ICYMI: August Is A Month Of Sunday Nights Edition (8/7)

The Institute staff is currently hunkered down on a lake straddling the New Hampshire/Maine border, a field office established by my grandfather, a NH general contractor, seventy-some years ago. There's not much signal here, but I can still do a little work to collect the week's readings for you.

Carnegie Medal for Dolly Parton

Let's start with something cool-- the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy went to Dolly Parton, who, as we've said before, demonstrates what real philanthropy is supposed to look like.

Pearson Plans To Sell Textbooks As NFTs

Well, this is an interesting new twist.  Especially if you're still trying to understand NFTs. But whatever is going on, it definitely involves Pearson trying to make more money. Story from the Guardian.

Laptops are still spying on students

From Wired, more news about how the surveillance state has not slowed down, and students are still at risk.

Epic founders pour money into politics

You've heard that the founders of Epic charters have been charged with all sorts of shenanigans. This piece from NonDoc details how much of the stolen taxpayer money was used to grease some politicians.

Georgia professor shoots and kills incoming freshman

Yes, arming teachers is an awesome idea. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has one more story of guns gone wrong.

How the Green Bay Packers helped Justice Alito explain religious liberty law

Deseret looks at a recent Alito speech and its implications re: his general disinterest in the separation of church and state.

Memo regarding new state teacher qualifications

Brittany Fonte at McSweeney's with a darkly hilarious take on Florida's new non-requirements for teaching certifications.

ICYMI: Truncated Road Edition (7/31)

 Still far away from the home office, but still have a few bits that you should see this week.

How the right wing went too far for Republicans

Molly Olmstead at Slate with an analysis of why Tennessee's governor and Hillsdale College's president managed to make a mess by saying what they've said many times before.

National Parents Union’s Mythical Membership: Letter to Los Angeles Times

Maurice Cunningham writes to the LA Times to correct the record on an astro-turf parents' group.

GOP school board takeover strategy is a bust

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are at The Hill with good news--the MAGA attempt to commandeer school boards is not going so well.

Make a commitment, go to teacher school for free

Virginia comes up with a plan better than just handing out teacher credentials to passing strangers on the street. 

Investment in teachers is central to the health of public education

From Maine, some more sensible talk about recruiting and retaining.

Roundup July 2022: Media, Reading, and Misinformation

Paul Thomas offers a guide to some of the notable misinformation out there about education.

ICYMI: Road Trip Edition (7/24)

 I've been driving across the country this week, but I still have time to read. Here's some goodies from the week.

Kentucky Teacher of the Year Speaks to Congress and Resigns

This is hard to read, but what a sign of the times. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is on the story.

The Jackhammer Parents Are Here

At We Are Teachers, a breakdown of the new kind of "activist" parent some schools are facing.

After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them

At Hechinger Report, a researcher explains how he concluded that vouchers are a bad idea.

Moms for Liberty: "Joyful Warriors" in the fight to demolish public school

Kathryn Joyce at Salon has been covering the christianist nationalist school busters like a boss (you should be following her on Twitter), and she went to the Moms For Liberty convention, God bless her.

Young NH Teachers Leaving the Profession

From Seacoast Online, another mainstream story about why some teachers are getting out. 

Stuck on the Rufo Road

Jennifer Berkshire writing for The Forum both dissects the Rufo-style assaults on pub lic schools and diagnoses why the Democrats are so damn useless on the issue.

New PA tax credit boost and accountability

Pennsylvania is upping its tax credit scholarship program while continuing to let that program operate in the dark. 

PA's teacher plan involves who??

Pennsylvania has a plan for stemming the teacher exodus. Steven Singer has some questions.

Hillsdale comes to Tennessee

As that whole deal turns radioactive, it's a good time to read this Andy Spears piece that explains what the whole deal is about.

Blog Bulletin

The staff of the institute will be on the road for the next several weeks, visiting a couple of the field offices. We will, in fact, be driving cross-country with the board of directors. In a car. While other family keep an eye on the homestead, we will rendezvous with Pacific Northwest crew somewhere around Portland, OR. The we will drive home, in a car. The we will catch our breath and head to the Down East field office, not quite near Portland, ME. 

All of which means that I will be away from the office for a while and posting here will be sparse and sporadic. In the interim, I recommend you check out the many fine writers on the list to the right or, if you like, wander through the back catalog here. Or just go outside and catch some fireflies. I have heard that taking a break to breathe deep can be good for you. 

ICYMI: Packing Edition (7/17)

The staff here at the institute will be traveling soon to visit some of our field offices. That will be an adventure, no doubt, but as we prep for that adventure, here is your reading list for the week. Remember--if there's something here you like, share the post from its original site. You, too, van be an amplifier.

"Critical race theory" is being weaponized. What's the fuss about?

From the Economist, here's one of the better pieces I've read for providing a level-headed summary of what the fuss is, in fact, all about.

The supreme court has ushered in a new era of religious school

Adam Laats, historian of school-related religious culture warfare, has another great explainer up, this time at The Atlantic. Now that the church state wall is in shambles, he says the country is not ready for what comes next.

The supreme court is unraveling the separation of church and state

Shelly Balik is a history professor; at the Washington Posr, she offers up a history of that much-hammered wall.

The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harassing teachers on social media

Tanya Basu in the MIT Technology Review. This is scary stuff. 

The world of high dose tutoring has become a land grab

In Edsurge, Daniel Mollenkamp notes that now that there's big money in tutoring, some of the folks getting involved aren't offering anything actually useful or proven. I know--what a shock!

Students need teachers NOT tutors! Who's pushing tutors and why.

Nancy Bailey has more about the rise of tutoring as a "solution" in teaching.

John White now sells Eureka math

John White was once education chief in Louisiana. Now he's one more salesman hawking questionable edu-wares. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the full story. 

We don't need no education

Warm body laws make an appearance in Arizona, and Kathryn Joyce is at Salon with the story of the latest move in the nation's most public education-hating state.

Florida's civic education and religion

At The74, Florida Phoenix takes a look at allegations that Ron DeSantis is trying to put the Jesus back in Florida civics education.

College Board no longer disclosing AP test results by ethnicity, state

What to do when your own data shows a bias in your test? Maybe stop publishing the data. K-12 Dive has the story. 

Community Schools: What are they and how do they work

"Community Schools" are defined roughly six trillion different ways. Teen Vogue takes a look at the way they ought to work.

The state took children from their parents--then failed to give them a real education

A heartbreaking failure of the system. These foster kids in Michigan thought they were gaining credits towards graduation. Turns out they were wrong. NBC News. 

The New York Times visits Croydon, NH

The NYT sent Dan Barry to cover the story of the small town where a libertarian tried to get the school budget cut in half. Includes some details not brought up in previous coverage of the story.

School funding lawsuits

Rachel Cohen anchors this look at the long difficult lawsuits filed to get school funding up to par with a look at the lawsuit currently winding up in Pennsylvania. At Vox. 

Nation's overthinkers convene to determine what that's supposed to mean

A little Onion to cleanse the palate. 

This week at Forbes, I took a look at the new grant rules for charter schools and looked at what happened to the Lemon Test for determining if the church-state wall has been breached.

It's Coming From Inside The House

You know the old scary story. babysitter blah blah blah scary phone calls blah blah blah police blah blah "It's coming from inside the house!" The scary thing is not outside; the threat is in the building with you.

Yesterday, TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild made a trenchant observation in response to my Christopher Rufo piece, which he admitted to not having finished.

So why didn’t I finish this piece?

It’s because I’ve grown weary of our obsession with crafting straw men in order to blame someone besides ourselves for the slow death of public education. Sure Rufo, and his ilk contribute in a significant manner to the ongoing dismantling of the public system, but if we really want to hold culprits accountable we need just look in the mirror.

He went on to write about MNPS system, specifically Oliver Middle School, where he was struck by a particularly non-responsive district meeting in which the district leadership gave a master class in how to do a crappy job of dealing with the public.

As fate would have it, within an hour or two of reading Weber's post, I was reading a post from Mary Holden, friend of the Institute, explaining why she had just resigned from her post in that same district, citing, among other things, that same meeting, and providing one clear example of why the district is losing teachers. 

Teaching should not be like this. Going to work should not be this stressful. There should not be tears shed on a regular basis about your job. But that is what many teachers, myself included, experienced at Oliver these past couple years. There are enough other stressors associated with teaching, like behavior management and the time needed for planning and grading, and what we need most is support, encouragement, and empowerment. But those things are not being given at Oliver. Teachers feel expendable and disrespected. And many have quit as a result.

When it comes to making schools function poorly, local administration trumps state or national policy pretty much every time. Plenty of parents and teachers who know diddly and squat about ongoing national debates about education policy know plenty about how Principal McButtface and Superintendent Dimbulb have made their lives immediately and palpably miserable. 

There is a lot of bad management in the education world. My personal favorite, because I've encountered it so many times, is to deal with oncoming contentious issues through some combination of stonewalling, denial and gaslighting. That trick never works, and yet plenty of administrators never get tired of trying it. "People are going to yell at me over this," they declare, "So I will just try to keep them from finding out it's happening." They are the management equivalent of the teen who grinds the passenger side of the family car against a tree and deals with it by parking with that side of the car real close to that side of the garage, going to bed without telling anyone, and hoping that things will be better in the morning.

The other classic bad administrator is the eternal antagonist, the one who views parents, teachers, students, the board--everyone--as an enemy intent on disturbing his peace and questioning his authority. These guys can never get through a day without getting into a fight with someone. 

Between problematic administrators and the non-zero number of problematic teachers, there are, as Weber suggests, more than enough explanations for dissatisfaction with schools without resorting to guys like Chris Rufo.

But I am going to push back against his point, because I think there are serious ways that the Chris Rufos exacerbate the situation.

For one thing, administrators and teachers need to understand that these guys are out there. Education is now a political issue in ways that it never was in the past. And because politics are particularly brutal these days, we're seeing a classic model affecting schools. In politics, the search is always on for the worst possible example of behavior by your opponent. There are something like 17,000 school districts in this country, and on any given day, somewhere, in one of them, somebody is doing something stupid. That's not new. What is new is that there is a whole political machine waiting to grab every bad example and blow it up and weaponize it against the entire institution of public education. 

Local problems rule, but some local problems are manifestations of problems created by state and national policy. Tennessee is a fine example; go back at least the days when Kevin Huffman was put in charge of the education department, with no more educational expertise than can be gleaned from a couple of years as a Teach for America faux teacher. Tennessee has been a magnet for one bad amateur education idea after another, with leaders clueless about everything except how to use education-flavored businesses to suck up taxpayer dollars. 

Teachers and parents have hate hate hated schools centered on high stakes testing, and while all the pain has been felt locally, the origin was national and state policy. 

George Floyd's murder was the most notable event spurring an attempt by schools to address the shifting demographics of education, but in the absence of any national leadership on the issue, local districts continued to craft (or buy) their own responses, and some of those were clearly awful. Not only awful, but awful at a time when some folks were actively searching for bad examples. As I've said before, I think of Moms For Liberty as not exactly astro-turf; like the Tea Party movement, I think some opportunistic political actors have poured gasoline on some real concerns. And that would have been an excellent time for some districts to pay attention to what kind of fuel they want to put out into the world. 

That's a hard line to walk in the current atmosphere. Here's NBC covering a survey--by the teachers union--finding that Ron DeSantis' messaging is working. The reason it's working is because DeSantis is careful and precise--in fact, using far more precision than reality supports. "All the Don't Say Gay law says is that we shouldn't teach K-3 graders about sexual and gender stuff," he says, which most people agree with, except that that glib shortening doesn't match the reality on the ground, where the law also includes a vague line about age-appropriate materials in other grades. Nobody knows exactly what the bill means. Is it a violation to acknowledge that gay people exist? Nobody knows, and the most critical part of the law is the part that says that anybody at all who thinks the law has been violated can sue the school. Pretty much everyone agrees that kindergartner's shouldn't be getting graphic demonstrations of sexual intercourse, but somewhere out beyond that is a big wide vague area occupied by people on both sides of the debates.

However, nothing about the nature of that debate means that schools should do something that is clearly stupid. I'm aware that "clearly stupid" is also a big vague line, and that it's a bad idea to let controversies chill you into doing avoiding anything at all. But there are still things that are clearly stupid. Refusing to engage in dialogue with the public that you serve is stupid. Bringing something into your classroom that you suspect might be controversial, without first checking with the professional opinion of some of your colleagues--that's stupid. Thinking that you are an educational crusader who doesn't have to answer to anybody--well, that may not be stupid, but it's certainly a serious error in judgment. You answer to everybody--that's the heart of the problem in education, and always has been.

Some of this is likely to get worse. It takes solid professional judgment to navigate tricky educational waters, and many states are deciding that the way to solve their "teacher shortage" is to redefine teacher as "any warm body with a bit of education," which is not going to bring in a lot of people with well-developed professional education judgment. 

And then there's the other problem we don't talk enough about--the trouble finding good administrators. Just as students can see whether or not teaching looks like a great career, teachers can see what it means to be an administrator. For twenty-some years, it has meant having all the responsibility, but none of the power. It means putting out fires. It means dealing with all the political fire being brought to bear on education these days.

We will never know how many teachers who would have great administrators looked at the job and thought, "They don't pay anyone enough money for that job." But tough times reveal character, and the past years in education have revealed that many administrators aren't very good at their jobs. 

Well, this has dragged on longer than I wanted it to. Let me try to abandon my other thoughts and just make for the exit.

Look, I do agree that some of us focus so much on the larger picture of policy and attacks on education that we may neglect the local issues that may have far more direct effect on the health and survival of a particular local district. But I believe that the local and the large policy pictures are linked and connected and intertwined in ways that matter. Likewise, I think those of us who write about local issues and those of us who write about national stuff are both important. It's a big complicated puzzle and it's going to take a lot of people to put it together. 

Goodbye, Dolly (Note: She's Okay, Honest)

Update: I wrote the headline to express a personal point and make a play on "Hello, Dolly," but apparent some readers have been panicking. Sorry. Everyone is fine, honest.)

After five great years, the Board of Directors has aged out of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library.

I have been plugging this program for years (my first post was in 2014, back before the Board of Directors was even a sparkle in our eyes). Parton has engineered putting a book a month into the hands of families all across the country--we're talking (currently) 184 million books in millions of households meeting no requirement other than they have a child between the ages of born and five. It costs the family nothing. 

The quality of the books is great. Over the years we have received classics, newer books, books featuring every sort of family, every sort of kid. They are filled with wonder, kindness, beauty, excitement. This is one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you'll find.

The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It's still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child's name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).

I am not, I'll confess, a huge fan of Parton's music, but she is the very best example of what good a person can do with their giant pile of money you can find. Not trying to shape the world to her own requirements, not trying to buy a good name, not trying to make herself the unelected boss of whatever. And the little PR that Imagination Library does is to get itself out into the hands of students, not to raise Parton's profile. She doesn't pay people to promote it, and it has spread largely through word of mouth or through the local organizations that co-sponsor it and help make the connections to local families.

Once a month, the boys received a book, addressed to them personally. We love books in this house, and the arrival of the monthly "book from Dolly" was an event. We will miss it.

The last book to arrive is Kindergarten, Here I Come, and the first page inside the front cover is a letter from Parton, that I'll quote in part:

My, how time flies. It seems only yesterday when your family and friends read you your first story. You were just a baby. Now you're five years old and about to go to school. How exciting!

This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading...Every book is a treasure and every time you open one you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.

I hope you have a great time in school. I bet your school will even have a library where you can check out books. You and all your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. 

The board of directors examines a position paper

Her signature, a simple Dolly, is at the end. The first time we read the message together I was apparently having a bad allergy day.

None of the rich amateurs who want to change the face of education are doing anything of this value on this scale--both intensely personal and yet broadly across the globe. I mean, imagine if Bill Gates had said, "I want to give every child a book" instead of "I want to give every child a test."

And if there is a tiny human in your life, and they aren't signed up, go to the program website and see if it's operating in your neighborhood, and if so, then sign up that child.

What a fabulous, generous, powerful program.  God bless Dolly Parton. We are going to miss here at this house.