The State of US Book Banning

PEN America is having quite the year, emerging as an organization that has helped us all keep tabs on the new wave of attempts to ban books. Now they've released a report looking at the whole picture of the rising tide of educational gag orders, and while I recommend that you go read the whole thing for yourself, including their index of school book bans, let me just pass along some of the more striking items in the report. 

And let me underline the fact that this covers just a nine month period. Nine months, covering 26 states and 86 school districts.

The index lists bans on a grand total of 1,145 books, with 874 authors and 198 illustrators having their work targeted. 819 works of fiction. 209 children's picture books. 31 graphic novels. 150 chapter books. 537 young adult titles.

Nobody wants to argue that every book is appropriate for every student, nor do school libraries have infinite space. Furthermore, I agree with those critics who say that schools and school personnel work for the public and do not function as independent agents answerable to nobody. For all those reasons, groups like the American Library Association have guidelines for best practices in making decisions about books, and most school districts have a procedure by which parents can challenge the presence of a work. But what PEN America found is that many of these bans are completely circumventing any such procedures. In the worst cases, we're finding schools where administrators are quietly yanking books they think have potential to draw criticism, without following any procedure at all. 

A mere 4% of the books banned "have been the result of processes that began with the filing of formal challenges to library or classroom materials by community members." In other words, lots of "concerned citizens" are skipping right past the procedures available to them to address their concerns and are skipping ahead to pitchforks, torches, and rants at board meetings. It's almost as if they are not as concerned about addressing the concerns about the books as they are in sowing chaos and eroding support for the district. There are several specific examples in the report; none of them will make you feel better. In one case, a single parent got five books booted from a class, including Night by Elie Weisel.

The greatest number of titles are being banned from classrooms (470), plus the 143 titles banned from both libraries and classrooms. 506 titles are banned "pending investigation."

The report finds that 41% of the bans came not from concerned parents or community members, but came from state officials or elected lawmakers. That, PEN America notes, is a big change in how these things happen.

The index does not include books that have been, well, partly banned. In Williamson County, Tennessee, a district with an exceptionally noisy Moms For Liberty group, several books have had select pages banned-- teachers may not read certain pages aloud. The infamous seahorse book has two pages banned from student view; those are the sex pages, which are displayed in the report, and let me tell you--they are some hotttt stuff. Okay, not really, but they do show seahorses twining tails and also mention that the female puts the eggs in the male's pouch, so maybe that's the problem.

Here's how the bans break down by states and districts. Way to go, Texas. 

Some of these bans are being reversed on review, or by court challenge, or just some level of respect for the First Amendment prevailing.

PEN America broke the bans down by topic. Here's how that looks.

LGBTQ+ topics or prominent characters:     379 titles

Protagonists of color:  467 titles

Jewish or Muslim characters and themes:  18 titles

Sexual or health-related content:   283 titles, including titles about sex, abortion, teen pregnancy, puberty, sexual assault.

Race and racism:   247 titles

History: 184 titles, including picture books about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ruby Bridges, Duke Ellington, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sonia Sotomayor, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai.

Death, grief and suicide: 122 titles. Which, yes, is scary stuff. But maybe keeping students with questions from searching for answers is not a big help. 

The report has several great quotes with it, but I'll leave you with this one from author Ashley Hope Perez:

Book challengers may convince themselves that they want to save the kids. But it’s a damaging myth that removing a story about painful aspects of human experience will in any way protect young people. This is like arguing that a school-wide moratorium on discussions of bullying will eliminate the problem. Silence is the real threat.

Take a look at the full report.

Cory Doctorow And Tech Baloney

Sometimes in this space I mostly just want to say "Hey, look at this!" This is one of those posts.  When it comes to ed tech, there's nobody better to read than Audrey Watters. But when it comes to slicing modern tech baloney, Cory Doctorow has a pretty sharp knife, and while he doesn't directly address education very often, many of his critiques make some points instantly recognizable to education folks. 

Take this interview from 2020 in the Guardian.

Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models.

We've been suffering from the "if you can't do maths on it" fallacy for a couple of decades now, and it is showing little sign of abating.

Here he is in that interview talking about The Social Dilemma, a documentary in which some "prodigal tech bros" make sad face noises about their work in big tech.

One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did – that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that’s the problem – the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there’s another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn’t that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting.

And he offers this cool frame for understanding what Facebook does, and why that's making the world worse.

What Facebook does is it locates people. So if you want to locate people, because you want to say something heterodox, which you might get punished for if you shouted it aloud, you can quietly find and talk to them.

That’s not an unalloyed evil – this is how we got Black Lives Matter, non-binary gender identity and so on. People have been able to find one another and quietly share the fact that they disagreed with the overarching consensus and build a coalition.

But you also get people locating people and saying: “Hey, you know, I’m not gonna openly call myself a racist when I’m running for office, but you and I, we’re both quite racist. And I just wanted you to know that.”

So you can build a coalition of racists who would otherwise struggle to find one another because of the social risk that they take if they go public with their views, but it’s really not the same thing as mind control.

So, it's not that these folks are being created so much as they're being connected and given the feelinmg that they aren't outliers and don't have to stay silent any more. 

If you don't follow Doctorow on the tweeter or elsewhere, I recommend him. You probably won't always agree, but his insights are usually brain-slapping thought stimulation. 

ICYMI: Not A Great Week Edition (4/10)

We said goodbye to yet another member of the extended family this week, so that got things off to a sad start. And now that I look at the week's readings--well, I will warn you up front that it is not an encouraging batch. This is probably a good week not read absolutely everything here.

Tucker Carlson calls on men to storm into schools "and thrash the teacher"

Let's get the most infuriating thing out of the way first. No, there's not full context for the quote. Is there a context that would make it better? I don't think so.

Betsy DeVos and Her Money Is Backing Ron DeSantis

No big surprises here, but at Salon, Igor Derysh breaks down how DeVos money is funding Florida's governor.

Fact check on DeSantis Don't Say Gay story

You'll be shocked to discover that one of DeSantis's stories about the need for the Don't Say Gay law is not entirely acurate. 

What Teachers Do

This may be the shortest post you ever read from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, but if you're a teacher, you will recognize this week in a teacher's life.

Missing: Future teachers ins colleges of education

NEA takes a look at how the pipeline is doing, and the answer is "not well." For example, "While 55 percent of U.S. students are People of Color, nearly 70 percent of prospective teachers are White, the AACTE analysis found."

The harm caused by the third grade reading ultimatum

Nancy Bailey looks at some of the damage created by the whole "pass the third grade reading test or else" movement.

Did we really learn anything about schools in the pandemic?

Valerie Strauss asks the big question-- specifically, did we learn anything that we did not already know?

State takeover of school districts no silver bullet

From Commonwealth magazine. In which Massachusetts learns that district takeover by the state doesn't actually do any good. In other news, the sun is expected to rise in the East tomorrow.

What music teachers do in the summer

Nancy Flanagan with a reminder that for many teachers, summer is not strictly a vacation.

Many teens report emotional and physical abuse by parents during lockdown

I'm sending you to this New York Times piece via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette so you can skirt the firewall. It's a discouraging piece, but teachers can get confirmation here of their sense of the heavy load some students have been carrying the past couple of years.

Southwest Missouri high school teacher accused of using critical race theory loses job

A simple privilege checklist for a reading unit was enough to get this teacher a non-renewal of her contract, even though she had the support of her administration. Infuriating and depressing.

No, machine learning can't predict trustworthiness based on faces

Not directly tied to education, but a useful addition to the "No, Ai Is Not Magic" file. From The Debrief, a look at how some bad old claims get a new life via software.

"Educators are afraid" says teacher attacked for Romeo and Julliet unit

At Valerie Strauss's Washington Post column, teacher Sarah Mulhern Gross explains just how scary it is out there these days. 

If standardized tests were going to succeed, they would have done so by now

Steven Singer walks us through some of the history of education's greatest failed policy idea.

Mitchell Robinson for Michigan State Board of Education

Friend of the Institute Mitch Robinson is running for the state board. Passionate and committed and exceedingly well-informed, he would be an excellent choice. If you are a Michigan voter, you should vote for him.

What Biden's proposed reforms to the charter school program really say

There's a lot of flap this week over the proposed changed to a federal charter grant program, mostly because the charter lobby really really really hates it. Once again, we turn to Valerie Strauss's column at the Washington Post, this time to hear from Carol Burris about what's really going on. You can also read what I have to say about here at Forbes and here at this blog. The next few days are your last to go make a comment in support, and you should definitely do that.

Also at Forbes.com this week (I was busy)

North Carolina has a terrible idea about how to change their already-terrible teacher pay system

and

Check out this new method from the far-far-right for trying to scare school board's into compliance.

PA: Principal Charged With Wiretapping

File this under "Well At Least I'm Not Working At That School."

Edward Pietroski is the principal of Conneaut Area Senior High School (over in my northwestern corner of the state). Last November several faculty members at the school held a meeting. Months later, they learned that their principal, with the assistance of the assistance principal, had recorded the meeting without anyone's consent or knowledge. Whoops.

Last month, a criminal complaint was filed and Pietroski was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Adam Stallard, then released on non-monetary bond, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for later this month.

Pietroski is still working in the district, staying in the office, and having no contact with the four teachers who reported the recording. Other administrators within the district are being shuffled around to cover some of the workload. Pietroski has gotten himself a lawyer, but the discussion about who exactly would be funding his defense is still going on. The school website carries a message from the board:

The Board of School Directors has been fully informed regarding the matter involving the high school principal. The Board understands that the single criminal charge arises from the recording of a faculty meeting. As this involves an open and pending legal matter as well as a personnel matter, the Board cannot discuss further information at this time. The Board intends to comply with all legal requirements as this matter proceeds. For the present, the Board recognizes that under our system of justice, the principal carries a presumption of innocence. The Board will continue to assess the matter as it progresses.

What was Pietroski thinking? He's been through the wringer before (his previous gig was at a school that had a library book flap and before that he taught in Baltimore). Reportedly the investigation shows that he was recording the faculty meeting for one teacher who was not going to be able to attend. Staff members received copies of the recording; one told the teacher who had missed the meeting not to let anyone know that they had a recording. The "recording a meeting for a person who will be absent" seems innocuous, but it does raise questions. Why didn't the absent teacher just ask a colleague to record it on their phone? Why didn't anyone tell the teachers they were being recorded? And how bad do staff-administrations relations have to be (and Pietroski is a new-ish hire) for teachers to react to this news by taking it to the police? 

Right now everyone's keeping quiet. We'll see what more story comes out in the weeks ahead. The felony wiretapping charge carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail and a $15,000 fine. 

PA: In Erie, School Shooting Followed By Teacher Walkout

On Tuesday (4/5) at 9:30 AM, the school day at Erie High School was interrupted by a shooting. Several shots were fired within the building, with one person injured. There was, of course, a lockdown (more about that in a moment) and a hefty police response.

The shooting was described as "an isolated, targeted incident." These days, I guess, it's good-ish news if a school shooting is committed by one student with a particular beef with another student, and not some sort of grandiose attempt to terrorize the entire school. Yesterday, the shooter turned himself in.

School was canceled for the rest of the week, and next week is a regularly scheduled spring. The district announced that it will be working on a comprehensive plan to re-open safely. Said Superintendent Brian Polito, "The well being of our students and staff is and always will be our priority, and we will take every measure possible to ensure their safety and security."

Teachers, however, delivered a message today via a letter from their union: they will not be back in the building until safety issues are fixed; they will be teaching remotely. They included a list, and it's kind of mind-boggling.

The shooting prompted a lockdown--but what do you do if there's an active shooter lockdown and your classroom doors don't lock!

Listed concerns from the letter:

*Fully functioning locks on all interior doors to rooms in which a staff person is assigned, to include the ability to lock and unlock the door from within the room.
*Fully functioning locks on all exterior doors to the building.
*Fully functioning communication devices for every staff person (i.e. walkie talkies, phones, PA system, etc.)
*An increase in security and/or police presence in highly visible and well-trafficked areas.
*The installation of fully functioning metal detectors. Until that can be accomplished, all students shall be scanned with handheld electronic devices which detect weapons.
*Clear, established procedures related to discipline and student behavioral interventions which are in writing and distributed to all staff. In addition, these procedures must be consistently applied and consistently enforced by all staff and administrators.
*Written instructions for student removal procedures, distributed to all staff.
*Fully functioning security cameras.
*All EEA members shall have access to the “Behavior” tab in Infinite Campus for every currently enrolled student at the High School.

These are the items on the "we're not coming back till these are done" list. There's a second "and we better get moving on these" list that includes things like staff training for emergency and crisis situations and security blinds. 

Erie has had more than its share of issues; it was just six years ago that the then-superintendent proposed closing the public high schools because they couldn't afford to run it any more. The city's district remains a poster child for charter-induced death spiral. So it's not the hugest surprise that they somehow haven't been able to put locks on classroom doors-- they've been spending money on marketing battles.

I cannot imagine what a huge gut punch it must be to learn that there is an active shooter in your building and at the same time to realize that you don't even have the fundamental things in place to protect your students and yourself. Particularly if you have already spent months and months trying to get those issues corrected. 

In an era in which educators and school personnel are warning of a rise in violence directed at them, it seems like having the ability to lock gunmen out of your room would be a pretty basic piece of infrastructure. Not only should a school be a safe place, but letting things get this bad invites over-correction and treating students like the enemy, which is also very bad news. Meanwhile, schools throughout northwest PA are practicing their lockdown drills this week. Here's hoping that Erie can sort things out by the time spring break is over. 

MI: DeVos and Far Right Team Up To Crush Public Ed (And Voting, And A Few Other Things)

Michigan's right wing has a problem, and she's living in the governor's mansion. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has vetoed many favorite proposals, including bills aimed at tax cuts, limiting voting rights, and vouchering education.

So they've developed a new plan--just do a complete end run around Michigan's elected leaders and get their wish list mandated. Michigan allows something called a citizen initiative, by which citizens can petition for a law and send it straight to the legislature. It takes just 8% of the voters from the last gubernatorial race to send a bill to the legislature where it can be voted up or down, with no option for a veto. 

The Let MI Kids Learn petitions bill themselves as a "scholarship" because "voucher," "taxpayer funding for private schools," and "tax dodge" aren't popular branding. The website for the initiative announces itself as aimed at taking power away from The Evil Union (though Michigan is a Right To Work state, apparently the Evil Union still exerts tool much power). The proposal is thin on details, but it appears to be a combination of a tax credit scholarship (instead of paying your taxes, contribute to your favorite private school) and education savings accounts (get some free money to spend at the educational-flavored product vendor of your choice). 

Of course, you know which Michigan resident loves this whole thing. Betsy DeVos and her family have donated a big ole ton of money ($400K just last December)  to supporting the initiative, as well as lending her face and voice to the effort. You may recall that Betsy DeVos resigned because she found the Trumpian rhetoric and January 6 insurrection just too much, but she seems to have set aside her aversion to far right misbehavior; according to Kathryn Joyce at Salon, this big initiative finds DeVos allying herself with folks like Stand Up Michigan, a "patriot" group whose protests have drawn the same kind of crowd that plotted to kidnap the governor.

DeVos has been promoting the initiative with familiar half-truths. She has argued that this is a chance "for parents to take control of education in Michigan," but vouchers don't give a parent the ability to enroll their children in schools that won't accept them. These vouchers, like all vouchers, mostly allow the state to say, "Hey, we gave you a small check. Your child's education is now nobody's problem but yours. We wash our hands of you." Nowhere on the website does it talk about protections for parents and students, or oversight and accountability for the businesses that will be hoovering up those sweet, sweet tax dollars. 

Or as Casandra Ulbrich, chairman of the State Board of Education explains

Michigan’s public schools are not for sale. We have an abundance of choice. This isn’t about choice. This is about privatizing education. This is about taking public education dollars and turning them over to private institutions that are not accountable to taxpayers, do not have to report anything to anybody, and can use that money in any way they want.

Ulbrich is part of For MI Kids, For Our Schools, a group mounting a counter-offensive against the attempted dismantling of public education in Michigan. They are attempting to counter the misinformation and just-plain-lying being used to collect signatures for the voucher plan. They are pointing out the lack of accountability in the new system, and the lack of choice for parents who do not have "desirable" student to enroll. 

Just because you have a voucher does not mean you can send your child to the school of your choice, because private schools retain the right to accept or reject as they please. Meanwhile, a voucher system knocks another hole in the public school funding bucket, and in Michigan, that bucket has already taken a beating--thanks, of course, to DeVos money.

DeVos's intentions have never been particularly secret. The government should not be in charge of education; the church should. Unions are just a way for lessers to exert power they don't deserve; lessers (like teachers) should know their place. Schools should not be for elevating everyone, but for sorting people into their proper place (kind of like the free market separates poor lessers from their rich betters), and so everyone should find a school that is the "right fit." DeVos isn't particularly big on democracy and its trappings (those unruly mobs); she's more of a Christianist plutocrat, and as such would prefer an education system that allows folks to make money implementing God's Kingdom, and not a system that takes money from betters in order to fund public schools for lessers. 

In other words, using a weird trick to do an end run around actual democratic institutions is just fine if it helps dismantle just a little more of the public education system. I sure hope that folks in Michigan are paying attention and not getting snookered into further dismantling public schools. And they'd better keep an eye on those other initiatives aimed at voter suppression and (of course) tying the government's hands in case of a health crisis. God luck. 

 

How To Innovate On Assessment (And Why States Won't)

At Bellwether Education Partners, Michelle Croft marks Testing Season by wondering why states have not been using their new-found sort-of-freedom-ish-ness under ESSA to innovate with the Big Standardized Test.

Despite rhetoric over the years about innovations in assessments and computer-based delivery, by and large, students’ testing experience in 2022 will parallel students’ testing experience in 2002. The monolith of one largely multiple-choice assessment at the end of the school year remains. And so does the perennial quest to improve student tests.

It's a fair point. States could be getting clever; they aren't. 

Croft cites a couple of possible explanation for the tepidity of the states. First, states are still staggering under the interruption of the BS Test over the past couple of pandemess years. Second is the challenge of meeting the accountability requirements of ESSA. States have the option of applying for the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority, but the major impediment is that new testing systems would have to be backwards compatible--in other words, people (well, state and federal education bureaucrats) would have to be able to compare new scores to scores under the old system. That right there is pretty much a game ender.

Croft has a couple of ideas about targets that a new system should aim for. One is to improve score reporting so that it can "meaningfully and easily communicate results to educators and families." Another is to try to improve "teacher classroom assessment literacy." 

Regular readers know my feelings about high stakes testing, which I would call the single largest, most destructive, most terribly toxic scourge on public education in the last 25 years. At the same time, I absolutely believe in accountability for public schools. But I am in absolute agreement with Croft that the state response to ESSA re:accountability has been--well, she says "tepid" and I would say "crappy." So, without getting into the nitty gritty devil-dwelling details, what requirements do I think a new, revamped system would need to have? What goals should we set out to meet?

Don't throw good money after bad. Suck it up and face the unfortunate truth that the last twenty-some years of BS Test data are junk, and there is absolutely no point in trying to pursue backward compatibility. We don't need the new data to be comparable to the old data, because the old data aren't particularly useful to begin with. Now is the perfect time to cut losses and start over.

Figure out what it's for. One of the fatal weaknesses of BS Testing accountability is that a single test was supposed to be useful for a dozen different purposes. That is not how tests work. Every tool is made for a particular purpose; you cannot use a hammer to hammer nails, drill holes, screw in screws, cut lumber, paint siding, and comb your hair. But the Big Standardized Test was supposed to be a measure for a myriad of purposes, from informing curricular choices to allowing state educrats to compare schools to evaluating teachers to telling parents how their kids were doing. It should not be a radical notion to declare that you intend to settle on the purpose for a tool before you design and built that tool. 

Note: this discussion should also include some "why" questions, e.g. why do we need to track individual students' results over their career? There may be good answers to some of these why's, and knowing them would help better focus the instrument we're designing. 

Also note: the discussion of purpose should stick to real things. Croft works back around to the notion that we need to track students and school achievement so that we can allocate resources and support, an argument people have been making for several decades despite the fact that has never, ever been how it has worked. Low test scores have not gotten schools extra help.

Create assessments that actually assess. Pro tip: whatever purpose you settle on, a multiple choice test will not be the best way to assess it. In fact, an assessment that can be scored by a computer probably isn't it, either, even though so many people seem to really, really want a computer-managed assessment system. 

Don't build it backwards. One of the problems with that insistence on computer assessment is that you immediately put yourself to the business of asking what a computer can assess instead of what you need to assess. That has been one of the major failings of the modern assessment system, which has asked what it can assess quickly, simply, and profitably, rather than what needs to be assessed. It's the old story of the drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post even though they lost the keys a hundred yards away-- "I'm looking here because the light's better." 

None of these things are going to happen, mostly because they are time consuming, because they are costly, and because the people making these decisions will get their advice from test manufacturing companies and not actual educators. Quality assessments that can't be scored by an algorithm are expensive and take time (particularly if you let people see them in order to better interpret the results, requiring the test manufacturer to come up with new materials every year). Croft, in another post, notes that she and her husband found accessing  and interpreting their child's results daunting (and they are trained psychometricians), but test manufacturers have been resistant to transparency both because of proprietary info concerns and because building a better interface would cost more money. 

There are way better ways to assess schools, teachers, students, etc than those we've been using (try Jack Schneider's Beyond Test Scores for an example), and lots of reasons to understand that the Big Standardized Test is a terrible solution (read Daniel Koretz's The Testing Charade for many of them). After twenty-five years of this baloney, we really ought to be better at it.