California's Creepy Cradle to Career Pipeline

If you thought that we'd moved away from the creepy idea of a cradle to career pipeline in which young humans are unwilling victims of steady state surveillance, then California has some bad news for you.

California enacted the Cradle-To-Career Data Systems Act in 2019. The stated public argument was, as has always been the case with data mining schools and students, something along the lines of "Only by collecting all this data about students can we figure out how to get the aid and supports out to the people who really need it." Or as their vision statement puts it, "The Cradle-to-Career System seeks to foster evidence-based decision-making to help Californians build more equitable futures and empower individuals to reach their full potential."

Sure. The cradle-to-career data pipeline has been kicked around since at least thirty years ago, when Marc Tucker  wrote the infamous "Dear Hillary" letter that laid out a federal-heavy system for tracking every child in this country data point by data point. 

The lion's share of the work on California's system appears to have been done by WestEd, a consulting firm grown out of the old federal regional education laboratory system.

California's version of the pipeline has been praised by the usual assortment of data fans, like the Data Quality Campaign, which thinks California's is a model program that everyone should be following. That's not a good sign.

The Data Quality Campaign has been around a long time in ed reform terms. DQC was put together in 2005 with ten partners:

Achieve, Inc. (www.achieve.org)
Alliance for Excellent Education (www.all4ed.org)
Council of Chief State School Officers (www.ccsso.org)
The Education Trust (www.edtrust.org)
National Center for Educational Accountability (www.nc4ea.org or www.just4kids.org)
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (www.nchems.org)
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (www.nga.org/center)
Schools Interoperability Framework Association (www.sifinfo.org)
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services (www.schoolmatters.com)
State Higher Education Executive Officers (www.sheeo.org)

The scope of California's data collection is staggering. Pre-K enrollment. The L-12 tab includes almost fifty data points (including lots of tests scores). Detailed post-secondary data. Workforce training. Financial aid. Social service "experiences." Employment "variables" including salary information. A batch of personal characteristics data. Data about teacher credentials and the schools the person attended. All of this is supposedly "depersonalized" and kept in a super-secure lockbox.

Who is all this supposed to be for? The system's site says there are three target groups. Students and families will have tools to make it easier to get through the go-to-college process. Unlikely. Educators will be able to monitor student prepping for college and "develop action plans based on data about learning, supportive services and employment." Also unlikely. There's nothing here that will be useful--certainly not more useful just because it's thrown into a hopper with a bunch of other data.

Third come "advocates and researchers" who will get to analyze a bunch of data to "shape policy." That is the only one of the three that sounds likely. Though the cynic in me bets that the process won't be so much "shape policy" as "sift through data top manufacture support for the policy I've already decided I want to push." 

Of course, the really ambitious dreamers in the conception-to-internment game want to see a bigger picture, a world in which young humans are so well described in a data profile (probably kept on the blockchain) that an employer can just order up meat widgets to exact specifications. That was probably one of the driving forces behind Common Core Standards, which could be understood as data tags for assessing, tracking and recording the exact competencies of students. The kind of deep data collecting that a womb-to-tomb pipeline would yield could also be harnessed for social impact bonds, a creepy was to monetize the struggles of human beings. 

Worshippers in the Cult of Data believe that if they just know everything, they can control everything. Neither side of that equation, neither the knowing nor the controlling, is an admirable or worthy goal. Not just because both are unattainable, but because the attempts to attain them are dehumanizing and destructive. 

California's framework for universal underage surveillance is just getting launched, and you can bet that its backers will have additional great ideas ("Hey, we could give everyone social and emotional tests and then record those in there, too"). There's also a non-zero chance that the assembled data will be used for a variety of unintended purposes, either to generate revenue or because someone fails at keeping it safe. And just wait till someone decides that they might as well imitate Florida's Big Brother Safety Surveillance System, because data-base future crime prevention is awesome. 

The risks are large, the violation is unconscionable, and the benefits are imaginary. Please, God, let it not catch on in every other state. 

FL: Can We Stop Pretending This Is About Choice?

Can we stop pretending that Ron DeSantis and his allies have any interest in choice when it comes to education?

The hits just keep on coming. This week DeSantis packed the board of Sarasota's New College with some far right folks. The headline appointment was Christopher Rufo, the right wing activist who brought us critical race theory panic and who has suggested that we can get to universal choice by sowing universal distrust of the public school system.

But choice is not the point, and for a certain sector, it has never been the point. Ron DeSantis has just become the most obvious example. Taking the liberal and successful New College and targeting it to become the "Hillsdale of the South" is not about creating more choices, and nobody is even pretending that it is. It's about silencing one set of voices and amplifying another set. 

This is not a new trend. The Don't Say Gay law and the Stop WOKE Act are two perfect examples of actions intended to stop one particular set of values and expression and replace them with others. At no point has DeSantis expressed the notion that Florida should have room for people to choose between "woke" and "unwoke" views in education; instead he has been quite clear that "woke" ideas must be stamped out. He's not arguing for a wide variety of choices; he is arguing that his preferred choices should be the only choices.

He pushes the end of tenure for Florida public university faculty, arguing that they develop an "intellectual orthodoxy" is left unchecked, by which he means they get attached to ideas other than the orthodoxy that he supports. DeSantis promised to crack down on "woke" ideology, then called for an audit of money spent on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at colleges.

None of this is about choice. None of it. School choice advocates who hold Florida and DeSantis up as examples of forward-thinking awesome school choice advances are being disingenuous--Florida is on a road to impose a more ideologically focused authoritarian model of education in which only ideas approved by the governor may be included in schooling. 

It's the two-pronged win-win of the culture warriors. Either they dismantle the offending institution and replace it with one of their own, or they take over the institution and install the leadership they prefer. 

There are many levels of irony here, including the irony that a pluralistic school system run by locally elected officials provides far more choices than a system bent to a particular ideology. And many folks have pointed out the disconnect between conservative support for choice in some areas (education) but not in others (reproductive health). But there really is no disconnect, just differing definitions of choice, and a belief that any system of choice should only include the correct choices. Which for the strictest of ideologies (or opportunists playing to the ideologue crowd) is a very narrow set of choices. 

It's not about choice or freedom. It's about restricting the rights and expressions of people you disagree with and expanding the rights and expressions of the people you agree with. The more DeSantis advances his agenda, the clearer it becomes that it has never been about choice at all. 

What George Will Missed About That Charter Case

Apparently it's a thing to try to create enough public noise that you might get the Supreme Court to take on your case, so Baker Mitchell has been all over the conservative mediasphere this week bemoaning a Fourth Circuit court decision from last summer that he and his friends are hoping the Supremes will shortly make a decision to hear. 

The case is about dress codes, except that it's really about whether or not charter schools are public schools (that have to follow the same laws as other public schools) or private businesses (that get to exist in a Constitution-free zone).

Baker's has been singing his sad song in several outlets, and somehow he apparently got George Will to play a remix of the original in the Washington Post. Will is a smart guy, but in this piece he mostly repeated the charter's talking points from the case. If someone comes waving this piece in your face, here's what Will gets wrong (you can get the full background of the case itself here). 

There's an opening salvo of lovable Willian snark-- "If opponents of expanded school choices would devote to improving public education half the ingenuity they invest in impeding competition from alternatives to the status quo, there would be less demand for alternatives."

Then a cut to the chase-- SCOTUS needs to find that charter schools are not "state actors" (aka "not public schools") so that charters can present "pedagogical and cultural choices without being vulnerable to suffocating litigation." Because it would be suffocating to have to constantly grant students their constitutional rights or follow other anti-discrimination laws.

Will offers a quick explanation of what charter schools are, and he's almost entirely wrong. Laboratories of innovation? I dare you to name one educational "innovation" that public schools didn't already know (cream students with supportive families). Publicly funded? True. Open to all? Practically speaking, absolutely untrue, unless you add qualifiers like "open to all who would comply with the school's rules and requirements." This one's extra tricky, because the whole point of this continued legal wrangle is to find charters non-public schools so that they can freely decide which students they will not be open to without having to be sneaky about it. Tuition free? Sort of true, unless you happen to choose a charter where, for instance, parents are required to volunteer a certain number of hours.

Being non-unionized, they are exempt from much of the stultifying micromanagement and uniformity that narrows parental choices.

Nope. For starters, some charter schools have unions, and some states have rendered unions virtually powerless. And Will is using a rhetorical trick to suggest what he knows he can't say, because unions are not the source of stultifying micromanagement and uniformity.

Will characterizes the school at the center of the lawsuit as "classical, traditional-values-based" education and oddly highlights "with attention to manners," as if making girls show their legs is a matter of etiquette. And he repeats the claim that the dress code is parent-designed, which I find unlikely, but it's moot anyway--the lawsuit against the dress code also originated with parents, so that's rather a wash.

The plaintiffs say that the dress code violates the 14th Amendment, Will reports. So does the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Will has a rebuttal for that, which in its entirety is "Really."

Will argues that the basis for calling the charter a state actor are flimsy. Number one is "Charters are called 'public' schools," which is true--and the people who have most often and most vehemently insisted that charter schools are public schools are, in fact, charter school advocates. The have been vocal, vehement, at times pretty cranky about it. But Mitchell and Will would like to pretend that some random person slapped that label on them, rather than the label being argued ad infinitum by an industry that desperately wanted to wrap itself in the mantle of "public" education--but only when it was advantageous to do so.

Will isn't really going to address that point. Instead he's going to point out that public funding does not transform a school into a public actor, and that an action isn't a state action unless the state "compels or coerces it." I skipped law school, but would that mean that nobody can sue a local government for anything ever? Also Will says we've always had private schools, so you can't claim that providing education is "traditionally and exclusively" a government function, and he may have a point there.

He thinks one of the dissents "demolishes" the decision as draping "a pall of orthodoxy over charter schools" whose purpose is to provide "educational heterodoxy," and if that's truly the purpose of charters, then they are largely failing. There's no excuse for stretching the Fourteenth Amendment to "stamp out the rights of others to hold different values and to make different choices," and the school is being picked on for rules "at odds with modern sensibilities," which is an argument that would be right at home in a dissent to Brown v. Board. The dissenter and Will both glide over the fact we're talking about different values and choices about how to treat other people and make them behave, not, as the dissenter frames it, whether to order steak or salmon at a restaurant. In his example, students are the steak and salmon. 

Will suggests that charters are under attack because they are so popular, and this case is just an attempt to strangle them. Next thing you know, Will argues, there will be attacks on single sex charters and charters with anti-trans rules. And then religion will bring up the establishment clause, which seems unlikely since SCOTUS has pretty much gutted that whole wall between church and school thing. 

But Will warns that this is all about crushing "true diversity." Yes, that's where we are--the right to discriminate and treat others in ways generally not allowed by law is now "diversity," another example of the conservative approach of grabbing a liberal buzzword and trying to beat liberals over the head with it. 

Like all of the supporters of the charters in this case, Will skips over the fact that the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools came down hard in favor of the Fourth Circuit ruling. A win for the charter in this case will mean an end of the marketing charters as public schools, and it will raise the next obvious question--if these are not public schools, why are we paying for them with public tax dollars. It will seriously blur the line between charters and voucher-fed private schools, which for those who really believe in charters as something other than a means of defunding public education and getting voucher feet in the door--well, it will suck. 

Will gets it mostly wrong in this piece. But he thinks SCOTUS is going to decide whether or not to hear it soon, and if so--well, maybe they won't decide to set up a parallel school system in a Constitution-free zone, but I'm not going to bet heavily on it. 

AI Gets It Wrong Again

The lead paragraph from the Gizmodo story pretty well captures the awful stupidity:

Randall Reid says he’s never even been to Louisiana, much less stolen $10,000 worth of Chanel and Louis Vuitton handbags there. That didn’t stop police from arresting the 28-year-old Georgia resident for the theft, committed in a New Orleans suburb, based on an algorithmic guess at what his face looked like. Reid was on the way to a belated Thanksgiving dinner with his mother when the cops picked him up, three states and seven hours away from the scene of the crime. He was locked up for nearly a week.

Facial recognition algorithms have a spotty record, except when it comes to Black faces, in which case they have a terrible record. 

This needs to be brought up repeatedly because A) people need to stop talking about "AI" as if it is magical and smart when it is neither and B) there are still folks who think that facial recognition algorithms would be a great way to make schools more secure. This nightmarish idea will have legs as long as tech security companies can smell money. In fact, it can get even worse when districts consider putting cameras in every classroom. 

From putting cameras in every classroom, or just all over the building, it will be a short step to, "Hey, as long as we've got these images anyway, why not throw in some cool AI to help us track and track down certain people." We need constant reminders of stories like the story of Randall Reid. When people turn off their brains and turn on algorithms, bad things happen, and it would be a massive tragedy if those things happened to the most vulnerable members of our society. 

Charter Operators: "Don't Call Us Public"

In the regularly pro-choice Wall Street Journal, Baker Mitchell and Robert Spencer want to complain about a court decision declaring that their charter schools are, in fact, public schools. This, they warn, "imperils the charter school movement." Their complaint is a big pile of deep fried baloney.

The case that prompted this whinging

One of the charter schools operated by Roger Bacon Academy was sued by some parents over a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts (or skorts--but none of that pants-wearing stuff, ladies). 

Such a big deal. Who knew?

RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr., one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc. from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. Mitchell (now in his early eighties) thinks the rule is great:

“We're a school of choice. We're classical in our curriculum and very traditional. I believe that the more of the traditional things you have in place, the more they tend to reinforce each other,” he said in a phone interview. “We want boys to be boys and girls to be girls and have mutual respect for each other. We want boys to carry the umbrella for girls and open doors for them ... and we want to start teaching that in grammar school.”

The case bounced up through the various court levels until it landed in front of the full panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared that the rule was junk and had to be thrown out. Not a worthwhile call-back to what one dissenting judge called "the age of chivalry" as the majority noted such an age was also the age "when men could assault their spouses" and that chivalry "may not have been a bed of roses for those forced to lie in it."

Nor did the court accept the argument that girls were still getting good grades. “We cannot excuse discrimination because its victims are resilient enough to persist in the face of such unequal treatment."

So what's the big deal? (Spoiler alert: that state actor thing)

Mitchell and Spencer are not whining about the loss of their ability to require girls to show their legs. They protest that the policy was created by parents; well, so was the lawsuit, so that hardly seems like a useful point. And it's not the main concern,

The case hinged on the question of whether or not charter schools are "state actors" aka actual public schools. The court said, "Yes, they are." 

Mitchell and Spencer complain that no court has ever done such a thing and therefor:

The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources.

This is kind of hilarious, because the "convention" of calling these school public was created entirely, and purposefully, by the charter industry and its supporters. They have insisted loudly and often that charter schools are absolutely public schools, and have engaged in uncountable arguments with anyone who dares to say otherwise. Of course, they have also frequently insisted that they are private businesses when it's convenient for fending off state scrutiny or grabbing PPP pandemic relief money.

And despite Mitchell and Spencer's apocalyptic warnings, you know who applauded the court's ruling?

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The importance of this case could not be overstated, as it was the first time a federal appellate court considered whether public charter school students deserve the same constitutional civil rights protections as district public school students. The en banc court clearly and unequivocally affirmed that charter schools are public schools and, accordingly, must be bound by the US Constitution. Moreover, public charter school students have the same constitutional and civil rights as their district public school peers.

Galen Sherwin, ACLU senior staff attorney, observed that the ruling was important because  

The court rightly recognizes that ruling otherwise would leave states free to establish parallel, privately operated public school systems in a constitution-free zone, free to implement race segregation, religious discrimination, etc.

So what are they really, really upset about?

The tell comes a little further down the piece.

The ruling comes at a time when the charter-school movement is growing. Oklahoma’s attorney general recently issued a legal opinion stating that religious organizations must be allowed to operate charter schools in the Sooner State. A key aspect of the opinion was a finding that charter schools are not state actors and, therefore, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause doesn’t prohibit the inculcation of religious values, as it does in government-run schools.

If charter schools are state actors, then that might get in the way of expanding religious charters. And sure enough-- we find amicus briefs filed by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington VA, Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Clinic, the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, and the Religious Freedom Institute. "These experts," say the writers, confusing advocacy and lobbying with expertise, say the Fourth Circuit's ruling would undercut charter schools.

Well, no. They would undercut the extension of private religious organizations into a sweet, sweet chance to get their hands on public tax dollars while still enjoying unregulated freedom to indoctrinate some students into their religion while also discriminating against whatever students they choose to discriminate against in a taxpayer-funded Constitution-free zone.

Are we done yet?

Of course not. The school has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear their appeal. It invokes the 14th Amendment and features this kind of flag-waving:

North Carolina charter schools-like many throughout the Nation-build upon a critical insight: Empowering private entities to operate publicly funded schools with minimal government oversight supercharges educational innovation and expands parental choice. The decision below profoundly threatens this model.

"Supercharges innovation." Sure. Making girls wear skirts is one hell of a supercharged innovation. My usual offer stands--name one educational innovation that has come out of the modern charter school sector.

Mitchell and Spencer want you to know that damn ACLU is behind this case, but they aren't exactly being represented by a Mom and Pop firm. Aaron Streett is an attorney with Baker Botts, a multinational law firm (where both Amy Coney Barrett and Ted Cruz once worked), and that he's the chair of their Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Group. Streett says that the majority opinion "contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action...and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children."

The argument is simple enough--we are not a public school, so we should get to do whatever the hell we want (and be paid by taxpayer dollars while we do it).

It's a tough call for the charter biz--if they aren't public schools, then at this point they really aren't much different from private voucher schools, so what's the point of them? But if they want to market themselves as public schools, they can damn well operate under public school rules.

Who knows if SCOTUS will hear this, or what they will decide. But regardless of how things end up, it looks like the charter movement's days of being able to have things both ways may be coming to an end.

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.