High Stakes Testing Town Hall--Sign Up

Is there a debate about this spring's Big Standardized Test, exactly? On one side, you have pretty much everyone who has actual direct knowledge of education and teaching pointing out the many reasons that going ahead with 2021's spring edition of the BS Test is a waste of time and money (I've been offering my two cents on the subject here and here and here and here and here, for example). On the other side, you have various newspaper editorial boards, leaning heavily on "research" by testing companies that stand to lose money if the test boom finally collapses.

But with the new administration, everyone seems to sense a window of opportunity, with secretary-designate Miguel Cardona being seen as someone who does not have strong inclinations one way or the other. So now is a good time to make some noise and spread the word-- this year is not the year to trot out the BS Test again.

Next Tuesday, the folks Bob Schaeffer and the folks at Fair Test are holding a national on-line town hall. The National Town Hall on Suspending High-Stakes Testing in Spring 2021will be 
held January 26 at 6:00 EST, and it features a powerhouse line-up of education speakers:

U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman, New York -- House Education Committee
Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, Dean, University of Kentucky College of Education
Dr. Lorrie Sheppard, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Colorado
Dr. Jack Schneider, Asst. Professor, Leadership in Education, University of Massachusetts
Dr. Lisa Escarcega, Colorado State Board of Education
Roberto Jiménez, School Committee Member, Chelsea, Massachusetts

MCs will be Bob Schaeffer, Executive director of FairTest, and Ilana Spiegel, University of Colorado Board of Regents.

There are so many reasons not to give the tests this spring, but probably the biggest is that there is no good reason TO give the tests, and with districts already strapped for time and/or money, so many more important, more useful, and more educational things that teachers could be doing. 

You can register for the town hall here. Doesn't cost a cent, and if you miss it, the meeting will be recorded and put up on Facebook. Make some noise. Of all the actions that the new Department of Education could take, nothing would be simpler to implement or more far-reaching in its positive effect. Let's get this right.

FL: Voucher and Privatization Endgame in Sight

Florida's legislature is at it again, joining in a national trend of using the pandemic crisis to fuel school voucher initiatives. 

Manny Diaz, Jr., (R-Hialeah) has spent his career chip chip chipping away at public education in Florida, and yesterday he returned with another bold idea. 

Florida has allowed choice programs to grow like an unweeded garden, but Diaz's new bill proposes to collapse five "scholarship" (aka "voucher") programs into just two Education Savings Account (ESA) programs. So Family Empowerment, Hope, Florida Tax Credit Scholarship--all under one roof now, along with the newly condensed Gardinier-McKay programs for students with special needs.

We'll look at the bill more closely in a minute, but let's pause first to admire the cynicism behind this proposal to further gut Florida's public school system. Here's Diaz making his pitch for why he heard the call to propose this bill:

During the past year, our scholarship families let us know that they wanted programs that were easier to understand and simpler to navigate. They also told us that they wanted more flexibility so they could give their children access to high quality education while continuing to keep them safe during the pandemic. This bill represents our effort to respond to those concerns and improve all our school choice programs by making them more family friendly. I am very proud to have my name attached to this bill

Senate President Wilton Simpson also noted that the state's system of programs is "pretty confusing," and you might think this has to do with the way that Florida GOPpies have rolled them out piecemeal, using various student groups, like the poor or those with special needs, has contributed to the patchwork nature. You might look at the Hope Scholarship, a program that was nominally set up to rescue bullied students but turns out to be more about Rep. Byron Donalds' desire to "leave his mark" than actually help bullied kids, which it turns out it isn't actually doing particularly well. 

But no--Simpson has another theory about why the system of vouchers that has been implemented by the legislature is a slapdash mess: “This patchwork system is largely the result of years of legal challenges from school choice opponents who have attempted to thwart every effort to actually give parents a say in how their children are educated.” Really? Because mostly lawsuits about Florida's voucher systems have run into a buzzsaw of voucher-backing money and well-financed opposition, as well as unfriendly courts. Now, if Simpson wanted to sat that the patchwork system is the result of Florida carefully dipping its toe in the school voucher water a little bit at a time so as to avoid getting called out on violating the state constitution, I'd say that was a more accurate take, but of course it wouldn't allow Simpson to blame somebody else.

So here comes SB 48, designed to expand the eligibility for programs, combine them, and put them under ESAs and folding in Tax Credit Scholarships. There are a few other wrinkles as well.

It also reduces oversight by the state--previously the outfits overseeing the tax credit scholarships had to be audited annually, to make sure they were spending public tax dollars appropriately; now they would be audited only every three years. That's important, because an ESA is like a debit card given to parents, and history tells us that without some oversight, the tax dollars carried by that debit card can end up spent on....well, in Arizona they discovered about $700,000 in ESA money on beauty supplies, clothing, and even attempts to just grab the cash.

Publicity touts "adding flexible spending options" as well. The vouchers can be used for the following: instructional materials (including digital devices); curriculum; tuition for full or part-time for everything from postsecondary courses to a "home education program" to private school to virtual school; fees for tests (SAT, AP, industry certification); Florida's prepaid college savings programs; contracted services, including classes from public school; part-time tutoring services (from someone who has certification or has just ":demonstrated mastery of subject area knowledge"); summer school or after-school ed fees; transportation (under $750). So, a whole lot of things other than just a voucher to go to school somewhere.

This fits with another piece of the proposal (which is really an amending of existing law); the consistent strike-through of "eligible nonprofit scholarship funding organizations" and replacing it with "K-12 education funding." This gets us back to tax credit scholarships, a type of voucher most recently pushed by Betsy DeVos. In the classic TCS, a wealthy donor gives some money to fund vouchers. That money is counted against their tax bill (in Florida's case, 100%), so give $10K to the voucher program, pay $10K less in taxes (and the state gets $10K less in revenue). So far, tax credit programs have involved a middleman to complete the process of laundering the money. Pat McGotbux gives $10K to, in Florida's case, Step Up for Students, who in turn award the voucher to parents (or, in some cases, to a school on behalf of parents). That extra laundering step has protected states from any charges of violating the separation of church and state, of giving tax dollars to a church-run school. But thanks to Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and a host of "religious freedom"-friendly judges installed by That Last Guy, states are no longer quite so worried about that whole church state wall thing. However, the proposed law still allows for a robust, profitable business in the scholarship funds management biz (there's a whole section on how to qualify).

This also dovetails nicely with the "flexibility" touted above; the dream for ESAs for many ed privatizers and profiteers is the "unbundling" of education. Why go to the trouble and expense to put a whole "school" on the market when you can target more tightly--get in the math class biz, or the art class biz, or the ELA biz. Instead of sending a child to school, parents can assemble a variety of educational "resources" and just put it all on the ESA card. Where the law used to say "A parent who applies for a Family Empowerment Scholarship is exercising his or her parental option to place his or her child in a private school," it now says "...exercising his or her parental option to determine the appropriate placement or the services that best meets [sic] the needs of his or her child." (l. 2316-2321)

So it makes a dark sense that the bill wants to swap out "give the money to some specific entity created to manage these funds" to "just give the money to something we'll vaguely call K-12 education." 

This also makes another significant swap-out. For "we promise to provide a free and appropriate education for your child" it substitutes "we promise to give you a credit card with some funds on it and thereby wash our hands of you--good luck in that free market, parents." The law includes a requirement that the state department of education "shall develop guidelines for a parent guide to successful student achievement which describes what parents need to know about their child’s educational progress and how they can help their child to succeed in school." So, here's an ESA credit card and a handy guide pamphlet--good luck, parents. Meanwhile, the market floods with fraudsters, profiteers, well-meaning incompetents, and high-gloss edu-businesses that you can't afford with the funds on your ESA. 

There are other bits and pieces--lawyers will have a dig through this if it becomes a law. But some other tidbits. Students who receive free or reduced price lunches can get funding to attend a school other than the one they're assigned to by residence. More follow-up on reported bullying incidents. Operators of scholarship-funding organizations have to pass background checks. At one point it talks about some rules that apply "if the scholarship-funding organization provided the majority of the scholarship funding to the school," anticipating, I guess, some close, chummy relationships between those two parts of the edu-biz-ecosystem. And just in case you thought I was exaggerating, there's a paragraph about how the scholarship funding organization may distribute the funding, including debit cards and electronic payment cards. You can only contribute to tax credit scholarships up to 50% of your total tax bill.

All of the usual folks like this bill. Americans for Prosperity (the Koch-funded group that helped turbo-charge the Tea Party) says that "the public health crisis reminds us that a crisis should never be wasted when it can help provide cover for our policy goals." Ha, no! Just kidding. Skylar Zander of AFP said that the health crisis reminds us that one-size-fits-all system does not meet the needs of every child, which I guarantee you will not be what he says when the subject of forcing every child to take Florida's odious Big Standardized Test, or their foolish third grade retention law, comes up. And, of course, Jeb Bush, the mac daddy of Floridian public school disruption, tweeted about how much he likes it. 

Somehow the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate Education Committee only heard about this via an aid on Tuesday, two days before the bill debuted. 

"This is a huge, huge problem that they’re about to do this in a COVID year, with all the budget constraints,” Jones, who is vice chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said during Tuesday’s Democratic caucus meeting. “We’re going to have to fight like hell on this one." I am not sure what it looks like when a Floridian Democrat fights like hell. Florida's teachers did a little better:

“What the world has learned during this pandemic is the importance of public schools to a functioning society, but one of the first bills out the gate this year in Florida undercuts public education. Parents want lawmakers to invest in and support public schools. This bill does the opposite, and would drain away more resources from the schools that educate the great majority of our state’s children,” FEA president Andrew Spar said in a prepared statement.

But, in an editorial choice emblematic of Florida, the FEA quote is the last paragraph in the news service release about the bill, and was cut off of many repeats of the story.

This, for many choice fans, is getting close to the end game. The dream-- rich people pay fewer taxes and only support the schools they want to support. Wealthy people still have access to all the choices they want, while everyone else gets to pick through a free market morass in search of do-it-yourself education for their children. Education becomes mostly privatized edu-business, and the public schools remains in some markets to do their underfunded best with the "customers" that nobody wants. But hey. Lower taxes. Less paying for the education of Those People. Put Jesus back in charge of more education, even if that means the education is not very good, aggressively exclusionary, or even abusive.

We'll see what happens. Pay attention. Because Florida remains on the cutting edge of disrupting public education into oblivion, the model which other states that hope to be the very worst still aspire to follow.

Meet Your Dead Teacher

 Well, this was going to happen sooner or later

HI EXCUSE ME, I just found out the the prof for this online course I’m taking *died in 2019* and he’s technically still giving classes since he’s *literally my prof for this course* and I’m learning from lectures recorded before his passing

..........it’s a great class but WHAT

— Aaron Ansuini 🪴🌱✨ (@AaronLinguini) January 20, 2021

I used to tell my students that I would teach until I died, and then have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics while old tapes of my teaching played. Turns out that I didn't do that, but it was still a thing someone could do.

If you think teaching is the act of pouring Knowledge Stuff from one container into another, I guess this makes sense. And I can imagine the administration salivating over the prospect of a "teacher" who requires no pay, no benefits, and no lengthy hiring process to acquire.

The weirdness that the poster talks about is, I think, a residue of the natural inclination we have to think of ourselves as in a relationship with our teachers. Hell, forty-some years later I still have a warm spot in my heart for Julius Sumner Miller and his videos of physics demonstrations which, though we were clearly watching a recording, seemed live and real and for us in 1974. So finding out that a person you think has been, in some way, sort of, really talking to you--well, they're actually dead. That's a little disconcerting, like taking a step backward and having your foot meet air rather than floor.

Practically speaking, why not. Is Khan Academy going to take down videos of "teachers" who die? Of course not.

But it's a reminder of what's wrong with this kind of "education," a kind of teaching that involves no relationship, like a performer stepping out on stage in front of nobody. No connection. No seeing who the students are, how they're reacting, what they feel, how well the lesson is landing.

There are reformsters who seem to believe, or at least want others to believe, that this kind of one-way lecture-only type of education is typical. It isn't, and hasn't been for decades. Because education runs on relationships. Except that that's expensive, so why not cram a few hundred students in a hall or have some mook deliver a canned lesson or just have them watch some videos, even videos recorded by someone who's now dead.

The weirdness of how this feels tells us a lot about education. After all, we watch movies and listen to music from dead people all the time. Some of us become obsessed involved fans, trying to dredge up every piece of information we can to feel closer or more connected to the dead performer. Others of us just watch or listen, relating only to the art and not the human behind it. Or we identify with the audience that was there for the work (hence the pervasive love of live audience recordings).

But in education we expect more than that. As students, we expect to be seen, and we build some sort of relationship with the teacher in front of us, a unique semi-professional one (yet personal enough that as students it can still rock the foundations of the universe when we discover a teacher wearing jeans or shopping for groceries).

As far as I know, nobody is trying to capture dead K-12 teachers yet, but much of the curriculum that teachers are required to write and align and record in painstaking detail in digital formats really is, literally, about reassuring staff-strapped administrators that if Mrs. McTeachalot dropped dead tonight, somebody could come in and do her job just like her tomorrow. And of course a great deal of robo-grading and robo-teaching is based on the notion that we can swap out live tissue for dead circuitry (and so far, it mostly sucks).

I've known teachers, now passed, who taught brilliant lessons, but I don't know how they could ever have been captured. The lessons, year to year, were tweaked in the planning to match the students of that year, and tweaked in the moment to match the immediate reaction. Captured in digital amber, they simply wouldn't be the same. 

And so it becomes radical to assert that teaching is a job best left to the living. 21st Century education, indeed.

Maintaining Classroom Discipline (1947)

God bless the internet. Here's a little 13 minute instructional film from 1947 for teachers about how to maintain discipline in a classroom. Watching it, you notice some things that are clearly from another place and time, as well as casual sexism and an all-white batch of students. 

But after you get past the old-timey yuks, it's notable that some of the message still holds up. In particular, the notion that respect is a better classroom glue than fear, and that treating students like low-life scum doesn't work nearly as well as treating them like actual human beings. The relevance of that lesson is, sadly, driven home by the comments section, which mostly focuses on how the movie students are so much better than Kids These Days. 

I would hope that if there's anything different in the country today, it's that it is once again okay to be kind, and that the solution to problems is not to simply overpower those who oppose you.

It is one of the basic lessons of human interaction that one can find playing out in a classroom--trying to wield your authority like a club creates more problems than it solves, and open contempt for the people you work with is a terrible approach for virtually anything at all, from running a classroom to leading a country. Today seems like a fine day to draw a breath, roll some tightness out of your shoulders, and embrace your kinder nature.

Oh, That Poem

I am not a huge fan of pomp; I recognize the need to mark occasions, especially occasions of great change. There's really only one thing I want to carry away from today, and I'm embedding it here so that I can always find it. Amanda Gorman's presentation of her own poem was simply perfect. 

 

 "There's always light, if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it."

 Yeah, I'll take that.

Here's one good profile of the youngest poet to ever speak at an inauguration. There will be plenty, I'm sure. There will also be plenty of folks telling you what she said, but it's the 21st century, and if there was ever a moment that you should simply see and feel and absorb for yourself, this is it.

What Donald Trump Means To Me

I have followed Trump's career for decades. As anyone who has been paying attention knows, and as some folks insist on being shocked and surprised to discover on a regular basis, he really is that bad, and has always been that bad. I cannot think of a single human virtue that the man has ever displayed, and he is not even particularly good at many of the human vices that he wields like a toddler with a twisted light saber. He is a shambling mountain of human awfulness. The closest thing to an excuse that might be offered in his defense may also be simply the capper of his awfulness--unlike other odious politicians like Mitch McConnell or Mike Pence, he is incapable of being any better. 

He has always been that bad. In writing, conversation, casual discussion, Trump has always been my go-to example of the personification of the worst in humans.

So nothing in his Presidency has shocked or surprised me. In fact, I've sometimes lost patience with people who clutch their pearls and declare, "Oh my goodness! How could he do such a thing?!" Likewise, the repeated insistence that "this time he's pivoting to a new style" and "this time he's made the mistake that will really sink him" have gotten no sympathy from me. If you are doing such a bad job of paying attention, you deserve to be alternately surprised and disappointed, because one of the human vices that Trump enacts poorly is guile and sneakiness. This is what his worshippers call his "tell it like it is" quality-- he tells you he's going to punch you in the face, and then while you're engaged in a huge debate about whether or not he really means that, he punches you in the face. 

But Trump has mattered to me personally. Trump has been an ongoing challenge to my conception of a just universe and the decency of human nature. Yes, I'm all snark and crankiness here, but I'm a fundamentally optimistic person, a believer in the value of humans, a believer in the human spirit's ability to rise and advance, a believer that people, mostly, try to do what's right as they understand it. Sure, sometimes people get stuck because of fear or comfort. Sometimes life breaks them and it's hard for them to come back from it. Sometimes we screw up and we carry the consequences on our backs (some more quietly than others) like weighty, decomposing carcasses. We are a mix of strong and weak, good and bad, fear and courage. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, but we have the tools and the opportunity to make it better. But when good things happen to bad people...?

Trump activates the human desire to see a comeuppance, but of course he has never in his life experienced such a thing. He's barely ever suffered consequences. But as humans, because it's reinforced either by our consumed narratives or our human nature, we want to see more than consequences. We want a comeuppance. We don't just want the bad guy to lose--we want him to show that face, that shocked awareness that he's been beaten, that sad realization that he's in trouble, even hear a shamefaced admission of guilt. We want to see not just that he's lost, but that he knows it. 

We're never getting that from Trump. I've watched for years to see if he was capable of such a thing, but as with all narcissists, it's just not in his tool box. His opponents are never going to get that satisfaction. And his allies are always just a step behind.

Trump's a toxic person who spreads poison wherever he walks. One of the great Trumpian mysteries is why, for decades, people have walked smilingly into this buzzsaw of a man. You would think that nobody would ever, for instance, agree to work for him without being paid up front. But Trump has that kind of feral charm that gets people thinking, "Yes, he's an amoral thug, but he will never stab ME in the back, because he and I have a real bond." Congratulations, Rudy Guiliani, on all that pro bono work you've been doing. 

And the racism and the misogyny, which metastasize in both unusual and pure form, because I'm not sure that anybody else is actually real to Trump, who lives in a world in which anyone who's not directly attached to him is an Other. But boy has that emboldened and empowered folks who hate Others of their own.

Does that mean there's no justice for Trump? Well, I've long believed that the biggest punishment for being Trump is that he has to be Trump. Here's a man who gets no joy from anything, who has no love of music or art, who spends his whole life trying to scratch the phantom itch that lives within the gaping open chasm inside him. Here's a man who managed to become the President of the United States, and he's still unhappy, perpetually pissed off, and still cut off from love, companionship, respect, connections of any real sort with other human beings. It's easy to say, "Boy, I'd love to have his money" (or at the illusion of money that he's built), but if you had to give up every pleasant aspect of your life, everything that gives you joy? That's the deal. The man suffers every day of his life, exerts all of his energy into erecting a shield between himself and reality. He will die miserable and alone, and he won't even realize that his life didn't have to be like that.

Trump would be a pitiable figure if he did not exert such a toxic force on the world around him. He ruins people, strips them of money and honor, and as someone who embodies the worst in humanity, instinctively calls out to those same qualities in others. He is not, by any means, the only awful person to occupy the office, but he comes along at a time in which the office has unprecedented power and reach. And he has not injected new evils or failings into our political system; he's simply stripped them of artifice, not because he's noble and honest, but because he's clumsy and because a consequence-free lifetime has taught him that the artifice is pointless and simply blunts the power that you want to exercise. It's not "polite" to say the quiet parts out loud? Who gives a shit? 

I've wrestled my whole life with the concept of evil. I believe in God; Satan, not so much. I just don't see much bad in the world that can't be explained by foolishness and fear. I believe that almost all people act as they believe they are supposed to, that they arrange to bring into their own lives what they believe they deserve. I believe that, almost all the time, when you think someone is doing what they do because they are evil and/or stupid, that means you are failing to understand what the world looks like through their eyes. That doesn't mean they're any less destructive or dangerous or deserving of being stopped;  just that you don't understand where they're coming from (which, with dangerous and destructive people, can be useful to see). Even when they are, in the final analysis, simply stupid and evil, it's useful to understand how they see the world. Maybe especially when they're stupid and evil.

The Trump presidency, and the 2020 vote, expanded the challenge. I get transactional politics--"I'll put up with his bullshit because he'll load up the courts with lots of anti-abortion judges." I don't agree with the goals, but I understand it. But I was surprised by other things. I was surprised by the speed with which the Republican Party tossed principle and country for some party power. And like many Americans, I was shocked and surprised and disheartened by how many neighbors and friends and people I have generally loved and respected have stuck with him to the very end, have gone all in on devotion to an authoritarian leader who, it turns out, was pretty much correct when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support from his base. That has been rough to take. 

Trump, it turns out, is a window into the abyss. He's the picture of lawlessness (it's only a rule if someone can actually force him to follow it and it turns out that mostly they can't, because civilization). He's the avatar of a great mountain of frustration and anger. And he's the personification of the human urge to be lead by a totalitarian god-emperor. None of this is pretty, but it's good for us to see it, to understand however briefly the thin membrane between us and that abyss. It is easy to imagine that the structures and mores and understandings that make up civilized life are so strong, so resilient, that individuals can abuse and kick and twist them for personal desires, that we can beat the system to get our own gain without any fear that the system will actually be hurt. We can steal a brick out of the foundation of society, we think, and the building will still stand, and our abdication of our responsibility and debt to the larger community that preserves us--well, that won't really hurt anything. Will it?

I can't hate Trump. He is what he is, what he's been his whole life, broken and twisted and empty and certain that he lives in a world that is all hostile, all the time. As I said, if he weren't so destructive and dangerous, he'd be pitiable. I'm far angrier at the elected figures and thought leaders and political operatives who know better and help him light the molotov cocktail anyway, because they think they'll get something out of it or just because they want to watch the world burn. It may be the teacher in me, but plain old ignorance doesn't bother me nearly as much as willful ignorance, the deliberate choice to turn away from understanding. That's what I find inexcusable, and Trump has been awash in a sea of it. I hate that.

So tomorrow he leaves the White House worse than he found it, defending the Big Lie till the end, a lie that I suspect is destined to live on just like the lies surrounding the defeat of the traitors of the Confederacy. The Trump flag will keep flying here and there just as the confederate flag does. And the giant churning machine that has learned how to churn profit and power out of Trumpism will keep on doing so, eternally to punch you in the face if you identify Dear Leader as the lying feral grifter he has always been. 

Thirty, forty years ago I started using Trump as placeholder in writing, a specific placeholder for "worst kind of human being." Today, that's still what he means to me, but he's enlarged my understanding of just how much damage a giant toxic creature such a man can be, how he can empower truly terrible people with evil intent, how he can destabilize a community, how he can warp people's very sense of right and wrong. More than that, how imagining any human being is some sort of icon of transcendent greatness simply opens to the door to bad, foolish things. 

And what did he, Trump, personally get out of this peak of his infamy? Some money, a bunch of people sucking up to him, some trappings of power, some undivided attention--and none of  it made him feel any better, even though, paradoxically, the loss of it will make him feel worse. All those people devoted to him because his anger somehow seems to rhyme with their own, and yet somehow the warmth of human connection and support escapes him. All this wreckage, for nothing.

Tomorrow Trump leaves the office, but he won't disappear quietly, nor will the millions of Americans conned into believing the election was stolen, nor the leaders who thought overthrowing an election would be fun. I look forward to having a boring guy in the White House, but I am anxious about seeing what the country is going to look like. Too many illusions shattered, too many dark things have shown their face. Walk carefully while we wait to see how strong the earth is beneath our feet. 

The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education

The 1776 Commission released their thing today, and pardon my French, Mom, but holy shit is it bad. You knew it was going to bad. It's really bad. You probably didn't know that Progressivism is on the same Challenges to American Principles list with slavery and fascism. Slavery, by the way, is addressed primarily through a massive whataboutism. 45 pages, and every one of them is filled with horrific, racist, dumb, awful awfulness (okay, pages 2 and 4 are blank). 43 pages of awful (without any footnotes or endnotes or citations or bibliography in sight for this work of ultimate scholarship). I don't have the time at the moment to pick apart all of it (I'll link to it, but you really shouldn't read it on a full stomach, and empty stomach, or at the end of a hard day).

I will note that the report came out remarkably quickly--the members of the commission were announced on December 18, which gave them a month, and a month full of holidays like that. It's almost as if someone had already pretty much written the report ahead of time (or, it turns out, as if someone had simply cut and pasted big chunks of it). 

At any rate, I'm going to focus on just one section, because it articulates so very clearly how terribly, dangerously wrong these folks are about education.

In Appendix IV: Teaching Americans About Their Country, after the section on the misuse of history, after the section about the decline of education (late 1800s, with the rise of progressivism), we arrive on page 37 at "What Is Authentic Education." This is the part I want to look at:

"There is no question that the one crucial purpose of education is to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills they need to provide for themselves and their families." Yes, never forget that education is about making yourself a more useful meat widget so that important people will be willing to give you some money in exchange for your meat widgetry.

But the section also acknowledges "the broader and deeper education called liberal education." And here comes a truly astonishing paragraph:

Education liberates human beings in the true sense—liberation from ignorance and confusion, from prejudice and delusion, and from untamed passions and fanciful hopes that degrade and destroy us as civilized persons. It helps us see the world clearly and honestly. In revealing human nature, it reveals what is right and good for human beings: authentic education is not "value-neutral" but includes moral education that explains the standards for right and wrong.

Holy shit. Liberation from ignorance and confusion, because there is just one Right and True way to see things in this world, and true freedom comes when you no longer have to waste a single moment even considering that some other point of view. People become "self-reliant and respionsible" because once you know the One True Answer, you fall right in step with the other True Believers.

But there's more.

Students should be taught that we are all "equal members of one national community," which would play a lot better had the report thingy not said elsewhere "The assertion that 'all men are created equal' must be properly understood. It does not mean that all human beings are equal in wisdom, courage, or any other virtues and talents that God and nature distribute unevenly among the human race." Just that nature doesn't naturally create castes.

Now hang on. The thing reasserts that all human's unique talents and characters should be respected and valued, and that the fact that "equality and liberty belong by nature to every human being" is the moral basis of "civic friendship, economic opportunity, citizenship and religious freedom." 

This education respects the students' "thirst for the truth. It is unafraid both to focus on the contributions made by the exceptional few, or acknowledge those that are less powerful, less fortunate, weaker, or marginalized." By embracing equality, we can better embrace inequality? And then we can "patiently address the ways injustice can be corrected." 

"Patiently" is important because we need that as an alternative to the Bad Way:

Rather than learning to hate one’s country or the world for its inevitable wrongs, the well-educated student learns to appreciate and cherish the oases of civilization: solid family structures and local communities; effective, representative, and limited government; the rule of law and the security of civil rights and private property; a love of the natural world and the arts; good character and religious faith.

Because embracing all of that let's us use the proper approach to educate citizens:

In the American context, an essential purpose of this honest approach is to encourage citizens to embrace and cultivate love of country. 

Don't get upset. Don't get mad. Don't be distracted by those little blips that will happen, donchaknow, here and there. Just hold on to the true values, the One Right View, and burrow into these things that, hey, you might not actually get to experience yourself, but if you don't, that's probably because you're one of those people who has not yet been properly assimilated into the One True View and it's your own damn fault for being an unpatriotic little bitch. 

It's like someone managed to take the 1950s version of squeaky clean white American life and mash it up with 1950s style Soviet Commie borg-style mind-melding. No critical thinking here. This is "education" that rejects pluralism, inquiry, actual thought and scholarship, while simultaneously nodding at and minimizing injustice, asserting that victims of such injustice should stay calm and love their country because it includes people who have the right values (and the right personal circumstances). 

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and may the Biden administration swiftly drop this damned thing into the deepest circular file in DC.