Trying To Rewrite DeVos History

When Arne Duncan was done being ed secretary, he undertook his own retcon rehab, complete with a book, a tour, and a string of interviews in which he tried to explain what happened, except that he never really understood what happened, nor did he appear to learn anything in hindsight. But he has tried valiantly to rewrite his history in the job.

Betsy DeVos has shown no desire to rewrite her own history, which is on brand, since she has never owed anyone an explanation. So it falls to other folks to try to gaslight reinterpret for us the DeVos years at USED.

The latest attempt comes from Robert Maranto, the current holder of the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He worked in the Clinton administration, and he writes for the right-tilted American Enterprise Institute, for whom he created this Betsy DeVos reconsideration report, "Outcomes over Image: Examining the Political Legacy of Betsy DeVos."

His basic thesis is that DeVos was "demonized as few prior cabinet secretaries have been, yet her achievements as secretary of education belie her image." And he interviewed a brace of her former education staffers.

We've burned up plenty of internet here at the institute talking about DeVos, who I find a sort of fascinating character. Just type "DeVos" in the search bar up at the top and you can stroll down memory lane. So I'm not going to go too deep here on Maranto's report, but I do think he has a point or two worth talking about. It's not super-long, but I've read it so you don't have to.

Maranto talks about DeVos's "rocky start," and while he oversimplifies things, he has a point. Folks generally vastly underestimated DeVos's smarts. For the general public, her "grizzly bear" comment encapsulated her dopiness, but for educators, her lack of knowledge about basic education stuff (like growth versus achievement on test scores) was taken as a lack of smartitude.

I've always argued that DeVos's poor showing basically every time she had to sit down in front of Congress was because 1) she had no interest in making a good impression on them, 2) she had never held an actual job or any position where she had to answer to other people, 3) as a Christian dominionist-type, she doesn't believe that Congress is particularly important, 4) she was in DC to fill a position in a department that she believed should be abolished and so 5) she never did her homework.

None of that helped an image of a woman lowering herself to be around The Lessers and whose general contempt for public education was well-documented long before she ever showed up on Capitol Hill. Maranto also wants to blame her choice of chief of staff Josh Venable for damaging her relationship with White House staff, Congressional staff, and department staff, and I'm sure he didn't help, but she was perfectly capable of doing the damage all by herself. Maybe someone more savvy would have swapped him out for someone more politically astute, but DeVos has never shown herself to be savvy--you don't have to be politically smooth and capable when you have a checkbook fat enough to use as a bulldozer, plus a conviction that you are Very Right and Above All This.

Maranto argues that DeVos had some K-12 successes, and they count if you agree that the department should come as close as it can to exerting no influence and basically not existing. That was good for ESSA proposals, not so great for the Office of Civil Rights and communication indicating what you think laws might mean. But DeVos was adamant that she couldn't imagine any scenario in which the feds should step up and tell states, "Knock it off with that."  And she was faithful to not touching the levers of federal power, until she wasn't anymore. 

Maranto hilariously refers to DeVos's response to COVID as her "greatest and leas noted" success.

DeVos acted quickly to put regulatory flexibilities in place to insure that K-12 schools and colleges could continue to serve students.

I might phrase that a little differently. How about-- when schools across the country were scrambling and looking for guidance through the unprecedented medical crisis and answers and assistance were hard to find, Betsy DeVos waved them off and said, "Not my problem. You go figure it out." Until she decided that she wanted schools physically open and also that relief funds would make a great voucher starter; then she once again decided federal overreach isn't so bad. 

Then it became a political football because MAGA smelled an opportunity. This did not, as DeVos devotee Jim Blew pointed out, "serve children." But DeVos did not help.

Maranto's list of higher ed successes includes characterizing the "closing" of Title IX cases as a win, along with her general rollback of Title IX coverage. She did help get the Perkins act reauthorized. She doubled down on Obama's terrible college scorecard that reduced college quality to the question, "Will this help you make a bunch of money when you get a degree?" Though if it didn't, DeVos was adamant that you should still pay off your student loans.

She took a stand against furriners trying to influence what colleges teach by giving them money; that is only supposed to work for Americans. And Maranto posits DeVos as the greatest supporter of HBCUs in the history of the department. 

The staff that Maranto talked to highlighted two failures. She spent a lot of time pushing vouchers, particularly her Education Freedom Scholarship program, which died a deserved death. The other failure they brought up was her failure to shrink the department, in part by farming out its various functions to other departments, or by closing and/or merging the department with, say, the Department of Labor (because education is about creating more meat widgets). Of course, as Maranto notes, "this initiative might reappear in future Republican administrations."

So does this move the needle? I think not. DeVos was far more smart than people believed and far less effective than her opponents feared. Most of the "successes" that her supporters can point to are conservative successes in the "she stopped doing this" or "she got in the way of that" variety. I do think that the version of DeVos that became cemented in pop culture was both unfair and dangerous, because that version is far more hapless than the real thing, and therefor makes DeVos herself seem like a harmless rich kook, which she is not. She's not done with dismantling and privatizing public education in this country yet, and it would be a mistake to forget that.

Another Chapter In The Corinthian Saga

A decade ago, the Corinthian chain of colleges was the poster child for predatory for-profits, the shambling demonstration of everything that could be wrong with profiteering in the education world. They were also pretty good at gaming the refs and escaping consequences--even profiting from them. And now their heavily besmirchified name has surfaced again.

Corinthian was not so much in the college business as in the business of conning people into becoming conduits for carrying government money into Corinthian bank accounts. They were collecting mountains of grant and loan money and providing their students, who were hoping to educate their way into a better life, with no employment prospects, no useful education, but lots of debt. But the gravy train started to run into trouble. (I was following the story at the time; much of the following is cribbed from my own posts.)

In 2013, then-AG Kamala Harris took Corinthian to court. Here's a description of the suit's claims:

The complaint alleges that CCI intentionally targeted low-income, vulnerable Californians through deceptive and false advertisements and aggressive marketing campaigns that misrepresented job placement rates and school programs. CCI deployed these advertisements through persistent internet, telemarketing and television ad campaigns. The complaint further alleges that Corinthian executives knowingly misrepresented job placement rates to investors and accrediting agencies, which harmed students, investors and taxpayers.

This doubles as a description of Corinthian's business model. Recruiters were paid a bounty for each customer they signed up. They hired their own graduates to get their post-graduation employment numbers up. They were called "the nation's worst private college chain." And as word spread, the financial wheels that had attracted manny investors started to dome off.

In 2014, the Obama administration announced that they were by golly going to crack down on these predatory schools. That was in March. In June, the feds announced their plan to help prop Corinthian up and keep it open. Undersecretary Ted Mitchell (who came to the department carrying strong ties to Pearson, NewSchools Venture Fund, and other investor ties to the private education biz) announced that Corinthian would receive an influx of cash, permission to keep admitting students, and a government overseer to keep an eye on them (powered, I supposed, by the threat of-- I don't know. Stern looks? More cash?). It's possible that the feds were also concerned about the interests of investors, a list which included Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Royce, New York Mellon, and Morgan-Chase. And Corinthian, it later turned out, had plenty of friends in high places. This, apparently, was what Too Big To Fail looked like in the college world.

The whole "keep Corinthian open" thing was nuts. The feds position was that Corinthian was selling bogus snake-oil coated crystal treatment for serious maladies, but that students should be given the chance to complete the therapy.

By fall of 2014, the feds were helping to broker a deal in which Corinthian was to be bought up by a company. Specifically, a debt collection company, to Educational Credit Management Corporation, a group specializing in shaking down college students for their loan debts. They have been the subject of more than a few horror stories about overzealous collecting, but they did immediately (as in, December of 2014) set up a new subsidiary named Zenith Education Group to run the schools, and they turned out to be a bunch of pips as well. Putting a debt collection agency in charge of a college doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you understand that the purpose of the "college" is to recruit "students" to use as carriers for transporting loan dollars from lenders to the "college." The feds were pretty proud of themselves for having made sure that investments were secured and nobody had to actually suffer for their mismanagement of the for-profit business.

But by April of 2015, Corinthian was done, shot, outies, kaput. The feds fined them several million (finally) for being Very Naughty. They filed bankruptcy in May. Also by spring of 2015, many students had figured out that they had been had, bilked, cheated, and lied to. It may seem like they were a little slow, but remember-- for well over a year the feds had been saying two things:

1) If we find any lying cheating predatory schools, we will totally shut them down.
2) We think it's worth going the extra mile or ten to keep Corinthian schools open.

Operating under the premise that the federal government was reasonably trustworthy, would those two items not lead you to believe that you would be okay staying at Corinthian and continuing to borrow money to do so?

But no-- a whole bunch of students were left holding the bag, and by "bag" I mean "giant crapload of crushing debt for which they actually received nothing of value." Corinthian students had, in toto, acquired half a billion dollars worth of debt. So a whole bunch of those students decided that they would simply refuse to pay the debt.

That debt strike raised yet more kerfluffle. Here's what I said at the time:

On the one hand, I fully sympathize with folks who say, "When you borrow money, you pay it back. Doesn't get any simpler than that. If you borrow more money than you can pay back, that's just dumb. If you don't pay back your debts, somebody else pays the price. Other people should not pay for your dumb."

On the other hand, it's easy to make dumb choices people are lying to you.

Folks who find themselves in debt for Corinthian educations, but without any marketable skills that would allow them to make money-- those folks got in this mess by driving past a dozen corners where there should have been big bright neon red flags. But there were no flags there, because the gatekeepers had taken the flags down and stuffed them in their back pockets.

Also

Corinthian students have racked up over a half billion dollars in federal loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already asked the courts to grant relief, and the Department of Justice has reportedly said that the Department of Education has "complete discretion" to make the loans evaporate. Back in February of 2015, a $480 million relief package was announced which would help (about 40%) with the private loans that students took out, but those are separate from the half billion in federal loans.

Then there was an election, and while the Obama administration had not been terribly helpful, Betsy DeVos was not having any of these shenanigans (I mean, student shenanigans--predatory for-profit shenanigans were totally okay). One of her many appearances before Congress to discuss her technique of dragging a Marianas-sized trench with her heels yielded this classic DeVos quote:

I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.

As well as this observation:

Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.

So for four years the Corinthian saga was largely stalled. Until this week, when, on June 1, the Department of Education said it was going to release $5.8 billion in debt, freeing 560,000 borrowers from that particular weight. Mind you, that doesn't get these folks back any of the wasted time, resources, and opportunity that they have lost over the last decade. 

The department press release leans hard on putting this in the context of Harris's previous actions against Corinthian, which is certainly a better look than the context of Biden's previous actions (doing nothing). But it's a nice next Chapter in a tale that has been both depressing and instructive about the effects of treating schools as investment properties and education as a profit-making commodity.

Can SEL Avoid The Skills Trap

Social and Emotional Learning is having its latest fifteen minutes, and as I've written before, I'm not a big supporter. It's not that I don't believe in SEL; I'm certain that it's not only important but actually unavoidable. But as soon as you start turning it into some sort of area of formal instruction, problems arise.

One such problem is a version of a problem we have in other areas--the notion that certain "skills" can be taught and measured in a vacuum.

But you cannot, for instance, teach critical thinking skills in their own self-contained unit, because critical thinking skills can only function when you are thinking about something, and you can't think critically about something when you don't know anything about that subject. My ability to think critically about certain slices of American literature or traditional jazz is fairly well developed; my ability to think critically about ice fishing or raising baby iguanas is fairly non-existent. To think critically, I must have a handle on the body of knowledge with which my brain is going to interact. 

Reading even more so. We have plenty of evidence, both hard data and anecdotal, that how well you can read something is directly related to how much you know about the topic. Decoding a bunch of symbols into the sound of a word is easier if you, somewhere in the process, you recognize the word. And decoding on its own is simply a technique for "word calling"-- the act of reading a word out loud without having the slightest idea what it actually means. Comprehension is a house built on the foundation of prior knowledge.

Why do some folks keep trying to cast these as free-floating "skills"? I suspect that in the last decade or two, it has been driven by the desire to generate data. If reading and critical thinking are free-floating skills, then we can test for just those skills. That has given us some bizarro testing scenarios in which the test designers try to control for elements that are interwoven with the "skills" for which they want to test.

So to eliminate a child's vocabulary and comprehension from decoding skills, we get the DIBELS assessment that requires children to decode nonsense configurations of letters. To eliminate prior knowledge in reading comprehension and critical thinking tests, we subject children to tests involving topics about which they could not possibly have prior knowledge, like a reading about trade patterns in twelfth century Turkey (I wish I were making that up, but I'm not). 

The "skills" model also runs into trouble because it often reduces the concept of the skill, like assuming that skill of loosening a screw always involves turning it counter-clockwise, when reading comprehension and critical thinking are far more open-ended processes that do not necessarily yield a single possible correct answer. 

The problems of defining these as free-floating skills are many (and it's worth noting that many of us in the education world who disagree about plenty of other things actually agree about this). And it's not hard to see how the "skills" trap would be bad news for SEL as well.

First, social and emotional "skills" do not exist in a vacuum, but in the space between two or more human beings. If reading comprehension is the "how" of interacting with text and critical thinking is the "how" of interacting with ideas, then SEL is the "how" of interacting with other human beings. There's very little you can teach people about how to use a hammer or a saw if you make them learn without touching the tool or allowing the tool to touch anything else.

The notion that you could stop teaching other stuff and spend an hour during the day just "studying" or "practicing" SEL seems absolutely doomed to failure. If what is discussed in those SEL sessions is not modeled in teacher behavior the rest of the day, the SEL time will be wasted. If it is modeled the rest of the day, the SEL time will be unnecessarily redundant. You character--the point of SEL--is how you do All The Stuff; it is very hard to display your character by doing nothing in some meta sessions. Or, to put it in a familiar context, a person does not convince you that they're funny or smart or kind or friendly by telling you they are those things. 

Nor can reducing SEL to a "skills" model make it susceptible to data assessment and collection. Assessing character via test is on par with those job application quizzes that ask questions like, "Is it ever okay to steal from your employer." The results will tell you nothing except how good the test taker is at guessing what they're supposed to say, because SEL is impossible to eliminate from human interactions, and the interaction involved in an assessment has its own special set of conditions and cues. It is impossible to assess character with a multiple choice test.

SEL is susceptible to the same wrongheadedness that has damaged other areas of instructions in schools. As with reading and critical thinking, we know what works-- a mindful approach to growing these "skills" while doing the regular work of the classroom. For SEL, that means play and a space to be human beings in the classroom. Better not to do formal SEL at all than to repeat the same old mistakes.

MO: Dark Money Group Targets "Woke" Schools

Liberty Alliance USA is a dark money far right group in Missouri, and one of their projects is the Woke Heat Map, a map offering "an interactive tool designed to expose the insane actions of the radical Left." All of the places marked on the map are schools. Here are the evil woke offenses being called out.

* a school offering diversity, equity and inclusion training

* some university students started a podcast entitled "Angry White Men and How They Ruined the World"

* a high school distributed safe space and safe zone stickers for staff to put up to indicate LGBTQ allies

* antiracism training for middle school staff

* a school district offered a "coming out closet"

* all state schools are hiding CRT in the curriculum

* a report of the already-removed Maya Angelou math homework assignment

* a school district hired a supporter of CRT

* a quiz about political ideology

* university students vandalized a pro-life display

* the genderbread man, used in some school

* and a  probably-legitimate concern about the district where the admin told teachers to just hide any lessons that might cause trouble

I'll link to that site again, just in case you feel moved to use the handy reporting form for telling them about any other places exhibiting naughty wokeness.

We've seen these kind of tattling on school sites before, but this one is different because this is aimed at a larger audience, not just people upset about schools. Which means the widest possible audience of anti-wokers (sleepers?) now has a set of handy targets. And really, if there's anything we don't need in this country, it's people drawing targets on schools.

Who are these people? For that part, I'm going to turn this over to a twitter thread I've unrolled from Lindsey Simmons, a Missouri attorney who ran unsuccessfully for the legislature in 2020. There's a lot here. 

It has been one week since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

In response, a dark-money group from Missouri launched a "Woke Heat Map" so that fascists can "fight back" against a "woke agenda."

Twelve locations are tagged.

All of them are schools.

🧵 

First, some history.

Missouri is a safe haven for dark money groups.

Dark money is cash used to influence our politics from a concealed source. Usually it's passed through a non-profit on its way to support a candidate or cause. 

You might be thinking, "But wait! I have to input my info everytime I make a donation--with my employer and everything."

Yup. You do.

But the Supreme Court has made a distinction between giving to a candidate and independent expenditures. 

An independent expenditure is money spent on communications to support or oppose a candidate or cause--without coordinating with the candidate's committee.

At least, technically that's the rule.

Also, these "independent expenditure" groups can accept unlimited donations. 

You probably know them best as SuperPACs.

So how does it work? Well. You can donate $10M to a so-called non-profit that doesn't have to disclose its donors + that non-profit can give your $10M to a SuperPAC that can then send out $10M worth of mailers telling your community. 

Until 2016, Missouri was one of a few states with zero campaign contribution limits. This made us ground zero for dark money operations.

Recall that Eric Greitens was accused of sexual assault--but didn't resign until his dark money contacts threatened to be revealed.

So it likely won't surprise you that dark money groups continue to flourish in our state.

One of them is Liberty Alliance USA--a group that has launched a "Woke Heat Map" so that their followers know which specific spots to target for "fighting back" against the "woke agenda."

Every single one of these 12 locations is a school.

And these schools are being targeted for supporting trans students, offering African-American and multicultural curricula, diversity education, and promoting equity.

The map reads like an anti-democracy school hit list. 

Liberty Alliance USA purports to "promote Conservative principles" while "fighting the reckless embrace of Socialism."

They mention politicians "fighting" only "half-heartedly" to "protect conservative values"--a callout to any Republican not towing the fascist line.

But who is Liberty Alliance USA? Why target 12 different schools?

Well. Buckle up. Because Liberty Alliance USA isn't even it's name. It's quite literally a "Fictitious Name" for Cornerstone 1791.

This allows Cornerstone 1791 to try and hide its work and avoid accountability.

Cornerstone 1791 listed Kristen Blanchard-Ansley as its President, Secretary and member of its Board--along with Shane Bartee and William Greim.

The Articles of Incorporation name Edward Greim as a registered agent and Matthew Mueller as as an incorporator.

Mueller + Edward Greim are attorneys at Graves Garrett in Kansas City, MO--a law firm with strong ties to the Trump administration and that is paid by the legal defense fund for January 6th organizers.

Matthew Whitaker (of counsel at the firm) was the Acting Attorney General. 

And it should be remembered that Whitaker was appointed by Trump as the Acting Attorney General illegally. That's because he never received Senate confirmation.

I mean--there's even an on point SCOTUS decision from 2016 where Roberts, Thomas and Alito wrote that rule down.

But Trump put in Whitaker in charge of the DOJ to dismantle Robert Mueller's investigation. Whitaker is the same man who wrote an op-ed suggesting Mueller's investigation went too far + who shared an opinion piece asking Trump's lawyers not to cooperate with the investigation.

When the House January 6th Select Committee issued subpoenas to those who organized January 6th, Matt and Mercedes Schlapp created a legal defense fund to "pay for counsel from the law firm of former acting attorney general Matt Whitaker"--Graves Garrett.

William and Edward Greim are brothers. William has been the Treasurer for a handful of anti-democracy PACs in Missouri, such as Fair Missouri, Freedom to Work and, of course, Liberty Alliance.

Worth noting is the address that appears on some of these organization papers--it's the same as the Graves Garrett law firm, where William's brother Edward Greim is a partner.

And then we have Kristen Ansley who is the former Acting Executive Director of the Missouri GOP. 

She's also the current Executive Director of "Private Citizen" a non-profit that originally was organized as "Nemo Resideo Group" located at--you guessed it--the very same address as Graves Garrett law firm.

Ansley also sits on the Board of Directors of the Herzog Foundation, where she joins Todd Graves--named partner of the Graves Garrett law firm.

Graves is the brother of Sam Graves--United States Representative to Missouri's 6th Congressional District.

Yes, the same Sam Graves who signed the amicus brief undermining the 2020 election + who later voted against certifying election results.

But let's go back to Todd for a second. He's the former Chair of the MO Republican Party and is now on the U of Missouri Board of Curators.

If you dig into dark money groups, you'll learn that Graves Garrett partner Lucinda Luetkemeyer represented a Montana Representative during his case over the use of dark money.

Lucinda is married to MO State Senator, Tony Luetkemeyer--who voted for Todd Graves's appointment. 

Oh, and, Tony Luetkemeyer's cousin, once removed, is sitting U.S. Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer from Missouri's Third Congressional District.

And so what you have is one law firm, with strong familial connections to state and federal legislators, employing Trump loyalists. 

And now they're pushing out their latest effort to create a surveillance state. One where schools are placed on a list for doing any number of things that far-right radicals define as "unAmerican."

In chat rooms and on message boards since the sites launch, posters have pointed out exactly the kind of harm the targeting of schools and individuals can lead to.

Concerned citizens are already reporting this targeted list of schools to law enforcement agencies.

Our country is playing with fascism. And our democratic republic will not last if our institutions protect + permit the targeting of democratic institutions by dark money groups. 

The Power Worshippers and Education

Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism came out in 2019, but her discussion of the political bent of Christian nationalism seems very on point right now. 

Two moments in particular leapt out at me in her introduction:

This is not a "culture war." It is a political war over the future of democracy,

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Stewart researched thoroughly and traveled extensively to places like the gathering in Tulane, where the man who Capitol Hill Bible studies hosts a string of speakers who speak religion, but are mostly about "money and power" and declare "their intention to dominate every aspect of life in America. 

She traces the movement back to its earlier and its founding fathers, men like Jery Falwell and Bob Jones, who felt that he had "not just a God-given right not just to separate the races but to receive federal money for the purpose." She looks at the story of how abortion was promoted to a major conservative rallying point by men who, in her telling, wanted to fight back government in general and in particular IRS threats to their tax-free status.

She notes hypermasculinity as a "leitmotif" in conservative Christianity, which really rang a bell for me. I spent much of my younger years around guys I called softball Christians--the guys who would preach the love of Jesus for your fellow man, and then after the picnic, lead their pick-up softball team with take-no-prisoners ruthlessness, like it wasn't just a game between a bunch of our fellow men. Love Jesus, but slide into base hard so you can push the defender off.

Stewart sees a movement built on division and conquest. Notes one interview subject, "For the evangelical church right now, membership is no longer based on color. It is also not really based on religion anymore, either. Your litmus test for religious belonging comes from your political beliefs."

For longtime observers of certain sectors of the school privatization world, there is much to recognize. For one, there is the staunch belief in layers--not everyone is called to be on top, and schools among other institutions should be helping people find comfort in their level, their "right fit," not trying to unnaturally rise above it. Stewart tags Rousas John Rushdoony as one of the intellectual fathers of the movement and quotes him:

"Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so," Rushdoony muses, and the law requires that a slave "recognize his position and accept it with grace."

If it seems Christian nationalism is inherently hostile to democracy, Stewart hammers that home repeatedly. And they are particularly hostile to democratic-organized institutions, like, say, public schools. In 1979, she notes, Jery Falwell said he hoped to see the day when there would not be "any public schools--the churches will have taken over and Christians will be running them." Gary North, who developed for the Ron Paul Curriculum for his buddy Ron, said:

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

Elsewhere Stewart shows how the movement has "gamed the American judicial system" to support a push for "religious liberty" that "serves to establish a very clear set of privileges for one variety of religion." That included establishing through repeated argument that a religious expression that would otherwise be seen as violating the establishment clause be recast as personal protected speech. In other words, if you tell me I can't preach Christianity in my classroom because I'm a government agent, I will argue that you are infringing on my personal faith-based freedom of speech. She cites Justice Souter as one who saw through to the end of this argument:

If excluding a religious group on account of the fact that it is religious is a violation of its speech rights, then religious groups belong to a super-category of activity that can never be excluded from school (or other government functions).

When you read this book (and you should) you will have to remind yourself that it was published in 2019, because Stewart speaks so clearly to much of what is going on now. 

There is much to recognize here. Betsy DeVos. Hillsdale College. The Council for National Policy, the shadowy group with a master plan for education and a truly scary membership list. If you've had the negging sense that the religious right's attack on public education is part of something bigger, that's here. And if you have the nagging feeling that much of it doesn't make sense, Stewart will show you the angle from which it makes perfect sense.

This book is not going to make you feel better about any of it, which is probably the best reason to read it. Highly recommended.

NY: Andrew Giuliani Would Make A Terrible Governor

 Andrew Giuliani is running for governor of New York. In fact, he is reportedly doing pretty well, considering his less-than-stellar start.

Yes, he's the son of that other Giuliani, and yes, he has a whole bunch of bad ideas.

In response to the shooting in Buffalo, he says he wants the death penalty (which is not much help for the victims who have already been murdered). He's disgusted that New Yorkers "celebrated": the legalization of late term abortions (though he can't really tell you who was celebrating that or when or where) and he is disgusted, as a father, by the idea of abortions at 39 weeks (which is not actually a thing). 

When it comes to education, he also shines. 

Giuliani promises the "highest tax cut and budget cut in the history of our state" and when asked what he'll cut to fund that, he targets education. Giuliani apparently believes the notion that public schools are just a scam run by the teachers' union. From an interview with Capitol Tonight

“I think immediately we have to go and we have to look at the teachers’ union. And we have to look that it’s over $31 billion and I understand a lot of that comes from property taxes as well,” he said.

When Capital Tonight pointed out that $31 billion is the entire education budget for the state of New York, Giuliani said that education and the teachers’ union are “one and the same."

“I’m a big believer in bringing the free market into education,” he said. “I don’t think the teachers’ union should decide, exclusively, what our child’s education should be.”

He promises to raise the charter cap from 460 to over 1,000, and he wants a "tax voucher program," which I guess is some sort combination of tax credit scholarships and vouchers and maybe education savings accounts too and I think we can safely say that he just wants to hand over money to folks "so that way parents can take those tax dollars and take them to a private school, a parochial school, a Yeshiva, or a home school."

This is where we are, I guess-- someone can be anti-public education while only having a general rough idea of what the heck he is talking about. Good luck, New Yorkers.

ICYMI: Another Awful Week Edition (5/29)

It just keeps coming. I've said my piece elsewhere, and will continue to do so in places where it might matter. I hope you do the same. In the meantime, here's some reading from this miserable week, and I swear, most of it is not about the news you have already read about over and over and over again.

Stop saying nothing has changed since Sandy Hook

I'm as guilty of saying so as anyone, but Greg O'Loughlin, guesting for Andy Spears, points out that some things are very different.

Why America's carnage never ends--and only gets worse

This piece is more hopeful that the title suggests, but it's also a pretty sweeping indictment of... everything. It also provides a look at our situation that goes outside the usual lines of debate. I don't agree with all of it, but it's something to ponder.

America is a society screaming out in rage and pain. In shock and despair. It’s heart has been ripped out. It has been dehumanized. You can see it in the way dogs are treated. Now imagine how people are.

How people treat each other. That is they key choice a society ever makes. Europeans and Canadians treat each other in ways Americans don’t. With dignity, respect, gentleness, warmth. Americans treat each other on a completely different spectrum. It goes from indifference to hostility to outright hate.

This is what happens when trust collapses in a society, as people become dehumanized.

Before massacre, Uvalde gunman frequently threatened teen girls online

What's bothersome here is not that he did it, but that in doing it, he was not particularly out of the ordinary. From the Texas Tribune.

Are active shooter drills worth it?

A really excellent piece of reportage from Rachel Cohen at Vox (who admitted that what she found challenged some of what she believed going in); a thorough look at the pros and cons of those stupid damn drills.

Voting is not enough to save public education or keep it safe

Nancy Flanagan on what it is that we need right now. Read this twice.

A year of "protecting children" in Texas

A good deep read into the contexst of Texas, a state whose leaders have lost their way.

Ohio charter schools gobble up more than ever

Stephen Dyer points out just how hungry for tax dollars Ohio's charter schools are.

Whittle's latest project barely solvent

Chris Whittle just can't stop failing upwards. Washington Post has the story of his current project-- a private school that was supposed to change the world, but which can barely pay its bills.

Teachers suspended for teaching.

When TC Weber covered this story, he was assured that no such thing happened. Now NewsChannel 5 in Nashville has the story of teachers suspended for daring to use their own materials in class and deviate from the proscribed teaching plan.

Attacking machine learning training by re-ordering data

Cory Doctorow with an explanation of just how not-magical machine learning actually is.

Conservatives long ago lost the war over America's public schools

Adam Laats in the Washington Post explaining that conservatives long since lost this battle, and that's why they are continuing to fight the way they are.

Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

Kelly Field at the Hechinger Report shows us what the prohibitions against--well, all the things-- looks on the ground.

Texas' Jim Crow-styled Highland Park ISD

When someone wrote a glowing tale of Highland Park's successes, critics popped up to explain that HPISD is a fine exercise in old-school segregation. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the receipts.

Inside the first year at Alabama's LGBTQ charter

This school was in the new for being a target of a candidate's political ads. Now AL.com has a feature story about their year. 

Under new laws, some teachers worry supporting LGBTQ students will get them sued or fired

Meanwhile, in other places, Don't Say Gay laws continue to have the intended chilling effect. A USA Today story, via MSN (so no paywall).

Meet the mild, gentle kindergarten teacher who tackled an intruder at her elementary school

Heck of a story from Nashville, and a reminder that teachers are dealing with this kind of crap all the time.

Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Maris Popova is a treasure. Her site The Marginalia (previously known as Brain Pickings) is loaded with fascinating and often uplifting material. I recommend subscribing. This piece about Beethoven's struggles in creating and presenting his Ninth Symphony-- it's inspiring and uplifting and it made me go listen to the symphony again.