-- focuses on Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program. The video looks at how this barely-regulated program manages to waste a ton of money on things that shouldn't be purchased with taxpayer education dollars (and guess how much you can spend with your voucher and be automatically approved). 

Josh Cowen, who makes an appearance in the video, notes that Arizona's program is the "gold standard for what not to do and how to do what not to do," and yet it is considered by many voucher fans as the gold standard. 

Watching the video will take barely 17 minutes out of your day. The video is also an excellent primer for folks who are just now trying to figure out what the fuss is about. 

ICYMI: Another Tech Sunday Edition (7/5)

Now that we've cleaned up after the Fourth, it's time for yet another tech Sunday with community theater. This time I'm pit conducting for a production of Disney's The Little Mermaid. Like many of the staged versions of Disney films, it has way more music and a tweaked story that corrects some of the ick from the original film, which was in fact awesome but still, the whole "give up your life for some cute guy you saw once" was kind of off, along with the helpless damsel ending. Anyway, community theater is always fun, so this should be a delightful week, kicking off today with orchestra practice.

Hope things are cooling down. My old high school was supposed to be marching in the Philadelphia parade for the Fourth, and it was canceled for heat. Fortunately-ish, my friend and former colleague the band director got the word a bit before he was supposed to be loading students on the bus. May we all enjoy better weather soon. 

Here's some reading.

Beware the Reading Proficiency Numbers Game: Florida Edition

Paul Thomas encourages us to look a little more closely at some of the goals of the SoR crowd.

Massachusetts Should Reject Trump's K-12 Privateering Scheme

After DFER chief Jorge Alorza published a piece encouraging Massachusetts to sign up for federal vouchers, Maurice Cunningham and I teamed up to write a rebuttal. 

 

What School and District Leaders Need to Know Before They Invest in AI

I spotted this a bit late, but Stephen Aguilar published a piece at The 74 that provides a good checklist of things for districts to think about before unleashing AI.

AI Can’t Fix the Student-Motivation Problem

Bots aren't great teachers! Surprise! Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing lay out the details.

How Good Teachers Get Broken

Matt Brady offers some explanation, with details you may recognize from your district. Note: he also explains how to do better.

Financial Nonsense

Audrey Watters talks about leaving the free stage of AI, and what it will mean to districts and companies.

Keeping SCORE

After some thoughts about the Fourth, TC Weber takes a closer look at SCORE, the very influential reformster group with an awful lot of say in Tennessee education

Children Are Increasing in the South: Their Champions Aren't

If you thought there was a terrible national fertility crisis, surprise-- not in the South. But Bruce Lesley points out that means we're getting the most children in the part of the country least prepared to help them.

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at new report from the Shanker Institute that underlines what teachers already know-- they need more time to implement your latest genius improvement program.

If you need a little chaser from your holiday music and explosions, the Muppets have you covered.

Can We Have a Nonpolitical Patriotic Moment?

We have done all the usual Independence Day things in my community. We had a parade, and last night the town band I play in delivered our usual pre-Fourth concert in the park featuring mostly marches, a salute to veterans of all service branches, Stars and Striped Forever, and the Carmen Dragon America the Beautiful.  

Attendance was down for most events. I have no idea why, though a crowded local calendar and punishing heat are undoubtedly factors. There's been noise about the lack of enthusiasm about the 250th, and as someone who well remembers the Bicentennial, I agree that the excitement level is far lower. However, as a student of history, I can also tell you that the 150th in 1926 was no great shakes, either. 

Who knows. 1976 was a moment in which the nation was bruised and recovering, looking for a reason to celebrate that after a lot of testing of our institutions and character, maybe we could focus on what was great about the nation. Right now we're in the middle of the newest test, and celebration may seem premature. Maybe it's because much of the national celebration has been hijacked for a MAGA rally. Maybe corporations are now so multi-national that throwing business weight behind a celebration doesn't make sense to them. Who knows.

Look, our country is a complex mess, and it always has been. The Founders were a fractious that agreed on very little. The actual war effort was a slog because some states refused to help pay and many, many men refused to join the fight (some by not signing up and some by running away as soon as bullets started flying). The Constitution was a second attempt, and it's partly because some states stayed home and had a hissy fit that the thing even got across the finish line. We are a democratic nation that has always included citizens that don't believe in democracy, just as we have always housed--right through today-- a bunch of folks who vigorously reject the Declaration's assertion that all men are created equal. We set up a collection of ideals around which to center a country, and we have spent 250 years arguing about how or if to try to live up to them.

But the ideals part matters, because that's a different animal than centering a single human leader. When you have Dear Leader in charge, people are measured not by competence or merit, but by loyalty. We are currently living through the demonstration of what you get with government built on loyal dopes. 

We are also living with the illusion that everything is politics. It's not too complicated-- when Dear Leader has an opinion about everything, then every opposing opinion is painted as politics. And really, there's a whole class of politics-oriented folks who also think that everything is politics.

It is true that for some folks, politics has shaped the context that they move through. But that doesn't mean they have to live their every waking moment maneuvering with politics and power. If we had remembered that, we could have had a nice party for the 250th. Instead, so much is polluted with politics and the related impulse that we will not be able to leave a good life until Political Goal X is achieved. 

But the saturation of politics also matters because our current moment in politics is mostly negative. The easy way to get people to donate is to point at something and holler that it's a threat. You can hear the desperate grasp for another Big Scary Thing in Trump's address yesterday trying to get us all excited about scary communists. Meanwhile, my inbox is filled with people who really need my money to combat the threat of MAGA. 

Some days you would think we lived in the scariest damned country in the world, and while I think that's problematic for many reasons, I do worry that we are passing it on to another generation, raising them to think they are growing up in some sort of combat zone (which is not only not helpful for them but is insulting to people who live in actual combat zones). 

There is much to love about this country, much to appreciate, and certainly, for most of us, a great deal to be thankful for. Are we the greatest country on Earth? It's a very American thing to want to be able to rate ourselves Number One, but it's a distraction. Can we be great, allow our people to be great, and accomplish great things? We can, and we do, and often it is far removed from politics. And we should be grateful for that.

The saddest lesson of this administration is its demonstration that you can grasp for power and money, that you can get your hands on some of the most powerful levers on the planet, and have it do nothing to sooth the gnawing in your soul. You can radically change your circumstances to acquire more power and wealth than most people can imagine, and you will still be your same old miserable self, empty and chased by inevitable mortality. Miles of words have been written about what Trump lacks, but one obvious item is an authentic love of country, and a less obvious one is a sense of gratitude. 

There are many things in my life because I was born in this particular time and place, and I have t9o be grateful for that. If we don't impart some sense of gratitude in our children, we are missing the boat. This is part of the point of school clubs and sports, the not-always-admirable pitches for school spirit-- learning to be part of something bigger than yourself, and being grateful for what that something gives you in the range of possibilities and achievements. You did not make yourself, and you should be grateful for that (and that gratitude should move you to pass it on). 

I hear the bitching about not feeling Fourthy because That Man is the President. Well, the President is not the country. The country is far bigger than any set of elected representatives or bureaucratic bozos. It is a collection of humans, and that means it's a big messy thing, forever balancing love for our best angels and a desire to clean up our worst impulses. That balance is never perfect, but we should reject any views that A) call for unreasoning unquestioning love that insists everything is perfect or B) call for a total rejection of everything the country is and does as evil and wrong. Both of those views are incorrect (and people who take one of the views will always insist that anyone who disagrees with them at all must be part of the other group), and they are usually political in nature.

Should we teach students to be patriotic? Certainly, and that should include the idea that being patriotic means be willing to question and challenge when we think the country is wrong. There's an important idea there-- that you can love and honor and respect something or someone even as you recognize and challenge its bad choices. Certainly it will be a useful concept for life and connecting with employers, friends, and partners. If your own child came home claiming that their partner was the most perfect human who should never be questioned, you'd be alarmed. If your child came home with a partner that they constantly denigrated and put down, you would also have concerns. Patriotism is complicated-- like every other relationship in life.

Tonight some family and friends will come over. We'll eat some food, and then a few of us will play some traditional jazz for the rest of us (and for neighbors) and then the city will set some fireworks off over the river that runs past my back yard. It will probably be too hot, and it might rain, and my food may or may not be awesome, and the playing will involve some bad notes but I will be grateful for all of it.

SCOTUS Okays Restrictions on Teen Girl Athletes

The Supreme Court has upheld the Idaho and West Virginia bans on trans girls in school sports.

This means trouble for all teen girls playing sports, and we haven't seen the end of the legal attacks.

The ruliong establishes that states may institute such bans. But they did not answer the question, "Do states have to ban trans girls from athletics in order to protect Title IX." We can fully expect that there are already people working to put that question in front of the court.

In the meantime, this ruling will do plenty of damage on its own. 

For trans girls (and it's always trans girls, because the culture panic crowd never gets excited about trans boys-- do they think that becoming a male is admirable but giving up male-hood in order to become a girl is terribly wrong) this means that no matter what they've been through to make gtheir decisions, no matter how widely accepted they are by their peers, the school must deny their identity and bar them from activities that give them joy and connection in their lives. A bunch of grownups have gotten together to look a teeneger in the face and call her names and deny her life. That is messed up.

But anti-trans laws have impact far beyond the tiny number of actual teen girls affected. Let me offer an example or two.

Here's a story from Utah about one of the results of the state's girls track and field competition:

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

Congratulations unnamed female athlete! For your dominance in your sport, you win the chance for the state and your school district to dig through your records to prove that you have always been a girl. 

That's what a trans ban gets you-- any female athlete who is too strong, too dominant, too good, or just too butch, is now subject to a challenge from any disgruntled parent whose daughter lost (second, third, toed for fifth, whatever). 

Ohio almost had an odious bill when the House advanced the Ohio version of a Save Women's Sports Act that allowed losers to burden winners not just with the burden to prove their adequate femaleness, but to do it by way of testosterone levels, dna testing or "participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy." Congratulations on your win, Bethany. Now, the state needs you to submit to a little physical exam.

That goodness Governor DeWine saw through to the real issue here:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

Other states are not so lucky.  Oklahoma and South carolina did get a Save Women's Sports Act passed into law. That one gives any female athlete who thinks she's been boxed out or beaten and deprived of benefits to sue the school, and she's got up to two years to sue. Oklahoma's law doesn't offer any guidance about how the school is supposed to defend itself in court and what demands for "proof" they can place on their athletes. 

And that's before we evenb get to states with laws saying that students must dress in ways the People In Charge deem appropriate for their "gender at birth."

Or take the Ted Cruz anti-trans ad from 2024. The ad shows images of female athletes at a track meet, while a caption says his opponent U.S. Rep Colin Allred has "voted to allow boys in girls sports." How messed up is this ad? Let's count the ways.

1) The track meet is taking place in Oregon.

2) Despite the implication of the caption, the girls are not trans.

3) Nobody with Cruz's campaign asked for permission to use the girls' images.

Anti-trans laws don't just declare open season on trans teens--which would be bad enough--but also declare an open season on all teenage girls. 

We'll see if subsequent decisions make this situation even worse. As of right now, it's bad enough.

 

Ten Federal Voucher Myths

Jorge Elozar, head of Democrats for Education Reform (a group started by hedge fund managers to convince Democrats to support education privatization), has been lobbying hard for the federal voucher program, with most of their talking points gathered into a single post here offering ten reasons that the Dems should not repeal the federal vouchers; the list corresponds to the reasons DFER thinks Democratic governors should sign on.

Let's look at the list.

1. It helps public school students.

Note that this is different from the claim that it helps public schools, which is slightly more honest than Elorza's suggestion elsewhere that public schools might benefit from this. 

But as usual, the list of expenditures includes things that public school students should and do provide, like transportation, special education services, and career training. This only makes sense if the public schools somehow manage to off-load some services to federal funding, which would be bad news for local control and for students who need those services. But it would be good news for those policy leaders looking for ways to dismantle public education and sell off the parts.

2. It Can Bring Significant New Resources Into Public Education

Again, the hint public school systems will benefit from these programs. But come on- if the feds really wanted to inject funding into public schools, it would be far easier to just offer tax credits for supporting a public school. A complicated set up with "scholarship granting organizations" is only useful if you are trying to launder public money so that you can legally give it to a religious organization.

"Scholarship organizations can support services that school districts often struggle to provide at scale, creating new educational opportunities without requiring states to raise taxes or cut other programs." Again, if this were an actual goal, the feds could devise much better ways to do it. Instead they are busy closing down the Department of Education and promising to send education back to the states, by which they mean sending back responsibility for funding any programs the feds don't like.

3. It Helps Close the Out-of-School Enrichment Gap

So federal vouchers will get poor kids SAT coaches and violin lessons? Maybe. But I'm waiting to see regulations that actually limit voucher use to non-wealthy students. Otherwise, I expect that these vouchers will follow the common pattern of mostly supporting families that are not wealth-impaired.

4. It Advances Democratic Priorities Like High-Impact Tutoring

Maybe that is a Democratic priority? It shouldn't be. Two-sigma tutoring is a fabrication, a snare and a delusion that has been thoroughly debunked. 

But even if it weren't an exercise in unicorn farming, please note the usual privatizer shift here, turning beneficial tutoring from something the system provides for everyone into a commodity that you are free to shop for on your own. This is right in line with the choice movement-- "Your child's education should be your responsibility, not society's. But here's a little voucher check to take some of the sting off when we wash our hands of you."

5. It Expands Opportunity for Students With Disabilities

Again, why are we touting a system based on the idea that families of these students should have to go find necessary services on their own. If only there were a program, like a federal program-- a sort of  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and if only that program were fully funded. I bet that would be a far better solution than handing parents a check and saying, "Good luck! Buh-bye!"

6. The Fiscal Impact Is Small Relative to the Federal Budget

Compared to the massive trillion dollar holes blown in the budget by this administration, the amount that this will add to the deficit isn't so bad. So...yay?

DFER skips the other financial impact, like the estimate from American Federation for Children, a severely pro-privatization group, estimates that $300 per child will have to be spent marketing the tax shelter part of this program to convince people to contribute. 

7. It Represents an Investment in America’s Future

Does it? DFER argues that we should welcome throwing more money at education. "The ROI from helping a child learn to read, master algebra, recover from pandemic learning loss, or access specialized support far exceeds the program’s cost," Elorza writes, without asking why the importance of these programs might call for an actual federal investment instead of a tax shelter that is designed to help public tax dollars flow to private schools. Did you forget that was the purpose of the federal voucher program? Elorza is glad you did.

8. It Is Popular With Voters

You know a good way to find out what voters want? Let them vote on it. Except they're not going to do that because school vouchers have never once been voted into place by voters. Voters, given the choice, have rejected vouchers every time. Which is why they are rarely given the choice. Every voucher program in this country was birthed by legislative shenanigans.

You want to show me how popular your program is? Don't show me the results of carefully crafted polling questions. Let people vote.

9. Democrats Need a New Direction on K-12 Education

This one is just whacky. "Ten years ago," says Elorza, " Democrats were the undisputed party of education." I will not dispute for a second that the Democrats lost their claim to be an education party, though I would say that it happened a lot sooner than ten years ago. Ten years ago would be when the GOP started pushing the exact same policy that DFER is arguing for today. 

How did they lose their education mojo? By listening to people like DFER and pushing policies like test and punish, privatization, and generally offering right wing policies with a blue towel draped over their shoulder. But DFER was founded explicitly to perform the "inside job" of getting Dems to fall in line with the privatization movement, and they have been consistent ever since, repeatedly trying out versions of "If you were a true and smart Democrat you would totally want to back school choice." And also "Public schools suck because of the evil teachers union." 

Do the Democrats need a new direction in education? They surely do, but following the privatization policies of Betsy DeVos is neither new nor win Dems education plaudits.

10. Democrats Should Be the Party of Opportunity

To be clear, Elorza is arguing that the federal vouchers expand educational opportunity. The questions he skips are: what kind of opportunity, for whom, and at what cost? Watch this bit of misdirection:

Families are asking for more options, more support, more tutoring, more enrichment, and more help for their children. The FSTC provides all of those things.

This skips over the most important question, which is what would be the best way for the feds to provide those things? Because this isn't it, and to pretend that this program, carefully designed as a tax shelter than funds private schools, is somehow a big boon for public schools and public school families is baloney. 

The DFER argument is like saying, "Yes, an AK-47 assault rifle will let you mow down a bunch of fleshy, vulnerable human beings, but let's not be hasty. You could do useful things with it, too, like cut down shrubbery or open a door you accidentally locked. Really, I don't understand why you don't fully embrace the AK-47 bush trimmer."

Elorza also throws in a bonus myth-- governors should opt in "to keep resources in the state." In that construction, "keep" is doing some heavy lifting, since we are talking about redirecting funds that were already bound for the bottomless money pit that is DC. 

DFER is presenting a backwards-engineered argument. They start with the policy they want to pursue; now they've searched for an argument, landing on "This will solve Problem X" rather than start with Problem X and asking what a good solution for that would be. DFER wants to dismantle and privatize education, and federal vouchers are set up to further that cause of converting a shared societal responsibility into an individual shopping problem.

None of this, unfortunately, means that more states won't sign up for some free federal money. The bare minimum we can hope for is some actual guardrails and restrictions on how the money would be used. Maybe even an actual out loud conversation about the steady erosion of the country's promise of public education. But I don't expect any of that from DFER.  

Chris Rufo and the Anti-Fact Right

For some damn reason or other, Ezra Klien decided to interview Chris Rufo for his podcast and his New York Times column. It's not a very pleasant read, but it is a window into the thinking of the culture panic crowd. I'm not going to walk you through the whole thing, because it's hot and humid and I don't want to spend a second more with Rufo than I need to.

Klein is harkening back to another piece by Rufo, and pulls up Rufo's rejection of the old "facts don't care about your feelings." I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were particularly committed to facts. But Rufo's reply (which employs the royal "we") calls this a "rationalization for losing" before flipping it entirely on its head.

But look, while we should have the facts on our side, and while we should use logic, by itself, it’s insufficient. And, in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion — much more on the field of abstract argumentation at the top.

Screw the facts. Rufo's argument here recalls JD Vance explanation for telling lies about Haitian immigrants:

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

This is, of course, a critical part of Rufo's strategy, all the way back to the days when he announced that he would simply use his own definition for terms so that he could harness everyone's bad feelings about things they don't like:

The goals is to have the public read something crazy in the news and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'

Klein moves on to question Rufo's argument for more conservative use of "agitprop." That's usually a term to refer to bad propaganda, points out Klein. But Rufo makes a distinction that really deserves our attention:

If you’re conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it’s bad. My point is that’s not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful.

Not a word about how one determines if a cause is "good and true and beautiful." In other words, propaganda is good for my side, and bad for the other side. Time to roll out Wilhoit's Law one more time:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This can apparently be expanded to include not just codified laws on the books, but more universal laws like "tell the truth" or "don't bullshit people."  

Rufo argues that persuasion is just rhetoric, and "rhetoric at an industrial scale" is propaganda. And that's a Good Thing if deployed in service of Our Side and bad for Your Side. Which is as good an explanation of why, as a culture, we go through periods when we are drowning in bullshit. I get the reasoning-- we are in pursuit of a Good and Noble End, so using any means at our disposal is Good. It's a seductive view; it's also wrong. Because we rarely get all the way to our ends, so it tends to be our means that define us. 

Rufo argues that his guiding "telos" is the restoration of the principles of our republic" which he defines thus:

You want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue and, in particular, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization.

AKA white nationalism. It's the right wing conservative culture project-- a nation in which the dominant culture is white, male, Christian, straight, healthy, and wealthy and all others sit in the back where they belong, subservient passengers. 

Some parts of the MAGA world seem to believe that such a goal is actually achievable, that we can somehow regress to the 250-year-old past (except, of course, that those folks were trying to look forward and imagine a better way to be a country-- so maybe MAGA would skip that part). That goal is unattainable, so the MAGAs and the Rufos are ultimately defined only by their means, and their means lack honor and integrity and simply focus on flooding the zone with bullshit.

How much damage to society is done by these tactics. Rufo once claimed that "You have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good" and "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust." But what do you get in a society, particularly a post-facts society, when you sow so much ruthlessness, brutality, and distrust? 

I try to imagine how Rufo's ideas would translate to a classroom. Should the teacher use whatever it takes to whip students into a passion for the content (as long as, of course, it's the right content). What would a school look like if a central principle was that facts just don't matter as much as a narrative, and the narrative should be judged not on accuracy but on how well it advances "good and true and beautiful" ends. And what the heck does something "good and true and beautiful" look like if facts don't really matter.

Rufo might argue that all of the above is about political stuff and that within the schoolhouse walls there should be no politics--just truth and beauty and the classic thoughts of great dead white guys. But if the goal is to prepare students to become useful members of society, and society is built on political gamesmanship, how the heck do we make that connection?

Rufo has always displayed some honesty about his intentions and tools, but he also does things like later in the interview when he argues that because Trump wiped out DEI policies and the Department of Justice has "taken a buzz-saw to so-called disparage impact doctrine (which means that a policy is only racist if the writers explicitly announce their racist intent) so therefore "you can make an argument that liberty, equality and virtue have been restored." So, "liberty, equality and virtue" mean, apparently, "white folks are in charge." 

I just don't know how "there are opposing sides and you need to do whatever you can to win--but only if you're on the side that deserves to win" can be transferred onto a school. Or maybe I do and I'm just reluctant to wrap my eyes around such an ugly vision. 

Showing Students They Matter

I very much appreciate a recent post by Ella Meisner at Edutopia. Meisner is a classroom science teacher in Austin, TX, and she reports on a gathering of former students. They didn't turn out to all be budding scientists, but...

But during our catch-up conversations, I heard a surprising sentiment: Top of mind for many former students was how a class made them feel, as opposed to the content they learned or even the grades they earned.

She cites a book by Jennifer Wallace--Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose-- and its mention of four pillars for a sense of mattering, and talks about implementing those pillars in her classroom.

This is not simply some warm fuzzy soft skill idea-- for students it's a quick step from "I don't matter" to "It doesn't matter whether I try to learn anything in this class or not." MY former students would laugh at the idea that I was some warm, fuzzy teacher; my class was focused on getting them to Know Things and being able to Do Stuff. That kind of attention is, I'm certain, part of how you convey to students that they matter-- by underlining that it matters if they succeed.

Meisner breaks down the four pillars.

Significant: Helping Every Student Feel Seen

Meisner has her own way of delivering Attaboys to her students, including weekly awards. I'm not an awards fan, but I agree that being seen is enormously powerful for students. Why do some students seem to actively seek out negative attention? Because it may be negative, but at least it's attention. They get to be seen.

Not to belabor the obvious, but the first step in making your students feel seen is to, you know, see them. See them as human beings and not problems or obstacles or just one example of a particular type. In English class, it was easy to give assignments that allowed them to show some of themselves. Being seen doesn't need to be a matter of something formal or carefully planned; it can happen in plenty of small moments that can flow naturally if you see them and talk to them like they are human beings.

This, incidentally, is why it's best to call them by their chosen name. To refuse to do so is to explicitly refuse to see them. Anti-trans laws are bad education policy because they state very clearly "We refuse to see you.

Appreciated: Valuing Students for Who They Are

Meisner says the idea here is to value students for more than just their performance on class-related tasks. In my small town district, this meant things like going to see the students play a sport or appear in a play. It was one of the benefits of being an extra-curricular advisor-- getting to see students function in other settings, and I was always surprised/disappointed at the number of teachers who never attended other stuff.

Seeing students in other contexts in which they may be far more confident and capable than in your classroom can be transformative. Once a year, I took a yearbook photographer and staff member to our version of a CTE campus where I got to see students who struggled in my classroom really shine operating heavy equipment, building a house, or providing home health care. 

Depended on: Helping Students Feel Needed

As Meisner points out, this can be one of the values of group work (and, again, extracurriculars). I feel like elementary teachers have an edge here; my sons feel like a crucial part of their classroom when it's their turn to take a classroom "job" like door minder or lunch counter (insert nostalgic stories from the days of cleaning chalkboard erasers).

Invested In: Showing Students You Care About Their Well-Being

Meisner includes end-of-year notes here. One of my sons' teachers just sent home a thank you note for an end-of-year gift they gave her (and picked out themselves), and while I wouldn't say it will change the course of their lives, it made an impression on them (more so because it comes at the end of a year in which each of these pillars has been a factor). 

Of the four, this is the one that veers closest to an important line-- the one between "showing interest in student's life" and "mind your own damn business." Not every student wants-- or needs--you to invest in them, and sometimes a great sign of respect for them as a human being is to allow them to set their own boundaries and respect them. You can offer to hear if something's up, but if they don't want to talk about it, back off. Showing you care doesn't mean being intrusive. 

Meisner cites the old “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care," and honestly, that saying always makes me cringe. Not just because it requires some sort of overt display of caring, but because--well, I don't need them to care how much I know. I just need them to grasp that the world will be a better place if they leave my class with more understanding and skills than when they entered it. I don't need them to be impressed with me; I would like them to be impressed with themselves. 

Still, for teachers in the field, this framework is not a bad one for a little summer reflection on how you interact with students. 

ICYMI: Penny Carnival Edition (6/27)

 Last night I marched (well, rode) in an Independence Day parade, something I have done for fifty-some years. Friday was the big penny carnival in town, for which the board of directrors is almost, but not yet, too old to really be entertained. This week I'll play in a special concert as part of my city's week-ish long celebration of the Fourth. I'll host the annual cookout in my backyard, followed by some trad jazz jamming. I like this holiday, regardless of what's going on elsewhere, because the government is not the country any more than a set of headlights drive the car. 

Here's the reading list for the week.

Tennessee increases private-school voucher vendor contract by $356M

There is a pile of money to be made by the groups that administer voucher dollars, and in Tennessee that pile is about to become mountainous. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.

Catholic Diocese of Cleveland misleads public about EdChoice

Stephen Dyer keeps trying to explain the realities of funding in Ohio, which becomes more of an uphill climb when certain parties keep pushing out inaccurate information.

School Voucher Advocate is Largest Single Donor in Tennessee Gov's Race

Jeff Yass is putting some of his fortune behind Marsha Blackburn's race for Tennessee governor. Andy Spears reports.

LA Lawsuit Challenges Shifting MFP Dollars to Teacher Stipends

Louisiana's teacher stipend-based sideway raise is the center of legal maneuvering. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains.

TN school to pay $10K, rescind suspension over social media post

A Tennessee private school tried to punish a senior for coming out as gay; she took them to court and now they have to pay. Angela Latham reports.

Legal experts speak out on idea of NV religious public charter schools

Including NPE's Carol Burris. The National Education Policy Center published a brief explaining how states could help draw a line between church and state.

Trends in Local Teacher Supply Since the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Teacher Job Applications

The trends uncovered by this working paper are downward, all across the board.

We Can’t Give Up on Teacher Diversity

Sharif El-Mekki does cite the untrustworthy National Council on Teacher Quality here, but his call for more Black male teachers still makes sense. In Education Week.

Bernadette Wilson and Right-Wing Candidates Proudly Embrace Anti-Public School Agenda

In Alaska, Mathew Beck reports, Moms for Liberty still draw plenty of obeisance from GOP candidates. The details are not encouraging.

Understanding NAEP: A Reader

Paul Thomas provides some useful sources for unraveling the data from NAEP. 

How to Get Students to School? Stop Driving them Out!

Nancy Bailey has some thoughts about the general panic over "chronic absenteeism." Maybe schools could stop doing some of these counter-productive things.

Broken Ribs, Broken Narratives, and Why I Still Don’t Trust the Test

TC Weber fell down and hurt himself, but his stay in the health care system gave him a chance to think about things like the Big Standardized Test, and he's ready to share those thoughts.

Like I said, Testing is Bullshit

Jeff Waid also has thoughts about the BS Test, stirred up by Ross Wiener's NYT op ed. 

Comparison of Florida’s Major K-12 (Publicly Funded) Education Options

Sue Kingery Woltanski offers a handy chart for comparing the major publicly funded education options in Florida. Nice and clear. 

Your tax dollars funding fast cars and tuition breaks for millionaires

Stephen Dyer points out that taxpayers are now helping private schools turn a profit (and buy cool cars).

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization

Emily Bendar and Nanna Inie give some practical advice about how to talk about AI without contributing to the impression that it is a living, thinking entity.

The United States Is the Only World Cup Nation Without Maternity Leave

Liz Plank reminds us that there is one respect in which the US lags all other World Cup competitors.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon I looked at the proposed reform bill for the state's long-time voucher program. 

This selection doesn't really require an explanation.

Choice for the Right Families

The choice system and the public system have two fundamentally different missions, and sometimes the choice crowd forgets itself and makes the difference explicit.

Take this webinar. It came to me in an e-mail blurbed "Attract the right families," and promises to introduce a three-step framework that will help schools "define their value, identify the right families, and guide them toward increased student enrollment."

The webinar is about marketing and features two marketing executives-- Amanda Duitsman for FlexPoint education, a cyber curriculum company, and Ashley Reyes for Florida Virtual School. That makes sense in a country in which school is inextricably welded to free market dynamics. It's not an anomaly; there's a whole industry out there like Schola Inbound Marketing with its promise to help Christian schools recruit "mission-appropriate families" and avoid the "rotten apple syndrome."

The free market does an excellent job of sorting out winners and losers, not just among vendors, but among customers. A business makes choices about which customers it wants to serve, and which ones it doesn't. This makes sense for restaurants or automobile dealers. No restaurant thinks it has a mission to feed every person in its area; it picks and chooses which customers it will serve.

We see this philosophy in the modern choice sector. Charter schools (like Success Academy in NYC) use a variety of obstacles and tests to shoo away families they don't want to serve. Voucher states write the laws to preserve a private school's "right" to reject students for any reason (or none at all). 

Choice fans will try to counter this argument by claiming that public schools aren't open to everyone either. But that glides past a fundamental difference in approach. The public school system says that the government has an obligation to provide your child with an education. The free market choice system says that society at large has no obligation to provide you with anything; it's your job to go find some vendor willing to educate your child. 

In that world, the public schools become holding pens for the hot potatoes that no private or charter school wants, a struggling system starved for resources and without much of a constituency to speak up for those schools.

There's one other irony in the "but public schools don't admit everyone, either" argument. The argument is that families are sorted by housing costs, and that's not wrong, but it also means that free market forces in the housing sector create educational inequity. And the solution to that free market effect is... the free market? The free market in housing has, in some times and places, been warped by prejudice and discrimination-- most notably the practice of redlining. Yet some choice advocates insist that private schools should be able to indulge in an educational version of redlining.

Attaching free market forces to education incentivizes schools of choice to be careful and selective about which students they admit. A free market choice system rejects the principle that we have a shared responsibility to make sure that every child has a decent education and replaces it with the notion that the responsibility belongs solely to the family, and that family will have to hope that they are deemed a desirable family for a school of choice to enroll. For the "right" families, choice; for the rest, good luck, caveat emptor, and here's hoping your local public school is still open.

Stop With The NCLB Nostalgia

Some reformsters just can't stop longing for the days of No Child Left Behind, particularly the test-based accountability component. Reformy Rahm Emanuel thinks there's political gold to be mined by harping on the issue. Mike Petrilli's substack includes spirited defense of NCLB, echoing Arne Duncan's misty-eyed insistance that we quit when we should have doubled down. 

The narrative is that after NCLB started and brought test-based accountability that made schools just get better and better for about a decade, and then things just started to stall about the same time that Congress replaced NCLB with the less stringent ESSA. That was 2015. 

Petrilli and others have been reacting to a New York Times piece from Ross Wiener, and while it gets some things wrong, he's right on the mark with this:

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

The narrative of NCLB doing swell things until America lost its nerve and bailed does not reflect any reality I lived through. I was classroom teacher of English in those years. Let me tell you the story of NCLB and test-based accountability that I remember. 

When NCLB testing first hit, we received it initially as one more fiddly piece of government paperwork. But early on, there were some troubling signs. 

One was how it trickled down through the bureaucratic infrastructure. NCLB came to us as a state policy; back in those days we didn't expect that kind of micromanagement to come from the feds and it took us a while to catch on to the real source of these policies. We were also used to state trainings that tried to convince us to buy in, the hope that we would nod and smile and adopt the policy like we'd thought of it ourselves. But in the days of NCLB, that changed; no more friendly convincing, but instead a steely-eyed "You can get with the program or get rolled over."

But the program was nuts. While NCLB was "launched" in 2002, very little trickled down to the classroom for five-ish years. My region didn't get our first training in Value-Added measures (PVAAS in PA) until the fall of 2009, and it was absolutely alarming. I wrote about that training at the time in my regular newspaper gig (I wasn't a sophisticated blogger yet) and said, in part, this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

This came just as local district administrators were waking up to the coming NCLB disaster. The required annual improvement on test scores increased slowly at first, but the last few years of NCLB included incredible demands for test score improvement, culminating in 2014 in which 100% of all students in every school were supposed to be "proficient." Every classroom teacher in the country knew this was not possible, but any time one wanted to bring this up to The People In Charge, they simply spat back, "Well, which children do you want to leave behind?" 

Legislators and bureaucrats may have operated on the belief that of course Congress would change the law before 2014 arrived, but they failed to do so, and actual schools had to operate with the knowledge that by 2011 or thereabouts there would be only two types of schools-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. 

That unmeetable deadline had multiple effects. For one, there's something very demoralizing about feeling that legislators have set you up to fail. And of course that unmeetable deadline provided the leverage for Obama/Duncan to push states into Race to the Top (or RttT Lite) and the Common Core, with its accompanying message of "Teachers are doing a terrible job, so let us tell you how to do the work." Boy, we were hoping that Obama was going to make things better; that did not happen.

But why did test scores go up for a while, and then... not?

The early approach to the tests was hopeful administration directives. "We'll revisit our curriculum to make sure it's aligned, and then if you just do good teaching, the tests will take care of themselves." That was combined with practice testing and the kind of test prep that is aimed at teaching students how to take that kind of standardized test.

Then came targeting. Schools sorted students into three groups, usually with the aid of the practice test. Group A: These students will do well enough on their own. Group B: These students are unlikely to do well enough ever. Group C: These students are close enough to the line that with some extra work we might be able to drag them over. Group C got extra test prep. They were taken out of study hall and, in some cases, even taken out of music or art or science or history so they could spend extra time getting ready for the tests. 

This was the infamous period in which schools used a simple metric-- Is it on the test?-- for deciding what mattered and what didn't. And for a while it worked, though it came at a cost to other aspects of education. Schools even altered districts structures in an attempt to get the notoriously-low-scoring 8th graders under the same roof as some other better-scoring grade,

But all of these fixes could only do so much. By 2015, an entire generation of students had learned how to take these tests-- there was nothing to be gained in scores there. Nor is there any good fix for one major obstacle-- making students actually care about how they do on a test that is boring and has zero stakes for the students themselves. And of course, painfully for those of us teaching English, a shift from teaching whole works to drilling dumb short excerpts with multiple-choice questions to better mimic the tests.

Schools were in the grip of Campbell's Law, and teachers were shoved into a Dilbert-esque world where we had to take a bunch of time away from doing the work in order to create reports on how we were doing the work. 

So here's my narrative. In 2002, the was an attempt to reorganize the entire education system around standardized reading and math tests. It took about a decade for the reorganization to be fully implemented and for the schools to rebuilt themselves around the new normal. That adjustment period looked like an increase in test scores (which way too many people continued to treat as if they were a perfect proxy for educational achievement), but once the system was rebuilt around testing and students and teachers adjusted to the new status quo, and once they were settled into the new normal, test scores settled into a new equilibrium with the usual dips and bumps that every classroom teacher is used to seeing year to year (because students vary from year to year and test scores do not represent some ebb and flow of a singular body). 

By the way-- the pandemic undoubtedly resulted in teachers and students achieving less than in an ordinary year, but the testing dip also represents schools spending less time to test-taking prep because instructional time was shortened and schools chose to use that precious resource for education rather than testing. 

There are so many reasons not to go back to the days of NCLB, not the least of which is that it made the cynical assumption that education could only be improved by using threats and punishment. My question for every reformster arguing that we need to bring back testing and consequences-- at your workplace, do you only try to do your job well when you are sufficiently threatened by your bosses?

Some reformsters are going to argue that NCLB totally got real test score gains for Group Z. My response is a request to go do a follow-up study on those folks and find out if having a raised test score resulted in improved life outcomes. Because if the only desired goal of raising test scores is to have raised test score, I do not-- and I can't stress this enough-- give a shit.

NCLB and the attendant text-centered accountability movement gave a gut-kick the morale of the teaching profession as we were forced to understand that most of the people who we thought were supposed to have our backs actually viewed us a problem. Test-centered accountability has proven toxic to schools and education. And secondary effects are appearing, because a whole generation has been raised thinking that The Test is the main point of school, resulting in fewer people choosing the profession while those that do choose it come into it with some narrow, meager ideas of what the job is about.

I don't have a lot of trust of the Science of Reading movement, but I do appreciate the reform voices that are saying, "Look, teachers want to do well, so let's help them get the tools to succeed" as opposed to "Let's threaten teachers some more so they'll take out the secret magic lesson plans they've been hiding and start doing better." I know which message was more consistent with NCLB (right down to the implication that it was teachers who were leaving children behind). 

I have no doubt that the whole history looks different when you have a mile-high view informed mostly by spreadsheets. But on the ground, in classrooms, NCLB was a mess and test-centered accountability was destructive and not particularly helpful. Nostalgia for those days is misplaced. Test-based accountability was worse than inadequate, and after two decades, we should know better. 

AK: Can The State Force District To OK Charter?

The Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board has made some charter fans big mad, and now the courts will be involved.

FNSBSD last fall dealt with a request to open a charter school in the district, to be the Pearl Creek Steam Charter School. The board voted unanimously to deny the request. They had plenty of reasons-- 52 pages worth, in fact. Those reason included a lack of a facility plan, lack of a clear enrollment projection, a mess of a contract, no transportation plan, an inadequate instructional plan that doesn't fully address state standards, no student lunch plan, no professional development plan, an admission plan that is probably illegal, an error-filled and incomplete budget, and the fact that this would have a big financial impact on the district. FNSBSD has already been closing schools to deal with dropping enrollment and funding. "Hey, the district is financially strapped, so let's open a new building," said no responsible school board ever. The Pearl Creek proposal is to reopen one of the closed schools as a charter school.

Also, said the FNSBSD board, this school is probably going to fail. "The plans in the application do not demonstrate likelihood of success," is how the board put it. Again, 52 pages of details covering the above.

The charter crew offers an estimate of $830,000 cost to the district. The district COO says it's more like $2.8 million. Coverage of the "controversy" has been extensive, especially from reporters Patrick Gilchrist and Shyler Umphenour at KUAC and Corinne Smith at the Alaska Beacon.

But Governor Mike Dunleavy would really like to see more charters, and so would Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, and so would the Dunleavy-appointed members of the Alaska State Board of Education, which has the power to overrule local school boards.

So in April, the state board went ahead and approved the charter over the objections and explanations of the duly-elected local school board. The state board declared that, essentially, the charter board had filled out all the paperwork, and that was good enough. Took them a whole fifteen pages to say it.

Bobby Burgess, the president of the FNSBSD Board of Education, had a comment for KUAC.

“Basically, my read of the state’s decision is that, if the application is filled out in full, the contents don’t really matter, even if the plan described is impossible to execute,” Burgess said. “It kind of seems like a lower standard than we hold students to on homework assignments.”

Cue the lawyers. The district appealed the state board decision. The charter board filed a civil lawsuit with request for a preliminary injunction in state Superior Court to force the district to sign the charter and get the building re-opened and ready. Last week Superior Court Judge Kirk Schwalm in Fairbanks denied the charter's request for preliminary injunction.

Now, in the newest twist, Acting Attorney General Cori Mills has filed an emergency petition to force the district to get that school opened. Because nothing says "We do too have an adequate plan for this charter school" than insisting you can get it up and running in two months. (Mills is Acting AG because the legislature rejected Dunleavy's first choice.)

Meanwhile, Pearl Creek STEAM Charter is still announcing that it will be open in the fall on both its website and Facebook page.

There are other issues at play here. Veteran reporter and columnist Dermot Cole points out that Pearl Creek will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, part of a larger charter trend in Fairbanks:

I believe that nearly all of the charter schools in the Fairbanks area have tended to attract enrollment from families with higher incomes or families where the parents have the time, energy and ability to be directly involved in their children’s education...

There are far fewer economically disadvantaged students in Alaska charter schools than neighborhood schools. There are also fewer students for whom English is a second language. Most charter schools do not have bus transportation for students, school lunch programs or other features that would make them more accessible to poor families.

I’m guessing, based on what I know about Fairbanks, that most charter school families have more flexibility built into their lives, whether it’s because of economic status, help from extended family members or the sense of mission that the best parents share.

Beyond all that, Fairbanks now has the bizarre situation of a district that has tried to cut costs by closing a school now being told by the state that they must reopen the building and pay for someone else to run a school there, reversing the decision of the elected local school board. 

It's not the most extreme version of state governments usurping the power of local school boards (take Ohio, where school districts can get in legal trouble for failing to hand buildings over to charters). But it is one more literal example of how running multiple parallel school districts costs the taxpayers extra. If only choice fans were honest enough to say, "We want choice, so we are going to levy a new School Choice Tax to pay for it." Good luck, Fairbanks.

ICYMI: Blues and Barbecue Edition (6/21)

It's the weekend of another fun festival in my small town. This time it's two days outstanding blues and plenty of good food. If you're in my neighborhood, you might still be able to make it. Admission is free, but what money is raised is donated to local school music programs, so there are many reasons to love this. 

In the meantime, here's your reading list for the week.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

The Trump administration continues to pretend it's sending education back to the states when it as actually sending it from one federal bureaucracy to another. This time it was IDEA, putting the oversight of education for students with disabilities in the hands of a guy who believes that disabilities don't exist and the weak should perish to improve the nation. It's a bold choice, given that parents of students with special needs are the parents most likely to have a lawyer on speed dial. At any rate, here's the Chalkbeat coverage of this move. Also, the PBS take. 

Special Education Issues Raised on Education Freedom Account Program

Some New Hampshire officials have noticed that special ed students are not necessarily well-served by the taxpayer-funded voucher program. Garry Rayno reports.

Get the Facts About Trump's Terrible School Voucher Scheme

Andy Spears breaks down some of the details of the federal voucher program.

New York: Charter School Operator Violates State’s Charter School Cap

Shawgi Tell reports on a charter chain that is trying to weasel its way around the state charter school cap. Can you guess which one? Yes, it's Success.

McKee Signs Legislation to Place Moratorium on Charter Schools

Surprise twist from Rhode Island

AP Exclusive: The school choice scholarship boom benefits kids already in private school

I am not sure how this story by Bianca Vazquez Toness and Sharon Lurye qualifies as an exclusive, but here's more confirmation that the taxpayer-funded voucher program in Texas is mostly benefiting students already in private school.

Growth of School Vouchers at State and Federal Levels Threatens Public Schooling

As always, Jan Resseger has done her homework. Many sources pulled together here to give a full picture of this mess.

NC Legislators Want to Put an Unproven AI Bot in Your Child’s Classroom in August

Juston Parmenter reports on the North Carolina legislature's rush to provide what nobody really wants. Here comes Khanmigo, like it or not.

Crisis for Public Education and Democracy

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the alrms sounding in the latest Network for Public Education report.

Tied Up in Knots

Jennofer Berkshire breaks down the troubles of pre-privatization pseudo-Democrats. They keep trying so hard.

My Room Is Infected by Jesus

Matt Brady and an examination of classroom culture. Some of you will know exactly what he's talking about.

Understanding isn’t just knowledge (and how we can teach it)

Christian Moore Anderson offers a thoughtful breakdown of the differences and values of knowledge vs. understanding. I may read this one several times.

AI tutor access alone doesn’t equate to student gains, study says

No surprises here, but it's worth looking at the details in this article by Anna Merod for K-12 Dive

College students are voting with their feet on AI.

Specifically, this Nick Lichetnberg article from Fortune argues that they are moving away from AI-vulnerable fields and towards those that may have more of a safe future.

"Education like Netflix"… Hunet declares the era of personalized learning designed by AI

"Education like Netflix"… Hunet declares the era of personalized learning designed by AI

What would make boring corporate training even worse? Maybe AI. Not from this country-- yet.

The smartphone era created an attention crisis — slow tech is fixing it

This article has nothing to do with education, except that it has everything to do with education. Amanda Siberling at TechCrunch

Pokemon Go Scans Quietly Trained the Navigation Tech Now Headed into Military Drones

I've seen variations on this story several times now, including how the game put rarer Pokemon in the spots they needed more pictures of. Just a reminder that when it comes to tech, you need to pay attention to what's really going on.

AI Economics for Dummies

Andrew Singleton at McSweeney's, right on the mark and hilarious.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at the NPE report on how well some states support public education (or don't), and a look at the NEA report on teacher salaries. 

Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebration in 2009. Turn it up!

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