Are Parents' Rights The Only Ones We Need To Worry About?

Being a parent is a scary business. Suddenly you've got these tiny humans to take care of and you don't know what you're doing and you try to make the best choices you can even though you're worried that you may be scarring them for life but you invest your heart and soul into trying to keep them safe and smart and growing up to be good people. And then just as they're starting to turn into real people and you're even starting to feel like you're getting a handle on things, you reach a point where you have to start handing their care and safety over to other people--people you don't even know--and you discover whole new levels of fear and anxiety. 

All of this is real. It's important to remember that. It's important to remember that no matter how many times the concern is exploited by charlatans and opportunistic demagogues, the concern is real. 

Parents rights is a hot political ticket right now, and like the best political opportunities, it has some basis in reality. Parents do, and should, have rights when it comes to their children. 

But--and this is a huge, important but-- any system that recognizes and supports parental rights must also recognize and protect the rights of children.

Right wing folks are fond of saying, "My child does not belong to the government" That's true. Your child is a human being. They don't belong to the government or the school or you--they belong to themselves. And because they lack the power and agency to fully protect their own rights, they need a champion, a person with power and agency to stand in their corner.

Ideally, that person would be a parent. But any responsible system has to recognize the reality that there exists a non-zero of bad parents out there. Some of them are spectacularly bad (like the parents who held their twelve kids captive); some of them even make news. 

Every teacher has stories. Kid thrown out of the house after a big argument with his dad about sharing drugs. Kid's drunken mom tries to purposefully run them down with the family car. Girl's dad punishes her by shaving her head; sends her to school with instructions to the school not to let her try to hide it with a hat. Kid falls asleep because Dad spends the utility money on beer, so there's no heat at home and it's hard to sleep. Kid's father leaves town to start life in new town with new wife and baby, and tells kid not to bother trying to visit because he's got a new life now.

This is over and above the more pedestrian stuff, like the parent who sits in a parent-teacher conference and berates the child for being stupid and lazy "like always." The parent who is never home. 

To be clear, these parents are not even close to the majority of parents. But I don't think you can find a school anywhere, regardless of race, wealth, or any other demographic marker, that does not have a few of these stories every single year. 

So any time you start talking to me about upholding parents rights, I will want to hear about how your "solution" will involve protecting the rights of young humans--not just from the school, but from their peers and their own parents. I don't want distrust of parents to be the default any more than I think distrust of teachers or schools should be the default--but there must be mechanisms in place to protect students rights when they are threatened and that must take precedent over parental rights.

If talking about parents rights, we also need to discuss rights of other stakeholders. Some parent "rights" cannot be honored without damage to society. Those parents who believe they have a "right" to raise their white children in a segregated environment. Parents who believe they have a right to place their child in a school where Those People's Children are not allowed to attend. Now we get into a different conversation, a conversation not about whether parents have the right to make that choice, but whether or not taxpayers have an obligation to fund it. Do parents have the right to make choices that are bad for society--and do they have the right to have society pay for those choices?

It is easy to demand that parents be in control of their child's education, that you shouldn't have to co-parent with the government--which is just another way that you should be allowed to make your own way and that your child should be totally dependent on your capabilities as a parent--when you are confident that you personally have the resources to navigate that challenge. Not everyone does, and a non-zero number of parents are not even trying under the current system, even with all its built-in supports and assistance. 

Parents must be partners with the schools that educate their children--but when they are incapable or unwilling to hold up their half of the partnership, schools need to step in. Parents' rights are important--but when they clash with the rights of the child, the child's rights must take precedence. Waving the parents right banner is swell for politics (must be, because it keeps coming back time and time again as a cover for other activities), but it's not a great way to put students first in education.

Education Is Not A Market Good, Episode 564,221

 A fun story from Tik Tok via Daily Dot, and which has been bouncing around for a while, showing once again how the free market actually works.

The clip is from a Door Dasher, and it shows a wall's worth of bags at McDonalds, waiting for someone to Door Dash them to the person ordering. They are sitting and languishing because the customer did not attach any kind of tip to them and Door Dash pays diddly. 

This is a lesson for every DeVos-style "education should be a Uber" person out there--if you make a good or service an item on the free market AND you also set up that good or service to be provided by gig workers, what you've basically a bidding system in which said goods/services go only to those who are willing to win the bid. That system will also set a low bar, a "this is not enough money to bother with" bar, below which you will find phenomenon like a wall full of cold Bic Macs.

So let's say that we go to an voucher/esa system, in which the state says, "You're on your own parents-- go buy your kid some education." Who wins the bidding war for education services-- the parents who have just the voucher money to spend, or the parents in a position to sweeten the pot? Where will the market set the inevitable "this customer won't make me enough money to bother with" bar? And what can be done for the people on the low side of that bar? Well, maybe there will be a public system limping along that they can go back to. 

The free market picks winners and losers, both among vendors and among customers. The sad Micky D's wall is a reminder of that.

Dear Teacher Near The End Of Your Rope:

It's not you.

You may be thinking that it's you, that if you were better, stronger, a more gifted teacher, a more resilient human being, somehow this year would not be feeling like an uphill slog against a downhill landslide. You may be thinking that somehow you're missing something, failing to catch something, just not getting your best foot forward. 

It's not you.

First of all, I can guarantee you it's not just you. I spend a chunk of my days reading education writing from all across the country and the "I can't do this any more" teacher is currently a thriving genre--and it's just the tip of the iceberg. So you are not somehow weaker than all the other cool teachers who are just sailing through this sea of shit.

Second of all, the list of things you didn't sign up for is now longer than the drive-through line at your local understaffed fast food joint. You didn't sign up to teach next to people who don't take the pandemic seriously or surrounded by the children of people who don't take the pandemic seriously. You did not sign up to be regularly vilified for teaching that thing about race that some folks can't explain but they're pretty sure your commie butt is indoctrinating their children with it every day. You didn't sign up to be jerked back and forth by incomplete and rapidly shifting responses to that pandemic that mostly result in half-assed measures that are not remotely reassuring. You did not sign up to be the default villain in whatever tale of woe is a headline today. (To be fair, unless you've been in the classroom for over twenty-some years, you did actually sign up to teach in a country where attempts to murder your students and you are considered the price of freedom, and while they are actually numerically rare, that possibility always hangs over your head--but none of that, unfortunately, is news.) And of course, you can't take a day off without feeling guilty about all the coverage your colleagues have to do because you're not there.

In educationland it is raining, pouring, drenching tubs of water and sleet and hail, and the administrators who are supposed to be putting a roof over your head are either too swamped by the gaping holes in their own roofs, or they're handing you cute little pep talk tissue umbrellas, or reminding you to go build your own self-care roof, or they aren't even trying (there are some out there getting the job done, and you can tell it immediately by how much less stress their teachers are carrying). Meanwhile, too many other people who ought to build the roof over the school, like legislators and leaders and even parents, are heaving buckets of water at you. And the folks who are rooting for public education to fail, to be smashed apart out of visceral hatred or a desire to sell off the parts or a dream of not having to pay taxes to educate Those People--all of those folks are emboldened by the storm and have set their firehoses to full. 

You already know a lot of this, but you don't dare to breathe a word of it because you know that you'll just be branded a whiner. That and perhaps the gnawing feeling that it really is your fault that you feel soaked to the bone. Maybe you're imagining it. Maybe it's not so bad.

You're not imagining it.

I'm in no position to tell you whether it's time to get out or not--only you know what you can take. I can say this: I am sure that whatever divine spark, whatever ability tempered by experience and sharpened skills, that lifted you through the classroom in better days is still there. It may be gasping for air, but I believe it's still there, mostly because everything that's making it hard to feel that teacher spark at the bone is a big collection of things that are Not Teaching. And I believe that the pendulum always swings, and that there is another side of All This, and at some point we will come out there and we may find ourselves in a place that doesn't look like the Before Times, but that place will still need schools and teachers. Bottom line--this right now is not forever. I hope you don't quit. But, as I said, only you know how much is too much.

Right now, and on the other side, there will be students who need you, who will benefit from your presence (my twins will be among them). I say this not to guilt you, but to assure you that while you may feel as if you're shoveling jello with a pitchfork, your efforts are not wasted. You are not doing this for nothing. Sometimes it takes all your effort and energy just to keep from moving backwards, but holding that line, or even reducing the amount of ground you give up--that's not nothing. Only you can decide if it's enough, but it's not nothing.

I hope the people who love you are holding you up. I hope the holiday break is helpful. I'm not here to offer advice today. Just to confirm that it's not you.

Can You Beat The Virtual Proctor?

Distance learning ushered in huge market opportunities for virtual proctoring businesses. These offered a method of watching students take on-line tests and making sure they don't cheat. It sems like an elegant solution--except that the programs stink. 

Take Proctorio, one of the big names in student test surveillance. They impose requirements that are a burden on poorer students, and their "machine learning and advanced facial detection technologies" work badly enough to cause student uprisings. And they play hardball; after trying to squelch a student twitter beef against them, they sued an instructor for posting videos about the company even though the videos were available on youtube.

Virtual monitoring has been one more example of not-ready-for-primetime AI, creating numerous problems for the students who are often forced to use it, from privacy violations to triggering cheating alerts for minor behavior like looking away from the camera (and heaven help the student who needs to pee while taking the test). Also, as is not unusual with facial recognition software, it dopesn't always do well with Black faces. It has been an unholy mess. 

If you want to have the experience, YR Media, a "national networ4k of young journalists and artists" has whipped up Surveillance U, a virtual proctor simulator, plus an assortment of demonstrations of how a virtual student can be nailed for cheating. You can give it a try (spoiler alert--you're a cheater) and see some of what students have been complaining about. 

There's no doubt that one of the challenges of distance learning is distance cheating. But it continues to be clear that virtual proctoring is not the answer. 

ICYMI: Lights Up Edition (12/5)

We are in the unusual position of putting lights up this year. I call it unusual because traditionally I just never take them down at all. Glad to do it and bring something to this miserable week. Maybe some year I'll finally be able to take down the call for reasonable gun control that sits in the right-hand column here. At any rate, here's some reading from the week.

More Sins of Omission

TC Weber provides a breakdown of some of the sweetheart deals and big spending going on in Tennessee--quietly.

The Democratic Dilemma on Dark Money\

This may not be easy to read, but it's important. Rachel Cohen explains why we're not going to get an end to dark money any time soon--because everybody is addicted to it at this point.

Oregon Trail at 50

Truth is, the74 has evolved to the point that it sometimes publishes some good stuff. This piece traces the history of your favorite pioneering game. Who among us has not died of dysentery? Created by teachers.

The New White Flight: banning uncomfortable books

Gretchen Eick offers some commentary about the current rash of book banning around the country, this time going after books that include the embarrassing parts of America's past.

Violence and Threats in School: Who's Responsible

Nancy Flanagan is in Michigan, a state on edge because of a round of social media threats to schools, now given more weight by the murder of four students this week. As always, she has some on point thoughts.

Caught in the Middle

If you're a teacher in Indiana hired a decade or so ago, congratulations--you've landed right in a dead spot in the state's teacher compensation plan. Some teachers are speaking out--here's the explanation.

Program shows promise putting more Black men in classrooms

In Alabama, there's a program that seems to be showing success addressing one of education's ongoing problems-- a shortage of Black male educators.

The Black people who lived in Walden Woods long before Henry David Thoreau

The Washington Post's Sydney Trent has one of those little-known stories of US history. Who got to Walden before HDT?

Current Attack on Democracy and Public Education

Thomas Ultican has followed the thread of Koch dollars through a host of causes and organizations, many of which have public education in their sights.

What gets taught?

“How does this apply to me when I teach in a school with all-white staff and an almost all-white student body?” Jose Luis Vilson has been asked the question--more than once. Here's his answer.

Amazon, The Algorithm, and the Future of Education

Intriguing piece in the New York Times yesterday, looking at Amazon's bookstore (and business in general) and how it has become an unholy mess. 

It is framed by a lawsuit being brought by an author, John C. Boland, who has found his own work listed at hundreds of dollars with a false, much earlier, publication date. This, it turns out, is just a tip of the proverbial iceberg. The online market is overrun with third party sellers, and has not shown much interest in policing resulting way-open marketplace. Reporter David Streitfeld rattles off the list of unhappy people:

There are sellers like Mr. Boland, who say they are suffering from the Wild West atmosphere on the site; regulators, who are taking a closer look at Amazon’s power; unhappy warehouse employees, who would like a better deal; and lawmakers, who want Amazon to disclose more about its third-party sellers. There are also the devious sellers themselves, whom Amazon says it is having a hard time eradicating.

Amazon has defended itself from Boland's lawsuit in court, but Streitfeld shows example after example of how the algorithm fails customers, ranking books in categories they don't belong and worse, elevating crap. I don't mean another badly written Dan Brown novel, but things like a knockoff Dave Grohl biography written in Almost English and yet sold "side by side" with the actual Grohl memoir. Meanwhile, the algorithm also removes all sorts of books for reasons known only to the computer. 

Streitfeld talks to Stacy Mitchell, author of Amazon's Toll Road: How the Tech Giant Funds Its Monopoly Empire by Exploiting Small Businesses. 

Amazon “doesn’t care if this third-party stuff is a chaotic free-for-all,” she added. “In fact, it’s better for Amazon if legitimate businesses don’t stand a chance. In the same way Amazon wants to turn all work into gig jobs, it wants to turn running a business into a gig job. That way it can walk off with all the spoils.”

Or consider this:

“In some ways Amazon doesn’t really want to be a retailer,” said Juozas Kaziukenas of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce consultant. “It doesn’t want to do curation or offer human interaction,” two of the essential qualities of retail for centuries.

Offering tens of millions of items to hundreds of millions of customers prevents any human touch — but opens up a lot of space for advertising, and for confusion and duplicity. This might be good for Amazon’s competitors in physical bookstores, which have a much smaller and more tightly controlled stock. But it does not bode well for e-commerce.

Why am I writing about this here? Because the future that some folks envision for education is education as e-commerce. Parents get their voucher, aka Education Savings Awesome Freedom Account debit card, and then go shopping for vendors to provide various bits and pieces of a full education. 

One common feature of the various ESA programs being rolled out or expanded across many states is that, like Amazon, the state provides little or no oversight or is even actually forbidden from exercising oversight of these various edu-vendors. It is the parents' problem to sort through the marketplace, to figure out which vendors are the real deal and which are not. In effect, vouchers turn running a school into a gig job done by parents, who will find themselves bombarded with the educational equivalent of fake biographies in Almost English and robocalls from the nice lady worried about your car warrantee. And for the bazillionth time, no, that algorithm being marketed as AI is not going to do the job for you, nor is it going to successfully personalize your child's education. 

Amazon is a trillion-dollar company that  has been unable to make all this work. There is no reason to believe that a privatized education market place will do any better.

(Incidentally, between bookshop.org and alibris.com, I find pretty much every book I'm looking for)

PA: Board Activism Versus Board Business

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a piece by Campbell Robertson contrasting the light and heat surrounding school boards with the actual problems crying for attention. The piece opens with a fairly stark example from Doylestown, PA:

Early in the November school board meeting, a few of the departing members made farewell remarks, talking of things that they believed still need addressing: more special education programs, mental health initiatives, a program for high school students to take college classes. There was a long list, but over the past two years other things had gotten in the way.

When the meeting opened up to public comments, there was an indication of what those other things might be. Parents and other residents took turns standing before the board, speaking about Zionism, Maoism, slavery, freedom, the Holocaust, critical race theory, the illegality of mask requirements, supposed Jewish ties to organized crime and the viral falsehood that transgender students were raping people in bathrooms.

“I fight here week after week,” one woman said, “to ensure that my children will never be subject to having their freedom taken from them.”

"Well, at least I don't have to wear a mask" 

There's this thing that happens, often, with one-issue school board candidates. They run for their particular issue (often a local concern like "save our elementary football program") but then they get on the board and discover that school board work is largely about very unglamorous nuts and bolts decisions. But now we're seeing districts that are being ground to a halt by people who don't care about the nuts and bolts--they just want their righteous--and sometimes imaginary--cause to be championed, at length.

We'll know better in the next couple of months. Some analysts believe that most of the board candidates who ran on liberty and anti-mask and anti-CRT did not win. 

But I live in Trump Country, and several local districts are feeling the pinch. Keystone School District was one of many that saw a contentious and successful campaign by anti-mask, anti-vax, grumpy parents candidates whose stated objectives include things like "put myself between our government and our kids." That in district's whose board has already spent a lot of angry time in struggles with mask mandates, to the point that they've had trouble filling the superintendent spot.

If you really want to see this sort of trouble in action, let me take you down the road a little past the Keystone District to Redbank Valley Schools, where an incumbent was unseated by a young local. Mitch Blose is a RVHS grad and volunteer coach. The election was not as contentious as some (pro tip-- in PA board candidates can cross-file with both parties, so trying to track party affiliation is not always helpful), and in the end Blose won.

His first act as a new member was to shut down board business.

The member-elect attended the board meeting as a member of the public, and refused to wear a mask. So the board held an executive session (required in PA for any personnel or student issues) and then quit for the night. This isn't remotely the first such occurrence-- back in September the Oil City School District board shut down a meeting because a couple of freedom fighters, including one student, refused to mask up for the meeting. Similar tales can be heard from around the country.

The Redbank Valley incident gets some extra detail because nobody thought to turn the livestream off right away, so Blose's arguments with board members was broadcast live. Nobody wanted to defend masking, but one board member pointed out that it looks bad when you make the kids do it and you don't. But another gets closer to the heart of the issue.

“Mr. Blose, I don’t want to wear this mask,” Reddinger answered. “I don’t want to see anyone else wear the mask, but at the same time, I am obligated to this board, sitting in this chair. I am obligated to the taxpayers, to the lawsuits."

As is infrequently noted, mask mandates are related to liability issues. If the state has mandated masks, and you don't follow the mandate, you are an expensive lawsuit waiting to happen. The first time someone can show they got sick in your facility, it will be costly. Consequently, many school district lawyers have been having quiet Come To Jesus meetings with their boards. 

In Pennsylvania, the state mandate for school masking is set to end in January, at which point local districts will have to relitigate the whole thing on their own. Expect lots and lots of spirited public debate, a reshuffling of enrollment in and out of cyber schools, and in general a whole lot of time spent on things other than the actual regular operation of the school district and dealing with the various challenges of doing the work. Bus drivers. Bus routes. Budgets. Program costs. Special ed. Lunch prices. Whatever specific challenges have cropped up in the district. And there's an unmeasurable secondary effect--how many people who would have been really useful board members said, "Well, I don't want to wade into this mess," and stayed at home instead? I'd like to be more optimistic, but I see some rough days ahead.