CATO Misses The Mark On Reading Restrictions

Neal McCluskey, the point man for education at the libertarian CATO Institute, took a quick look at Banned Books Week, suggesting that PEN America is missing the root problem of Book "Bans" (his quotation marks). 

McCluskey opens by noting the PEN America report of book bans in the US, and he has this to say 

To what does PEN attribute the rise? Organized right‐​wingers, including such groups as Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education. PEN is largely correct about the immediate cause, with people on the right increasingly sounding alarms over “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in public schools.

But then he pivots to what has been CATO's refrain on the issue of public education

But as is often the case, the PEN report misses the root cause: public schooling itself, which forces diverse people to pay for, and de facto use, a single system of government schools.

This has been a recurring refrain--that public schools cause conflict by putting people with different beliefs in the same building. McCluskey is a serious grown up and no dope (something I would not write about everybody in the reformy choicer universe), but I always find this argument troubling because it can so clearly be used to argue in favor of segregation. Nor do I believe you can effectively run a country, state or community by simply separating all the people who disagree with each other into their own distinct silos. It speaks to one of the fundamental flaws of Libertarian thought, which is that government regulation and laws ceased, we would have a level playing field and everyone would have a fair shot at whatever goodies they wanted out of life. But for THAT to have a hope of working, we'd have to be able to wave a magic wand so that everyone started life on the same footing, which they don't, because everyone starts life with advantages and disadvantages, and the playing field is, therefor, never ever level. And while I share the Libertarian distrust of a government's ability to make the playing field more level or just, I do not agree with the notion that we should revert to Might Makes Right. 

But I digress.

McClusky says PEN America almost gets it when they note that the problem comes when choices made by librarians or educators are "overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers or even politicians." 

Ironically, PEN calls efforts to get school boards or state legislatures – popularly elected bodies – to remove books “undemocratic.” But that is almost the textbook definition of “democratic,” and for many public schooling defenders democratic control is a crucial aspect of public schooling. The people collectively decide what ideas the newest generation is exposed to.

That said, the PEN report is correct in perceiving a huge problem with elected bodies making decisions about what ideas are off‐​limits to school kids. What if the political majority – or a powerful minority, as PEN asserts about right‐​wing activists – wants to use its power to impose its values on the politically less powerful? That is dangerous. Indeed, a recipe for oppression.

McCluskey gets a lot right here, but by conflating several options, he slides past an important point. Educators and librarians decide what books will or will not be available to students. They do not decide which book students will be forbidden to encounter. Libraries have only so much space, and there are only so many days in the school year, so it is normal and necessary for librarians and educators to say, "We'll get this book and not that book." 

Deciding which ideas the students will be exposed to, deciding which ideas they will have access to, and deciding what ideas will be off-limits are three very different decisions. The first two are a normal part of school; the third is not. And while choice advocates argue that only parents should be able to decide any of these, there is nothing about the first two items that keeps parents from deciding, and no power in the world that can be exercised by school or parents that will make the third possible. 

McCluskey concludes

To protect people without political power government must neither empower experts nor political majorities to decide for everyone what books will or will not be accessible to children.

That's not the power that the anti-book crowd are trying to grab. They are trying to decide what books children will be forbidden to read. No amount of disempowering public schools or actual education experts will change that; these folks have already made it clear that "At least my kid won't have to read that awful book" is not an adequate answer for their concerns. We've already seen places where folks have made it clear that they don't want to see choice schools that cater to Those People.

Deciding what books will be available in a school building does not restrict the rights of students. Deciding that students must be forbidden to read certain books is a direct attack on their rights, and depending on free market forces to defend those rights is a vain hope. 

McKinsey and How To Soak The Customers

It's hard to imagine exactly what an open market for education would really look like, but we can get a scary inkling sometimes by looking at the world of health care.

For instance, the hospital world is loaded with non-profit operations that make a giga-ton of money (that remains untaxed). A recent New York Time piece gives a picture of how hospitals can squeeze blood from stones, with some help from our old friends, the amoral giants of money-grabbing consulting, McKinsey. 

The article focuses on the big challenge of hospitals--patients without money--as it plays out at Providence, one of the nation's largest chains. The Times got ahold of the training materials for a program called Rev-Up, ordered by Providence executives and created by McKinsey.

Training materials instructed administrative staff to tell patients — no matter how poor — that “payment is expected,” according to documents included in Washington’s lawsuit and training materials obtained by The Times. Six current and former hospital employees said in interviews that they had been told not to mention the financial aid that states like Washington required Providence to provide.

One training document, titled “Don’t accept the first No,” led staff through a series of questions to ask patients. The first was “How would you like to pay that today?” If that did not work, employees were told to ask for half the balance. Failing that, staff could offer to set up a payment plan. Only as a last resort, the documents explained, should workers tell patients that they may be eligible for financial assistance.

Another training document explained what to do if patients expressed surprise that a charitable hospital was pressuring them to pay. The suggested response: “We are a nonprofit. However, we want to inform our patients of their balances as soon as possible and help the hospital invest in patient care by reducing billing costs.”

Staff members were then instructed to shift the conversation to “how would you like to take care of this today?”

The Times found that this approach was used even on patients who were entitled to free care. Providence collected a ton of COVID relief money and sits on $10 billion in investment money.  The whole story is pretty rage-inducing, particularly when you get to the parts about people who are ruined by their health care debts. Non-profits measure their charity care; the national average is 2% of expenses spent on charity; Providence currently sits at 1%.

It is not encouraging to imagine this model extended to education in a world in which folks have to come up with their own education for their kids, perhaps with a pittance of a voucher that will only allow them to purchase bare bones education care. Meanwhile, private and voucher schools would be coming up with new and better ways to hustle money out of the customer base. Charter and private schools would be consolidated, gathered into chains owned in some cases by hedge funds and private equity firms that would just squeeze and squeeze  They'd have the pile of money needed to hire world-class consulting firms like McKinsey to get every last drop out of the poorer families (unrestrained by any sort of ethical concerns). 

The future reflected in health care is an ugly one, in which an industry is shifted from serving the needs of human beings to enhancing its pile of money and paying its executives exorbitant amounts of money.

What will happen in a future in which families are required to purchase education on their own, and they don't have enough money to do it, or at least not enough to purchase more than a very basic substandard "product." It's a future I'd just as soon avoid. 

Alito's Time Bomb And Education

Writing for The Hill, Andrew Koppelman outlines a time bomb set by Justice Samuel Alito in one of his opinions, and while Koppelman doesn't connect it to education, I can read this particular writing on the education wall.

Koppelman is a law professor at Northwestern University and the writer of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, so you can see where he's coming from.

The time bomb was set back in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in which SCOTUS found that Hobby Lobby did not have to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees, arguing that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act meant that "religious objectors" were exempt from federal law unless the burden on them "is necessary to a compelling government interest. Koppelman explains the bomb:

There was already an accommodation for religious nonprofits, which used an alternative mechanism to guarantee workers the disputed coverage. If that program were extended to Hobby Lobby Stores, Justice Alito wrote for the court, the impact on its employees would be “precisely zero.”

But Alito did not stop there. His opinion mused that the “most straightforward way” of providing coverage “would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.” He rejected the Obama administration’s claim that “RFRA cannot be used to require creation of entirely new programs.”

That sentence came back to haunt us in this year's case Braidwood Management v. Becerra--that's the one in which employers argued they shouldn't have to provide insurance that covers HIV, contraception, HPV vaccine, counseling for STDs and drug use because that would make them "complicit" in homosexual activity, sex outside of marriage, and drug use. 

The plaintiffs found a friendly Texas judge who invoked the Hobby Lobby decision:

Alito’s dictum was the basis for Judge O’Connor’s decision last week. Quoting “Hobby Lobby,” O’Connor wrote that the Biden administration had not “shown that the government would be unable to assume the cost of providing [HIV preventive] drugs to those who are unable to obtain them due to their employers’ religious objections.”

Boom--no coverage.

In Hobby Lobby, Justice Kennedy had expressed concern that the reasoning could force all sorts of new programs on the government. Justice Ginsberg feared that there would be no "stopping point to the 'let government pay' alternative. Suppose an employer's sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work?"

Or, I would add, suppose their religious belief is offended by students from the Wrong Background or whose parents aren't properly married, or a whole laundry list of reasons to discriminate against students. Kennedy was worried about decisions forcing the government to create new programs, but when it comes to education, the government program is already in place--public schools.

So Alito's time bomb could be used for any sort of "sincerely held" religious-based discrimination that charters or voucher-collecting schools care to impose. "Well, they can always just go to public school," becomes a free pass for any sort of discrimination, bigotry and repression they care to indulge in, and public schools become a dumping ground, resources stripped for choice programs. Not that this isn't already happening (see here and here), but Koppelman's argument suggests one more legal protection for this twisting of the promise of public education.

People of faith ought to oppose this sort of reasoning. When "sincerely held" religious belief becomes a free pass for all manner of misbehavior, it's only a matter of time before religion becomes overrun with scam artists and grifters who find it convenient to suddenly develop "sincerely held" beliefs. Same as it ever was. 

It's not the books that suffer

I've started trying to avoid using the phrase "book bans" or "banning books." Here's why.

I understand that the phrases carry power and punch. They're short and sharp and they have associations; nobody ever thinks that someone who's proposing a book ban is the good guy. For that matter, nobody who wants to ban a book ever says, "We want to ban that book."

But I'd like to suggest a refocus on the language. I don't have a punchy substitute, but I'm tending toward "reading restrictions," and here's why.

A book ban is about a book. We imagine a book being pulled off a shelf, maybe even thrown on a fire.

But the real damage done is not that a book has been shackled. The actual damage is that some human being has been restricted from reading about certain ideas or certain strings of words.

This is particularly true these days in which many of the folks who are trying to restrict student reading rights aren't targeting particular books so much as they are targeting particular ideas or types of people. The specific books being banned are incidental. In many cases, we're seeing something like Texas State Representative Matt Krause's big list of naughty books, which was clearly assembled not because of objections to particular books, but by doing a blunt instrument search for books that contained particular words or phrases and therefor, he presumed, certain forbidden ideas.

These gag laws and moves to restrict aren't about limiting the movement and activity of books; they're about restricting the reading (or more accurately, the thinking) of students. 

While locking up a few books may offend the sensibilities of some, I suspect a larger group of people would be alarmed if we started fitting all school age children with blindfolds and ear plugs.

That's what these reading restrictions and gag laws are all about-- forbidding students from seeing or hearing anything about certain parts of human experience, about the reality of the world as it is today. 

It's not about banning books; it's about restricting the freedoms of children. Yes, as a parent you absolutely set the guardrails of experience around your kids as you see fit. But as soon as you want to limit the freedom of everybody else's children, you're just one more kind of tyrant, one more person trying to exercise authority over others. 

It's not about parental rights when it's about one set of parents infringing on the rights of other parents to decide on the range of experience for their own children (note: the existence of a book does not infringe on your parental right to limit the experience of your own child). 

The term "book ban" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now, collecting a wide range of actions an initiatives. But what unites them all is their real purpose--to restrict students' experience and limit their freedom to read and learn. 

ICYMI: Fall At Last Edition (9/25)

We're big fans of Fall here at the Institute, and it arrived in Western PA in a very Fall-like fashion, so we are switching to hot chocolate and flannel sheet mode. Nothing better. In the meantime, here are some items for your reading edification from the week.

Denver students sue district over podcast

Denver students created a podcast that the district decided was so great that they'd just go ahead and appropriate the brand, but the students are not okay with that. From Chalkbeat.

To Build a Pipeline of Black Teachers, This Program Starts Recruiting in High School

A program in Pittsburgh seeks to address Pennsylvania's egregious shortage of Black teachers. Emily Tate Sullivan at EdSurge. 

What teachers of color say will work to diversify the profession

Madeline Will at EdWeek talks to some actual educators of color (including The Jose Vilson)

My Former TX District Has Collapsed into Cruelty and Absurdity

In The 74, a first person account of how one Texas district lost ots damn mind over book restriction politics.

Banned in the USA

The latest report from PAN America on the growing attempts to restrict what people can read.

How Arizona became America's school choice lab

From the Christian Science Monitor, an explainer about how Arizona became the education mess it is today.

Public School Closures in Oakland: Another Example of Failed School Reform and Charter School Expansion

Jan Resseger takes a deep dive into the history of public school dismantling on Oakland, CA.

Standardized tests aren't the only meaningful data on Student Achievement

At EdWeek, Shane Safir offers some practical alternatives to the Big Standardized Test. If you want to see a concrete example of how this could work, Leonie Haimson at Class Size Matters revisits the Opportunity to Learn Index that was developed in 2017 (but not adopted). 

Mr. Fitz for 9/25

I've written a ton about the inadequacies of the Big Standardized Test, but David Lee Finkle nails it in just 7 comic strip panels.

How we talk about heroes with feet of clay

At Blue Book Diaries, Jonathan Wilson offers a piece that reminds us that students are having their own conversations about what may or may not be taught.

Book banning is a coordinated national effort

From Idaho Press, a report on a panel presentation that discusses some of the money and organization behind the reading restriction push.

What  Mrs. Bailey taught me in AP History changed my life

Essay by Esau McCaulley in New York Times connecting experience to the current teaching debates.

An open letter to Josh Shapiro

In Pennsylvania, public education supporters were pretty bummed to learn that Johs Shapiro, the gubernatorial candidate who isn't a crazy-pants right-wing christian nationalist authoritarian, supports a school choice voucher that any far right Republican would love. Here, Steven Singer begs Shapiro to reconsider.

‘Swatting’ Hoaxes Disrupt Schools Across the Country. What Educators Need to Know

When I was growing up, disrupting school by calling in a fake bomb threat was a thing. But the new thing is swatting--telling authorities there's an active shooter incident or something else that will cause a swat team to descend on the school. It's a growing trend, and it's ugly. Evie Blad at EdWeek.

Cowards, Censorship, and Collateral Damage: The Other Reading War

Paul Thomas doing what he does best--connecting the dots to important ideas. In this case, about reading.

One of Higher Ed’s Worst-Kept Secrets Is Out. It’s Even Grimmer Than We Knew.

John Warner is in Slate, explaining how the practice of student swapping is one more factor driving college costs (and putting students in debt).

The pandemic and early female puberty

I did not know this was a thing, but apparently so. Some researchers in Rome have a theory, and it has to do with too much screen time. 

The Middle School Teacher's Lounge: A Restaurant Review

McSweeney's is at it again. "Drawing on diverse culinary traditions, including salad-left-over-from-last-night’s-school-board-meeting and the reduced-for-quick-sale aisle at Sam’s Club, the newly reimagined Thurgood Marshall Middle School Lounge is a feast for both the palate and the eyes."

Meanwhile, I had a busy week at Forbes. There's a piece about a joint international ed tech thingy from UNICEF and Micrisoft, a look at the latest GOP attempt to roll back charter regulations, and an attempt to see if closing school buildings is really the culprit for the pandemic test score plunge. 

Another Plug For The Robot Teaching Future

"Can robots fill the teacher shortage?" This is what some corners of the industry are thinking. It's dumb, but it's out there.

That dumb question headline ran in Digital Future Daily, a "newsletter" under the Politico banner that is "resented by" CITA-The Wireless Association, an industry group that "represents the U.S. wireless communications industry and the companies throughout the mobile ecosystem." The piece is written by Ryan Heath, who is a Politico staffer, so we are somewhere in the grey mystery area of newsvertisement (which we're in far more often than we realize, but that's a topic for another day).

The piece is essentially an interview with Cynthia Breazeal, who recently became dean for digital learning at MIT, where she's been with the media lab since getting her PhD there about twenty years ago. Breazeal has a long-time interest in personal aid robots. 

She's also an entrepreneur and co-founder of jibo. Jibo started out as an Indiegogo project in 2014. The first home social robot was supposed to release in 2015, then 2016. It was finally released in 2017 by MIT. Even though Time profiled it as one of the best inventions of the year, things did not go well. Less powerful and more expensive than Alexa or Google Home. Software kit for developers never released. Jibo was released in November, and in December layoffs began at the company. Wired wrote a thorough eulogy for the little robot in March of 2019. 

In 2019 the disruption division of NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) bought up the scraps of the failed company and product and has been "working on preparing jibo for an enterprise scenario mainly focusing on healthcare and education" but only as a business to business product, including applications for education,. They proclaim that Jibo provides the "perfect combination of intelligence, character, and soul." Sure. 

None of this comes up in the Politico piece, which presents Breazeal as an academic and "evangelist" for AI who has come to the UN to pitch educational robots. In particular, the piece notes the international needs of students dealing with covid, students with special needs and "displaced children" (aka refugees). This is the second time in a week I've come across someone plugging an ed tech solution for these children, and I get the interest in what is, unfortunately, an emerging market--when you have students who have been ripped away from their home country, how do you give them some continuity of education while they live in a place where their usual educational system does not reach?

The UN expects a global teacher shortage of 70 million by the end of the decade. But folks have concerns about AI and "socially assistive robots." Given AI's previously demonstrated ability to turn racist on top of the fact that these constructs are not actual humans, those concerns seem appropriate. 

How do you test AI with children? “We actually teach the teacher and the parents enough about AI, that it's not this scary thing,” Breazeal said of plans for a pilot project in pro-refugee Clarkston, Georgia — the “Ellis Island of the south.”

“We want to be super clear on what the role is of the robot versus the community, of which this robot is a part of. That's part of the ethical design thinking,” Breazeal continued, “we don't want to have the robot overstep its responsibilities. All of our data that we collect is protected and encrypted.”

How do parents and teachers react to the role of a robot in their children’s lives? “It's not about replacing people at all, but augmenting human networks,” Breazeal said, “This is not about a robot tutor, where teachers feel like competing against the robot,” she said.

Breazeal said the children she’s studied are “not confusing these robots with a dog or a person, they see it as its own kind of entity,” almost “like a Disney sidekick that plays games with you, as a peer.”

How, exactly, does a robot enhance human networks without replacing humans? If the robot is not an actual teacher or even a tutor, then exactly what role is it filling, and how, exactly, is it filing that.?

Granted that Breazeal is at the mercy of Heath's editing of their conversation, but it's striking how much of her pitch focuses on what the robots won't do, rather than things like, say, what they are actually capable of doing, or how she plans to solve the issue of what teaching materials the robot can manage and where those materials will come from. And before I let Breazeal handle any of this sort of thing, I'd want to hear from her what she learned her in her previous attempt to launch such a business--the attempt that failed, but she has apparently remained pretty quiet about the whole chapter.

Like the vast majority of ed tech stories, this one is aspirational--dreaming as marketing, prognostication as advertising. It sure would be great if more ed tech was about things we can actually do to help educate children and less about fantasies about products we might be able to move, someday, if we can just convince people they're inevitable. 

PA: Yet Another Don't Say Gay Bill

House Bill 2813 is like a cut and paste version of every "sexual orientation and gender identity" gag law we've seen over the past couple of years. Its one useful feature is that it is a stripped-down, bare bones version of its many predecessors, which throws its many problems into stark relief. There's no poking around and digging to see what's wrong with this bill.

So here are the highlights of this "Parental Rights In Student Health Care Act" This will be quick; the bill is just three pages and change.

The legislative intent is to declare "that it is the fundamental right of a parent or legal guardian of a student to make decisions regarding the student's upbringing and well-being." As with many such parental rights bill, this one completely slides past the question of what rights the student might have in regards their own well-being. 

The bill does cover public school districts, vo-tech schools, intermediate units, cyber charters, and charter schools. 

Section 4 states in its entirety, "A school entity may not offer instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity to a student in kindergarten through fifth grade."

That's broad and vague as these bills are, leaving schools to wonder what, exactly, violates this language. Every single children's book that depicts a male Daddy and a female Mommy, every book that depicts a Mommy who stays home and cooks and a Daddy who goes to work--every single one of these depicts a particular lesson about sexual orientation and gender identity. Of course, what the sponsors almost certainly mean is that they don't want any of that gay and trans stuff--but that's not what the law says. 

What does this language mean to a teacher or aide who has in a same sex marriage? Should that teacher hide all pictures from home and refuse to answer the questions that students inevitably ask about a teacher's personal life? What about a child who comes from a household with two moms or two dads? Should that child be silenced if she tries to share a story about her same-gendered parents? Must the school refuse to sponsor any LGBTQ-related groups? Must teachers take down any rainbow flags?

You may think that all this hinges on the word "instruction." If none of these things rise exactly to the level of instruction, then the school's in the clear, you may argue. You are wrong, and we'll get to that in a second.

Section 5 says that the school must notify parents of health services provided to the child, with the parents having an option to refuse, and "A process for notifying a student's parent or legal guardian of a change in the student's health care services or monitoring related to a student's mental, emotional or physical health."

All of this speaks to the conservative fear that schools are secretly turning their kids gay or trans. This particular bill is worse than the usual. Many of the Parental Rights bills acknowledge that a student may find himself in a home where revealing an LGBTQ identity will put that child at risk or abuse or abandonment. Those bills give the school the right to keep the child's secret if they believe that it's in the best interest of keeping the child safe.

This bill does not do that. 

Under this bill, if a student comes to a school staff member and asks for counseling to help deal with an LGBTQ situation, the school must out the child to the parents. Which means, practically speaking, that if a child is afraid they'll thrown out or beaten for being gay, they dare not seek help at school. This kind of policy puts LGBTQ children at risk of suicide, among other potential issues.

Section 6 puts restrictions on school well-being questionnaires and health screenings. This is a relatively minor feature, though it does provide one more level of cover for abusive parents.

Section 7 makes it illegal for a school staff member to encourage students to withhold information from parents, to keep parents from accessing student education or health records, or retaliate against a student who reports a school's violation of any portion of this law. That's all fine. I can see some problems with some inexact language when it comes to divorced parents who do not share custody, but that's easily clarified.

Section 8 is the kicker. This section creates a right of private action. In other words, any parent or guardian who thinks the school has violated any part of this law may sue the school district.

This is why the words "any instruction" up in section 4 don't really matter. The school district does not have to ask itself if it has violated the actual law; it has to ask itself if any of its parents might decide they've violated the law.

You can argue that the school will win the lawsuit if the parent is full of it and the school didn't really violate the law, and you might be right--maybe--but in the meantime, the school district has to spend time and money dealing with the suit, and gets to have its name smeared in the paper and across social media as well (which given the kinds of attacks being spurred by made-up social media baloney these days, is no small thing). 

The right of private action is what gives this kind of law its extra special kick, its ability to scare schools into silence. School administrators who are risk averse, especially those who are already dealing with a vocal minority of right wing grievances, will sit their staffs down and declare, "We don't want any trouble, so I don't want you bringing up anything ever that is even remotely close to the line on this."

Who pays the price? Students. LGBTQ students who find themselves erased from conversation and required to stay silent about their own identities. Straight students who receive a redacted experience, in which they find that some things just can't be discussed at school; in some cases, those forbidden subjects may include friends and family members. Teachers who have to wonder about how, if at all, they can continue with their careers. Who benefits? I suppose, eventually, some lawyers.

Where did this particular bill come from? It was introduced by a whole batch of legislators, starting with:

Stephanie Borowicz:  Grad of Altamonte Christian School who famously started a state house session by invoking Jesus thirteen times, praised Trump, and declared "at the name of Jesus, every knee will bend"-- right before the House swore in its first Muslim member.

Rob Kauffman: One of the PA House Republicans who called for withdrawal of the certification of Presidential electors. 

Also, Francis Ryan, Bud Cook, MiLou Mackenzie, David Millard, Joe Hamm, Lesli Rossi, Ryan Mackenzie, Aaron Bernstine, Rich Irvin, Daryl D. Metcalfe, Seth M. Grove, David H. Zimmerman, Barbara Gleim, Dawn W. Keefer, Jim Cox, Kathy L. Rapp, David H. Rowe, Keith J. Greiner, Craig T. Statts, and Clint Owlett.

I'd like to believe that some of these folks just kind of signed on without really thinking things through, and if you're in Pennsylvania and one of these is your person, please give them a call.

And if you're in one of the states that doesn't have one of these Parental Rights bills yet, keep your eyes open.