Critical Race Theory Panic Continues To Widen Its Aim

Moms for Liberty is one of the frontline groups fighting against "critical race theory" and a whole lot of other things. Launched initially as anti-maskers and anti-school closers, they quickly moved on to anti-race stuff. They are another of the groups that has hired some pros and generally displayed available resources that are impressive--even unbelievable-- for just a group of moms.

They're also an excellent example of how "Critical Race Theory" has become an umbrella term, a socially acceptable way to say, "I want all that Black race stuff out of my school."

MFL franchises itself through local activists, like the Tennessee chapter run by Robin Steenman, whose child attends private school but who is nonetheless "fed up with the way the public schools of Franklin, Tennessee are teaching kids about race."

Tennessee is a soft target for these attacks on public education because it has a law against "critical race theory," except of course that hardly anyone throwing the term around has any idea what it means or how one would prove that a public school teacher was teaching it, despite Governor Bill Lee saying that it's un-American.

Steenman sent a letter to the state Department of Education in June accusing Willamson County Schools of violating the state's gag law, but the specific charges are chilling. The Daily Beast reports on an 11-page appendix to the letter, a spreadsheet of all the objections submitted by parents, and they are--well, covering a very broad spectrum

Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)

There's way more in the list of 31 objectionable books. Spanish and Creole words might be "confusing for children." A fictional Civil War book is naughty in part because it depicts "out of marriage families between white men and black women." Someone objects to a book about Galileo because there is no "HERO of the church" to contrast with their mistakes in persecuting the astronomer. Also, there's too much sexy picture of sea horse mating in a sea horse book. 

This is right on par with the York, PA district that "froze" the use of some books (not a ban, nosirree) including books like I Am Rosa Parks by Brad Metzler, a really well-done children's book about her work (he's got a million kid biographies--you can see his work on the PBS Xavier Riddle series). I've read this book to the Board of Directors at least a zillion times, and there seems little to be upset about unless you find it objectionable that a couple of white people are depicted as being mean to her. After student protests (and lots of bad press), York's all-white board reversed the ban. 

But this appears to be where we're headed. Anything that parents or random citizens don't like, anything at all, can now be protested or reported to the authorities. Just say the magic words ("critical race theory"). We're talking broad, wide, stormtrooper-caliber aim, and it would be funny if these wild shots weren't hitting real targets, actual live students and teachers.

If You Have Missed Michelle Rhee...

She Who Must Not Be Named is back, a little.

One of the early examples of how one can parlay two years in Teach for America into a career as an educational "expert," she took over DC schools, launched some advocacy groups, established herself as a major brand (the Kim Kardashian of education reform), and then--poof. Her career turned out to be brief after all. 

Dogged by controversy and revelations about her non-miraculous miracles, she retired to Sacramento with hubby and NBA star Kevin Johnson (who has had problems of his own). She was on the board of Miracle-Gro and a Sacramento charter school run by Johnson (apparently no longer). 

But you can still, apparently, hire Rhee to come speak from around $30,000 to $50,000--less if you want her to speak virtually. 

Somebody has taken her up on that.

Sacramento State has an annual Student Academic Success Day. This year's is coming up on September 27. Entitled "I Fly: Resilient, Relentless and Resourceful," the day is meant "to inform and inspire students and the community to lay out a blueprint of success that fosters lifelong dreams and achievements." It will be an all-virtual event, and will include some awards (Principals and Leaders, A Woman Who Takes Flight, Optimism). There are workshops and sessions and speakers. Three of them. 

The opening session speaker is Kevin Bracy, known as Coach Greatness and a busy motivational speaker. At noon, "leading educational expert, author, and one of the premier motivational speakers in the education arena," Jeremy Anderson.

And, as you have already guessed, the leaders and principals summit keynote speaker is Rhee. 

Her bio for the event is creative. For instance, in writing about her appearance on the public stage as DC school chief, we're told "Under Michelle’s leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years." Except that her work in DC, besides being divisive, turned out to be smoke, mirrors, and cheating. She saw "bureaucratic barriers as a key problem in improving the school system," which is a fair representation of the mindset of the wave of reforminess that Rhee represents, the wave of hubris-infused amateurs who believed that no rules or regulations or other human beings should stand in the way of implementing their genius ideas. 

I suppose that Rhee is a fine choice for a gathering entitled "resilient, relentless, and resourceful," because she has certainly managed to just keep on swinging, even in the face of a single notable success in the field she elbowed her way into. I'm just going to hope that this is a gig of convenience and not an attempt to get back into the ed biz. If you're curious, you can register to zoom in on her address. 

ICYMI: Tech Sunday Edition (9/19)

Yes, I'm directing a community theater production again, and in the time of covid it's quite the adventure. This time it's the Wizard of Oz, and today we enter the final run-up to performance, so if I don't seem to be logging as many hours at the Institute, that's why. But we have reading for today.

Ida's Wild Ride

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider keeps us updated on her Ida-related adventures, and how education in her classroom will prevail.

Separate and Unequal

Bruce Baker and Mark Weber have done some important research about funding and education in New Jersey.

Steve Bannon hopes homeschooling moms will be his new shock troops

The Daily Beast has been watching this political storm brewing. Take with a grain of salt, but pay attention.

Big money in selling charter schools

Carol Burris over at the Washington Post lays out a crazy pants story of how one charter group is all about making big real estate dollars.

How republicans turned school choice into a losing issue

A Jennifer Berkshire piece at The Nation takes us to the Pompeo/DeVos choice pep rally in New Hampshire. I told you this was coming, but she actually went. 

Black educators silenced from teaching America's racist past

Melinda Anderson takes a look at some effects of the CRT panic

School boards and other political targets

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at the current wave of attacks on school boards.

Our Faculty Success Initiative Redefines Everything You Thought You Knew about "Faculty" and "Success"

McSweeney's scores with yet another darkly comic look at education baloney.

School Choice Isn't Uber. It's LulaRoe.

I didn't mean to watch; I really didn't. But my wife started in on the LulaRoe documentary and I was sucked in. Mostly because the founding couple, DeAnne Brady and Mark Stidham are such truly awful people, but they were awful in a way that immediately rang a bell. 

There are some superficial similarities. In particular, the multi-level marketing pyramid scheme aspects of LulaRoe, where the focus is not on the actual product, but on recruiting more people for the organization--that rang a bell (kind of like treating people as if each one was carrying a backpack full of cash). 

But what really resonated was the attitude of the founders. 

DeAnne and Mark talk a lot about freedom and choice. They talk about liberating their members, giving them choices and opportunities in their lives. But when your LulaRoe business doesn't work out, Mark wants you to know that it's your own damn fault, that you didn't work hard enough or have the moral fiber or the hustle and you're making excuses. 

We've seen these people before. They believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this?

Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should.

This is not an idea that translates well to public education, but it is a foundational belief about how the world works, and their ideas about the freedom to rise or fall on your merits echo those of fellow multi-level millionaires, Dick and Betsy DeVos (in fairness, Betsy's money also comes from the manufacture of auto parts). 

It's the Betsy DeVos Education Freedom universe, parents get their vouchers and are cut loose in the marketplace. And if they later come back complaining that they were bilked by bad actors or snookered by a snake oil salesman or left stranded  by a suddenly-closed non-public school or were in a community that the "market" chose to pass by or they simply couldn't make the combo of their voucher and their own money stretch far enough for an effective education--well, as Mark Stidham would tell them, we gave you the freedom and the opportunity and if you didn't make it work out, well, that's on you. You didn't have the virtue or the character or the grit or the hustle to make it work. Stop making excuses. 

Betsy DeVos liked to compare school choice to Ubers, or food trucks. But her worldview is on display in the LulaRoe saga, along with all the broken people and dreams that it leaves behind. 

FL: The Big Standardized Test is dead. Long live the Big Standardized Test!

 As widely noted, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis has had a testing epiphany. "More learning and less test prep," he says, and his right hand education man Richard Corcoran says, gee, testing really is a waste of as lot of time (he only just noticed this during the pandemic BS Test suspension period). Man, that Big Standardized Test is bad news, says the top guys in the state that wrote the book on the cult of testing.

If you follow me over at Forbes, you know I've already written about this. However, at Forbes my job is to be reasonably calm, considered and factual. I come here to the Institute to vent my spleen, and my spleen says that this all smells like a lot of fertilizer. 

Or as a friend of mine put it, Florida is replacing CCSS with B.E.S.T. and the governor now wants to replace FSA with F.A.S.T., and it all will produce C.R.A.P.

The governor's proposal is to replace the Big Standardized Test with progress monitoring. In other words, instead of one big high-stakes standardized test at the end of each year, an unending string of high-stakes standardized tests throughout the entire year. The BS Test would be gone, but all of the high stakes, from the stupid school letter grade rating system to test-based teacher evaluations--that stuff stays. The ability to run down the public education system as a means of marketing Florida's fifty-seven varieties of school choice--that stays. 

So while DeSantis has now disavowed two key pillars of Jeb Bush's reformy policy, the heart and soul--crush public education and sell off the parts--is still firmly in place.

In some ways, F.A.S.T. is worse, because testing and punishing assessing throughout the year means that the high stakes never let up. And assuming that this unending barrage of tests is delivered by computer, Florida would be generating a mountain of student data. That's a lot of money, and it's also an opportunity to start deep and damaging files for each of those students. 

Computer-delivered low-cost high-data-yield competency-based education-flavored products have been a dream of some folks for years now. Now one looks to be taking a shot.

The state government and department of education are already treating this as a done deal (presumably the legislature will do as it's told) and bragging that they are the first state in the nation to go this route. We'll see if the feds think this is an acceptable way to meet the requirements of ESSA. It's going to make some testing company a load of cash, set new standards for data mining, and show new heights in test-centered schooling (every week is test prep week). And it will presumably provide DeSantis a better way to garner some national political 2024 attention (because going pro-covid isn't looking like a winner right now). Of course, Jeb Bush thought he was going to ride education to the White House as well...

But if you aren't paying attention to this story, you should, because when it comes to destructively bad ideas in education, all roads lead us back to Florida. Guaranteed that GOP strategists around the country are watching this and thinking, "Hmmm.... maybe we should try this..."

DeSantis is making a play for it; all the more interesting because he's burned the single BS Test bridge behind him. There's not really any "Oh, I guess the Big Standardized Test is awesome after all" way back. He's committed. Here's hoping nobody else gets encouraged by it.

How To Undermine The Teaching Of Reading

No, this is not yet another salvo in the reading wars, because I don't  care where you fall on the pure phonics -- just take your holistic guess continuum, you have to believe in the power of content knowledge. 

There's plenty of evidence of the importance of content knowledge, though I'm partial to the old baseball experiment, in which it turned out that students have a higher reading comprehension level if you ask them to read about topics where their content knowledge is strong. 

This doesn't seem particularly mysterious. Sounding out words isn't all that helpful if the sounds add up to a word I've never heard before. And my ability to form an educated guess is limited to things I actually know something about. 

Unfortunately, the high stakes testing area has asked us to think of reading as a collection of "skills" that are sort of free-floating and unattached to actual content, as if "find the main idea" is a task that can be completed by a third grader as easily in a paragraph about baseball as in a paragraph about the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. 

And yet the stars are aligned to once again give the short end of the stick to content knowledge rich areas. Worried about getting those test scores back up (because that's how Learning Loss is going to be measured in their neighborhood), administrators are bearing down on reading classes. I have not yet heard of anyone repeating the worst excesses of one former principal in my old district; he took students with low pre/practice test scores and putted them in two math and two reading classes per day and pulled them out of math and science entirely. But plenty of administrators are hurting the cause in other ways. For instance, elementary principals like to stick history and science in lousy time slots-- last fifteen minutes before lunch, last twelve minutes before lining up for buses, only once a week. 

Deciphering words without a connection to content knowledge is not only harder, but it's an unfinished process, like opening a door to nowhere. And not just a door to nowhere, but a door without hinges or a frame. Trying to teach reading without content knowledge is like teaching a student how to open a door with just a door, by itself, lying in the middle of a field. You can teach them the parts of the door and how a doorknob works, but it's really hard to operate the door that way, and not very fun or interesting.  Love of reading, the most desirable outcome, requires an ability to understand and operate the door (decipher the words), but it also requires the door to open up on a world, not a blank nothing. 

Look, tortured metaphors aside, this is an area in which I agree with people I often disagree with in other areas-- when the Board of Directors is ready to learn to read, I want the foundation to be built on tons of content knowledge and vocabulary. I don't give a rat's hairy tushy about their DIBELS scores, and I already know they can pretend to read (If you want someone to provide a dramatic recitation of "Mighty, Mighty Construction Site," I've got your guys right here). When they sound out a word, I want them to recognize it. When they struggle through a text, I want them to have enough understanding of what's going on to use a context to help them. I want them to grasp that the marks on the page correspond to actual Things in the World, and I want their teachers to help them fill their brains up with all the knowledge of all the things.

And not because content knowledge will help them raise their test scores but because the whole point of the written word is to transmit understanding and knowledge and ideas and feelings and insights across space and time, human to human. Content knowledge, rich and deep and broad, is an aid to reading because it is the whole point and purpose of reading. "Reading," whether by decoding or by best-guessing, without any connection to the world, is just a performative school trick that misses the point and purpose of language. Don't shortchange content knowledge so that you can teach reading. Teach children content so that you can teach them to read.

What's Too Controversial for the Classroom

John Wallis was a fresh new teacher, hired to teach drama, world mythology, and speech and debate at Neosho Junior High in southwestern Missouri. He hung a gay pride flag and a sign saying "In This Classroom, EVERYONE Is Welcome." He was told a parent complained, so he took the items down. Students asked why. He explained, said the flag did not represent what he would teach in his class, and went a bit further:

“But I followed it up by saying, ‘If you have a problem with the flag representing me, or students who identify as LGBTQ+, then you can probably find a different class,’” said Wallis. He said that prompted more complaints from parents.

He was then asked to sign a letter saying he would keep his "personal agenda on sexuality" out of the classroom, including no displays of any references to gender or sexuality. 

So he resigned.

Not the first or last teacher to be out of a job over personal beliefs in the classroom, but we're definitely into an era in which it's getting harder to see where the line is. (And we should note that the line's presentation via the press is also muddied up because we can never be certain that we're getting all of sides and all of the details visible at ground zero.)

There are certainly limits to a teacher's speech, both legal and ethical. Legally, teachers are government employees and that means they don't enjoy the full freedom of speech in a classroom as a private citizen on the street. That is exactly why a classroom teacher cannot legally lead her students in prayer--because that would constitute a government endorsement of a particular religious faith. And yes, there's a deep irony in the fact that the same people who want to erode that particular barrier want to erect an iron-clad one around teachers who bring "controversial issues" into the room.

The "How To" for handling controversial issues in an academic way is not all that tricky. I taught American Literature, which means I taught religion, race, gender, etc etc etc, and my basic template was, "I'm not here to tell you whether the osquolots were right or wrong, but I want you to understand how they saw the world and how that affected how they wrote about it." And then I'd make the osquolot case as clearly as I could. 

That seems pretty straightforward, and yet it does not guarantee smooth sailing. For some parents, it will be too controversial to talk about the osquolots at all, as if they had some sort of valid viewpoint. These parents often end up home or private schooling, so that their child never has to encounter an idea that those parents disapprove of. Mostly this story ends with parents learn that it's nearly impossible to raise a child who believes only what you believe.

But that's the academic area. It gets trickier when, like Wallis, and like too many students, you are dealing with topics that are not merely academic. For some non-zero number of parents, a teacher who simply walks into the classroom delivers an unspoken message of "I'm gay and I'm free to walk around and be a teacher in a school" and that message is controversial enough. A non-zero number of parents will find it too controversial is a Black teacher lives their Black life in the classroom in front of students. 

This is the problem with "don't be controversial" directives, pleas to "just teach facts" and "don't push your opinions"--they too often mean "just be in the classroom in the same way you would if you were a heterosexual white person." 

All good teachers know that connecting with students, building a relationship, is critical, which means you have to bring part of your story into the classroom. It's a tricky balancing act. You don't want to be that teacher who overshares, whose students know you were on a date last night and how it went, but you also don't want to be an impersonal robot who apparently gets clicked off and leaned in the closet at night. "Students have to know you care about them" is time-tested advice, but it requires that them to know that you can care about anything. Plus, in some cases you are one of the few adults in their orbit, so you're a bit of a role model; how to have an opinion about something without being an ass is a good skill to model.

Side note: All of this is easier if you live in the district where you teach and students see you out in the community (is there anything as exciting for a young student as discovering that your teacher buys groceries and wears jeans). It's just one more reason that you really ought to live in the district where you teach. End of side note.

LGBTQ students, students of color, students with any number of challenges-- they all benefit from seeing teachers like them in front of a classroom. So do all the other students. And that means seeing what those teachers care about, living their lives. I kept pictures of my family on my desk all the years I taught; why shouldn't a married LGBTQ colleague be able to do the same?

We are stuck in an age of agitated groups, most of them currently on the right. Is there anything we can't raise a fuss about. I was watching an episode of Daniel Tiger yesterday with the Board of Directors, and it was all about sharing when you play with someone, and I realized sadly that this would be controversial content because some folks don't cotton to sharing which sounds a little socialist and in this world you fight for what's yours and you hold onto it. And folks who cry controversy over things like actual facts, rendering science ands history classes an uphill struggle. And folks who think children shouldn't learn anything that their parents don't know or believe. And folks who don't believe in vaccines.

The missing factor in all of these "teacher leaves the classroom" stories is an administration with a backbone. Because it certainly seems as if the answer to "What is too controversial for the classroom" is "pretty much everything." I've worked under controversy-averse administrations, and "don't do anything that will get me a phone call" is a terrible administration policy, especially in times when some folks are intent on whipping up controversy for their own political gains. Drawing that fuzzy, ever-shifting line is part of an administration's job, but they have to have the nerve not to fold to every single parent phone call.

I have no idea whether John Wallis was destined to be a great teacher or not. But I do know that as districts have more and more trouble filing positions, "Go in that classroom, but don't be gay or Black or any of this other stuff on our list in front of the students" is not a great recruiting tool. Nobody's career dream is to be an empty suit.