ICYMI: Santa's Almost Here (12/20)

 And the Board of Directors has just about figured out this Christmas thing and twigged onto the notion that presents are coming (but why not right now). I am going to try not to think constantly about all the family and children and grandchildren that I am not seeing this week, because that sucks. In the meantime, here's some reading from this week.

The Logjam that Awaits Biden's education secretary

Derek Black at CNN, with hard dose of reality therapy for everyone imagining that a new administration will bring dramatic change. What a grinch. Okay, he may have some points, too.

How to assign writing when you don't teach writing  

Paul Thomas with some great thoughtful practical advice for assigning writing when that's not really your lane.

For Black educators when school systems aren't doing enuf

Dena Simmons at ASCD with some powerful personal reflections for the times.

Reaganland: Public education and America's right turn

Have You Heard talks to Rick Perlstein and takes us back to the seventies. Really interesting stuff about how schools became a target in the culture wars.

Black students most likely to be going to school remotely

Samantha Fields at Marketplace looks at an emerging trend. Safety and trust seem to be the issues (and not that they are dupes of the teachers unions).

Testing students this spring would be a mistake  

Can't say this enough, but this time it's not me, but testing expert Lorrie Shepard at EdWeek.

Fifty years of trickling down didn't work  

Not directly related to education, exactly, but important validation for what everyone already knew.\

How teachers are sacrificing student privacy to stop cheating

From Vox, one more article pointing out that surveillance software is a bad idea, and schools should knock it off.

The 2020 snow day is here. It must include "sleducation."

Okay, I wish Joshua Goodman at Education Next had the courage to write sleducation without the quotation marks, but still a nice little piece.

A rural school under pressure to stay open

This is how ugly it's getting in places like rural Idaho, where the 'rona is still a big hoax and people are too tough to mask up. Kirk Siegler at NPR.

Sen. Jon Tester on Democrats and rural voters

Tester has some thoughts, including the novel idea of standing up for public education. From New York Times.

Florida lets voucher schools hire dropouts as teachers--and keep it secret

The Orlando Sentinel has been a great source of watchdogging the Florida shenanigans. You may or may not be able to scoot past the paywall, but if you can, this story is amazing. You will not believe how bad it is down there.

As the gap between students and teachers of colors widens in PA, Black families demand change

Sojourner Ahebee reporting for WHYY, Philly's NPR station. This is a great piece of reportage, with plenty of nuance and detail for a difficult topic. If you don't read anything else this week...

Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

 We already know that the teaching profession is primarily composed of white women (average age 43). But sometimes, when you break data down in particular ways, it becomes even more striking.

Research for Action is a Philly-based group that has done some great work over the years, and they've done some research about the TOC/SOC balance in PA that are featured both in this article from Sojourner Ahebee and a "supplemental" Twitter thread (and you can read the research here).

Some of the PA data is just striking. First, PA is an outlier when it comes to the gap between students and teachers of color. Nationally, the share of SOC is 2.5 times the share of TOC, but in PA the SOC share is 6 times greater (only NE, NH and Indiana have a bigger gap). I'm not totally shocked and surprised by that; PA suffers from a fairly severe urban vs. rural divide, and the rural parts of the state are pretty white. 

But when RFA starts breaking down by districts, it gets even starker. There are 500 school districts in PA (which is its own problem) and 184 of those districts employ zero teachers of color. Only about twenty-five districts in the entire state have staffs that are more than 5% TOC. Here's a map from Research for Action, breaking it down district by district:

There are roughly 3,200 schools in Pennsylvania; RFA found that 1,500 of them have all-white teaching staffs. A dozen schools across the state in 2019-2020 were 80% students of color and had no teachers of color at all. And there are other schools that come close to that; Ahebee's piece looks at William Penn School District, where 4% of the students are white and 80% of the teachers are. 

The shifts have occurred over time, both in the increase of SOC and the decrease of TOC. And in some rural districts the staff is mostly or all white, but so is the student body. But we are now in a problematic place.

I know that this subject is a touchy one for some white teachers, that the initial reaction is to bristle and argue that white teachers are perfectly capable of teaching students of color. But at this point the research is overwhelming--the presence of Black teachers in a school produces better results for Black students. With a Black teacher, Black students are more likely to go to college, less likely to suffer exclusionary discipline, more likely to be placed in gifted classes. The list goes on. And it's important for the white students in a school to encounter Black teachers as well. Ahebee hints at one other reason that Black teachers can be effective for Black students--in many settings, those teachers are the ones who actually live in the community that the school serves. Every student is best served by teachers from within and from outside her community. The student needs someone who gets the local flavor, and someone who can show her what lies outside familiar boundaries. All voices have their place within the school, and a diversity of voices best serves the students. 

We are at a difficult point at the moment, with the teacher supply already problematic. In my corner of PA, colleges have been compressing and even eliminating teacher programs because they don't have the enrollment. Add pandemic messes and we are in a place where the entire teacher corps needs to be rebuilt. That's a tough challenge, but it's also an opportunity to rebuild a teacher corps that is not so white. 

How is it done? RFA reports that PA has actually grown, slightly, its share of male TOC by 129, which is better than nothing. The guru of teacher workforce studies, Richard Ingersoll, has told us for years that retention is a huge part of the problem, especially for TOC, so part of the challenge is not just to recruit folks, but to keep them around. 

There are folks working on the issue. The PA department of education has a program to address the drain of teacher talent and the lack of TOC in the state. And the Center for Black Educator Development ("We address educational inequities to improve academic and social outcomes for all students through increased diversity") is one organization working on the issue. Teach for America, after its launch as a platform for primarily white temp teachers, has made equity more of a priority, but students need to see someone who stays, not someone who's just passing through for a couple of years. Per RFA dats, charters in Philly are doing better than public schools, but you know I don't think that's the answer (even if we ignore all the other charter issues, sheer scale rules them out). It will take state initiatives, organizations like CBED, and deliberate, mindful decisions by the people who do hiring at each of those 500 districts.

I don't see or hear anyone in all of this saying that white teachers can't teach students of color, or, for that matter, that women can't teach young men. But there is something fundamentally missing in any education system where a child can spend twelve years and never see an adult person like themself. Pennsylvania is in the weeds on this. 

Read Ahebee's article, which delivers a nuanced and close-up look at how the issue plays out for students and teachers. Read RFA's study, which has layers and layers of data to unpack. There is plenty here for Pennsylvania's education leaders to think about and act upon. 

1776 Commission Members Appointed (And It's About What You'd Expect)

You remember just six 2020 weeks ago (that's roughly a year and a half in regular time), Dear Leader proclaimed that the 1776 Commission would be formed in order to create a more perfect set of teaching stuff that would teach our young people to think about our country in the Correct Way. The proclamation announcing this was a piece of work, among other things laying out how we should teach students to have the Proper View of our country (we were bad about Black people for a while, but now that's all fixed) and wipe out that 1619 Project stuff. It was not exactly lined up with the goal of teaching critical thinking, but, hey, Patriotism.

Now Dear Leader has appointed his crew, and it has gone about as one would expect. You can check out the official list here, but here's a rundown of who some of these folks are.

Larry Arn will be the chair. Arn is the president of hyper-conservative ultra-Christianist Euro-centric Hillsdale College (Betsy DeVos was just there to deliver a Jeremiad).

Members include Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, the campus right-wing group, and recent receiver of hard talk from Geraldo Rivera (Trump lost. Knock it off.). Because a history commission needs people who can't even come to grips with the history of the several weeks.

Brooke Rollins, the Trump domestic policy advisor since May.\

We've got Carol Swain, a retired poli sci professor that Trump probably saw talking on the TV, or maybe on Twitter passing along already-debunked election conspiracy baloney. And she's Black, so for Trump's purposes that's a bonus.

Vincent Haley, another member of the Trump administration (speechwriting, etc). Formerly employed by folks like Gingrich Productions and Trump for America, Inc.

Victor Davis Hanson, a pundit and Hoover Institution senior fellow who was on the TV explaining that Black Lives Matter is trying to "hijack" American history.

Phil Bryant, Governor of Mississippi and Trump lover. Briefly a sheriff before becoming a career politician.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, whose listed areas of expertise are conservatism, Europe and global politics. Not U.S. history.

John Gibbs, a conservative commentator who has held a variety of jobs in the Trump administration. He started out as a software engineer. His Wikipedia entry says, so far, that he has a "history of making inflammatory remarks and spreading false conspiracy theories on his Twitter feed." That would include the claim that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign took part in a Satanic ritual.

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He's a regular on the Fox business channel, and he held a Trump fundraiser for the election that Trump just lost. He did once found a company (Curriki) that did education stuff, so there's that.

Gay Hart Gaines, a GOP fund raiser from Palm Beach. He once received a lifetime award for that, awarded by Laura Ingraham at a dinner at Mar-A-Lago.

Ned Ryun, founder of American Majority, an outfit that locates, recruits and trains conservatives to run for local offices. He has a whole podcast series about the History of the Constitutional Convention.

Peter Kirsanow is a lawyer from Cleveland and is a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, serving his fourth six-year term (originally appointed by George W. Bush).

Charles R. Kesler is a professor at Claremont McKenna College. He appears to have written many real articles and at least one book about the founding of America.

Dr. Thomas K. Lindsay--who is not a medical doctor but is still listed with "Dr" attached--works at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-tilted thinky tank. An academic (even though he calls himself a doctor), he research has focused on democracy and education.

Jerry C. Davis is president of the very Christianist College of the Ozarks (in Missouri) and his heart is heavy about racial injustice.

Michael Farris, a lawyer and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, and also worked on the Convention of States Project. Citizens for Self-Governance is also one of his projects.

And Bob McEwen, who was a GOP pol in Ohio back in the day, but nowadays is a lobbyist and talking head, primarily at Advantage Assoc International. He was a vocal supporter of Trump during impeachment proceedings.

So what we have is a couple of people who might actually know something about early U.S. history (albeit viewed through a conservative lens, or even a heavily smudged conservative lens) and a bunch of Trumpers, fundraisers, and folks who have no apparent excuse for being on this commission. And almost nobody who knows anything at all about education--well, actually nobody at all when it comes to the K-12 students who are the target of this baloney. 

What a bizarre little thing to try to pull off in the final moments of a lame duck Presidency (and on a Friday afternoon before a holiday week), as if there aren't a few other things that require federal attention at the moment. Here's hoping that the commission doesn't even manage one meeting before vanishing into the ether, like the silly piece of vaporware it is. 

Children are not our future

There are plenty of warm fuzzy teacher sayings that I could well do without, emphasizing as they do that teachers are too noble to ever want to do things like, say, insist on being paid a decent wage or have control over their working conditions. But there's a child-focused saying that I would like to banish to the Island of Misfit Cliches--

Children are our future. Or, sometimes, children are the future.

The first is worse, carrying with it the notion children belong to us--and not just now, but in perpetuity, as if their adult selves will exist only to take care of the rest of us. "Shut up, kid, and get back to work. Grampa is going to need a new pair of shoes!"

But I object to both for other reasons.

I hear in this cliche the echoes of a notion that children are empty vessels just waiting for Wise Adults to fill them up with knowledge and thoughts and values and all the other stuff that makes a person an actual person. Because, yeah, if they're empty vessels, they're not exactly persons, are they.

The modern version of this is to view them as a sort of empty hard drive, just waiting for programming to be added. I think this is part of the reason that the "science of reading" moniker rubs me the wrong way--the implication that one simply plugs or pours in this scientific programmy stuff, and that will result in every single child being filled up with proper reading stuff.

And, of course, if the child is an empty lot, we needn't look inside to see what's already there--we can just concentrate on what we want to see dumped into the child. We can build the child to order without having to pay attention to anything that might get in the way of the new structure we plan to build. 

The emphasis on the future is also problematic, suggesting that the child's life isn't really going on right now, that their current life is just a staging area for the life to come. And yes--it's absolutely true that their childhood is the time in which we should help them build strong, robust, vibrant structures that will allow them to enjoy their life in years to come. Is that more true for a five year old than a thirty-five year old? 

The idea of potentiality, the collecting of tools for future use--that's all important. But let's not get so focused on that that we forget that these children are living their lives right now. Let's not fall so far into this rhetoric that we start thinking that children will be, you know, real people some day, but not today. 

Plenty of adults act as if children are a mystery, as if nobody can know how to talk to this alien species. There is no mystery. Children are people. People who haven't yet developed some physiological and psychological aspects, people without limited experience in the world, but people all the same. Not future people. People right now, today.

This "children are the future" talk makes it easy to justify the kinds of bad policy we've seen in the last few decades. Sure, let's start sitting them down to study academic subjects earlier and earlier because there's nothing about what's going on in a four-year-old's life right now that could possibly be as important as getting her packed full of employer-desired skills for the future. It's easy to deny childhood when you think that all of a child's Real Life is in the future. 

"Children are the future" is often used as a motivational nudge for funding and/or supporting education and can feel like part of a larger conversation that started with "We don't need to spend money on that--they're just children." It's a conversation one would expect from people who measure a person's worth in their utility (in particular, their utility to employers). It's a hard conversation, because if you don't know that you should care about, look after, cherish and hold close our children, I don't know how to explain it to you. They are bundles of raw humanity, undiluted and unvarnished. That ought to be good enough. 

"Children are our present" doesn't sing like the "future" version, but I think it's truer and important in that it doesn't let us push off our obligation to the young humans among us. They are here, with us, today, and deserve to be cherished and supported and seen and heard and embraced for all they are today. The future will come on its own, soon enough.

 

More Teacher Effectiveness Mirages

 The Fordham Institution has a new report entitled "Teacher Effectiveness and Improvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools." Despite what it claims to study, the report is a neear-perfect demonstration of Campbell's Law in action. 

The study starts with a question that, as used car salesmen put it, assumes the sale:

Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?

We're not going to get bogged down in the details of this study, including this assertion that charter school superiority is a proven thing, because none of them matter when it comes to understanding why this study is fatally flawed.

The fleshed-out version of the question under study is this-- we know that more experienced teachers are generally better at their craft then newbies (an assertion that Fordham didn't make back in the days when they were part of the Let's Get Rid Of Teacher Job Protections crowd), but we also know that charters mostly have newbie teachers, so how is it that charters gets these superior results with fresh-out-the-wrapper staff?

The report was written by Matthew P. Steinberg (George Mason University) and Haisheng Yeng (U of Penn grad student). They worked from a pile of data from the PA department of education from between 2007 and 2017.

We could dig deeply into this report, but there's no reason to. All we really have to see is this sentence:

Like other studies, this one uses estimates of teachers’ value-added—that is, their contribution to students’ English language arts (ELA) and math achievement growth— as a proxy for their effectiveness.

So once again, "teacher effectiveness" is being used as a synonym for "scores on a single standardized test of math and reading soaked in the widely-debunked VAM formula." This is bunk. They try to prop it up with this--

Although such estimates cannot capture other valuable aspects of teaching practice and behaviors, research shows that (in addition to learning more math and English language arts) students assigned to teachers with higher value-added scores are more likely to go to college and earn higher salaries later in life.

That assertion about later salaries is cited from Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014, a work that is problematic at best and bunk at worst. Meanwhile, even folks in the ed reform community have caught on to the fact that raising a child's Big Standardized Test score doesn't lead to that child having a better life. 

But using test scores as a proxy for "student achievement" or "teacher effectiveness" is a critical tactic for ed reformsters, because writing a whole paper about how one set of teachers is better at raising test scores isn't very sexy or exciting. "What I really want from a teacher is for her to get my kid to do better on that one standardized test they take every spring, and nothing else matters as much," said no parent ever. Likewise, while there are a million interpretations of "good teacher," very few of them are "teacher whose students get good scores on that one big test." 

Using test scores as a measure of teaching quality and student achievement isn't just a bad, inaccurate measurement--it triggers Goodhart's Law, or its somewhat better known sibling, Campbell's Law. The idea here is that the more you use a quantitative social measure for social decision-making, the more it will tend to disrupt and corrupt the processes it's supposed to be monitoring. If you like a pithier version, take Strathern's restatement of Goodhart--

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Which brings us back to this piece of research. Steinberg and Yang find that CMO-run charters seem to have better-trained teachers, and they posit that hiring practices, training practices, or the charter chain tendency to force all teachers to follow the prescribed procedures--not just curricular, but pedagogical--might be the answer. 

But if we stop using bad proxies and just say plainly what we're talking about, there's little mystery here. The premise of the study is that newbie charter teachers get better test scores than public school teachers. That points to just one thing--more focused test prep. This is easy to enforce with newbie teachers in a restrictive teaching environment because they don't have enough of a well-established professional identity to push back. Meanwhile, teachers in public schools are trying to balance the demand for raising test scores against the demand to actually teach. 

In short, the explanation laid out by this report is that charter schools (at least the ones studied here) train teachers to do test prep instead of training them to actually teach. 

Mike Petrilli suggested on Twitter this morning that I'm being cynical here with my reading of the report, but I think it's far more cynical to keep arguing in 2020 that using a single set of test scores and a long-since-discredited number crunching formula as a measure of true teacher quality. It is possible, as Petrilli says, that some charters are doing a great job of teaching junior teachers to "teach well," but as long as the premise is that "teach well" means "have students who get high scores on the BS Test," we'll never, ever know. 

"Well, then, how do we figure out which teachers are doing a good job," has been the complaint for the past couple of decades, and I agree that this is a tough nut to crack, but that does not mean that we settle on a bad answer. It is hard to cure certain types of cancer, but that does not mean that we should settle for "drink bleach and sacrifice a frog under a full moon" as a cure. We do not, like the proverbial drunk, search for our car keys under a streetlight a hundred feet from where we dropped the keys because the light is better there. 

It has been true since we ushered in test-centric schooling under NCLB--the discussion about teacher quality is worth having, but we cannot have it if we insist on using as "data" something that does not measure teacher quality. 

There are other problems with this particular study. Most notably, since it is based on tests scores, it makes sense to look at the students who are taking those tests and the long-known techniques of cherry picking and push-out used by many charter schools to insure that they have a good crop of quality test-takers. Or we could talk about longer school days, or simply organizing the vast amount of school time around the BS Test. Any of these would explain the charter alleged test edge. This study doesn't address any of that. 

But it doesn't matter. Any study that accepts the premise that BS Test-based VAM scores are a measure of teacher quality is wasting time. 

How Does Education Fix Poverty? Spoiler alert...

 The idea that we can educate poverty away has been a popular one with policymakers and politicians for years now. Here's just one example, from Janet Yellen, former Fed Chair and, possibly, future Treasury Secretary, back in 2017:

Yellen spoke to a conference on community development today, where she says that providing children with the opportunity to learn important skills earlier is essential to ending this generational cycle of poverty.

“This research underscores the value of starting young to develop basic work habits and skills,” she said. “These habits and skills help prepare people for work, help them enter the labor market sooner, meet with more success over time and be in a position to develop the more specialized skills and obtain the academic credentials that are strongly correlated with higher and steadier earnings.”

You can find this kind of idea echoed at the international level or when plugging particular edu-programs-- education ends the "cycle of poverty" or "lifts the economy."

Now, I am not an economists (though there are so many economists that pretend to be education experts that it would serve them right if I got in their lane), so I may be missing something here. Feel free to sort me out in the comments.

But it seems to me that two things are being conflated here. One is that education can help an individual escape poverty. That one makes sense-- Pat gets an education and can quit that job at the widget factory assembly line and get a better one designing widgets or VP of widget marketing.

But the second idea--that education can end poverty as a whole--seems more problematic. Pat leaves the widget assembly line job, which pays minimum wage with no benefits and only provides 29 weeks of work per year. When Pat had the job, Pat was among the working poor. But when Pat leaves the job, the poverty-creating job, is still there and will be filled by someone else, who will still be a member of the working poor. So Pat's life improves, but the total poverty that exists remains the same.

I am stumped on how the education-ending-poverty thing works. If everyone in the country has a masters degree, does McDonalds start paying its burger flippers $20/hour? Would Walmart suddenly start paying big money and benefits because every single stocker has a degree? Will companies that used to hire 10 people with masters degree now hire 20 just because they're so plentiful, so that the available jobs for highly educated people will grow? 

None of that seems likely. Businesses are not replacing humans with computers because they just can't find humans who are well-educated enough. Businesses did not outsource jobs to other countries because the people there are so much better-educated. And businesses, as we have seen demonstrated with stimulus funding, companies don't hire more people just because they have some spare money lying around. Businesses outsource and cybersource because it saves them money. The level of education for the people they're avoiding paying doesn't change that.

Maybe the idea is that if everyone had more education, we'd suddenly be awash in entrepreneurs creating start-up businesses left and right. This seems... unlikely. Or maybe better-educated people would be more productive and that boost in productivity would lead to--oh, never mind...

(Okay, here's a differing view of that infamous chart, which is a long read and at the end, doesn't make things look much better for US workers).

My cynical non-economist view is this-- "education will fix poverty" is an excellent way to absolve all the other players. Politicians and policymakers don't have to address the problems of poverty because, hey, if the schools would just do their jobs, poverty would be fixed. Business leaders don't have to behave like responsible members of society instead of oligarchs because, somehow, it's not their fault that their business is built on the backs of underpaid, ill-used fellow citizens. It is yet another more subtle way to blame the poor for being poor, as if the Captains of Industry are looking down at the meat widgets saying, "Look, if you had more education, I'd pay you more to do that job." 

Does all this mean we should not do our best to give every student the maximum educational tools so that they can lift themselves just as far and high as they can? Absolutely not--the gig is to give every student all the tools, all the knowledge, all the power that education can give a person. We should fight poverty, and arm students to fight it. But schools can't do it all themselves; lifting individuals out of the tar pit of poverty doesn't clean up the pit itself. 

And when people start using "poverty" and "education" in the same declarative sentence, be clear on what they are talking about--helping individuals rise, or cleaning up fundamental injustices in society because society's leaders don't want to do the job. Escape poverty, or fight it? The first job may belong to schools, but the second belongs to everyone. 

Schools, Supposedly, Have Caused the Fall of US Religion

The Christian Church has been suffering a steady and rapid decline for a few decades now, a trend noted by many social scientists, and a source of struggle within many churches that are looking for ways to fill newly-emptied pews. You can look at many data sets on the subject. The folks at Pew Research find that there's a stark generational factor; in the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer cohort, those who call themselves Christian are a vast majority (84% and 76% respectively), but only half of Millennials describe themselves as Christian. 

It's a complicated phenomenon, and carries a little existential weight in a country that many folks like to think of as a Christian nation. 

So what's the answer? 

Religion News Service offers ten reasons, including prosperity that distracts people from faith, lack of compelling religious leaders, the end of Sunday as a "protected" church day, and the "wired" world. Many writers point out that US numbers are still higher than European ones. Focus on the Family says it's all okay, because evangelicals are gaining. Ross Douthat at the New York Times kind of agreed, suggesting that it's "lukewarm Christianity" that is declining. Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at Notre Dame, pointed at three historical events driving the precipitous post-90s plunge: the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the political team-up of the GOP and the religious right. Researcher Jean M. Twenge found a sharp drop in religiosity among teens; we might come back to her findings in a moment.

Or maybe we won't bother, because Cameron Hilditch over at the National Review has solved the mystery-- it's those darned public schools. 

We have discussed Hilditch's work before; he's the one who is pissed off that people think of teachers as selfless and calling some schools "public" is just a rhetorical dirty trick. He's a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute, a Belfast native, and an Oxford guy. 

His argument here is built partly on the work of Lyman Stone at the American Enterprise Institute, who cranked out a report about this back in April of 2020, Promise and Peril. I'm guessing a lot of folks missed it because in April of 2020, we were pre-occupied with a few other issues. It's loaded with lots of attempts to find a way to measure how religious folks are.

The title "Why American Children Stopped Believing in God" doesn't telegraph much, but the sub-head does--"The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state." Hilditch is here both to solve the mystery and to torch some straw persons, and he's neither subtle nor witty about which side he's backing:

Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time.

Get it? Conservatives "cite" and progressives "mutter something." And there's this:

Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”

It’s a simple theory, befitting the minds of those who have historically espoused it.

Lord knows I have thrown my share of snark, but the rules of decent snark include 1) an honest attempt to grasp the other person's point and 2) avoiding a devolution into direct insult.

At any rate, Hilditch wants us to understand that religiosity or the lack thereof doesn't particularly correlate to education attainment level, so "enlightenment" doesn't explain it. Here's the answer he finds in Stone:

But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.

 

Or, as he quotes Stone:

Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser degree, government spending on old-age pensions. Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious. It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.

How to explain the linkage? Hilditch is ready to shine a light:

It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.

So there's his argument. Let's take a look at why he's wrong.

First, despite the use of words like "drives" and "affected," what Stone is pointing at is correlation, not causation. We could just as easily look at the data and conclude that a loss in religious identification causes a society to spend more money on a government-run education system. Or we could ask an even better question--what third factor is driving both of these changes. We could even ask--and probably should--if the correlation is an illusion. Let me direct you, once again, to one of my favorite websites, Spurious Correlations, where we learn that the US space program causes suicides and Nic Cage movies cause people to drown in pools. 

Next, Stone himself is not quite as certain that "it's quite simple." He gives secular education its own heading as one possible cause. He talks about the "club goods" theory of religiosity--the idea that get a certain set of services as a member of a club--and how other competing providers would undercut church, and offers examples of how Sunday football and Sunday liquor sales lower church attendance. Also, if you have sources of safety and security in times of trial, you are less likely to turn to the church. (Note that these are similar to items on the Religion News list above).

Stone also looks at his own charts and reaches a valuable conclusion:

The story of the secularization of America is not mostly the story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults. It is the story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.

Stone has a thought about that, but his language, which has been so firm up until this point, now gets very waffly. The source of this secular upbringing "may very well be" in schools. More educational spending by the state "may teach not just math and reading." It "may even alter" parental behavior and the "household environment." So it might maybe be the schools, kind of, via methods that a 60 page paper doesn't take time to explain. Because, really--how exactly would greater government spending on school lead teachers to work harder at inculcating a world view or life orientation. Nor does Stone, who rolls out plenty of charts and graphs and data and research, take the time to explain what exactly "more government spending" means. More total? More per pupil? Nor does he venture a guess at how this school spending would affect parental behavior or the household environment. And that's not the weakest part of his argument:

It is striking that religiosity declines so much between age 12 and 18, before children have left the home. Most likely, instead of a religious school supporting and encouraging religious behavior and instruction, high school becomes a season of secularization.

I spent 39 years working with teens. The notion that anyone in a school, religious or not, is going to indoctrinate them into a particular set of beliefs, religious or not, defies reality. If such a t6hing were possible, every one of my students would have emerged from my class loving reading and writing. Sadly, that did not happen. Anyone who thinks a teenager is likely to say, "You know, that's not what I used to believe, but now that I've heard you say it, I've changed my whole view of the world," has never met a teenager. 

But Hilditch sees schools as irresistible juggernauts of indoctrination, run by--well, let him say it:

College, career, and popularity become the existential targets toward which the arrow of each student’s soul is aimed by bow-wielding commissars across the country. In a context such as this, secularization becomes ineluctable.

My colleagues and I were just bow-wielding commissars (because, you know, evil socialists), and students were just helpless putty in our hands. And this is important too--how did we jump from the idea that more government spending hurts religion to the idea that it's these "commissars." Did we use the money to hire more commissars? Did we spend it on more commissar training? Where is the connection to taxpayer money here?

Anyway, this brings up another problem with Hilditch's vision. It would require a vast conspiracy among millions of compliant teachers. But the figures say that at least 65% of American adults identify as Christian; would that not suggest that at least 65% of school faculty members also identify as Christian, or does he assume that some mechanism in either policy or conspiracy weeds out all the Christian teachers and keeps them out of public schools? A good-sized chunk of teachers voted for Donald Trump in 2016; is that just a cover, or are teachers really not a very homogenous group? Or is his theory that teachers are all locked in place by government policy? Because that's nuts--the government tried really hard to lock everyone into Common Core, and they failed. Is there a super-secret Secular Core that they've successfully implanted?

His conclusion was there at the start--religious families should get their children out of public school. How will this be financed? He admits it will not be cheap and will require "the establishment of charitable private education co-operatives," which could mean tax credit scholarships or it could mean privately funded schools or it could mean that not everybody will get a part of this.

Whatever the case, Hilditch should direct his attention to the Netherlands. Betsy DeVos is a fan of the Netherlands because after decades and decades of political conflict on the issue, the Netherlands basically went full voucher--they fund public secular schools and private religious schools, so there is no country where it's any easier to get your child out of the public schools and into a private religious school with the faith of your preference. 

But here's the thing. The Netherlands appear in Stone's report in Figure 2-- Religious Affiliation over Time in Different Countries. It shows the drop in religiosity in thirteen different countries. All have had precipitous drops, but no country fell farther, faster, sooner than the Netherlands. 

So maybe it's not actually the public schools causing all this.

I said we'd come back to Jean Twenge. She and her co-authors looked at teen religious convictions in a paper published in PLOS ONE, a journal that involved actual peer review. They found that the drop is real, and that it's not a shift (in other words, "religious like in church" didn't change to "Just spiritual, man.")

The paper offers some "possible explanations" that open with this magical sentence-- "This analysis cannot show causation, only correlation..." because that's how real scientists talk. But the authors lean toward individualism as an explanation. First, real commitment to the church means commitment to a larger organization ahead of your own preferences. You also have to go along with what the group believes, and in general submit to a higher authority. In particular, religion "often focuses on concerns outside the self." All of these, they suggest, run counter to individualism. 

It makes a certain sense, and points at what could be a large irony lurking in the midst of Hilditch's article. The rising love of Ayn Rand among conservatives has always been, well, odd, given that Rand believed that religion is for weak suckers and that selfishness is the greatest virtue. Christianity and Randian objectivism are hugely incompatible, but the post-Reagan conservative world loves it some rugged libertarian-flavored individualism. So it would be a special kind of irony if one of the factors dragging down religion in the US is, in fact, exactly the kinds of philosophy regularly promoted in the pages of the National Review.

In the meantime, opponents of public ed are running out of ills to blame on teachers. Stay tuned for the next installment.