Children Are People

During his town hall on education, far-right-light Governor Glenn Youngkin was pressed on various issues of trans children, and in response, he echoed a sentiment that keeps appearing in these parental rights debates (though not always quite so clearly):

Children belong to parents. Not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.

Well, no, Children are human beings, not chattel.

But the humanity of children often seems at question in much of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation from culture warriors these days. New Hampshire is yet another state considering legislation that could require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents. Meanwhile, the well-funded advocacy group, Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] has released a list of 6,000 schools that, they charge, have policies to "hide" trans student status from parents. And the hot new wave in anti-LGBTQ student bills are Birth Name bills, requiring schools and school staff to address students by the names and pronouns on their birth certificates without written parental permission. 

What all of this has in common is a disregard for the agency and independence and humanity of the students themselves. 

The scenario often darkly hinted at is one in which school staff somehow convince a student that they are LGBTQ, and tell them they had better not tell anyone at home about it. 

But the far more likely scenario is one in which a student comes to a trusted school staff member to talk about their identity while begging the staff member not to tell parents. This conversation may occur during the highly charged time when the student is struggling with a new understanding of themself, or it may occur in a more standard school drama context (the girl who asks for advice dealing with her girlfriend but "I can't talk to my folks about this because they would freak").

Anybody who pretends that these moments are easy to navigate and can be handled by a cut and dried set of rules is kidding themselves. Students, especially teens, play with their sense of identity an awful lot, and sometimes it's temporary and sometimes it's not. Students are sometimes terrible judges of what they can expect from parents and sometimes they are excellent judges. Parents are sometimes great at supporting their children's growth into independent adults, and sometimes they are not, at all. 

As with many hot button issues, folks are dealing from different premises. If you believe that LGBTQ identities are unnatural, that LGBTQ identities are made, not born, then you will react to news of your own child's LGBTQ identity by wanting to know who made them that way, and schools are the most obvious place to look. If you believe that LGBTQ persons are born, not made, then your main concern will be how to protect and gird them for a world that is often hostile--and that hostility can start at home. We know that LGBTQ children go through a lot. It seems simple enough to want them to go through less, but different premises yield different solutions to the problem ("stop being LGBTQ" versus "put protections for the child in place").

The ideal situation is parents who are loving and supportive of the child, though that situation can be less ideal in states where the parents of LGBTQ persons are stripped of their legal rights to make certain decisions for their children (because parental rights apparently involves only certain parents in some states). A school can't hide any of this information when the child is loving, accepted, and open with their parents. 

Put another way, there is no situation in which the school hides information about LGBTQ students from the parents; there are only situations in which the school and the child keep the information from parents. 

The school's decision has to be based on two factors. One is the question of possible abuse of the child. Some commenters say, "Well, the law doesn't have to worry about that because the laws already require school staff to report abuse." But that's abuse that has already happened. "We're going to tell your folks, and if they beat you and throw you out, then we'll just report it," is not a great plan. But figuring out what possible abuse may or may not happen is not an exact science.

The other factor is that schools must balance the rights of the parents with the rights of the students. The disturbing part of so many of these laws, so much of this rhetoric, is that the rights of students are absent from the debate. This has become an ugly part of the new idea that schools serve families and not all of the community--the notion that teachers are simply hirelings whose primary purpose if to extend parental reach in exerting their will over their children. 

None of this is simple to sort out, and there is no doubt that sometimes schools get it wrong, that staff, well-meaning or not, make some bad judgement calls. 

But any solution that treats children as property rather than people is not going to help. Any solution that enshrines parental rights but ignores students' rights and safety is not a real solution. Students are trying to figure out who they are, and they are trying to figure out how their identity is going to affect their relationships with the people around them. The people around them can help by being mindful, thoughtful, and extending grace to the students and to each other. 

Can Conservatives Reconcile With Teachers

Robert Pondiscio has an interesting piece out in National Affairs. Pondiscio and I sit on the opposite sides of many education issues, but I find him to be one of the more nuanced, thoughtful writers working his side of the street. 

This piece goes past some material on which we disagree, including his brief history of ed reform so far and much of what he has to say about teachers unions, but there are also pieces of this that are worth noting, and are, in fact, the kind of things I would expect to hear from actual conservatives (as opposed to the far right neo-faux-conservative-or-something culture warriors dominating so much of the choice conversation these days). If you don't read conservative writers about education (and you should--nobody's understanding of an issue is enhanced by only reading one side), you might have missed some of this. But I think it's well worth a read.

The meat of this piece is Pondiscio's argument that conservatives should not write of public education nor the teachers who work there. It would be a mistake, he argues, for conservatives to favor "school choice as the exclusive, or even primary, lever of reform." 

For starters, asking America's parents to abandon their support for local public schools in favor of entirely new educational paradigms is a heavy lift. Changing schools or opting to home school can be profoundly disruptive to family life and routines, as well as children's social lives. Transportation challenges are often insurmountable. If the majority of American families seem stubbornly attached to local public schools, it can't be explained away by a lack of parental engagement or credible alternatives; it's often the result of more practical considerations.

He also points out that, for several reasons, school choice is no bulwark against the forces of "progressive indoctrination" (God bless him, Pondiscio gets through this whole piece without using the word "woke")-- those "elite private schools" are actually more likely to be full of progressive policies.

But then there's this:

More fundamentally, though, arguments for choice as the main solution to failing public schools sidestep the shared interest Americans have in public education. Parents of school-age children undoubtedly have the most personal stake in the quality of schools available to them, but the claim that families should have control over "their" money elides the fact that the cost of education in the United States is socialized: We pay school taxes regardless of whether we send our children to public schools, or even whether we have children at all. Choice strategies like vouchers, education savings accounts, and other such mechanisms, therefore, put parents in control of our money.

It makes sense to put decision-making in the hands of those closest to schools and with the most at stake — namely their own children. But the shared cost implies a mutual interest, as well as a literal investment in every child. School choice can solve a school-based problem for a family, but it can't address the interest every American holds in the education of the next generation.

This makes so much more sense than the traditional "We don't need oversight because parents will vote with their feet and the free market will fix everything." Conservatives ought to be first in line to demand that somebody tell them how their tax dollars are being spent, and the attempt by some choicers to place choice above conservative values gets us the strange display of advocates saying, "We want new rules requiring more transparency from public schools, and we also want more money directed through vouchers into a system with no transparency or oversight at all."

The inescapable truth about education in America is that there is no foreseeable scenario under which traditional public schools will not educate the majority of the nation's future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens for generations to come. Conservatives are not wrong to take exception when activists seek to impose a progressive agenda on what is at heart a bedrock government service, but their response of promoting school choice as a conflict-avoidance strategy functionally cedes public education — and the vast majority of America's schoolchildren — to the left. If conservatives earnestly believe that public education is a hotbed of progressive indoctrination on social and political issues, it would be an act of self-immolation to surrender future generations to its influence.

Yes, this too. This is exactly what I would expect from an actual conservative (e.g. the many GOP members of my family). Another part of the modern choicer argument that doesn't make sense is "The building is on fire. There are hundreds of children trapped inside. Let's save five of them."

And then Pondiscio shifts to another interesting part of his argument--that conservatives could find allies for the rescuing of public schools among teachers themselves. Pondiscio points out that despite the continued characterization of the teacher task force as dominated by crazy lefties, the data suggests a distribution that makes the teacher pool "only slightly less conservative, and somewhat more moderate, than Americans at large."

Absolutely. I taught in GOP country, and I worked with plenty of conservatives. A hefty chunk of NEA and AFT members voted for Trump. When right-tilting teacher Daniel Buck told Rick Hess about how he and other conservative teachers "speak in whispers behind closed doors," I rolled my eyes so hard I reparted my hair. 

Teachers are, by the nature of the job, pragmatic. The staunchest principles, conservative or progressive, must yield to "what exactly am I going to do with this seven minute space in my day." Teachers are also, by the nature of the job, moderate in the sense that they have to moderate the pushes coming from a hundred different directions, from dozens of parents, to students themselves, to board members, to administrators, to whatever version of state and federal mandates filter down to the classroom, to whatever Great New Thing someone is trying to foist on them. 

As Pondiscio suggests, there is no real reason (and never has been) for teachers and conservatives to be enemies. Well, no reason but one--and that's conservatives insistence on picking a fight. We could go back further for fights over particular issues, but 1983's A Nation at Risk is arguably the point at which conservatives broadened their attack to simply, "Teachers are bad at their job." Conservatives have hammered away at that failure message and worse, rather than following it with "What could we do to help" have instead moved on to things like "Let's create a system to hunt down the bad ones and fire them" and "Let's just burn the whole system to the ground and replace it with something else." With No Child Left Behind, Democratic politicians (in their special hapless way) joined in the chorus. 

Plenty of rank and file members disagree with state and national choices of their union. But who else is standing up for them in the political arena.

Pondiscio offers some concrete examples of areas where conservatives and teachers could find common ground.

One is classroom safety and student behavior. Nothing makes it harder to do your job than out-of-control students in the classroom, and the pandemic has only made matters worse. Restorative justice poorly implemented, and micro-managing parents given free reign by the front office are part of a larger problem that is, by most survey accounts, a huge driver of teacher dissatisfaction with the job. It's always a balancing act, because racism-infused systems of discipline or a school culture that relies on students being forced to compliantly knuckle under is its own kind of problem. But teachers pretty universally want a safe and orderly classroom.

Pondiscio also suggests that "common-sense measured curricular policies" might be a point of agreement, and he points to issues like the schools that have dealt with inequitable use of advanced programs and tracks by doing away with them entirely. An unscientific survey of teachers I know shows a large support for fixing the problem by applying the programs equitably rather than simply blowing it up. Because gearing a class to forty-seven different ability levels is labor-intensive and taxing to implement.

Pondiscio also thinks that there could be consensus on teacher pay. I doubt it. I have yet to see a measure of teacher effectiveness that teachers can--or should--trust. Like many conservatives, Pondiscio points to DC's IMPACT system. Well. Creating a teacher evaluation system is hard-- really hard. Jason Kamras thought he really cracked the code with IMPACT in the DC schools, but given time and reflection, it seems to have established a culture in which rampant cheating and misbehavior were encouraged. Kamras was hired as a superintendent for Richmond Public Schools and he did not take IMPACT with him. IMPACT is a dud.

So I'm not sure that there's a chance for consensus on teacher pay, but I do have a suggestion-- those who want to see teacher effectiveness tied to pay should stop pretending that teacher opposition to bad evaluation systems is the same as opposition to any evaluation at all. They might also consider letting go of the whole pay-for-excellence approach to teacher evaluation and instead embrace the evaluation-as-a-path-for-improving-teacher-effectiveness approach instead, which would be far more fruitfull as a path to improving schools.

On the issues of trying to suppress the mentioning, discussion and reading about certain topics by various draconian law, Pondiscio hints, gently, that conservatives could start acting like conservatives and just not. Pondiscio points to a teacher code of conduct (the NEA has a nice one that some states adopted somewhere along the line) to prioritize teaching over preaching.

Finally, Pondiscio moves to the issue of trust. He suggests that teacher trust in parents declined, and he returns to a favorite point of his, which is that teachers are employed not as free agents, but as voices of the institution. On this we agree; the taxpayers pay us to do a job, and while "do a job" includes "exercise our professional judgment," it does not include "operate our personal crusade." Not that that's an easy or static line to draw, but I believe it exists.

Pondiscio also has advice for conservatives.

At the same time, conservatives would do well to cease fomenting parental discontent with public schools to advance prospects for school choice.

That is a pretty direct response to the work of Jay Greene ("Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars") and Chris Rufo ("To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust") both of whom have clearly articulated exactly that tactic. Pondiscio points out that this may in fact drive more parents to progressive education solutions, and suggests that it's not helpful to burn down the institution where the majority of America's students get their education.

In the end, Pondiscio calls for what strikes me as a more traditional conservative approach to schools, and the conclusion to this piece is solid:

The opportunity exists, and would likely be acceptable to a critical mass of both public-school personnel and conservatives, to renew trust in public education by restoring it to its proper role as a collection of local institutions operating in the public interest to prepare American children for the challenges of citizenship and adult life. This is certainly a more modest role than the activist mentality embraced by some, but by no means all, of the nation's 3 million public-school teachers. And yet it serves the interests of both teachers and conservatives — not to mention Americans more broadly.

Making common cause on public education requires both sides to acknowledge what is plainly observable: that schools are conservative (in the best sense) institutions that serve progressive (in the best sense) ends. Our fiercest arguments occur when either is encroached upon: when schools stray too far into progressive activism, or when education fails to deliver on its promise of being an engine of fairness and social mobility. Reestablishing the proper balance between the two sides offers the critical first step toward restoring legitimacy and trust in this essential American institution.

It would be great to see this stance adopted by more folks in the conservative camp, but I'm not sure how many are really interested in Pondiscio's vision. The Goldwater-libertarian wing of ed reform retains its commitment to a vision of a country in which government doesn't have anything to do with public education at all, and the christianist nationalist wing isn't really interested in either choice or reform--just bending education to their particular brand of values. And folks way on the right are still posting things like this Kevin Portteus piece at American Greatness about the need to follow DeSantis in ripping "our schools" back from the crazy Marxists; he shares Pondiscio's understanding that most students will be educated in public schools--and that's why they must be taught the correct things and not the leftist indoctrination that all teachers are bent on delivering. 

Still, Pondiscio has been ahead of the curve before (he called the dissolution of the free market-social justice alliance in school reform), so maybe this piece will turn out to be prescient and not just an outlier in the conservative thinky tank-o-sphere. We'll see. 

KY: Putting Religion In The Classroom

It's touted as a bill to protect the religious freedom of public school employees, but that's not exactly what Kentucky's HB 547 does. 

What it does is give teachers the right to proselytize in school, particularly in their classrooms. 

Asked why the state needs any such legislation, sponsor and former pastor Rep. Chris Fugate had an explanation:

Fugate said HB 547 is needed due to out-of-state groups protesting prayer before football games.

“I hope that this bill shows that the teachers in Kentucky are supported by not only the Kentucky General Assembly but by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Fugate said.

This guy.

In other words, Fugate has read about the Kennedy v. Bremerton case, in which the Supreme Court was so eager to sign off on allowing school prayer that they traveled all the way to an alternate reality to do it. So he'd like to rewrite the laws so that it allows faculty and staff to proselytize in this reality.

The bill is only two pages long; the beef says that while a school district employee is "on duty" they may "at a minimum" talk about religion with other employees, lead student religious groups, wear religious garb, decorate their desk and other personal spaces with religious stuff. Note: that's "at a minimum."

Linda Allewalt, a former teacher calls the bill "a blatant attempt to legalize evangelizing in school," which sounds about right. And she imagines how this would work:

When I read about this legislation and considered the fact that atheism is also protected speech under the First Amendment, I imagined what it would be like if I was once again running a classroom under the provisions of Rep. Fugate’s legislation. I could imagine wearing my Freedom From Religion shirt that says, “Unabashed Atheist: Not Afraid of Burning in Hell.” I could wear my nice Big A atheist necklace. I could put a copy of Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” on my desk next to my pencil holder. I could put up a little sign with one of my favorite quotes on it by Chapman Cohen, “ Gods are fragile things. They may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.” I could go on with this idea, but I think you get my drift.

Meanwhile, of course, Kentucky has tried to pass some laws limiting LGTBQ rights, particularly in schools. 

The law has some odd guardrails, like the right to wear religious clothing--as long as it conforms to the school dress code. So publicly displaying your love for Jesus is okay, but not if you insist on doing it with spaghetti straps instead of full sleeves.

And the bill comes with a ready made escape clause for any administrator who foresees endless headaches, like having to set up a school committee to determine what constitutes a "legitimate" religion or not. The law grants all of these freedoms to the extent that they are exercised in no-religious ways. In other words, faculty can discuss religion "at the same time and in the same manner that employees are permitted to engage in nonreligious expression and discussions outside the scope of duties." They can decorate their desk with religious items "to the same extent that other employees are permitted to decorate their desk and other personal spaces with personal items." Teachers can sponsor religious student groups to the same extent that they can sponsor other sorts of clubs. Etc.

So I predict that highly conflict-averse administrators would simply shut down everything. "I don't want to get in flaps over personal religious items on your desk, so as of now, you are not allowed any personal decorations or items in your classroom." The Stanic Temple wants to sponsor an after school group? Fine--the new rule is that there will be zero after school groups.

And as always, I predict that support among christianist conservatives for this sort of measure will suddenly dry up when an Islamic football coach wants to lead a prayer after the game.

Allewalt has an answer to all of this. Referring to her imaginary atheist bedecked classroom:

I wouldn’t do any of this, even if the law said I could. Why? Because it’s wrong, both morally and ethically and violates everything I ever learned about the role of the teacher in a classroom of children. It is also wrong to harangue the people you work with everyday with proselytizing pamphlets and out loud vocal prayers. When a teacher is more invested in pushing their religious rights than they are creating an equal community, void of divisiveness, with the staff in the building and all the children in their classrooms, they don’t belong in the profession. They are taking advantage of the captive audience of children for their own purposes. It’s beyond reprehensible.

You carry the person you are into the classroom with you. I don't think it's necessarily a great idea to try to pretend that you do not believe anything about anything for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's nearly impossible. But I absolutely believe that you have an obligation to run a classroom in which what you believe is not connected to how you treat your students. Students must absolutely believe that they do not have to pretend to agree with you in order to get a good grade and respectful treatment--that goes for beliefs about the value of algebra, the interpretations of Hamlet, and proper way to honor the Lord of All Creation. 

In this day and age, it's not a bad thing to model for students how to be a grown human who believes things, but does not allow their personal beliefs to affect their professional behavior. I'm pretty sure the country would be a better place right now if everyone mastered How To Believe Things Without Being A Jerk About It. But teachers need to do better than that; every classroom should be safe for all students. 

This is a bad idea for a law; not only does religion not belong in the classroom, but supporters will live to rue the day they passed such a thing (hello, school district religion approval committee). If Kentucky is fortunate and wise, this bill will die a well-deserved death. 

PA: Failed Candidate Not Done Attacking Public Education

David McCormick is currently best known as the guy who couldn't beat a carpetbagging grifter in the GOP primary for a US Senate seat. But he's apparently not done yet.

McCormick started out as an actual Pennsylvanian, though he had to come back from Connecticut for the campaign. He's got a PhD from Princeton, worked for McKinsey, and had a great hedge fund career. He served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under Georg W. Bush. He's a trustee of the Aspen Institute.  And lest you mistake him for some elitist candy-ass, know that after he graduated from West Point, he was an Honor graduate from Ranger school (I had a brother-in-law who was a Ranger, and those guys don't play). McCormick got in the habit of saying he served as a Ranger; he didn't. 

He apparently backed Jeb Bush, but did not donate to the Trump campaign either time, though Trump ultimately offered him the Deputy Secretary of Defense job (he turned it down so he could keep hedge funding). McCormick's wife, Dina Powell, served as Deputy National Security Advisor for former President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. She also served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs from 2005 to 2007 under former President George W. Bush.

In his run for Pat Toomey's seat in PA, he was heavily portrayed as a liberal Wall Street Republican. "Nice guy," said Trump, "but not MAGA." 

Well, apparently he's working on that. He recently appeared on a Philly radio talk show, where he was asked about the dreaded wokeness in America's education system. Here's the reply, as flagged by American Bridge 21st Century: 

Our schools are failing, in terms of teaching our kids the ability to compete on a global stage. But more than that, they're teaching them that America is not exceptional. If you look at the history that's being taught, and the key to preserving America is that our children believe it's exceptional and they fight to keep it that way. And so that's my biggest issue. And this all became clear during COVID, because all of a sudden, parents could see that the history that was being taught, the sexualization that was happening, particularly in our elementary schools, they could see that teachers were making decisions that were not in the best interests of their children. And that's why we've got to break the back of our teachers' unions and our public school system and give kids choice and get parents more involved. And if there was ever a case for that, we've seen it recently.

It's all the hits, including some oldies like the "compete on a global stage" trope, plus new standards like "during COVID, everyone saw that schools are awful." So let's "break the back of the teachers' union" and of course all so we can involve parents and give kids choices. 

Hats off as well to the call to teach American exceptionalism.

All of this is consistent with his original campaign materials, which tried hard to capitalize on culture wars and MAGA outrage.

Now McCormick has a book-- Something Something Renew America-- and GOP establishment types are reportedly urging him to go after Bob Casey's Senate seat in 2024. The could turn into quite the primary, as failed gubernatorial MAGA Jan 6 apologist and Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano is also "praying about" a run for that seat. Either one would make a terrible Senator and a threat to public education in the US. 

ICYMI: Family Visit Edition (3/19)

The West Coast branch office of the Institute is in town for a visit, including the newest addition to the office (picture to follow). So I've spending extra time in the actual physical world. But I've still put together a reading list for the week. Read and learn.

A public school teacher's perspective on vouchers

Texas teacher Cecily Riesenberg offers one of the best speedy dissections of the school voucher issue you're likely to read. From the Amarillo Globe-News.

Preaching to the Choir: Greg Abbott Tours Private Christian Schools (Exclusively) to Make the Case for Vouchers

Forrest Wilder at Texas Monthly notices that Greg Abbott's voucher pitch seems to be aimed at a very specific audience:

Of the seven schools the governor has visited on his “Parent Empowerment Tour,” not a single one has been a public school or a secular private school or a religious school affiliated with Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism. Not even a Montessori. If the goal was to reassure critics that Abbott’s embrace of vouchers wasn’t a recipe for draining the public school system while subsidizing the children of wealthy Christian conservatives in private schools of their choice, well, none of those critics were around to hear it. The governor was quite literally preaching to the choir.

Gov. Abbott To Pay For Buses To Transport Voucher Supporters To Austin

Yeah, there's a lot of Texas on the list this week. Reform Austin has inside scoop that suggests Governor Abbott is spending some money on astroturf for the big voucher push.

Texas asking for trouble if it pours billions into unaccountable ‘school choice’ scheme

Jimmie Don Aycock was a Texas legislator, and he'd like to point in particular to the complete lack of accountability for taxpayer dollars in the Texas voucher plan.

Dallas Has a Problem with Zombie Astroturf Groups

Heck of a piece of research and reporting from Steve Monacelli, showing how some of Dallas's noisiest groups are part of some huge dark money machine. From the Texas Observer.

Texas has taken over the Houston school district. Educational outcomes have not always improved in other states that have done so.

NBC News reports on the state takeover of Houston schools, correctly noting that the history of school takeovers does not suggest that this is going to end well.

And now we're done with Texas. Moving on to the rest of the country.

At risk in Pennsylvania schools - books, political talk, LGBTQ policies

Chris Ullery in Phillyburbs takes a nicely comprehensive look at the various reactionary moves against speech and reading in Pennsylvania.

Parents Defending Education’s Hit and Run Job on Milton Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham is an expert at tracing money trails in astroturf groups, and he has spotted some Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] shenanigans in Massachusetts.

Preparing Minority Students for College Success Deserves Conservatives’ Support

Let Robert Pondiscio at the American Enterprise Institute explain to conservatives why they should not be trying to make A Thing out of college prep programs aimed at minority students.

Kansas legislators’ war on the poor opens worrisome new front: School vouchers and tax avoidance

The Kansas Reflector has emerged as a major defender of public education in that state, and Clay Wirestone, opinion editor, has lambasted the voucher plan being pushed there. Here he argues that it's a boondoggle for the rich.

Kansas ‘school choice’ plan is a money transfer from rural taxpayers to urban families

The Reflector isn't alone. Here's the editorial board of the Kansas City Star arguing that vouchers are just a cash grab for the rich.

‘Heartbreaking’: Dozens of RI children with special needs not receiving education

From Eli Sherman and Steph Machado at WPRI. What happens when a district completely failed to fill special ed spots? Special needs students get hung out to dry.

Empowering Teachers: A Strategy For Teacher Retention

Nicole Wolff at Stories from Arizona about an approach that might actually help retain teachers called Visible Learning which ironically she learned about in Houston. 

How one university is creatively tackling the rural teacher shortage

Wyoming has some good ideas about how to better train and support teachers (thereby increasing the odds they'll stick around). Nichole Dobo at Hechinger has the story.

ALL Students Deserve a "Positive Learning Environment"

Steve Nuzum pens a letter to the South Carolina legislature on the subject of their newest Don't Say Gay bill.

Teen Mental Health Distress Didn't Start with the Phones

John Warner pushes back on the recently published assertion that teen mental health crisis kicked off in 2012 (because smartphones). He brings receipt, and points instead toward toxic meritocracy.

How Stressing Preschoolers and Kindergarteners Could Lead to Mental Health Problems

Nancy Bailey points to another possible cause, and she's got research to go with it. 

Why Is the Republican Party Suddenly Weakening Child Labor Laws?

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire at The Nation point to the disturbing history of child labor and the recent push in red states to weaken child labor laws.

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

Yes, that means they're coming for education, too. ProPublica put a whole reporting team on this story of the next group to try to take over the country.

Here's how an AI tool to catch child abuse may flag parents with disabilities

For your "reasons not to trust AI tools" file, this AP story is heartbreaking. 

For the Dedicated Teacher

Finally, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider with indispensable advice for teachers who need to master one simple word. 

Over at Forbes.com, this week I was plugging the new book from Alexandra Robbins (and I'll keep plugging it, because you ought to read it). And I took one more swipe at the continued misuse of NAEP proficiency. 

Our newest VP. Her portfolio includes drool.

If you want to stay caught up on everything coming out of the Curmudgucation Institute, I recommend subscribe to my substack version. It's free. 

NH: School Opponent Ousted From Board

It has been around a year since Free State Libertarians tried to defund public education in tiny Croydon, New Hampshire. This week, the citizens ousted the school board member who pushed the school-gutting plan through.

Ian and Jody Underwood moved to New Hampshire, part of the Free State movement that imagines that if they can get enough Libertarians to move to the Granite State, they can remake it in their own anti government image (read A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear for a fair and sometimes hilarious look at how it's going). Ian became a selectman, and Jody got on the school board. 

The district serves only about 80 students, and because it can't support more than a tiny elementary school itself, it has a model for what an honest-to-God school choice program would look like-- full tuition for students to attend the school of their choice. 

But that's expensive, and in a town hall meeting held during a blizzard, Ian sprung an unannounced motion from the floor--a 50% budget cut for education, based on just $10K per student. That's one of the lessons of Croydon--that folks on the far right are far less interested in actual school choice than they are in simply slashing government and taxes. 

That $10K did not come close to covering the tuition for the upper grade students. Newport's tuition rate is about to rise to $17,880. Private tuition costs are, with only two exceptions, also higher than the $10K. And of course the costs of special ed, transportation, and administration. So in the end, each student would not simply get a $10K pseudo-voucher from the school.

The Underwoods said it's all good. "This gives us an opportunity," said Jody. "This is going to force us to step back and figure out a good way to do this [based] on what we know about how people learn, so that we can keep costs down." Another board member cautioned against a "failure of imagination." Options like a virtual school or learning pods with new New Hampshire BFF Prenda were also tossed out.

People were pissed. The school board meeting two days later drew a crowd of 100 mostly-angry people, destined to be even more frustrated to learn that the budget passage was legal and binding and couldn't simply be reversed. 

That was not the end of the story. Residents were worked up, and they discovered that they could call a special meeting by petition. They went door to door. They held two calling events. They wrote letters to the editor. They enlisted assistance from surrounding communities, including teachers, administrators and boards of nearby districts.

Jody Underwood reportedly said the board had legal advice to not advertise the special meeting (she says she said no such thing). Meanwhile, Ian Underwood was blogging increasingly angry posts: parents don’t understand how children learn, the special meeting was actually not legal, the school district wanted to take money by force, and a piece in which he argues that majorities in a democracy are a big problem.

In the end, the budget was restored. (You can read my accounts of these events here and here--I did some actual reporting and talking to sources and everything). 

Folks on the winning side said they knew the fight wasn't over, and at the recent town meeting, they proved it. Angie Beaulieu was one of the architects of Croydon's choice plan, and pretty unhappy about the Underwood's plan. Beaulieu defeated Jody Underwood 229 to 36, as decisive a pasting as one could expect to see.  

Last year, Underwood insisted to me that she was misrepresented, that the budget cut was fair and square. She was not happy about being outmaneuvered by her fellow citizens a year ago, and I don't imagine she's any happier about this latest defeat. 

PA: Board Member "I don't care what the law says."

Penncrest is a small rural district up the road from me, a district that has been mirroring the reading suppression battles of the more famous Central Bucks district (and by mirror, I mean that some folks on the Penncrest board appear to be literally copying some of the Central Bucks work). 

But CB is a big district in the busy part of the state, and Penncrest is a tiny district up in the wilderness, so it's not getting much attention. But it's worth paying attention to, because here in the rural school region, it's not unusual for board members to say the quiet part out loud because they don't realize they shouldn't. That happens a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the rest of the state doesn't pay much attention to what rural districts do. Someday I'll tell you the story of a local district that fired a teacher for being gay, didn't bother to cover that reason with even a tiny fig leaf, and was really surprised when they were dragged into court and lost. 

Penncrest has been trying to wield a tiny tattered fig leaf over its motivations for a new set of rules aimed at getting LGBTQ+ books out of its libraries, even as some board members have been quite clear about what they mean by "sexualized content," and while we're at it, all that racism stuff, too. 

Board member David Valesky on LGBTQ books in the library:

Besides the point of being totally evil, this is not what we need to be teaching kids. They aren't at school to be brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is okay. Its [sic] actually being promoted to the point where it's even 'cool'.

Board member David Valesky on books about race in American history:

"I don't have an issue if we're giving books that's targeting education of the Civil War and slavery and there is racism even today, but this is obviously like shoving it down every corner," he said.

Valesky said there were four books on the list that "openly promote the hate group Black Lives Matter."

"That's a group that is for destroying," he said. "They aren't protecting Black lives."

Board member David Valesky on the possibility of legal challenges to the board's new rules:

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

Those legal issues may in fact occur soon, but in the meantime, the board is setting up a citizen's committee to review naughty books. And in discussing that, board members ended up talking about what was revealed in some emails unearthed by a Right To Know request. 

I believe the terms in the policy we presented are clear. I honestly don’t care what the law says, as long as what I said is right before God. They can change the word at any time in state and federal laws. I’m just concerned that if this policy is pulled, then we have a minimum of 3 months until we can vote on it again. The remainder of my time on the board is uncertain at this point.

Yes, that's member David Valesky again (emphasis mine). Member Jeff Brooks brought it up with the suggestion that maybe the committee should include people who actually care about the law. Valesky said that it was taken out of context, but it's hard to imagine a context in which "I don't care what the law says" doesn't mean "I don't care what the law says." And given the context of Valesky's previous comments, it's hard not to think that he means that he doesn't care what the law says.

Don't blame Valesky just because he's the one who keeps saying things that end up in the paper; he's part of a board majority that appears to agree with him (and plenty of members of the public, some of who hit my comments sections with posts too rude and slanderous for me to put up). And what this board nakedly displays is the same stuff that's behind curtains and masks and tiny fig leaves in other places where the culture wars are being imposed on districts.

What can we take away?

1) It has nothing whatsoever to do with school choice (not really an option in this rural area) and everything to do with imposing the Correct Values on the school system-including all the other people who use it and pay for it. 

2) "Sexual content" means any dirty heterosexual stuff and any mention of LGBTQ persons at all (and it's all "porn" that is favored by "groomers.")

3) No conversation about race-related issues is possible because the terms and targets will move on a sentence by sentence basis.

4) They answer to nobody but God, as they conceive Him to Be.

Penncrest has a bunch of seats open for election this year, and in this neck of the woods, it's an unpaid position, which means community members sign up to get a load of grief for free, and the ongoing battle over these issues in Penncrest seems unlikely to resolve any time soon. We'll see what happens next, but I can practically guarantee that whatever it is, it won't be pretty.