Introducing the Public Education Hostility Index

Here at the Curmudgucation Institute, we have always realized that we are lacking one thing that every good thinky tank and Institute and Foundation has--reports. So we finally buckled down and created the American Public Education State Hostility Index (APESHI). This report now has its very own website.

The goal was to address the question, "Which states are the most hostile to public education right now?" To answer that question, we picked some factors to consider, like funding and state leadership and gag laws, assigned states numerical ratings, and added all the numbers together. Critics might argue that we have just assigned a bunch of numbers to subjective value judgments, but A) as far as I can tell, that's how the game is often played and B) they're numbers, so, you know, science.

Much of the rankings worked out to be pretty close together, though Florida's unsurprising domination of the field was unchallenged. So there is very little difference between 10th place Idaho and 11th place South Carolina. But it's still a handy tool for discussion. The full spreadsheet is available on the site; feel free to let me know in the comments where I missed something. 

I'll share some results here. The top ten Most Hostile states, in order, with scores, so you can see the ties

Florida (55)

Arizona (48)

Louisiana (43)

North Carolina (43)

Arkansas (39)

Ohio (39)

Oklahoma (39)

Indiana (38)

Georgia (35)

Idaho (35)

And the nine least hostile states, according to the rankings

Wyoming (16)

North Dakota (15)

Maryland (14)

New York (14)

New Jersey (12)

Vermont (10)

Hawaii (9)

Alaska (8)

Massachusetts (7)

If you don't see your state at the top or the bottom, the list of all 50 is right here.

There are some limitations to the Index. For one, I did not try to factor in COVID response, which was just too noisy and local for me to sort out effectively. And while including economic factors, I did not get into the heavy math of contextualizing salary issues, which may account for Hawaii and Alaska scoring relatively well, even though they are ultra-expensive states in which to live.

The Institute expects to make this an annual exercise, and situations on the ground change fairly quickly. Feedback is appreciated. I prefer to think of the Index as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of it. 

The full PEHI website is located here.

NH Teacher Bounty: Gov Denounces, Moms for Liberty Double Down

New Hampshire instituted a gag order on teachers that could strip them of their licenses for teaching the wrong thing, and Moms for Liberty jumped in by putting a bounty on the heads of teachers whose broke the law. It has been a good-sized flap, as well it should have been. 

Governor Chris Sununu has come out pretty clearly on the matter.

“The Governor condemns the tweet referencing ‘bounties’ and any sort of financial incentive is wholly inappropriate and has no place,” Sununu's spokesperson, Ben Vihstadt, said in an email.

Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, whose education credentials (if not his wealth) are on par with Betsy DeVos's, wasn't exactly condemning the M4L tweet. Asked for his two cents:

“I would encourage people to be very careful on social media," he said in an interview. “There’s a lot of rhetoric on social media that is not helpful or constructive.”

Which translates roughly to, "Dammit, Karen, don't say the quiet part out loud-- you'll queer the whole pitch."

But neither a philosophical nor realpolitik scolding convinced Rachel Goldsmith, New Hampshire's M4L chief, to back off, other than now referring to the bounty as an "incentive."

Goldsmith said if public schools had been doing the job in the first place, none of this would be necessary.

“We are parents tired of public school systems failing our children. This incentive will encourage teachers, parents, and students to find and replace bad curriculum. We just want the school boards and teachers unions to stop pushing alphabet soup (CRT/DEI/SEL) and start teaching kids to read. Manchester SD is graduating only 20 percent of kids reading at grade level,” Goldsmith said.

Goldsmith is also part of the Free State Project, once serving as executive director. The Free State Project is an initiative to bring a bunch of Libertarians to New Hampshire in hopes of essentially taking over the state and establishing a Libertarian paradise in which the government does pretty much nothing (you can learn more about them here, or in the book A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear). So perhaps Goldsmith's outrage over teachers doing indoctrinatin' is related to her feelings that public schools shouldn't really exist at all. 

At any rate, it's safe to say that M4L NH will not be backing off any time soon, no matter how inappropriate the governor thinks this is.

GOP House Proposed Parents Bill of Rights.

 The GOP is ready to do some serious pandering, as the critical race theory panic continues to metastasize. Here comes Kevin McCarthy with an announcement:

Over the past nearly two years, we have seen a troubling trend take root in the Democrat Party. Their elected officials want to take power away from parents and hand over more control to politicians and teachers unions to dictate what our children should be taught in classrooms.

McCarthy goes on the fold in school closings and the DOJ's "targeting" of parents "at the behest of an interest group." And also, Terry McAullife's ill-considered quote about parents not having a say (which McCarthy attributes to a "prominent official in the Democratic Party").

So McCarthy, Virginia Foxx, Julia Letlow, Burgess Owens, and Jim Banks have a proposed solution-- the Parents Bill of Rights. 

The bullet point version of the bill lists five rights-- the right to know what's being taught, the right to be heard, the right to see school budget and spending, the right to protect their child's privacy, and the right to be updated on any violent activity at school. Most of which seems... kind of redundant, giving parents rights that they already have.

But maybe the actual bill reads a little better. (Spoiler alert: it does not. It is far worse.).

The bill seeks to amend various sections of the Education and Secondary Education Act by adding some requirements. These are perhaps best summarized by the "Notice of Rights" paragraph, which lists the rights that parents must be informed they now have under this act:

A) The right to review the curriculum of their child's school (already exists). But there is also an "all instructional materials" requirement for parents, which is nuts-- but it includes the right to see and inspect all those materials including "any survey, analysis, or evaluation." Which--wait! Does that mean the Big Standardized Test, the SAT, and any other test must be available for inspection? One problem with these transparency laws is that they run smack into copyright laws protecting all sorts of proprietary material belonging to testing and instructional materials companies. "Pearson on Line 1 for you, Representative McCarthy!"

B) The right to know if the State alters the State's challenging academic standards (does this mean State's don't have to notify anyone if they change standards that aren't challenging).

C) The right to meet with each teacher of their child not less than twice during each school year. Okay, are there schools out there somewhere where parents are being denied the chance to meet with a teacher even twice? On the one hand, this represents a huge amount of time. On the other hand, most teachers can tell you a story about ghost parental units who could not be convinced to even answer e-mails. So once again, a solution in search of a problem.

D) The right to review the budget, including all revenues and expenditures. I'm unaware of states that don't already allow this. 

E) The right to a list of the books and other reading materials contained in the library of their child's school. Does your school not have an electronic card catalog, or even an old-school paper one? Or is the requirement to have it on a list form that you carry home? Because I figure doing an electronic search for books with naughty words or titles from that List of Naughty Books you're looking at would be easier in electronic form.

F) The right to address the school board of a local educational agency. Again, I know some boards can be cranky about this, but are there boards that refuse public comment without getting in trouble? Are there states that don't have sunshine laws forbidding private meetings? And will we be acknowledging that this right does not include the right to make threats, follow members to their cars and homes, or just speak up at any moment of the meeting you feel the mood strike you? The details say that expression should be in a "lawful and appropriate manner," so I guess we're covered.

G) The right to information about violent activity in their child's school. The actual language notes that names of minors can't be released when communicating this.  Again, I am unclear exactly what problem this is meant to address.

H) The right to information about any plans to eliminate gifted and talented programs in the child's school. So, even if their child isn't in the program?

There are also some amendments offered to FERPA and PPRA saying that the school can't act as a parent in giving consent under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and parents must be given a chance to opt out. Also, no educational agency or "authorized representative" of the agency can sell student information. Sounds swell, but just in case you're worried that this would hamstring all the education-flavored businesses handling this stuff, a later clause allows that data collected for "legitimate educational purpose," so the test manufacturers are still free to do whatever.

Look, there's no question that some local school boards hunker down and deal with difficulty by stonewalling and misbehaving. Lucky for us these folks have to stand for election. But the bill is mostly a combination of redundant requirements and solutions in search of a problem (well, other than the problem of how to keep getting Republicans elected). It's a staggering level of federal intrusion into local business, particularly coming from the Party of Small Government.

There's are also levels of irony here. For one, the voucher programs that the GOP loves so well (e.g. Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom Scholarships) champion schools that don't have to do any of these things--and often strongly resist any pressure to make them do any of these things. The other is that the GOP is still trying to brand itself as the Parent's Party, despite its opposition to paid family leave, medicare for all, and a variety of other measures that would actually help parents (like. say. addressing the US's shameful maternal mortality rate). But why actually do something when you can instead float some doomed symbolic legislation that doesn't actually do anything, let alone something useful. 

History is a conversation

History is a conversation, not a declaration, and anyone who says, "This is the Only One True Way to understand this event," is not doing history, but something else.

It is ironic that in all this fretting about how history is taught, students generally consider history to be the most pointless class they're asked to sit through. But we humans are hardwired to do history (even if we have trouble imagining that history didn't start when we were born). Let me use the analogy I used to use with my students.

Saturday night, at a big party, Pat and Sam have a big public fight, break up, stomp out of the party separately. Roughly five seconds later, the conversations start. What exactly happened? What caused it? What explains why it happened? Who's responsible for what happened? Which part of what we're hearing is reliable, which is second- or third-hand, and which is just stuff someone made up? What changed because it happened? How will this affect the way people act on Monday? What is the True Story of what happened?

There will be so many different answers to these questions. Pat's answers. Sam's answers. Their different sets of friends. People who have known them for a long time. It's possible that all these people will reach some sort of consensus about what happened; possible, but unlikely. And in the meantime, new tidbits may ripple through the conversation ("Did you know that Pat's folks were talking about divorce when the fight happened?" "Did you hear that Sam was developing a substance abuse problem?") New information will cause folks to re-evaluate information in retrospect. 

And if, for some reason, the Great Saturday Night Breakup Fight turns out to be a big enough deal that it sticks in people's memory (because part of the Conversation of History is "Does this thing merit being remembered and mulled over?"), as the various participants and witnesses age and learn and grow, they acquire new perspective. Fifteen years later, Pat may look back and think, "Yeah, I was just an ass back then," or Sam may look back and think, "Yeah, I just wasn't ready to talk about what I really wanted." The event may, over time, have harsh repercussions and harden into a bitter, angry turning point, or over time Pat and Sam may end up friends who remember it warmly as a small blip in their relationship. Turns out figuring out how to fit the chapter into a larger story is its own conversation. And some results may be unexpected; some stranger at the party may have seen the fight and determined that they would avoid any such event in their own life. Someone else may have seen something that every other observer missed.

Human beings are complex, and the ways in which we bump into each other are also complex and rich and, most importantly for this analogy, multi-dimensional, so that the conversation about a moment in human existence is never, ever settled. 

But, oh, how we love to settle it. We decide that This is the One True Story of What Happened, and (particularly if we use that story to help define ourselves) we may fight like hell against any different information, any different interpretations, any new perspectives. As much as we humans are driven to create a map of the world, we are equally driven to keep people from messing with it once it's built. We want the feeling of solid, settled history under our feet. We hate feeling it shift and tilt and move under us, and yet, we are doomed to either feel that shift or to expend a huge amount of energy to convince ourselves (and anyone who will listen) that it isn't shifting, that it shouldn't shift, that if it IS shifting that's because Nefarious Persons are messing with it with ill intent.

History is never settled. People who insist that schools should "just teach the facts" are arguing that we should take a steak, cut off the fat and the meat, wash off the juices, and let students lick the bone. It's like telling literature teachers that they should "just teach the words," but not the sentences they form. 

There's so much more to it, and that so much more is a conversation, a debate, a discussion, a search for other information, other perspectives. Ideologues and children are not very good at that kind of history, but it's the only kind worth doing. We are limited human beings, hemmed in by time and space and experience. We can never view any moment, any event, any slice of human experience in 360 degrees and infinite time, so we try and stretch the best we can. It's hard and one of those "strive toward a star you will never reach" things, but that's no excuse to try to reduce rich human history to a single simple story by denying the full depth and breadth of the thing. 

Education is about learning to become our best selves, to grasp what it is to be fully human in the world, and that means grappling with history--too big to hold in human hands or see with human eyes. A debate about whose One Single Truth should be taught is missing the point. Trying to reduce history (or education) to something small and simple is to cut away the important parts; we owe our students more than that. 

Speaking Of Indoctrination

The Board of Directors was excited when we arrived at the doctor's office because there, on the edge of the reception window, was a row of small figurines.

"Look! Paw Patrol!" they said happily. 

The thing is, we don't watch Paw Patrol. We barely watch tv at all, and what we watch is streamed ad free. And yet somehow, we know Paw Patrol. I've been through this before. My older children also rarely watched tv, and yet they knew who the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. 

If you want to talk about indoctrinating children, let's talk about the hugely effective world of marketing. So effective that products leak through to children who don't even directly engage with the product or the typical marketing channels. Let's talk about how much money Coke, Pepsi, and the US Army spend to make themselves omnipresent in schools all across the country. Or even how parents themselves often slide into letting their kiddos get in on the latest cool cultural thing (just how many children watched the ultra-violent Squid Games). 

What all of these various indoctrinatin' influences have in common is that they are massive, well-financed, and coordinated so that the influence is coming at children (and adults, for that matter) from a hundred different directions, including both old media and new. 

Perhaps that's why folks who worry about indoctrination in schools like to imagine this vast web of communist teachers all connected and coordinated, a notion that is, to anyone who has actually worked with teachers, hilarious. Teachers did not agree on which candidate to support for President, or much of any other office. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find a school building in this country in which all the staff agree on vaccinations or masking. And there is not a union local president in this country who would forcefully argue that union leadership is not at all like herding cats.

But sure-- some folks should go ahead and rail against a massive indoctrination conspiracy where none exists, while at the same time ignoring the ways a giant marketing machine tells your kids what they need to eat and drink and watch and buy to be happy. 

ICYMI: Good News Edition (11/14)

Happy to let you know that the twins have both tested negative for the Corona Pirates after their exposure to a positive classmate earlier this week. So that's a win. Now here's your reading for the week.

Learning Loss or Learning Found

A great real teacher view of the whole Learning Loss flap, by Sharon Murchie.

Stop Telling Students, "You Belong!"

At Education Week, Greg Walton offers an explanation for why telling students they belong might actually do more harm than good.

Teaching critical race theory is about liberating all of us

Rann Miller at The Progressive makes the case for having CRT influence your school's curriculum, and it starts with the most jaw-dropping quote you've read in a while.

"Helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white, Christian, or conservative kids,” Mary Beeman, the campaign manager for a Republican school board candidate in Connecticut, said in October.

I'm a Teacher and I Feel Like I'm Failing My Students

Thomas Rademacher with one more piece about the morale problem eating at the heart of education these days.

Play is the most rigorous curriculum known to humankind

Teacher Tom with some insights about what is the best lesson for the littles.

Censorship and Book Burning: A Reader

Paul Thomas has assembled a batch of links to the most current raft of book banning stories in the US. Not encouraging, but handy.

Lost in the Hoarders' Closet

A very short post at Notes from the Educational Trenches, but an intriguing image nonetheless.

New Report Illuminates Constitutional Crisis in North Carolina's underfunded schools

In NC, there's been a battle going on between the courts, which want the state to live up to their constitutional mandate to fully fund education, and the legislature, which would rather not. Justin Parmenter looks at a new report that shows just how bad the situation has become.

Universal Preschool Cookie-cutter Pressure

Nancy Bailey takes a look at how early childhood education, including and especially Head Start, has turned into bad news for education and the littles.

How Edgenuity Ruined My Education

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider turns her blog over to one of her seniors, who has a few words to share about one brand of distance learning.

I'm adding a new feature this week which I suppose we can call "Stuff I Published Other Places" which is partly for my own benefit because I lose track of things. 

This week over at Forbes.com, I put up Charter Schools Fight for Their Right To Discriminate, which looks at two different charters--one in California and the other in Massachusetts, that are working hard to avoid being open to all students in their communities. Also this week was New Hampshire and Moms for Liberty Put Bounty On Teachers' Heads, which is about exactly that--M4L is backing the state's new gag law with a cash reward for the first person who manages to use the law to end some teacher's career. 

Current Pandemic Update (11/21)

So I was going to tell you how things are going in this neck of the woods. We get so many updates from major cities, I've figured all along that we might as well have updates from rural NW PA, an area that seemed, 20 months ago, to be well-positioned to weather this storm.

I was going to tell you that local schools are back to having spot outages. A class sent home to quarantine here, a building closed for a week there. Meanwhile, sports and dances and the usual stuff are going on semi-normally. Lets of things in the community are up and running again, some with huge amounts of caution and mitigation, and some not so much.

I was going to tell you that the already-thin substitute ranks are down to near-nothing. That when teachers miss, the dominoes fall all over the building trying to fill the gaps. That school bus routes are disrupted by that shortage (which, like the substitute thinning, has been coming for years). That school staff is getting covid. One known death so far. That school districts are dealing with it mostly by denying any responsibility ("You can't prove you contracted that at school") and, as a corollary to that, are requiring teachers to use their own sick days if they get the 'rona. 

I was going to talk about how the notification and tracking business is only marginally less ad hoc than last year, that we're still depending on the honor system and the word getting passed somehow by someone. 

The court just ruled that the state's department of health mask mandate for schools is void, but the final word is being held up for appeal, so districts are trying to get out the word that nothing has changed yet. Child vaccinations are under way, as are boosters (I've had mine; my wife, as a teacher, got one as soon as they were out). Just before they were supposed to get their boosters, my brother and sister-in-law were nailed by a breakthrough case of what the twins call the Corona Pirates; it was not fun, but they are fine. Pretty much everyone knows someone who has gotten either an unvaxxed or breakthrough case. Anecdotally, breakthrough is clearly less miserable.  

I was going to talk about how there's a sense that there's less above-ground discussion of the situation, but lots of undercurrent. No daily counts in the paper any more. Actually data remains hard to come by. Word is that the hospital is packed, mostly with unvaccinated cases.

I was going to talk about how that it all still remains concerning to we three children of my parents, who are in their mid-eighties and facing some of the challenges that come with being so well-seasoned, but are at least well-vaxxed. And how I also worry about my former colleagues and my wife, who are still leaping into this mess every day.

I was going to talk about all that today, and was prepping that very piece, when I got word that my two four-year-old boys apparently spent a day at pre-school earlier this week playing with another child who has since tested positive for covid. I certainly wish that things had worked out so that we got that information before we all went out to celebrate my mother's 88th birthday. Lots of levels of vaccination and masking and the power of youth suggest that we are probably all clear, but one never knows for certain, and I still have vivid memories of when Baby A's early brush with RSV earned us a life-flight trip to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. So now we'll spend some time anxiously monitoring every sneeze and cough and change in the already-normally-prolific river of snot and worrying about their ability to self-report symptoms. 

So I'm in a mood, and if you come at me with some of your bodily medical autonomy bluster or rantings about how wearing a small piece of cloth is an unacceptable intrusion on your liberty or how vaccinations are an unheard-of level of imposition on freedom or your Joe Rogan-style internet "research" or schools should be open because all children don't ever get it-- well, I'm generally pretty good at listening to folks with a wide variety of ideas, but I'm just tired and out of patience with your bullshit. 

[Update: Thanks to everyone who reached out to express concern. The twins were tested and cleared. My patience, however, remains at the same low level.]