Identity and Social Emotional Learning

I believe a couple of things about social-emotional learning. 

One is that it is a critical element of education that we neither can nor should attempt to remove from schools. The other is that attempts to formalize SEL and deliver it in SEL-specific "lessons" are misguided and just generally a bad idea. I don't defend them.  

However, a couple of things jumped out at me in this recent Vox article from Fabiola Cineas about SEL. First, there's this.

Identity

Critics of social-emotional learning, like Parents Defending Education, a group tracking what it says is “liberal indoctrination,” say the programs focus too much on children’s identities.

This is nuts. This is peak "tell me you don't understand education without saying you don't understand education" But it also gives us another angle for understanding what MAGA parents are upset about. 

There is nothing more fundamental to growing up than identity--shaping it, experimenting with it, trying to define it, and just generally trying to figure out what it is. Young humans (and sometimes not so young ones) are trying to grapple with identity all the time. It is only natural that the place where they spend so many hours, the place where they practice working and socializing with other young humans, the place where they stretch and test their mental abilities--that's a place where they will also be working on their identities. That is why I say that education is the students' work of becoming their best selves as they figure out what it means to be fully human in the world.

But this is one of the fundamental fears of parenting, as old as changling stories-- you turn your back, and your child turns into someone else. Most of us wrestle with it at some point as the children grow, but for some parents, particularly parents who already live with a laundry list of Others that they consider less-thans, this fear is huge. 

They don't want that child to change into someone else, especially not into an Other. They want to send their kid to go to school and have them come back home as exactly the same person. They want their child to develop an identity only at home, under the watchful eyes of parents who can decide and control exactly what that identity will be. 

It shouldn’t matter what a child’s race or gender is, these parent groups say.

Shouldn't matter to whom? Because it certainly matters to the child.

The whole "just teach the basics" mantra is about defining school as a place where information and skills are pumped into the child's brain, while the child's identity just sort of sits in stasis all day, untouched and undisturbed. 

This is not just a bad idea. It's a hopeless idea, like deciding "I like my child right now at the size he is at age six, so I'm not going to send him to school, but he'd damn well better just always stay this size."

How did we get here?

Here's the other part of the article that struck me.

To be clear, most SEL frameworks have no connection to identity politics, but critics of SEL have conflated it with critical race theory, a concept rarely taught in grade school that argues that racism is endemic in American society. In the past two years, following the peak of the CRT backlash, several states including Virginia, Indiana, and Oklahoma have tried to enact legislation that restricts the use of social-emotional learning or bans the use of government funding to support these programs. And across the country, some parents are pushing for the removal of social-emotional learning. Reports have shown that many parents, including those pushing for the removal of SEL, still aren’t aware of what it actually is.

So how did we get here?

When parents couldn’t find evidence of critical race theory being taught at their children’s schools, political strategists went back to the drawing board to find something that would stick, said Jim Vetter, the co-leader of SEL4US, a national SEL nonprofit. “They started focusing on SEL as the Trojan horse to get CRT into our schools,” Vetter said. And that has meant scrubbing the phrase “social-emotional learning” from school district websites, more teachers who are afraid to correspond with parents on the subject, and an overall chilling effect, Vetter said.

My emphasis. 

I don't think that's exactly how it worked. I think it's more a matter of parents who suspect a Something Being Done at school that is threatening to change their child. Maybe it was CRT, but if CRT doesn't seem to be the Thing, then maybe it's SEL. This search has been going on for a long time. Fifty years ago it was long-haired commie pinko stuff. A hundred years ago it was evolution. 

It has to be Something, the thinking goes, because children wouldn't be LGBTQ or socialist or angry, pushy minority children (as opposed to quiet, compliant ones) if someone didn't Do Something to change them, recruit them, trick them. 

Rescuing the changelings

I think of one of the respondents to a "turn in your indoctrinatin' teacher or school" survey that North Carolina ran a few years back. The woman wrote

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

That daughter had graduated from school fifteen years before. And somehow it was three years of public school that turned this daughter into a person that the mother couldn't even find a way to communicate with.

I am sure there is lots more to this story, and I'm sure that most of it would make me sad. I don't care who you are or what you believe--it's a tough thing to have a child grow up to become someone you don't recognize, someone who rejects the things that you value. I totally get the urge to slap your child into a bubble and take control so that you can be certain they grow up to be the person you dream they'll be. I understand the impulse, but it's a huge mistake to yield to that impulse. It's disrespectful, it's treating your child as property, and it's pretty much doomed to failure.

As long as parents wrestle with these issues, we will have folks who blame schools. Thirty years from now, there will be something--not CRT or outcomes based education or SEL or DEI or evolution, but something--that will be held up as a Terrible Thing that schools are doing to usurp the rightful place of parents. And they will have part of a point, because when a young human works through the business of growing up and figuring out their best selves and what it means to be fully human in the world, the process is like a miniature gravitational singularity that drags in everything around it. 

Like every parent who ever parented, I have Ideas about parenting. You have to lead and nurture and love and do everything to head them in the direction you want for them, and it can be frustrating and even heartbreaking when factors beyond your control move them in another direction. In those moments, you have choices to make. But it strikes me a very useful to remember that the child should be building their own identity, and not just an extension of someone else's. 

I've rambled off again, but there are many layers to this. The parental rights movement is a lot about political and anti-public school opportunism, but it would have no traction if it weren't rooted in a primal parental fear about sending your child off to school and having some changeling come home, a fear that can be exacerbated by a view of the world that sees only a very narrow path that can or should be navigated as we move through the world. And sometimes schools don't help. Sometimes they implement ill-considered data-grubbing formalized SEL programs that are as intrusive as they are useless. And sometimes young humans have a hard time working things out. But it is impossible for them not to spend this time in their lives focusing on, working out, and trying to find their identities. 

Curiosity

There are a variety of qualities we associate with good teachers and strong students. Curiosity is at the top of the list.

There is no more powerful motivation for learning than "I want to know." One of the best ways to draw a class in, to get them engaged in the lesson is to point at something curious enough to make them go, "Wait! What? Explain, please."

I don't imagine that I'm particularly brilliant, but I am curious as hell. I'm lucky enough to have been born late enough that every time a question pops into my head, I can get in front of some sort of connected device and look for answers. Before the interwebz, I was a library denizen, a book digger. The internet has affected that as well; much of the newer part of my personal library is made up of books that I ordered because I stumbled across them while looking something up. 

Some of my best memories from college are library related, digging and flipping through pages of books, discovering leads to another work, leading to another writer I hadn't heard of and--oh, hey, what's this on the shelf next to the book I just found? 

And this is how we travel now in my family. What is that structure over there? Why is this town here? How big is this community and how does it support itself? If you're not driving, then you're on "Wait a minute, let me get my smartphone out" duty.

Curiosity feeds itself. The more you find out about stuff, the more stuff you find to ask questions about (one more reason that the "nobody needs to know things because now we have Google" crowd is wrong). Every answer is the set up for another question. 

We seem to be mostly born curious, but then adults have to figure out what to do about it. The Board of Directors remind me daily that childlike wonder and curiosity often takes the form of inquiries like "How hard could I pull on this before it broke?" So all but the bravest of parents need some boundaries.

Likewise, we aren't necessarily entitled to have our curiosity satisfied all the time. Celebrities repeatedly demonstrate just how unhealthy it is for their fans to have boundless curiosity satisfied. And while I may be curious about how some other people configure and deploy their various genital structures, it's none of my business. 

So, boundaries.

But what we have lately is people interested in barriers to curiosity. Every book ban, all the way up to the extreme gatekeeping of Florida, where books are now considered guilty until cleared by a government-run bureau, every policy that says certain things must never be mentioned--that's about squelching curiosity, about telling young humans, "You should not look over here. And we're going to make sure that you can't accidentally stumble over anything that might pique your curiosity about certain aspects of human existence." 

Or like this interview with the head of Great Hearts, one of the classical chart chains, in which the founder explains that classical education is based on "the Great Books, the best of what has been thought and written for millennia" and "begins and succeeds by grounding itself in timeless things that do not change." The Great Hearts website promotes "the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty" and while that sounds lovely, I also worry about people who believe they know certain unchanging Truth-with-a-capital-T, because they're saying "We know everything we know about this, so nobody needs to examine it or explore it or be curious about any aspect of it. Nothing to see here."

We had a whole thing about this in the 19th century; Ralph Waldo Emerson earned his American philosopher stripes by pointing out that instead of just treating dead Greeks as the be all and end of knowledge, we could exercise our own minds, our own curiosity about the world and ourselves.

The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength.

That's Emerson.

Any educational approach or policy that involves telling young humans to just accept something as Truth and ask no questions about it, to tell them that they don't need to be curious because the Truth of that matter is already known and all they need do is just receive it-- that's not just anti-education, but anti-human. 

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.