What Joe Biden Actually Said (Or: How To Distort News By Omitting One Word)

After Joe Biden delivered some marks at the reception for the Teacher of the Year, and some on the right were quick to claim a gotcha, and it has continued to spread. Even if it takes active misquoting to do it. 

The RNC kicked things off with a tweet:

Biden to teachers: ‘They're not somebody else's children. They're yours when you're in the classroom.’"

The Daily Wire had things both ways. The body of the article gets the quote right, but the headline says 

Biden Tells Teachers: Children Are ‘Yours When They’re In The Classroom’

While that quote is not technically inaccurate, it's not the truth, either. The idea, of course, is to play to far right assertion that the damned government thinks it owns your children when in fact you do (even as teachers and parents are mostly aware that children are not actual property). But that talking point has turned up at the Gateway Pundit, and from there metastasized into this terrible op-ed by Jerry Newcombe at Christian Post with the headline saying "I only wish it were a gaffe." Newcombe is a God and Country guy, a buddy of D. James Kennedy, and an author of works like How Would Jesus Vote. This Christian Post piece is a fine example of the kind of moral panic being sown on the religious right these days.

Biden said to teachers: “They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re yours when you’re in the classroom.”

Excuse me? Teachers suddenly supplant the children’s parents when the school bell rings?

The left doesn’t get it. They really do think the state owns the children.

Except, of course, that Biden didn't say that. This is one of those cases where altering a quote by removing just one word and also stripping the quote of context allows you to make it mean what you want it to mean. Here's a fuller quote:

We always talk about 'these children.' They're not someone else's children. They're our children. And they are the kite strings that literally lift our national ambitions aloft in a literal sense. Think about it. If you got to do one thing to make sure the nation succeeded in the next two generations, what would you do? You'd want, I would say, literally, have the best-educated public in the world. Have our students gain confidence enough to know what they can do, to reach in. We have an obligation. We have an obligation to help them teach and reach their potential.

You've heard me say it many times about our children, but it's true: They're all our children. And the reason you're the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They're not somebody else's children; they're like yours when they're in the classroom. You represent a profession that helps them gain the confidence — a confidence they believe they can do anything.

Emphasis mine, because I didn't want you to miss that word that so many just skipped over.

As one commenter on the Newcombe piece suggested, this does raise a question. Don't you want to have teachers treat your child as if the child were their own, as opposed to saying, "Hey, you're not my kid, so if you want to flunk math or take a nap or skip class to go chase squirrels through traffic, that's not my problem."

But the current rhetoric is aimed at gutting trust for teachers and public institutions, and this fills the bill nicely. It's one more way that portions of society are currently determined to tell teachers that they are bad for students. Terry McCauliffe offered a perfect quote to hand victory to Glenn Youngkin, but when your political opponents don't say exactly what you need them to, you can always just manufacture the quote you want. 

ICYMI: Mothers Day Edition (5/8)

Also, Prom weekend and the closing weekend of our production of Nunsense. So lots to do. And here's your reading for the week. Remember to share the pieces that you think deserve more audience. Everyone can be an amplifier.

Follow the money...

Stephen Dyer takes a look at Ohio charters and discovers that they spend a hell of a lot more on administration that public schools do. Some spend more than half their funds on administrators!

Teens catfish teacher, share his explicit images

From Michigan, the story of a teacher who got catfished in the worst possible way. He's not in trouble, but come on people-- do not send nudes!

Pedagogy, Lesson Plans, Instructional Materials-- and Politics

Nancy Flanagan looks at the tools of the trade and the politics of transparency.

Oakland community schools worked, district shut them down anyway

Jeff Bryant in the LA Progressive with the story of Oakland's initiative to close a bunch of schools. IT seems as if maybe effectiveness was not a deciding factor in the shutdowns.

"The Hate Is Too Much"

Minnesota is losing school board members in record numbers. The 74 has the report on this trend.

WV state charter board's first director advocates using culture war to advance school choice

West Virginia's school choice programs are just getting started, and their first chief thinks talking about the awful indoctrinators in public schools is the way to go. Just in case you had any doubt about what all the vilification of public school was about.

Youngkin's ed secretary says her goal is preparing students for jobs

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the ed boss argues that schools are just there to crank out meat widgets for corporations. 

How to lose the culture war

Robert Pondiscio offers a right-tilted history of the culture war, explaining where ed reformsters went wrong. You may disagree with a bunch of this (it's in the Washington Examiner), but it's a perspective worth reading.

Kansas Democrat Threatens to Recruit Parents to Sue Schools For Lack of Honest History Lessons

Do you want a law that gives parents the right to sue schools over educational discomfort? Fine, says a Kansas Democrat--I will round up parents of every marginalized group to sue when their story isn't told in history class. A discussion involving extensive misquoting ensued. From The 74.

Last time, the religious right told us not what we can teach but how to teach it

Alfie Kohn takes a look at one of the previous iterations of the culture wars--back in the 1970s when the religious right was all upset about Whole Language.

Alabama losing large numbers of new teachers within first three years

Another study outlining the hemorrhaging of teaching positions, this time in Alabama.

#HateRead: Admissions, testing and the media

Akil Bello takes a look at the ins and outs of media coverage of college admissions news. Bonus: a list of sources that he trusts on these issues.

Pa’s K-12 school nurses treat more than scrapes and bruises. And they’re asking lawmakers for help

A look at the push to update nurse staffing requirements in PA. Includes a map that will allow you to be surprised at how few states do not have any staffing requirements for nurses at all.

Memo To Non-Teachers The Day After Teacher Appreciation Week (Plus Betsy DeVos)

Did you do something nice for teachers last week? Say some supportive words. That's great. What are you going to do next week?

With any luck (well, it's not luck that is required), you're avoiding boneheaded moves like the district that gave its superintendent a 14.47% pay raise since December of 2020 and, during that same period, raised staff pay an embarrassing 1.11% raise--and then layered on that by gifting teachers an appreciation gift of a shiny pen. Then--then!!--offered a non-apology apology by pointing out that, hey, they'd also given teachers peppermint patties and bags of chips in previous months. Teacher appreciation all year round!! Woohoo!

So maybe you did something more appreciative than a shiny pencil this week. Maybe you said some nice words, or posted a nice teacher meme, or even gave a teacher something more thoughtful than a shiny pencil. And that's nice, I guess. Nicer than a kick in the pants, anyway.

But the real question is, what are you doing to day? What are you going to do next week? What are you going to do the other fifty-one non-appreciation weeks of the year?

Do you continue to be supportive of teachers in big and small ways, or do you figure that once Appreciation Week festivities are dispatched, you can take teacher support off of your plate? Do you go back to arguing that teachers are overpaid, lazy and incompetent, the root cause of everything wrong with education? Are you sitting silently when someone claims that teachers are just a bunch of groomers? 

It's not that I think that you should be worshipping at the altar of teachers fifty-two weeks a year. Life is big and you have lots of things to think about and fold into the layers of your daily life.

But teaching today is not like it was years ago. Teaching always went on against the background buzz of dissatisfaction, but nowadays that has swollen to an angry roar directed at teachers. The polls tell us time and time again that parents mostly like their children's schools and the teachers in them, but those aren't the people making the noise. 

In the current atmosphere, what you did last week takes its meaning from what you do next week, and the week after that. If you're a school board member who issued a proclamation about how much you value your teachers last week, and next week you're going to sit down at the bargaining table to argue that teachers shouldn't get a raise, your proclamation is meaningless. And if you're an administrator-- will you be respecting staff boundaries and trying to lighten their load, or will you just keep piling duties on them and taking more and more of their hours with no regard for them having a life? 

We humans have a short attention span. We opine that Every Day Should Be Christmas, but by December 26, we're over that. We make resolutions on January 1 that we have dropped by February. But if you are in a relationship with someone who's nice to us one week out of the year and treats us lousy the other fifty-one, that's not a healthy relationship destined to stand the test of years. 

I don't mean to make a big deal out of this. Teachers mostly get that along with fame and fortune, they aren't going to get a lot of public acclaim. If you're unhappy with teaching because you don't get enough applause, you have entered the wrong profession.

I just want you to get that, particularly in the current world, what you did last week isn't the main thing. The main thing is what you do next week. It doesn't take a lot. Fifty-two weeks of respect beats a shiny pencil any day.

(And really--this kind of thing...)

Celebrating all of America's excellent teachers this #TeacherAppreciationWeek! THANK YOU for everything you do to inspire, challenge, and guide the rising generation! I especially appreciate my favorite, and first, teacher -- my mom. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/NxR2Qq7p2p

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 6, 2022

Additionally,  Betsy's mother taught for just a couple of years, before Betsy was born or old enough to remember, so this tweet comes with the usual DeVos message subtexted-- parents are the real teachers, and all you people working in the "dead end" public school system are not. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week indeed.

Appreciating Teachers In May

There's a certain irony in parking teacher appreciation in the Month of May when teachers are absolutely hammered and don't even have five minutes to run to the teacher lounge and pick up one of those celebratory donuts that the administration brought.

I remember most of my Mays, when the gauzy September promise of "Here are the things we'll get done sometime this year" burned away under a harsh sun of "There are now sixteen class periods left in which to handle this list of 157 objectives." I was never one to count down the days, but I did sit down by May 1 to plot out exactly what I would aim for every day left in the year. Every time the office would announce some event to interrupt the flow of the days, meaning I would lose a period (or fifteen minutes out of it) I would curse and, like a cranky educational GPS, start recalculating.

So maybe it makes sense to appreciate teachers now, when they are up against it, trying to convince students that there are, in fact, more school days left even though the Big Standardized Test just finished. Maybe teachers need that extra boost during May, when only teachers are praying for cold, miserable days that do not make students shift into summer gear. Maybe now, as everyone is lurching toward the finish line, particularly in this pretend-post-pandemic year (which, according to most of my teacher friends, is actually worse than last year), is the perfect time to holler some attagirls at teaching staffs.

But many times, I have wondered if a teacher appreciation week in September would be far better.

It's nice to hear "Ya did good" at the end of a run, but a hearty "Thanks for showing up to take this on. We'll be with you every step of the way," would be great, too. Being appreciated at the end of your run is a nice thing, an expression that people think you did a good job. Appreciation at the start shows some trust and confidence without waiting around to make sure you really did do a good job. 

There's never a bad time to appreciate teachers, particularly in the current climate. Teachers, we hear repeatedly, are commie-sympathizing, child-indoctrinating, enemies of the state who got into the profession either because they hate children and America (or for darker purposes). The current atmosphere can make Teacher Appreciation Week ring a little hollow. 

At this point, teachers are keenly aware of just how much they are appreciated (or not). From gag laws to stagnating wages, appreciation has been shown. And while it may seem like ages ago to the culture at large, for teachers it has not been that long since the fifteen minutes of You're All Heroes praise was replaced with You're Our Servants--Get Back In There. As various memes point out, you know who doesn't have appreciation weeks-- people who are well paid and respected year round.

If the school year is people throwing tomatoes at you every day, Teacher Appreciation Day in May is someone handing you a hand towel. How much better if, in September, someone handed you a raincoat and an umbrella. Instead of saying, "Sorry that happened," how much nicer to get a pledge of "We are going to work to make sure it doesn't happen in the coming year."

Any teacher appreciation is better than no teacher appreciation. Some appreciation in September would be nice. Appreciation all year round would be great. 

Teacher Appreciation Bingo

 

Feel free to play this week. Sadly, there are no squares for "extra $$$ bonus" or "administrator offers to take over class so you can take a break." But there is an extra column so you have more chances to win

.

PA: The Voucher Bill Advances

A few weeks ago I warned you that Pennsylvania's latest attempt at a super-voucher bill was progressing through the legislature. Last week it took one more step forward.  

HB 2169 is an education savings account bill, a kind of voucher that involves handing parents a stack of money that they can use for any of several sorts of education-flavored items, from private religious school tuition to tutors to education supplies. They can even bank a few bucks to spend for college later on.

I wrote about the bill here, but let me re-hit some of the main points to keep an eye on.

The bill's authors (whoever they may be--the far-right Commonwealth Foundation has certainly been following the bill's progress very closely, and they're part of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing thinky tanks that has been doing the ALEC-like job of creating legislation for states to pass) have followed the usual playbook of starting small. Advocates of the bill have taken great pains to point out that the vouchers are only available to students in failing schools, and that they will only take one-third of public school's per pupil funding (sort of).

Note, however, that by defining "failing schools" as "schools that scored in the bottom 15% on last year's PSSA or Keystone," they are guaranteed access to 15% of the schools, because no matter how well everyone does, somebody is going to be in the bottom 15%. This is standard foot-in-the-door language. Voucher bills always start small, and then just keep expanding.

Also note that the one-third claim is smoke and baloney. The voucher amount will be the state's average cost per-student for the whole state. The "one third" comes from the fact that, on average, the state only provides about one third of school funding, the rest being provided by local taxpayers. So not only will these vouchers stake state funding away from the local districts, but since the figure is based on a state average, about half of all schools will lose MORE per-student funding than they would have gotten from the state. The poorer the district, the worse this is going to hurt.

As with other super-voucher bills, this one provides little protection for either families or taxpayers.

The bill has a clause saying that parents who "engage in fraudulent misuse" of the account will be thrown out of the program. How will anyone know they've done that? The bill requires the Auditor General to "conduct random audits" of accounts annually. How many? Up to the AG apparently. Advocates will tell you that parents will provide ultimate accountability (voting with their feet, etc etc), but it's worth remembering that the parents were not elected by the taxpayers and are not answerable to them. "Just trust them" is never a good accountability plan for taxpayer dollars.

There is no accountability for the vendors themselves. Since the whole rationale of the bill is that students need to escape from their "failing" public school, you'd think there would be some mechanism for making sure that they didn't end up in some failing private school or failing tutor system, but there's nothing at all along those lines. Nobody--not the state, and certainly not taxpayers--will ever know if the students ended up getting a better education than they would have had they stayed put. And if parents discover they've been defrauded of their voucher dollars by some lousy vendor? Too bad. A central premise of all voucher programs is that once the state has handed you some money, you are no longer their problem.

While the bill may not demand accountability of the vendors, it offers them protection. The bill includes explicit language to make clear that the state cannot tell the private school or tutor or other vendors how to run their business. Religious schools can keep on being as religious as they like, and private schools are still free to accept only the students they want to accept. Just because you've got a voucher, that doesn't mean you can pick any school you want. It's up to the school, not the family.

The bill has now passed the House 104-98, mostly along party lines with some turncoats on either side. Call or write your Senator. Complain that the bill robs public schools to pay private businesses, and that it provides no accountability for taxpayers. You can throw in a note to Governor Wolf telling him to veto the hell out of it if it makes it to his desk. 

Nobody Is Pro-Abortion

Here's the thing. Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody's position on the issue is "We need more abortions in this country." Women are not out there thinking, "I hope I can get pregnant so that I can get an abortion again because that was super-awesome." 

In other words, at the heart of one of our most contentious issues is a pretty solid agreement that fewer abortions would be a good thing.

Just a couple of things get in our way.

Most obvious is a disagreement about methods. The thing is, we already know what works and what doesn't. Criminalizing abortion doesn't work. When abortions were illegal, all that meant was that women with resources could get safe abortions, women without resources would resort to back alleys and horrifying self-inflicted abortion attempts, and women facing serious complications (the kind of things that prompt people to say, "Well, surely it wouldn't be illegal in that situation" even though it would be) just died. 

What works is comprehensive sex education along with readily and easily available contraception and birth control. 

But for some reason, opponents of choice are largely opposed to these solutions as well. A report from The 74 shows that 13 states poised to criminalize abortion post-Roe also have no sex ed at all. It's reminiscent of the Rush Limbaugh flap; Sandra Fluke testified in favor of insurance coverage for contraceptives and Rush called her a slut and a prostitute and said that women getting this kind of contraceptive coverage should post videos of all the sex they were having so that "we can all watch."

It's one of the details of the debate that suggest something else is going on.

There is a sincere point of contention at the heart of debates about abortion, which is the question of when a human life begins. Birth? Conception? The truth is that we do not know. We may have really strong opinions, but we have zero evidence to back them up. Personally, I find the idea of a human soul taking seat at conception hard to accept (and it raises some serious questions about my twins, who were not twins until well after conception--so do they share a soul, did the soul sub-divide somehow, or do souls arrive sometime after the fetus hits a certain number of cells?)

But if you believe that life begins at conception, wouldn't taking steps to make sure conception didn't occur make sense?

That's another thing that gets in the way of this debate. All the ifs.

If you thought the tiny life was incredibly important, would you fight for a pre-natal and birthing level of spending and support that would rival our military spending (and all free to mothers)? If you believed that the tiny life were hugely important, wouldn't you be doing something about the fact that our nation has the worst laws for new parent leave? Why, if this tiny new life is so important, does legislation say that the need of a new parent to spend time parenting in those first critical months is less precious that an employers need to get their employees back to work ASAP? 

Put another way-- if abortion is murder, does that mean a society that fails to provide all necessary support for expectant and birthing mothers is guilty of murder? 

And why, if young humans are of such great importance, are we not moving heaven and earth to create the best education and support system in the history of the world?

There are a lot of calls of hypocrisy against the pro-life crowd, and honestly, some of them are disingenuous; the answer in many cases ("why should a woman's autonomy be sacrificed for a fetus") is "because we believe that a fetus is also an actual live human being." 

But there is also a lot of rhetoric that suggests that, for some people, abortion and contraception are just a way for women to escape consequences for having sex (particularly for having sex for reasons other than procreation), and this is about making sure those naughty women don't Get Away With Something. This appears to be yet another great American debate in which we don't talk about what we're really talking about. 

That's particularly troubling this time because of the implications in Justice Alito's leaked opinion, which suggest that LGBTQ marriage and Brown v. Board of Education are also in jeopardy under the same reasoning. It's impossible not to see the opinion as an attempt to roll the clock back--way, way back-- to days when white guys were in charge and women and minorities knew their place. For beleaguered public education, this opens up one more front for attack.

The short version of all this:

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. It will put the lives and health of many women (mostly poor ones) in jeopardy. There are other things we could do that would be far more effective at reducing the number of abortions, but first we have to decide whether we want to reduce abortions or punish women for behavior we don't approve of. 

The decision to have an abortion is rarely an easy one, and often a very rough one. Pete Buttigieg's response to a question about third trimester abortions remains one of the best statements on the subject-- it's a hugely difficult decision, but there is no way the choice would be improved, morally or medically, by having the government step in to dictate the choice. It's a sensible answer and, ironically, exactly then answer I would expect from a small-government conservative.