A Handy Guide To SCOTUS, Schools, and the Wall between Church and State

When I first met Dallas Koehn, he was approaching the end of his rope with education in Oklahoma. Now he's in Indiana, but when he moved, he took with him a background in history, teaching, and consulting (imagine--hiring a consultant who actually works in a classroom). Koehn has been blogging for years at Blue Cereal Education, where he applies a nice combination of insight and sass. 

All of those qualities--the deep knowledge of history, the writing skill, and the sass--are on display in his new book A Wall of Education: What the Supreme Court Really Says (And Really Doesn't) About The Separation of Church and State in Education). It's an extension/collection of his regular "Have To" History posts on the blog, where the history teacher him just has to break down significant historical stuff.

The book is a chronological collection of every SCOTUS case related to the long-storied wall between church and state where it runs through schools. That may sound like a tough row to hoe, but Koehn makes it tolerable--even entertaining--through a couple of devices.

For one, each section lets you go as deep as you like. Koehn starts with Three Big Things--the basic "what you need to know about this case" boiled down to three bullet points. Then there's the background (how we got there), the arguments, and the decision, plus why it mattered, all clearly labeled so that you can skim as you wish. At the end, he gives you the opinions and dissents from the judges themselves. With each case, you are free to dig as deeply as you wish (or not).

This is all aided by Koehn's relaxed, plain-language voice. It's pretty easy to imagine these capsuled explanations as class presentations. Take this paragraph, selected by me pretty much at random, from his discussion of Lee v. Weisman:

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, had a number of problems with the majority decision, most of which centered around--wait for it-- the focus on "coercion." Being Scalia, this wasn't the only problem with the decision. Everyone participating in it was a big stinky dumb doo-doo head. But coercion came up the most in his mocking, sputtering rebuttal. (Quote from Scalia follows)

There's a lot of scholarship here, and a lot of understanding conveyed in ways that don't require you to be a legal scholar, but which makes the musing of legal scholars a bit easier to follow. Reading the volume through, in order, one gets a real education on the ubiquitous "Lemon Test," and you can see, almost in real time, the slow erosion of the wall as folks on the religious side keep probing and pushing, sometimes more honestly and sincerely than others. 

Koehn divides cases into major in-depth chapters and quicky "worth a look" sidebars. It makes a great reference book for those of us who aren't lawyers, like having easy access to a legal historian who speaks regular English. I know I'm eventually going to be irritated at the lack of a table of contents or index, but there is a very handy grouping of cases by subject area in the back, as well as a list of further resources. 

Koehn's own inclinations are easy to spot, but he is fair and even-handed in his treatment of the various parties in these cases (kind of like any experienced well-read professional educator handling a controversial topic). The book is self-published, but available at plenty of on-line outlets. It's a hefty 400-ish pages, but reads quickly and provides a quick look-up source for all the cases you'd want to know about. I recommend this book as a worthwhile addition to your education policy library.

The Missing School Choice Argument

Sometimes it's what people don't say that tells you a lot about their position.

Proponents of school choice rarely-if-ever talk about one of the great obstacles to school choice.

Private school admissions.

For instance, private schools that explicitly or implicitly forbid LGBTQ students (and faculty). Or private schools that resist admitting students of color. Or private schools that have religious requirements. Or private schools that have erected barriers of price, thereby blocking poorer families from access. (And that's before we get to a whole other class of obstacles, like the parochial school that told my divorced friend that her children would probably be better off in a more suitable surrounding--presumably one better-equipped for children from a "broken home.")

When the private or charter schoolhouse door is locked, it is most often the people inside who have locked it. Why are choice fans not after them to open their doors?

When cries go up that students have to be rescued from their "failing schools" and must be released from being trapped in their zip code, why do none of these complaints ever address the people who already have lifeboats in the water, calling on them to carry more children to safety?

Why not demand that the pricey privates use their endowments to extend more scholarships? Why not insist that the Catholic Church use its billions of dollars to welcome more students into its huge chain of private schools? Why is nobody giving Eva Moskowitz grief about the families she chases away from Success Academy? Why is there so little talk from choicers about all the seats going empty because charters refuse to backfill and replace students who leave? We know most of the tricks that schools use to make it "school's choice"--why aren't choicers who are in it For The Children out there hollering, "Knock that off right now"?

Why do so few voucher systems include any safeguards for students and families, so few guarantees that when they find the school that's the "best fit," their "right" to make that choice will not be violated by the school itself? 

Heck, why not demand better wages for American workers so that more parents could afford to keep one parental unit out of work to home school instead?

School choice is, after all, widely available right now--except for the barriers of school's admission policies and tuition price tags. It is within the schools' power to fix both of those so that school choice would be more readily accessible to families. And yet, nobody in the school choice movement raises their voice to make this argument. 

I don't know, but I can guess at some of the arguments. 

"Even if private schools open their doors wider, we'd still be asking parents to pay for school twice." But nobody pays for school twice, because nobody pays the full price to send their child to school even once. I pay my property tax, and some other undefined amount of school tax through state and federal channels. It does not remotely add up to the price per pupil--even less so if we're talking about more than one. And if we accept this argument, then we open the floor to folks who want to argue that their kids are grown and why should they be paying any money at all for school taxes?

"It would cramp the school's style to just fling open the doors." Sure. But either we are in favor of a system that takes responsibility for educating all children, or we don't. If private schools want to exist outside of that all-children system, they don't need to take the money that's paid by taxpayers to maintain that system. That makes no more sense than saying, "I want to build a nice private park, but I want the government to give me public tax dollars to help pay for it." 

But here's the thing--if actual choice were the main concern here, advocates could argue for vouchers etc at the same time they lobbied for more open access to private schools. But for many, it's not about choice- it's about taxpayer-funded choice, or transforming a public system into a privately owned-and-operated system. It's not about access to choice for students; it's about access to tax dollars and the education market for entrepreneurs and vendors. In the most extreme cases, it's about ending tax-supported public education.\

There's a whole world of ways to provide more choices to students (including choices within the public system itself). Why do choicers insist that we should only talk about one particular approach?

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/3)

 Once a year, my small town closes the streets, brings in a ton of vendors, runs a whole passel of events, and calls it a festival, and it's pretty cool. Like the Harvest Homes of a century ago, it serves as a city-wide homecoming. It's not quite the same this year (the apple pancake breakfast was take-out only), but it's something. In the meantime, here's your reading list for the week.

Fighting back in Arizona

Trevor Nelson at Public Voices for Public Schools tells how activists are fighting back against the folks in Arizona trying to use the pandemic to sow more chaos, disruption and destruction of public schools.

What 150 studies have to say about motivating students

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at a meta-study of student motivation, Surprise--students are motivated by the same things as other humans.

How for-profit charter schools open the door for private investors to exploit public education

Jeff Bryant has been digging again. Here's a pretty appalling look at how some loopholes are being exploited by some shady actors in the edu-biz world.

Teaching children and teenagers philosophy and social justice

An intriguing and unusual slant on teaching the thinky stuff. From the blog of the APA

Why charter schools are not as "public" as they claim to be

Kevin Welner has a new book about charter schools coming out--here's a piece of what his research discovered about how charters actually enforce school's choice, not school choice.

Teach two years, climb ed ladder, score $5 mill contract

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with an astonishing story of corruption amongs the TFA grads in Rhode Island

Racism matters to our students, so it must matter to us

Jaty Wamsted doing a guest turn at Maureen Downey's spot on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, talking about the real place of critical race theory in the classroom.

Behind the teacher shortage, an unexpected culprit: covid relief money

From NBC news. Some folks think that covid money is being used to poach teachers from other districts.

Koch-backed group fuels opposition to mask mandates

The Washington Post got its hands on some leaked documents, and you will be shocked--shocked--to learn that the Kochtopus is doing a new version of its Tea Party fueling work in the world of anti-maskers.

Junk Mail Yet Again

The Koch-backed Freedom Foundation wants to once again encourage teachers to quit the union. Grumpy Old Teacher breaks it down.

How America screwed up the great school reopening

The New Republic tells the tale of how we came up short.

PA: Another "Mom" Group Involved in School Board Elections

Today PennLive reports that an Open Schools group is throwing big bucks into school board races in the state.

Back to School PA is a PAC that intends to drop a ton of money all over the state to back school board candidates who want to make sure that schools are open for in person learning. The money behind the group comes from Paul Martino, a venture capitalist who has been busy mostly in the world of sports and gaming, but on the subject of opening schools was just an angry parent. If watch him talk, he has swallowed the entire Learning Loss panic.

Nope.

Martino is teamed up with Clarice Schillinger, who previously organized Keeping Kids in School PAC, which grew out of Parents for In Person Education. That PAC backed 94 candidates in various primary board races (mostly in the southeastern corner of PA) and 92 of them were successful. Schillinger also helped float a multi-family lawsuit against a school district in an attempt to force it open (that was under "Voice for Choice--Open Our Schools")

If it seems as if they know how to play this game well, that may be because of Schillinger herself/ Although she is invariably described as a "mom," her last full-time job was as a staffer for a Republican Senator. Previously she worked as an executive assistant for the county housing authority and for Delamor Enterprises, a company that operates some McDonald's in the Chambersburg area. She just finished a BA in human resources from Penn State (Class of '20). These days she works as a system administrator at Charles River Laboratories.

In short, Schillinger has not been sitting around the house in her apron baking cookies to sell in order to raise money for her cause. Like most of the "moms" in front of these groups, she's politically seasoned and well-connected. The "mom" nomenclature is an odd journalistic choice, as if Bill Gates were routinely described as a "dad interested in helping schools."

The story of this latest group is that Schillinger and Martino just kind of bumped into each other on line, discovered a shared passion for forcing schools to be open. Just a mom and a rich guy who happened to connect.

The Open School movement might be easier to support if that passion for open school buildings resulted in demands that school districts put appropriate safeguards in place, upgrade ventilation, cut class sizes to ease social distancing--all the kind of stuff that makes it possible to open schools safely. But that never seems to be the case, and it's not the case here. Teacher requests for adequate ventilation are dismissed as an unfair moving of the goalposts.

If it seems like there are a ton of these groups, well, there are. Back To School PA Pac has a whole page you can use to contact the group in your county. And if it seems to you that schools in PA are actually mostly open already, Schillinger hints that they might all close right after the election in November. 

So one more mom group. It's hard sometimes to tell whether this keeps happening because women are routinely stripped of their professional role, or because these groups want to use the word "mom" as cover, masking professional well-organized activism with the notion of nice homebodies who are just trying to make some nice, sincere amateur grassroots noise. But whatever you believe about such groups, Pennsylvania has another of them, and they are coming for a school board election near you.

How Do We Achieve Effective Classroom Transparency

A Pennsylvania rep just offered up yet another proposal to reveal the inner workings of school classrooms by requiring schools to post textbook lists, curriculum, and lesson plans. It's another one of those endlessly repeating cycles of education, currently being goosed along by the anti-indoctrination crowd.

Because the initiative is coming from a whole host of bad faith actors who are simply looking for ways to intimidate teachers and strip mine school content for any "proof" that schools are teaching something from the ever-lengthening laundry list of complaints that started with That Race Stuff and now includes mentions of sea horse sex--anyway, because that's the crowd pushing this, there's a knee jerk reaction among educators to resist it.

But here's the thing--the desire of parents and taxpayers to know how their children are being taught and their money being spent is a perfectly legitimate desire (that's why it is so effective for the anti-public school crowd to harness it). There have always been, and will always be, some folks who are asking these questions in good faith. Taxpayers fork over perfectly good money for this, and for parents, school is the first significant part of a child's life where the parent must give up control, which is a scary thing. 

It is not enough to say, "Just trust us, and no, you can't see within the black box." Parents and taxpayers are entitled to see.

The challenge has always been how to see effectively and without derailing the process. The Big Standardized Test is a great example of ineffective accountability-- it interferes and warps the thing it's trying to show us, and doesn't even provide a good look at what we're trying to see.

So how do we do it?

Live video?

Some folks want to strap body cams on teachers or live video feeds in the room. I've heard from plenty of teachers who say, "Sure. Let them see how their kid actually behaves in class," and there is a certain appeal to teachers in having a video record to contradict student claims about how the teacher did something mean to them. 

In my teaching days, I would have been perfectly happy to have parents come sit in my classroom, but I'm not sure that would have been fair to the students. The live camera feed idea is a non-starter simply because it is a huge violation of the rights of the other students in the classroom, particularly because to provide any transparency for parents, the video would have to be stored somewhere so they could watch at their convenience (I'm not seeing anybody getting an hour off from work so they can watch their child's fifth period math class). I am not in any hurry to advance the surveillance state, and any such video system would immediately draw the attention of a hundred "We'll monitor student behavior to spot potential problems and academic issues"--oh, wait-- those companies are already at work.

Post it all on the internet?

The more popular plan is some version of the PA bill-- get everything posted on line. The challenge here is the definition of "everything."

Too little, and there isn't any real information for parents and taxpayers. If schools just post textbook lists, that doesn't tell you what is actually in the book or which parts the teacher actually uses. Too much, and you push teachers into a Dilbertized universe where they have trouble getting their actual work done because they're so busy creating reports about their work. Too much also buries parents and taxpayers under a mountain of paperwork that takes forever to sort through. 

There are practical limits as well. If the law demands that I post in August the exact text of the worksheet I'll be using in May, well, I simply can't do it. I could never have posted a year's worth of lesson plans at the beginning of the year, and any teacher who does is either lying to you or is not a particularly awesome teacher. Nor do most teachers' lesson plans look like something other folks can read, but are often in shorthand and language that makes sense mostly to them; a lesson plan posting requirement will also come with a lesson plan rewriting-into-plain-English requirement (except for passive aggressive teachers who simply post plans that civilians won't understand).

It makes far more sense to post materials week by week, as the year develops. Many schools already do some version of this with Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard or Google Classrooms, internet platforms that are used by teachers to communicate with students, but which can be easily opened up to parent access as well. That rollout of material will be far more accurate than an entire early report, and as a bonus, rolling it out in real time means that parents wouldn't need to devote an entire week just to reading through it all. As a bonus for this approach, a lot of teachers just spent some pandemic pause time becoming more proficient at using these kinds of platforms. If school districts wanted to open these platforms up to read-only access for taxpayers, they could do so.

The system will be effective and information-heavy to the degree that it doesn't require a buttload of extra work. Not a month goes by in which teachers are not required to add some new duty prompting them to reply (aloud or silently) "And when am I supposed to do that? What other thing should I stop doing to make time for it." I point this out not to say "Wah, poor teachers" but because the teaching day is a zero sum game that was maxed out decades ago, and if you want something done well, you have to provide people the time to do it. Given the choice between grading papers, prepping lessons, or preparing a report that most parents and taxpayers are never going to look at, teachers are unlikely to drop everything and devote time to getting their lesson plans posted.

There's always talking

There is also an option of actually talking--to teachers, to students, to administrators. E-mail, phones. It can be done.

There will be hard parts

There are people out there who are trying to make political hay out of the threat of Evil Teacher Indoctrinators, and we have already seen multiple tales of them finding indoctrination where none exists. Their intent in demanding teacher scope and sequence and lesson plans and text are clear--they are going searching for indoctrination, and they are going to find it. They will be far louder than the people who dip into the stuff and find it, well, mostly boring. 

There are also people who just don't trust public schools, and no amount of transparency will change that. 

Schools need to be transparent anyway. I worked for some administrators during my career whose reaction to every possible problem was to try to hide from it and build walls. That trick is not only wrong, but it never, ever works.

Will school districts be called upon to justify the presence of some materials in their curriculum? Maybe--but they should be able to do that. Even if the accusers stop listening after they make their accusation, there's a wider audience than that small mob. 

Do it anyway.

School districts need to adopt workable transparency both because it's the right thing to do and because it's the only way to deal with the current manufactured panic. 

There is a cycle of distrust, particularly in high schools, in districts where teachers rarely hear from parents except when they want to complain about something and parents rarely hear from teachers except when their child is in trouble. It's a hard cycle to break, and an easy cycle to exploit. Regular communication helps. Transparency helps. 

The goal of some of these folks is to break things, to make the gears grind to a halt, to keep public schools from working, and in some states and communities, I don't know if anything will stem the tide in the short term. But as long as these folks can point at the school walls and claim that something mysterious and sinister is going on in there, they have an advantage.

Public schools absolutely have to be defended right now, vigorously and vocally. Opponents are doing a good job of shouting down and intimidating other voices. Defenders and school district leaders have to stand up, and it's hard to use secrecy and opacity as tools for defense. 

So open the doors, tear down the walls, and let parents and taxpayers see just how work-a-day, unexciting, and ordinary the inside of a school is. Give them a good look at the sneaky indoctrination of participial phrases and the periodic table. Let them see the ordinary awesome process of student learning. And if some must squawk, let all the public see the diversity and sexy sea horses that they are squawking about. 

In the meantime, may legislatures please not pass one-size-fits-all laws that create busywork for schools without providing real information for parents and taxpayers who actually want it. 

Bipartisan School Choice Is Over

This has been coming for a while. After the bipartisan launch of No Child Left Behind and the desire to advance bipartisan support during the Obama administration (and into the presumed Clinton administration thereafter), a kind of deal was worked out between the right and the left, and school choice was presented as a hybrid that could appeal to both right-tilted free marketeers and left-leaning social justice advocates (profiteers, as always, are both politically agnostic and financially opportunistic).

Strike up a debate about school choice and you were as likely to hear about the power of competition and the free market as you were how school choice would finally bring equity and uplift to children trapped in an inequitable system.

But then the truce began to crumble. Trump and Betsy DeVos didn't help--suddenly certain policies were toxic for lefties. But the fault lines were noted even earlier. In 2016, Robert Pondiscio (AEI) drew some reformy ire by saying out loud that the left and right were not getting along any more. A year and a half later, Kate Walsh (NCTQ) was wondering if the movement had lost its way, citing a new orthodoxy that required reformsters to Be Performatively Sad about certain past failures. 

Many observers have followed this dissolving partnership (Jennifer Berkshire has covered it exceptionally well-- try here and here) looking at the causes. Part of the issue has been that Democrats were always the junior partners; school choice has been near and dear to conservative hearts for generations, while Democrats were brought into the fold more recently. Often they were simply Democrats of convenience, as typified by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group whose creation hedge funder Whitney Tilson described thus: 

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job... In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Democrats came into school choice on the theory that choice would bring improved education results and lift people out of poverty. Technocrats thought disruption--moving fast and breaking things--would revolutionize education. But none of that happened. Years--decades--passed and test scores didn't rise and charter schools didn't provide genius new education ideas and the gaggle of education amateurs running about didn't actually have any great successes and poverty was not erased.

For folks sitting on the right side of the aisle in the school choice chapel, that was not a problem. They could easily pivot from discussing results to extolling the value of choice itself. Freedom, liberty, choice--all are their own reason for being and injecting those qualities into the school system is a net good, regardless of the results.

You can see the effects in recent choice victories. There have been a host of them in 2021, and they are all about vouchers and expanding existing programs and pushing toward the literal holy grail of public tax dollars going to private religious schools. Charter schools were never a right-side priority. Watered-down choice, charter schools were a foot in the door, a compromise with Democrat neoliberals. But true believers like DeVos were never real fans (we forget now that charter advocates were not excited about her nomination, requiring her to make nice when taking office). Charter schools live attached to the public system (like symbiotes or parasites, depending on how you feel about them), while vouchers simply grab sustenance before it ever gets to the public system. Charters look to expand the public system, and have staked their future on demanding to be called "public" (they aren't); vouchers are out to replace the public system entirely, just as Uncle Miltie Friedman envisioned. 

If you want a more official declaration of the death of bipartisan choice, look no further than this recent report by Jay Greene (University of Arkansas now at Heritage Foundation) and James D. Paul (Education Freedom Institute). This report is pretty brutal. "Does school choice need bipartisan support?" might as well be entitled, "Buh-bye Dems: Who needs you?"

"We do not suggest that anyone should be excluded from the education reform coalition," they conclude. "But advocates for choice should be clear-eyed about the types of lawmakers who have historically done the heavy lifting on the house and senate floors." And as the report lays out, those are Republicans. It is not worth it, the report suggests, to craft policy to attract Democrat votes and in the process, lose dependable GOP support. Only three times in 70 did a state legislature need Democrat votes to support private school choice which, the report notes, "has historically been a Republican priority."

Further evidence of which way the choice wind is blowing? Greene and Paul recommend that policies should be designed to "increase the constituency for school choice and reflect the values of legislators who have been responsible for the existence of such programs." In other words, dance with the guys what brung you. And the policies mentioned are vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education scholarship accounts (aka "vouchers, another kind of vouchers, and a third kind of vouchers"). The word "charter" does not appear at all in the report.

Bipartisan school choice is over, and it's going to have an effect on how choicers make their pitch and craft their policies. We'll want to pay attention.

One More Story About The Extra Challenges of School Right Now

This is what educators are up against right now.

Last night was school board night in my county. At one board meeting, the board was subjected to a certain amount of ranting about masks, including assertions that asymptomatic children do not spread the disease. One board member thanked them for speaking out.

Just up the road from me, the Oil City School District was supposed to have its regular meeting.

Two attendees at the meeting wore "Freedom over Fear" t-shirts and refused to put on their masks.

So the board recessed for an hour to allow an attempt to sort out the masking. The two did not leave or relent, so the board canceled the meeting and rescheduled it as a Zoom meeting later in the week. 

Both had attended previous meetings. Only one spoke. Previously, that speaker asserted that covid isn't real. 

That speaker is a high school student.

Fifty one teachers were there to show solidarity as they questioned the board about covid sick day policies; like many districts, this one now requires teachers to use up their own sick days if they contract covid. They didn't get to stand together as a group to address that concern.

And some of them had to be in school today, dealing with that student and others like him.

If we were in a state like North Carolina, how quickly do you suppose the family would turn a teacher in to the state for trying to "indoctrinate" their child into believing that disease that has killed almost 700,000 people in this country is not real, and that he needs to follow the dictates of the state and wear his damn mask? How does this work in a district where the board agrees with the student? And how many students are being told, indirectly or directly, that they should not respect or listen to the educators at their school?

It's one more obstacle thrown in the path of people who went into this line of work because they wanted to teach children.

There is a desperate need right now for parents who do not feel anti-vax/mask/etc to speak up in school board meetings, letters to the editor, and anywhere else. But they can see that speaking up invites attacks, and so a vocal minority is shouting down the rest. And teachers hunker down for another long year, or start looking for the exit.