How To Prepare High Quality Teachers

Pennsylvania has been looking at some ideas for addressing what they call the "Teacher Shortage Crisis." I'm not a fan of calling it a teacher shortage, and the actual nature of the "shortage" is debatable, but in PA, where the number of teaching certificates has plummeted from over 20,000 per year to around 6,000, we clearly have a problem.

Some folks held a big confab last fall and just issued a report with analysis and recommendations. Some of it is baloney (Hanushek's bogus "lost future earnings" baloney), and I have some side eye for some of the participants (TeachPlus), but much of it strikes me as a look in the right direction. They note, for instance, that the financial equation is now out of whack, that becoming a teacher now costs the kind of money that you will not make back easily. 

They also have a couple of excellent insights. Make policy solutions incentives rather than requirements, so that you don't encourage "compliance mentality." As Rick Hess once noted, you can make people do things, but you can't make them do those things well. The report also recommends that solutions should be systemic and address root issues. True that.

There are issues with recruitment and retention that will be hard to address, like, say, the widespread and often deliberate attempt to devalue and demonize the profession. "Be a teacher and maybe someone will accuse you of being a pedophile, groomer, and commie indoctrinator" is a lousy recruitment slogan.

The report is also on point in noting that it can't just be about upping quantity, which is the goal of various "let's lower the bar so any warm body can be put in a classroom" programs. It's not just that this puts people in the classroom who aren't very good; it's that being bad at a job makes staying in that job really unappealing. And that's doubly true in teaching, where a roomful of young humans will subject a bad teacher to immediate pain and suffering for their badness. In other words, insuring that teachers are good at their job increases the likelihood that they'll stay in the job.

There's a long list of things you can do wrong to chase people away, but let's skip over that for the moment and focus on what could be done right.

And since my invitation to the confab was somehow lost, let me add my two cents.

Here are some features that a state needs to have in place to rebuild its teacher pipeline.

Let's start with training in college teacher programs.

Putting the right people in charge of teacher prep

In my perfect world, certification of college teacher prep programs would be handled by a board of teachers. Just like they do it in the medical and legal world. 

College education departments should have a preponderance of people with actual classroom experience, preferably at least a decade (two years in Teach for America doesn't count). College education departments include too many people who are selling their imaginary version of teaching designed for an imaginary ideal classroom. 

Double bonus points for any department that requires its education professors to go do substitute work in public schools. Double points because not only does that keep them acquainted with reality, but it gets students in the schools acquainted with college education professors.

Build expertise

Future teachers should be subject area experts. Future English teachers should major in English. Future history teachers should major in history. Future elementary teachers should be experts in child development and psychology. 

It's not that the pedagogical techniquey stuff doesn't matter-- it absolutely does. But I've been arguing for years that you can't teach reading "skills" in a vacuum, that they don't exist outside of the actual content being read. I'm going to say the same thing is true of teaching techniques; they do not exist in a vacuum somewhere outside the actual things being taught. 

And if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, all the pedagogical technique in the world will not save you. More to the point, pedagogical technique without content expertise is like an uninflated balloon--you can't really do anything useful with it. When you say, "I don't teach math. I teach students," I understand what you're getting at, but I'm still going to ask, "Teaching them what?" Bonus feature: knowing what the hell you're talking about is at least 50% of good classroom management.

Also, every future teacher should spend a large number of hours working with small humans in the age range of their possible future students. Large numbers. I cannot tell you how many student teachers I have seen land in their first classroom and then react with growing horror at what a roomful of students is like. True quote from a colleagues student teacher: "Oh, I don't want to teach these kids. I just want to teach the honors classes." 

A strong student teaching experience

The Pennsylvania report got this part absolutely right. 

When I would tell my student teachers that my own experience was a supervisor seeing me once a week, often for an entire half day, while also seeing me once a week in an evening class, they are unable to imagine such a thing. Because my student teachers' experience was to be assigned to a school, and having a supervisor (in most cases, a person they had not previously met) drop in twice for part of a period. 

Student teaching needs to be done with a ton of support. Mountains of support. A Queen Mary sized pile of life preservers. Right now, some student teachers get that and some don't--it's just the luck of the assignment to a cooperating teacher. In the PA report some pull quote repeats that old chestnut "When I'm student teaching, the district should pay me." No, they shouldn't, because you are not even a baby teacher. You're a teaching fetus, and if your cooperating teacher is doing her job properly, you are making twice as much work for her. I had about fifteen student teachers in my career; only one of them was a natural who needed very little support from me. I never regretted a single one of my student teachers--the future professionals have to come from somewhere, and it was a privilege to help with that work. But it was definitely work.

The PA report raises the question of how long student teaching should last. In many programs, it has become way too short. In my region, most schools have adopted a split model in which a student teacher spends about 6-7 weeks each in two placements. I think that's a mistake-- a student teacher should be in place long enough for the newby shine to wear off, long enough for students to get tired of the student teacher so that she can start dealing with realistic management issues. Give them a full fifteen weeks in the same classroom, with at least six weeks of carrying the full load of teaching, planning, etc. (all of it checked and double checked and observed by the coop--none of this "I have a student teacher so I'm just going to spend all of this month in the lounge all day" baloney).

Strong support through beginning years

Pennsylvania requires schools to provide first year teachers with a mentor, and it's the start of a good idea. Unfortunately, in many districts mentors are assigned not based on factors like complementary teaching styles or relevant experience, but are instead based on factors like "has the same prep period." 

A first year teacher, particularly at the beginning of the year, needs the same kind of heavy duty support as a student teacher. Again, some first year teachers get lucky with either a good official mentor or a next-door teacher who takes on the job out of the goodness of her heart (and a desire not to work next door to a pit of chaos). 

Ideally there should be an official, assigned, required mentoring time scheduled, Make it a period out of the day, or make your newbies and their mentors meet biweekly after school hours (yes, you have to pay them for it). Do this because if new teachers make getting support a "when I have time" thing, they'll never do it, because first year teachers never have time for anything. 

Let students look behind the curtain

This comes both at the end and the beginning of the cycle. Nothing awakens a love for or interest in teaching like being in the classroom with a teacher who is good at the work, who makes it look exciting and fun. Good teaching awakens new teachers.

There are other things districts can do. Those include more formal steps like creating a future teachers program to help high school students look into the career. The district can also do simple things like having high school students teach mini-lessons in an elementary classroom; it's a simple thing that has educational benefits for everyone involved, but it can also provide students with their first moment of "Hey, this would be fun to do for real!"

Teaching is an excellent method for learning, and it also helps students discover if they have an aptitude for it. 

Teachers can also help by being more open about what they are doing. Our tendency is to make teaching into good theater, where all the magic happens where the audience can't see it. We could just as easily narrate our own processes so that students have a clearer idea of what is actually going on.

Sigh. There's more, but this post has already ballooned tremendously. But the bottom line is that, beyond dealing with the negative attacks on the profession, and obvious things like smaller class sizes and full funding and resources, there are positive things we can also do to build it up. Unfortunately, most of them involve money. But we could do better. We should do better. 

FL: DeSantis Clamps Down On Ideological Impurity, Targets More School Board Members

Ron "No Choice But My Choice" DeSantis is continuing his purge of school board members that dare to disrupt his plans for a state bound together in ideological purity. It worked the last election cycle, so he's ready to go after another batch.

It's most fitting that the next set of targets was announced (by name and their thoughtcrime against Dear Leader) in the Florida Standard, the recently launched media voice of the DeSantis regime. After all, you can't maintain your narrative if you have to keep talking to those impure mainstream news outlets that keep relying on facts or who allow the ideologically impure to speak. 

So Florida gets the Florida Standard, the outlet that has no apparent purpose except to amplify the voices of DeSantis and his allies. 

The FS lists each of the fourteen board members who now find themselves in Dear Leader's crosshairs. Their crimes frequently include being supporters of masking and things like "showcased her disdain for parental rights on MSNBC" (I think that's a double penalty) and being "the Left's operators in Hillsborough County" and, gasp, "lifelong Democrats." 

DeSantis whipped this up with help from some loyal attendants. Notes FS

Alongside House Speaker Paul Renner and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, the governor met with Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice to strategize for the 2024 school board election.

I can remember when Moms for Liberty at least sort of pretended to be non-partisan, but now they are fully maskless, simply a political tool to help launch DeSantis toward the White House.

Meanwhile, in the Legislature, supporters of the newest expansion of Florida's dismantling-via-voucher of public education were asked what should have been a simple question. Based on the discovery in Ohio of an extensive network of neo-Nazi (actually, I think we could call them actual Nazis) home schoolers, the question was raised--will Florida be sending taxpayer dollars, via vouchers, to support neo-Nazi homeschoolers?

This should not be a hard question-- will we allow taxpayer dollars to go to support Nazis? And yet...

Really? FL Republicans refuse to rule out funding neo-Nazi lessons as part of voucher bill. Good to see @loriberman fighting back. ⁦@DianeRavitch⁩ ⁦⁦@TheDaraKam⁩ ⁦@MitchPerry18⁩ ⁦@FLBaloney⁩ ⁦@JoyAnnReid⁩ ⁦@NPEaction⁩ ⁦@carolburris⁩ pic.twitter.com/ErMJRb6dLQ

— Susan Smith (@stsmith222) February 21, 2023

"Um, we need to put our heads together for a second for that stumper, before we offer that somebody will probably talk about that some day probably and then they'll decide something." Dammit, guys--the correct answer is "No."

So, yeah. A state that has declared books banned until cleared by its reading commissars  and has banned books for having the wring ideas in them (and don't say so to the public) and threatened felony charges for teachers who don't fall in line-- that state also refuses to say that Nazi homeschooling is unacceptable. Gay penguins? Unacceptable. Black studies? Unacceptable. Teaching Nazi version of history? Well, um... we'll have to get back to you on that.

There are plenty of references to consider here. For instance, Wilhoit's Law applies, with its particular definition of current conservative thought

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Mind you, that's not my idea of conservatism. Certainly not my father's conservatism. But here we are.

This is also a good time to recommend Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers. Stewart has been watching the rise of what we now call Christian nationalism (except, again, this is no version of Christianity that I recognize) and while the book includes a wealth of insights, the one that helps bring so much of these shenanigans into focus is this: 

For these christianist conservatives, the legitimacy of an enterprise comes from only one place. Christian nationalism "asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage." 

This applies across the board to all institutions--including education. A media outlet or a school (and a school board) are only "legitimate" insofar as they adhere to the correct doctrines. They are only legitimate to the extent that they are ideologically pure. And that purity can best be achieved by a strong leader at the top who is himself pure and has the strength to impose his will, to burn everything else to the ground and cleanse it with fire.

I will not pretend to have a sense of whether Ron DeSantis and his allies believe all this christianist nationalist authoritarian baloney or if he is simply an opportunist who sees the movement as a path to personal power, though I'm certain that he is surrounded by plenty of both types. I do believe that these folks have zero interest in discussions or debates about policy with impure infidels.

I can't imagine what it must feel like to be someone who made the choice to give up some of your time and effort to try to make a foundational part of your community work a little better for all students, and to find yourself targeted by the governor of your state and his cronies, and not just targeted, but demonized and vilified. It's all just ugly and getting uglier, and no number of invocations of God and Jesus will put a prettier face on it. 

OK: The Legislature Puts Ryan Walters In A Box

Ryan Walters was a spectacularly bad choice for Oklahoma State Superintendent, but the voters elected him anyway. Now the legislature--including and especially some fellow Republicans--are putting a leash on him. 

Walters established right off the bat that the new office would not reduce his affection for petty political anti-public ed antics. Just in the last week he decided to order that the portraits highlighting the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame be removed from the Oklahoma State Department of Education building. It pissed a lot of people off.

The stated reason was to remove the Hall of Fame in order to put up pictures honoring parents and students, though nobody seems to believe that there's some kind of critical shortage of wall space. And Walters, always willing to add gasoline to a fire, issued a statement:

All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.

Walters has also proposed a new rule barring any school districts from having books with "sexualized content" in libraries K-12. This would go beyond the usual "pornography" definition into vague territory, but the rule would be used to downgrade a district's accreditation because of "willful noncompliance." 

"Downgraded accreditation as a violation for vague rules" is a touchy subject in Oklahoma, a state where two school districts had their accreditation reduced because of alleged violation of Oklahoma's spectacularly vague anti-CRT law which allows for such downgrade without anything resembling due process by the state board that is now loaded with Governor Stitt appointees.

And the new sexualized content rule was only one of Superintendent Walters's bright ideas. He has also formally proposed a rule to require school staff and teachers to out children to their parents, disclosing “any information known to the school district or its employees regarding material changes reasonably expected to be important to parents regarding their child’s health, social, or psychological development, including Identity information.”

So a whole bunch of new rules that could be used to threaten a school district's accreditation.

All of which was enough to push some Republican lawmakers to slap a legislative leash on Walters.

Calling it a direct response to the newly proposed rules, Rep. Mark McBride proposed a bill to defang Walters and the state board.

“The Legislature, and not just the state superintendent and a board that has no common education experience, should have input on schools’ accreditation status,” McBride said.

HB 2569, as amended, declares "a moratorium on additional accreditation rules approved and imposed upon school districts by the State Board of Education without specific legislative statutory authorization." In other words, no more sudden knee-jerk rule changes from you or your rubber stamp squad without legislative approval.

As reported by Rep. John Waldron (co-author of HB 2569) on the Twitter machine today, the House Education Committee landed pretty hard on Walters. I'm going to paste some of this thread here for your edification.

Further down the thread, after a poster says it's great that McBride recognizes "how dangerous and destructive Walters is to education," Waldron replies, "We all do." 

It's not the biggest victory ever, but it is a nice reminder that not everyone is 100% all in on the Stitt-Walters program to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public ed. Just, you know, 87% or so. Stay tuned. 

ICYMI: Road Trip Edition (2/19)

Also known as what happens when your spouse finds deep discount same day hotel room rates-- we're away from the Institute headquarters at the moment. But I've still got some reading from the week, perhaps to while away the President's Day hours tomorrow,

There's No Merit in Merit Pay

Paul Thomas looks at the new South Carolina merit pay idea (and by "new," I mean "not very new"). A nice tight explanation (again) for how merit pay is a failed idea.

Florida Teacher Is Fired for Posting Viral Video of Empty Classroom Bookshelves

Yeah, that guy who posted the video of the rows and rows of empty shelves has been fired. He's unimpressed.

With Apologies to John Denver, She's Leaving on a Jet Plane, Who Knows When She'll Be Back Again

TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild is the king of tracking all the various connections between people minding the Tennessee education store and their real gig--soaking education for $$ and dumb ideas. Here's more of that.

How public schools can stop wasting millions of dollars

At Valeries Strauss's Answer Sheet at the Washington Post, David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs, and Margarita Pivovarova explain how much benefit we could get out of dumping the texting industry from education.

The Gaslighting of Teachers Continues

Steve Nuzum dismantles some South Carolina gaslighting of teachers.

Case for Kansas school vouchers riddled with misleading statistics, cherrypicked data

Liz Meitl is an English teacher and public education advocate in Kansas. In the Kansas Reflector, she points out some of the gaping holes in the state's voucher proposal.

American teens are unwell because American society is unwell

There were lots of reactions to these findings this week, but this piece by Kate Woodsome in the Washington Post is a good one, though not very uplifting. Time to get our collective acts together.

Will Restrictions on Teaching ‘Controversial’ Issues Target Science Classes?

Spoiler alert: of course they will. But Sarah Schwartz at Ed Week takes a look at some of the specifics behind this next wave of assaults on public ed. 

Neoliberal Education Reform Paved the Way for Right-Wing “Classical Education”

Nora de la Cour at Jacobin with some thoughts about how we got here and how Barack Obama and Ron DeSantis are linked.

Taxpayer swindle: More states should not seek school vouchers

This piece, in The Hill of all places, pulls no punches: "School vouchers are a taxpayer swindle that fails to raise achievement while eroding public schools and the principle of equal protection under the law outlined in the U.S. Constitution."

Parents know best — except when they don’t

At the Answer Sheet (Washington Post), Kevin Welner points out that sometimes, parents are not the best judges of what makes good education, putting him, weirdly, on the same page as Chester Finn this week. What a world.

The other thing locked classroom doors keep out

Jamey Melcher, writing for Chalkbeat's First Person column, points out some of the things that are lost in a school when security starts taking over and locked doors and empty halls become the norm.

Child Labor Has Made a Comeback

Yup. The latest big headlines just scratch the surface. Terri Gerstein has the story at Slate.

The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools

This is a long, deep read, but what a picture Mimi Swartz paints of the Texas attempt to dismantle public education. The "if you only read one thing" on the list this week.

Robbing From the Poor to Educate the Rich

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire in The Nation look at the reverse Robin Hood nature of the new voucher programs (like Iowa's). It's a lousy deal for public schools and taxpayers alike.

The CLT Exam

At Grumpy Old Teacher, Gregory Sampson looks at the test that Floridians are supposed to consider as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. You will not be shocked by what he finds.

At Forbes.com, I took a look at an Iowa bill that wants to redefine obscenity and send teachers to re-education camp. 

And as always, you're invited to sign up for my free substack, where you get all of the usual stuff (except sometimes for the fixed typos that I don't spot until too late, but hey).

OK: Catholic Church Proposes Religious Charter

Last December, Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor issued an opinion stating that in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, he believes that the SCOTUS would "very likely" find unconstitutional the state requirement that charter schools be non-sectarian. The Catholic Church is wasting no time testing that theory.

The church has proposed a virtual charter--St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, named for a sixth-century catholic bishop and scholar, who is patron saint of the internet (a "saint who can help us find what we need as well as protect us from the darker side of the World Wide Web"). The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City collaborated with the Diocese of Tulsa made their pitch on Valentines Day, with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board expected to make a decision April-ish. 

Brett Farley is the executive director of Catholic Conference of Oklahoma says, Oh, hey, it'll just be a regular charter school, nothing to see here:

We’re not talking about establishing a religion through religious charter schools. All we’re talking about is an anchor carrying values and principles and virtues, so forth, as we’re already doing in our schools.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the state is buying that. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has already popped up to point out that Oklahoma's charter law says you can't do that religious charter thing. 

And Michael Scaperlanda, the Chancellor of Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, says, "I think Attorney General O’Connor's opinion was a very good opinion of the current state of constitutional law and why St. Isidore and other charter schools are not public actors and not state actors." In other words, when the dust clears, we are totally going to have a religious charter school.

While SCOTUS has already cleared enough ground for this to happen, they could conceivably blast the church-state wall further if they rule on Peltier vs. Charter Day School, a case nominally about a sexist antediluvian dress code but which hinges on whether charter schools are really public schools or actually private non-state-actors (and therefor free from government regulations).  

Inside religious circles, folks are pretty damned excited. In a piece in First Things (which claims to be America's most influential journal of religion and public life), the authors make their real case:

The premises of St. Isidore’s application are clear and straightforward. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the “free exercise” of religion and so prohibits anti-religious discrimination by governments. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in last summer’s Carson v. Makin decision, “a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” Accordingly, the justices ruled, it was unconstitutional for Maine to exclude “sectarian” schools from a program that helped pay the private school tuition of kids who live in rural areas without government-run schools. By the same token, the Oklahoma attorney general’s letter correctly reasons, a state may not open up a charter school program—one that permits private entities to accredit and operate a wide variety of schools—but exclude otherwise qualified schools simply because of their religious character or affiliation.

And lest we forget, the folks busy tearing down the wall between church and state would like to keep a door there that only swings one way.

Note that St. Isidore’s argument is not that secular, civil governments in the United States may or should operate religious enterprises. After all, the First Amendment also protects religious freedom by outlawing religious establishments. Under our Constitution, religious and political institutions and authorities are distinct. They may and often do cooperate, to be sure: Governments have long funded religious agencies’ healthcare and social welfare services, asylum resettlement and anti-human trafficking efforts, and schooling and research. What our “separation” of church and state means, though, is that secular governments do not decide matters of religious doctrine or interfere with churches’ religious affairs.

In other words, the First Amendment is there to keep government from messing with then church, but the church should be free to mess with government all it wants, including hoovering up those public tax dollars while performing government functions (like school), but not with any government rules and regulations being applied. 

In other words, they like the part of the wall that serves them, but only that part.

The formal, clear erasure of any sort of rules, any manner of regulation or oversight, means that we are inching (well, actually, footing or yarding) towards removing any sort of meaningful distinction between charter school programs and vouchers. Either way, the already extraordinarily wealthy Catholic Church will be able to collect government subsidies for its private religious education system, drawing taxpayer dollars even from taxpayers whose presence within its school walls will be forbidden. 

OK: A Triggered Voucher Bill

I have read many, many voucher bills, a truly thankless task because they are numbingly similar, displaying about as much variation as pages from an old hand-cranked mimeograph machine.

But in Oklahoma, I have found something legitimately new. A voucher bill (one of several ed disrupt, defund and dismantle bills out there) that doesn't just provide a trigger warning, but an actual trigger payoff. 

The bill is courtesy of Senator Shane Jett, who does not look like a frail snowflake, and yet... Perhaps he's worn out from trying spending his years pushing bills to ban CRT and SEL and who knows what other letters of the alphabet.

This education savings account style bill has all the usual accoutrements, like the laundry list of education-adjacent items ending with "any other damn thing you can get past the agency we hire to run this for us." It has the special hands off rules so that the state won't try to interrupt education vendors when they are discriminating against LGBTQ folks or performing religious indoctrination or teaching kids how to be wonderful nazis.

But it has something those other voucher bills don't have.

Triggers.

By the rules of SB 943, two groups of students are eligible for the Oklahoma Parent Empowerment Act for Kids (PEAK) vouchers. Students who live (or whose parents work) in a county with more than 10,000 people, and students who live in counties with fewer than 10,000 people but who attend school in a Trigger District.

What, you ask, is a Trigger District? It appears to be a district that does anything that could trigger a right wing culture warrior. There's a list of triggers, which starts out with some three violations of Oklahoma's Title 70, including don't do gender/diversity training. Then things take a turn. As God is my witness, I am not making up any of the following triggers that can trigger conservatives into putting the school on the trigger list. The exact language is any district in which the following are "advocated or tolerated."

Instruction in gender identity and sexual orientation including instruction designed to promote gender confusion (Are there such things? When I taught I used some materials that usually promoted some other kinds of confusion, but I never came across a deliberate gender confusion unit).

Possession of books which contain obscene material as defined by Section 1024.1 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes. So if the district even "tolerates" someone carrying a dirty book around. Smartphones are still okay, I guess.

Curriculum which is sexual in nature, except as provided for in Section 11-105.1 of Title 70 of the Oklahoma Statutes (that's sex ed).

The presence of any school employee or volunteer engaged in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries. So maybe dressing up as the school mascot is still okay if the student isn't getting into it too much?

Climate change ideology including, but not limited to, disparaging the oil and natural gas industry or the agriculture industry. No saying mean things about oil, gas or agriculture. Unclear whether or not you can make fun of their silly counterfactual advertising. 

Curriculum promoting social and emotional learning.

Curriculum promoting animal rights activism.

Instruction that disparages the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The next time there's a school shooting, don't say mean things about the guns involved. 

Ideology that encourages efforts to defund the police. 

Curriculum promoting a Marxist ideology including, but not limited to, violations of Section 1266.4 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes. That's the one that says it's bad to try to overthrow the government or conspire to do so, which is an odd thing to pair with an anti-Marxist trigger, since the most recent attempt at "the overthrow, destruction, or alteration of, the constitutional form of the government of the United States" by use of "force or violence" did not involve Marxists. I am also curious about how many card-carrying Marxists are rattling around the rural counties of Oklahoma, using their copies of Das Kapital to bat away tumbleweeds.

It's a pretty impressive list, and I feel as if it could have been extended with some other important trigger items.

The presence of any school employee or volunteer who says aloud that Hunter Biden's laptop is "not a big deal."

Curriculum that suggests that all racial issues in the United States were not solved by 1964.

Curriculum or instruction calling the United States a democracy and not a republic.

Any instruction that suggests that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.

The presence of any school employee who says "Happy holidays" during the month of December.

Curriculum that teaches that all of Shakespeare's female characters were original portrayed by male actors.

Landscaping school grounds in such a way as might promote them as a landing area for Chinese spy balloons.

The presence of any employee or volunteer who responds to any of the above complaints by suggesting that the complainant needs "to put on their big boy/girl pants and get over it," and it counts as a double trigger if they fail to use the correct gender of the large pants that are supposed to be put on.

The hiring of a baseball coach who is in favor of the designated hitter rule.

There are undoubtedly more (see you in the comments) because somehow the folks who used to complain about liberal snowflakes and put up "F#@! Your Feelings" signs are now just loaded with feelings, and not just feelings, but feelings that are easily bruised and hurt and triggered. How did the party of cold, hard facts somehow become the party that cannot give up the story of furry students in schools, a thing that--and I cannot stress this enough--did not actually happen anywhere at all ever.

And let's not lose sight of what this bill does-- it pays folks for being offended. "Dear State of Oklahoma. There was a student at my child's school with a copy of "And Tango Makes Three" and the school did not punish that child, so this is clearly a trigger district. Therefor, I would like you to send over my pile of voucher money right away."

This is a silly bill, and I can only hope that it gets the kind of mocking it deserves, even if that triggers somebody. 

KS: Hilarious and Sad: A Teacher Speaks Up

I want to show you footage of an awesome piece of testimony before the Kansas legislature's budget committee on the subject of Kansas's entry in the school voucher fad turning up across the nation. HB 2218 has all the usual features of these things, the basic "Here, we'll give you a chunk of money that you can use to buy an assortment of education products" approach is here, plus the usual promise that vendors are free to peddle whatever they like without fear of government oversight of any sort.

That last part is important because part of the lead-up to this cookie-cutter bill has been an embrace of the far right strategy of scorched earth culture war, demonizing teachers and undermining trust in public education, just folks like Chris Rufo and Jay Greene (neither, incidentally, from Kansas) have been encouraging, so that the troops are hearing "school choice" as code for "schools where people will taught good proper christianist education the white way"). 

Committee chairwoman Kristey Williams, a former teacher from rural Kansas ought to know better, but she clearly doesn't, as noted by columnist Clay Wirestone, who calls out her "joyous expression of nihilism" before writing, "She and fellow Republican committee members appear committed to undermining the public education system that serves a half-million children — and razing the future of our state along the way."

So that's what high school English teacher Dr. Liz Meitl was preparing to testify for the fifth time, a process that she described to me as saying what you have to say and they either ignore you or go on to mischaracterize what you said. And, she said, "I think I just kind of cracked."

The result was this following bit of testimony.

(You can stop watching after she finishes-- my Youtube skills are limited)

Dr. Liz's testimony has been a bit of a TikTok hit, and she followed up with a print version of the modest proposal. 

The total lack of oversight and regulation, combined with the financial incentives, create an almost irresistible opportunity for those of us with an agenda for our state’s future. Teachers’ dedication to Kansas’s public schools and serving every student will certainly mean almost nothing when we consider the possibilities offered via this legislation.

Meitl's road to this moment really captures much of the education world in the past few decades. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in English and was going to serve with the Peace Corps in a middle eastern country; then 9/11 happened. She started teaching, but then marriage and kids happened and it did not make financial sense for her to work. A mentor convinced her to go back to school where she developed both her PhD and a desire to get back in the classroom. But then COVID hit. 

In the meantime, Meitl has been politically active, fighting for public education with middling results. She expresses frustration with politicians who treat teachers like the cause of student struggles rather than the folks who work on the front lines to help students. "They have demonized the hell out of us." 

It seems likely that the heavy irony in this testimony failed to move the committee, but God bless her for giving it a shot and giving voice to the frustrations that teachers feel. The real tragedy here is that, as Meitl pointed out, teachers who care about education may actually have to do this. "It is," she said, "both hilarious and sad."