Merry Christmas

The annual tradition here at the Curmudgucation Institute is to share the updated version of the Christmas Youtube playlist. The selections are chosen to be a hair off the beaten path, because by now the beaten path is really beaten, and the list also reflects my appreciation of jazz and brass. I also like to think that's a nice reminder of what a varied species we are. And this year, I also skewed more toward the perky, because lord knows we could use a little perk these days.

For those of you who like listening to the Spotify, here's the listening list that my extended family came up with for Pandemic Christmas. 

And if you want a real challenge, here's an hour and fifteen minutes of various versions of Jingle Bells. Jingle Bells has nothing to do with Christmas at all; it's more a 19th century precursor of "Little Deuce Coupe" or "I Get Around," a musical tribute to the awesomeness of fast cars and cute girls. It's a song that I believe persists, as some songs do, because musicians like to play (and play with) it.

So if Christmas is your thing, have a wonderful day. If it's not, have a wonderful day. 

FL: Another Shot At Teachers Unions

Ron DeSantis doesn't have time for victory laps. He's busy continuing the project of remaking education in his own image, or at least the image of a political base for conquering the state and, who knows, bigger things. (Okay, everybody knows.) 

With that in mind, DeSantis hosted a star-studded Right Wing Pallooza (Betsy DeVos, Manny Diaz, Richard Corcoran!!) a "Freedom Blueprint" (as always, "freedom" is short for "freedom for the right people and not Those Icky People over there"). 

The headline making part was DeSantis talking about how he's going to continue to do his best to push out school board members who aren't loyal to the correct values (especially the ones that dared to defy him on masking etc). And if you think he plans to be sneak or subtle about this, let me direct your attention to Broward County schools, where he used a technicality to declare a seat "vacant" (the duly elected guy didn't get sworn in in time because he was late getting his civil rights restored after his felony conviction--oh, Florida). 

DeSantis appointed Dan Foganholi to the seat. Foganholi was a previous DeSantis appointee who led the charge to fire the superintendent. Foganholi didn't run for the seat because--fun fact!-- in Florida you can be appointed to a board if you live outside the district, but you can't run for it. He was available because he ran for a commission seat in his actual home area, but lost.

All of that is the marquee stuff, but another part of Freedom Pallooza was to announce a push for teachers to have "paycheck protection." Teachers from other states will recognize this anti-union baloney that forbids districts from doing any automatic deduction of union dues from their paycheck. 

No, nobody ever argues to cut out other paycheck deductions, and the rhetoric with these bills never really explains what the paycheck is being protected from. The more honest complaint is "I don't want my tax dollars paying some employee of the district to do the work of making these deductions work," which in all fairness probably does burn up five or ten cents of taxpayer money each year. Or there's the DeSantis explanation:

“We don’t want to play a role in deducting anybody’s money, so you write [your check] every month for the dues and you do it that way,” DeSantis said. “It’s more of a guarantee that the money is actually going to go to teachers and not be frittered away by interest groups who get involved in the school system.”

Because teacher pay is leaking out of their checks somehow?

Paycheck protection is just about making dues payment a PITA, a technique more effective than ever since most people under 40 don't write more than two or three checks a year because automatic bank drafting is so much easier. Ot maybe the unions will start doing auto bank drafting and DeSantis et al will have lost a golden opportunity to run the old "Look at how much bigger your check would be if dues weren't taken  out of it" for nothing. 

It's just one more small way that state leadership can make teachers' lives a little more irritating, one more stupid piddly thing that happens because your leaders would rather attack you than support you in even the smallest, simplest ways. 

Just remember--when Trump collapses, this is the kind of guy just waiting to pick up the MAGA mantle. 

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.