A Dumb Act About Faculty Merit

What if we hired college professors based on their SAT scores?

George Leef just turned up at National Review pushing this very dumb idea. Leef is the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and if you want to know where he's coming from, the first sentence of his NR piece gives us a hint. 

The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

Thing is, we could dismiss Leef as one right winger with a dumb idea, but it's not just Leef's personal individual dumb idea. Let's trace it. He's referencing a piece by David Randall published at Leef's own shop, "It's time to mandate merit." Randall is the executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, and what he is pushing is their model bill, the Faculty Merit Act. Which is a dumb bill.

Who are these people?

The National Association of Scholars is a long-standing right wing outfit that was culture panicking before it was cool. They were founded in 1987 to preserve the "Western intellectual heritage" and "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," originally called Campus Coalition for Democracy. They get funding from all the usuals-- Alliance Defending Freedom, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, Olin, etc etc etc. Founder and long time president was Stephen Balch, who has made a career out of operating in these Let's Make Colleges Not Liberal circles. Current president Peter Wyatt Wood is a regular columnist for National Review.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Reagan adviser, has been in the group, as has Chester Finn. Go figure.

Leef's opening idea-- that a lefty education ideas like multiculturalism, gender studies and affirmative action are 1960s radical notions that caused institutions like universities to become a threat to Western civilization and general white conservatism-- that's a long-standing belief of NAS, periodically updated to include CRT and DEI. NAS has launched a variety of battles to oppose things like the AP History framework and anything DEI-ish and climate change talk. They often worm their way into state level stuff, like back in 2001 when they tried to commandeer Colorado's teacher training system.

In 2022, NAS decided to launch a whole new initiative under the heading of Civics Alliance, an attempt to ride the wave of culture panic into some new controls that included a variety of pre-fab policies for new board members who wanted to make sure that White kids weren't being discriminated against.

Their mission statement manages to squeeze a whole lot of right wing alarm bells into one paragraph:

We oppose all racism and support traditional American pluralism, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. These beliefs are not those of the radical New Civics activists, which espouse identity politics with overlapping ideologies of critical race theory, multiculturalism, and so-called “antiracism.” Unfortunately, these dogmas would ruin our country by destroying our unity, our liberty, and the national culture that sustains them. They have replaced traditional civics, where historical dates and documents are taught, with a New Civics based on the new tribalism of identity politics. Their favored pedagogy is service-learning, alternately called action civics, civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, project-based civics, and global civics. These all replace civics literacy with a form of left-wing activism that adapts techniques from Alinsky-style community organizing for use in the classroom.

Well-meaning folks, they warn, might adopt the new wolves in sheep's clothing, but "Well-intentioned reformers must not collaborate with those promoting an ideology that would destroy America."

Civics Alliance drew a real crowd to sign off on their We Want letter-- folks from the Claremont Institute, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Great Hearts Institute for Education, Heartland Institute, 
The Federalist, Eagle Forum. And plenty of familiar names. Jeremy Tate (Classical Learning Test), Sandra Stotsky, Chris Rufo, Nicole Neily (Parents Defending Education), Katharin Gorka, Max Eden, our old friend Rebecca Friedrichs, and  of course George Leef. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.

What does the proposed bill actually say?

CA appears to have set itself out to be a source of model legislation and policy, so the Faculty Merit Act is just one among many others, like the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act and the Human Nature Act (an anti-LGBTQ bill). 

The introduction of the bill re-asserts that administrator and faculty hiring is rife with political discrimination in hiring, which is itself just a "fig leaf" for discrimination by race and sex. "Faculty merit has declined precipitously as a result." It varies by discipline, of course-- "the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics." 

How are we to turn back this tide of affirmative action mediocrity in hiring for college professors? Clearly, the solution is standardized testing. 

Our model Faculty Merit Act promotes academic transparency by requiring all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department.

Yes, the best way to judge that 30-year old aspiring political science professor is to look at the scores from the test they took when they were 17. This is such a dumb idea, and the creators of this dumb bill almost admit it. 

A standardized test is only a rough proxy for academic merit—especially as the College Board has weakened its tests. Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score. But standardized tests do provide some measure of general intelligence.

Do they? Do they really? Because the SATs offer roughly zero measure of teaching and researching skill. In his article, Randall argues 

a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.

Will they? Because I'm pretty sure that a standardized test score is a terrible proxy for faculty merit. Leef quotes this same section and follows it with "This is a very good idea." No, this is a very dumb idea. But the second part really captures the real intent of the policy, which is to get the public riled up against these slacker liberal professors who, these guys are certain, have terrible test scores. Says the bill language:  

The public also will learn something by comparing the average standardized test score of different departments. If Ethnic Studies professors have standardized test scores two standardized deviations below those of physics professors, then the public will have better means to assess the claims of the professoriate to intellectual capacity that merits public deference.

In other words, we have a list here of departments that we think shouldn't exist, and we feel certain that the professors in these departments tanked their SAT scores back in the day, so if we can publish the proof of their intellectual ineptitude, we could erode the support that would keep us from axing them. Also, and "perhaps most importantly," it would provide statistical information that guys who didn't get that job could use to sue the school. 

The actual list of retired scores included in the bill is the ACT, the Classic Learning Test, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the SAT. Also, the school has to swear they coughed up all the applicable scores or they will be subject to charges of perjury. The language of the bill hits all the particulars of the ideas covered above.

The whole exercise takes me back to the early days of the Big Standardized Test, when reformsters were just so certain that they knew about the Trouble With K-12 Education and that test results would provide the biggest lid-blowing digitized Gotcha ever. NAS/CA are already certain that all those damn squishy liberal non-white hires are a pack of inferiors who need to have their inferiority stripped naked to the world so that public opinion can chase them away from the University. 

That's not a particularly admirable goal, but really, the whole proposal is a just a dumb idea. The notion that an SAT score makes a major statement about someone's merit, especially years and years later is just bizarre. "Well, Dr. Wisdompants, we're sure your PhD work is fine and all, and your work as a graduate teaching assistant is swell, along with these letters of recommendation from you last teaching positions-- that's all well and good, but what we really want to see is your SAT scores." 

Or maybe they're picking up on student conversations. "Yes, Professor Bigbrains runs a good class, and I am learning like crazy in there. The professor really knows the field and really knows how to make it understandable to us. But damn-- have you seen their SAT scores??!!"

The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person. 

ICYMI: Back To It Edition (1/4)

Vacation is over and it is time to get back to it, whether your "it" is work or school or extra-legal kidnappings of foreign heads of state. Feels like a long year already.

All of this [waves vaguely in direction of country] makes me oddly more committed to following education, because education remains hugely important even as it falls off the radar of folks who are worried about things like unaffordable health insurance and wars for oil and a decaying federal government. 

While on vacation, lots of folks' output slows down, and this list gets quieter because of it. But there's still stuff to not miss. So let's see what we've got here. 

U.S. Dept. of Education denies appeal to save $30M grant funds for Idaho rural schools

The department continues to withhold taxpayer dollars from public schools. KTVB reports on how Idaho students are getting squeezed by the feds, because somebody saw some scary DEI words.

When Billionaires Built a Teacher

Mike Simpson is mostly know as one of the big voice amplifiers on line; Big Education Ape shares a ton of writing with snappy illustrations to go with. But Simpson does do some writing of his own, like this big picture piece about the big billionaire plan to dismantle public education.

Charter School Flimflam 

Thomas Ultican looks at the latest report from the Network for Public Education looking at the charter school industry.

In Their Own Words: The New Orleans Community Wants Their Direct-run, Leah Chase School.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is back at it with an in depth look at the single public school left in Orleans Parish and the continuing threats to its continued existence.

Why Conservatives Should Defend Socialized Education

Robert Pondiscio spotted my piece highlighting the Michigan lawmaker who wants to cut school taxes for property owners without kids in school. I didn't care for that idea, and Pondiscio doesn't, either. Here's the conservative argument for taxing everyone to pay for schools.

Days Gone By

Audrey Watters offers an end-of-year reflection on the dangers of throwing AI at humans in general and young humans in particular.

Wanted! Presidents/Leaders Who Protect ALL Children!

Nancy Bailey provides an excellent beginning-of-year reminder of the many areas in which children need leaders who care about them.

Where the Students Are Leaving—and Who Is Left to Absorb the Cost

Something strange-- and undoubtedly costly-- is happening to Nashville school enrollment. TC Weber had the time to sort at least some of it, and the resulting report unveils the story-- at least part of it.

Francis Wilkinson: MAGA's book bans are coming back with a vengeance

Frances Wilkinson doesn't so much provide a picture of the current state of censorship as she provides a history of the last couple of years, and in that respect, it's a nicely done piece of work. This is how we got here. Go ahead and get frustrated and angry all over again.

Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

Christina Samuels at Hechinger provides a handy update on how far the Project 2025 assault on education got this year.

A Banner year for Censorship

Big Katherine Stewart fan here. This post from her newsletter looks at the nature of censorship this year under Dear Leader.

Whatever Happened to the Art of Brainwashing America Before Plunging It Into Unnecessary War?

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz at McSweeney's with another darkly hilarious take on our current moment.

At Bucks County Beacon this week, I offered a look back at the year in education here in Pennsylvania {it could have been worse). 

At Forbes.com, I looked at some uncomfortable findings about young humans and their use of AI "companions."

In the other end of the state, New Years means a mummers band, and while the pageantry and costumes are nice, there is something about just getting out there and playing for the neighborhood. It's a sound unlike any other.

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The Sad Gift of 2025

There is a lesson to learn this year, or maybe we can call it a demonstration. And it is huge, beyond politics, beyond the squabbling, but not beyond education itself.

Let me explain.

We come into the world, and even at the youngest ages, we start to sense the outlines of the great existential issues, grasping the edges with chubby fingers and a still-plastic mind. I am tiny and powerless in a huge world. I am isolated and alone. And someday, I am going to die.

We move into the world, through the world, grappling with these. We find healthy ways to manage. We learn to value and connect with other people, becoming part of something larger than ourselves, healthier and stronger than we are alone. We make our peace with death, embracing a belief about how it is followed by something more than oblivion, or, alternatively, finding grace and acceptance of an oblivion we believe we can't escape.

Not everyone copes well. Fear and panic drive us to more extreme measures. Am I small and powerless? Then I will do everything I can to gather power and might to myself, enough to bend the world to my anxious will. Am I isolated and alone? Then I will find ways to demand the love and attention of others, maybe even use force to take what you should be tokens of affection (but which I have transformed into signs of my own power). Am I going to die? Then I will find ways to make a mark on the world, to build monuments and scribe my name on anything large enough to be seen by everyone. We deny our own nature in order to put on whatever mask we imagine would protect us from whatever fear drives us. We hollow ourselves out and try to cover the gutted remains with borrowed armor, a makeshift Gregor Samsa. 

Most of us, at one time or another, succumb to these fear-driven impulses, but if nothing else, our circumstances limit us from taking it too far. But when the fear grabs us, we try some small version of these big fights against the abyss, and we come up short against the restrictions of our circumstances, thinking "if only..."

Well, here's the gift of 2025. We get to watch a man who acts out the worst of human emptiness and fear, who has his whole life (for those of us who have been paying attention) been awful. Have you imagined that given enough power and money, you could silence the voices of fear and emptiness that nag at you? Look on his works, ye wanna-be mighty, and despair. 

He slaps his name on everything, worried that if he does not build himself a monument, nobody else will. He acquires (and wastes) mountains of money, and insists on displaying it in an imagined show of wealth. He demands attention and praise for his great achievements, no matter how imaginary. He diminishes everyone else who challenges him or in any way challenges the notion that he is so great that he is above the abyss. He looks for some simulation of love, though he perversely and repeatedly confuses love with submission, which is just one more way he tried to reassert his power over the world. He does all of these things over and over again, because none of it is ever enough.

He has been successful in pursuing this panic-driven campaign to quell his own empty-hearted flailing against the human existential dilemma-- more successful arguably than any human in the history of humans. Women. Money. Submissive butt-kissing from a host of people. A host of people he can look down on. And the most powerful position in the world. Everyone who ever dreamt that power and wealth could beat back the abyss now has an exemplar.

And it isn't working. Never mind the intellectual and moral and ethical and decent human being shortcomings of this thirst for power and wealth. It clearly hasn't done the job. He's not happy, not at peace, not finding joy. I mean, he's got everything he has fought and wrangled and stomped on others for, and he still seems miserable, a joyless hunk of a man whose still grasping for the one more thing that might make it all okay, a grasping so desperate that it slides through ethical, moral, and legal restraints because nothing--nothing--is more important than collecting that Stuff, because surely that will hasten the moment that finally makes him okay. And it never comes, and it won't come, and he will still die.

Mind you, he's not alone. The techno overlords who really do plan to avoid death and have "more everything forever." The people who believe they are better than the common herd and are therefor exempt from life's hugest questions. The believers who think an angry God has singled them out for different (better) treatment.  And they stick to this because fear has blinded them to the obvious-- that fear and panic do not drive us in a direction that strengthens or soothes the soul. 

They are a sad, pitiable group of humans, accomplished at games of power and wealth, not so great at humaning. Well, they would be pitiable if they were not making life harder for everyone else. 

I mean, we have no shortage of stories about what happens to people who try to escape the boundaries of mortality by pursuing wealth and power and domination of others, people who are certain that if all bonds of restraint on their own will and impulses were removed then--then--they would be happy and at peace. We've heard the stories, and now we are living through a living demonstration and it so much more pathetic and toxic and just worse than any story we've ever heard. 

There are better ways to move through the world, better ways to enjoy a rich, connected life. Ways to make the world better, yourself stronger, your heart less a slave to fear and despair. Ways to be full and truly human, and in doing so give voice to a greater something. 

I won't pretend, in this space, to know every bit of how that better way is to be found and followed, and my suspicion (along with centuries of human history) suggest that there are multiple paths that depend on the person and time and place.

If you want an argument for education-- a quality education, for every single young human-- this is it. I believe that real education is the process of helping young humans find a way to become their own best selves as they try to understand what it means to be fully human in the world.  Not the process of trying to fill up the empty bucket of their head with facts, not the process of training them to have skills they can exchange with corporations for money (though those can be part of the process). 

We all have a front-row seat for what it looks like when a country is awash in leaders who are so hollowed out by toxic fear that they are desperate to dominate the world around them, when they are so 

terrified of their own humanity that they are driven to reject that humanity and instead clutch to themselves a tower of scraps and patches in hopes that it will somehow prove they are not tiny, they are not alone, they will not die, that they are not, in fact, merely and actually human. There has never been, in all of human history, such a display of how to be bad at humaning.

I'll admit, it's not a great gift. This course in "How Not To Human" is not remotely worth the cost we're paying for tuition. But we've all been forced to sign up for this, so the least we can do is learn the lessons being paraded in front of our face. 

We are tiny and powerless and isolated and we can deal with that by A) facing it and B) using empathy and grace and love to connect with our fellow carbon-based life forms. We are going to die, which may mean metaphysical transition or oblivion or some inconceivable other thing, but we can either try to live in denial or use awareness of our brief flicker to give value and beauty to what we set our hearts to do. (Lord, the number of times over the decades I have looked at that man and thought, "Life is too short to live like that.")

Education at its best helps young humans with all of this-- not the how, but the what. Learn about yourself and who you are and who you want to be, your strengths and weaknesses, your aspirations and accomplishments. Be curious about the world, and try to unpack how it is (sciences), how humans can move through it (humanities), and how we can manage the journey (everything else). 

That's the lesson of 2025. We are watching our own grotesque Richard Corey, slouching toward oblivion and demonstrating how the most outsized grasping will not bring the peace that humans crave. That path is a dead end, a waste of our brief flicker without peace, joy, or connection. You can try to slap gold foil and your own name on everything, grind some humans into the dirt while begging for the praise of others, collect more imaginary honors, and even if nobody stops you or holds you accountable, you eventually run out of road, still aching from the soul-sized hole inside. 

May we and our children and our students follow a better path. Happy New Year!

AI Makes Strange Bedfellows

There's that weird little feeling you get when you find that you kind of agree with someone you don't generally agree with. So here I am nodding my head to M oms for Liberty, Ron DeSantis, and National Parents Union because they are talking about AI.

In their newsletter, M4L proudly announced that Tina Descovich was "at the table" for the regime's AI in Education Task Force (pretty sure that's not an A1 task force). 

Representing parents across the nation, she expressed support for the responsible use of artificial intelligence as a tool to enhance educational outcomes, while also emphasizing parents’ serious concerns about rushed implementation without appropriate safeguards and guardrails in place.

Well, yes, that's...um...correct. 

Meanwhile, Politico's Andrew Atterbury covered Ron DeSantis's very crabby opposition to AI. 

“Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” the governor said Dec. 18.

He notably has taken aim at data centers sprouting up across the country by attempting to slow their growth in Florida, siding with local communities opposing the massive developments. And DeSantis frequently raises fears of how AI could ultimately upend the economy by displacing countless workers. The Republican rails against what he calls the “mindless slop” AI creates and warns deepfakes and manipulation could pose “a potential existential crisis for self-government.”

“The idea of this transhumanist strain, that somehow this is going to supplant humans and this other stuff, we have to reject that with every fiber of our being,” DeSantis said Dec. 15 during an AI event in Jupiter. “We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That's what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”

 Okay, a little christiniast nationalismy for me, but basically, I think he's right.

And here's NPR, running the Ai resistance banner up the flagpole that is Keri Rodrigues, the leader of the astroturfed National Parents Union. She found her son interacting with the chatbot on his Bible app. He was asking deep moral questions about sin and stuff. Author Rhitu Chatterjee sets her irony ignorer on stun and writes

That's the kind of conversation that she had hoped her son would have with her and not a computer. "Not everything in life is black and white," she says. "There are grays. And it's my job as his mom to help him navigate that and walk through it, right?"

She's not wrong (she's just a bad spokesperson for moral complexity and nuance). 

It feels a little reminiscent of the Common Core days, when the opposition include a coalition of people who were against the Core because they wanted to defend public schools and those who were against the Core because they considered it the ultimate example of everything Terrible and Wrong about public schools. 

And just to ramp up that sense of deja vu, here comes the AFT to team up with our AI overlords to spend $23 million on teaching teachers to use AI. Or maybe you caught AFT chief Randi Weingarten's Christmas posts on the twitter and ye blue skye-- some lovely arts from the plagiarism and lies machine. Sigh. AFT has displayed some caution about AI in classrooms, and Weingarten has been crystal clear about her opposition to Trump's order to keep states from passing any sort of AI rules.

Lots of smart folks are predicting (even more) AI backlash in 2026, so maybe the right wing outrage crowd is simply angling to get in front of what they believe will be the next big fifteen-minute wave. 

Whatever the case, these folks who are so reliably on the wrong side of so many education issues are, on this issue, are better on AI, or at least are saying some of the right words. Can they keep it up even as Trump continues to argue for unfettered, unregulated AI, including a federal attempt to forbid states to exercise their rights to regulate a business. Because if Dear Leader can do anything, it's sense where a whole lot of money is about to be thrown around so that he can insert himself into the transaction. States' rights? Who cares. 2026 could be an interesting year. 

OK: OU Earns Failing Grade

Oklahoma’s right wing governor Kevin Stitt calls the situation “deeply concerning" and we certainly agree on that but probably not on why.

University of Oklahoma student Samantha Fulnecky didn't do the reading and tried to bullshit her way through the assignment. Or maybe she was just trolling in attempt to follow in her activist mom's footsteps, so that she could get a trans teaching assistant in trouble. 

Kristi Fulnecky is an attorney who has, among other things, defended two January 6 insurrectionists. She's a right wing podcaster who served in politics, including a stint in combat with local government when they went after her for taxes owed because she operated a business without a license; just a political witch hunt, she claimed. During the height of the pandemic, she sued over mask mandates and sued Springfield Public Schools over their hybrid re-opening plan. As a local councilwoman, she regularly blocked anyone who corrected her. She apparently is also good at threatening legal-ish letters.

In other words, Mom has fully mastered the art of aggressive victimhood.

Fulnecky was supposed to read a paper about a study that looked at the connection between "gender typicality" and popularity in middle school students. In an assignment familiar to most teachers, she was to respond to the article in a way that demonstrated that she had actually read it. 

She did not.

Instead, she unleashed a rant about the Bible and transexuality. Many critics have argued that she cites no sources, and I'm not sure that's an issue for this kind of paper. However, the essay does not include anything that would allow one to correctly guess what she was responding to-- in other words, no signs that she had done the reading and was responding directly to it. 

Instructor Mel Curth gave her a zero. Unfortunately, Curth also took the bait. A simple, "This does not meet the requirements of the assignment" would have sufficed, but Curth challenged Fulnecky's assertion that gender is binary and fixed, and urged Fulnecky to show more empathy. Not saying Curth was wrong, but her extensive response gave Fulnecky raw materials for some oppression theater.

Couple of details to note. The assignment was worth 3% of the course grade, so not a make or break thing. And Fulnecky did not work her protest through the usual academic channels, but went straight to the right wing outrage machine, calling in the OU Turning Point USA chapter and former baloney peddler and edu-dude Ryan Walters. They also took the bait and put the outrage machine right in gear.

 

Said the TPUSA at OU chapter on line, “We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students.” Walters unleashed a giant pile of bullshit on Twitter

Samantha Fulnecky is an American hero. She stood firm in her faith despite the radical attacks from the Marxist professors at the University of Oklahoma. The OU staff involved should be immediately fired and OU should not be receiving taxpayer dollars if they continue their assaults on faith. The war on Christianity is real, and we will not be silenced.

Other instructors backed up Curth's judgment, but the University folded like a wine-soaked paper bag, posting its statement on Twitter, just in case you were wondering to whom they feel answerable. They had already canceled the grade, removing any accountability for Fulnecky. Now they've decided that Curth's grade was "arbitrary" and Curth "will no longer have instructional duties at the University."

There's some more noise about how seriously they take student and faculty rights and academic freedom and integrity and it is meaningless, because the university has show exactly where it stands. 

Deeply concerning? How do you enter a classroom to teach knowing that any 19-year-old who skips the reading, gets caught bluffing the assignment, and who cried religious victimization can end your teaching career? 

There are difficult conversations and decisions to be made in the area where academic freedom and personal conviction bump up against each other, but this was not one of them. The correct decision should have been easy to make, and OU somehow managed to blow it anyway. Shame. 

OH: An Unfunded Tutoring Mandate

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that will require schools to provide students with free "high-dosage tutoring" that will be subject to Department of Education and Workforce auditing along with a new professional development program for math teachers. The legislators have not included funding for any of this. Not a cent. It is the very definition of an unfunded mandate.

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“Our educational system must be responsive to the needs of our students,” bill sponsor Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican, said earlier this year during bill testimony. “In this last year alone, we have significantly increased the amount of funding each student receives for their education, provided resources for tutoring services, and made high quality instructional materials available while identifying methods of instruction that most benefit students. If we are unable to say that our students who need the most help are in fact receiving that assistance from their school, then we are putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children.”

Lordy, it's like a word salad made out of some of the most popular baloney talking points. "Putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children." You know, like teachers with their need to be paid for extra hours of work. Mind you, putting the needs of adult politicians to look like they're bravely Doing Something about education ahead of actually supporting that education-- that kind of adults-first posturing is perfectly okay. 

Brenner was a realtor and insurance salesman before he ascended to the legislature in 2019. He has a Masters in Ed in Leadership from far-right Christian nationalist Liberty University. In 2020, he warned that the state was going to become Nazi Germany over the Covid rules. 

The bill at least exempts schools from providing these services for IEP students. 

But it assumes that high-dosage tutoring is a real thing, without noting that it is hard and expensive to scale up. 

This is the story of education a million times-- some legislator gets a bright idea and declares "Let's require schools to fix this" while waving vaguely in the direction of schools. And while this bright idea may require more resources and human-hours, that lawmaker will be confident that this whole new program can be implemented for free. Rick Hess has often said that you can force folks to do something, but you can't force them to do it well. That is doubly true when you make zero effort to provide them with the resources needed to implement the program.

Doesn't matter. Lawmakers will sign the bill (already through the Senate and headed through the House) and congratulate themselves on solving an education problem. For those who, like many Ohio legislators, would like to gut public education, the school's failure to do a great job implementing the unfunded mandate is just more fodder for the "We gave them money and they didn't perform magical pedagogical feats" argument used to discredit and dismantle public schools. 

Would more no-cost tutoring be great? Sure, though I'd rather it were employed in a more useful cause than raising Big Standardized Test scores. And if you are undertaking a program that essentially increases the number of teacher hours in a day while simultaneously lowering the student-teacher ratio--well, if you are at all serious about it, you come armed with a big pile of money. 

The Ohio legislature is not serious about this, but it will be a serious problem for schools. 

But hey-- they're probably pre-occupied with the question of whether or not the state will be allowed to buy the obscenely wealthy owners of the Browns a new stadium with $600 million of taxpayer money. Gotta focus on important stuff that deals with the real interests of adults. 

ICYMI: Top Tenless Edition (12/28)

No top ten list this year, either for the blog or the ICYMI stuff, because A) there are too many posts to sort through and B) the analytics that decide which posts have been seen the most are wildly unreliable and C) sometimes you think a top ten list will be an easy less time-intensive way to get a post done during a busy season, but it turns out that's a snare and a delusion. My hat is off to everyone who did the work to get a top ten list assembled, but it has been a busy week here at the institute, with visits from all the branch offices, and today you just get the usual-- the reading from the week.

AI Conversations Behind Closed Doors

This may be hard to read, but Stephen Fitzpatrick's actual conversations with actual human students tells us about how AI is landing out in the field.

Unhelpful Disruption Rocks Indianapolis Schools

Andy Spears reports on the latest anti-public education shenanigans in Indiana and it's not very pretty.

On Vacations and “Learning Loss"

Steve Nuzum reminds us that the folks really leaning on the learning loss alarm have some whacky ideas about how to address it. 

The ABCs of College Board

Akil Bello connects the dots between the College Board and Glengarry Glen Ross. Plus what happens when marketing masquerades as useful data.

How Florida’s Grinch Privatized Classrooms

Sue Kingery Woltanski borrows from Dr. Seuss. 

Much Ado About Something

More from Sue Kingery Woltanski. This is an important read, because the Florida co-location scheme for getting charter schools free real estate is so awful that your first response is to assume that somebody is making stuff up. They aren't. It's that bad, and even if you aren't in Florida, you need to understand it just in case your state is next.

Choosing Harm Over Help: How U.S. Policymakers Are Turning Against Children

Bruce Lesley  on the many ways in which this country's leaders are turning against children.

Ohio bill requires free tutoring, extra help for students with lowest test scores

It's unfunded mandate time in Ohio, where the legislature wants schools to provide free after school tutoring for low-testing students, but offers no money to pay for it.

Most Depressing Blogs of 2025

I didn't take the time to do a Top Ten list, but Nancy Flanagan did, and while it's kind of a bummer, every one is worth the reading.

'We have to reject that with every fiber of our being': DeSantis emerges as a chief AI skeptic

Did you have "Ron DeSantis comes out wildly anti-AI" on your bingo card? Well, here we are. “Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” he said, and more. 

Over at Forbes.com, a MAGA legislator wants to cut property taxes for anyone who doesn't have a kid in schools. Because who wants to live in an educated country?

A hair late, but I can't wait a whole year to share this new track from Scott Bradlee and Casey Abrams. 

It would be nice to see the subscriber list grow. Join up, for free! 

Merry Christmas Music

We started the day really early here at the Institute, where the Board of Directors is extremely excited about the day and are quite certain that it actually starts at 12:01 AM. I'm not a nap guy, but today...

Here is the annual version of my Youtube Christmas play list, which tries to center stuff that you haven't already heard a gazillion times. 

I also like to share every year my extended family's spotify playlist, curated during Covid Christmas. 

And if you are really a glutton for punishment, try this collection featuring nothing but Jingle Bells. Have a fine day, however you choose to celebrate it or not, because every day should be a fine day.

TX: More Anti-School Choice From The Choice Crowd

Once again, it turns out that school choice supporters are not actually in favor of school choice. This time it's in Texas.

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.

One of the major points for his campaign? Hancock and his crew will be setting up the taxpayer-funded school voucher program (named the "Education Freedom Accounts Program" because nobody who supports school vouchers ever wants to say the word "voucher"). Hancock has been traveling around the state promoting the taxpayer-funded vouchers and the opportunity for choice.

Only it turns out that choice is not actually okay. The Texas Tribune reports that Hancock asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton if maybe certain choices shouldn't be allowed. Like schools with alleged connections to a U.S. Muslim advocacy group or the awful Chinese. Hancock asked if schools could be excluded if the were linked to a “foreign terrorist organization” or a “foreign adversary.” Hancock is targeting any school hosted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that Abbott just labeled a foreign terrorist group because they want to impose Sharia law. Hancock also claims there are "credible concerns" that one school in the state is owned or controlled by a group of people connected to a person who is allegedly an advisor for the Chinese government.

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.”

Well, yes it does. It also, once again, illustrates that many school choice fans don't actually want school choice. We see this pattern repeated. "There should be school choice and religious freedom for all," they proclaim loudly. "Oh, but not for you guys," they add when Certain People try to take them at their word. For these folks, school choice is not about choice-- it's about funneling tax dollars to private religious institutions, but only the correct ones.

This is why religious folks ought to be the biggest defenders of the First Amendment. Because the next step, as we see in Texas and Florida and Oklahoma and elsewhere, is for the state to step in to settle debates about which religious institutions are "legitimate" and which religions really deserve the freedoms (and tax dollars) that are being offered. And once a religion needs state approval to exist, we have some huge problems. Somebody who is upset about the imagined threat of Sharia law ought not to be comfortable using the power of the state to force students to look at the Ten Commandments every day. 

Is everyone who promotes school choice actually opposed to school choice? No-- there are serious real choicers out there, and I have a different set of disagreements with them. But those true ought to be keeping a closer eye on some of their allies who are absolutely anti-choice. It's the anti-diversity, anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd that is bad for all Americans. And Texans.

ICYMI: Hope You're Ready Edition (12/21)

It feels like there are a couple of days yet, but there really aren't-- especially if we hold onto our reserve not to enrich Bezos this year. So let's use this last time to clean the house, pack in the groceries, and finish the laundry. That leaves us free to clear the decks and lower the expectations so we can just enjoy each other. We're only here for a little while; let's make the most of it.

Still got a reading list to look at. Here come this week's nifty reads.

Is Anyone Really Surprised?

It is hard to grasp how profoundly screwed up Florida's education funding is at this point. Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down how just one district's students are suffering from the voucher drainage. These numbers are astonishing.

Rural schools hit by Trump’s grant cuts have few options for making up for the lost money

Annie ma reporting for the AP takes a look at how Dear Leader's cuts are making life difficult for families served by rural schools.

How the charter school industry’s newest scheme could be ‘the death of public schools’

Florida's voucher program isn't the only disaster brewing; the new rules allowing charter school squatters to take over public school property are crazy pants. Jeff Bryant reports.

Take note, Gov. Polis: Coloradans have repeatedly said no to school vouchers

Colorado's governor is gazing longingly at those federal school vouchers. Kevin Welner and Kathy Gebhardt explain why he should really just take a pass on this one.

As 2026 Dawns, Future of Civil Rights Protection in K-12 Public Schools and Higher Ed. Looks Bleak Under Trump Administration

Jan Resseger on the administration's continued whacking away at K12 civil rights.

Alabama state education committee identifies ‘burdensome paperwork tasks’ for teachers

Andrea Tinker in the Alabama Reflector with this interesting little nugget. The state went to identify time-wasting paperwork, and the results aren't surprising, but it's still something that the state was even trying to find out.

As state’s school voucher program expands, legislative oversight committee has not met in a year

New Hampshire is not exactly killing it in the oversight department.

Charter school advocates fear their future at the Labor Department

Charter school fans have started to realize that they are in fact one of the entrenched interests being threatened by the Trump administration. Matt Barnum for Chalkbeat.

Erie School District sues Erie Rise to spur ex-charter school's dissolution, find assets

In PA, when a charter is shut down, its assets are supposed to go back to the district its students came from. In Erie, one closed charter is dragging its feet (and maybe spending its leftovers).

K-12 Indoctrination: Every Accusation is a Confession

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at the many ways that MAGA would like to indoctrinate children into their preferred ideology.

Swimming Below The Surface

Test scores. Vouchers. Security officers. Teachers coached via earpiece. TC Weber as always has a handle on what's going on in and around Memphis.

Empty empathy machines

Thin empathy, thick empathy, the kind of empathy we want teachers to have, and what chatbots lack. Benjamin Riley.

What If Students Want Something More Than AI?

John warner at Inside Higher Ed. "We should stop declaring we know the future and give students the space to figure things out for themselves."

How Black Barbershops Are Helping Boys Fall in Love With Reading

This story ran way back in February, but I didn't see it until it turned up on somebody's "swell stories from this year lists" and it's definitely worth a share.

O Christmas Tree

Nancy Flanagan is not yet convinced that she should buy an artificial tree so that more tree farms can become data centers.

Texas universities deploy AI tools to review and rewrite how some courses discuss race and gender

Well, you knew this was coming. How better to root out that awful DEI than with a soulless, brainless bot?

Silicon Valley’s Fake Christianity Enables Tech Genocide

Excellent interview with Paris Marx delving into our tech overlords and their God complex. Who's the AntiChrist, really?

Your seasonal palate cleanser this week is just the thing to calm the soul.

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Stride Sued For Securities Fraud

Stride, Inc. (formerly K12), the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber charter biz, is the subject of a new class action suit alleging securities fraud. 

The lawsuit is tied to some legal problems that I've previously covered, so let me recap. 

New Mexico Issues

Stride was hired by the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a New Mexico district that covers almost 5,000 square miles, including some reservations. There are 12,518 students enrolled. 48% of the children in the district live below the poverty line. Stride was supposed to run an online program for the district, but when the district checked to see how things were going, things didn't look so good.

* Graduation rates in GMCS's Stride-managed online program plunged from 55.79% in 2022 to just 27.67% in 2024.
* Student turnover reached an alarming 30%.
* New Mexico state math proficiency scores for Stride students dropped dramatically, falling to just 5.6%.
* Ghost enrollments and a lack of individualized instruction further compromised student learning.

At the special May 16 board meeting to terminate the contract, the board was feeling pretty cranky.

The district said that the company is failing to meet requirements outlined in their contract. “This is something we’ve literally been working on since the beginning of the year with stride, and we just finally had a belly full of it and we’re ready to make a change,” said Chris Mortensen, President of Gallup-McKinley Schools Board of Education

The board voted unanimously not just to end the contract, but to seek damages. Stride filed a motion for a restraining order to keep the board from firing them. The court said no.

Mortenson has had plenty to say about the situation. From the district's press release:

GMCS School Board President Chris Mortensen stated, "Our students deserve educational providers that prioritize their academic success, not corporate profit margins. Putting profits above kids was damaging to our students, and we refuse to be complicit in that failure any longer."

Stride CEO James Rhyu has admitted to failing to meet New Mexico's legal requirements for teacher-student ratios, an issue that GMCS suspects was not isolated. "We have reason to believe that Stride has raised student-teacher ratios not just in New Mexico but nationwide," said Mortensen. "If true, this could have inflated Stride's annual profit margins by hundreds of millions of dollars. That would mean corporate revenues and stock prices benefited at the expense of students and in some cases, in defiance of the law."

"Gallup-McKinley County Schools students were used to prop up Stride's bottom line," said Mortensen. "This district, like many others, trusted Stride to deliver education. Instead, we got negligence cloaked in corporate branding."

Stride appears to have dealt with all this by mounting a PR campaign to smear the district's superintendent.  

But you'll notice the charges that Mortensen leveled against the company go beyond a simple "They cheated us" and went all the way to "They are cheating their shareholders." And apparently somebody heard that message.

The Newest Lawsuit

On November 11, Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP filed a class action lawsuit against Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN) and senior executives Donna Blackman (CFO) and James Rhyu (CEO) for securities fraud after significant stock drops resulting from the potential violations of the federal securities laws. Investors have until January 12, 2026 to ask the court to be added onto the case. The suit was filed in the Virginia Eastern District Court.

The suit appears to charge that the complaint filed by the district caused the stock value to drop from a closing price of $158.36 per share on September 12, 2025, to $139.76 per share on September 15, 2025. Then in October, Stride had to fess up that “poor customer experience” resulted in “higher withdrawal rates,” “lower conversion rates,” and drove students away. Stride estimated they had 10,000-15,000 fewer enrollments and predicted a "muted" outlook. That led to a drop of $83.48 per share-- more than half the value.

So, in short, the suit argues that Stride got its great investment results by cheating at its business, and once it got caught cheating, those great investment results went down the toilet. The business fraud facilitated the securities fraud. Folks invested because of claims the company could do a thing when it was just faking doing the thing. Fraud.

Is This a New Problem for Stride?

Are you kidding? Since Stride was founded as K12, they haven't gone a year without some sort of legal problems.

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison, who both kicked in money for K12.

Also investing in K12, very quietly, was the financial giant Blackrock, founded and run by Larry Fink. Larry graduated from the same high school as Milken. Larry's brother Steve is a member of the Stride board, and at one point ran the division of Knowledge Universe. Larry Fink is noted for his privacy about family, and a search for the two brothers’ names turns up only one article— a Forbes piece from 2000 which notes that Steve Fink, in 1984, moved next door to Micheal Milken and went on to become “one of Milken’s most trusted confidants,” a “guy he’s relied on to fix business trouble.”

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12's schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about “the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12 to start a new enterprise.

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors." K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

In November of 2021, K12 announced that it would rebrand itself as Stride.

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride was still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

In 2023, Stride found itself wrapped up in a lawsuit with one of its own division over broken promises and attempts to lie their way out of commitment.

In 2024, analysts at Fuzzy Panda were warning investors away from Stride, saying that, among other things, Stride was lying to investors about how many schools were operating and ghost students being used to inflate enrollment numbers-- in other words, these guys absolutely called it. Later that year, Senator and noted MAGA doofus Markwayne Mullin was in trouble for shenanigans with his Stride stock.

CEO James Rhyu used to be CFO for Stride, and before that had a prolific career as a bean counter for companies like Match.com. I've read a variety of Rhyu depositions, and let's just say he doesn't come across as a straight shooter. Here's an example that captures his style pretty well:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

Is it? Is that a hard question to answer? Because I feel as if even a dishonest-but-correct answer isn't hard to concoct. But that's Rhyu (for a more detailed story of his slipperiness in action, read this).

For Stride, Education Really Isn't the Point

Stride has never really been in the education business. Stride is in the investment business. Just look at the people who founded and have run it-- not an educator in the bunch, but plenty of high-powered and/or shady investment guys. I've talked to more than a few Stride teachers (none of whom want to go on the record) and the picture that emerges is over-worked widgets whose main job is to keep the numbers looking good, because student "success" is an important part of marketing, whether that success is real or not.

So if investors manage to claw back some of their money, I guess that's fine. Stride has proven remarkably resilient when called out on its misbehavior. I suppose a laser-like focus on its main business helps, but we should never imagine that that business is education. 

OK: Court Axes Social Studies Standards

After Ryan Walters decided to officially leave the job he hardly ever showed up for in order to take a cushy anti-teacher union job, leaders in Oklahoma decided that maybe they would like to have someone leading the department of education who was actually interested in, you know, education.

So they tagged Lindel Fields for the job. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. He does not appear to be the kind of guy who will hire a personal publicist and spend his time running off to wag his jaw at Fox.

Instead, he and others have been busy cleaning up after Walters. Given two weeks to decide if he wanted to keep Walters's Trump Bible In Every Classroom mandate, he took one day. He scrapped it. Attorney General Gentner Drummond started digging into where exactly Walters had been flinging money. And by the time Fields showed up, the state supreme court had already put a hold on Walters's beloved new social studies standards. 

The standards were the center of yet more Walters drama. That's probably because they are bad. They feature everything from a mandate to teach the Big Lie about Dear Leader's 2020 election loss as well as other awesome things he has done, plus the usual ahistoric baloney and attempts to insert a particular brand of Christianity into the classroom. 

I would love to say that their badness ultimately proved fatal, but in a piece of poetic justice, the standards have been thrown out by the court because Walters was always very bad at just doing his job. Here's what happened. Walter started the new year with new members on his state board of education, members hand-picked by Governor Stitt, who had finally decided, after having elevated Walters in the first place, that his favorite education dude-bro was a giant PITA who needed some grown-ups to babysit him. So Stitt canned three board members and replaced them with three people not slavishly devoted to Walters's brand of Trump Lite, and Walters was not happy.

So he took the standards that had been out there for public comment, added a bunch of stuff without saying anything, handed them to his board and told them they had to sign off on these push push push. He did not mention that he had changed stuff, and they did not realize that was the case until it was too late. 

As Sasha Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman reported for NonDoc, Walters was not trying very hard to imitate a grownup:

Asked after the meeting why Walters did not at least notify board members of what changed between the initial version of the standards and the final version, Walters declined to give a reason besides saying he made it clear to board members that the version of the standards given to them less than 24 hours before the meeting was the updated and final version.

“I don’t control when Gov. (Kevin) Stitt put these board members on here. That’s what he chose to do,” Walters said. “It was at the very end of the process.”

The court was unimpressed by this passive-aggressive hissy fit. Making last minute changes without notifying the board, especially when those changes result in final document that is substantially different from the document released to the public-- not a winning strategy. 

So the Christian [sic] Nationalist standards are out, and Oklahoma will go back to the standards adopted in 2019. 

And who knows-- maybe the state will eventually finish cleaning up after Walters. Meanwhile, his new anti-union union has enrolled almost 7,000 teachers-- which is not exactly a whopping slice of the 4 million-ish teachers working in this country. 

Parental Roll of the Dice

The death of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hand of their son, is a terrible story. And it reminds me of too many other stories of children who have gone off the rails.

Yes, there are children who are raised by parents who simply aren't up to the task ("better off raised by wolves" we would sometimes say). Like any teacher, I can tell you stories that would break your heart, stories of parents who were simply unable to rise to the occasion of parenthood. 

But there are also the wild card children. Their parents did all the responsible things, gave them a good home, took care of them. Maybe they even grew up in a home with siblings who turned out just fine. And yet, somehow, somewhere, something happened, and that child ended up in a mess. 

Maybe it was something chemical or biological. Maybe just a wrong combination of peers and circumstances. Sometimes we really don't have a clue-- not a single damned clue.

Again, any teacher can tell you stories. Heck, as someone who taught in the same small town for almost forty years, I know stories where two generations of perfectly fine parenting somehow led to a sad and challenging outcome for one child. 

We look for simple explanations. If a child turned out to have big problems, then we blame the parents. If there's nothing obviously dysfunctional about the parents, we start to conjecture and whisper darkly-- there must be something bad going on in that home that we just don't know about. If the child turned out to be troubled, it has to be a parental screwup. 

It has to be something those parents did. Please, God, it has to be those parents. Because if it isn't the parents, if it's some wild roll of the dice that isn't completely under of the responsible humans, then we are all vulnerable. It could happen to any one of us. No no no no no no, no. It has to be the parents. It has to be something they did that I am definitely not doing.

This is where I sympathize with the parental rights crowd's distress. "We did everything right. We kept tight control of this child so that they would turn out the right way. And instead we got this!" I get the urge to cast about for someone or something to blame.

Some folks set the bar for a Child Turned Out Bad a lot lower than others. The child doesn't follow our religion, doesn't respect us the way we want them to, doesn't identify with the traditional gender roles. Others have tried their hardest and ended up with children who have actual challenges and dysfunctions, not just disagreements with their family of origin.

I get that some folks experience a powerful impulse to tighten control over your children, to force them to become the people you want them to be. I even understand how that desire can turn into a desire to control every other person who comes in contact with your child. 

I could argue that trying to exert this kind of control over another human being, even a human being for whom you are responsible, is not morally or ethically sound. But I think it's enough to point out that it is an unreliable approach, a parenting approach that is likely to end in failure. 

I like the work of Russell Barkley, a psychologist whose work is largely in the area of ADHD. "You do not get to design your children," he argues. 

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

Barkley suggests that parents think of themselves not as engineers, but as shepherds.  

You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything--everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them, and what they do, and if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong when in fact the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather you would stop thinking of yourself as an engineer, and step back and say "I am a shepherd to a unique individual." Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog. Ain't gonna happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do, all the time.

And sometimes, for reasons that nobody could have predicted or controlled, the sheep run out of the pasture and get in trouble-- maybe a little bit, or maybe a whole lot. 

Three things to remember, I think.

First, beware of guilt and blame. Parents blame themselves. Others blame them. Okay, sometimes the guilt is earned. But if you are manufacturing guilt, particularly based on some hypothetical alternate universe in which the parent said or did a magic something that Fixed Everything-- maybe a little grace is in order.

Second, remember that sometimes a dark chapter is not the end of the book. As long as it's possible to move forward, there is hope. Some people find their way out of the weeds, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The real tragedy comes when they do something unredeemable; until that happens (and sometimes even after), there is still hope.

Third, beware any person or system that claims that we can keep young humans safe by taking total control of their lives, their environment, their contacts. The fundamental argument for authoritarianism is always an appeal to fear, a claim that "If I have total control, I can guarantee that the Terrible Thing will never happen to you." That version of safety is an illusion; jailers do not keep us safer than shepherds. 

Sometimes the shepherd just isn't enough, despite all of their best intentions and efforts. Doesn't mean we should stop making out best efforts. But my heart breaks for the parents who did the best they could and still, somehow, lost their child to the dark.