The Unchanged Century Myth

There it was again. In a launch event for a new staffing program idea, the contention that schools haven't changed in a century. The Ford Model T “represented breakthrough technology more than 100 years ago that wouldn’t serve us well today,” says the slide (which shows, ironically, a photo of a 1934 Ford Coupe, stripped down for that hot rod look), and goes on to draw the parallel with how schools also haven't changed in a century.

Everyone with a education-flavored product or miracle reform to pitch likes to make this claim, unless, like Education Secretary McMahon, they are pitching the reverse-- 60 or 70 years ago American education was awesome, "a shining light guiding generations, built on faith, heritage, patriotism."

Both views are really wrong. To say that schools are basically the same is like claiming that, because they still use four wheel and seats, automobiles are fundamentally unchanged over the last century. To say that schools have devolved from an earlier golden age is to insist that you would like to trade your current vehicle for a Model T (complete with the hand crank for starting it). The argument about the unchanging century is like arguing that houses have not changed since colonial times, because they still have walls, a roof, and a door for getting in and out. 

A Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education report gives us some info on what schools were like in 1926. 

They were, of course, highly segregated. And not just in the ways you're thinking of-- depending on where you were in the country, there may have been a school just for Italians or other immigrant groups. But while segregation was still the law of the land, the report only shows 84 schools for Black students, located in 22 states. 

Nor were the schools particularly well-used. The report says that of those youths of high school age, only 53% actually attended school. The notion that these schools were intended to get students ready for industrial jobs doesn't make sense--the young humans intended for industrial work were already doing that work instead of going to school. "The public high school will continue to grow," said the report, "but probably at a rate not nearly that of the growth of population." The report also noted that big changes were underway, including the creation of junior and senior high schools, plus

The reorganization and enrichment of curricular material and the construction of buildings suitable to the needs of reorganization are being pushed forward at a rapid rate. All this is done in a serious attempt to make the secondary school better fit the needs of the pupil and of the community as well. 

17,710 high schools reported in 1926, compared to just over 10,000 in 1910. The schools reported just over 3 million students (2.6% of the total US population), up from 1.8 million in 1920. There were 4,873 school libraries (with just over 8 million books). Attrition rates were huge-- only 55% of first years made it to the fourth year. 

High school teachers in the 1925-26 school year? 163,555 in the whole country, varying wildly by state. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California were the only states in five figures, while ten states had under a thousand. Some of those low counts are unsurprising (Arizona, 500; Nevada, 189; Wyoming, 550) but others-- Delaware reported 272 high school teachers!

The 1920s were actually a time of many shifts-- the 1920 census was the first to show more citizens living in big cities than in the countryside or small towns-- and the report pays attention to the differences between schools in places over 2500 population and those under 2500. 

There's a plenty of fascinating data in the report, but you get the idea. The Encyclopedia Americana 1920 edition noted that while fifty years ago, schools focused on basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, but were busy adding new subjects of study. "The vast changes in our social conditions have reacted on the whole theory and practice of education." Schools took on a social role as a means of improving one's circumstances through education. Two year teacher programs in college were replaced with four year programs; it was barely considered a profession. And in many places, there was a push back against those darn godless progressive ideas in education, as exemplified by the Scopes trial (1925). 

There were fewer students in school, but more students in individual classrooms. There was far less material to cover, but no accommodations to make for students with special needs, and those students mostly just dropped out. 

McMahon's Golden Age of Education circa 1950 was, of course, an age before Brown v. Board, so fully and deliberately segregated (as opposed to post-Brown deliberate and sneaky segregation). In 1960, enrollment of 5-13 year olds was hovering around 95% for white children, with nonwhite behind by around 2%. For 14-17 year olds, the enrollment numbers were around 90% for whites and 85% for nonwhites. In 1965, administrators reported that only about 40% of students with disabilities got an education (and if they did, it was while being warehoused in some corner of the building). 

The 1960s saw the beginning if international testing (like the PISA we now know and love) and back in those golden days the US was still below the median.

Classroom tools and materials were still rudimentary. Technology was expensive. Teachers were poorly paid. 

In the past hundred years, schools have seen a multitude of changes that encompass what we teach and when we teach it. We have seen changes in how we teach, both in terms of pedagogical techniques and instructional technology. We have seen changes in who we teach, both in terms of trying to reach all students and in terms of trying to actually teach students who were previously ignored. And we have seen changes in the intent of education, of what we think it is for. 

Do schools still run on four wheel and seats for the passengers? Sure. Have they "failed to change" over the last 100 years? I don't think so.

That said-- are schools an institution whose inertia is frustratingly large? They surely are (and I say that as someone who many times tried to push change on the inside). They are by their nature small-c conservative institutions. 

And as much as I find that a pain when the change is something I want, I still think it's better that way.

Educational practices get to be tested by time, and tested carefully because it's best not to sacrifice an entire cohort of students to experimentation. When Bill Gates said it would take ten years to find out whether the Common Core was a good idea or not, hackles went up all over the nation because ten years is a generation's education, a too-big-to-lose gamble that can never be recouped. Reformsters too often talk about student achievement levels like they are just the rise and fall of the stock market or the tide, with everything staying in place, just moving up and down. But that's not it. A bad experiment with teaching reading to third graders results in a bunch of third graders who are shortchanged forever. It's why some folks are rightfully upset about the pandemic-forced experiment in distance learning at scale-- it was quick, unplanned, and not very successful.

The tech mantra of move fast and break things is not suited to education, because the things we're talking about breaking are the educations of young humans.

Experimentation is often slow and careful, and it should be that way. Does that mean that sometimes schools hold onto suboptimal practices longer than they should? Sure. But the argument that schools have never changed and the argument that schools have changed for the worse since the golden age are both specious and unmoored from reality. Changes in education come best with time and thought and testing and paying attention to the experts in the classroom, not from yielding to whichever brand of panic-mongering is trying to stampede education in a particular direction RIGHT NOW!

Education is a house that is always filled with young humans, so burning it down is not a viable option. Radical revolution has to be tempered by concerns for the people living in the house. And yet, over the decades, the house has added electricity, indoor plumbing, all sorts of climate management, new architectural ideas. A colonial walking into a modern smart home would be awestruck (even if Grampaw is loudly complaining "Well, my house and my neighborhood in 1950 was much nicer).

There will always be a push for revolution, and there will always be a pull to take the whole business backwards (e.g. cursive writing mandates). Somewhere between "you changed too much" and "you never changed at all" is the reality, and anyone who really wants to make a positive difference in education needs to live in that reality. Anyone tossing out the panicky extremes is just trying to sell something; anyone who is arguing both extremes at once is just running a con. 

A Federal Book Ban Bill

Well, you knew this was coming. 

Representative Mary Miller (IL-15), Chairwoman of the Congressional Family Caucus, has introduced a federal book ban bill. 

HR 7661, the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act," seeks to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act by forbidding any federal money going to "develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, including any program, activity, literature, or material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing."

The bill includes certain exemptions from the list of Forbidden Naughty Stuff.

Science stuff (there's an inclusive list of sciences), texts of major world religions, classic works of literature, and classic works of art. Those are all okay.

What counts as "classic" literature and art, you ask? About what you'd expect. 

Classic works of art are defined as anything in Smarthistory guide to AP Art History. That's not bad.

Classic works of literature? The official lists are from three sources. The 1990 Encyclopaedia Brittanica Great Books of the Western World. Emphasis mine.

Also, two articles. "Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read" by Thomas Purifoy, Jr., and "Classics Every High Schooler Should Read" by Mary Pierson Purifoy. These are from Compass Classroom, a Christian homeschool support company that calls you to "Teach your kids to think Biblically about the world with our video courses." They even have a handy guide to using taxpayer-funded voucher money to pay for their stuff.

Their "classics" lists are just what you would expect. The middle school list is 29 items long, and includes The Scarlet Pimpernel, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Scarlet Letter, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and its most modern entries, All Quiet On The Western Front and To Kill a Mockingbird. Several are tagged as maybe "a little violent for some audiences" (Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm) while others are marked as having "sexual content that may be a bit mature" (Mockingbird, Scarlet Letter, The Odyssey). 

There's some very heavy lifting for middle schoolers in there, and I have real concerns about someone who finds sexy parts in the Hawthorne, but the real tell among these two-sentence blurbs is the one for the Last of the Mohicans, which declares "This incredibly moving novel tells the story of the impossible love between an Indian brave and a British girl despite the war raging between their people." There's no such romance in Cooper's novel, however, the 1994 film has that plot element. 

The high school list is longer, and comes in four sections. Antiquity hits all the ancient dead white guys (plus CS Lewis's retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces). Then we get Christendom, covering more recently dead white guys, Bede through Shakespeare. Then American History, which throws in some Dickinson and Bradstreet with all the dead white guys. Nobody from after the 19th century, unless you count Robert Penn Warren's history of the Civil War. Finally Modernity, which also is mostly 19th century with a few 20th century authors thrown in (Tolkien, Huxley, Faulkner, Fitzgerald).

You get the idea. Strictly Western literature, relentlessly white, almost exclusively male. That's your list of classics that are okay to use. And anything else that doesn't have sexy parts.

"Sexually oriented material" is banned, as defined by Section 2256 of Title 18 of the US Code, which includes any kinds of depiction, description or simulation" s of any kind of sex plus any "lascivious exhibition" of a person's naughty bits. Which takes us a bit past actual pornography, which was already not allowed for minors.

And there is one more big kicker. 

This bill also defines "sexually oriented material" as any material that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism." So a federal law that requires transgender persons to be rendered invisible.

But thank goodness we've outlawed strippers in school, because that was surely a problem that needed to be solved. Also, there is no exemption for historical documents, so I guess history students don't get to study the Epstein files.

Miller offered this comment in her news release about the bill:

Parents deserve complete confidence that their tax dollars are being used to promote academic excellence — not to expose children to harmful and explicit material that undermines their innocence. My legislation draws a clear and enforceable line to ensure our schools remain focused on education, not explicit ideological agendas or radical indoctrination.

The line is not particularly clear at all, and in fact offers no guidance on how it would be enforced-- who reports the allegedly naughty book, and who on the federal level decides if it is, in fact, naughty. 

The American Library Association responded swiftly to the bill

Parents, not politicians, should guide their children’s reading. In our school, campus, and public libraries, materials are selected by trained literacy professionals who understand child development and community needs. Their work is grounded in one clear purpose: helping young people become lifelong readers.

H.R. 7661 isn’t fundamentally about protecting kids. It’s about giving politicians broad authority to restrict whose stories are allowed on our shelves. That should concern anyone who believes in the freedom to read and the right of families to make decisions for themselves.

That sounds pretty much on point. 

The bill has a bunch of familiar names for co-sponsors (Fine, Gosar, Tenney, Roy, Self, among others). I have no idea whether the bill has traction or if it will die a well-deserved death, but if you've got a spare minute this weekend, you might give your Congressperson's office a call. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. 

Federal Voucher Myths

The folks at the Network for Public Education have released a quick explainer about the federal voucher program, the program that Betsy DeVos always dreamed of implementing. Share this with someone who's wondering why your state shouldn't just go ahead and opt in.

 

Is Teacher Quality Portable?

You may be old enough to remember this awesome idea from the annals of reformsterdom--

Let's use magical VAM scores to evaluate teachers. Then we'll take the super teachers with awesome VAM scores and we'll move them to struggling schools, and they will cause test scores at that school to go up and up and up. 

It was always a dumb idea in so many ways. For one thing, VAM scores are a big pile of baloney that are only slightly more reliable than evaluating teachers by giving horned toads Ouija boards to operate under a full moon. For another, it assumes teacher excellence is portable, that a teacher who does well in one school will be equally awesome in any other school. Give that teacher a different boss, a different school culture, a different type of student, a different surrounding community, and different co-workers and it won't matter a bit.

This is a bit like arguing that the teacher in the classroom with no roof keeps getting wet during the rainy season, so let's get a teacher who is always dry in her classroom and move her to the roofless classroom. Will she stay dry? 

As Matt Barnum reports in Chalkbeat, some research from 2013 said yes. They were looking at the federal program that offered "effective" teachers (aka "teachers of students with good test scores) to move into a low-performing high-poverty school. The federal Ed Department's research wing (back before Dera Leader gutted it) found that test scores went up a bit. But now new research suggests that the 2013 paper missed something.

This new working paper-- "Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives"-- uses some dense and, honestly, off-putting language, but the results are simple enough-- when you move the dry teacher into the roofless room, she might stay a little bit dry, but not nearly as dry as she used to be. Or as the academics put it--

Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate that incentivized-transfer teachers’ value added dropped by 0.12 student standard deviations.

Meaning that the effective teacher did not bring all of her effectiveness with her. Maybe she pulled the class up a bit, but not nearly as much as she was elevating her class in her former classroom. The study looked at 80 high-rated teachers; when they moved, their effectiveness rating fell from the 85th percentile to the 66th. 

Why did this happen?

This decline appears to be driven by lower match quality, negative indirect school effects, and the loss of student-specific human capital.

I told you their language was sometimes off-putting. Lord save students from anyone who refers to them as "student-specific human capital." But the point is sound. Different (and new) teaching colleagues, different students (aka students at a struggling school with fewer resources), and different context in which one might not fit as well-- in other words, any teacher you put in the roofless room gets wet. If they're very good, they may be able to get teaching done while they're getting wet. The old notion that you don't have to repair the roof-- just stick a dry teacher in there-- is and was a terrible theory.

I don't want to pay a lot of attention to a study that relies so heavily on the notion that the Big Standardized Test is a valid and reliable measure of educational quality, and I note that one of the co-authors is from TNTP, creators of the execrable "Widget Effect" paperish thing. But if research like this will convince some folks that teaching is, in fact, a "team sport" and context and specifics do matter and that we can't "fix" struggling schools by porting in Very Special Savior Teachers, then by all means, let's put this research in front of those people. 

Google's AI Push For Schools

Google has scored another chance to get its products into schools in the form of a "sizable investment" in AI training. As Greg Troppo reports at The74, training will be offered through ISTE+ASCD (that's the fused Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and the International Society for Technology in Education). 

The justification will seem familiar. Per Troppo:

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

Sigh. I do believe that teachers are feeling swamped by the ongoing wave of AI stuff, the students who are using it, and the folks (including all too often administrators) hollering that they have to get on this bandwagon Right Now. I do believe that teachers need plenty of training to help them cope with this toxic tide of anti-human plagiarism machines.

You know what would be lousy source for that training? The company that has bet the farm on being able to rope in a mountain of money to support that toxic tide. The company that has a vested interest in selling its product to every carbon-based life form on the planet. That company. Google.

Not that other education folks haven't made similarly terrible deals (looking at you, American Federation of Teachers). But why keep falling for this same pitch?

Particularly from Google, a company that was just caught referring to its work in education as "a pipeline for future users." Did we not already do this with the tobacco industry's attempts to enlist customers while they were still young enough to be enticed by cartoons? "You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life," said A) Google or B) RJ Reynolds. Is it bad for them? Who cares. Rake in those dollars!

This is Google, the folks who brought schools Chromebooks (described in education circles as "What if a laptop, only broken?"). We've have let advanced computer tech run loose in schools, a solution in search of a problem, like a puppy looking for a good place to pee. 

When the tech has a purpose, it can be great. I spent much of my career on the front lines of using desktop publishing tools to create yearbooks, and it was absolutely awesome. It was also purposeful and useful and sold itself exactly because it had utility, helping us do a job better than we could without it.

But that was not all of ed tech. And the high tech revolution was a nightmare of moving fast and breaking things, bringing us to headlines like the recent Fortune piece by Sasha Rogelberg-- "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents."

Soooo many parents have handed their too-young children high tech tools, soothed at least in part by the fact that such tools were in their child's classroom, and surely the school would only use these tools because they knew the tools were safe and effective. Meanwhile, schools had no damned idea.

So AI is a chance to turbocharge this whole ed tech mess by injecting fantasy, magic, and more desperate profiteering into the equation. 

Do schools and teachers need someone to help them cope with these dangerous bots? Do they need to learn how to help students and families cope with a revolution whose outlines we can barely grasp and whose story is a jumbled mash of fantasy, magical thinking, and utter bullshit? Should they be getting those answers from a company whose primary concern is selling as much of the AI service to as many people as possible for as much as they can collect? Gee, that's a stumper. 

Meanwhile, we have the steady drumbeat of tech-fueled ecstasy and agony. Everyone should sign up for i-Ready! Oh, no-- turns out that i-Ready is terrible! The idea of putting students in front of a teaching machine is a century old, and yet has not produced a win for students yet-- just the occasional money for investors. And AI companies increasingly don't even try to pretend that they are aimed at helping students learn. 

So can organizations that claim to care about education please just take a breath and slow down before selling out. Maybe take a moment to think about how to best serve the interests of students and society before signing up for the latest barely-disguised sales pitch from an AI company whose biggest concern is not education, but how they're going to make back some of the gazillion dollars they've poured into AI. 

Is This The Most Bullshitty AI Product Bullshit So Far?

I apologize for the language, Mom. But some days. 

I'm not sure anybody can pick the absolute worst AI company; it's like trying to pick the worst toxic waste dump. But this one is certainly a candidate. Here's the pitch for Companion's Einstein:

He logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically.

What the actual hell. The pitch is broken down into areas, so you know that Einstein can log into Canvas, watch videos, covers every subject, works while you sleep-- everything. In the FAQ section, it promises that your professor will never know, and will in fact get better at meeting the course expectations (well, you know, except the expectation that a human student will learn by doing the work). The FAQ even answers the question, "What if I want to do an assignment myself?" You can tell it to skip that assignment, though you can of course set the bot to auto-submit everything. 

But hey-- as the website says:

Stop stressing. Start acing.

Einstein does the busywork so you don't have to.

You know, the busywork, formerly known as "the actual coursework." 

There's no veiled language about efficiency or speed or anything other than the pitch of "Here's a bot that will do all your schoolwork for you--every last bit-- so that you, the student, don't have to do a damned thing." Not even the pretense that handing over the work to a bot might somehow help you learn.

What is even the point? What do the people who work at this company tell themselves? "We are making the world a better place by creating more humans who have good grades and are preternaturally ignorant!" 

The company behind this is Companion Inc, and I can't tell you more than that because feeding a that generic term into a criminally enshittified search engine yields nothing useful. Their claim is a "personal OS" and their "about" page is deeply absurd baloney. It starts with some over the top AI woo-woo:

Today's most powerful AI systems can reason through PhD-level problems, write production code, and generate entire applications from a sentence. They are, by any meaningful measure, brilliant.

Narrators voice: They cannot do those things.

Yet every conversation starts from zero. Bad advice carries no cost, misunderstood values get forgotten by next session, and a decision that derails your month goes unnoticed and unlearned. Nothing compounds—including the responsibility.

The point seems to be that companion won't forget you, like those other goldfish-powered bots (though ChatGPT is among those that is now supposed to remember your other "interactions" to better mine data better meet your needs). But it just gets more and more bizarre--

Oh for crying out loud. I suppose an AI can be "bound to a human," though "bought by a human" seems more accurate. But "loyal"? Nope. Able to figure out a human's long interests and align itself to them? Bullshit. How do I know it's bullshit? Because humans can't figure out their own long term best interests. How else do I know? Because it would not be in the long term best interests of a human to ditch an entire course and dodge an education by having a bot fake it!

But hey-- the company promises that "your companion knows what you're working toward and how you think." This is also bullshit, because no program knows how any human thinks. It does not even "know" what "thinking" is. The pitch here is also that your companion has a "private virtual computer"  so that anything a human with a computer can do, your companion can do. I don't even know what to make of that, other than it may be the most effort yet put into trying to anthropomorphize a computer program. "No, this bot isn't a computer! It's a little tiny person, sitting inside the computer working on its own tiny little computer." I mean, damn-- how do I know that my companion isn't even logging onto its virtual computer, but has hired a companion of its own to do the work. I'm envisioning a series of ever-smaller digital Russian nesting dolls, each sitting at tinier and tinier computer desks.

An extension of you so you can be more of you.

Yes, they say that, too. That seems to raise a larger question of what the more of me is doing if I have outsourced being me to the bot. 

If this seems like a lot of bullshit justification for a company whose main product seems to be a plagiarism machine designed to facilitate cheating, well, you ain't seen nothing, yet. Because there's a "why this matters" section, and it has some striking ideas, some big ideas, some big, deep, bullshitty ideas--

Human morality rarely begins as an abstract love for all of humanity. It begins with someone specific. Your child. Your partner. Your team. Your friend. Through concrete responsibility, care expands to the rest of the world.

This may, in fact, how the sociopaths of Silicon Valley go about developing a moral sense, though let me suggest that if loving other humans doesn't start until you have a partner and a child, you may be a very troubled human being. This goes right up there with the Sam Altman quote circulating today

People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

But Companion isn't just talking about the origins of morality for humans, because "AI should develop the same way." Here's the wrap-up:

A companion shaped by one human life over time develops something closer to genuine responsibility. It learns your boundaries by crossing them and being corrected, your values by watching which suggestions you take and which you ignore, what trust means by earning yours slowly over months.

We believe an AI that cares for one human life is more likely to care for humanity itself.

So while you may think that Companion Inc is just offering an AI bot that can take classes and cheat effectively for you, it is actually a program that will save the entire damned human race by teaching the bots to care about us. Letting Einstein take your class, do your homework, and write your papers will lead it to love you and care for you, and through you, all of humanity. That sounds wonderful, and if we could somehow get the tech overlords who design these bots to care about human beings half as much, the world would be a better place. 

I came across Einstein thanks to a former student who is now a college English professor at one of those places where administration thinks teachers should Get With The Program because AI Is The Future and students are going to use this stuff anyway, so maybe take a few minutes to teach them about Using AI Ethically. Which is bullshit on bullshit. Look at this product, AI-friendly administrator, and tell me how it should be used ethically, because ethical use of Einstein strikes me as absolutely impossible. Unless, I guess, you believe that using Einstein will teach our Robot Overlords to love us and care for us in a deeply moral way. But I have my doubts that even a college administrator could wade through that much bullshit. 

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.