Emails and Vampires [Updated]

There's a scene in many vampire movies. Someone (usually not the hero) is holding a vampire at bay with a cross. The vampire locks eyes with him. "You don't need to do that. You are perfectly safe from me, and I know that cross is just starting to feel heavy. Heavier and heavier. Why don't you just put it down." And the camera closes in on our intrepid human-- will he put the cross down?

The Supreme Court decision in favor of the corporate sponsors of the Janus case came as a surprise to absolutely nobody. The implications of that decision have yet to be worked out. Of course, in the 28 right to work states, the implications are almost non-existent. In the other 22, wellll…… I'm not inclined to view this as a catastrophic death knell for unions. It sure doesn't help, and it's certainly part of a larger campaign to get rid of unions, but it could well be surprisingly good for some unions that had made themselves vulnerable to this sort of thing by letting leadership become entrenched and detached from members.

"Vouldn't you rather exercise your First Amendment rights?"

Supporters of the lawsuit call it a win for freedom of speech. But as with many freedoms, exercising freedom of speech is not free. If you're a billionaire, you get to exercise your speech via advocacy groups that you finance and research reports that you pay for and news stories that you plant or create and sectors that you commandeer via "philanthropy" and just the fact that powerful people will take your phone calls. If you're working stiff, you get to exercise your freedom of speech by writing letters that may or may not be read or making phone calls that may or may not be answered or, hey, you could always start a blog. Or you could join together with three million other working stiffs and collective enjoy the same kind of money and clout that one of the one percenters enjoy. It is, admittedly, a tough trade off, because three million people (or even a hundred local people) put together won't always (or even ever) agree on a message, and sometimes the leadership doesn't help very much, but on the other hand, trying to negotiate a contract for yourself, by yourself-- well, it's a tough choice, but I know what lots of folks on the other side of the table want you to pick.

Hence the e-mails that started flying roughly 6.3 seconds after the Janus decision was issued.

The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that all government workers – teachers, state workers, local public employees, police, firefighters and more – now have a real choice when it comes to their unions. The case is Janus vs. AFSCME and, put simply, the court determined that no public employee can be fired for not paying money to a union.

Whether it’s disagreements about politics, concerns about a lack of local representation, problems with union spending, or something else – you now have the right to stop paying for activities you don’t support. 

This followed by a link to your state's version of the MyPayMySay website, which gives you a chance to fill out a form which yields a pdf you can hand to your union to drop out. They will also store your information "in order to help public employees exercise their rights when it comes to union dues, fees and representation. It may be used to contact or follow up with you."

Some teachers received this email, with the smiling face of teacher Susie Stockphoto in her room, 10-nowhere.

Regardless of your state, you got a paragraph or two of someone's personal "why I don't want to support the union" strory.

These emails are coming from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a group from Michigan that has been heavily involved in rolling back teacher rights, with ties to ALEC, the Koch Brothers and, of course, the DeVos family.

They are landing all over the country, mostly by way of teachers' professional emails. This is particularly ironic in states like Michigan, where Mackinac-backed legislation makes it against the rules for teachers to use school emails to discuss union business. In most states the professional email addresses are public information, so a simple FOIA request would have yielded them, though in many cases a bot or an unpaid intern could have scraped them from school websites where they are all publicly listed. On the other hand, such a request might be illegal under privacy laws in some states. One does wonder why some spam filters are not catching them.

This, of course, will not be the last of it. The Freedom Foundation (Koch Brothers, etc) has announced a plan to spend the summer going teacher door to teacher door to get people to leave the union.

And, wow-- it sure is inspiring to see the one percenters so deeply concerned about teacher freedom of speech. I mean, to devote all this time and money just because they want to make sure that every teacher has a chance to exercise her rights. It's inspiring. Just like all those other times they were out there in the schools making sure that teachers were free to express their opinions and stand up for students and advocate for better education without fear of losing their jobs and-- oh, no, wait. They DeVos's and Koch's were the ones agitating for the end of job protections so that teachers could be fired at any time, including for speaking up and exercising their First Amendment rights. In fact, the number of times that groups like Mackinac have been out there standing up for teachers' rights, First Amendment and otherwise, would be, by my rough count, zero. None.

It's almost as if this whole thing isn't about teachers' First Amendment right at all.

It's almost as if this was just a ploy to bust up the unions and make sure that teachers had even less voice in the world of education. It's almost as if this was a way to drain funds from the Democratic Party.

Which takes us back the vampire. He isn't gently crooning things like "That cross must be so heavy. Don't you want to just put it down?" because he's so concerned with the man's weary arms. In most of the versions of this scene, what happens next is this-- the man puts the cross down, giving up his last bit of protection. The vampire leaps forward, rips open the mans throat, drinks his blood, and leaves the victim dead and the vampire refreshed.

The cross may be ugly, prickly, imperfect, even a distressing mess. But at that moment, it's all the guy has got. Teachers, no matter what mess your local union is in, this is not the time to listen to the vampire's gentle plea.

[Updates: First, I can confirm that the emails are hitting Pennsylvania, too, as confirmed by one in my wife's school email spam box that arrived yesterday.

Second, My Pay My Say has its very own Facebook page, so if you wanted to share some thoughts with them about their campaign, that would be a place to do it.]

What They Remember

Of all the retirement gifts I've received, by far the most moving has been a book put together by my daughter, my niece, and my wife. Through the magic of the interwebs, they were able to collect a whole bunch of personal messages from former students into a book. I won't lie-- it's pretty awesome, and mighty humbling.

It has also turned out to be one more opportunity to reflect on one of the big questions of teaching-- what is it that we do, exactly, that makes a difference for our students. What is it that they remember? We all wonder about it-- I just happen to have some answers right at my fingertips.

Some of it really is content-related on a fairly micro scale.

One day in Honors English, Mr. Greene said people only use hyphens when they don't know what to do. Now, every time I use a hyphen, I beat my chest and scream "I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO!" Then I get shushed by the Starbucks girl.

I'd like to thank Mr. Greene for all he's done; however, he is the reason I put semi-colons in text messages now...and I take a lot of shit for that.

Sometimes it is larger scale content material.

One time PAG pulled me aside and said in my writing I was like a chef at a burger joint-- bored and putting things no one had ordered, like sparklers, on their burgers for my own entertainment. "Just give me the burger," he said, "no sparklers." I later wrote tweets for a living.

Sometimes it falls into the larger life lesson category.

From a list of "Things I learned in PAG's class"

Don't make excuses or apologize for your work; own what you've done, and if you're embarrassed by it then do it better.

You can't protest The Man by asking his permission to do so.

Much of it is extremely personal. Most years I gave personal gifts to each graduating senior on yearbook staff; one year it was beanie baby spirit animals, and one woman told me the story of how she carried that spirit animal through the next decade as a reminder of the kind of strength she has inside her. There are several stories like that in the book.

And I don't have to tell you (but I will) that not a single former student wrote to thank me with fond memories of those life-changing Big Standardized Tests, or how moved they were by how we dealt with Common Core standard 11.2-d/15b. I have notes from writers who thank me for helping them get started and teachers who thank me for being an example, even some who thank me for helping them figure out how to be a better human being, but none from someone explaining how taking the PSSAs really altered their life trajectory. Because none of that baloney makes anyone's "Top Ten Things About My Education That Really Mattered."

What is striking is how specific it all is. Some students remember broad themes and ideas of my class, but even then, they remember them attached to a very specific memory. They can quote me to me. They can remember not just specific works we read, but specific assignments or questions we dealt with regarding those works.

What's also striking is how many of those specifics remembered by my students are not remembered by me. That sparkler hamburger story? I remember how that young woman used to write, and the hamburger sparkler thing certainly sounds like me-- but I don't remember saying it. A student I taught about thirty years ago remembers being struck by my statement that every person is worth knowing. Again, I agree with that-- it sounds like something I would say. But I don't remember saying it.

It all confirms what I've always believed to be true-- that very specific moments in our classrooms often have powerful effects on our students, but we will never know ahead of time which moments will be the important ones. We may think that this particular moment that we plan and prepare and set up and lay a foundation for and think, "Boy, this is just going to be powerful" and instead, ten or twenty years later, it turns out that some unplanned moment that we just tossed off the hip stuck with students long after our carefully sculpted teaching moment is long forgotten.

What's a teacher to do? I don't know THE answer, but I know MY answer--

Build a strong foundation. Not in your class-- in yourself. Know why you're there. Know what you believe. Know what truths are important to you about your content, about your material, about the lives of the young humans you're dealing with. Carry all of that into the classroom with you every day. Make it the foundation of every carefully planned teaching moment you try to create, but if you have a clear strong foundation, know that when you are flailing into those unplanned moments, those off-the-cuff comments, or those moments when a student comes to you for help and you don't have time to plan anything out-- in all of those moments, your core belief and understanding comes through.

This is one other reason I don't believe in scripting-- because a teacher reading a script has no foundation in anything, and that will show through in every single unscripted moment. Worse, if the teacher's foundation is something like "these kids are dopes who can barely learn a simple thing" that will bleed through as well.

You won't mean for it to happen, but it will happen. In some specific, unplanned, unprepared moment, what you believe as your foundation will come through in a really clear, really specific way, and at least one student will see it-- really, really see it-- and that specific moment will stay with them for years, even decades.

So if you want a piece of advice from the back end of a career, here's one piece. Know why you're in the classroom, and be there for good reasons. Know what matters. Know your purpose, and the purpose of your materials. Know your materials. Know your content. And as quickly as you can make it happen, know your students.

No amount of superficial technique, no amount of technique focused tech, no amount of pre-planned material-- none of that can compensate for a hollow person standing in front of a classroom.

Yes, when you're young and you're starting out, you don't know all of these things. That's okay. No amount of teacher training could have fixed that. Your job for the first few years is to figure it out. (This is, incidentally, one more reason that someone who is only there for two years and fully plans to leave at the end of the two years-- that person is no more a teacher than someone who put on a parachute but never jumped out of the plane is a skydiver).

That is one of the beauties of teaching-- a staggering long progression of tiny, specific moments built on a foundation giant, broad ideas. It's like traveling across the Badlands of South Dakota on foot, or hiking through the Grand Canyon-- don't watch just your steps or just the awesome view, because both matter. Every step is critical and needs your attention, but if you never look up and around, you'll get lost and you'll miss the whole point. And you may never know which particular step each of your fellow travelers will remember-- so you make every step count.

And sometimes, if you're lucky, at the end of the journey, they give you a book.

Education Deserts

Two weeks ago, a hearing by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce tipped its hand with its title-- "The Power of Charter Schools: Promoting Opportunity for America's Students." It featured a parade of charter school advocates, with one exception. Somehow, Jonathon Phillip Clark made it into the room.

PS 138 used to be right over there

Clark is a father of seven, assistant director of a Detroit nonprofit that provides mentoring and tutoring and a board member of 482Forward, a group that advocates for high-quality education for all Detroit children. Clark's testimony highlights many of the  problems of charter schools in Michigan and elsewhere—broken promises, unstable leadership, unelected governing bodies hundreds of miles away from the people they serve. He underlined the practical problems as well, like driving back and forth across the city to get children to and from their separate schools.

Clark later in his testimony calls this an education desert, a predictable result of a free-market approach to schools.

We already know about food deserts, described by the CDC as "areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet." Food deserts tend to be areas where it does not make business sense to serve the local (usually poor) population.

The free market is not evil, but it is practical. No matter what sector we're talking about, there are always some customers who are unprofitable to serve. You may want new Chipotle or Lexus dealership in your town, but if nobody can build a business case for the operation, then your town will remain a Chipotle and Lexus desert.

This is why the government provides some goods and services. If the markets were responsible for roads, only some people would get roads. If the markets were responsible for providing military protection, only some people would be protected.

We have an area where the private sector competes with the government—mail delivery. Private mail and parcel services compete with the U.S. Postal Service—but only up to a point. When it's time to deliver a package to some place out in the boonies, where delivery costs too much to be truly profitable, the private delivery companies hand the packages off to the USPS which then finishes the job for them

In many urban areas, we have inched toward that model. Some charter schools work with the students who can be profitably taken on as customers, while others work at the fringes, going out of business as they discover they didn't have a business model that worked. Meanwhile, some students who will never be attractive customers to private operators (too many special needs, special problems, special burdens) are left in the public school.

But when legislators are backing charters, it makes business sense to keep public schools underfunded and undersupported so that they can't be serious competition. And when that formula is miscalculated (just enough, but no more than that), then the public schools also collapse, and suddenly we have an education desert—an area where there are no easily available education options for residents.

The free market is not evil, but no business has ever made it its mission to provide services to every single potential customer in the country. We can't allow the free market to run education without changing our national mission, because no private charter chain will ever appear with a mission to educate every single student in the country. If we let a thousand charter schools bloom, we must be prepared for education deserts to bloom as well.

Originally published at Forbes.com   

Impatient Reformsters

Over at Red State, a site that leans just a bit to the right with articles like "Milennials Get Classes on Basic Adult Skills, Still Act Like Children," (but not "So Get Off My Lawn),  Joe Cunningham is impatient. "It's Past Time We Tackled Education Reform" he insists.

He notes that despite early controversies, Betsy DeVos's education department really hasn't done much and "aside from her rolling back Title IX memoranda for colleges going after sexual assault, there has been little to celebrate." Because the only thing worse than sexual assault is universities trying to do something about sexual assault. Sigh.

But like many DeVos backers, Cunningham is sad. "Frankly, it appears as though the faith we had in DeVos to be a driving force behind education reform was for naught." Dude, I wouldn't say it was so much ":for naught" as it was "based on naught." What gave you that faith? Her complete lack of experience in running any sort of large organization? Or the way that she kept indicating that she thought the department should be doing pretty much nothing?

He notes that Congress hasn't done much about education, either, which is also unsurprising because A) Congress doesn't do much about anything and B) Congress mostly ever discusses education in vague platitudes, and the last twenty years have made even that route a risky one. Better to just not talk about it at all. It is, he notes, "is the topic of conversation that always gets left for when there seems to be nothing else to talk about," which is a pretty good line. Cunningham says he wants to have that conversation; I don't know that he really does.

We should be having the conversations. We should be working to improve the education system, public and private, so that we provide our children with the best possible education we can offer them.

That means we have to talk about private school vouchers, school choice, public school funding, free pre-Kindergarten and college, and every other issue in between.

See, he kind of skipped over the whole conversation about what improving the education system would actually look like. And his "have to" list? We really don't have to talk about vouchers, but we really have to talk about things a little more specific. DeVos supporters thought we would talk more about choice, and as evidence of the alleged popularity of choice, he cites some "research" by American Federation for Children, a dark money group founded by DeVos. Is it some kind of political tautology when a politician creates an advocacy group to push that politician in the direction they already want to go?

Course, he says, it doesn't have to be school choice. It could be any old thing. "What kinds of reform can we push that really only require local and state input or are teacher-centric?" Stem, maybe? That we do somehow?

I can help him out a little on this. He might want to look into a reform program that I like to call "Shut Up, Sit Down, and Let Teachers Do Their Jobs." It's local, it's cheap. and it's very teacher-centric.

But Cunningham is just sort of flailing now. People should care about this stuff. After all, they care about child separation, because children. Well, education, too!

Cunningham identifies himself as a conservative, parent and educator-- I have no idea how true any of those are. But plenty of conservatives saw DeVos as an antidote to a department that was too "proactive," a quality Cunningham says he hopes for. He's also hopeful about the proposed Laborducation merger, even though some conservatives aren't at all. And despite her pledge to be inactive in DC, DeVos has started to show some signs of the same meddling that conservatives hated in Arne Duncan.

Cunningham wants the department to be "more proactive in seeking and implementing good reforms that benefit our students, not just one type of school over another." First, that flies in the face of most charter school programs, which privilege charter schools over public schools. Second, he sounds like some "let's get help from DC" Democrat. Third-- and this is really important-- what exactly does he think could be done from Washington? Because he has one other correct point in his piece-- going back twenty years, we have repeatedly implemented bad, even destructive, education policies because a bunch of amateurs were in DC jumping up and down and yelling, "We have to do something RIGHT NOW!"

We don't need any more impatient reformsters-- not political ones, not business-oriented ones, not philanthro-capitalist ones. The educational system includes millions-- literally millions-- of trained, experienced professionals who have committed their entire lives to making US education better. Betsy DeVos is not one of those people. So sit down, drink some lemonade, and catch your breath. If you let the professionals work, we'll even promise to get off your lawn.

Thinking

A slide popped up on my twitter feed that attempts to explain that mysterious quality-- rigor-- using terminology I've seen before.

Rigor is not more work or harder books or AP course. On the defining rigor side, the slide offered that rigor is "scaffolding thinking" and "planning for thinking" and a few other bullet points all highlighting the word "thinking."

I agree in principle. What teachers hope for from students is some serious, deep, heavy-duty thinking. And if all teachers had psychic powers or at least some useful teach like a teenager tuned cerebro, we'd be all set and ready to go.

Yeah, let's not talk about the phallic symbolism right now

But of course the bigger problem is not getting students to think (though lord knows that is a challenge on its own) but to somehow determine whether or not such thinking is going on.

This is one of the challenges of a classroom teacher-- how to build a mountain that only a person who had done some serious thinking could get over.

We know lots of things that don't work. If you have ever dealt with Study Island or its ilk, you know that students who can solve the problems can still be frustrated because they don't express the solution the way the canned computer program wants them to. Their thinking is steered away from asking "What's the solution to this problem" and instead toward "What does the program want me to say."

Some folks talk about test prep like it is memorizing a bunch of facts and figures, but these days, test prep is really about learning to think like the test manufacturers. Here are the kind of distractors they like to use for fake answers. When they use this word, it means they want this kind of response. This is also not teaching the students rigorous thinking; instead it teaches a form of intellectual compliance.

Most objective tests reinforce recall or recognition (re-cognition is kind of an interesting word that captures the notion of rehashing knowledge you already have). It's not impossible-- I had a tenth grade biology class for which the tests were take-home multiple choice questions, and they were an absolute beast. I still remember things from that class because of the tests.

If we throw in the reformster love for large scale comparison, things get murkier. Exactly how do I compare the "thinking" of a few million students? What does that even mean?

My bias after decades as an English teacher is to assess thinking through writing. I admit that's it theoretically possible that someone could have really thought something through, but they can't put words together on the page to explain it. But my bias is that I think that's hugely unlikely. Most writing problems are really thinking problems; if you've done the thinking, then the writing is so much easier.

But even there we can wander off course. You're going to find teachers who say, "I totally support my students in rigorous thinking, and I can tell they've been thinking rigorously if they reach Conclusion X, because nobody who was really reading and thinking well could reach any other conclusion." There are two problems with this-- first, this teachers is just wrong. Second, and more practically, once word gets out from year to year that you are a teacher who is looking for the One Correct Answer, students will stop thinking and start giving you what they think you want to hear, either by detective work or by just asking last year's class. Now you're back to teaching intellectual compliance, which is pretty much the opposite of rigorous thinking.

There is some advice I can offer. Don't assign essays based on questions for which you are certain you know the answer. Seriously. One year I assigned a paper in which students compared and contrasted Pip from Great Expectations and Huck Finn. I had no idea how that one would turn out, but the students figured it out. Change assignments from year to year. Give assignments that require them to "translate" a work (you haven't lived till you've seen Light in August as sock puppet theater).

Don't get comfortable. If you aren't putting rigorous thinking into the assignment, the kids probably aren't, either.

Fox Nails The Problem: These Aren't Our Kids

On Friday, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade was talking about the immigration clusterfahrfegnugen when he hit upon an important insight:




These aren't our kids.

These aren't our kids.

Of course, in this case, we're drawing a circle around all US children and saying only those within the circle matter.

But understanding this aspect of tribalism explains a huge number of our problems in education.

We are happy to spend money on our kids. But those other ones, the children of Those People-- these aren't our kids, and we don't want to spend money on them.

It's not a new problem. Segregated schools were all about white folks saying, "I don't want to spend my tax dollars on schools for these black kids, because these are not our kids." They don't belong to our group, our tribe, our family. If they want money for decent schools, then let them get that money from their own people.

These aren't our kids. We have to take care of our own. I've got mine, Jack.

Some supporters of vouchers and charters and choice see these as a way to extricate their own children from schools that are filled with Other People's Children.

Some supporters of choice (and magnet) schools think they aren't involved in such tribalism because they believe in a mechanism for lifting Worthy Strivers out of those more lowly circumstances, but all they're really saying is that it's possible that some of our children got mixed in with Those People's children. Given the chance, some can prove they belong in our tribe. But this approach hasn't really changed anything-- it still ascribes to the belief that some children are inside the circle and some are outside the circle, and the one's outside the circle aren't our problem. These aren't our kids. Nor is there anything admirable about schools where the approach is "These are not our kids, but we'll try to make them almost as good as our kids, in some ways."

What some people find stunningly wrong about the Kilmeade quote is the notion that some children don't matter, because some people draw their circle around the whole human race. We've been light on rabid nationalism for quite a while, so it's jarring to hear the administration's policy of "We're America, Bitch" and the idea that other people are just worth less because they weren't born here. (This is one more reason that the embrace of Trumpism by some people of faith reveals a terrible hollowness in their religion).

Watch out for tribalists. Tribalism is a heady drug, and once you're comfortable saying that Americans matter more than people in other nations, it's easy to say "My state matters more than the rest of the states" and then "My city is more important that my any city in other parts of the state" and then "My neighborhood is more important than other neighborhoods."

We get into the occasional argument about whether or not education is a common good, but to a tribalist, there is no such thing as a common good, because that would involve people outside your own circle. A common good would be shared with the children of Those People, but these are not our kids.

There is only one question that need be asked of a school board member who has decided to direct shabby funding and minimal resources toward a particular neighborhood's schools, or a charter school operator who instructs children to stay in line and quietly comply, or policy-launching politicians or rich self-appointed overseers of education, and that question is this--

Would you put your own child in this school? Would you subject your own child to this policy?

When politicians force Common Core and related testing into schools but send their own children to schools that have neither; when charter operators don't send their own children to their own schools; when local politicians strip resources from schools their own children will never, ever attend; when they strip local control from the families of the students who will attend these schools; when they let fly-by-night scam artists run rampant and put children's futures at stake in edu-flavored businesses that their own children will never suffer through-- they are not simply revealing hypocrisy. They are revealing that the affected children and families are outside the circle they have drawn. They are looking at the policies they propose and the children these policies will affect and they are saying to each other--

It's okay to do this.

Because these aren't our kids.

I don't know how you fix this. As Kayla Chadwick wrote a full year ago, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. The fundamental affliction here is a small, cramped definition of your own tribe, your own people. Yes, we don't have access to infinite resources to address every problem. But if you don't have enough food to give each one of your children a full meal, the best, most moral solution is not to pick a couple of children to disown and allow to starve.

Certainly we've gotten tons of religious direction on this. The New Testament is loaded with instructions to treat everyone as if they were part of your tribe. And yet, here we are.

It seems like a small, obvious thing to ask that policy makers (both elected and unelected), bureaucrats and politicians simply approach every decision, every idea from a standpoint of, "Would I want this for my own child?"

But time after time we have failed that test, and we always fail it the same way- but using some sort of tribal assertion, some sort of metal gymnastics, that allow us to say, "Well, I wouldn't want this for my kids--

"But these aren't our kids."

ICYMI: It's Actually Summer Edition (6/24)

All right-- summer is actually technically here, and most everyone has finally finished their school year. That means it's time to start reading up on the issues. Remember to share what you see here that speaks to you.

DC Public Schools Go From Success Story To Cautionary Tale

Remember when DC schools were supposed to be a proof of concept for so many reform ideas? Almost everyone has finally with the man behind the curtain who isn't wearing any clothes behind the smoke and mirrors. This is a good summary of how this particular baloney was made.

If This Is The End of Average

Daniel Willingham with a brief but clear explanation of why personalized learning can't deliver on what it promises.

Charter Schools Are Whiter Than Nearby Districts

From Hechinger Report, some more data showing how charters are creating more segregation in the USA.

Pennsylvania Cyber Charters Consistently Receive Poor Academic Scores

Yet again, evidence that cyber in Pennsylvania simply aren't delivering what they promised.

How The Texas Testing Bubble Popped 

This is the first in a series of stories that actually ran in 2014, but it's a well-reported series that both shows why standardized testing deserved its bad rap, and how some folks stood up to it.

The Gates Sort Of Admits That Its Teacher Evaluation Dreams Were Baloney

Yes, I paraphrased that title a bit, but you get the idea. Once again, the Gates learns everything about its past failures except its own mistakes.

Childhood Captured

A look at one of the scary things happening in the Pre-K space. More profits for companies; less worthwhile education for children.

Boston Schools Chief Resigns After Lawsuit Says District Shared Student Data With ICE

Need one more example of how badly things can go south in the era of school district data mining? Here you go.  

It's Just Not Funny Anymore

Bruce Baker reflects on our continued unwillingness to do what we know works.

Finally, I wrote this week about why the proposed labor-education merger strikes me as a terrible idea. Nancy Bailey is also not a fan, and she explains why. Jan Ressenger also explains why it's a lousy idea. And Neal McClusky of the libertarian Cato Institute is not a fan, either.