Welcome Back, Honesty Gap

We have heard about the Honesty Gap before, way back in the spring of 2015. Achieve.org was one of the first to make some noise about it (Achieve, you may recall, was instrumental in launching Common Core), but in short order everyone was going on about it, from Jeb Bush's FEE to the Center for American Progress, Educators for Excellence, Students First--all the reformster biggies. The Honesty Gap even got its own website, which is still running today (it's owned by the Collaborative for Student Success, a CCSS promotion group that is tied directly to The Hunt Institute, which is in turn "an affiliate center" of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lists the usual suspects as collaborators-- Gates Foundation, Achieve, NEA, The Broad Foundation, et al.)

That's one dishonest looking thermometer

So what is The Honesty Gap? It's pretty simple--it's the observation that in many states, the proficiency rate on the NAEP doesn't match the proficiency rate on the state's Big Standardized Test. It dovetailed nicely with a theory espoused by everyone from Arne Duncan to Betsy DeVos, which was that public schools were lying about how well their students were doing, presumably to hide their own wretched failiness. 

In 2015, when the Honesty Gap was having a moment, Rianna Saslow was a high school freshman at The Galloway School, a private school in Atlanta, founded in 1969. (Current tuition for grades 9-12 is $31,150.) Saslow went on to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and graduated with a BA in Political Science and a second one in Educational Equity just about six months ago. Then she went to work as a policy analyst at Education Reform Now, the 501(c)(3) arm of Democrats [sic] For Education Reform, a reformy outfit started by hedge funder Whitney Tilson to get Democrats on board with the reformster biz. To get a sense of how ERN plays, they just hosted their 12th annual Take 'Em To School Poker Tournament, where you could grab a single seat for $2,500 or a whole table for $100,000 (cocktail ticket for $250).

It's Ms. Saslow who is going to reintroduce us to the Honesty Gap, and I bring her story up for a couple of reasons.

1) A reminder that for some people, these reformy ideas really did first appear a lifetime ago. I may remember a time when the dismantling of public education was not a major narrative; folks like Ms. Saslow do not.

2) A reminder that none of this stuff dies, no matter how much it deserves to. It just keeps coming back. Therefor so must the refutations.

Saslow's piece appears at The 74, which is always a mixed bag. Some of their education journalism is top notch; their opinion section is reliably tilted in the direction of the education disruptors, defunders, and dismantlers. The piece provides a bit of an echo of The 74's earlier coverage of the Virginia report that brought up the Honesty Gap for the usual purpose--to discredit public schools. 

Like too many models of the 3D crowd, this is not an honest attempt to understand a problem in education in order to find a solution. But let's take a look at Saslow's piece and see what issues are hidden there.

Saslow starts by holding up the NAEP as a "highly respected and objective set of assessments that consistently holds students to a high level of rigor and acts as a neutral referee in comparing students to one another." Wellllll.....folks have taken issue with the NAEP for as long as it has existed. One NCES study found that about half of the students rated Basic actually went on to complete a Bachelor's Degree or higher; in other words, despite what the test said, they were college ready. 

Saslow suggests that it's a shortcoming that NAEP offers no individual school ratings, but that's not what it's designed for. This is a recurring problem with Big Standardized Tests, this notion that if a yardstick is good for measuring the length of a shoe, it can also measure the length of an interstate highway, or the relative humidity, or atomic weight, or how ugly that pig is. Instruments are only good at measuring what they're designed to measure.

Saslow moves on to the complaint that is the heart of the Honesty Gap. States give their own BS Tests:

But, by and large, states set a bar for academic proficiency that is lower than that for the NAEP.

Yes, states and the NAEP folks define "proficiency" differently. This has been an endless source of honest and deliberate confusion, as folks keep making up their own definition of NAEP proficiency, rather than using the NAEP's own explanation. Proficient does not mean "on grade level," or even "sort of above average," but instead is roughly equivalent to a classroom A. States do not necessarily define proficiency in the same way. This is not a complicated issue. If I define "tall" as "over six feet" and you define it as "over 5 and a half feet," we will get different numbers when we analyze a group for the number of tall people. It's kind of a silly problem to have; even sillier since the NAEP folks could have solved it long ago by giving up their singular definitions of the terms involved.

Saslow rolls out some examples of how state levels of proficiency are usually higher than NAEP levels, and then she is going to drag classroom teachers into this as well by noting that classroom grades run higher, which she supports with data from ACT, a company whose whole sales pitch rests on the notion that only the scores from their product can be trusted to give a true assessment of student skills and knowledge. This is like depending on the auto industry to give you figures on the health benefits of riding a bicycle, but she's not going to mention that built in conflict.

There's a really fundamental problem--okay, two--in the whole Honesty Gap model. 

Let's say I want to know what the temperature is in my living room. I use three different devices to get the temperature. If they give me different answers, the most obvious explanation is that one or more of those instruments is faulty. Learning is even more subjective and difficult to measure than temperature--when all these measures fail to match perfectly, the most obvious and likely explanation is that the measures are themselves defective. 

And I certainly wouldn't accuse my mismatching temperature devices of being liars. By labeling the mismatch between instruments as an "honesty gap," we introduce the idea that the mismatch is being deliberately created by folks who are lying. The implications is that somewhere in all this there are some naughty liars (and they probably work for the public school system).

Those two factors lead me to suspect that people who talk about an Honesty Gap are not making a serious effort to solve any problems.

There are other bumps in Saslow's road. She repeats that same mistake of equating "proficient" with "on grade level." It isn't, but she uses that mistaken use in a mistaken survey to raise the old picture of families that have been misled about their children's knowledge (in 3D land, parents know their children best except when they don't have any idea what their children really know).

If families are provided with overly optimistic data, how can leaders expect their support when looking to implement robust policies and practices to improve public education?

By suggesting policies that might actually help. For instance, we could stop the practice of using low tests scores to target public schools for charterization or closure instead of actual increased support.

Closing the honesty gap requires commitment at all levels of leadership. State policymakers must ensure that their assessments are academically rigorous, and they must set benchmarks that reflect true grade-level proficiency.

Except that, in terms of NAEP scores, "grade-level proficiency" is a self-contradictory term, because "proficiency" means "well above grade level." I know, I know. I'm repeating myself. I'll stop when they do.

On the district level, administrators must ensure that instructors have access to standards-aligned, high-quality instructional materials. And within the classroom, teachers must provide consistent and reliable grades that allow students, families and school leaders to monitor progress before higher-stakes exams take place.

In other words, organize the entire school around the Big Standardized Test. Schools have already done too much of that. It is backwards and upside down and not the way to do education well (and, I'll bet, not how they do things at the Galloway School, where they don't take the Georgia state assessment). 

Saslow also points out that the private sector offers some "helpful tools for accurately gauging student achievement and post-pandemic unfinished learning." I have my doubts about the "accurately" part, just as I have doubts about the process of having a problem assessed by people who want to sell you solutions to the problem.

The Honesty Gap remains a tool for marketing and pushing the old narrative that public schools are in Big Trouble, but it is itself a dishonest and sloppy argument that provides little real assistance in dealing with the actual challenges facing public education these days. 

Heritage Foundation: School Choice Is Wokeness Antidote

Well, Jay Greene said he was going to do it. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars."

Greene argued that the culture wars were an opportunity that choicers "should not squander." Heritage had some data that showed an overlap between the anti-woke crowd and the anti-public school crowd, and Greene argued that it was time to put that to work. Not a shock; Chris Rufo was arguing last spring that the road to choice was through sowing distrust in public education. But while Rufo likes to play Crusading Journalist and Firebrand, Greene has positioned himself as more of a rational academic (with citations and stuff). 

And so we arrive at his latest-- a report thingy at Heritage entitled "Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education." The piece is co-authored by Ian Kingsbury, who previously worked for cyber school giant Stride (formerly K12) and the Empire Center; these days he's a senior fellow at the Education Freedom Institute ("Protecting and promoting school choice") which is led by defunding crusader Corey DeAngelis, so you know he's approaching this work with an unbiased view. 

That's okay. I read this so you don't have to.

The report has an academic research costume on, but it is something else. And we catch a whiff right in the first lurid paragraph. I'm going to take a minute with this because it gives us a strong sense of where this is all headed.

American K–12 education is currently mired in an unmistakable radical leftward lurch. Whether changing the pronouns of students without informing their parents, eradicating academic standards in the name of “equity,” infusing ahistorical curricula meant to engender contempt for the United States, or lobbying the Department of Justice to label anyone who opposes any of the former “domestic terrorists,” progressive activists are increasingly able to use America’s schools as a tool for advancing their woke agenda.

Every one of those burning clauses comes with a footnote. It's online, so they could come with links instead, but footnotes are more legit and researchy. The closest to a legit source is the last, which takes us to a Wall Street Journal story about Merrick Garland's dumb letter that gave parental rights groups the chance to complain they were being oppressed as terrorists. The 1619 rebuttal is from Naomi Schaeffer Riley, a senior fellow at the right-tilted American Enterprise Institute. Another is from the Empire Center, a project of the Manhattan Institute (current employers of Chris Rufo). And the first two are from the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing faux journalism outfit backed by hedge funder Paul Singer. In other words, not a fact in the bunch--just the kinds of links to other opinions that you would expect in a blog post.

"Blog post masquerading as research report" is exactly where we're headed. There's some more ranting about the state of public schools these days interspersed with questionable assertions such as 

Since parents, on average, demand far less wokeism than schools supply, shifting more power to parents will reverse this leftward lurch of the education system.

That sounds like an assertion that could be tested, and there's a footnote that links to... the Jay Greene post I mentioned at the top, which does include some survey questions handled by Ipsos, a multinational marketing firm, and aimed at producing the desired results. 

Anyway, we work our way around to the central idea--

At the heart of this debate is an empirical claim that can be tested. Does giving parents greater control over choosing their children’s schools actually reduce how woke those chosen schools tend to be? If it does, then expanding school choice offers greater promise given the difficulty of getting a recalcitrant school system to comply with direct bans on woke indoctrination. If, however, parental control over chosen schools makes little or no difference, the skeptics may be right that expanding choice could fail to combat radical ideology in the classroom, even if it helps families in other ways.

Yes, boys and girls--wokeness can be measured empirically, and you will be amazed at how easy it is to do.

There are some more unsubstantiated assertions linked to Things That Are Not Research (did you know that progressives "have enjoyed near monopolistic control of universities for decades"--well, an article in National Affairs says so) before we arrive at the methodology for figuring out just how woke charter schools and public schools are, and it is astonishing. Stay with me now.

They measured how "woke" a charter is by searching the  student handbook for eight terms-- (1) diversity, (2) equity, (3) inclusion, (4) justice, (5) restorative, (6) social-emotional learning, (7) gender identity, and (8) culturally affirming. They did this for the 20 largest charters in each state (and skipped states that didn't have enough to participate). As they searched through each of the several-hundred handbooks, they made sure not to count instances where these words were used for non-woke purposes.

The checked this against the level of charter autonomy in each state on the theory that where there was less autonomy, there would be more wokeness enforced by the state. The get that figure by using the charter sector scores that the Center for Education Reform (Jeanne Allen's rabidly anti-public ed outfit) gave states. 

And to compare these wokeness scores to the public schools and thereby prove their thesis that charters offer a wokeness respite, they... wait a minute. Hold on. No, they didn't gather any data about public schools at all. They're just going to correlate their wokeness index with "regulatory capture."

After that it's just math. The states that scored below average for the CER ratings (aka have more state regulation) also have more instances of those woke words in their student handbook. And vice versa. Also, just to up their game, they searched for handbooks that included all of the eight terms, and the correlation held. They even made a chart.

Or this charter woke-osity chart breaking it down by state. Because charts = science.

Greene and Kingsbury argue that this analysis "lends credence" regulation is more woke than the free market, and therefor charters are more responsive to parents, all of whom dislike wokeness which we know because we just, you know, do. 

What else can they squeeze out of this "analysis" of the "data"? Charter authorizers and bureaucrats might be more woke than average citizens. Maybe states with so much charter wokeness create a "woke duopoly" in which parents (who, as we know, all hate woke-itude) choose the lesser of two evils. Conservative states with highly regulated charter markets should loosen up in order to drive out excess woke-osity (Alabama, get with it). And just generally, charter schools should be regulated less because they should, and because the woke!

As always, I wonder if it's no longer a conservative value to want accountability from government and know how your tax dollars are spent.

Look. This report is twelve kinds of baloney. Eight key words are a terrible way to grab a wokeness score (though I suppose it helps if, like the authors, you never really try to define the term "woke"). Assertions are not facts or data, and other articles produced by your colleagues in the same camp are not research. And even if, by some miracle, we accepted any of what's asserted here, we'd still be left with a big question--what if every public school has a lower woke score than any of these charter schools.

This is not research. It is not a report. It's a blog post with a snazzy heading. It's an op-ed in search of a newspaper, though I expect it will find its way there in some form, because mostly this is just an argument to reduce regulation and promote charter schools. It's trying to harness the culture war so the opportunity isn't wasted. "Unregulated school choice will rescue your child from woke-ification!! Oooooooooo!!!!" It's the folks who want to defund public education just trying another angle. To try to dress it up as science is intellectually dishonest. It's bad PR, with charts. Everyone deserves better.

TX: Far Right Book Banning In Action

Steve Bannon was one of the Trumpers to start arguing that school boards needed to be targeted, and he soon found a partner in Patriot Mobile, a mobile phone company with a christianist nationalist bent ("America's only Christian conservative wireless provider"). They're headed by Glenn Story, a CPA on a mission, that in recent years has veered more toward Dominionism and the Seven Mountains, which are all about how Christians are supposed to take over the rule of society, both in government and culture (one such group once gave Betsy DeVos an award).

Patriot takes millions of dollars and pumps it into far-right causes, and Story decided that they would like to follow Bannon's lead and grab themselves some school boards in Texas. Bannon and Story put on a little show in August for attenders of CPAC.

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

The districts were in Southlake, Keller, Grapevine, and Mansfield.

Southlake we've visited before. It's in Southlake's Carroll Independent School District that an administrator suggested that a book about the Holocaust should be balanced by a book representing the other side. They leaped right on the book banning rubric bandwagon, and all this after several years of trying, sort of, to address local issues with racism. 

Carroll is also the district where Patriot moved to take advantage of a boneheaded Texas law requiring schools to put up any "In God We Trust" posters that were donated. So Patriot donated a bunch, and so did some other folks who put the text in Arabic and with gay pride colors. 

Keller Independent School District also did their new owners proud by going after a bunch of books, including an Anne Frank adaptation and the Bible. But back then the district was still hewing to the notion that these books included divisive concepts or sexual content.

Now, it seems, the Keller school board isn't even trying to pretend that there's any principle involved here except bigotry and bias.

Joni Shaw Smith, a Moms for Liberty board member, said she was concerned about some of the books on the new acquisition list. Which matters because now the Keller board must approve any and all books purchased. 

The board already had a strict list of limitations on books, but this week they extended it to include "discussion or depiction of gender fluidity" at all. Not a depiction that involves depiction of nudity or sex acts. Just any depiction at all. As Bookriot points out, that forbids any mention of trans persons as well. 

Lots of folks had lots of things to say about this, but the award for most unintentionally hilarious comment comes from another Texas politician who attended the meeting:

“You promised to defend our kids, you promised to put education above indoctrination. … That’s what you’re doing tonight,” said Nate Schatzline, who recently won a seat in the Texas House.

“You have put no political beliefs inside of this,” he added, which drew laughs from some in the audience.

Indeed. 

It's all worth paying attention to because in this move, the mask has slipped. This far right crowd may try to get their feet in doors by making noise about the innocence of children and graphic sex and shocking depictions, but here's the endgame for many--to simply erase LGBTQ persons from sight. And not just for their own children, but for all children. It is not Texas's finest hour. I sure miss old fashioned actual conservatives who believed in actual freedom and not the suppression of every piece of human existence with which they disagreed. 

ICYMI: Post Election Blues Edition (11/13)

Well, that was a party. Here's hoping your state was more Michigan and less Florida. Now back to work. Here's some reading from the week.

Initial merit pay vote has troubles

In case you haven't followed my link elsewhere, here's Justin Parmenter's take on the newest development in North Carolina's quest to trash teaching. 

Dozens of youths illegally employed to clean meat plants, Labor Dept. says

From the Washington Post, this appalling story about youths working in highly dangerous jobs, and the employer's efforts to hide it all from the authorities. Surprise--the youths are all Spanish-speaking.

How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax

Also from WaPo, one more story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and how current moral panic can trash just about anything, in spite of facts.

As Teen Loneliness Rates Soar, Schools May Be Making It Worse, Scientists Say

Yes, it's a lot of depressing stuff this week. This is a Newsweek story via MSN, and it gives folks in education an awful lot to think about. 

Denver Archdiocese’s guidance to Catholic schools: Don’t enroll transgender students. Treat gay parents differently.

Not that it's a surprise to anyone, but it's still a bit stunning to see it in print and official. In the Denver Post.

A Science of Reading reader to go with the latest Hanford podcast

Courtesy of Paul Thomas, a useful guide to some actual science.

What I believe Emily Hanford misses

Nancy Bailey asks some questions about what Hanford may or may not really get about reading instruction. 

The Right Wing Mothers Fueling the School Board Wars

From the New Yorker, so mind the paywall if you've already burned your free reads. A great dig into the culture wars and the women who have helped push them. 

The Damage Is Already Being Done

Sue Kingery Woltanski is a school board member in Florida, and she blogs at Accountabaloney. She has fears about the level of disinformation and distrust currently in play (and commenters show up to provide evidence). This is what Florida looks like on the ground right now. 

Oklahoma teacher helms campaign against banned books after being threatened by conservatives

Remember Summer Boismier, the English teacher who got in trouble over sharing the link to the Brooklyn Library's banned books program. The woman who got harassed by a bunch of conservatives (including the dudebro now in charge of Oklahoma education). Here's what she's been up to since then.

Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it

Jill Barshay at Hechinger (via KQED) unpacks some study that shows that--shocker--students aren't all that interested in logging on for extra work from an online tutor. Who would ever have guessed?

Texas politicians rake in millions from far-right Christian megadonors pushing private school vouchers

NBC news with the also-unsurprising story that school voucher supporters are spending a lot of money to rent some politicians.

I'm going to brag on my home town here, recently profiled in this Pittsburgh news outlet. This is where I have lived and worked for most of my life. It's not a bad little place.

At Forbes this week, I took a look at a policy memo by Helen Ladd about some problems inherent in charter schools as currently practiced. 

Jeb Bush Charterpalooza Is Back!

For over ten years, Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), these days going by the nom de reform of ExcelInEd, has sponsored a Grand Gathering of reformsters, an annual Big Wet Kiss to privatization. All the big names are there, and while the budget here at the Curmudgucation Institute does not allow me to attend, it's always interesting to take a look at the schedule to get a sense of where the movement's head is these days.

The National Summit on Education convenes the nation’s leaders in education policy to share what works, what doesn’t and what’s next in education policy. Join us as we host more than 1,000 legislators, state superintendents, policymakers and advocates at the 2022 National Summit on Education in Salt Lake City, Utah, at The Grand America Hotel.

Right off the bat, one notices that this doesn't sounds as chartery or privatizy as it has in years past (like just back in 2017, when Betsy DeVos was the big guest speaker)

So here we go, to the National Summit on Education 2022.

Jeb! kicks things off with the first keynote. There's a lunch keynote about 21st century skills, then a first day wrap-up session with Axios explaining how to do better PR. The second breakfast keynote is Emily Hanford (still billed as a journalist and not an advocate) and a Science of Reading panel, followed by an international update on pandemic recovery. I'll save the final big presentation till later.

In between, there's an assortment of breakout sessions to choose from. Those include:

How states are building stronger teacher pipelines.

There are, of course, no teachers involved here. But you can learn secrets of building that pipeline from representatives of Indiana, Florida, and Tennessee (Commissioner Penny Schwinn). Not sure these are the states to listen to on this subject.

How test-based accountability helps students far beyond the classroom.

Lordy. Tom Kane, Aimee Guidera and Eric Hanushek are going to peddle the same old bullshit about how results on the Big Standardized Test correlate to future life outcomes. Prediction: nobody will present any evidence that getting a student to raise her BS Test score will improve her life outcomes.

Power to the Parents.

Derrell Bradford (50CAN) moderates a panel not, as you might have guess/feared, about how to ban books and ga teachers, but about "unbundling," an old reformster favorite in which families shop for education piece by piece. This panel is about the newest school choice options, and there doesn't seem like much to see here.

Designing choice programs for impact and sustainability

Mysteriously, this panel includes a rep from New Hampshire, where the new choice system has not had a chance to prove sustainability and has mostly had the impact of steering tax dollars to families that already had children enrolled in private schools. Arizona, another place where vouchers have mostly given funds to rich folks who were never in public schools in the first place, is also represented. moderated by Shaka Mitchell from Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children

Innovative Learning, in and beyond the classroom

A panel moderated by Adam Peshek, senior fellow at Stand Together (formerly the Charles Koch Institute) with reps from Utah, North Dakota and Idaho on getting credit for learning outside the classroom. 

Oh, and some folks from Tennessee are going to explain their new funding formula, maybe, sort of.

This is all good old reformy stuff. For each of these explicitly reformy topics, there are sessions about fairly pedestrian topics-- retaining high quality teachers, literacy, getting more post-secondary degrees, math success strategies, broadband access, education-to-workforce pathways. All of these topics are being addressed by various reformy types, but their inclusion typifies the lack of any real core to today's disruption movement. Much of the old standards-- charter schools, high stakes testing, states standards--are now part of the status quo, and this sort of gathering may be a bit too tame for the burn-it-all-down-and-give-the-money-to-private-Christian-schools crowd. 

Nevertheless, the closing lunch keynote features "Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Governor Kevin Stitt and education visionary Sal Khan, founder & CEO of Khan Academy, for an inside look at the education innovations unfolding in Arizona and Oklahoma." Ducey is getting the ExcellInEd's Excellence in Education award for all the hard work he's done to trash public education in Arizona. The award, the program announces in a swell non sequitor, "recognizes the trailblazing contributions of visionaries who are transforming education and elevating student achievement. Prior honorees include Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz and Khan Academy’s Sal Khan." 

It is emblematic of this gathering that it happens on a Thursday and Friday, thereby insuring that it is not attended by people who actually work in education. Sponsors include the Walton Family Foundation, Western Governor's University (an online competency-based college that failed its federal audit), the Bezos Family Foundation, College Board, Donors Choose (bummer), Stand Together, edChoice, plus a host of other reformster groups and a bunch of businesses as well, like Pearson and NWEA and edmentum. What's not in sight is any serious number of actual educators.

But then that's not really the point. The point is to get policy and business joined to crack open the big taxpayer education piggy bank. I can believe that many of these topics are being discussed by people who have a sincere interest in the education aspects of them--but then why not have actual educators there? In the end, Jeb's big gathering is like a bunch of lawyers getting together to discuss the best techniques for appendectomies, or a bunch of teachers sitting down to hash out the best way to run a multinational corporation, or economists talking about anything. Can't wait to hear how it all turns out. And there's still time to register before this kicks off November 16-18 in Salt Lake City, and the participants enjoy "an unparalleled forum for exchanging results-based solutions and strategies that can shape public policy so critical to transforming education. This unique conference serves as a catalyst for accelerating student-centered education solutions across the nation. Join us as we ignite ideas and inspire change." Ka-ching.

PA Midterms and Education

We managed to dodge a couple of bullets in PA this time, but there's no reason to relax.

Doug Mastriano had threatened to chop education funding in half, and was likely to support every kind of gag order possible to bring public schools in line with christianist beliefs. But Mastriano ran an unusual campaign, deliberately ignoring traditional media and counting on the christianist network of social media and churches. It did not work out for him.

Fetterman vs. Oz was not that important from a public ed standpoint, but it sure was nail-biting entertainment. For a guy who built his empire as a media star, Oz was a terrible campaigner. You could easily convince me that some/all of his coms team simply hated him. Some of his unforced errors went national (crudite, anyone?), but his campaign was an endless supply of easy set-ups for Fetterman's team, right up until the final Sunday when he encouraged supporters to find him ten voters before the Steelers game, allowing Fetterman to point out what PA sports ball fans already knew--the Steelers had a bye and weren't playing that day.

Most interesting story of that campaign? It looks as if Fetterman's debate performance actually may have helped his campaign and stopped Oz's momentum.

The results were wonky. In my small rural county, folks went harder for Oz (64%) than Mastriano (61%), which I would not have predicted. Both of them were outperformed by the local House GOP candidates, which was less surprising (my dog could win an election here if he ran as a GOP dog). 

The other surprise is that the state House might flip Democrat. Even if it doesn't, that means the GOP won't have a super-control of the House. That's good news for education, as GOP reps repeatedly try to launch the same gag laws, anti-reading rights laws, and various forms of vouchers that have appeared in other states.

However--and it's a big however--one of those GOP voucher proposals for education savings accounts got the full-fledged support of Governor-elect Josh Shapiro during the campaign. Perhaps that was merely strategic (supposedly it help keep PA gazillionaire Jeffrey Yass from dumping a pile of money into the Mastriano campaign), but it bodes ill for public education in Pennsylvania. The only reason Shapiro looked okay on public education is that Mastriano looked spectacularly apocalyptic. But now groups like the teacher unions that supported Shapiro will need to shift gears and apply some education and pressure on his administration. And it remains to be seen if Shapiro will continue Governor Tom Wolf's long and fruitless attempt to reform charter and cyber-charter funding rules in the state. 

So things could look worse right now. We are not, thank goodness, Florida. But we are not Michigan, either, with its solid slate of public education supporters. The same debates that raged in previous years will keep raging next year, and public education supporters still have their work cut out for them. Catch your breath and let's get back to it.

An Election Story: What I Learned

This is not really a story about the election (or education) exactly, but about distraction, and about what I learned this time.

I didn't know that Rick and Fred had gone to Florida until they were on their way back. Let me tell you the story that leads up to that discovery, and what it reminded me of.

I've known Rick and his two brothers since we were all kids, mostly because our parents were friends. Rod was the youngest; in the tradition of youngest siblings everywhere, the most laid-back and fun of the lot. He was enough younger that he was still a student in high school when I returned as a teacher. 

In high school he dated Chris, a year behind him in school. I knew her because she played trombone in the marching band (I was assistant director) and in the town band section with me. A few years later, they got married, moved to Florida, built their dream house. Then a heart defect triggered a heart attack that took Rod's life. He was 26. 

Chris stayed in that house. Years later, she remarried. I don't know him, but Chris has a heart of gold, and if she felt Mike was worth marrying, that's all I need to know about him. 

I've known Fred almost as long. We've played traditional jazz together for decades; for many years his brother (who had played in band with Chris, too) was our drummer, and was also taken by disease way too young.

So after weathering many hurricanes successfully, Chris and Mike got hammered by Ian. Rick and Fred (both retired these days) loaded up and headed down. They drive to Florida, helped Chris and Mike and some other folks in that community rebuild and clean up, and headed back north just ahead of the next hurricane. (And there's a Go Fund Me)

I missed all of this until the tail end; my social media and much of my own attention was focused on the mid term elections and the worry what the outcomes could mean for various policies that I care about. My attention was so focused on the politics and policy that I missed some basic human stuff.

It's not that elections and politics and policy don't matter--they do. But it's a mistake to get so focused on them that we forget to note the basic stuff of life. Taking care of each other. Helping folks deal with the inevitable struggles that are part of life.

Ironically, Pennsylvania's campaign contained its own corrective. Fetterman, already a Regular Human type candidate, had his stroke, and struggled through recovery in a way that many pundits identified as a political liability, but which many regular human beings identified as the kind of struggle and striving that regular human beings go through. 

Politics matter, but they aren't life. They can make life easier or harder, but life itself is still about human striving and growing and building and working through whatever circumstances have thrown in our path, and helping those we are connected to, helping them do the same. 

This, perhaps, is why so much of politics has become screaming, a constant giga-decibel attempt to convince us that nothing could possibly be more important than Candidate X and Policy Y, because political operatives have learned that it takes a high level of screaming and fear and disaster-style rhetoric to draw our attention away from living our lives as human beings in the world.

Politics matter. One of the ways we watch out for our fellow humans is by working against policies that hurt them. But politics aren't everything, and human beings that we disagree with are still human beings. 

So what did I learn? I learned that I need to resist being distracted from life on the human scale just because the arena has become really loud and shiny. I'm reminded that my own definition--helping students become and discover their best selves, learning to be fully human in the world--is about human scale, and that's the scale I don't ever want to lose sight of. The central issue is always that people are trying to make their way through the world, and when we have the power to make their journey easier or harder, it is right to make it easier. Sometimes that involves politics and elections, but mostly it just involves paying attention and being human.