Bill Hangley, Jr.: Abbott's Lesson for Charters: Look In The Mirror...Please (Guest Post)

Bill Hangley, Jr., is a free lance writer who worked the education beat in Philadelphia, and as such he has some thoughts about the charter scene in Philly as reflected through recent episodes of Abbott Elementary. I'm pleased to present his guest post on the subject.

America’s school-choice lobby can relax: when ABC’s Abbott Elementary returns this Wednesday [April 5], the plot will hinge on teacher qualifications, not charter school takeovers.

That’s good news for a community that’s used to being taken seriously – very seriously. Wherever charter supporters go, they usually have friends to defend their interests. But the choice lobby wasn’t represented in the Abbott writers’ room. Nobody stood in the way as the hit sitcom raked charters over the comedy coals, presenting them as cynical, counterproductive, and even absurd.

Unsurprisingly, the charter lobby didn’t like what America saw. “No one likes being vilified,” said Debbie Veney of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “It’s pathetic … to criticize the schools that succeed,” tweeted Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform.

As a journalist who covered Philadelphia’s charters for years, I expected to see people like Veney and Allen vigorously defend their industry. That’s what they’re paid to do.

I just wish somebody would pay them to take a good hard look in the mirror. Because as merciless as the sitcom’s portrayal of district-charter relations may have been, to me it looked far more accurate than charter supporters care to admit.

Admittedly, some might say I’m biased. As a reporter for WHYY News and the late, great Public School Notebook, I saw the ugly up close. In over a decade on the beat, I saw politicians meddle and school boards dissemble. I saw underperforming charters stay open while district-run schools shut down. I heard officials beg repeatedly for relief from costly charter payments that drain district budgets.

And I saw the real-life versions of the charter takeover featured in Abbott’s recent episodes. The sitcom version was funny. The real-life version was downright cruel.

In what our school district dubbed the “Renaissance” process, Philadelphia asked school communities to pick sides and fight it out. What America just saw on television, I saw a decade ago in places like Steel Elementary and Muñoz-Marín Elementary and Wister Elementary and Martin Luther King High.

It was brutal. Parents were asked to choose between imperfect schools they knew and blue-sky promises from well-dressed “providers” they’d never met. The resulting campaigns were every bit as impassioned and intrigue-riddled as any other Philadelphia election. I did my best to cover them fairly, and interviewed countless parents. Plenty were willing to consider a charter, for plenty of reasons.

But the question that came up most often: “If our school’s not good enough, why don’t they just fix our school?”

I had no answer, and the School District of Philadelphia never really did either.

That’s what rings the most true for me about Abbott’s charter episodes: the underlying absurdity of offering “choice” as a solution to an underfunded system. How do you fix one school by opening another? Especially when the old schools have to pay for new ones?

Think about it: no other government service is run that way. Nobody offers “trash collection choice” or “police choice.” Nor do prosperous suburban school districts choose “choice.” They choose to invest in their own schools, not open new ones run by somebody else.

But America’s choice lobby isn’t used to being laughed at. Which may explain the bitter edge to the tweets from Allen, who accused Abbott creator Quinta Brunson of hypocrisy: “attended charter schools her entire education.”

In fact, Brunson went to a public elementary school in West Philadelphia, and a now-closed charter high school. “You’re wrong and bad at research,” Brunson tweeted. “Loving something doesn’t mean it can’t be critiqued.”

So Brunson could easily dismiss Allen. But Philadelphia cannot easily dismiss its charters or their impact. The city’s 83 charters now educate about 65,000 students – almost enough to fill Lincoln Financial Field. They have powerful friends in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, including deep roots in parts of Philadelphia’s Black and brown communities.

How deep? Consider the recent Board of Education forum for Philly’s mayoral candidates. None significantly challenged charters’ role, and several embraced potential charter expansion, including having charters serve as neighborhood elementary schools, like the fictional Abbott.

Take Maria Quiñones Sánchez, who helped launch a charter: “We cannot tell parents, wait until we fix the whole system.”

Or Cherelle Parker, whose home turf in Northwest Philly is a charter stronghold: “We will not have an us-versus-them strategy.”

Or Derek Green, a former charter board member, who wants an “independent authorizer” to award charters, not the school district: “Parents do not believe that there’s not bias in the approval.”

Or Rebecca Rhynhart, who was serving under Mayor Michael Nutter when a Renaissance charter takeover collapsed amidst allegations of corruption and cronyism: “We can’t wait till the neighborhood schools get up to the place where every parent is comfortable.”

Even Helen Gym, a relentless charter-policy critic but also a charter founder, said she’d concentrate on strengthening District-run schools: “I don’t mind choice, but my focus is public schools.”

So charters may disappear from Abbott’s scripts, but in Philadelphia, they’re here to stay.

And now that America has seen charters’ bad side, how will the sector respond?

There’s plenty the charter lobby could do, if its deep-pocket donors choose. It could better support Philadelphia’s community-based charters, many of which badly need financial, academic, strategic and legal assistance. It could help stabilize district budgets by supporting much-needed statewide reforms. It could take a strong stand against obvious absurdities, like giving cyber-charters the same per-student payments as brick-and-mortar schools.

Sadly, my experience says the charter lobby won’t do any of those things.

Instead, it’ll probably keep lobbying for more charter schools. And if charters are on TV, they’ll lobby TV. They’ll be calling executives and advertisers to complain. And I can guarantee that somebody is hiring writers to gin up a pro-charter sitcom. I bet it’ll be full of union jokes. And I bet it won’t be funny.




Bill Hangley, Jr. can be found on Twitter @hangleyjr

A Note To Subscribers

When Google decided to drop its feed subscription app for Blogger, it was a sad day. I had hoped that the app that I replaced it with would be useful, but my frustrations with it continue to grow. The emails it sends out are unrecognizeable as coming from this blog, and virtually all useful functions require me to pay.

On the other hand, the substack experiment is working out well. It's free, it shows up in your email with a subject line that actually lets you know what it is, and I can use it to send out everything I'm publishing, not just the stuff from here at the mother ship. 

Shortly the signup box for the old email app will go away, though I presume the subscriptions will continue until that service gives up its internet ghost. But I want to take this moment to encourage you to sign up for the substack. It's free, it works, and it will keep you up to date on the regular posts here (including the weekly digest), plus whatever I post at Forbes. com, The Progressive, and the Bucks County Beacon. It's quick and simple.

Betsy DeVos Is Not Done Yet

When history closes the book on Betsy DeVos. it may well determine that she did the least damage to public education during the handful of years she was officially overseeing it.

Since she left DC (making a belated attempt to throw Trump under the bus on her way out), DeVos has been doing what she has done most of her adult life-- use money and influence to try to replace public education with a privatized, voucherized, taxpayer-funded-private-christianist-school, system that operates as a free market commodity unaided by the government. 

In Michigan, she tried hard to ram through a voucher bill, even trying to buy up enough support to circumvent the Democrat in the governor's mansion. She failed (thwarted once again by a system that allows any old citizen to vote and not just the righteous and deserving ones). She published a book that I'm sure somebody somewhere read (I'm not going to read it for you--DeVos has lived rent free in my head so long that I could probably write her book for her). 

She teamed up with some of the Koch-funded crowd in New Hampshire to start a national tour for yet another version of her Educational Freedom (Definitely Not "Vouchers") Scholarship program.

She has, in fact, dispatched her American Federation for Children all across the country (complete with head cheerleader and the left's least favorite mean girl Corey DeAngelis) to help goose the push for vouchers. 

I've been collecting clippings. In Nebraska, she spent big to push vouchers (AFC's Nebraska affiliate chief said their fighting the teachers unions that want "to protect their education monopoly" which I guess is why they collected billionaire money out the wazoo). AFC and their affiliate have been funding their friends in Missouri. They have been financing the way-right crowd in Oklahoma as well as in Texas--both states where it has been necessary to lean extra hard on rural GOP legislators who correctly see vouchers as a threat to their constituents and their beloved schools. There's also been some griping among conservatives who remember that giving taxpayer money away with no oversight or accountability is not really on brand for traditional conservatives.

Georgia. Iowa. Idaho. DeVos has been busy. The sudden eruption of voucher bills is not some oddly coincidental local phenomenon, but a full court press for the nation. Way too many folks are seeing it as a local fight, when it's really a collection of coordinated carpetbaggers (or in DeAngelis's case, one with what must a ton of frequent flyer miles). 

Not to mention that she's also backing upward-failing serial school dismantler Paul Vallas in his bid for the mayor's office in Chicago. 

Unfortunately, only a handful of journalists have noted the bigger picture. Here's Tyler Kingkade at NBC News managing to both A) spot the DeVos handprints all over various states and B) correctly identify her favored voucher bills as private school subsidy bills. 

DeVos is certainly not the only person throwing millions and millions of dollars around to try to stamp out public education as we know it. Here's Connie Matthiessen at Inside Philanthropy trying to sort out all the dark money from the various proponents of school vouchers--it's both impressive and scary.

Both of those pieces, as good as they are, miss the full story of DeVos, calling her "Trump's former Secretary of Education," as if her career in defunding and privatizing public education started in 2016. Not even close. She has spent decades as a right-wing, christianist crusader. Her ineffectiveness (and ill-suitedness) in office were predictable, given her traditional method of operation has been blunt, hardball politics. Aid her in her crusade, and you have her substantial financial wind in your sails; refuse her, and find yourself primaried and cast out. 

This is the woman who, in 1997, wrote

I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return.

As I've conceded in the past, I may project a bit too much with DeVos. But she's my generation, and I've known lots of folks like her (well, in every respect except the filthy rich heiress part). People of faith sometimes talk about being in the world, not of it, and I think it probably drove DeVos a little bit crazy to have to pretend to go along with little godless people and follow their silly godless rules. 

So I imagine that once she brushed the dust of DC off her sandals, it was a sort of relief to get back to pursuing kingdom gains by following the only rules that matter, the rules that she understands God to be requiring of her. 

Everyone who watched her leave office and thought, "Now that this big dope is out of office, we've seen the last of her" just hadn't been paying attention. It was easy to dismiss DeVos as a dope, but she wasn't. She was just a woman who was stuck in a job she was unqualified for in every important way. But the job she had before that--crusader for kingdom gains wielding a big fat sword of money given to her by God because she deserves it and will use it to His Will-- is the job she has prepared for and practiced her whole life. And now she has that job again.

She's got a strategy, a vision, a personal hired army, and a pile of money that would make Scrooge McDuck drop his flappy jaw. She is not going away any time soon, and it would be a big mistake to stop paying attention to what she's up to, because she is absolutely not done. 

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.