The Person In The Classroom

Lately, some folks have been online opining about how teachers should be a mysterious black box to their students, not a piece of personal information shared. Mostly, it's in the context of exchanges like this:

Growing up, I don’t recall teachers announcing their marital status & pronouns to everyone.

They’re there to educate.

How is this still a complaint of the Left? https://t.co/s7nZeegZuh

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 21, 2023

In other words, it's okay if teacher gag laws make it necessary for LGBTQ teachers to keep their personal lives a secret, because all teachers should keep their personal lives a secret (not sure what you're supposed to do about being Black in an anti-CRT state). 

For the many millions of us in small town and rural school districts, it is an absurd argument. 

I taught for almost forty years in a small town/rural district. Taught, in fact, in the same school from which I graduated. I was also, during those years, a church choir director, a newspaper columnist, and an active local theater and music guy. Also, the father of two students who came up through that same system. I do not have the time or space to trace through every line of connection that ties all the folks in this community together. Beyond those ties, you simply meet students everywhere--in church, shopping for groceries, at the 4-H fair, walking down the street, buying underwear, any sort of outing with your family. 

In that environment, you share details of your life for a couple of reasons, one being that nature abhors an information vacuum and if your students don't know things, they will either make them up or dig them up elsewhere (e.g. Student to me: "My mom says you were a big weenie in high school"). But also because it is hard for students to get interested in being taught by a robot. 

This does not mean that a teacher should regularly spew their guts over the classroom. But there is no reason to stop being a person when you walk into a classroom, and in small town settings, it's hard to avoid it. 

Also--and I have to believe this is true no matter how large your district--as a teacher you are often one of the small group of adults that students know, and you cannot avoid modeling how adults navigate the world. 

Years ago, in the process of discussing a work, I mentioned that a literary character was probably a hot babe, and one student responded, "Oh, I don't know how Mrs. Greene would feel about that."

There was a brief moment in which some students looked around in mild alarm, and my niece, who was also a student in the class said, "He's divorced." The student who had spoken up absolutely froze.

In that moment, whether I wanted to bring up the subject or not, I was going to show students how an adult could feel about being divorced. Was it something to be proud of, ashamed of? Was it something unmentionable? I was going to model... something, whether I wanted to or not. (FTR, I think I modeled something along the lines of "not shameful, but no point of pride, either, and also not news, so nobody's in trouble for bringing it up.") 

The things people will know about you in a small town teacher world is just mind-boggling. They come from the same families that serve your food, chat with you while you're shopping, sit in the next pew, fix your car, and handle your medical care (one of my Small Town Teacher stories is the time I had my first colonoscopy and the tech was a recent student of mine). It evens out a bit, because students will share things with about home that would make their parents' hair curl, but still. The notion that you could keep your personal life a secret is hilarious.

Likewise, in a small town district, your politics may not be a secret at all (Heck, for years, a social studies teacher in my school was also the mayor of the city). Maybe you can keep your political leanings secret, or maybe ever since your picture ran on the front page of the newspaper waving that sign at that rally, your politics will be pretty well known by everybody who cares to pay attention (and it should be noted that not everybody will care to pay attention). 

What do you do? You model how intelligent people handle political stances in the adult world. You show that you can treat people with whom you disagree as if they are human beings deserving of respect and decent treatment. 

The politics in the classroom debate is getting broader because we have decided that everything is politics. The foundation of our big disagreements about race and LGBTQ issues is a disagreement about what the argument is really about. 

For folks on the right, the understanding is that racial issues in this country were all fixed in the mid-sixties and there is no longer anything to complain about, and that LGBTQ orientations are unnatural and therefor the result of either trauma or trickery. Therefor, any discussions about rights or considerations for these groups is simply a political ploy.

For other folks, "Black lives matter" and "LGBTQ persons deserve to exist and be treated decently" are not political statements, but statements about basic humanity.

Are there limits? Sure. Like everything else in education, it's a balancing act. Requiring students to sign on as active crusaders in your cause is not okay (and most often comes across as "You must pretend to believe X in order to get a good grade in this class," which never serves anyone). 

Look, if a teacher is going to be a person in the classroom (and I think they should), then I think the appropriate stance is this: 

"I am a person, with strengths, weaknesses, biases, opinions, and a variety of life experiences. Some of this may come up in this class, and some may not, but what you need to know as students is that none of it will affect how I treat, teach, or assess you. You will not be picked on or receive a lower grade because you believe X or refuse to believe Y. I will communicate the standards of this class clearly to you, and I guarantee that there are no secret hidden standards that I will use. Whatever you believe or disbelieve, you are safe to be that person in here."

Maybe in a large district you can work in a building where nobody knows anything about you. Maybe you can carefully monitor every word that comes out of your mouth so that you never slip up and drop hints about your life outside of school. Maybe you find a way to never be seen with your family in public. Maybe nothing in your life will ever blow up loudly enough that the echoes make it into your classroom. Maybe you can learn to function as someone who is not actually a full person in your classroom. You sure can't do any of that in a small town district, and imagining trying just makes my head hurt. It's perhaps my own bias and experience speaking, but the whole exercise strikes me as making you a less effective teacher and a very weary human being.

Choice, Vouchers, and the End of Public Education

Doug Mastriano was not out of step with the movement; he was just a bit early.

Mastriano ran for governor of Pennsylvania with the idea that he could end real estate taxes entirely and  cut state funding for public schools to $0.00. Just give everyone a tiny voucher and send them on their way. The idea was far enough out there that the campaign tried to back away from it (without entirely disowning it) and even other GOP politicians raised eyebrows and said, "No, not that."

You slice them off at the knees, right here--

The thing is, this is not a new idea. It has been the fondest dream of some choicers all along. Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, offered a succinct digest in the Washington Post of what Milton Friedman, granddaddy of the not-overtly-racist wing of the school choice movement, thought about the movement and its ultimate goals.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

You don't have to set the wayback machine to find folks saying this quiet part out loud. Utah is one of several red states racing to ram through a voucher bill. Here's Allison Sorenson, executive director of Utah Fits For All, an outfit marketing the voucher plan like crazy; in this clip, she's explaining that the folks who back Utah's plan can't come right out and say they're going to defund public education entirely, that admitting the goal is to destroy public education would be too politically touchy. 

Vouchers are not about choice. Just look at Florida, which has worked to disrupt, defund and dismantle public schools for years, while simultaneously shutting down and limiting what choices schools are allowed to offer. Look at every state's voucher law; they all enshrine a private "education provider's" right to deny and discriminate as they wish, thereby denying choice to any students they wish to deny choice to. One of the biggest limiters of school choice is not the public system, but the private system's unwillingness to open their doors to all these students who, we hear, are just thirsting for choices.

We know what a free market education system looks like--it looks like the US post-secondary education system. Occasional attempts at free-to-all schools are beaten down by racist and classist arguments, along with charges of socialist indoctrination. You get as much choice as you can afford, the private schools only accept (and keep) the students they want, and those who aspire to certain levels of schooling have to sink themselves in debt to get it. Meanwhile, state's slowly but surely withdraw financial support from the few "public" universities left.

Should we enter a world where vouchers flourish and public schools die out, it seems easy to imagine a next step in which politicians either quietly (with budgetary legerdemain) or publicly (by attacking the voucher "entitlements" or asking why people without kids should have to pay taxes to send other people's kids to school) make the voucher payment thinner and thinner, offering advice like the already-too-oft-repeated advice that some folks might want to sign up for one of those Microschools, where a few neighbor kids gather to pull some education off a computer screen. 

It would be easy. After all, instead of a collective such as a teachers union or the collective group of parents and taxpayers rallied around a community's school, the slashers would face a disjointed, splintered bunch of individual parents making their individual way through a broad marketplace. 

Milton Friedman's dream is still alive, and this year it appears that some folks are working hard to get one step closer to it. May they all fail miserably. 

ICYMI: Is It Still January Edition (1/22)

Is this month dragging? It seems like January is dragging. But it has been a huge week for Good Things To Read, so here's your list.

Old Obstacles, New Opportunities

Let's start on a hopeful note. The opponents of public education in Arizona (and there are many) lost the governor's office. Nicole Wolff at Stories from Arizona explains what some of the benefits could be.

Tennessee bill wants to shift control of third-grade retention back to local school districts 

More hope. Tennessee might actually stop a stupid, ineffective,. abusive third grade reading retention law. Erin McCullough at WKRN reports.

After Bill to Eviscerate Ohio State Board of Education Fails in December, Same Bill Is Reintroduced as SB1 in New Legislative Session

So much for hope. Jan Resseger reports from Ohio, where the GOP has decided that there are too many Democrats on the state board of education, so they'd like to strip it of power and just put the governor in charge.

Constitutional amendment would eliminate State Board of Education

Nebraska, too.

A teacher shortage so acute that students are expected to learn without one

A tremendous piece of reporting from Moriah Balingit at the Washington Post. Rural Mississippi is in trouble. The trouble filling teaching positions may be a regional and local thing, but this is the region and locality where it is really being felt.

Conservative group involved in Central Bucks library regulations some fear as de facto book ban

Turns out that the Central Bucks school district's reading restrictions for students may have been actually co-authored by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a far right group with a goal of making Pennsylvania "a place where God is honored."

A deep-pocketed donor from Pa. is moving onto the national stage. That’s a problem

You may not have heard of Jeffrey Yass (though I have written about him), the richest guy in PA and a huge fan of right wing anti-public ed causes. A group of writers at the Pennsylvania Capital-Star explain why his intention of going national is not good news.

Gender Queer: A banned book review

At Brutal South, Paul Bowers goes ahead and checks to see what the fuss is about, while providing some useful context for that fuss.

The “Learning Loss” Trap

The editors at Rethinking Schools explain how Learning Loss is a tool for yet more reformster shenanigans.

The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession

For you podcast folks, a new installment from Have You Heard. Warning-- it's kind of a bummer. Solid research on the hollowing out of the profession.

Americans want to know what Gov. DeSantis’ definition of ‘woke’ is. He’s not saying

A Miami Herald op-ed (via Yahoo) by Fabiola Santiago calling out DeSantis and his ill-defined lousy beliefs.

Universal Education Savings Accounts, HB1 and the Further Defunding and Dismantling of Florida’s Public Schools

Accountabaloney adds up the cost of Florida's new vouchers for all proposal, and holy smokes!

Conservative America’s New Authoritarianism: “Free Speech as Long as I Agree.”

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the hot new trend among red governors and other right-tilted folks.

Have we really hit 46% grift inflation in per-voucher cost?

Billy Townsend does the best he can with Florida's sketchy data to figure out just how big and bad the voucher impact has become.

Field Trips Gone Wild

Nancy Flanagan with a story of how some folks, poised to jump on public schools for anything they can gin up discontent about, found a way to kill a great field trip. 

What Happened to the 1.3 Million Children Who Stopped Going to School?

Carol Burris at The Progressive breaks down what exactly did or didn't happen to the "missing" children. (Spoiler alert: they didn't all sign up for charter schools).

Few Iowa families will have more choices with GOP ‘school choice’ plan

Iowa is on the list of states where the GOP is trying to quickly ram through an expansive voucher law. Ed Tibbetts at the Iowa Capital Dispatch points out that the choice that the bill promises is an illusion.

If Iowa passes a voucher bill, this guy says he’ll open up a Satanic school

His name is Joe Stutler, and he told a hearing, "Satan wants your money, and I want a piece of this lovely grift action."  He's a combat veteran and a champion troller. Reported by Herman Mehta for Only Sky. 

Community groups call on Marion County to stop approving charter schools

Jasmine Minor at WISHTV reports on calls by community groups (including some ministerial types) for Indianapolis to knock it off already with the continued approving of crappy charter schools.

Anger grows in Virginia city where first-grader shot teacher

An AP story about the school and community where that shooting occurred, providing some useful context and a reminder that the rising tide of school violence is an ongoing problem.

Altoona Area School Board approves AR-15 for school resource officers, “heaven forbid” they need them

It's doubly stupid, because nobody needs more guns in school and of all the guns to use to defend against school shooters, the AR-15 is a lousy choice (you'll notice that police departments do not carry them into shooter situations). 

Over at Forbes, I took a look at Virginia's terrible voucher bills and how to teach in the era of ChatGPT and its ilk.

Join me on substack to get all this stuff in your inbox (for free).

UT: Vouchers and a Cynical Bribe

Utah has jumped on the voucher train as they railroad an education savings account bill through the House, tying it to a call for raises for the state's teachers.

It's not particularly subtle. The language is right here, where the bill says "the amount of the salary adjustment for each full-time educator is:"

(i) if Title 53F, Chapter 6, Part 4, Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, is funded and in
effect, $8,400; or
(ii) if Title 53F, Chapter 6, Part 4, Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, is not funded
and in effect, $4,200.

Utah voters rejected vouchers back in 2007. Heck, the House voted down a voucher bill in February of 2022. That time, folks were afraid that it would drain far too much money from a system that ranks at the bottom in the US for state funding of public schools.

What's a voucher supporter to do? Ram a bill through quickly, so that people don't have a chance to voice opposition, and throw in a bribe so that folks can't oppose it without giving up hush money opposing teacher raises. 

Some days it's just a lot of work to find ways to circumvent that pesky democracy thing.

How about the voucher bill itself? Is it any good?

Short answer: No, it's a money-grabbing nightmare.

All Utah students are eligible, which means that rich families whose students never set foot in public school can still grab some public tax dollars to supplement their private schooling, draining money from public schools while reducing their costs by $0.00. Homeschoolers can hoover up some free state money, too. 

The program will be run by a hired "program manager," thereby outsourcing a government function to a private company.

Families that sign up must waive any rights to "disability service" for their children and give up all rights under IDEA.

There are no educational qualifications to be a vendor in the program, no requirements to check to see if vendors are actually able to do what they say they can do. Private schools do face some minimal requirements. The program manager is supposed to "adopt policies that maximize the number of eligible service providers," one more sign that, once again, this program delegates the development and implementation of education policy to a private company.

But there are, of course, the usual restrictions saying that they are not state actors because they accept state money, and that nobody can require them to alter their "creed, practices, admission policies, hiring practices, or curricula." Bring on the taxpayer funded discrimination and religious education. 

Buried in the bill is some language that comes close to acknowledging what this is really about:

The creation of the program or establishment of a scholarship account on behalf of
a student does not:
(i) imply that a public school did not provide a free and appropriate public education
for a student; or
(ii) constitute a waiver or admission by the state.

In other words, we know that we are cutting these people loose and we are, in fact, trying to weasel out of any obligations to actually provide a free and appropriate education for all the students in our state, so we'd better put in some language to protect ourselves in case anyone wants to call us on our bullshit in a court of law.

This is a bad bill. Sponsor Rep. Candice Perucci wasn't kidding when she said "This is the beginning of us reinventing public education in Utah," if by "reinventing" you mean "defunding and getting everyone out of it so that we no longer have it in any meaningful way." 

No accountability. No oversight. Privatizing the operation of the state's education system. Defunding public education, while funding discrimination and religious instruction. Literally taking money away from students in public school to give it to homeschoolers and private schools.  And trying to throw some money at teachers to sell the whole ugly thing, while suspending rules so that they can rush this by quickly before anyone says anything. Well, I hope folks in Utah who want a public education system say something now. 

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).