The Fake Furry Story That Will Not Die

There it was again, this time on my facebook feed, One of my friends had shared someone else's post, a four-picture collage of a teen girl wearing some ears and makeup, costumed to look catlike. Could have been a Halloween shoot or just a dress-up photo, but of course it was accompanied about pearl-clutching text about how some school was allowing some girl to attend school self-identifying as a cat, and What Are We Coming To These Days.

"Not true," I responded with some context. "I guess," others replied, "But still..." while others responded with various mixtures of horror, derision and outrage.

It's the lie that will not die, and it should be laughable, but it tells us something about the far right bubble and how quickly it can spread baloney even as it remains impervious to actual facts.

Folks started noting the spread of furry panic back at the beginning of this year. There are schools, the story goes, that allow students to self-identify as animals, wear their furry costumes, eat sitting on the floor, do their business in litter boxes. So far there has not been a single factual foundation for any of these stories. Nor, for that matter, do the stories get it right when it comes to Furry culture and behavior  (furries do not, for instance, wear their outfits to work and insist on acting as animals or pooping by their desks). But it doesn't matter. 

In Colorado, the GOP candidate for governor has tripled down on the claim that students are self-identifying as animals throughout the Denver with the support of their school districts, despite repeated debunking and denials. 

Minnesota also has a GOP gubernatorial candidate who repeated the litter box claim, despite debunking.

In Tennessee, school leaders had to take time to respond to a litter box claim by a state senator. 

South Carolina districts felt the need to respond to litter box stories. In Wyoming, parents told a board they were worried that furries were covered in equality policies. And Rhode Island. And Pennsylvania. And New York. And Illinois. And Oregon. Oh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, too.

And so far we're just talking about stories in the last month (h/t @KyleClark).

If we go back over the last year, we find more. In Nebraska, in a rare apology, a state senator had to admit that the furry rumor he had repeated was baloney in March. In Texas, a GOP house candidate went with the relatively milder "lowered tables" story in January. A South Dakota school district had to explain to a parent in July that no, they would not be putting in litter boxes for furry students. Maine was battling back the litter box rumors in May. In April, a Wisconsin school district had to explain that they have no "furry protocol."

Patient Zero for this fake story seems to be Michigan's Midland Public Schools board meeting in December of 2021, at which a mother spoke claiming she was informed that litter boxes had been added in bathrooms for students who "identify as cats", calling it a "nationwide" issue and pointing to an "agenda that is being pushed" (a "nefarious" one). The co-chair of the Michigan GOP promoted the stories ("Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools), and before you could say crazy-pants disinformation campaign, the story was being covered by Buzzfeed, USA Today, and the New York Times. 

Since this post went up, several readers have pointed out that the story also traces origins back to the post-Columbine practice of keeping an emergency bucket in classrooms in case of an armed siege--including kitty litter for the trapped students. 

And you can find all this coverage and more quickly and easily by just going to the Wikipedia page about this whole loonie story.

Regrettably, almost none of the coverage asks obvious questions. Like, do furries self-identify as animals? And do furries use litter boxes? The answer is no to both. Furries are best understood as animal cosplay, and like your neighbor who dresses up as Captain Kirk or Wolverine or a Rennaissance Faire sword-bearing barbarian, they know who they are in "real life" nor do they wear their costumes to work.

But the "identify as" that folks use when they spread the stories is a tell-- furry panic is a barely-masked version of LGBTQ+ panic, cut from the same cloth as the old "If we let the gays get married today, will people be marrying their dogs tomorrow."

Furry panic highlights several features of the current landscape. It is ready-made for the parents' rights movement, which is in turn ready-made for the current election cycle. It also dovetails nicely with the drive to reduce trust in public schools so that they can be dismantled and replaced with a privatized system. It's a story that serves too many peoples' purposes to be allowed to die. 

And it reminds us of the societal cost of destroying trust in everything outside a particular propaganda bubble. Because these stories should absolutely have stopped by now. The repeated denials by school officials of every stripe should have mattered. The fact that after almost a year, nobody can point to an actual incident should matter. There's one story about a kid who got in trouble for barking at a teacher, and someone on my Twitter feed says a student told him that kids at school get away with wearing horns and a tail, and that's all a far cry from allowing students to identify as animals and use litter boxes at school. 

But we are once again in the land where facts don't matter--or, rather, only information that comes from people in the bubble can be treated as a fact. Objective reality is not a thing; only my far-right rumors and outrage source can be trusted. Ironically, it's likely that actual furries probably have a better grip on reality than some of the people who are indulging in this groundless panic.

Furry panic is also a reminder of the power of repetition. Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes that thing that you heard somewhere and hey, if I keep hearing it--well, where there's smoke, there's fire right? This is one of the best tricks of the far-right outrage complex--just keep bouncing the same picture of smoke around and around and eventually folks believe that there's a fire, when there isn't even really smoke. That's why the "mirrors' in "smoke and mirrors" matter. The notion of "I'm correct, so if I just explain it once, clearly, that should be enough to make it stick," is sweet, but not an excellent plan.

Nashville Turns To Arizona To Fund Charters

This is a small story, but shows more of how the charter biz works.

Nobody seems to be covering this story except Jeremy Duda and Nate Rau at Axios. 

KIPP is getting financing for charter schools in Nashville by turning to the Industrial Development Authority in Arizona.  IDA has okayed a bond for a whopping $25 million in March, and expects to approve bond #4 sometime in the next month or two.

IDA program manager Patrick Ray told Axios that KIPP is a "real warm and fuzzy kind of feel-good story" because it runs elite charter schools that primarily serve low-income students." 

Rabbit hole alert.

Arizona's IDA helped Equitable School Revolving Fund LLC, an outfit that appears to be involved in issuing Social Bonds because financing such loans to "nonprofit charter schools" will advance goals by "providing high-quality education to vulnerable youth in educationally underserved areas." ESRF is, in turn, an arm of Equitable Facilities Fund, Inc., In 2018-2019 ESRF received a $200 million capitalization grant as a charitable gift from--well, somebody. 

ESRF and EFF are successors to the Charter School Growth Fund; they were founded by former CSGF exec Anand Kesavan, "experienced investment banker, charter school executive and education philanthropist." Before that he spent six years as CFO at KIPP Austin, and before that six years as senior vice president at an investment bank in the Bay area, before that 4months in 2010 with Ed Pioneers helping develop growth models for Massachusetts charter schools, and before that five years as an investment bank vp with UBS.

The ESRF management team includes a bunch of investment and loan people, though among them are:

Kevin Alin, previously the Executive Director of School Choice and Enrollment for the Cleveland Metro School District, and he founded the Citizens Leadership Academy charter in Cleveland.

Shannon Falon, who put in her stint with Teach for America before getting her MBA and moving on to investment banking

Brian Kates, founder of ZATA Consulting, a charter school consulting firm, and the founding Director of Finance for that spectacular failure, the Tennessee Achievement School District

Shawn McCormack, Broadie and former CFO of KIPP San Antonio

Mark Medema, currently Managing Director for the Charter School Facility Center at the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools

End of rabbit hole

So, short version, Arizona's IDA has been happy to help out with forms of charter funding before.

Why is Tennessee going to Arizona to fund its KIPP business ventures? 

Axios points to a change in the climate in Nashville. Specifically local boards questioning exactly how some of these charters are getting their facilities funds. The heat appears to have hit Rocketship Academy, whose whole business model seems to be built around a for-profit buying facilities and leasing those facilities back to Rocketship (ka-ching). Financial deals for these operations have become complex, with an article in The Tennessean (by Nate Rau and Joey Garrison) noting that Rocketship's deal involved $42 million and the approval of three states.

So KIPP may simply be trying to dodge any controversy and scrutiny. Nashville Metro Council member Dave Rosenberg has thoughts:

Rosenberg tells Axios he was surprised to learn that a development board in Arizona has been approving bond issuances for Nashville charter schools. He called the practice another example of charter schools dodging financial accountability.

And IDA serves as a conduit, effectively turning loan money into tax-free bonds for the charters.

The other factor in play here is that charter chains like KIPP and Rocketship are national chains, so state borders don't matter all that much to them-- a new level of non-local control of schools. If the local authorities are making too many noises about responsibility and accountability, just get your money somewhere else.

And as with many charter shenanigans, it all--the financial legerdemain, the investment bankers running the show, the shuffling about--makes much more sense if you look at it as a real estate or investment business that really doesn't have anything to do with education at all.  

Management By A Thousand Paper Cuts

This is a strictly local story, but I'm going to talk about it because A) many other folks from other districts are going to recognize it and B) because it typifies the kind of crap that teachers wrestle with that goes on far below the level of big policy discussions (and therefor can demand more teacher attention than big policy discussions). 

Once upon a time, there was a copier in the office, and whenever teachers needed to make copies they would just go make copies. This was, admittedly, not a great system. As a teacher, you had to hope that you weren't running to the copier at the same time as everyone else. If you were an administrator, you had to wonder how much of the gazillions of dollars you were spending on the machine were actually funding teacher mistakes and personal copies (answer: probably not millions of dollars, but probably not zero, either).

Copiers represent one of the great technological advances in education. Ask your great-grandparents what it was like to use mimeographs, the distinctive chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk, the distinctive and, for some, seductive aroma, the suspense of waiting to see if the page would print properly. The advent of a quick, reliable means of copying anything printed opened up whole new possibilities for what materials you could use in your classroom, and the advent of computers and internet connections multiplied those possibilities by millions. 

But copiers cost money. Paper costs money. And district management has to find ways to deal with that. 

A copy aid was added to staff, which helped everyone. Teachers could drop off copy work and not have to spend valuable minutes riding the machine (instead they could do other things like, say, pee). Swing by, drop off your stuff, then swing by later and pick the stuff up. And the district had a gatekeeper so that staff wasn't copying their entire library of cross-stitch designs on the taxpayer's dime. 

But copier paper is getting way more expensive. And leasing copiers has always been expensive. So management has come up with a way to make copying more centralized and "efficient." Create a central "print shop" and everyone can just submit their copying needs through a central form and then await the appearance of your copies through inter-office mail.

Why would this cut copier costs? According to the district, by "reducing unnecessary use of paper." Also, "We can get more longevity out of the machines if only one person is running them." Also, "streamlining the process," because nothing streamlines a process like adding extra steps to it.

It's management technique known as "If we make this thing more inconvenient and more annoying to do, maybe staff will do it less." 

Look, we're just talking about making copies, so this, and procedures like it in districts all over the country, is not the end of the world nor an insurmountable obstacle to getting the work done. But it speaks to a certain mindset, a part of the thousand-cut death that drains some teachers.

This move takes a management problem (It's hard to pay for all this copying) and prioritizes it over a teacher problem (How do I reproduce all the materials needed to do the work in my classroom). It takes a management problem and shifts the weight of the problem onto staff (I don't have to deal with this any more; now they can deal with it). 

And while that problem is not huge or weighty (I don't imagine any teachers wailing, "Oh no! How will I ever get my job done NOW!!??"), it sends a message about whose problems matter more to management, about whose work is prioritized. It is wearing for teachers to work in a district in which even one administrator projects the attitude that teachers are minor functionaries whose work is not the most important thing going on in the district.

Life will go on. Teachers find a way to adapt and makes these sorts of policies work. But damn--isn't it great when an administrator says those seven powerful words-- "what can I do to help you?" It's powerful when that phrase is part of the whole district culture, when the whole district is aimed at giving people what they need to do the work. And, yes, it works in all directions; if you want a good relationship with your administration, it helps to give them what they need to do their job. Ditto for how you treat your own students. 

Far healthier than a culture built on, "This may make your job harder, but it makes my job easier, so tough luck." 

ICYMI: Hello October Edition (10/2)

It's a great month, for certain. Except that it marks the escalation of election-related shenanigans, and I am surely not looking forward to that. Pro tip: If you contribute to your favorite candidate, make a separate email address to use just for that purpose. The you'll have a bucket for catching the onslaught of spam. Sure wish I'd done that.

Here's some reading for the week.

"Statewide book bans" are coming to Florida's classrooms, enforced by the far right

Kathryn Joyce has been absolute gangbusters writing about the far right's moves against public education for Salon. This time she looks at how Florida's reading restriction rules are playing out. It's not pretty.

FLDOE Names Book Banners To Workgroup Designing Training For School Library Book Selections and No One is Surprised

Speaking of Florida's work to deny students the right to read, Accountabaloney has some details of the state's new censorship board and who's on it, which turns out to be some folks who are big fans of banning books.

Vouchers will divert $1.3 billion in public money to private schools

Florida also continues to set new standards in funneling taxpayer dollars to privateers. Here's a new report showing just how bad it is. 

Bruises, scrapes and trauma: Idaho kids harmed when restrained, secluded in schools

From Idaho Statesman, a disturbing story about the use of restraint and seclusion on the state's children.

Erie’s Public Schools makes history as first school district in Pa. to be removed from Financial Watch list

Good news from my corner of the world. The perennially financially struggling Erie school district actually managed to get off the state's naughty list--the first time anyone ever managed that. It was accomplished by teaming up everyone--politicians of both parties, unions, management, local leaders. A heartening step back from the brink of disaster.

We could fix childhood poverty

Jan Resseger points out that we now know how to do it. 

Community schools promise and pitfalls

Thomas Ultican talks about how this promising model can quickly be co-opted by the usual pack of privatizers. 

Implications of Carson v. Makins

Preston Green and Suzanne Eckes take a look at the legal implications of this case (this was the one where SCOTUS decided that Maine must fund private religious schools).

Audit of charter school program finds big problems

The Office of the Inspector General took a look at the troubled multi-billion dollar charter school federal grant program and found a mess. Carol Burris is at Washington Post's The Answer Sheet to explain just how bad it is. 

It’s time to expand our thinking about what works in education reform

Another pair of researchers scan the globe and conclude the same things that teachers have been saying for twenty years, namely, the idea of "what works" is seriously misfocused. Still, better they got it right than perpetuated baloney. Hechinger Report.

Vouchers do not improve student achievement

No kidding. But this time the word is coming from a research study at Stanford

We Must Demand Play-Based Education Because, Damn It, That's What The Evidence Tells Us

Teacher Tom reminds us that it would be useful to base our education policy on actual reality.

Dear Dr. Cardona: Punitive Student Assessment is Meant to Privatize Public Schools!

Secretary Cardona just asked everyone to use high stakes testing to help, not hurt. Nancy Bailey would like to remind him that high stakes testing has never been used to help.

When Good Students Get Bad Standardized Test Scores

Steven Singer and that conundrum that every teacher has faced. Who do you believe--the test, or your own lying eyes?

David Berliner: Why It Is So Dangerous When Governors and Legislatures Reduce Teacher Credentialing Requirements

Jan Resseger again, because she is really on it this week. Come to this piece for this insightful paragraph:

When I really think about it, I am forced to conclude that a lot of people—including powerful people like governors and legislators—imagine what teachers do by thinking about what teachers do for them—the important adults. School teachers keep kids safe and busy—out of the way and out of trouble—while busy adults are at work—work that these adults consider important, in contrast to the work of schoolteachers.

IEEE Blockchain Chair Urges Speedy, Collaborative Open Metaverse Deployment (Before Mass Dissent Erupts)

Yes, I know that some folks find Wrench in the Gears to be a lot, but Molly keeps her eye on things that many of us don't have the time or inclination to dig for. This particular piece comes from a conference and gives a broad collection of Bright Ideas that techno-wizards have in mind.

Meanwhile, at Forbes.com this week I took a look at why so many SEL programs are doomed to failure. 

Fund Raising and Data Mining

It has started already.

The twins, five weeks into their first year of school, have been given materials for the school fund raiser.

If you are not current in the parenting world, you may hear "fund raiser" and think, "Okay, time to carry that order sheet around and hit up the grandparents to buy a couple of stinky candles." If only.

What the Board of Directors brought home is a sign-up for SchoolStore, a kind of online portal/platform that lets folks buy stuff from a couple of different outlets and a whole bunch of the usual Major Merchants. Each purchase through the program earns the classroom money and the individual student points good for Valuable Prizes. Teachers may also win prizes for their classroom's commercial success.

It's elegant and simple; as the veteran faculty member behind a gazillion fundraising projects, I can immediately see the advantages (no more trying to get the product sorted and out to the customers, no more extorting the public in exchange for cheap junk). 

But there's a catch.

To get started, your child has to sign up at the site, and sign up is not complete until you've given six email addresses to which the company can send marketing emails (that pretend to be from your child--you can even choose from pre-made PS messages like "I love you" and "Thank you for caring." Once you've handed over the emails, you get a code that goes back to school to certify that your child has signed up, at which point they get a cute participation prize (in our case, a little stuffed creature).

Not since political operatives started sending messages that "We need your input on this important survey!" has anyone come up with such a wickedly efficient method for harvesting contact information. That stuff is golden. I worked a couple of summers taking phone orders for a catalog company, and one of the things I learned is that a major source of their income was selling lists of contact information. Of course, companies these days promise they won't "sell" contact lists, just "share" it with their "trusted partners," which is a distinction without a difference. 

And, as you might expect, it's not hard to find folks on line complaining that SchoolStore spams them relentlessly via email addresses that they never personally gave away (also, something seems to be wrong with the site's email opt out feature....hmm...). 

The leverage, of course, is that I start my day with a five year old in tears because his classmates are getting stuffies and he is not. 

I don't fault the school, entirely. The real solution to all this is to fund schools fully and properly so that they don't have to explore other avenues for revenue. On the other hand, I am also wondering if the digital citizenship units have anything to say about being cautious with your own and other peoples' information on line.

So now my wife and I have a choice.

My preferred choice is to skip the whole thing, but that is going to require us to develop some sort of in-house lesson/explanation about all of this, because I'm starting my day with a little boy in tears because every day some of his classmates are getting a participation stuffie and he is not. I suppose we could just wait it out and he'll get over it. In the meantime, the boys have very little experience with computers, so explaining dealing with data harvesting operations is going to be a stretch. Nor am I ready for the "sometimes people in charge are just wrong and you should ignore them," because there's no way that can end badly for five year olds.

I could just make up some email addresses to fill in the six spots, and since, as mentioned, the boys are not particularly sophisticated about computer stuff, we can get away without having to have a talk about the ethics of cheating a cockeyed system in order to get things you want. I'm not ready to introduce "this is unfair, so it's okay to be unfair back" into their ethical schema. Also, since retirement I have enjoyed not being a constant raspberry seed in the wisdom teeth of the system; I thought I'd have longer before we'd get back to that. 

We could just go ahead and fork over the email addresses, but exactly which friends or family members do I think deserve to have one more daily junk e-mail?

I'll share my thoughts, politely, with the school. I get it--this is so much easier and less painful than the old school fund raisers, and funds need to be raised. It would be nice to do it without trying to leverage peer pressure and the littles' love of trinkets, but that has always been an issue with fund raisers. 

It's all a reminder that data is the new oil, and schools are a vast untapped reservoir. We could not make it more appealing to try to breach the boundaries of schools if we had built all the school furniture out of gold. Schools have got to get better at being vigilant, and parents have to pay attention, because the attempts to turn schools into data harvesting operations are never going to stop. 

PA: The Charter Industry Has Ana Meyers' Back

 Ana Meyers had risen swiftly through the world of charter school biz, and even when her career trajectory took a turn for the worse, the charter industry has her back. 

Meyers was the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. She has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse.

Meyers only got into the charter biz with PCPCS in 2017, but she hit the ground running with vocal opposition to Governor Tom Wolf's stated intention to rein charters in and perform some common sense overhaul of Pennsylvania's charter laws. When he said it again in 2019, Meyers expressed her sadness.

“I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvanian’s charter schools [brick-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” states the letter signed by Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, the state’s largest organization representing charter schools.

“I would have thought that a governor who has championed public education like you have over the past four-plus years would know better. I believe that you would have a much better understanding of how charter schools operate in Pennsylvania if you took the time to visit a few of them.”

Well, that's baloney, but it's the baloney that Meyers was paid to sell. And sell it she did--right up until she shot herself in the foot. 

Meyers was an active voice in opposition to Governor Wolf ever since he put charters on notice that there would be more regulation and less gravy train. Can't limit family choices, can't trap students in failing zip codes, etc, Meyers said. She tried hard to sell the idea that PA charters are non-profits (they are, but the management companies that run some of them surely aren't). And she just helped the coalition launch 143K Rising, a PR push to resist attempts to cut charter budgets (something Wolf hasn't actually tried to do, but you have to keep your people scared). And she wasn't very shy about it, calling Wolf "an idiot on so many levels."

The world of charter supporters has long been an alliance between those who see charters as a tool for equity and social justice, and those who want to unleash free market forces in place of "government schools." Meyers' tea party past offers a hint about which group she comes from. But Saturday, May 31, 2020, less than a week after the murder of George Floyd, she put her foot in it.

Avi Wolfman-Arent caught the story and reported it for PBS station WHYY. Saturday, Meyers posted a response to an emergency alert about "violent protestors" in Philadelphia. "None of this is okay," she said, noting that her husband is a retired state policeman, argued that all sectors have some bad apples "including the church." After offering support for the police, she closed with "These protestors disgust me. All lives matter."

When the station called to ask her about the post, it disappeared and an apology was posted. Meyers asserted her support for Black Lives Matters, explained she had not meant the protestors, but the looters. "I did not mean to insinuate that I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” she said. But it's pretty hard to read "All lives matter," any other way.

Criticism from the charter sector was swift. Sharif El-Mekki is a charter principal and heads up a group working on solving the problem of too few Black teachers in the classroom rejected her apology. At least one charter chain "condemned" her remarks. And as of yesterday, she was out of a job. Said the coalition board, "We have determined that new leadership is in the best interests of our member schools and the families they serve across the state." They thanked Meyers for her work, and buh-bye.

If you're thinking it's a shame that a career could be derailed by a single (okay, a couple) thoughtless post, fret not. Meyers was unemployed for a whole month. In August of 2020, she started a new job as the Associate Vice President of Community & Board Relations for Commonwealth Charter Academy. 

Commonwealth Charter Academy started out life as an arm of the Pearson octopus, who bought it from the original investors in 2011. Since then they have branched out into many lucrative fields, like their 

expansive real estate dealings. They also operate the largest cyber school in Pennsylvania. Like all of Pennsylvania's cyber-schools, they do a lousy job of teaching students, but a fabulous job of making money--particularly during the big pandemic boom (in PA, 99.7% of the students who jumped from public school to charter jumped to a cyber charter). They spend a ton of money on marketing, including floats for parades and, believe it or not, the CCA Ice Level Lounge in the home stadium of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. Lots of taxpayer dollars getting burned through. Try to imagine what your local taxpayers would say if they discovered your local school district was spending millions of their tax dollars on marketing, parade floats, and swanky stadium lounges.

So those are the folks that hired Ana Meyers. And the people who ousted her? They just gave her an award.

At the 2022 Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools Conference, earlier this month, Meyers received a Legacy Award for being a longtime advocate of charter schools. From the people who "ousted" her two years ago. The presenter touts her for being a force for charter schools for "over a decade" which scans, I guess, since a decade ago her LinkedIN profile says she was working as Pennsylvania State Director for FreedomWorks ("Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom") and lists one of her many accomplishments as being "responsible for helping pass major piece of Education Reform (School Choice) legislation with the 2012 state budget" aka "Opportunity Scholarships" aka tax credit scholarships. I'm not sure what she was doing for charter in subsequent jobs like her two and a half years at LeadingAge PA which is busy "advancing aging services and quality care for seniors."

Her accomplishments as listed by the presenter boil down to building the market, pulling in more customers, landing grants--nothing about actual education. But if you're good at business, everyone's more than happy to put that one little slip-up behind them. 

Meanwhile, PCPCS has moved on to preparing for the next big event, the CEO Summit; one treat for that is the legislative breakfast for which legislative leaders are invited to come break their fast with business and school leaders. It's "an excellent occasion to reach families, educators, and community partners who collaborate with Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools."  And it will be held at the Commonwealth Charter Academy at 1 Innovation Way in Harrisburg. 

Teaching Gender Roles and Sexual Identities

I know I've said this before, but this time I have a picture.

Forbidding teachers to bring sexual orientation and gender identity into their classrooms is a hopeless cause. Yes, even and especially when talking about K-3 or K-5.

Children's books are loaded with families, which is not surprising--families are a huge part of a child's world. However, every one of those books says something about how families are built. That's why conservatives had a small cow over a married pair of lesbian polar bears on Peppa Pig--because even though their sexual identities and gender roles are not discussed at any length, the mere fact that they exist in the show means that they might shape a child's idea of what is ordinary.

What's ordinary in traditional books? You've got series like the Little Critter books or Classic Clifford (we have not yet dipped into new, improved, tv-derived Clifford), where Mom stays home (usually in an apron) and Dad goes to work. There are more mysterious books like the Llama Llama books, where dad is not in evidence because Mom is the actual caregiver of the child. As a stay-at-home father, I appreciate the occasional book in which it's ordinary for the dad to be staying home, doing the laundry, making the meals, etc etc etc, but they're rare. For that matter, we get pretty excited when we find a book about twins. And you will never see the kind of excitement that you get when a little sees their own name in a book.

Because it's nice to look in a book and see your own life.

Children's literature tells them what is ordinary in a family all the time. It shows them what is ordinary in sexual orientation and gender identity all the time. 

I've made that argument often, but this week I was reminded that it's more than that. Here's a paper that the Board of Directors brought home from kindergarten.

"Bed" rhymes with "wed," as depicted by this nice couple. To be clear, I have no beef with this assignment at all. Do you think this assignment could get someone in trouble in Florida or other states where teaching sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal? Traditional gender identities and sexual orientations are still gender identities and sexual orientations, and we currently teach them all the time. 

Just keep this in mind for the next time somebody says, "But of course nobody thinks we should teach kindergartners about sexual orientation or gender identity."