When The Wall Of Separation Comes Down

As noted earlier this week, the Supreme Court has decided to hear a case that could blow a hole in the wall separating religion from public schools. Lots of folks are salivating at the prospect, from hard-core libertarians to the Dominionist folks who think the church should take back the school system.

So let me say again what I have said many times before-- if the wall separating church and state comes down, people of faith will rue the day.

June provided an example of exactly why rue-age will ensue. The Kenai Peninsula Borough council decided it would try to work its way around the establishment clause since, like many local government bodies around the country, it really wanted to get some prayer into its meetings. But not just any prayer-- so they whipped up a policy saying that only chaplains serving in the military, law enforcement agencies, or representatives of local established religious organizations could offer a pre-meeting prayer. The Alaska Superior Court, because they've read the Constitution and are not dopes, ruled that policy unconstitutional. The board tried to broaden its policy, feeling the heat from an atheist, a member of the Satanic Temple and a representative of the local Jewish community. They were unsuccessful.

And that's how members of the council and the public ended up walking out on their own meeting while Iris Fontana opened the government meeting with a prayer to Satan.

It never fails. Enthusiastic fans of bringing down the wall always seem to imagine that only their own Christian faith will come through the breech. And yet it has been almost fifteen years since the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster became a visible advocate for religious pluralism.

Here's what's going to happen. If you win the right to spend tax dollars on religious institutions (like, say, private schools), sooner or later you are going to be shocked to discover that your own tax dollars are supporting Sharia Law High School or Satan's Own Academy. And that's not going to be the end of it. Where resources are limited (there can only be, for instance, as many meeting opening prayers as there are meetings), some agency will have to pick winners and losers. Worst case scenario-- you get a government agency empowered to screen churches and religions. You can paper over it, as Kenai Peninsula apparently did, by turning it into a lottery (but what does it mean that God apparently let Satan's crew win that drawing).

No matter how you slice it, busting that wall of separation will not just let religion on to the government side-- it will force government onto the religion side. Your church will have to lobby and politic for representation on the Upper Boswash Religious Observance Approval Commission.

And all of that is separate from further issues--like whose faith-based bad science gets taught, or whether or not smaller religious groups are entitled to a certain minimal amount of taxpayer support to keep things equitable.

Not to mention the great encouragement this gives people to fake faith. Many many many local government boards open meetings with prayers; while I'm sure in many cases that has grown out of a sincere faith, I'm betting it's an awful lot of putting on a good Godly faith for the electorate. How many fake Christians does the church want to absorb?

Yes, the wall is probably going to come down, and I'm going to hate that. But before all is said and done, I'm betting lots of people of faith are going to learn to hate it, too.

Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

We have repeatedly seen examples of ed tech innovations that hinge on surveillance, and not just surveillance, but software to interpret what the surveilled data means.

This results in some huge promises. Here's software that says it will read student facial expressions and eye movements to determine if anyone is learning. Companies are lining up to tell you all about the social and emotional well-being of students. And in one of the finest examples of building mountainous conclusions out of data molehills, NWEA will now tell you how hard students are working and how well they're engaged, based on how long it takes them to bubble in a multiple-choice answer.

ProPublica and Wired decided to take a look at yet another piece of software that claims to be able to read hearts and minds both in schools and in a few other places as well. You will be shocked--shocked!-- to discover that this is yet another piece of tech that has big dreams but little to back them up with.

Sound Intelligence, a Dutch company that hopes to set up shop in Chicago, has some audio analytics it wants to sell you.

Sound Intelligence's patented sound classification solutions make security monitoring systems proactive, enabling early detection of potential incidents, swift intervention, and in many cases, prevention of further escalation.

Yes, in addition to more standard fare like gunshot detection and breaking glass detection, Sound Intelligence offers aggression detection that promises, among other things, to detect  "fear, anger, duress and verbal aggression" including "early warning and intervention to prevent physical aggression." It can also be seamlessly integrated with your video surveillance. Good to know.

To be fair, there is a level of credibility here. Most high school teachers can quickly parse the difference between the sound of students screwing around play fighting and the sound of students who are a few seconds away from throwing down. Can that be translated into software and science?

Well, ProPublica finds the aggression detector "less than reliable." In their trial, it ignored a student screaming and flagged a student coughing. It also flagged a YouTube clip of Gilbert Gottfried. Guessing at Pictionary triggered it, as did students cheering for the arrival of pizza.

The article doesn't really address the other problem with surveillance software-- the storage and use. The company promises that it will record triggering incidents for playback, but where do they store all this, and who has access. Which students will later have trouble getting a job because they were recorded coughing aggressively in fourth grade?

The article is otherwise thorough and worth the read, if for no other reason to remind you that the continuing problem with all these tech surveillance solutions is not just that they are intrusive and Big Brothery, but also that they aren't very good at doing what they say they're going to do. But remember-- not only is Big Brother watching, but he is also listening.

This Case Could Break The Wall Between Church And School

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue case for Forbes, trying to explain why it would be a big deal if the Supremes decided to hear this case. One thing has changed since then-- the court has decided they will hear the case.

This is a big deal. Here's a slightly modified version of that Forbes piece to serve as an explainer for why we need to pay attention.

This summer the US Supreme Court has decided to hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. Its decision will have huge repercussions for public education. To grasp why this case matters and why it's coming up now, there are two pieces of background you need to understand.

Tax Credit Scholarships

Tax credit scholarships are yet another variation on a school voucher program. With vouchers, a family picks the school it wants its child to attend, and the state hands that child's "share" of education funding to that school. The problem is that when a family chooses a religious school (as is often the case), that can run afoul of the separation of church and state in general, and Blaine Amendment laws in particular. The Blaine Amendment was a failed Constitutional amendment that prohibited spending tax dollars on sectarian schools; 38 states adopted it for their own constitutions. It's not an easy law to defend, because it rose out of nativist reaction to immigrant Catholics, even if does fit with the wall between church and state.

Tax Credit Scholarships do an end run around the wall. A business or wealthy individual gives a contribution to a special "scholarship" organization that then hands out scholarships to private schools. The state lets the business or wealthy individual count that contribution as some or all of their tax liability. Think of it this way: I'm the state, and you owe me $100. I am not allowed to gamble, but if you give that $100 to my bookie instead, I'll consider us square.

Rules vary from state to state (in Georgia, for example, contributors can actually turn a profit on the TCS donation). But one feature is constant--whatever money is fed into the TCS represents money subtracted from state revenue. This, it should also be noted, is the model for Betsy DeVos's proposed Education Freedom Scholarships. In all cases, these are vouchers dressed up with fancy accounting.

A Church Parking Lot In Missouri

The other factor here is Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. The case seems like small potatoes; a church in Missouri wanted to apply for a public monies grant to help resurface its playground. It was disqualified because it's a church. The case ended its five-year trek to the Supreme Court in 2017, and Chief Justice Roberts said, "The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand.” This was a big deal because, as Bloomberg noted:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes.

Some of the majority tried to rein in the implications of the case by noting it was a ruling strictly about playground resurfacing. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, however, indicated that they believed that discriminating against religious practices was not okay "on the playground or anywhere else."

Meanwhile, In Montana

Montana's legislature tried to get a voucher foot in the door with the Montana Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which allowed a not-very-staggering tax credit of $150. There was just one problem; the Montana Department of Revenue wouldn't implement the program, claiming it broke the law. The Montana Supreme Court agreed that the tax credit benefited religious schools and therefore broke the rules.

The case has found its way very quickly to the Supreme Court, and the long list of very conservative and religious school choice fans filing amicus briefs lets us know just how much some folks are hoping the Supremes will reverse Montana's own high court. Cato Institute, EdChoice, Christian Legal Society, Liberty Justice Center, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, Georgia Goal Scholarship Program, Alliance for Choice in Education, and former governor Scott Walker are among the many who have been urging SCOTUS to take this case and run with it.

The case matters because it could extend the Trinity Lutheran notion that free exercise beats the establishment clause. The case matters because it could open the door wide to the use of public tax dollars for private religious schools. The court could also drive a stake through the heart of voucher programs aimed at shuttling public funds to private religious schools, no matter how clever and convoluted the voucher scheme may be. That last possibility seems less likely, because, as with many issues beloved by the right, this is an issue that may be facing the friendliest court in many decades. This is definitely one case to watch for this summer.

ICYMI: Now Where Was I Edition (6/30)

Last week I was on an actual vacation, so I'm still getting back up to speed. Here's what I've got for you to read on  this muggy Sunday.

Michigan's School Choice Mess

Jennifer Berkshire took a road trip to Michigan for the Have You Heard podcast, to see what she could learn about the choice system, the local love for DeVos, and the implication for the nation as a whole. This episode focuses on the inter-district choice system they have out there.

Why Many School Districts Are Being Set Up For Fiscal Failure  

Jeff Bryant takes a look at how some systems have been financially gutted. Good reporting here.

What If Teachers Didn't Focus On Individual Achievement

Some really interesting thoughts about how to use a classroom to lift up a community.

Are Today's Children Developmentally Different  

This is a classic from Nancy Bailey that was making the rounds again this week. Still an important read.

AltSchool Finally Bites Dust  

The high tech personalized learning boutique charter chain has finally devolved into the software company it was always destined to be.

What Actually Helps Poor Students

Another article from a few years back. A meta-study about what actually helps students achieve and-- surprise-- it's not computer software.

Things Education Reformers Still Don't Understand About Tests

Jersey Jazzman lays out in plain English some of the fallacies worked into reformer "news" about test results.

Chalkbeat and TFA Propaganda

Chalkbeat Tennessee published a horrendous piece of TFA-as-savior baloney, and Gary Rubenstein is here to pick it apart.

New Koch and Walton Backed Initiatives  

EdWeek reports on some new players in the reformster advocacy game. Forewarned is forearmed.

About That Marshmallow Test

Another study debunks the famous delayed gratification experiment.

Pay for Success Preys On The Poor

A direct and clear explanation of how some see the pay for success movement turning the poor into financial fodder in the surveillance state.

DeVos Backs Corporate Profits Again

If there is one signature feature of a DeVos doctrine, it's that the government should never, ever stand between a business and its revenue stream.

That part of the doctrine was on display yesterday as DeVos officially announced her intention to let for-profit colleges do whatever the hell they want. Okay, that may be an overstatement. What she actually did was roll back the Obama-era requirement that such schools either show that their graduates actually land jobs, or the school would lose access to all that sweet sweet federal money. That was a powerful piece of leverage, because the for-profit colleges focus on veterans and poor folks with the result that a great deal of the for profit college revenue stream comes from the feds, who loan to the students and pay off the schools, guaranteeing that the for-profits get paid and that the students are in hock to the feds.

Rolling back Obama-era protections is problematic because the Obama administration itself did a super-lousy job of riding herd on these predatory schools. At one point, having announced that they were now by golly going to clamp down those outfits, they turned around and bailed out one of the worst. Then, when that outfit collapsed anyway, the feds let them be sold off to a debt-collection agency.

It was after all that foolishness that the administration finally implemented a gainful employment rule. This was also followed by  students scammed by the for-profit agitating to be released from their debts. The Department of Justice requested that the Department of Education simply release the portion of that debt that they held; they refused.

All of that happened before Trump ever descended the escalator to unleash havoc on US politics; it's only fair to note that this is, in many ways, a mess that DeVos inherited and which the Obama administration never exactly showed signs of fixing.

Last week, DeVos was sued--again--by a boatload of students stranded in massive debt. The student position is that they were defrauded and their loans should be forgiven.

DeVos's position about loan forgiveness has been to simply pretend to lose all the paperwork and never process any of the requests to have loans erased. Having ignored the rules for two years, DeVos last year tried to get rid of them, and this week she finally did it.

The USED position is that a combination of transparency (defined as "a  government website that students will have to find and decipher on their own") and caveat emptor is the solution to all of this (though presumably the almost-200,000 debt-loaded students asking for forgiveness will also need a time machine to get any use out of the transparency).

The repeal of the rule will take effect in 2020, and it will remove any sort of useful consequence for for-profit misbehavior. It's perfectly in line with the DeVos doc trine, which says that the government should not interfere in any meaningful way with a business trying to fleece its customers make a profit by marketing baloney offering a service. Since the moment she sat in front of te Senate confirmation hearing, DeVos has been consistent in expressing that she has no intention of putting the protection of students and "customers" ahead of the interests of businesses. This is just more of the same. Ka-ching.

Eight Weeks of Summer: Leaders and Followers

This post is week 3 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

This post will catch me up on this little project. It's an interesting piece of teacher sharing and is also turning out to be a nice antidote to political overload. As always, I'm answering the prompt on behalf of the younger, pre-retirement version of me.

How are you both a leader and a follower in your career?

Of course, every teacher is a leader in her own classroom. But stick around the same building long enough and you can become a leader in other ways. Not that there are tons of leadership opportunities formally given to teachers. Sure, you can be appointed by administration to "The Committee To Implement Any Solution It Likes As Long As It's The Solution Administration Wants" or "The Committee To Create Cool Documents That Nobody Will Ever Read." But somehow, those aren't very exciting.

It's more common, I think, for teachers to grow into unofficial roles, so that you become The Person to see about particular problems and solutions. You can become the person whose judgment other teachers trust on certain edu-matters. In my case, I stuck around that I became The Only Person Who Remembers How And Why We've Always Done That.

But the big problem with teacher leadership roles is that there's hardly any role you can take, any piece of power you can have, that administration can't strip instantly. E.G. I was on a committee that was tasked with leading implementation of PLCs in our school-- until administration decided they wanted different things and suddenly we were not leading a thing.

You might argue that this blogging thing has become a sort of leadership role, but I'm not sure that's accurate. I feel more like a resource than a leader.

Followers matter. There's a whole field of study around the idea of first followers-- that an outside the box innovator is just one crazy guy in left field until a first follower shows up to start a crowd. I've been a first follower a few times, saying, "Hey, look at this. Let's all listen up."

But in the  formal institutional sense, I've worked for very few leaders-- mostly I've just had bosses, and I'm a lousy follower of bosses. I can mimic compliance with the best of them, though I got pretty lousy at  it in the final few years-- but that's not following. Teaching is not a very followy profession-- we're usually just out there breaking trail on our own. So I'll be interested to see what types of following turned up  on this third of eight weeks. (Remember, you can use the hashtag #8WeeksOfSummer to track down all the posts people are writing for this challenge).

Eight Weeks Of Summer: Influences

This post is week 2 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

Well, actually, I'm a week late because I was on vacation where the mosquitoes are stronger than the wifi. But I'm going to stick with the exercise anyway, because I find it interesting.

Here's the Week #2 prompt. As always, I'll answer for my previous pre-retirement self.

What has contributed to the educator you are today?

I'm going to skip over some of the obvious factors, like former teachers who had a profound impact on me, and writers about education who directly affected my thinking about classroom and content. Those are all hugely important, but I think we too often think of the growth of a teacher as a linear progression, that proto-teachers learn from teachers and read about teacher things and take teacher classes and that all leads directly to who they are as a teacher. 


That's fine, but I think there's way more to it than that. Teaching is highly personal work, and it's simply impossible to teach effectively without bringing who you are as a person into the classroom. That doesn't mean teachers should be unprofessional ("My boyfriend dumped me last night, so we're not going to have class today"), but it does mean that all the other things we are matter when we hit the room.

So here are what some of those factors are for me.

Student teaching. Yes, I know what I just said. But for me it wasn't just the pedagogical and content aspects of student teaching; it's that I came from a mostly white small town background and student taught in Cleveland Heights with rooms of almost entirely non-white students. It was a clear signal that there were many things that I didn't have a clue about that I needed to have clues about.

Performing. Mind you, I am not an extrovert, not a stage guy. But I've been playing music my whole life up in front of audiences, and that turned out to be hugely integral to my classroom work. In particular, learning to read the room and sense whether you're doing great or bombing.

And while I have done a lot of different types of performing (three hours of oompah-band for a slightly sloppy Oktoberfest crowd, anyone), my heart has always been in traditional jazz. And here's the thing about jazz-- you need a plan, a beat, a progression of chords, a sense of where you and the people you're playing with are going, but if you have a precise note-for-note plan, you're just sucking the life out of it. If you aren't free and flexible enough to respond to the moment, then you're missing the very best parts, the whole point. That is teaching.

Likewise, I've spent a lot of time directing theater, both music and stage, and that idea-- that you need a direction and a sense of the bigger thing that you're  part of, but you also have to be open to respond and collaborate-- it's there, too. And when you're in charge, you cannot try to micro-manage every second of your cast's performance.

Phone bank. I've written before about my time as a catalog phone order taker. I was lousy at the job, and it underlined for me a lot about the cost of having to show up and do poorly at something day after day. It affected how I treated my lower-performing students.

Marriage, divorce, singlehood, marriage. My own relationship struggles were useful in connecting to the issues of my students and their families. Likewise, parenting made a difference. Not that I'm advocating doing any of these things to build your teaching tool box.  Nor do I suggest that you share the play by play with your students. Just that even these very personal experiences can do a great deal toward building your classroom toolbox.