Cry and Pout If You Damn Well Want To

I am really so not a fan of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town."

Is there anything less in tune with the meanings of Christmas-- both secular and religious-- than the whole "You'd better be good, or Santa won't bring you anything" trope?

Jesus was born to wash away the sins of the world, to offer redemption and salvation, even though no human actually deserves it. God extends grace to us, regardless. But Santa says, "If you're naughty, there's no goodies for you."

Secular christmas is big on the Spirit of Giving, of giving freely to those we love and appreciate (or maybe just work with). We are supposed to give without hope of return, a sort of store-bought grace. But Santa's spirit of giving is "I'm waiting to see whether you earn it or not."

I'm a bit tetchy on this subject because an endless parade of people, some barely acquaintances, some complete strangers, choose this idea to communicate with five year olds at random moments, as if the only thing for a child to understand about Christmas is that this is the time of year you must be good or else. I understand that communicating with children is a challenge, but plain old "Are you excited for Christmas" or "Did you pick out a present for someone special" or pretty much anything other than raising the possibility that, per some obscure inscrutable adult rules, they may discover they are a bad person. And that Santa is a judge who rules on their worth as a human being. 

It finds its roots in another problematic notion--that children are "good" or "bad" based on how mush adults find them compliant or inconvenient. 

The Board of Directors, as newborn twins, required feedings every two hours, and they mostly, but not always, allowed themselves to be synched up for those. It was torturous and exhausting and mighty inconvenient, but it would never have occurred to us to say they were bad babies, yet I have heard the phrase used for similar reasons. Yikes.

This does not mean that I am in favor of raising or teaching students free of all social constraints and rules and considerations for fellow human beings. Be kind. Learn lots. No, you can't have that cookie just because you're crying about it. No, it's not okay to scream and kick because you don't like what your brother just did. 

Same for school. Let me tell you a story about one of my formative experiences. I was sitting in back of music class in fifth grade, and I was waving my hands around, mocking the conducting the teacher was doing. I was, in short, being kind of a dick. She lost her cool, called me up front, and paddled me (with something like a magazine or otherwise floppy device, making her look kind of ridiculous). And then it never came up again. Never. I was not forever marked as a bad kid, and she never treated me as if dickishness was an immutable part of my character. Even gave the me plum assignment the following year of MC of the talent show.

I took two things away from that. One is don't lose your damn mind over students acting naughty. The other was don't confuse behavior that you feel the need to correct with judgments about the student's value as a human being. "Please stop doing that" does not have to be confused with "You're a bad person." But I digress.

If Christmas is going to be about anything, please let it be about grace and love, not fear and extortion. And I don't know if this McSweeney's piece ("Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Edited by Twenty-First Century Parents") is meant to mock those parents, of which I am one, but I consider it by and large an acceptable and entertaining substitute for the original. 

Today In Surveillance State News...

Kelly Conlon wanted to go see the Rockettes with her daughter and the rest of her daughter's Girl Scout Troop. She did not get to. All of following reported on CNBC.

She did not get to, because Madison Square Garden Entertainment recognized her via facial recognition software scanning, apparently, everyone passing through security. She was flagged because she is an attorney at a firm that is working on a lawsuit against a restaurant currently under the MSG umbrella. They just loaded the names and faces of all the folks at that firm into their facial recognition software, and then barred them from entering any of their properties. Note that she does not work on their actual case or practice in their actual city--she just works at the same firm.

MSG says, hey, it's just policy that nobody involved in a case against them can be on any of their properties. A partner at Conlon's firm says, “This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network.” And supposedly the courts have already decided on this issue with a different blacklisted firm, making it clear that MSG can't do this. 

The possibilities here are endless. Imagine if you just loaded the information of every LGBTQ person you could to keep them from entering your building and thereby infringing on your right to freely exercise your religion (by, I don't know, filling the air you breathe with LGBTQ cooties). 

And let's put this together with Kansas City schools, where the board is contemplating spending its COVID relief funds on putting a camera in every classroom. This is a district with a teacher shortage, with multiple classes taught via livestream distance teachers, which is the story they're using here--we just want to tape lessons so that we can play them back in classrooms that don't have teachers.

Which is its own kind of nuts. My first question is, will teachers whose recorded lessons are used be paid some sort of royalty for the use of their likeness and recorded work? 

Teachers feel disrespected and students feel policed. Because, well, they are.

“A lot of us, maybe a lot of us minorities because we come from Black and Mexican households, we’re going to feel like, even though they’re telling us this is to learn, they’re actually trying to watch us. They’re trying to monitor our behavior,” said Damarias Mireles, a 2020 Wyandotte High School graduate. “So it kind of adds to that stigma, even if it’s not the intention.”

While Stubblefield said surveillance could be a “byproduct” of having the cameras, she said the purpose would be for learning. She said video footage is currently only reviewed when a specific incident is reported.

Does byproduct surveillance feel less intrusive than when the surveillance is the primary objective? Is it reassuring that the school says the footage is reviewed when administration feels the need.

Place your bets now on how long it will be until some authority shows up at school saying, "We have some footage of a teenaged suspect, and we'd like to run your videos through some facial recognition software to see if we can find the suspect in one of your classes." How long until somebody says, "You know, as long as we've got this video feed going, let's attach it to one of those cool software programs that assesses potential threats by measuring eyebrow twitches."

How long until someone says, "Heck, let's just use facial recognition to run all outstanding warrants or people on our Suspicious Person list against everyone who sets foot in the school--not just students, because we might catch a miscreant picking up their kids at school." How long until some kid ends up in serious trouble only because the facial recognition software screws up. 

It is easy to dismiss this kind of thing with sentiments like "Yeah, now parents will see their kids messing around in class," but the sheer power of surveillance software, the many many things that can be done once your privacy is violated, is too scary. And how far does this road stretch. "Sorry, but we can't offer you the job. Facial recognition connected you to some shenanigans at school when you were 15." 

The security team at MSG knew Conlon's name, where she works, and presumably everything else connected to her record, and they made choices about her life and ability to move freely based on what the facial recognition software kicked up. I shudder to think what this could do in the wrong hands, and I struggle to imagine what the right hands could even be.

Kevin McCarthy Has Some Thoughts About Education

Kevin McCarthy has some thoughts about what priorities of the GOP-controlled House should pursue in the 188th Congress, and that includes education (and, no kidding, Hunter Biden's laptop). They're worth a quick look, just to see where those folks are headed next year. 

Tucked amidst the concerns like the swamp's bureaucracy is a section on "Education & Woke Ideology." It's a short rant and a list. First, the rant. For starters:

Schools should educate not indoctrinate. Unfortunately, the classroom has become a battlefield where competing political ideologies, gender theories, and junk science wage war against the well-being of children across the country. Worse, the Biden administration has promoted harmful policies pushed by the far-left teachers unions that have restricted learning and funded radical curriculums that poison the minds of children across America.

Far left teachers unions. Poisoning the minds of children across America. Sure.

But I do like this one--

Students should be learning in the classroom – not over Zoom.

Other than the small percentage of students who actually do prefer distance learning, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with this. Well, also except all those people who spent the last couple of decades arguing that with computers students can learn anywhere and innovative charters like the Rocketship chain where students bat away at keyboards in front of screens all day are awesome. Folks are going to have to get their story straight on that one.

The next line is a dumb one.

Schools should focus on raising test scores.

No, they shouldn't. No parent in America sends their kids off to school--any kind of school--with no aspiration higher than "Just get a better score on that annual standardized math and reading test." 

There's one more sentence, but I'm going to save it. 

Next comes the list, and it tells us something about where the Republicans are that it is a list of things they oppose, not a list of things they propose. They should know better, having watched the Democratic party sit back on its heels reacting and rarely acting, but no, here they are, stuck waiting for Democrats or liberals or the Great Woke Monster to do something so they can leap up and say, "We don't like that!!"

The list of Things We're Agin' is familiar. Federal promotion of Critical Race Theory. Legality of Biden's loan debt plan. Department of Education attempt "to erase scientific definitions of gender" (which is, well, not what they seem to think it is). Promoting transgender surgery and puberty blockers. Violating religious liberty by making people do things they don't like. Oh, and they still want to relitigate "scientific justifications for school closures" (though schools weren't closed for long--just the buildings) and mask mandates.

The final sentence in the opening graph is this one:

House Republicans are committed to empowering parents and ensuring the best education possible for America’s children.

Are they? Because while some of the issues raised here deserve some serious discussion, McCarthy's document sounds like a weak attempt at rank political opportunism rather than an attempt provide high quality education for US children. Not that I'm holding my breath waiting for the Democrats to come up with a serious attempt to support public education in this country, but they certainly won't get there by following the GOP example. 

 

MA: Looking For Charter Cash

Worcester, MA (that's "wooster," not "wor-chester") is under charter attack once again.

Back a decade or so, the Spirit of Knowledge charter school opened, over plenty of objections, primarily that their financial plans were seriously flawed. Within just a couple of years, Spirit of Knowledge closed up shop, because of--surprise--financial problems. So the Worcester public school system absorbed the abandoned students, and life went on. 

Not a school bus.

But now somebody new wants a shot at this market. Old Sturbridge Village wants to open up the Worcester Cultural Academy, a proposed school that is already accepting applications despite only being a proposed school at the moment. 

Old Sturbridge Village is a historical recreation, a living museum where folks portray colonial settlers (an old friend of mine worked summers there as a candlemaker). If you're now asking, "What the heck do they know about running a 21st century school," the answer is that they are "partnering" with EL Education who will actually run the school for them. EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) emerged from a collaboration between the ever-reformstery Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound USA.

So why would an outfit that runs an 1830s recreation village want to run a charter school? Well, the answer is in print in the FY2022 Annual Report letter from the president. Noting that they already have one academy, he writes:

Our Academies are key to the future of the Village and expanding into Worcester will allow the Village to impact a greater number of students in an entirely new geographic area. The Academies will provide reliable, contractual revenue to the museum, safeguarding us against fluctuations in uncontrollable futures that impact admission weather and public health.

In other words, we're not opening a school to meet educational needs of the community or address some educational element of our mission--we just want to get our hands on a reliable revenue stream in case another pandemic kneecaps our gate receipts. 

The idea of another charter in Worcester has not been greeted with delight. The Mayor is also the chair of the Worcester School Committee, and he asked city council to pass a resolution "disapproving" the creation of the proposed charter. Mayor Joseph Petty noted that the opening of a charter school would be a real blow to Worcester's work getting funding for the district.

The proposed school, which would be connected to the Old Sturbridge Village Charter in Sturbridge, would operate using money from Worcester Public Schools — about $7 million, according to Petty. That would eat up a majority of $12 million in new state funds coming to Worcester through the Student Opportunity Act.

"We worked too hard as a community to get that funding back to WPS," Petty said. "That equals 100 teachers or educators in WPS."

School committee member Tracy Novick, in a blistering post, notes that the folks proposing the charter don't seem to have a grasp of some basics, like how much a school bus costs, or that you need money to put fuel in it. 

In Massachusetts, unfortunately, local districts, taxpayers, and voters do not get the final say on whether a charter school can fasten itself, leechlike, to the district in which they all live. The state has a committee to give that final word. Here's hoping that they don't consider "provide steady revenue for a historical reenactment" sufficient cause to saddle the taxpayers of Worcester with a new set of bills. Or maybe they could support Old Sturbridge with steady revenue by taxing the people of Worcester directly, and leave the children or Worcester out of it. 

ICYMI: It's Almost Winter Edition (11/18)

Wednesday officially kicks things off for the next season of the year, and we're getting the snow this weekend to set the scene. Hope you've got your shopping mostly done. Here's the reading for the week.

Lessons from stopping Stop WOKE

Little bit late on catching this, but it's worth a look. The ACLU lists its main lessons to be learned from putting the brakes on Florida's Stop WOKE Act.

About that Florida plan to put vets in the classroom

From Military news. Turns out the big hot idea to get armed forces veterans and spouses into classrooms has underperformed. Number of military teachers under this plan? 7.

Missouri school district votes to adopt 4-day school week

From the "Yeah, that's a thing that's happening out there" file, one more district goes for the four day week.

There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually.

This New York Times op-ed has changed headlines a few times, but the point remains the same--hammering teachers may not have been the best way to improve the profession. By Thomas B. Edsall.

Perry Township board unanimously votes to end school choice in district

Not really choice exactly--just choosing schools within the district. But it was buses. It came down to a shortage of bus drivers. 

A critique of a GAO report on charter schools

The GAO had issued a report on the federal charter grant program, and it wasn't a very good look for charters. Turns out that the reality is even worse than the GAO showed. Carol Burris at Valerie Strauss's Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.

Does diversity training work? We don’t know — and here is why.

Also at the Washington Post. Not exactly education-related, except that it is. Diversity training might not be changing the world (also, sun expected to rise in West tomorrow).

Taking our school boards back

From The Progressive, a look at how one North Carolina district dealt with their right wing candidates.

Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.

From the New York Times, a look at how the military have upped their recruiting at high schools (spoiler alert: not the ones in wealthy neighborhoods)

A well-informed citizenry: fact vs. fiction in American media, then and now

Derek Black, lawyer, scholar, author (Schoolhouse Burning), and friend of the Institute, gave a TED talk. Check it out.

At Forbes this week I wrote about the hot net chatbot.

And as always, you can subscribe to my substack as another way to keep up on all the Curmudgucation Institute stuff.It's free.

Miguel Cardona's Terrible, Very Bad, No Good Tweet

So this popped up on Twitter.

Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.

— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona) December 16, 2022

It was swarmed, "This is not education," said many posters. "This is a bad tweet, and you should feel bad for writing it." And "Our children do not exist to serve." And "This sounds like the Chamber of Commerce, not the Department of Education."

Some were dipped in a bit more acid. "At this point, why not just send kids back to the mines" and "my parents always told me when i was growing up that i could be anything that tomorrow's global industrial workforce demands."

All of which are on point. 

Look, it is important that children be able to support themselves when they grow up, and that they have a set of skills that can be marketed. We would do a huge disservice to students to send them into the world unemployable.

But to imagine that education is simply a means of providing employers with a full supply of useful meat widgets is such a sad, narrow, meager vision of education. It is certainly not what wealthy parents send their children off to school to learn. 

Education should align with student needs, not industry demands (and why is it that industry gets to make demands). Education is about providing choices for students, not employers. It is about helping young humans figure out how to be their own best selves, about learning how to be fully human in the world. That certainly includes figuring out what work they are here to do, but if all you are is your work, then you have a problem. 

And that should all be true for all children. It is not okay to say, "Well, those poor kids don't need a real education--they just need something that will get them a good job." This is the old idea, popular in certain Democratic administrations, that education is the only thing we need to fix poverty (and so we don't have to do other things). This is the old idea that poor people don't need rich lives or choices or the kind of deep, enriching education that not-poor kids get. And that is just all kinds of wrong.

So, yes, this was a terrible tweet, and I hope that whatever social media intern wrote it feels bad. Because this is a lousy thing for the United States Secretary of Education to put out there.

Profiteering Does Not Mix With Human Service

The line that jumps out in the story is this one:

“I feel like this is not being ran as a school but as a business,” the parent told Washington’s education department. “Kids seem to be a paycheck.”

The story is a ProPublica piece about United Health Services, a Washington state company that hoovered up $38 million in taxpayer dollars to provide special education services. And, unsurprisingly, parents and former teachers charge the company with cutting corners, short-changing students, and just generally failing to provide the services it promises to provide.

The company runs private companies like Northwest SOIL, Washington state’s largest publicly funded private school for children with disabilities, where one administrator quit after banging her head on a corporate brick wall that would not provide the resources necessary to fulfill its promises. After being required to cut staff hours, she banged out a resignation letter.

“It is truly like living in the dark ages,” she wrote about the school, detailing its cost cutting at the expense of students. “I cannot ethically or morally be a part of this any longer.”

UHS, ProPublica notes, 

is one player in a small but growing market of special education and disability services, as investors recognize the potential for profit from insurance, public education funding and other sources. A February report by a private equity watchdog group noted a flurry of recent corporate acquisitions of autism service providers. One national broker marketing the sale of a special-needs private school group touted it as a good investment and “extremely profitable.”

There's a lot to unpack in this article, but I want to note two important things here.

One--this is yet another reminder that profiteering and human services don't mix.

Two--what the article describes is a school voucher system. This one is for special ed, but this is how any school voucher system works.

This is school choice in action. The money is following each child, equipping each child with a backpack full of cash, and that turns each child into a courier, a conveyance, a cash cow. This is a system (and it is a system, no matter how much choicers insist that we should fund students, not systems) in which a child's function is to carry money to the profiteers operating the "schools." 

As one expert puts it

“There’s a lot of money at stake here,” said Kathleen Hulgin, a University of Cincinnati associate professor who studies the funding of private special education schools. Companies know they can depend on steady revenue with a “stable, publicly funded system.”

In a school choice system that is wedded to the marketplace, the interests of the owners of the education-flavored businesses will always conflict with the interests of the children. Always. And the main means of maximizing profit will always be to find ways to spend less and less serving the "customers." 

The defense offered by UHS and its various wholly-owned subsidiaries is a familiar one-- we haven't broken any laws, we provide exactly as much as the law requires. 

And in many states, that's particularly alarming because the law requires very little. 

Corner cutting is the least of the terrible outcomes. We have only to look at the privatized health care industry to see the worst cases in action, like this story about a hospital in Pennsylvania.

Or rather, what used to be a hospital, because the private equity company that bought it judged it too hard to make profitable, even after stripping away various services. The problem was that the hospital served too many poor people. So they shut it down.

As I've said repeatedly, the goal of making a profit is not inherently evil. But it does not mix well with human services. 

I can opt out of certain commercial transactions for a variety of reasons. I might not buy a velvet widget because I don't like it or because I can't afford it. But I can't opt out of needing to have a broken leg set, a disease treated, or emergency treatment for a sudden medical issue. I can't opt out of an education for my child, especially if my child requires special accommodations to get it. That gives these sorts of operations a built in customer base, but if the service is provided by someone in search of profit, they have no incentive to provide anything but the least they can get away with and still make money. 

Venture capitalists, hedge funders, private equity owners-- put them in the education business, turn loose children carrying backpacks full of cash, and the business focus will be on collecting those backpacks. Those who believe in economism might shrug and say, "Well, yes. What else would possibly motivate people other than the chance to collect cash?" But for folks who believe in bigger things, the problem is obvious. If you're going to take care of people, you've got to have your eyes on their humanity and needs, and not the cash strapped to their backs.