ICYMI: Ice Jam Edition (2/22)

My area made some national news this week when the ice started piling up on the Allegheny River and threatening communities. We can watch the river out our back window, but if it ever rises high enough to touch the house it would be signs of a waterpocalypse. We used to have bad winter floods in the region-- a epic ice jam and flood 100 years ago went on for three months-- but a large dam and some smaller bits of technology have made the area safer. It's one of those things where you don't think about what is keeping you safe because the result is a bunch of Not Happening. 

Plenty to read this week. Here we go.

Defending the Promise: Public Education and the Fight for Democracy

Greg Wyman has been writing a series celebrating traditional public education. This new entry looks at education and its struggles with recent policy decisions.

What Would It Mean if Ohioans Voted to Eliminate Property Taxes?

Jan Resseger looks at one of those bad ideas that just won't die.

Hempfield School District ends partnership with religious rights firm

Really hoping this is a trend. The Independence law Center has been peddling anti-LGBTQ policies to school boards across PA. It is great to see someone firing them.

Sex Education, v. 2026.0

Nancy Flanagan looks at new sex ed revisions in Michigan, and why the feds have decided to go after them.

Ten Commandments could go up in Tennessee public school

More performative anti-religion religious law, this time in Tennessee. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.

Parents are opting kids out of school laptops, returning them to pen and paper

Tyler Kingkade reports on a trend that is, I suspect, maybe not that much of a trend, but still worth reading about.

The Impacts of Immigration Actions on Students and Schools

Steve Nuzum has some info on how the immigrant crackdown is affecting schools in South Carolina.

No Public Funds for Secular or Religious Charter Schools

Shawgi Tell reminds us that some folks really want to start religious charter schools, and it's a really bad idea.

Top teachers’ performance drops in high-poverty schools, showing school context is key

One persistent neo-liberal idea is that we can pluck good teachers out of one school, plug them into another bad school, and magical test improvements would ensue. This was always a dumb idea, but as Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, we now have research to prove that it's a dumb idea.

How One Rural District Used College Students to Keep English Learners in School

Lauraine Langero at EdWeek reports on a school where college students come mentor English Learners-- and it seems to be helping the dropout rate in this Virginia school.

“The Time Had Come to Find My Work”: Diane Ravitch’s Authentic Autobiography

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reviews Diane Ravitch's memoir. If you need one more opinion to convince you to get a copy, here you go.

Immigration trigger bill would require Tennessee schools to track, report student status

Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat reports on an ugly law being considered in Tennessee. Should schools be forced to help the government target immigrants?

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility

ProPublica put a whole team of reporters on this story, and it's a tough read. (It's also apparently the reason ICE goons have been confiscating children's letters)

Earn the Seat: What a School Board Is — and Why Mine Failed

Have school board elections in your district lost the plot? Matt Brady looks at the problems in his own district caused by people who don't understand the assignment.

A New National Reading Panel? It Depends

Should we try having a national reading panel again? Maybe, says Nancy Bailey, but only if we avoid some of these major problems.

120 Champions and Defenders of Children: The Lawmakers Who Show Up for Kids

The First Focus Campaign for Children has issued its annual report on which legislators are doing right by young humans. Learn more (and see if your Congressperson made the list).

Vouchers' growth will be their demise

Stephen Dyer explains the quirk in Ohio's legal debates over vouchers. They have to stop looking like they are funding a second, unconstitutional school system.

UT Board Policy Asks Faculty to Avoid ‘Controversial’ Topics in Class

University of Texas joins the list of colleges offering vaguely worded bans on Bad Language. Inside Higher Ed has details on this baloney.

Teacher-centered vs. student-centered instruction: mitigating the socioeconomic achievement gap through differential access and returns

It's an academic paper with some dense language, but it concludes that teacher-centered instruction may be superior to child-centered. Wade through at your own risk.

In defense of stochastic parrots

"Large language models are useful," says Benjamin Riley, "and that's the problem." Lots to unpack here.

The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper

If your school district has made a deal with Amazon, or is planning to, you might want to look at this research that shows just how much Amazon is shafting government bodies and school districts who have made this deal.

Can We Please Stop it with the AI Woo-Woo?

John Warner asks for an end to baloney-pants over-hype on AI.

Two pieces are out at Forbes.com. One deals with Arizona's latest voucher reform battle, and the other with how Kentucky's supreme court shut down yet another charter funding scheme.

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The Wrong Way To Deal With Anxiety

We live in an age of anxious, even fearful, students. And a pair of authors argue that accommodating their anxiety only makes things worse.

Ben Lovett (Psychology professor at Columbia) and Alex Jordan (private practice and Harvard med school) are the authors of Overcoming Test Anxiety. I only just came across an op-ed they wrote last fall, but it really rings a bell.

Here's the set-up:

Jacob is terrified of oral reports he’s expected to give in his 10th-grade history class this school year. A therapist’s note recommends he be excused, and the school agrees. This scenario is playing out nationwide. The individuals and institutions involved are well intentioned and trying to help students feel more comfortable. But as psychologists who’ve studied and treated anxiety for decades, we believe that this approach — eliminating whatever makes students nervous — is making the problem worse. Here’s
why: Anxiety feeds on avoidance.

Anxiety and fear, particularly among young humans, are fed by a debilitating combo-- the belief that 1) the scary things is truly dangerous, so dangerous that 2) you can't possibly handle it.

I've written about this many times before. Students are still trying to grow coping mechanisms for Scary Things, and they are surrounded by adults who may or may not having very good coping mechanisms of their own. Choices for coping with scary, anxiety-inducing things include:

1) Perform a set of behaviors that will magically keep the Scary Thing at bay. This one is popular among adults, and the problem is that in this model, the scary thing is always right outside, just waiting to get you, and you have to keep performing your keep-it-at-bay activities forever. I'm convinced that much of what we're living through right now is a man (and some like-minded sycophants) frantically pursuing the belief that if he acquires enough wealth and fame and power, he doesn't have to be afraid of dying. No human has ever pursued this tactic so fiercely or extensively, and there is a lesson for all of us in the fact that despite the success of his pursuit, it clearly hasn't assuaged his fear in the slightest. 

2) Denial and avoidance. The Scary Thing isn't real, isn't happening, isn't a threat. You aren't really here. You will run away and therefor avoid it. You can't lose if you don't play. This is every student who is suddenly too sick to deliver their oral report. It's not really coping so much as delaying. Worse, it reinforces the notion that the Scary Things is too devastating and you are too weak to deal with it.

3) Strength. You are strong-- specifically, strong enough to cope with the Scary Thing. Even if you don't beat it (and by God, you might), you will still be okay afterwards. You might even get stronger by wrestling with it.

2 is the strategy that the authors are talking about, and I agree. Every time we give a student a way to avoid the Scary Thing, we reinforce the idea that it really is a threat, and they really aren't strong enough to cope. 

By contrast, when students take on what they’d rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice.

As is always the case in education, there's a lot to balance here. Getting students to face the Scary Thing can mean they need a kick in the ass combined with a forcible closure of all escape routes, or it can mean that they need to have their hand held as they are coaxed and reassured to go forward. It almost always means prepping them for the Scary Thing so that they have the tools they need. 

It also means that teachers have to be thoughtful about how they handle failure in a classroom, in things both big and small. Through most of my career, I tried to respond to everything from wrong answers to a question in class to bombed assessments with a message, somehow, of "That's not what we want, but you are still okay." Students, particularly younger ones, are susceptible to the message that failing at school is proof that they are sorry excuses for a human being-- in other words, they are too weak and too incompetent to face the Scary Thing which is, in fact, a Big Scary test of their worth as a human being. 

Of course, as a teacher, you have to switch gears with a student who doesn't seem to experience any anxiety at all, and of course you have to try to assess whether the student is actually out of !#@%s to give or if that's just a defensive pose (see 2 above). 

Some teachers, it must be said, tend to make mountains out of molehills ("If I have to talk to you one more time it will go on your permanent record and you will never get into college or get a job ever!") which can feed some students' dramatic sense that they are engaged in an epic struggle with apocalyptic forces. This is not helpful.

The messages that students need to hear are--

1) You can do this.

2) If you don't manage it the first, or even the second time, you will be okay.

3) I am here to help you get better at doing this.

They need to hear these messages from teachers and parents and other adults as well. 

They can also, Lovett and Jordan point out, be taught explicitly about anxiety-- what it is, where it comes from, how people deal with it, and how it is a feeling that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. I suspect they could also stand to hear tales of anxiety from adults; sometimes, young humans feed their anxiety with the assumption that everyone else, adults especially, has everything completely under control and therefor there must be something wrong with the young human who does not. 

Adults might also just generally stop pushing the idea that it is a big scary world, that we are all balanced on the edge of disaster, and that young humans are particularly in danger (and incapable of dealing with that danger). 

Schools do not have to be anxiety farms, and teachers do not have to feed the idea that students face Scary Things that those students can't possible deal with or survive. We can believe in our students (and if you teach in one place for a long time, you will see the evidence as they grow and thrive and weather adversity), and we can let that belief color how we treat them. We are all of us stronger than we sometimes imagine; all we have to do is grasp that strength for ourselves and those around us. 

FL: Replacing Immigrants With Children

This is not actually a new story, but recent comments by Florida's attorney general have reminded us that for some folks, the solution to sticking all the immigrant labor in detention centers is to fill the empty labor market with teenagers.

Many states have been stripping child labor protections in the past few years. Much of the push has been coming from employers, part of a general desire not to have to follow stupid rules. Also, teen employees are cheap and disinclined to start unions or complain about lousy conditions.

We know that businesses are pushing much of this, even writing bills, but it turns out that there's a big fat dark money lobbying group that is "helping out" in many states.

Meet the Foundation for Government Accountability.

FGA was founded in 2011 by CEO Tarren Bragdon, who himself highlights a quote that gives us a good idea of who he is:

I greatly value the ability to provide for my wife and children and want more Americans to experience the freedom that work brings. I founded FGA to pursue good policy solutions that will free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream.

I've written a whole post about this guy, who took his show from Maine to Florida, where he helped write some legislation to give teens the freedom to be more easily exploited by employers. Yay.

It's been almost a year since Governor Ron DeSantis dropped this nugget when chatting with Border Czar Ton Homan

“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” DeSantis said last week at a panel discussion with border czar Tom Homan, as first reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

So here comes Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to add his two cents. Uthmeier was DeSantis's chief of staff as well as the guy who ran the failed presidential campaign of his boss. When appointed to the post a year ago, Uthmeier barked

We will not stand idly by as the left tries to infiltrate our institutions and use the court system to indoctrinate our kids. We will fight the activists that try to weaken our duly enacted laws, that try to challenge our constitutional order and try to harm the unborn.

This week, when the Wall Street Journal, reported that Florida employers are having a hard time filling jobs legally, Uthmeier got to go on Fox and respond. We're cranking out all sorts of meat widgets, he proudly more or less declared. And also "getting people into the workforce earlier." 

We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly.

Uthmeier, it should be noted, is not getting his own hands dirty. Instead, he has landed a gig at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he will rake in $100,000 a year for teaching two hours a week. He also proposed constructing "Alligator Alcatraz," but maybe that wasn't so much a human rights abomination -- maybe he was just trying to create job opportunities for teens in concentration camp construction. He was also part of that business of shipping migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. 

Maybe he just has different ideas about what getting your hands dirty actually means.

This represents one more step toward a multi-tier education system, a system where some folks get a full and rounded education and others, destined for a life as meat widgets, need only get enough education to make them useful to the employers who will start extracting labor from them as soon as possible. It's not a future I favor.

Are there students who are going to lead happy, useful lives as blue collar workers? Absolutely (I taught hundreds of them). But two things should be true-- 1) blue collar workers benefit from a well-rounded life-enhancing education just as much as everyone else, and 2) their path is to be chosen by them and not forced on them by policy makers. Certainly not as a way to patch over problems created by self-kneecapping xenophobic policies.

The Ed Department's Anti-DEI Letter Is Dead. Don't Get Too Excited.

Is this particular nightmare over? I don't think so.

Wednesday, this went up on Bluesky.

The occasion is a federal court ruling on the infamous February 14 Dear Colleague letter. That letter was a crystallization of the Trump regime's belief that "civil rights" doesn't mean what you think it means.

The short explanation is that the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the decision that struck down race-conscious admissions establishes that all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are actually violations of Title VI. Therefore, the only real civil rights violations in this country are the ones committed against white men. And therefore, all DEI programs are a violation of Title VI. 

That belief was expressed through a variety of avenues and policies, but the Dear Colleague letter was a shot directly at schools across the country. And it was dragged into court almost as soon as it was issued.

Last month I reported that the Ed Department had withdrawn its appeal of the earlier ruling against the letter, meaning that the whole thing was doomed.

Except.  

When I wrote that piece, I committed an actual journalism and asked the Ed Department for a comment, and they surprised me by replying. This is what Julie Hartman, Press Secretary for Legal Affairs, told me via e-mail:

The Department has full authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to target impermissible DEI initiatives that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Title VI has always prohibited schools from racial preferencing and stereotyping, and it continues to do so with or without the February 14th Dear Colleague Letter. OCR will continue to vigorously enforce Title VI to protect all students and hold violators accountable.

In other words, "we will keep doing what we've been doing and we really don't care about the letter."

Perhaps with the letter gone and only things like Dear Leader's edict left to convey the regime's extremely obvious intent, maybe school district and university leaders will say, "Well, without a letter I feel confident that the administration won't come after us for some crazy anti-DEI reason." But I kind of doubt it.

I don't want to dismiss this victory. Certainly this is better than if the courts had sided with the administration. But it feels a little like a ruling that instead of using twelve different ways to announce its intention to do some awful things, the court has told it to knock it off with the sixth type of announcement. 

The ACLU and the teacher unions and people who are fans of the rule of law can certainly celebrate. But I'm pretty sure that the administration let this one go because the existence or non-existence of the Dear Colleague letter has zero bearing on what they intend to keep doing. 

NH: Considering a Messy Open Enrollment Policy

New Hampshire is considering an update on their unused open enrollment law.

HB 751 started out as a bill about licensure for outpatient substance abuse facilities, but because legislatures are a wacky bunch of folks, an amendment was just added to turn it into a bill about open enrollment. 

The old open enrollment law allowed school districts to opt in, and for years, only one district has done so. But it does also allow districts to block students from leaving, and apparently the legislatures is fast tracking the new bill to get ahead of the annual meetings where such local decisions could be made.

The new version of open enrollment would be mandatory for all districts. 

Any student could choose any school in any district for any reason. Districts are allowed to set their capacity and, having done so, reject students for whom they have no space. Districts could also deny a transfer because the student had been expelled, the student had a documented history of significant disciplinary issues, or the student had a history of chronic absenteeism. Also--

No receiving school or district shall accept or reject an applicant based upon grade or age levels, pupil needs, areas of academic focus, aptitude, academic or athletic achievement.

What happens if the sending and receiving districts have different per-pupil spending amounts? What if my kid wants to leave East Egg High School where they spend $10K per year on him and go to West Egg High, where they spend $20K per pupil? The sending district only has to pay their own per pupil amount as tuition; if there is a difference, the parents have to make it up. So if I want to send my kid to West Egg, I have to kick in $10K myself.

What if a West Egg student wants to come to East Egg? I'm not sure anyone is seriously expecting that to happen, but if it did, the bill says sending schools pay not less than 80% of their rate, so the West Egg taxpayers would pay $16K. 

Schools can offer tuition rate "bargains," and a school "may receive financial aid, private gifts, grants, or revenue."

There are numerous problems with the proposal. For one, it absolutely kicks local control in the teeth. Districts would face major financial decisions that they could neither predict nor control. I would expect many districts would simply set their capacity in a way that allowed for very few transfers in.

But as writer Garry Rayno points out, there are other problematic effects over time. The most likely effect is to drain poor districts and make their taxpayers donors to wealthier districts. Analysis by Reaching Higher NH argues that as sending districts send more pupils, their cost per pupil will grow, because the law says transfer students will be used to compute Average Daily Members in Residence. Actually, the law would get really confusing because the state uses Average Daily Members in Residence and Average Daily Members in Attendance to compute different formulas, and those two numbers would be increasingly different, because the state will count transfer students in ADMR counts, but not ADMA. 

So to simplify. Let's say East Egg has 100 students and spends a million dollars on students, and ten of them head off to West Egg. Now the district has 90 students--but because it's paying the tuition of those ten transfer students it still spends a million on students, but now that is spread over 90 students. Cost per pupil goes up. Meanwhile, the cost-per-pupil in the receiving school goes down, and the stranded costs remain (losing ten students doesn't allow East Egg to cut buses or heating, maybe not even staff). 

This is just such a complicated mess. Sending students to neighboring districts is not unheard of in the state, but that has historically involved a sending district that does not operate its own schools (you may recall a huge dustup over this very issue in tiny Croydon, NH). Opponents warn that this bill sill simply result in a reverse Robin Hood situation, with poor districts losing funding and facing the choice of either cutting expenses or raising taxes, which is itself a mess because New Hampshire is already under a court order to fix a bad school funding system that leans to heavily on local taxes to fund schools. 

School superintendents-- including those whose district would likely be a winner-- oppose the bill, citing budget headaches. Meanwhile, school choice fans make the same old argument that it would allow students to escape struggling districts, as if this would not leave the majority of students behind in a district that would be facing even more struggles due to lost revenue. It'll encourage improvements to compete for students, say the choicers, even though that's just not howe it works. 

And of course, like most choice programs, this would strip local taxpaying voters of local control. Your neighbor sends their kids to a different district, and your taxes go up, argue superintendents. 

The bill was supposed to be on a fast track; we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, John Sheas, superintendent of schools for Somersworth School District, seems to have a pretty good grasp of which way the wind is blowing among Granite State legislators. The bill, he says, "could be the knockout punch for universal public education" in New Hampshire. Noting the chromic underfunding issue, he goes on to write

On top of all this has been a decades-long effort to undo the very premise of universal public education. Rather than a system built and maintained together (federal, state governments, and local communities) aimed at educating all of our kids for the greater good of our communities and nation — they’ve sought to replace it with a private marketplace narrative. Education is an “every man, woman, and child for themselves” endeavor — not a public good. The NH school voucher program (a.k.a. Education Freedom Accounts) has fit this narrative perfectly and done even more damage to struggling school systems. It seems only a matter of time before we offer vouchers (or tax rebates) to those among us who don’t plan to use police services, the fire department, or local roads. No?

 No, indeed. 

The AI Task Force and Moms For Liberty: It's Complicated

Moms for Liberty has staked out some positions on AI in education, and it may be a preview of the policy challenge facing conservatives in the area. 

Last April, Dear Leader issued an AI in Education edict in which somebody wrote

By fostering AI competency, we will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to adapt to and thrive in an increasingly digital society. Early learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.

The edict established the Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, five words that, when crammed together by this administration, create some sort of field that overloads and destroys any irony in the vicinity.  The federal AI Initiative offers a page of "resources" that looks much like a "list of folks hoping to make money from AI." That goes with the part calling for public-private partnerships

A bunch of organizations and businesses and also more businesses have signed the presidential Pledge To America's Youth in which [Your Name Here] pledges to provide resources that foster early interest in AI technology, promote AI proficiency, and enable comprehensive AI training for parents and educators" all of which sounds much nicer than "We promise to hook customers as soon as they are born and do whatever we can to saturate the market. Ka-ching."

Specifically, over the next 4 years, we pledge to make available resources for youth, parents and teachers through funding and grants, educational materials and curricula, technology and tools, teacher professional development programs, workforce development resources, and/or technical expertise and mentorship.

Well, of course. Hey, did you hear the unsurprising discovery via internal documents that Google is using its education products to turn schools into a "pipeline of future users"? Is it any wonder that Dear Leader, our Grifter In Chief, wants to keep an eye on this new, promising money tree.

The initiative and task force are headed up by Michael Kratsios, whose previous gigs include Chief of Staff to Peter Thiel. He served in the first Trump administration in the Department of Defense, spent his interregnum as managing director of Scale AI and is now the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In his current gig, he's calling to "demystify these amazing technologies" and figure out what AI is and is not good for, and then American families, students and educators "can fully take advantage of AI applications with confidence and responsibility." Perhaps he's unfamiliar with the research that shows that the more people know about AI, the less inclined they are to use it. 

The task force has been meeting with folks to "discuss AI's impact in the classroom," which of course means everyone except people who actually work in classrooms. At their December confab, they heard from Chris Woolard of the Ohio Department of [Privatizing] Education, Adeel Khan of Magic School, and Tina Descovich, co-founder and current Big Cheese of Moms for Liberty. 

M4L has some thoughts about AI in education. And, well, they aren't entirely terrible. 

Along with tech companies acting responsibly, policymakers must do everything possible to make sure parents have full transparency into how AI systems operate, what data they collect, and how decisions or recommendations are made

By acting below, together we can ensure parents, not algorithms or activists, shape how AI is used in the education of our children.

Of course, they leave teachers out of the equation, perhaps because they can't quite figure out how to work "we think teachers are sometimes okay, but we hate their evil unions" into this equation. But their slogan for AI-- "Demand transparency, accountability, and boundaries" -- is not bad. And they do better by teachers elsewhere-- we'll get to that.

They've got a pledge to sign, and it hits all the usual M4L notes--

It's the usual "parents' fundamental right etc" song and dance, but that song and dance in the face of a plagiarism-driven data-mining monster makes some sense. It also suggests that M4L and its ilk are not quite ready to jump on the White House's grifty AI bandwagon. The M4L pledge certainly strikes a different tone than the White House's AI Pledge to America's Youth. 

M4L also has a model school board policy and a model bill for legislatures. The school board policy lists four purposes:

1. Protect parental rights and student privacy;
2. Preserve the central role of teachers in instruction;
3. Maintain academic integrity; and
4. Ensure transparency and accountability in the use of emerging technologies.

The policy calls for no AI tools used without prior parental consent. The school should annually provide written notice of all AI tools approved for use.

There's a whole section on "instructional safeguards" that states as its first point

Artificial intelligence shall not replace a certified teacher in providing core academic instruction or assigning final grades.

Which doesn't go quite far enough (AI should assign no grades at all), but still is a more blunt defense of actual human teaching than anything the administration has offered. 

M4L also seems to understand the AI threat to all manner of data that can be collected from young humans far better than plenty of other folks (for God's sake, stop inviting ChatGPT to scan all your social media content so it can make you a cute cartoon of yourself). 

The M4L model legislation is much of the same stuff with more expansive lawmakery language, but again, they seem to understand the issues here:

While artificial intelligence may offer instructional benefits, its use also presents risks, including data privacy violations, diminished academic integrity, ideological bias, and inappropriate replacement of human educators.

Well, yeah. 

It's an unusual day when we don't find M4L falling right in behind Dear Leader and nodding along with whatever his crew has to say, and I would love to think that this shows a bit of fissure between pro-any corporate entity that might enrich me MAGA and right-wing conspiracy crew MAGA. It almost smells a bit like that time a whole lot of Very Conservative Folks went rogue over Common Core.

But if the Moms want to join in the resistance to throwing AI into classrooms Right Away because if we don't OMG students won't be ready for the jobs of tomorrow because AI is inevitable and awesome and so much better than all those troublesome human meat widgets-- anyway, if the Moms want to stand up to all of that, I'm happy to see it. I am definitely staying tuned. Can AI make popcorn?

ICYMI: Opening Weekend Edition (2/15)

My latest show opened this weekend, and the cast is enjoying the result of their hard work. We are fortunate to have a great little theater in this community, and I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work in it from time to time. Making stuff is good for the soul.

Here's the reading for the week.

Misunderstanding and Misapplying "No Zero" Policies (and Why They Are Good)

Paul Thomas looks at the much-debated No Zero grading policy, and explains why he believes it's good practice.

Trying out the clt

Testing guru Akil Bello takes the Classical Learning Test, the alleged "classical" alternative to those all-woked-up SAT and ACT joints, out for a test drive. If you've been wondering what's actually under the hood with this test, here's your info. Fascinating and informative.

Are Charter Schools Innovative?

It's a fairly important question, but as Shawgi Tell points out, we haven't really been dealing with it honestly.

White House says it won’t withhold funding from NH schools with DEI programs

The regime takes another loss on its anti-diversity, equity and inclusion campaign. Annmarie Timmins reports for New Hampshire Public Radio.

A Subsidy For the Few: Vouchers Leaving Public Schools, Students Behind

Tim Walker (who, I think, has been writing for NEA Today for roughly a million years) gets into how taxpayer-funded vouchers really work and who benefits from them. 

"The Bill Dies Today"

True to its promise, the Mississippi Senate just killed the House school choice bill really most sincerely dead. Devna Bose reports for Mississippi Today.

Arizona librarians could become criminals for recommending these books

Arizona takes some more steps to criminalize Naughty Books and threatens librarians with jail time.

Tennessee House panel kills private-school voucher transparency bill

Yet another state's legislators declare that taxpayer-funded vouchers should not be subject to any sort of transparency. Gee, I wonder why. Sam Stockard at Tennessee Lookout has the story.

Governor Polis Has Opted Colorado Into the Federal School Voucher Scheme

The big question is whether Polis is a liar or truly doesn't understand the policy. So sorry, Colorado. Advocates for Public Education Policy explains the situation.

State Data: Ohio spent more on school privatization last year than public schools in many communities

Stephen Dyer continues to detail the many ways that Ohio's taxpayer-funded choice programs stick it to students still in public schools.

A Structural Problem, A Temporary Fix

Sue Kingery Woltanski actually goes to legislative meetings and pays attention and stuff, and she understands the many brands of Floridian shenanigans. The rest of us are fortunate that she's willing to explain it all.

All the Ways the Trump Admin. Keeps Redefining Civil Rights by Banning Equity and Inclusion in Education

Jan Resseger looks at several of the reports about the Trump regimes work in redefining civil rights and who gets to have them.

Kristof Is Wrong about Reading (Again), and He Knows It: A Reader

Paul Thomas has collected many of his resources about the science of reading in this post that argues that Nicholas Kristoff is wrong about something else, again.

Does Love Really Make the World (or Classroom) Go ‘Round?

Nancy Flanagan with some reflections on the importance of some non-academic factors in school.

Students Unite!

Jennifer Berkshire highlights some of the students who are standing up to ICE.

Homophobic President Attacks Transgender Students

Thomas Ultican looks at Trump policies and trans students.

A pair of giants here.

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Why Is Inclusion Political

One more anti-banner ideological censorship law is under legal attack, this time in Idaho. And there is something we can learn about the defense.

This is fallout from the case of Sarah Inama, the Idaho teacher who got in trouble for a classroom poster that showed "Everyone is Welcome Here" with cartoon hands of different skin tones. Her administrators were sure this would violate the state's anti-ideology poster ban. Here it is--

If you are an ordinary human, you may wonder how the heck this poster is ideological or political. Lucky for you, you ordinary human, the attorney general of Idaho, Raul Labrador, wrote a whole op-ed (One state’s bold fight against classroom indoctrination targets woke ‘welcome’ signs) to explain why, and it's illuminating.

On its face, the message appears neutral — simple, positive words that seem apolitical. But the design reveals its true purpose: colorful letters above imagery designed to signal adherence to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The rainbow colors and progressive symbols accompanying these messages make their political purpose unmistakable.

Do they? What political purpose is that? This, I think, is leads to an important idea that isn't always mentioned--

These classroom displays reflect a broader ecosystem of political resistance groups launched in protest of the political rise of President Donald Trump.

There's aplenty to unpack there.

For one, if you've been looking for a working definition of "woke" or "ideological," here's one for you-- anything opposing Donald Trump. This, really, makes a certain kind of sense. If the regime is going to value first and foremost loyalty to Dear Leader over all else (competence, ethics, adherence to the rule of law, religious principles), then anything that is disloyal to Dear Leader would be Very Bad. When your primary ideology is Loyalty to Dear Leader, then anything that is not loyalty is by definition a bad ideology. Woke. 

For another, there is the underlying notion that people like Sarah Inama do not put up "Everyone is Welcome Here" signs or otherwise promote diversity, equity, or inclusion because they have some sort of ethical or moral beliefs about the value of human beings and diversity in a pluralistic society. No, the assumption is that people are only pretending to care about those things in order to oppose Dear Leader. The assumption is that these folks are not operating out of principled ethical values, but out of their desire to oppose those in power. 

This is not a new Trumpian thing; scratch opposition to movements like Black Lives Matter and you get some version of "Race problems were totally solved around 1964, and everything Black folks have done since then is simply political posturing in order to get some sort of unearned advantage." But now we have upped the ante by viewing even this idea through the lens of loyalty to Dear Leader.

People keep tearing hair out over what appears to them to be hypocrisy. I will continue to argue that when you encounter what seems to be hypocrisy, you're just failing to see the true underlying value. Looking at the seeming contradictory positions of Trumpers through a lens in which the main, even only value, is loyalty to Dear Leader, and it doesn't seem so hypocritical at all. 

Everyone really is welcome here-- as long as they demonstrate their loyalty to Dear Leader. 

Sarah Inama Takes Idaho To Court

Sarah Inama is the Idaho middle school teacher who was told to get rid of her "Everyone is Welcome Here" poster. 

The boneheads at West Ada School District decided that the sentiment, combined with an image of hands of different skin colors, was just too political to be tolerated, citing Idaho's House Bill 41, yet another bill designed to censor any double-plus-ungood ideas that teachers tried to express. 

So now Inama is going after that bill.

There's a whole lot of racism involved in the law and its enforcement, and the state Attorney General Raul Labrador went the extra mile to clarify that, in fact, everyone is not welcome in Idaho classrooms (no, he didn't use those exact words, but the sentiment was clear). Labrador issued a press release/op-ed (picked up by Fox, of course) that framed the whole flap as "One state's bold fight against classroom indoctrination targets woke 'welcome" signs." 

I have written a whole separate post on how this "woke" message is "political," rather than digress wildly here. Suffice it to say that the anti-inclusiveness in West Ada ran all the way from local parents all the way up to the state capital.

After battling her district, Inama got out of West Ada and immediately found a new home in the Boise school district, where she can put up her scary woke signs in her classroom. And she could be forgiven for just shaking the dust off her shoes and getting back to work. 

Instead, she has filed a lawsuit in federal court looking for a declaration that the state's flag and banner law is unconstitutional. 

The defendants in the in the lawsuit, filed February 3--

The Idaho State Board of Education
The Idaho Department of Education
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador
The West Ada School District
West Ada Superintendent Derek Bub
Monty Hyde, principal of West Ada’s Lewis and Clark Middle School

The suit points out Inama's distinguished career, and puts her posters in the context of a district attempt to make its schools, already struggling with some racism issues, more welcoming. The suit also points out that administration admitted, as they forced her to remove the posters, that no actual complaints had been lodged against them. 

Then all hell broke loose. Inama became a national story, and the administration and school board scrambled to make it go away (a crisis management technique familiar to teachers in districts across the nation). This included meetings with admins, including one at which the superintendent told Inama that he wanted to protect her from a smear campaign, but if she wouldn't let up on the issue, he would not be able to protect her. And then state decided to pipe up.

The lawsuit argues that the Speech law is vague and inconsistently applied. Inama is asking for damages, attorney fees, a jury trial and an injunction against the law.

Inama is represented by attorneys from Dorsey & Whitney, a large, high-powered firm, with the team including Elijah Watkins (a partner at the firm), Aaron Bell (an associate), Latonia Haney Keith (Dean of Graduate Studies at the College of Idaho, with a law degree from Harvard) and McKay Cunningham, a Constitutional law professor. The state has its work cut out for it. Here's hoping they lose big. 

Kristoff Loves That Asian Bootstrapping

Nicholas Kristoff is part of the New York Times stable of amateurs with high-profile unfounded opinions about education, and last week he decided that maybe we should be more like Taiwan or Vietnam. 

He waves vaguely in the direction of societal commitment to education (the headline is "What if the Valedictorians in America's Schools Were the Cool Kids," which, in assuming that they aren't already the cool kids, reveals its own biases). He talks about visiting schools in Asia since the 1980s. "Every time I visit, I feel a pang of envy for societies that seem to value education more than America does."

Okay, I feel his pain here. Our country's attitude toward education mirrors our attitude toward young humans-- we make a lot of noise about valuing them, but when the rubber meets the road, it turns out there are plenty of other things we value way more. 

Kristoff, however, is not so much focused on what society can do to live up to educational value as he is on how such a value will inspire students to bootstrap the hell out of themselves. He focuses on stories like the girl who works full time and studies full time so that she can go to college (she sleeps for two AM hours at her workplace if things are slow). Or the student who eschews dating because in these countries "respect for education is so deep that it can even overwhelm youthful hormones."

He nods to the idea that such obsession stifles creativity and robs children of fun and youth. He also nods to the fact that some nations devote huge amounts of money to education (Taiwan mandates 22.5% of net budget revenues go to education). He notes these things with a "Yes, but" and swings right back to promoting a culture obsessed with education so that young humans will feel moved to grab those bootstraps. He Yesbuts his way past poverty, inequity, and injustice without examining how this A) restricts access to both education and bootstraps and B) how education obsession doesn't seem to have mitigated the issues.

Most of all, he doesn't examine the Rugged American biases that lead him to center this story about education valuation on students rather than, say, political leaders and other adults who throw society's weight behind education. This is the Rugged Individualist dream-- students who rise up and doggedly pursue education without any powerful adults doggedly working to make that pursuit of education more doable. It is an Asian version of a familiar story-- the heartwarming portrait of a young human overcoming obstacles without ever questioning why those obstacles are requiring overcoming in the first place.

Kristoff might want to take a look at the work of Yong Zhao, the China-born scholar who has plenty to say about the Asian brand of education obsession.

But mostly he might want to look at his vision (and it's a vision shared by many) that a more education-valuing society would look pretty much exactly like our society right now, except that students would work harder.

He ends the piece with some questions: "Maybe we could acknowledge the inequity of local school finance that results in sending rich kids to good schools and poor kids to weak schools? Perhaps politicians could stop demonizing universities and taxing their endowments? What if we respected human capital as much as financial capital?"

Those are not bad questions. But they need to come at the beginning of a piece, not as a sort of post-script of a piece that is mostly about something else entirely.

Will School Choice Kill Athletics?

Nancy Bailey, a retired teacher and longtime blogger, asked a good question this week-- Will school choice destroy athletics as we know it?

Let me provide the answer from Pennsylvania-- the shape of high school athletics "as we know it" is already deeply influenced by school choice.

It's worth remembering that we have always had school choice-- what we're talking about these days is really taxpayer-subsidized school choice. But the school choice we already have in Pennsylvania is more than enough to shape the athletic landscape.

Right now, the top rankings of high school basketball are dominated by Catholic high schools, with a few private schools thrown in for good measure. Flip back through the years on sports site MaxPreps, and you'll see the same names year after year. Same thing for girls' basketball. You can see the same thing in football, though not quite as pronounced. 

But if you are a Pennsylvania high school enjoying a really good year in sports, you will almost certainly meet one of the usual private Catholic schools on your path through the playoffs. 

The secret is recruiting, and it works just like college. Woo the family, promise a good spot on a successful team, and throw in a hefty scholarship. Plus, perhaps, some help in relocating the student or even the family to the location. In my state, Catholic and other private schools recruit-- and they recruit hard. We think of "school's choice" as gatekeeping-- the school just sits there and sifts through the applications that come in. But for high stakes operations like these, recruitment is a big deal. Schools actively choose students without passively waiting for them to show up.

Pennsylvania privates enjoy an extra advantage. We classify school sports through A rankings (Single A all the way up through 6A) based on enrollment size-- not the size of the population the district serves. So 2A public schools with small student bodies get to compete with 2A Catholic schools that also have small student bodies--but which can draw from students anywhere in the state. (And if you call them out on this in, say, a local newspaper column, their athletic director will send you a cranky letter filled with non-denial denials.)

Recruitment is a feature of choice, and always has been (it was used by the "miracle" T.M. Landry school). Because schools need to be able to do marketing, they will go after students who can help them with that marketing, whether it's by strengthening a sports program or helping a high-profile marching band or keeping test numbers up. Turning school choice into taxpayer-subsidized school choice just supercharges the whole business, putting more money into the recruitment kitty. 

Nancy Bailey's piece covers other states and has some excellent references-- you should read it and keep in mind that in some states, the transformation of school sports by school choice athletics began years ago, much to the frustration of many public school programs. 

The Feds Push School Prayer

Last week the U.S. Department of Education offered some "guidance" on prayer and religious expression in public school. 

“The Trump Administration is proud to stand with students, parents, and faculty who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights in schools across our great nation,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Our Constitution safeguards the free exercise of religion as one of the guiding principles of our republic, and we will vigorously protect that right in America's public schools.”

To be clear, the rights of students to freely exercise their religion has never been in question. Well, okay-- the right of Christian students to freely exercise their religion has never been in question. What has been "in question" is the rights of school-adjacent adults to practice their religion in ways that pressure students to follow along. 

The guidance still recognizes some restrictions. They point out "Public schools may not sponsor prayer nor coerce or pressure students to pray. For example, a school principal may not lead a prayer at a mandatory school assembly." Also, you're allowed to shut down a student whose prayer disrupts class (as long as you are consistent in restricting other forms of class-disrupting speech). 

But there is still plenty of baloney here. Schools should not "favor secular views over religious ones or one religion over another." This follows the religious conservative view that secularism is just another religion (albeit a naughty anti-god one). That's incorrect (I get to it in greater lengths here and here) much like saying that the plate a meal is served on is one more food item. If I never talk to my students about what person they should marry when they grow up, that is not suggesting that they shouldn't get married at all-- it simply leaves that conversation for a more appropriate person to have at a more appropriate time in a more appropriate place. 

The not favoring one religion over another is also problematic. Exactly who gets to decide A) what counts as a legitimate religion and B) what counts as favoritism? 

The guidance calls for judging religious speech with same standards as secular speech, for exampling "a paper with religious content," which I think can assume refers to the bullshit case of the Oklahoma student who trolled her trans professor with a terrible religious content, just so she could make a fuss about it. 

The department cites the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the case of the football coach who wanted to pray on the fifty yard line and made it to the Supreme Court, where the justices decided in his favor by using a legal technique known as Making Shit Up (the scripture you're thinking of is Matthew 6:1-- Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them). Coach Kennedy promptly quit his job and went on the conservative speaker circuit.

In that vein, the regime's new guidance declares that "visible, personal prayer, even if there is voluntary student participation in such prayer, does not itself constitute coercion." As long as the teacher doesn't say, "Come pray with me" or "Points off for anyone who doesn't pray with me" or "I will think less of those of you who don't pray with me" it's okay. Even if it is obvious to the students that these are on the table. "Voluntary" is doing some real heavy lifting here.

Like the Kennedy case, this pretends that if a teacher isn't directly commanding students to join in, there is no coercion or endorsement going on. And it is certainly true that some students are pretty well inoculated against any such pressure (I am thinking of a Jewish student of mine whose elementary teacher tried to nudge her toward Jesus). 

But at the same time, these are the folks who are sure that students should not be exposed to any mention of sex or LGBTQ persons. If we were using a similar approach to religion, the rule would be that teachers can't even mention that any religions exist and any books that include characters who pray would be pulled from the library. 

Look, this is a tricky issue, with schools landing all over the place and finding a variety of ways to be wrong, from the school that forbid a student to pray in his graduation speech to the school where the superintendent opened an elementary choir concert with a Jedsus prayer. And just wait till some teacher decides to open class with an Islamic prayer or starts Transcendental Meditation club during the school day. Or when teachers start praying in front of the class for God to support a particular politician. 

If only there were a way to accommodate a variety of deeply held personal religious beliefs in a space shared by many members of a pluralistic society. It would be so important we could attach it to the Constitution, like an amendment. I think it would be important enough that we could put it first.

Seriously-- the framers covered this. Make a government-run institution like public schools a religion-free zone, in which no religions are required, practiced, or endorsed. Let people of all ages pursue their religious beliefs on their own time (particularly if they are adults in position of authority).

It will be messy and difficult at times, but certainly more valuable and useful for the health of society than, say, letting each group of believers hide together in their own silo, or allowing one group to dominate the school. It would require balance and negotiation and occasional pauses to think about where lines should be drawn and to reel in overzealous folks on one side or another, but all that would be good practice for living as an adult human in a pluralistic society. Yes, I realize that some folks are very anti-pluralism these days, but I don't think that's very American of them, and I look forward to the day when we can replace this not-very-helpful guidance. 

ICYMI: Tech Sunday Edition (2/8)

I'm directing a community theater production of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, a show you probably don't know but should. 4 actors play 52 characters in 20 vignettes about love and connection. The show starts with getting ready for a first date, conducts a wedding before intermission, and finishes up in a funeral home. It is warm and tuneful and captures a lot of the beauty and hilarity of ordinary moments. The cast has worked hard, and this is the week we do the final work of getting ready before opening next Friday night. If you're in the neighborhood, by all means, stop by. 

This is part of how I stay charged up, because if you gaze into the contentious abyss that is our current national state of debate about every damn thing, you can forget what is great about being human in the world.                          

And now, this week's reading list.

Legislative Extortion bill would withhold more than $4.3 billion from 700,000 Ohio public school students

Stephen Dyer has been on a tear lately, but so has the Ohio legislature. I wrote about this extortion bill this week, but this post gives more details on just how much damage this would do.

Mobile Co. Public Schools request US Education Secretary McMahon visit rescheduled

McMahon's right wing history tour hits yet another snag. What a shame.

"A deliberate effort to circumvent the law"

Steve Nuzum reports from South Carolina about some voucher-loving senators who are sad that home schoolers are getting in on their pile of money.

I Can't Learn It For You

Matt Brady with some words that most teachers will recognize in reaction to too many familiar student claims.

Unanimous committee vote halts wide-ranging education overhaul

Mississippi was thinking about a big fat voucher bill, but after the House passed it, the Senate has (as promised) shot it down.

Ramaswamy’s proposed rule for public schools highlights Ohio’s lack of rules for private schools

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for Ohio governor, and he has a bunch of dumb ideas about education. But Denis Smith points out that at least some of his pronouncements have a different side effect.

Teens should read great (but hard) books: 'Macbeth' is better than 'Hunger Games'

Joanna Jacobs weighs in on and aptly summarizes last week's online discussion of the place for "hard books" in the classroom.

Stop trying to make the humanities 'relevant'

I missed this essay by Thomas Chatterton Williams when it first ran in The Atlantic a month ago, but here it is on MSN out from behind the paywall, and worth a read as he considers teaching the humanities in the rise of ChatGPT. 

NYS: Why Are Authoritarian Entities Needed to Create Charter Schools if They Are So Popular?

Shawgi Tell asks the million dollar question-- if the public really really wants charter schools, why don't leaders use democratic means to create them?

Why some Texas private schools are not accepting school choice vouchers

Texas has kicked off its taxpayer-funded school voucher program, but not all private schools have signed on. Lacey Beasley at CBS News interviews a private school head who explains why she's not on board. Short, but you'll recognize some of the issues. 

Debunking the latest The74 miracle charter school story

Gary Rubinstein checks out the latest miracle school headline and finds, once again, no actual miracle in evidence.

How to Teach Authentic Christianity in Public Schools

Nancy Bailey has the answer (hint: it doesn't involve throwing immigrants in detention centers).

When "Parental Rights" Become a Shield for Child Abuse

"Parental rights" are headed for several courtrooms. Bruce Lesley breaks down the implications and problems connected to the Texas case and the problems of child abuse.

What Are “Parental Rights”?

Steve Nuzum takes a deeper dive into the legal and ethical aspects of parental rights and "parental rights." 

Rent-a-Human, When AI Becomes (Almost) Everyone’s Boss

Julian Vasquez Heilig warns that AI is not just stealing your job-- it's stealing your boss's job, and that means work is getting lousier for you.

I used AI chatbots as a source of news for a month, and they were unreliable and erroneous

From the file of things that are so obvious nobody should have to say them, except that I know too many people who need to hear it. Jean Hugues-Roy ran a little French experiment.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at an exceptional new book about the "miraculous" T.M. Landry private school in Louisiana. Great work by journalists Katie Brenner and Erica L. Green. 

Why tenors like to gather in groups of three I do not do, but thank heaven they do.

The Administrative Plague

In the last year, Commonwealth Charter Academy (the 800 pound gorilla of cyber schooling in PA) has poached an assortment of teachers from the public schools in my area. I'm not a fan of the choice, and I fear they may live to regret it, but I understand why they did it.

Why would excellent public school teachers leave for a profiteering edu-flavored business. You may think the answer is money, and money was certainly involved, but the answer seems to be much simpler; it was respect. Many of those teachers felt disrespected, and not just once, but systematically and repeatedly over time; CCA treated them like valued professionals, and that made a huge impression.

It reminds me that teacher exodus is largely fueled by local issues, and that old saying that people don't quit jobs--they quit bosses. 

Disrespect has always been endemic in education. Teachers are too often treated like children. Teachers are too often treated as a management problem to be solved rather than valued professionals to be supported. Teachers can feed into the dynamic themselves. Teachers tend to be rules-followers, especially compliant in buildings that can be built, top to bottom, on compliance culture. But that doesn't absolve those administrators who are bad managers. And bad management, I'm quite certain, is at the heart of many teacher shortages around the nation.

Administration's main job in school is to A) hire the best people they can find and B) provide the conditions that allow those people to do the best teaching they can. Failing to do so leads to many of the problems facing schools.

You can look through stories about our knowledge of why teachers leave or why they stay (try here, here, here, and here). Let's take a look at the list.

Low pay looms large, particularly in some states. I'll give administration a pass on that one. 

Lack of support from administration and the community. Yes, there is a steady background hum of accusations ranging "teachers stink" all the way to claims that, somehow, vast numbers of teachers are secretly engaged in criminal activities. Administrators don't create that buzz (mostly), but they are the folks who should be dealing with it. 

We don't need more cowardly admins who fold every time a cranky community member complains. Should admins be responsive to the public? Absolutely. Should they base district policy on the goal of avoiding any conflict with any parent ever? No. If admins policy is "Don't ever mention anything in any way related to gender or race or sex, because if you do, I will throw you under the bus so fast you won't have time to cover your face," they are part of the problem.

There are plenty of lists that talk about "empowering teachers" or "elevating teacher voices," but it can all be simplified to "Treat teachers with respect. Treat them like trusted professionals." 

Working conditions: other staff. You know who hates that one terrible teacher in the building almost as the parents of that teacher's students? The teachers who have to work with her--particularly those who have to clean up after her the following year. 

That terrible teacher is not a union-caused problem. It's an administration problem. It may be that the hiring process is broken. It may be that the admins have failed to support that teacher into a better place. Edward Deming had a saying to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, then either A) it was dead when you hired it or B) you killed it. Behind every teacher who's failing at her job, there's an administrator who isn't doing his. 

Working conditions: student behavior. Blame the parents if you wish, but the front office has so much to do with this. Students know whether "getting in trouble" means minor inconvenience, free break time, or an actual reason to make better choices. The employment of empathy and understanding does not mean there shouldn't be consequences. 

And if the teacher is botching the job, then an admin should be right there helping her do better.

Long, long hours and heavy workload. Yeah, a problem forever, but admins have the power to help. Cut administrative burden on teachers (does that new computer program save work, or transfer the work from your secretary to the classroom teacher). Cut class size. Cut timewasting baloney (do you really want to pay someone with a Masters degree professional level money to watch children eat). Reject the notion that teachers are only doing Important Work if they are in front of students.

Respect, respect, respect. This drives everything else. Do not subject your teachers to treatment that you would not tolerate were it directed at you. And do not let them be subject to treatment by others that you would not tolerate for yourself. 

And that includes listening to them when they have something to say about how the school is run, how classrooms are managed, or how education will be delivered. And when they run into the bumps of life happen, you can step up with empathy, or you can treat the teacher's problem as if it is an inconvenience for you ("Why did your father's funeral have to be held on a busy Friday at the end of the grading period!")

Nor can we blame individual weaknesses for all of it. There are systemic contributors to bad school management. The reform movement of the past few decades has dumped a ton of responsibility on administrators while stripping them of ability to deal with it. Our regime of bad high stakes testing created an almost impossible challenge, hog tying many better administrators and chasing others out of the building, to be replaced by people whose grasp of the job is, well, limited. 

I'm not saying a great administrator cures all ills and solve all problems. And, like teachers, there are administrators who may be great at one part of their job and terrible at others (there are so many ways to be a bad administrator). But bad management is grievously under-discussed as a contributing factor in education problems in general and teacher retention in particular. State leaders aren't having the discussion, and the feds certainly aren't going to, but that doesn't mean you couldn't be talking about it in your local district. 

My Local Paper Bites The Dust

My local newspaper is shutting down.

The newspaper is published as two newspapers (same content, different mastheads). The Derrick, as the name hints, goes back to the days of the oil boom in Western Pennsylvania. The News-Herald is the fusion of two newspapers that merged a little over a century ago. A few decades ago, they were combined into one news operation. Like many other news outlets, they also entered the online world, experimenting with different versions of paywalls. They were about to be sold, but that deal fell through, and the company, citing the usual (drop in subscribers, drop in advertisers). The last issue will be published on March 20.

It is hard to describe just what a gut punch this is to the community. The newspaper is where people read about local sports, school board meetings, city council meetings, obituaries, and a wealth of stories about local people and activities. The newspaper has been doing just what a small local paper needs to do-- providing news and coverage that local folks couldn't find anywhere else. 

Will someone pick up that slack? There are no radio stations with local content. We are located about halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh (which has newspaper problems of their own), too far outside their media markets for them to bother with coverage of our area. We have a local county-level web site that so far has had about one reporter, and has depended on looking over the newspaper's shoulder for much of its content. They are now advertising an initiative to scale up, but that's going to involve creating basically a whole news organization from scratch.

For local organizations and government bodies looking to communicate with the community, the prospects are now much dimmer than ever. 

The newspaper was our newspaper of record. Who lived here? What did they do? What were their stories? All of that was set down in print. Now what will become of all those stories of all those lives? How will history be recorded? Will history be recorded? A big city may have other avenues for creating those sorts of records. We do not. 

The loss feels very personal. Pieces of my own history are in that record. A photo of my family when we moved to town. High school graduation stories. Pictures of my kids in local events. My father's obituary ran in the newspaper; when my mother passes, where will that life be noted?

And, as longtime readers may recall, I have written a weekly column for that newspaper for almost 28 years. The pay was--well, I don't think cutting my pay would have saved the paper-- but the chance to create something that added to a unique local flavor gave me a sense of giving a tiny something to my community. And the writing discipline required to meet a weekly deadline has shaped who I became as a writer and a teacher. It's a big chunk of my life to say goodbye to. 

Journalism has always relied on a problematic business model ("We will gather a crowd and sell you access to their eyeballs") married to a sense of civic responsibility with an occasional too-large helping of political opportunism ("You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war"). I wonder, too, about the effects of our economic split-- particularly the finding that the wealthiest 10% drives 50% of the spending. What does that mean for areas like mine where the wealthiest 10% don't live? 

Our new situation is already the situation of many communities across the country, news desserts now lacking one of the main sources of glue that holds a community together. People make a lot of noise about how journalism is important for keeping an eye on officials and bringing to light shenanigans and misbehavior, but local journalism is also hugely important for telling and sharing the stories of the people share community with. The small triumphs, the minor milestones, the rich and varied stories, the slow unrolling of history, and all the other part of the small town narrative that the AP is never going to pick up-- that's what we lose.

Instead we're left with the sloppy ephemera of facebook gossip and other social media baloney. It sucks.

I am sad for all the people who are losing their jobs and all the stories that now will not be told and the huge gap this will create in my county. This is terrible news; ironically, it may be the last terrible news that the newspaper reports.