Another Version Of Choice

One of the slickest rhetorical tricks of the modern choice movement is to weld the idea of "choice" to the idea of privatization. 

We've been sold the notion that providing students with a school choice must involved privately owned and operated providers, as if the only conceivable way to provide school choice is by opening the "market" to private operators. I have a hard time escaping the feeling that we did not get here by asking, "How can we best provide educational options for students" but rather got her by asking "How can we best use these issues to promote the free market policies that we want to implement."

If we start with the first of those questions, there are so many more options available.

In fact, some are not new. Maine and Vermont have both had choice for decades; if your town doesn't have a school, then you can pick one somewhere else. My own small town high school offered plenty of choices, from CTE to college prep programs that sent students everywhere from community-ish college to ivy league schools. 

It would be efficient to operate choice under the school district or state banner. Certain specials could be shared by the different schools. Most of all, students could change their minds without having to upend their entire lives, and families would have the security of knowing that whatever they choose, it would still be accountable for the rules and regulations governing all public schools. In Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars, you can read about an early school-within-a-school approach that successfully made use of this approach.

Choice under a district and state umbrella could also be modified to provide the kind of choice that many advocates say they want--the chance for students from poor neighborhoods to attend the same kinds of schools that rich neighborhoods have. The system could allow students to cross district lines to exercise their choice. (Do I think that would be enough to fix our segregation problem? No, I don't. But current choice systems don't, either. Both public and choice systems are too responsive to the desires of folks who want to get their children away from Those Peoples' Children. We'll need to force the erasure of gerrymandered school district boundaries and perhaps bring back bussing.)

There would be challenges with such a system. Any choice system--including the ones we've got right now--carries a greater total cost, because choice requires excess capacity. If you have 100 students and 100 total seats, those students have a very limited choice. For maximum choice, every school that could be a choice needs 100 seats. Reality will land somewhere in between, but the answer should always be more than 100 total seats.

That costs more, but with current choice systems that excess cost is hidden by the funding methods, with charters and private schools supplementing their revenue with contributions, and public schools making up lost revenue with either increased taxes or reduced services. In a public school choice system, all the extra cost would be transparently passed on to the taxpayer, instead of hidden. 

Choice advocates like to complain that public schools are one size fits all, yet within every public school building and district, there are folks with different ideas and philosophies, liberated in some districts and waiting to be liberated in others. And if legislatures can see the value of releasing charters and private schools from some rules and regulations, can't the same be done for public schools?

Charters were going to be great laboratories of educational experimentation, but after thirty years of experiments, charter schools have not produced a single new technique, a single new piece of educational insight. Mostly they have demonstrated that putting unsupervised amateurs in charge of schools is not a great idea (and if your educational bona fides are that you spent two years in a classroom on the back of five weeks of training, you're an amateur). And there are people who realy believe that an open market would foster quality and efficiency and, again, after thirty years, there's no evidence that this is true.

The idea of choice should, by its very nature, offer us a world of options, but in modern practice, it has only offered one--let privately owned and operated providers have a chance to get their hands on public tax dollars (and, in the process, breach the church-state wall so that taxpayers can fund religious education). There's no reason that this should be the only choice in choice.

The Vast Education Conspiracy

There are choice and reform advocates that I talk to, online style, fairly regularly. I do so because they are rational, fairly reasonable people and 1) I'll talk to almost anybody and 2) there's a lot of understanding to be gained by listening to people who disagree with you. I think these folks are wrong about a lot of education stuff, but they're still rational, fairly intelligent human beings.

There's a down side to talking to these folks--it sometimes leads me to forget about the other folks.

You can find those other folks fairly easily on Twitter, and sometimes they will find you (and if they do, they will generally bring a few dozen of their friends along). And they did not come for conversation.

What they bring with them is a constellation of beliefs, some of which are further out there than others.

Vast conspiracies can happen. This idea is fundamental, and can only be held by anyone who never tried to organize a work group of more than six people. Those six people couldn't coordinate, focus, stay on task, schedule a meeting, or keep any of the process quiet, but somehow hundreds of thousands of people have been enlisted, coordinated, weaponized, and kept quiet for all this time. (See also: deep state.)

Public education is bad. They would like to kill it with fire, abolish it, end it. It is horribly racist, unless it's involved in pushing indoctrination into Marxist woke evil race stuff. It is a conspiracy between the unions and Democrat politicians, set up to funnel money through the union into Democratic campaign coffers, with teachers being paid off to facilitate this by being given a sinecure that pays a bunch of money for doing nothing. Everyone who says a word in defense of public schools is simply trying to preserve this conspiracy.

Teachers hate children and don't want to teach. They went into teaching for the money and the summers off and they hate any attempt at accountability because then they'll get caught doing a terrible job and the jig will be up. Sometimes this even involves the sleeper cell theory of conspiracy, which is a feature I find astonishing. In this one, somebody fakes entering a field and doing well because they knew, somehow, that one day they would have a chance to turn around and attack (see, for instance, the theory that Dr. Fauci has been faking it for fifty years so that he could position himself to sow chaos in a fake coronavirus pandemic). 

Many folks have noticed that the revolt against "critical race theory" is reminiscent of the right-wing revolt against common core. First, define the term so broadly and loosely that it means "anything that upsets me." Then go hunting for extreme examples to use as a proxy for the whole thing. Then demonize away. I'm not and never have been a fan of the core, but not because I think it's a commie plot to turn our children into Marxist lesbians. And an ongoing conversation about race and history in this country is absolutely necessary; the fact that the prospect makes some folks angry-sad is just further prof of how necessary it is. 

But conversation with these folks is difficult (on Twitter, impossible). These folks are scared and angry about crt, about sex ed, about LGBTQ+ people, about schools not doing what they wanted them to during the pandemic, about "elites" taking away their control of their children, about white folks not being the center of the universe, about their children learning more in school than they did. In many (if not most) cases they've had five years to get all MAGAed up. They are mostly not stupid and mostly not evil, but they are loud and determined and destructive, and they are not in the mood for a conversation. 

Some days, I'm not sure how we get preserve and improve public education while they are intent on burning it down. Other days, I figure we just have to move forward without them. But they are the school policy version of our larger MAGA-style problem; how do you build a country with people who inhabit an alternative reality? I don't have an answer; I just have to remember that the question doesn't go away just because I can't always hear them in my bubble.

ICYMI: Summer Break Begins Edition (6/13)

This weekend marks the beginning of summer break for all the staff here at the Institute (I, of course, am either always or never on break, depending on how you look at it). We have not quite hit our stride yet, but I'm sure it's coming. In the meantime, here are a few things for you to read from the week.

Is the Charter Schools Program funding white-flight academies?

Carol Burris makes a guest appearance at Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog to lay out some research showing that North Carolina charters are the modern version of segregation academies.

A magic school bus brings science class to schools in need

Hechinger Report looks at a program providing mobile labs for rural and low-income communities.

35 Baltimore-area schools dismiss early--no air conditioning

A reminder that infrastructure issues plague schools and create real, daily problems that trump arguments about policy and philosophy.

Struggling schools don’t get a boost from state takeovers, study shows

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat looks at a recent study that shows that the sun rises in the East. No, seriously, there's now some science-flavored evidence for what we already knew was true-- the school takeover model doesn't work.

Justice Department says it can defend religious schools’ exemption from anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws

The Washington Post has this story looking at the nuances, legal maneuvering, and political disappointment behind the DOJ's announced willingness to back religious anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

Should Louisiana close all its charter schools?

A new bill will lower the bar for what's required to shut down a charter school in Louisiana. For one legislator, that's just the start.

The Fog of History Wars

David Blight at the New Yorker takes a deep, thoughtful look at the history of how we argue about history. Old feuds, new battles, and the usual difficulty in understanding that history is not cemented in place.

A Generation at Risk

John Warner notes that "bad things happen when children are used as units of global competition." In China, a generation is dropping out. Can the US learn anything?

Rethinking K-12 education coverage for the post-pandemic era

Jenny Anderson at Kappan Online has some thoughts about how the world of ed reporting could be revamped and revitalized. I'm not sure I agree with everything she has to say, but it's a thought-provoking piece.

Court scraps VT ban on sending tax dollars to religious schools

Vermont's voucher system has some unique features that made it a likely choice for one of the lawsuits trying to dismantle the wall between church and state, and those bricks have indeed fallen. This coverage is from the 74, but it's a good wrap-up of what happened.

Parents give public schools high grades for instruction during pandemic

The Pittsburgh Trib has this piece about a survey showing that, despite all the noise from the anti-public ed crowd, parents are mostly happy with how their schools performed during the pandemess.

Democracy Prep Founder and Thief, Seth Andrew: Spinner of Chaos.

Seth Andrew has already been arrested for stealing from the charter school chain he founded, but as the indispensable Mercedes Schneider lays out here, that's not the only mess he's been making.

How to practice best practices

McSweeney's with some more useful advice for faculty.

Nevada Family Alliance: That Body Cams for Teachers Group

Nevada is yet another state where folks are whipped into a frenzy about "Critical Race Theory," which they can't entirely identify and therefor consider to include , apparently, anything about equity, diversity, racism and US history. But the headline item is one particular proposal-- attaching body cameras to all teachers to make sure they aren't indoctrinating children. 

Who's behind this really terrible idea?

“You guys have a serious problem with activist teachers pushing politics in the classroom, and there’s no place for it, especially for our fifth graders,” Karen England, Nevada Family Alliance executive director, told Washoe County School District trustees Tuesday.

So who is the Nevada Family Alliance?

That turns out to be a little unclear. 

According to their Facebook page, they've been around since at least 2016. They joined Twitter in 2017. They have about 2,600 Facebook fans and 147 Twitter followers. They're generally referred to as a non-profit, but there doesn't appear to be a Form 990 on file with the IRS for them. The site offers no actual physical address.

Their website listed as nevadafamilyalliance.org, but that takes you straight to reclaimingourschools.com. The "what we do" for the site includes Monitor & Research, Educate, and Act (although act is a little fuzzy--"We mobilize our network to impact the culture in real-time." Their issues are education, anti-LGBTQ+, and the whole constellation of Christianiat culture war stuff.

NFA has no particular clear understanding of what CRT actually includes. Rather, it's just a signifier of the large progressive plot, a chance to, as NFA puts it, take the "racial justice" ball and run with it:

Why? Because progressive activists in education can’t pass up a golden opportunity to indoctrinate our nation’s impressionable children with the victim/oppressor worldview.

 It’s as if they relish any chance to undermine parents’ efforts to rear children who are psychologically healthy, skilled in thinking critically, morally wise, and self-controlled.

And here they are, lumping it all together in just one paragraph:

Simply put, instruction in Critical Race Theory as presented in Black Lives Matter curriculum and The 1619 Project pushes American students down the road of hate. These poisonous classroom lessons immediately hook youth who are looking for meaning. The CRT revisionist telling of America’s history churns out angry activists who are eager to lead the effort to accomplish “social justice.” The twisting of true history causes students to feel unequal and undervalued, and then points them to the “oppressor” as a target.

NFA is particularly focused on Benchmark Advance textbooks being considered  by Washoe County schools. Says NFA's site, "Board President Dr. Angela Taylor has vehemently denied the Benchmark Advance curriculum contains ANY aspects of Critical Race Theory. Clearly, Dr. Taylor has not viewed the curriculum, or she does not know what Critical Race Theory is."

NFA offers links to these CRT lesson plans, though no explanation of how, exactly, these links prove NFA's point. The kindergarten units include "social justice guiding questions" which might be the trigger here, but the questions are scorchers like "How can the messages in stories make us feel safe and proud of who we are" and "What are small and large ways that people can help if someone is in danger?" in support of topics such as "Families are not all the same." I am not remotely well-schooled in CRT, but I do have to agree that somebody here  does not know what Critical Race Theory is, and it's probably not Dr. Taylor.

So who is this group, really?

Often when we dig into these groups, we find the usual web of professional advocates and money from, say, the Kochtopus (looking at you, Parents Defending Education). That doesn't seem to be the case here.

NFA's Twitter following is mostly folks; Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal group pushing to get public money for religious groups, hopped on late in the game. No other connections are readily noticeable.

In fact, there only seems to be one name associated with the group, and that's Karen England. But England has been a busy lady, and this is not her first rodeo. And yes, I noticed that her name is actually Karen. 

England (who doesn't have a LinkedIn account) has also served as head of California's Capitol Resource Institute, a non-profit that advocates for "religious freedom, life, the family, and parental rights" (she's right there on their home page). Their Form 990 history is spotty. Back in 2012, England was the Executive Director  drawing a salary of $27,600, about half what she was paid four years earlier. The chairman at the time was Tim LeFever. In the most recent 990 (2017) he and treasurer Richard Treakle are the only listed officers. In most years they ran through a couple hundred thousand dollars--average revenue $131K, with tens of thousands in assets (except for 2017, when they ended up $4K in the red). Most of their money was spent on publications and PR. In 2011, CRI tried to get a gay textbook law overturned. In 2015, they co-signed a letter from Mike Huckabee warning of the evils of a gay marriage ruling by SCOTUS. 

In addition to serving as member of the Board of Directors for Pacific Justice Institute, yet another religious anti-LGBTQ+ outfit, Tim Lefever is a politican, attorney, and co-owner of a real estate company, as well as member of the Board of Directors for Pacific Justice Institute, yet another religious anti-LGBTQ+ outfit; CRI for a while had offices in the same building as the real estate company. But that's just the company Karen England keeps. Before we get sucked too far down this rabbit hole, back to her.

England has worked against many issues, including sex ed, drag queen story hours, Clark County school district trans regulations (women will be assaulted in rest rooms), and student privacy (irony alert). "We need to take back the land that was given to us," she once said, referring to children. In 2012, she was National Coalitions Director for Rick Santorum's Presidential run. 

She was active for a while with the California Republican Assembly, a group for California's social conservatives, and boy, did she piss some folks off. And I mean other right wing Republicans, one of whom, Aaron F. Park, runs a blog that is mostly about right-leaning issues, but which also includes some scathing indictments of England (and LeFever) for fraud and bullying and failed initiatives and botched coup attempts, and calling her "either incompetent or completely corrupt." A blistering post entitled "Dear Nevada, Welcome to California's Night mare Known as Karen England" says, in part

Fraud is Fraud. No true conservative does the things Karen England does. I am of the opinion that Karen England is a charlatan and I will relate a body of evidence I have assembled from dealing with her up close. I have the battle damage to prove it, including a legal threat letter from her lawyer. (I note that her lawyer certifies in the letter that “Ms. England is NOT Mentally Ill”.)

England is also accused of sucking up to Tea Party members to build a power base, and of trading bribes for political endorsements by CRI. The rage just jumps off the screen; here's one last example:

Those of us that still care about the California GOP will be ten years cleaning up the trail of destruction she has left behind. If you are a liberal democrat, don’t pat yourself on the back. Nevada is a different state. It will see-saw between parties. Unless a dedicated group of good people from both sides of the aisle put down the issues and focus on the demonstrated pattern of personal and professional corruption – like a leech and a cancer, Ms. England will metastasize and you will all be in the cross-hairs yourselves.

That was in 2015. Park later reports with no small glee that England is not doing so well in Nevada.

Bottom line?

It seems entirely possible that Nevada Family Alliance is actually just Karen England and nobody else. It is entirely possible that hollering about indoctrination may be a sincere concern or it may be that she, like many others, smells an opportunity to gin up some attention and work her way into the big leagues. 

Here at the Curmudgucation Institute, where a broad range of members from across the broad range of places, believe, based on our many supporters and broad sampling of fronds from among the grass roots, that the idea of putting body cams on teachers is stupid, offensive, and a gross violation of student privacy, an issue that Ms. England claims to care about. Here at the Institute, located at a secret address that we aren't going to share, we also believe that Nevada Family Alliance is quite possibly a scam, and that Ms. England is, herself, full of it. 

Utopia Thinking (Education Is A Journey, Not A Destination)

One of the signs that Common Core was fatally flawed was not just that it was one size fits all, but that it was one size fits all in four dimensions, that it would fit not just every student today, but every student in the future for years and years and years to come. There was no review process, no mechanism in place to revisit and adjust parts of it, not even an organization to provide oversight and reflection. And the guys who wrote it just released it and then walked away, moving on their next gigs. 

"Set it and forget it," is terrible education policy. Education exists at the intersection of innumerable strands of tension. Tension between the student's potential and what they are actually doing, between the curricular demands on the teacher and the realities in the classroom, between the expectations of the hundred different stakeholders, between following the program and being swept by the issues of the day, between autonomy and accountability (for everyone), between the demands of society and the desires of the student, between the weight of history and the press of the present, between the hundreds of pieces of content all clamoring for a piece of the limited time pie, and on and on and on and on and on. 

All of them shift on a daily basis, and every shift moves the target. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

You can pick your favorite metaphor. When I was blowing up my first marriage, I was trying to drive the bus by tying the wheel in place and setting a brick on the gas pedal, and every time I hit a tree, I deduced that I had tied the wheel in the wrong place and retied it. Not until it was too late did I realize that I had to actually drive the bus. Education is like that, too. The conditions change every day, and you have to steer to accommodate them.

So many attempts to "fix" education, both within the modern ed reform world and outside of it, involve a search for that perfect place, where we can just plunk everyone down and declare "Nobody move a muscle. If we just stay right here, things will be perfect." 

It takes many forms. No excuses schools try to block out as many factors as they can--teacher individuality, student circumstances, the random eruptions of human behavior--so they can stay locked in an education Utopia. Curriculum in a box, scripted teaching programs, teaching material "with fidelity," going "all in" on a particular education philosophy--all attempts to place a school in the middle of an educational Utopia and lock it in place. 

But that's not how education works. In fact, that's not how any human relationship works. There is no locking in on a perfect place because the definition of "perfection" changes every day, shifting with all the many tensions that we balance while we live in the world. We change. The students change. Circumstances change. Needs change. Strengths and weaknesses ebb and flow. We keep moving.

I understand the desire to find that perfect place and lock down in it. It's human to want to know that we have things set up so that tomorrow and tomorrow and a hundred thousands tomorrows yet to come will all be okay, that things are going to work the way they're Supposed To. Uncertainty and unpredictability are inefficient, and scary, plus if we could get things locked down ahead of time, we wouldn't have to deal with it in the moment all over again every single day. 

The often-unspoken part of Utopia thinking is "We'll get these things locked down in the perfect place--and then they will never change forever." Utopia is not only locked in place, but in time. And that's simply not how human existence works. We grow, we expand, we change, we learn. 

And so every idea to fix education that involves locating the solution, imposing the solution, and then locking it in place is doomed, doomed, doomed, just as surely as a wish that your ice cream cone stay just like this forever. Education is a journey, not a location, and it always has to keep moving. 

Dear Teacher At The End Of The 2020-2021 School Year

Congratulations.

You have made it to the end of the year which I'm pretty sure is burned into your brain as the worst in your career. But I am hugely impressed.

You did a lot of above-and-beyond things this year. All that retooling of lessons and materials for zoomification. All the driving of paper packets out to BFE so that the kids living in a shack without indoor plumbing or wifi could still do the work (which they mostly didn't, but you still made that possible for them anyway). The time you spent going in to school so that you could hand out lunches which meant not only that the kids could eat but that they could get the food from a friendly teacher face. The many phone calls you made just to try to find all the students and their families. 

Then the district opened the building after half-developing some policies which they then sort of followed, but you went in there and did the work and did your best to watch out for the kids, including the ones who were "challenging," in ways that I'm pretty sure would have been far more manageable in an ordinary year. The pandemic demanded both more instructional invention and emotional support for students and teachers alike. You stepped up.

You said that the end-of-year gifts from students were a little different this year. More heartfelt. I wonder if the zooming didn't make them more personally close to you, or if they simply appreciated how hard you worked at it this year. 

That would make sense, because you were a beast this year. You worked so damn hard, even when you didn't know what was going to happen next, even when you didn't know if the students were even seeing or hearing what you were doing, even when the country and the state provided no leadership or guidance (like, for some reason, this is one time they don't want to micro-manage you). 

It was a physically and emotionally taxing year, and you looked out for your colleagues, and you still took care of your family and managed something like a life beyond school. 

I know that what looms large for you is all the times you fell short, the lessons you didn't get to teach, the students you didn't connect with, the things you always look at and say, "If I were a better teacher, this would have gone better." You got an email of appreciation from the parents of one of your challenge students, and instead of fist-pumping the air and yelling, "Yay me," you cried because you don't think you did enough  for that child.

But I'm telling you that you were a damn hero this year (well, every year, but especially this year) and that you managed to make an omelet in the middle of a tornado and assemble an origami giraffe while on the back of a bucking bronco. You took care of your kids--and taught them--in the midst of chaos, with far less help than you deserved. Rest up. You've earned it. 

It's possible that I have one particular teacher in mind here, but I figured I'd post this for all the other teachers to whom it applies.

Educating the Unreadable Heart

The ongoing debate about teaching about race and history is a reminder of one of the fundamental challenges of education in a free society-- we may want to reach hearts and minds, but we can't read them.

The twins just turned four, and we are at one of the magical stages of childhood-- the Lie Your Tiny Ass Off stage. It's not that they are morally or ethically impaired, exactly. It's just that they've learned that there are "correct" answers to certain questions. If I ask, "Did you wash your hands," they know that I'm looking for a "yes." So why not give me what I want? They just haven't quite grasped yet the value of making their words correspond to reality.

Most humans catch on soon enough, but that basic skill never leaves them. 

Most, if not all, teachers want to influence young hearts and minds, not just program some correct answers into young humans. But you can never be absolutely sure you've accomplished it. That's why when people start throwing up their hands and wailing about how teachers are indoctrinating children, teachers are thinking, "I just spent a month trying to convince students that Ralph Waldo Emerson isn't stupid, and I'm not sure it went all that well. I'm not sure I'm the one to convince them to reject all the values they've picked up at home." 

In a classroom where one particular idea or value is clearly preferred, the learning most likely to occur is learning to give the "correct" answer in response to any prompt. The more clear you are on what answer is "correct," the less certain you can be that students actually believe what they are saying or writing. 

My old school, like many, had a Prom Promise program in which students signed a pledge not to drink on Prom night; a signed pledge got them trinkets like free pens and an entry into a prize drawing. One of my students observed that it was mostly about making adults feel good because they'd received those promises, and students meanwhile felt no compunction about going back on the pledge they'd made in exchange for a cheap bribe.

It's not nefarious dishonesty; it's just giving grown-ups what they want. But if we're not careful, we unintentionally teach some lessons not about race or history, but about how the game is played. 

All we have as a tool for assessing what is in hearts in minds are various forms of outward behavior, from picking a correct answer from four options on up to constructing a complex essay. This is one of the central tensions in a classroom-- a teacher trying to design a set of hoops to jump through that will separate those who have really learned from those who really haven't, and students trying to find the easiest way to navigate those hoops. 

This is why openness matters in a classroom. If students learn in September that they will get slapped down quickly for saying the wrong thing, they'll stop trying to understand or absorb or grapple in any honest way with the material, and they will focus instead on the central problem of "what does the teacher want me to say." If a student can't say X in your classroom, you will never have a productive conversation about X.

This is also, I think, why teachers sense that engagement is important. The "what does the teacher want" question is skin deep; it keeps the whole subject at arms' length; real thinking actually gets in the way. Student engagement means more involvement of the hearts and minds that we're trying to reach, and that means it's just a bit easier to read the unreadable.

Insisting on one single simplified view of a topic in a classroom isn't just a barrier to critical thinking; it's also a guarantee that whatever effect you hope to have on those hearts and minds, you are getting in your own way. If you believe those smiling faces all telling you exactly what to hear, well, I know a couple of four year olds who would love to tell you about how they washed their hands.