ICYMI: Health Care System Edition (11/23)

My 92-year-old mother has spent most of this week in the hospital, and as always when I encounter the health care universe, part of me wonders how the hell people who don't have A) decent insurance, B) relatively easy access to a health care facility, and C) someone who can spend days sitting with them in the room, keeping them company, and translating and advocating-- I mean, my mother has all of those things, and it's still not super-easy. What the hell hope do people without those resources have? What a screwed-up system we have in this country, and yet some people insist on defending it avidly (and some other people would like to change the education system to more closely resemble it). 

So it's been a week here and it's not over, and if the blog has seemed a little quiet, that's why. I love you all, but I love my mom more. But I still have some pieces for you to read. 

School voucher confidential: Yes, the other parents are talking about you

Austin Gelder and Elizabeth L. Cline at Arkansas Times get commentary from a bunch of actual Arkansas parents about the state's voucher program. Nice change of pace, that, and not nearly as snotty as the headline might lead you to believe.

Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search

Shiri Melumad has done some actual research indicating that people get more knowledge from a Google search than they do from an AI summary. And isn't that a low bar to fail to clear.

Are States Equipped to Track Students’ Paths From Classroom to Career?

Evie Blad at EdWeek asks many questions about the cradle to career data pipeline-- but not the most important one which is "Should we do this?" Informative yet awful.

RIP Department of Education

Jennifer Berkshire explains how education policies will be handled by the Department of the Boss.

‘Selling off the Department of Education for parts’: The agency’s major overhaul faces fierce backlash

If you want some official reactions to the news, 19th News has them.

I’ve already seen the impact from Charlotte’s Border Patrol surge

Juston Parmenter writes an op-ed for the Charlotte Observer (yes, that Charlotte) about the effects of the border patrol incursion. (Spoiler alert: the effects are not good).

Wall Street Is Paywalling Your Kids’ Sports

From The Lever, by Luke Goldstein. Turns out private equity has found yet another turnip to squeeze. And it includes not allowing you take recordings of your own child playing the sport.

Ohio is passing a law about a school exam question - A strange story behind a testing fiasco

When the Big Standardized Test screws up, does it take the state legislature to fix it? Ohio is working on the question.

Crazy-Pants Makes Crazy Prediction

Thomas Ultican notices that Erik Hanushek is out making wacky predictions again. What he's saying, and why you can safely ignore him.

Uncredible! ASD Debunks AG Cox’s Hillsdale Allegations, Citing Bishop-Era Policy

Continued noise and kerfluffle from the far right over Hillsdale pamphlets handed out in Anchorage schools.

How the Trump Administration Manipulates Power and Undermines Core Principles that Protect Public Schools and Students’ Rights—Part 2

Second part of a Jan Resseger series. It includes a link to Part I if you missed that, which you should,

Open Enrollment/Predator Schools

Andru Volinsky explains the trouble unleashed in New Hampshire by a state supreme court decision that facilitates an ALEC open enrollment scheme.

What is going on in Florida?

A lot, and almost all of it is unprincipled, anti-public education, and ugly (but not all of it). Sue Kingery Woltanski has the rundown, including the part where someone wants all public schools converted to a classical education. Plus the part where the state voucher system made $270 million go missing.

In Florida school wars, are locals finally pushing back?

Well, we can hope. Column by John Hill in Tampa Bay Times.

State Spending on Public School Students Lowest since 1997

That's the year they started voucherizing education. Ohio continues to shaft public school students, and Stephen Dyer has the numbers.

Federal judge rules law requiring display of Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms unconstitutional

This really shouldn't be news, but here we are-- no, you can't inflict your own particular religion on all school students.

Tennessee parents sue to stop voucher program

Opening shots fired. We'll see where the courts land on this one.

AI Suckage Round-up

An awful lot of news related to the awfulness of AI and its unfitness for education. Here we go--

‘We could have asked ChatGPT’: students fight back over course taught by AI

As I've repeatedly argued, you can't expect students to feel as if they should make an honest human effort when the people in charge of the course won't

AI Companies Are Treating Their Workers Like Human Garbage, Which May Be a Sign of Things to Come for the Rest of Us

Indeed. Joe Wilkins at Futurism

A general understanding of the human

Ben Riley hits several points, including classroom tech.

OpenAI Blocks Toymaker After Its AI Teddy Bear Is Caught Telling Children Terrible Things

Frank Landymore at Futurism says that at least OpenAI knew enough to pull the plug on sex fetishj instructions for children.

The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun

See also: college recommendation letters.

The Great AI Bubble

Carole Cadwaller, the woman who used a TED talk to call Sam Altman a data rapist, explains the AI bubble and the economic disaster it will unleash.

The more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities

Ther's now some nifty research suggesting that AI will make your Dunning-Kruger problem even worse. "ChatGPT explained it to me, so now I am a freaking expert!!"

I started putting a music video into each of these weekly roundups because these days we can surely use a reminder about some of the nice, even beautiful, things that we humans create beyond policy arguments and political detritus. These are pieces of music I like, some for ages, and some newly discovered. Recommendations are welcomed. This week, it's Zak Abel, a performer I know nothing about, but I do like his song.

As always, it would be delightful if you subscribed. Always free.

Supporting Teachers

How do we help teachers be better?

Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that A) you go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had and B) with around 4 million teachers in the country, many are likely to be just regular human beings and not super-teachers.

He's not wrong. On the national, state, local, and building level, the teacher corps includes some very excellent teachers, some pretty good ones, some average ones, and a small but non-zero number of not very good ones. (My argument remains that it's not a simple bell curve because the majority of people who would be bad at it either never try or give up fairly quickly.)

Policy and reformy folks have tried to deal with this distribution in a number of unproductive manners.

Firing our way to excellence.

A favorite with the technocrat crowd. this was the plan whereby test scores soaked in VAM sauce was going to create hard data that could be used to make hiring and firing decisions (or, in some cases, merit pay decisions). But sure-- if we just fire all the terrible teachers, we'd be left with nothing but the good ones. 

There are numerous problems with this, starting with the lack of a valid or reliable way to evaluate teachers. The Big Standardized Test is its own kind of sham, but Value-Added Measures can only dream of someday working their way up to junk science status. 

Sardine Superteacher

The flip side of firing to excellence. This idea was to find the super-duper teachers and plunk them in classrooms with a couple hundred students. (There was a time when they also liked the idea of hooking the super-teachers up to computers, but COVID took some of the bloom off the distance learning rose.)

Rendering

Another idea was to take the Highly Effective Teachers and move them to the low-achieving schools. This idea lost traction on the slippery idea that teachers had to be convinced, somehow, to take the different job. More money? Sort of. Send a team to grab them, drop a hood over their head, and throw them in a van? Probably illegal. 

All of these have the same problem

It's not just that it's really difficult to quantify how good a particular teacher is. It's that teacher effectiveness is dependent on context and environment. A teacher who's effective with 20 students is not necessarily equally effective with 200. A teacher might be very effective with one type of student and not with another. And despite being the best work at being "professional," sometimes teachers bring their own lives into the classroom. Plus, what are we asking them to teach? I found that I was actually better with multiple preps in a day than just teaching the same thing, but some of my colleagues struggled with that kind of grind. And there's just the influence of time and experience; I taught for 39 years, and I was not the same teacher every one of those years.

On top of that, teaching involves a teacher and a student, and that connection is also variable. Pick any teacher in your local school, one that you are certain is terrible, and I guarantee you that we can find students who will praise that teacher to high heaven. Likewise, pick someone known widely as a wonderful teachers; we can find students who will tell you how awful they are. 

I'm not going to argue that judging teacher quality is impossible. I am going to say that it is heavily influenced by context and environment and factors that shift regularly, making it hugely difficult to quantify teacher quality in such a way that the measures can safely and accurately be used to make major decisions about teaching careers. 

And even if you could...

What are you going to do? Fire a bunch of teachers and replace them with...? How much more practical is it to take the folks you have and help them be the best they can be. Will there be a non-zero number of non-salvageable teachers who have to be shown the door? Certainly. But can you direct (or re-direct) staff to be better? I think that's not only possible, but necessary.

So how?

We've seen bad ideas about this, as well. 

Carrots and sticks and sticks and sticks

There's a whole family of reformy ideas that starts from the premise that teachers know how to get the high-achieving results that policy makers want, but those teachers have been keeping the secrets of Teaching Well locked in their filing cabinets, waiting to be either bribed or threatened into finally unleashing all the awesome.

It's a premise that is both insulting and myopic. The vast majority of teachers are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But some reformsters (looking at you, Arne Duncan) treat teachers like the main obstacle to educating children instead of the people who are actually in classrooms trying to get the work done. 

Teachers and their students face a variety of obstacles, but reformsters got into the nasty habit of dismissing these explanations of real hurdles by calling them "excuses" rather than, say, "challenges that maybe we could try helping teachers meet." 

De-professionalizing the Profession

For some reformsters, the dream has been the teacher-proof classroom. Set out a curriculum so specific and pre-programed that whoever your teacher is, you just hand them the program, tell them to implement it With Fidelity, and voila!-- an educational program that a trained monkey could implement effectively. Maybe it's scripted. Maybe it's just a day by day, minute by minute guide. Maybe it's a computer program, or a series of videos. 

Some reformsters see this as an opportunity to cut personnel costs. Turn teaching into a job that anybody can do, as long as they follow instructions, means that the labor pool is huge and the meat widgets hired for the classroom can be easily (and inexpensively) replaced. These are the folks who are so excited about AI "teachers" that they barely bother to pretend that such a move would foster better teaching. 

De-professionalizing teaching is the fast food model of education. But the promise of standardization in a McDonalds is not that you can always get excellent food there, but just the promise that you probably won't get terrible food. People who want excellent food go somewhere else, where the chefs are chefs and not assembly-line food prep meat widgets.

Maybe forcing your less-gifted teachers into a program to implement With Fidelity will improve schools on the bottom end (though I'm not convinced that someone with limited teaching ability can really implement one of these scripted programs effectively). But by stripping teachers of autonomy, you will inevitably hamstring your best teachers. You can argue that their superior teaching skills will allow them to find ways to put their personal spin on the mandatory teacher-proof program, but I'd say you're just arguing that they can still be great to extent that they work around, ignore, and otherwise find ways to escape the mandatory program. 

Removing teacher authority may or may not help your mediocre teachers, will hamstring your better teachers, and will make the profession less attractive to people who would be a real asset.

Testocracy

We are already reaping the problems created by a new generation of teachers who have never known anything in school except test-centered prep work. Too many have learned that you check the standards, google for "exercises" aimed at those standards, hand them out, drill them down, and that's supposed to be teaching (Daniel Koretz writes about this in The Testing Charade). 

Okay, have you got anything other than complaints?

The job of a school administrator (of any manager) is to create the conditions under which staff can do their best work. Most folks who work in schools already know that teachers are overworked, overstressed, and overburdened with a whole bunch of responsibilities. Many attempts to improve teaching and/or sell new education-flavored products are built around the idea that we could take X off teachers' plates. 

The crazy thing about this is that these attempts are all marked by one feature--the people behind them have decided on teachers' behalf what it is that teachers need. Let me suggest a crazy new approach--

Ask the teachers. 

I've talked about this before (see "The Seven Most Powerful Words in Education") but not enough since. Just ask staff, "What can I do to help you?" 

Now, sometimes this will be tricky, because teachers, as different individual human beings, will want/need different things. And sometimes they will want things admins can't give them. But administrators have to be better. One former colleague of mine pissed off our administration by asking, after being given yet another new responsibility, "What do you want me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" It's a legitimate question, and one that every teacher in that room was thinking, but asking it was Forbidden Not A Team Player naughtiness.

Ask your staff what they need. Don't just jump to "I have decided that what you want is a program to manage grades" or "I have decided that you want PD about apps I'm sure you want to use." Ask.

Provide high quality materials and resources.

But do not mandate how they must be used. Involve staff in the collection or creation of these materials, and revisit the collection annually. There will be eternal debates about which materials are high quality, just like there are eternal debates about what belongs in the canon. These debates are eternal because the answer keeps changing because of the times, the context, the available materials. But the fact that these debates can't be settled conclusively is not a reason to abandon the work of getting the very best materials available to your staff. 

Provide structure and scope and sequence, but don't set it in cement.

Your newer teachers should be able to find a useful answer to "What should I be working on next" and your experienced teacher should be comfortable adjusting the scope and sequence to fit the class, and all staff should feel safe adding their own special educational touches.

Flexibility is a local thing

Note that every mandate that comes down from the state or federal government tends to reduce flexibility, particularly since so many of them are wrongheaded variations on "If we make all teachers do X, all students will learn Y," a statement which is always wrong, no matter what you plug in. Policy makers need to ask one simple question-- does the proposed policy provide support or a straightjacket?

Teacher training and peer support

Too many undergraduate teaching programs waste too much time. For secondary teachers, there should be far more emphasis on the content of the subject area they plan to teach. For all teachers, there should be far more support through the student teaching experience, and hefty support should also be present through the first couple of years in the classroom. 

Some folks like the mode school model, with professionals working their way up as interns etc etc. Schools don't have to look exactly like that, but supports need to be in place. In most schools, whether a teacher has good support in their first few years depends on random factors like which other teachers have lunch the same shift. That early mentoring needs to be deliberate, intentional, and carefully considered. 

Peer support should continue. It should be easy for teachers who work in the same department or who work with the same cohort of students to collaborate and consult. If policy makers want to encourage this, there is one thing they can offer--money. Schools don't build more deliberate mentoring programs because such programs depend on time during the work day which equals money (sometimes there's also a lingering attitude that teachers are only really working when they have students in front of them).

Nothing else-- not PD, not merit pay, not threats, not scripted instruction-- will work to turn a new teacher into a good teacher better than regular support and mentoring by capable colleagues. 

Hold teachers accountable

The myth that teachers are all about defending low-achieving teachers is bunk. Second only to parents, nobody is more bothered by a low-quality teacher than the teacher who has to teach those kids the following year. What teachers fear is not accountability, but random irrational bad-faith harassment and mistreatment trying to pass itself off as accountability. 

So when a teacher wanders into the weeds, go help them get back. Yes, maybe they won't be helped, but you need to try first because firing just means starting over from scratch (if you can even find somebody). Give them extra-intense mentoring, coaching, daily assistance--whatever you think will get them back on track. But don't just leave them out in the field flailing. 

The non-answer answer

There is no one single simple answer to finding and developing good teachers, but we have more than enough experience to know that "Hire some people and hope for the best" is not the winning approach. Provide and surround them with access to top quality materials. Provide them with personal support. Treat them like grownups. Provide a supporting structure that holds them up without choking them off. 

If you want a metaphor, here's one I'm sure I've used before. 

Let's call teaching the classroom version of playing jazz. To pay jazz, you need a couple of things. For one, you need a solid rhythm section; a solid rhythm section makes everyone else sound better, plus it gives you a foundation on which to play. On that foundation, you have plenty of freedom, but you exercise that freedom within a framework--a best, chord changes, maybe even the basic tune of the song. Ignore the beat and the chords at your peril; you can't just do whatever the hell you want. Find good people to play with, and you will play better. And when you are really good, you can actually bend and defy the framework of beat and chords--but you have to really know what you're doing. It's part inspiration and gut, but it also requires technical skill and control and a good piece of equipment on which to play. Also, some songs are way better to play on than others (depending on who's on the stand tonight), so have a big book to select from. And especially also, you have to pay attention to your audience and where your own playing is in that moment, and adjust accordingly.

I have no idea how many jazz trombone players there are in the US, but if there were 4 million, only a small number would be a Jack Teagarden or a George Brunis or a Gunhild Carling. But given the right tools and the right support, the rest could do a good job. That's teaching. 

Outing LBGTQ Students

One of the culture panic hills one which some folks want to battle is the issue of schools outing LGBTQ students to their parents. The culture panic crowd is not only in favor of it, but they demand it, and quite a bit of perspective is being lost over the issue.

Take this from a recent Helen Lewis piece for The Atlantic--

Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”

Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed.

A kernel of truth? Letting children pick their pronoun or bathroom is akin to performing what Trump called "brutal" surgery on children. 

Parents Defending Education has a whole collection of outrage-stoking stories of schools with policies that allow students to decide whether or not they want information about their status to be shared with their parents.

Here's just one example-- a story from New Hampshire, where a school allowed "radical LGBTQ group" GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance) to run a professional development center.

GLSEN was founded in Massachusetts by two teachers; in 1994 it branched into other states. Their goals have been centered around making schools into "the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve." For the culture panic crowd, GLSEN is a promoter of "gender ideology" aka "acknowledging that LGBTQ persons are, in fact, human beings." 

But GLSEN told staff things like this:

Although it may be hard to believe, there are students whose emotional and physical safety were jeopardized when school staff outed them to other students and even family members

And that, we're meant to understand, is self-evidently terrible, a crazy thing to tell teachers. 

Except that it's the truth. Here's a graphic taken from a report by the not left-wing Bellwether Partners. 

None of these are great, but consider the homelessness statistic-- more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ young persons experience homelessness, and that's going to be mostly due to being thrown out of their home. Also, LGBTQ youths who feel supported at home reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who didn't feel that level of support. And the picture surely hasn't improved since the pandemic pause.

So we need to ask-- what is the point of an out-to-parents requirement, exerted through either local school regulations or state law? What is it that supporters of such regulations want to achieve?

Lots of these folks seem to believe that LGBTQ persons never occur "naturally," that LGBTQ folks are made, not born, through some combination of indoctrination, seduction, and peer pressure. So perhaps the idea is to create more social pressure to just not "choose" to become LGBTQ. This is a technique that has never worked in the history of LGBTQ persons (which coincides with the history of the world). 

In some cases, the aim seems to be to assert control over children, as if they are a piece of property belonging to the parents. No, the child does not belong to the school. The child also does not belong to the parents, nor to anyone else, because the child is an actual live human being. It is a normal and natural thing as a parent to worry about the twists and turns your child may go through growing up. As old as stories about changlings, the visceral fear that your beloved child may be mysteriously replaced with some stranger. But "if my child has to tell me they think they're LGBTQ, then I'll be able to make them stop it" is not a winning plan.

But a non-zero number of parents react by trying to overpower their children and forcing them to become the person those parents want them to be. (see also "children going no contact")

Separate from them are the folks who want to overpower other peoples' children, as if government power can be used to force LGBTQ persons into nonexistence.

Supporters argue that these rules are about protecting parental rights, but which rights are we talking about. The right to control your child? No such right exists. The right to erase a child's privacy and step over any and all boundaries? The right to know everything about your child? It's a weird dance that the far right does--when the child is a fetus, its rights are supposed to totally overrule the rights of the parent, but once born, the child loses all rights to the parent. 

Whatever folks on the right think mandatory rules will accomplish, the actual results are not hard to predict. Children who feel safe and loved and supported at home will continue to freely share information about themselves with their grownups. Those who don't feel safe at home will quickly understand that they are not safe at school, either. So young people who are at a vulnerable time dealing with difficult questions of identity and their place in the world will be further isolated in world where social media makes teens more vulnerable to all manner of awful stuff.

I have no doubt at all that there are schools and school personnel out there who, in their desire to help, are over the line on these issues. But making wholesale outing of LGBTQ students without any concerns or safeguards for the rights--and safety-- of that student is irresponsible and, sometimes, dangerous. The rules have to treat those LGBTQ persons as real human beings and not faceless threats to a traditional gender orthodoxy. We have to do better.

A Useful Public School Support Resource

"I know I read something about that somewhere." 

It's a pain (believe me--one that we at the Institute are all too familiar with) to know that you know something, but can't locate the source. Or wish you knew more, but can't find a handy clearing house for the information you need. Particularly if yours is one of those states where some legislators are whipping up some speedy back door voucher bill.

So here's one useful answer. The Partnership for the Future of Learning has created a website at TruthinEdFunding.org that provides a wide assortment of resources in a library organized by topics. History Rooted in Segregation. Types of Vouchers. Discrimination. Accountability. Drain Funds from Public Education. And more. 

There are links to studies and data as well as graphics and personal stories. You can also filter through the resource library by a set of more specific tags. 

The website is the result of a partnership between about 25 organizations that are all in support of public education-- Network for Public Education, Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy, Florida Policy Institute, In The Public Interest. 

So if you are looking for a place to find a bunch of useful resources to use in defending public education in your state against vouchers, or just some tools for educating friends and neighbors and journalists (and legislators) who haven't quite caught on to what's happening, this resource is for you.  Stop and browse, and return from time to time because new stuff is being added regularly. One of the most useful websites I have come across (and putting up this post insures that I'll always be able to find it).

Administrators and The Big Chill

The Washington Post just covered a Rand Corp. report that provides unsurprising data: 65% of K-12 teachers restricted their instruction on "political and social issues." The paragraph that really jumped out at me was this one:

Teachers’ most common reason for curtailing some forms of education, the report found, was their worry that school or district leaders would not support them if parents expressed concerns — and teachers working in politically conservative areas were more likely to censor themselves.

In fact, the Rand report found that the percentage of teachers self-censoring was double the percentage of teachers working in a state that has actual restrictive laws forbidding woke DEI CRT race gender divisive concepts etc etc etc culture panic teaching.

I don't know if the culture panic crowd figured this out or stumbled across it, but either way, culture panic  has hit on an important tactic-- all you have to do to get a big chill is scare the administrators.

Far too many administrators operate from a simple vision-- a good day is a day on which the phone doesn't ring. And if it does ring, the easiest way to get the problem to go away is to make the teacher stop doing whatever it is that made the phone calling parent sad.

This is not a new problem. Every teacher knows stories of that administrator that folded like a wet paper bag when a parent called. Most teachers have given that advice to a parent: "This is what we need to do next for your kid, and I can try to get the ball rolling here, but things will happen much faster if you call the office."

But culture panic has raised the amount of background noise and added to the list of possible offenses. So in states that don't even have Don't Say Gay laws, administrators are making teachers take down any room decorations that some parent might think are just too gay. Administrators are having staff meetings to deliver the message, "I hear that parents out there somewhere are freaking out over CRT/DEI/LGBTQ stuff, so do us all a favor and just don't come near any of those topics ever." 

And in way too many districts, teachers already know that when push comes to shove, they are working for administrators who will not have their back. They've already adjusted their classroom style accordingly (e.g. adjusting disciplinary requirements because they know that when it comes to problem students, they are on their own), so steering away from the new list of Controversial Stuff is just more of the same. 

It's a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it's a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it's a luxury that many teachers don't have. The Rand findings are just a reminder of that unpleasant truth. Administrators set the temperature for a building; if those classrooms are extra chilly, the problem lies in the front office.

Twelve Education Activist Groups (Including Moms For Liberty) Make Southern Poverty Extremist List

The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued its "Year in Hate and Extremism" report for 2022, and some familiar names from the world of "parental rights" are on the list. It's some kind of new world when activism in the public education space can get you this kind of attention. 

SPLC frames the rise of these groups as a "reemergence of the attack on inclusive schools" and position the current culture war panic in the long history of such panics.

The attacks following the Brown decision were not the beginning of the so-called parental rights movement, and it certainly was not the end. Going back to the 1920s, the U.S. has witnessed ebbs and flows of white, cisgender, heterosexual groups battling public education.

Regardless of the time period, most attacks against public education have been reactionary and rooted in racism, from the fight against integration after Brown v. Board, to the so-called school choice movement, to the latest attacks on inclusive education.

Segregationist parents did not relent and side-stepped Brown v. Board through self-titled “school choice” that made it possible for parents who were allowed to maintain their racist values by sending their children to private Christian academies. Some 3,500 white, racially discriminatory church-based schools sprung up in the wake of Brown v Board. However, when the tax-exempt status of these “segregation academies” were revoked by the court in 1971 and then upheld by former President Jimmy Carter’s IRS, parents claimed government infringement and violation of their parental rights to make decisions about their children's education.

This was not the first or last time claims of government overreach would be used as a protestation by these groups. It has become a common theme in iterations of anti-student inclusion groups over the decades.

SPLC says that 2022 saw the filing of 84 "anti-student inclusion bills"

So which twelve groups made the cut?

Moms for Liberty

This is the inclusion that made headlines, and the report gets into some detail with the group's activities, noting "Like the mothers of massive resistance before them, Moms for Liberty is ready to fight tooth and nail to preserve the unseen but understood caste system existing in their public schools and communities."

Moms for America

M4A could have been M4L-- after all, they've been around for almost twenty years without ever getting quite the traction that M4L got within weeks. They do have some star power attached, like Kevin Sorbo's wife and Rebecca Fredrichs. But they don't quite draw the press attention for their full-throated opposition to "CRT". They helped support the Stop The Steal rally on January 6, and they hang out at CPAC. Their last high-profile action was--well, remember the People's Convoy that was going to circle DC and really show somebody something? M4A had a purple truck in that. 

Army of Parents

Army of Parents is based in Loudon County, VA, which has been the hot spot for lots of school controversy (that's the place where the bathroom sexual assault was misrepresented as a transgender issue and not handled particularly well by the district). Elicia Brans, a co-founder who was activated by COVID concerns (no masks, open schools), has charged Loudon Love Warriors with threatening her. Co-founder Erin Roselle Poe told The Federalist "We've got to get the evil out of the schools."

Courage is a Habit

"Actionable tools & strategies for parents to defend their children from indoctrination in K-12." This group will help you "win the war against indoctrination." Their website warns about critical race theorists and "child mutilation advocates," as well as SEL, school counselors, and vulgar books. The group is headed by Alvin Lui, a "political refugee from California" who hangs out with the Parents Defending Education crowd and does plenty of media.. 

Education First Alliance

North Carolina group that set up a whistleblower program to "help fight woke indoctrination." President Sloan Rachmuth is an "entrepreneur-turned-journalist and activist"--she's also a coms professional. Anti-indoctrination, anti-naughty books, anti-trans. Rachmuth also heads Pen and Shield, a nonprofit newsroom. 

Education Veritas

"Education NOT Indoctrination." Atlanta-based group opposing "obsession with race, equity over merit, unpatriotic attitudes, hyper-sexualization" in pursuit of "pure, non-political education." Also, "teach history, not hate." Don't want "Anti-white CRT" or "sexual orientation nonsense." They appear to be aimed at private schools in particular. Links to explainers from Prager U. It's not really clear what they've done or who they are.

No Left Turn In Education

Launched by Elena Fishbein, a doctor of social work from Gladwyne, one of the uber-rich Philadelphia suburbs who got upset when her child's school adopted some culturally sensitive programming in the wake of the George Floyd murder. They've been linked to violent school board protests and toxic rhetoric and hollered loudly when the Department of Justice suggested school board opponents might want to tone it down a bit. "Black bigotry towards whites" is a "very real problem," she said. You can see lots more of their rhetoric here. 

Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT)

More from Loudon County. Led by Scott Mineo, Third Way studied the group and found "inflammatory tone" and made up baloney, QAnon style.

Mineo also claimed in the press and on his website that teaching CRT is explicitly “anti-white,” that CRT is “poison,” and that the CRT “lifecycle” is “infiltration, transformation, and indoctrination.”

They were very busy in the election that got Virginia Youngkin as a governor.

Parents Defending Education

Everybody who looks at this outfit finds the same thing-- a group of seasoned right wing political operatives pretending to be a grass roots organization.

 
Parents Rights In Education

Against "destructive polarization." Concerned about "viewpoint discrimination, comprehensive sexuality education, radical gender ideology" etc. The head honcho is Suzanne Gallagher, a previous chair of the Oregon GOP (who was forced to step down) and "sales and marketing expert." Worried about sexual indoctrination in schools, including the claim that teachers are using porn as a teaching aid.

Purple for Parents Indiana

In Indiana, Purple for Parents is Jennifer McWilliams, a former teachers aid who quit over SEL programming and went on the right wing victim circuit (I have her story here). The Purples started in Arizona as a response to Red for Ed and as an offshoot of a Patriot group. They've also cropped up in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the main group's Facebook page wants you to know that June is "Groomer Awareness Month."

Parents Involved in Education

Founded in 2000 as a South Carolina group, now gone national, this is one of the older groups. Their mission: "to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates." ("Parental rights come from God--not the government.) With an advisory board that includes Sandra Stotsky, Joy Pullman, Michelle Malkin, and Christel Swasey, these folks are heavily anti-Common Core. Sheri Few, the head honcho, ran for Congress in 2017 with what The Root called “a series of ads that might be the most racist, homophobic and craziest campaign ever.” She's also a producer of their film, "Truth and Lies in American Education" which is aimed at the more current panics like America and racism, gender stuff, and the fear that public schools are teaching socialism. Agenda 21!! Special appearance by Kevin Sorbo's wife! It's the true story of young mother April Few, who is converted from skepticism about the Big Plot. She is Sheri Few's daughter-in-law.

That's the list.

We could ask why these and not some others (why, in particular, only the Indiana wing of Purple for Parents). There's a wide range here, from well-financed full size groups to what appear to be one or two-person operations, from experienced comms professionals to amateur goofballs.

But they all have a few things in common, like a long twisty path of interlocking connections with each other and other groups. But mostly they all share a powerful desire to recapture schools for parents--but only certain right kinds of parents. And they now each have a spot on the SPLC map.

Children Are People

During his town hall on education, far-right-light Governor Glenn Youngkin was pressed on various issues of trans children, and in response, he echoed a sentiment that keeps appearing in these parental rights debates (though not always quite so clearly):

Children belong to parents. Not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.

Well, no, Children are human beings, not chattel.

But the humanity of children often seems at question in much of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation from culture warriors these days. New Hampshire is yet another state considering legislation that could require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents. Meanwhile, the well-funded advocacy group, Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] has released a list of 6,000 schools that, they charge, have policies to "hide" trans student status from parents. And the hot new wave in anti-LGBTQ student bills are Birth Name bills, requiring schools and school staff to address students by the names and pronouns on their birth certificates without written parental permission. 

What all of this has in common is a disregard for the agency and independence and humanity of the students themselves. 

The scenario often darkly hinted at is one in which school staff somehow convince a student that they are LGBTQ, and tell them they had better not tell anyone at home about it. 

But the far more likely scenario is one in which a student comes to a trusted school staff member to talk about their identity while begging the staff member not to tell parents. This conversation may occur during the highly charged time when the student is struggling with a new understanding of themself, or it may occur in a more standard school drama context (the girl who asks for advice dealing with her girlfriend but "I can't talk to my folks about this because they would freak").

Anybody who pretends that these moments are easy to navigate and can be handled by a cut and dried set of rules is kidding themselves. Students, especially teens, play with their sense of identity an awful lot, and sometimes it's temporary and sometimes it's not. Students are sometimes terrible judges of what they can expect from parents and sometimes they are excellent judges. Parents are sometimes great at supporting their children's growth into independent adults, and sometimes they are not, at all. 

As with many hot button issues, folks are dealing from different premises. If you believe that LGBTQ identities are unnatural, that LGBTQ identities are made, not born, then you will react to news of your own child's LGBTQ identity by wanting to know who made them that way, and schools are the most obvious place to look. If you believe that LGBTQ persons are born, not made, then your main concern will be how to protect and gird them for a world that is often hostile--and that hostility can start at home. We know that LGBTQ children go through a lot. It seems simple enough to want them to go through less, but different premises yield different solutions to the problem ("stop being LGBTQ" versus "put protections for the child in place").

The ideal situation is parents who are loving and supportive of the child, though that situation can be less ideal in states where the parents of LGBTQ persons are stripped of their legal rights to make certain decisions for their children (because parental rights apparently involves only certain parents in some states). A school can't hide any of this information when the child is loving, accepted, and open with their parents. 

Put another way, there is no situation in which the school hides information about LGBTQ students from the parents; there are only situations in which the school and the child keep the information from parents. 

The school's decision has to be based on two factors. One is the question of possible abuse of the child. Some commenters say, "Well, the law doesn't have to worry about that because the laws already require school staff to report abuse." But that's abuse that has already happened. "We're going to tell your folks, and if they beat you and throw you out, then we'll just report it," is not a great plan. But figuring out what possible abuse may or may not happen is not an exact science.

The other factor is that schools must balance the rights of the parents with the rights of the students. The disturbing part of so many of these laws, so much of this rhetoric, is that the rights of students are absent from the debate. This has become an ugly part of the new idea that schools serve families and not all of the community--the notion that teachers are simply hirelings whose primary purpose if to extend parental reach in exerting their will over their children. 

None of this is simple to sort out, and there is no doubt that sometimes schools get it wrong, that staff, well-meaning or not, make some bad judgement calls. 

But any solution that treats children as property rather than people is not going to help. Any solution that enshrines parental rights but ignores students' rights and safety is not a real solution. Students are trying to figure out who they are, and they are trying to figure out how their identity is going to affect their relationships with the people around them. The people around them can help by being mindful, thoughtful, and extending grace to the students and to each other. 

School Choice Is Not The Goal

Well, Jay Greene told us what he was going to do. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." And he's been giving it a big sloppy hug ever since. At the same time, he's part of the choice movement that is revealing it isn't really interested in choice at all.

In a piece for Fox News, Greene and his colleague Ian Kingsbury (Educational Freedom Institute) offer some really half-assed "research" to show that there's a "disconnect" between rural Texas teachers and rural Texas ("Progressive teachers vs conservative families: School choice can help level the playing field"). 

Let me break down how hard they reached to prop up their point.

They dug up 1,400 contributions by checking school district employees against zip codes with fewer than 500 people per square mile. Then they determined that 90.2% of those contributions were made in support of Democratic candidates. But hey-- Greg Abbott won re-election with 80.7% of the vote. So there you have it-- rural teachers are out of touch with rural parents.

Here are some things they don't look at. How many of those school district employees are teachers? How many teachers are there total in those areas-- are the 1,400 contributions out of 100,000 employees? How did things go in elections other than Abbott's gubernatorial race? 

Nor do they offer a theory about what exactly is happening. Are a bunch of progressive teachers being airlifted into rural areas as part of some socialist assault on rural areas? Or do rural teachers go to teach in rural areas for the same reasons that other folks go to live in rural areas?

They don't mention that teachers are remarkably non-monolithic, as witnessed, for instance, by the huge number of NEA members who voted for Donald Trump. They do mention that rural areas of Texas has been staunch in their opposition to school choice, particularly the vouchers that Greene and Kingsbury are pushing in this article. 

And push they will. Having manufactured their point, they move to the sell.

A teacher who is an active supporter of Democrats could be a perfectly fine teacher of the children of active supporters of Republicans in the same way that the children of Baptists could receive a quality education in a Catholic school. But we don’t compel Baptists to send their children to Catholic schools nor should we compel conservative, rural Texans to send their children to public schools dominated by progressives.

Which is a heck of a leap--should we just assume that everyone who believes something is automatically trying to impose that belief on everyone they encounter? And then this

Rural superintendents have been blocking the expansion of school choice in Texas by whispering in their state legislators’ ears that doing so might jeopardize jobs in the local public schools. But it is unclear why rural legislators should heed these concerns given that rural educators may be undermining the values of their constituents and donating to their political opponents.

Choice is not the point. 

I spotted this piece on Twitter because choicer Corey DeAngelis was using it as part of his reply to Elon Musk's tweet of "The woke mind virus is defeated or nothing else matters." 

Select quotes from the article that he chose to use in that conversation include "All that school choice would do is shift some of the jobs from public schools dominated by Democrats to other schools whose values would be more likely to align with those of parents in those areas" and also "There is no reason to trap rural families in schools dominated by people with sharply different values and priorities." This is thin-sliced baloney (first, Greene and Kingsbury proved nothing and second, do these rural districts not have elected school boards?) but it points us at the real idea here, as does one other response to Musk

we win this war with school choice. https://t.co/iXMewD5Cxk

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) December 12, 2022

 In other words, the goal for these folks is not choice. It's to replace the current public school system with a private one that's aligned with the Proper Values, to wipe out any and all school systems that teach The Wrong Values. 

There are folks in the choice world who believe that choice is in and of itself a virtue. There are people who believe we should have woke schools and conservative schools etc etc etc. But these are not those people.

I have long argued that people do not really want choice, that they just want to get what they want. 

We are seeing repeatedly that choice is not what some folks who nominally support choice actually want. Choicers have campaigned against LGBTQ charters. Patron choice saint Ron DeSantis is not in Florida fighting for every parents' right to have whatever school they want, but to Stop WOKE and CRT wherever it appears. The Libertarians of Croydon, NH, actually trashed a functioning school choice system because they wanted lower taxes. We are seeing repeatedly that choice-loving folks like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education don't want choice for everybody--they just want schools to reflect their values. The book banners do not campaign for libraries where everyone can get the books they want, but libraries where people can only get the books the banners approve of.

Hell, we've now got an entire legal theory that argues that the Framers didn't really want liberty and democracy--they wanted a government that was based on the Right Values.

I will say, again, that this is not all school choice fans. Education policy makes strange bedfellows (remember back when that wacky Common Core united people who love public education and people who hate it). But right now this is a big chunk of the school choice crowd clamoring for an end to schools that teach things they don't approve of. We don't really need choice, reads the subtext. We just need one system that teaches the things we want it to teach. 

This is not a system that would serve anyone but a select few. It's not democratically owned and operated public education in a pluralistic society, and it's not actual school choice, either. It's just another version of the conservative-ish christianist call to "take back our schools" and make them all ours again (and keep us from having to pay taxes to fund schools for Those People). This is not a system that would uphold any of the ideals of American education. 

National Politics Vs. Education

You may not read anything from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that right-tilted, Common Core pushing, privatization-loving thinky tank, but I'm going to direct your attention there for a moment and a piece by Dale Chu. Chu and I disagree on a great deal, but in this recent piece, while talking about Rick Scott's crazy-pants (my word) plan to save America, he makes some worthwhile points, starting with this one:

What we have today is a smash-and-grab version of education reform that features a maximalist approach to securing legislative victories. The ethos seems to be: Throw the current bums out of office and get as much as we can until we eventually get tossed to the curb ourselves. Lather, rinse, repeat. Neither side has a common-ground agenda. Each tries to burn the other down. All of the incentives are organized around fealty to the “national brand,” which in the case of Scott and his role as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee is to use an uncharacteristically inflammatory and hardline rhetoric when it comes to talking about schools.

I could quibble. I am not sure, for instance, that Democrats have an education agenda at all, having spent a couple of decades simply adapting the conservative reform agenda and now lacking any sense of how to find their way back. But the larger point is a good one--blast into power, grab what you can without any concern about whether or not it's sustainable, and gather up the political spoils while you can. It's an apt description of the politically-driven CRT panic, which contains 0% "Let's find a good and universally acceptable way to talk about our difficult history with race" and 100% "Vote for me because I helped chase away that scary Black People Stuff from the evil indoctrinatin' schools." 

Building education policy for the long run matters, because the long run is what teachers and schools are here for. Every teacher who's been in a classroom for more than five years has mastered the New Policy Eyeroll--some administrator breezes in and brandishes a shiny new game-changing program, and teachers deploy the eye roll because they know with a year or three, both the administrator and the policy will be gone, shoved aside by the newest shiny thing.

Remember when you were learning to drive? You learned that if you focused on the road a few feet in front of the car, you'd wander all over the pavement. To keep the car steady and the journey safe, you focused far ahead on your destination. That's what teachers have to learn to do.

Schools and teachers have to play a long game; when politicians start playing a short game, a smash and grab game, that works directly against the health of schools and education. But as Chu points out

...neither national Republicans nor national Democrats seem to show any interest in being a majority party when it comes to getting our kids back on track. Instead, both sides have cynically employed conflict engineers to dictate the strength and direction of our education fights, resulting in today’s zero-sum playing field.

Chu thinks the answer is in state and local leadership. Well, maybe. He's looking at ways to forward the reformster cause, and I suppose a state like Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have just about finished burning public education to the ground, looks like a fine example. It looks to me as if smash-and-grab politics are fully installed in many state capitals which are, in fact, where the CRT panic is playing out. Meanwhile, the GOP has been working hard to install that same philosophy on the local school board level. 

Chu thinks the "silent majority" should speak up about "the need for schools to focus their limited bandwidth on education recovery," but that ship has sailed in many communities, where Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and a host of other conservative astro-turf groups have screamed their way to the front of the conversation; in some cases, the silent majority has been chased right off the board.

Chu wants to see intra-party coalitions motivated by the "calamity" of low test scores for BlPOC students, but I'm not sure low scores on the Big Standardized Test is anybody's idea of a Top Ten crisis in education. And the intra-party coalition was largely the result of Democrats embracing a version of the right-tilted reform ideas; that coalition broke down under Trump, and the right has since concluded that it doesn't need Dems for anything. 

But Chu is right in a larger sense-- if anybody in the political world would stop asking "How can education be used as an issue to create political advantage" and start asking "How can we help schools with the mission of educating children," we'd get better education policy. As it is, one of the things that makes teaching a dispiriting activity in the 21st century is realizing that public education has no champions among either party, and whenever a politician looks at education, it's not to see how they can help, but how they can smash-and-grab something for their own benefit. 

FL: Education Buffet of Bad Bills

Nationally, we're seeing a great surge of bad bills being proposed as pseudo-conservative legialtors rush to prove that they are the banniest, teacher-gaggingest legislators out there. And as always, we can find Florida providing an example of how that looks. 

Here are just some of the bills under consideration in America's Swampland.

There is of course all the activity around Ron DeSantis's STOP Woke Act, which has a spectacular level of hostility toward public ed and teachers. But what else does Florida's legislature have up its sweaty sleeve? All icky, and I've saved the worst for last.

SB 148 Individual Freedom

The bill isn't exactly related individual freedom; it's just the Florida version of the critical race theory bans sweeping pseudo-conservative legislators. This forbids the usual list of naughty "discomforts" for both schools and businesses, so if you're a business owner, it's not your individual freedom that the GOP is concerned with. Also, abstinence education is in, but for some reason, the list of health education subjects hereby eliminates "mental and emotional health." and instead adds a requirement for teaching life skills like resiliency and self-awareness that "support mental and emotional health." Yes, the state legislature will now tell you what mental and emotional health entail.

The individual freedom part arrives at the end, where the bill takes the usual list of anti-crt boiler plate (nobody is inherently racist, meritocracy is fundamental to the pursuit of happiness, no individual is responsible for past bad stuff, no discomfort, etc) are now acknowledged and enshrined in education programs as the "principles of individual freedom." This is kind of mind blowing, but a fine codification of the pseudo-conservative belief that if you are less wealthy and less free than other folks, it's your own damned fault for failing to make good choices. 

HR 1055: Video Cameras in Public School Classrooms

This dumb bill wants to install video cameras and body mics for teachers. These may be used to investigate an "incident," defined as "an event, a circumstance, an act, or an omission that results in the abuse or the neglect of a student" by either the teacher or another student. The camera should be mounted in such a way that it can cover the entire room, but not anywhere students change their clothes. If a district installs such a camera, they must inform everyone who could conceivably be affected. 

There are protections in the bill for students, and they are dumb. When showing the video to involved parties, you should blur out the faces of other students, which provides little actual confidentiality ("Pat, who sits next to you in Mrs. Whinglebutter's room?") Presumably the bill is intended to give parents one more tool to catch teachers who are abusing their child with indoctrinatin' stuff, but it looks like an excellent tool for using the school to harass other ("Sam says that Winslow kid is causing trouble every day, so let's pull Winslow junior up on video, shall we?") There are no items in the bill about providing due process for the teachers or students who become the subjects of this increased surveillance. Stay tuned for teacher evaluation form that includes "number of times administration had to watch your tape."

SB 1300: Transparency etc

One of the side debates raging in Florida is what to do with school board pay. Before it gets into its real meat, this bill proposes making school board member salaries equal to the pay given legislators, which is not a hell of a lot (a useful method of keeping the poors out of government). 

Any adoption or review of instructional materials must be public, and the committee must include parents. Library and school materials must be selected by professionals, and all materials must appear on line in a searchable format (otherwise, how can you check to see if your school has That Naughty Book you heard about on OAN). 

All materials must be available to the public (including teacher editions), allowing the public to inspect and copy anything they wish (far use copyright laws apply, somehow). Adoption of materials must be a separate line item so that the public can comment on them. Also, submit a banned book report annually to the state ed chief. And the state must develop a training program so that folks have been taught How Not To Select Naughty Books. 

HB 1467: K-12 Education

Is the sibling of SB 1300--except that it eliminates school board pay entirely. A sponsor thinks that will take the politics out of school board elections, somehow? 

We want to make sure our schools are focused on parental engagement, parental involvement, and by eliminating, quite frankly, the financial incentive for politicians to use this as an opportunity either as a launching pad to a political career, or maybe a landing pad by which to get a salary.

SB 244 is also aimed at school boards, but this one would make elections more partisan by requiring school board candidates to file by party affiliation. Because extreme party politics are definitely making America more greater these days.

SB 1348 is trying to clean up after the mess that Florida made when they combined and expanded their various voucher programs, creating a voucher behemoth that turned out to be a lumbering bureaucratic mess. So this bill is supposed to make it faster and more efficient to give public tax dollars to private education-flavored businesses and religious schools.

HB 1557 Don't Say Gay (SB 1834 is its counterpart)

Okay, it's actually called "an act relating to parental rights in education." This is perhaps one of the scariest bills out there. The headline making part of the bill is this one:

A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in the primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students. 

Pat: Teacher, my older brother says he's gay, and I'm confused about what that means.

Teacher: Shut up, Pat. 

But the scarier part for teachers is that on the one hand, the bill absolutely forbids the school to withhold any personal information about the child. 

The procedures must reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children by requiring school district personnel to encourage a student to discuss issues relating to hie or her well-being with his or her parent or to seek permission to discuss or facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent.

And, boy, howdy, we could talk about that word "control," but instead, let's imagine another day in Florida schools.

Teacher: Students, I want you to know that you can share anything you're struggling with me. This classroom is a safe space, and whether we're having a private discussion or you're just sharing in your journal, I want you to know that's okay. Also, I'm required to report everything you tell me to your parents.

The bill tries to have things both ways, acknowledging that teachers still have a responsibility to report suspected abuse, and even acknowledging that teachers might want to hold off on that parental sharing thing if they have reason to believe that the student will be subject to abuse if the parent gets Certain Information. 

So teachers have to somehow straddle that line and --oh yeah. Parents have the right to sue the school district if they think you got it wrong. The court can award damages to parents who think the school didn't tell them everything they were supposed to be told. 

So call this bill Don't Say Gay, or call it Teachers Must Narc or No Safe Space. Florida Rep. Joe Harding, who introduced the bill says that it's about defending the "awesome responsibility" or being a parent. "That job can only be given to you by above." But Chase Buttigieg was more on point when he said "This will kill kids." Struggling LGBTQ kids in Florida will have no safe place to turn, and teachers will have their hands tied in a dozen new ways. 

On the plus side, I'm not sure this bill wouldn't open the door for parents to sue schools over not letting their children discuss LGBTQ issues in class. That would be fun, and well deserved, but unfortunately would simply further the goal of sowing chaos and destruction for public education.

Moms For Liberty And The Unified Theory of Far Right Grievance

Anti-maskers. Anti-school closings. Anti-vaxxers. Anti-something-vaguely-lumped-under-critical-race-theory. 

If it seems as if these folks are all actually the same people coming back with new signage every couple of months, join me as we take a look at Moms For Liberty.

MFL was launched at the beginning of 2021 by two Florida women, both with school board experience.

Tina Descovitch  ran for Brevard County School Board in 2016, with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovitch ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. She won that election overwhelmingly, taking 48% of the vote in a primary election field of four. Then she lost in 2020. She stayed active in local school politics; after a big dustup over LGBTQ+ policy in Brevard County, she was mailed an envelope full of poop.

The co-founder is Tiffany Justice, who won a school board seat in Indian River County in 2016.  In 2018, the Indian River chapter of the NAACP asked the board to rein her in; she was accused of dominating African American Achievement Cor Committee Meetings and in those meetings violating board policy and open meetings laws. She was a reported victim of cyber-bullying by a district employee. As a board member she was agitating by October of 2020 for a mask-optional policy for students in the district, which earned her some attention from Parental Rights Florida, the wing of yet another of these groups, and I'm not going down that rabbit hole other than to note that the Parental Rights national board president is James Mason from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and the board includes Grover Norquist and John Rosemond. Justice is no longer a member of the Indian River board.

Justice also stayed active in her district, post-board. Justice in particular has some big feelings about mask wearing, demanding some exceptions be made by the school for her son and her. Justice also wanted to be allowed to stop into her son's classroom without the 24 hour notice required by district policy.

The two launched their new group in January of this year in their home counties, agitating about mask wearing and getting school buildings re-opened. At some point, they decided to go national. Their big pitch has been parental grievance. From a profile in February:

“The balance of power in education has dramatically shifted away from parents and communities to unions and bureaucrats,” said Descovich.

“Moms for Liberty is fighting to restore the role of primary decision maker for children back to parents by helping them organize and amplify their voices.”

They've expanded their reach and their mission "to stoke the fires of liberty." You can find them and their many local branches on Facebook. Some of those local groups aren't exactly bursting at the seams, but a couple boast huge numbers and a great deal of posting.

But their portfolio of grievances has expanded as well--now they are on the front lines of organizing against public school "indoctrination" as well as monitoring school boards and making sure that the correct American history is taught. They offer a plan for educating your friends and neighbors about the Constitution. They say they have a plan "to turn this ship around."

The local chapter model has let them unleash some formidable ground troops. In Tennessee they have landed hard against the Wit and Wisdom book series for a huge list of offenses for everything from "social justice" (which they know is just a sneaky way to get CRT in there) to reading selections they just think are too bloody for children. And they want you to know that "we have a bullying problem, not a racism problem."

Their national voice is expanding as well. Quisha King (some outlets call her "Keisha") runs a consulting firm, has a degree in business marketing, and was a regional engagement coordinator for Black Voices for Trump, but she's often billed as just a concerned Florida mom. She's a member of MFL, sometimes referred to as a board member, though their board membership is not listed anywhere I could find. Ron DeSantis has quoted her, and national news outlets like her. And she just picked up national press for calling Rep. Ilhan Omar a liar on the subject of CRT.

Occasionally MFL calls itself nonpartisan, but these are clearly conservative culture warriors. And if you have suspected that all of these culture war complaints are tied together, this group has clearly gathered them all in one basket, a unified field theory of far-right grievance. 

Watch this MFL chapter chair from Seminole Florida talk to her board and quickly tie it all in a bow. 

I heard someone say a great awakening is usually preceded by a rude awakening. 10 words that could surely be the mantra over our country the last 16 months. 18 months ago the majority of parents naively believed school boards were set in place by their vote for the sole purpose of protecting their rights and values inside public schools. March 2020 changed that. Suddenly facing lockdowns and mandates parents found themselves in a massive rude awakening. As devastating as the consequences have been, I actually thank God for this rude awakening, because without it we would not have a great awakening. Ironically you and school boards across the country, while masking our children, found your hidden motives and operational methods being unmasked....Today it's about masks. Tomorrow it's about isolating and segregating the unvaccinated. Then it's CRT being disguised as equity training to skirt new state legislation. The list of offenses has become the proverbial elephant in the room.

Well, no. Also, I can think of a few other purposes for school boards, like, say, education stuff.  But then she goes on to threaten the board because their day is passing and the newly awakened-but-not-woke parents will rise up and get rid of them. The sense of grievance, of victimized by the Grand Conspiracy comes through the MFL website's call for joining as well:

Are you tired of feeling like you are alone in your concerns for the future of your children? Do you try to speak to community leaders about your concerns and your voice goes unheard? There is power in numbers and the purpose of our organization is to fight for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents.

Are there deep pockets backing this outfit/ There's no evidence I've found, and while they have been picked up by the Trumpist hard right ecosystem quickly, that could be backing or it could be that they're just the perfect group to promote that narrative. And this is no group of June Cleavers--these are smart, professional women. MLF has been picked up as part of the professionally astro-turfed Parents Defending Education, but MLF appears to have arrived a few months earlier.

Time will tell. Mothers for Liberty is worth watching because when it comes to white disenfranchised disenchantment, the raging culture wars, and the belief that the public school system is a dark conspiracy between unions and elites, these folks are the total package.