Your All-Purpose NAEP News Release

It's time once again to greet the release of another set of data from the NAEP testing machine, which means everyone is warming up their Hot Take generator. But if, like me, you're getting tired of writing a response to the latest NAEPery, here's a handy news release that will let you mad lib your way to NAEPy wisdom.

The new scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known as The Nation's Report Card, have been released, providing important data about [insert your preferred education policy area]. The recent crisis in [select your favorite policy-adjacent crisis] has clearly created a burgeoning issue of [select whatever Bad Thing you feel will most scare your audience in the direction of your preferred policy]. 

Says [head of your organization], "The new scores provide important evidence that now is the time for [insert whatever policy action your group always supports]. Clearly the [rise/drop/stagnation] in scores among [whichever subgroup cherry picking best suits your point] proves exactly what we have been arguing for [however long you've been at this.]"

[Insert paragraph of data carefully selected and crunched for your purposes. Add a graph if you like. People really dig graphs.]

"This is a clear indication," says [your favorite go-to education expert], "that it is long past time to [do that thing your organization has been trying to get people to do for years]. Clearly [our preferred solution] is needed." [Insert further sales pitch here as needed.]

You can expand on this if you wish, but make sure that you definitely do not--

* provide context for the data that you include

* ever explain that "proficient" on NAEP represents well above grade level; just go with the assumption that it means "adequate" or "on grade level"

* offer perspective from NAEP's many critics

* absolutely never ever reference the fact that the NAEP folks are extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else.

As always, the main lesson of NAEP is that contrary to the expectations of so many policy wonks, cold hard data does not actually solve a thing.

The NAEP remains a data-rich Rorschach test that tells us far more about the people interpreting the data than it does about the people from whom the data was collected. Button up your overcoat, prepare for greater-than-usual pearl-clutching and solution-pitching from all the folks who still think the pandemic shutdown is a great opportunity to do [whatever it is they have already been trying to do]. 

Doug Mastriano's Fake Parental Rights Bill

Last week Doug Mastriano held a campaign event masquerading as a hearing for a parental rights bill so empty and vague that its only possible use could be as a campaign prop.

Mastriano signaled a whole year ago that he was going to wade into the whole "parental rights" thing with his own version of a "legislate the gay away" bill. Soon thereafter, he proposed SB 996, which was turned over to the State Government committee on January 4, 2022. 

And yet, the time to hold a hearing on the bill is just before time to vote for Mastriano or his opponent for Pennsylvania's governor's seat.

The bill itself is a brief nothingburger. The Parental Rights Protection Act is 41 lines long. 6 lines give its name. 16 lines define the terms "commonwealth agency" and "non-commonwealth agency." Section 3 in its entirety says:

(a) General rule.--The liberty of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, care and welfare of the parent's child is a fundamental right.

(b) Infringement.--Neither a Commonwealth agency nor a non-Commonwealth agency may infringe upon the right under subsection (a) without demonstrating that the law or ordinance is narrowly tailored to meet a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means.

In 8 lines, we get the applicability of the law, and two lines to tell us that the law would take effect in 60 days.

The Mastriano campaign has maintained its unwillingness to speak to the press, and so has offered no clarification of the bill's intent or function. But the parade of witnesses at the hearing brought the usual list of grievances--mask mandates, trans student using rest rooms, "pornographic" books in the school library, and "pronoun games."  The bill, absent any specifics, allows all of these folks to imagine that it would provide them some relief, without including any language that opponents could point to as objectionable. 

To the charge that the hearing only invited supporters to testify, it was pointed out that former state health secretary Rachel Levine was invited, but declined. Levine is one of the few openly transgender government officials in the U.S.

More specific parental rights legislation has been proposed in Pennsylvania, such as HB 2813, which follows more closely the national template of other Don't Say Gay bills forbidding discussion of "gender orientation and sexual identity." 

What would the bill actually do? Nobody really knows. Does this mean I can get satisfaction when my kid's teacher shows a Disney movie when I don't allow them in my home? Or when my kid has to use  Chromebook and we are an Apple household? Will I be able to do something if the teacher mentions Jesus or God and we don't do religion at our house? What would qualify as an infringement, and what could a parent who felt the law had been broken do? Call the police? File a lawsuit? Should they report the agency to the proper part of the state government--and if so, which department would that be? What penalty would be imposed? 

Mastriano says the bill would "restore common sense" in public schools. The bill does not offer any explanation of exactly what "common sense" means. 

This is a proposal for a law so broad and vague as to be nearly meaningless, with no enforcement mechanisms included. But it did allow Mastriano's flagging campaign to stage an event in Harrisburg close to election time. 

Federal Don't Say Gay? What are we really not talking about?

Driving LGBTQ folks back under cover or into the closet seems to be the current wave of the storm that started with CRT panic. And the stakes just keep getting higher. Which is why we need to remember what these Don't Say gay laws actually say. 

Florida's department of education has indicated that teachers who "intentionally provide instruction" about gender identity and sexuality will lose their teaching license. Which is nuts enough, but now we've got a proposal for a national law. 

The bill was introduced by Rep Mike Johnson of Louisianna. His previous legislative high points include a bill to allow discrimination against LGBTQ persons. He was on Trump's impeachment defense team, and was one of the 126 House Republicans who signed on the lawsuit to contest the 2020 election results. The bill has been co-sponsored by thirty other GOP House members*

The bill is all about forbidding the use of federal tax dollars on any kind of sexually-oriented program for children under 10 The bill does spell out that nude adults, stripping and "lewd or lascivious dancing" are not okay. The preamble of the bill mentions that drag queen story hour at a library is a bad thing, but what if the drag queen reads a non-sexual story in a non-sexual way? Do the bill's sponsors suggest that when a man puts on women's clothes, that automatically broadcasts sexuality? The bill's official definition lumps many things together:

The term ‘‘sexually-oriented material’’ means any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects

(The bill also includes a definition of stripping, just in case you were fuzzy on that one.)

As is the current trend, the federal bill proposes private right of action, meaning that any person who gets to feeling aggrieved by something vaguely related to the bill can drag someone into court. I guess we'll be living with the Texas Workaround for a while, as conservatives have found it useful to dodge government responsibility for enforcing crappy laws.by deputizing litigious citizens.

One huge problem--for the umpty-zillionth time--is the lumping in of the terms "gender identity" and "sexual orientation."

The Washington Post's Kate Cohen absolutely nailed it in her column about Florida's OG version of this gag law. Speaking of some of the politicians who backed it:

The truth is they don’t bother to use the words correctly because they don’t believe the words apply to them. They seem to think that only gay people have a sexual orientation and only trans people have a gender identity. Which is sort of like thinking that only foreign people have an accent. Or that “ethnic” means any food you didn’t grow up eating.

Opponents of these bills understand their true intent not because we are equally narrow-minded but because the culture we live in still sees “straight” as “normal” and gender as “boy,” “girl” or “made up.” We’re trying to change that culture, but we know it well. We know whom these laws mean to silence or shame. We get it.

A local school in my area is hosting a "Donuts with Dad" event, in which fathers are encouraged to take some time out from work (because, you know, they're dads) and come hang out with their children at school. This not-at-all-unusual event is so loaded with statements about gender identity and sexual orientation (Dads are males, and every child has neither more nor less than one of them, for starters) that, in many other school districts, it has simply collapsed under its own weight. But under the proposed federal bill, I could just go ahead and sue the district over this. 

You can find examples of this kind of thing, easily, every single day. But purveyors of these Don't Say Gay bills are sure that straight, traditional roles for men and women are not gender roles or sexual identities, but just "the way things are" and need no explanation, examination or justification, while everything else is a deviance from what Just Is and therefor must be explained and justified. As Cohen wrote, for some people, only LGBTQ persona have a gender identity or sexual orientation.

Furthermore, if the words mean what the folks who write and support such bills think they mean, then this bill outlaws any mention of transgender folks, as well as any LGBTQ folks. Under this definition of "sexually-oriented material," Peppa Pig episodes with the lesbian polar bear couple would qualify as sexually-oriented material. Anything that a child brought from a home, if home includes a pair of same gender parents, would be sexually-oriented material. By the law's definition, the mere mention of LGBTQ people makes a work sexually oriented and thereby verboten.

Let's roll the calendar back, they say, to the days when nobody had a gender identity or sexual orientation because everyone knew to settle into the default and Cole Porter wrote lovely songs and the Village People made that great song even your uncle can dance to and that Paul Lynde is always hilarious and maybe we could even enjoy some jazz from Billie Tipton with our spinster great aunt and her long time best friend and not ever have to think about that LGBTQ stuff instead pretending that it just doesn't exist, because of course there's only one real way to be in the world, and we all participate in that one way, right? No need to talk about gender identity or sexual orientation ever. Easier to have gags for you than blindfolds for me. 

I'm just sitting here waiting for the first big court case when some parents take a school district to court for using Berenstain Bears to indoctrinate children into certain gender identities and sexual orientations. 

*Representatives Bob Good (VA), Brian Babin (TX), Jeff Duncan (SC), Vicky Hartzler (MO), Doug Lamborn (CO), Markwayne Mullin (OK), Lauren Boebert (CO), Gregory Steube (FL), Debbie Lesko (AZ), Daniel Webster (FL), Ralph Norman (SC), Randy Weber (TX), Van Taylor (TX), Mary Miller (IL), Lance Gooden (TX), Louie Gohmert (TX), Glenn Grothman (WI), William Timmons (SC), Clay Higgins (LA), Steve Womack (AR), Tracey Mann (KS), John Joyce (PA), Scott Franklin (FL), Burgess Owens (UT), Matt Rosendale (MT), Russ Fulcher (ID), Tom Tiffany (WI), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Doug LaMalfa (CA), Andrew Clyde (GA), Michael Guest (MS), and Dan Bishop (NC) joined Representative Johnson in cosponsoring the legislation.

ICYMI: Leaving On A Jet Plane Edition (10/16)

Today I'm hopping (well, more likely, given the state of air travel these days, trudging miserably) onto a plane to travel to Seattle to meet the newest member of the Institute. She's already a month old and I haven't met her yet. Consequently, things are probably going to be quiet around here this week. Here's some reading to tide you over.

Something of a Rut

Blue Cereal Education with a piece that takes an honest look at how it feels when your teaching wagon seems a bit stuck.

Watch out for Ron DeSantis

Okay, if you're a regular reader here, you probably don't need to be told. But Jan Resseger has assembled a list of DeSantis highlights, to be remembered when he makes his play for national office.

Don't say gay is working as intended

The father of a trans child in Florida reports that the new law is just as damaging as you expected it to be. In the Washington Post.

Cry on the Last Day of School, Too

Jose Luis Vilson with a great piece of appreciation for Abbott Elementary and a reminder of why it's the show teachers need right now. 

Lawsuits put school choice on Vermont Legislature’s agenda 

Vermont has had a quiet little version of school choice for a while now, but, as this piece from Valley News explains, the Vermont legislature may have to have a bit of a talk about what happens next.

The true genius of tech leaders

Not about education, but this piece by Cory Doctorow is certainly about some of the folks who think they ought to be running education, and what the true secret of success might be (spoiler: it's not their superior wisdom about everything).

Young people need experiences that boost their mental health

Some unsurprising research results suggest that maybe tens need to get out and do stuff to lead fuller, healthier lives.

Who's left out of the learning loss debate?

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes for the New Yorker about the flap over school closings, learning loss, etc etc, and if you can bear to wade through all of this again, there are some good insights contained.

More than politics

Meanwhile, at Chalkbeat, Patrick Wall points to research that shows that no, school closings and openings were not all about politics after all. 

Inside the Struggle to Rebuild America’s Black Teaching Workforce

At EdWeek, Benjamin Herold takes a look at ab ambitious program to get more Black faces in front of classrooms. 

What next for New York Charter schools?

At Education Next. Yes, I know, but as with his book about Success Academy, Robert Pondiscio has written something worth reading regardless of your stance. 

Meanwhile, I was busy this week at Forbes with three new pieces:

--A look at how the pendulum swings on reading policy, and a new paper by P. L. Thomas that helps clarify the current state of the reading wars

--A look at a cool new data tool that shows what kind of educational opportunity your state offers, and also shows that Pennsylvania has the worst opportunity gap in the country.

--And check out a documentary film about the travails of the Chester Upland school district in Pennsylvania. 

"It's about the passion, not about the paper"

That exceptionally silly quote is from Robert Abel, the Dallas schools Chief of Human Capital Management (a silly job title). It comes from an AP article about the growing move to "ease job requirements" for teachers in many states. You will be unsurprised to learn that Abel has never taught in a classroom; he graduated with a BA in molecular biology and was, somehow, a Vice Principal in DeSoto, TX, three years later. 

But let's not pick on Abel, who simply articulated an idea that is not uncommon. Teaching is all about passion and being called and just, you know, caring real hard. Lots of folks are spouting this line these days, including, unfortunately, people who think they are supporting teachers. But if all it takes is passion, well, then, anybody can be a teacher. Anybody at all.

Doesn't that make sense?

I've been dragged into court. Don't get me one of those lawyers who has gone to school and studied and practice law for years--just get me someone who's passionate about courtrooms and lawsuits and stuff. 

My beloved partner needs a major operation on their spleen. Don't get me one of those surgeons who just has a bunch of papers from some med school--just get me someone who's passionate about spleens and cutting things. 

I mean, we have shortages to deal with. There's a nursing shortage--let's just start hiring people who are passionate about being around sick people. There's a truck driver shortage, but hey--let's just issue big rig licenses to anyone who has ever driven any vehicle and is passionate about traveling. There's a rural doctor shortage--let's just let anyone who's really passionate about working with sick people be a doctor. And there's actually a plumber shortage--let's just hire someone who's passionate about water to do the job.

What could possibly go wrong?

This is the same kind of baloney that some people spew about art, that one just has to feel real hard and art pops out, as if there is not a world of technique and skill and study and practice required to enable that artful popping. 

This is not about "easing job requirements." It's about redefining the job and thereby expanding the candidate pool. Ray Kroc did this for McDonalds by redefining "cook" as "somebody who flips a switch, drops a fry basket, and assembles a product according to instructions." Redefining the job gets you a larger candidate pool, which in turn lowers the cost of hiring or replacing people--you know, that pesky human capital. 

"Passion not paper" doesn't even make sense in this context, because people who are passionate about a pursuit generally direct that passion into action and study and growth. Imagine someone who says, "I am really passionate about playing the trombone, but I don't ever actually do it." 

Teach for America was founded on the premise of "passion not paper," except that only a small percentage of its temp workforce was actually passionate about teaching (as opposed to, say, being passionate about building their resume), and you can spot those people because they actually stayed and did the work to become real teachers. 

So I'm not sure exactly what slice of human capital Abel is talking about, which persons are out there saying, "I am really passionate about teaching, but I have not taken any steps in my life to pursue that passion." If someone tells you, "I feel very passionate about you, but not enough to call or see you or listen to you or spend time with you," are you thinking that person is relationship material?

Look, I'm not about to defend the current teacher prep pipeline as a flawless source of training. Some college teacher prep programs are crap. I also recognize that some schools (like the one in the story that hasn't had a qualified math teacher for a year) face dire situations that demand some kind of solution right now. I believe that programs that create a path for people who have worked in schools as support personnel and have come to love and respect the work can be a plus. And I have known second-career teachers who were good.

Does passion matter? Sure. It's passion that fuels the engine that gives you the strength to power through the hard work, the long practice, the deep study, the acquisition of skill, the will to navigate the crappy days--all the things that get you the paper. Passion, by itself, is not enough.

But I also know that (as the article acknowledges) the new bunch of unqualified pseudo-teachers are not going to end up in schools filled with students from wealthy white families. Redefining the teaching profession so that any warm body can be placed in a classroom is going to have negative effects (exacerbated because these unqualified warm bodies tend to have a high rate of turnover), and those negative effects are going to be felt by students on the bottom end of the socio-economic scale, the students who already get the short end of the stick. They don't need passion and heart and gooey excuses--they need people who know what the hell they're doing and can do it well.

How Does Educational Opportunity Look In Your State?

I want to direct your attention to a great new tool from Research for Action, a non-partisan nonprofit educational research outfit. They're based in Philly, and I've talked about their work before; they do good stuff. 

This new tool is the Educational Opportunity Dashboard, and it breaks down and crunches data from fifty states that comes from the 2017-2018 federal Civil Rights Data Collection, so it's all pre-COVID, but still interesting, and the dashboard is very easy to use.

The EOI looks at fourteen factors, grouped around educators, school climate and curriculum. It's not the exact list I would pick (in particular, I don't care about how many AP courses a school offers), but it's still instructive. 

You can see how states stack up against each other from various angles, like the gap for opportunities between different groups of students. For example, it turns out that Pennsylvania has a respectable level of average opportunity index, but when you look at the gap between white students and students of color, we're 50th in the nation. 

Beyond rankings, you can see state's individual scores. You can also break down each state's numbers for each of the fourteen categories and see how they compare to nation. For instance, in Pennsylvania we do better than the national numbers for certified teachers and experienced teachers, but are far worse when it comes to student-counselor ratios. 

Reformsters have insisted for decades now that we focus on "outcomes" ("deliverables") and ignore inputs, which suits them fine because they'd rather not have to deal with how underserved so many schools are. But it has led us to a situation where, as has been said many times, we're trying to make the pig gain weight by measuring it. But if you want the pig to gain weight--especially if you want to understand why Wilbur is gaining weight and Peppa is not, it only makes sense to check to see if they're both being given a full-sized meal. This dashboard is a step in that direction. 

It's a worthwhile tool to check out, easy to use, easy to read, and fully explained. RFA has done an excellent job on this; folks who are interested in the state of educational opportunity in the nation and their own home state will find it useful and interesting. 

Ben Carson Wants To Talk To Your Little Patriots

Ben Carson wants a piece of the Patriotic Education For The Youngs action, and what he's come up with for Little Patriots is...well, not awesome.

After he finished serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. Carson created the American Cornerstone Institute, a sort of conservative thinky tank/advocacy group/instrument for pushing whatever thought is ambling through Carson's brain. It had a director of policy--Eric Blankenstein, who found then need to exit the Trump administration a bit earlier than Carson, but he appears to have exited in February. Otherwise, it's not clear that ACI is anything other than Ben Carson. 

Cornerstone touts this goal:

Guided by our cornerstones of faith, liberty, community, and life, we will strengthen the bonds that hold our country together by promoting conservative, commonsense solutions to the issues facing our society.

"We will create unity by selling our team's view" seems a bit counterintuitive, but in talking about ACI Carson has generally emphasized unity and peaceful communication. As with his years with the previous administration, Carson doesn't seem to quite get where all this divisiveness might be coming from, but give him credit--his message is not "We have to obliterate those evil bad guys on the other side." For a conservative in 2022, that's something. 

Incidentally, if it seems as if "cornerstone" isn't a more common part of political rhetoric in this country, that may be because one of the better-known historical "cornerstones" is the Cornerstone Address, in which Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, explained that the cornerstone of the new nation rests "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

It's a curious oversight on Carson's part, particularly since one of the things he/ACI wants to do is teach children history.

Whipping up patriotic instructional stuff has become a staple of the right, and Carson's entry that three-legged race is Little Patriots. 

The program appears aimed at grades K-5, and it emphasizes the four "cornerstones" in the quote above. It involves some fairly thin lessons and activities (from the K unit on Discovering America, "Have you ever wanted to find something new? You too might be an explorer.")

But the big central feature appears to be a series of animated episodes of Star Spangled Adventures. It looks like there are supposed to be 25 eventually; right now there are 4. 

The production crew for these episodes is not a bunch of amateurs. Producer/director Robert F. Arvin has done work in Hollywood on movies and TV shows you've probably watched, from Inspector Gadget to JAG to Shanghai Noon as a digital artist, working mostly on pre-visualizations. Writer Jeff Holder has worked in mainstream kids media as a writer and VP of development at Hanna-Barbera. Songs are by Bradley Skistimas whose most recent claim to fame is getting his defamatory song about Dr, Fauci taken down by Youtube. Main voiced actor Cheryl Felicia Rhoads has worked professionally for a long time. 

So these are people who are pros, and yet somehow, their finished product is not great. Consider Episode Four about the Declaration. 

Open with the theme, which sounds kind of like a C&W singer doing a John Wayne imitation. "So come on all you patriots, let's go."

The animation for these pieces is bobbleheaded and flat, like cut scenes from a 90s-vintage video game. And although animation allows us to go anywhere and see anything, most of this episode is set in a room with Thomas Jefferson sitting at a table (while his wife cleans up, serves guests drinks, and says encouraging things). 

The host for the series is Liberty, a giant eagle in a tri-corner hat, voiced by Rhoads as a sort of discount Angela Lansbury. The video underlines a theme that tensions and conflicts have been getting worse, and the only cause hinted at is King George's tyrannical belief in his divine right to rule. Jefferson is mad at that "plundering tyrant," all of which seems aimed at making it seem as if England is vastly different from the US and has no idea of representative government, no such thing as Parliament, etc. Nor has anything like the French and Indian War ever occurred, creating the debts at the heart of the taxation debate. You can say that's all too complicated for the K-5 crowd, and I don't disagree, but what you choose to include or leave out when you simplify tells us a lot about your message, and the message the  here is that the Revolutionary War was caused by a monarch mistakenly believing in a God-given right to rule when in fact only we understood what God really meant.

Writer Jeff Holder has a career in children's television, really, so I'm thrown by lines like reference to Thomas Paine's "salient points" or "yes, his discourse on role of government is brilliant" and "the magnitude of what we are saying is staggering."  There's a background jazzy score that just loops away without responding to what's happening, not even when we get to the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" part that is a focus of the episode.  And then the eagle says "The world's may be old fashioned, but what they mean are timeless." And yes, that's a subject-verb agreement error. And before someone points it out, yes, I know it takes a good ten seconds to find an error within the confines of this blog, but I'm not a paid professional who has been typing for a living for decades.

We take a moment to explain that "all men" back then meant "all humanity" which...okay. And we are heavy on the God-given part. Also, leaning on "those who are governed are over those who govern." 

After Congress deliberates, we get a song that rhymes "get it done" with "independence." Then we get a scene of King George being hacked off about the Declaration while the eagle whispers incomprehensible pieces of it in his ear and he rants (and happy jazzy piano plays), because I guess doing something doesn't really count unless it upsets someone else. 

The eagle tells us that Jefferson always regretted that the Congress cut the part about slavery. But Congress thought it would cause more arguments, which is a clever way of skating past the fact that members of Congress were the ones arguing. But one theme of this series is the idea that the Founders were a united body, and not a bunch of squabbling men who had major disagreements about just about everything. This matters, because there's a huge difference between understanding ourselves as a nation founded on disagreement and compromise and understanding ourselves as a nation founded on one single inviolable Truth shared by unified founders. But Little Patriots leans on the second version all the way. Of course, the eagle does not mention that Jefferson kept human beings enslaved even as he called slavery an abomination. I don't care how young a person is--you are never too young to understand that people are complicated.

You'd better off showing the musical 1776.

There are some short slide-show style videos that are actually more watchable. There are also a couple of books that Carson co-authors with Valerie Pfundstein and which emphasize things like the Judeo-Christian values of our founding. 

Through lessons and cartoons rooted in our American history, the Little Patriots Program focuses on America’s four founding pillars: faith, liberty, community, and life, and celebrates all the values that make our country exceptional.

The whole program favors a simplistic view of our history anchored in religious faith and national exceptionalism and the awesomeness of entrepreneurial marketeering, with a few head nods to little corrections we made along the way (Jackie Robinson integrates baseball, and MLK Jr. leads some marches and says that character thing). There's a bibliography (the Kindergarten lessons are sourced mostly from the Brittanica online version). There is, at least, no apparent signs of the sort of "And then dirty socialists tried to undermine the work of our Founders" that other patriotic history curriculum are fond of. 

Not to mention irony, as when another video about liberty explains that it means "to follow a new and perhaps different path than others before you." As long as, you know, it's an acceptable right kind of different path.

I don't think Little Patriots is going to fix the nation. It may pad out the work for the private schools, homeschoolers, and grandparents that it's aimed at, but I can't imagine it benefiting actual children. Pass on this.