Wilson: Segregation and Religion and Race

Erika Wilson, scholar, law professor (and dabbler in that scary CRT stuff), has a new piece in the Yale Law Review. I've read Racialized Religious School Segregation so that you don't have to, but you ought to. Granted, it reads like the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the Yale Law Review, but that's what you get when you get a plate instead of a bowl of twinkies. There's a lot to chew on here, and I want to pull out some of the highlights.

Wilson is looking at school choice in the wake of Carson v. Makin, the case in which SCOTUS cemented the notion that states must include religious schools in any sort of voucher-ish program, even if those schools are discriminating in ways that no public school would never accept. Here's her main point.

The central claim of this Essay is that racial integration of public schools—though much maligned—is indispensable to moving America’s democracy away from its exclusionary origins and into a well-functioning, racially inclusive democracy. Choice in the private market exacerbates inherent and unresolvable tensions between school choice and racial integration. School choice generally operates against a backdrop of racial pluralism, racial subordination, and racial power imbalance that puts choice in tension with principles of equality, tolerance, and universal citizenship. Expanding school-choice options to include private religious schools is likely to exacerbate these tensions in ways that threaten the possibility of moving into a functioning multiracial democracy.

It occurs to me that in this context, the agitation against critical race theory makes another kind of sense (beyond eroding trust in public education) as a pre-emption against any arguments about choice-driven segregation ("That's just more of that CRT stuff").

The first section of the essay looks at the history of school segregation and the importance to democracy of integration efforts. It's the section that's going to make some people tetchy.

School integration undoubtedly requires Black and brown students to bear heavy costs. But given the realities of white supremacy, the costs of not pursuing integrated schools are even greater. Pursuing integration sets a path toward disrupting the racial subordination that is inherent to segregation in America. Because of America’s history of white supremacy, segregation in America makes material and social equality impossible.

Section II looks at how school choice has not helped, and digs down into the ways that school choice works counter to democracy itself. The market does not bend that way.

School choice is supposed to reform public education by creating a marketplace of schools and allowing families to shop for a school. But in doing so, it situates students as consumers rather than as citizens. It shifts the purpose of public education away from cultivating citizens for American democracy toward furnishing a marketplace through which individual consumers can gain economic, social, and political advantage. To the extent the school-choice model engages with democracy, it defines democracy through the lens of freedom, reasoning that democracy should afford citizens the freedom to choose schools free from state regulation. School choice furthers values like liberty, autonomy, privacy, and competition. In contrast, school integration furthers values like equality, tolerance, and citizenship training.

Emphasis mine. Wilson looks at three ways that the tension between these models causes issues. Let me pull those three points out.

First, under the school-choice model, parents are not required to consider how their choices impact the broader community. Parents instead select schools that fit their preferences, even if that preference is for a school that teaches discrimination, intolerance, or myopic American history.

Second, parents of different racial and socioeconomic groups use school choice differently. Parents select schools that reflect either their ability to exercise social privilege and power or the limits of the institutional context in which their choices are being made.

Finally, racialized power dynamics place true choice out of reach for marginalized Black and brown students.

Put another way, the fewer resources parents have, the fewer choices a school choice system offers them, and the more they make choices based on circumventing the barriers built into the system. 

Section III looks at the intersection between choice, religion and segregation. This, again, gets rather academic in language, but the idea is solid enough--that in the US, many religions "are not organized solely around a collection of spiritual beliefs; many are also organized around social and political viewpoints." 

We've seen a ton of this over the past decade. Obama isn't really an American, isn't really a Christian. Trump, somehow despite all evidence to the contrary, is an instrument of God/Jesus. What are the odds that this effect spills over into schools that select only "real Christians" for their student body?

Wilson discusses the old objections--public schools have a terrible track record on segregation, so what's wrong a choice school that also segregates Brown and Black students if it gives them a good education (answer: it probably doesn't).

Section IV (yes, this essay is not short) considers the struggle between racialized religious segregation and American democracy.

American democracy is under attack. Though the attacks are multifaceted, one of the largest threats is the rise of racial and religious balkanization. The Court’s decision in Carson may significantly exacerbate the balkanization. As Justice Breyer noted, allowing religion into the public-school system increases the risk of social strife and division. Proliferation of school choice that creates racialized religious segregation will result in students being siloed, unexposed to the diverse array of persons that inhabit America. The net result will be a decrease in social solidarity and cohesion, elevating risks of internal upheaval and violence. Violence resulting from the insurrection at the Capitol, attempts to prohibit teaching about the history of race and discrimination in America, and the protests over extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police epitomize the dangers of existing balkanization. The insurrection at the Capitol wherein the participants made explicit calls to Christian nationalism presages how adding religion to the layers of balkanization could endanger America’s democracy.

The opposite of the CATO Institue argument, which is that public school is a hotbed and argument and the only way to bring peace to the country is to let everyone retreat to their own educational silos where they don't have to get in fights with people who are different. Something that, as Wilson points out, we've been trying on an ad hoc basis and which is not working out particularly well.

Choice, she warns, also creates the growth of tiers of education,

Allowing school choice to be contoured by religion and race opens up the possibility for the dominant racialized religion to be used as a sorting metric that enhances the relative value of some students’ education while devaluing the education of others. Put another way, certain kinds of religious education could become sought-after status markers that are unavailable to those who are not part of the dominant race or religion.

There's a lot more to this piece, and you may not buy all of it, but it's still a thought-provoking work, worth a read. You can find the whole piece here. 

Gratitude

 Every year on this day, in my regular column in our local newspaper, I take a whack at the complicated feelings around Thanksgiving. This is from last year, and it's about as close as I've come to saying what I want to say. Happy Thanksgiving.

I have steadfastly avoided arguments about the historical basis of today’s holiday. No version of the first Thanksgiving is made better by the human impulse to flatten complicated human beings into two dimensional good guys and bad guys.

The Pilgrims appear to have been absolutely sincere in their faith, but with that comes an absolute certainty that they were right and everyone else was wrong. “Let’s establish a colony where everyone is free to worship as they wish,” said no Puritan ever. And the native tribes and bands that they encountered may have seemed more primitive than the European immigrants, but they had their own web of complicated and occasionally nasty political wranglings in which the Pilgrims represented a whole new factor.

Our colonial history is a complicated, messy tangle, worthy of careful inspection and thought. Kind of like all the rest of our history. But history is an endless conversation, not a single story set in stone, which means that history-based holidays are always going to be problematic.

But Thanksgiving isn’t just about history. It’s about gratitude, which absolutely deserves at least one holiday, because gratitude is everything.

We Americans aren’t very good at being grateful. We’re like the idea of being self-made, of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, of doing the work to be deserving of rewards. This often leads us into a strange sort of pseudo-gratitude—“Thank you, God, for giving me the things that I have earned and so richly deserved.”

That’s not really thankfulness. The Puritans themselves had a counter-argument—in their view of God and humanity, the only thing that human beings actually deserve is to burn in Hell forever, so anything else was a gift from God, something that you did not deserve but which God gave as a gift. In the Puritan view of the world, you could never, ever stand before God and say any version of “I earned this. I deserve this. So you must give it to me.”

We play the cards we are dealt in life, and we alone are responsible for what we do with them, how we play them, how we make the best use of them. But we don’t pick them ourselves. We do not make ourselves. And we don’t do anything alone.

It can be discouraging to take a hard look at our favorite self-made success stories, because they are all fables. Our favorite billionaires got started with family money or government money or important connections that gave them a leg up. I can’t think of a single success story, big or small, that doesn’t depend on the assistance of others. At the very very minimum, modern success stories depend on a basis in a stable nation with stable currency and a functioning infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with getting assistance from people, circumstances, luck, grace. We are still responsible for what we do with all of that. Nobody is a success based on only their own personal effort and work, but nobody is a success without putting effort and work into it.

But to deny the importance of the assistance we get, the crises we didn’t have to navigate, the breaks that were handed to us—well, that’s when we forget to be thankful. And gratitude is everything.

Without gratitude, we become hardened and unkind. From believing that we did it all ourselves, it’s an easy step to thinking that anyone who doesn’t have what we have—well, that person must be lazier or dumber or just generally less deserving than we are. Thankfulness naturally leads to a desire to pay it forward; the lack of gratitude leads to saying, “Not my problem. They need to take care of themselves.”

When we think all our success is self-created, we start to take it as proof that we are better than those who don’t have what we have. Thankfulness leads to empathy, to the ability to say (and mean) “There but for the grace of God go I.” Lack of gratitude leads to thinking, “I would never, ever be in that position. I’m just too smart and good. Those people must deserve their misfortune because they are lazy or bad.” Ingratitude concludes that you have been paid what the world owes you. Gratitude realizes what you owe the world.

So the challenge today is to think about what you’re truly thankful for. What do you have that is a gift of other people, God, fate, the universe? What in your life is more than you deserve? What do you have to be truly thankful for?

Keeping Teachers Safe

I had two moments in my first year of teaching.

One was the moment when two students stood up and squared off to fight, and before the smarter part of my brain could intervene, I stepped between them. They were both a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than I, and they were damn sight more used to using fists to hammer out conflict.

The other was the moment when a student from another class period entered my room and stood chest to chest with me, describing in considerable detail how he was going to beat the shit out of me. Then he left, and I made it through the rest of the period before sitting down, shaking, at my desk. It ended okay; at the end of the day, he came back and sat down and talked to me at length about what was bothering him. But I kept the door to my classroom closed and locked for decades, and, weirdly, I have never, ever forgotten the date.

That was the 1979-80 school year. Things have not improved for teachers. 

Every teacher has some stories about dealing with violence in school. Sometimes it's student-to-student. Sometimes it's an act directed toward a teacher, even as simple as throwing an object. Sometimes it's just the threat, a student who spits out some language accompanied by a look that tells you that given the wrong circumstances, that student would be coming at you.

There's a nightmare that I suspect pretty much all teachers have, where somehow you have lost control in the classroom and things are spinning out of control as you desperately, fruitlessly try to get a handle on it. There's the knowledge that you have to work past when starting out, the realization that if your classroom of students decided to ignore you and collectively shut down the class, there's nothing you could do to stop it. You learn to wield authority, but you're aware that it's a construct, an illusion that exists as long as you and the students find it mutually agreeable to maintain it. 

And more than that. I say all of the above as a 6'1" male. I can't quite imagine how a classroom feels for a diminutive female. A teacher in a classroom is uniquely vulnerable, and yet you cannot let fear grab ahold of you because it renders you useless, even dangerous, as a teacher. It's one of those things that they don't teach you in teacher school (but you with any luck learn from your student teaching co-op)-- how to be calm and confident and large and in charge all at the same time.

These days, you can't be a teacher without being aware of the threat of violence. On top of the same old personal experiences, you hear (with shock) how young the attacker was, you see the news stories where the violence escalates and is rebroadcast on the net, you see the worst of the stories that escalate to actual murder. 

So it's not just the mass shootings. Those events get all the talk and generate the most shot, but teachers understand that these shootings are not disconnected balloons floating far above the earth, but the peaks of mountains of escalating violence.

Back in 2014, an American Psychology Association Violence Directed Against Teachers Task Force survey found that 44% of teachers reported an incident directed against them personally. A more recent iteration of that survey found numbers almost as high--and that was during the pandemic. Websites that usually focus on the wacky, fun side of teaching have published hard-edged articles about the issue. 

"Too Many Teachers Are Getting Hit, Kicked, and Punched by Students," writes the WeAreTeachers staff. "Student Violence Against Teachers Has Become the Norm and That’s NOT Okay" hollers the post at Bored Teachers. 

The issue exists at the intersection of many others, making it hard to implement. Like every single major issue in education, it requires balance between the many points of tension.

Fordham Institute, working from its own study, declares that "Lax discipline is bad for teachers," and they are not wrong. Teachers cannot do their best work in the midst of chaos. It is deeply demoralizing to work in a school setting where both you and your students know that no matter what they do, there will be no consequences. When folks argue that some level of discipline is needed to keep a school functional, they are not wrong. 

And it's not just to make teachers' lives easier; what is most annoying about that disruptive student is not the personal affront to teacher dignity, but the effect it has one the learning environment of every other child in that classroom.

But at the same time, these are students, children, and "school discipline" should not be some sort of pedagogical police state. "Break this child's will and bend it to my own," is not a viable strategy, not just because it's morally and ethically wrong, but also because a too-large part of the time, it simply won't work. 

People want to be heard. If they don't think you're hearing them, they will keep raising their voice till you hear them. When someone is yelling at you, that's a message for you. Every piece of student misbehavior is information about that student. 

However, it's also true that many schools have botched the rollout of programs like restorative justice. In the wrong hands, these are programs that reinforce an old bad lesson for students--just say the words the adults want you to say and you can go on about your business unhampered. 

And really, if there are SEL lessons to be learned at school, one of them has to be that struggling with your own load is not a free license to piss all over everyone else, and being in the classroom of someone who is not doing a great job is not a good reason to physically attack them. 

The issue is difficult because so many things can be true at once. A child can be a trauma victim who needs appropriate services. A teacher can be lousy at managing a classroom. A student can cause problems because he knows there will be no consequences for his bad behavior. A school can have a bad learning environment because students run roughshod over teachers, and a school can have a bad learning environment because the adults impose a tyrannical culture of compliance. 

And all of this happens against the background of a culture in which it's okay to denigrate and disrespect teachers, to accuse them of being groomers, teaching "filth," hating children and their country. And that is happening in a country in which it's increasingly acceptable to deal with people you disagree with by trying to obliterate them, either figuratively or literally, violently. Schools exist downhill from society and the culture at large; everything happening in society eventually ends up in schools. 

What can help? The biggest line of defense preventing violence against teachers is administration. Take teacher concerns seriously (and if you have a teacher who is demanding your happen too often, take that seriously). Be clear, proportionate, and consistent with student consequences, and keep those separate from labeling and pigeonholing children as "bad." Watch your teachers' backs. Prioritize making your school a safe space for everyone. Embrace solutions that work, not just those that feel good (throwing the book and just having a talk can both feel good). If you are over thirty, recognize these are not the times you grew up in. 

Parents can help, and some do, and some won't. Teachers can help, often, but not always. 

And policy makers can help mostly by not reducing the issue to simple solutions, which starts by admitting that the issue exists and that it needs to be worked on and not simply exploited as another way to kick the public education football around. 

Another Data Mining Cautionary Tale

 Over at The Verge, a story copublished with The Markup reveals that Facebook was looking over millions of our shoulders as we prepared our taxes.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned.

The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.

So, yikes.

Even when some of the information was obscured, there was enough included that Facebook could match up the tax info to the Facebook profile, giving Meta a collection of particular sensitive and personal data.

Remember this story the next time your school district is talking about whatever cool new computer program they are plugging all of the students into, and what sort of data is being collected. Not even the various parties involved seem to have fully grasped what information was being passed around by the pixel that is largely about collecting a record of where you've been and what you've done and passing it on.

This stuff gets complicated. Read Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism to get just a taste of how intertwined ad software has become. One new one on me-- an online advertiser can contract to advertise to widget.com customers by setting ads to target "people who regularly visit widget.com" and thereby avoid paying widget.com's advertising prices. 

Schools are data goldmines, and every piece of software that gets inside the schoolhouse door is looking for nuggets, and sometimes nobody really knows how much is being mined and where it will end up. If your district is not prioritizing data security, you have a problem.

Boston Globe Offers More Testocrat Cries of Anguish

Lost months of learning! Lost future income!! 

What the heck does that even mean.

The NAEP numbers have been used to manufacture all sorts of panic, and the privatization-loving Boston Globe has piled on, using a few of the more dubious arguments, starting right in by chicken littling the headline:

Pandemic learning losses could cost Massachusetts students $21 billion in future earnings

Don't click on it. You'll only hit a paywall, anyway. The research referenced is the work of Tom Kane, economics professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is interviewed for the piece and takes the opportunity to ring the urgency bell about "helping students catch up."

But let's review two of the most misleading pieces of "research" cited by the 3D crowd (disrupt, defund, dismantle).

Measuring learning in months/days/years is bunk

The analyses show that on average, Massachusetts students lost 75 percent of a school year's worth of math learning and 41 percent of a year of reading.

Any time someone measures learning in days, months, years, seconds, eyeblinks, etc, your bullshit detector should go off like smoke alarm at a forest fire. Let's think about this for a minute.

73 percent of a school year is roughly 131 days. Which 131 days are we talking about? Because days in September are not quite as learning-filled as days in, say, February. The days coming up between Thanksgiving and Christmas are not exactly well-known in education circles for being learning rich. Likewise, Fridays and Mondays probably aren't as learningful as a Wednesday. So which 131 days of learning are students short?

Of course, the answer is that days of learning (and months, and years) aren't really a thing. They're a made up way of talking about test scores. Turns out we're back to the gang at CREDO.

The Learning Policy Institute offers an explanation for days of learning. The short form is that a typical growth on a standardized test score, divided by 180, equals one day of learning. If you want a fancier explanation, LPI looks via CREDO to a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann:

To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman (2012) that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.” Therefore, assuming an average school year includes 180 days of schooling, each day of schooling represents approximately 0.0013 standard deviations of student growth.

So in the ends, we're really talking about test scores. Saying that students "lost" thirty days of learning is another, more compelling, way to say, "Test scores are down this many standard deviations from what we expected them to be." 

It's smoke, mirrors and misdirection, because "Your child's bucket of learning is empty" is scarier than "Your kid's score on this one reading and math test went down, boogah boogah." Lost instruction time is a thing. Lost days of learning is not. It's just a drop in test scores.

Of course, if your reaction to dropping test scores is "So what," there's another piece of questionable research to answer that.

Test Scores and Future Earnings

Economist Raj Chetty (it's always an economist) made a big splash with research that tried really, really hard to link test scores to future earnings. The sexy headline version you may recall was that a child who has a great kindergarten teacher will make more money as an adult. There's a full explainer of Chetty here, but whenever you see someone trying to link test scores to future earnings, you're usually looking at the work of with Chetty or Erik Hanushek or Tom Kane.

And that's what the Globe used for the "state level analysis performed by the Globe"--a paper by Tom Kane. The paper is not long, but it's thick with layers of nearly impenetrable economist argle bargle. But here, to the best of my ability to slog through the language, is how Kane et al figure that a drop in test score means less money as an adult.

They used "the mean [NAEP] score of 8th graders in a state as an estimate of the mean achievement of those born in the state 13 years before," then added scores for missing years by "estimating" then did some mathy things to adjust for race/ethnicity and parental education. Then they used census data by state to compute life outcomes (income, teen birth, arrest for violent crimes). Then they looked at changes in each. Then they pretended that there was some sort of connection between them. 

In other words, they said that from 1996 to 2019, Pennsylvania's math NAEP score went up 16 points. From 2001 to 2019, Pennsylvanian's mean income rose $1,600. Therefor, point on the math part of the NAEP equals $100 in future income.

That's an over-simplification, but not by much, and I'm not sure what you could do to that approach that would make it a non-ridiculous mess of assuming correlation equals causation. Kane and his co-authors add a bunch of math stuff that's supposed to correct for various factors, but it still looks like fried baloney to me. 

“We use these state-level differences in achievement gains on the NAEP along with outcomes by year and state of birth in the American Community Survey to estimate the association between past achievement increases and later-life outcomes.” Rather than NAEP scores, one could just as easily look at average height, or common hair colors, or shoe size. This seems like a good time to link to one of my favorite sites, Spurious Correlations.

Other highlights

Other research is cited, including a finding that spending more time in remote learning meant less math learning (aka test score) except when it didn't. Thanks. Very helpful.

Kane tries to make a case for saying that "underlying these tests scores are concrete skills" which matters because "you just can't skip calculus if you want to be an engineer" and "you just can't skip writing if you want to have almost any professional job" and good lord. The connection between test scores and concrete skills is a leap. The assumption that everyone should be tested as if they want to be an engineer is odd. The assumption that the NAEP (or any other standardized test) is a legitimate measure of writing skill is counter-reality.

There's a quote from Stephen Zrike, a school turnaround "expert" and current superintendent who may have the least silly comment in the whole piece:

We have a moral imperative and responsibility to support young people, not just in their academics. That's critical, but [so is] their ability to engage and enjoy their childhoods.

Which actually gets at the central problem with this kind of fear-mongering. It all boils down to an argument that, out of all the things that children experienced (and experience) during the pandemic, nothing is more important than the drop in standardized test scores, and the bulk of our meager resources must be focused on raising those test scores. 

All of this panic-button hammering is just the anguished screams of testocrats who, for a variety of reasons, would like us all to join them in thinking that nothing schools do is more important than getting students to score higher and higher on the Big Standardized Test (and its corollary-- believing that schools are failing because the score are low).

Late in the piece, the Globe returns to this theme

The analysis sheds light on the progress Massachusetts students had made on the NAEP over the 27 years prior to the pandemic--around two grade levels' worth of gains in math, or $65 billion in future earnings.

This is utter, fabricated nonsense. It's an attempt to stampede the crowd toward the exit marked "Testing" by hollering "Fire." It's not to be taken seriously. 

Pompeo: Randi and Teachers Public Enemy Number 1

Oh, look! We're already starting the new election cycle by further vilifying teachers.

This frickin' guy

David Weigel (former Washington Post) and Shelby Talcott (former Daily Caller) are new hires as political reporters at Semafor, and they stirred up the clickbait today by getting Mike Pompeo, in his role of coy candidate, to slam U.S. teachers. You're going to see this quote lots of places, but let's commemorate it here as well.

I tell the story often — I get asked “Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?” The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.

There it is, fully distilled. Teachers teach filth (the anti-CRT+ movement) and they don't know math or reading or writing (science of reading, high stakes test scores). When you think about it, it's quite an accomplishment-- teachers don't know enough about reading, math, or writing to actually teach it, but they can indoctrinate students with all this commie filth. That's America's teachers--supremely incompetent, and yet the greatest brainwashing conspiracy in the world. Can't teach students to read; can teach students to hate the United States of America. What a pile of baloney. 

There's a follow-up, in which Weigel, not unreasonably, asks that, given Pompeo's dismissal of silly conservatives trying to own the libs:

Criticizing Randi Weingarten, pointing to something crazy in a textbook or classroom — if I’m talking to a Democrat they’d say “that’s just owning the libs.”

I'd disagree. It's not so much owning libs as it is slandering several million hard working Americans who have spent far more of their adult lives working to educate young people than Mike Pompeo ever dreamed about. But he has an answer:

If there’s something in the textbook that shouldn’t be there, it’s okay to identify that and call it out. But that’s just openers. That’s identification of a risk. Then the question is, so tell me how it is the case that you’re gonna go convince the people of Cedric County, Kansas, that they need to identify school board members who are going to push through a curriculum that actually returns to the ideas that made America unique and special.

If our kids don’t grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we’re done. If they think it’s an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project, and we were founded on a racist idea — if those are the things people entered the seventh grade deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it’s difficult to understand how Xi Jinping’s claim that America is in decline won’t prove true.

Well, "something in a textbook that shouldn't be there" is doing a lot of work here--who exactly makes that call--but he's crystal clear on his belief in American exceptionalism and the idea that every child should be indoctrinated in that belief. I'm not going to relitigate the entire CRT/1619 Project debate here. Just going to note that American exceptionalism is a scary bad idea, and ahistorical to boot. The "American exceptionalism" crowd often reminds me of an angry fifteen year old snarling "If you say anything at all bad about my girlfriend, I will cut you." Mature love--love of a person, love of a country--sees and understands the flaws and problems. Insisting that they don't exist and we must never ever talk about them is not healthy. Likewise, serious grownups recognize that history is a conversation, not a declaration. 

There's one other moment to catch. Pushed to admit maybe he's sort of critical and breaking with Trump, Pompeo offers this:

Well, when you work for the president of the United States, you work for the president of the United States. There’s no, “coming out against the president.” It would be deeply anti-constitutional. It’s immoral, it’s not right. And I never did it, and would never.

Anti-constitutional to criticize the President?! Immoral??!! But then, I thought that the folks in the administration were supposed to be working for the country, not the President.

There's more. He talks about the Deep State without using those words, and he cheers for traditional conservatism, which is apparently another term he doesn't understand.

I'll link to the piece here, because I think it's important to cite your sources so people can check your work, but for the love of God, don't click on it because then they'll just do more of this baloney.

In the meantime, congrats to Randi and America's hardworking teachers on being a football yet again for an aspiring rightwing hater who wants to claim to be conservative while simultaneously vilifying the backbone of one of America's oldest and most important institutions, even as the numbers suggest that beating up teachers has not been a successful strategy. May he disappear into the dustbin of history exceptionally soon.

ICYMI: Finally Winter Edition (11/20)

I still remember the year my family was driving back from New Hampshire via the New York Turnpike and after driving down one land snow canyons, we were finally forced off the road at Syracuse, where the turnpike had been closed. As a kid, I found it a great adventure. As an adult, I'm suspecting my parents did not. God bless everyone in the downwind-of-the-lake portion of New York. 

Meanwhile, here are some readings from the week. 

Police Officer Accidentally Shoots Child While Teaching High School Students How To Be Good Police Officers

Whoopsies! Everyone's okay in this Indiana high school, and they've certainly learned about the importance of gun safety and why it's a super-good idea to bring guns into schools.

Not just ‘Maus’: A Missouri school district removed several Holocaust history books, too

That Holocaust is such a bummer, so in Missouri, some folks think maybe we should just disappear it so nobody gets uncomfortable. From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

What you don’t know about the UW System’s new charter schools should worry you

In Wisconsin, a sudden explosion in charter schools, and there are many reasons to be concerned. By Ruth Coniff for the Wisconsin Examiner.

‘Too hyperbolic’? School board parental rights push falters

Collin Brinkley for the AP. Another election post-mortem looking at the ways in which the parental rights moral panic didn't quite score as well as hoped.

Democrats poised to increase their majority on state board of education

Some good things happened in the last election in Michigan, including the election of Mitchell Robinson, friend of the Institute, to the Starte Board of Education.

One Educator’s Grateful Remembrance: A Teacher

Paul Bonner guest blogs at Nancy Bailey's blog, talking about a teacher who made a difference in his life. Spoiler alert: he doesn't remember her for her excellent test prep.

Messy

At Blue Cereal Education, Dallas Koehn offers a personal reflection on the place of mess in his life and teaching.

A call for rejecting the newest reading wars

At Hechinger, fifty-eight educators sign a letter in reaction to Emily Hanford's latest podcast/hit piece for the reading wars (my wife, a certified reading specialist and second grade teacher is listening and is not impressed). 

Success Academy Parents Speak Out. Part 2 “I was told my seventh grade daughter had to repeat entire grade because she failed one course by one point”

Gary Rubinstein has been hearing from parents who have dealt with Success Academy, New York's bit time charter business. Here's another rough story.

The Promise, Power, and Practice of Student Agency

At ASCD, Tanji Reed Marshall has a paper looking at the whys and hows of building student agency. You may not agree with all of this, but it's still thought-provoking.

Play is crucial for middle schoolers, too

Christina Samuels at Hechinger with something that's not exactly news to anyone who spends time with middle schoolers, but it's still nice to see it in print.

This week at Forbes, I looked at research about Arizona's new massive voucher system that serves wealthy students who were never in public school in the first place, and some of the stories coming out of places where right-wingers took over the school board.

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