Sec. Cardona's Bold Bowl Of Oatmeal (And That's Okay)

This is a critique of a pronouncement from Education Secretary Cardona, with a special twist ending. We're going to Raise The Bar: Lead The World.

That's the title, a thing stripped of any poetry or sense, of some new initiative thingy that the United States Department of Education is embarking on. Secretary Cardona rolled it out in a "major address." And if you're wondering what, exactly, they're talking about--well, let's drill down into the language of the announcement and see what we can find.

The press release is appropriately vague, speaking of "global engagement" and making "a call to strengthen our will to transform education for the better, building on approaches that we know work in education" and a "collective will to challenge complacency." The department tweet is even more obtuse, exhorting that "we must step up, seize this opportunity & maximize the potential of our students, our schools, and our country." It all seems vaguely familiar.

This new--well, I guess we call it a "direction" which I suppose is less definitive than an "initiative" but more focused than a "general inclination"-- thing comes with three "focus areas." 

• Achieving Academic Excellence
• Accelerating learning for every student
• Deliver a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student 
• Boldly Improve Learning Conditions
• Eliminate the educator shortage for every school
• Invest in every student’s mental health and well-being
• Creating Pathways for Global Engagements
• Ensure every student has a pathway to college and career
• Provide every student a pathway to multilingualism

A, B, C--get it? The actual goals are about as generic as one can get, with nary a specific actionable item in sight. I'm not even sure what "global engagements" are. Do we want our citizens to outdo workers in other countries? Bring the jobs back here (as if that is in worker control)? 

We can tease out some more specific notions from the actual text of his speech.

The speech, like the press release, really really wants you to know that the American Rescue Plan includes a "historic" $130 billion thrown in the general direction of schools. 

What we do need is a collective will to fight complacency and status quo in education with the same passion we used to fight COVID. We need the same spirit of unity and bipartisanship we had in the first two months of the pandemic, when we looked past red and blue, and tapped into our humanity, courage, and American spirit.

That's a bold choice of comparison, because education is still dealing with people whose passion is to fight against the fight against covid, a passion that they have indeed transferred to education itself. "No masks" and "No vaccinations" shifted pretty quickly to "No naughty books" and "No telling kids to be nice." He says at one point that culture wars aren't the answer, but maybe he doesn't get where they're coming from. Nor does getting nostalgic about a period that was a two-month blip in the larger narrative seems unlikely to yield help.

But I really take exception to the "complacency" line. I know a lot of teachers, and while they might be described as tired, beleaguered, passionate, overworked, committed, professional, and doing their damned best, I can't say I know many that are "complacent."

But from there we move on to the ABC's of this new thingy.

Academics? We get this baloney:

As much as it is about recovery, it’s also about setting higher standards for academic success in reading and mathematics. It’s unacceptable that in the most recent PISA test, an assessment which is done internationally, our students scored 36th place out of 79 countries in math.

Bringing up our rank on the PISA is an automatic disqualifier from the Take Me Seriously derby. We have always ranked low on the PISA, and nobody has ever correlated that performance with anything. We always get beaten by Estonia. So what? If you want to convert education to a Prepare for the PISA model, it could be done--all you'd have to do is give up any pretense of actual educating.

What specific academic advances does he have in mind? "Science of literacy" and "strong decoding," and I'm not going to get into the reading wars because (spoiler alert) winning the reading wars and teaching students to read are two different things. Financial literacy. High standards aka stop grade inflation. STEM. Pre-K. And this bold stance:

It means that we pursue good pedagogy in a well-rounded education that includes and embraces the Arts—and reject a school experience that is narrowed to only what is tested.

It tells you something about the last twenty-some years of government edumeddling and general bullshittery that it's even a thing that a statement by the secretary of education saying that "good pedagogy" is a thing we should pursue. 

We need to recognize once and for all that standardized tests work best when they serve as a flashlight on what works and what needs our attention – not as hammers to drive the outcomes we want in education from the top down, often pointing fingers to those with greater needs and less resources.

This is a true thing. Federal education people should say it, and they have, many times. It's a fine thing to say, but if it is not immediately followed by "And so we will call on Congress to end federal mandates for standardized testing as a measure of school effectiveness, teacher quality, and student achievement," it doesn't mean a damned thing. Especially when it's coming from the guy who defended the BS Test at a time when it was clearly a waste of valuable time and resources.

Then we're on to better learning conditions. Cardona calls for better mental health supports, with more counselors, somehow. More professional development on trauma informed practice (because one more PD session will totally take care of that). 

Let’s not have pandemic amnesia and forget how schools closed because they did not have enough teachers.

Yeah, too late on that pandemic amnesia thing. Teachers are important and we should pay them more, he says, with various rhetorical flourishes. The administration is ready to throw a bunch of money at teacher development and retention. Higher salaries. Career ladders like Master Teacher and Teacher Leader. Cancel college debts. Actually listening to teachers and respecting their opinions. These are all nice ideas that we have heard before (though admittedly not in the previous administration, so thanks for setting that bar low, Secretary DeVos).

Pre-K through college connection. Career and technical education. Watch for the rollout of a "new pathways initiative" which will "include very specific plans on how our high schools should be evolved to meet the career and college pathways of today and tomorrow." Micro-credentials. Career pathways create options. 

This cradle to career stuff will help our graduates "compete on a global stage," and whenever I hear that magical phrase I want to know if A) better educated widgets will somehow cause corporate bosses to bring back jobs to the US and B) what sort of education prepares students to compete by agreeing to live on subsistence wages. Cardona seems to love the cradle to career model; I've complained about his support before. 

Also, multilingual stuff is good.

Then it's the big finish, including something Cardona cribbed from the Betsy DeVos playbook. In a list of parallel structures exhorting folks to join in:

If you believe that it’s worth taking a few lumps as we challenge the protectors of the status quo in education: join me on this journey.

What status quo, and which protectors? Seriously. Because one status quo I can think of is the continued use of the Big Standardized Test, and that piece of status quo is protected by the federal government. So go ahead and get started on that one, will you? 

The speech and the thingy that it introduces seem like the usual lukewarm bowl of unflavored oatmeal, and in a way, I guess that's okay. Here's a bit from early in the speech:

We have seen shiny silver bullets from the federal level promising to “fix” education. We’ve seen big initiatives with clever names that promise everything, only to fade away after the sense of urgency is over.

That’s not what this Administration is about.

This Administration is about substance, not sensationalism in education. It’s about real solutions to complex issues, informed by real experience – with an unrelenting focus on the instructional core.

Okay, I'm not sure that it's clear what the heck this administration is about when it comes to education, but the idea here is sound.

Any Secretary of Education who stands up to say, "Hey, here's a Great New Thing that will fix education in this country" is full of it. Doesn't matter if the Great New Thing is National Standards or a Big Standardized Test or a federal grant competition/bribery system or even Freedom Scholarship Vouchers--anyone who thinks they have a silver bullet for education is full of enough fertilizer to turn the moon brown. 

The speech that I would most trust from a Secretary of Education would be one that admits that there's nothing special or exciting that the feds can do, other than make it possible for states to support teachers in doing the work. 

That's the big secret of education. Doing the work. Getting good people to do the work, and then removing as many obstacles and providing as many supports as possible. We've lost our way educationally in this country by a sustained bipartisan effort to do the inverse--providing obstacles and removing supports. The federal government has treated teachers with distrust and tried to micromanage them, and bot directly and indirectly empowered the very people who want to put obstacles in the path of public education. 

It's not drudgery. It's not a grind. But the work is slow, steady, unglamorous work, and every attempt to turn it into drama of operatic proportions just gets in the way. The work is about relationships, and though teacher-student is a relationship different from others, it still thrives not on the Grand Gestures but on the daily maintenance. 

It's not just that I'm not looking for fireworks from the bully pulpit in DC-- I distrust them. And while I find nothing in this bland compendium of committeefied bureaucrat-speak to get excited about, I can't imagine what a secretary of education could say that would excite me. 

But do you know how I know for absolute certain that Raise the Bar is a nothingburger?

Here's the twist ending. Although the tweet that brought it to my attention went up March 31, the press release and speech about Raise the Bar happened back in January. And since then...?

It made it obliquely into Cardona's Not Gonna Take It Anymore interview with Politico ;ast week:

“I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”

In that interview he went to actually say some stuff, like calling out bogus culture war baloney. In an op-ed run in Florida, he actually pointed out that parent's right rhetoric was just a fig leaf for a push to defund public schools (a point on which I'd say he's exactly correct). 

“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”

He added: “If we’re not standing up for our students, who will? I feel it’s time.”

In other words, let's get all this crap out of the way of doing the work. I would take one education secretary like this over a hundred of the kind that pump out oatmeal like Raise the Bar. It remains to be seen if he can sustain it, or if we're just going back to oatmeal.

ICYMI: Out Like A Drunken Lion Edition (4/2)

It has been a miserable mess of a week. Nationally we have had to repeat our usual gun violence in school dance, which always feels dark and draining and casts a pall over most everything else.

Here at the Institute, it has also been a week. My parents needed a hospital visit for a variety of challenges, and the cherry on top was a positive COVID test. They are vaccinated and so doing well, but my sister has been quarantining with them, which means heaven will have to build an annex for her crown in order to fit all the stars that belong in it. I have two siblings who are both absolute bricks, so we tag team our way through these things. Meanwhile the Chief Marital Officer of the Institute is away at a library convention, and as you read this, I'm off helping my oldest son, his wife, and my granddaughter move into new digs. So we are just roaring our way into spring here. Also, power outages.

It is just a time, and the readings for the week tell us that many people are having a time all over the country. Let us all just keep keeping on.

The defeat of a school voucher program reveals the truth within the 'school choice' debate

Sandra Jones writing for Our Schools with a report on how the defeat of one voucher bill shows what's wrong with education savings accounts, and why even some conservatives oppose them.

Ron DeSantis Chose the Wrong College to Take Over

Conor Friedersdorf misses a lot of the fundamental issues involved in this piece, but it still provides a pretty vivid picture of what the takeover of New College looks like on the ground. It's in the Atlantic, so beware the paywall.

"They banned Dolly": Republicans want the dumbest parent at the school to control the curriculum

Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, has harnessed an awful lot of anger about right wing culture war stuff lately. Here she focuses on policies that have given individuals the ability to dictate to everyone.

The culture wars are driving teachers from the classroom. Two campaigns are trying to help

At Hechinger, Javeria Salman looks at two new organizations aimed at helping recruit and defend teachers in the current climate.

Calling Out Some “Ban Books, Protect Guns” Hypocrisy

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider lays out some of the double-faced legislating going on in states.

Florida school bans Disney movie on civil rights activist because a parent didn't want her child to learn hatred

Claire Thornton reports on the story of the district that banned a Disney movie about Ruby Bridges because one parent was sad about it. 

The GOP Embraces the Kyle Rittenhouse Approach to Kindergarten

Dahlia Lithwick looks at the apparent disconnect between the far right's interest in defending students from books, but not from guns. It's important to remember, she points out, that they don't believe in public education in the first place.

High stakes for Chicago schools in mayoral election

Valerie Stauss at The Answer Sheet (Washington Post) hosts Cassie Criswell and Diane Horwitz to talk about the many reasons that Paul Vallas is the wrong choice for Chicago's mayoral election.

Paul Vallas’s trail of school privatization

Jim Daley at The Tribe looks at the trail of destruction that Vallas has left behind him. Share with a Chicago voter you love.

The Absolute Folly of Standardization

Nancy Flanagan with a reminder that standardization and education make a problematic pairing.

Why Republicans Are Embracing Vouchers Even Though They Don’t Work

Jonathan Chait at the New Yorker is absolutely wrong about charter schools (but then, his wife works in the charter industry), but that means he's more than willing to point out the problems with voucher support. That makes this article both a good critique of the politics of vouchers and an interesting peek inside the charter-voucher rivalry.

The West Coast Think Tank Behind DeSantis War On Woke

Okay, so to read this you have to navigate one of the most annoying paywalls on the internet at The Nation, but Jennifer Berkshire is there with the tale of the Claremont Institute. 

Gun Deaths Among Kids Keep Rising, But Studies Show State Gun Laws Can Help

From US News-- the school shootings are not the worst of it. But we already know some things that help because (spoiler alert) it's not equally bad everywhere.

Why Donald Trump is talking about parents not loving their kids

Does it seem like the parental rights movement is a bit hostile to children? Philip Bump at the Washington Post picks on a new Trump thread that may be part of the same narrative.

The GOP's 'Parents Bill of Rights' excludes millions of parents

Hayes Brown at MSNBC looks at parental rights law, and who doesn't get to be part of it.

Michael Lawler breaks GOP ranks, votes against 'Parents Bill of Rights' he co-sponsored

For one legislator, an amendment to target some children was just too much to bear.

Schools forced to divert staff amid historic flood of records requests

One of the effects of parental rights laws is turning the three R's into reading, 'riting, and records requests. It's the perfect tool for harassing the heck out of districts. The Washington Post has this story.

The SEL Battles in Florida

Allie Wong with an in depth look at the battle in Florida over whether or not to talk to students about being nice. 

Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality.

In The Jacobin, Jennfer Berkshire reviews The Education Myth and the persistence of certain neo-liberal fairy tales.

Three minutes and the truth

Paul Bowers went to the South Carolina capital to speak out against censorship. What he said and heard.

State superintendent emails 'pornographic' images to entire Oklahoma Legislature

Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief is a special guy.

Over at Forbes.com, I looked at a survey that says many Floridian students have had enough, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman's proposal to put an end to Big Standardized Testing.  

Join me on substack, where you get all the stuff I send out into the intersphere. Free and in your inbox.

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?