High School Theater and Changing Genders

I came across this story over the weekend-- the Central Academy of Technology and Arts in North Carolina has drawn the ire of Moms for Liberty and other reactionary folks by staging a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar in which casting was done without any consideration for gender. 

I had several thoughts, including flashing back to my high school days in the early 1970s when Superstar was all the rage and was also stirring up all the rage. The title song was a radio hit and so many pearls were clutched , and then clutched even more when folks discovered that the single had King Herod's Song on the B side, which in retrospect strikes me as some top quality trolling, because taken out of context that song certainly seems a tad blasphemous. I also vividly remember that in the world of church youth ministries, Superstar was greeted with great enthusiasm. The JCS flap was my introduction to that phenomenon in which many people who get all offended on behalf of religion are not actually all that involved in the church. 

But mostly my thought was that gender flipping of roles in high school theater is not remotely new.

I've been involved in amateur and school theater for ages, and here's the thing. Shows are written with heavily male casts. But in school and community theater, mostly what you get coming out are females. School and community theater are, in some respects, harder on directors than a big Broadway production. In the pros, you can say, "For this part I want an actor who's 5'10" with blue eyes and blonde hair and can dance, act and juggle fire." In the school and amateur world, you get what you get, and you have to figure out how to make a show out of it. 

So you do what you have to do. I cannot even count the number of times I've switched role genders. Some don't make the slightest bit of difference--the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat could be anybody, or even a couple of anybodies. And why not older female authority figures, like Mr. Lundie in Brigadoon. I've done Once Upon a Mattress a couple of times; it's a great little show and it has a brace of main characters who can be either gender. It's also a great example of a show that's just more interesting if you mix it up rather than just using a stage full of male characters.

That's part of what you discover when you start casting women in roles originally written for men; it unlocks all sorts of cool stuff. Make Bell's crazy father into her crazy mother in Beauty and the Beast and all sorts of little things shake loose. 

I once directed an in-the-park production of Hamlet, costumed to look like a generation story in the sixties, and turned Laertes into Ophelia's older sister, and that creates some really interesting dynamics as well as adding a female character who's not a terrible mess (and don't come at me about "historical accuracy" in a work by William "I giveth not one fig for thy true historie" Shakespeare. 

Or a production of The Fantasticks in which the fathers are played by women playing men. Or the gazillion chorus members that have been asked to cross dress. The list goes on and on. Make the changes a few times out of necessity and you start seeing that musical theater's endless tendency to use male characters as a default setting deserves to be challenged and ignored.

That's really at the heart of all our arguments about gender and race in fiction--the long-standing idea that a straight white male is the default setting for all characters and you can have other types of characters only as long as you can make a case for them--but the straight white male is the character that you never have to make a case for. High school theater upends this by making a very simply case--not enough guys came out for this show--but once you've broken the habit, you can start thinking of casts without that default, and it opens a whole world of rich possibilities. 

(And that's before we even get to the "straight" default, which is not obvious to the audience, but how many young LGBTQ performers have come up playing straight characters on stage.)

CTA has a famously successful theater program; I suspect their decision had nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with opening up more opportunities and possibilities for their cast and production. I'll also bet dollars to donuts that none of the M4L crew has much experience with high school theater (not even as audience members) because to anyone who spends time in that world, cross casting is not a shocking new surprise. In that respect, necessity pushed high school theater productions ahead of the culture at large. No reason they shouldn't stay there. 

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/9)

Once a year, my small town transforms into the site of a three-day festival that is a combination of every craft fair you've ever seen, plus a race, plus a car show, plus food, plus a combination homecoming and fall festival. Our excuse is a tenuous connection to John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) who lived in the area briefly before heading west, apple stuff in hand. But it is one of the big highlights of the year here, and a chance to run into all sorts of folks. This year we have the bonus of the twins, who are never not amazed and excited to see someone from school outside of school. 

Despite all that activity, I've still got a reading list for you. Remember to share your favorites. Amplifying voices is how the word gets out.

Big tech is co-parenting our children. Yes, be afraid. 

The New York Times looks at Susan Linn's "searing indictment of corporate greed" and the tech companies who target children, as well as the lawmakers who make it easy. 

Some Politicians Count on Teachers Staying Silent. We Can’t Afford To

At Education Week, Monte Bourjaily says it's time for teachers to speak up and push back against the wave of gag laws.

Tennessee charter school commission accused of 'enormous conflict of interest'

NewsChannel 5 out of Nashville has been all over the state's charter school shenanigans, including this story of how the state has handed charter advocates the power to overrule local government. 

An ever-growing disconnect

While we're talking about Tennessee shenanigans, it's useful to check in on Dad Gone Wild

Dallas Schools Turn to NFTs to Boost Student Engagement

From the file of Dumb Things That School Districts Buy Into. 

The Reckless Rankings Game

The Chronicle of Higher Education will only give you a couple of free articles, but this should be one of them. Akil Bello offers this scathing look at the U.S. News college ranking racket.

Gaming the school rating systems

Gail Sunderland notes that parents mostly like their schools, so reformsters have created school rating systems that are far more about politics than about education. 

Foot soldiers for Ron DeSantis: The right-wing money and influence behind Moms for Liberty

Nobody tracks dark money influences like Maurice Cunningham, and in this piece for Our Schools (this link will take you to LA Progressive, but you can find the piece in several outlets) he plays connect the dots with Moms For Liberty and entirely too many other of the usual shadowy players.

Book bans part of coordinated assault on public education

Jonathan Friedman of PEN America put out this op-ed explaining why there's more to worry about than just the book bans.

NC virtual charter schools continue to have poor performance yet high demand

In news that will come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention, North Carolina Public Radio discovers that the state's cyber-schools aren't very good at educating students.

Reading the College Board's 990

I'm sending you to Tik Tok this time, and a user whose whole thing is reading non-profit's federal 990 forms. This time she breezes through the College Board's form and golly bob howdy but do those folks make a ton of money. This includes David Coleman's salary. Yikes. 

A broke marching band parades on Capitol Hill to practice. Magic ensues.

There is perhaps more to unpack here than Lizzie Johnson at the Washington Post gets into, but it's still a cool piece, especially if you're a marching band person.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes, I took a look at the federal audit of the Charter School Programs grant program, which finds, once again, a hellacious amount of waste and mendacity. And I took a look at North Carolina's terrible merit pay plan and how it seems to have come via some shadowy backroom dealings. 

One More Misguided Call To End School Boards

At reformy publication Education  Next, Henry Smith calls for the elimination of school boards. Smith has been the mayor of a small town (Dover, NH), and an assistant secretary of education under Bill Clinton; currently he's an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Once upon a time, he interned for a member of Boston City Council.

His takeaway from his experiences is that politicians can be self-aggrandizing and more interested in gaining political power than doing the right thing, and that school board members are often politicians, and therefor do many Naughty Things. And he rattles off some recent scandals, without even getting around to the hijacking of boards by the right-wing anti-public ed crowd. 

While the recent school board scandals and demagogues echo the old ones, such activities are just a few of the many reasons to call for the elimination of school boards in the 21st century.

So let's see how he makes his case. He offers four arguments.

First, technology. Parents can communicate directly with schools and staff. "Parents no longer need to rely on the board’s political capital with individual schools when they can learn about their children’s progress by speaking directly and daily to the system’s staff themselves." This has been true since the invention of the telephone, a pre-21st century invention. This point seems to rest on a misconception of school board's role. "Since school boards rarely use their political clout to connect parents to principals and teachers, they have made their job of constituent outreach and representation mostly obsolete." Was that ever a school board's job? Have teachers and administrators been surrounded by a mysterious barrier that only school board members could breach?

Second, Smith says, that school boards "tend to roll over for the expertise of the school administrators." So the complaint is that the board hires folks with educational expertise to run the school district and then... listens to them? "It often looks more like the school boards are managed by school administrators instead of the other way around." Well, yes. That's exactly what school administrators are hired to do. Is Smith also upset that members of Congress set policy for social security, but do not actually manage social security offices themselves? 

Third, "voters are long past showing much interest in engaging with school boards." He means as far as elections go. Nobody is voting in school board elections and so school board elections have "devolved into contests in which mostly just teachers and community rabble rousers participate." I don't even know what to do with this one--the average ballot, especially in an off year, is filled with offices for which few people vote, from county coroner to 5th Level Adjudicatory Judge of Appeals Court of 157th Subdistrict. What an interesting world it would be if we simply eliminated every office for which voting fell beneath a certain level. 

Fourth, Smith blames contract negotiation difficulties the fault of the board. 

Direct contract negotiations between the school administration and the teacher unions, without the machinations caused by the additional layer of school board politicians, would eliminate one layer of government and, thereby, accelerate those contract negotiations.

Oh, Honey. There are two problems here. The first is that there is zero reason to believe this is actually true. Second is that direct negotiations of this sort would risk poisoning the working relationship of teachers and their managers. Okay--three problems, and I'll get back to the third one in a second.

So how, in Smith's world, are school districts run?

[F]or parents who want to advocate for their children and the schools’ programs, Parent Teacher Associations offer numerous advantages over school boards. PTAs simply do a better job of giving parents political and social capital within the school system.

Have you noticed what's missing from all of Smith's grand ideas and complaints? Every taxpayer who is not a parent. In direct teacher-administration negotiation, nobody represents all the taxpayers who will foot the bill. PTAs do not include non-parent taxpayers. 

Smith also like mayoral control, citing big-city mayors Boston’s Michele Wu, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, New York’s Eric Adams, and DC’s Muriel Bowser as folks who "need no assistance from school board politicians" and it is true that mayors like Eric "Swagger My Way Through Massive Budget Cuts" Adams have provided excellent examples of politicians who don't accept input from much of anyone. 

Smith hates the politicking and grandstanding and the "political battlefield" that school boards represent, but he somehow imagines that "mayors, families, PTAs, and school systems, working together, can do a better job" on issues like children's test scores and resegregation problems. This imagines that mayors, families, PTAs and school systems will somehow not involve people who are interested in political maneuvering and self-aggrandizement or "extremist political exploitation," which is just a silly thing to imagine. Mayoral control in particular leaves schools at the mercy of one person's bad ideas, and appointed boards are at least as political as elected ones, if not more so.

Less silly, and perhaps more important, is that Smith's idea cuts a whole vast number of taxpayer stakeholders out of school governance, leaving a critical group paying taxes and having no say. I can't imagine that such a system wouldn't stir up some political battles of its own.

I get it. There isn't a teacher who has taught for more than a week who hasn't felt frustration and/or rage over their local school board and the whole business of being a trained professional who ultimately answers to a batch of elected amateurs.

But a democracy-ish system in which government is run by a bunch of elected amateurs is fundamental to our country's operation. It as, as the saying goes, the very worst system except for every other system. Nor is there any system that cannot be bent to politicized shenanigans if citizens simply stop paying attention and exercising due diligence. I get Smith's frustration, but his solution is no solution at all.

A No-Cost Gift Schools Can Give To All Students

Slack.

It's been seven years since Robert Putnam published Our Kids, a book that laid out a lot of depressing evidence that the wealthy of this country are, in every way, leaving the poor behind. 

One of the things that wealthy families have that poor families do not is what you can think of as either a big web or a large account of social capital. It's a web of connections, the ability to call a guy, the chance to get some slack in a difficult situation. You can think of it as privilege or social capital or simply the power of family reputation. 

It shows up in a variety of ways. Some are extra bonuses, like having the right web of connections to get your kid extra help with an area of his or her interest (Little Pat is suddenly interested in widgets, and I know a guy who runs a Junior Widgeteer Club). Some are the chance for a do-over--Pat steals money from the school concession stand, but people decide to give Pat a second chance. 

When you're a kid, you learn about slack pretty quickly. I was halfway through high school when I realized that I was coded as a Good Kid and could wander the halls and skirt rules in ways that some of my peers could not. 

Some students get slack. They get extra opportunities and extra chances to bounce back from mistakes.

And the thing is, schools can give that kind of slack to everyone. From the classroom to the front office, schools can extend slack to each and every student no matter the circumstance.

Mind you, nobody should get infinite slack. I always told my students that I would trust them until they proved to me that I couldn't, and every year there were a couple who proved to me that I couldn't give them slack.

But you have to start with the slack. Even if you have Heard Things about that kid. Even if you remember How Their Older Sibling Was, or you've lived around the community long enough to know about the Parental Units' various failings.

It's exhausting and wearing to live your life as if you are just one misstep away from disaster and loss. It's hard to fix that in the world at large, but not so hard to fix it inside a school.

That means cutting slack for getting work done, for minor misbehavior, for being surly and uncooperative, for not Getting It yet, for violating some rules. It means not getting pissed at a student for what you imagine they're probably going to do. It doesn't mean a license for assault or otherwise creating an unsafe environment for teachers and other students.

There are many ways in which we cannot give some students the kinds of privileges that come with wealth and station and, well, privilege. But you can treat every single student as if they are from a wealthy, upstanding family. 

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."