What The WSJ Anti-Public Ed Op-Ed Gets Wrong

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal (Fox News' upscale sibling) published an op-ed from Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded pro bono firm that takes cases primarily to defend against the "administrative state." It's a hit job on public education with some pretty bold arguments, some of which are pretty insulting. But he sure says a lot of the quiet part out loud, and that makes this worth a look. Let me walk you through this. (Warning--it's a little rambly, and you can skip to the last section if you want to get the basic layout)

Hamburger signals where he's headed with the very first paragraph:

The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

Hamburger offers no particular evidence for any of this catalog of arguable points. Various surveys repeatedly show that the majority of parents approve of their child's public school. The rest is a litany of conservative complaints with no particular evidence, but Hamburger needs the premise to power the rest of his argument.

So here comes Hamburger's bold assertion:

Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination

Conservative talking points about public education routinely assert and assume that public education is a service provided to parents, rather than to the students or society at large. It's case I've never seen them successfully make. At the same time, society's stake in educated members is clear and the entire rationale behind having non-parent taxpayers help pay the cost of public education. In any other instance where the taxpayers subsidize a private individual's purchase of goods or service (e.g. food stamps, housing), some conservatives say the social safety net is a Bad Thing, so it's uncharacteristic for them to champion public education as, basically, a welfare program for parents when they want to dramatically reduce all other such programs to bathtub-drowning size (spoiler alert: they'd like to do that with public education, too). 

But Hamburger has taken another step here, arguing that speech to children somehow belongs to their parents. It's a bold notion--do parents somehow have a First Amendment right to control every sound that enters their children's ears? Where are the children's rights in this? Or does Hamburger's argument (as some angry Twitter respondents claim) reduce children to chattel?

Hamburger follows his assertion with some arguments that don't help. He argues that public education has always attempted to "homogenize and mold the identity of children," which is a huge claim and, like much of his argument, assumes that schools somehow have the power to overwrite or erase everything that parents have inculcated at home. But then, for the whole argument currently raging, it's necessary to paint public schools as huge threat in order to justify taking dramatic major action against them. 

The great Protestant scam

Hamburger also notes that public education has "been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out" which would be a more powerful point if most of the poor hadn't generally avoided public education entirely. But he's going to go further by claiming that "well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children." There's no doubt that some of this was going on, but the primary goal of public education? 

The court case he leans on first is Pierce v Society of Sister, a 1925 Oregon case that established a parental right to substitute private religious school for public schooling. Hamburger argues that the underlying idea of the case is that Freedom of Speech = educational liberty, which gets him back to his central idea:  education is speech and therefor public education impinges on parents' First Amendment rights.

Further, Hamburger imagines an America in which some sort of pressure is exerted on people (mostly Catholics) to accept public education mind control, thereby violating--well, here's the shortest form of the argument he offers.

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.

Hamburger doesn't offer any kind of smoking gun to underline or expose the "nativists" dire intent. Nor does he explain why the public school system in some locales had to be forced to accept some students (I assume that he does not intend to argue that Southern schools blocked Black students out of deep respect for their parents' First Amendment rights). 

Public education squashes parents, apparently.

Hamburger returns to a funhouse mirror of public education. Rather than an attempt to improve society as a whole and extend equal opportunity to all children, his view is that public education exists strictly to indoctrinate, to overrule parents, and is so lacking in any desirable virtue that government must conspire to force families to submit.

His language posits a bizarre world. Parents somehow "can't adopt speech expressive of their own views" and must adopt government "educational speech in place of their own." All of this as if once parents send their children to school, they must never again express their own values or ideas in their own home. He hits this "in place of their own" idea a lot, as if the beginning of public education is the end of any sort of childrearing at home. 

He next does a neat ju-jitsu trick where he observes that if fears of coercion and indoctrination are enough to keep religious elements out of public school, they should be enough to keep Other Secular Stuff out of school.

Next, he works his way around to the objection I raised earlier--society's "compelling interest in public education." He would like to dismantle this claim. I'm unconvinced. 

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling.

This elicited my first "Oh, come on." When the US was founded, some students went to private school. Some did not. Most enslaved children were specifically forbidden to. When the US was founded, the body of knowledge one needed to grasp to make one's way through the world was considerably smaller, and there were fewer citizens in the whole US than there are right now in New York City. So, no.

Also, he argues again that public schools caught on basically as a plot by anti-Catholic nativists. This is a bold argument, made all the bolder because many, many paragraphs in, he has not offered even a cherry-picked out-of-context quote to back this up. But he is going to try to reinterpret a quote with a wild stretch:

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.” 

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestant.

Has any giant conspiracy ever failed so spectacularly? Horace Mann and his ilk were out to wipe out Catholicism and make everyone think Protestanty ideas and get everyone to vote the right way, and yet, none of that actually happened. And again, Hamburger talks about education as if it has no value or purpose beyond indoctrinating children. 

Is this one more plan to replace white folks with Democrat voters?

This goal of shaping future voters gave urgency to the government's interest in public education. As today, the hope was to liberate children from their parents’ supposedly benighted views and thereby create a different sort of polity. Now as then, this sort of project reeks of prejudice and indoctrination. There is no lawful government interest in displacing the educational speech of parents who don’t hold government-approved views, let alone in altering their children’s identity or creating a government-approved electorate

So, again, Hamburger reduces public education to a vast conspiracy to shout down parents and not, say, a means of creating educated citizens who are empowered to understand themselves and the world well enough to forge a productive and rewarding place in it. 

Hamburger wraps up by again harkening back to those great days of the 18th century:

The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference. 

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division.

I have some serious doubts about the diversity he lists, but I will note that it does not include a diversity of wealth and race. Or, for that matter, gender. Divisions is always less of a problem when Some People know their place and avoid interrupting their betters with complaints. But he needs this to be true because he's headed back around to the assertion that public schools are "coercive" and "the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart." His solution, favored by Libertarians these days, is to get public schools to stop tearing people apart by letting people tear themselves apart and silo with other folks of the same ideological stripe, because that has always worked out well.

So what is actually new here? Or is this the same old anti-public ed stuff? What is he actually saying? Let me boil this down.

Hamburger's argument breaks down into a few simple parts.

One is that the country (aka "government") has no legitimate stake in public education. Just let everyone get their own education for their own kids; it worked great back in the 1700s. This is a silly argument. 

Also, the government has no legitimate stake in public education  because it's all just a nativist plot to grind down Catholics and other dissenters. This part of the argument is important because it sets up the notion that only parents should have a say in education, which is an old favorite assertion of the anti-public ed crowd. If you don't know why we all benefit from being surrounded by well-educated people, I don't know how to explain it to you.

Education is speech. This part of the argument is important because it allows him to rope in the First Amendment so that he can declare public education unconstitutional. But it feels like a stretch--does he mean formal education? Is it still speech if it's not in a classroom? Is reading a book speech if you learn from it? Does this mean teachers have more First Amendment rights than previously rules, or fewer?  If it's on a computer? Is anything a person learns from speech? 

But "education is speech" is not the really bold part of his argument. That really bold part is where he goes on to say "therefor, parents should have total control over it." I have so many questions. Should parents have total control over all speech directed at or in the vicinity of their children, including books, and so would I be violating a parent's First Amendment rights if I gave their child an book for Christmas? And where are the child's rights in this? Would this mean that a parent is allowed to lock their child in the basement in order to protect that parent's First Amendment right to control what the child is exposed to? 

Hamburger's argument has implications that he doesn't get into in his rush to get to "do away with them and give everyone vouchers." The biggest perhaps is that he has made an argument that non-parent taxpayers should not have to subsidize an education system. I'm betting he's not unaware of that. 

ICYMI: No Staff Shortage Here Edition (10/24)

The advantage of having the Curmudgucation Institute operated with a staff of one, unpaid, is evident at times like these. I would give me a raise, but the Institute can't afford to stretch our budget of $0.00. I mention this because we all need to be periodically reminded that all one needs to be a policy spokesperson, think tank, or important activist group, is one person, a point of view, and access to the interwebz.

Speaking of which, here are the reads from the week. Warning--we have several Washington Post items this week, so if you're burning free views there, you may want to peruse the list and make your choices first.

Teacher Self Care Hinges Upon a Single Word

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with some short-but-sweet advice. When i think of all the times I tried to coach my colleagues to use this word...

Why so many teachers are thinking of quitting

Leslie Gray Streeter of the Washington Post took the radical step of talking to actual teachers (or former teachers). 

Kentucky judge finds new school voucher program unconstitutional

Jan Resseger with some good news from Kentucky. 

Best school lists are meaningless

Lots of folks had mean things to say about US News and their crazy decision to rank elementary and middle schools, but Jack Schneider had the best dismantling of the whole foolish business for WBUR.

Of all the conservative bands on teaching about racism, the one in Texas is the worst

Michael Gerson for the Washington Post, offering some insight on one of Texas's moves to try to overtake Florida in the crazypants bad education ideas department.

How newspaper closures open the door to corporate crime

In this education-adjacent story, Harvard Business School has the research that shows one bad side effect of closing newspapers.

ACLU: Oklahoma ban violates free speech rights

The first big anti-crt-ban lawsuit is on its way. Stay tuned.

Teachers are barely hanging on. Here's what they need.

The "teachers at the end of their rope" genre has been blowing up lately, but this Cult of Pedagogy podcast (with transcript) is probably the most thorough of the breed.

Nobody Hates The Gifted

While everyone else is worried about bans and disease, NYC has descended into a huge flap over gifted education. Nancy Flanagan has some thoughts about gifted education.

Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids' school curriculum. They don't.

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire at the Washington Post look at just how much control parents should have over school's programs.

What is Taught in Public Schools? Volunteer as a Substitute Teacher and See for Yourself!

Steven Singer offers some excellent advice for all those lawmakers so deeply concerned about what schools are up to.

Texas school district bans long hair. Lawsuit ensues.

Oh, Texas. Believe it or not, we're back to making rules about how long a young man can grow his hair. 

4th circuit will review skirts-only dress code for charter

What is it--the fifties again? This suit actually has larger ramifications, because the charters' defense is that it's not a public school. 

How protesters came after this Florida board member

The Washington Post has a first-person account from one of the board members being harassed in Florida.

America's Standardized Test Giants Are Losing Money Fast

The Chronicle of Higher Education has this sad, sad tale. Okay, it's not a sad tale. Come enjoy the schadenfreude.

TN librarians speak out again board member's attempt to ban books

Tennessee is the home of one more aggressive attempt to ban books. Here's some good response to that in the Tennessean.

Trump’s Lawyer Sues Wellesley for Charles Koch’s Phony “Parent” Group

If you've heard about this lawsuit, you need to read this piece from dark money expert Maurice Cunningham explaining just where the action is coming from.

Another Faux Diverse Viewpoint Ed Site

I have reached the point where I really appreciate a website that says "We are here to promote the right wing education agenda," rather than one like Chalkboard Review* that leads with lines like "Everyone is a stakeholder in education" and "Educator perspectives are diverse and necessary." This is, to put it gently, not actually true about this site, which is clearly fully tilted to the right.

First hint. The top of the home page menu is a link to their Critical Race Theory Toolkit, which includes sections like "How to advocate against CRT" and "Evidence of CRT in Schools." That evidence includes items like the National Teachers Association's guide for culturally responsive lesson plans. 

Second hint. Their very first post back in January of 2019 is entitled "School Choice Also Gives Teachers Like Me More Choice." It's by Daniel Buck, a teacher in Wisconsin who writes for the Foundation for Economic Education and The Federalist. Of The Closing of the American Mind he says, "The Bible taught me how to live but that book taught me how to think." He started his teaching career in 2016 in Green Bay public schools before switching to the Holy Spirit Catholic School. He's not a union guy.

Third hint. They run a podcast. The latest episode features Corey DeAngelis, one of the more pugnacious choicers out there.

Fourth hint. Well, let's look at the "about us" tab. 

Turns out that Daniel Buck is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of this operation. He co-founded it with Tony Kinnett, who is, since July 2020, the District Science Coordinator & Instructional Coach at Indianapolis Public Schools. Before that he was Head of Biology at Lawrence North High School in Indianapolis for the 2019-2020 school year. Before that he taught two years at Knightstown Intermediate School. He did his student teaching in the first part of 2017, culminating his undergrad education at Maranatha Baptist University. 

Where geography may have separated these two guys, ideology seems to have connected them. They both write for the Federalist, the Foundation for Economic Education, the conservative Washington Examiner, and the Lone Conservative, a platform for conservative college students.

Director of Operations Adam Burnett is another Lone Conservative guy, who studied journalism at Illinois State and enjoys, in his free time, exercise and working on cars; favorite authors include Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro. His Twitter account lists him as the press secretary for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Director of Social Media Quinn Weimer has logged some writing with CNSNews ("The right news. Right now.") Their podcast producer is Alison Heape, who just last summer became a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, and started this fall as music teacher at Anthem Classical Academy; her music teacher undergrad work was done at Bob Jones University. Managing editor Lou Scataglia also wrote for the Lone Conservative, including an unironic piece entitled "President Trump's Top Ten Tweets" The site writing staff includes Paul Rossi, the teacher who was canned by a private NYC school for accusing the school of indoctrination.

Their Content Producer for K12 Public Education is Stephanie Edmonds, who's an interesting choice. Edmonds has quite the track record, most recently scoring lots of press for her anti-vax martyr stance that she says is deeply rooted in her Jewish faith (did she also refuse her other vaccination requirement for teachers). Before that she was heavily open the schools (because a vaccine is available). She has a big brand online, complete with an occasional Bronx accent, with folks occasionally called on her stuff and pointing out that she's from Connecticut's Gold Coast. She started teaching in 2016, so she fits the age group here. When she lost her job over her anti-vax stance, Chalkboard Review set up a Go Fund Me for her, after which they apparently decided to give her a job. 

Fifth hint. Following the founders podcast appearances, we find items like Tony Kinnett appearing on a podcast to tout the new site. It's not so much "let's have a diverse conversation" as touting a "new website that will counter the lies spewed by teachers union-dominated educational media."

Let me be clear--there is absolutely nothing wrong with some right-wing twenty-somethings getting together to get on the interwebz and advocate for their views about a cause. They mostly seem sincere enough, if not exactly well-informed on the subject. What they clearly are not is balanced or diverse in their perspective--which again is absolutely their right, but I just wish they went ahead and owned their rightward tilt as clearly as they do over at their various other projects. 

Pretending to be a source for balanced and diverse viewpoints on education has been a popular strategy since these folks were on a grade school playground. They clearly know what they're here to do (basically pick up the mantle of the original Education Post) and they might as well own it. When you lie about what you intend to talk about, you call into question everything you decide to say. 

*As always, I include links so you can check my work if you don't believe me, but I don't endorse sending this site more traffic.

Dear Substitute-Desperate Districts. What Are You Doing About It?

There's a great deal of hollering about the lack of substitute teachers. Like the challenge of filling regular teaching positions, this is not a new problem, but the pandemic has exacerbated it considerably. Everywhere you turn, you can find administrators bemoaning their lack of subs.

But if you are one of these administrators, what are you actually doing about it?

Are you raising sub pay? Sub pay is notoriously lousy, particularly if you're hiring them via some substitute or temp service. I started out substitute teaching in 1980; sub pay in local districts has risen about $25 since then. When you factor in the lack of benefits, it's impossible to make a living substitute teaching and the pool from Way Back In The Day (Moms of school-age kids who wanted a little grocery money) is gone. 

Are you tapping the available talent pool? Michigan just sent out a letter to retired teachers, which seems sensible. I'm a recent retiree, but I have yet to get a single request to consider heading back into the classroom. It's not that I'm in any hurry to go back, but if one were looking for subs, wouldn't it make sense to see if you could guilt some retired educators into helping out. They'd have the added feature of already knowing the drill.

Are you making sure your schools are safe? Let's say you're someone who subs in addition to another job to make ends meet (my wife started out substitute teaching and waitressing). You do a day of subbing, then find that one of the 150 students you were around has tested positive for covid--now, depending on your locale and integrity, you lose two weeks of work at both jobs, a pay cut you can't really afford. Too many districts have taken the position that they can just half-ass safety precautions (unenforced masking, no ventilation improvements, crowded classes, etc) and teachers will come to work anyway. But subs, because they don't (aka can't) count on the work to make a living, are volunteers, and if it doesn't seem safe to be in your building, they can choose to not.

Have you lowered the bar? Are you still requiring all sorts of hoop jumping to be a substitute? Plenty of states have been lowering the bar for teaching, and Oregon just dropped the bar on the ground for substitutes. Which is one way to increase the sub pool, but you had better have some supports in place for these amateurs, or you're going to create more problems than you solve.

Have you invited the big wigs? Friend of the Institute Steven Singer has proposed that all those lawmakers so Deeply Concerned about What Is Being Taught In The Classroom can get a first-hand look even as they help solve the subbing problem. I fully endorse this idea.

Have you gotten out there yourself? At this stage of the game, I am kind of amazed to hear from districts where administrators still haven't stepped up to take over classrooms. This is not a small thing. When a classroom stands open because there's no sub, administrators are making a statement, a choice. Sure, they have work to do, but when they cover a missing sub by dragging teachers away from clerical work periods or other assignments, or just cancel the subless class, they are telling the staff "What I do in my office is actually more important than what you teachers do in your classrooms. Administrators who do sub duty are making an important statement, as well as showing that they're willing to get in there shoulder to shoulder with their staff. 

Finally, are you actually doing something? Because sitting in your office and wishing that subs would suddenly appear is not actually doing something. Complaining that nobody is signing up to sub is not doing something. Some districts are terrible at communication (pro tip: just because everyone in your building knows X does not mean that everyone in your community also knows X); this is carrying over into the sub problem.

Remember--it is not a substitute shortage. There are literally thousands of people in your community who could be substitute teachers, if only you gave them convincing reasons to choose to do so. Your problem is the same as many employers bemoaning staffing problems right now; it's no use complaining that people ought to work, but instead, you need to answer the question "Why should somebody want to do this job for you?"

(Also--radical thought-- if you just hired full time substitutes with full pay and benefits, you'd have handy subs every single day. Of course, that would cost money...)

Nevada Family Alliance Still Pro-Cameras, Anti-Irony

Remember Nevada Family Alliance, the activist group that may or may not just be one person with some software and a wifi connection, and that one person, a lady named Karen England, may or many not be a big ole scam artist.

I'm still on NFA's mailing list, and my last check-in from my friend Karen, whose latest email is just loaded with stuff. Well, three stuffs. Let's take them one at a time, because she certainly captures some features of the current anti-stuff panic.

First, she wants you to know that she has a map of all the places where teachers have signed the Zinn pledge to Teach Bad Things No Matter What. That includes a link to the list to the names of Nevada teachers on the naughty list, which is actually a link to the website Cameras in the Classroom. It's a dumb idea, but it's been the one way that England has broken through to some larger coverage. It's her thing. And she assures us that this is supported by Russ Vought. Vought was director of the office of management and budget 2020-2021 under Trump. He used to work for the Heritage Foundation, but these days he runs Citizens for Renewing America, one more Trumpy critical race theory panic group. Also signing on are Mark Levin (who has featured NFA on his radio show), Becky Norton Dunlop (Heritage Foundation), Charles Cooper (founder of a "leading litigation boutique") and Brandon Zehm (tech bro). More coming soon, the website assures us.

The website further warns us about cultural Marxism, the attempt to start a race war, and offers this irony-free quote from England, this time in her capacity as executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, another of England's anti-Progressive groups. Anyway, here's why we need cameras in the classroom-

Every day we are told of another incident where a teacher is violating the privacy of a student or contradicting the lessons taught by parents at home.

You know what would really violate the privacy of a student? Having a video record of everything they did in school. Imagine some parent deciding that your kid is causing problems for their kid in school, and demanding to see what your kid has been doing in class. Yikes.

Anyway, we came to this site so we could look up exactly which teachers, by name, are Indoctrinating Our Children. However, to see the map/database, the site requires you to give up your name, email, and zip code. Almost as if this is a data gathering exercise rather than an attempt to liberate our children.

So, second item in the email. An item about the 17 state attorneys general who wrote to Joe Biden and Merrick Garland to protest the targeting of parents at school board meetings. 

"Your recent action seeks to chill lawful dissent by parents voiced during local school board meetings by characterizing them as unlawful and threatening," the attorneys general wrote in the letter.

While I have some misgivings about the AG's action, but at least it's not as if they made a website where you could look up the individual names of misbehaving school board members with an exhortation to "double down" and let them know they can't get away with what they're doing. 

Irony is so dead, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear complaints about "cancel culture" from any of these groups ever again.

Part three? That is, of course, the plea for money. "Please Join with NFA," she says, because they "relies solely on the generous giving from people like you and from the many churches and organizations that support us." That link takes you right to their Square site.

The address for NFA is the same as that of Capitol Resource Institute; an office building in Sacramento, CA. Nevada Family Alliance's website URL is actually www.reclaimingourschools.com. There's a whole England trail that leads back to her failed attempt to commandeer GOP politics in California. 

It's such an unprincipled mess. Don't try to chill expression on our side while we try to put your side in a deep freeze. Privacy for me, but not for thee (and not for me, either, if I thought this through for even fifteen seconds). 

PA: Another CRT Panic Tale

 So here's a story from my corner of the state that tells you how far the "critical race theory" panic has seeped into the ordinary operations of school districts.

Penncrest School District  is located in the NW corner of the state, located mostly in Crawford County. It's a mid-sized (around 3500 students K-12) district that was stitched together out of several very small rural districts. 

The district pops up in the news occasionally, most recently in May of this year when two board members got in a Facebook flap over a collection of LGBTQ+ books displayed at the Maplewood High School Library. Board member David Valesky posted:

Besides the point of being totally evil, this is not what we need to be teaching kids. They aren't at school to be brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is okay. Its [sic] actually being promoted to the point where it's even 'cool'.

Board member Jeff Brooks responded 

There have always been gay students in our hallways. And unfortunately there have always been hateful voices looking to discriminate against them. Let's just be a little better today and not make kids [sic] lives worse by being hateful, bigoted and prejudiced.

Valesky later told the local newspaper that "he was against the school 'pushing' such topics onto the students," and that schools shouldn't have anything to do with "kids determining their sex or who they should be interested in." Brooks expressed his opposition to censoring books at school and that schools "need to be a safe place."

So their board is used to some argument over issues. 

Fast forward to this month. High school English teacher Stacey Hetrick has gotten a spot as a presenter at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts conference. It's a great privilege, and the conference itself is a great professional builder. The conference is on Friday and Saturday in Harrisburg; Hetrick wanted the board to approve a day off to attend on Friday. She was paying her own registration for the conference; her presentation was entitled "Using audio analysis to maximize independent reading time."

But David Valesky had dug through the schedule for the conference and didn't like what he saw. Like any such conference, the gathering included multiple session offerings in time slots throughout the two days. These concurrent sessions include a wide variety of selections, from "How do I foster a growth mindset" to "Teaching with poetry." But one of the five threads in the conference deals with "social justice movements in literacy education," and that included some sessions that alarmed Valesky, like "Building an anti-racist lens in your classroom" and "Elevating diversity starting with the traditional curriculum."

The Penncrest Board is currently considering a policy to ban what it imagines to be critical race theory from the district. So Valesky was primed to spot tell-tale signs.

“Obviously, the entire thing is laced with aspects of critical race theory,” he said. “That’s not what English is for.”

Valesky's old pal Brooks noted that having a teacher learn about anti-racism "might be worth our time."

The board denied her request 5-4.

Note--this is not a CRT anti-racism conference. It's just a conference at which many, many topics will be discussed, anti-racism and diversity among them. But five members of the board couldn't bear to even have Hetrick in the same building as these dreaded ideas. 

They could have congratulated her on being selected to present and told her to make the district proud. They could have, I suppose, tried to forbid her to attend any of the naughty presentations. They could even have weaseled around the issue by simply saying (as many districts would) that it's too hard to get subs on Fridays and therefor they couldn't give her release time. But instead they did this.

Members on the losing side were angry. Robert Gulick was one of the four:

“I have never been more disappointed in this school board in my entire career, four years of being on this school board, and I have never been more disappointed about the overreaction, about the craziness, the insanity,” he said.

Hetrick had no comment for the paper, and did not indicate whether or not she would attend the conference, but she's no longer listed on the schedule.

Let Me Propose A New Teacher Pay System

One feature of modern ed reform over the last couple of decades has been the attempt to "disrupt" teacher pay. I have an idea, or at least a thought experiment.

Many education disruptors have noted that it seems unfair to pay "good" teachers and "bad" teachers the same amount. To be honest, that thought has occurred to one or two teachers as well. Meanwhile, not a day goes by that some civilian doesn't argue that teachers only work nine months out of the year, so they should get lousy pay.

A variety of alternatives have been proposed and tried. Attempts to link pay to quality flounder because there is no reliable objective way to measure teacher quality so we end up with systems that link teacher pay to test score, resulting in an unfair, complicated, demoralizing mess. Merit pay bonuses are great except that 1) they're invariably tied to a really low base pay and 2) they never work. Also, see above problems with measuring merit. And the problem behind all of these stabs at teacher pay systems is that the goal is to reduce total personnel costs for a school. 

That personnel cost level drives some people from the business world crazy. My district had a board member years ago who ran a concrete business, and the high percentage of district expense that went to personnel drove him crazy, because in private industry, that's just not how it works. 

But if our goal was to come up with a better way to pay teachers, and not just cut costs, I think I've got one. And I stole it from the legal profession.

Billable hours.

Teaching in a classroom? Billable time. Grading papers at home? Billable time. Research and development of lesson plans? Billable time.

Teachers would have to get over the loss of being salaried employees, but school districts would have to start thinking about what they're actually paying for instead of operating on the assumption that if teachers aren't in front of students, they aren't Doing Any Work. 

It would require administrators to be more thoughtful about how they waste teacher time. Want to have forty-seven after school meetings, or drag teachers into pointless PD sessions? Fine--but you have to pay for it. Need teachers to show up before actual report time in order take care of morning clerical stuff? Pay for it. Want a teacher to watch a study hall or patrol the parking lot? Sure--but you'll pay for it. Maybe you'd rather hire some lower-cost personnel to cover non-teaching duties.

Paying a higher hourly rate for experienced teachers makes sense, because experience leads to greater efficiency-- an experienced teacher gets more done in an hour than they did when starting out.

For teachers, this would give some control over their own personal and professional lives, because they get to decide about the trade-off. Now we have a system where teachers are told to feel an obligation to give their infinite all in exchange for a flat rate. Under a billable hours system, you can still decide to give up your weekend to read about the influence of Poe on modern gothic literature, but you make the choice knowing you will get paid for it instead of simply doing it to try to fight off a heavy blanket of guilt. 

Could a system like this be gamed? Sure--but from a district point of view, this is a plus. To game the current system, a teacher just does less (like my not-very-respected previous colleague who never, ever took a piece of paper home). To game a billable hours system, a teacher would have to do more work--a win for the district.

Would districts be incentivized to screw over older, more expensive teachers? Probably--but we're living in that world already. Would some teachers hate the idea of having to punch a clock? Probably. Personally, I'd still have liked knowing that I wasn't donating hour after hour for free.

There would be critical nuts and bolts to work out, like a reasonable hourly rate--that part would be huge, because this system must not end up requiring teachers to bill 100 hours a week just to make a living wage. How to pay coaches and extracurricular advisors, who currently make anywhere from $100 to $0.02 an hour. Monitoring the hours in a way that provides accountability without treating teachers like children (always a challenge for the education system). And maybe a way to index the hours to other factors, like, say, number of students in a class. Teacher contracts would have to be changed to a model that contracts for a certain base number of hours.

The big drawback for districts would be giving up what they quietly love about traditional teacher pay grids-- being able to know fairly precisely what next year's personnel costs will be. Billable hours would make that figure a little harder to predict. And, if cutting personnel costs is your goal, well, it would not reduce personnel costs at all.

But for teachers? More control of your life. Bosses forced to respect your time (if not you). 

I'm not expecting anyone to try this any time soon, and it's in no way a perfect set up, but it's fun to think about. If someone in your neighborhood has done more than think about it, please let me know.