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. 

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.