Charter Dress Code Case Pushing For SCOTUS. Here's Why We Should Care

A dress code case with larger implications for the charter school industry is not done yet; charter profiteer Baker Mitchell has petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold his right to impose sexist dress codes. 

How did we get here

In North Carolina, Charter Day School back in 2016 was sued by parents who objected to a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, jumpers, or skorts. Charter Day School is part of the network of charters operated by Roger Bacon Academy, one of the charters that focuses on a "classical curriculum" in a "safe, morally strong environment," which meant, apparently, none of those pants-wearing girls in their school (It also supposedly means things like sentence diagramming in Kindergarten and Latin in 4th grade).

RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. (an electrical engineer, not an educator), one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. That's where the Roger Bacon Academy, a for-profit charter management company comes in.

In 2019, a federal judge passed down the ruling that any public school in the country would have expected-- a dress code requiring skirts for girls is unconstitutional. The school quietly retired the item in the dress code.

But that wasn't the end of it. In August of 2021, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals appeals court tossed out the 2019 ruling--sort of-- in a 2-1 ruling.

The two judges, both Trump appointees, ruled that contrary to the assertion of the lower court, that charter schools should not be considered state actors, and are therefore not subject to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision pointed to the larger issue in the case--deciding whether or not charter schools are public schools.

The federal appeals court was clear: Charter schools are not public schools. They are not state actors.

But wait--we're not finished

That decision was decided by a three judge panel. The appeals court, in July of 2022, issued an en banc (meaning the whole court and not just a panel) reversed the panel decision.

Galen Sherwin, the senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, shared some of the details on Twitter. The defendants trotted out a "parade of horribles," which the court rejected. This ruling will not somehow stifle innovation. It will not threaten HBCUs.

Sherwin added that the skirt rule violates equal protection because it's based on the old notion that "girls are fragile and require protection by boys." Judge Wilkinson, who was part of the three-judge panel in the previous decision, lamented the end of the "age of chivalry." The majority noted that such an age was also the age "when men could assault their spouses" and that chivalry "may not have been a bed of roses for those forced to lie in it."

Sherwin reports that the court rejects the notion that the dress code was okay because it was oppressive to both genders. Discriminating against both men and women, the court notes, "does not eliminate liability, but doubles it."

And Sherwin passes on a great note from Judge Keenan (the 1 on the original ruling) who separately wrote against the argument that the code wasn't harming girls because they still got good grades. “We cannot excuse discrimination because its victims are resilient enough to persist in the face of such unequal treatment." "Nevertheless she persisted" apparently does not excuse whatever she must persist in the face of.

Kudos also to Judge Wynn who, Sherwin reports, "says the dissent's comparing school choice to ordering steak or salmon at a restaurant 'leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Subjecting girls to gender discrimination that causes lasting psychological damage is not the same thing as ordering fish.'"

Because of the underlying issue, many in the charter school biz lined up against Mitchell. 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools applauded the ruling:

The importance of this case could not be overstated, as it was the first time a federal appellate court considered whether public charter school students deserve the same constitutional civil rights protections as district public school students. The en banc court clearly and unequivocally affirmed that charter schools are public schools and, accordingly, must be bound by the US Constitution. Moreover, public charter school students have the same constitutional and civil rights as their district public school peers.

Sherwin tweeted a sadly insightful analysis:

The court rightly recognizes that ruling otherwise would leave states free to establish parallel, privately operated public school systems in a constitution-free zone, free to implement race segregation, religious discrimination, etc.

Which is a fairly good summation of what the voucher crowd is working hard to do anyway. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of allowing the state to spend tax dollars on discriminatory education. And their "education freedom" rhetoric was echoed in this case. Aaron Streett, representing Charter Day School argued that the school is not a state actor, and that status "provides leeway for policies that some might deem discriminatory, but that's the spirit of individual liberty."

You call it discrimination, but hey--I call it freedom.

And now for the next act

Baker Mitchell(now 82), still thinks it's a good rule:

“We're a school of choice. We're classical in our curriculum and very traditional. I believe that the more of the traditional things you have in place, the more they tend to reinforce each other,” he said in a phone interview. “We want boys to be boys and girls to be girls and have mutual respect for each other. We want boys to carry the umbrella for girls and open doors for them ... and we want to start teaching that in grammar school.”

But that's not why they petitioned the Supremes.

Aaron Streett is an attorney with Baker Botts, a multinational law firm (where both Amy Coney Barrett and Ted Cruz once worked), and that he's the chair of their Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Group. Streett says that the majority opinion "contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action...and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children." After the ruling came down, Streett played coy about whether they would appeal or not; now we're past coyness.

The appeal is going straight after the underlying issue of the case

In its petition, the school argues the ruling by the appeals court is flawed because it identifies Charter Day School as a state actor. The school argues it is a privately run school that receives public funding through its charter, and therefore is not a government-run entity.

"The (court of appeals) decision ... profoundly threatens this model," said a statement from school officials in a Monday news release. "This holding undoes the central feature of charter schools by treating their private operators as the constitutional equivalent of government-run schools."

So, says the school, we are most definitely not a public school. Meaning we should get to do whatever the hell we want.

Will SCOTUS take on this case? These days, who the hell knows? 

It matters to the charter industry, which has in the past couple of years been left behind by many old friends who once viewed charters as a nice foot in the door, but believe now that the pandemic has given them the chance to kick the door down, so "Thanks for the help, charter schools, but we have a chance to get the vouchers we always really wanted, so good luck to you." 

For people still actually invested in the charter industry (both figuratively and literally) this continues to be a strategic puzzler. Do they insist on holding onto the "public" descriptor for charters because it's a good marketing tool, or do they insist they are private schools so that they can compete with private voucher-collecting schools by also discriminating as they wish? 

Meanwhile, the students who originally wanted to wear pants are now young women. But they were never really the most important part of this case. The rest of us should stay tuned for the next chapter.

Addressing The Teacher Exodus By Blocking The Exits

Well, that's one way to do it. 

There's no doubt that having a teacher depart mid-year puts a strain on a school district. Even if they leave at the end of the semester, which theoretically would provide a natural break in the year, students still have to readjust. 

There are a variety of ways to head off this part of the teacher exodus, like making life in the school less miserable. Administrators might even try things like talking to the teachers and finding out how they're doing and what they need. But a few states have taken a more punitive approach to the problem.

In North Carolina, teachers who leave before the end of their contract could have their license suspended for an entire year. That's a milder penalty than some are facing.

Some states like Illinois have laws on the books that have rarely been invoked. But now WGLT reports that a large school district in McLean County has actually refused the resignation of several teachers before the start of the school year. The situation is not unusual--you accept a job one place just to be safe, then another district makes a better offer, all before school even starts, and so you jump from one to another--but the response from the district was very unusual. Two of the teachers agreed to stay. Two others did not, and now their teaching licenses are in jeopardy.

Texas is leading the pack on this particular issue. The last half of the 2021-22 school year saw a record number of mid-year resignations; at least 471 contract abandonment reports have been sent to the state. While a one year suspension is possible, Texas can also revoke a teacher's certification. 

While the challenges created for school districts by losing teachers clearly demand attention, I'm not sure this is the best way to handle it.

First, I worry about forcing people to stay in the classroom when they have told you they don't want to be there. When someone says she wants to quit, does that not identify her as an employee that you do not want to hold onto. Maybe the process can include an attempt to address the issues that made that teacher want to leave, but still, as a parent, I'm not going to be excited about having my child taught by someone whose heart and mind are already way out the door.

Second, if you're problem is that you don't have enough certified personnel, actively reducing the number of certified personnel available seems counter-productive. Of course, that's fine if you're one of those states changing rules so that any warm body can be put in charge of a classroom. Texas is not one of those, but if I lived in a warm body state, I'd keep an eye peeled for this sort of teacher-punishing rule. 

Tough times call for tough measures, I suppose, but states ought to be careful to impose tough measures that help solve the problem and not worsen it. 

Black Ariel, The Classroom, and the Expansion of the Ordinary

The current wave of freakouts over non-white fantasy fiction characters has broader lessons for all of us, if we're only willing to learn them. Yikes-- Black elves in Middle Earth! Oh nos! A Black Ariel in live action Little Mermaid! 

There was a great post on LinkedIN from Bonnie Dilber, an HR professional. She writes, in part, regarding the overlap between those freaking out over Black fantasy characters and those who do the hiring at companies:

If someone has been so strongly influenced by a movie made in the 1980s that they can't support a Black woman playing a mermaid, than how are they looking past seeing white people as directors, VPs, and Chiefs day in and day out to envision a Black person in the role?

Part of working towards equity is recognizing the archetypes we've developed for what a "leader" or "doctor" or "politician" or "fancy singing fish" look like so we can check those biases and make sure that we don't miss out on people who check every single box except "looks like what I pictured when I thought of this title."

In the language of those objecting to everything from Black elves to a same-sex couple on Peppa Pig--particularly ordinary folks on social media or in my supermarket--there's the idea that these characters represent a change. They're angry that somebody deliberately chose to create these characters, which just brushes up against an important truth--

Every character design represents a series of deliberate choices, but for some folks, that deliberate choice is about editing or altering, because every character in a story should be set the automatic default of white and straight. 

In other words, in some folks' thinking, a white straight character does not represent any sort of deliberate choice, but every non-white non-straight character results from a deliberate choice to alter, edit, even replace that straight white default. 

This same thinking is reflected in laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, that include an injunction against teaching anything about gender roles. Folks feel strongly about this. Here's Dave Rubin on Youtube telling us that if he found out a teacher talked to his six-year-old about gender or sexuality, "I might kill that person."

Except, of course, everyone talks to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality all the time. Every kids' book (and I have read roughly sixty gazillion of them with the Board of Directors) that shows a Dad coming home from work and a Mom who cooks and cleans at handles the nurturing of the children. Every children's book that shows a male Dad and a female Mom. Heck, every adult who thinks it's cute to talk about a six-year-old's boyfriend or girlfriend. All of that is talking to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality. Just not, you know, anything other than the default. The ordinary. The regular.

The right is cranky not exactly because there are Black elves and Black mermaids and lesbian polar bears, but because these all push aside some ideas about what is normal, natural, regular, default, ordinary. These all challenge the idea that white and straight (and male) are not a choice, but an effortless way of being that just is. That while every other choice about a character or a person's way of being has to make a case for itself, being white and straight (and male) isn't supposed to need to. 

There's a lot of complaint about the notion that woke folks are being driven by superficial skin-deep distinctions, itself a telling image, as if all this other non-white non-straight stuff is a skin slapped over the proper ordinary default. "I don't see color" ends up meaning "I see everyone as sharing the same ordinary normal default identity as mine." And as Adam Serwer notes in his Atlantic piece

It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified?

In the classroom, some of this argument should be familiar, going all the way back to when folks first starting picking apart the canon on the theory that maybe there were things worth teaching that weren't the product of dead white guys from England and America (who, if they were not straight, at least didn't say so but pretended to the normal ordinary regular default identity). 

Choosing what to teach and choosing how to envision futures for our students are all exercises that bump up against this new challenge.

Checking our assumptions shouldn't be an unexpected challenge in teaching. It's part of the teacher's journey in one form or another. Forty years ago I had to realize that no, it's not okay to assume that students and parents share the same last name. You can't default to the assumption that all your female students like boys. And no, you can't make assumptions about students' most likely future based on what you see when you look at them. We can't, as Dilber says, disqualify someone because they check every box except "looks like what I imagine when I think of that role."

So yes-- the idea that elves and Jedi Knights are made up characters, but they aren't realistic if the elves are Black or the knights are female is kind of nuts. The notion that LGBTQ people are not an ordinary part of the world is--well, that takes us right into Flat Earther territory. But before we use all our energy making fun of these people, best we use some of it to examine whatever assumptions about "ordinary" we're carrying around.

This is not a bad thing. We sometimes frame history by the edges, the people who expand what is possible. But we can also frame it as the less edgy business of expanding what is ordinary. There will always be struggle there, people who fight like hell to hold onto the notion that only they are ordinary. But expanding the ordinary is how we widen the boundaries of the tribe and extend our embrace of what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Dear Teachers: AI is probably writing papers for your class

Have you really looked at your Microsoft Word tools lately? Because, yikes. We'll get to that in a moment.

We've been following the question for an algorithm that can write essays or add copy or other fun stuff. There have been advances, but also problems (like AI that "decided" to write Really Naughty Things). And the gibberish. Or the uncanny valley. Or the bloviating nothingness. 

But the search goes on because if writing were one more job that could be handled by computers instead of those annoying and wanna-be-paid-a-living-wage carbon-based life forms, well that would make some entrepreneurs very happy. And the flip side--an algorithm that could read and grade student papers would close that final gap in the search for a fully automated teacher-free classroom. 

But as Aki Peritz, writing for Slate, reminds us, there's another group of folks who welcome cyber-writing, and that's students themselves. 

Got an assignment? Feed an opening sentence into an algorithmic text generator like Sudowriter, and you'll get back a mediocre, somewhat hollow essay to hand in. In fact, Peritz argues, some of the awkwardness of the program actually echoes the awkwardness of as student writer. And it is, of course, untraceable by conventional plagiarism checking methods, because it's not actually plagiarized. It's just having a bot do your work for you. Bringing us just one step closer to a future in which an algorithm generates a page of text that is then graded by another algorithm, while students and teachers just sit awkwardly in a classroom doing nothing.

There are teacher solutions for this kind of cheating. Have the students write the essay in class. Better yet, listen to the old dictum that if an assignment is easy to cheat on, that's the assignment's fault and you need to redesign it. 

But there's an arguably more annoying AI out there, and one that's far more likely to be in use by your students.

I haven't paid any attention to my Microsoft Word menus in ages except when I need to find a way to do something I didn't already know how to do. But David Lee Finkle, creator of the teacher comic strip Mr. Fitz, tipped me off to this feature in one of his recent strips.

Microsoft Word's editor will now grade your work. Okay, it calls it "editor score," but it's given as a percentage in a style every student will recognize as a score. Up in the upper right corner of the screen, you see [editor], and it will spit out a score along with some advice.

The "advice" is a compendium of the same old mediocre algorithmic editing suggestions that Word has always offered. I ran some of my newspaper columns through the editor and got advice like "replace 'expertise' with 'ability' so that it's easier to understand" (except, of course, that's a fairly significant change in meaning. Chakaris (as in George) is flagged as a misspelled word--maybe I meant "Chakari's"? The phrase "it's telling that we describe..." throws it and it suggests "it's saying..." instead, which is just wrong. The program has lots of thoughts about commas. And it hates my tendency to coin my own words. 

The editor also checks for clarity, conciseness, and formality, and will let you set it for formal, professional, or casual. And there's a special setting for resumes. 

I ran this post (so far) through it, and got some suggestions for clarity and conciseness, including old standards such as getting rid of a passive voice and contractions. But as a piece of casual writing, I scored a 98%. 

I am imagining students running their essays through this and following all the advice so that their work is scrubbed clean of personal voice and yet with some additional weakness and inexactitude of language. As Mr. Fitz's student says, "You think I should stop writing to please the computer and write like a human being with flaws and all. To retain my humanity against our computer overlords."

But mostly I am imagining students saying, "What do you mean I got an 87 on this essay??!! My computer says it's a 93!" 

Okay. So language processing algorithms are here, and so widely distributed that they are unavoidably part of the education landscape. But they're tools (and not great ones), not crutches. Students have to learn that the algorithms can't actually "read" or "write" as we understand the terms, that the algorithms have some serious limitations, and that these uncivilized beasts must still be kept on a leash that's firmly in the hand of the writer. Or, you could just turn the algorithms loose into the wild, or lock them in a cage, and carry on without them. 

Jill Biden's Almost Great Stump Speech For Teaching

FLOTUS was in Tennessee, of all places, to kick off an "education tour." meant to make hay out of the Biden administration's relief package for schools. At the University of Tennessee, she followed the mayor, Secretary Cardona, and Teacher of the Year Melissa Collins (who is a compelling presence). There's also an emphasis on recruiting and retaining teachers, and she had some good, moving things to say, but I can't let this quote pass without response.

“Teaching isn’t what we do, it’s who we are” - @FLOTUS @WXII pic.twitter.com/hFAuXUuASF

— WXII Maria DeBone (@WXIIMaria) September 12, 2022

This quote's heart is in the right place. It got a big chunk of applause. But here's what's wrong with the sentiment, because it's part of what has gotten the profession in trouble already.

"Teaching is who we are," plays to the myth that people are born teachers, and that myth has several unfortunate, damaging side effects.

First and foremost, it contributes to the notion that teaching is not a profession that people can either choose or not choose. It contributes to the mindset that figures it doesn't matter what we do to teachers and their working conditions because it's not like they could choose to do something else or find another line of work or just choose not to be teachers, because, hey, teaching is who they are. 

If teaching isn't a job folks choose to do, but is simply a calling (which Dr. Biden labeled it at least thrice) or an identity one is born into, then we don't have to talk about how to make the profession more attractive in order to recruit and retain people. 

We can talk about a "teacher shortage" as if we're talking about a shortage of green beans, as if the magic teacher tree for some reason just didn't bear enough fruit this year. And that in turn means we can start talking about "solutions" that address everything except the real issues at hand (like creating cockamamie rules to let any warm body pretend to be a teacher because the teacher tree didn't yield enough fruit). 

If I want to really stretch a point, I can even argue that this quote is a little dehumanizing, erasing the whole "we are people who" choose to do this job. And while it's not at all the most important piece of all this, I'll also point out that if teaching is your whole identity, retirement will be a bitch. 

FLOTUS frames it all as people wanting to teach but being stopped by obstacles--low pay, student loans, class sizes, and safety concerns. If we want to bring bright talented people into the field, she says, "if we want educators to be able to do what they do best, we have to give them the support that they deserve." And then she introduced the Three R's For Teachers-- Recruit, Respect and Retain. And then she pivots to stumping for her husband (opening schools, vaccinating teachers, loan forgiveness, more counselors, encouraging states to raise pay, yay). She just knew he would have to be an education President; she does not offer a connection between this and the years he spent in the public-education-thrashing Obama administration. 

She also refers to teaching as "this profession" and talks about "the work," which strikes me as a better framework. And she really brings it all home toward the end:

Become a teacher. And when you do, and when you do--and I hope all of you do who want to join this profession-- you'll find a vocation that brings you joy and meaning. You'll know that someone out there is a better thinker because of you, that someone is kind of sitting a little bit taller because you gave him the confidence. Someone is working a little harder because you pushed her to try. Someone is braver because you helped him find his courage. And you'll know this, too-- that your President and his administration are working every day so that you have the support, respect and pay you deserve. So join us. Become a teacher. And we will change the world, one student at a time.

Well, she was on a roll for a minute, anyway. 

I'll repeat that Tennessee, with its ardent embrace of Larry "Teachers are the dumbest" Arnn and its long string of amateur-hour grifters as secretary of education, is an odd choice. The gang appear drawn there by a proposed Grow Your Own program, which is currently nothing more than a pretty idea, but as unrealized ideas go, I suppose it's prettier than North Carolina's crappy proposed merit pay program. And it's certainly nicer to have someone from DC saying pretty things about teachers instead of calling them names and suggesting they all stink (like Betsy DeVos under Trump/Pence and Arne Duncan under Obama/Biden). 

But I'm not sure we've fully grasped the range of issues gumming up the teacher pipeline (or at least we have chosen not to express said grasping in words). I like a pep rally for the profession as much as the next person, especially these days, but when it veers toward the ditch, my nerves, long made twitchy by pretty words untethered to any useful, practical policy--well, I get a little pain.

Bottom line. Some swell parts, some terrible parts, some choices clearly made in order to stump for Biden policies (which echoes the "don't tell me what you need, just listen while I tell you what I want to do for you" pitch that teachers know so well from dozens of edu-wares salespersons). This was the kickoff for the tour; maybe things will pick up down the road. 

Study: Broad Academy Grads Help Privatize Public Schools

The Broad Academy has been around since 2002. Founded by Eli Broad, it's a demonstration of how the sheer force of will, when backed by a mountain of money, can cause qualifications to materialize out of nothing. The Broad Foundation ("entrepreneurship for the public good") set the Academy up with none of the features of a legitimate education leadership graduate program, and yet Broad grads kept getting hired to plum positions around the country. And now a new study shows what, exactly, all these faux graduates accomplished.

Give Eli Broad credit-- his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture-- building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA. He was a scrapper; Broad called himself a "sore winner."

Broad believed that education was in trouble, but he did not believe schools had an education problem. He believed they had a management problem--specifically, a management problem caused by not having enough managers who treated schools like businesses. The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work. 

Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.” And Broad maintained some control over his stable of faux supers. In one notable example, John Covington quit his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad did not particularly believe that public schools could be reformed, with his vision of privatization becoming ever more explicit (leading to the 2015 plan to simply take over LAUSD schools). The Broad Academy offered an actual manual for how to close schools in order to trim budgets. The process was simple enough, and many folks will recognize it:

1) Starve school by shutting off resources
2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

Anecdotally, the record for Broad Faux Supers is not great. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled (and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure, and he's been bouncing from failure to failure ever since..

But now a trio of researchers takes us beyond the anecdotal record. Thomas Dee (Stanford), Susanna Loeb (Brown) and Ying Shi (Syracuse) have produced "Public Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents." 

The paper starts with some history of Broad Academy, and places it in the framework of venture philanthropy, the sort of philanthropy that doesn't just write a check, but stays engaged and demands to see data-defined results. The we start breaking down information about the Broad supers.

The Academy members themselves. They are way more diverse than the general pool of superintendents, so that's a good thing. Slightly more than half of academy participants and about two-thirds of the Broad-trained superintendents have some teaching experience. This is way lower than actual school superintendents, and probably even lower because I will bet you dollars to donuts that the bulk of that "teaching experience" is a couple of years as a Teach for America tourist passing through a classroom so that they can stamp "teacher" on their CV like an exotic country stamped on a passport. On the other hand, one in five Broadies has experience in the military.

Broadies started at an average age of 48, and their average tenure was a whopping 3.8 years, with more than half moving on to another super job. Fun fact: Broadies tended to be hired by districts that have shorter-than-average superintendent tenures. Over time, the placement of Broadies moved from large public districts to Charter Management Organizations; from 2013 to 2015, one third of the cohort took jobs with CMOs or EMOs. 

But what did these Broadies, with their intensive business management style training, actually accomplish?

The answer is, mostly nothing special. This is not surprising; less-than-four-years is not enough time to move the needle on much of anything in a school district, no matter how awesome your management skills may be. Broadies were found to have little effect on enrollment, spending and student completion. The last is, again, unsurprising--you're there for a small fraction of the students' academic career, so what affect are you going to have, particularly if you're just one more body speeding through the district's revolving door. 

But one effect the study did find-- "they initiated a trend toward increased charter school enrollment." So if the purpose of the Broadies was to nudge schools towards privatization, they apparently did that. 

Near the end of his life, Broad was able to arrange for the Academy to finally get a cloak of legitimacy by having the program housed by Yale (accompanied by a whopping $100 million contribution). The Broad Center is not, of course, anywhere near Yale's education department, but is instead parked in the School Of Management.

The Broad Center at Yale School of Management fosters the ideas, policies, and leadership to help all students – particularly those from underserved communities – to learn and thrive. Our work is bolstered and enriched by the Broad Network, a nationwide community of nearly 900 dedicated and diverse leaders who are alumni of TBC programs.

"Particularly those from underserved communities" makes sense, because wealthy families expect more education from their educational leaders. The Broad Center started its first cohort this year, who will now work for a Yale Masters Degree. 

These thirty education-flavored leaders include about three people with actual public school classroom experience, and a whole lot of Teach for America products who "began their career in teaching" before quickly moving on to leadership roles based on the deep education expertise they acquired from spending two whole years in a classroom. The charter sector is heavily represented (whole lot of KIPPsters in this group). They appear well aligned with the Broad philosophy that the best people to fix public education are those who have little direct knowledge of public education. Eli Broad may be gone, but his vision, now festooned in New Haven ivy, still chugs along.

ICYMI: Welcome My New Granddaughter Edition (9/11)

Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law welcomed their first daughter, my second granddaughter. So all in all, it's a good weekend. In the meantime, I've got a particularly good collection of worthwhile reading for you. And remember--sharing and boosting the stuff that connects with you is important. 

Let Teachers Fix this. They Know How

Cheryl Gibbs Binkley doesn't post at Third Millenium Teacher very often, but when she does, she makes it count. Her point is simple. If you're worried about "learning loss," teachers already know what to do. If ever there was a time to get out of the way and let teachers teach, this is it. 

It's time to stop calling for schools to implement actions that are not going to happen.

While we're on the subject, here's a little quick realism from Larry Ferlazzo

Florida ranked No. 1 for "education freedom" — by right-wing group that wants to privatize it all

Kathryn Joyce reports for Salon on Heritage Foundation's new education freedom report card, and the state that came in first. Great piece. 

It's time to put woke schools myth to bed

In a guest op-ed in The Oklahoman, Dan Vincent argues that the plague of woke schools isn't really a thing. 

Daring to speak about race in a divided school

Thoughtful and even-handed piece in the New York Times by Daniel Bergner, focusing on a small community in Michigan and its wrestling with issues of race. 

With Don't Say Gay Laws and Abortion Bans, Student Surveillance Raises New Risks

The 74 has one of the scarier stories out there. The surveillance state plus restrictive laws equals bad news for students. 

A Texas Eighth Grader Was Pulled From Class And Grilled About His Gender-Identity

Greg Abbott told the state to start treating trans youth cases like cases of child abuse, and they are by God doing it. This is a chilling story of what happened to one 13 year old boy. 

Tennessee school library law's expanded scope puts burden on teachers

All you have to do is just check through every single book in your room for every single thing that some parent might object to. Super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Chalkbeat has the story.

Cyber charters see enrollments rise

Carol Burris guests at Valerie Strauss' Washington Post space, providing more detail and insight on the pandemic explosion in virtual charter biz-- and what that means for educating students and making money.

And To Think I Thought I Had Nothing To Say

Dad Gone Wild, school, funding, and the reformers making a bundle.

As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

Matt Barnum looks at school funding and the problems set to re-emerge as the pandemic aid runs out. Some god breakdowns of the problems of poverty and schools.

A tiny Christian college in Michigan is infiltrating Florida's schools

Yes, it's Hillsdale. And it turns out they've had even more control of Florida schools than you thought. Mary Harris reports at Slate. 

Hackers infiltrate LAUSD in growing trend

One more damn thing to worry about. The nation's second largest school district had to postpone the first day of school because they were hacked. 

A modest proposal for police reform 

From a few months ago, but I only just encountered this cleveland.com piece from Benjamin Helton. What if we used vouchers for other things? 

High school senior wins Boise school district board position

In fact, he beat an incumbent to do it. Kids these days. An encouraging story from KTVB7.

The Grove City class of 1967 had a request for its 55th reunion: One more class with its 99-year-old science teacher, Homer Christie

Heck of a story, from just up the road. In 1960, high school science teacher Homer Christie started teaching a free, optional Saturday morning extra science class. He retired from teaching in 1986, but he kept teaching the class until four years ago--at age 95. Now he'll be a featured part of a class reunion.