PA: Education Commission Loaded With Red Flags

You may recall that back in February, the court in Pennsylvania declared, after almost a decade of chewing on a lawsuit, that Pennsylvania's education funding system was unconstitutional and they would need to get things straightened out, toot suite. There were not many teeth attached to that decision, and speculation among those of us of a more cynical bent was that the legislature would swiftly begin the process of hemming and hawing and stalling and definitely not doing what the court had ordered them to do. 

So, back in March, spurred by the PA funding lawsuit decision, the state senate's majority whip created a new group-- the Pennsylvania Commission on Education & Economic Competitiveness. The group "will bring together stakeholders from education, business, labor, and government to create a shared long-term vision to redesign Pennsylvania’s education system." Because nothing gets action happening like a good study commission. 

The group certainly casts a wide net, with something like fifty members of the commission and subcommittee, including representatives from the public school world (including teachers unions), the charter world, and the private school world (we have tax credit scholarship style vouchers in PA). 

The commission is supposed to crank out a report in 18 months with 13 bullet points to be addressed that include some real whoppers like "an aligned instructional system spanning early childhood through higher ed" and soothing ones like "a holistic approach to education that prepares students for life after graduation." Here's the whole list:

However, there are definite red flags here. The extreme focus on jobs, as if that's the real purpose of education. Or maybe it's just supposed to be the only/most pressing issue facing education in Pennsylvania. Either way, it's a pretty narrow view to reduce education to vocational training (and doesn't fit with that nice holistic approach goal on the list.

The brief claims Pennsylvania's education system is "antiquated and struggling" and warns "To meet the challenges of an interconnected global economic landscape, Pennsylvania must build a world-class education system to produce a highly skilled workforce."

The senator behind this is his own red flag. Ryan Amaunt started out his political career as Clerk of Courts in Lancaster; before that, the Citadel graduate served as a US Army Captain during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He moved up to state representative, then moved on to the state senate, running on "conservative results." Part of that is "improving our education system with choice and accountability." Amaunt is on the "sexually explicit" content in schools bandwagon, though so far he has stopped short of outright book banning or going after gay penguin books. He opposes abortion rights and has pitched both trans female athlete restriction bills and a version of Don't Say Gay. 

On education, he sounds like more of the same. Back in March when he was proposing the new commission, he wrote an op-ed that played all the old tunes.

Under the headline "Pennsylvania shouldn't fund a broken education system," Aument made the familiar arguments. 

Despite historic increases in education funding, the numbers continue to fall, and more and more employers look to the commonwealth to do something to better prepare kids to become productive members of society.

"We've been throwing soooo much money at education, so where are our bigger better meat widgets?"

Schools are not preparing students for the jobs of today, let alone the jobs of tomorrow, he says. It's the kind of claim that ought to be verifiable by things like vast numbers of jobs unfilled because nobody is qualified to fill them, or vast number of twenty-somethings unemployed because they lack necessary skills. But he's not going to do that.

Our students have been failed not by teachers, but by an antiquated system built over a century ago with goals that are no longer relevant in today’s globally competitive, knowledge-based job market, which we know is prone to rapid change and disruption.

It's nice to try to avoid blaming teachers, though I'm not sure which direction we should point to aim at "the system." And the "school's haven't changed in a century" claim was old and dumb when Betsy DeVos made it. Of course schools have changed in a myriad of ways. Nor has it become clear what the "global competitiveness" charge means, exactly. How will technology helps US citizens compete for low-wage jobs in countries chosen for their lack of regulation? 

Aument cites an international education conference he attended, but he doesn't name it. And he points to the part of the court decision that says money alone won't fix Pennsylvania's equity problems. He does not point to the part that clearly says very plainly that more funding is needed. 

We need effective teachers and principals, a rigorous and adaptive learning system, and an evenhanded foundation of support — all held to the highest standard of excellence and efficiency.

The word "efficiency" is always a red flag, as it usually means "doesn't cost so much." And sure enough, there's also this:

While we must review our structure for funding education, we shouldn’t throw more and more money at a failing system that we know is not meeting the needs of our students or the workforce.

As the lawsuit underlined repeatedly, Pennsylvania's problem with education funding is, at root, the state's low level of support means that local communities must make up the bulk of school funding themselves, meaning that poor districts stay poor, and wealthy districts have lots of cool toys. The political barrier to straightening out PA's equitable funding issues remain pretty simple-- wealthy districts do not want to pay more taxes that will be sent off to poor districts (and that goes triple when the poor district is Philly).

It's not an issue that's unique to Pennsylvania; you will notice that a great deal of ed "reform" starts with the base assumption that we simply can't spend any more tax dollars on public education, so let's come up with cool ways to shuffle the money around differently. The blanket on my bed is too small, but maybe if we chop it up and move it around, it will cover more.

But in Pennsylvania, it's particularly acute already, and now the court decision adds some urgency to a pressing need to appear to pretend to for a group to study a recommendation for thinking about planning to do something about it some day, while also working on how to make the same old non-solutions look like a solution to the court requirements. Wave those flags. 

The End of Ed Reform and a Clue For Dems

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a piece from Perry Bacon, Jr., (whose usual beat is not education), and I cannot encourage you enough to read it. ‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education echoes many points already made by folks in the edu-sphere, but it does so in the context of a quick history of modern ed reform that is as compact as anything I've read. The opening paragraph tells the story:

America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.

Bacon points out the effect of A Nation At Risk in focusing reform on measurables and a bipartisan support for education as an economic fix, as well as putting all the responsibility for fixing racism and its effects on schools "thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted." Racial, economic and education policy all tied up in one package.

That, as virtually everyone has noticed, didn't work. So the GOP has shifted to a policy of burn it all down and privatize the ashes, while Dems are just sort of stuck, unable to articulate much of a vision because they've still got ed reform smell all over them. Bacon gives Dems more credit than they deserve, but he uses the point to set up a real articulation that I really like:

I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.

Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.

They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.

What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.

Not bad.

Reformsters are going to argue (already doing it on the tweeter) that calling ed reform dead is silly because they are currently getting vouchers and school choice bills and gag laws passed left and right (well, definitely right, anyway), and Bacon doesn't answer that directly.

Here's the thing. Vouchers are not ed reform. School choice is not ed reform. And various versions of gag laws and reading suppression rules are definitely not about reform. These are not about reforming the US education system-- they're about dismantling it and replacing it a privatized market-based system.

There was a time when ed reformsters and privatizers were all sort of mixed together (and those of us advocating for public education were right in there mixing them). But privatizers were only interested in ed reform in so far as it helped them sell the idea that public schools were super-failing and needed to be replaced. But the alliance between privatizers and reformsters has slowly dissolved; voucher and choice advocates rarely try to make the case these days that they are going to improve the US economy or lift poor folks out of poverty, and they certainly don't talk about combatting racism now that the culture warriors like Rufo and DeAngelis have sold the idea that any discussion of racism is just one more sign that public schools have to be burned down. 

It is a legacy of the modern ed reform movement that Bacon talks about is the notion that "ed reform" and "anti-public education" are still considered synonyms by many. But actual modern ed reform--the idea that we can test and measure deliverables as a way to create more employable meat widgets and  fix economic and social problems-- is indeed losing steam.

The term "ed reform" is still useful to some, like an arsonist protesting that he's come to your home just to help remodel it. But as a description of the forces opposing public education, it's not accurate. 

Meanwhile, for Democratic politician or the remaining non-MAGA GOP folks who would like to promote some positive vision of public education, Bacon's short description is a fine place to start.

School Choice and Tuition Inflation

I graduated from Allegheny College, a medium fancy small liberal arts college in NW PA back in 1979 at a cost of about $4,000/year. My oldest child (VP of an Institute Field Office) graduated from Penn State--a state school-- in 2008 at considerably greater cost. 

The cost of college has ballooned by tens of thousands of dollars for any number of reasons, but a popular culprit among conservatives is federal largesse--that the willingness of government to hand out that free federal and state money has encouraged colleges and universities to just raise their rates in tandem. Really, conservatives have been kvetching about this forever-- here's Bill Bennett back in 1987 calling colleges greedy. Bennett's idea, often tested since then, was not that college tuition hikes were directly caused by aid increase, but that colleges and universities could increase their costs and expand their services confident that aid packages would cushion the blow. Hence the Field Office VP's dorm room with internet, a microwave, and a daily newspaper. 

It's not a theory I'm prepared to argue against. College tuition costs are complicated, and colleges themselves, whether institutions of higher learning, sports businesses with some classes attached, or financial institutions with some classrooms in their portfolio, often defy clear explanation. 

All that aside, it's not hard to get the feeling that working up the mandatory financial aid info package doesn't put one in the position of a used car buyer walking on the lot carrying a huge sign listing just how much he has to spend. 

But it doesn't so much matter if I believe it as much as many conservatives believe it. And if they're right, then why are they not expressing concern about similar inflationary pressures in a school choice ecosystem? Because some evidence of just such a phenomenon has cropped up.

The Diocese of Des Moines is raising tuition rates around 7-10%. This is to increase teacher salaries, they say, as well as hiring more staff and maybe increase programming.

In Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, some hefty increases as well (like 40% in one case). Some of the increases will only apply to Catholic school students who aren't Catholic. KCRG reports:

Phil Bormann, who is the Chief Administrator, for Holy Family Catholic Schools in Dubuque, said it’s seeing a “bump” in enrollment at all levels due to the voucher in an unlisted YouTube video. He also said the school will increase tuition over three years to improve the school because of the funds from the state.

“We’re going to be able to leverage some of those funds to improve programming for our kids to do things that we’ve never been able to do in the past,” Bormann said. “...We’re going to be able to pay faculty and staff, even more, a more just wage. This is something I think we all can agree they absolutely deserve. And so these things are going to come in time, but to get there we’re gonna have to make some adjustments to our current tuition model.”

Iowa has universal vouchers for anyone making less than 300% of the federal poverty level, meaning that many families who have already enrolled their children in private schools and paid tuition themselves will get a sweet kickback from the state. In many cases, the $7,600 education savings account voucher will cover more than the tuition.

So with all this free state money floating around, why wouldn't private schools up the ante-- particularly parochial schools, where the church is providing a subsidy to cover some costs--that means an increase in tuition can mean a reduction in the church's subsidy, which would mean vouchers not just directing money to church-related schools, but to the actual church itself. 

I cannot blame the voucher-accepting schools for not wanting to leave money on the table, but I do expect vouchers to create an education ecosystem mimicking colleges. Parents borrowing more and more money for the "opportunity" they believe the "right school" can give their child (provided that child can get accepted into school). Schools using the available money to expand their programs and offerings or profits. And of course the folks on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder being squeezed out of much of the market--unless they're willing to go in serious debt or settle for getting conned by opportunistic profiteers.

Free marketeers argue that the market will correct itself, and that the "forced funding of government schools" provides less freedom than what they propose. It's a puzzler-- the free market education system that sorts students out depending on what they can afford is somehow supposed to fix the free market system of housing that sorts students into districts depending on what their parents can afford. The injection of government subsidies into the college marketplace has caused distortions and inflation and that's bad, but injecting government subsidies into the K-12 marketplace would be a good thing. Of course, the college market is different because not everyone enters it.

It only makes sense to me if I assume that the through line is to get government out of the education biz, so that the well-to-do don't have to pay taxes to fully finance the education of the poors, replacing it with a free market system in which everyone is on their own, free to get their kid as much education as they can afford to buy, with just enough taxpayer subsidy to take the sting out of it and maintain the illusion of freedom.

How not to fight book bans

Illinois is aiming the first state to "ban book bans" by passing a new bill;.

It's a bad idea.

I get that it means well. And at least the bill's authors leaned on the work of the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, rather than concoct something from scratch on their own. 

Nevertheless, if I were a legislator contemplating HB 2789, I'd have to say no. Here's the pertinent language from the bill:

In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.

I have several issues here. 

First, all libraries have to make choices, because all libraries have limited space. All libraries make choices about which books not to acquire, which books not to give a slice of the valuable and limited shelf space in the library.

So libraries are going to say "no" to certain books. This language invites folks to imagine what the motivation for the book's rejection might have been. I'm betting that one of the most common reasons to not procure a book is "we didn't think of a good reason TO purchase a copy," which just starts an argument in which I say, well the reason I think you should have that book is a political one, so if you didn't see that reason, that's a sign of political bias on your part. And on and on--we can run in circles all day because ultimately this hinges on what is in the hearts of the librarians making the decision.

I'm betting this bill is aimed mostly at library boards that might have been "captured" by the anti-reading folks. However--

Second, legislators do this thing where they imagine how a certain legal tool could be used by their team while failing to anticipate what it would look like in the hands of other teams. So some folks may be imagining that this bill could be used to thwart boards that want to block any LGBTQ penguin books; however, it would be equally useful in thwarting a librarian who had objections to stocking books from Aryan Pride Publishers. 

Okay, so I think those are real concerns, but I also suspect that--

Third, this results in one of those policy policies. The library board adopts a policy so that they can check that box on the paperwork for the state, and then they go back to conducting business as usual while the policy languishes in the dusty volume of policies and procedures.

So what should be done?

The best policy for managing a well-curated library collection is two steps:

 Step 1) Hire trustworthy people and let them do their jobs.

Step 2) Because reasonable people can disagree about suitability of some resources, have a formal procedure in place for challenging library contents. 

That's definitely a better process than the one currently be used in far too many public school libraries these days, which consists of this conversation:

One angry adult: I am angry that [copy and paste book title from activist's list] is in the library. You'd better fix that right now, because I'm upset.

Spineless administrator: Eeek! (Runs off to get rid of offending book.)

I have little faith that we can legislate our way into equitable and free access to a wide and wonderful bunch of reading in a library. Trying to rewrite the rules so that they reflect every nuance and detail of your own personal moral code is not, as the forces of reactionary culture panic are now demonstrating, useful or healthy. Better to speak up, en mass, and let the library board know where you stand. The ideal scenario remains this one--

Library patron: Oh, I don't think I agree with what's in this book. (Walks on by and doesn't check that book out.)

But until we get there--well, I get saying "This is 2023 and we shouldn't have to be fighting people who want to ban books," but here we are. We can't pick the times we live in, and we can't ignore them, either. Stand up, speak out-- many times, if necessary. Listening is also helpful--short of the radical extremes, there's a lot of room for disagreement on this topic. But trying to legislate what librarians must have in their hearts and minds as they try to do their job--that's not the way.

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.

Sign up for my substack. It's free, and it's one way to be a bit more sure that you'll get my stuff.

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.