Why "Just Teach The Facts" Doesn't Work (A Message from the Past)

I want to direct your attention to an old article--forty years old--that provided a valuable and even-handed look at Mel and Norma Gabler, a couple that became the driving force in Texas behind pushing a conservative bent to that state's textbooks, and thereby the textbooks of much of the nation. Because this article, though old, speaks loudly to our current situation.

The article (from Texas Monthly's November 1982 issue) is a reminder that the grievances of today's "culture warriors" are not new (the group they founded, Education Research Analysts, is still operating), but in taking a close at the Gablers (who really were a couple of ordinary citizens who ended up running a major activist movement out of their home-- Norma Gabler was an actual grandmom), writer Wiliam Martin offers some important insights into the problems with the Gabler world view.

The Gablers’ views are straight-forward and comprehensive. They believe that the purpose of education is “the imparting of factual knowledge, basic skills and cultural heritage” and that education is best accomplished in schools that emphasize a traditional curriculum of reading, math, and grammar, as well as patriotism, high moral standards, dress codes, and strict discipline, with respect and courtesy demanded from all students. They feel the kind of education they value has all but disappeared, and they lay the blame at the feet of that all-purpose New Right whipping boy, secular humanism, which they believe has infiltrated the school at every level but can be recognized most easily in textbooks.

Yeah, it was secular humanism forty years ago, the critical race theory of an earlier age.

But the Gablers also feel that even those students who learn to read through intensive phonics, memorize their “times tables,” diagram sentences perfectly, and win spelling bees and math contests must still cope with an educational system that is geared to undermining their morals, their individuality, their pride in America, and their faith in God and the free enterprise system. Much of this corrosive work is accomplished through textbooks in history, social sciences, health, and homemaking.

I'm going to remind you that the article was written in 1982.

The Gablers seem to believe not only that the proper subject of history is facts rather than concepts but also that all the essential pertinent facts are well known and should be taught as they were in older textbooks, in a clear chronological arrangement with a tone that is “fair, objective and patriotic.”

They were also upset about the elevation of certain Civil Rights movement figures, what they saw as attacks on religious thought, and as to sexual issues, "their view of the family falls into the Father-Mother-Dick-Jane-Spot-and-Puff mold, with no doubt as to who does what." Women who want equal pay, the Gablers argued, were abandoning their highest profession--motherhood. Sex education = bad. They helped push the rules that said evolution had to be clearly labeled in texts as "just a theory.

Values? Martin quotes from a Gabler pamphlet:

“To the vast majority of Americans,” it asserts, “the terms ‘values’ and ‘morals’ mean one thing, and one thing only; and that is the Christian-Judeo morals, values, and standards as given to us by God through His Word written in the Ten Commandments and the Bible….After all, according to history these ethics have prescribed the only code by which civilizations can effectively remain in existence!”

And they bristled at the invasion of privacy in asking students about opinions of, well, anything.

Where the article gets really interesting is where Martin starts to consider the effects of the Gabler point of view (which contains more familiar moments)

A major result of the Gablers’ misunderstanding of a humanistic approach to learning is a stunted and barren philosophy of education. In a manner typical of those distrustful of the intellectual enterprise, they take pleasure in scoring points against the professionals; Norma says she has read so many textbooks that “I figure I know enough to be a Ph.D.” It is clear, however, that they have little appreciation or understanding of the life of the mind as it is encouraged and practiced in many institutions of learning. They tend to cite the Reader’s Digest as if it were the New England Journal of Medicine and to regard a single conversation with a police chief or a former drug user as an incontrovertible refutation of some point they oppose.

And this next part really gets at the essence of why this "just teach the facts that are the One True Thing that has never changed" approach doesn't serve human beings well:

In general, they know precisely where they stand but have difficulty dealing with a question that originates from different premises. Norma showed me a ninth-grade history book that observed that the route most likely taken by Israelites in their exodus from Egypt would have been across a swamp known as the Sea of Reeds. The book adds: “IT may be that the Sea of Reeds was later called the Red Sea by mistake.” Norma found this highly amusing: “Can you just imagine pharaoh’s army, with all his horses and all his men, completely disappearing into a swamp? Now, that’s a miracle!” I pointed out to her that many scholars feel the biblical story may be an embellished, rather than strictly accurate, account of Israel’s escape from slavery. I noted that there is no record in Egyptian history of such a catastrophic event, and that the Hebrew Bible does indeed say “Reed Sea,” not “Red Sea.” She faltered, then said: “But still…okay…what happened to pharaoh’s army?”

In similar fashion, questions posed by members of the textbook committee at the August hearings characteristically received oblique answers or a puzzled “I don’t think I understand the question.” That, of course, is the point: when one regards education as simply the ingestion of facts and not the investigation and analysis of ironies, ambiguities, uncertainties, and contradictions, one will be far less likely either to understand the question or to provide a useful answer. And that kind of trained incapacity will endanger the vitality and ultimately the survival of treasured forms of religious, political, social, and economic life.

Emphasis mine, because yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Too long for a t-shirt, but I'd gladly put a poster of it in classrooms across the country. You can object to the narrow Gabler view on moral or ethical grounds, but there's also a practical problem--it's a very ineffective way to engage with the world.

The Gablers were a piece of work--

Norma Gabler’s difficulty with unanticipated questions is a communicable disease, and she is working to spread it. “What some textbooks are doing,” she has complained, “is giving students ideas, and ideas will never do them as much good as facts.” Further, in her view students should apparently not show any interest in facts not found in their textbooks. Norma objected to a fourth-grade book that urged students to verify facts by consulting other sources, on the grounds that “it could lead to some very dangerous information.”

On their failure to understand how history works.

The shortcomings of the Gablers’ view of education — as a process by which young people are indoctrinated with facts certified to be danger-free, while being protected from exposure to information that might challenge orthodox interpretations — can be seen by looking at three areas: history, science, and the social sciences. One may or may not agree with the particular objections the Gablers make to various history books, but it is clear that they are oblivious to the idea that the writing of history has never been, nor can it ever be, factual in any pure sense. Those who provided eyewitness accounts and other records with which historians work were engaged in interpretation, not only in adjusting the light under which they chose to display the materials they assembled but even in their selection of events, dates, and people from the infinite possibilities open to them. And to imagine that they or anyone else engaging in the historical enterprise does so free of the influence of his or her values, perceptions, and ideological biases is to believe something no reputable historian has believed for generations.

Nor did they accept that a textbook could contain any criticism of America ever. They were Young Earth creationists. 

There's lots more. This article is worth a read; it's thorough, thoughtful and fair. I'd never run across Martin before--he spent 54 years teaching at Rice and has a variety of other accolades--but he wrote a profile that turns out to have resonance across the decades. It shames the christianist nationalists and astroturf culture panic artistsof today. I'll leave you with his final paragraph of the piece.

It may not be possible to prove that an open mind is better than a closed one, or that the proper antidote to a bad idea is not censorship but a good idea, or that a society in which some questions are never answered may be preferable to one in which some answers are never questioned, but I believe these things to be true. I not only believe them; I have bet my life on them.

Finding the Sweet Spot for Teacher Autonomy

How much autonomy should a classroom teacher have?

On the one hand, a teacher with no autonomy, who simply reads from the book or the canned script is not an actual teacher at all. If you're not bringing something to the classroom as a professional, educated adult, then why are you there? Some autonomy is absolutely necessary for real teaching.

On the other hand, there are limits. I always believed that I worked for the taxpayers, that I had been hired (and paid) by them to teach their children with the best of my professional, educational judgment. My standard response to student requests for a movie day or a free day was, "That's not what the taxpayers hired me to do."

Teaching is such a consuming job, a job that you put yourself into, and so it can be easy to let the line blur between your professional judgment and your personal crusade. The Libs of Tik Tok twitter account dragged into "woke"-shaming prominence a teacher who announced her intention to undermine ideologies with which she disagrees in her classroom. I disagree with most of those same ideologies, but when Robert Pondiscio charged that "what she’s really drunk on is power—albeit a power she does not have," I can't defend her. 

Teachers from all over the ideological map make this mistake. I think of my Jewish student's story of the elementary school teacher who tried to convince her that she was all wrong about Jesus. There are plenty of teachers across the country who are certain that their personal mission to bring souls to Christ should be part of their pedagogical practice. They are wrong, too. The guy in Texas who was fired after explaining to his Black students his belief that his race was superior? Also wrong.

But when I hear all the indoctrination panic, I also think of Lois Anthony, my tenth grade social studies teacher. She was new, and it was 1972, and she really wanted us to understand that George McGovern was a better choice for President and that he would get us out of Vietnam, which was the only right thing to do. She preached it--she even brought in a local liberal newspaper guy to sell the message. But anybody who thinks that any of this would indoctrinate high school sophomores has never met a high school sophomore. All she managed to indoctrinate into us was the knowledge of which buttons to push in order to get her riled up and off track. 

Teacher autonomy is a critical part of serving students, or capturing teachable moments and adjusting the class to meet the needs that students present. At the same time, teachers who write their own complete curriculum from scratch created trouble for the school as a whole. But the argument out there currently isn't really about curriculum--it's about personal stuff.

The best teachers are real people, and they bring their real people stuff into the classroom. Not all of it, and not all the time, but students do not respond particularly well to robot teachers. And teachers' real people stuff includes their beliefs and their values. We're hired to teach students to the best of our professional ability, and it's impossible to draw a hard, clear line between personal and professional beliefs.

So how do we decide how much autonomy is too much? How do we decide that too much of the personal has slid over into the professional?

I don't have a hard and fast answer (because I don't believe that one exists), but I have some thoughts about the guidelines.

Most importantly, the personal can't interfere with the work. Drawing on what we know about human relationships to add to a discussion of relationships in a novel? Probably okay. Talking to students about relationship problems instead of covering the day's lesson? Probably not okay. Letting details of your home life slip through now and then, like photos on a desk? Probably okay. Starting each class with a five-minute update on what your family members are up to? Probably not okay. Letting your personal biases affect how you treat particular students? Not okay. Refusing to consider what those personal biases might be? Also not okay.

When you teach and live in a small community, it's impossible to hide your own story. You can't pretend you don't believe things, haven't been through things, don't worship at a particular church (or no church). 

But what you can do is make sure that your students believe--really, truly believe--that your personal beliefs will have nothing to do with how you treat them, teach them, and evaluate them in your class. That for me is absolutely key. Particularly in a class about communication, you cannot send the message "I want you to express yourselves, but only certain expressions and ideas will be accepted." 

This is not easy. It really isn't. I've known a non-zero number of teachers who have sincerely said, "I don't want to teach students what to think--I just want them to think." But unfortunately, the unspoken--often unacknowledged second part of this was "And I will know they have really thought about this if they reach what I believe is the correct conclusion." (And a great number of folks outside of education operate on the same premise.)

The most basic thing that student suss out in September (if they don't already know via reputation) is whether the teacher wants them come up with ideas of their own, or if students are supposed to come up with the teachers' ideas. Once they've decided that their job is to mimic and regurgitate the teachers' thoughts, any kind of deeper or richer education becomes less likely. And the teacher becomes doubly ineffective if students learn that they need to have a different identity to pass the class. 

Everyone needs to feel safe in that classroom, including safe to freely express whatever it is they have to express. That does not mean they can be free to express hostility and disrespect to other students in that classroom (and in my experience students don't push back against that rule as long as they believe that it applies to everyone). 

It requires restraint and reflection from the teacher. In my case it meant not assigning essays about topics on which my feelings were so strong that I was concerned my biases would leak through. It also requires a certain kind of optimism. I realize that's not on brand here, but I have long believed that if one is open, thoughtful, curious, and willing to move forward, one will move toward better understanding.

Or to take it from another angle--fear and anger are obstacles to understanding and truth, so it's a teacher's job to get fear and anger out of their classroom.

Look, I promised that I wouldn't have a simple answer for this, and I don't. Teacher autonomy is one more string on the educational instrument, and like any string, it only makes music when it's being pulled in opposite directions. Too little autonomy and teachers can't do the work. Too much autonomy and teachers get in their own way of doing the work. Don't trust anyone who says they have a simple answer. 

School Choice Is Not The Goal

Well, Jay Greene told us what he was going to do. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." And he's been giving it a big sloppy hug ever since. At the same time, he's part of the choice movement that is revealing it isn't really interested in choice at all.

In a piece for Fox News, Greene and his colleague Ian Kingsbury (Educational Freedom Institute) offer some really half-assed "research" to show that there's a "disconnect" between rural Texas teachers and rural Texas ("Progressive teachers vs conservative families: School choice can help level the playing field"). 

Let me break down how hard they reached to prop up their point.

They dug up 1,400 contributions by checking school district employees against zip codes with fewer than 500 people per square mile. Then they determined that 90.2% of those contributions were made in support of Democratic candidates. But hey-- Greg Abbott won re-election with 80.7% of the vote. So there you have it-- rural teachers are out of touch with rural parents.

Here are some things they don't look at. How many of those school district employees are teachers? How many teachers are there total in those areas-- are the 1,400 contributions out of 100,000 employees? How did things go in elections other than Abbott's gubernatorial race? 

Nor do they offer a theory about what exactly is happening. Are a bunch of progressive teachers being airlifted into rural areas as part of some socialist assault on rural areas? Or do rural teachers go to teach in rural areas for the same reasons that other folks go to live in rural areas?

They don't mention that teachers are remarkably non-monolithic, as witnessed, for instance, by the huge number of NEA members who voted for Donald Trump. They do mention that rural areas of Texas has been staunch in their opposition to school choice, particularly the vouchers that Greene and Kingsbury are pushing in this article. 

And push they will. Having manufactured their point, they move to the sell.

A teacher who is an active supporter of Democrats could be a perfectly fine teacher of the children of active supporters of Republicans in the same way that the children of Baptists could receive a quality education in a Catholic school. But we don’t compel Baptists to send their children to Catholic schools nor should we compel conservative, rural Texans to send their children to public schools dominated by progressives.

Which is a heck of a leap--should we just assume that everyone who believes something is automatically trying to impose that belief on everyone they encounter? And then this

Rural superintendents have been blocking the expansion of school choice in Texas by whispering in their state legislators’ ears that doing so might jeopardize jobs in the local public schools. But it is unclear why rural legislators should heed these concerns given that rural educators may be undermining the values of their constituents and donating to their political opponents.

Choice is not the point. 

I spotted this piece on Twitter because choicer Corey DeAngelis was using it as part of his reply to Elon Musk's tweet of "The woke mind virus is defeated or nothing else matters." 

Select quotes from the article that he chose to use in that conversation include "All that school choice would do is shift some of the jobs from public schools dominated by Democrats to other schools whose values would be more likely to align with those of parents in those areas" and also "There is no reason to trap rural families in schools dominated by people with sharply different values and priorities." This is thin-sliced baloney (first, Greene and Kingsbury proved nothing and second, do these rural districts not have elected school boards?) but it points us at the real idea here, as does one other response to Musk

we win this war with school choice. https://t.co/iXMewD5Cxk

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) December 12, 2022

 In other words, the goal for these folks is not choice. It's to replace the current public school system with a private one that's aligned with the Proper Values, to wipe out any and all school systems that teach The Wrong Values. 

There are folks in the choice world who believe that choice is in and of itself a virtue. There are people who believe we should have woke schools and conservative schools etc etc etc. But these are not those people.

I have long argued that people do not really want choice, that they just want to get what they want. 

We are seeing repeatedly that choice is not what some folks who nominally support choice actually want. Choicers have campaigned against LGBTQ charters. Patron choice saint Ron DeSantis is not in Florida fighting for every parents' right to have whatever school they want, but to Stop WOKE and CRT wherever it appears. The Libertarians of Croydon, NH, actually trashed a functioning school choice system because they wanted lower taxes. We are seeing repeatedly that choice-loving folks like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education don't want choice for everybody--they just want schools to reflect their values. The book banners do not campaign for libraries where everyone can get the books they want, but libraries where people can only get the books the banners approve of.

Hell, we've now got an entire legal theory that argues that the Framers didn't really want liberty and democracy--they wanted a government that was based on the Right Values.

I will say, again, that this is not all school choice fans. Education policy makes strange bedfellows (remember back when that wacky Common Core united people who love public education and people who hate it). But right now this is a big chunk of the school choice crowd clamoring for an end to schools that teach things they don't approve of. We don't really need choice, reads the subtext. We just need one system that teaches the things we want it to teach. 

This is not a system that would serve anyone but a select few. It's not democratically owned and operated public education in a pluralistic society, and it's not actual school choice, either. It's just another version of the conservative-ish christianist call to "take back our schools" and make them all ours again (and keep us from having to pay taxes to fund schools for Those People). This is not a system that would uphold any of the ideals of American education. 

When Democracy Is Not The Common Good

I've seen many people make versions of the point, and I've done so myself a few times, but Katherine Stewart in her book The Power Worshippers does it really well.

This is not a "culture war." It is a political war over the future of democracy,

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

In other words, this is a brand of "conservatism" that believes that Thomas Jefferson got it wrong and that democracy is not the correct way to run a country. 

This guy

And now, according to a recent piece at Politico, these folks have a formal legal to back it up. 

It's called Common Good Constitutionalism, and one of its proponents is a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeule. As the article explains it

The cornerstone of Vermeule’s theory is the claim that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself”

In other words, democracy is bunk. Liberty is bunk. All that matters is the common good, as defined by wise men who understand that things like abortion bans, the end of same sex marriage, a government that extends its reach to do things like ban naughty books--that's all okay, even if the majority of citizens oppose it and vote against it.

As one might expect (and the article delineates), there are plenty of conservatives who disagree with this theory. The American Conservative wrote of Vermeule and his "moral madness" that "One can critique the limits of freedom and excesses of libertarianism without echoing the nihilism of totalitarians." 

But it has great appeal to the folks who make up what I think of as faux conservatism, the not-my-father's-conservatism that has swept through the GOP. It is also, as many critics of the article have pointed out, awfully fascist-looking. (They are also, the article points out, mostly Catholic).

Well, at least we have a name for it now, this movement that says "We should just take the power and exert it to impose what is Right and True." And we should understand that when we say an attack on public education is an attack on the foundations of democracy, these are people who don't care, people who believe liberty is only for those who align with the Right Values. Moral madness indeed.

Scaring Our Children To Death

In the Washington Post last week, yet another alarm sounded about the mental health crisis among our children, calling it "much vaster than we realize." 

This alarm has been rung again and again over the past year, including a declaration of a national emergency in the fall of 2021 from the American Academy of Pediatrics (and underlined it this year), but for folks working in the field, it's not exactly news. 

I wrote about this, sort of, in 2015, and did so in response to a story about the high rate of teen suicides in Silicon Valley. Back then I focused on the One Wrong Move syndrome, the message we send students that a single screw-up, a critical failure, can leave your whole life in shambles. And I still think that's part of it.

Things have not improved. The WaPo piece cites data saying that 75% of schools report concerns about student depression and trauma. Counselors are in short supply, both in school and out.

Causes? Some folks would like to blame the pandemic and the closure of school buildings or the trauma of personal loss to the disease, but according to the AAP, suicide was already the second leading cause of death for youths age 10-24 in 2018.

There's no doubt that the reasons are complex and varied, that the pandemic and social media and generational trauma (I just saw somebody refer to the under-25 crowd as Generation School Shootings). But I want to point at one factor in particular.

Everyone lives in scary times. In the 1930s, it looked as if the world was going to collapse, first economically and then with a rise of fascism. In the 1970s, we grew up with the assumption that nuclear holocaust was a when-not-if proposition. 

But we live in different times. For the past couple of decades, the go-to political strategy is to whip up fear and anger, anger and fear. From the days when every initiative was The War On [Your Cause Here], we have moved on to an endless series of existential crises. Every election is about the continued existence of democracy and/or our country. Every Congress vote is critical test; every Supreme Court decision is a turning point in the struggle for our very existence. Our enemies want to destroy Western Civilization. 

We are all-apocalypse, all the time.

For those of us who have grown up with this steady escalation, there's a certain recognition that this is political puffery, ever-anxious marketing designed to herd the electorate one way or another. For those of us who live in circumstances that allow us to assume that the floodwaters will not so much as soak our shoes, it's easy to distance ourselves. And much of the country is just sort of numb, hence the impulse to scream louder to cut through the haze and mobilize people.

But if you're a young person in this country, you were born into a theater where people were already screaming "Fire," and your whole life, they have never stopped. Our constant soup of rage and fear may be background noise to adults, but to students, it defines the world they have navigated for their entire lives.

There is no sentiment more quaint than "Not in front of the children." We don't have differences of opinions that the grownups need to work out on our own; we have enemies who must be silenced and obliterated and called out publicly on cable news. School exists downhill from the culture, and our culture is all about fear and anger and oncoming disasters that YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY SURVIVE SO YOU'D BETTER SEND US SOME MONEY AND GET OFF YOUR COUCH AND VOTE AND ARM YOURSELF AAAH AAH AAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

I can't remember the last time the prevailing message on an issue--any issue--was "This is probably going to suck, but we are tough enough to get through it." 

For students, in addition to the general noise about onrushing catastrophe, we send messages about their weakness, about all the things they must be protected from because otherwise they'll be broken and bent, about how they must either be kept in a protective bubble or taught to put on the armor of "grit" or some other quality that we imply they naturally lack. 

Young people are the canaries--the young, vulnerable canaries--in a cultural coal mine. They suffer from adults who forget to affirm them, to tell them that they are in fact strong and resilient and beautifully and wonderfully made, that despite the fact that life will often go in directions contrary to plans or expectations, that they can still rise and advance. And they suffer from adults who reject nuance and complexity in favor of an always-on scream of impending doom, that we must all be terribly afraid because Something Terrible is about to deliver Destruction That Cannot Be Withstood.

I expect that plenty of people will not heed any of this, that the plight of the canaries will not move them. We are a culture that likes to talk about how we value children, especially when we're using it to justify our latest policy initiative, but our actions and choices show that mostly we aren't serious about it. But we could be. We could decide tomorrow to do better, to listen for the canaries, to act like the people they need us to be.

ICYMI: Nutcracker Edition (12/11)

Not a fan. But I am a huge fan of my niece, so we once again trekked south to watch her dance studio's production of this plotless fixture of the holiday season. But she was delightful. And now I have a whole lot of things for you to read.

Whatever happened to the fight over Critical Race Theory?

Nirvi Shah has a decent overview of CRT panic and how it played out during the elections. At Grid.

Bad Faith and Cruelty

Steve Nuzum is fed up with various anti-LGBTQ legislation. He explains why.

La. AG Jeff Landry Creates Tip Line to Expose the First Amendment

One more political hack hopes to score points by cracking down on students' reading rights. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the story (and the address, if you'd like to send something to his tip line). 

Stitt has vowed to revive a private school voucher plan, but details are scarce

From The Frontier, an excellent source of Oklahoma education news. And the news these days is not good.

Who will defend public education?

John Merrow, retired education reporter, looks at the need for someone, from any party, to step up and defend public education from the forces set against it. 

“Kids Seem to Be a Paycheck”: How a Billion-Dollar Corporation Exploits Washington’s Special Education System

It took ProPublica, the Seattle Times, and three reporters to publish this story. It is a tale of what happens when children become nothing more than a backpack full of cash to corporations looking to make a buck. 

New Data Reveals That Success Academy Attrition Is Worse Than Previously Reported

Gary Rubinstein has been crunching numbers for Success Academy, and it turns out the cohorts that start at SA are way different than the cohorts that finish.

A Shooting Star

Gregory Sampson with seven things the nation needs to know about Ron DeSantis (besides his desire to become President).

N.J. district with $7,500 signing bonuses has hired 115 teachers in 11 weeks

Golly gosh. Who would have guessed that offering people real money might entice them to take a teaching job. 

Stop Punishing Poverty in Schools

This is a powerful piece by Paul Gorski at ASCD. Here's how poverty in school looks to the students who experience it.

The Science of Reading and the Perils of State Literacy Policies: Virginia’s Cautionary Tale

For NCTE, Dorothy Suskind looks at the charges leveled at "unscientific" practices by the SOR folks.

My Favorite College Search Things

Guru Akil Bello talks about some of the delightful things he finds in his email and the world of college admissions coaching.

Elsewhere this week, I wrote about Pennsylvania's new culturally responsive standards for teacher training programs. And at Forbes.com, a look at a resurgence of the old idea that we can use test scores to sort out the Bad Teachers.

Also, a piece in The Progressive magazine about the battle to restrict reading rights. I worked hard to connect some dots on this one, and I'm pleased with the result, so take a look, please.

Here is a nice little video promoting the arts initiative in my small town corner of the world. 

And you can still subscribe, free of charge, to my substack as one other way to pick up whatever I've been laying down. 

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.