FL: Don't Say African American Studies

The list of things unwelcome in Florida schools continues to grow, adding more evidence to the argument that whatever it is the DeSantis administration wants for education, it surely isn't choice. 

The DeSantis administration rejected the new College Board Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. In the letter to the College Board, the Department of Education stated that "the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law." 

The use of the word "inexplicably" here apparently refers to the fact that FDOE did not actually explain what in particular they found objectionable. Not a new trick--you may remember that Florida also rejected a pile of math textbooks for CRT violations and only after being pressed gave a couple of examples of what they were talking about. Though timing it to come in the same week as Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was certainly a bold choice.

The conservative Florida Standard pointed to some likely culprits from the syllabus, including the topics of Black Queer Studies and "Postracial Racism and Colorblindness" and here's Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a known critical race theory user. 

The AP folks say, "Well, it's just a first draft," and it remains to be seen if they will scrub the proposed course of anything they guess is offensive to DeSantis's sensibilities. The College Board is not a group I pujt great faith and trust in to get things right.

In the meantime, DeSantis and his legislature will continue to make sure that school choice can only be used to choose the choices that they approve of. 

In the meantime, Florida is also busy taking Disney to court to keep them from converting Splash Mountain. I'm sure the fact that Disney wants to convert to an attraction centered on their only African-American princess has nothing to do with it.  Nope-- the story has been picked up by many sites, but they all track back to a satire website. So there are apparently some limits.

Is It Really Equity Vs. Excellence?

Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) just published a piece about "The True Enemy of Equity," and while it makes some useful points, it misses a critical issue. 

Petrilli is spinning off a Stephen Sawchuk piece about how "equity" has become a "trigger word" and includes the quote “Equity may be the law, but we don’t agree on what it means.” Petrilli agrees that equity is a Good Thing to which the nation should aspire, and yet...

I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from Americans across the ideological spectrum. A potentially unifying argument might go something like this:

In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blemish on human dignity and flourishing.

Searching for the reason this is not a unifying theme of our nation, Petrilli notes that we know that inequity starts between birth and age 5, so equity work ought to address those years. The left, he says, has been working hard there, though he argues the right can contribute as well, mostly by supporting the "success sequence" (he doesn't use those words, but that's what he's describing--family stability, marriage before parenthood, etc). 

Then, he says, schools have to back that up. "Schools," he writes, "may not be able to overcome all the damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot." And so we arrive at his central point.

Educational equity, then, means providing children, and especially poor children, with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public dollars on the students who need it most.

The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity....

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excellence is the antidote to inequity.

He thinks the solution to Sawchuk's puzzle is this-- that "equity advocates" have turned the notion into a "trigger word" by "arguing that excellence is indeed the enemy."

By their line of thinking, anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or National Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a zero-sum game. Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.

There's no doubt that there are folks out there who, in the name of fairness, want to Harrison Bergeron the hell out of everybody and slap every fast runner in a pair of cement shoes. I met plenty of them when I was in the classroom. But that's only a slice of the issue. The real heart of it is this--

Who gets to define excellence?

Petrilli's own piece includes multiple examples of anti-excellence that are highly debatable, from decisions blocking charter schools to rules that keep schools from retaining their best young teachers to test scores (and the full on baloney flap about Virginia schools that aren't "celebrating" students with a fourth place get-no-prize finish on the PSAT). I don't want to go down a rabbit hole of arguing each of those, but I want to note that, on the subject of excellence, we keep having this conversation:

Pat: The [SAT/exam school/gifted program/etc] is biased and favors students from particular backgrounds. It's not really measuring excellence.

Sam: Why are you opposed to excellence?

I absolutely agree with Petrilli that mediocrity is an enemy of equity--especially when we slap a medal on it and call it excellence.

Look, this is not a new issue. In English, much of what we think we know about the most excellent words to use and the most excellent way to pronounce them is simply because of the belief that the most excellent people in London used language in a much more excellent way than the poor folks out in the sticks. Things like the notion that Latin-based language is more elevated and excellent is an artifact of cultural and historical events.

"Excellence" is inevitably defined by the dominant culture. I'm not arguing that it has no meaning at all, but its meaning is slippery, and if we are not careful, it is a hugely biased and tilted playing field. Excellence can only exist in response to a set of standards, and those standards are always human-made--sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Those standards cannot be treated as if they were plucked full-blown on stone tablets from the heart of a burning bush. 

So I agree with Petrilli when he writes 

John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need to live up to their full potential.

But "get what they need" is doing so much heavy lifting there. 

I also agree that programs like gifted and talented programs should exist (though often they involve giving a select group of students opportunities and supports that all students ought to get). But if that gifted and talented program seems to mostly include certain sorts of students from certain backgrounds, somebody had better back up and take a look at what standards are being used. 

Unquestioned belief in a particular measure of excellence, particularly when that measure is a bad one, can cause a great deal of damage (insert here everything I've said about the Big Standardized Test in the last ten years). But--and here I am agreeing with Petrilli again--that doesn't mean we should never make the attempt to identify, locate, support and celebrate excellence, even as we regularly examine our measures of excellence and the values that we have embedded in them. 

That discussion--what is excellence, how do we spot it, how do we support and celebrate it--is one of those education discussions that will never ever end, and it should very much be tied to a never-ending discussion about equity. 

Should We Tear The Paper Ceiling?

Upon his installation as Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro's first move was an executive order that ended degree requirements for 92% of the state workforce. Effective immediately, about 65,000 jobs don't require a college degree. 

If that strikes you as a big step, let me introduce you to the Tear The Paper Ceiling campaign.

It comes courtesy of the folks from Oppotunity@Work.  The outfit was founded by Byron Auguste and Karan Chopra, and a look at their careers tells us plenty about what kind of operation this is.

Chopra was born in India and grew up in Ghana. In 2014 he made the Forbes 30 under 30 list. He was a software developer at Siemens for a year, and went on to found WAVE (social venture tackling youth unemployment in Nigeria), GADCO (an agri-food biz in sub-Saharan Africa), advises X (a "moonshot factory"), was an advisor for Entangled Group (focused on economic mobility and the future of work), advises the SkillUp Coalition, and currently heads up Cervest (a climate intelligence platform). And back in the day, he spent three years as a consultant with McKinsey.

That may be where he met Auguste, who spent twenty years as a senior partner at McKinsey, before going on to be a deputy director of the National Economic Council under Obama. I'm not going to get into why massive consulting firm McKinsey is a big flapping red flag, but you can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So they founded O@W in 2015 "in part to support and grow TechHire, a White House initiative launched by our co-founder Byron Auguste to connect overlooked communities with technology job openings. We were originally “incubated” as a “civic enterprise” within New America, a think tank dedicated to bringing new ideas and voices into America’s public discourse." One more neoliberal thingy. 

Then in 2017 they turned into a 501(c)(3) with two goals. First, to look for "tech-enabled solutions" to fix the opportunity gap, and second, "rally public, private and nonprofit partners to rewire the labor market." Their stated mission is now just that second one. As such, they tout the STAR worker-- Skilled Through Alternative Routes. And that has brought us to Tear The Paper Ceiling.

TTPC was launched by O@W in October of 2022, with a big fat list of partners. Co-hosts included LinkedIn and the Ad Council and O@W, and the list of 50 partner groups includes Cognizant, Education Design Lab, the Gates Foundation, Google, IBM, Walmart, and McKinsey. 

The campaign is built around a PSA campaign, which is why some of you have been seeing ads for this thing. 

The basic pitch is that there are 70 million STARs out there--people who would be swell hires if not for "the invisible barrier that comes at every turn for workers without a bachelor’s degree. See also: no alumni network, biased algorithms, degree screens, stereotypes, and misconceptions." See, it's just an unreasonable prejudice that makes people who have an opening for a physicist only consider people with a degree in physics. That damned paper ceiling. Or take this florid description of the problem:

Millions of workers with in-demand skills and experience, overlooked for higher-wage jobs because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Companies stuck on a talent treadmill, desperate to build a reliable pipeline of skilled workers. Two allies separated by an insidious and invisible barrier. Now the enemy has a name. The paper ceiling.

Oh, that insidious and invisible barrier put in place by... well, they never quite explain that one. Companies are encouraged to sign a pledge, and STARs are encouraged to sign up for a job placement service. 

What to make of this? How is the College Board partnering with a push to tell folks they don't need college? Why is Walmart in on this when they're not exactly known for demanding that their underpaid meat widgets have college degrees? 

Look, I'm quite certain that there are very valuable workers out there with non-college backgrounds, and I'm also certain that there are plenty of jobs for which a four-year degree is not truly necessary, and when the labor market was stuffed with fresh meat, companies ramped up job requirements just because they could. Who built the scary paper ceiling, if not the people who are doing the hiring in the first place? So encouragement to stop demanding that people be overqualified for jobs is not necessarily out of place.

Given the many corporate players involved, the cynical view of Tear The Paper Ceiling is that this is just one more attempt to enlarge the work force by lowering standards. We've seen plenty of states tearing up the paper ceiling for teaching by enacting various rule changes that allow anyone with a warm body to run classrooms. Some of these partners are here to pitch themselves as Just As Good As College (Google career certificates ought to be just fine for hiring). 

The pitch here is also for "skills-based hiring," which is the employment side of competency based education and its cousin, "ledger"-style cradle-to-career pipeline stuff, where you collect a bunch of "I can do X" badges from wherever you will, and employers can sift through the meat widget database of blockchain-stored digital identities to order up whatever configuration of meat widget skill sets they desire. That seems like the better explanation for why Walmart is in on this. 

It should go without saying that this approach to employment is for the Lessers, and that the Betters will still send their kids to college. Bill Gates did not tell his children, "Just go out there and get some life experience and find whatever job you can by dint of your life skills." But for corporate leaders looking for cheaper and easier ways to fill jobs (and doing it comfortably from far above any ceilings), this could be great. I'll bet you anything that somewhere not far above that torn-up paper ceiling, you'll find other ceilings made of much tougher stuff.

And while nobody at Tear The Paper Ceiling is talking about redesigning education to fit this twisty dream, it looks to be very much a part of how a cradle-to-career pipeline for worker bees would operate, and that has implications for how K-12 would work (at least for some people).

NH: Supporting Vouchers By Changing the Law

New Hampshire's GOP has had a long, rough road to get to the Land of School Vouchers.

Education Savings Accounts, a kind of super-voucher, have been pushed in New Hampshire for several years, championed by Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, a businessman/legislator who homeschooled his children and has long advocated for school choice. Edelblut bowed out of a gubernatorial race with Chris Sununu, and was subsequently appointed to the head education spot by Sununu, where he butted heads with the Democratic-led legislature over many attempts to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education.

Back in 2017, voucher fans came close with SB-193, which proposed Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for the state, handing parents money they could spend on a broad assortment of education-ish expenses. The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. John Reagan, argued that the lack of accountability didn’t matter because he claimed that public schools “can’t explain where the money goes now, anyway.” Edelblut backed that one, too.

In 2020, the GOP flipped both the House and Senate. One of their first orders of business was a new voucher bill. They used the name “education freedom accounts,” an echo of Betsy DeVos’s ill-fated national voucher plan. The state would hand its share of a student’s education funding to a scholarship organization to give to families for a wide assortment of expenses, with loose limits on who could get the voucher, few limits on how it could be spent, and no oversight of the taxpayer dollars.

The hearing for this bill drew 3,800 people to speak, only 600 of whom were in favor. Opponents warned that the cost of the program would be far higher than the $130,000 advertised. Rather than buck the wave of public opinion against the bill, the legislature turned it into a last-minute addition to the state budget.

The vouchers are funded by the state’s Education Trust Fund. That fund was established in 1999 as a result of Claremont School District v. Governor of New Hampshire, a case that resulted in an agreement that the state would kick in a larger share of school funding. (Claremont is also the city where I lived and attended school up through third grade. It's a nice little place.)

And those warnings about a lowball estimate for the cost of the vouchers? Yeah, they were only off by about 18,400%-- the current price tag is $24 million. There are two contributing factors. One was the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity canvassed door to door to make sure that everyone was aware that there was free money on the table, which may be why (factor #2) the vast majority of families taking voucher money have students who have never set foot in public schools in the first place. 

However, New Hampshire's voucher plan has one big achilles heel--the law.

Remember the Education Trust Fund from which that $24 million in taxpayer money has been taken? There are rules about that money, and they include a rule that says the funds

shall not be used for any purpose other than to distribute adequate education grants to municipalities' school districts and to approved charter schools...

Not vouchers. Not  debit card payouts to families for whatever education-adjacent expenses they choose.

And so, it is lawsuit time. Besides the misappropriation of funds in direct contradiction of the pretty clear law point, the lawsuit also raises another issue--one that applies even in states that don't have this peculiar funding system.

The voucher system is administered the Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire. They have the responsibility to determine which families are eligible for the program, disburse the funds, and determine which vendors may be on the receiving end of the voucher money. This company--which is not a government entity-- takes over the functions we would expect from a state department of education, which is the other critical point of the suit.

This diversion of public education funding is central to the State’s goal for the program: removing students from public school systems by using the EFA as a substitute for the State’s duty to provide an education.

Further, the suit alleges, “the EFA program delegates virtually all authority to CSF with no meaningful oversight.” In fact, as is the case with many such voucher laws, it expressly forbids the state to “impose any additional regulation of education service providers.”

So even though New Hampshire has established one of the most expensive voucher systems in the country, with virtually no accountability or oversight, the system is still facing pushback.  So what is a voucher-loving legislator to do? 

How about proposing a constitutional amendment? Here's Constitutional Amendment 7, which is a simple bill-- it just removes one sentence from the part of the constitution that says that money raised by the state for education may not be spent on "the schools of any religious sect or denomination." Yes, New Hampshire taxpayers could have the super-duper opportunity to pay taxes to support religious schools that reject those taxpayers own children for not being the right sort. Seems awesome.

And not that anyone is saying that the lawsuit looks like winner because the law so clearly forbids the spending of Education Trust Fund money on vouchers, but here's HB 440, that just rewrites the Education Trust Fund rules so that it's okay to use the funds to fund the voucher system. The bill actually expands the original rules quite a bit. ETF funds could also be spent on a variety of things, including charter school lease costs and "phase out" grants for school districts. And if it seems like this might get even more expensive, the bill also allows general fund monies to be shunted into the ETF, which is handy way to hide from taxpayers that they are setting up an entire parallel school system, which represents an entire new financial commitment from the state.

There are some other bills waiting to be heard in Concord, including one that would allow local communities to establish their own voucher system. And, of course, there's a bill to broaden the already-broad eligibility requirements for the voucher system, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for even more extra education funding (but still without oversight or accountability). 

My grandmother, who was a New Hampshire state legislator for much of her adult life, started her political career on the school board, and she would have some choice words for this continuing effort to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public education in the Granite State. It's destructive and, more than that, dishonest-- but then, I suppose neither "We want to raise taxes so that we can send more tax dollars to private schools" nor "We'd like to just defund public education and leave you parents to fend for yourselves, but we'll give you a couple grand to shut up about it" would play that well. 

Here's hoping taxpayers in New Hampshire are paying attention. Not that the legislators don't know how to just ignore the public and press on, but there have to be elections eventually and all of these shenanigans would be worth remembering. 

Time To Get Your Copy Of Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door

Perhaps you just didn't get around to it at the time, or maybe you're not one to spring for hardback copies of books (I get it--for extra money you get a book that takes up extra space on your shelf). But if you never got your copy of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, now's your chance, because the paperback edition is now available to order (release date March 7).

The book came out in November of 2020, and in the interim it has become only more trenchant. Every trend and threat identified by authors Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire has only become more pronounced, more active, more shamelessly aggressive.

They end the book with a clear alarm:

The threat to public education...is grave. A radical vision for unmaking the very idea of public schools has moved from the realm of ideological pipe dream to legitimate policy.

The book identifies a four-pronged push against public education (I'm going to crib here from my Forbes review). First, the notion that education is a personal good, not a collective one. Reformers have suggested that public education is not a public service to society, but an individual consumer good, like toasters and automobiles. Therefor, schools “belong in the domain of the free market, not the government.” And while society should bear a minimal cost for minimal education for the poor, education “consumers” should mostly pay their own way. Finally, collective groups like teachers unions need to be quashed, both to allow more “efficiency” in the marketplace and to nullify their political weight.

The rise of vouchers and neo-vouchers, the development of techniques to make education profitable, the rise of computer-centered education, deregulation of the education sector (both directly and via charter schools), the development of reductive school ratings, edvertising, breaking teaching into fast food style Uberized gig work, and the “unbundling” of education so that school itself is no longer even necessary—Schneider and Berkshire trace all of these developments through the various tactics used and successes or failures achieved.

The result is a stark and alarming picture of the movement to dismantle public education (currently getting a further boost from the nation’s pandemic response). But the writers handle all sides fairly and clearly; this is not a book that paints the ed reform crowd as evil monsters, and readers will come away understanding the rationales and beliefs behind various wings of the movement to disrupt public education. These are old ideas, but they have neither gone away nor tired of trying.

This is an eminently readable, thoroughly sourced book that puts all the various threats to public education into a single picture. For someone who is trying to figure out what the heck is going on, or who has heard vaguely that there is some kind of education related fuss, this is a clarifying read. 

And while this book predates the recent rise of critical race theory panic, the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ students, gag laws, and suspension of the right to read, once you understand the ongoing attempts to tear down public education and learn who some of the players are, the current maelstrom makes much more sense. 

Plus there's a new preface, and a bunch more blurbs (including one by me), so there's that to look forward to. Seriously-- if you didn't get around to ordering a copy last time, now's the time to hop on the paperback version. 

ICYMI: MLK Weekend Edition (1/15)

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is a test that many districts fail. Districts in my neck of the woods take the weenie's way out-- it's an in-service day for teachers, and a day off for students, so no matter how you feel about the day, the district can claim it's in your corner. If you are in a place that doesn't enact such shenanigans, congratulations. 

Here's some reading for the week, which is scattered all over the place. Remember to share.

Pennridge LGBTQ students feel ‘erased’ after losing Pride symbols in schools, as Central Bucks considers its own ban

Exceptional piece from Emily Rizzo at WHYY/PBS, in which she actually talks to students about how a local version of Don't Say Gay affects them. The best quote, though, is from the Education Law Center: "Being gay or transgender is not a political statement that a student is making and with which others can agree or disagree; it is their identity and must be respected.”

Charter school innovation shouldn’t come at the expense of constitutional protections for students

One more piece about that dress code lawsuit that SCOTUS may or may not hear. Tressa Pankovits at The Hill manages to spot the issues at hand.

How School Security Changed Since the Pandemic, in 5 Charts

From EdWeek, by Sarah Sparks, a collection of interesting factoids in chart form. Make of them what you will.

5-4 Podcast on Kennedy v. Bremerton

I am not much of a podcast guy, but the CMO (Chief Marital Officer) here at the institute loves them, and she's recently been listening to 5-4, a podcast that looks at close decisions by the Supreme Court. This episode looks at the case of the post-game prayer coach. It's a good breakdown of the case. Warning: you could level a small country with the number of f-bombs these folks set off.

‘Public school dollars have to go to public schools’: Beshear backs charter school lawsuit

The courts decided that Kentucky's constitution does not allow for tax credit scholarships. Now that same reasoning is being used against charters. A report from LinkNKY.

Caldwell School District meeting ends in chaos

In Idaho, a first term legislator decides to do some grandstanding and lead an attack on elected school board members. 

Steve Perry and P. Diddy Harlem Charter School: Only One 8th Grader Proficient On State Math Test

Gary Rubinstein reports on yet another uninspiring moment in the history of Dr. Steve Perry.

Pro-Voucher Lobbying Group Funds a Questionable Report to Support Its Fight

Meanwhile, Jan Resseger in Ohio looks at a questionable piece of research put up by voucher lobbying groups hoping to squelch the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.

DeVos-funded campaign for school voucher-like plan withdraws petitions in a sign of defeat

Betsy DeVos suffers another defeat, or rather, packs it in before the actual defeat arrives. Vouchers lose yet again. Story at Chalkbeat Detroit.

The Conservatives Who Attacked School Boards in 2022 Are Now Going After Libraries

In The New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant takes a look at the newest outgrowth of Moms for Liberty-- Moms for Libraries. And yeah, that's not "for" as in "we support them" so much as "for" as in "we are out to get them."

Keep Your Hands Off My Curriculum

Nancy Flanagan has some thoughts about people who want to tell teachers what not to teach. 

New data shows fewer students per counselor at nation’s schools, but caseloads remain high

Chalkbeat with a story about another one of those slow-brewing quiet crises-- schools are running short on guidance counselors.

A Leap in the Rankings When Nothing’s Changed

John Warner with another installment on Peleton Pedagogy, and why rankings are not to be trusted.

At Forbes this week, I took a look at the Network for Public Education report on charter profiteering, specifically the whacky world of cyber charters. 

Feel free to follow me over at substack, where you get all of the content straight into your email inbox (for free).

PA: Penncrest Passes Reading Restrictions

"If we go to court over it, so be it,” he said, “because at the end of the day we’re standing up for what’s right and for what God has said is right and true.”

That's David Valesky of the Penncrest school board, responding to the board's passage of new restrictive rules on what sorts of books can be placed in the school library. 

The rules change has been brewing for almost two years, starting in May of 2021 when the library set up a display of LGBTQ+ books and 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'.

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."

Valesky's concerns continued. Back in May 2022, 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, but within a few months (including the month with elections in it), Valesky was back calling for tighter restrictions on what people can read.

Valesky has been the point man on this moral panic, but he's certainly not alone. Folks have been vocal in support of the restrictions at board meetings, and in the comments for my previous post about this (and that's not including the comments I didn't put up--pro tip: if you want to accuse people of an actual crime, the take your evidence to the police, and if you don't have any, then just shut up). And supporters were there at the January 12 voting meeting (you can watch it here-- don't miss the student who opens with "Hi, I’m Ezra. And I’m a radical left wing activist.”). 

These are clearly people who believe they are doing God's Work by stamping out evil books that promote evil things, though they see an awful lot of evil in an awful lot of things. To listen to the discussion you would think that the school wanted to place hard core porn films in the library and not, say, mass market novels like Water for Elephants and Looking for Alaska. 

And there is the usual disconnect. A student in the previous comments notes that with cuts and schedules, most students have no access to the library, anyway. Meanwhile, research tells us that students are turning to the internet--even in school--to look at actual porn. 

One board member noted that there was no worries about unintended consequences because the policy only forbids "explicit" stuff, so her beloved Les Miserables will be safe. I wish her luck. Since supporters claim that those opposing the policy were defending "pornography being read by minors," my sense is that the folks on this reading rampage are not interested in making very fine distinctions. Especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ depiction, where they have been clear that any depiction at all is evil and not to be tolerated. 

The broadest term in the rules is "sexualized content," which can mean almost anything. Valesky and his supporters have been pretty clear about what they think it means. For Penncrest students, it means they're about to learn some lessons about censorship in the US.