I Am Done With These School Shooting Arguments

Here are the discussions I'm really tired of wading through in the wake of the school shooting du jour.

The problem is mental illness.

Every nation on the planet has mentally ill people. No other nation on the planet approaches our level of gun violence against children and youth. 

There's nothing to be done. Shooters gonna shoot. 

This attitude that there's simply nothing that can be done, so why should legislators even try, is a mysterious notion that is only ever applied to gun laws. Not abortion or drag queens or traffic violations or even elections being won by the other side. Somehow, gun violence is the singular area in which the United States government is powerless to even attempt anything. 

Laws don't make any difference.

Every other country in the world says differently. 

Every argument ever presented by people who want to ban drag queens and dirty books.

If you have been vociferously arguing that children must be protected from knowing that gay people exist and there are books with sex things in them, and also let's not expose them to versions of history that will make them feel bad, but you don't want to try to reign in stuff that can actually kill them, then just shut up. In fact, shut up twice. (If you haven't seen the Jon Stewart clip, here ya go).

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

Catchy, but dumb. We're not talking about disarming the military or the police. 

But more guns make us safer!

I think we can safely say that we have tried this theory, and the empirical evidence suggests it is bunk, because with the number of guns we have, we should be the safest country on the planet, not the country with the most staggering level of gun violence in the history of the industrialized world.

Let's arm teachers.

This is a dumb idea that sooner or later is going to get somebody killed. Armed, undertrained amateurs in a high pressure situation will not help. Also, this keeps coming from the same people who also say that teachers cannot be trusted to choose books for students, but give them a gun. We can throw terms like socialist and groomer at them, but let's hand them a gun, too. It's almost as if you're not serious about one or the other or both.

Shooters are all angry white guys.

Other nations have angry white guys. They don't have our staggering level of gun violence.

It's those damned video games.

Other nations have video games. They don't have our staggering level of gun violence.

You can just as easily kill people with rocks or spoons.

Other nations have rocks and spoons. They don't have a staggering level of rock or spoon violence on par with our level of gun violence.

We shouldn't have taken prayer out of school.

Other. Nations.

Parents these days just don't raise their kids right.

Other.    Nations. 

This is just an excuse to come after our guns.

Yes, I sure remember when folks wailed that Obama was coming for their guns and then, he didn't. Because the government isn't coming for your guns. Gun and ammo manufacturers, however, would love to come for your money.

But the Second Amendment--

I love the Constitution a lot. I don't agree that the framers wanted to make sure that everyone could own an AR-15, but let's pretend for a moment that the Second Amendment says everything you think it does. The Constitution also failed to give women and Black folks the right to vote. We recognized that this was a mistake AND WE FIXED IT! Because that's what we do in this country. You know--just like some of you keep pushing for a constitutional convention so we can add term limits, balanced budget requirements, and other stuff that you think the framers overlooked.

Let's have the death penalty for school shooters.

This is double stupid. First, I'd rather prevent the violence than get revenge for it. Second, a goodly portion of these shooters have no intent of getting out of there alive, anyway. 

Here are some conversations I'm more than willing to have.

Let's not get too focused on school shootings.

School shootings are horrific and newsworthy, but children are still more likely to be victims of gun violence at home. Nobody is talking about it, but in a district in my own quiet corner of the world, a child shot their cousin, at home, in the chest. Nobody died, and it didn't even make it into the newspaper, making it probably the eleventy zillionth unremarked instance of a child getting their hands on a gun because some adult failed at adulting. 

So we have way more to talk about than the headline grabbing horror of school shootings. Way more. It's just that the one-at-a-time incidents don't generate quite the buzz, and at this point it's hard to imagine how much horror we'd have to be exposed to in order to move the legislative needle. I don't know how we break that cycle, other than by electing legislators who value children more than guns or gun lobby money. 

But while focusing on school shootings makes sense (including emotional sense), I suspect it's self-defeating because school shootings, as frequent, horrific, and terrible as they are, are too easy for ammosexuals to wave off as outliers. And they're not entirely wrong--school shootings are just the ugly tip of a grotesque iceberg of blood. We need to be talking about all the gun violence.

We can't get rid of all the guns.

If I had a magic wand, I'd be waving a mountain of firearms out of existence, but I don't, and no legislation imaginable could achieve that result. We'll never bring the toll down to zero. But we could be better. We could make it harder to get guns, to get ammo. We could outlaw the whole family of guns that have no purpose except to shoot other human beings (no--I'm not going to argue with you about what "assault" means--we all know what we're talking about). We could keep guns away from people who have proven themselves dangerous. We could require training and education for gun ownership, and mandate proper safe storage--you know, exactly the sort of stuff that responsible gun owners already do! The kinds of things we do for people who want to own and operate cars (which now are behind guns in number of children killed).

We don't need to talk about being perfect. But we sure as hell could talk about doing better.

It's a complicated issue, and we are not even close to having the complicated conversations needed to deal with it. This is not the best we can do. Shrugging after each death and saying, "Oh, well, price of freedom and all that" is not the best we can do. 

All the words on this subject are used up. Like the Onion's "No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (which was first run in 2014), we're simply caught in a continuous, ineffectual, damning loop. We should do better, but we won't, and that is a hard thing to accept. 

Independent Women's Forum Performs Some Covid Theater

There's a lot to know about the Independent Women's Forum, but the quickest way to get where they're coming from is to note that they grew out of a group called "Women for Clarence Thomas." They are a right wing, Koch funded, advocacy for hire group that has opposed the Violence Against Women Act, defended Rush Limbaugh, and fought teaching about global warming in schools. The chair is a member of the Council for National Policy, a sneaky but well-connected hard right christianist nationalist group.

IWF has a whole division devoted to education-- the Education Freedom Center-- that is always happy to argue for privatizing education and removing government from the whole business. The center's head is Ginny Gentles, a Florida product who led the state's school choice programs, worked in George W. Bush's department of education, and runs IWF's "Students Over Systems." ("Fund students, not systems" is a genius way to say "Defund public schools.")

And today, she's testifying before the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus Pandemic on the Consequences of School Closures, a House subcommittee that is totally devoted to getting a grasp of the real and complex issues behind the pandemic impact on schools and not at all one more attempt to air grievances and get some hits in against the teachers unions and public education. 

The subcommittee is headed by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), one of the GOP reps who sued to overturn Pennsylvania's election results in 2020. Other witnesses include writer David Zweig, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and, as "minority witness," Donna Mazyck, executive director of the National Association of School Nurses. So we know where this is headed. 

Zweig's testimony and Hoeg's testimony both dance around the notion that closing schools might have been a bad call and Europe opened sooner and it's probably the fault of the AFT. 

But Gentles is pretty clear: 

Let’s be clear: school closures were not a good or necessary response to the coronavirus, and closure decisions were not grounded in data. School district superintendents, school board members, and state leaders knew early on that children were extremely low risk, but many feared the political consequences of prioritizing open schools. They also knew that school closures were an ineffective strategy for preventing the spread of the virus. Schools stayed closed primarily because the teachers’ unions in our country have enormous political power and parents do not. As parents pleaded for open schools, services for our children with disabilities, and a response to the learning loss crisis created by prolonged closures, we found out just how little leverage we possess.

There's an awful lot of bullshit here. Children may well be low risk, but children have families. My twins are low risk; their medically frail grandparents are not. School leaders did not know shit, and Secretary DeVos was explicitly opposed to providing any sort of guidance at the beginning of this mess. As for parents--polls tell us repeatedly that the vast majority of parents (aka parents who don't make as living as political operatives) are quite happy with how their local district handled things. 

As for the evil teachers union, let me summarize the national conversation that has been repeated incessantly:

Teachers: Remote teaching sucks, and we would love to go back just as soon as schools put some basic safety measures and protocols in place.

Districts: How about now?

Teachers: Have you put some basic safety measures and protocols in place?

Districts: Not really, no.

Teachers: Then we would rather not go back, even though working our asses off via remote is no fun at all.

Certain folks: See! See! The schools are closed because the evil teachers union is trying to keep them closed, because they want to get paid for doing nothing.

But Gentles has the usual thesis.

Irresponsible school district leaders endangered children academically, emotionally, and physically by closing and refusing to open schools, decisions that led to devastating learning loss, mental health issues, developmental delays, and persistent discipline challenges.

She is, as I type this, trotting out the thin-sliced baloney about months of learning lost, the mental health crisis that has been ongoing for over a decade, developmental delays as imagined by McKinsey, and the persistent discipline challenges that I don't think anyone will argue with.

And look-- I'm not here to reargue the pandemic response. My take is that people had to make big decisions with very little clear information or direction, that the situations varied wildly depending on local conditions, and all of the available choices were bad ones, and I believe the vast majority of folks were trying to make the best bad choice they could. And we will be living with a variety of consequences of the pandemic and the bad choices it required for a while. And anyone who says that the choices were obvious, certain and clear at any point and if we had just chosen the right way, everything would be hunky dory now, is just full of it.

But for people who are already anti-public school, the pandemic has turned into a golden opportunity to go after public education. Here's how Gentles is finishing up her testimony:

Parents and policymakers must hold school districts accountable for school closure decisions and COVID-era federal supplemental funding choices. School districts that were closed for extended periods should be investigated so that students with disabilities can receive compensatory services. District, state, and federal leaders that caved to political pressure from teachers unions should be questioned in order to avoid a similar scenario unfolding in the future. Superintendents that chose to direct millions in COVID-era federal funding to athletic fields rather than academic recovery should be required to report regularly on the academic progress of their students.

In addition, education bureaucrats, superintendents, and local and state leaders must acknowledge their mistakes and take drastic measures to address the learning loss and discipline crisis they caused. Districts should prioritize the students with the highest need and invest in intensive high-dosage tutoring and summer school programs with proven track records. Supplemental federal funds should be invested in phonics-based literacy instruction. States and districts should provide learning recovery microgrants to families, similar to COVID-era programs created in Oklahoma, Texas, and Idaho, and recently launched in Virginia, so parents can direct funding to the tutoring or enrichment options that best meet their child’s needs.

In other words, punish our favorite villains (unions, education establishment) and implement our favorite policies (phonics, vouchers) and through it all, keep hammering away at the awfulness of public ed, employing the Rufo doctrine--get to universal choice by sowing universal distrust of public schools.

This is the new COVID theater--grandstanding about the real problems of a real pandemic that resulted in real deaths and real disruption, but avoiding any useful discussion about any of it in favor of using it as a political tool. What does this help? Whom does this help? 

ICYMI: National Spinach Day Edition (3/26)

Yes. that's a thing, and today is it. It's also the birthday of both Steven Typer and Jennifer Grey. Big month, March. It's this time of year that I get the little pangs that come from not still being involved in the heavy performance season in schools around here. Student performance productions are one of the things I truly miss about the job. 

It's been a slapdash kind of week for education news, but if you want to invest your mental energy, send the vibes to Texas where they're still holding the line on voucher-style privatization. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week. Also, a disclaimer that I rarely think to make--I may not agree with every word that I pass on in this list, but I believe everything on the list is worth reading.

Book ban lawmaker "very sad" that a parent is using his law to ban the “sex-ridden” Bible

An unsurprising and thoroughly predictable development in Utah.

Girls. Period.

From earlier in the week, Nancy Flanagan responds to the preoccupation in some quarters with the discussion of That Lady Stuff. She did not yet know it was going to get worse.

Idaho Republicans block ‘woke’ free tampons in schools proposal

Here it is, getting worse. 

How LA's teachers are making good on their promise to support community schools

Four years ago, LA teachers ran a successful strike and promised to support community schools. Here's Jeff Bryant looking at how well that all turned out. Really, really well.

Central Bucks reportedly plans to spend $1 million-plus in legal fees in response to allegations of anti-LGBTQ discrimination in schools

Central Bucks is one of the districts in PA that has decided to do God's work and stamp out Naughty Books. Looks like taxpayers in the district are going to pay for it big time.

How Vallas Helped Wall Street Loot Chicago’s Schools

There are so many reasons that Paul Vallas, poster boy for failing upwards, should not be the mayor of any city, town, village or fictional cartoon town, let alone Chicago. This piece lays out some of the damage he did to Chicago's school system his last time around.

Really, Governor?

Gwen Pauloski rolls her eyes so very hard at Greg Abbott in this blog post, questioning some of the rationale behind his voucher plan (who's been in charge of Texas schools for most of the last decade?)

DeSantis to expand 'Don't Say Gay' law to all grades

Yes, you probably heard this already, but if not, it can't be missed. "But it's only to protect the youngest children" is so last month. 

Wisconsin 1st graders were told they couldn't sing 'Rainbowland' by Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus because it was too controversial. The song is about accepting others.

The biggest enablers of these gag laws continue to be scaredy-pants administrators.

Recess Is Good For Kids. Why Don’t More States Require It?

Monica Potts at FiveThirtyEight with another one of those ongoing discussions that's ongoing not because we don't know the answers, but because for some reason we don't want to act on them.

Gay Sarasota school board member walks out of meeting after homophobic remarks

Just fake christians being awful again. And the board chair who took no action to stop this? That would be Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms For Liberty.

Is there a test for the love of reading?

Dr. Jesse P. Turner with a couple of thoughts about the testing of reading.

I am a Charter School Abolitionist, and You Should Be, Too

Steven Singer makes the case for doing away with charter schools entirely.

Is This the Singularity for Standardized Tests?

Ian Bogost at The Atlantic points out that the ability to chatbots to pass beloved standardized tests tells us more about the tests than about the chatbots.

We’re nervous that tests might turn us into computers, but also that computers might reveal the conceit of valuing tests so much in the first place.

Group Taking Over School Boards Nationwide Furious Their Children Are Being Taught Basic Empathy

Jack Doyle at The MarySue is kind of pissed of at Moms For Liberty and the whole “Not every human is deserving of my child’s empathy" thing

The DeSantitizing Agenda of the "Joke Mob"

Speaking of pissed off-- Schools Matter takes a hard swing at the work of Ron DeSantis.

“Freedom Caucus” Types Abandon Pretense

Steve Nuzum takes a look at the crew doing their best to shut down ideas they don't approve of in schools of South Carolina.

Why Abbott Elementary's Charter Schools Arc Hit Home for Teachers

And speaking of education issues penetrating media that doesn't ordinarily cover education issues, here's Laura Zornosa at Time Magazine, explaining the whole Abbott Elementary fuss. We can think choice fan Jeanne Allen for trying to pick a fight with the popular show; suddenly a charter story line that has been running all season gets national attention.

Pennsylvania’s teacher shortage has an ‘uglier’ problem: Lack of teacher diversity

Not a new issue--Pennsylvania has always had a problem with a very low percentage of teachers of color. But it's getting worse. Rebecca Watts at the Penn Capital-Star.

The Arizona Senate's book banning hysteria has gotten ... hysterical

Just gonna walk on by this headline. Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic has the story of one of the dumbest bills out there--this one tries to outlaw books that contain "gender pronouns." 

Ohio’s Proposed Income Tax Cut for the Rich Would Impose a $929 Million Property Tax Increase on Ohio’s Homeowners and Farmers

God bless Jan Resseger. Trying to sort out this bill gives me a headache, but she has managed to get a handle on one more way that the Ohio legislature is committed to defunding the public and refunding the wealthy.

Pearson agrees to sell online unit to Regent

Brief little news item, but it may turn out to be a whole thing--Pearson sells off a chunk of its online business

Next Week Won’t Be Much Better – Messing With The FEFP

What do you do after you've chased a huge chunk of your population out of public schools and into private and charter schools? Well, you go back and change who gets how much of the funding. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains what Florida is up to next.

Jubao

Thanks to Gregory Sampson, we know that there's a word to use when a teacher is turned in for teaching Unapproved Ideas and has to be fired and reeducated. 

Proctoring the PSAT

Can we talk about something not quite so heavy? Arthur Goldstein talks about the experience of proctoring the PSAT--and reading those obnoxious and privacy-violating directions.

Lasting Impressions

Here's a nice story. Rebecca Brinkman shares a story about little art galleries. Makes me wish I could go back and do something like this.

In 'The Teachers,' passion motivates, even as conditions grow worse for educators

Here's NPR's review of Alexandra Robbins new book, if you need one more review. Just go get a copy.

Nothing from other platforms this week. Please sign up for my substack, which will give you all my current stuff reliably and for free.

Of Course Schools Teach About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Florida's Don't Say Gay law is about to expand, so now's a good time to remember that it is a stupid law.

Florida's GOP wanted to avoid saying what they actually meant, so they said something stupid instead. 

What they meant was "Don't talk about LGBTQ persons, ever, in school." But they phrased it in a way that allowed defenders to argue repeatedly, "Hey, can you even show me the word 'gay' anywhere in that bill?"

And it wasn't anywhere there. The bill's language bars "discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity." Which makes it a stupid law, because sexual orientation and gender identity are discussed around children all the time, in school and out.

With a pair of five year old twins, we are awash in children's books here, and those books are loaded with depictions of sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Little Critter's mom stays at home, cooks and cleans, always wearing a dress. Dad comes home from work wearing a suit. Daniel Tiger's mom is married to his father, and she becomes pregnant with Daniel's baby sister. Or let's talk classic Disney flicks, in which princesses (wearing dresses) are rescued by men. Or movies like Bambi or Jungle Book in which we learn that the mere sight of a friendly female overwhelms the male brain. 

And there are certainly books that present non-traditional roles, like the nurturing father of the Jabari books or the varied families of Daniel Tiger's neighborhood. But all of those are displaying different non-traditional lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Heck, before children gave even set foot in school, they've learned to tell men's and women's restrooms apart based on the icons that show women wear dresses and men wear pants. The pants-dress distinction is probably the ultimate in Shit We Humans Make Up And Then Pretend Was Dictated To Us By God. Pants, just for the record, were probably invented by the Chinese and adopted in Europe much later (the Romans supposedly considered them barbaric, so all those classical charter schools are really missing the boat). 

We could go on and on, but as many have observed, we are teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity all the time (up to including all those times that somebody tries to cutely suggest that two five year olds are boyfriend and girlfriend). There are a handful of materials out there that avoid gender altogether, but I suspect that kind of unspecific androgeny would not please certain folks, either.

To expand this stupid law up through 12th grade is so many kinds of unenforceable stupid. How does one even begin to teach literature while making sure that nothing encourages a discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity? All of Shakespeare has to go out the window. Most of American literature-- I am struggling to think of a major work that does not deal with sexual orientation and gender identity. We could still do "Stopping by a Wood" and "The Road Not Taken" and some other Frost. 

But of course none of that is what the proponents of these laws want. They want schools to never talk about LGBTQ persons ever, only if they just say that directly, both their bigotry in their hearts and the illegal discrimination in their law would stand naked for everyone to see. Their shameful intent to oppress and erase would be on display.

So we're going to get more half-baked defenses of an indefensible law. "The word 'gay' isn't actually in there" as if we don't all understand that the words of the law aren't meant to mean what they say, because that would be hopelessly senseless. "So I guess you want to show hardcore porn to five year olds" as if there are no gradations and nuances that reasonable people can discuss. And some folks will keep throwing "groomer" around, because they don't want to talk about any of this, and nothing shuts up your opponents like slandering them with accusations of heinous crimes. 

Well, that and the constant threat of lawsuits, because don't forget--the law gives any parent who thinks the law has been violated the right to sue the school district. 

Maybe I'm underestimating just how repressive the state intends to be. Given the firing of a charter school principal who allowed sixth graders to be caught unawares by a marble penis (said the board chair, "The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids"), maybe the dream really is to get children all the way to age 18 unaware that there is any such thing as gender or sex. If so, that's not a plan destined for success. 

Florida may be the sunshine state, but when it comes to education, it is the coldest spot in the nation. 

Should Student Teachers Be Paid

Among the fifteen or so student teachers that I hosted over the years, a handful made the observation that somebody should be paying them. 

I didn't say anything. I did not agree then. But I may have changed my mind.

Hosting a student teacher, done properly, is a ton of work. You have responsibility for all the usual lesson planning, only second hand, checking and going over all of it. And the more trouble your student teacher is having catching on, the more time you spend ("Okay, you say you want to discuss 'The Road Not Taken.' What exactly do you want to discuss about it? What are some of the questions you're going to use to draw the students out? Where do you hope the discussion will lead?") You watch the lessons being delivered and essentially develop a lesson plan on the fly for how you'll help the student teacher process what happened. And you've got to balance making sure that neither the student teacher nor the students in your class are being shortchanged. Plus the career and personal counseling (How many times did I tell someone at the end of their day, "It's okay. If you don't cry at least once during student teaching, you don't understand the situation.")

To get all meta and mindful about classroom practice is exhilarating, but also exhausting. It is no wonder that some cooperating teachers simply hand a lesson plan over and say, "Just do this," or just hand the class over and go sit in the lounge. In all my years, I had exactly one student teacher who was a natural who needed very little assistance from me. In many cases it was not until the last several weeks that the ceased to be extra work, and in a few cases-- lordy!

So the notion that, as a student teacher, you are providing a valuable labor-saving service for the district is just not so. And that's okay. I took on many student teachers despite the extra work it made because I believed it was a way to keep my own professional muscles exercised and because if I wanted to see a new crop of good teachers enter the field, then I had to play my part in helping that happen. 

But pay them? That seemed backwards to me. And I suspect it seems that way to many of the "Nobody paid me to student teach" crowd.

However.

College has gotten increasingly expensive. Really expensive. Anyone who says, "Well, I just worked my way through school" is just showing their ignorance. In my region, student teachers usually teach close enough to campus that they can keep staying in a dorm room--but that's not cheap. And the costs of commuting are not cheap either. And a teacher's salary is not going to work off that debt very quickly.

Over the past couple of decades, an increasing number of professions have become prohibitively expensive to enter. It's not just the education, but that the entryway now lies through an unpaid internship, and that creates a variety of barriers to entering the field. And I defy you to name any field-- journalism, advertising, medicine-- where the ability to live for a year or two without any income is an actual qualification for the job. 

Loan forgiveness and grants can lower financial barriers to entering the teaching profession, but a stipend for student teaching also makes sense. Use state or federal money. Districts that can afford it would be smart to offer stipends to student teachers as a step toward recruiting folks to fill the district's empty teaching spots. 

Student teaching is a crazy chapter in a baby teacher's life-- you're still in college, but not really, and can you even do this, and why aren't there enough hours in the day, and there definitely enough hours for you to maintain solid contact with your human support system, and graduation is almost here and what are you going to do with your life, anyway, and did you even remember to eat today? A stipend could reduce worries by a hair and serve as a gesture of support for your professional choice.

Most importantly, it could reduce, by even a little bit, financial barriers to entering the profession. It may just seem like nickels and dimes, but if you're going to be a teacher, getting used to nickels and dimes will be valuable.

Testing and the Love of Reading

There's a great piece in the Atlantic from author Katherine Marsh that looks to answer "why kids aren't falling in love with reading." 

It's not just the screens. And she notes that surveys pre-pandemic already showed reading for fun had already dropped off a cliff for 9 and 13 year olds. 

If you have taught in the last twenty years, or regularly reads here, you already know what's happening. As Marsh explains the loss of interest in story:

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

Yup. The rise of NCLB and Race to the Top and Common Core have cemented the practice of teaching students to read and respond to tiny little fragments of works rather than the whole thing.

You can argue (as some have, responding to this article on the tweeter machine) that no standards ever said, "Go out and never read an entire work of literature again." And that's fair-- Common Core didn't require this exactly. But it surely enabled it, in two crucial ways. 

For one, it added fuel to the high stakes Big Standardized Test craze. NCLB ramped up BS Tests across the nation, but those were sorted out state by state. The Core created the illusion that we could have BS Tests aligned to national-ish standards and so it was okay to attach higher and higher stakes to test results. But that meant lots and lots of test prep materials, conveniently published under the "Common Core aligned" claim. And since the BS Tests tested with short clips from reading, the most effective test prep would have to mirror that approach. Teachers were pitched coaching book after coaching book with selections just a few paragraphs long tied to multiple choice questions. 

The Core also ramped up the idea of reading "skills," the idea that reading skills could somehow exist in a vacuum, somehow separated from actual content. And if you don't need any content knowledge to pack in with the reading, well, content knowledge can also mean the rest of the piece itself. David Coleman wanted us to stay within the four corners of the text, and the absurd extension of that idea is that we can stay within the four corners of the fifth and sixth paragraph of the entire work. 

"Skills" divorced from content gets us reading comprehension equivalent of DIBELS, the crazy pants "reading" assessment that tries to "test" the skill of decoding by having students decode words that aren't words--reading without actually reading. The literature version of that is reading comprehension without any larger work to comprehend. Answer these questions about one page out of Hamlet, as if one need not read the whole work to develop real comprehension. As if reading comprehension is a skill that can be tested in a vacuum. 

The end effect is to reduce "reading" to a performative task, with no real purpose except to gear students for the Big Standardized Test.

As Marsh points out, the enjoyment of reading, the pleasure of being on the receiving end of a story, a communication, a human mind and heart being transmitted through the printed page--none of that needs to be sacrificed in the service of developing reading skills. 

This is why high stakes testing remains my Education Enemy #1. It turns everything upside down by insisting that the purpose of education is to get students ready to score well on the Big Standardized Test, instead of getting them ready to live their lives, to become their best selves, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world. Twenty years of high stakes testing has caused too much of education to lose the plot. The number of students who can't imagine any purpose for reading except to answer test questions is just one sad symptom.

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.