John King's New Year

New Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King hit the ground running with New Year's wishes and this New year's tweet

As 2016 begins, I resolve to work hard for students, teachers, and anyone seeking a better life through education pic.twitter.com/8h8XqfkWXT

— John King (@JohnKingatED) January 1, 2016

Now, it's not that anybody is watching King carefully to see which way he's going to jump-- his tenure as education chief in New York State already tells us what to expect. He has an inspiring back story, from which he himself appears to have missed the most important lessons. He has a healthy ego, but he is not so keen on dealing with the public. The first words of his twitter profile are "Taught HS social studies" but not "for only a couple of years in a charter school." King is a fine example of a test-and-punish, privatizing reformster policy leader.

His three resolutions are... well, interesting.

Working to ensure that every student in America-- regardless of zip code or background-- has the opportunities a high-quality education provides.

First, let's note what this doesn't say. It doesn't say "Making sure that every community is served by a great school in their own zip code."

Second, "working to ensure" is politician to "try real hard" which may be more realistic than saying, "we are going to do this" but is also less aspirational. Given the lofty aspirations that USED likes to set for teachers and students, it seems like a lowball.

Finally-- the opportunities a high-quality education provides. That's a lot to unlock. When a wealthy, well-connected scion of a wealthy, well-connected family lands a great job opportunity, was that opportunity provided by education, or something else? This is a statement that invokes "zip code and background," the new euphemism for "non-wealthy and non-white" that pretends that socio-economic issues descend like weather systems upon randomly selected neighborhoods-- it invokes all that, and then goes out of its way to ignore the role of poverty, race and class on opportunity in this country. We really need to have an honest conversation about what opportunities a high-quality education opens up. Mind you, I have a high opinion of the value of a high-quality education, and if I had my way, every student in America would get one. But to continue with this fiction that just fixing up some schools will create economic mobility and shrink the yawning chasm of economic inequality in this country is the silliest kind of fiction.

Supporting our nation's educators and elevating the teaching profession.

A good way to elevate the teaching profession would be to treat teachers like they are important education experts worth listening to. Imagine a world where, before something like ESSA could pass, every legislator says, "Hold on-- I can't vote on this until I have some teachers from my home district look at it and tell me what they think." Imagine a Department of Education that actually incorporates and listens to working teachers-- and not just hand-picked ones who have established that they will not say anything that makes the department bureaucrats sad. In fact-- and I know I'm talking crazy talk here-- imagine a world where a career as a working public school teacher was considered a necessity to serve as Secretary of Education.

Of course, we'll just have to imagine. Because in this world, "elevate the profession" means "make up more rules and regulations to force the profession to look more the way we wise bureaucrats think it should look." Thanks a lot, guys.

Improving access, affordability, and completion in higher education for all.

We have got to talk about this fetishization of college education. I like college. I support college. Went there, sent both my kids there. But the world also needs all sorts of people who don't need college degrees (you can still put on a blindfold, throw a dart at a map, and hit some place where you can go find a well-paying job as a welder). Public education has always suffered from a pro-college bias that does not always serve the needs of students or community, but we are veering closer and closer to a world where education policy says, "Look, kid, I don't care what you want to be when you grow up. The US wants a higher college attendance-completion rate so we can look good when we're hanging out with Estonia, so write a check, take out some loans, and get in there. Major in something."

This talk of affordability is particularly nervy, because the feds in general and the USED in particular have done exactly jack squat to make college affordable (including giving up the huge profits that the feds pocket from college loans).

But this is one of the hallmarks of reformsterism-- we can make education better by forcing more students to become customers of this testing service, or this charter school, or this college.

The missing

I could devote a mile of scrolling screenery to all the things that Acting Pretend Secretary King doesn't address, like empowering communities to create and steer their schools, or pushing states to fully fund all schools, or demanding that each school provide a full range of services, or declaring that the Big Standardized Tests are a waste of everyone's time, so the USED will be spending $0.00 on enforcing compliance with ESSA's testing demands.

He could make a call for more social and economic justice. He could demand that every zip code be a place where students can be free from danger and hunger so that they can focus on education. He could resolve to actually listen to parents and teachers and students. He could resolve to open his mind to a fuller idea of what a high-quality education is beyond "one that results in high test scores in math and reading."

But he didn't. First day on the job, and Acting Pretend Secretary King is already living up to our low expectations of him. Just once I would like a politician to surprise me in a good way. But that is not how we're going to start the year at USED.

The Best Lobbyists

Most industries are the subject of reports about the effectiveness of the various players. Why would the lobbying industry be any different? Let me introduce you to Bloomberg's quarterly report on the Best-Managed Lobbyists in the government sector.

We're going to look at the third-quarter report from 2015, and it starts by laying out the challenges of the current DC.

For lobbyists, Washington is growing more complex and more competitive. Lobbyists say their clients are more sophisticated. Clients expect more, despite there being fewer opportunities to influence legislation. Competition, lobbyists say, is intense–and growing.

Bloomberg notes that (in a sign of These Tough Times) that out of 1300 lobbying groups, only 22 are Bloomberg certified awesomesauce proficient performers who exceed expectations.

To be influential, firms need to be savvy about how they use information to get ahead. “There was a time when personal relationships were the only thing that mattered,” Greg Nickerson of the #1 ranked Washington Tax & Public Policy Group tells us  (page 4). “Those days are gone.”

So what does the report tells us about these days. Well, there's a list of the top ten issues for which lobbies were filing (that's out of 79 possibilities). Budget is #1, followed by taxes. Number ten on the list? Education. So we're still in the lobbying world's top 10. Which begs the question-- why are so many lobbying firms lobbying education, and who are they lobbying for?

Whatever they're up to, it's not cheap. Bloomberg ranks the top ten industries on lobbying spending, and "Education Services" comes in at number three with $16.8 million spent on lobbying in just the third quarter.

The report rates the best of the lobbying world, based on four criteria (remember, relationships aren't enough any more)--

Growth (are they making more money every year?)
Accretive growth (they need to be getting more money from each client every year)
Client retention (can't just be churning up every year)
Employee profitability (keep talent happy and productive)

Says Tony Costello, Bloomberg's head of lobbying product and analysis, notes, "Quite frankly, these are the criteria you would track for any kind of business." Let's keep that in mind the next time someone is talking about treating schools like businesses.

The report also includes some brief interviews with leading lobby guys. Here are some choice moments.

Greg Nickerson: I truly believe the single most important factor to success in this business is earning the trust of  your clients and of members of Congress and their staffs.

Matt Keelen: Lobbying has gone from “what can you do for me as  a firm over the next several years” to “what have you done for me this week.”  

Steve Clark: Lobbyists help clients understand, and effectively influence, the full range of politics and policy, whether it be lobbying, fundraising, agency expertise, coalition building, grassroots or working with press and media.

Dan Fans: We believe lobbying today is simply shorthand for a person who can provide solutions to diverse, complex issues in a proactive manner while dealing with unforeseen variables pretty much 24/7. Lobbyists provide critical information to policymakers that allow them to be better informed on the issues, which is coincidentally why lobbying is one of the few professions enumerated in  the Constitution.

David Lugar: The biggest misconception is that somehow the profession is this awful group of people. But, during many legislative battles, the lobbyists help to give an honest assessment of how a particular policy might affect the economy and/or employment in a particular district or state. Often times one of the lobbyists might be one of the few with institutional knowledge. So in general there are a number of beneficial things we  offer to the process.

Lugar makes me wonder-- what lobbyists in DC know anything at all about actual education? Making money from education, perhaps. The corporate ins and outs of benefitting from education policy, probably. But actual education? I suppose it doesn't matter. Nothing in this report suggests that top quality lobbyists actually do legwork, study and connecting with people who really know the business. Just keep making more money.

Tamir Rice Is Dead

Much has been written about the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, most of it written in an attempt to put Rice's death in some sort of larger context, or to resist the creation of any such larger context. But what keeps coming back to me is how awful it is, how appalling it is all by itself.

For those of you for whom it has become a sort of background noise, one more example of That Awful Thing That Keeps Happening, I just want to focus on this one stupid death.

Watch the video. Rice is hanging out in the park, and the police car races up, onto the grass. The policeman on the passenger side shoots Rice in less time than it takes to read this sentence, before he can even get all the way out of the car. No warning, no instructions, no chance for Tamir Rice to do much of anything in reaction to the car barreling across the grass in the park.

Why were the police there? Another person in the park made a 911 call about a kid waving a gun around. Probably a fake, but he's scaring people.

What happened next? The police left Rice lying on the ground, dying. When Rice's sister arrived and tried to run to her brother's side, they tackled and cuffed her. And then, Rice died.

There are plenty of questions here. Why drive the squad car so close to Rice in the first place? Why no warnings? Don't even the most casual tv cop show watchers know, "Freeze! Police! Drop it!!"

And one of the biggest questions-- why had anyone given Timothy Loehmann a badge and a gun? His previous experience was four months of police academy, followed by one month on a force during which his superiors determined that he was unfit for duty-- emotionally unstable and unwilling to follow orders. He quit before he could be fired. the Cleveland police department never checked his record, even though it had all happened about a dozen miles away.

Now, as the rest of us welcome in the New Year and clean up the dishes of last night's celebration as we prepare to watch the Rose Parade on tv, Tamir Rice's family faces another holiday for which their son, their child, is not there. Because he's dead. And not because of some tragic accident or random disease, but because somebody shot him. We can talk all day about what Rice did or didn't do, how wise or unwise he was in those moments, but we have to remember that those moments are now past, and Tamir Rice is dead. Do you see anything on that tape, in these events, that justifies a death sentence for Tamir Rice? Neither do I.

I have relatives who are police; like most police, they are good men doing an important job. I know a little bit about how tough and dangerous certain situations can be, how split-second decisions in moments of huge stress can be hard and important. This was not one of those situations, and everything that made it more tense (the dispatcher who didn't report that probable fakeness of the gun, parking the car only feet away from Rice) was a mistake by the authorities, not the child. If Tamir Rice had been shot by a civilian in those exact circumstances, and that civilian was put on trial, and claimed self-defense, that civilian would be laughed into the penitentiary.

I wonder how you teach in a situation like this. How do you teach children to deal with authority in the school building when the authority outside that building might kill them, suddenly, in the space of seconds, with no warning, no chance to save themselves. How do you help a classroom of twelve-year-olds wrap their brains around a classmate's loss at the hands of police, for nothing, at the hands of police. How do you prepare students to live in a world where that happens?

I wonder what it was like in Cleveland at Christmastime, watching the unending reruns of Christmas Story, another Cleveland classic story. From the house where Ralphie went outside to shoot his BB gun to the park where Tamir Rice died holding his is about five miles-- a ten minute drive according to Google. Ralphie was worried about shooting his eye out; nobody was worried that a policeman would drive up and shoot Ralphie dead before he could even speak a full sentence of explanation. And literally nothing separates Ralphie and Tamir except five miles, a few decades, and race.

It is so easy to get sucked into the larger implications of an event like Tamir Rice's killing, to use it as a gateway to larger discussions about race and racism and class and the proper role and responsibility of police and how large chunks of our urban landscape have been dragged off the rails by neglect and systemic racism.

But when we look at those bigger issues (and we should-- we must) the specific event, the individual person and his family, all start to look like small trees in a large forest. And as a father, a parent, a person, I just can't get past the image of that young man, not yet a teenager, going in just a split second from bored to startled to dying on the ground, alone and scared. Tamir Rice is dead. How can it be that nobody has to answer for that?

US Students Lead in Browsing

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is the group that administers that nifty PISA test-- the one that periodically leads to breathless headlines of "Oh Nos!! Our students don't test as well as Estonia!" But the OECD is more than just a test (and attendant PR)-- they've also been taking a look at technology in education.

Back in September they published Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, a report about the importance of digital learning. If you follow the link, you can order the book, because the OECD apparently has a delicious sense of irony.

The information in the report is from the 2012 cycle of PISA, for which ICT awareness questionnaires were distributed, except not in the US, so there is less information about us in the report than their might be.

Back in 2012, one in five of students in the bottom quartile of income did not have internet at heom. Among the other 75%, only 3% didn't have internet.

Back in 2012, we had one of the lowest student-to-computer ratio in schools among the OECD nations. Pretty sure that this is old news after three years of frantic computer deployment, though it might be interesting to note how many students have access to computers for activities other than taking standardized tests.

But here's an interesting factoid-- our teens are among the world's leaders in web browsing.

No kidding. US fifteen-year-olds were ahead of the OECD average for digital reading. They are better than average at evaluating whether or not a link will lead something useful. And we are below average in the percentage of students who browse aimlessly.

So, yay?

Meanwhile, reporting on their own findings, the OECD demonstrated that (like many folks) they don't really have a clue about what a useful role for technology in education might be.

"School systems need to find more effective ways to integrate | technology into teaching and learning  to provide educators with learning environments that support 21st century pedagogies and provide children with the 21st century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills. “Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. To deliver on the promises technology holds, countries need to invest more effectively and ensure that teachers are at the forefront of designing and implementing this change.”

The first part of that quote translates roughly to "Blah blah blah jargon blah twenty-first century skills." The second part translates to, "I do not understand the distinction between knowledge and information."

And all of it translates as, "The OECD is either unaware of or prefers not to discuss the body of research suggesting that reading from screens results in less comprehension than reading from paper (here and here and here)." It's all up to debate, but you can't debate what you choose to ignore.

Still-- leading the world in web browsing! Take that, Estonia!

NYT Spots the Problem

The New York Times is wrapping up the year with a full-court press on the magical marvels of testing, including a shot today from the editorial board that really does show us a major part of the problem. But not on purpose.

They open with this line:

Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States.

Then they go on to talk about testing as though following the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States.

They make sure to call out the usual villains--look, teachers unions make the very front of the multi-wrong lede. First, teachers unions are hardly the most notable critics of the testing mandate in New York, but the Times has been steadfast in its refusal to see the Opt Out movement as parent-led. Second, nobody has claimed that the end of a testing mandate would fix all that ills public education, particularly ills like poverty and systemic refusal to fully fund schools that are most in need. (Also, "get rid of tests in the early grades"? What early grades, because no federal law has ever reached lower than third grade)

The writer then goes on to complain about weak curriculum and graduation requirements, and at this point a fog of confusion settles over the writer, who seems to believe that no student should graduate from high school unless that student is fully prepared for college. Really? As "proof," the Times offers vague references to "college entrance exams" by which they mean... SAT? ACT? The exam given by the college (either Harvard or Podunk U)? As an example of why this is bad, the writer expresses concern that South Carolina, with its lax graduation requirements, "is producing high school graduates who are not qualified to compete for higher-skilled jobs at companies like Boeing, Volvo and BMW."

Five minutes of googling indicates that they can be less worried. BMW appears ready to add more jobs in South Carolina, and these jobs include Forklift Operator and Production Associate. Production associates must have a year of steady job experience and be able to pass a drug test; they must also be willing to work any day they're called, for a 10-12 hour shift. Forklift operators must have experience operating a forklift. Clearly more AP math courses would help graduates be better-prepared for these jobs.

The NYT has of course completely skipped over the question of students who seek employment in areas that don't require a college degree, just as they've skipped over the question of who determines the need for college remediation, and how.

The editorial board complains that 40% of students are not ready for college math and English, though they offer no source for this figure (which I find kind of incredible from the New York Times). The figure suggests that they've picked up this finding from the NAEP folks, but that's a problem as we've known since 2007 that NAEP doesn't know all that much about college readiness (about half of the students who scored "basic" i.e. "not college ready" went on to achieve bachelors degrees or higher). Or they could have pulled the 40% from this analysis by the ACT folks, which says that only 40% of ACT-takers scored high in at least three of English, reading, math and science. In other words, that math genius who graduated valedictorian from your college but who needed your help to pass Freshman Composition 101-- that guy was count by ACT as "not ready for college."

Sigh. We're not done yet, and we haven't even gotten to the crux of the matter.

But here's the board decrying high school grad's unpreparedness for the military by citing .... a study from 2010! Has nobody looked at this in the last five years? Politifact took a look at this talking point back when Jeb! garbled it in 2014. Here's what the Defense Department had to say:

For the military, the largest single disqualifying factor is health, including such problems as obesity. The estimate for those who are disqualified only because of aptitude is about 2 percent, said Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman. That includes not just people who failed the test but also those with other academic deficiencies, such as failure to get a GED.

There are other big chunks of wrong, well-worn and repeatedly gnawed on by commenters, like the old baloney that the teacher unions oppose Common Core (they didn't-- they supported it and continue to do so) and the connected testing because they "did not want to be evaluated based on how much students learned," a statement which ignores the question of whether the Big Standardized Tests actually measure any such thing, and which also ignores the rich and detailed arguments about these points that are all over the interwebs.

So here's the big question? How did the New York Times editorial board get so very much wrong? Does the NYT not have Google? I mean-- here's my New York Times story. One of my oldest friends from here in our small NW PA town now lives in Manhattan, and when he got married years ago, his wedding announcement ran in the NYT. A fact-checker called to verify the name of the business that his mother runs here in our population 7000 town hundreds of miles away. That's the level of commitment to accuracy that I associate with the the NYT.

What's the problem? I think we can find it in these two sentences:

A recent study from Achieve, a nonpartisan organization that works with the states to raise academic standards....

An alarming study by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation...

These are the sources that the NYT relied on? Seriously?  

I suppose they are "bi-partisan" in the same way that The Tobacco Institute and most lobbying groups are "bi-partisan." In that sense, the NYT board just stopped short of flat out lying by saying that these two groups are impartial or unbiased. But the Education Trust is a Gates-funded advocacy group from the earliest days of the Core. And Achieve is the organization that "helped" the CCSSO and NGA write the Common Core to begin with-- no organization is more highly invested in the continued support and push of the Core Standards and the tests that are welded to them. And they earlier this month released a report that says-- well, it says pretty much exactly what this editorial says.

In short, the NYT board has done the opposite of journalism here. This belongs with such classics as "Cigarettes Are Totally Good For You" or "US Must Solve Critical New Car Gap." This is endorsing one political candidate without ever actually talking to any of the others.

The problems that face public education are complicated. In fact, right now they're more complicated than ever because we have a muddy mix of actual problems (e.g. poverty, refusal to fully fund), created problems (e.g. charters stripping public schools of resources), and made-up problems (e.g. Oh Nos! Our students aren't taking enough standardized tests!). All of these problems exist at the intersection of larger national issues such as income inequality, systemic racism, and the proper relationship between corporate and citizen interests.

What would help? Information. Correct, well-researched, thoughtful information. If you want to find one of the problems getting in the way of finding a remedy for everything that ails education, a good first step would be for journalists to stop uncritically running the PR of the people who want to dismantle public education and sell off the parts. The NYT did not solve any problems today, and they didn't identify any, either. But they surely provided an example of one of them. Come on, New York Times-- do journalism better.

Why Do the Feds Heart Testing?

It has been a fact of educational life for so long, that we don't take the question out and ask it much any more, but really--

Why is there a federal requirement to give students a standardized test?

Why has that provision, that requirement, that burden been given the weight of federal regulation? Even as ESSA tore down and ripped up many pieces of federal oversight and regulation, that provision was never in doubt. At best, for a while, there was hope that the testing requirement would be reduced, but nobody ever thought that the federal requirement to make schools give students a standardized test would go away. And it didn't.

But why? Why does the federal government believe that an important national interest is served by testing every American school student, year after year?

There's no federal requirement that every automobile be inspected year after year. There's no federal requirement to even register firearms, let alone make sure they're still working properly. Federal requirements for food are loose and getting looser, with the FDA limited in how much inspecting they can get done and what they can do about the results. There's no annual federal testing requirement for soldiers and armaments, no federal requirement for annual testing of road surfaces, no federal requirement for annual testing of judges or legislators-- you get the idea. There's a big long list of things that are important for the welfare and safety of the country, a long list of things that taxpayers spend big money on, and yet do not operate under a federal demand for constant testing.

On top of that, once the federally required tests have been given-- what will the feds do with the results?

The official answer under ESSA is "Nothing." The feds don't get to draw pass-fail lines, nor do they get to proscribe the consequences for schools on the fail side of the line. There's enough leeway in how states can handle their testing that it won't be possible to make a legit comparison between states. And the NAEP (America's Report Card) will still be a thing, anyway. So why do the feds need to require that Big Standardized Tests be given to every student in every year for every grade 3-8.

What federal interest is served by requiring these tests? Do they make us safer? Smarter? If we want to require that each state monitors its school system to make sure that nobody is falling through the cracks or being deprived of an education, then why not require that the states do that-- why require the mechanism of a very narrow BS Test?

I know the unofficial reasons. Pearson et al are making a buttload of money from testing, and they'd prefer not to stop. The government will continue to collect giant heaping mountains of data from testing which will help keep the dream of a cradle to career pipeline alive. And a whole bunch of people believe that tests are magical devices that somehow make education work, and that without a federally required test, education would collapse into anarchy with teachers napping and students mired in ignorance, knickerbockers rolled down below their knees, dogs and cats living together, and the country conquered by Estonia.

But seriously. We became one of the most powerful and successful nations on earth without federally mandated BS Tests. We instituted federally mandated BS Tests in order to achieve certain swell goals, and we achieved none of them. Now we don't even have federal aspirations to accomplish certain goals attached to the BS Tests, and yet the tests are still here, enshrined in law, like a federal appendix that can't do anything except maybe swell and burst and spread poison throughout the body. Federally mandated tests are the education equivalent of the Bridge To Nowhere.

"Well, it's the law now, so we have to live with it," is what many school administrators will say. And that 95% requirement may give some states pause. But they don't have to live with federally mandated BS Testing. And you know who really really doesn't have to live with it?

Parents.

Prohibition died as law because people just ignored it. Citizens wouldn't follow the law, and states wouldn't enforce it.

FL: Stamping Out Science?

Florida remains an important reminder that as much as I love the idea of local control, it can a powerful instrument for educational malpractice.

Yes, the state has managed to fumble everything from their Big Standardized Test crash-and-burn to making Florida a petri dish for growing some of the most odious reformster groups around (and all of that educational baloney just to help launch Jeb! into the biggest national campaign fizzle since New Coke). They let Bill Gates play with (and crash) a whole school district. But Florida has also allowed local school boards the freedom to make baldly racist assaults on their own school system. Pinellas County schools resegregated their elementary schools and cut off proper funding and support to the poor black ones.

Now some right-wing Common Core opponents are backing proposed laws that would give local taxpayers a tactical nuke to use on their school districts.

House Bill 899 and Senate Bill 1018 are aimed at the book-buying procedure in Florida. Florida Citizens' Alliance is one of the groups backing this measure; on their web page you can find a call to action for both these actions (billed as anti-Common Core legislation) and open carry and campus carry bills.

They would like to see a change in how textbooks are selected. The bill calls for a committee chosen by the local school board, containing at least one third parents, following public meeting laws, and unbound by the 50% digital/electronic content requirement. And one other item, but we'll get to that in a second.

The conditions listed so far are... well, why would you not put textbook selection in the hands of your professional staff? Here in PA, as in many states, the schools put requests before the board. Sometimes they consult their teachers (sometimes, not so much). But the general assumption is that people who teach professionally are knowledgable about what their own professional needs are. Textbook salespersons are a hardy breed, and they will pitch to whoever controls the pursestrings. Like all salespeople, they are often full of baloney and power their pitches with usual sales tricks ("I can only hold this special offer for you for another few days" never fails with one local district). So, yeah, maybe teaming up someone who actually knows the material with, say, a used car salesman might make the procurement process more interesting.

But there's one other stipulation in the bill-- that parents who don't like the selection can appeal to the circuit court.

This is a dumb idea. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

Part of the dumb is the intent. The National Center for Science Education calls these bills "anti-science." They point back to the Florida Citizens' Alliance website where there are complaints that textbooks treat Darwin and evolution as if it's real and the Bible creation story is not. Plus, there's all this talk about climate change. And Florida has a history of anti-science fervor. At one point, Governor Rick Scott banned any use of the term "climate change" by state officials. If you want to see a full litany of Florida's creative assaults on science, check out the Florida Citizens for Science blog (and really-- in how many states does anyone feel the need to create a group to support science).

But there's no question that these bills would give plenty of leverage to any group of citizens who decided that they didn't want science in the classroom (or, for that matter, history that didn't fit their particular notions of what history should be). Florida does have standards for science and other subjects, but the new laws says that texts can either meet the standards or be even better-- without explaining what would constitute "better" or how that would be decided.

So if this is one more idea about how to roll Florida back into the eighteenth century, that's not a benefit to anybody.

But it's also dumb because it will almost certainly backfire on the supporters.

Advocates for particular political viewpoints make this mistake all the time. All. The. Time. They construct a powerful weapon for winning particular battles, imagining that the weapon will only ever be used by them and the people who agree with them. Religious conservatives got all excited because the Supremes ruled that government meetings could open with prayer, because religious conservatives imagined that they were the only people who would be offering up such prayers. But right in Florida, we got one of the earliest tests as a Florida man demanded to be allowed to open a city council meeting with a satanic prayer.

These laws will seem like a super idea right up until the first time that a family drags a school district into an expensive court case because they demand that schools NEVER teach creationism, or demand that the Flying Spagetti Monster be included in history class, or demand that texts reflect the Flat Earth model of the solar system.

The notion that science should be subject to public debate and court rulings is in itself fundamentally anti-science. Millions of people can agree that the sun circles around the earth; that does not make it so. That's not how science works, and to try to create a system in which scientific facts are open to debate and rulings is, in fact, an assault on science. The folks who are pushing this kind of bill are not doing their state, their schools, and least of all their students any favors.