ME: Another Assault On The Church State Wall

Having failed to win popular votes, voucher supporters this year are turning to legislatures and courts to push and expand vouchers, and a lawsuit in Maine is the perfect vehicle for them. 

Maine actually has a voucher-ish law on the books-- if you don't have a high school in your town, then you get tuition paid to a high school elsewhere. Unless, the law says, you want to choose a religious school. 

So here comes the lawsuit. Three families sued the state's commissioner of education over the restriction, using the now-familiar argument that the tuition law  “violates the principle that the government must not discriminate against, or impose legal difficulties on, religious individuals or institutions simply because they are religious.”

As usual, the families are represented by a pair of firms that specialize in this sort of lawsuit. The Institute for Justice specializes in activism, litigation, and legislation; their issues are economic liberty, first amendment, private property and educational [sic] choice. They're a libertarian organization founded by two Reagan-era government guys with a push and seed money from Charles Koch. The other firm is First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative firm based in Texas. 

When the case was first filed in the summer of 2018, they plaintiffs were hanging their hopes on Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, the 2017 SCOTUS case that ruled the state couldn't withhold a playground paving grant from a church. Since then, we've had Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which even more explicitly placed the exercise clause over the establishment clause. 

The First Court of Appeals ruled against the three Maine families, upholding Maine's restriction on using public tax dollars to support a private religious institution. The firms families determined to appeal to SCOTUS. 

That was last October. But yesterday, the 2nd Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Vermont, saying that local districts cannot exclude religious schools from its voucher program. This time it's the Alliance Defending Freedom doing the litigating; this is a right-wing religious outfit that just entered the news by defending a teacher suspended for refusing to follow his district's policy on trans students. ADF's spokesperson says of the Vermont decision, “Today the court powerfully affirmed the principle that people of faith deserve equal access to public benefits everyone else gets,” which sticks with the framing that this is about the rights of parents and not the rights of taxpayers. 

So now the Maine lawsuit folks are feeling like they have some wind in their sails and are hoping SCOTUS will hear their appeal. At this point, it seems realistic to assume that SCOTUS will side with the plaintiffs and further wreck the wall between church and state and trample on the establishment clause. 

That will end poorly for everyone. There are only a few possible outcomes of such a decision.

Proliferation of bad and discriminatory schools. We've already seen this in Florida, where taxpayers fund schools that are aggressively anti-LGBTQ+, as well as schools that teach junk instead of science, turning out citizens, employees and voters whose low-information views of the world become a problem for their community. Or perhaps the good Christian taxpayers of your state will find themselves paying taxes to support a Shariah Law High School. Or maybe your state, like Iowa, will even get its own push for a Satanic High School. 

Taxation without representation. Taxpayers will increasingly find themselves funding schools over which they have no say whatsoever. Taxpayers will retain the power to shut off the spigot; will they look at the voucher system they've been stuck with a vote not to fund it?

Regulation. Perhaps the taxpayers will instead demand accountability, a feature that many current voucher bills and laws work hard to explicitly leave out. An uprising of students who have been discriminated against could lead to a spate of laws regulating private religious schools that take public taxpayer dollars. Personally, this doesn't strike me as the most terrible outcome, but I suspect folks in the religious school biz might disagree,

Government oversight of religion. After the Satanic High School opens or some grifter is caught running a fake religious school or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes to town, maybe it will be time for a government body to certify whether or not the religious school is a legitimate religion. 

Religious folks do, of course, have a right to set up their own schools to reflect their own value systems. They don't have a right to make everyone else pay for it. And it's particularly odious to make people finance a religion that can only (apparently) fully and freely be expressed by discriminating against those same people. But nobody is saying these folks can't choose a religious school; only that they can't choose it at public expense. 

The First Amendment means that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers in the religious sphere; it doesn't mean that everyone should have to finance all religions no matter what. Here's hoping that SCOTUS does the right thing and just lets this case sit where it is. 

Religious Persecution and/or Freedom

In the least surprising news development yesterday, a Loudon County Public School teacher's suspension has now become a lawsuit.

Phys Ed teacher Tanner Cross went to a school board meeting and voiced his opposition to any proposed policy that called for addressing students with their preferred pronouns. "I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it's against my religion," Loudoun County, Virginia, teacher Byron "Tanner" Cross said. For that, he's been suspended from his district in Virginia.

I am not without a small slice of sympathy for the man; the former union president inside me saw the story and immediately wanted to question the wisdom of suspending a teacher for saying they were going to disobey a policy even before they actually had the chance to actually disobey it. "I'm going to be insubordinate," is not quite the same thing as being insubordinate. Though I suppose the public announcement sort of forced the administration's hand.

At the same time, I have to wonder about his position. This is not the first time that religious objections to transexual humans have cropped up, and I am still searching for the Biblical basis for this. Exactly which part of the Christian faith, which teaching of Jesus, requires people of faith to object to trans folks? Cross (and his attorneys) are trying to hedge bets by suggesting the problem is the lying, that telling anything but the unvarnished truth is unChristian. I'm.... dubious. Cross teaches elementary school; I'd like to be there for the days when he blasts kindergartners for talking about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny, or really, any conversation about movies in which actors pretend to be people who don't really exist. All of those are far more lie-like than calling a person by their preferred pronoun. 

The attorneys (we'll get to them shortly) would like to use this as one more chance to extend the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, a game these folks have been working at for a while. What we keep coming back to is the notion that one can't really fully exercise one's Christian faith unless one is free to discriminate against Certain People. To which I say, if you can't be a fully-exercising Christian without discriminating against someone, you are doing the whole Christian thing wrong. 

Cross's lawyers would disagree. They include Tyson Langhofer and J. Caleb Dalton of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group that was incorporated in 1993 by six right-wing luminaries, including Larry Burkett, Bill Bright, and James Dobson. They are supported by a host of right-wing foundations, including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. And they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, most all LGBTQ+ rights. Their track record is sadly successful; these are the Hobby Lobby lawsuit folks. They have a summer legal training program to get Christian law students whipped up for legal careers; Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught at it.

The group characterizes the district's actions as "unconstitutional" and leans on both the idea that Cross shouldn't have to violate his beliefs (by using pronouns) and also the notion that this is an ideology "that ultimately could harm them." I'm wondering if the same argument could be used by a teacher who wants to thwart the practice of letting armed forces recruiters into schools. 

The suit is a win-win for these folks. Either they can impose more of their own religious beliefs on schools, or they can further break down the whole notion of public education and "government schools." And religious persecution no longer means the persecution of religious folks, but the preservation of their "right" to persecute others.

The Gig Economy Has Issues

Betsy DeVos was probably the most high-profile person to claim, repeatedly, that education just needed its own version of Uber. But the last months or two demonstrate just a few of the problems with the gig economy.

Gig economy is great if you're an employer. It lets you have "employees" without any of the actual responsibilities of being an employer. The gig workers are left to deal with their own issues of income, insurance, and employment stability, while the employer can just wash their hands of the whole thing while congratulating themselves loudly on promoting "freedom." 

This is a dream for some reformsters. Teachers, stripped of unions, serving as gig workers, maybe even hired just to teach a class or three. Privatizers complain about how union rules "restrict" teachers and keep them from being free, though it's never clear what they aren't free to do. But imagine--every teacher a Uber-style actor, who scans the app and sees who would, for instance, like to learn a little calculus today. Meanwhile, the education broker doesn't have to pay for retirement or health care. The model is already out there in a limited format, called Outschool, where teachers can sign up to teach a particular class and hope that students sign on, with the education "provider" operating a website to broker deals. Venture capitalists are already salivating.

But a funny thing has happened coming out of the pandemic (or at least imagining we are coming out of the pandemic). A lot of people have realized that their crappy job is crappy, and they don't want to go back. The classic neo-lib theory is that if all those people just get some education, they can elevate themselves and the whole economy--except that our economy is rigged to feed off of low-wage workers who are too desperate to stop doing the turns-out-they're-essential jobs they're being paid poorly for. 

Except that, at least for a moment, they're bailing. And, surprisingly enough, gig workers do have some freedom. And it is hurting Uber and Lyft. Turns out that even when you keep unions from appearing, workers can still decide, en masse, they don't want to work for you when the job sucks. Uber and Lyft's inability to hang onto their drivers has resulted in an increase in costs for riders, making what was a bit of a luxury item even harder to afford. If you had imagined that Uber would some how democratize taxi service so that everyone could afford it, guess again. 

What Uber does is cut out almost all costs of employing people and transfers that money to the top, making gazillionaires out of the owners and subsistence humans out of the gig workers who make the company function. 

Gig work is swell if you've got a real income elsewhere. Lots of fields are rife with gig work from writing to the musician work that gave this style of labor its name. But it's no way to make a living, and it's not even a particularly good way to provide the service that it's supposed to provide. And still, it's only a good model for education if you plan to be the person at the top of the pyramid, skimming cash from everyone else. 

Being Mortal (And Measuring )

I've been reading the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. It's not at all a book about education, except that, like everything that deals with being human, it does.

The book is actually about facing the end of life, mortality, and the ways we handle end-of-life decisions in this country. It's about gerontology, assisted living, and making decisions about hospice care. Gawande is a surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, and if you or anyone you know and love is ever going to be old, it's worth a read.

There were many passages that jumped out at me. Here's one from a chapter in which he's talking about the way that old age health care and nursing homes hit the wrong targets in their approach to care. 

Compounding matters, we have no good metric's for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention of people who run places for the elderly; whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

Go back and read just the first sentence. There it is. When dealing with the care of living human beings, the things that matter are really hard, if not impossible, to measure. But because we want a concrete, clear, put-in-a-number measure of success, we just measure what can be measured and convince ourselves that it's important, or a valid proxy for what is important. We might want the measurement for "accountability" or so the authorities can Tell What's Working or because we don't trust our own insight or judgment about knowing success when we see it. True for aging humans placed in care facilities, true for young humans placed in schools.

And then there's this one, which I would very much like to put on a poster and then go back in time to hang on the wall of my classroom.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.

I love the nuance of this so much. This is not the cry for "Liberty" that we here from pseudo-conservatives these days demanding the right to be free from rules or obligations to society or other human beings. Nor does it pretend that we just set our vehicle on one track and follow it straight on no matter what we learn or see or discover or encounter. This is not a demand to live in the land of Do As You Please.

It's a basic human desire--to write our own story (the book was published in 2014, the year before Linn Manuel Miranda built a powerhouse finish to Hamilton by raising the question of "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.") That desire applies to students and teachers both, and it is necessarily wobbly and fuzzy and not in tune with the desire of some to reduce it all to a simple formula, precise and set in concrete. 

Being able to write my own story doesn't mean that I don't face obstacles. rules, requirements, the strictures of institutions and society. But I still write my own story and set my own course as I travel about the seas I didn't create against the weather I didn't ask for. It means that while others may have the power to set the conditions under which I travel through life, they do not control how I respond to those conditions. And that should be true for students getting started in the world as well as older humans approaching the end of life.

Why My Children Are Not Scholars

"Why does calling children scholars make me cringe?" Rosemary Jensen

That's a Facebook post that crossed my feed today, and reminded me that I also find that labeling, a popular feature among the charter crowd, a bit gag-inducing.

Why exactly? It's hard to pin down. After all, it's a relatively harmless term. One who attends school or studies, or an especially learned or erudite person, particularly one who in expert in a particular area. Why not use language that conveys to young humans that we aspire for them to achieve great things?

And yet, I'm still kind of cringy.

Maybe it's that it's a sign of the school trying to pump itself up ("other schools may have mere students, but we teach scholars"). Or maybe it's the attempt to verbally turn young humans into grown-ups with a rhetorical flourish. Why do that? Why try to adultify children before their time? And does that adultification serve, in part, to absolve us of having to meet their more child-appropriate needs?

But I think it might be more than that. "Scholar" sounds like a job. It sounds like a function, and as such, it verbally reduces the breadth and depth of a child's life. "You are not here to live your life," it says. "You are not here to play or socialize or to work out the dailiness of personal relationships. You are here to learn things. That's it." 

There is a lot of this running through reformy ideas, the notion that children have a job to do, and that is to Learn Stuff so that they can Produce Test Scores. It is certainly at the heart of No Excuses schools, predicated on the notion that all the things that distract students from learning are "excuses" and must be stripped away by a laser-like focus on Getting the Job Done. 

This suggestion that students--children--have only one function that matters runs counter to what I believe about education--that it's the business of becoming more fully yourself while learning to be more fully human in the world. 

None of this means I think students and teachers should sit around all day hanging out and talking about their feelings. In the classroom, I was focused on the work, and I expected my students to be as well. But I didn't imagine that the work of my class should be the all-consuming focus of their lives. Some of them may well have grown up to be scholars, but most young humans are still learning too such about themselves and the world to become specialists with a singular focus. 

This may all be overthought hairsplitting. But my ambition for my children and grandchildren is not for them to be pre-teen scholars. Humans, first. Children, second. Students, third and when in school. Scholars some day if that's what they decide they want to do. 

Tulsa and Teaching History

The Tulsa Race Massacre happened 100 years ago today. It's a horrifying chapter in US history, its anniversary arriving ion the midst of a new national argument about how history should be taught. 

Nowadays you can find plenty of resources about the destruction of Greenwood and the murder of--well, the number 300 is used, but the fact is we don't really know exactly how many Black folks were murdered. That lack of information is par for the course; the massacre was effectively covered up, buried by civic leaders who wanted to build a reputation for Tulsa as a cosmopolitan oil center. Tulsa's chief of police sent his officers out to physically collect all the pictures taken of the carnage--they stayed hidden away for decades.

When the massacre was discussed, it was called a riot. The full, true nature has only worked its way into public view in this century, and even right now, the massacre is characterized as a white mob running out of control, which portrays the events as still one step less horrific than they actually were. Read this thread by writer Michael Harriot; the white population of Tulsa did not "erupt" in violence. They organized, drilled, prepared and attacked. 

It was a large scale lynching, as well as a real estate grab (most of the thirty-four blocks burned down by white Tulsans ended up being owned by White Tulsans). And lynching, as Harriot points out, was a regular US thing in those days. There had actually been an attempt to make lynching a federal crime in 1918. The NAACP did the research and showed, among other things, that only one sixth of the 2500 lynchings of Blacks between 1899 and 1918 had involved accusations of rape. The bill failed. It was tried again in 1922. It failed again, defeated by Southern Congressmen's use of the filibuster. The Southern legislator argument was that "blacks were responsible for more crime, more babies born out of wedlock, more welfare and other forms of social assistance, and that strong measures were needed to keep them under control." Between 1882 and 1968, around 200 anti-lynching bills were floated in Congress; three passed the House, and none were approved by the Senate. The Senate did pass a bill making lynching a federal hate crime in 2018, and it died because the House did not pick it up and vote on it. The House did pass a similar bill last year, and it's currently in bill limbo.

But I digress. The Tulsa massacre is just one example of a chunk of history that the country has trouble coming to grips with, even as so many states are floating laws to make the conversation even harder, or even forbidden, to have. 

Oklahoma's anti-critical race theory law is less expansive than some, but at the top of the usual list of "concepts" that it forbids, it says that no school "shall require or make part of a course," which means they can't even be discussed. Governor Stitt, in supporting the bill, offers that he believes "not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans." He argues that Bad Things, like the massacre can still be taught. It's also worth noting that while the law applies to public, charter and cyber schools, it does not apply to any of the private schools served by the state's voucher program. An expansion to that program was just signed into law by Stitt.

Fallout has been immediate. Melissa Smith has been teaching classes in high school and community college about race and ethnicities for years, but she has just been told by her summer college race and ethnicities class, fully enrolled, has been canceled. Smith teaches about things like "disparities between the races in terms of education, housing and income," but apparently that's trouble enough.

Smith's story is a good example of how these laws work--not by arresting teachers who teach naughty things, but by scaring the hell out of less-steely administrators who immediately shut down anything that they think has a remote chance of stirring up bad trouble. The folks behind these laws know that--that's why we see folks from astro-turfy Parents Defending Education to Dan Crenshaw to the Lt. Governor of Idaho encouraging folks to anonymously turn in anyone that is teaching any of that scary race stuff or wokeness or  indoctrinatin' our children.

Will anyone be turning in Mikael Vaughn at the Urban Coders Guild? He and his students partnered with Tulsa Community College to set up historicblackwallstreet.com, a website that attempts to capture the legacy of what was destroyed. Will the state take action against the Oklahoma City Public School Board for saying the law is just to protect white fragility?

Look. Teaching history is hard, and teenagers, many of whom are certain that the world sprang into being the day they were born, are a tough audience. For 39 years, my students were near-unanimous in saying that history was the most pointless class they took. Of course, part of that was probably a reaction to the attempt we make to reduce history to facts and dates. When Stitt says that schools can still teach things like the Tulsa Massacre, he means they can keep teaching that X happened on date Y. But that's not history. Not really.

We are hardwired to do history, I would tell my students. We do it every day. Pat and Sam have a fight and break up at a party Saturday night, and by Sunday everyone is talking about it, sharing the different versions of events (Pat's, Sam's, Pat's friends', Sam's friends', etc) and trying to parse out what led up to it, what caused it, what it means for the past, how it will affect the future, and all of that for the ultimate goals of A) building a consensus reality and B) figuring out how to feel about it. And on top of all that, none of these questions will ever reach a final answer. At the fiftieth class reunion, someone will bring it up and relitigate it. That's history. We just mostly do it with dead people who can no longer speak for themselves, which means that the conversation can always be disrupted by new information and that we never can be completely certain we know what we're talking about.

The challenge of teaching history is to convey all that while, at the same time, not telling students how to feel about any of it. Part of my usual fall spiel: "We can't talk about American literature and history without talking about issues of race and gender and class. It is not my job to tell you what to think, but it is my job to convey as clearly as I can what other people think and thought about the issues at hand." And then we buckled up for a year of discussion, and I periodically bit my tongue off, because you cannot change hearts and minds by demanding that they do so or forcing them to declare ideas they neither grasp nor believe (even if you're pretty sure those things are true). 

The White civic leaders of Tulsa tried to control the narrative of their crimes by controlling what people could see and know and say. It only worked for a while. Right now, GOP legislatures are trying to do the same thing by driving discussion of America's racist sins out of classrooms. The conversation has to continue, and it will only serve us well if it's based on reality. 

Okay, this is running long, but I realize now I have one more point to make. Here's a thing I learned during the meltdown of my first marriage--lying is exhausting. It seems easy at first, but the thing about lying is that it requires mental maintenance of at least two narratives. On the one hand, you have the things that are actually happening, and on the other, the things that would be happening if what you said last week was actually true. Little lies may not be a big deal--after a few days, the divergent narratives come back together and life goes on. But big lies-- the longer you go, the further they diverge and pretty soon you're like a person with each foot on a different car, and the cars are racing forward down roads that diverged at that Y back where you lied and it takes everything you have not to fall.

You can try to just forcefully shut up and shut out everything that provides evidence of the truth. Gaslighting, shouting down, sheer exercise of power--those are the popular tools. For a single person, this is tiring and toxic; for a nation, it is, well, tiring and toxic. White folks have spent a lot of energy trying to maintain a narrative about Black folks, and also spent a lot of energy trying to maintain a narrative about that narrative (we used to have a racism problem but that all stopped some fifty, sixty years ago). But here we are again, passing these laws to try to keep people from raising the topics in the hopes they'll all go away.

The story of Tulsa--and not just the story, but the story of the story--is a reminder that the conversation needs to continue, that, in fact, some parts of the conversation have barely begun. We can do better.

ICYMI: Memorial Day Weekend Edition (5/30)

It has been a time, with a double funeral yesterday and some other little series of life adventures this week. Makes you want to shake some folks and ask, "Is this really what you want to do with your limited time on earth?" Be better. Anyway, I have a few things for you to read this week. Here's the list.

What Education Researchers Can Learn From Teachers

Larry Ferlazzo at EdWeek lets us hear from four teachers with some good thoughts about what researchers need to do to shape up their act.

Here's the truth behind the right-wing attacks on critical race theory

Jeff Bryant at Alternet with a look at some of the forces behind the big crt push, and some comments from people actually in the field.

School choice and charter proponents target public education in key states

A good overview of the rising tide of teacher gag laws, and the rising tide of opposition to them. From Rachel Cohen at Capital & Main.

Bricolage Academy educators vote in favor of unionization

Such a vote isn't always a big deal--but this time we're talking about the staff of a New Orleans charter school. This could be the start of something good.

Turnaround is a relic

Chicago's board of education decides to retire its largest turnaround program.

EdTech in schools -- a threat to data privacy?

This piece from Velislava Hillman looks at just what edtech companies want (spoiler alert: educating students is not Job One).

Why A Billionaire Telecom Executive Gave $1,000 In Cash To Quincy College Grads

From Forbes, the story of a billionaire exec who decided to do something useful (and non-prescriptive) with his money.

More than 125,000 Myanmar teachers suspended for opposing coup.

From the "you think you've got troubles" file. Also from the "this is maybe closer to happening here than I'd like to imagine" files.

America's richest school serves low-income kids. But much of its Hershey-funded fortune isn't being spent.

Milton Hershey was doing educational philanthropy back in the old days, and his death in 1945 left a huge estate that became a massive fund for the Milton Hershey School, a school set up to help poor orphans. The school is still in operation, and it has giant piles of money, which critics say should say should be being spent on the school's educational mission.

An elementary school teachers secret life as a white nationalist writer.

Yeah, this HuffPost piece is not going to make you feel better. It will, however, remind you that some people in the classroom are bringing along a whole set of toxic beliefs.

A call for imperfectionists

From the School of Thought blog, a call for a kinder, gentler, not so focused on being perfect approach to the classroom.

Camden sheds Black teachers at a uniquely high rate

Mark Weber, writing for New Jersey Policy Perspective, shows how Camden is losing sooooo many Black teachers.

Some things are always wrong

Nancy Flanagan with a reminder that wrong is wrong is wrong, even and especially when it comes to education and children.

Eliminating Federal Charter Schools Program Would Curb Academic and Financial Abuses by Charter Operators

The federal program for financing charter schools is still there, still wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. Jan Resseger explains why it should be ended.

A Productive Meeting Between the District and Teachers about the Next School Year

Let's wrap things up with the latest from McSweeney's. Short, bittersweet, and funny.