A Systemic Tale

They hated tall people.

They were the ruling class in this country, and they were all 5 feet tall or shorter. There were tall people among them, mostly as servants or laborers, because the short ruling class hated them and barred them from the same kind of freedoms that the short rulers enjoyed.

This was reflected in many aspects of their society, including the architecture. In those long-ago days, the ruling class built a fabulous capitol building, a seat of power and government, in which every doorway was no taller than five and a half feet. The law of the land required those short doors. In some private homes there might be a tall entrance ion the back, for the help, but most major public buildings--hospitals, schools, stores-- were built with short doorways, both for entry and through the inside.

But as time passed, and some critical historic events occurred, and society just got smarter, and many of the laws were struck down and attitudes shifted. It was rare that you'd hear someone openly say how they hated the tall folks.

But the buildings were still there, unchanged. The old capitol building, the schools, the hospitals, all still had short doors. And though building codes had changed, some people still built their houses with short doors. "We like," they would explain, "the classic traditional look." 

Nobody who worked in the capitol hated tall people, but tall people still had to scrunch and stoop themselves to get in there.

Tall folks would launch movements to have the doors enlarged to accommodate tall folks. 

"Why do you have to make it all about height?" complained some short folk.

"We just want to be able to walk through those doors," said some tall folks.

"Well, everybody wants to walk through those doors. Why are we just talking about what you want?" said some short folks.

"We want to change the way doors are made in this country," said some tall people.

"Why are you trying to erase our history?" said some short people.

Some tall people became so frustrated that they brought tools and tried to break down the tops of the doorways. "You'll never get people to listen to you if you go around behaving like that," said some short folks.

"Can we at least talk about the history of how these doorways were designed, and what effect prejudice and bias led our buildings to be built the way they are?" asked some tall people.

"Why are you trying to make me feel guilty and uncomfortable," replied some short people. "I didn't build these doorways. The people who did have been dead for years. It's not my fault I can walk through these doors without hunching over." 

"But why not fix the doors?"

"Look," said some short folks. "I don't know what you want from me. I contribute to a group that buys head protection for you people. If you work hard and adopt the proper posture, you can pass through these doors just as easily as the rest of us." 

"But the system--"

"There is no system. There's just a bunch of doors built by my dead ancestors in every public building. This is so damn frustrating. If you don't like the doors, do something about it--but not that violent thing where you try to bust them."

So the tall folks knelt next to the doorways.

"No, not like that," said some short folk.

The tall folk had prayer meetings around the doors.

"That's too noisy," said some short people.

The tall folks built some buildings of their own with doorways seven feet high. "Why do you have to be so divisive," said some short people, who felt really uncomfortable walking through the tall doorways. And other short people, who loved tall people just as well as they loved anyone, tried hard to understand why there was so much chaos and argument and wondered why everyone couldn't just get along. But even after the builders of a prejudiced, biased building are all gone, the building remains.

No, I don't have an ending for this story, and yes, I know the metaphor is an imperfect one. You can take me to task in the comments. 

ICYMI: Fourth of July Edition (7/4)

Here's hoping that you are busy with some combination of friends and family today that leaves no time for the weekly collection of readables. But just in case, here's the list.

How Do You Fight Hot Air

Tired of reading CRT pieces? Me, too. But people keep writing good ones. Here's an op-ed in Washington Post by Karen Attiah, writing about one school district leader many other folks will wish they worked for.

White Evangelicals and CRT

If your question is, how did white evangelicals end up cranky about CRT, this is a good procedural explainer, from Religious Dispatches.

No, school choice is not the answer to critical race theory

Yes, I'm putting up something from school choice advocate Robert Pondiscio, and yes, I think it's worth reading, because in it he calls out a lot of tactical reformster nonsense. Edit--"nonsense " on reflection is a bit stronger than I intended. But this piece is an honest assessment.

Why the critical race theory fight is harder for educators than the common core battle

Many observers, including moi, have pointed out some similarities between the right-wing attack on common core and the right wing attack on CRT. Andrew Ujifusa at EdWeek does a really good job of looking at the parallels and differences between those two battles.

Clint Smith's radical faith in Americans

An interview of author Clint Smith by Anand Giridharadas about Smith's new book. It's encouraging and interesting.

From viral videos to Fox news

If you're curious about how CRT blew up exactly, this explainer from the Guardian has some good explainy parts.

Honesty on Critical Race Theory

Diane Ravitch discusses the topic du jour in the NY Daily News

The Handmaid Teacher's Tale

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the dystopian novel and the world we are living in. As always, worth the read.

Green Schools: Are they child friendly and public?

I had not really been paying much attention to the green school movement at all, so this explainer from Nancy Bailey was very useful.

Muzzling America's Teachers is What Orwell Warned Us About

Steven Singer looks at the troubling rise in teacher gag laws in response to--well, you know.

Using the SAT for school grades? What justifies that baloney?

Accountabaloney with yet another bright idea in Florida--using SATs to grade schools.

Moms For Liberty And The Unified Theory of Far Right Grievance

Anti-maskers. Anti-school closings. Anti-vaxxers. Anti-something-vaguely-lumped-under-critical-race-theory. 

If it seems as if these folks are all actually the same people coming back with new signage every couple of months, join me as we take a look at Moms For Liberty.

MFL was launched at the beginning of 2021 by two Florida women, both with school board experience.

Tina Descovitch  ran for Brevard County School Board in 2016, with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovitch ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. She won that election overwhelmingly, taking 48% of the vote in a primary election field of four. Then she lost in 2020. She stayed active in local school politics; after a big dustup over LGBTQ+ policy in Brevard County, she was mailed an envelope full of poop.

The co-founder is Tiffany Justice, who won a school board seat in Indian River County in 2016.  In 2018, the Indian River chapter of the NAACP asked the board to rein her in; she was accused of dominating African American Achievement Cor Committee Meetings and in those meetings violating board policy and open meetings laws. She was a reported victim of cyber-bullying by a district employee. As a board member she was agitating by October of 2020 for a mask-optional policy for students in the district, which earned her some attention from Parental Rights Florida, the wing of yet another of these groups, and I'm not going down that rabbit hole other than to note that the Parental Rights national board president is James Mason from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and the board includes Grover Norquist and John Rosemond. Justice is no longer a member of the Indian River board.

Justice also stayed active in her district, post-board. Justice in particular has some big feelings about mask wearing, demanding some exceptions be made by the school for her son and her. Justice also wanted to be allowed to stop into her son's classroom without the 24 hour notice required by district policy.

The two launched their new group in January of this year in their home counties, agitating about mask wearing and getting school buildings re-opened. At some point, they decided to go national. Their big pitch has been parental grievance. From a profile in February:

“The balance of power in education has dramatically shifted away from parents and communities to unions and bureaucrats,” said Descovich.

“Moms for Liberty is fighting to restore the role of primary decision maker for children back to parents by helping them organize and amplify their voices.”

They've expanded their reach and their mission "to stoke the fires of liberty." You can find them and their many local branches on Facebook. Some of those local groups aren't exactly bursting at the seams, but a couple boast huge numbers and a great deal of posting.

But their portfolio of grievances has expanded as well--now they are on the front lines of organizing against public school "indoctrination" as well as monitoring school boards and making sure that the correct American history is taught. They offer a plan for educating your friends and neighbors about the Constitution. They say they have a plan "to turn this ship around."

The local chapter model has let them unleash some formidable ground troops. In Tennessee they have landed hard against the Wit and Wisdom book series for a huge list of offenses for everything from "social justice" (which they know is just a sneaky way to get CRT in there) to reading selections they just think are too bloody for children. And they want you to know that "we have a bullying problem, not a racism problem."

Their national voice is expanding as well. Quisha King (some outlets call her "Keisha") runs a consulting firm, has a degree in business marketing, and was a regional engagement coordinator for Black Voices for Trump, but she's often billed as just a concerned Florida mom. She's a member of MFL, sometimes referred to as a board member, though their board membership is not listed anywhere I could find. Ron DeSantis has quoted her, and national news outlets like her. And she just picked up national press for calling Rep. Ilhan Omar a liar on the subject of CRT.

Occasionally MFL calls itself nonpartisan, but these are clearly conservative culture warriors. And if you have suspected that all of these culture war complaints are tied together, this group has clearly gathered them all in one basket, a unified field theory of far-right grievance. 

Watch this MFL chapter chair from Seminole Florida talk to her board and quickly tie it all in a bow. 

I heard someone say a great awakening is usually preceded by a rude awakening. 10 words that could surely be the mantra over our country the last 16 months. 18 months ago the majority of parents naively believed school boards were set in place by their vote for the sole purpose of protecting their rights and values inside public schools. March 2020 changed that. Suddenly facing lockdowns and mandates parents found themselves in a massive rude awakening. As devastating as the consequences have been, I actually thank God for this rude awakening, because without it we would not have a great awakening. Ironically you and school boards across the country, while masking our children, found your hidden motives and operational methods being unmasked....Today it's about masks. Tomorrow it's about isolating and segregating the unvaccinated. Then it's CRT being disguised as equity training to skirt new state legislation. The list of offenses has become the proverbial elephant in the room.

Well, no. Also, I can think of a few other purposes for school boards, like, say, education stuff.  But then she goes on to threaten the board because their day is passing and the newly awakened-but-not-woke parents will rise up and get rid of them. The sense of grievance, of victimized by the Grand Conspiracy comes through the MFL website's call for joining as well:

Are you tired of feeling like you are alone in your concerns for the future of your children? Do you try to speak to community leaders about your concerns and your voice goes unheard? There is power in numbers and the purpose of our organization is to fight for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents.

Are there deep pockets backing this outfit/ There's no evidence I've found, and while they have been picked up by the Trumpist hard right ecosystem quickly, that could be backing or it could be that they're just the perfect group to promote that narrative. And this is no group of June Cleavers--these are smart, professional women. MLF has been picked up as part of the professionally astro-turfed Parents Defending Education, but MLF appears to have arrived a few months earlier.

Time will tell. Mothers for Liberty is worth watching because when it comes to white disenfranchised disenchantment, the raging culture wars, and the belief that the public school system is a dark conspiracy between unions and elites, these folks are the total package.

Language Generating AI Still Lacks I

You may remember that last year, a piece of language simulation AI software appeared touted as the next big thing. OpenAI rolled out GPT-3. The claims were huge. It can write poetry. Various writers wrote pieces about how realistic it was. It can write computer programs--well, actually that was less unbelievable. But the other claims were looking somewhat shaky already, including some linguistic trips into a verbal uncanny valley. 

Unfortunately, turns out that it also makes racist jokes, and backs up white supremacy. OpenAI signaled some of those issues back in May of 2020.

Since then, more problems. GPT-3 was being used to create child porn. It was, as Wired recently put it, "foulmouthed and toxic." This is not a new problem; you may recall when Microsoft created an AI chatbot that had to be shut down because it turned racist and abusive.

There's an unsettling message in all of this that I have rarely seen acknowledged. AI language software works by sampling huge amounts of human language and imitating the patterns that it sees. If these language AI programs are essentially distilling all the human language that's fed them, what does that say about all of our human communications? When you boil down every sentence written in English, do you get a grimy ugly abusive residue of slime? And if so, does that mean that slime trail is the undercarriage of all our communication?

Computer whizzes aren't asking those questions--they're asking more immediate practical questions like "How do I get this bot to be less racist?" 

That's the subject of a recent Wired article--"The efforts to make text-based AI less racist and terrible," which is an article we should all be reading in education if for no other reason than to remember that, among its many shortcomings, language-generating AI is racist and terrible.

Here are some of the attempts being made according to that piece. 

OpenAI researchers are going to fix GPT-3 by "feeding the program roughly 100 encyclopedia-like samples of writing by human professionals on topics like history and technology but also abuse, violence, and injustice." So, a big diet of bland, boring writing, some focused on problem topics so that it's sample base is tilted toward boring stuff, I guess. That may work--it has been tried with some marginal success to offset GPT-3's anti-Muslim bias.

Another approach is to give GPT-3 more toxic text, and then when it spews it back, label the bad examples as "bad" so that it can learn.

All of this underlines the issue behind AI language generation, which is that there is no actual intelligence there--just a prodigious ability to fake language behavior based on a huge bank of samples. Every advance in this field, including GPT-3, is mostly about figure out how to get the software to handle more samples. Wired talked to UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik who studies human language acquisition in order to apply lessons to computers.

Children, she said, are the best learners, and the way kids learn language stems largely from their knowledge of and interaction with the world around them. Conversely, large language models have no connection to the world, making their output less grounded in reality.

Wired also collected the most awesome quote on the subject from Gopnik:

The definition of bullshitting is you talk a lot and it kind of sounds plausible, but there's no common sense behind it.

This would include many of the folks trying to sell schools and teachers super-duper software "powered by" or "incorporating" or "driven by" AI. It's still a machine, it still doesn't actually know anything, and it still serves as a dark mirror for some of our worst linguistic behaviors. 

.

NC: Another Way For Charters To Hit Taxpayers

With all the CRT fooferraw and voting suppression and a world of other hurts coming from legislatures and courts, it would be easy to miss this latest wrinkle from North Carolina.

Durham is already awash in charter schools, but as we've seen many times, the wisdom of the invisible hand of market forces does not include charters looking at a saturated market and saying, "We might as well not" and certainly not "Adding more schools to this already over-saturated community will just cause a ton of disruption for the students." 

Anyway, Oak Grove Charter Academy, a new charter to be operated by for-profit CMO National Heritage Academies, set out to create a new charter school in Durham County. The two districts most likely to be hurt by the new charter opposed the application, and the city of Durham was none too keen on it, but since the state board of education can authorize charters no matter what local taxpayers want, Oak Grove Charter Academy was approved. 

The school, now called North Oak Academy, intended to incorporate its property into the city of Durham and then as to be hooked up to the city water and sewage supply. The city was not inclined to help out. From the News & Observer

“Let’s just say it’s no secret that I believe that charter schools have been detrimental to Durham Public Schools in many ways,” Mayor Steve Schewel said at the November meeting. “I think they have been re-segregating, and I think that they have also really taken so much of the good parental and professional energy out of our public schools.”

National Heritage Academies asked again. Council said no again. National Heritage Academies threatened a lawsuit and warned that this would make their charter a martyr to the cause. One council member tweeted "I just love bad faith arguments. Also threats."

Enter the North Carolina legislature. At the end of June, the House voted  to approve a bill that require municipalities to extend water and/or sewer service to charter schools that ask for it.

So if this makes it past the NC Senate, taxpayers in North Carolina will have to fund infrastructure for charter schools they never asked for, or even opposed. Just one more way that charter systems create private profit at public expense.

Okay, I missed a pertinent line in the most recent version of the bill (which, because the bill process is kind of hilarious, actually started life as a bill for putting carbon monoxide detectors in public school buildings and has since been amended) indicating that the property owner will have to pay the cost of extending the service. Of course, the charter funding comes from the taxpayers, so the taxpayers are still paying for all of this, as well as the cost of managing a that-much-larger system, but my original implications were incorrect. H/t to Kristopher Nordstrom for pointing me at the correct language.

One More Lens

I often talk about education as the work of acquiring more tools, but there's value (particularly right now) in framing education as a collection of lenses.

There's a scene in the counter-reality romp National Treasure in which our heroes have to use some fancy glasses to see secret messages on important documents. And that's a good simplified model--looking through different lenses allows you to see different things.

Studying literature is about finding different lenses through which to see a work.

Sometimes it's a chore--if you use the right set of lenses and squint, then you can convince yourself that the ending of Huckleberry Finn fits with the rest of the novel. Is it ironic? Is it a final twist on a search for identity? Is it a discouraging take on American oppression? Or is it just an author getting stuck and finally just writing his way out any way he could think of?

Sometimes it's exciting. One of my college professors would always talk about the ambiguity than enriches, and I think of works like Hamlet--every time you look with different lens, you see a different work, but each work is awesome. Is the play about death? Is it about depression? Is it about power? Is it about generational conflict? 

As society grows and changes and scholars push boundaries, new lenses are developed. 100 years reading through a lens of critiquing patriarchal power structures or theories about racist systems was not a thing. The rise and fall of certain authors in the canon often runs parallel to the rise and fall of certain lenses; the rosy glow of a Romantic lens is out of favor, and so some Romantic authors are no longer in favor.

The use of lenses is, of course, not just a literary thing. We bring our lenses to reading history, consuming pop culture, even reading the actions and character of the humans around us. 

But the important part--and I cannot say this hard enough--is to use more than one lens.

Literature, history, media, humans--all very complex, and the more lenses we use to filter our perception, the more details we can tease out and understand. The more lenses we use, the better we understand how our old views were incomplete, sometimes dramatically and dangerously so. A single lens always has blind spots.

Many of our issues are problems with one-lens people.

It's a reliable "there are two kinds of people" dichotomy. In any English department in any school, there are two types of teachers--those who believe there's just one way to read Literary Work X, and those that believe there are multiple ways to read. Right now you are probably remembering one of each. David Coleman and his Common Core reading ideas touched a nerve with so many of us because he is clearly a one-lens guy. His direction to read only within the four corners of the text is a call to throw out every other lens you use to view readings. Autocrats like Donald Trump sell the idea that their followers don't need other lenses (maybe even no lenses at all) except the lens of "Dear Leader always tells the truth." 

Where do one-lens people come from? 

Some folks just go through a stage. Like new converts to any previously unknown viewpoint, some folks just get excited. I am ashamed to admit there was a nine month period during which I Bechdel tested the hell out of everything in sight as if it was the only way to watch anything. You get excited about your new lens, and you kind of forget to consider anything else. 

But I think the big source on one-lenser is people who want the world to be clear and simple. The idea that you can use multiple lenses, the multiple things can be true at the same time. If there are conflicting of a person or an event, then either the problematic view must cancel out the good, or the good view must cancel out any negatives. 

And because these folks have just one lens, they must view attempts to promote any other lenses as an attempt not to supplement, but to supplant. Pushing a new lens troubles them, alarms them, and they can't give an inch. An attempt to examine ways in which racism has affected US history and institutions will, for some folks, mean that we're going to throw out anything good the country has ever done. They get stuck in endless loops of this conversation:

Pat: I'm just saying there's another way to look at this.

Sam: So you're saying I'm wrong. But you're wrong.

And when one-lensers clash, when someone really is trying to completely replace one lens with another, then we have a conflict that cannot be resolved by anything other than a patch of scorched earth. 

If you have just one lens with which to view the world, that's part of who you are, and anything that challenges that lens challenges your identity. And there is almost nothing that people will fight harder to defend.

The tension between single and multiple lenses has always been part of our country, and it has certainly always been part of how we talk about and do education. For some folks, education is about giving students experience using that One True Lens and keeping it polished. You can see it in the people who have been complaining for the past several years that they don't students taught all that bias and stuff--just the facts. As if there's a set of objectively true historical facts that look exactly the same no matter what, because the only lens is the "facts" lens. Having just one lens means never having to say you're biased.

The other education approach is to, in effect, try to give students fluidity with the greatest possible number of lenses, as well as some skill in figuring out which ones work best when. This, for one lensers, is what indoctrination is all about--teaching students that there's more than one way to read the world. 

Multi-lens teaching isn't hard. I did it for most of my career without really thinking of it in those terms. I taught American literature, which meant that religion, race, gender, politics, wildly different views of the world were all on the table. My approach, whether it was Puritanism or 19th century critical realism, was to say, "I'm going to try to show you how these people viewed the world. I'm not here to say that they're right or wrong, and what you decide to think about them is up to you, but I want you to understand what they believed about how to be in the world." I never wanted them to answer the question "Who's right," but just "What would this group think about X?" If I could  teach just one thing in a year, I was hoping for, "People can see things differently for reasons other than stupidity or evil." 

I can't claim I always kept my own viewpoint out of my classroom, but I always labeled it as such, and I hope I ran a classroom where it was safe to disagree with me. 

The multilens view is, of course, its own kind of lens. But I've been using it to help unravel the current scramble over "divisive issues" in the classroom, and to think about what teaching really is, or should be. Some folks have been arguing that this massive argument is a sign that we need school choice, that public schools suck at uniting. I'm not sure that the ideas themselves are the real root of divisiveness as much as the single lens approach. Yes, it's a problem if some folks are racist, but it's an insoluble problem if they are incapable of imagining that real people could be any other way.

I hope that my children and grandchildren move through the world with as many lenses as they can carry. I hope our schools bring together people who use many different lenses and teach them about many more. I wear bifocals and have a pair of reading glasses for playing music. With two different eyes, that's a total of six different lenses; to really see the world I have to use some different combination of them all at various times. If I ever need more, that'll be fine, too.

The Importance of School Administrators

School administration jobs suck. Principals and superintendents have are responsible for everything and accountable to everybody while having little actual power. It's an aspect of the charter revolution is understandable--let's give the school CEO all the power and make him accountable to nobody--even if it is wrong.

But as little power as administrators seem to have, they still serve a critical function. Witness Jay Mathews' look (at the Washington Post) into Karin Chenoweth's new book Districts That Succeed. 

When she asked the teachers how long it would take for a bad principal to tear the school apart, she expected them to say they wouldn’t let that happen.

Instead, they frowned in despair and said about 20 minutes.

That sounds about right. It takes you one staff meeting to know that you've got a boss who's going to break things. 

Bad administrators implement their badness in a variety of ways, but they are all bad for the same fundamental reason--they have forgotten the actual purpose of their jobs. (Here's a Bad Administrator Field Guide)

If a school's job is to educate students, and that actual work is done by teachers, then an administrator's job is to make it possible for each teacher to do her best possible job of educating students.

All administrative duties are best understood through this lens. All that state and federal paperwork and reporting? Administrators handle that so that teachers can focus on teaching. Should an administrator be a visible and respected member of the community in which the school is located? Absolutely--so that the administrator is better positioned to advocate for the teachers and the school. Why does an administrator handle disciplinary issues? So that teachers can teach. Why do administrators make sure the school has a smoothly running schedule and program? So that teachers can teach. Why do administrators do observations of teachers? To help them do a better job of teaching.

Administration offices are often besieged. It is easy for busy, overworked administrators to start imagining that what goes on in their office suite is the "real" work of the district. But as soon as they start to think that way, the wheels start to come off. 

As Chenoweth's interviewees suggest, it is easy for district administration to kill a program, to poison a school culture. There's another step on the road to hell, when administrators move past the "we're doing the real work here and all this stuff is just getting in our way" and move on to the idea that the key to doing their job is not to empower teachers, but to strip power from them. 

This never ends well, ever (and that's why the charter visionary autocratic CEO model is a huge mistake). The country is littered with faux committees, convened to come up with the administrator's pre-selected idea. Uncountable PLC programs have been started and killed by administrators who were unwilling to let teachers have even a little power. Thousands of teachers do their best work in spite of their boss rather than because of him. 

When the weather gets really rough, the badly administered schools careen into the weeds. The most critical factor needed to get schools through the pandemic break was trust--trust between staff and administrators, school and parents--and many districts failed. 

Now we have new storm clouds whipping up around "critical race theory." Multiple states have passed vague, unclear laws even as real and faux parent groups come loudly demanding that the school stop doing, well, something. One of the big dangers of this uproar is that the lack of clarity in the laws is going to prompt a bunch of administrators to freak out and try to shut down anything that might possiblyattract trouble. "I can't sort all this out. I'm not sure what the law says and I don't want a mob of parents in my office, so as of this school year, just don't teach anything about race in your classroom, ever." Or nuisance rules like "Every single lesson you have mentioning race must be reviewed by my office before you teach it." 

When the education weather gets rough, it's an administrator's job to be a strong shelter, to make sure that teachers stay warm and dry so they can do their jobs. We're in the middle of a storm; here's hoping that your administrators understand what they're supposed to do.