In Pennsylvania, where we ought to be focused on responding to a court finding that our whole method of funding public education is both inequitable and inadequate, our Democratic governor Josh Shapiro and the GOP legislators just cannot get over their desire for more school vouchers.
So there are hearings going on (and have been for some time). Recently one of the people offering testimony was Susan Spicka, of Education Voters of Pennsylvania. Spicka is a rock star in the world of supporting public education. At a hearing of the House Democratic Policy Committee, Spicka opened her testimony with these lines:
In his budget address, Governor Shapiro said, “It’s ridiculous that here in Pennsylvania two women can get married on a Sunday and fired from their job on a Monday, just because they’re in love.”
What Governor Shapiro left out is that the children of this couple could get kicked out of their private school on Tuesday. And that tax dollars are used to support this discrimination.
Discrimination is a feature, not a bug, of school voucher programs. Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) school voucher programs direct $470 million tax dollars into private and religious schools that can, and do, explicitly discriminate against students for just about any reason they choose.
During this particular hearing, Representative Ismael Smith-Wade-El asked the question that has been on lots of minds since the death of Nex Benedict (video below):
Do you feel that the outcomes of these sort of funding pass through and voucher programs pose a risk to the lives of transgender young people?
Spicka's answer was to the point. Yes.
If you're not living in an area like this I don't think that you can understand the impact that this hate that is coming out of these churches has on communities and on children, and without the tens of millions of dollars in voucher funding that has been poured into Lancaster County since eitc ostc was founded, these churches would not have the revenue that they have they would not have the expanse that they have. These churches are being funded by voucher dollars and they are spreading the hate.
Spicka's full testimony is worth reading, but I want to underline this point because it is often overlooked. It's not just that these discriminatory schools reject and expel students who don't align with their particular values. It's not just that they take taxpayer dollars and then decide which students they consider worthy of receiving an education, once again demonstrating that the promise of school choice is empty--it's school's choice instead.
It's also that by strengthening and funding these schools, taxpayers are energizing a source of toxic attitudes in the community. People who want to treat LGBTQ persons as Other, treat them as (as NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson puts it) "that filth," get to gather together in a bubble, convince each other that their way is the only right way, and then go out into the community and act on that belief.
We continue to see signs that increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric fuels more abuse and mistreatment of LGBTQ persons, and funding these christianist organizations makes it easier for them to amplify their anti-LGBTQ voices.
I use the term "christianist" because none of this discriminatory nonsense looks like the Christianity that I know. Look, if you feel you can't fully and freely exercise your religion without being able to marginalize, attack, and discriminate against certain classes of people, I'm pretty sure you're doing your religion wrong. You are making your community worse, and why taxpayers should finance your bad behavior is beyond me.
Don't forget to move the two or three items in your house that did not automatically change the time. Remember-- today won't be so bad, but tomorrow it's going to be a real treat to pull the bodies of yourself and your loved ones out of bed. But at least we have the comfort of knowing that daylight savings helps... something. I'm sure there's some good reason.
Lots of election results this week, including news from North Carolina, where Republicans decided they wanted to go full wingnut, including this candidate for state superintendent.
From Amanda Ruggeri in New Scientist, a piece that isn't about education exactly, except that this has rather huge implications for the whole idea of teacherbots and what they can't provide students.
Jennifer Cohn at the Bucks County Beacon has uncovered yet another planning document from Christian Nationalists who would like to be in charge of, well, everything.
Elizabeth Will-Greenberg reports for The Appeal on this story that is just as bad as it sounds. Bet you didn't know that Jim Crow laws were totally race neutral.
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Expect to see versions of this story over and over again. Charter schools mostly require some sort of authorizer to sign off on their ability to function, and those authorizers are backstopped by the state. Meaning that even in a state like North Carolina, a charter school can be a big enough mess to get itself shut down.
Charter schools in some states have barely minimal accountability and oversight. But "minimal" is still more than "none," and "none" is what most states have in place for school vouchers.
The state doesn’t ask potential vendors to submit a business or education plan up front. Anyone who wants to be an authorized Hope “service provider,” including a microschool, must sign a contract agreeing to get criminal background checks on staff working with students and to notify districts when they enroll. To receive funds, vendors need only submit a W-9, a tax form for an independent contractor, and document the Hope funds they receive from parents.
That's typical. In most voucher states, all you have to do to be a voucher "vendor" is just say so. And it's not just that voucher laws lack any sort of oversight or accountability mechanisms--most of the recent voucher laws or law expansions very specifically forbid oversight or accountability.
This has happened even as voucher fans have retired the talking point that vouchers allow students to get a better education. Fact is, most voucher laws are carefully designed in such a way that we have no idea what quality education students are getting.
Why are we here? It's simple.
Voucher programs are not about giving students access to quality education. Vouchers are about giving churches and businesses access to taxpayer dollars.
The less oversight and accountability, the more access to those taxpayer dollars. If that costs some students a few years of their education, oh well. They are not the priority.
"Teachers are embracing ChatGPT-powered grading," says the headline at Axios, and with all my heart I hope that's not true, because what a terrible idea. What a supremely terrible awful bad idea.
The good (-ish) news is that the article's source for this reported embrace is one of the companies pushing it. The bad news is that the company is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the 800 pound gorilla of school instructional materials.
It's not that tech has no place in the world of writing (obviously). There have some good pieces of software, for instance, that grew out of the idea of providing a quicker, simpler way of attaching those comments that you find yourself using on student work over and over and over again (though in my experience, as with lots of software timesavers, there's a huge investment of time up front to get the time savings further down the line).
But to use a bot to assess writing? Crappy idea.
This latest version (Writable) tries to soften the blow by calling for a "hybrid" system with "a human in the loop," which seems to mean that the bot assesses the writing and the human looks over its work, just in case. But why bother? To really check the bot's work would take as much time as just assessing the writing yourself. No, a human in the loop is just a wink wink nudge nudge moment, a way to help folks pretend that things haven't gone too far yet.
But what a lousy idea. Let me count the ways.
The software just isn't very good at it.
We have been over and over and over and over and over and over and over this. Computer software does not "know" or "understand" in any conventional sense of the words. Once you get past the very technical explanations (and here are three good ones of varying complexity), what AI language generating models do is decide, based on all the examples fed into them, what a very probable sentence might be. Give it a topic and specific sort of prompt (which basically allows it to narrow its sample base of examples), and it will give you a high-probability string of words. As an essay grader, what it can do is turn that around and decide if the submitted material falls within the probability parameters established by the examples it has "learned" from.
What it can't decide is whether or not the student has written something stupid. It may spot whether or not the student has included a specific example for support, but it can't judge how good an example it is. And given generative AI's propensity for just making shit up, it's not clear how good it would be at catching students doing the same.
Misplaced trust in authority.
Your computer cannot think, does not understand, is not smart in a conventional human sense of the word. It's an object whose virtues are an absolute tireless ability to follow instructions at the speed of light.
But since they first poked their heads into pop culture, computers have been portrayed as possessing some sort of objective superhuman wisdom and knowledge. And human beings continue to defer to computers as having some higher level of authority.
However, computers are machines. They do exactly what their human programmers tell them to do. Even when they employ machine learning to "teach" themselves, they do so according to the instructions of human programmers. In short, computers do not implement and express the computed wisdom of some higher power; they simply implement the ideas of whatever humans programmed them.
When it comes to insights that might take a human a lifetime to work out, like complicated computations, computers get us knowledge that we can trust and which would have been hard to find otherwise. But an essay is not a computation, and a computer has nothing to offer that improves on human judgment. Software assessment of writing should just be viewed as humans using the programming to make a judgment about writing, not as some sort of objective wisdom over and above what humans could provide. Yet, I'm afraid that some folks will view it as exactly that, and instead of treating the software assessment as they would one more human voice in the room (whose judgment might be suspect), they'll treat it as some digital Word Of God.
Distorting the entire process.
Writing is the work of communicating thoughts, ideas, emotions, and other human stuff to other human beings. Stringing words together in order to satisfy the algorithm is not any sort of meaningful writing (and that is true even if the algorithm is being applied by humans). This is conditioning young humans to string words together in a manner completely unrelated to anything they want to say or express.
Lord knows we don't need computers to promote this bad kind of word spitting. I've seen too many students who figured out that trying to focus on what they actually think or believe just gets in the way of satisfying the assessment algorithm that gives them their grade. And the Big Standardized Test only enshrined that sort of anti-writing as a important goal.
What do you suppose it does to a student's approach to writing when they start with the understanding that they are writing not for a human audience, but a computerized one? Not to communicate, but to perform word spitting for a digital audience?
Writable and its brethren are pitched as tools to save labor and time, but they save that labor and time by changing the very nature of the task and distorting the learning goals for students.
It could be worse, I suppose. The software could be wired to a dispenser that fed students a piece of candy every time they spit out an especially probably string of words. Or it could aim even more directly at the current internet cyber-hell, where AI spits out articles designed to be pleasing to the AI that pushes those articles on search engines-- "Ten Weird Tricks I Used To Enjoy My Summer Vacation (You won't believe number eight)"
I sure hope teachers don't embrace this attempt to train human children to become word spitting widgets. We can do better.
Back in its MAGA Moms for Liberty period, the Central Bucks School Board implemented so many discriminatory policies that both the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Education came after the district for creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students. So they hired the law firm Duane Morris to do an internal investigation. Turns out that the result was not just junk, by hugely over-priced junk.
The Duane Morris firm was an odd choice to begin with, as the firm includes Bill McSwain, a former failed GOP gubernatorial candidate whose candidacy included such great moments as calling the West Chester Area School Districts' Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club an example of "leftist political indoctrination." So maybe not the guy to take a hard look at the district's LGBTQ environment unless your fear is that it's not hostile enough.
The district got what they paid for – a one-sided investigation that was never intended to take seriously the allegations of a hostile environment for LGBTQ students at Central Bucks
It was not great. But now it turns out that it was also hugely overpriced.
Folks noted at the time that the $1 million bill from Duane Morris was pretty steep. But it has since mushroomed to $1.75, and many folks are crying foul--especially because the previous board majority knew.
Reporting for the Bucks County Courier Times, Jo Ciavaglia unearthed some emails from an attorney whose firm had previously worked for the district to former Superintendent Adam Lucabaugh and former board president Dana Hunter. Those emails warned that the bills were seriously inflated and that the district should seek both detailed documentation and reduced charges. That email was sent in June of 2023.
The attorney noted that while McSwain promised that associates and legal assistants would handle most of the work, keeping costs low, that's not what happened-- a whole team was brought in, and billed hours like crazy. Maddie Hanna of the Philadelphia Inquirer (whose work is always top notch), dug through some of those emails, for specifics like $10,000 billed for a memorandum after the interview of a middle school principal.
Turns out Duane Morris also helped the district draft some policy barring teacher "advocacy" in classrooms. The policy is a page and a half; it apparently took five lawyers to draft it.
This came under the same board that tried to give Lucabaugh a massive severance reward when the election showed shifting winds.
Central Bucks is a wealthy district, but that's not an excuse to throw taxpayer money around left and right (well, mostly right). That this particular fleecing was performed in the service of protecting an atmosphere hostile to LGBTQ students is doubly odious. If ever there were board members who deserved to be ousted, it was that crew. Let's hope the current board doesn't find any more messes to clean up after.
If you have not seen the 60 Minutes piece on book banning, here it is. Go ahead and watch; it will be thirteen and a half minutes well spent.
There are several things on display here, not the least of which is a school district taking a sensible students-first, parents-involved approach to the issue of difficult books.
Reporter Scott Pelley gets right to the heart of several issues. The difference between giving parents the tools to control what their own children can read (something the district also provides in spades) and trying to control what other parents can let their children read. The outrage-enhancing technique of treating isolated mistakes as proof of some widespread conspiracy.
In the midst of it all, the Moms for Liberty, with Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich finally seen in the footage from an interview they sat for way back in October of 2023.
The piece is tough on them. The parents that are set up to represent the district are Republican, conservative, combat veterans. Pelley in repeated voice overs points out that the Moms are evasive and avoid answering question but instead retreating to their talking points (he does not point out that they are seasoned political coms professionals, but he doesn't portray them as cookie-baking domestics, either). Some of the talking points were so six months ago. "We don't co-parent with the government," said the women whose demands include forcing the government to help them with the part of parenting that involves keeping an eye on what your children read and watch.
Their PR firm (Cavalry Strategies) was on the case this morning, emailing out the M4L transcript that includes the part that CBS didn't include, and offering the duo for press interviews to tell their story. It's an odd choice, because the stuff they want you to see is just more of the non-answering that CBS showed. That and they are really, really big sad that CBS chose not to air them reading the Really Dirty Parts or Certain Books. This remains one of their weirdest arguments--since this part of this book is too objectionable to read in certain situations, it must be too objectionable to be found in any situation. Like, it's not okay for me pee on the steps of City Hall at noon, so it must not be okay for me to pee anywhere, ever.
But the question that Pelley asked was a really, really good one. The Moms led into it by saying that although they love teachers so very much, there are some "rogue teachers" out there (I can hear the ty-shirts being printed already). "Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology."
And so Pelley asked the obvious question-- "What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into?"
And the Moms wouldn't answer. The extended answer in their email (and some tweets) suggests that they're talking about gender and sex stuff, and their go to example is telling five year olds that genders can be changed).
The answer remains unclear. What exactly is the objection? What is the problem? What does "gender ideology" even mean? Because the harder I stare at it, the more it seems as if the problem is acknowledging that LGNTQ persons exist.
But in the MAGA Mom playbook, that's not it as all, which brings us Pelley's other fruitless attempt to get the Moms to explain what they mean by all the "groomer" language that they use on their own social media. They really didn't want to talk about that, though they did insist that they like gay folks just fine. They didn't attempt to address the groomer question in their responses to the 60 Minutes piece. Perhaps that's because their premise makes no sense.
But if you boil it all down, this is what you get.
If you acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist in front of children, then you are grooming those children to become LGBTQ.
Part of the premise for that is an old one-- if you believe that nobody is born That Way, that nobody is LGBTQ by nature, then you must believe that all LGBTQ persons are recruited.
But to jump from there to the notion that simply acknowledging that LGBTQ persons exist must only be about recruiting--that's a hell of a leap. And it leads to the worst culture panic impulse, which is to erase those persons, to treat them as if their very existence must be a dirty secret.
And because acknowledging them is equated with grooming other children, this becomes the worst brand of othering. To make it okay to attack the Other, you have to establish that the Other represents a threat, that you need to defend yourself against them. And that makes violence against them okay.
So when Ryan Walters says that he's not playing "woke gender games," he's saying that he won't acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist, and that anyone who does acknowledge they exist is trying to attack children and groom them and so that "woke mob" is attacking, and so it's okay to attack back. When the Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate calls LGBTQ persons "filth," particularly in the context of talking about them in school at all ever, that message is pretty clear.
Pelley's unanswered questions point us at the nuance missing in the Moms for Liberty outrage and panic factory, the nuance that recognizes that reasonable intelligent people can disagree about the value of certain books. In the real world, there's a huge difference between showing six year olds graphic depictions of the ways one can use a penis and a non-graphic depiction of LGBTQ persons. There's a vast gulf between grooming some small child for sexual abuse and simply acknowledging there are some LGBTQ persons in the world (and possibly in the classroom or the homes of class members). There's a planet-seized difference between saying "LGBTQ persons are not extraordinary or unnatural" and saying "You should become an LGBTQ person." And yet, in the Moms for Liberty universe, there is no difference between any of those things.
It's very hard to distinguish between the opportunists and the truly panicked on this issue. The Heritage Foundations Project 2025 seems like an opportunist's political project, but it is also shot through with what seems like a sincere and extreme LGBTQ panic. The Ziegler scandal deserves attention because it suggests that one founding M4L member is not all that freaked out about non-het sex.
But at a certain level, it doesn't matter whether all this LGBTQ panic is sincere or not, because as the toxic sludge filters through the culture, some people feel justified, even encouraged, in violence and mistreatment of actual human beings. No amount of carefully refined talking points will change that; only the kind of nuanced, complex conversation that doesn't get you a special seat at the MAGA table.
The encouraging part of the 60 Minutes piece is that it shows how ordinary folks can actually have some of those conversations. Over a hundred citizens came together to have some thoughtful consideration about the list of 97 books that were marked for removal, and they kept 92 of them. Imagine that.
Yeah, here at Curmudgucation Institute headquarters, neither a lamb nor a lion showed up, continuing our trend of having a winter that's not very wintery. Maybe later. But there's still plenty to read. Here we go!
Arizona's barely-regulated voucher system continues to provide lots of benefits to grifters and fraudsters looking to gather some green. This latest scam involves a whole lot of ghost students. Wayne Schutsky has the story for KJZZ.
Ron DeSantis has been trying to redeem his book ban laws by claiming that all the terrible stories that you hear about books in Florida are just hoaxes and baloney, perpetrated by people trying to make the whole book banning thing look bad. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains how his "solution" puts school principals in the cross hairs.
Philadelphia had big plans for a charter-driven turnaround, because of course charter operators know secrets of education that public schools don't. Except that it didn't actually work. I know, shocker! Dale Mezzacappa breaks it down for Chalkbeat.
Michael Griffie writes for the Detroit Free Press that Michigan is still dealing with the mess that the DeVos dollars made of public education, and it's time to rebuild.
Governor Roy Cooper and Governor Andy Bashear team up in this USA Today op-ed and they mince no words. If you'd like to see an elected official actually stand up for public education, you'll want to read this.
Samantha Smylie at Chalkbeat Chicago with yet another study showing that vouchers don't aid academics. Illinois is the first state to have rolled back its voucher program, and from the looks of this study, they didn't lose anything worth keeping.
Here's some fun. Akil Bello ran this piece in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks back, and it's well worth a read. But then you can also read this piece, in which he looks at the material that he cut from the IHE piece, which is pretty interesting stuff in its own right.
A while back, I did a review of Gayle Greene's book about teaching the humanities. Here's another look at this very worthwhile book, this time from Nancy Bailey.
The Friendly Atheist breaks down the flap over the Politico writer whose misquoting has launched a whole lot of high dudgeon on the right. Best breakdown of the story I've read.
