ICYMI: Teacher Appreciation Week Edition (5/7)

So, the explanation is that Teacher Appreciation Day is the first Tuesday in May, but Teacher Appreciation Week is the first full week in May (starting on a Sunday), so that's why they're separate this year. Last week teachers got their day of appreciation, but today we kick off the week. Hope that clears it up for you.

Lots to read this week, on a tour across the country.

Unhappy meals

At Popular Information, a look at one striking child labor case as well as the current wave of discoveries about such shenanigans.

Christian activists are fighting to glorify God in a suburban Texas school district

In Texas, a microcosm of how competing versions of conservatism (as well as big dollar political interests) duke it out. From NBC News

The Conservative Scholar Who Convinced GOP Lawmakers Civics Conceals CRT

Asher Lehrer-Small at The 74. Yes, I know, but sometimes they publish some useful pieces of journalism. Stanley Kurtz is a name you should know, Like Koch or DeVos. Because he's one more busy rich guy.

Texas guts ‘woke civics’. Now kids can’t engage in a key democratic process

Another Lehrer-Small piece, looking at how Texas just threw away a key part of civics education.

Against teacher censorship

Paul Bowers speaks out against an impending teacher gag law in South Carolina.

Selling Denver’s Portfolio Model by Confusing Correlation with Causation

Thomas Ultican takes a look at how that whole portfolio model thing (the one where you treat schools like investments) is working out for Denver.

Virginia students aren't showing up to school, putting accreditation for many at risk

The whole attendance thing is an issue, though perhaps not drawing the attention it would if anyone could figure out how to weaponize it. But they're starting to feel it in Virginia.

The parents’ rights movement keeps ducking parental responsibilities

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post makes a good case for renaming the parental rights movement the "make this not my parental problem any more" movement.

Mrs. Drummond, You Are Appreciated

I'm not going to fully endorse all the teacher appreciation ideas included in this Natalie Dean piece, but the appreciation itself is nice.

Iowa Students Outsmart GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds at Scholar Ceremony

Smartass students manage to inject some youthful rebellion into Governor Reynolds's student appreciation photo op.

GOP governor rejects funding for PBS because Clifford the dog "indoctrinates" kids

Not the Onion, and while LGBTQNation has put the worst possible spin on this story, they aren't lying. Clifford showed some lesbians. Add this to the file of stories to pull up when the culture police say they're just trying to keep pornography away from five year olds.

Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom

Conor Friedersdorf is nobody's idea of a fuzzy liberal, but it takes a conservative to come up with "anti-woke nanny state" to describe DeSantis's Florida.

Stories About How Charters Profit and Suspect Statistics from a Charter School Lobbyist

Meanwhile in Florida, charter lobbyists are spreading fertilizer in hopes of growing one more money tree. Sue Kingery Woltanski would like to correct the record. 

Will Chicago Be Able to Climb Out of the Deep Hole Dug by Neoliberal School Reform?

And speaking of fertilizer, Jan Resseger takes a look at the long tale of neo-liberal damage inflicted on Chicago schools.

Teen shelves half empty at Hamilton East as library conducts $300K board-pushed book review

Meanwhile, in Indiana, it turns out that comply with book freakouts can be really expensive.

Essex/Westford School District parents speak to support gender-neutral terms

It's a small story from Vermont, but it really highlights the contrast between the nationally-based culture attack and the actual taxpayers and parents in the district.

Tennessee Goes Back to Looking Back Texas

Come for Tc Weber's Al Kooper stories. Stay for his take on the newest changing of the guard in Tennessee's education chief, a job you apparently can't get if you don't have ties to the reformster movement (ties to Tennessee are optional).

Jeb Bush and Reed Hastings' New TN Commissioner of Education

Schools Matter has a take on the Tennessee shuffle.

Here's what AFT’s Randi Weingarten said about reopening schools during COVID-19

The misrepresentation of what teachers and their unions wanted during the pandemic (spoiler alert-- it was NOT to keep school closed--which it wasn't--in order to extort a big payday), so here's a quick fact check from Politico for what Randi Weingarten actually said. You can believe it or not, but here's the record.

When Our Students Leave Us

Steven Singer talks about those moments when your grown students surprise you with the rest of their story.

Me, Aladdin, and 110 Newcomers

What a cool outing. NYC Educator takes a huge raft of students to their first Broadway show.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and my Middle School Band

Nancy Flanagan reflects on how a band arrangement and an unusual pop hit sparked a worthwhile lesson.

Ed Sheeran Wins Lawsuit Alleging Copyright Infringement of Marvin Gaye’s "Let's Get It On"

You may not have been paying attention to this suit, but musicians were, because being able to lay claim to a vaguely similar chord progression would have been disastrous. But no-- you can't copyright, say, a twelve bar blues progression. Phew.

School principal unlocks dumpster, finds bear inside

You've almost certainly seen this this week, but I would hate for you to miss it. Proof that any principal's bad day can, in fact, get worse. 

Over at Forbes, my teacher appreciation post for this week.

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Five Hard Truths About The Big Standardized Test

Christopher Tienken (Seton Hall) has done some especially valuable research work with the Big Standardized Test, that state-level test that supposedly tells us how well students are learning and teachers are teaching. 

In one of my favorites, from way back in 2016, Tienken and his team showed that with just three pieces of demographic data-- percentage of families with income over $200K, percentage of people in poverty, and percentage of people with bachelors degree-- you can pretty accurately predict what the BS Test results for a district are going to be. If you want solid evidence that BS Tests primarily measure socio-economic factors rather than educational ones, Tienken is your guy.

So this piece, which dropped quietly in January, is well wort the look. Tienken has put together an invaluable and brief listicle-- Five Things Educators Should Know About Standardized Tests. I could have just put this on the weekly Sunday digest of Good Things To Read, but 1) it requires a couple of clicks to get there and B) I really, really think you should see this. Also C) it makes me want to add my two cents.

The five hard truths about the BS Test:

1) State tests are not diagnostic

Since Day One of the rise of the BS Test, critics have pointed out repeatedly that a single standardized test cannot be used for a dozen different purposes. A test that is used to measure achievement is not useful for diagnosing student needs. Tienken can explain this in more professional terms, but for laypeople, there are many analogies. You can't measure water temperature or volume with a yardstick. A tool that ranks students according to height does not tell you how tall any given student actually is. If you want a test to diagnose what students need to plug holes in their understanding, test experts can tell you how to design it, and the BS Tests do not meet those design specs.

2) State tests are predictable.

See above. Tienken has repeated and repeated versions of the earlier research in state after state. The fact that test results can be predicted by using demographic factors strongly suggests that, at a minimum, we are spending way too much in time and resources to get information we could easily elsewhere. Also, maybe that information isn't really telling us what we were promised it would tell us.

3) State test results are influenced by family income and background knowledge.

Teachers assess how well students learn and how well they taught by aligning tests to the actual lessons that preceded them. This is not exactly a radical notion. State tests don't do that, and so they favor students who have a bigger background of general knowledge, vocabulary, and reading.

State tests and other standardized assessments have included questions that uses passages, contexts, or situations based on a famous violinist, visits to a state park, pioneer life in the 1800s, ecology and environmental topics, life on the farm, space exploration, travel and vacations, contemporary suburban life, roller coasters, life in Japan, and other contexts and topics that require students to have varied life experiences and background knowledge to successfully navigate and understand the passages and contexts to answer the question.

4) Standardized tests disadvantage English Language Learners

It's not just trying to navigate a second, new, language, but the use of idiom, slang, and "white middle class situations." 

Look at 3 and 4 together this way-- imagine I give you a series of questions about 11th century slavic language development or Central African culture in the 500s, and then declared that the results of those questions showed your reading comprehension skills.

5) Standardized tests disadvantage students with individualized education programs.

An IEP is supposed to mean that you get an education crafted to meet your particular strengths and weaknesses. A one-version-for-everyone standardized test does not do that. As Tienken puts it, "Standardized testing for a student with an IEP makes as much sense as having a left-handed person create a writing sample in cursive with his right hand and then making a determination about the quality and skill of his handwriting and his readiness for college and careers based on that sample."

What standardized tests promise us is a frictionless measure of student skill, achievement, smartitude, whatever. It's supposed to be like giving a runner a clear, flat open track so that we get a "pure" measure of the runners true, best speed. 

But what Tienken and others repeatedly remind us is that the standardized test track is not level, not flat, not smooth, and is littered with all manner of obstacles, so what we end up measuring is not the runners speed, but their ability to navigate that particular set of obstacles. Instead of a frictionless measure, we get a measure of how well students manage the friction itself. That makes them lousy tools for the many purposes for which they've been sold.

Gods and Parents

In my corner of the world, the wall between church and state is pretty flimsy. Our schools still have Christmas concerts, and it's not unusual for school officials to offer a little Jesus prayer before a public event, despite a couple of high profile lawsuits in the region, brought by students who didn't want a Christian prayer at graduation (and who were vilified by many in the community after siccing the ACLU on local officials). 

So it was no surprise to pick up my newspaper earlier this week and find a whole front page story about a Bible club at a local high school, complete with a picture of the teacher-advisor of the club praying with a student in a classroom "during a break in classes." That may be as much a feature of a newspaper photographer asking "Can I get a picture right now" as the regular conduct of Bible business during the school day. But what I found even more striking was the part about a prayer locker--the school has given the Bible club a few lockers to paint and use as a place for students to drop prayer requests. Afterschool use of school facilities for club meetings is one thing; the contribution of school resources, however small, is another. Wonder what would happen if students went to the administration and demanded a Hindu locker or an atheist locker or a Satanic locker.

Again, none of this is a shock or a surprise, but times being what they are, I wondered-- do members of the Bible club have to get permission slips from their parents? Is the school required to notify parents that their child is involved in a religious activity? 

I remember years ago a Jewish student talking about the elementary teacher who tried to convince her of the error of her ways. She wasn't swayed, but what if she had been? Would the school have been required to report her change of heart? 

We're not just talking about atheists or non-Christians. What if a Catholic student decided to join a Baptist Bible study, or vice versa? 

And there's the Satanic Temple, which never tires of getting federal courts to rule that, yes, if your school allows an after-school Christian club, it has to allows a Satan Club, too. If your child decides to join that club, should the school let you know?

The interface between public school and private religion is always fraught. Here's another story: Girl gets caught sneaking out, and her angry religious (non-Christian) father shaves her head. Sends her to school and instructs the school that she is not to be allowed to put on a hat to lessen her public shaming, because it's a faith and obedience thing. What should the school do?

Let's try something easier. Consider these two scenarios:

Sam is raised in an atheist home, but Sam decides to join a Christian Bible and Worship Club after school.

Pat is raised in a church-going home, but Pat decides to join an after-school Satan Club.

Should parents be told? Should the child be free to join whatever club they like, and it's up to them to communicate with parents or not? Is your answer the same for both, or is your answer that Sam's parents shouldn't be allowed to stand in the path of Sam's salvation, but Pat's parents need to get involved. If so, can you explain why the public school should subordinated to a particular faith?

There are a couple of issues in play here. One is the issue of having a public school pick sides in religious debates. Texas has decided to stick the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and the legislators involved don't seem to understand the implications of this. That includes not realizing that there is not a single agreed-upon version of the Ten Commandments; right off the bat, Texas school officials (or the legislature) will have to decide which church's version gets posted. 

The Christian church has not gone more than fifteen minutes in two millennia without having a debate about one thing or another; historically these debates have been settled either by schism or violence or both. It's unclear how injecting government into the equation.

The other issue at play is the rights of the students themselves. There is no way for schools to keep this kind of information secret if the student wants to tell their parents. 

Do students have the right to keep secrets from their parents? Plenty of religious folks seem to believe the answer is no, never ever. And there are folks who will argue that their children are their property (how their property is going to transition to a functioning independent adult is unclear). I'd argue that any policy that safeguards teacher or parental rights at the expense of student rights is problematic. 

So should students have a free hand to explore their religious options in school? Should parents be looped in to all such decisions? Should religion be strictly left to the home, with schools not getting involved at all? 

It's a complicated conversation, and unfortunately far too many people are skipping it entirely and going straight to "Anything that promotes Christianity is good and should be allowed to just roll on unhampered in any way." That's not a real answer, and no serious school administration should allow it to stand as an answer, and thoughtful people of faith shouldn't accept it either. Otherwise we get closer to a place where your local school board decides whether your church is real enough to qualify for district benefits, and I'm pretty sure that's a place none of us want to be.

Can We Fix Civics and History Education

So, let's take a moment to freak out over the NAEP history and civics scores.

They dipped in a manner reminiscent of the math and reading scores, and some folks are going to provide reruns of previous cries of alarm. "Students' understanding of history and civics is worsening," hollers the Washington Post (and they'll go on to do the standard failure to explain what "proficient" means for NAEP). 

There are several possible reasons. The pandemic resulted in far less time being spent on training students to take multiple choice tests, and that's crucial. Just because you Know Stuff, that doesn't mean you can automatically apply that knowledge to the very specific activity of taking a multiple choice standardized test. 

And because states all put emphasis on the standardized reading and math Big Standardized Tests, that's where much of the "catch up" energy went. 

Responses to the scores have not been particularly useful. Education Secretary Cardona released a short statement that dovetailed with his team's talking points, saying essentially, "Look at that! This is no time to banning books and cutting education budgets." Cardona's words were cherry picked and used as a talking point for folks like the head of reformster group 50CAN who accused him of saying that red state book bans were responsible for the drop in scores. Others correctly pointed out that once again, the lowest scoring students were the ones who had the biggest score drop. Others used the occasion to bemoan the sad state of K-12 civics and history education. Can't we do better?

We can. We should. I don't know if we can in the current atmosphere. And suggesting that history and civics education can cure what's ailing our country right now is absurd, 

To begin with, history and civics education is hard, for many reasons.

One is simply the matter of reaching students. For most of my career, I asked students to reflect on their own education and classes and talk about what was and wasn't working for them. The hands down winner of the "Why do we even have to take this class" award was history. When Lauren Boebert says she never learned the three branches of government, I believe her--but I don't assume that's because nobody tried to teach her.

Students hate history class because the typical high school history class is stripped of every appealing part of history. History is stories. History is a conversation, not a declaration. Likewise civics is a constantly ongoing debate about what our government is supposed to do and how it's supposed to do it. But if you are committed to keeping all of those discussion out of the classroom, then you're left with nothing but dates and locations and verifiable events and that is A) barely the point and B) supremely boring. But we insist on cutting away all the complicated, controversial parts, like butchers who throw away the meat and keep the gristle.

There are ways to do it right, and most all of them involve bringing all of the various points of view into the classroom. The basic model is not complicated. "Some people view this like X, but other folks view this like W. Research, explain, and discuss." And that model has to be regularly updated and amended, because there is virtually no piece of history on which we have had absolutely the last word. The beauty of this model is that it fosters not only content knowledge but also critical thinking, building arguments from evidence, and just a generally nuanced view of the world (I deeply believe that reality has a bias toward nuance). 

But that's not where we are right now. Where we are right now is promoting the idea that proper history and civics education is designed to turn every child into a patriot. We have folks scrambling around to erase even the mention of certain types of citizens; yes, Oklahoma's governor wants to defund PBS in part because Clifford the Big Red Dog and Work It Out Wombats (a less-known by superior show) showed lesbian characters (not doing anything sexual- just showed them).

Real, serious study of history and civics requires a variety of viewpoints. That doesn't mean the viewpoints must be required for adoption but they have to be available for discussion. The discussion has to have guardrails--it's not okay to declare "All wombats are evil and don't deserve to live" when there are wombats sitting in the classroom. And my experience says that it can be tough to work through the barriers of a student whose position is "This is right because I say so and that's all the evidence I need." 

History and civics is hard to teach if you come at it with a belief in One Correct Answer, which is currently the stance of way too much of our public discourse. We're in a place where, for some people, it's not even acceptable to encourage empathy for all fellow human beings. But if you want to teach that there's only One Right View of history and only One Correct Answer for all civic questions, you're teaching something that is neither history nor civics.

This is why the Everyone To Their Own Silo approach is not an answer. A model of choice in which everyone sorts themselves out according to their One Right Answer does not make this pluralistic scrambled salad of a nation work better. 

How do we navigate all this? I don't know. I don't know how you get people to stop feeling so fragile that even exposure to an idea they don't like is more than they can bear and especially more than they think their children can bear. I don't know how you get people to develop a better plan for dealing with those with whom they disagree than to somehow just make all those Wrong People shut up and go away. 

Americans are not very good at history. Never have been. If you get to be a certain age, you can marvel at how many people spring up with arguments and viewpoints and policies that are not, in fact, bold and new, but just the same old time-worn trappings of an earlier age, while at the same time holding fast to the notion that certain historical ephemera (like, say, fashion signifiers of gender) have somehow existed since the dawn of time. 

I don't know how you help people set down their fear and anger long enough to catch hold of the desire understand. The public spaces are filled with so many very loud people who have no real interest in understanding--just label it as "my team" or "their team," mark all opponents as evil or stupid, and treat every new event and piece of information as something to be fashioned into a cudgel for Our Team. As they say, I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people. I don't know how to get someone to be curious.

It may seem like my wailing and moaning has now expanded far past the point, but I don't think so. To imagine as some do that by strengthening history and civics curriculum we can cool the fever in our society are simply imagining that we can change the color of the ocean with a thimble full of food coloring. Schools exist downhill from the rest of the culture, and right now our culture is too full of contempt and derision for those who disagree with us. The most effective teacher of citizenship is what adults model.

We can do better. We should do better. We won't agree on exactly what the process should be, and how we manage that disagreement will be the first lesson we teach students about history and civics. If the lesson we try to teach is "Everyone who is Wrong must be silenced and stamped out," well, that's going to leave a mark. If we move on to lessons like "You're a child and you can't handle the truth," that will stick, too. 

We can do better. We should do better. Step one is to give up the dream of a world in which everyone is Right (aka thinks the same way we do). And yes, I do recognize that my belief in the need for pluralism could be framed as my own One Right Way--except that my way leaves room for all the other ways. It's complicated. People are complicated. History is complicated. But we can still do better.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day

There have been better days for the profession. 

In Oklahoma, State School Superintendent Dudebro called the teachers union a "terrorist organization" while suggesting they want to "sabotage our kids," because, as we all know, the teachers union kept schools from opening as a way to extort more government funds (maybe he meant funds for things like making schools safer to operate during a deadly pandemic). If that seems like a bad way to recruit teachers, well, he is offering a signing bonus for newbies. You know what doesn't help you apply for a car loan or a mortgage? A one-time bonus.

That was awful, albeit predictable. Maybe not as awful as the school district lawyer in Virginia, where the  teacher who was shot by a six year old is suing the school district that failed in so many ways to keep her and other students safe. The lawyer's argument? Getting shot is just part of what teachers should expect when they sign up for the job. So a simple worker's compensation claim is all that's needed. 

The brief glowing period of March-April 2020, during which people appreciated the Heroic Teachers doing their best to McGyver some sort of education in the midst of general pandemic panic--it now looks the really high initial hill on a roller coaster, the one you climb so that when gravity finally catches hold, it can wreak maximum havoc.

And at this point it doesn't even count as news when the indoctrination or groomer charges are leveled. Just another day in educationland.

Teaching has always had an appreciation problem. Everybody thinks they know how to do a teacher's job; mostly they're wrong. And the appreciation week you do get was created by the PTA; it's not like some folks completely outside the education ecosystem thought, "Yeah, teachers should have a week for appreciation." 

And to be fair, it's not just teaching--for whatever reason, we are in a cultural period marked by a serious lack of generosity of spirit, a meagerness of grace. Appreciation is a scarce commodity, and when it appears it is too often simply a slightly dressed up version of "I appreciate you for being on my team."

Nevertheless. Teachers deserve some appreciation. 

I did the job for 39 years, and with the exception of a brief dark period, I didn't regret it for a minute. But it was hard. It was time and labor intensive; on the list of things people don't understand about teaching, we can include just how many hours of the day it eats up. And I don't mean just the obvious stuff, like the stacks of papers and forms and lesson plans that get carried home, or the hours and hours of time spent in the classroom outside the contracted hours. There's also the sheer head space--one of the big adjustments of retirement is that (even with Board of Directors navigating toddlerhood), I didn't have nearly so much stuff taking up space in my head. You think through the day's interactions with students, you think through individual student issues, you mentally rejigger your schedule for maximum efficiency ("If I grade those papers while I eat supper, I could carve out twenty minutes to go walk outside").

Nor do people get the weight of compromise, the hard part of teaching where you have to make decisions about what needs to be done that you are not going to do, because you are human and you have limits. And then making peace with those decisions. And then not talking about it because talking about the hard parts of teaching just sounds like whining to people who haven't been there. 

Teaching is not for just anyone. It's not for folks who are slow on their feet. It's not for people who have limited grasp of the subject matter. It's not for people who can't be self-motivated and self-directed, because for much of the time, it's an isolating job, and when you do encounter adults in your work, they're after something. The cavalry is not coming (and if something cavalry-like shows up, they may very well be shooting at you). 

Teaching is a profession (the second oldest one), with all the training and professional skills and knowledge that implies. But it's also a very blue collar type of job, where you have to roll up your sleeves, dig in, and flex whatever muscles you have. And unlike other professional jobs, it's one where you have very little control over your environment or the flow of your day. I've known lots of medical folks, and their experience of time is completely different from teacher time. Doctors and nurses do work in the time it takes to get it done and done right. Teachers work with dozens of deadlines every day. 

And in a society that is ever-increasingly organized around profit and gain and ROI and increasing shareholder value, teaching remains largely work of service--service to students, service to families, service to communities. Despite widespread and concerted efforts to make schools run like businesses, teachers remain largely focused on service to the point that the tension between teachers; mission of service and demands that schools function like (or converted to) businesses that crank out useful meat widgets--that tension is one of the major sources of personal stress for the modern teacher.

Teachers do the work, day after day, student after student. Well, actually not student after student, because they are handling umpty-ump students simultaneously. I'm not partial to billowy shining writing about teaching as a calling and a gift because, for me, that glosses over the sheer hard work that goes into teaching, the degree to which teachers gut it out. They are climbing that mountain, hand over hand, skinned knees knocking another rocky outcrop; they are not floating up to the top like some kind of feathered angels. And while they climb that mountain, they are helping dozens of other fledgling humans and fellow sherpas make the climb as well. If it all seems that effortless and natural, that is only one more mark of how much skill and technique and experience and sweat that teacher is putting into the work.

Teachers are real people, with the whole range of real people weaknesses and flaws, and they do the work anyway, which, for me, is far more meaningful and impressive than if they were all some sort of superhuman beings walking on clouds and magically imbued with some sort of teacher power. Real people, and--as we've been learning for the past few years--real people who don't have to stay in the classroom if they don't want to.

So God bless everyone who is still in there, still doing the work, still climbing the mountain, still helping hold up your little piece of the human race and society, helping as many as you can climb that mountain, too. Thank you for everything you've done and everything you're about to do.

ICYMI: So Long, April Edition (4/30)

Well, that was a month. God bless all the teachers out there in the midst of testing season,

I'll remind everyone that part of the purpose of this weekly collection of pieces is amplification. It is harder than ever to break through the media fog, whether we're talking about legacy media, online media, or social media. You can help by sharing anything that you think others should read. Tweet. Post. Do whatever it is that people do on Instagram. You can help make writers some noise in the world.

These States Have the Most 'Underqualified' Teachers Stepping in to Fill Open Positions

Now that states have been pushing laws to let any warm body into a classroom, we can start to see the effects. From Edsurge, here's an article complete with an interactive map that lets you see which states have the most not-exactly-qualified teachers in the classroom. 

A Far-Right Moms Group Is Terrorizing Schools in the Name of Protecting Kids

David Gilbert wrote this piece about Moms for Liberty for Vice, and it is blistering, with some specific tales of people who have crossed M4L and an exceptional retelling of their origin story. A good antidote to M4L's attempt to push out PR about how nice and non-threatening they are. An important read.

Gaslighting Americans about public schools: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’

Another important read from this week. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post hosts the true story of A Nation At Risk (celebrating another one of its birthdays) from James Harvey, who was part of that report's creation. What better person to debunk that influential festival of cherry picking and logic chopping. And this link is to MSN's copy of the piece--so no paywall.

The Lies America Tells Itself About Black Education

Bettina Love at EdWeek with another take on A Nation At Risk, well worth your time. She pulls up the sub-text of the report--that the US was falling behind in education because it was spending too much time and money on Those Children. Another important read.

New “Ed Reform” Coalition Shows How Media Allows Billionaires to Control Narrative

Maurice Cunningham, expert on dark money in education, takes a look at the hottest new coalition in Massachusetts.

Are Schools Responsible for the Racist Behaviors of Students?

Nancy Flanagan wonders who bears the responsibility when students start acting out racism.

NARF Demands Change in Charter Hair Policy

Classical Charter School of Leland requires boys to get their hair cut short, because, I guess, the 21st century still hasn't made it everywhere yet. The Native American Rights Fund is not a fan of that policy.

Chromebooks’ ‘Short’ Lifespan Costs Schools Billions of Dollars, Report Finds

Maybe your district heard it, too-- the claim that by going digital, we could save all sorts of money on textbooks. But it turns out that Chromebooks are actually super-expensive. Lauraine Langreo has the story at EdWeek.

‘We need help’: Portland middle school principals plead for help to manage student behavioral problems

Reporting from Portland about behavioral issues through the roof. 

Should Monroe Tax Dollars Be Used to Open Charter Schools in Escambia? More Fiscal Shenanigans in Florida.

Florida leads the way once again. If nothing else, this serves notice that "the money should follow the child" will be jettisoned once it does its work. Sue Kingery Woltanski has her eye on Tallahassee.

Review: Christianity and Critical Race Theory

I ordered this book on the strength of the review. Turns out Jesus didn't necessarily demand that His followers had to reject CRT. This looks like a thoughtful piece about, among other things, the church's need to deal with its own racism.

Stop Giving Away Our Tax Dollars to Private & Parochial Schools.

Steven Singer would like to have a few words with elected representatives about the tax credit scholarship program in Pennsylvania.

Spring Branch ISD cancels trip to see play due to performance that was not 'age-appropriate'

This week in Dumb Culture War Moves, a parent complains that a performance of James and the Giant Peach includes actors who play multiple parts in flamboyant costumes that don't always match their birth gender. So the district canceled the trip. 

Take Your Kid To Work Day Reports from Greek Mythology

From McSweeney's. Made me chuckle.

At Forbes.com, I covered a new working paper from Mark Weber and Bruce Baker, school finance wizards, that finds another influential factor for how long districts stayed remote. 

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PA: Hillsdale Comes To Pennridge

“Our end goal is that every single kid who leaves Pennridge loves this country and understands our constitution,” said board member Ricki Chaikin. “Right now, that’s not happening.”

That's a board member of Pennridge schools, a district that just okayed a contract with Vermilion Education, LLC. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because the company was the center of a controversy just a few weeks ago when the Sarasota, FL, board considered (and ultimately rejected) a contract with the education consulting firm. Who are these guys (or, perhaps, this guy)?

The Sarasota board considered board a contract with Vermilion Education, LLC . If Vermilion's website seems a little sparse, that's because they have only been operating for a few months. Their promises and principles are suitably vague-- I mean, here's the whole pitch --




The address Vermilion lists on the Sarasota contract proposals is a single family home (1640 square feet) in a residential neighborhood of Hillsdale. And their personnel--well, so far, it looks like one guy.

That guy is Jordan Adams, fresh from Hillsdale. There's a lot of story with Hillsdale (here's a short-ish version or get into it more heavily with a whole series of articles), but the current version is a private right-wing christianist college whose head, Larry Arnn ("Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon"), is the same MAGA-fied guy who headed up Trump's 1776 Education thingy (and said teachers are the dumbest). They've provided a platform for a lot of school privatization and taxpayer subsidies for private christian school rhetoric from heavy hitters like Betsy DeVos and Christopher Rufo, all arguing that government shouldn't be running schools--churches should.

Hillsdale has long had a charter school initiative called the Barney Charter Schools, and more recently they've been behind the launch of many "classical" academies around the country.

Jordan Adams is a Hillsdale grad ('13), which means he was a Hillsdale student when they were launching the Barney schools, and eventually became their Associate Director of Instructional Resources. I'll let you draw your own conclusion about his fitness for the role:

“I mostly focus on the history and Latin curricula, figuring out how things are taught in a fourth-grade or eleventh-grade classroom,” said Adams. He looks forward to experimenting with more accessible resources for teachers: “When you’re a first-year teacher, you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of what you’re supposed to be teaching. You don’t have time to sit down and read a long text about teaching. But maybe if there’s a short video that is clearly titled and easy to access, you might conceivably watch it while you’re making dinner.”

If only there were a place to go where you could study teaching so that you knew what you were doing on more than a day by day basis. Adams's original undergrad plan was to work at a think tank, then he went to grad school for a Masters of Humanities. One more educational amateur rediscovering the wheel. But apparently reinvented it well enough to move up to interim director of curriculum for the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, a job he was holding back in October of 2022.

Adams was part of the crew that screened the Florida math textbooks that DeSantis accused of being too indoctrinatey.

Adams is no longer listed in any current capacity as employed by Hillsdale, though there is no peep about his departure. Not sure what we can make of that.

As was the case in Sarasota, Pennridge added the Vermilion contract to the agenda 24 hours before the meeting,

Pennridge School District is located in the Southeast, just north of Philly, in Bucks County. Their board has been pretty relentless in pursuing repressive and reactionary policies. They have trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they blew up DEI policies (even as they demonstrated why they needed such policies in place). And they are considering Hillsdale's ideological, biased and not very great 1776 Curriculum (Hillsdale is presided over by Larry Arrn, the guy that Donald Trump appointed to create an anti-1619 curriculum). 

As was the case in Sarasota, it's not really clear what Adams and Vermilion are supposed to do, and since they appear to have no previous track record (the site is still nearly bare and there's no sign anywhere that they have any previous contracts). It's still not clear how close Adams ties to Hillsdale remain. But now the taxpayers of Pennridge get to pay for Adams to do something, for some amount of money, to be completed sometime. Good luck to them.