A Tale Of Research And Social Distancing

A recent article in Wired is both fascinating and scary if you are in a school with lousy ventilation and a modicum of social distancing.

The fascinating part may be fascinating only to those of us who find research stuff fascinating. But "The sixty-year-old scientific screwup that helped COVID kill" is about one of those little things that worms its way into acceptance as conventional wisdom in a particular field, but nobody really knows why, exactly. 

In this case, the item in question was "5 microns," the supposed dividing line that marks the difference between an airborne illness (one that can float about for large distances) and droplets, which are supposed to succumb rapidly to gravity. The 6 feet of social distance are in our pandemic repertoire because COVID is supposed to be droplet-spread.

I'll give you the bad news here-- that dividing line doesn't actually hold up upon inspection, and therefor  in a place that's not aggressively ventilated, six feet of social distancing aren't necessarily enough. Of course, if you've got your vaccination and your booster shot, you're in good shape. Go get your shots, if you can.

The story of how a couple of researchers worked out where "5 microns" comes for is a great tale of how research can be a challenge, unpeeling not just layers of research and writing, but shifting attitudes about the scholars who created them. 

ICYMI: New Pandemic High Edition (11/21)

Well, my county has hit its highest COVID numbers since the whole thing started. Now, for us that's still under 200 with rare mortality, but it's still not encouraging. And still plenty of people with their "well, it's my choice" crap about vaccination. Thanksgiving's looking great. For no particular reason, there's a long list this week, just in case you need more reading to tide you through the holiday. 

The book bans will continue until patriotism improves

Don Moynihan runs a pretty good little substack. This post connects a lot of the current culture war panic dots.

Burning Books is Un-American

Paul Thomas offered this op-ed to newspaper across South Carolina; one more good reminder of how wrong book bans are.

Parents coming for mental health programs next

NBC looks at the emerging trend on the list of educational programs that certain parents would like to see the manager about

The teachers here are not okay

A first-person piece at Chalkbeat looks at the many crises that Louisiana teachers have been hit with.

What rational parents must do to combat education conspiracies

Andre Perry at the Hechinger Report looks at how to push back against the culture war attacks on schools

Why there hasn't been a mass exodus of teachers

Has the Great Resignation extended to teaching? There are plenty of anecdotes and stories, but I've been wondering if we aren't just seeing a version of shark attack summer, where something is going on as it always has, but we're just paying more attention? I'm still not sure, but Rebecca Klein has a good story to address the question.

Want to rethink education? It's time to take back kindergarten!

Nancy Bailey points out that now would be a great time to make kindergarten kindergarten again.

4 Reasons to ditch academic preschools

Janet Lansbury offers four great reasons to avoid this assault on littles

Unmasking Moms for Liberty

Olivia Little at Media Matters has a good look at where, exactly, the Moms are coming from.

Toward a more inclusive Williamson County

The good news is that Moms For Liberty is not the only group organizing in Williamson County, Tennessee. Andy Spears has the story.

Authentic Voices

Dad Gone Wild gets all radical and actually listens to what teachers have to say about the current state of affairs.

Lessons of youth activism, climate change, and climate justice

Jose Luis Vilson has some reflections on all three, from a summit he attended.

The art of twisting good things into monsters

Teacher Totter looks at some current vocabulary-- equity, fidelity, critical race theory, etc--and shows how school districts turn them into disaster. One of those painfully funny kind of posts.

I'm a Teacher, and I can't live like this

Ellen Dahlke has a piece that isn't just one more "I Give Up" post, but a look at the toll on teachers that comes from making them act as ad hoc mental health professionals.

How teaching is like blowing leaves and snow

Blue Cereal Education has a two-fer; how is teaching like blowing leaves, and how is it like blowing snow? 

Presidential Timber

Grumpy Old Teacher offers some observations about Ron "Gonna Run For The White House" DeSantis and some of his great ideas in Florida.

Appreciating the Public Schools we take for granted

Jan Resseger offers a Thanksgiving-ready reflection on the many ways in which we should be appreciative of our public schools.

That Old Time Religion Saves The World

Nancy Flanagan offers some meditation about the natures and uses of religion in troubled times. 

And finally-- I didn't post anything to Forbes.com this week, but I did turn up over at the Progressive, responding to Arne Duncan's ideas about how we can bring everybody together over education.

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.