Netflix Chief Ready To Help DFER Fix Education

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is delighted to announce that Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, has joined their board, "bringing a disruptor's lens to education." That seems about right.

First, a reminder of who DFER really are. One of the key founders of DFER is Whitney Tilson, a big time hedge fund manager (you can read more about him here). Long ago, Leonie Haimson had a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

DFER's mission has always been to convince Democrats that they should be backing ed reform ideas from the right. It's standard to find them trying hard to convince Democrats that it would be a winning strategy, like the recent NYT piece by their chief Jorge Elorza in which he tries to sell taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Hastings, meanwhile, is a long time fan of school choice programs. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board. Unelected is how he likes them-- in 2014 he told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with.

Hastings likes to note that way back in the day, he was a teacher. That was with the Peace Corps in Swaziland over 40 years ago. But he's been a busy edu-preneur for decades, and he certainly knows all the classic bits.

There's the whole "unchanged classroom" shtick. Hastings sees schools as being like the entertainment biz thirty years ago-- "a model built for a different era" and has often claimed that "the traditional classroom model—one teacher, 20-to-50 students, sage-on-a-stage—is ripe for reinvention." He declares "the schools of the future won't look like the schools of the past," which is his one accurate observation, though he could easily note that the schools of the present don't look like the schools of the past. Lord, they were ushering the sage off the stage back when I was in teacher school. 

Paired with that is the claim that "Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive," which is just a silly claim. In 1997, when Netflix launched, cable tv was achieving great new heights of variety. Hell, Fox News launched in 1996. Back then, boys and girls, cable provided actual variety before free market forces pushed cable channels to become barely distinguishable imitations of each other (you know, back when MTV played music and A&E stood for Arts and Entertainment, and there were two comedy channels). The broadcast model was already well and fully disrupted, and the only thing that Netflix disrupted was the practice of having to go to the store to rent DVDs. 

So guess what Hastings thinks is the key to this new shift in education? Here's a hint-- as of last year, Hastings is on the board of Anthropic, the big AI company.

"AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it,” Hastings continued. “The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before."

Individualized computer instruction is definitely a thing we've seen before, though what we've seen is the many ways that it crashes and burns and fails to deliver its many promises. There is no reason to believe that the newest iteration of the giant plagiarism machines is likely to change that, no reason to believe that education delivered through a screen is somehow superior to education involving other humans, both as teachers and as co-students. Hastings believes AI can help make education more personal, which highlights how oxymoronic it is to propose personalization that is delivered by non-persons. 

"He sees AI enabling a shift where teachers become more like coaches and build deep relationships with students."

Why does he see that? How does he see that happening? Could it be that replacing teachers with "coaches" solves that nasty labor problem with schools and helps make them more profitable? And yes, his description sounds very much like Alpha School, a ridiculous school model that is somehow beloved these days with its assertion that students can get a full education with two hours per day on computer. It's technoamnesia all over again, as folks just seem to forget that we have seen this model tried and failed. AI will make it better by... being more expensive, in every sense of the word?

Oh well. DFER and Hastings are just as dangerous to public education separately as they are together. May they have many lovely meetings together

The Great Screen Debate

Well, maybe not even a debate. More like a holding action.

Because the Chief Marital Officer (CMO) teaches elementary school and I spent decades teaching high school, we were clear from Day One that the Board of Directors would grow up with minimal screen exposure. They have always gotten a little bit of tv time (about 45 minutes a day, now that they're older) and always with a grownup watching along. A weekly family movie. No personal devices. Lots of reading, lots of books, lots of play (including being left to suffer the kind of boredom that births improvisational self-entertainment). 

Then it was time for school. And like the parents in Jackie Mader's Hechinger piece about ed tech pushback, we had to deal with new heavy exposure of the boys to screens. 

It was probably less of a shock to us because of our professional background. My high school went one-to-one with mini-laptops back in 2010, plunging us immediately into the many problems that come with such an ed tech initiative.

Ed tech is like every other kind of tech-- some of it is magnificently useful, some of it is a waste of time and money, some of it is crap, and some of it is dangerous crap. And being selective really matters. My high school used a program to gamify math for struggling students, and it was awful, particularly in the way that it would only accept a correct answer if it was typed in exactly the way the program wanted it (imagine a program that tells a student that 2x5=10 is correct, but 5x2=10 is incorrect). The Board of Directors have gotten much of their math instruction via a computer program (Reflex Math), and as much as it pains me, they seem to have actually learned well from it, buoyed up by the way the program lets them move on to the next thing the instant they are ready to go. 

I was a yearbook advisor who lived through the transition from paper layouts and photos to all-computerized desktop publishing and digital photography, and you could not have paid me a zillion dollars to step backwards. 

Too many districts have been unwilling or unable to ask the most basic questions when adopting ed tech ("Is this program junk?") and so students spend a lot of time in front of screens that are wasting time and providing zero educational benefit. That and the possibility of screen "addiction," with students hooked on the same sort of rushes that bring grown-ups back on line too often. 

And screens in school inevitably have a "leakage" problem. Students with a few extra minutes of screen time use it to surf Youtube or whatever else the school's filters won't stop. Cheap districts that use lower-level subscriptions expose students to resources that "leak" ads onto student eyeballs. The Board of Directors had never seen a video advertisement until they went to school, which seems... backwards somehow. 

Meanwhile, the ed tech is an ad. When it turned out that Google's education products are about "creating a pipeline of future users," no educators were surprised.

The last twenty-or-so years of ed tech were sold with the same sort of pitches that are now employed for new AI baloney. Don't let your students be left behind! This is the inevitable face of tomorrow and you want your students to be prepared! This tech will provide miraculous leaps in learning (just don't ask us for proof). 

Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD (motto: "Let us jam ed tech directly into your veins!") is in Mader's piece with the usual baloney

When kids hate learning because it’s boring, it will have far more damaging consequences than if they are playing a game that is helping them find learning more interesting

Sigh. No. First, you know who doesn't find something interesting just because it's pixels on a screen? People who have grown up in a world stuffed full of pixels on screens. Second, when you spend years around teenagers with phones, one thing you notice quickly is that a fascinating new app generally has a half-life of about four weeks. Culatta also trots out this old chestnut

We do have to be really careful that we don’t actually end up harming kids by taking away tools that are really helpful for them for their future

Nope. No student is going to lose ground in reading or math or history or art or music because she didn't have access to EduBlart3000 on her screen. 

And I myself once bought the idea that students could benefit from exposure to tech tools so that they were better able to use those tools in the future. I have changed my mind. First, the tools schools teach them to use now will be long gone in the future and second, we are well into the stage in which tech tools can be learned quickly. 

Lawmakers across the country are scaring the crap out of tech companies by contemplating restrictions on screens in schools. That new wave yielded this hilarious quote to NBC from Kieth Kruger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an ed tech trade organization. 

I think some well-intentioned policymakers trying to do something are rushing so quickly that they haven’t thought through the implications.

Ironic, given that the ed tech industry's motto has always been "Buy our stuff RIGHT NOW and don't pause to think through the implications."

Well, the implications of years of screens in classrooms are starting to catch up with us. Check out Jared Cooney Horvath's set of graphs showing that the much-lamented dip in test scores seems to line up with digital adoption. Endless teacher anecdotes of students having trouble focusing, paying attention, just plain sticking with something for more than five minutes. Increasing numbers of studies suggesting that screens have hurt learning-- and (horrors) news that ed tech companies aren't making mountains of money! 

And yet, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, absolute amnesia about how we got here. Folks who cheerfully burbled about the promise of ed tech are now shocked-- shocked!!-- that screens have been allowed to dominate classrooms. Not a surprise-- as Audrey Watters has repeatedly pointed out over the years, the story of ed tech is the story of enthusiastic promises, joyous press coverage, and expensive failure, all wrapped in a blanket of sweet, sweet forgetfulness.

The amnesia would be funny if we weren't already being dragged into the next wave of ed tech, the one powered by "Artificial Intelligence," a marketing term designed to put a pretty, inevitable face on a morally bankrupt industry. "Come take a kick at this hot new ed tech idea! It's inevitable! It's awesome! This time it really will change everything!" 

We're still getting back up from the last faked kickoff. Here's hoping we think twice before we fall for this again. 

Three Problems of Big Standardized Testing

Of all the various Great Ideas launched at education in the past couple of decades, none have done more damage than the Big Standardized Test, a practice that has been in place now for a generation. So on top of the other harms done by test-driven accountability, the cherry on top is that a whole crop of newbie teachers has emerged thinking that test-centric schooling is natural and normal and how the U.S. education system has always worked. Meanwhile, we are just about to enter the season in which school staffs start creating cutesy videos and holding noisy pep rallies in an attempt to convince these tests are Important and students should Do Their Best. Yuck. 

The BS Tests have been a source of toxic waste in schools for years and years, and they have created this toxic effect in three distinct ways.

High stakes for a narrow measure

A single test is used as a broad measure of educational achievement. It claims to measures reading and math and nothing else, and yet it is repeatedly used as a measure of educational quality, students achievement, and teacher/school effectiveness. States have used BS Test results to label schools as "failing" which can have consequences ranging from a loss of funding to charterization to plain old reputational damage. 

Attaching high stakes to the test has led to a twisting and warping of curriculum, with course content and even courses themselves judged by just one metric-- is it on the Test? Science, history, the arts, even recess cut from schools so that extra work can be put into getting studennts to raise those scores, because the BS Test turns schools upside down. The school doesn't exist to serve students by giving them an education; students exist to serve the school by generating test scores. The upside down school effect is particularly notable in manuy charter schools, where the scores are an important marketing tool and so students who don't help make good numbers have to be "counseled out."

Meanwhile, test scores make an easy reference point for journalists, especially when combined with such prestidigidatation as "days/months/years of learning" which is just a fun mask to slap on the increase or decrease in test scores. Or soaking test scores in VAM sauce to make them seem as if they Really Mean Something. Or the transformation of scores into a kind of stock market, rising and falling as if they are waves of data flowing through a single medium, rather than representing the scores of different students.

But, hey. If the scores represent real measures of reading and math skills, isn't all of this justfied? Isn't it?

Lousy tests

Have the Big Standardized Tests been checked for validity and reliability? Do they measure what they purport to measure? Will they produce consistent results (iow, if the same student takes the test multiple times, will he get pretty much the same score every time)? 

The most likely answer is "Nobody knows for sure, but probably not." 

Multiple choice questions are about the weakest measure of knowledge and skill we have. But written answers create an assessment challenge that is almost insurmountable at that scale (and certainly insurmountable by any bots currently available). Also, a test needs to be created for a particular purpose, while the BS Tests are sold as being useful for multiple purposes. "We will sell you," say testing companies, "a piece of string that can be used to measure the circumference of a cloud and the amount of water in a swimming pool."

If we start with the number of skills that the BS Test claims to measure and multiply it by the number of items that it would probably take to measure those skills, we arrive at a test much larger than the actual tests. 

All of this gives us ample reason to suspect that the BS Tests are less-than-awesome assessment tools, suspicions that might be quelled by extensive test testing to show validity and reliability. Except that there doesn't seem to be any such test testing out there. Meanwhile, folks keep arguing that if teachers just teach the standards, the test results will take care of themselves, despite the fact that test results vary wildly from year to year for the same teacher.

But, hey. It generates some data, and even that sketchy data should be useful for something. Shouldn't it?

Tortured data

When a classroom teacher uses an assessment to evaluate learning and instruction, she can dig down to a granular level. Go question by question, checking student responses against the test items to see exactly where students are going wrong (or right). 

But the BS Tests are black boxes. Policy makers have accepted the notion that a test manufacturer's proprietary material is more important than useful data for schools, so teachers are forbidden to so much as look at the questions on the test, and the results that come back to schools (in too many cases, still after too many months) are rough summaries. For years, my results for student on the BS Test were broken down into "reading fiction" and "reading nonfiction," and that was it. 

Imagine you are a parent whose child brought home a C on a major reading test, and the teacher wouldn't let you see the test and wouldn't tell you what areas your child needed help with and what areas were your child's strength. In response to the question, "What can we do to help him," the teacher replied, "Just, you know, work on his reading." That is where teachers are with BS Test results. 

This tiny sliver of data is one of the reasons that schools take to carpet-bombing students with a host of broad, unfocused "interventions." It's also why we've seen the booming cottage industry of pre-test testing, with schools giving multiple tests throughout the year in an attempt to identify students who can be dragged to a higher score and to identify the areas in which interventions for these students might help. The actual BS Test doesn't give us the information we need, so maybe a few rounds of NWEA MAP testing will tell us what the BS Test won't (spoiler alert: it won't, in part because it's hard to predict how students will do on a test that isn't very reliable or valid).

So very little useful data gets back to teachers and schools. It is almost as if policy makers are only interested in generating pass-fail labels for schools and not in providing data that would actually help improve performance.

Solutions?

Policy makers could fix any one of these three factors. They could reduce the stakes attached to the BS Test, or combine test results with other measures of education. They could simply require the tests to be better, and they could certainly require test manufacturers to provide more useful data in a more timely fashion. In fact, in some states, policy makers have taken some baby steps. But it's not nearly enough.

Underneath all of this, there are philosophical questions to be answered, like how does one distinguish between good schools and bad, can you measure the difference, and if you can, is there any benefit to trying to slap "good" and "bad" labels on schools or teachers. But I don't recommend holding your breath while waiting for policy makers to have serious philosophical conversations about education in this country.

But in the meantime, high-stakes large-scale standardized testing continues to be one of the single most destructive factors in U.S. education. If you handed me a magic wand, it is the very first thing I would disappear. Barring that, it would be great if we could just do better.

ICYMI: The River Is Rising Edition (3/8)

The Institute's grounds back up against the river, and the waters are rising. It has been a combination of rising heat hitting a lot of snow, and a steady rain. The river never rises all at once, but slowly and steadily, as combined forces drive it slowly and steadily over its bank. It's a natural process; as it rises, the waters will sweep away the garbage, detritus, and goose poop that have accumulated on the banks. We root for the river to rise far enough to sweep the area clean.

Meanwhile, a varied assortment of education reading this week. Have at it. 

Don't Talk to Me About the Factory Model of Education

Dylan Kane takes on everyone's favorite counter-factual education talking point. 

Experts liken potential Supreme Court reversal of school funding rulings to overturning Roe v. Wade

Hyperbole? Maybe-- but the New Hampshire Supreme Court is taking a whack at the landmark Claremont decisions, another of those court decisions that tell a state it can't keep half-assing public education funding. But the NH GOP would really like to just half-ass public education funding, so here we are. Jeremy Margolis reports for the Concord Monitor.

A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight

At The Century Foundation, Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra have produced an excellent explainer of the federal voucher program. Great for forwarding to that person who keeps insisting that the state ought to grab some of that free money.

State Law: Ohio's "Dropout Recovery" Charter Schools don't actually need to have any "dropouts". What they do need, though, is less accountability.

Stephen Dyer explains another charter school scam ripping off Ohio taxpayers. Saving dropouts? Not so much.

Nearly half of Ohio’s teachers say they may quit teaching; morale lags national average: Report

Speaking of Ohio, the new Ed Weeks survey suggests that Ohio excels in making teachers regret their career choices.

Zooming Out

Steve Nuzum explains what really drives all those book bans (spoiler alert: it is not deep concern for children).

The plot to replace teachers with tech

John Allen Wooden provides an absolutely blistering takedown of i-Ready.

Louisiana's 10 Commandments Law Marks a Critical Step Toward Christian Nationalism

Lorena O'Neil at Rolling Stone looks at 10 commandments laws in the context of rising Christian nationalism and its designs on schools.

Why Your School District Is Losing Its Leaders

Drew Perkins explains how the culture wars are driving leaders out of school districts.

The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment

The National Education Policy Center presents some research from Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza supporting what you already knew-- the constant attacks on public schools lead to policies that hurt those schools.

ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools

Good luck to them.

America’s teachers are working two jobs and barely getting by

CNN reports on a new survey that shows many teachers are having trouble getting by. In other news, sun expected to rise in East tomorrow. But Matt Egan does report some details and data.

Trump aims to shrink the Education Department — while Washington tightens its grip on schools

Matt Barnum captures the duality of this administration. On the one hand, they want to kill federal education oversight; on the other hand, they would like to micromanage local school policies that they don't like.

At least $7.2 million in taxpayer funds has been spent on LEGO sets through Arizona's school voucher program

Craig Harris ay 12News continues to dig deep and find out just how badly Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program is ripping off the taxpayers.

Florida Once Rewarded Academic Success. Now It Prorates It.

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports the latest Florida shenanigans, this time involving quietly cutting funds for a program that actually worked.

Ben Albritton’s priorities — rural spending and school voucher fixes — seem dead

Meanwhile, attempts to fix a system that can't even keep track of students will apparently stall once again.

The Backlash Against School Vouchers Is Showing Up at the Polls

Jennifer Berkshire continues to be a voice crying the wilderness that vouchers are a losing issue for elections, and maybe somebody ought to mention that in coverage.

"AI" is Yesterday's News

If you ever have a chance to hear Audrey Watters speak, do not pass it up. Here's a talk she gave to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and it highlights, with humor and unexpected connections, the hollowness of the AI education promise.

About that School Trump Referred to in the State of the Union Address…

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Alpha School, a massive techno-scam that somehow keeps drawing glowing press.

A Simple Idea That Could Change Things for Kids: Child Impact Statements

Bruce Lesley has a great idea. Government will never adopt it--but they should.

Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

Jan Resseger looks at the latest initiative from those big-hearted clowns at Heritage. One more court decision to overturn.

Test Scores Tell You Who Your Child Beat, Not What Your Child Knows

Akil Bello reacts to a recent Jill Barshay article chicken littling parental favoring of grades over Big Standardized Test results. It's a great critique of the grades vs. test scores debate.

No one wants to read your AI slop

Cory Doctorow on the habit of tagging in AI to rebut arguments. Worth it for this quote--"There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws."

Former UM president Seth Bodnar officially launches campaign as independent vs. Daines

Montana's Senate race is turning out to be a complicated mess, but allow me to endorse this guy. He's a former student of mine and you won't find a better human being on the planet.

At the Bucks County Beacon, I reviewed a new plan-shaped report aimed at sort of fixing the problems of recruiting and retaining teachers. 

This is from the memorial concert for George Harrison. Lots of layers here, but the performance itself is quite a reading of the song.

Subscription is free. I don't want your money-- give it one of the other fine writers about education. But your subscription raises my numbers which in turn increases my visibility and gets the word out. 

School Voucher Math

To hear some voucher fans talk, they just want their own money back.

For instance, here's Julie Emerson, former legislator and now Louisiana Governor Jess Landry's chief of staff, explaining the LA GATOR taxpayer-funded voucher program.

It’s this basic principle of your tax dollars that you send to the government to educate your child, and we want you to have more flexibility in how those dollars are spent. You’re all sending your tax dollars to Baton Rouge, and you all want your child to be educated the best way that you see fit, and you would like to see those dollars follow your child into that education situation of choice, because every child learns differently.

Except that this is all a lie. Let's use Louisiana as an example.

According to tax-rates.org, the median property tax in Louisiana is $243 per year (that's on a house worth the median value of $135,400). Using census figures, worldpopulationreview.com figures the median property tax rate across all 64 counties is $732. If we go county by county, the lowest median property tax is $199 in West Carroll Parish and the top median rate is in Orleans Parish-- $2,428. 

For 2025-26, the GATOR program will provide the following amounts to families--

Up to $15,253 for IDEA students
$7,626 for students whose family have an income below 250% of federal poverty guidelines
$5,243 for other eligible students

The federal poverty guidelines say that 250% for a family of four is $80,375. 

So let's say Mr. and Mrs. Median live in a median home and pay $300 a year in property tax (I'm rounding up to make the math easier). Let's say they live in that house for fifty years. That's a grand total of $15,000 paid in taxes. Let's say they have two little median children. We'll even assume they are "other eligible." That means $5,243 per year per child for 13 years, or a grand total of $136,318. Even I do this math with the top median tax amount of $2,428 for fifty years, I get a total tax bill of 121,400. 

In other words, property tax costs do not cover the cost of vouchers. The voucher program is not simply letting taxpayers decide where their tax dollars go-- they also get to decide where their neighbors' tax dollars go. The only scenario in which this becomes true is a couple with a very expensive home and just one child. For all other parents, the more kids they have (and the more special needs those children have) the more necessary it is for "your tax dollars that you send to the government to educate your child" to be supplemented by your neighbors' tax dollars

This example was Louisiana, but the point holds true in virtually every voucher state. Voucher users are not simply getting to control their own tax dollars, but also the tax dollars of many, many other people.

Also, if we are going to adopt the legislative principle that taxpayers should get to decide exactly what their tax dollars are spent on, I have a few thoughts about my tax dollars and the US military. 

But that's not what's happening here. Voucher users are most definitely not just getting their own tax dollars handed back to them; they are getting to appropriate the dollars of many other taxpayers, whether those taxpayers like the idea or not. Arguments like Emerson's are dishonest, but too rarely called out. 

Teach For Awhile For America

Wendy Kopp, the woman who hatched Teach for America, popped up in The Atlantic with an odd reflection on "first jobs" and teaching, and, well, there's a lot of subtext to unpack. After "four decades trying to inspire young people... to work directly with low-income communities," Kopp has some thoughts.

She opens with the story of Jack, who was trying to decide whether or not to go the TFA route, and jumps from there to bigger ideas:

Policy makers and philanthropists aren’t particularly focused on first jobs. But these choices matter—and not only for the individuals beginning their careers. If we want to address society’s most deeply rooted challenges—poverty, polarization, environmental degradation, geopolitical conflict—we need to encourage young people to work on these issues early in their careers, so they can grow into leaders capable of solving them.

In other words, going into teaching as a "first job" doesn't really help anybody, but it gives TFA members the exposure to issues so that they can move on to leadership roles where they can actually accomplish something. You know-- real jobs where the real work gets done. 

This is in line with the longtime criticism of TFA that it's for rich white kids from elite universities to get an "experience" being briefly exposed to the poors.

It also points to the less-acknowledged problem of TFA. Plenty has been said about TFA's disrespect for career teachers ("Step aside, Grandma, and let me show you how we smart Ivy Leaguers get the job done") and the absurd condescension of insisting that a top college kid can pretty much master the work in a five week training. But over time it has become clear that a wider danger of TFA is that it keeps producing a bunch of reformster amateur edu-preneurs who go into business and government claiming to have been "in teaching" because they spent two years in a classroom somewhere. 

TFA has certainly produced some folks who became real teachers and embarked on real teaching careers-- which I guess would be a disappointment to Kopp, who was rooting for them to zip through their two-year first job so they could get on to important leaderly jobs of solving the world's problems.

Her story of Jack defies parody:

While teaching in Harlem, Jack saw that a lack of resources made failure seem inevitable for the kids at his school. He also saw the incredible resilience and character of the students, families, and teachers. He realized just how entrenched inequity in education is, but he gained confidence in his ability to help address it. Jack is now in his first year at Columbia Law School.

Yup. Jack went face to face with the challenges of poverty, saw what strengths were there, grabbed ahold of the problems of teaching in a low-resource classroom and decided-- to go to law school. But don't worry-- Kopp assures us that he "hopes to litigate for increased funding for education and better compliance with anti-discrimination and disability-rights laws."

But Kopp just can't stop. "Research confirms that working close to the roots of social issues early in one’s career fundamentally reshapes a person’s beliefs and life trajectory." And she connects some of that research to TFA, showing that yes, TFA is great because it provides an important formative experience for the TFA members. The actual students should, I guess, be happy to provide a useful learning experience for those college grads. It's almost as great as if someone provided learning for those students.

Kopp reminds us that her generation was known as the Me Generation. But offering a "prestigious alternative to the corporate track" those college grads proved to be more "idealistic and civically committed than people assumed." So the trick was, I guess, offering a prestigious alternative like TFA and not a non-prestigious alternative like an actual teaching career. 

Kopp comes real close to some insights here--

In 2024, 35 percent of Yale’s senior class entering the workforce chose jobs in finance and consulting; add tech into the mix, and the share rises to 46 percent. At other schools—including Harvard, Princeton, Claremont McKenna, and Vanderbilt—at least half of the graduating class moved into those three fields. Meanwhile, the data I’ve seen on the share of students taking jobs close to inequity and injustice suggest a decline across the same period.

Ah, but Wendy-- those graduates going into those fields are taking jobs close to inequity and injustice. They're just close to the winning side of those issues.  

Some students, of course, feel they can’t afford to pursue less immediately lucrative careers. But if this was all that was holding graduates back, you’d expect to see more kids from wealthy backgrounds taking these jobs. Yet students from the highest-income backgrounds are the least likely to enter into public service and the most likely to pursue the corporate path.

Huh. Rich people don't want to help poor people, and don't even want to be around them? I feel like there's a really deep vein to be tapped here, but Kopp isn't going there.

Kopp points out that the corporate track has a well-funded recruitment arm and that colleges are eager to hoover up some of that money in a sort of collegiate product placement. 

Kopp also sees an opportunity in the AI onslaught. Maybe, since AI is going to do all the entry level jobs, companies could "push back their recruiting timelines" while grads go out and get some human skill jobs, in communities tackling social problems. Not, mind you, that she thinks the grads should stay in that first job:

And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges.

Get those humaning skills, then move on to your real job.

There are so many blind spots in Kopp's essay, like her observation that "High schools should inspire students to step outside of their comfort zone and wrestle with pressing social issues," as if there are thousands of high schools where the students wrestle with pressing social issues every single day. Philips Exeter Academy is not a typical high school.

But mostly is this whole notion that the direct social work of the world should be done by fresh-faced college grads who only stay for a couple of years before they go on to the real lifetime work of, perhaps, amassing money or political power by occasionally remembering the social issues that they observed up close for a brief time. What does a school system look like when it is staffed mainly by people who never stay long enough to actually get good at the work of teaching? And are those people really fit "experts" to lead the world of education policy? 

Takes me back to two classics from The Onion-- the point/counterpoint "My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids vs. Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher" and "Teach For America Celebrates 3 Decades Of Helping Recent Graduates Pad Out Law School Applications." I'm going to reread those now to get the taste of Kopp's ideas out of my head. 

TX: They Don't Want School Choice

Texas once again provides proof that many school choice advocates do not actually want school choice at all.

A Muslim parent has taken the state to court in order to sue for access to Islamic private schools via taxpayer-funded vouchers. 

But wait, you say-- doesn't Texas have (after years of battling and political shenanigans) a taxpayer-funded school voucher program? Aren't we seeing stories about how gazillions of parents are signing up for it?

Yes, and yes. But in Texas, as in many states, the people who have fought so very hard for school choice don't actually want school choice. 

As I posted last December, the acting comptroller threw a wrench in the works before it even got in gear. Kelly Hancock was in the chemicals business when he decided to step up his political career from school board member to House of Representatives in 2006. After three terms in the House, he moved up to the Senate. His undistinguished career included his award from Texas Monthly for being one of the worst legislators in Texas in 2017. The 2021 gerrymander still gave him a safer district. Then in June 2025, he resigned the Senate so he could be appointed the acting Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts by Governor Greg Abbott. (He's planning to run for the office for realsies next year.)

Hancock entered the Acting Comptroller gig by asking if maybe he could just exclude some schools from the voucher program. Hancock argued that the accreditation company Cognia (in business since 1895) had hosted some events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Governor Greg Abbott last November designated CAIR a "foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organization," because Islamophobia is a big selling point for Texas Republicans. The feds have not made any such charge, but Governor Ron DeSantis got Florida on that same bandwagon (and just lost the court case over it). Attorney General Paxton told Hancock to go ahead and shut off those private schools from the taxpayer-funded vouchers.

So because some schools know a group that knows a group that the governor says (without evidence) is tied to other bad guys, hundreds of schools have been locked out of the Texas voucher program. The schools include schools that serve Christian students and students with special needs, and those that serve Muslim students. 

So now a father has to sue the state to have access to the school choice program. “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit states.

CAIR issued a statement about the events it hosts, “Know Your Rights” events designed to inform students about state and federal civil rights and protections.

“Hosting civil rights education for students is lawful. So is teaching students about their rights under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” a spokesperson with CAIR Texas said. “Any attempt to penalize schools for learning about their civil rights from an organization Greg Abbott happens to dislike would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”

It sure looks like Texas would like to provide taxpayer dollars only to certain schools that are connected to certain religions. For the umpteenth time, we get school choice advocates who only support choice when it involves families making choices of which they approve, which inevitably involves the State deciding which religions are legitimate, and that ought to alarm people on all sides of religious debates.

This father should win his suit, and I'll be interested to see what the "pro-choice" leaders of Texas do next.  

A Hurricane in Indianapolis

Indiana is facing hurricane level takeover of its public school system without the use of an actual hurricane.

Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust, a group of business-minded reformsters who have attached themselves, leechlike, to Indianapolis schools. Brown has spent 17 years "in education," which translates to a two whole years in Teach for America followed by various reformster groups. 

In The74, Brown can be found delivering a bunch of corporate argle bargle about HEA 1423.

Brown opens by citing the example of post-Katrina New Orleans, which became the first major city to "restructure its school system." Kind of like the way rockets sometimes employ "rapid unplanned disassembly." "In the two decades since, however," writes Brown, "no city has attempted such an ambitious structural reform." It's true, just as few rocket makers have deliberately pursued rapid unplanned disassembly. 

But Brown is happy to announce that the Indiana General Assembly is on its way to replicating the effects of a natural disaster with the bill's "dramatic restructuring of public education."

Brown's description of the vast benefits of this rapid unplanned disassembly of the district is remarkably vague and free of plain language, but there are two major pieces that one can glimpse dimly through the fog of jargon.

The bill would establish the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. The IPEC would be the super-boss-daddy of all Indianapolis schools, both public and charter. It looks a lot like the old portfolio model, which Mind Trust has been pushing and expanding in Indianapolis for years. The model is based on the idea of an investment portfolio, where you keep juggling investments in and out of the portfolio depending on how well they pay off. (Longer explanation here.)

I wrote this next paragraph in 2019:

Portfolio models are privatization writ large. In places like Indianapolis, the portfolio model has been pushed and overseen by a group of "civic-minded" private operators. The Mind Trust of Indianapolis flexed its political and financial muscle and elbowed its way into "partnership" with the public school system, pushing for the expansion of charters in a manner perhaps calculated to destabilize the public schools and create financial peril for low-scoring schools. There is a certain gutsy aggressiveness to how portfolio models are established. Step One: Bob sets up a snack vending stand in the lobby of a local restaurant. Step Two: When the owner complains about how Bob is draining business, Bob smiles and says, "Look, let's just become partners under one brand. And I just happen to know a guy who would be great to run it."

Now we're at the step where Bob says, "You know, there's no reason I shouldn't get paid the same amount for my popcorn balls that your restaurant charges for steak. Also, how about some help with this dinky stand I'm stuck in."

Because the IPEC has a couple of mandates under the bill. One is to "create a unified transportation plan." Another is "Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, buildings for all schools that choose to opt in." IPEC should also levy property taxes "for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally." And also creating a "unified performance framework" so that persistently low-performing schools would be shut down (see Portfolio Model). 

Says Brown, "The changes will effectively put charters and traditional public schools on the same footing — both in terms of the money spent per student and the consequences for poor performance." Or as he says later in the piece, "IPS will now become another school operator alongside charter schools, and district schools will compete on the same playing field and be held to the same accountability standards."

So taxpayers will now get to fund charter schools directly, as well as provide transportation. The IPEC would get to close down public school buildings, or hand them over the charter operators. Between the lines, it appears that IPEC would have all operational and financial power, and school operators would just manage the teaching part (until, of course, someone with their hands on the purse strings decides they have some thoughts about the teaching part).

It's not just that this is a takeover of the public system (also, any charter schools that don't want to play in this game don't have to). This gives us once again one of the major features of privatization under the fiction of school choice--

Disenfranchising the taxpayers.

IPEC will be appointed, not elected, and it will in turn make sure that charter schools, run by boards that are not elected, will get a hefty share of the taxpayer money. What do the taxpayers get to say about how their money is spent? Not a damned thing, particularly if they don't have any school age children. Brown promises "greater efficiency and coordination," but not accountability, transparency, or a voice for the people who pay the bills. 

Brown promises "a single point of accountability," but the reality is that a portfolio system, run by nine mayoral appointees, has no point of accountability to the taxpayers. 

Brown says he hopes this model catches on and spreads to other cities. Just think-- you, too, can have your own corporately manufactured natural disaster. 

Small Town Accountability

One of my mother's nurses is a former student of mine who now works at the assisted living home where Mom now lives.

My car used to be serviced by a former student. When we eat out, we're often waited on by a former student. I taught side by side with many former students. Yesterday, the Board of Directors had a playdate with their friend, who is the son of a former student. I go to church with former students. I meet former students in the grocery store. 

My lawyer is the father of one of my former students. So was my previous doctor. So was the presiding judge in county court. We could discuss a whole category of families where I have taught multiple generations. The guy whose company painted our house is the father of former students, and is married to a former student.

I could go on and on. This is teaching in a small town. 

Not everyone cares for it. Some teachers deliberately live away from the community in which they teach, hoping for some privacy and a life that is separate from their teaching work. 

It's a level of transparency and accountability that no system cobbled together in a big urban school district will ever match. If parents (or other taxpayers) want to ask you, to your face, why you are doing X or what was the point of nY, they can do it. As a teacher, you have to live with the knowledge that you may have to really explain and justify yourself. And as your students grow up and graduate, many leave, but many stay, and even the ones who leave come home for family holidays. You get to have conversations with former students while they are in college, talking about what they did or did not find themselves prepared for. And the challenge becomes personal, too. If you were an unbearable jerk to your students-- well, you are going to be living around them literally for the rest of your life. Are you a highly effective educator? There are a whole lot of people who have an assessment, and they have shared it. A VAM score is a tiny fart in a big wind compared to, "My kids and my grand-kids had her for class, and she was absolutely [insert adjective here]."

Your students do not apear out of the mysterious mists, to return to some great unknown at the end of the day. They are real humans who live in a real neighborhood.

This can also help you do your job. When you know more about the family's challenges, you can better appreciate where your students are coming from and what they're carrying with them on the journey.

When folks talk about teachers not bringing their personal stuff into the classroom, small town teachers chuckle. You want LGBTQ persons to stay closeted and invisible? Lots of luck. In a small town, your students know where you go to church, who you marry--heck, who you date, where you go to eat or drink. Unless you never mention your politics to a soul, they know that, too. I've been writing a local newspaper column for almost 28 years. For many years, one of the social studies teachers in my school was also the mayor of the town. 

It's not always a great thing. Rumors can fly, and you may at times wish for the space and privacy to deal with your own problems and mistakes. And sometimes you have to watch some of the process play out in front of you. Here's a real conversation from my classroom many years ago:

Me: Expressing some admiration of a female artist

Student: Watch out. You'd better not let Mrs. Greene hear you talking like that.

Another student: He's divorced, you dummy.

Being closely tied to a small community can also be difficult if it's a community that does not collectively value education all that much ("My family has never needed all that book learning.") But at least you know what you are working with (or resigning from).

I have never been able to think of how to scale up the small town model of accountability, to create a system where teachers and administrators have to deal face to face, on a daily basis, with the taxpayers that they serve. I sure wish I could. It's more personal, more immediate, more effective than trying to collect a bunch of "data," mold it into some sort of consumable shape, and that get those data patties served to people who ought to care. 

You will find small town school systems out there trying hard to act like they're big city districts, working to be more impersonal and cold, on purpose. That seems backwards to me. But then, most of modern education reform is aimed directly at large city school systems and is poorly suited to small town education (but that's another post). 

I'd love to see a day when large districts try to learn from small ones. We could have an education conference, do meetings in local fire halls, house attendees at a couple of local hotels, eat at some local restaurants. I know a few people who could help set it up. 

ICYMI: Oh Great A New Frickin' War Edition (3/1)

It's hard to really capture the many levels on which the US attack on Iran is just stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. I'm not going to get into it here-- there is plenty of press about it and you probably couldn't miss it if you wanted to. But I surely hope that you are badgering your Congressperson.

In the meantime, the business of helping a country be less stupid remains super-important, so we will continue to pay attention. Here's your list for the week.

Center for Christian Virtue is the new White Hat Management, just as Jesus intended

You may remember White Hat Management, an outfit that really mastered the art of scamming their way to rolling up taxpayer dollars via school choice. Stephen Dyer says someone else is also showing that kind of self-enriching skill-- but with more Jesus.

Ohio school district bans ‘Hate has no home here’ poster from classroom

One Ohio district apparently doesn't want to get caught discriminating against the haters. Cliff Pinckard reports for Cleveland.com.

Private-school owners: Florida’s biggest voucher-funding group is hurting us

Florida's voucher-funding system is a mess, and some private school operators are getting big sad about it. Natalie La Roche Pietri reports for the Miami Herald.

Senators find out what you get when you ask for "disruption" in education.

South Carolina legislators wrote themselves a big ole taxpayer-funded school choice law, but now they are sad that some folks are getting money that the legislators didn't intend to give money to. Steve Nuzum explains.

Overselling the Mississippi Miracle

Jennifer Berkshire reminds us that while Mississippi may have helped its fourth graders get better reading scores, it is still a systemically bad place for children to grow up.

The Great AI-in-Education Paradox

Paul Thomas looks at one of the mysteries of the great AI push for education-- if students learn about AI by using AI, how do they learn anything?

Public School Profiteering in Stockton

Thomas Ultican takes us to Stockton, CA, for yet another demonstration of how to get rich in the charter school biz.

Lost in the Noise: A Major Shift in Florida School Choice

It was certain to happen-- turf wars over the highly profitable school privatization biz in Florida. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the inside scoop.

The 100-Point Scale Is a Design Flaw

Matt Brady explains why the 100 point grading scale is a flawed design. 

Gifted and Talented Redux

Nancy Flanagan considers the proper role of gifted programs (and why it's such a touchy subject for some folks).

Secret Agent Man

Audrey Watters offers a wealth of links this week, looking through the world of Ai and training and literacy and other messy ed tech detritus. Have you subscribed to her newsletter yet, because you should.

McMahon Continues Dismantling Dept. of Education. Will She Succeed?

Jan Resseger breaks down the latest rounds of assaults on the education department. 

Google and ISTE+ASCD announce new partnership to destroy US education

I covered this news, but Benjamin Riley really brings an appropriate amount of rage to the discussion.

Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Betrays Working Class Students

Maurice Cunningham looks at the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education's plan to offer second-rate degrees to working class students. Not a great idea.

Meta patents AI that keeps users posting after they die

I used to joke that I would teach until death and then have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics so I could keep working in my classroom. Apparently META is now on the case. Once again I am struck at how little superficial data they feel they need to replicate you. Ick. 

This week I was in The Progressive, looking at a group of Democrats who might actually support, sort of, public education. And at F9orbes.com, a look at one more school choice defeat in Kentucky, and a Pew survey with information about teens and AI. 

I am not really a Sufjan Stevens fan, but I do love this song which just hits me somewhere in here. 

I would be delighted for you to sign up for my newsletter. I can send you what I write, you can read it from your email, and both of us can spend less time on social media.

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.