Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY
That's from the flyer that Freedom Foundation's Ohio office (yes, Ohio) sent out to teachers union members in PA for Halloween.
Freedom Foundation is one of several active anti-union operations in the US. FF is all about fighting unions, specifically "government unions" who represent "a permanent lobby for bigger government." They've opposed pay raises for state workers, pensions, and health benefits. They want to liberate "public employees from political exploitation."
If you're getting a sense of what their actual mission is, a fundraising letter from August of 2015 makes it plain:
The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.
Destroy unions and defund the political left. You can get more of this message from the work of CEO Tom McCabe. The goal is to neutralize unions as a political force, specifically as a force to counter the "shrink government till it's small enough to drown in a bathtub crowd." The group's funders include the Bradley Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust. They're connected to ALEC, the corporate legislation mill, and the State Policy Network, a network of conservative advocates and think tanks.
The newest flyer argues that teachers should leave the union because it didn't get them pay raises that match the current rate of inflation (a curious argument from folks who certainly don't want teachers to get that large a raise). There's a simple detachable postcard to send to their office (again, in Ohio, even though the organization has a Pennsylvania office). It's nominally addressed to the PSEA president and includes a reminder that by Pennsylvania law, you are absolutely entitled to all the benefits of union membership even if you don't belong to the union.
This kind of thing started roughly five seconds after the Supreme Court ruled on Janus, the case that established that members of government worker unions should not have to pay even a fair share. Groups like Freedom Foundation have filed numerous suits to get the home and email addresses of government employees, including teachers, precisely for this purpose. Heck, in the summer of 2018, Freedom Foundation sent folks door to teacher door to try to talk teachers into quitting the union.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (heavily supported by the DeVos family), For Kids and Country (launched by Rebecca Friedrichs who rode point for the failed pre-Janus lawsuit), and Speak Up For Teachers, launched by the Center for Union Facts a dark money group run by union-buster Richard Berman have all taken a shot at separating teachers from their union.
Ironic that the pitch includes a reference to vampires, because the 2018 round of this anti-union push reminded me of just that.
There's a scene in many vampire movies. Someone (usually not the hero) is holding a vampire at bay with a cross. The vampire locks eyes with him. "You don't need to do that. You are perfectly safe from me, and I know that cross is just starting to feel heavy. Heavier and heavier. Why don't you just put it down." And the camera closes in on our intrepid human-- will he put the cross down?
Look, I'm the last person to argue in favor of unquestioning loyalty to PSEA, which occasionally pulls a bonehead move. But being your own union puts you on the same wisdom level as being your own lawyer. I'd love to live in a world in which management is so benevolent and altruistic that teachers don't need any representation; I would also love to live in a world in which I got back all my hair. But here we are in this world. And no--the assorted 'alternative" organizations do not provide anything like the coverage and protection of the actual unions.
And while the decision to become a free rider of the union can be criticized on ethical grounds, I'd also point out the practical problem with depending on rainstorm protection from a big pavilion roof even as you are sawing away at the supports for that structure. Getting people to quit the union is, first last and always, about weakening the union. If you think that would be great, simply look at the states where unions have been neutered--less job protection, les pay, less voice in the profession.
Meanwhile, in other states, Freedom Foundation is spreading lies about what teachers do in school. These are rough times to be without a union if you happen to be in a state with teacher gag laws that forbid you from mentioning sex, gender, race or "controversial topics"--and in a week or so, we'll learn which states are about to join that club. It would be a shame if a teacher had to face these kinds of attacks without any kind of organization to help support them.
Groups like Freedom Foundation do not have teachers' interests at heart. They just want to use every tool at their disposal to make unions go away.
School choice implies a world in which students can select from a wide variety of educational options. But that is not where privatizers of the DeVos strip have been steering us. As I've argued before, the public school system isn't even the major obstacle for a true choice system.
But like our Puritan forefathers, these far-right folks are not interested in a nation in which everyone is free to learn as they wish. They would like to see an end to public education because they see it as not aligned with their values (and it takes their money to educate Those Peoples' Children). What they want is a system in which their own values are ascendant.
Dixon complained that her daughter had checked out a book "about having two different homes" and how the very idea of divorce "caused an unnecessary anxiety."
"Why was this something she was just able to pick up off the shelf?" Dixon inquired.
Dixon is unclear about who, exactly, experienced the anxiety. It's almost as if her own adult concerns are being placed ahead of her daughter's right to read a book.
This is the tell. Over and over again, we see that some choicers actually believe that certain choices should not be available to anyone, including other peoples' children. In New Hampshire, Libertarians attacked a robust school choice program because they just didn't want to spend that much money insuring that other peoples' children had all those choices (let 'em get microschooled on the computer). In Alabama, a school choice politician ran a campaign attacking a charter school set up to serve LGBTQ students. And every single attaempt to ban books is about trying to limit the choices of other peoples' children.
So Dixon is right in line with that crowd when she calls for parental choice--but not for the parents who want to choose things that Dixon doesn't approve of.
Meanwhile, incumbent Gretchen Whitmer asked the right question in their final debate last week:
Do you really think books are more dangerous than guns?
I should get to carry a gun. You should not read books about nasty divorced people.
Dixon's education proposals are cut and pasted from privatizers across the nation. She supports a Don't Say Gay law that limits students' and families' right to hear about the varied forms human life takes (and which fails to understand what it actually says). Anti-trans athlete laws, a solution in search of a problem that, of course, removes choices from Those Parents. A nationalistic and inaccurate history program that makes sure students only learn the "right" history. And vouchers, so that parents can give up the right to a free, quality education in exchange for a small voucher, the better to create a system in which people are free and entitled to get as much education as they can afford--and no more.
Dixon is a bad choice for folks who care about education in Michigan. If you're in Michigan, get out and vote for Gretchen Whitmer for governor (and for state board of education candidates like Mitch Robinson) who will help maintain actual public education for students and families in the state.
We're back, and with election season ramping up, there's plenty to read about. Education is opn the ballot in many states--get out there are vote for it. In the meantime, here's some reading.
You may remember that M4L quietly mothballed one of their three founding members, perhaps because of her close marital ties to the GOP establishment media machine. But as financial detail emerge, we learn that ties to that media machine were maintained with $$$. From The 74, which remains, despite the rightward tilt of its opinion side, a decent source for actual news.
Education is on the line in Oklahoma, as Ryan Walters, an unqualified privatizer runs to be head of the state's education department. Here's what PBS had to say.
Walters, as the current secretary of ed (which in OK is different from the head of the ed department) chairs a committee that is concerned with many of the things he says he's concerned about. But he's never been to a meeting, and his goal appears to be to eliminate the committee. From Payton May at OKCFox.
You may have heard about a dustup at Penn State over a Proud Boys co-founders "speech." Don Moynihan has a much clearer picture of what was happening--and what it tells us about far right tactics.
A reminder once again that the capabilities and future of AI have been hugely overhyped, as the soon-to-be-awesome world of self-driving cars continues to evaporate. Kris Mamula at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Nancy Bailey looks at back at the moment that computerized ed fans thought they were about to have their Katrina moment. What happened, and what do we watch for next?
Short version: in cities, when you get more charter schools, you get fewer teachers coming out of college and university teacher prep programs. Harris finds that elementary, math, and special ed suffer the most. .
This would be an excellent time to remember that correlation is not causation (here's the awesome spurious correlations website to remind us that, among other things, cheese consumption rises with the number of people killed by being tangled in bedsheets, and swimming pool drownings rise and fall with Nicolas Cage film appearances).
So charter schools and the teacher pipeline might very well have absolutely nothing to do with each other. We need to be clear on that right up front.
But if they are connected, what could explain that?
Harris and his co-author Mary Penn don't have an explanation for the connection, which they first noticed while doing their New Orleans research.
The National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools offered a rebuttal. Part of it was just a silly tautism-- there are fewer teachers coming out of traditional programs because there are fewer persons entering programs. And then this:
Although charter schools are a convenient scapegoat for the report author, they are simply not the cause of the nation’s teacher shortage. Given the dire labor shortage, we as a nation need to be open to alternative certification and preparatory programs that attract talent from untraditional sources and provide teachers for the classrooms that desperately need them. Charter schools seem to understand that point.
Especially cranky words from a group that actually sits on the REACH advisory board.
So what could the connection be? NAP[S]CS hints at it as they profess their love for teachers from "alternative" routes. Charter businesses like teachers without traditional training, and they like temps with a high turnover (like Teach for America). Alternative path teachers tend to leave sooner, which suits charter businesses just fine. And that can have consequences.
No profession recruits its own members quite like teaching. Prospective teachers get to watch the profession for thirteen years. They have all that time to watch and think, "Wow, that looks awesome" or "May God forbid I ever wind up in that job."
So what might the effect be of watching a steady parade of mediocre beginners who never stick around to become mature professionals? Particularly in a charter where the teacher's job is to simply implement the program they're handed. Just how fun does reading a canned curriculum look?
I also wonder--charter heavy urban areas tend to be cities where the public system has been beaten down to help sell the charter system, so that teachers in public schools are also laboring harder, in an atmosphere larded with too much disrespect and non-support. None of which makes the profession look particularly attractive.
As I warned, those two trends (charters up, teachers down) could be the result of some other factor entirely, like Nicolas Cage movies, but it's not that hard to imagine what a plausible link might be. Charters are the point of the spear in a general move to devalue the teaching profession, and a lack of interest in that profession would certainly be a predictable result.
It's long past normal for economists to pretend that they have the answers for issues in education (and to be wrong pretty much every time). But a post/twitter thread from Cory Doctorow today puts that in the context of larger problems with economism. What is economism?
Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, "economism," views us as slaves to "incentives" and nothing more.
Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all "non-market" solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they're begun, due to the "incentives" of the individuals in the government.
Doctorow in particular cites an article by Timothy Noah ("May God save us from economists") in tracing the growing influence of economists. In particular they note the growth of things like cost-benefits analyses that involve putting a price on human life. Which is, I learned today, mandatory for all major regulations. IOW, an economist has to sign off on everything in DC.
There's this lovely snippet from the airline biz:
For example, economists convinced Carter to deregulate the airlines and turn legroom into a commodity that you pay extra for. That was the brainchild of then-chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board Alfred E Kahn, an economist, who cheerfully declared "I don't know one plane from another – to me, they are all marginal costs with wings."
Economists find monopolies "efficient."
Doctorow turns to a 1944 work by Kartl Polyani that has given birth to a view of five areas in which economists mess up. See how many of these you recognize from the education reform ideas of the past couple of decades.
I. Excessive reliance on models, which is a big problem because economists' models largely don't work.
Noah rejects the comparison of economic forecasting to weather forecasting: since 1984, economic forecasting has incorporated 20,000 times more variables with few improvements, over the same period, the time horizon for weather forecasts has grown from a few days to a few weeks ("Hurricanes no longer surprise us. Financial crises still do").
II. Underreliance on data. For all the yammering about data and numbers and models, economists largely ignore actual data. Doctorow cites the classic Ely Devons quote--
"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"
In education, we've been subjected to talk about the cold hard outputs of deliverables, based on a testing system whose validity is based on unicorn wishes and fairy dust. And, of course, the actual expertise of teachers who swim in education data daily has been dismissed and ignored.
III. A rejection of society.
At the core of economism is a rejection of the very idea of society ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). The only way to understand our lives is to model us as individuals, making individual choices and expressing individual preferences. Economism gives short shrift to how individuals affect one another.
This is, for some, inextricably bound up in the concept of market-based school choice, merit pay, and a few other choice ideas. Schools--both students and faculty--must be understood as atomized individuals, and the fact that unleashing market forces for some would weaken the system that is meant to support all is simply irrelevant. Economism is the principle of "I've got mine, Jack" as a guiding light.
IV. A failure to understand "irrationality."
For economists, anything that is not done in self-interest is irrational. Every problem is addressed from an angle of "what would this person do to get the maximum personal benefit," and anyone who doesn't appear to be acting on that question is irrational. Even if a vast number, even a majority of people, don't follow that guide, they are still considered irrational by the economists, who do not stop to think that maybe observing how people actually behave might be useful.
This "irrationality" could also often be called "ethics" – for example, the decision in various "ultimatum games" to punish selfish people, even if it means getting less for yourself. You can view this as "irrationality" if your sole conception of human motivation is "how do I get more for myself?" But you can equally say, "I don't like people who betray the social contract and I am prepared to go with less if it means punishing them."
But by insisting that ethics are irrational, economism can actually do away with them. Michael Sandel's 2012 book "What Money Can’t Buy," offers examples of things that you shouldn't be subject to market forces, like concierge medical services. A decade later, these have gone from examples of the unthinkable to actual products.
Yeah, we can name a few of those. Like education, where economism insists that if we create "competition," education will get better because people will all pursue their own self-interest. Teachers must be coerced--bribed with merit pay or, more often, threatened with punishment--in order to get them to produce the "product" of education.
This is the great economism blind spot--there couldn't be any possible reason for teachers to pursue a particular path other than self-interest. In the worst cases, this comes with a darker side--since teachers became teachers despite the fact that teaching is a lousy way to pursue economic self-interest (aka get rich) it must be because their limited abilities put more lucrative paths out of their reach.
And since ethics aren't really a thing, there should be no issue in setting up incentives for educators to follow unethical paths. But high stakes testing, a very economist approach to running education, incentivizes all manner of unethical behavior, from cutting meaningful education in favor of test prep all the way up to just plain cheating. And the notion that competing for merit pay would make schools function more poorly by stifling cooperation--that's just an unfathomable mystery to economics man.
V. The prejudices of economism.
Well, at least they aren't hypocritical. Doctorow cites findings that economist live like "economic man" by "pursuing self-interest at the expense of cooperation." They give less to charity and are the least racially and gender-diverse of all disciplines. Says Doctorow
It's one thing for a profession to be so different from the majority – but when that profession has elevated itself to the final arbiter of all regulation and government, its narrow composition and ideological blinkers start to tell.
For instance, it is ill-suited to redesign a system that is fully diversified as our population.
Economism has permeated too much of ed reform in the past few decades, not just in assuming that the only rational approach is to pull the levers of self-interest, but in measuring everything based merely on its monetary measure. The notion of "value-added" measurements, as if schools are comparable to assembly lines cranking out toasters. The idea that education's goal is to give students skills whose worth is measured by a future employer's willingness to pay for them. The data-centric notion that students should accumulate competency based badges so that employers can simply pull up a database and search for employees that meet their exact specs. The very idea of "efficiency." The idea that Milton Friedman, the ultimate example of an economist who knows nothing about education but whose vision of education is treated like it was inscribed by a finger of fire on a stone tablet.
None of these ideas enhance education--at least not if we believe that education is about helping young human beings become their best selves as they learn what it means to be fully human in the world.
Economism is a sad, cramped, meager view not just of education, but of life itself, and yet in many ways we have let it take over the country. Read Doctorow's piece and the links in it. You may not agree with all of it, but it's definitely worth a think.
The voucher argument is that if the money just follows the students, everything comes out even. Public schools lose money, but they also lose students, so no biggie.
There are some obvious problems with this--can you run four schools for the same money that ran one school? Remember that time that your school district was cash-strapped, so they addressed the problem by opening more school buildings? That's right. It never happened.
But there's another reason that this is bunk, because in many states, vouchers are not being used by students exiting the public system, but students who are already gone. We've discussed this before, but here's a handy graphic to make it even clearer.
In other words, the vast majority of vouchers are going to students who were never in the public system in the first place, so the public system has its operating funds cut by a big chunk, and its operating costs cut by $0.00.
The graphic comes from the National Coalition for Public Education, a group that goes all the way back to 1978 and collects lots of other organizations. They have some excellent materials citing real research about vouchers (as opposed to the "research" created as marketing tools by voucher advocates. They've even got some handy downloadable materials just in case you need something to hand to your local elected officials.
Well, I suppose that was inevitable. Dr. Phil last month ran an episode about the parental rights debate. And there among the featured guests are Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, and while there was some appearance of balance, it tells you something about the episode that M4L's PR firm is sending out links to it with an invitation to interview the two leaders about it.
The episode opens with Phil recapping the narrative favored by M4L--that covid came along and kids went on remote school and parents found out the terrible, awful things that schools were doing, and so a movement was born. That seems simple enough, but it's a markedly different narrative from the narrative that three experienced hard-right women with a communications background, one of whom is married to a GOP operative, decided to stir up some base voters (after two of them were ousted from school board seats by local voters) and tried on a couple of different issues before settling on naughty books, from which they hope to whip up some GOP electoral success.
Descovich and Justice get the first explaining spot, and then Phil turns to Nadine Smith, a community organizer and executive director of Equality for Florida, who, God bless her, does a lot of heavy lifting here.
Much of the conversation is well-worn territory, but Descovich and Justice drop a couple of new ones into the mix that are worth noting, so I've watched this episode so that you don't have to.
Seeing them in action is always a reminder that these are pros--they know their message, and like many on the far right, they are good at delivering a moderated version of it for mainstream consumption. You may want to be pissed off at them, but in front of a mainstream crowd they are not going to present like the cranky church ladies you imagine them to be. Here they absolutely agree that teachers worked so hard and did heroic duty during the pandemic and that teachers don't get fame and glory (though that nasty union...). They'll get testier as we go (Descovich likes to wag her finger), but they mostly keep themselves under control. You would never guess that people who supported the Florida gag laws were called groomers and pedophiles by the governor's office.
Descovich and Justice insist they are not hostile toward LGBTQ folks, and I'm not sure that anyone in the studio believes them. Phil points out that there certainly does seem to be a thread running through the books they object to that would suggest they are anti-LGBTQ, and that's when we get one of their new talking points--and it's a peach:
Descovich :It's unfortunate that many LGBTQ books have so much sexual violence in them. That's an unfortunate thing that is happening. We're sorry that it is happening.
Smith smiles and notes "That is a new one" and Hannah Edwards, a school teacher and parent of a trans child pipes up to say that among the many books in her classroom that could get her in trouble, there is nothing with sexual violence. Which is super-obvious. But Descovich just pivots to the sex ed standards and argues that the national standards include a K-3 standard saying students should be aware that a person can be boy or a girl or neither or both. We're talking now about Florida's gag laws. And here's where we get another new one
Phil: That wasn't being taught in the schools before fifth grade in Florida anyway, correct?
Descovich: But it is being taught now in New Jersey and all around the country in other states and so it was coming to Florida just like everywhere else and so this bill stopped that from--
Phil: This was a pre-emptive bill
Descovich: Correct
So it turns out that much of that talk about awful things that were happening in Florida and needed to be stopped was not actually true.
Smith gets in a good talk about what the Don't Say Gay bill really does in terms of stifling speech and Justic jumps in to says that schools should not tell her child to be afraid to tell her something, and Smith's face speaks for all of us who are momentarily non-plussed by this angry rejoinder to something completely unrelated to what Smith was saying. And then we get some over-talking and an attempt to make nice with the parents of the trans child, who are not having it.
And then that gets squelched so that a law professor (Jody Armour, USC) with a truly epic fro can get us to look at what the law actually says. He correctly notes that the language is vague and that the law gives any parent the right to sue, which simply leads to administrators saying, "Just don't talk about any of that stuff ever."
Phil expresses his frustration about how schools don't teach students how to navigate life, stress, etc--he's talking about SEL, so I wonder if M4L will explain to him why that's bad. Not now anyway. Armour reiterates his explanation of chilling effect. Phil says "Didn't SCOTUS say parents are in charge years ago?" And everyone wants to get in here, but Armour gets to talk.
Phil is now in Smith's face. What makes you think you know better? You can't give a kid a tylenol without calling parents. You can't make a presumption that the child isn't safe taking this home. She doesn't get an answer, because Dave Edwards steps in with the idea that children are who they are and adults won't change that, and we need to provide education that keeps them safe. Phil brings up suicide risk for trans kids and more talking erupts but--commercial!
Afterwards, there's a brief flurry in which Smith points out that M4L wants to take books from everyone and then Phil gets back to his question--why do you assume you know better--and Smith answers, "I don't." Here's a moment we can stop and note how Phil is framing the two sides; M4L are concerned moms, but Smith wants to tell keep parents uninformed because she thinks she knows best.
Dave Edwards (the chyron now notes he's also a school admin) delivers a really nice talk about wanting students to be congruent, to be the same person everywhere, and how sharing information with parents is a critical part of that. Hannah points out that the missing piece is the child, that they could not get an education for their trans child at the original school because of adults and their concerns. She offers a clear description of how other parents rights were used to strip her of her own parental rights, which really is a critical point in this debate.
Candice Jackson is here; you may remember her as the DeVos Education Department's civil rights chief who famously observed that 90% of campus assaults claims are because both parties were drunk. She will now try to explain where the line should be drawn. On one side, it's okay to be anti-bullying and keep the child safe and educated, but on the other side is where the "belief system" of the child and their parents must be "validated and affirmatively proclaimed to be believed in" and it's a valuable point because I think these folks really think that's a distinction except that in practice time and time again it seems that anything other than staying quietly stuffed in the closet is seen as a demand to be validated and affirmed. She sees trans stuff as different because tolerance isn't enough--which, yes, and I don't know that she gets the implications here, but while you can just pretend that a gay or lesbian person is straight if they will cooperate by shutting up about it, you can't shove a transition in the closet and just keep treating them as their former gender.
Dave Edwards comes back with another good point-- home and school are different in that you can believe lots of terrible things at home, but you can't act them out in a public school where everyone is welcome (which may be one more reason that Justice has talked about overturning the whole system).
The M4L crew says that school should focus just on facts, not on believes, which is quite the eight-year-old approach.
Now Phil will move the goal posts and ask if schools are getting too political. Should the government just stay out of all this.
After break, Rep. Joe Harding, a government person who has gotten involved in all this, will explain why government should get involved. He heard some shocking examples of schools holding closed door meetings without parents (not that he'll mention any of them), but parents totally wanted the state to step in. Also, calling it Don't Say Gay is just more fearmongering.
Smith gets to ask him a question, highlighting the chilling effects on her son's school (remove those rainbow stickers, removing books with LGBTQ families, warning stickers on books about race). Pretending that the bill doesn't mention gay so it's a neutral bill is disingenuous. He counters by saying that Smith's allies said parents should get out of schools, and opposed a bill to protect parents.
Smith: That bill did not protect me
Justice: That bill protected you-- your child from not having a conversation happening behind closed doors without your consent or knowledge.
Which is a lovely thought, but of course has nothing to do with the actual language of the bill.
The they talk over each other for a bit, and then Harding floats his own straw man by being indignant that because he wants to be involved in every decision in his child's life, that somehow makes him anti-gay. I am impressed that at this late date, some of these folks still want to pretend that the bill is not about stifling LGBTQ folks. Smith observes, "I don't think you're anti-gay. I see this as a political move."
DeSantis's office sent a statement. Bet it doesn't include the part about opponents being a bunch of groomers. Oh--I sort of lose. He's going to say that leftists support sexualizing children, etc.
Phil tosses a last softball to Harding "Do you want LGBTQ children to be safe in the state of Florida." And he hands back a fluffy obvious answer sandwich in which he somehow manages to get "all children matter" and "parents know best."
Oh, but snap-- Dave Hoffman calls him on his vaguerie and says it's interesting that he won't just say ":LGBTQ students should be safe in school" and challenges him to say it AND HE WON'T. Instead he accuses them of trying to spread fear etc etc. It's dangerous that they're trying to break kids down into groups and say certain kids matter more "It's dangerous." Jackson tries to stand up for him by saying that there is no such group as LGBTQ kids and Hannah talks back and Phil dismisses Harding in the midst of much talking.
With 8 minutes left we're switching to talking about race in school.
Phil says we've been talking about "the feud between parents and school boards and government"
He goes to Armour with the "why now" question, and Armour says sure we had the pandemic but we also had the George Floyd protests, with people pushing for more diversity, equity, and inclusion and now we have this backlash, demonizing it as critical race theory etc. and anything that will make me or my child uncomfortable is bad. Good summary, Professor Armour. If we're going to live in a pluralistic society, he continues, schools are going to have to teach this stuff. "in a sense, racism has been at the very foundation of this nation." Acknowledging that shouldn't make someone white feel bad.
Armour keeps going, subtly noting that teaching reverence for the flag and patriotism is, in fact, teaching values (the director cuts to Jackson for a reaction shot). Armour gets to talk a lot (in talk show terms) and it's all good. I like "Good pedagogy says we are all in this together. We've made mistakes but we can move forward together."
Wrapup time. Phil waxes rhapsodic about teaching negotiation. Two principles-- focus on shared values and set differences, so that we can view it as a problem to be solved rather than a battle to be won, and two, how can I get the other side as much of what they want as I possibly can. I agree with that, but he seems stumped on how it can be applied here. "There has to be some motivation to put the children first," he says, and I'm thinking the word "the" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Lots of talk about loving children. He adds that he gets really nervous when we start talking about censorship (but we still pay attention to what our children are exposed to). He wishes we would be less combative and more cooperative and, well, Dr, Phil, welcome to the last thirty years of education policy. He likes Professor Armour's energy and spirit.
I don't disagree with any of that, but for negotiations to work, you have to have two sides operating in good faith, and as M4L falls further and further down a political rabbit hole, and gets more and more aggressive in language when it's in friendly territory, it's harder and harder to see them as anything other than political operatives.
Nothing left but thank you's and wrap-ups
I'll embed the episode here. If you do decide to watch it, for God's sake don't look at the comments.
