Do Vouchers Make Babies?

Sometimes, choicers really, really reach to push their policy ideas.

There is a now-classic formula used by reformsters and choicers:

1) Define a problem, including the consequences.

3) Propose your solution.

Yeah, it just skips Step 2, which is the part where you build a connection between the problem and your proposed solution. 

I don't think I've ever seen someone work this rhetorical stretchy bridge harder than the Heritage Foundation in a new report released Monday. 

I've read this so you don't have to. I'm providing a link so you can check my work if you so desire, but I would recommend not reading this report because...well, it's embarrassing.

I'm here for the vouchers

The title of the report will tell you where we're going: "Education Freedom and Work Opportunities as Catalysts for Increasing the Birth Rate Among Married Couples." It took three authors to concoct this. Lindsey Burke, Heritage's education person, who is a fellow at EdChoice (Milton Friedman's foundation) and helped lead education for Glenn Youngkin's transition. Rachel Greszler, who does jobs and labor and budget and entitlements for Heritage. W. Bradley Wilcox, a sociologist and director od the National Marriage Project, and who has previously expressed concerns about declining fertility and marriage rates. 

So let's see how they put this together.

We are short some babies!

Fertility rates are down in the US; the two contributing factors are decline in marriage and increase in women's educational attainment (according to a paper from the Institute for Family Studies--a conservative think tank founded by Wilcox and "dedicated to strengthening family marriage and family life"). We've got some correlation-causation issues here, but basically married women are more likely to have babies, less likely to have an abortion, Bachelor degree correlates with less baby-making, and bachelor degrees among women are up. 

And so we reach this conclusion (what we can call, stretchy bridge number 1):

The fact that fertility rates fall as women’s education and incomes rise suggests that opportunity costs—not a lack of income—is driving fertility declines, and that improved options for combining family and careers would increase family formation and raise the fertility rate.

Does it? Are we to believe that poorer, less educated women are looking at pregnancy and saying, "Yeah, no opportunity costs here. I can squeeze a baby into my life without giving anything up." I could build some bridges with this "data" too, like being wealthy enough to have easy access to contraceptives and health care makes it easier to decide when to get pregnant (and not abort). I might deduce that "combining family and career" might involve supports for new parents, like paid parental leave or affordable and convenient child care, whether you have a "career" or not. I might argue that this points straight toward Medicare For All, or raising the minimum wage, or extending the child subsidies from the pandemic. And I would say that readily available birth control lowers that abortion number, but that's not really their goal here, exactly.

I'm not going to try to argue a particular conclusion for this batch of data. I'm just going to point out that the path leads to a hundred possible doors, and Heritage is going to confidently declare, "It's definitely that one door right there."

Their solution?

Multipronged. And remarkably, it turns out the best solution to our baby shortage consists of policy ideas that were already on the Heritage wish list. What an incredible coincidence!

So what are these solutions, these ideas that will lead to more baby-making?

Flexible work options

Yes, folks would like more flexible ways to balance work and life. Citing techbro neolib group Economic Innovation Group, Heritage says that remote work increased "family formation and fertility rates." Workers with "access to" paid family leave went up 67% (so, we went from three hundred workers with paid family leave up to 500). 

But the big idea here-- the gig economy! Freelancing! Gig work! Self-employment! Be your own boss! Heritage cites this study by Freshbooks, which looked only at self- employed women working full time independently, to say that self-employed women are happier and have better work-life balance. But the survey (which has some other issues, but we don't have all day) is clearly looking at female entrepreneurs and business owners--not gig workers driving Ubers and Dashing for doors. Much as Heritage loves the idea of a  gig worker economy, I don't see a lot of couples saying, "Well, we've got no steady reliable income stream, and no health insurance. Seems like the perfect time to have a kid."

Supporting Parents’ Preferences in Early Childhood Education and Care.

Access to childcare that meets parents’ preferences and needs can increase the chances that would-be parents choose life over abortion and can help to enable couples to have the number of children they desire.

What parents really want, they say, is home based child care. I thought I'd end up agreeing with them in this section, but they can't quite bring themselves to say "So there should be federal laws mandating paid parental leave" or "Let's get those pandemic child care subsidies back." But no. They want more of that flexible work stuff, and also, less regulation of in-home child care providers. 

Education Choice for All Families

Married couples may also delay having children over concerns about the quality of elementary and secondary schools that would be available to them.

But if they knew they were going to get a voucher, then they'd get busy popping out babies. Education Savings Accounts. That's the ticket.

There's a list of the various alleged benefits of school choice, all tied to footnotes that cite the usual assortment of in-house "research" from Education Next, EdChoice, Corey DeAngelis etc etc and I'm not going to chase it all down at the moment because even if it were all true, it leads us to this huge leap:

The benefits of education choice accrue to some of the most important aspects of families’ lives and could increase the marital birth rate.

In other words, there is not a shred of a connection between school choice and making more babies. I can say that anything "could increase" the marital birth rate (and why would these marvelous benefits only affect marital births). 

Teaching Students the Success Sequence in School

The "success sequence" refers to the research that shows that a certain sequence (graduate high school, get a job, get married, have kids) correlates with not ending up in poverty. The evidence includes research by American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. I think the sequence is fine. But besides the fact that I've never seen any of this research address the question, "What about all the married moms who skipped the job part," the success sequence seems to have a real chicken and egg problem-- do people who follow the sequence then become inoculated against poverty, or does poverty make it really hard to follow the sequence. Folks like the Heritag Foundation would prefer not to consider the implications of the latter because the policy implication would be to double efforts to lift people out of poverty so that they had a better shot at following the sequence.

I guess this helps because it means more babies will be born to married couples? The success sequence doesn't really talk about where divorce fits in. 

Using Markets—Not Taxpayer-Forced Loan Cancellation—to Reduce Student Loan Debt

This just gets better and better. If we stop forgiving loans, people will have more babies. But wait--

One can sympathize with borrowers who were given the impression by guidance counselors, the elite media, and government actors that their only way to climb the ladder of upward economic mobility was by attending a brick-and-mortar college to obtain a bachelor’s degree and to delay marriage until they fully establish themselves in the workforce.

"Don't get married until you have a job" was exactly the advice they just said that everyone should follow!! The key here is that college thing-- you don't need that. Stop college pressure (I don't disagree) and end government subsidies of colleges and students. The report doesn't really explain why it'll be a good thing to price some people out of a college education, though they suggest that somehow requiring colleges to bear some of the cost of student loan defaults will dramatically lower the cost of higher education. 

Also, somehow, forgiving loans will make middle and low income people poorer, and then they'll put off having babies.

Lower-Cost, More Effective Education and Workforce Development

I'm not sure where it bubbled up from, but this push to scrap college credentials as important for the work force is everywhere these days. Here Heritage argues that "career-based education" will more likely get jobs and good pay and that will, of course, lead to making babies.

Recommendations for State and Federal Policymakers

All of the above. Teach success sequence. De-regulate pre-K. Vouchers. More gig work and flex hours. Let workers "earn" paid family leave. Make more workers ineligible for overtime hours. Turn head start into pre-K vouchers. Turn Title I into vouchers. End federal PLUS loans. Make colleges liable for student loan costs. De-bundle college education by removing ties between accreditation and college aid. Add more vocational training. 

Never mind that these are mostly bad policy ideas-- if I showed you this list, would you think, "Yeah, this would definitely get more people to get married and make babies." Heritage characterizes these as :new, commonsense approaches," but they are neither.

Public policy should support families as they form and grow and can do so through reducing government regulatory overreach, by directly funding students instead of institutions, and by removing barriers to a flexible workforce.

A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. This "report" is not research and it's not proof; it's just the assertion of a preference for particular policy ideas. Which is fine. That's what I do in blog posts many times a week. What I don't do is try to pretend that my blog post is a piece of real research, or package it as a "report" or "study." 

This Heritage blog post is a supreme example of the template I showed at the top of this post-- ther5e is a complete lack of connection between their stated problem and their favored solutions. I could start from the same place they do and end up arguing that this is why we should have universal guaranteed income, or universal single payer health care, or a much higher minimum wage. Hell, using the same "rigor" they use in this piece, I could argue that we would get more babies if we made people eat more fiber, or took steps to eliminate free radicals.

This is what you get when someone starts from the conclusion they want to reach and then tries to go backwards to support. It's a very silly "report," not to be taken seriously. Here's hoping nobody does.

Available To All: Same Old Crew, New Wrapper

Every year thousands of American kids are unfairly or illegally turned away from public schools. Hear their stories and how we are fighting back on their behalf.

That's the top line at the site for Available To All, a new (sort of) outfit founded (maybe) and headed up by Tim DeRoche, author of  A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools.' DeRoche started out at McKinsey, then spent some time in the investment world before spending 20 years as an independent business consultant. Along the way he wrote a best-selling retelling of Huck Finn and produced/wrote a PBS kids science series (Grampa's Garage)

A Fine Line came out in 2020, and was praised soundly by Tony Miller (former Deputy Secretary of Education under Barack Obama), Lester Hiner (EdChoice), Gregory McGinty (Broad Foundation), Mona Davids (founder NYC Parents Union) and Corey DeAngelis (choice cheerleader for hire). DeRoche spent five years researching and collecting stories for the book, which hits on many of the themes that we find in ATA, in particular focusing on educational redlining, the practice of drawing lines so that districts include the Right Students. That can include old district lines and the modern practice of seceding from a district, what I once called white flight without the actual flight. 

When exactly was Available To All born? That's a bit fuzzy. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine finds a version of the site in November of 2021. Same text as current front page, different design, no links to other pages, and an invitation to "Sign up now for updates as we move toward our launch in early 2022." In August of 2022, the archive finds the familiar front page, but none of the inside pages show up at that time. On his LinkedIn profile, DeRoche dates his founding of ATA from January of 2023, by March the inside pages show up, and on his LinkedIn page, DeRoche posts "Today we launch Available To All" and says he'll be suspending his consulting biz to run it.

Characterizing itself as a "watchdog group" (and not, say, a PR operation or a website), The ATA position is pretty simple:

Our mission is to ensure the public schools are available to all on equal terms, as promised by the Supreme Court. Public schools of all types--traditional, charter, magnet--should have admission policies that are simple, fair and transparent. We believe it is vital for our social contract that the best public schools be accessible to families of all backgrounds.

And DeRoche thanks his partners-- 50CAN, Stand Together, Bryan Gillette, and ExcellinEd.

50CAN is the longtime choicer-promoting advocacy group. Stand Together is the rebranded Koch Foundation. Bryan Gillette is a PR firm. ExcellinEd is the Jeb Bush choice advocacy group. 

The Director of Digital Communications is Aaron Guerrero, who "worked at two leading education reform groups," the California Charter Schools Association and StudentsFirst. The Board of Directors is chaired by Derrell Bradford, head of 50CAN, a pro-privatization outfit. The other two members are DeRoche and Adam Peshek, the education guy at Stand Together, formerly at ExcelinEd.

So what is Available To All, "a nonpartisan watchdog defending equal access to public schools." actually saying?

The basic message is that public schools do not provide fair and equal access to all students, and thereby, they suggest, not living up to the Supreme Court requirements of Brown v. Board. And DeRoche cites different sorts of stories, typified by what he writes in the current Time, "How public schools cherry pick their students." Not all are equally valid critiques.

He has several times turned to the story of an Arizona mom whose autistic child was rejected by a public school because they didn't have "any more room" for kids with disabilities. This is absolutely not okay. It is also an absolutely predictable result of Arizona's open enrollment law, which says you can pick any school you want to attend. Because individual schools do not have infinite capacity, the law allows for caps. Because there are caps, not everyone gets to go to the school of their choice. The fix here is really simple-- cut open enrollment and make each public school responsible for the education of every child in their area (just like most other states in the country).

DeRoche also takes some charters to task for cherry picking--and then tries to lump them in with public schools. Charter schools are not public schools, and their ability to officially or not-so-openly curate their student body is one reason why. 

DeRoche is critical of magnet schools and the games they play to manage their enrollment. He's got a point; some magnet schools don't quite work as intended, like using a magnet to attract wood and gold. He also throws a shot at Ney York City schools, which I've come to believe are representative of nothing except New York City schools and if so many journalists, thinky tank folks, and policy wonks did not live in NYC, we wouldn't talk about that system nearly so often.

His most solid complaint is educational redlining. There's no question that it has been used in some cities as a way to resegregate schools. The really unfortunate aspect of this issue is that the country has been steadily rolling back all manner of civil rights actions (thank you, conservative judges). States have gone to court to argue that they have no obligation to do more than the bare minimum in providing education. How do we convince districts to reverse education redlining, or states to make them? 

I don't have a certain answer, and I doubt that ATA does, either. Nor am I 100% certain that they're looking for one.

I don't assume that anybody with ties to a Koch organization or Jeb! Bush is automatically evil and awful. But we know that the organizations that are tied to ATA have a fairly clear agenda. And that agenda has never been the support and strengthening of public education.

So what do they get out of backing DeRoche's project?

Well, for one, they get to push out headlines that accuse public schools of cherry picking. This has been a standard talking point response to the idea that public schools are better than choice for taxpayers because public schools serve everyone-- "No, they don't. They're all cherry picky, too." So here's a whole "nonpartisan" group to help push that talking point out into the press and help discredit public schools (even if it has to enlist charter schools and anti-public school policies to do it).

While "the principle that public schools need to be 'available to all on equal terms,' as the Supreme Court requires" is an idea worth supporting, I note that ATA doesn't advocate for the solution of, day, making every public school an excellent one by providing resources and support and taxing the super-rich to make it possible. Nor do I see them calling to break through educational redlining by, say, busing students across those lines. And they certainly aren't making a single sound about using public tax dollars to provide vouchers that finance schools that are openly and explicitly absolutely NOT available to all.

Educational gerrymandering is certainly a real issue, but I'm hard pressed to think of a time that these groups have been out there fighting against it, other than promoting school choice as a way for a select few students to escape, or programs like the Arizona open enrollment program that guarantees some students will be shut out. And, of course, gerrymandering of school districts wouldn't matter so much if it wasn't a tool for segregating resources. 

So, bottom line, I'd say that tucked in amongst ATA's complaints are some real issues, or at least the tip of some real issues. But I'm betting this organization is not going to lead the search for actual solutions.

Moms For Liberty and the LGBTQ Conspiracy

Hats off to Elle Reeve, who in her coverage of the Colorado struggle between Moms For Liberty and the folks standing up to them, elicited this exchange with M4L chapter president Darcy Schoening:

Reeve: What I feel like you're strongly implying, and I'd like to get your take on it 'cause I don't want to attribute something that you don't think. But to me it sounds like you're saying there's some kind of high level coordinated effort to make more children trans and gay--

Schoening: Sure there is. Yes.

Reeve: Well, who's directing that? 

Schoening: Teachers' unions, and, um, our President and a lot of funding sources, and teachers unions are also heavily backing the curriculum that we're bringing into schools.

Reeve: Why would they want more kids to be gay and trans? 

Schoening: Because it breaks down the family unit which breaks down traditional conservative values. It breaks down a lot of things in this country. It changes the way that people think, it changes the way that people handle politics.

Reeve (in added voice over narration): Of course, there's no evidence of a coordinated plot to make kids trans.

Reeve goes on to ask Schoening if that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory, and Schoening pivots to saying that it's not a conspiracy theory that the state and federal government are trying to take "a stronger and stronger hand" in public education and "raising out kids." She goes on to say that it's a "mischaracterization" to say that she thinks these people want everyone to be gay. "The people who want to erode away parental rights-- the left, the teachers unions-- they'll use LGBTQ or whatever may be the case at the time" as just "tools" to "erode away" at parental rights.

It's as good an encapsulation as you'll find of this particular viewpoint. First, the foundational belief is that nobody is born LGBTQ; therefor, all LGBTQ persons were "recruited" or tricked into turning LGBTQ. It's not an unusual belief; I taught with someone for years who was certain that high school girls only pretend to be lesbians for attention. And while there's no doubt that some students experiment with sexual orientation and gender identity like they experiment with hairdos, the evidence that LGBTQ is not a "lifestyle" choice is so overwhelming that I wouldn't know where to begin, other than if you've ever sat with a teen struggling with all the issues that come from discovering that they're LGBTQ in a cis straight world, you would not imagine for a second that this was something they chose, on purpose. 

But if someone starts with the assumption that LGBTQ is a choice, then one next has to ask why. The anti-LGBTQ crowd of course deduces that part of the recruiting is about recruiting partners, a seduction of the innocent (a charge and a 1954 book by Fredric Wertham that charged that comic books were, among other things, pushing homosexuality). 

Then you get the explanation offered here--that turning kids LGBTQ is about disrupting traditional conservative values as a way of amassing political power. This parallels the similar argument about racism stuff; all racial issues in this country were solved around 1964, so anyone still bringing it up is just creating a fake issue as a way of gaining political power.

If you believe that every accusation is a confession, then what we have here is a confession that the M4L crowd is simply working parentals rights and LGBTQ issues to gain some political clout.

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Schoening, in addition to the M4L gig, used to be a member of the Monument Board of Trustees (by appointment), in which position she leaked privileged information. Last year she announced a run as a super-conservative for the Colorado House of Representatives (though it does not appear to have actually happened, nor did she win re-election to the Monument board).

If M4L is in the business of defending the traditional family, I'd expect to hear about their opposition to divorce, Maybe there's another part of the interview in which Schoening expresses her disapproval of Colorado Rep Lauren Boebert's filing for divorce. Still, folks on the right are working to apparently poised to attack no fault divorce, so I guess we're on that. Personally, I like the conservative argument for same sex marriage, which sees it as LGBTQ persons buying in to the traditional family idea. 

Meanwhile, Schoening's theory fails to account for the fact that the most teachers are, in fact, parents themselves. About half currently have children at home, while the vast majority of the rest have children who have grown. How is it that all these parents are backing an anti-parent conspiracy?

CNN's Elle Reeve: "It seems like you think there’s some high-level, coordinated effort to make more children trans and gay.

Moms for Liberty: "Yep."

Reeve: Who's doing that?

MFL: Teachers unions, Biden, money.

Reeve: "Why would they want more children to be gay and trans?" pic.twitter.com/JZKRucE4nh

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 20, 2023

ICYMI: I Don't Feel OIder Edition (5/21)

And yet I am, though that is technically true every day. But there is still stuff to read. Remember-- if you find it a valuable read, share it. Writers need your help to bust through the cloud, and every litle share helps. Amplify the voices that you believe should be heard.

‘Lose Your School, You Lose Your Town’

Tim Walker writes for NEA Today about rural resistance to voucher programs.

No School, No Town: School Vouchers Threaten Rural Communities

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider breaks down how vouchers cause damage to rural communities, looking at some specific examples.

The Wisconsin teacher who wanted her kids to sing 'Rainbowland' says the school district plans to fire her and things are 'only going to get worse' for educators

Well, that headline tells most of the story, but Rebecca Cohen digs into it for Insider. One more story about how culture warriors don't think we should tolerate certain people, and school administrators who stink.

Minnesota Senate sends paid family and medical leave to governor's desk

The news is not all terrible. In one state, a move to compensate for the US last place position on parental support.

School district requires teachers to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents. The state is suing.

From New Jersey. LGBTQ Nation reports on the district in Hanover Township, New Jersey, has passed its own required outing rule, and the state is not having it. 

Pennridge School District To Eliminate Four Curriculum Supervisory Positions

Jenny Stephens has the latest chapter from Pennridge schools in Bucks County, PA for the Bucks County Beacon. Turns out the next thing that happens after you hire Vermilion consultants is you fire a bunch of people. 

The Newest College Admissions Ploy: Paying to Make Your Teen a "Peer-Reviewed" Author

Well, this was certainly a new one on me. A whole new baloney industry to pad college applications and devalue scholarship, all at once. From ProPublica.

Open and accessible? Here’s what happened when we tried to attend 10 Detroit charter school board meetings in a month.

One of the many reasons that charter schools are not public schools is the lack of transparency or open meetings. Koby Levin, reporting for Chalkbeat Detroit, tells the tale of trying to attend a charter board meeting. 

When the Last Real Teacher Says Goodbye: The Dangerous Myths Driving Their Exit

Nancy Bailey looks at some of the more corrosive myths in education.

Abusing child labor just got easier in Arkansas, and that means educational attainment will go down. Here’s proof.

The Arkansas Times reports on the likely outcomes of the state joining the pro-child labor states.

Would You Recognize a Good Lesson If You Saw It?

Nancy Flanagan looks at the inherent ridiculousness of some teacher evaluation models and the challenge of moving beyond them. 

DeSantis’s book banners face a tough new foe: Angry moms with lawyers

Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, looking at some of the other moms who have started to push back against groups like Moms For Liberty. And they have lawyers.

Please, get rid of testing. It just doesn’t work

So much this. Julia Borst and Chris Tienken guest editorialize in the Star-Ledger, neatly condensing many reasons that the Big Standardized Test should go away.

As problem behaviors persist, is state testing making things worse?

Ronak  Shah with a first person column for Chalkbeat, drawing a line between the kinds of problems we're seeing with students and the kinds of schooling that testing has created.

An economist spent decades saying money wouldn’t help schools. Now his research suggests otherwise.

Matt Barnum, my favorite Chalkbeat reporter, reports that Erik "Money Doesn't Matter" Hanushek has decided that maybe money does matter after all.

No Quick Fixes: Disparities in COVID Learning Loss Reflect Persistent Inequity in Children’s Economic Circumstances and Inequitable School Funding

Jan Resseger has once again done all her homework regarding the newest unsurprising findings.

After School Satan Clubs Are Teaching Public School Districts an Important Lesson in Free Speech

Steven Singer warns about getting what you asked for, and what Satan clubs after school tell us about the First Amendment.

The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.

At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey has an interview with Matthew Desmond spinning off his new book about poverty, American style.

This week, at Bucks County Beacon, I did a big ole piece about the Bradley Foundation. They're not as famous as the Koch Brothers, but they deserve to be. \

And as always, you're invited to subscribe to my substack. It's free, and it gets you all of the stuff in your email inbox.

 

20 Rules for Life (2023 Edition)

After first posting this list years ago, I have made it a tradition to get it out every year and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place (it is also a way to give myself the day off for my birthday). I will keep my original observation-- that this list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence. Also, I'll note that it gets longer every year; if you think you see a book, feel free to contact me with a publishing offer. In the meantime, I exercise a blogger's privilege to be self-indulgent.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. Sometimes conflict and struggle appear, and there is no way out but through. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. 

This is doubly true these days, when everyone is already feeling the stress even as some folks have decided that being a dick is a worthwhile goal to be pursued, that inflicting hurt on Those People Who Deserve It Because They Are Wrong is some sort of virtue. It isn't. Be kind.





2. Do better.

You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better. Important note: having screwed up yesterday does not excuse from doing better today.

3. Tell the truth.

Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). "Untrue but advantageous for my team" is not an okay substitute for "true to the best of my understanding." Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue. I'll extend this to social media as well: if it's not true, don't post it.

4. Seek to understand.

The necessary companion to #3. Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not helpful. Understand that this is a journey you will never complete, and it's not okay to quit.

5. Listen and pay attention.

Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important. Also, love is not a thing you do at people-- to say that you care about someone even as you don't actually hear or see them is a lie.

Also, pay attention to things and people who contradict your cherished beliefs about yourself, because there may be something there that you really need to hear.

6. Be grateful.

You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful. That's important because gratitude is the parent of generosity.

7. Mind the 5%

95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%. I'm pretty sure that part of what happened during the pandemic is a whole bunch of folks looked around at their lives and thought, "Man, 95% of this is bullshit that I don't even care about." The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%, and sometimes the path to honoring and loving that other person is to indulge their 5%.

8. Mind your own business (and hush).

Somehow we have arrived at a culture in which everyone needs to have and express an opinion about everything. If it's not your monkey, not your circus, and not a topic about which you know a single damn thing, what do you suppose you will add by chiming in? There are people whose whole day is organized around roaming the internet so they can unleash their opinion on people (see Rule #1). This does not make the world a better place, doesn't make them better people, and doesn't help solve the issue. 

9. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is a dumb question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones). Nobody is in a better position than you are to take care of the people right in front of your face.

These opportunities may come at inconvenient times in inconvenient forms. That's tough--we don't get to pick our times or circumstances, but we can either rise to meet them or bail. Bailing does not make the world better. Take care of people.



You are never too young for your first tin hat.


10. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment gets up and gets the job done on the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly.

11. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Sometimes we spend too much time talking about the work instead of just doing the work. 

Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could do the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," ask yourself why not.

One of the side effects of social media is that not only do we curate and craft our lives, but we want lots of other people to participate in and confirm the narrative that we're creating. "You're canceling me," often means "You are refusing to corroborate my preferred narrative." We don't just want an audience; we want pliable co-stars. Worry less about both.

12. Assume good intent.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world.

Also, this: when you paint all your opponents as monsters, you provide excellent cover for the actual monsters out there, and you excuse monstrous behavior in yourself.

13. Don't waste time on people who are not being serious.

Some people forget to be serious. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness. Beware: One of the great tricks of not-being-serious people is to get you to waste time on them, to spend time and energy thinking, fretting, arguing acting about shiny foolishness, leaving them free for larger abuses that go unchecked.

14. Don't forget the point.

Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose. And don't try to shorthand it; don't imagine that you know the path that guarantees the outcome you want. Focus on the point (even if it's a goal that you may never reach) because otherwise you will miss Really Good Stuff because you had too many fixed ideas about what the path to your destination is supposed to look like.

15. People are complicated (mostly)

People grow up. People learn things. People have a day on which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs; our strengths and weaknesses are often the exact same thing just in different contexts. Awful people can have good moments, and good people can have awful moments-- it's a mistake to assume that someone is all one thing or another. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game.

16. Don't be misled by your expectations.

Most of our daily misery (not the real big suffering stuff) is the result of measuring our actual situation against expectations we've created for ourselves. So many times we could be saying "Wow! A steak!" but instead we go with, "Dammit, where's my watermelon?"

Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for.

17. Make something.

Music, art, refurbished furniture, machinery. Something.

18. Show up.

The first rule of all relationships is that you have to show up. And you have to fully show up. People cannot have a relationship with someone who isn't there, and that includes someone who looks kind of like they're there but who isn't really. In the combination of retirement and parenting again, I'm reminded that this also means nor just being fully present, but remembering to show up at all. You put your head down, go to work, and then a week or two later you're suddenly remembering that it's been a while since you checked in with someone. Rule #2 applies.

Part B of this rule is that when you show up, you may suddenly find out that the place and time requires something of you. Showing up means answering that call.

19. Refine your core.

Know who you are. Strip the definition of yourself of references to situation and circumstance; don't make the definition about your car, your hair, your job, your house. The more compact your definition of self, the less it will be buffeted and beaten by changes in circumstance. Also, the more compact your core, the less often you will be existentially threatened by some small piece of the 95%. Note: this is good work to do long before you, say, retire from a lifelong career that largely defined you.

20. How you treat people is about you, not about them.

It's useful to understand this because it frees you from the need to be a great Agent of Justice in the world, meting out rewards and punishments based on what you think about what people have done or said. It keeps you from wasting time trying to decide what someone deserves, which is not your call anyway. It also gives you power back that you give up when your stance is that you have to wait to see what someone says or does before you react to it. Treat people well because that's how you should treat people, not because you have decided they deserve it. But don't be a dope; if someone shows you that they will always bite you in the hand, it's prudent to stop offering them your hand.

FL: Doubling Down On "Don't Say Gay"

Florida's Don't Say Gay law was carried through the legislative process with plenty of lies. Now Florida's leaders are ready to take the masks off.

Back then, the big counter-argument was "Well, what teacher needs to expose 5-8 year olds to sexual content?" Nobody needs to talk sex stuff with the littles! The other defense of the bill was that people calling it "Don't Say Gay" we're overreacting. The guy who introduced the bill, Rep. Joe Harding, was among the many saying, "Look, you can still talk about this stuff--you just can't have lessons or curriculum about it."

That, of course, all turns out to be baloney. 

Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a stack of anti-LGBTQ bills, including one that extends the reach of Don't Say Gay into high school. Where "classroom instruction by school personnel or third  parties on sexual orientation or gender identity" was previously prohibited from kindergarten through third grade, it is now prohibited in pre-K through grade 8, with some restrictions on 9-12 sex ed. 

The new version of this law also covers charter schools. Which means this law about "parental rights" further restricts a parent's right to choose a school that doesn't keep gender identity and sexual roles a secret.

It's a dumb law for many reasons, not the least of which is that sexual orientation and gender identity come up all the time. But hey, defenders of the law say, this law just prohibits instruction about them. If the subject just happens to come up, that's not illegal.

Except that's a lie, too.

Just ask Jenna Barbee. She's the teacher now under investigation by the state because she showed fifth graders the Disney flick Strange World. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has an excellent run down of what happened; you can also watch her tell her story here and I've embedded it below--it's worth a watch. The short form is that Barbee had sent out parental permission slips, showed the film, and Moms for Liberty-backed board member and parent Shannon Rodriguez went after her. 

“It is not a teacher’s job to impose their beliefs upon a child,” Ms Rodriguez said during the meeting, adding that the movie opened the door “for conversations that have no place in our classrooms”.

I've seen Strange World; it's an okayish Disney entry that happens to include a gay teen character. We see him crushing on the object of his affection at the beginning of the film. When the central characters leave for the main adventure, the crush is not with them, but the teen has a conversation with a family member about his love interest, and they talk about it from a "how do you handle being really interested in someone" angle--the gay aspect of the relationship is treated as ordinary, and no character ever challenges it. At the end of the film, we get an indication that the main character has acted on his crush, but the film does not have so much as an LGBTQ kiss.

In other words--no sexualized content, no graphic anything. The message that Rodriguez objects to is "Gay person exist and that's no big deal." 

A movie, not instruction. Just talking pictures that show gay persons existing. 

Will that "open the door" to terrible conversations. Have you met a fifth grader lately? As Barbee told CNN:

“These students are talking about things way beyond this (movie),” Barbee said. “This door that she’s talking about, it’s been open. These are common conversations that I have to tell my students, ‘Woah there. We’re getting a little too much here.’”

And as Schneider points out, these continues attacks on teachers and schools, the need for schools and teachers to police their students' speech and conversation, also open the door to conversations that are, at a minimum, Kafkaesque:

Teacher: Stop, Pat. We can't talk about that in here.

Pat: Why can't we talk about that?"

Teacher: Well, we can't talk about why we can't talk about that.

But under Florida's repressive law, any shmoe can initiate action against a teacher or district if said shmoe thinks the vaguely worded law has been broken. So now Barbee is being scrutinized by the Florida Department of Education. And even if they correctly determine that the complaint is a load of baloney, it will still take a toil on Barbee and the district, as well as sending a message to other teachers and districts. And the message is, as it has been, "Don't mention LGBTQ persons at all." 

The notion that this dumb law can be extended to older students would be silly if it weren't going to cause so much damage. Go tell an 8th grader they aren't allowed to talk about something. I dare you. All of their time is focused on figuring out their identity; forbidding them to talk about anything on the State's list of forbidden topics, is going to cause real damage. 

Apparently only the rights of some parents matter, and apparently those rights for those certain fragile parents include the right to evade any slightly difficult conversations with your children (what some might call a parental responsibility). Why should Rodriguez be so alarmed at having to discuss with her child an LGBTQ character in an animated film? Heck, LGBTQ parents and parents of LGBTQ children have to have conversations with their children why persons like them are not allowed to be discussed or depicted around children in Florida. 

If Floridian MAGA M4L folks imagine they can simply drive LGBTQ persons into invisibility by using the full force of the state, they are kidding themselves-- which would be fine if they weren't hurting a lot of other people miserable at the same time. 

But if you are in a state considering one of these laws, just remember--all the talk about how it's just protecting small children from graphic porn turns out to be just lie, a cover for more repression and mistreatment later on.

Meanwhile, Barbee told CNN that she has already submitted her resignation "due to 'politics and the fear of not being able to be who you are' in the public school system." Good luck with those problems filling teaching positions, Florida. 

@becomingabetterbarbee I am the teacher. Here is the truth. #indoctrination #disneymovie #disney #strangeworld #viraltweet ♬ original sound - Jenna Lynn

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.