Saturday, September 4, 2021

We've Been Having This Fight For Decades. It Won't End Soon.

This next is from a report of parents speaking before a school board. Don't peek at the link just yet.

Ultimately, she said she didn’t want to see schools teaching students any values, arguing that it should be the parents’ sole responsibility.

“It’s our job as partners to [teach our kids] values — it’s not your job,” she said. “Respect us, respect [us as] parents. In the end, this comes down to me doing my job, and you doing your job.”

This could be from a board meeting from any time in the last fifty years. Because this is a central conflict in public education, and it's not one we'll resolve any time soon.

If you are of a Certain Age, you will remember Values Clarification. Personally, I encountered it at my church youth group (liberal-ish churches dug it), but it cropped up in some schools, sometimes in a watered-down form, across the country in the late sixties and seventies . The idea was for students to get a handle on what their own underlying values were, and to use the idea of values (what do people care about? what matters most to them?) as a lens for looking at society. It involved considering hypotheticals (If you were a mugwump, how would you design a government) and trying to see things from other value sets (How do you think someone who valued widgets would design a government). 

Some folks were not fans. These were folks who had trouble understanding the hypotheticals (What do you mean, telling my kids that mugwumps should design government!) as well as allowing that some points of view could be considered legitimate. And believe me when I tell you that some people stayed pissed off about it for a long time, because what they heard was "truth is just a matter of opinion, which means right and wrong are just matters of opinion."

Values Clarification handed off much of its shtick to Character Education. Then came Outcome Based Education, which also had a values and character component, and actually upped the ante by requiring these components to be measurable and graded. An army of conservatives (led mostly by Peg Luksik) trounced OBE soundly. 

The conflict has never gone away. Teaching Tolerance, Social and Emotional Learning, diversity training, etc-- all embrace the value of multiple viewpoints and tolerance for viewpoints different from your own. And that is not a value some folks share.

To be fair, virtually everyone draws a line somewhere. Everybody has a list of viewpoints and values that they don't believe deserves consideration. But some folks draw more lines, harder lines, and much sooner lines than others. When the various anti-"crt" laws and resolutions list the things that Must Not Be Taught, they generally lump things like the 1619 project in with Holocaust Denial on the theory that these are things that should not be given equal time. Most people agree with the stated principle of exposing students to all sides, except for X--and it's the definition of X that raises conflict.

We always seem to be fighting about the topic--feminism, racism, LGBTQ+, anti-racism. But the roots of the conflict are deeper than whatever issue is currently manifesting. 

Underlying that conflict is also differing ideas about what "promoting" an idea or value might mean. I tell the story of a colleague years ago who taught a gifted class, and one of his ideas was to do a unit on comparing the major world religions. One conservative Christian student said she would not be participating; there was, she said, no point to studying those other religions because they are all wrong. Sift through the many complaints sent in to the various groups collecting "reports" of "indoctrination" and you keep finding people who consider it indoctrination to even bring up certain things. A lesbian teacher mentions that she has a wife at home. A teacher lists the reasons that some people disagree with Christian beliefs. 

For some people, it's "indoctrination" just indicate by word or deed that certain things are in the world and that's okay. In the flap over the firing of a Black principal in Texas, various accounts quote students who say he always presented all sides and left students to sort things out, while other students claim that he was "pushing an agenda." I believe both sets of students are probably telling what they see as the truth, because for some people on one side of this issue, to simply present a point of view as existing and normal is "pushing it." 

We've got a fundamental disagreement about foundational truth and whether truth involves a broad a varied set of perspectives and ideas and facets or whether there is One Immutable Truth. And those divisions don't always line up exactly the way you think they do--liberals are also capable of hewing to One Immutable Truth in some areas. But it's that fundamental value of either truth or Truth that is the bigger part of the iceberg, the underlying issue that keeps us from working out the surface issues. Challenge someone's One Immutable Truth or, worse, treat it like it's just dumb to even believe in such a thing, and someone is going to fight back, hard. 

Further complicating this debate is that we are talking about beliefs and feelings which are both hard to change and harder to measure. The trouble with all of these programs has always been that savvy students quickly read the intent of the program as "The teacher wants me to act as if I believe X." Whether values clarification or SEL programming, a student who is an actual sociopath will be excellent at just sailing through the assessments. It's really hard to assess what someone thinks; it's even harder to assess what they feel.

And. (Yes, there are hundreds of "ands" and "buts" in this discussion). And the energy of these debates are further jacked up because they tap a deep parental fear-- the fear that you could do your best to bring your child up to believe in what is true, and somehow they are seduced into rejecting it all. Listen to this mother responding to the North Carolina witch hunt survey:

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

The woman's daughter graduated fifteen years ago. And we aren't hearing the daughter's "I grew up and my mother wouldn't and now we can't talk to each other at all." This kind of hurt leaves scars.

The point of all of this is that the current battle over what values should be--well, not even taught, but simply acknowledged and recognized in schools has been raging for fifty-plus years. If anything, it has been intensified by the iPod world in which we can more easily avoid ever dealing with people who don't share our values or beliefs. Now that has simply bled into education-- I can listen to only the people I agree with, only hear the music I like, only watch the shows that sit well with me, so why shouldn't I be able to send my child to a school where no adult in the building ever contradicts what I say at home?

The answer is of course around us--we're getting a good look at what a country looks like when a big chunk of the population believes it should be able to just make those Other People who believe those Bad Things--well, we should be able to make them go away or at the very least strip them of any power. It's not a good look, if for other reason than it makes the country not work very well, and it really, really keeps the country from responding effectively to crises like a massive global pandemic. 

We've been working on this for a long time. Louis Raths was working on Values Clarification in the mid-fifties, and he was building his work on what John Dewey had to say about the importance of values in education. I don't know a clear, inspiring easy way forward. This kind of conflict erodes humanity and kindness, and both are needed to deal, and yet neither can keep us from stopping people who are intent on just watching everything burn. But none of this is new, and what the history tells us is that we probably aren't going to socially and emotionally learn our way out of it.

 

Friday, September 3, 2021

The Troubles With The Learning Loss Debate

Like many education debates, the Learning Loss conversation has developed so many, many ways for people to be wrong, most of which can be avoided if one starts with the assumption that the problems facing us are complicated, defy a simple solution, and look different depending on where you're standing.

Some of what's coming out of union leadership offices makes me cringe. "There is no such thing as learning loss," say some union chiefs. "Oh, please stop," I think. It's not helpful to assert that it doesn't really matter what teachers do in a year or how they do it or under what conditions they and students do school. 

I get, sort of, where they're coming from. 

For one thing, there's an urge to counterbalance the kind of apocalyptic chicken littling that comes out in pieces like the New York Times editorial characterizing learning setbacks as "grave" to "catastrophic." 

Also--and I think this matters a lot--while the policy discussions can handle these extreme declarations of alarm, classroom teachers know that the best way to carry students forward and onward and upward this fall is not to greet students with some version of, "You are all disastrously behind and ignorant and we've got to hammer you with academics or you will all end up as pathetic failures." This is the tightrope that teachers always have to practice walking--you do not snow students by blowing happy talk smoke up their butts, but you don't make them feel big and powerful by telling them they're small failures. (Note: telling them this fall that it's not their fault they're currently small failures does not help.) 

So when I read things like "Our kids didn't lose anything," I cringes, even though I also understands that our path forward (as always) is for classroom teachers to pump children up, not to beat them down. Meanwhile, while there is no question that most students in this country got shortchanged last year, it's unlikely that a whole generation will now live in a van by the river eating cat food off hot plates because they can't read the food labels in the grocery store. But I really wish union leaders would stop making mouth noises that sound like, "Hey, there's no problems at all."

There are so many voices in this discussion that aren't helping. It doesn't help to say that students didn't lose a single step during the pandemic pause. It doesn't help to keep insisting that the gap occurred because a nation of slacking teachers treated the pandemic as a vacation and never tried to do anything. 

I'm also unexcited about the emergence of NWEA and McKinsey as prominent voices in "diagnosing" what has happened. Personally, I distinguish between learning loss (or the gap or the behindness or whatever term you want to use to indicate that students get as much learning in the last two years as they ordinarily would have) and Learning Loss, the latter the equivalent of halitosis, an attempt to make a problem look huge and the solutions you have for sale look scientific. NWEA and McKinsey are businesses, not impartial scientific observers. McKinsey is a global business consulting firm aimed at helping clients spot opportunities to profit, which is just what they've been doing during the pandemic. NWEA is a testing company. I've used their product (the omnipresent MAP test) and though our school, like many, used it as a predictor of Big Standardized Test performance, it was lousy at it, and in general did not provide me with information I didn't already have. Getting their input on the state of Learning Loss is like asking the Tobacco Institute to weigh in on the health benefits of smoking. 

None of which is meant to say that we do not need--desperately--data about Where The Children Are Right Now. But we are in danger of being led astray by the long-time love affair with high stakes testing. 

Here are the things we need to remember about the Big Standardized Test (and its various knock-offs, like MAP).

1) It only assesses reading and math.

2) It doesn't do it all that well.

3) Success depends a great deal on preparing students for taking that specific sort of test, a thing that many teachers didn't have (or take) time to do last year, or the year before that.

4) When you give students a standardized test during a pandemic mess and tell them it has absolutely no stakes for them, but policymakers really need accurate data, students do not necessarily give it their all. 

Even if the test were perfect, and even if the students gave it their best shot, we would still have gigantic, gaping, critical gaps in our knowledge of Where Students Are Right Now. For one, all of the tests were jiggered during the Common Core boom to assess "skills" rather than content. So they will tell us nothing about content gaps. For areas such as history and literature, that's a big question. Were I still in a classroom this fall, I'd be thinking, "I know which works are on the curriculum for last year, but I'll need to find out which ones they actually got to." Different areas will experience different sorts of gaps; musicians will miss out on the kind of development that comes from playing in an ensemble, while art and CTE areas will be missing the hands-on practice that develops skills in a normal year. I know policy makers really, really want an instrument that will tell them where students are compared to where they would have been in a "normal" year. No such instrument exists. Sorry. It just doesn't.

As the school year starts, classroom teachers are doing what they always do-- figuring out where their new batch of students are right now. Some of what they're discovering is not pretty (2nd graders who can't yet write their last names, high school seniors who have read half the usual stack of literature, the list goes on). On the other hand, the pandemic did not make students dumber, and most of the factors that could help them move forward are still in place (even if, in some cases, they're covered with layers of trauma and struggle from pandemic hardship).

But as has been the case since COVID first starting kicking sand in our faces, the challenges are specific and local. We can try to collect data, pass it up through levels of bureaucracy, let them try to craft one-size-fits-all solutions for distributing relief funds, or we can push that money down to the levels of decision-making closest to the situation and say "Use this as you think is best." I favor the second choice, but even that is complicated because we know that some local decision-making goes really poorly. So oversight is required, even as local decision-making is preferred.

The irony of the various new issues raised by the pandemic is that they are all versions of issues we've been debating for decades, just magnified by a medical--and cultural--mess. But magnifying them also makes clearer that it's all complicated and the complications look different depending on where you're standing and anyone who's plugging a simple, clear answer is both A) full of it and B) selling something. 

Educating our way out of the pandemic gap (and the pre-existing gaps exacerbated by the pandemic) is going to require hard, steady, thoughtful, day-by-day work. But that has always been true of education. Folks have been touting the pandemic as a reset, a sea change in how the system works, and I've said all along that I think they're dreaming--the human (and American) impulse is to get back to the normal and familiar as quickly as possible (or even more quickly). But if I could have my wish, I'd wish that the pandemic ended the Age of Easy Answer. 

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

OH: Phantom Football School Bishop Sycamore Unraveling

ESPN featured the school's football team in a nationally televised blowout. But it turns out that the school doesn't seem to actually exist.

If you don't pay attention to sports, you may have missed the crazy tale of Bishop Sycamore, a private school in Ohio that appears to follow the business model of the infamous basketball academies- "schools" that barely educates and runs on the empty promise of a pro future for young athletes.


But Bishop Sycamore goes one better. After they got totally clobbered on tv (58-0), and ESPN commentators noted that some of the school's claims (like its DI prospects) seemed unverifiable, folks started poking about. The school gives Columbus City Schools as its district, but CCS doesn't know them. They were listed last year with the state as a non-charter, non-taxed school. Addresses for the school include a PO Box and a sports complex that rents practice space to "hundreds of teams" (they were apparently just asked to stop using the address). They also claimed Franklin University as an address, although attempts to negotiate with the university had long fallen through.

Officials from the school have evaporated and are responding to none of the many media outlets working this story. Meanwhile, it turns out they had played a game against a Pittsburgh team just days before (losing 19-7).

Coach Leroy Johnson has reportedly been fired--whether over the spectacular loss or because he's wanted on fraud charges is not clear. The team allegedly has players who are post-graduates, including some who have played junior college games

Their website has gone dark ("under construction") but the Wayback machine shows a fairly generic website with a sports blog focus. No "about us" info, and as yet no outlet has turned up the operators behind this scam. Even required state reports are not signed by a person. They promise a sort of blended learning. One parent of a Bishop Sycamore student told the Columbus Dispatch, "As far as I know, none of the kids does any school." The Dispatch also relates that Bishop Sycamore is a second attempt by this crew to start a football school, the previous attempt called the Christians of Faith Academy, shut down in 2018. Again, an attempt to front a touring high school football team.

How does a new phantom team get an ESPN gig? Well, those games are set up by a third party, in this case Paragon Marketing Group, who just plain blew it. "They looked good on paper," seems to be Paragon's excuse. Their president said "he was led to believe Bishop Sycamore is a totally online, but legitimate, academic institution."

There are people who could have warned them, like coach Kyle Shoulders in Macon County, TN, who was ghosted by the school for a preseason jamboree. Bishop Sycamore (hey--notice anything about their initials?) was booked and ready to come on down.

Shoulders was ghosted by them. No one would return messages.

That led Shoulders to start researching the team

"Obviously, I did more research than ESPN because we were able to find out how much lack of information there actually was on them," Shoulders said.

Shoulders said he tried to call the coach and the athletics director. He sent emails and messaged them on Twitter.

"We just couldn't get a response from them," Shoulders said.

Or the woman listed on the board of the school who told WKYC that she had been asked to tutor students, which she had done once.

Or former players like Aaron Boyd, who played for both COF and BS. He tells of the school promoting itself to the players as a real school "blueprints and everything. They told us we was gonna be on Netflix; they recruited us telling us we were gonna be on a show. They told us we're gonna be the IMG of the Midwest." But Boyd moved to Ohio, found no school, had to stay in a hotel for five months. Read the whole interview--it's nuts. If anyone had talked to a player, they would have known.

Ohio Governor DeWine issued a statement saying, Hmm, that seems fishy. Maybe have the department of education look into it "to ensure the school is providing the educational opportunities Ohio students deserve."

And that IMG that Bishop Sycamore aspired to be? That's who kicked their butts on ESPN. IMG Academy is a school set up to support athletic programs. The "IMG" comes the sports and talent management company IMG, which bought the place in 1993. It is what Bishop Sycamore promised to be--just with better financial support and better athletes. Oh, and it's located in Florida.

It's no mistake that these two schools are located in two of the wild west states of education. And what's extra scary is that all this attention popped up only because Bishop Sycamore lost so badly; had they done a better job on the field, they would still be heading on to play other games scheduled for the season ahead. The fact that Bishop Sycamore is not an actual school was well and widely known, but nobody cared or starting digging (and it took very little hard digging) until they were defeated so badly on national television. 

Kind of makes me wonder what other versions of these athletic fake schools are out there, staying in business because they're smart enough not to take on a game against a top national athletic academy on national tv.


Monday, August 30, 2021

PA: Candidate Threatens School Boards. Who Is Steve Lynch?

So this delightful little clip has been shooting around the interwebz this morning

First of all,  we should note that this guy is not a gubernatorial candidate. He's running for Northampton County executive. He's a Trumper through and through. He's a QAnon-quoting, insurrection-joining part of the January 6 crowd (though in one of his later interviews he claimed he didn't go into the building, which is on par with "I didn't inhale"). He's been working his way into politics, and his facebook page says a lot more about the Patriot Party than the GOP

At his campaign website, you can learn that he's a strict constitutionalist and a business owner. The business is Keystone Alternative Medicine and Weight Loss, including testosterone and hormone replacement therapy for anti-aging and sexual health. Before that launched in March 2020, Lynch created Creation Fitness, as well as Steve Lynch Fitness. He's worked mostly in the personal training biz, with occasional forays into financial services. His college work was in Criminal Justice/Law Enforcement Administration; one wonders why he didn't end up in those fields. He's also the chaplain for Allentown Rescue Mission, where it's his work to "prepare and deliver Biblical messages monthly" to the men at the mission. 

Some of his supporters are just what you'd expect ("Kikes and shitlibs are having a meltdown" over his speech). Lynch expects a conservative uprising in PA soon. On his Facebook page (top photo-- "audit everything") you can see him hanging out with Ian Smith (the gym owner who offered free memberships to those who refuse vaccination) and expressing support for Nche Zama, the heart surgeon running for the GOP gubernatorial spot.

So, fringy, but not nearly as fringy as you might have hoped. This is what we've got running for office now-- guys who believe in law and order and punching people that don't do what you want them to. One more reason it's getting harder to get people to run for school board.

PA: The CRT Flap Continues To Metastasize

It's worth remembering that they told us what they intended to do. From back in March...








Just up the road from me, you can see this in action.

Clarion County, despite containing a state university, is a mighty conservative place. Back in March, the County Commissioners, for no particular reason, declared themselves a "Second Amendment County." Now, one of the county's school districts has let itself get played by the "critical race theory" flap.


Parents showed up to complain about the possibility of that race stuff sneaking into schools, supporting the board's newly-minted policy. The policy follows the usual template, borrowing language that is being used in these policies all across the country, such as 

The teaching concepts which impute fault, blame, a tendency to oppress others, or the need to feel guilt or anguish for persons solely because of their skin color, race, sex, or religion are prohibited in the district as such concepts violate the principles of individual rights, equal opportunity, and individual merit underpinning our constitutional republic and therefore have no place in training for administrators, teachers, or other employees of the district.

That same language was adopted by the Mars School District, located just a bit north of Pittsburgh (and in California, and Alabama, and so on...). While the basic policy seems to be getting copied and pasted all across the US, folks feel free to add some details as well. In Mars, there was an addition of patriotic patriotism ("We will teach our children to honor America..."

Because these policies also come with a built-in "This is totally not saying that teachers can't teach controversial stuff, but only, you know, factual stuff and only all sides presented," there's also a list of Stuff That Can't Be Taught. 

Further, this policy shall ensure that Social Justice and unsubstantiated theories of any kind, including but not limited to Holocaust Denial Theory, 9/11 Theory, The 1610 Project, and Critical Race Theory, are not advocated or presented to students as part of any curriculum unless approved in advance by the board.

Holocaust Denial and 9/11 Theory (which is...what? They presumably mean Trutherism) give the list some illusion of balance, but we're balancing a couple of loony conspiracy theories with the work of actual scholars. The list can be augmented with anything that current board members don't like--one board member in Clarion wants to add "gender theory" to the list. 

Even in the rural areas of a state that has, so far, avoided this nonsense on the state level, the usual talking points have penetrated. CRT is really racist. It's indoctrination. This doesn't take any freedom away from teachers. 

Well, of course it does. It creates a chilling atmosphere, where virtually anything could turn out to be somebody's idea of indoctrination and teachers, who are already busy navigating a pandemic in which folks think being asked to wear a damn mask is both indoctrination and oppression, must either brace themselves for the possibility of an attack at any time, or avoid anything at all that might offend someone (good luck, history teachers). 

And as backdrop to all of this, we have an actual anti-mask political candidate declaring, in public, on purpose, that people should take "twenty strong men" into board meetings and give the board the choice of leaving or being thrown out. 
 



(More about this guy here.) This is dangerous stuff. The real conversation that spreads this looks something like this.

Small Number of Parents: We don't want any Yetis in our school.

School: Great. We don't have 'em. Never have.

SNOP: Well, they have fuzzy hair, and we see that some of your teachers have pictures of fuzzy animals in their room. What about that?

School: Um...

SNOP:  Also, I never liked the way schools play dodgeball with a really big soccer ball.

School: What?

SNOP: Indoctrination! Get 'em!!

This is going to get worse--and scarier-- before it gets better.



Sunday, August 29, 2021

ICYMI: Pre Pre School Edition (8/29)

The board of directors is off to pre-school tomorrow, but mostly they're excited about using their new lunch boxes. Meanwhile, local schools open up to students on Tuesday. So we'll just see what hits the fan around here. In the meantime, a lot of things are happening in a lot of places. Here's some reading.

Covid mask issues in school sparking violence

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at some troubling trends in the pushback against masking rules in school.

New Mexico's discriminatory charter schools

Jessica Pollard in the Santa Fe New Mexican reports on a study discovering that some charters aren't even being subtle about keeping out students with special needs.

Bill would require school board representation at charters

Well, this proposed Pennsylvania bill will go nowhere, but it's a cool idea. 

Is school voucher system in Los Angeles a done deal?

While we've been worrying about covid, the LAUSD board has been going full voucher. Carl J. Petersen has the story.

Bill Gates funding happy news at NYT

Public ed advocate Leonie Haimson lays out how Gates funds his own news pipeline.

What we know about masks, students, and covid spread.

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat is one of the journalists I trust to do a good job of covering the facts with fairness and accuracy. Here's his piece looking at what we really know about masking.

Battles on the school board front

NPR/All Things Considered uses a board member in Indiana as a focus for a piece about how school boards are under siege right now.

What if...thoughts on education

Akil Bello, testing expert, offers a post about some dreams for education.

Pennridge schools pause diversity initiatives

In Pennsylvania, a state that doesn't even have a "CRT" gag law yet, a school board demonstrates its lack of guts.

Teaching is a woman

This has been all over the place, but icymi, here's Ari Christine's entry that elevates the genre of "why I quit" teacher essays.

The Real Reason Kids Don't Like School

Arthur C Brooks in The Atlantic, arguing that hard work is not nearly as daunting as loneliness.

A school board will pay $1.3 million over trans student bathroom ban

Via the Associated Press, a Virginia district pays big for its trans student policy.

The War in Afghanistan is what happens when McKinsey types run everything

On his substack, Matt Stoller writes about something other than education, except, of course, McKinsey types also want to run education.

To protect democracy, defend public education

A Jacobin interview with Derek Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning

The effect of HBCU-trained teachers on students

A great episode of Have You Heard looks at the secret sauce of HBCU teacher training

Local control of schools--good or bad?

Nancy Flanagan contemplates a question that has new relevance right now.



Friday, August 27, 2021

NC: Public School Teacher Witch Hunt Report Released

Searching for something to add momentum for their proposed teacher gag law, North Carolina Republicans rallied behind Lt. Governor Mark Robinson last March when he announced the Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students (FACTS--get it?) task force, with the stated purposes of 

* assist holding local and county-level education officials accountable for what occurs in their schools

* provide a safe and secure method for right wing teachers to tattle on their co-workers (I'm paraphrasing a bit)

* provide a state-wider pipeline for any parents who also want to report subversive activity in schools

* provide "underrepresented parents and students"--by which they appear to mean put-upon conservatives--a chance to turn in subversives

* assist parents in navigating bureaucracy of school system

There was a form to submit any damn thing that burnt your toast. And at least 580 people did. I know that because the task force released a report earlier this week, and it includes all of the reported items. Let me tell you about it.

The short answer is that it is just as awful as you think. For one thing, the 580 items have the reporter identity and contact information redacted. Names of teachers in the items? Those are still there. We'll get into it ion greater detail in a second.

The Task Force

So who was on this witch hunting panel, this unironic tribute to McCarthyism?

We've got a couple of public school board members. Melissa Oakley (philanthropist, independent child advocate, Onslow County BOE). Melissa Merrell (Union County BOE chair, with history of harassing teachers). Plus a county commissioner- Rick Watkins (also an assistant professor and educational consultant). We've got a couple of teachers. Jennifer Rosa (Wake County, and not much of an online footprint) and Jennifer Adcock (Brunswick County schools, 16 years teacher, also not very on line).

We've got Judy Henlon, president of Classroom Teachers Association of North Carolina, one of those "alternative" professional groups. There's Olivia Oxendine, who's listed as an Associate Professor at UNC Pembroke and a member of the state Board of Education; the FACTS report doesn't mention that she's also with North Carolina's very conservative John Locke Foundation and failed political candidate

Two politicians. Senator Kevin Corbin, who sits on the Education Committee, and whose sponsored bills from this year include one to make sure that students and their parents could enjoy live high school sports and the state's Punish Third Graders For Failing the Reading Test law. Also, Representative David Willis, who has sponsored a bill to use COVID relief funds for vouchers, and who owns a Kiddie Academy franchise.

If you think you've guessed which way the wind is blowing here, meet our last three members.

We've got Terry Stoops, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Center where, among other things, he has argued that North Carolina should not pay teachers for having masters degrees because it doesn't raise test scores. Yes, that makes two reps of the Lockers, who are part of SPN, tied to ALEC and all the usual suspects.

There's Lindalyn Kakadelis, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Charter Schools North Carolina Coalition for Charter Schools and also tied to the John Locke Foundation. She believes that competition and the free market will fix education.

And finally, Baker Mitchell. Mitchell has been a leader in charter school profiteering with his conservative "classical education" charters.

So if I were a betting man, I'd suspect that this GOP-laden commission is maybe partly about weeding out evil indoctrinators and maybe part about finding one more way to kneecap public schools in North Carolina. But let's look at the report itself.

The Tattle Items

The report says that they've attached all the submitted reports, and I'm inclined to believe them (Submission #578: "Gehehsidhdbdud"). It's an interesting cross-section of grievance, despite its unfortunate resemblance to the comments on any heavily-trolled online article. Here are just a few highlights.

The one time I got on the phone with the Vice principal she made me feel like she thought she knew better for my son and when I asked her if she personally has look at the CDC website to see they published this so called virus is no more then the common cold she told me the info has not been passed to them. How hard is it to look for yourself? These kids need schools open an no mask. Wearing a mask when not necessary will do more harm to your body then this virus will. 

My grandson has to watch CNN NEWS every morning in his class. (There are multiple complaints about watching CNN.)

There are several teachers at east chapel hill high school who lecture daily a curriculum that pushes a very “progressive” liberal agenda.

At Ligon Middle School, my 6th grader (last year) was asked to complete an assignment where she was supposed to "Create Your Own Religion."

Teacher wearing BLM shirt on her bitmoji the entire year in her virtual classroom. Also talking about her wife at home etc. (And then the teacher is named.)

My 8th grade son is in the AIG program at his school. The AIG teacher chose the book "Stamped" by Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi. If you are familiar with the authors, they are strong supporters of CRT and the anti-racism movement. The book is very one sided and is rooted in neo Marxist ideology. I opted my son out of reading it because it is divisive, one sided, and honestly, I think it will have a negative impact on relationships with out fellow Americans and to the foundation of our country.

Teaching children gender identity, lgbt (shoving it in those kids faces that don't believe in it and KNOW that it's sinful), and teaching Black Lives Matter movement (it is like telling all other ethnic groups that they DON'T matter). Blm group is also a terrorist, satanic group...

Some responders pushed back.

NC schools are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each day at school. This fits the criteria of "Examples of students being subjected to indoctrination according to a political agenda or ideology, whether through assigned work, teacher comments, or a hostile classroom environment" since it has "God" in it and it also forced patriotism. Not all students are from the Christian faith and should not be forced to learn, recite, or even hear the Pledge of Allegiance. There are also students who are from other countries. They should not be forced into patriotism.

The school calendar only revolves around Christian holidays.

Some pushed back really hard. I'll skip those because the language will upset my mom.

And some just don't sound real. I know, I know-- never underestimate the weird out there, but still...

My son wanted to give a speech about all the good things Germany did early in the 20th century, but his teacher wouldn't let him and just kept talking about Jews, I mean what's a Jew? Sounds like the liberal media.

My nephew came home yesterday from school and informed me that his teacher laughed in his face when he said George Washington was the best president. The teacher laughed and embarrassed him and then  told the class that the only right answer was Obama.

So how did they get a report out of this?

The task force--doesn't that sound cool? like they were wearing sharp uniforms and scaling walls and cool shit--not like, say, a central committee or the loyalty oversight commission or the unAmerican activities committee sitting in a room deciding which people are not pure enough of heart-- anyway, the task force sorted through the tattles and decided which ones "needed to be examined further" and then if the report was "deemed relevant to the efforts of the Task Force" and then contacted the tattler. Then the twelve "education professionals" listed above decided if the reported naughtiness was "appropriate" or perhaps "attempted indoctrination, coercive teaching methods, or inappropriate lesson content"-- and then declare whether or not the North Carolina education system has a problem.

And that resulted in a 254 page report. Hey. Witch hunting is hard work.

There are some data-ish breakdowns, like breakdown by county (Orange and Wake Counties had the biggest share of reports) which show that "reports of indoctrination in every region" of the state. 

The Lt. Governor's office "found" six major themes/problems in the state.
    1. Fear of retaliation
    2. The Sexualization of Kids
    3. Critical Race Theory
    4. White Shaming
    5. Biased News Media and/or Lesson Plans
    6. Shaming of Certain Political Beliefs

You'll note that "People Accusing Us of Witch Hunts and Conservative Indoctrination" as well as "People Yanking Our Chain" did not make the cut.

Each of these is supported by ten or a dozen examples from the indoctrination reports. They dug hard to find all the teachers who reported fear of backlash for reporting their colleagues indoctrination. This point matters because this explains why you might not be hearing more--there's so much more indoctrination going on, but people are afraid to speak up. For "sexualization," by which they mean exposing students to info about LGBTQ stuff, there are five complaints, including one about a teaching tolerance magazine.

CRT is broadly defined so that "social justice lessons" and PD about microaggressions and equity qualify. One complaint says that the child was being taught CRT "buzz words" such as bias, discrimination, equity and racist, and that he had to use these words to pain white folks as bad. White shaming involves anything that makes white students feel bad.

Bias examples bring up the Dr. Seuss flap, and, again, the classrooms where students watch CNN. One argues that teachers shouldn't be openly vocal about personal beliefs because "Students are instructed that their teachers are the authority and speakers of truth." Don't worry, Ma'm-- folks are working on changing that. There are tons of bias examples. Shaming of certain beliefs was just leftovers that didn't fit elsewhere.

Side note. While some tattlers did turn in charter schools, I did not see any of those submissions make it into the final report. Go figure.

There's a glossary of terms (not bad, actually) and a statement about Robinson's plan of action, which is vague. Pressure needs to be put on certain districts, and that includes forcing them to cough up all the details. Then a couple hundred pages of odds and ends the task force dug up. District policies, board agendas, employee codes of conduct, materials cribbed from in-services, a whole lot of stuff from Durham County which is apparently a hotbed of naughtiness. Some selected submissions along with the follow-up information, like worksheets. A special case study of the Governor's School, a five and a half week summer school that was a treasure trove of naughty papers for the task force. 

Then. For crying out loud. A collection of tweets and facebook posts culled from various teachers and other educators, catching them being all biased and indoctrinatey (nobody asks the question-- can you indoctrinate students on social media that they don't use? Should indoctrinators be on snapchat and the gram?) This includes incriminating evidence like NC Public Schools Twitter account tweeting a promo for the joint CNN/Sesame Street town hall on "Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism." Also, they are offended by materials that draw parallels between "CRT" opponents and 1960s white integration protestors as well as KKK members. 

Basically, the task force and its deputies have been creeping on schools and school districts all over the state.

Good Lord In Heaven

This would be a hilarious piece of irony-laden baloney if it weren't such a serious attempt to crush teachers, schools, and any attempt to deal with serious issues. Joe McCarthy and the Chinese Cultural Revolution look like bad satire from a distance, I suppose, but up close, they ruined peoples' lives and damaged the fabric of society. Every member of this task force should be deeply ashamed of themselves, and that goes double for Mark Robinson. This is indefensible witch hunting, cynically unAmerican, and just plain evil. What a shame that North Carolina's teachers, who have suffered so much crap at the hands of their states' leaders, have to add this to the pile.

Everyone else? Keep an eye on your own state government.