Is This The Conservative View Of Education?

Jay Greene (Heritage Foundation), having previously decided that the "culture wars" can be used to further the school choice movement, has been working to redefine what the choice crowd is really about, like maybe combating wokism.

His recent piece for the right-tilted Washington Times carries the exercise a bit further. I'm going to take a look at it because A) it's an interesting point in the ongoing evolution of pro-choice arguments and B) I'm quoted in it.

Greene's hook is his reaction to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona's set of ill-considered tweets, particularly, “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.”

This, he charges, is the progressive view. 

The predominant understanding of education on the left is that a human being is a tool, and education should shape that tool to be productive and serve the needs of others.

And this, he says, contrasts with the conservative view:

Conservatives approach education very differently. They begin with the belief that all human beings possess dignity — are created in the image of God, if you will. The purpose of education from this perspective is to cultivate and develop human dignity to serve what is sacred.

And he boils the contrast down to this:

If progressives want education to promote industry (whether collectively or individually owned), conservatives want education to promote virtue.

That whole construction is doing a lot of heavy, heavy lifting, some of which is wrapped up in the business of assigning team labels to particular ideas, which is never one of my favorite things. "To which team label shall we ascribe this idea" is far less interesting to me than "Is this idea any good." But Greene is not the first to try to weld education ideas onto political categories, because lord knows its way easier to say, "Mugwumps want this and we all know mugwumps are bad so this shall not stand" than "Here's my idea and why I think it's a good one." 

But Greene's parsing leaves a lot of people to account for who fall outside of his model, so he is going to No True Scotsman the heck out of this. (That's the fallacy where I say "All Scotsmen wear glasses" and you reply "But what about all these Scotsmen over here without glasses" and I reply "Well, they aren't really Scotsmen, don't you see.")

There are an awful lot of conservative people who have leaned awfully heavily on the idea of making useful meat widgets. Rex Tillerson, while he was Exxon CEO, characterized students as the product and "the business community" as the customer, and he was not any special outlier. We can go all the way back to Reagan's A Nation at Risk, which did not frame its manufactured education crisis as some sort of crisis of virtue. But Greene characterizes these people as people "who call themselves conservative education reformers" aka "you can call yourself a true scotsman, but I know better."

And Greene refutes these folks in a fairly awesome paragraph:

Big companies that hire large numbers of coders naturally want the education system to increase its supply of coders, but it is unclear why their desires should determine how we educate our children. This is especially true as companies frequently use the fresh supply of newly trained and cheaper coders to replace the older and more expensive people they are laying off. Corporate executives may similarly want there to be more finishing schools to increase the supply of trophy wives to replace their older spouses, but we do not cater to their every whim.

I am jealous in a Wish I Had Written It way of that trophy wives line.

On the other side, there were a plethora of people "who describe themselves as progressive education advocates" who gave Cardona hell for his tweet. This is the part where Greene quotes me (I don't describe myself as a progressive, but I understand why I might be seen that way): “Public education is not meant to serve the needs of employers, but the needs of students. Yes, students probably need a job. But a job training system is meager and narrow. Our children should aspire to more than being useful meat widgets.”

Now, watch this next part.

In their own way, this faction of progressive education supporters shares the conservative view that education should promote virtue. They differ only in their understanding of virtue. Conservatives may oppose the social justice version of virtue backed by these progressives and should fight the imposition of the social justice approach on everyone.

You may remember a time when the school choice movement was an alliance between free marketeers and social justice supporters, between "Competition will make education better" and "We need an alternative so we can rescue poor and minority students from failing public schools." But that alliance was all but obliterated under the Trump administration, and here we find folks interested in social justice relegated to the other side, a version of virtue to be opposed. 

Greene seems certain that given the chance to free themselves from "government-operated schools controlled by education-school-credentialed teachers," families will mostly chose "an education promoting a traditional view of virtue" over the social justice agenda.

What is the "traditional view of virtue"? There are certainly traditions that value honor, strength and integrity. Of course, there are also traditions that value women and people of color knowing their place and shutting their face (and LGBTQ people staying in their closets). There are even conservative traditions that value certain public institutions, like public school. 

The whole exercise in political bifurcation seems futile. All sides of every major education debate have included folks from across the political spectrum. Common Core, for example, was supported by people on the right and the left, just as it was opposed by people on the right and the left. And when it comes to corporate attempts to "reform" education-- well, some folks find green more compelling than red or blue. It tells us something about the pan-political forces behind education reform that the reformster baton could be passed back and forth from Democratic to Republic to Democratic administrations without losing a step. And all this talk of left and right skips over the neo-liberals, whose promise of big government social programs run by private corporate interests offers us the worst of both worlds.

Attempting to make the various threads of education reform line up with political identities is largely a snare and delusion. Almost anywhere you build your fence, you'll find a mix of people on all sides, so why bother to try?

But I don't want to leave the impression that education is entirely a Both Sides issue. There has been one political constant in the ed reform biz--the right has for decades worked to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public education (it does not follow, unfortunately, that the left has been equally dedicated to defending public education). And they have tried a variety of arguments. General declarations that public schools are failing. Creating an entire data system to "prove" that public schools are failing. Failing public schools are a national security risk. Charter and private schools will do better. Choice will better meet the needs of industry and employers. Choice systems will be cheaper and do more with less. Choice will rescue students from failing zip codes. Choice is a virtue in and of itself, regardless of the educational consequences. Freedom!

This is just the newest argument. Choice is necessary to restore traditional virtues. It will run until the next argument shows up.

Choicers keep changing the game and the playing field, but the goalposts actually stay right where they've always been--dismantle and privatize education. I'll continue to argue that this turns a public good into a private commodity, that it wastes public tax dollars, that it disenfranchises taxpayers, that it opens the door wide to fraud and waste, and that it ill serves the needs of students and society. I neither know nor care if that makes me a progressive; I'm far more concerned about the fate of public education than the logo on my jersey, which I suspect is one more thing I have in common with choice advocates. 

AZ: When Christians Stand Up To Anti-LGBTQ School Leaders

We can unpack several items from this story. One is the fallacious idea that there is such a thing as a Christian school. Another is just what certain christianists think about LGBTQ persons. All plus a side of considering what happens when "religious discrimination" charges start to fly around. Also, tenure.

How it started

Adam McDorman is an English teacher in the Phoenix area. He has run a Youtube channel focusing on classic vinyl for 11 years. He's a Christian, so taking a teaching job at Valley Christian High School ("Our mission is to equip students to be culture changers for Christ...) may well have seemed like a great move. He headed up the yearbook, managed pandemic online/hybrid teaching, and spent seven and a half years teaching all manner of English and communications courses, including AP. 

How it's going

In November of 2021, VCHS fired McDorman. Now he's suing the school for discriminating against his religious beliefs. Specifically, the part of his Christian faith that includes "acceptance for all LGBT persons."

Okay. What's the story here?

Neither side is talking to the press, but here's the story as laid out in the lawsuit itself. 

In fall of 2021, student "Jane Doe" posted on social media that they identified as pansexual. VCS principal Josh LeSage  (just starting his second year in the post) held a November 1st staff meeting at which he underlined that all staff should share the same belief in the sinfulness of LGBT orientation, and that "anyone who did not agree was like a cancer that needed to be removed" from the organization.

On November 3rd in a department meeting, McDorman suggested finding better ways to care for VCS's LGBT students and to protect them from discrimination. Later that day, LeSage emailed VCS leadership and included gems like "There is a hideous lie that 'you can be both,' meaning homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant and also a Christian." He also noted that a staff member had, in a meeting, suggested getting a pastor from a gay-friendly church to come talk to staff to help understand how to better minister to those kids. Wrote LeSage, "Hell no! We are not doing that."

On November 8th, LeSage indicated that planned to meet with Jane Doe to discuss their sexual orientation without parental knowledge or consent. McDorman met with LeSage "for several hours" to try to convince him to be more accepting of the LGBT population. LeSage "was hostile to McDorman's religious view of Christian tolerance and acceptance of LGBT students."

On November 9th, McDorman was fired.

Yikes! Just how hostile to LGBTQ persons is this Christian school?

School policy is clear enough. 

under the "Foundational Positions" section of its website, VCS writes, among other things, that "rejection of one’s biological gender is a rejection of the image of God within that person" and "any form of sexual immorality … is sinful and offensive to God" and could result in a student's expulsion.

But if you really want a sense of the shape of the attitudes at play--well, also on November 9th LeSage and the VCS High School Coordinator of Student Health and Wellness Chizzy Anderson went ahead and held that parentless meeting with Jane Doe, and, according to the lawsuit, recorded meeting. This part is a little lengthy, but most of the limited coverage of the suit has skipped over it and if you often wonder "What are these people thinking," well, here's part of an answer.

Anderson (whose degree is in communications) offered an explanation of where trans people come from:

Transgender people actually have a mutation in their brain where like, if someone's a woman, they're the same way that when you were in your mother's womb, you were given only XX chromosomes until something equivalent of a mutation, it's not considered a mutation anymore. But there's an assignment where you like, you get the Y chromosome that makes you a man. So transgender people have that mutation and their brains were like, oh, like, if I was born as a woman, I could have a mutation in my brain where my brain starts producing Y chromosomes, because I still have that capability. They're not crazy. It's a biological thing.

LaSage offered some wisdom of his own, including:

Now, let me tell you, the homosexual community is shying away from the fact that most homosexual men did suffer sexual abuse as an adolescent. And there is solid scientific research outside of Bible circles, that shows your first sexual experience has a strong determining factor in what your sexual preferences are. So again, sin coming into the world, a boy is abused by a man, something happens in his brain that shifts and makes his preference cannot always, but can, give him a preference for men sexually. But acting that out is still sinful and God doesn't give people a mulligan,

Same-sex relations are an abomination to God. And whenever you confuse whether I'm a man or a woman, and so and God is dealing with sex, and so far, this gentleman who's pretending to be a woman, and now if he has sex with a man, he cannot stand before God and say I am not committing a homosexual act, because I am a woman, when God made him a man. And that's the danger, theologically of what happens because if I can decide to be a woman today, and a man tomorrow, and when it's convenient for my lifestyle, I conflate gender and sexuality,

God very clearly defines sexual relationships that he approves of. And it's a man and woman inside marriage, and any sexual relationship outside of that is sexual deviancy. It's a perversion. It's missing the mark for God's plan …

I believe God can take away the desire you have for women, just like he took away my grandmother's desire for cigarettes. But you have to want that. I also believe you could pray every day until you die like my grandfather, and say, God, please take this desire away from me. And he may not do it, because he's God.

There's more, but you get the idea.

What is McDorman looking for here?

In February of 2022, McDorman filed a charge of Title VII employment discrimination--that's the one that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. In September of 2022, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that they wouldn't investigate further or rule on the issue themselves, but he was free to go ahead and sue. So he has. in the US District Court for the District of Arizona. 

He's looking for compensatory and punitive damages, plus back pay and lost benefits. McDorman currently has a job in the public school system.

Any bigger issues here?

While private religious schools can be free to discriminate as they wish (and we are talking about Arizona here), the suit points out that VCS grabbed itself over $1 million in Paycheck Protection "loans' (since forgiven). So yes--if any of the above bothered you, remember that your tax dollars are helping finance it. VCS is also a tax-exempt operation. The suit argues that this puts the school within the grasp of federal law. We'll see.

What else have we learned?

When we talk about "Christian schools" or "Christian values" or the "Christian church," we're talking nonsense, because if there's anything that marks the history of Christianity, it's the endless internal arguments about doctrine and faith and pretty much everything.

It's a go-to move to respond to calls for public funding of private religious schools by saying, "Bet they would object if it were a Muslim school," but it's not necessary to reach that far. Southern Baptists used to call the Catholic Pope the Whore of Babylon. The puritans of Massachusetts punished, banished and occasionally executed those who proselytized for the wrong version of Christianity. 

The courts have lately insisted that people's free exercise of religion can't be messed with. But people's ideas of religious expression bump up against each other all the time. The inevitable result of government funding for religious schools will be government refereeing of infinite religious squabbles, and nobody will be pleased.

It's also worth noting that Adam McDorman made some ballsy moves by actually standing up for the LGBT students, since he had zero job protections. If you want teachers to be able to stand up for the rights of students, you have to insure they can't be fired just for disagreeing with the boss. I'm also thinking that Arizona's stance on the parental right to direct your child's education might have been trampled here, but then, we've always understood that only certain parents were entitled to that right.

The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind fine. We'll see what this particular set of wheels grinds up. 

AI and Plagiarism

Algorithms like the ChatGPT defy the traditional idea of plagiarism. They do not directly steal from a single source. But they are a sort of super-plagiarism engine.

It's important to remember how these pieces of software work. They neither understand nor create; what they do is hoover up an increasingly larger body of pre-existing work and store the patterns that they see and then use those patterns to answer whatever request they're received.

So you could ask, as this teacher did, for lesson plans to explain how volcanoes are formed. In the old days of, say, last year, a teacher might google that and come up with an assortment possible lessons to choose from. The AI functions like an assistant who googles all the materials and sort of mushes them all together. It's not plagiarized, exactly, but it's not fresh, original work, either.

To see the issue really laid out, look at the world of art where software like Lensa and DALL-E are doing the same thing for visual art that ChatGPT does for written material. And that just makes it all the more obvious that what the program does is somewhere between mimicry and theft. And in the opinion of many artists, it's just plain theft.

The theft comes in two parts. First, the software's ability rests on a database of existing art that has been scraped from the internet without asking anyone's permission. Writes Tony Ho Tran in the Daily Beast, "[Artists’] work wasn’t taken by a team of thieves in an Ocean’s Eleven-style caper. Rather, it was quietly scraped from the web by a bot—and later used to train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence models out there."

These art AIs can do work "in the style of," which involves scraping work by that artist and imitating it. Cartoonist/illustrator Sarah Anderson wrote about that experience for the New York Times, and here's what she says about it:

I felt violated. The way I draw is the complex culmination of my education, the comics I devoured as a child and the many small choices that make up the sum of my life. The details are often more personal than people realize — the striped shirt my character wears, for instance, is a direct nod to the protagonist of “Calvin and Hobbes,” my favorite newspaper comic. Even when a person copies me, the many variations and nuances in things like line weight make exact reproductions difficult. Humans cannot help bringing their own humanity into art. Art is deeply personal, and A.I. had just erased the humanity from it by reducing my life’s work to an algorithm.

ChatGPT can do the same for anyone whose work is online enough for the algorithm to have scraped a bunch of it up ("I'd like a resignation letter in the style of Ernest Hemmingway"). It's not exactly word-for-word plagiarism--more like a remix or a mash-up--but it's not really original work, either. These are interesting new times for teachers. 

Pay Students To Go To School? (Bad Pandemic Recovery Idea #42,231)

Over at Hechinger Report, Brandon Cardet-Hernandez has an idea about how to "solve the education crisis"-- pay students to go to school. Well, specifically, pay 16-and-older students to attend after-school enrichment programs, extended "summer learning" and work study programs. 

Cardet-Hernandez has knocked around education for a couple of decades. Currently he's the executive director of the Ivy Street School (a "therapeutic approach" school) and an appointed member of the Boston School Committee. He was the turnaround guy for a school in New York City as well as senior education advisor to Mayor Bill DeBlasio. During his four years as a special ed classroom teacher, he "developed a comprehensive, Common Core-aligned curriculum focused on History through an anti-oppression framework."

Despite all that, he loses me in his second paragraph when he cites Thomas Kane's notion that, "recent NAEP scores showed startling declines that could amount to as many as 22 weeks of learning loss." Anyone who claims they can measure learning in weeks or months or years or hectares or liters is just shoveling baloney. What they actually mean is "test scores are down," but you can't get people worked up about that. 

But Cardet-Hernandez wants us to know that "we are not approaching a crisis, we are already in one." Spoiler alert: he's not going to actually define the crisis beyond "test scores are down." Also, "chronic absenteeism is on the rise" he notes, linking to an article whose actual headline is "Pandemic Causes Alarming Increase in Chronic Absence and Reveals Need for Better Data" on a website for a group created in 2016 to sound an alarm about school attendance. 

Students' lives are different now, he notes, and so schools will have to do different things.

We often talk about simply making up lost learning time, but it’s not that simple. Like lost sleep, lost learning time cannot be reclaimed — but we can chart a new course that will set students up for success.

Side note. Ages ago, I actually did research about sleep deprivation, and you can, in fact, make up lost sleep--and pretty efficiently at that. You probably already know this on some level--if you sleep five fewer hours tonight, you don't have to sleep five extra hours the next day to get back on track. 

So his analogy is flawed, but I get his point, which leads us to his solution.

What if we used ESSER funds to create opportunities that allow for more focused and intentional learning time, aimed at addressing gaps exasperated during the pandemic? What if we created an entirely new way of connecting with students who are facing competing priorities?

This is great language, but we're mostly talking about paying students to go to school, and the problems I see are many. "Why am I getting paid to go to summer school but I have to go to regular school for free," ask a few million students. Add to that the problems that arise from using extrinsic motivation with students (eg actually decreasing motivation and interest). 

But most of all, this strikes me as simple admission that there's no good reason, no intrinsic reward available for going to extra school in order to raise some test scores. "We have no good argument for why you should give up part of your life so that test scores will go up," we're admitting. "How about a twenty?"

That's just the summer school and tutoring part of his solution. The other part is worse.

If we want to tackle learning loss and absenteeism with the necessary level of response, we could also use ESSER funds to employ students in age-appropriate job positions at their schools and in their cities. Think lunch prep in a cafeteria or clerical work in an administrative office, for example.

Yes, he's seriously suggesting that bringing back child labor would improve test scores-- a bad justification for a bad idea. And which period would students be dropping a class to make time for cafeteria prep? What confidentiality issues would come from students doing clerical work for admins? But Cardet-Hernandez suggests this would help with school labor shortages, and students would earn supplemental income while "acclimating themselves to the workforce." Also, it would help administration keep tabs on students' whereabouts and thereby help with the absenteeism problem.

Just yikes. Many, many students above the age of 16 are, of course, already acclimating themselves to the workforce. I suppose the chance to acclimate themselves to additional surveillance would be a plus? 

Yes, paying kids to go to school and/or to work at school is a seismic departure from simply fulfilling the requirement for attendance, but we are lying to ourselves if we believe that the solution is doing exactly what we’ve done to date.

"Seismic departure"? Yes, I'd say turning a privilege and right and a public good into a job would be seismic. Nor is it clear to me that this would help, because I'm pretty sure the proposition would be heard, correctly, by many students as, "So you'll pay me to come sit in this summer school class." So I'm highly doubtful that the damage done by this scheme would even yield the higher test scores he's hoping for. You can pay a student to show up, but you can't pay her to care--and the mere fact that you're offering to bribe her to show up is a clear indication that there is no reason for her to care. 

As for that last part--I've had this problem with this common post-pandemess argument all along. We used everything we know about educatin' to get students to deliver the kinds of scores we had in 2018. Then the pandemic screwed everything up. How does that mean that we can't use the same techniques we used to get to 2018 to get back to those score levels?

If I build a porch on my house, and then some jerk comes along with a bulldozer and knocks the porch down, why would I declare, "Well, the house now looks like it did in the pre-porch days. I guess now I'll have to build a garage or a rowboat on the front." Why would I not just build back the perfectly good porch I had built there before?

Cardet-Hernandez says we would be "foolish" not to give his idea a try. I'll wait to see if he can convince his colleagues on the Boston School Committee to go for it. In the meantime this sounds like a waste of money that harm more than help.

ICYMI: Happy New Year Edition (1/1)

I'm always disinclined to get extra excited about New Years. It highlights our human tendency to just kind of make stuff up and then sit around parsing the deep meaning of the thing that we just made up, ourselves.

I can only hope that the last few years have taught us not to say, "Well, this year will surely have to be better." I'm just sad that I have to wait a day to watch the Rose Bowl Parade. In the meantime, here are some pieces to read.

Don't Pass The Trash

Grumpy Old Teacher has some thoughts about the new hire that Arkansas just took off of Florida's hands. 

Full James Dunn Timeline

Billy Townsend breaks down the timeline for another Florida export--the felon that Texas hired to handle education stuff.

Ohio's crippling private school vouchers will go to court

In Ohio, folks are pushing back against a crappy voucher program, and they have passed the first hurdle. Despite the Attorney General's whinging, EdChoice will go to court. Here's hoping more good news comes down the line. 

What will Vermont lawmakers do about religious schools?

You may recall that the Supreme Court told Maine that they have to extend their voucher program to private religious schools. It's a result, in part, of some unique features of the state's education system--but Vermont has similar unique features, so they may have some issues coming at them. Peter D'Auria at VTDigger looks at the story.

New GOP-proposed bill targets preferred pronoun use in schools

In Arizona, it's time to crack down on those pronouns, because that's clearly the biggest problem facing education.

North Carolina Board of Education Chair Eric Davis has a history of bad faith on teacher merit pay

If you doubt that one person can make a difference, let me direct your attention to Justen Parmenter who has been single-handedly directing attention to the shenanigans behind North Carolina's terrible initiative to screw with teacher pay. Here's more background on that story.

Why David Brooks Is Wrong to Blame “Teachers’ Unions” for Pandemic School Closings

Diane Ravitch with a don't-miss reply to David Brooks and his attempt to goose along the story of how teachers unions shut down schools, for some reason. 

Teaching Media Literacy Includes Teaching About Racism

New Jersey is going to require schools to teach media literacy. Rann Miller explains what that ought to include.

Looking Ahead to 2023 and the Danger of Universal ESAs in Florida

Accountabaloney looks ahead at what fresh hell Florida's leaders have in mind for education in the swampland state.

2022 saw conservative gains on education issues. But they may be short-lived.

Historian and Friend of the Institute Adam Laats writes in the Washington Post about how conservative victories last year might not be all that permanent. In fact, he explains how they may have undermined their own efforts.

2022. What a Year?

Nancy Flanagan looks back at 2022, both good news and bad. 

At Forbes.com this week I posted an interview with the head of Nellie Mae and a look at Daniel Willingham's new book (which I liked).

And to ring in the new year, here's the only version of Auld Lang Syne you need, with strings and bagpipes (and they're all in tune).

 

 And you can subscribe to all my various writings via substack

Bill Gates Is Going To Fix Math

Bill Gates's aspirational announcements are always a good time. He swings for the fences. He announces the ends of things. He repeatedly almost takes responsibility for the floppage of large ideas.

But his new "My wish for 2023" note is unique in that, when it comes to education, his stated goal is really not huge.

There are nine goals. One is for education.

It is to raise math scores.

The foundation is doubling the percentage of their funding that's spent on math (from 40% to 80%). How is that going to be spent?

Our funding will help develop better instructional materials that keep students interested and motivated, give teachers the support they need to deliver these materials, and make sure that each math course gets students prepared for the next one.

By "materials," Gates apparently means "software."

In class and at home, students should be able to use software that’s interactive and personalized. It should know when they’re stuck and notify the teacher that they need extra help. Teachers should be able to choose from various ways of organizing students to help each other, for example helping them identify the students who are ahead and can help out the ones who are behind. The idea is to make the most of the teacher’s time and skills. We have many capable partners; the nonprofits Khan Academy and Zearn and the startup company Mastory, for example, are doing promising work.

That's awfully close to the description of a microschool, where some students hang out on a computer and some adult is handy just in case. 

It is education via screen, a model that has not exactly gotten rave reviews during the distance learning days of the pandemic. 

As always with Gates, there are some notes suggesting that he either doesn't understand basic things about education or he's pretending not to.

Although there are many factors that affect a student’s trajectory, the evidence shows that it’s extremely important for them to succeed in math. For example, those who pass Algebra I by ninth grade are twice as likely to graduate from high school and more likely to go on to college, get a bachelor’s degree, and go on to a high-paying career. And those who don’t complete Algebra I have just a one-in-five chance of graduating from high school.

Say it with me folks-- correlation does not mean causation. If sixth graders who have a large shoe size are more likely to become basketball players, it does not follow that making every sixth grader wear big shoes will result in more hoopsters. People who come from wealthy, well-educated families are more likely to graduate high school, more likely to get a bachelor's degree, and are more likely to take early Algebra I. 

And as always with these letters, Gates wants us to know that he has Learned Things.

As I’ve learned through the foundation’s work in this field, it’s one thing to make modest improvements in a few classrooms, and another thing to spark big improvements at scale. If we’re lucky, we’ll hit some of our milestones within three years and be able to prove out these new tools within five. That will set the stage for school districts and states to make sure that all students have well-supported teachers and an engaging curriculum that makes math feel relevant to their lives.

"Another thing to spark big improvement at scale." Yes, indeed, especially if by "another thing" you mean "thing we have never successfully done." And that timeline-- hit "some" milestones, "prove out" the tools, "set the stage" for schools and states--that sounds a lot like we'll will probably be mostly ready to start beginning to prepare to launch the early preliminary versions of that thing. 

I do like one thing about this new aspiration of Gates's--compared to his previous attempts to appoint himself the Czar of Us Education, this is fairly modest. With any luck that means the damage will be minimal. 

PA: Another District Clamping Down On Reading Rights

Penncrest School District is located in the NW corner of the state, located mostly in Crawford County. It's a mid-sized (around 3500 students K-12) district that was stitched together out of several very small rural districts. 

Penncrest has been home to the occasional controversy. Like back in May of 2021 when a couple of board members got upset about certain books in the library.

Two board members got in a Facebook flap over a collection of LGBTQ+ books displayed at the Maplewood High School Library. Board member David Valesky posted:

Besides the point of being totally evil, this is not what we need to be teaching kids. They aren't at school to be brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is okay. Its [sic] actually being promoted to the point where it's even 'cool'.

Board member Jeff Brooks responded

 
There have always been gay students in our hallways. And unfortunately there have always been hateful voices looking to discriminate against them. Let's just be a little better today and not make kids [sic] lives worse by being hateful, bigoted and prejudiced.

Valesky later told the local newspaper that "he was against the school 'pushing' such topics onto the students," and that schools shouldn't have anything to do with "kids determining their sex or who they should be interested in." Brooks expressed his opposition to censoring books at school and that schools "need to be a safe place."

That was enough to prompt an on-line petition to remove two board members that currently has 4,899 signatures.

Then there was the time they refused a teacher's request to go present at the state Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts conference because some of the sessions at the conference sounded a little too critical race theory (her presentation was supposed to be about “Using Audio Analysis to Maximize Independent Reading Time”). 

Penncrest is once again focused on limiting the reading rights of its students. 

Back in May, Valesky held up the purchase of books for the library. In particular he singled out  the books "Global Citizenship: Engage in Politics of a Changing World" and "Nevertheless We Persisted: 48 Voices of Defiance, Strength, and Courage" as promoting Black Lives Matter. Other books on the list pertaining to racism that Valesky did not approve of include "Finding Junie Kim," "Genesis Begins Again," "Apple Skin to the Core," "Downstairs Girl" and "Fat Chance."

Valesky explained at the board meeting, as reported by the Meadville Tribune:

"I don't have an issue if we're giving books that's targeting education of the Civil War and slavery and there is racism even today, but this is obviously like shoving it down every corner," he said.

Valesky said there were four books on the list that "openly promote the hate group Black Lives Matter."

"That's a group that is for destroying," he said. "They aren't protecting Black lives."

Valesky said the resource list needed to be "well-founded" and said the current version was "definitely far from it."

So in July, the board adopted new policies about library materials, including this guideline

Library materials will reflect and support the district’s educational goals and academic standards. The library resource collection will take into consideration the varied interests, abilities and maturity levels of the students served in each school. Materials will be chosen to stimulate growth in factual knowledge, literary appreciation, aesthetic values and ethical standards. Materials will be chosen to represent diverse points of view on all topics.

So just the facts, literary stuff is okay, maybe "art," and "ethical standards," though no guidance on whose ethics exactly.

But that wasn't enough. In December, Valesky, who heads the policy committee, was back with more revisions and more naughty books. 

One proposed change in policy is a ban on transgender students in sports (though nobody knows of any such athletes in the district). 

The new library policy has a proposed addition of several paragraphs:

The district Recognizes there exists a vast array of materials with rich educational value. It is the District's objective to choose material that provides such rich educational content appropriate to students in the district over material that may provide similar content but with elements that are inappropriate or unnecessary for minors in a school setting. 

Sexualized content that falls short of material prohibited by criminal laws is nonetheless generally inappropriate and/or unnecessary for minors in school. Parents/Guardians have a wide range of options outside of the district library system to introduce their child to sexualized content they deem appropriate for their child’s age. As such, the District will prioritize inclusion of quality materials suitable for educational goals and worthwhile for the limited amount of time available to students that do not contain sexualized content. 

No Material in District libraries shall contain: 

• Visual or visually implied depictions of sexual acts or simulations of such acts, 

• Explicit written depictions of sexual acts, or 

• Visual depictions of nudity- not including materials with diagrams about anatomy for science or content relating to classical works of art

Valesky came to the meeting with examples of what he wants gone, including Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants," the basis for a 2011 Reece Witherspoon film; "Looking for Alaska," a John Green bestseller I've seen carried by umpty-gazzillion teen readers; and "Angus, Thong, and Full-Frontal Snogging" by Louise Rennison. Also on the list was "Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out," the book that helped prompt his "totally evil" Facebook post. Valesky even offered a McCarthy-esque presentation, according to the Tribune:

"I have a list of books here in my hand, if anyone would like to look at them, of books that are in our libraries that promote this garbage and absolute trash to students," he said before wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.

So, no sexy stuff, no nudity. It doesn't have to rise to the level of porn, and Valesky has made it clear that any depiction at all of LGBTQ persons is over the line. And if parents object to the school district banning these works for everybody's kids, they can just go get the stuff on their own.

Valesky is the point man on all this LGBTQ panic, but it would be a mistake to imagine that he is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. He was successfully re-elected in 2019. The December meeting featured many speakers objecting to the policy, but it also included some folks standing up to speak in favor, noting that "good people" wouldn't object to it. A speaker also notes that this language has been used in "many districts." (And if you want more, just check the comments).

The proposed changes should be up for a vote at the January 12 meeting. Expect some noise before then.

It's a small district far from big press and big city concerns. The selection of books for a school library is an issue that will always spark discussion and concern, but when a board considers erasing LGBTQ persons entirely or trying to convince young humans that sex is a big secret that they should never hear anything about or allowing the concerns of the most conservative members of a community to limit the right to read for all members--well, it's not just a local issue, and it is troubling. This story is being enacted all over the country; we'll see how this one plays out.