SC: Palmetto and The Giant Conspiracy

The Palmetto Promise Institute of South Carolina has just released a report entitled "Education or Indoctrination" a "dossier" of the many, many left-wing enemies of all that is Good and True in South Carolina education--organizations that "target South Carolina teachers, students, and parents." The dossier reveals their "true agenda" in over 60 pages; a good alternate title would have been "Lock Up Your Children! They're Coming To Get You!" SCI describes it as "comprehensive but beautiful," and it really is pretty. And I have read it so that you don't have to. 

Buckle up, boys and girls. We are traveling out beyond the lands where reasonable people understand that there are many legitimate points of view and that the opposition is not necessary evil and/or stupid. These folks are far, far, far right. 

So who are these folks?

The Palmetto Promise Institute was founded (twice) by Jim DeMint, the Tea Party conservative senator who resigned his post to become president of the Heritage Foundation. It is part of the State Policy Network, that network of right-tilted thinky tanks and advocacy groups. Current chair is Phil Hughes, president of Hughes Investments, Inc., a commercial development outfit.

PPI's visiting fellow in education is Jonathan Butcher. Butcher has been around-- he came out of the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform (a Jay Greene joint), helped set up education savings accounts in Arizona, and was education director at the Goldwater Institute. These days he's heading up the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. And that's just the highlights; Butcher appears to have never met a public school system he didn't want to dismantle.

That brings us to Ellen Weaver, founding president and CEO of PPI. Weaver graduated from Bob Jones University, then went to work for DeMint, somehow landed on the SC Education Oversight Committee, and then decided to run for State Superintendent of Education. In that race she was backed by Pennstlvania's pro-school-choice gazzillionaire Jeffrey Yass, and managed to beat her primary opponent through good old-fashioned lies, exaggeration, and innuendo about her supposed liberal leanings. Oh--and when it turns out you need a Masters degree to hold that office, Bob Jones University whipped up a custom 6-months masters program and zipped her right through it.

Remember all that, especially the "mischaracterizing your opponent" thing as we look at this dossier--but especially remember that as of January, the woman at the head of the organization that created this thing will be in charge of education in South Carolina. Yikes.

Ready to wade through this thing? Here we go.

Foreword

Butcher wrote the foreword, and it sets a tone. Education is "beset by special interest groups" who want to wrestle "authority--and learning options--away from families." The NEA and AFT push Black Lives Matter Week, which is all about "disrupting" the nuclear family. The National School Boards Association "colluded" with President Joe Biden's administration "to prompt officials to treat parents like domestic terrorists if they speak against leftist ideology," a thing that didn't actually happen, but we are here to raise anger and panic and not understanding.

Butcher wants you to know that the Nation's Report Card shows steep declines in learning, yet while some states have instituted education savings accounts (ESAs), South Carolina has not. Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. This is a classic trick--state in loud tones the problem, propose your solution, and never provide evidence that your solution will actually solve the problem. 

Butcher also wants you to be upset that South Carolina has not taken steps to "protect children from racial discrimination caused by educators' application of critical race theory" (I will warn you know that you will lose track of how many things folks are supposed to be scared of that have not actually happened). 

The basic thesis here is a version of what Butcher's old mentor Jay Greene laid out in February-- choicers need to use the culture wars to help push choice policies. 

This report describes how certain interest groups want to limit learning options for students and promote critical race theory’s pernicious ideas.

Introduction

Oran Smith wants you to know that South Carolinians are nice folks, and that's why they've been reluctant to push back and so--

There is no better example of the unlikely coexistence of centrist citizens and radical left ideological efforts than in the area of public education.

That line comes with a footnote, not to a source, but to an explanation that you can tell the unions are really socialists because they use words like "workers." Parents are busy and don't want to be thought of as bigots, and teachers, he explains, are overwhelmed with their duties and don't want to be stigmatized. That's why moderate and conservative teachers "felt pressure to “like” posts of support for the left-of-center Facebook group SC for Ed in 2019, and why a large minority of teachers pay the dues that keep The South Carolina Education Association afloat." 

So, two take-aways here-- the leftists are a minority, and everyone who isn't openly with the right is, either by inclination or intimidation, against them. I half-expect, "When we crush the unions and socialists, we will be greeted as liberators."

To his credit, Smith includes a special-fonted paragraph explaining that they don't think their "policy opponents" are evil. "But, we both respectfully and emphatically disagree with their beliefs about America, about the purpose of education, and their goals for South Carolina children." And the thing is, I believe him. Lots of folks in this biz are not ideologues--just opportunists for hire, there to clear the ground for the corporate interests they represent. Now, if in the process, they have to whip up some ideologues who do think that everyone left of Barry Goldwater is evil and dangerous--well, that's not what they think.

But enough preliminaries. Let the calling out of various conspirators begin--starting with a scary graphic

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See? They're everywhere!

1. American Federation of Teachers

Teachers unions are "the major opponents to meaningful education reform," so we'll start there. 

You know who was awful? John Dewey. He held "a progressive and romantic view of education." He opposed teaching the classics. He didn't like "personal competition." The dossier also says that Dewey "seemed to believe" that a correct view could be arrived at socially, which seems like rather a stretch. Also, Randi Weingarten is a radical, and it's her fault that school buildings stayed closed. And then there's this:

AFT is a traditional labor union, and as a labor union, it favors strikes and walkouts and other measures as leverage for collective bargaining

Nobody "favors" strikes and walkouts. Nobody. "Never mind sitting down to work this out at the bargaining table--I just want to go on strike," said no union member ever. But the dossier wants you to know that if state law permitted it, AFT would have "no qualms" about shutting down schools to demand "better working conditions." The dossier uses scare quotes around "better working conditions," as if that would be a made up excuse for the union to have that qualmless strike that everyone is dying to throw.

2. National Education Association

NEA is also bad, but in addition to strikes, they use the courts, The dossier includes the "most shocking" example, when the NEA in Rhode Island sued Nicole Solas for carpet bombing a school with over 200 FOIA requests, including requests for all of a teacher's emails that include the word "race." Solas became a cause celebre for right wing news outlets.

The dossier authors perused a copy of NEA Today (Jan 2022) and discovered that it identified disruptive parents at school board meetings with extremist right-wing groups, promoted Social and Emotional Learning, identified "voting reform" as Jim Crow 2.0, celebrated the defeat of a charterization plan in North Carolina, and celebrated union engagement and advocacy. 

The authors also rifled through some Representative Assembly resolutions, like schools being fiscally independent, supporting progressive taxation, opposing privatization, opposing immigration enforcement on school grounds, supporting the right of librarians to use their professional judgment, supporting right to strike... the list is, I guess, supposed to be self-evidently crazy radical stuff?

3. South Carolina Education Association

So, just how liberal is The SCEA? A better question is whether The SCEA leadership knows just how liberal and out of touch they are.

The authors apparently got into an SCEA webinar and caught the group saying things like "Christopher Columbus didn't discover America" and "We should be able to teach the 1619 Project" and "We need to organize and advocate for ourselves."

SCEA is also accused of, in its podcasts, "focusing on the fruit of the socialist tree: union-type grievances and demands for more money." Because only socialists want to be paid well? 

A few words about Howard Zinn

We pause now to make some connections. The authors claim that there seems to be a "common liturgy" beneath the surface of the "shockingly consistent" ideology of these groups, including calling capitalism bad and dissing Columbus and saying "the winners write the histories" (which is an odd statement to object to when you're sitting in the state that kicked off the Civil War). 

But these tropes "like so much memorized secular scripture" (there's a lot of language in this report framing leftist stuff as a religion--all the better, I suppose, for contrasting it with good Christian faith) spring from a particular source-- Howard Zinn. This dossier sees a huge smoking gun in the NEA Zinn Project.

Also, capitalism

The "education left" doesn't like the free market, and "anti-capitalism is a core tenet of the new orthodoxy." Then we turn to heroes and villains who run through the whole dossier. Bad guys are Ibram X. Kendi and Zinn; good guys are Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Also, if the unionists don't like capitalism, then the only possible alternative is socialism. And probably authoritarian as well. 

4. SC for Ed

"Clearly to the left of even" the unions, these wacky folks want things like increased salary and improved funding and better working conditions. Their website includes stuff from FairTest, those crazy radicals who call for the end of "misuses and flaws of standardized testing." Also, they have had rallies. And "if social media posts are a barometer (and SC for Ed and its leaders are prolific online), the real fear of SC for Ed appears to be parents encroaching on their turf (advocating for their children and their learning needs)." No word on what would be true if social media posts are not a barometer.

Red State Revolt

SC for Ed was "no doubt" inspired by the 2018 teacher strike in West Virginia, which was another leftist led socialists. "This explains once again the choice of red as the official rally color."

5. Consultants and Foundations

The most dangerous path to radical agendas entering South Carolina’s public schools can be through Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer positions in the district office, or retaining of DEI “consultants.”

For this part they cite Parents Defending Education and their library of Naughty School reports and list of some tales of specific districts and schools that dared to hire consultants and implement DEI or SEL programs. The dossier acknowledges "we need more diversity, inclusion, and equality in South Carolina," but not with "discrimination of another kind" (spoiler alert: there is no other kind of discrimination in their examples). "We hope we are wrong" about these programs, they say, leaving the "but we assume we aren't" part unsaid.

Palmetto State Teachers Association

PSTA is one of those alternative unions for folks who don't want their union to be too uniony. The dossier describes it as "centrist," and they've done good things like being more interested in policy than pay, so they don't get lumped in with the "constellation of the left." However, they have taken to "dogged opposition" to the enactment of any private education choice program, most recently daring to insist that choicey schools take the same state Big Standardized Test as public schools (which the dossier objects to because those schools get to ignore the state curriculum and standards on which the test is based). 

So, the dossier suggests, PSTC used to be a nice bunch of non-lefties, but we've got our eyes on you guys.

6. National School Boards Association

Never to be forgiven for backing masking policies or that time they asked the administration to help defend members from crazy far right attacks at board meetings. 

7. K-12 Associations

There's a bunch of professional associations like the National Science Teaching Association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Some are nice, but some insist on advocacy and are "seemingly bruising for a fight." "Seemingly" does a lot of work in that sentence.

8. Higher Education

They cite one incident involving parent protest against one book as proof that higher ed and K-12 organizations operate "hand in hand." Higher ed has been the home of "political correctness: since the 1980s. The dossier doesn't have time to study how higher ed affects the "worldview" of future teachers, but it needs some looking into.

9. Accreditors

Specifically, the groups that provide accreditation for teaching programs. The dossier notes that one of the standards talks about personal biases and increasing the practice of equality, diversity and inclusion, to which they say

Again, diversity, inclusion and equality are important, but by whose definition, Ibram Kendi's or Tim Scott's? We suspect that there is no diversity in the definition of diversity

Diversity is okay, but only the right kind. I'm hearing echoes of every person who ever complained that Civil Rights activists had a point, but they were going about it all wrong and would they please just shut up and wait.

10. Litigators

National litigators that recruit plaintiffs in South Carolina to promote humanism and extreme views of separation of church and state include the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU South Carolina, Americans United [for Separation of Church & State], the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association.

Is there anybody on any side of any issue who doesn't go out to recruit litigants? I do wish there was further explanation of the difference between "extreme" and "mild" views of the separation between church and state.

11. Standards, Curriculum, and Textbooks

Before Common Core, the dossier argues, nobody outside of the education bubble knew what curriculum standards were.

If the textbooks, curricula, and curriculum standards used in South Carolina are to be rigorous, balanced, and reflective of South Carolina values—it matters a great deal who sits on the State Board.

Wrapping up

The dossier has tried to maintain some even-handed language throughout, but for the big finish, the pristine white gloves come off.

Our tour through the world of “radical” and “disruptive” “social warrior” organizations pressing down hard on South Carolina schools, students, teachers, and parents has had the collateral benefit of revealing the marked difference in worldview from that of the typical South Carolina parent and teacher.

This broad “constellation” of indoctrination organizations has vastly different origins, goals, heroes, and villains from those of advocates of what we believe to be true education.

If you want it all reduced to a chart, they have a crackerjack graphic for you

This is, they assure us, based on primary sources "as well a vast body of proof documents and eyewitness accounts we do not have the space to even footnote here." So totally not a straw man constructed out of their fears and/or desire to agitate feelings against everyone not sharing their view. 

What's a parent (or right-minded teacher) to do?

The dossier concludes with an action list. 

Seek a parental bill of rights, one that "affirmatively protects parental rights." 

Work for "true diversity, equality, and inclusion." That means being color-blind and gender-blind. I suspect they really really didn't think that second one through.

Understand the evils of racism past and present. Tim Scott is quoted, providing yet another version of CRT in which "kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them." 

Also, learn about NEA and AFT alternatives. Get involved in school and leadership. Parents should talk with their children regularly. Visit our website.

There's an appendix that includes the text from where legislators slipped the standard anti-"CRT" language into the budget. A list of influential national ed groups. And footnotes.

Still here?

That's the whole thing. The language does not froth at the mouth or scream loudly, and there are moments that are perfectly reasonable. And there are dozens and dozens of moments of exaggeration, fabrication and twisting of information--more than I could ever cover in even this long post. But mostly the message is simple--

There's a vast conspiracy of socialist that includes everyone on the left and in the center which is pretty much everyone involved in education. It's a specific and even-tempered version of the old arguments about the education establishment, the keepers of the status quo. They are well-connected. They aren't like the Regular People from Around Here. They want to replace parents with The State, and they have their own (not Christian) religion; that's how Godless socialists roll. 

And as is often the case, there's an assumption here that teaching someone liberal stuff is indoctrination, but teaching them right-leaning stuff is education.

The report's function is not to rant and rave. Reports like this (all the way back to A Nation at Risk) provide ammunition to the ranters and ravers, allowing them to hold up the slickly produced official-looking pages and say, "I'm not just ranting and raving--what I have to say is supported by this sober academic report." 

Did I mention that the woman in charge of the organization that produced this will soon be in charge of education in South Carolina? Going to be a rough couple of years for teachers in Palmetto State.

Netflix's Reed Hastings Provides Example #534,215 of Why Free Market And Education Are A Bad Match

You've probably noticed that your various streaming services are providing an increasingly baffling batch of service levels. Now Netflix is about to join the fray by offering what they're calling an "as-supported plan." 

Netflix Big Kahuna Reed Hastings recently explained in a NYT interview reported by Variety

“You’re right to say I didn’t believe in the ad-supported tactic for us. And I was wrong about that.” Hastings credited Hulu and founding CEO Jason Kilar (also former chief exec of WarnerMedia) for demonstrating success with advertising in premium video: “Hulu really proved that you could do that at scale and offer consumers lower prices, and that that was a better model.”

Hastings is also a long-time promoter of charter schools and choice, so when I read that quote, I immediately flashed on another "service" business that we could scale with a model for lower prices for consumers--charter and private schools.

In the world of market driven school choice, there will, of course, be tiers. There is no market that doesn't do this, because one of the things the free market is good for is sorting customers and vendors into tiers. You can buy a Lexus or a used Yugo. Tiy can shop on Rodeo Drive or at Walmart. In short, free market choice really means that you can have all the choice you can afford. 

And for vendors who serve folks on the lower tiers, it's helpful to have alternative sources of income, to sell not just your product but access to your customer base, aka advertising.

So if I want to watch a full range of streamed content without being interrupted by stupid commercials, I can pay for the higher tier; otherwise, I can go low price and regular advertising. Thousands of executives at "legacy" tv channels are slapping their heads and muttering "No shit! What a brilliant idea." As well they might, because that's also how this part of free marketeering works-- you offer a unique business model at really low prices, and then once you've buried your competition, you change your model, including putting back some of the things your competition used to do.

Anyway, imagine this model for privatized free market schooling. Folks at pricey private school get, well, school. Meanwhile, on the lower tiers where students have to depend on meager voucher amounts and shrinking taxpayer subsidies, students get to attend "The Pepsi Corp Algebra II Class, brought to you today by Diet Pepsi." Consumers will get to enjoy lower prices while being soaked in advertising and marketing. 

It's one of the unstated economic pressures to privatize. We now all know one lesson of the internet--if you are not paying for the service, then you are actually the product. If you aren't buying, then you're the one being sold. By that measure, school is filled with millions of student-products that are not being sold, a giant source of revenue that is just being left on the table and nobody is cashing in on all those young eyeballs and hearts and minds. Just because a bunch of parents and government types would object.

How much easier it will be to sell the idea once marketeers are dealing with other marketeers looking for revenue streams and not parents and educators with crazy ideas about service and protecting children.

This is not even a new idea--remember the whole idea of Channel One was "We'll show your students some news and you'll let us show them some marketing." Don't imagine for a moment that privatized school won't bring that "ad-supported model" back the first minute they think they can. 

OK: Lowering the Bar Even Further For Teaching

Oklahoma has had trouble holding onto teachers for quite some time. A 2018 report found that over the previous six years, 30,000 Oklahoma teachers had left the classroom. Keep in mind that the state only employs about 52,000 teachers. Oklahoma has real trouble recruiting and retaining.

What could it be? What could it be? The lowest per pupil spending in the region? The low pay? The constant disrespect directed at them from public figures? The fact that their right-tilted leaders have spent years and years in a schoolhouse version of this conversation:

RTL: (Set fire to buildings)

Occupants: Hey! This building is on fire! We could use some help here!

RTL: We are shocked and outraged at your failure to keep your building safe! 

Occupants: A little help here?

RTL: Nonsense. We are going to set up charter and voucher buildings where folks can escape from the fire that some irresponsible parties are unwilling to fight. 

And then, every so often the Oklahoma GOP sees some corner of the building not yet engulfed in flames and takes a can of gasoline and a blowtorch to that.

That includes, especially, the teaching profession itself. That includes a whole set of rules that allow all manner of alternative paths to the classroom, including the popular "as long as you have a college degree in something, we might as let you teach" rule. 

But it turns out that wasn't loose enough. Oklahoma had a category called "adjunct teacher," a designation awarded to someone who had nothing but a high school diploma. But an adjunct teacher had limitations, allowing only 270 clock hours of classroom teaching per semester. 

Last January, Senator Jessica Garvin  (former nursing home administrator) decided to fix that by proposing that the limitation be axed, and school districts allowed to stick adjuncts in a classroom for as long as they liked. 

"Increasing pay and other recent changes haven’t helped end the teacher shortage problem, so we need to look at what assets we already have available, like adjunct and substitute teachers, and how we can better utilize them,” Garvin said.

Yes, say Oklahoma's leaders, we tried one thing, one time about four years ago, so clearly there's nothing left to do but lower our definition of what a "teacher" is. The bill, of course, passed.

Adjuncts are supposed to have "distinguished qualifications," but local districts get to decide what they think that means. 

This is the kind of dumb law that makes me wonder whether these folks are cynical or just, you know, dumb. Now that the law has been in place for this year's start, the Norman Transcript gathered some reactions, and oh boy. 

Contemplating the 370-or-so adjuncts hired this year, Bryan Duke, interim dean at the University of Central Oklahoma's college of education had some thoughts:

He said lawmakers promised the changes would draw highly-trained professionals, but based on conversations with district leaders, he said “that is not what we’re seeing.”

“We’ll just say that I’m not aware of those qualifications,” Duke said. “And, I certainly doubt that most folks would have those qualifications.”

Seriously, lawmakers? Exactly which highly-trained professionals did you imagine were going to jump at the chance to make less than $50K for doing teaching, which is--and I can't say this often enough--a really, really hard job to do when you're an amateur. 

That may have included Rep. Kyle Hilbert ("A new generation of conservative leadership"):

“I would push back on anyone that says that just because someone doesn’t have some letters next to their name that they’re less intelligent than someone else,” Hilbert said. “Some of the smartest people I know, their highest level of education is high school. and if they’ve got a career of experience and excellence in their field, perhaps they do have some expertise that they can bring.”

This is dumb stuff to say. Dumb. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what teaching actually involves. But its State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister who really offered some useful observations to the Transcript:

State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, though, appeared stunned when she learned during an interview that lawmakers had stripped the college degree requirement for permanent teachers. She whispered “Oh my God!” under her breath.

She called the change “worrisome,” and said Oklahoma parents expect and deserve a college-educated teacher for their child.

Educating is a science, and students benefit from college-trained graduates who have the practice and expertise in helping students lift outcomes, particularly in reading, she said.

Hofmeister said when someone enters school having previously owned a Hallmark store, they don’t have the experience and training to step into a second-grade class.

“There are some who really seem to think that what is happening in school is a lot of babysitting,” Hofmeister said, “and it’s not. Kids don’t get back these days. They need to be spent with those who have the expertise to deliver an excellent education, and we have to do more.”

Hofmeister just launched state Science of Reading academies in order to train teachers in the One True Way to teach students to read. That's $13 million wasted. If you thought it was a terrible, awful, no good, really bad thing that schools of education weren't teaching teachers the One True Way to teach reading, then how must you feel knowing that classes can now be run by people who have never learned anything about teaching reading at all?

Of course, it may be that the legislators are not so much dumb as they are focused on what has long been a set of Oklahoma education goals--to privatize it, to crush that troublesome teacher union, and to spend as little on it as possible. This is McDonaldization in action--the larger your pool of potential employees, the less you have to pay them and the more easily you can replace them. And the more you degrade teaching in public schools, the more you can push charters and other private schools. It's the Florida model--to make your charters and vouchers look better, make public schools look worse. 

Alternate pathways to the class are not automatically a bad thing, and being able to tap professional expertise can be a big benefit for schools. But this measure goes far beyond that.

And if Oklahoma legislators think that there's a vast untapped supply of people who would have made really great teachers, but skipped it because of some red tape--well, they might want to look at a 2017 survey of Oklahomans who hold teaching certificates but weren't using them. One third said more pay might tempt them, but two thirds said it would take more, like respect, autonomy, professional treatment. Do legislators imagine that people who didn't train to be teachers will be happier about mediocre pay and general disrespect? 

Oklahoma (and other parts of the country) didn't dig this hole overnight, and they won't fill it overnight, either. But solutions like "just let anyone fill the job" is just digging the hole deeper and deeper. It sends a terrible message to people who bothered to actually invest time and money in preparing to teach, and an equally terrible message to people considering entry into the profession. This is a lousy solution to a real problem.

ICYMI: A Quick Calm Moment Edition (12/4)

Christmas is still far enough away that the Board of Directors are not yet losing their mind, but at age 5 they clearly understand Christmas in ways they previously did not. Just hang on.

I'm going to remind you that this weekly post is all about amplification. They way people get heard on the interwebz is to be shared, far and wide, again and again. Every single person who can click can help out with that. So if you read something here that speaks to you, share it. Post it (from the original source) on your Facebook or Tweetster or whatever platform you hang out upon (which is important, because as folks spread out across various platforms, it takes a little more work to get the word to them all). 

Sharing really is caring, and the bigger your personal audience, the more amplification you can provide. Okay, here we go.

Erie students get an A+ for academic growth

The story of Erie is encouraging. A school district that at one point seriously considered closing all its high schools has put together a remarkable coalition to lift it up out of the ditch. Yeah, I don't think much of test scores as a measure, but several measures, something is going right up there.

What do we owe the children of the pandemic

Nancy Flanagan with a heck of a post asking some of the important questions that most NAEP panic coverage is missing. 

Conservative states are blocking trans medical care. Families are fleeing.

Politico offers some reportage on how things are working out for some families in Texas and Florida.

"Groomers"

A post about the political machinations of the anti-LGBTQ crowd in South Carolina.

The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?

From Maren Aukerman at the Literacy Research Association, an excellent rundown of what's going on in the current iteration of the Reading Wars.

After a bruising Michigan election, what’s next for Betsy DeVos and her education agenda?

Chalkbeat Detroit considers the DeVos fortunes after their shellacking-by-proxy in Michigan's elections. 

Election Reflection

Teacher activist Nicole Wolff in Arizona reflects on an election that was exhausting and not entirely encouraging in its results.

The System is Just Not Built That Way

TC Weber with some things to think about considering relationships and canned SEL programs

Former area teachers say they left profession feeling exhausted, unsupported

From Fargo, a look at teachers who have been worn down by problems with student behavior and a lack of support in dealing with them. 

Cynical MAGA censors are damaging public education

Always interesting to see how these things look to people outside the education bubble. Here's nominally-conservative Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post offering her take on the reading restrictions movement.

NC Baptist: On book bans, Moms for Liberty sure has a narrow view of liberty

And here's a take on book banning from a card-carrying Baptist in the South. 

And then there are the pensions!

Jeff Waid continues his series with a look at the arguments being made to reduce pensions for teachers.

Pursue School Improvement Through Persuasion, Not Vilification

Yes, this is a decade or two late, and yes, Rick Hess has been pretty close to the problem he's critiquing. But he's not wrong. At Ed Week.

Elsewhere, a piece I wrote is in the official magazine of the official superintendents' association. It's about the connections between small towns and their schools.

Over at Forbes, I looked at some standards movement fans spinning their wheels and still not understanding where they went wrong, and then I picked up on Oklahoma's stated intent to require taxpayers to fund religious charters. 

And here's your weekly reminder that you can get all of this stuff via substack--free and delivered straight to your inbox. 

PA: The Shapiro Transition Team (Education Division)

Now that Pennsylvania has rejected the crazy guy running for the governor's seat, we can turn our attention to the guy who won and who did, in fact, say some scary things along the way, including expressing his love for school vouchers. 

Shapiro's people just dropped their transition team listings which are plenty expansive, with seven separate Transition Advisory Committees. So we're just going to look at education.

The Education/Workforce Committee is headed up by Patrick Gallagher, Chancellor at the University of Pitsburgh. And its header is a not-particularly-reassuring vat of verbiage:

The Advisory Committee for Education and Workforce will be chaired by Pat Gallagher, Chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh, and will be comprised of teachers, former school administrators, and education policy experts. Josh Shapiro believes that every child in Pennsylvania – regardless of race, class, or zip code – deserves access to a quality education and the opportunity to shape their own future, and this committee will advise the transition on how to carry out Governor-Elect Shapiro’s vision to ensure every student has access to the “thorough and efficient” education. The committee will work to develop recommendations to prioritize mental health, invest in vocational, technical, and computer training throughout our education system, ensure our teachers have the resources they need, and give parents a real voice in their children’s education.

Emphasis mine. The "regardless..." line has long been a staple of choicers, as has the "access to..." The access to formulation is particularly annoying. The Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats, yet everyone on board the ship had "access to" lifeboat seats. There are two ways to make sure that children in every zip code can get a good education-- you can move some of those children to where the good education is, or you can make sure that every zip code includes a well-supported fully-funded good school. Only one of those approaches provides every student with a good education. Do not promise "access to" a good education; promise that every child will have a good school.

And "give parents a real voice"? What do they have now-- a fake voice? And should taxpayers and employers and the people in communities who don't currently have school-age children-- should those folks also have a say?

There's a lot of choicey school privatization language here. Yuck.

So who's on the committee? The early takes keep mentioning that wealthy donors, lobbyists, Republicans are in the mix. This is not a new thing. Not a great thing, but not a new thing (well, except for the GOP part; I support trying to cast a wide net for an administration).

So let's see who's on the Pre-K-12 subcommittee. 


Lisa Nutter, Founder and Managing Partner, Community Impact Investments. Philadelphian Nutter is in the "impact investing" biz; not clear if she's into the troubling world of pay for success, but her business's website includes lots of argle bargle like "the mechanisms and actionable information needed to harvest, share and bring community-based solutions to scale." Fun fact: she's also a competitive track cyclist with the USA Masters Track Cycling and holds a world record for her age group. Another fun fact: wife of a former Philly mayor.

Jim Vaughan, Executive Director, Pennsylvania State Education Association. He's been in that job since 2015; previous jobs include lobbying for the association.

Laura Boyce, Executive Director, Teach Plus Pennsylvania. Teach Plus is part of the Bill Gates reformy octopus that was, at one point, charging money to give people access to lawmakers; they focus on creating teacher-lobbyists. Boyce has plenty of reformy credentials, including stints in charter schools in Philly and Camden. She graduated from Princeton ()2007) with a BA in Public and International Affairs before going to work in a turnaround charter in Philly. Her LinkedIn profile says "Visionary educational leader with experience achieving impact at the classroom, school, and policy levels."

Joel Greenberg, Founder, Susquehanna International Group. Greenberg is a co-founder of SIG, along with Jeff Yass (one of PA's richest men and a huge proponent of school privatization). SIG is a "trading and technology" firm, founded by a bunch of college poker buddies. There is no reason to believe that Greenberg knows Thing One about education, but he knows plenty about money and giving it to politicians. All based in Bala Cynwyd, an address that will turn up again.

Kathy Christiano, Board Chair, Stoneleigh Foundation. Stoneleigh is a "positive social change" foundation in Philly with education one of their focuses. Christiano's background includes a degree and work in early childhood education, as well as youth hockey.

Sean Reily, President & CEO, Roscommon International. Reily is a bit of a mystery. Neither he nor his company, Roscommon International, have much of an internet footprint. They might be a consulting firm, or a lobbying group, but one withoput many clients, though one client was, in 2017, Wadsworth Academy, a private Philly school that closed down after a special needs student died. School, corporation and Reily all appear to be based in Bala Cynwyd.

Daniel Weidemer, Director of Government Relations, Pennsylvania State Education Association. 11 years in the job, after a background in political jobs in Harrisburg.

Art Steinberg, President, American Federation of Teachers Pennsylvania. Steinberg started his career as a special ed teacher in Philly. He's currently vice-president of the national AFT.

Amy Sichel, Former Superintendent of Abington School District. What a story. Sichel worked in the Abington district for 42 years, starting out as a guidance counselor, and eventually spent 18 years as superintendent. She became the president of the Superintendent's association. Along the way she apparently acquired some swanky friends, like Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, who goes to places like Davos and proclaims that we should stop throwing money at education. He's also a buddy of Donald Trump, so when Sichel attended Schwarzman's Palm Beach 70th birthday party she may have met some important folks. At any rate, she asked Schwarzman to throw some money at Abington schools, which he did, with the understanding that the high school would be renamed after him, plus a few other considerations--none of which were shared with the public. All hell broke loose, people complained, the terms were changed, and soon thereafter Sichel retired. Not sure what she's been doing since, but she certainly brings a unique perspective. Abington, I will note, is just a hair NE of Philly. 

Turea Hutson, PhD candidate in the Drexel University School of Education. Former school board member (Norristown Area--just a bit NW of Philly) and "multifaceted independent consultant" and PR person. Did graduate from BA in Elementary Ed and Teaching from Arcadia University , though she doesn't seem to have ever used it. [Update: Hutson did comment on this post to note a variety of accomplishments. I should have more accurately said that she doesn't seem to have used her degree much as a classroom teacher. She has clearly been plenty busy in other areas of education.]

Rich Askey, President, Pennsylvania State Education Association. Retired music teacher, God bless him. Member of PA's Commission on LGBTQ Affairs.

Sharif El-Mekki, CEO, The Center for Black Educator Development. El-Mekki has a history with the privatized sector, having served as a principal of charter schools. For the last three years, he's been doing some impressive work with the Center for Black Educator Development.

Christopher Goins, President, Girard College. Goins is only just barely the president of Girard, a unique Philadelphia institution--a boarding school for poor, orphaned or fatherless boys. Before that, he's been working in Chicago, first in the Noble Network of Charter Schools, then in Thrive Chicago, which in turn worked with the Obama Foundation's My Brothers Keeper.

Tracey Hart, Educator, Franklin School District. Yes, that's my home district, and Tracey is a veteran working elementary public school teacher, an active voice for the union and public schools, a former colleague, and a friend of the Institute. So that's pretty cool.

Nathan Mains, CEO, Pennsylvania School Boards Association. Mains has been in that job for almost a decade. Lots of background in government and business.

Robert Mitchell, Educator, Pittsburgh Public School District. It appears that he teaches at Westinghouse Academy, a 6-12 school in Homewood. Maybe for almost 30 years, teaching foreign languages.

That's sixteen members, plus chair. Two working teachers, one rural and one urban. Four union officials. 

Of the sixteen, nine are from the greater Philly area. That's unfortunate, because Philly's issues are not generally representative of any other portion of the state. But Philly's school problems are a common go-to excuse for school privatization across the state (e.g. "We must have charters because those poor Philly kids and their terrible failing public school system"). And while Shapiro may be working hard to embrace diversity of some important types, in this case he's largely ignoring geographic diversity, an issue that is often on the minds of Pennsylvanians who don't live in Philly, Harrisburg or Pittsburgh. 

There are some people from outside of the classroom who do some important work for children and education. But the committee includes several people who come from the school choice world (far out of proportion to the number of Pennsylvanians who actually use school choice). There are several members of the committee whose connection to education is tenuous at best, and at least two who have no business being within 100 yards of discussions of education policy. 

So my position on the upcoming Shapiro administration remains somewhere around cautious dread. Maybe the unions will be able to steer him away from his espoused education policies, which are for the most part exactly what we'd expect from right-leaning GOP legislators and anti-public ed privatizers. Maybe he'll pick a secretary of education who's not going to try to expand charters and vouchers and support the already-GOP-proposed super-voucher Education Savings Accounts. Or maybe public education in Pennsylvania is about to get hammered. 

We'll just have to wait and see what comes next. I'm going to cross my fingers, but I'm not going to hold my breath while I do it.

Hillsdale Goes To War On Education

It's a lot, but we're going to learn about how babies are made and get a warning about the violence to come.

I am not a fan of war-and-violence rhetoric. The word "war" has been thrown around a lot as a political tool, and its use in so many causes minimizes actual warfare, in which people try to kill each other and plenty of death and maiming ensues. And when people insist on using that kind of rhetoric, they tell more about themselves than about the conflict they're attempting to describe. 

So when Imprimis, the Hillsdale College inhouse publication, runs a version of a speech by its chief Larry Arnn under the title, "Education as a Battleground," I'm certain that mostly what's about to happen is we're going to get a view inside Arnn's head, which as an influential christianist right wing player in the education debates, is a view worth considering. I've read this so you don't have to. Let's see what's going on in Arnn's dark little view. This may take a while.

We've got trouble right here

He opens with the stats showing that administration in education has grown far greater and faster than the growth in number of students or teachers. That's really worth looking at (especially since the charter sector that Arnn loves is generally even more top-heavy than public schools). It's actually a statistic worth mulling, but he's going to use it as an Ominous Sign of other changes in our whole nation-- "a change in how we govern ourselves and how we live."

He then plays with the words fundamental and foundation in order to build a long rickety bridge over to the notion that it is education that "has changed everything else."

The next paragraph is something special.

One way of describing the change in education today is that it provides a different answer than we have ever known to the question: who owns American children? Of course, no one actually owns the children. They are human beings, and insofar as they are owned, they own themselves. But by nature, they require a long time to grow up—much longer than most creatures—and someone must act on their behalf until they mature. Who is to do that?

In other words--this raises a really important question, except it doesn't because we all know that isn't a valid question, so let's talk about this other question instead. On the page this is a crazy self-contradiction, but remember this was originally a speech, in which one can ring a bell, announce that the bell shouldn't be rung--but the bell cannot be unrung.

But he's not done. Because he goes on to explain that the "who must act on their behalf" question isn't one anyone asks, either, but, he argues, that question is implicit "in the question: who gets to decide what children learn? It is contained more catastrophically in the question: who decides what we tell children about sex?" So he's laid out a chain here, whereby making decisions about whether students should be taught about the Spanish-American War, prepositions, and pregnancy is pretty much the same thing as claiming you own the child.

Are these decisions the province of professional educators, who claim to be experts? Or are they the province of parents, who rely on common sense and love to guide them? In other words, is the title to govern children established by expertise or by nature as exhibited in parenthood? The first is available to a professionally educated few. The second is available to any human being who will take the trouble.

Look, I'm a parent four times over, and have been through more than a few experiences in which I have felt the need to make sure my judgment overrules the judgment of the school or the people in it. But the notion that anybody who makes a baby is naturally imbued with common sense and love for that child--well, it is not aligned with reality. 

Where babies come from

Arnn is going to lean into the "natural" part of his point. 

Prior to recent scientific “advances,” every child has been the result of a natural process to which people have a natural attraction. “Natural” here does not mean what every single person wants or does—it means the way things work unless we humans intervene.

Stay with me here. Because people like sex and sex makes babies--well, actually, he admits that "not every human is attracted to the natural process of human reproduction but nearly all are" and "nearly all" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Anyway, this process works, he says, because we are better than other creatures especially because we can talk. (You gorillas and dolphins in the back just hush up). And because we can talk and reason, "we are moral beings" who can distinguish right from wrong. And since we are social beings, we can explain stuff to each other that other creatures don't which "draws us closer together than even herd or swarm animals." Sure.

So. We are unique in having those capabilities, which is what the framers meant by "all men are created equal." Arnn argues that "this equality has nothing to do with the color of anyone" and I'm sure the spirits of the people that the framers kept enslaved or gave on a fraction of a full vote (though Arnn reports on his old prog who replied to animal rights activists by saying that "one must not be cruel to any creature, but ...only those who can talk are entitled to vote").

Okay--second reason that human reproduction is unique is "our especially long period of maturation," which I'm thinking is not that unique at all. But he's trying to get somewhere. Newborns would die without attention (which is not a segue into a call for national paid parental leave) and they must take years to develop the skills and knowledge needed. 

Modern educators often mistake the work of helping them to learn for actually doing the learning for them.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I have never met a human, let alone a professional educator, who made that mistake.

The skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are direct exercises of the rational faculty. They are in principle the same thing as talking, and in principle every child will learn much of them unassisted.

Hey, look! Arnn supports Balanced Literacy and thinks phonics are bunk! Also, Arnn doesn't grasp that learning to speak and learning to read and write are two completely different things, one largely natural and one largely not. But here comes this word salad to wrap up section one of this tome.

Raising a child has always been difficult and expensive. With rare exceptions, it has always been true that the parents who conceive the child raise him the best. And throughout American history, it has been thought that the family is the cradle of good citizenship and therefore of free and just politics. Public education is as old as our nation—but only lately has it adopted the purpose of supplanting the family and controlling parents.

"Rare exceptions" is working hard here, but it's just a stop on the way to wrapping up the first section of the speech with the charge leveled against public education.

The commie nazis are coming

Arnn cites DeSantis and Youngkin as governors who won "on this battleground of education." Also, "supplanting the family" gets us the stuff that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and Communist China, and don't forget Orwell's 1984. We're not there yet, he warns,

 

But we do have children being turned against their country by being indoctrinated to look on its past—of which all parents, of course, are in some way a part—as a shameful time of irredeemable injustice. We also increasingly have children being encouraged to speak of their sexual proclivities at an age when they can hardly think of them.

The premise, as always, is that nobody would become a socialist or LGBTQ on their own, but they have to be seduced to these unnatural views by evil grownups. And even though we disposed of this question, here we go

Who “owns” the child, then? The choice is between the parents, who have taken the trouble to have and raise the child—and who, in almost all cases, will give their lives to support the child for as long as it takes and longer—or the educational bureaucracy, which is more likely than a parent to look upon the child as an asset in a social engineering project to rearrange government and society.

There are all manner of absurdities here. There's the not-insignificant number of parents who have not and will not give their lives for their children. And this massive social engineering project? There are certainly people with such aspirations out there, like the folks who think we can engineer a cradle-to-career pipeline to churn out and track employers' dream meat widgets or the folks who believe that if they keep their children in a bubble, they can make them grow up to be dutiful religious followers. What distinguishes these groups is their remarkably low level of success. And meanwhile, teachers are just trying to "social engineer" students to bring a pencil to class and keep their hands to themselves.

Arnn goes on to echo a speech by Chris Rufo at Hillsdale last April. The thesis is that there is an administrative state (a really deep one, one might say) composed of elites who are well paid and permanently employed, who have in turn taken over colleges and universities and turned them into indoctrination camps. These faceless bureaucrats are supposedly dispassionate and nonpartisan, but Arnn doesn't buy it (and I'm not sure I blame him on this one). Arnn argues that this administrative state can and should be reined in by the law (as interpreted by conservative judges). 

The deep state and the school system

The administrative system, with roots in DC and "tendrils" in "every town and hamlet that has a public school." The result has been to move money and authority away from the schools and toward the bureaucracy. It's an interesting observation that puts Arnn directly at odds with the standards movement, and ought to prompt a serious conversation about the choice movement, which pretends to put power in the hands of parents but actually moves it to private vendors and leaves an awful lot of it with the government.

But Arnn is not interested because "the political battle over this issue is fraught with dishonesty." He's chuffed because he thinks any attack on the system is styled as an attack on teachers, but dammit those teacher unions are at least half devoted to growing the administrative state. 

Ge decries the seductivity of bureaucracy, because we like knowing that there are processes in place that give legitimacy. A history curriculum is adopted not because "it gives a true account of unchangeable things that have already happened, but because it has survived a process."  This is a solid religious right view--there is a Truth, it is set in stone, and only adherence to that Truth should be a measure of legitimacy. This is the root of why the religious right is actually anti-democracy; the legitimacy of a government does not come from any democratic process, but from its adherence to the Truth As I Understand It. 

Arnn criticizes the involvement of "stakeholders" in education, brushing away the notion that parents are not the only people who have a reason to care about the kind of education children are getting.

Bring on the violence

Arnn believes that the key political contest of our time is between two clear sides. On one side, parents and "people who make an independent living" (by which I assume he means people who don't get paid by the government). On the other side, the administrative state "and all its mighty forces" (because it's important that we understand that Arnn's side is the underdogs, the true victims here). 

Then we get this.

As long as our representative institutions work in response to the public will, there is thankfully no need for violence.

Yikes. As long as you do what we want, nobody has to get hurt. 

Arnn wraps up with some de-contextualized quotes from the Declaration of Independence and ends with his own declaration:

And so it is our duty to defend our American way of life.

Still here? Good for you. Let's take it home.

This speech serves as yet another window into the religious right's education manifesto. The deep state has taken over the government, all the way down to your local schools, which it is using as a tool of indoctrination to create more socially engineered tools for the deep state itself. So, to fight back against the deep state, they must take over the education system (either by commandeering the public system or replacing it with their own system) as a means of destroying the deep state from the roots up. 

They're pretty clear and straightforward and consistent about this message, and the use of battlefield language shows how seriously they take the struggle. 

This is one of those times when it's wise not to lump education reformers together. The Hillsdale crowd is really at odds with some reformsters, like every federal approach from NCLB onward. It's also important to note that, unlike some folks in the reformy camp, these folks are not interested in a better conversation nor anything else remotely resembling negotiations. They know what they want, they are assured in the certainty of their own rightness, and they are not prepared to alter their view of The Truth. 

We should take them at their word. Government is to be driven out of education and it is to take its place in a marketplace dominated by right-thinking christianists. Until that day comes, they will not put down their swords or leave the field of battle.

How Much Does Knowledge Matter For Teaching

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an editorial that was picked up and run in my region, raising a question about the "most important component of teaching."

The actual issue was the substitute shortage (which I can report, via the experiences of the Board of Directors is severe--they have never had a sub when their kindergarten teacher is absent, but are just shunted into the other K teachers). Ohio has shifted to their own version of a warm body substitute law; in Ohio, if you have a college degree, you can apply for a subject-specific substitute license. IOW, if you have a BA in English, you can be an English class substitute in Ohio. 

Pennsylvania has loosened up the rules as well, including letting near-graduated teacher program students sub and allowing retirees to sub without having to give up pension payments (though no retiree I know, including me, has gotten a call from a district to step in). This measure would loosen things up more. But what raised the question is part of the Post-Gazette's rationale:

Knowledge of the subject matter is the most important component of teaching.

Is it? And if not, what is?

I am a huge believer in the importance of subject matter knowledge. When you are standing in a classroom, there is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about. It helps enormously with classroom management and earning the respect of your students (yes, you have to earn that). It helps you stay fast on your feet and adapt to whatever kind of teachable moment presents itself. 

I'm not saying you have to be the world's foremost expert, nor is your job to strut your stuff as the smartest person in the room. But a teacher who plans to get by by just following the textbook makes me cringe. It's the difference between being a guide who knows the paved path to the destination, but is stumped if anyone takes one step off the asphalt, and a guide who knows every part of the territory, on the path and off, and can guide you to any spot from any other spot. I want a classroom with the latter.

But teaching also involves being able to convey that knowledge you have. Everyone knows (and some have experienced) the cliche of the person who's really smart but can't actually explain what they know to anyone else. You can't be a good guide if you arrived at the destination with no idea how you got there and the only advice you can offer others is to keep hollering, "Well, just go to the place!" You have to be able to break the trip into comprehensible pieces.

And that means you have to understand your audience and read the room. You have to be able to communicate with the young humans that you are supposed to be teaching. For the younger students in particular this means some exceptional communication and empathic skills are required of teachers. If you can't read the room, every teachable moment will fly right past you and every opportunity will be lost. 

And you have to be in charge, but not a tyrant. You have to maintain the safe learning space, which means all those people skills have to be harnessed in service of balancing all the needs in front of you.

Yes, there are plenty of pieces of conventional wisdom that dance around this issue.

"I want them to love learning." And that's absolutely the important goal, and you can only achieve it if you know something to teach them and are able to do so. 

"We teach students, not subjects." Sure. What do you teach them. I get the point of this one, that we should not get so caught up in our material that we get things backward and think that the students are there to serve the content instead of vice versa. But we still have to teach the students something.

"Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage." Honestly, I don't know a teacher who still sticks closely to the sage model and just stands up there bloviating away the days, but it would be a lousy model to follow. But it's a serious mistake to over-correct into the 

"We're all just here to learn together and I'm just one more learner and they teach me as much as I teach them." If you don't know more about what you're teaching than your students do, just go home. You are the grown up adult specialist. That is the gig. If you don't know more than the students, if you are not the expert guide on the learning journey, then what exactly are the taxpayers paying you for? Your heart can be as big as all outdoors, but your brain needs to be full, too. 

(Also, if you're going to tell me that nobody needs to know anything because Google exists, just go far away.)

None of this means you have to be an all-knowing teacherbot who is the supreme authority on all matters, just standing in the classroom spewing forth your infallible wisdom. 

All of this is a lot of work, and constant work because teaching is about balancing a whole bunch of things and the eight is always shifting so you can never ever get into a stance and think, "Well, I can just lock this down exactly here." 

Which means on top of all the rest, you have to want to do the job. You have to want to succeed, to do everything that's called for. You have to want to teach, not just grab a paycheck or add a line on your resume. You have to give a shit. You have to care.

So I'm torn, because in my mind, almost everything on the list rests on knowing your content. Except the desire to do the job. But of the two, content knowledge is the element that can be learned. I don't know how to teach you to give a shit about teaching, but I know lots of ways for you to learn the content so that you can do the job. 

So I think I have to put knowledge of subject matter at #2, right behind "Want to do the job." Which is why I suspect the Ohio idea won't help much, just like most of these bar-lowering warm-body-recruiting ideas aren't helping all that much. It's easy to find people with college degrees and warm bodies, but the people who want to teach and really care about the work are already there. If you are a policy maker (or newspaper publisher) who imagines that there are millions of folks just dying to teach and the only thing holding them back is some paperwork, then you have some subject matter knowledge problems of your own.