St. Louis City Museum

One of our cross country stops was in St.Louis, where we visited The City Museum. If you have children and live anywhere within reach, we recommend this Very Highly.

The museum is located in a 600,000 square foot former warehouse of the International Shoe Company, and "museum" is a little bit of a misnomer. There are some displays of historical stuff, but mostly it is a multi-story interactive art installation, a huge complex of immersive art. Your kids will just think it's the best playground in the world.

There is no map or guide to what is where, and it seems that something is always under construction, so visitors have no choice but to just start exploring. The Board of Directors leapt into the first tube the saw snaking around a pillar, and quickly disappeared into the ceiling. And so much of the museum is built from recycled stuff, particularly recycled industrial stuff.

There's a complex of caves, a whole bunch of hamster-tube type climbing runs, a three-story slide, a bunch of fish, tunnels that go from one floor to another. A few floors up there are a couple of installations for younger children--well, really, they're for parents of younger children who want to be able to see whatever the child is up to.

All of that is indoors. Outdoors is a whole other installation several stories high and loaded with more crawlspaces and I will tell you that it was when the boys were about to head into the very top I called them back down because my own acrophobia was fully kicked in. Apparently they did not inherit my irrational fear of heights.

But that points at what I find interesting and inspiring about the City Museum. I've logged many hours in many children's museums, and what most have in common is that you have to monitor your child and make sure they adapt to whatever rules the place requires. 

But the City Museum is centered on children, in the sense that it is built for them to use, not for them to be taught how to use it "properly." There's no "Honey, you can't put the plastic pork chop from the pretend store over in the fake fish pond" in this place. There's certainly a place for activities that require children to bend (we've spent many hours at various versions of water tables), but it's a whole other sensation to be in a space where kids can just be. The City Museum is not organized around what adults think kids should be made to do, or should want to do, but just around how kids are. All while being truly beautiful. 

One wonders, obviously, how a school could incorporate such a philosophy, to organize around students and what they want to, love to, do. 

At any rate, this is a fabulous spot. St. Louis is about a day away for us, but I think we may revisit it next summer just to stop here. You can follow City Museum on Twitter and of course visit the website. And at the end I'll throw in a drone trip through a tiny fraction of the whole thing. 

Lumping, Hyperbole, and Education Disruption

I get the occasional note pointing out that I use what appears to be wishy washy language with "some reformsters this" and "a few right wingers that." and while I generally try to avoid fuzziness, this particular fuzziness is deliberate and, I think, necessary.

It's incorrect to lump all education disruptors together, because there's a wide array of folks who want a piece of the education disruption action. But they don't all want the same thing, and not only is it unfair to lump them all together, it's just not accurate.

There are people who believe in choice, in the idea that there should be a broad selection of options for students. I'm actually one of these people; I just happen to believe that providing those options under one roof is the best, easiest, most efficient way to provide those choices. 

There are people who believe in the power of the free(ish) market. They believe in competition and lifting all boats and all that fun stuff. Most sincere free marketeers have no real beef with public education; mostly they would just like to see it as one of many options. I think their model is flawed and would ultimately do more damage than good.

There are people who are concerned about something going on in their own local schools, from bullying to some educational choices they disagree with. More than once I have been one of these people, too (I think pretty much every single teacher has been). These people, I want to note, are different from the people who have heard something on Fox News or a Twitter thread about some terribly awful thing happening in some school somewhere else and here are 143 signs that the same thing is about to happen in your local school (though 142 of the signs are unrelated to the actual awful thing).

There's a whole other broad spectrum of people who don't know what they're talking about, but who are sure they know just what education needs, and they range in levels of effectiveness in bollixing things up from the powerful (Bill Gates and Common Core) to the merely annoying (that lady who comes to every board meeting to demand that cursive, Latin, and sentence diagramming be required in grades K-12). 

There are privatizers who, by and large, want to skim off the profitable bits 

There are grifters. They don't have any particular ideological beliefs; they just smell a chance to make some money. T. C. Weber has convincing argued on his blog for ages that Tennessee's education leaders are not interested in any particular aspect of education reform as they are in just running whatever grift looks most promising this week.

So far we're talking about people pursuing policies that have a variety of negative consequences, from wasting resources on ideas that simply won't work, to making the work of teaching and operating a school that much harder, to removing accountability and democratic processes from school, to crippling a public school's ability to function. 

It's hyperbole to say these folks are "destroying" public education; they are making it suck more and weakening it in ways that make it easier to destroy. The hyperbole comes from many quarters, from public ed teachers who are very alarmed to public ed supporters who want to raise an alarm (these days, if you aren't yelling about a Major Crisis, how do you even get anyone's attention) and reformsters who have at time used the language of destruction, assuming, as many do, that you can't really destroy public education because it's just indestructible.

And while many of these folks have not intended to destroy public education as we know it, they have provided cover for lots of folks who do. 

You can find them at places like FlashPoint 2022, swearing their fealty to God and the Constitution and their intention to take back the United States. You'll hear these folks talk about reconquering the Seven Mountains-- business, government, family, religion, media, education, and entertainment. They've been talking about this for a long time, courtesy of such shadowy groups as the Center for National Policy. Read Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. 

These are the folks who envision a completely different education world. Education as a private good that you buy yourself with the aid of a government voucher (and if you can't afford more than that, well, your lack of wealth is your own fault and other people shouldn't have to pay to make up for it). Education used to sort people out into their proper level in life. Education under the control of religion. 

Disruptors come in a variety of flavors, from those who think they're in the early stages of a game of Jenga and they can yank out planks here and there without really compromising the basic structure, to those who just want to take a sledgehammer to the whole tower. The education disruption field includes the same range, and it's not useful to lump them all together.

It's a tricky balance (which should probably be the official motto of this blog). On the one hand, it's useful to know which kind of disruption you are--or are not--facing. On the other hand, many disruptions don't intend to trash education entirely, but they provide cover and plough the field for those who do. And many of these disruptors and privatizers have been trying to change the whole purpose and premise of public education in this country without any sort of public conversation about that change, and it's hard to predict how significantly altering the foundation of public education will affect the structures resting on that foundation. Easy answers are almost always wrong (maybe that should be the official motto of this blog). 

School Vouchers and Resource Hoarding

I was revisiting a piece from just a couple of months ago in which I subjected myself to the Daily Wire's Betsy DeVos interview, and I noticed again the exchange that starts with this extraordinary quote from Michael Knowles, the interviewer.

This sounds like when Western civilization made sense, when our civilization was growing and thriving--this is how education was done. It wasn't big institutionalized one-size-fits-all public schools. Alexander the Great (going all the way back) Alexander the Great didn't go to a public school...he was tutored by Aristotle.

This was available to people who had privilege and means, he muses. Why can't we give that to everyone?

DeVos replies that we can, with vouchers. 

I talk a lot about how a voucherized education world would leave parents (and the general taxpaying public) unprotected in an unregulated market loaded with grifters and amateurs, but we also need to be aware of the other part of this dynamic.

DeVos et al like to talk about vouchers as if they create a level playing field for all parents and students, but of course they don't. DeVos and the other Betters of the world will take their kid's backpack full of cash and toss it onto the back of a dump truck full of more cash. There is no voucher in the world big enough to keep the DeVos family from hoarding all the Aristotles for themselves. 

Well, goes the DeVos theory, the poors can just pool their voucher money and try to hire their own Aristotle, or maybe set up some kind of microschool where some kids meet in someone's living room and all log on to Aristotle.com together (except it will be something else because that website is taken by an "industry leading political data, consulting and software" corporation. 

This whole "band together and hire some teachers" idea is not bad-- the group could band together, and then, I don't know, elect representatives who sat on a board to collect the tax money and make decisions about the "school" that they own together. Except that they wouldn't have the power to levy taxes or legally do all sorts of other stuff. Yes, DeVos is proposing a neutered school board--one that doesn't have the power to make a nuisance of itself or counter-balance the power and privilege of the Betters.

And those various solutions, from microschools to software to classes from maybe-qualified teachers in makeshift facilities are all solutions that the Betters would never accept for their own children.

See, there are lots of ways to view the call of DeVos et al for "education freedom," but one way is definitely to view it as a way for the Betters to disempower the competition, so that it's easier for them to grab all the best educational resources. Especially to be able to do so without the galling requirement to finance via taxes their own competition for those resources. 

Vouchers would enable resource hoarding. Does the current public system enable it in some places. It surely does, but vouchers do not offer anything like a solution. 

How To Harass Female High School Athletes

In the interest of Fairness, many states have pursued the idea of anti-trans athlete legislation, largely centered around the notion of athletes who were born male transitioning to female and thereby gaining an unfair advantage over those athletes born female. 

I'm not going to wade into the debate about this issue, other than to note that I've known plenty of highly driven teen athletes and their highly driven parents and I still doubt that any of them would have ever decided that a gender transition would be a great way to get an edge in sports competition.

Instead, I want to look at the real world consequences of these kinds of laws.

Here's a story from Utah about one of the results of the state's girls track and field competition:

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

Congratulations unnamed female athlete! For your dominance in your sport, you win the chance for the state and your school district to dig through your records to prove that you have always been a girl. 

The girls showed excellence in her sport, so disappointed competitors can go ahead and make the accusation and she then has the burden of proof to show that she is and has always been a female. 

Might have been worse if she were in Ohio, where the House advanced the Ohio version of a Save Women's Sports Act that allowed losers to burden winners not just with the burden to prove their adequate femaleness, but to do it by way of testosterone levels, dna testing or "participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy." Congratulations on your win, Bethany. Now, the state needs you to submit to a little physical exam.

That goodness Governor DeWine saw through to the real issue here:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

He vetoed the bill.

Other states have shown less restraint. Oklahoma, for instance, did get a Save Women's Sports Act passed into law. That one gives any female athlete who thinks she's been boxed out or beaten and deprived of benefits to sue the school, and she's got up to two years to sue. Oklahoma's law doesn't offer any guidance about how the school is supposed to defend itself in court and what demands for "proof" they can place on their athletes. 

South Carolina has one of these laws, too., basically identical to Oklahoma's. And even the feds were trying to get in on the act at one point. 

These laws are a perfect example of how focus on ideology ends up creating a huge mess for real human beings. Every one of these laws becomes a tool by which successful female athletes can be harassed, a whole new way to take revenge on Suzi because she beat your beloved child on the field. And the more excellent and dominant the female athlete is, the more she makes herself a target for this sort of thing. Not a great way to "save" women's sports.

ICYMI: Back Home Edition (8/21)

 We're back home at the Institute, where the living is easy and the wifi mostly works. Lots to catch up on.

We don't need more police in schools

An op-ed by a 17 year old New Jersey student, providing a perspective on the issue.

Gov. Youngkin faces second suit over tip line

In Virginia, Governor Youngkin is getting sued over his super-secret snitch-on-a-teacher operation. Here's hoping some light is shed. Reported by Hannah Natanson at the Washington Post.

TN charters deny connections to Hillsdale

It has become advantageous in Tennessee to distance your Hillsdale charter operation from Hillsdale, but Channel 5 dug up the connections anyway. 

Is there a national teacher shortage?

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat looks at what we do and don't know about the great teacher shortage that may or may not be going on right now. Barnum has, for my money, one of the evenest hands in the ed journalism biz.

There are lots of bad ideas for solving the teacher shortage

Anne Lutz Fernandez writing at Hechinger about everyone's favorite topic. Some great insights here. 

How to make more teachers

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at the shortage and some of the bad ideas for fixing it. 

Can local dialog keep trust strong?

At 4 Public Education, some thoughts about how to keep local ties strengthened.

What parents should say to teachers

The Washington Post actually asked actual teachers this question, and the results are useful.

Yep. Class Size Matters.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider supports what every teacher already knows. 

How many teachers have been assaulted by students or parents?

EdWeek writes about a survey about just how physically safe teachers are these days. It's not encouraging. 

The truth about the history education wars in 2022

Johnathan Zimmerman in the Washington Post bringing some perspective to the battles over how to teach US history in schools. 

What's actually being taught in history class

Pretty cool multi-media piece from New York Times that talks to actual history teachers. It's an encouraging piece, a reminder that what is actually happening is far more complex and rich than the shouty debates going on elsewhere.

Florida's war on public education looks a lot like Russia's

Johnathan Friedman and Polina Sadovskaya from PEN America write about just how bad the Florida assault on civics looks. 

North Dakota aims to recruit Florida teachers

Fargo, specifically. Newsweek looks at the prospects of luring teachers away from the land of Don't Say Gay.

Fordham wants school choice explosion

Stephen Dyer reports on Fordham's new push for more choice in Ohio, which he calls "too much."

Just do this and ten thousand other things

McSweeney's for the win with this "teacher's back-to-school lament" by Tom Lester

Meanwhile, in other places, I published a print piece at The Progressive about Teachers Feeling The Heat.  And at Forbes, why teacher merit pay is a fool's dream. 

The Evolving School Choice Argument

A quick summary of the history, so far, of pro-choice arguments. Because if it seems like they keep shifting, well, there's a reason. 

If you're old enough, you may remember a time when the argument in favor of school choice was that students needed to be able to escape their failing public school.

There was a period way back when in which the argument was for vouchers, but vouchers tested poorly with the electorate, so choicers threw their weight behind charter schools, with a continued and frequent emphasis on the notion that charter schools were just another type of public school, because generally speaking, people liked and trusted public schools. Charters will just add to a robust public educational ecosystem, they said.

The "public schools are failing" trope (first given some heft in A Nation at Risk, a report commissioned to make exactly that point) needed some back-up, and at just that opportune moment, we got the rise of the Big Standardized Test, a high stakes system that would provide solid data proving that public schools were Failing Our Children. 

Then school choice was adopted by folks on the Left and the Right (and by people from the Right pretending to be on the Left) so we had a tag team argument. Students should not have their educational quality determined by their zip codes. The pro-choice argument was two-pronged:

1) Public schools are failing academically (look at these test scores) but unleashing the power of the free market will competitionize them into excellence.

2) Public schools are failing poor and minority students, and in the pursuit of equity, those students should be given a school choicey path out. 

This two prong period lasted roughly most of the Obama administration, because the movement benefited from the neo-liberal Democrat support of choice. But it was at times a tense partnership. Free marketeers chafed at the social justice wing's ideas about regulating choice schools to suck less, and the social justice wing tried hard not to notice that free marketeers didn't really care that much about how choice affected their children.

And then Obama was out and Hillary tanked and the free marketeers didn't need the social justice wing any more, and detente was over.

The choice argument was also suffering from another problem. Charter schools weren't any better than public schools, and voucher systems were maybe even a little worse. Some new arguments were tried out, like "choice gives strivers a chance to get away from those other kids." Some free marketeers and libertarians started saying more loudly that it didn't really matter if choice improved outcomes or not--it was a virtue in its own right. 

Trump knew nothing about education policy except that backing choice got him support from the Catholic Church. And Betsy DeVos was patiently waiting for the rest of the movement to catch up to where she has been for years. 

Her moment was almost coming, but first we had a few years of just replaying the hits-- escape failing schools, improve outcomes, let's push vouchers under some other name, etc.

Then the pandemic hit, leaving local schools to wrestle with the question "How do we navigate this unprecedented crisis" while on the national level, everyone was more focused on "How do we leverage this unprecedented crisis for maximum political benefit."

To their credit, many choicers initially resisted the call to blame public schools for schools being closed, but that moment passed, someone decided it would be good strategy to blame school closures on the unions, and then people lost their damned minds over masking. When Christopher Rufo decided to elevate critical race theory to the level of a McCarthy-style Red Scare, a whole network of anti-maskers was already in place to spread the word (Moms For Liberty is a fine example of a group that started out anti-mask and quickly pivoted). 

The many waves of complaints and controversies may seem large and complex, but they really aren't. They all connect through one simple idea, the new choicer pitch, summed up in this quote from Rufo speaking at Hillsdale College:

To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.

The current choice pitch is that parents need the power of choice because public schools can't be trusted. Jay Greene, who I always thought of as intellectually honest, has moved to the heritage foundation and now publishes pieces like "Who will raise children? Their parents or the bureaucratic experts?" He signaled this new approach explicitly with February's "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war" aka "We can use this current noise to further our cause." My state of Pennsylvania is facing a viable candidate for governor whose idea is to end property taxes, replace them with nothing, and give every parent a voucher good for half of the current per-pupil spending amount in the state. 

Do not be distracted by the arguments about LGBTQ students and trans athletes and teacher gag laws; these all matter, and certainly many hard right folks will be happy if they win these fights, but for the pro choice crowd, the point is that public schools can't be trusted and we need to scrap the whole system and replace it with vouchers (or, as DeVos called it, "educational freedom"). If the right drags victory out of any of these many erupting pockets of chaos, that's gravy, but for many choicers, the chaos is the whole point, because it adds to the claims of a failing public system. 

The end game, for those on the far right DeVos-style wing is as it has always been--get the government out of education. Take back the schools for religious education. Slash the tax-based funding because that's just the government stealing our hard-earned dollars to pay for more services for Those Peoples' Children. And while all that's happening, if we could break the back of the teachers unions, which just prop up the democratic Party, and, hey--also let some entrepreneurs make a buck selling education flavored products. 

At every stage of the choicer evolution, you will find people who sincerely believe their talking point du jour. But at this point, it's hard not to notice that some choicers will adopt whatever argument will get them closer to the dismantling and privatization of public education. 

Like many other movements, the school choice movement has room for both true believers and grifters, but in both cases, the school choice debates are marked by a refusal to talk about what we're really talking about--changing education from a universally provided public good into a privately owned and operated commodity delivered however and to whomever the market deems worthy. 

The irony of the newest talking point (Public schools can't be trusted and we must burn the system down and replace it with vouchers for parents) is that it's the closest we've come to having that honest conversation. Granted, it's dishonest in its indictment of public ed, and it's dishonest in that it fails to admit that we're talking about stripping all guarantees and protections for parents and students and the nation that depends on an educated public, but hey--at least we're finally openly discussing the destruction of public education as we know it. Stick around to see what comes next. 

Banning Pride Flags

It has become to common to even track effectively. Here's an example from Milwaukee. From Missouri, we get one of several stories about a teacher resigning after being told to take down a pride flag. And for what it's worth, there's plenty of fighting over rainbow flags outside of schools as well. 

The argument against Pride flags in classrooms generally boils down to a schoolwide ban on political statements, and the fact that this is considered a reasonable argument is one more sign that we have allowed almost everything to become politicized. 

Politicizing everything means treating issues, concerns, problems, etc as props in a wrestling match for power. Politicizing everything results in the moment when someone discovers a fire in the building and thinks, "How can I use this to score an advantage for my team," as well as the moment when someone runs into the office hollering that the building is on fire, and the reaction is, "I wonder what they're trying to get out of making this claim." Everybody is thinking about angles, and nobody is grabbing a fire extinguisher. 

In a country that is increasingly performative, this is increasingly a problem. 

A rainbow flag conveys a simple enough message, particularly in a classroom-- LGBTQ+ students can expect that classroom to be a place where they will be accepted and supported, just like every student in the school. Some are going to respond to that with the All Lives Matter response-- if all students are supposed to be accepted and supported, why should LGBTQ+ students get to see a special flag? The short answer is that while all students should expect to be treated with dignity and respect, some students have learned (by personal experience or by watching the news) that they cannot automatically expect that treatment. 

But for those insisting on a political lens, the rainbow flag is a ploy, a tactic for Certain People to get special treatment. And even if school administration doesn't use that political lens, many live in fear of parents who do. There have always been and will always be school administrators whose real rule is, "Nobody is allowed to do anything that might get me an angry phone call from a parent." 

Treating other human beings with basic kindness and dignity is now, somehow, a political act, and so schools can't have it. And in an attempt to be politically "neutral" we end up with crazy pants policies that equate statements of "All students are welcome here" with "Gay kids go home." It equates the Pride flag with the Confederate flag. The argument is that they are all political, and not, say, stances that can be distinguished on the basis of which ones involve decency and kindness and which do not. 

Politics involve calculations of power and control and privilege for our team at the expense of any considerations of humanity. Insisting that certain issues are political and not human is yet another way of driving humanity and respect out of schools, and that's not good for anybody.