ICYMI: Important Upcoming Holiday Edition (2/13)

 By which I mean the much-beloved annual Half Price Candy Day, celebrated on February 15th every year. Spend it with someone you love. Meanwhile, here's the reading for the week.

What's behind the right-wing book-ban frenzy? Big money, and a long-term plan

Jon Skolnik at Salon takes a look at the ongoing book ban panics across the country.

Think my South Side high school is a "bad school"? Think again.

A Chalkbeat first person essay from a student in one Chicago's allegedly-bad schools. She offers a different perspective.

It's time to stop the insanity that is killing public schools

The rhetoric is a little overheated, and the contents are mostly familiar, but the source is one of those interesting moments when the education debate penetrates outside the usual boundaries. This is from Baptist News Global.

How the Heritage Foundation became a leader of red meat attacks on public schools

Jan Resseger breaks down some of the details on how we arrived at this CRT-panic induced wave of teacher gag laws.

A Word about the Work We Must Do

Jose Luis Vilson offers some words about the crt panic, and especially about the work we should be doing in response to it.

What do masks do to kids?

Melody Schreiber at the New Republic went looking for the evidence about the detrimental effects of masking kids. She didn't find any.

Meet the Philly teacher who's the namesake for Abbott Elementary

If you've been watching the show, here's the teacher who inspired the show's creator

You thought the Scopes trial was something?

Bob Shepard looks at the coming education shenanigans in Tennessee and the plan to recruit a Christian conservative college to come run charter schools.

The Murky World of i-Ready, Grading, and Online Data

Nancy Bailey takes a look at the issues surrounding i-Ready. If this program has been cropping up in your neighborhood and you're wondering about it, this is a handy explainer.

The Big Lie that keeps the Uber bezzle alive

For the "education should be like Uber" crowd, here's a Cory Doctorow explanation of just how big a scam Uber actually is.

Texas School Censors All of Huck Finn Except the N-Words

Teacher fired for breaking state critical race theory laws after telling students she's Black.

The Onion is on fire this week, so they get two spots on this week's list. 

Also, this week in "Things I Wrote Other Places," a Forbes piece about why lowering the bar to fill classroom spots is only going to make things worse, and a reminder at Progressive that test-based teacher evaluations were a bust. 

Everyone On The Train

The issue of loving the work had come up a few times already this week when this article turned up on my screen.

You may remember the story from 2017. A white supremacist threatens two girls on the Portland rail; three men intervene, and he attacks them with a knife. The youngest of the three, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, was stabbed fatally. As he lay dying in another passenger's arms, he said, "Tell everyone on this train I love them." The article writer picks up there:

These beautiful words stopped me in my tracks when I first heard them. They gave me a directive, a way of being. At my best moments, this stranger’s last words guided where I looked, how I acted, and what I chose to do with my time.

Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche’s mother describes her son’s last words as “the most important thing in the whole process”. Taliesin’s father says that when he heard what his son said, “It was literally a saving grace for me.” They were a saving grace for me, too: they changed my life.

Loving everyone on the train meant I could love people I didn’t yet know. What Taliesin said felt instinctually correct to me yet was simultaneously baffling. It often seems there are impossibly huge chasms between me and others, so how could I love them?

Early in my career, I had a superintendent who liked to tell a story at the beginning of every year. It was a story about a rancher talking to some new horse trainers, and quizzing them about what the very first step in training a horse. They took turns answering and this part of the story changed every year because it didn't really matter--all their guesses about bridles and first skills to train were all wrong. "First," the rancher said, "first, you have to love the horse."

It's not a perfect story (students aren't untrained horses), but the point was clear enough and while we joked about it, we also got it. Caring about the students is the foundation of everything else. 

Not that you need to be all mooshy or syrupy--love and care take a lot of forms, and some of them are rather dry and direct. But the foundation of teaching is care. You teach students to read because you care whether they can read or not. You can teach them a particular skill or piece of knowledge because it's what you're paid to do, or because your boss ordered you to, I suppose, but there's little chance of hiding from the students that you are simply acting out of obligation or coercion rather than genuine care, and it will make you less effective. 

It is certainly one of the hard parts of the gig, because some students can make it awfully hard to care about them. Or maybe it's more honest and fair to say that you and certain students come together in ways that aren't very conducive to a caring relationship. Nor do I mean that you need to be every student's friend, or even that you need to be close--it's hugely important to respect students' boundaries instead. Like everything that matters in education, balance matters. And it's hard to transfer the skill--I am a master of analogizing things, but there is no relationship analogous to the relationship between a teacher and a student.

But here's a big thing I believe about love--it's not so much a feeling as an action and a choice, a commitment (I learned this sort of thing by going through the meltdown of my previous marriage, but smarter people than I have figured it out with less wear and tear). You can choose to love people, and you can do it based on who you are instead of waiting to be inspired by who they are. 

You can choose to love all the people on the train.

This is important these days, because twenty years of modern reform and especially two years of pandemess and CRT panic have worked to drive love and trust out of schools. Since (at least) A Nation at Risk, critics have deliberately ignored and abused the notion that teachers might choose to teach out of love and care, but must instead be threatened with Consequences. From No Child Left Behind through various gag laws, the whispered accusation has been that teachers just don't care about kids, don't care if they learn, don't care if they fail. Some have sold us a model of children as not-yet-people, empty vessels that need to be filled and conditioned and engineered into usefulness, not loved into full humanity. 

All across the political spectrum, we've been sold a grim and loveless picture of schools. Schools are twisted tangles of social issues, of Problems and Deficiencies. Schools are hopeless failures where most fail to learn and teachers only care about using students as indoctrinated tools. Schools stink. Schools are failing. Nothing good or decent or bright or kind or happy is there, and in fact, according to some, that is furthest from the purpose of Whipping Them Into Shape, or training them to be useful meat widgets, to take their rightful place upon the treadmill in pursuit of wages. 

Look, I am the last person to suggest that a big hug and a nice chorus of Kum-Bay-Yah are all we need to make the world right again. Love without works is empty. Caring about people without trying to lift them up is just virtue signaling into your own mirror. And telling someone to practice self-care is pretty much an open admission that they had better care about themselves because you don't; toxic positivity sucks, and I don't want to go there, either.

But caring about the work, loving the horse--that's the foundation of everything else. That means not only does it keep the building straight and upright, but it provides strength and support when the storm is raging. And it is certainly okay to go back to that caring at the heart of the work and revisit it, let it warm you, and remind yourself that it's real, regardless of what the world seems to be telling you. 

The love at the heart of the work doesn't mean you have to use yourself up (I hate that damn candle meme thingy). But it is at the heart of the work. Don't lose your heart, and let it remind you what is bright and beautiful about the work, even when the storm rages. So much of the rhetoric surrounding education (and I'm at fault sometimes myself) encourages us to see it as small and petty and meagre, crabbed figures in a cramped ledger; it's love that helps us remember that the work is bigger than all of us, bigger than everyone on the train. 

When Choice Doesn't Put Parents First

I often say that vouchers and neo-vouchers are not about empowering parents--they're about getting government out of education and giving private operators an open shot at a marketplace.

It's true that I can't know the minds of choice advocates, but I can play the what if game. I can ask, "If X were true, what would that look like?" rather than sift through the details of what is. 

If parent empowerment were really our North Star, then what sorts of things do I imagine we'd see? I think we'd see choicers putting pressure on private schools to be more accepting, arguing that schools that refuse to take students because they're LGBTQ or not born again are infringing on parents' right to choose a school for their children. I think we'd see demands that parents be given some tools for navigating the marketplace, with at least the kind of safeguards that the average grocery shopper has come to expect. I think we'd see protections written into these new voucher/esa laws to cover the risks that a family takes on the open market. 

But instead, the new raft of laws contains protections for the private operators, clauses specifically noting that a voucher-accepting school is not a government actor, that nothing in the law gives the government the right to regulate or oversee what the school does. In some cases, a vendor can be blackballed if they fail to deliver--but there's no corresponding recourse for the families they failed to deliver to. Grifters, liars, incompetents, have-baked outfits that fold up mid-year--there's nothing to protect parents from these folks, and no safety net for parents who fall prey. For families, it's caveat emptor all the way.

What I conclude is that, when push comes to shove, many choice advocates value free market and private entrepreneur autonomy over parent empowerment. Which is certainly a value one can hold; one can, I expect, even believe that without free marketeering autonomy for entrepreneurs, you can't have choice. But then you're talking about a market driven by what vendors want to offer, and not what parents want to choose--which, again, is a policy preference you can certainly have, but it's not the same as the whole parental empowerment narrative that some folks are selling. 

Utah: It's not a voucher bill--it's worse.

Its sponsor says it's not a voucher bill--it's a scholarship. What HB331 proposes is an education savings account, which is a voucher on steroids. There are a few significant differences between the two systems, but they are fundamentally the same thing.

With a voucher, the state gives you a "ticket" to the private school of your choice (if they will accept you). With an ESA, the state gives a pile of money to a "scholarship" organization which in turn gives you a pile of money to spend on whatever education stuff you wish, including, but not limited to, tuition at a private school.

The advantages for choice advocates are these:

1) It makes the free market even freer. With ESAs you don't have to operate an entire school to get a shot at collecting some of those sweet sweet public tax dollars.

2) The scholarship organization adds a level of protection in case someone wants to bring up that pesky wall between church and state. "We did not give public tax dollars to a religious school," the state can say. "We gave them to a scholarship organization." It's a defense familiar to every underage teen who had an older sibling buy beer for them

3) The term "voucher" doesn't have as much success or appeal as "scholarship." Utah voters hated Utah's 2007 voucher law so much that 62% of them voted to overturn it. No wonder none of the sponsors want to use the V word this time.

ESA laws have been popping up around the country, including extreme versions in Alabama and Oklahoma. Each have their own special features--let's see what Utah's bill HB 331 looks like.

Utah's ESAs are indexed to the poverty line--the further above it you are, the less you get. But at the high end (the greatest level of poverty), you get more than the state would have given to your public district. 1,000% of the federal poverty level is the cap.  

To fill out the application form, parents must acknowledge "that a private education service provider may not provide the same level of disability services that are provided in a public school." It also requires that parents acknowledge that taking a scholarship has the same effect as "a parental refusal to consent to servoices." Giving up the right to an IEP is not uncommon in choice programs. Proponents, like Alison Sorensen of Education Opportunity 4 Every Child, basically argue, "Well, yeah, but since you'll be able to pick a school that's a great fit, it won't matter." Thing is-- students with special needs are expensive to educate, and not a financial winner for education-flavored businesses like private schools. If I were one of the many parents of special needs children who have had to fight with public schools to protect my child's rights, I'd be leery to move to a school where I had zero legal recourse if I didn't like how things were playing out. 

Parents must also sign off on "I will assume full financial responsibility for the education of my scholarship recipient if I agree to this scholarship account" which is the closest I've seen to the quiet part out loud--in which the state says, "We cut you a check, and so we wash our hands of you. Good luck. You are no longer our responsibility." This is largely the point of vouchers and neo-vouchers--to get the government entirely out of education thereby ending public education as we know it. The bill also wants you to know that setting up this program in no way implies "that a public school did not provide a free and appropriate public education for a student," because if it did, somebody could get sued.

The bill includes the usual list of eligible expenses, but goes further than some in listing expenses that aren't eligible, like travel unrelated to education (never forget that $700K in Arizona ESA money spent on cosmetics and other sundries). 

The bill also goes further than some by listing some qualifications for vendors that want to get involved in the sales side of the program, as well as qualifications that private schools must meet, including an independent audit to determine their financial viability. Private schools enrolled in the program don't have to have fully certified teachers (a Bachelor's degree and "skills, knowledge or expertise" will do). Also, the school can't make the student sign a contract agreeing not to transfer out during the year. The private school has to resubmit an application if it changes owners.

And the bill calls for annual random independent audits, which is certainly more than several states do.

But it also includes what has become typical "hands off" language, indicating that the state cannot mess with "service providers" by extending its authority over them. The providers "may not be required to alter the qualifying service provider's creed, practices, admission policy, or curriculum in order to accept scholarship fund." So private religious schools can refuse students whose families aren't sufficiently "born again," expel students who come out as LGBTQ, and require whatever religious practices they want on the public dime. In Florida that has made a mess in many ways, but that's Florida. Maybe Utah will be different--religious issues have never been a big deal before there, right? 

Actually, since posting, I've learned on the Twitter that Utah already has a problem with some extremist groups using choice systems to fund their activities; this bill is going to give them even more taxpayer funding while insuring that the state won't interfere with their white supremacist ways. 

The program, called the "Hope Scholarship Program," gets $36 million in its first year ($2 to set things up), and can be grown after that.

As usual with these bills, some of the critical parts are the ones that aren't there. While this bill goes  marginally further than others, it is still lacking any sorts of protections for parents and students in the program. What happens if you run out of ESA money? They signed off on this to get into the program--it's all their problem. And they do have an out, because unlike some ESA/voucher bills, this bill has no requirements for what minimal amount of education the parents are required to provide--which is not great for students. If parents get hoodwinked by a grifter, or left in the lurch by a vendor that shuts down mid-year? Well, in all these cases students can return to public school (though the money that's supposed to follow them everywhere will not follow them back to public school). 

Look, it's a voucher bill, only instead of just signing students up for a private school, it also contains the possibility of paying off various other "providers" of education-flavored products. As a voucher, it drains money from public schools. 

Also--and this isn't discussed nearly often enough--like every other voucher/ESA bill, it completely disenfranchises taxpaying non-parents. Don't have a kid? Then you have no voice in this marketplace. If you think your tax dollars should not be going to support America First High School or Critical Race Theory Central, there is no elected school board for you to go yell at. 

But make no mistake. This is a voucher bill, only worse because it has even less focus and accountability than a straight voucher bill would have. If you're in Utah, call your elected representative and say no. 

Just How Discriminatory Are Private Christian Schools

We've heard--heck, the Supreme Court of the United States has now heard--that private religious schools feel a powerful need to reject and exclude LGBTQ students and teachers. But it turns out that there's an entire industry devoted to recruiting and retaining students for private Christian schools.

Meet Schola Inbound Marketing, a company in Ephrata, PA, that has a mission "to help Christian schools throughout the world grow enrollment and become sustainable using proven marketing, admissions and retention practices that will enable each school to impact their community for Christ and be a blessing to students and parents for many years."

Schola posts plenty of webinars, but one from last December caught my attention, warning schools not to admit the wrong sorts of people. You are probably thinking, "Well a bunch of atheists or Muslims or members of the Satanic Temple wouldn't want to enroll in a Christian school anyway, so what's the problem?" Well, here's the pitch:

A mission-appropriate family is actively committed to your school's mission. When this type family enrolls in your school, you want 2 dozen more of the same type because both the students and their parents enhance the culture of your school. You don’t want to lose them! One of the easiest ways to lose them is by enrolling families who are not mission-appropriate.

During these uncertain times, your school can easily make this mistake! And it’s natural! There are families that look like they are mission-appropriate but could change the culture of your school.

They dub this the rotten apple syndrome, and talk about how to avoid it.

The webinar (which I had to sign up for to gain access, you're welcome) is hosted by Schola pres Ralph Cochrane, a 1995 graduate of Grove City College (if you're from northwest PA, you already know about GCC, the powerhouse school for academically advanced heavily-churched kids). He's a business guy and "entrepreneur" 

So in the webinar, he elaborates on the idea of rotten apples and retention, noting that when public schools got all radical about masks and things, plenty more folks became interested in making the switch to private Christian schools (he also notes that such schools are seeing a loss of teachers who are burning out) and that these new families can "infect" the culture of the school. The big worry here isn't even the infection of the school culture, but the worry that letting these not-mission-appropriate families in may drive out the families that the school does want to keep.

One of the questions he answers is "Should we try to keep everybody?" The answer, of course, is no--some of those students and families may not be mission appropriate (I love that phrase, because it sounds so much nicer that "Christian enough"). He suggests ranking families in tiers, and has a company agent show off a spreadsheet that helps rank them both on how likely they are to return and also how mission appropriate they are "like, they may be really likely to return, but you really don't want them to." Ther are categories offered for mission-appropriateness, ranking families A through F. 

He also wants to address the "elephant in the room"--what if we take a bunch of public school kids and then they turn around and go back to public school because the mask thing is over. You can, he warns, be blindsided by both the new enrollees who turn right around and leave, plus, you can be surprised by the long-time families who are disgruntled because "these new students are ruining it." 

Look, this is absolutely within the rights of any private school. It's part of the point of being a private school. But when we start talking about sending public tax dollars to these schools via vouchers or education savings accounts, it's important to talk about the ways in which these schools are not aligned with the mission of public education. It's not just that they are exclusive in all the ways that make big headlines, but that they have a fairly narrow definition of their perfect student. If you're thinking that you'll have no trouble using your voucher to send your kid to the local private Christian school because your child is straight and is nominally a Christian--well, you may still find yourself nudged out the door because you're just not Christian enough. We talk a lot about the big obvious ways that these schools may discriminate; we should also pay attention to the small, subtle ways.

This is a model of schooling that absolutely does not align with the mission of educating every child in the country no matter what. We should not be connecting that model to public funding without at least talking about the change in mission. 

America First Academy Is A Sign Of What's To Come

 Charlie Kirk, Trump activist and leader of Turning Point USA, had a plan. It's hit a big speed bump, but the plan is a warning about what's coming next in the privatization of US education.

Kirk's plan was an academy, marketed directly to families after an "America-first education." To do this, he had hired StrongMind, an Arizona company that specializes in setting up virtual and hybrid learning (and suffers from an unfortunate name choice that always reminds me of StrongBad). (My old school district hired StrongMind to operate their virtual academy.) They were planning for 10K students and a gross revenue of $40 million. 

There were several speedbumps, as revealed by investigative reporting at the Washington Post. For one thing, it turns out that StrongMind depends on a lot of labor in the Philippines; that didn't fit the America first brand well and Turning Point asked if the work on their project could be done in the US. The contract also required StrongMind to "adjust" some of its content (can't use a GOP President speech as an example of propaganda). None of that didn't seem to bother StrongMind, which saw this big contract as a chance to become the Amazon of school choice.

However, a StrongMind subcontractor disagreed. Freedom Learning Group was hired to provide the content (StrongMind is more an infrastructure outfit). FLG is run by military spouses and veterans, and its CEO told WaPo, “When advised that the ultimate client was Turning Point USA, we notified the curriculum developer that we are terminating the contract.” At that point, StrongMind had to back out of the contract that they could no longer fulfill.

So Kirk's plan to rescue students from schools “poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas” has hit a bit of a snag. 

The plan gives us a glimpse of the coming supply side of the education savings account (neo-vouchers) revolution. Already several states have launched expanded versions of this program that hands parents a loaded debit card and says, "Your child's education is now your responsibility. Be free--and don't bother us any more." Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah--  multiple states have or are planning to pass laws opening up this new world where parents can take their neo-voucher and spend it on whatever education-flavored product they wish. 

Just as veteran education benefits gave rise to a world of predatory for profit colleges, we can expect any ESA advances will include predatory for profit K-12 schools, aimed at soaking up those sweet, sweet tax dollars and peddling whatever extreme message they think will bring some market share. The ESA laws we're seeing are very explicit in saying that the government must keep its hands off the private schools collecting neo-voucher money and allow them to do as they please (hence the Florida voucher schools discriminating against LGBTQ students and teaching anti-science). 

This is what an ESA world of education would have--ideological (or at least those who can pose) grifters setting up concept schools that market well, but which may or may not have any real goods inside. But as long as the investors are happy, what more will we need.

You can say, "Well, the market worked--people weren't willing to help Kirk set up his crappy jingoist nationalism school," and I will say, just wait. Somebody out there will more than happy to slap together some content for the chance to hoover up some of that taxpayer cash. Kirk may be down, but sadly, I don't believe for a minute that he's out. And if more neo-voucher and voucher laws are enacted, he'll turn out to be just the tip of a scummy iceberg. 

Furry Panic. Yes, Furry Panic.

Add to the list of school-related panics a panic over furry students. Specifically, a panic over schools making special accommodations for students who like to dress up and take on characters of life-sized fluffy animals. Kelly Weill at Daily Beast has been collecting the stories.

In York, PA, a concerned parents Facebook group warned that furries "could be in your child's classroom hissing at your child and licking themselves." 

In Michigan, a speaker at a school board meeting said, "Yesterday I heard that at least one of our schools in our town, has in one of the unisex bathrooms a litter box for the kids that identify as cats, And I am really disturbed by that.” Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock picked that up and ran with it on Facebook. "Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom. Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools."

In Texas, a Moms for Liberty activist tweeted "Cafeteria tables are being lowered in certain @RoundRockISD middle and high schools to allow ‘furries’ to more easily eat without utensils or their hands (ie, like a dog eats from a bowl)."

Bloggers in Idaho and Iowa have repeated the stories, adding that furry students didn't have to do homework (paws can't hold pencils), based on what they'd heard from people at the county fair.

Just to be clear--none of these furry tales are true. It would be easy to just dismiss all of this furry panic and make jokes about the people freaking out, but there are two things to take away from this, and I think they're important.

First, these stories indicate just how low the level of trust has become among some members of the public. If you hear these furry stories and your first reaction is not, "That's ridiculous. There's no way that could be true," then you have traveled far down a dark rabbit hole. These panic attacks are a measure of how effective the steady drumbeat of "You can't trust those evil schools and teachers. They're just out to indoctrinate your children" has been. 

Second, it's worth noting the nature of the outrage, because similar issues inform other panics in schools these days. The panic trigger, specifically, is that the schools have accommodated these "abnormal" students. It's not hard to imagine some parents saying, "Look, I have nothing against furries. I don't have an anti-furry bone in my body. But if they want to be in our schools, they need to adapt and act like our other students--you know, normal." 

This, in both schools and society, is the panic trigger for so many people. It's okay for Those People to be different, but our institutions should remain fixed and centered on Us. When we start adapting to fit or accommodate or acknowledge Those People, then that's just wrong. That's the argument too many times.