The Generation Gulf

The culture wars feel an awful lot like a generational war, a collective yawp from a slice of an older generation that has seen its children turn into people that are not what they had planned for, hoped for, expected. 

The target that they've selected is schools and the apparently huge cadre of socialist indoctrinators hiding there, but the real source of their frustration is their own children who refuse to be the person they're supposed to be. They are deeply alarmed about parental rights; they are not nearly so concerned about the rights of their children. "The government does not own my child," they say, and in case you miss the implication, Rand Paul is one guy who finished the statement:

“The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul said in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

I often think of one woman who responded to the North Carolina tip line set up to report public school indoctrination. She wrote:

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

Her daughter had graduated fifteen years before this was written. Fifteen years and this sound Biblical mom had not found a way to bridge the gap that was totally created by schools and in no way a result of any parenting choices she made. 

This gulf between parents and children is everywhere in the culture war skirmishes. For instance, the many requirements that school districts must not keep secrets about the children, as if there were any secrets the school could keep from parents if the parents and children were talking freely and openly at home. Yesterday, my sons had a special program at school that I knew nothing about ahead of time, but we talk about the day's events every afternoon when I pick them up, so they told me about it, we talked about it, and life went on. It's that easy.

Except, of course, for some folks it is not. And we have studies to illuminate the issue, sort of. 

What's out there is spotty, inconsistent, and (surprise) sloppily reported by some news outlets (though given the absolutely frustrating and expensive hoops one needs to jump through to read the actual research, it's understandable). 

There's an oft-cited statistic from a 1997 study (that you have to really dig to find) finding 7% of adults are estranged from mothers, 25% from fathers. In 2013 we find mainstream outlets like Today talking about a "silent epidemic" of "cut off kids." Nowadays the study of estrangement is a "young field of research" of a "surprisingly common" phenomenon. 

 

In 2020, Karl Pillemer (Cornell) gave the topic a bump with his book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, -- but that book came out in September of 2020, and as you may recall, we were all a bit preoccupied with other issues at the time. Pillemer found that 27% of over-18 people-- 1 in 4--had cut off contact with a family member. That's around 67 million Americans. 

What's going on? Joshua Coleman, author of When Parents Hurt, suggested in a 2022 article that families view their lives through different lenses:

However they arrive at estrangement, parents and adult children seem to be looking at the past and present through very different eyes. Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship. 

Coleman further notes that "Both sides often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century." And he quotes historian Stephanie Coontz:

For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.

So where families used to argue about what one was supposed to do or how one was supposed to act, we're now fighting over who we're supposed to be. 

Other writers point to a constellation of the usual suspects, heightened in our current atmosphere. Different values. Different politics. New approaches to mental health--Coleman says that the idea of cutting off a family member as a step in personal growth is "almost certainly new." 

Coleman also argues that our increased valuing of individualism, which puts greater stakes on parents who try to control children's behavior--their friends, their activities, their jobs. Children, once they're old enough to do it, seek to set boundaries, make their own choices, define their own identity.

Much of what I'm reading makes me wonder if the helicopter parents of 20-ish years ago haven't spawned a break-away generation of children.

Being cut off from your own child, having them reject your guidance and values, watching them deliberately break from being the person that you invested so much time and effort and self in can be a tough and painful thing. It doesn't have to be, especially if your parenting goal has been top raise an independent, functioning adult. It doesn't have to be hard if, in fact, you raised them on the premise that they are a separate individual and not a parental possession. You also have to face up to the realities of parenting; is there anything more hilarious than a first time parent telling you exactly what their child will or will not be like? But even if you've managed not to parent based on control and possession, it can be rough to realize that the child that you once rocked in your arms is a stranger to you.

It's unsurprising that folks suffering through this hurt or anger will look for someone to blame. One 2021 study of 1,000 estranged mothers found most of them blaming ex-husband's or their child's partner. 

Add to all this ideas like "Race stuff was fixed in the sixties and anyone who's still talking about it is just making trouble for political gains, or they've been tricked into going along by someone who's looking for political power."  Add to all this misguided biases like the idea that LGBTQ persons aren't born, but have to be "recruited." You get a bunch of older parents saying, "Who stole my child from me" and a bunch of younger parents declaring, "Well, by God, nobody's going to take MY child away!" It's a very human thing to ask "who did this to me" instead of "what did I do cause it?"

These waves of generational angst always end up looking for culprits, and schools always make the list, so it should come as no surprise this time. Schools are targeted, and all that parental fear and frustration is harvested for societal and political clout. 

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post convincingly argues that the parental rights movement is actually about avoiding parental responsibilities, that the various reading and subject matter restrictions are a way to shield parents from having to talk to their children about anything difficult or uncomfortable, or more to the point, shielding parents from having to explain themselves, their values, their beliefs. Maybe, the reasoning seems to go, if my child never hears anything at all about any of this, they will be the person I want them to be. But that trick doesn't work, has never worked, will never work. 

Should We Spare The Rod?

Classroom chaos is an issue. How bad is it? Why is it bad? What do we do? (Warning: this ended up being quite a ramble).

Daniel Buck raised a bit of an internet stir with a complaint about school discipline issues, "Don't Spare the Rod," that ends with this rather dark paragraph:

Schools fail when they lose sight of human nature. Children are capable of wickedness and cruelty. There is something rotten in the core of man. When schools deny this, when they fail to punish cruelty, the apple is left putrefying on the teacher’s desk.

Who is Daniel Buck?

We have met Buck before over the years. Buck is a teacher in Wisconsin who writes for the Foundation for Economic Education and The Federalist, among other outlets. Of The Closing of the American Mind he said, "The Bible taught me how to live but that book taught me how to think." He's not a union guy. He's a "senior visiting fellow" at Fordham. He got started in the conservative writing in college, and wrote for the now-defunct "The Lone Conservative" website. From reading his tweets, I learned that he would pay to keep the union rep out of the lounge and once shook Scott Walker's hand and thanked Walker "for all he's doing to improve education in Wisconsin." He dresses up for school, appears to take a serious and conscientious approach to the work. Back in 2019, he helped launch the Chalkboard Review, a right-tilted news and commentary ed site (which seems to have quieted down in the last year or so). And he's got a book in which he explains what's wrong with education. 

Buck has been busy, considering he started his teaching career in 2016. For his first four years he was in Green Bay public schools before switching to the Holy Spirit Catholic School, a move he has said was prompted by the lack of student discipline in public schools. He left Holy Spirit at the end of the 22-23 school year, and he now teaches at a private Christian school. I know this because I read the name off a lanyard in one of his pics, and while I usually like to show my work, Buck has chosen not to talk about at what school he teaches, and to publish the name of the school when he hasn't is a level of doxing that I'm not willing to do. But the nature of his current employment is important to our story. I'm just not going to get specific and this time I'll ask you to just take my word for it.

Buck's thesis, developed in multiple articles and social media posts is that education has been infected by a debilitating wokeness, that a combination of things like restorative justice and treating behavior as communication and, of course, that awful social emotional learning are leading to chaos in classrooms. 

Now, Buck's rhetorical stock in trade is the straw man, but anyone who knows a teacher knows that, post-pandemic, we've got trouble in classrooms across the country. There is not a day that I don't see some classroom horror story on my screen. So Buck and folks like him are not, I feel certain, making something out of nothing.

How bad is the problem?

Is it worse than ever? Hard to know--we haven't been quantifying this on any kind of national scale for a long time, but as someone who's been in the classroom for ages, I can't remember a time when it wasn't a concern. Not only a concern, but often characterized as "worse than ever." And that "worse than ever" has always been a localized thing. I remember coming back to my small town after teaching my first year in Lorain, Ohio, where fighting and disorder were common, I'd faced physical threats twice in my own room, and students came from environments where guns and knives were not unusual. When I came back home, I tried not to laugh at colleagues who were really, really upset about how out of control gum chewing had become. 

Buck has stories of his own. "A kid punched another child and then threw a chair at my colleague yesterday. He’s at school today. No consequence. Nothing," he tweeted just a week ago. And he's at a private Christian school, one that says that their "education helps each child learn his or her Identity in Christ and live out a God-given Purpose in life. We regularly discuss and practice the Actions that grow character based on who we are and what we have been called to do in our lives." Plus emphasis on college prep. (Buck doesn't claim that this is a public school, but he doesn't correct responses that assume so, either.) 

Are things worse these days? My gut says yes, and the most obvious cause to point at is the pandemic disruption of education that brought chaos into students' lives even as it gave them ample opportunity to lose the habits of "doing school." A year is a really long time if you're a child. I'm betting that every school building in the country could use one more counselor, at least.

Why is it so bad?

Can we also point at restorative justice and SEL and other such fuzzy-headed touchy-feely stuff. Surely that's part of the problem; even if these are solid programs, I would bet dollars to donuts that across the country, a decent number of schools are implementing them poorly. I will also point at the political climate, the rise of brutal, crude scorched earth, and even physical attacks on "enemies," which becomes even more of a factor when the "enemy" is the school. In some communities, students hear plenty of that language.

Conservatives like Buck also point to mission creep, the degree to which schools have been tasked with so much beyond simply "teaching the basics." Two problems with that (well, at least two). One is that it's really hard to get kids who are hungry or tired struggling with other issues at home to care about prepositions and times tables, or, even if they care, to have the mental bandwidth to engage productively. The other is that mission creep is constant and from all sides; right now even conservatives are saying that we need to spend more time on civics and history education and. Also, let's add more time on math and reading to get those test scores up. More time, more time, more time (but not more resources). 

Nor is mission creep a public school issue alone. Buck last week tweeted, "Overheard a teacher saying 'I’m not here to teach academics so much as life lessons' Ok… but can you also teach the academics?" Buck is teaching at a school that promises, "In Partnership with the Character Formation Project, we offer a Biblically-based journey that equips and trains children to live Christ-centered, fulfilling lives for Greater Purpose." Their mission statement lists as goals "Growth in wisdom, character, faith, relationship, service, leadership and discernment take significant time, experiences and diligence." It's not a bad list, but the Three R's it is not.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for an answer to "why"

The roots of the issue are both deeply philosophical and simply practical.

The philosophical part is hinted at in Buck's paragraph and the responses to it. Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Is there "something rotten in the core of man" that must be harnessed, tamed, restrained? Or are humans destined to grow into something bright and beautiful if we just give them what they need to do that and shelter them from forces that will twist and stunt them? Or are humans some kind of blank-ish slate upon which family and experience write any number of possible answers? Are we all doomed sinners, or do we each carry a piece of divine spirit that can be nurtured? Or do humans carry the potential for good and bad, developed and enhanced by the circumstances and people they encounter through life? 

It's a complex question, complicated by the fact that everyone has an opinion, even if they don't take it out and look at it often. There's a tradition that says folks on the left are in the fundamentally bad camp, hence their desire to put powers in place to rein in human tendencies toward naughtiness, while the right favors a free field that trusts people to do mostly the right thing, but that's a gross oversimplification. Also, if conservatives think we should trust grownups, why do they think we can't trust children? At what point is that magical transition supposed to occur?

It's not an issue that I'll sort out in a blog post, which is fine, because it could all be true or none of it could be true, and the answers for school discipline would be the same. 

So what is the best way forward?

In fact, the answers to school discipline requires us to set aside "either or" and pick up "and."  Many things can be true at once. Behavior is communication, AND behavior needs to have consequences. Social emotional learning is a critical unremovable part of what teachers do (iow, I don't care what you do, you can't NOT teach SEL), AND some formal SEL programs are junk. Schools have to be conscious of biases and prejudices that may adversely affect disciplinary processes AND disciplinary processes need to exist. Students need the class to be a safe space to learn, which includes both being free of disruptions by fellow students AND not worrying that some small step on their part might bring the hammer down on their own head.

We don't have to argue philosophy when we can talk practicalities. Maybe you pine for the days when students were raised to automatically fear and respect the authority of the school and its personnel. Maybe you wish we had classrooms in which all those different groups just pretended to blend in with the presumed mainstream. Too bad. Those days are gone, and you aren't going to bring them back. Maybe you still believe that a key part of school discipline is breaking the spirit of a disobedient child. Morally, I think you're dead wrong, but at the same time, I encourage you to stop trying because it just doesn't get you the results you think it will. Worse, it gets you to a place where your desire to be the boss has become a higher priority than meeting the needs of the child. And speaking of your own needs, if you are letting everything go because you want to never ruffle student feathers or make anyone sad, that is also putting your need for comfort ahead of their needs.

Much of your classroom order comes down to you and how you leverage your particular style and resources. Know your material. Be firm and fair and consistent. Build relationships, but don't break your own rules to do it. Don't take what they do personally. 

None of that is new. What's also not new is the root of most school chaos issues--

The front office.

Long before SEL or culturally responsive teaching or restorative justice, there were administrators who didn't back up their classroom teachers. Every teacher who has worked more than a decade has met them. The principal who has a friendly chat with the kid who you threw out of class and then send the kid back five minutes later, a big smile on their face. The principal who requires you to complete the 147-item checklist before they'll get involved. The principal who always takes the student's word over the teacher's. The principal who folds the minute a parent makes contact. The principal you avoid involving in any situation because you know he'll back the student into a corner and escalate the situation. The principal you avoid involving because you know that certain students can expect poor treatment in the office. The principal who is somehow never around when you need them. The principal who doesn't observe (or maybe understand) district policy. The principal who will do anything to avoid having to answer a phone and hear an angry voice on the other end. The principal who is too overloaded with stuff to do so they don't have enough time to deal with your student's issues (again--at least one more counselor in every building in the country).

I do not want for a second to minimize the importance of the individual teacher taking care of her business in her classroom. It's hard for an administrator to back up a teacher who is making bad choices in her own room. But one fundamental part of classroom management is for the teacher to know that the front office has her back. An ineffective teacher can make a mess out of one room; an ineffective principal can make a mess out of an entire building. 

None of these principals (or their brethren and sistern) needed any particular policies or program to implement their approach, but you can bet they embraced them when they appeared, because it's a big help, if you don't want to do your job, to have a policy or program to point at for the blame. 

And again--this entire issue is not simply public school. Buck's piece focuses on a bullying incident and the administrative non-response at his current school. He also mentions students smoking weed in the restroom, "roaming the hall in gangs of three or four," and a slack policy toward attendance. This is a K-6 private Christian school.

There's another level of irony here. You may think "spare the rod and spoil the child" is Biblical. It isn't, exactly. The Bible gives us 

Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them. (Proverbs 13:24).

If you punish (children) with the rod, they will not die (Proverbs 23:13b).

A rod and a reprimand impart wisdom (Proverbs 29:15a).*

The familiar variant comes from Hudibras, a mock-heroic poem by Samuel Butler (1613–1680) that brings up the notion as part of the satire of outmoded and Puritanical ideas. 

I swear I'm just about at the end of this post

We kind of forget what "spare the rod" means-- it means that if you don't beat a child, they're liable to grow up bad. It's an idea that never goes away (witness the earlier versions of No Excuse charters like KIPP) despite the fact that it has never worked particularly well, and it plays with bonus oddity in Buck's piece, which lands somewhere in the neighborhood of "If we don't bully these children, they will continue to bully each other." 

There's a whole other side trip we could take about bullying itself, but this has already rambled on long enough. My short answer is that if we want students to live respectful lives, it would be helpful to model respect for them, and starting with the assumption that they're rotten inside probably doesn't fit that model well. Nor would I argue that we show respect by sparing them any negative consequences for bad choices. It's a complicated balancing act between two extreme poles, neither of which is the whole answer by itself. Kind of like every other complex issue in education. 

One of my first superintendents used to start the school year with a story about a horse trainer asking rookies what the first step of training was; the punch line was "First, you have to love the horse." The student-to-horse comparison was questionable, but his point was solid enough-- it helps to care about the students you are supposed to teach. Some folks imagine a kind of false dichotomy, that either A) one is a hard-nailed taskmaster who focuses strictly on the three R's or B) one is focused only on warm fuzzy socio-emotional stuff and never does anything that might seem "mean." As it is unkind and ineffective to demand complete depersonalized compliance, it is also unkind and ineffective not to teach the students to read and write and all the rest.

My idea of the purpose of education is pretty simple-- to help students better understand the world, to help become their best selves, and to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world. It can't happen in an atmosphere of chaos and Do As You Please, and it can't happen in an environment in which rod-enforced compliance is valued above all else. And I hope that my children's teachers don't start from any assumption that A) they are perfect angels or B) they are rotten inside. 

*For the record, Proverb 29 also includes verse 7:  The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.

PA: The Culture War School Board Checklist

This is of most interest to folks in my region, but worth noting elsewhere because I'm sure this kind of thing will continue to pop up all over. 

The American Family Association, a longstanding conservative Christian fundamentalist group that mostly works against LGBTQ rights and porn. Founded nationally by Doug Wildmon, now headed by his son Tim. They're big on boycotts, like boycotting convenience store chains for carrying Playboy and Penthouse, companies that advertise in gay magazines, Disney a zillion times for a long list of offenses. 

Their Pennsylvania affiliate, the last time I checked, was the work of two women located in my neck of the woods. Like so many activist groups on both sides, they don't so much have members as subscribers, and they depend heavily on the church network to get their word out. As a local theater director, I've been on the receiving end of one of their public calls for a boycott, and it is better than the best marketing money can buy, so they tend to avoid publicly mounting these campaigns.

They've been busy sending questionaires out to area school board candidates, and the areas of concern will be familiar to anyone who's been following the culture wars:

Do you support emphasis on phonics? Are you anti-trans? Would you like some "don't say gay" rules? Do you want the feds out of ed? Abstinence only sex ed?  All the classics are here, presented without any nuance or complexity, and focusing on parental rights for only the parents who believe the Correct Things. It's a quick guide to the far right agenda for schools.

If you are in my region, here are the results that AGA got for their response. As one might expect, the slate for Penncrest, where they're already all in on anti-LGBTQ, reading suppression, and the rest of the agenda-- that crew says yes to it all. Other districts in the area can check to see which candidates want to prioritize the suppression of students who don't fit the Proper Mold over fully educating them. 

I do wish I'd gotten my hands on this sooner, as the primary election is tomorrow, but it's still worth look. School districts suffer when these folks get in charge. 

ICYMI: Mother's Day 2023 Edition (5/14)

Well, that's it teachers. Teacher Appreciation Week is over and now we can go back to the usual everyday levels of appreciation (or the lack thereof). In the meantime, today we will appreciate moms. And while all that appreciating is flying about, here's some reading from the week.

‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.

Perry Bacon Jr. at the Washington Post had a must-read column this week, a compact history of modern ed reform paired with a succinct articulation of a positive vision for public education.

Williamson County mom helps launch national campaign pushing back on 'parents rights' groups

Let's start with something encouraging-- a group of moms who are trying to act as a counter-force to some of those other parental rights (for the parents we approve of) groups. By Rachel Wegner in The Tennessean.

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

In Jacobin, Jennifer Berkshire takes a look at Jon Shelton's new book, the Education Myth (my copy is on the way), which takes a look at the notion that education will somehow fix poverty and inequality ion this country (spoiler alert: it won't).

A Charter School Board Member Says The Quiet Part Out Loud

Carl Petersen catches a charter board member talking out loud about the practice of creaming students and only accepting the Right Students for the school (spoiler alert: they do it).

False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate

Phoebe Petrovic at Wisconsin Watch covers a voucher school story that asks if a school can really discriminate in ways that would be illegal for a public school, even as they accept taxpayer money. Can they really suspend two successful, accomplished seniors from activities just because they are in a gay dating relationship? (Spoiler alert: Yes, they can).

A Philly charter school manipulated its lottery to keep kids out, a top administrator says

A Philly charter is also caught cooking the books. Story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so if you want to get the story without navigating the paywall, check out the coverage by the indispensable Mercedes Schneider here. 

A Tennessee teacher planned a Mother’s Day class. Then came the MAGA rage.

Just another one of those stories. As always, chicken administration is a key feature. 

State offices tasked with making Indiana high school curricula more career-centered

Well, here's a new wrinkle. What if taxpayers were to foot the bill for a private business's job training?

The Troubling Focus on Testing Rewards, Testing Pep Rallies, and Test Prep Bootcamps

You already know that most of this stuff is a bad idea, but Nancy Bailey has the research to back it up.

The Black Screen of Agony

Is it a "standardized" test if every student has a different experience, depending on how well their computer works (or doesn't)? Gregory Sampson with some reminders of what this kind of testing looks like at ground level.

Why Is the Ohio Legislature So Devoted to the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee?

Jan Resseger looks at Ohio's misguided devotion to a third grade reading retention policy. 

Where the Boys Aren’t: Why is Teaching Still a Female-Dominated Profession?

Nancy Flanagan asks the question. Do you already follow her blog? Because you should.

Teach Like a Desert Father

From the blog Whatonomy, another meditation on teaching in the age of AI.

The truth is that my immediate thought is that the poem had been written using Open AI’s ChatGPT. This thought was the first arrow. The pain of self-loathing that arose from the entertaining of this suspicion, this doubt was the second arrow. I had recently attended a poetry competition organised by a group of students and I knew that, from this moment on, I would in all likelihood never be able to freely enjoy listening to my students’ recitals of their original work without, from time to time, wondering whether indeed they had written their own work or whether AI had had a grubby, silicon hand in the poem’s creation.

Texas lawmaker lobbies for 3rd graders to be trained to administer aid for gunshot wounds in the event of a school shooting, says report

For your Crazy Stuff That Is Actually Happening file. And you thought that active shooter drills were traumatizing...

Chaplains could be in Texas public schools this fall under new bill

Also in Texas. Because, Texas. 

‘Trump was great at this’: How conservatives transformed a Colorado school district

This story from NBC News is pretty frustratingly rage-inducing, but it's important to understand just how bad things can get when you put terrible people with no real interest in education on a school board. And I call them terrible not because I disagree with their politics, but because of their desire to exercise to slap people down just because they can and because they believe they should be making Certain People hurt. 

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The Pandemic and The Testing Red Herring

The pandemic exacerbated some of US education's major problems, and that's reflected in the effects on children. Unfortunately, it's also reflected in how we respond to those effects; policies that were a bad idea in "normal" times become terrible ideas in a post-pandemic world.

I have no doubt that learning loss is a real thing, and we need to address it. But I'm afraid that instead we're throwing weight behind Learning Loss instead.

Look, we all know there was learning loss, that students did not get the usual amount of learning and growth done during the pandemic, hampered by cobbled-together distance learning set-ups, general stress, and a disconnection from education in general. 

But Learning Loss is something else; it's a slightly panic-stricken doubling down on the Big Standardized Test, the single biggest policy failure in education of the last thirty years. 

The panic is predictable for many reasons, not the least of which is that the pandemic suspended the Big Standardized Test, which threatens the income of lots of folks in the testing industry. 

There are people who really believe in the importance of the BS Test, who have always believed that we can make the pig fatter by weighing it repeatedly. In the economism-dominated world of ed research, we get the regular assertion that testing results are linked to future life outcomes. Well, not exactly. Test results correlate with future life outcomes. This is not a surprise. Test results correlate with the socio-economic back ground of the students. Future life outcomes also correlate with the socio-economic background of students. 

What's missing--what has always been missing-- is any research showing a relationship between changing test scores and changing life outcomes. We know that if Pat has a high BS Test score, Pat is probably going to have swell life outcomes. What we don't know is this--if Sam was going to get a lousy BS Test score, but the school gets Sam to score higher, will Sam's life have more swell outcomes than it would have otherwise? Probably impossible to prove, but given the fact that we can accurately predict a school's test scores with just demographic data, it's the only question that matters.

Other arguments-- like dropping test scores mean a loss of millions of dollars of income--are based on even flimsier reasoning. 

The testocrats have pulled off the neat trick of getting people to debate and clutch pearls about BS Test scores without even knowing they're doing it. They do this by using some mathy prestidigitation to turn test scores into days/weeks/months/years of learning. When test fans Tom Kane and Sean Reardon get space in the New York Times to push the panic button over Learning Loss and print charts showing how many years or months students are "behind," all they're talking about test scores. When they and others talk about "catching up" and "making up lost time," all they're talking about is getting test scores back up.

This is a lousy focus, a misguided response that uses a made-up crisis to take attention away from a real one.

I'm partway through Anya Kamenetz's new book The Stolen Year, which catalogs the many ways in which students were pummeled, hurt, beat up, deprived, cut off and generally batted about by the pandemic and our responses to it. 

On the long list of things that students need to deal with in the aftermath, both educational and non, "get test scores back up" doesn't even make the top ten.

We got children being carted into the ER, battered, bruised, bloody, and a bunch of folks are hollering, "First, we've got to get these kids some clean shirts. And maybe a nice hat." 

I get the whole "it's the only concrete data we have, so what else are we going to use" argument. Pro-test folks have been using this argument forever, just like the guy who's searching for his car keys and night under the street light that is 100 feet from his car because that's where the light is best. Is testing data really better than nothing at all? Probably--but only if we approach it is an only-sort-of-accurate tiny slice of a larger picture. In other words, if we discuss them as scores on a single standardized test given to students who are out of practice in taking standardized tests, and not as some magical measure of the complete state of student learning. 

The current state of learning loss (not Learning Loss) is complicated. Beyond reading and math, there are subjects that took an extra hit, like those that require group work (chorus, band) or hands on work (the CTE stuff). And we're seeing widely that many students simply lost the knack for (or interest in) "doing school." Every community was hit differently, with some fielding far more trauma than others.

It's the people on the ground who know the most about what the students in their school need, and once again we run into one of the problems of the testocratic approach-- an attitude of "we don't need to talk to people who are there because we have all these numbers we can look at instead." Which is exactly backwards to what students and schools need right now. 

I'm doubtful that we'll prioritize the needs of students or the parents and teachers who work directly with them, based on our failure to do so when the pandemic was officially on. But "get those test scores back up" is a red herring, a beside-the-point exercise that will make far too many people feel as if The Problem is being addressed and they can stop worrying about it. Meanwhile, resources will be directed for some big herring hunt. 

Choice Advocates Argue: How Far Is Too Far?

Amidst all the choicer crowd crowing over voucher victories, there are some other stirrings in the choicer camp, some disagreement about just how far education savings accounts should go. 

Education savings accounts have emerged as the favored form of super-voucher, a stack of money handed to parents to be spent, in turn, on the education-ish product of their choice. In many states it is a deliberately wild west marketplace, with most of the newest laws not just without oversight or accountability, but expressly forbidding oversight by the state. 

It's a hell of a way to throw around taxpayer money, and some of the more seasoned players in the choice world are expressing some misgivings. 

Chester Finn (Big Cheese Emeritus of the Fordham Institute) has expressed concern about the corrosive nature of the culture wars being use to fuel choicey advances:

We’ve known—I’ve surely known—for years now that pure market forces in K–12 (and higher) education do not reliably yield more effective schools and better-educated children. Sorry, Milton F and Corey D and a host of other living colleagues. Too many things go awry in that marketplace, from parents who make bad (if understandable) choices to greedy school operators who don’t care about outcomes, not to mention kids who lack competent adult guides.

Michael Petrelli (Current Big Cheeses at Fordham) has been drawing fire from his colleagues on Twitter by suggesting that maybe "We shouldn't subsidize junk education either, ESA fans." And when Finn expressed his concerns and "wariness" about ESAs, Robert Pondiscio expressed some cautious optimism about the vouchers, seasoned with conservative restraint:

A common talking point among proponents is that ESAs give parents control of their money to customize their child’s education, spending it on private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational products and services. But it’s not “their” money. It’s our money that’s being put under parental control. This is not mere pedantry or a difference of semantics. The cost of education is socialized; we have a shared stake in the education given every child in America and pay school taxes whether or not we have kids in our local school or have kids at all.

This distinction—“their” money versus “our” money—holds the key to thinking about ESAs that may assuage your misgivings, Checker. To my way of thinking, an ESA is not a new form of education funding, it’s a different form of education accountability. States like Arizona, Iowa, West Virginia, and Utah that have enacted universal ESAs aren’t giving parents money heedlessly. They’re making a public policy wager to put accountability into the hands of those who “nurture and direct” the child. They’re betting that parents will discharge their “high duty” with more attentiveness, care, and diligence than the state can possibly provide through its districts and schools.

This is its own kind of choicer heresy--it's a standard claim of voucher fans that we're talking about their money, not anybody else's. And Pondiscio has made his case for ESAs as a sort of middle ground:

These all represent a comparatively nuanced view of ESAs. It's not a view I agree with, but it at least recognizes the issues that surround taxpayer dollars and the accountability for how they're spent. They're a little late coming around, but it's still welcome.

But it's not a point of view shared by other folks in the choice camp. Rufo and DeAngelis are pretty clear about their passion for either burning it all down or converting it to a culture war indoctrination camp. As anyone on Twitter who has run afoul of DeAngelis and his troll army can attest, there's no room for nuance or conversation there.

Over at Permissionless Education, the blog run for Stand Together (the rebranded Koch Trust), Adam Peshek also responds to Finn. Checker's ideas for a “judicious phasing-in and monitoring of universal ESA programs,” where “regulators and managers can set and enforce clear guidelines as to what is and isn’t allowable.” But to Peshek, this just sounds like charters, and he says (very politely) to hell with it. He lays out his own take on the different choicer camps.

On one side of the debate are those who are mostly fine with the structure of education in America. They just want to reform some parts of it. The goal is to increase student test scores, increase graduation rates, get more kids accepted into college. They wait with bated breath for the release of NAEP scores and consider it a position of honor to get a sneak peek before the results go public. There are heated debates about whether Calculus or Data Science should be in the scope and sequence of what high schoolers learn.

It’s a vision that is largely planned by experts to minimize exposure to what they would deem low quality. It’s called controlled choice for a reason.

That's not what Peshek (and presumably his employers) wants.

I support ESAs as a means to an end – to provide as many students, parents, and educators with the tools (financial, regulatory, socially) to create new and unique learning environments that are responsive to their needs — not the needs of regulators or some vague idea of “society.” A great school for one kid may be a terrible school for another, and vice versa.

This echoes perfectly the Koch dream. If you have seen Stand Together mini-videos pop up on your social media, you'll notice a theme-- here's a plucky person working at a job and hampered by red tape. Wouldn't the country work better, Koch argues (as they have for decades), if government just didn't do anything? 

Why should individuals be held back by "some vague idea of society," when it's so much more fun to live in the Land Of Do As You Please (or at least, Do As You Can Afford To Do, Because You Shouldn't Tax Me To Make Up For Your Poorness). 

The aim for some ESA fans is to simply do away with government-managed school, to privatize not just the providing of education, but the responsibility for it. Is it bad for some vague notion of society to have people learning to be great little nazis or to believe in a flat earth? Do children have a right to a decent education that some vague notion of society ought to help preserve and protect for them? In a Koch-style universe, that's not my problem. It's not anybody's problem, except the parents, and if they aren't up to the challenge, that is also not anybody else's problem.

A while back, free market fans made a deal with social justice folks to create a bipartisan vision of school choice. For a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, the election of Trump) that alliance came apart. Now they're tied to the culture war crowd, whose interests dovetail nicely with those of the Libertarian burn it all down crowd. 

It's entirely possible that the traditionally conservative nuance-friendly responsible grown up-ish wing of the choice movement is just going to get rolled over this time. While I know we'll disagree with much about improving education in this country, I'd welcome the continued return of actual conservatives to the conversation, but I'm afraid that, like others, they are going to be shouted down by the Rufo DeAngelis Moms for Liberty crowd (Pondiscio regularly annoys them by pointing out that public schools aren't going away any time ever.) It would be interesting to sit back and watch this all unfold if the stakes weren't so high. 

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.