PA: Penncrest on PBS NewHour (with Penncrest Reader)

Judy Woodruff took a trip to Penncrest school district (right up the road from me) where the culture wars have been raging for a while now. I've been writing about their reading restrictions for a while, part of their attempt to imitate Bucks County and just generally stamp out those "evil" LGBTQ persons and that naughty CRT (whatever it is). 

The report is pretty well balanced. You will note that member David Valesky, who in print comes off like some cranky old fart, is actually more in the Chris Rufo-Corey Deangelis cranky young white guy mold. If you want to read up on the district to go along with the piece, here's the Institute Reader for these folks:

PA: Another CRT Panic Tale

In which an English teacher is denied the opportunity to represent the district as a presenter at an NCTE conference because a board member thought there might be CRT cooties there.

PA: Another District Clamping Down On Reading Rights

In which two board members become alarmed that there are "totally evil" LGBTQ books in the library, and they decide to Do Something about it.

PA: Penncrest Passes Reading Restrictions

In which the newest version of the reading restrictions pass, because that's what God wants.

PA: Board Member "I don't care what the law says."

In which the board says the law doesn't matter, but they're looking for a good conservative lawyer, anyway.

And here's the Judy Woodruff report, which puts some faces and voices with those names, and captures to some extent how the community wrestles with this stuff.

Teach For America Is Rebranding Again (Again)

Teach For America is announcing its new "brand identity," and it's...well, not great. 

The announcement, nominally by TFA honchos Elisa Villaneueva Beard, is a word salad with a dressing of corporate argle bargle:

This view is moving and remarkable, and it has called us to launch a new way of presenting ourselves to the world: a new brand identity to embody the work of this moment and the enduring values of equity, excellence, and leadership that underlie it. This includes a new look, a new logo (for the first time in 25 years), and a new tagline that concisely states what animates our work at its core: “Illuminate every learner.”

Illuminate every learner?

Our hope is that out in the world, our new brand identity will illuminate our work and ignite a spark in others, inspiring them to share our vision for the future. It’s rooted in hope, grounded in reality, and accountable to our kids and communities. While a brand is more than just a look, a logo, a color palette, or a tagline, those things are one way we shine a light on who we are today and who we aspire to be.

Illuminate every learner??

TFA has changed its corporate identity multiple times over the past twenty-five years (see here, here, and here, for a few). It is an exercise that only makes sense if one assumes that TFA, like any other corporate institution, considers its primary goal to be its own preservation. If I start WidgetCorp to make widgets, and it turns out that either widgets become obsolete or WidgetCorp is bad at making them, then I have two choices. I can A) say "Well, that's that" and go get into another business or B) decide that keeping WidgetCorp alive, so I'll rebrand it as a lemonade manufacturer.

TFA has steadily moved away from "teaching" and toward the creation of an alternate universe of education separate from the public education system. Over time, its cavalier idea that the Right Kind of People can learn to teach in five weeks (and do it better than the so-called professionals) has turned out to be far less damaging than its steady production of clueless amateurs who use their two year vacation in the classroom to slap "former teacher" in their CV as they head off into leadership or edupreneurial roles (ka-ching). Some very fine actual teachers with actual teaching careers have come out of TFA, but I can't think of a single TFA-trained "education leader" who has helped make public schools work better. Nor do they even pretend that teaching is their main focus. Under "What we do" on their website:

Teach For America is a diverse network of leaders who confront educational inequity by teaching for at least two years and then working with unwavering commitment from every sector of society to create a nation free from this injustice.

As educators, advocates, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and community members, we fight for the aspirations of students and families.

TFA is a corporate producer of education-flavored products and resumes. An expressed concern about teaching provides cover for the rest of its work. And this rebranding is such a corporate exercise. There's a whole FAQ about the rebranding with explanations like:

Early research and testing validated that our current logo is not providing lift or recognition. Our current logo, which is simply a type treatment of our name, was created more than 25 years ago, at a moment when we were an emerging nonprofit. Although the logo was not hurting the organization, testing validated that it also was not providing brand lift or differentiation in the marketplace. Importantly, it was not designed for the type of digital landscapes in which people today consume information and content—so a thoughtful evaluation and refresh were clearly needed.

They added the symbol "to add deeper meaning and support brand clarity by adding a symbol that would speak to our mission and purpose." And if you're wondering what the hell that thing is "It's a spark! It's a sun!! It represents the light and potential that lives in all our students." In other words, they don't really know, either (Actually, by their own account, folks made guesses all over the map until they were told what the logo was for.) It's purple because "the vast majority of similar organizations primarily use blues and/or greens in their logos." Also, for what it's worth, it's much like a logo for Pharmaceutical Bank and Religion in Society.

Illuminate every learner.

I'm still stuck on that part. Illuminating something usually means reveal parts of it, make parts of it visible (e.g.illuminate the solution). Or we illuminate something so we can find our way, like turning the lights on in a room. So why are we illuminating learners? Aren't we, as some of their material suggests, illuminating paths for learners? I'm sorry, but whoever workshopped this slogan for them did not workshop it enough. 

The old logo, just in case you were wondering

Who knows. TFA has been shrinking for a while now, and have decided to try to recruit and retain through the time-worn technique of throwing money at people. Beard writes that it is clear that "more of the same in education isn't working," but in 2023 "more of the same" means the same old reformster policies that TFA and its edu-adjacent grads have been pushing for two decades.

Back in April she was making noise about how they were changing the way they operate, noting they needed to do things like "leveraging a digital approach to delivering our program to corps members and alumni"-- so, more TFA training via Zoom meeting? They built a tutoring program. They doubled down on recruitment efforts. And they intend to "double the number of children who are on a pathway to economic mobility and improved outcomes," which would be a really neat trick, as nobody really knows for sure how to tell if you've done all that for a child (or maybe that makes it a simple trick.)

So definitely a logo change is needed. And a new slogan that doesn't actually make sense. 

The breathless announcement highlights one other long-standing feature of TFA. They have always, always understood that it is at least as important to look like you're doing the work as it is to actually do the work. They depend on lots and lots of contributors who don't think much more deeply than "Helping teach poor kids! Well, that's a good thing, right?" or even just "Well, it has 'teach' and 'America' in the title so it must be good." 

Oh well. Making an overthought logo change and a misses-the-mark slogan may be the least damaging thing that TFA has done in the last 25 years. It's hard for me to take these folks seriously, but I respect the amount of damage they've done to education, under any logo. I can believe that once upon a time they meant well, but even with a cool new logo, I'm not sure what the heck they mean today. 

NC: Charter Fires Teacher For Teaching Book About Race

This story carries so many reminders. This is why you need employment protection. This is why you need a union. This is why it's bad that charter schools put students and teachers in a rights-free zone. And this is why CRT panic laws hurt education.

Charlotte Secondary School is a 6-12 charter school in North Carolina, a "diverse middle and high school community that focuses on college and career preparation and individually tailored learning opportunities to empower all students to reach their full potential." The school has an 88% minority student body, with about 50/50 White/Black faculty. They've been at it for around fifteen years; their test scores aren't so hot, but their lacrosse team was on ESPN once. They use a no-frills block schedule.

And they're being sued.

Last October the school hired Markayle Gray to teach seventh and eighth grade English. The hiring was "on a contract basis" meaning he has no job protections or guarantee of year-to-year employment. And in February, he was fired. And now he's suing the school.

Gray chose to teach the novel Dear Martin, a YA book that follows a Black high school student as he deals with a violent encounter with the police. After being thrown to the ground and handcuffed, the teen writes ten imaginary letters to Dr. Martin Luther Kingh, Jr.

The school requires teachers to clear materials with the principal before using them. In his lawsuit, Gray says he not only did so, but that the principal not only approved the novel, but she recommended the novel to him as a “challenging but age-appropriate work that promoted a discussion of core American values like justice and equality.”

But then white parents complained. According to the lawsuit:

on February2, 2023, Gray was informed by the school’s principal Keisha Rock that his contract was being terminated effective immediately. The ostensible grounds, he was told, was the emergence of parental opposition over “Dear Martin” and other aspects of Gray’s teaching content related to racial equality. As Rock stated, “I cannot address complaints made by parents all day.”

Rock also told Gray that she had been in constant communication with the Board of Directors,“all day long”, as she put it, which had also received parental complaints regarding Gray, and that the Board had authorized his immediate termination.

According to a press release from Gray's lawyers:

White parents complained that the critically acclaimed novel injected what they regarded as unwelcome political views on systemic racial inequality into their children’s classroom. In its published core principles, Charlotte Secondary, whose student population is 80-85% Black, Hispanic or biracial, claims that “Diversity is not merely desirable, it is necessary for the accomplishment of our mission.”

According to the lawsuit, Rock also saw firing Gray as the only way to avoid pressure from North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) as a complaint had been circulated to DPI that a Charlotte Secondary teacher was teaching Critical Race Theory.

North Carolina's House passed a teacher gag bill back in March, after failing to get an identical bill past the governor's veto in 2021. HB 187 does specifically include charter schools in the requirement to avoid teaching any naughty topics; like many anti-CRT bills, it doesn't mention CRT by name but instead offers a large, vague list of characteristics that legislators imagine might describe CRT.

That bill was filed in late February, after Gray had been fired, but some version of it has been around for a while. This is the state where Lt. Governor Mark Robinson set up a McCarthyish tip line in 2021 so that citizens could report teachers for teaching naughty things. Any school-- including a charter school--has to know that this sort of state-sponsored intolerance is in the air.

The school's attorney has the predictable response:

"Since this is a personnel matter, we are limited in what we can say about the reasons for Mr. Gray's termination," attorney Katie Weaver Hartzog told ABC News in a statement. "However, I can say that the termination of Mr. Gray's employment was based on legitimate, nondiscriminatory, non-retaliatory reasons. The school denies any and all allegations of wrongdoing and intends to vigorously defend the suit."

Dear Martin has been banned elsewhere. Haywood County schools in North Carolina pulled it from 10th grade English classes after one parent complaint. In Georgia, Columbia County schools banned the book from classes and libraries for reasons that are unclear (read The Root's account of that flap). And Monett High School in Missouri yanked the book and replaced it with To Kill a Mockingbird. 

As the book's author Nic Stone put it, “I think there’s an overall discomfort with facing up to the fact that racism is still a thing that we need to be talking about. But I don’t think it’s possible to talk about it without people being uncomfortable.” 

Gray's actual complaint hinges on the charge that his firing was a product of race discrimination. Gray is suing for back pay, front pay, lost benefits, punitive damages, and compensatory damages. 

So many layers here. So many things missing. Job protections, so that a school can't just fire someone because they find him annoying. Laws that actually defend against discrimination. A union to defend Gray's right to due process. And just generally not bending to the will of White folks who don't want to even discuss the idea that racism is a thing. I guess we'll see how Gray's lawsuit turns out. 

Aldeman Tries Making a Progressive Case for Choice

Chad Aldeman, one of those people I consider a serious grown-up in the reformster camp, is in The 74 this morning seeing if he can make a case for school choice, or at least counter what he sees as 

warnings coming out of the political left that educational choice programs will “destroy public schools” or “harm our society,” and that calls for more educational choices represent an “assault on American democracy.”

Instead of painting the movement to provide more educational choices for families as a right-wing bogeyman, progressives would be better off understanding that voters, especially Black and Latino parents, support greater options within the public schools.

Emphasis mine. 

Aldeman makes some very valid points. The public system we have has huge room for improvement when it comes to equity. Other countries do have some variations on our basic set up that work. 

And he offers five questions that "progressives should ask as they evaluate K-12 educational choice programs." And they are five questions, not all bad. Let's take them one at a time.

Are programs allowed to discriminate?

Aldeman notes that we have some segregation problems in our current system, and choice systems will allow a certain amount of self-segregation. Both true. But he hits the mark here:

States should protect against bad actors by requiring that any school accepting public money be prohibited from discriminating based on a student’s national origin, race, color, religion, disability, gender or familial status. If public money is going to private educational programs, they must be open and accepting of all students, and there must be protections and avenues for students and families to resolve conflicts. This should be a minimum bar to accepting public money.

Yes, yes and yes. Unfortunately, this gives us a problem right off the bat. The newest round of voucher (education savings account) laws not only allow discrimination, but specifically forbid any sort of state interference with the voucher-accepting school. And Aldeman has left out the right-wing elephant in the room, which is that voucher programs are largely about steering public dollars to private christian schools for whom discrimination is kind of the whole point. 

I absolutely agree with him--but the voucher wing of the school choice movement emphatically does not, and if Oklahoma has its way, the charter wing may soon follow. 

Is there a real check on quality?

I could quibble here that we haven't come up with any very good checks on public school quality, but I'll agree with Aldeman that whatever hoops public schools are jumping through, choice schools should jump through as well. 

However, again, we are going to run over the religious right's desire to teach that the Earth is 4000 years old and that Black folks "immigrated" to the US. But Aldeman is right:

Anyone who cares about program quality should insist that all kids be tested against the same statewide standards.

Unfortunately, as I suspect Aldeman well knows, plenty of choicers have taken the position that program quality A) is far less important than the moral imperative to offer choice and B) states don't have to do anything because the invisible hand of the market will take care of all quality issues.

Are the funding programs progressive?

Aldeman allows that fears that voucher programs are just handouts for wealthy families are "well-founded." He suggests that states could issue vouchers of higher amounts to students with higher needs.

Is the program actively supporting disadvantaged families?

Aldeman says that transparency and accountability would help families make good choices, but I'll argue it's unlikely that any choice system will not suffer from asymmetrical information issues, and it is not in the vendors' interest to fix that. This is what you get when you unleash the free market--marketing in place of transparency. 

Aldeman's solution is for the government to fund "choice navigators" aka a whole other level of bureaucracy to help families navigate the level of choice bureaucracy. I'm trying to imagine who these people will be and where we'd find them all (would this be a full time job? part time? minimum wage?), but there's another problem here-- many schools use the red tape and bureaucracy to weed out the families they don't want (see for example Sucess Academy). 

Does the state treat existing providers (traditional school districts) fairly?

Aldeman makes some weak claims that competition improves public schools and the financial hit isn't all that bad, though he acknowledges that some folks are "justifiably concerned about what happens to traditional districts if they lose students, especially the most active and engaged families. They could become the school of last resort for the most expensive, most disruptive kids" even as he calls the concerns "overblown." But he does argue that states will have to figure out a lot of funding questions, and I would certainly welcome an end to the era in which the choice argument was based on the absurd notion that we can run ten schools for the same money we used to spend to run one.

Questions he left out.

I am never entirely certain whether I am a progressive or not, though I know that's the bin I'm generally tossed into. But here are a couple of other questions that this public school supporter thinks need to be answered when choice turns up.

Who actually owns the facilities?

Schools involve real estate--often highly desirable real estate. Who owns the building, the facilities, the ground on which they're located? As a taxpayer, am I owning something, or am I paying taxes so someone else can get rich?

Who is actually in charge?

Are the people at the top elected representatives of the taxpayers who have to conduct business in a public meeting, or a bunch of unelected officials who can meet in private elsewhere?

Is this a business or a school?

Is this business run for profit, either directly or indirectly? I'm not asking because I have some philosophical objection to businesses because I think making a profit is dirty and evil. I'm asking because businesses make decisions for business reasons, and I don't want to send my child to a school only to have the school yanked away at some point because the business case for the school no longer makes sense to the owners/investors.

Is it a religious school?

Public taxpayer dollars should not be going to private religious schools for all the usual reasons, but also because the mission of a religious school is inherently incompatible with the mission of public education (see Question #1 above). It's not a matter of one mission being good and the other being evil; they just don't fit together. 

Finishing up

I appreciate Aldeman's offering what I read as a thoughtful take. I believe there are ways to incorporate choice ideas into the public education system (that's a whole other post), and it's worth it to have versions of that conversation wherever it crops up. It's never a bad time to have a deeper conversation about what "public education" means.

And while I understand why Aldeman would have an aversion to apocalyptic right wing boogeyman talk from public ed defenders, folks in the choice camp have to have noticed that they are currently allied with a lot of right wing boogeyman-looking folks who do, in fact, want to see public education either destroyed or converted. So I do want to see the grownups keep talking about the important stuff, but those conversations have to take place with an awareness of what's going on around them.

In Praise of Waffling

If there are any continuing threads at this blog, one is certainly that education in general and teaching in particular are about balance, about managing the tension between a wide variety of conflicting forces and ideas. Students need direction. Students need freedom. Direct instruction. Discovery. Learning mastery takes whatever time it takes. Students must make it to certain goals by the end of the year. Teachers can't work with no standards at all. Teachers can't work with standards that are like straightjackets. Students should be lovingly nurtured. Students must be held to high standards. Students with special needs. Teachers bringing their own values into the classroom. Parent involvement. Culturally sensitive instruction. SEL. DEI. Etc. Etc. Etc.

There isn't an issue in education that doesn't involve multiple, contradicting points of view.

Balancing them as we move from circumstance to circumstance, from class to class, from student to student-- it looks a lot like waffling.

For many of us, waffling is suspicious behavior, a moral failure to identify a particular position as the One True Answer, and then stick to it. The way to develop policy, to teach a class, to properly pedagogify, is to identify the One True Answer and then tie off the steering wheel and put a brick on the gas pedal.

This is baloney. It's attractive baloney. Lord knows I was, decades ago, deeply attached to it. I set some conclusions, welded the steering wheel in place, nailed the gas pedal to the floor, and went to sit in a comfy seat in the back of the bus, which is where I was when the vehicle that was my marriage ran off the road and hit a tree. And even then I didn't get it. Even then I thought my mistake was in where I welded the wheel, and I just had to weld it in the correct direction. Uncounted arboreal impacts later, it finally dawned on me that I had to actually drive the bus.

Pick your metaphor. The classroom is a bus and you have to steer it as you go, responding to twists and turns in the roads, the demands of your passengers, and even the occasional person who darts out in front of you. You have to adjust the seat and the mirrors to your own particular personal shape. Do you have to have some idea of a general direction? Sure--but you can't simply steer directly toward it blindly (again, the balance is somewhere between the extremes).

Or maybe the classroom is an actual balancing act, and you just have to keep shifting and adjusting as the weights you're carrying shirt, the wind blows, and the tightrope wobbles beneath your feet. No, you can't just walk heedlessly forward, but you can't ignore the conditions of the moment, either.

There is lots of very specific teacher advice to be had, and every last bit of it is only useful in specific circumstances. "You must not get personally connected to the students" and "You have to forge more of a personal connection with the students" are both perfectly solid pieces of advice in entirely different specific circumstances. "Tighten up and act more like the adult in the room" and "loosen up and don't be so strict" are both great pieces of advice in the right moment, and terrible pieces of advice in the wrong moment.

"Use a hose to shoot thousands of gallons water at the house" is great advice when the house in on fire. It is terrible advice if the house is caught in rising flood waters.

Education has always been plagued by people who hop way too quickly from "This is an answer that works some of the time under certain conditions" to "This is the answer that works all the time for everybody." They once saw a house fire put out by a tanker spewing a ton of water, so now they want to hose down everyone. Education also suffers from people who, having seen their flooding house ruined by an application of even more water, now insist that hoses should be kept away from burning buildings as well. 

One of the greatest fallacies in education is some variation of "This works/doesn't work for me, therefor it must work/not work for everyone."

Classrooms are not always complicated, but they are always complex. If you accept, for instance, the notion that humans are a pastiche of 400 psychological traits, then multiple 400 by the number of humans in the classroom, plus the varied versions of lived experience, plus the dynamics that emerge in the interactions between the individuals in the room (any teacher can tell you about a class where the absence of one particular student changed the dynamic of the entire class), plus the dynamics around the material itself, with all of that slathered over with whatever has happened to those individuals in the past 12-24 hours. And what each of the students needs, and what the course is supposed to require. And all of that has to be boiled down, by the teacher, to a very specific action at a particular moment in time. Your deep-felt pedagogical philosophies are very cool, but the teacher is facing a certain student with a specific situation at Tuesday at 10:27 PM and she has to decide what exactly to do right then.

A teacher is on a high wire holding a ten foot pole that has, on each end, a twenty foot stack of cages with various wild raccoons and ferrets running around inside, and the teacher is on a bicycle, and the bicycle's tires aren't round, and there's a gusty wind, and a flock of geese flying at her. And she is adjusting and shifting every step of the way. Anyone who wants to tell her "Just do it exactly like this. Just hold this exact pose all the way. Then you'll be okay."

Certainly not all advice is created equal-- some techniques or grips or methods will serve better than others (which is part of what I'm talking about, because the sweet spot in teaching on any given day also lies somewhere between "You must do exactly this every time" and "Just pull whatever out of your butt on a whim"). And individual teachers will find certain techniques that work better FOR THEM.

The best teachers drive the bus. They shift the load as they move. They smoothly juggle dozens of possible tools to deploy the right one at the moment it's needed. They waffle. They waffle like a boss (even as they manage the tension between consistency and flexibility, because various tensions underline every single part of the job).

It is hard to overstate just how completely and thoroughly those who propose a Single Magical Solution simply don't understand how a classroom works or what teaching is. Scripted programs are absurd. A universal set of standards is absurd. Mandating a particular pedagogical approach, either by district policy or legislative edict, is absurd. Can some of these things contribute useful tools to a teacher's kit? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean they're the one tool that should be used every single time.

Waffling is a good and necessary thing in education. Teachers have to be adaptable and flexible, neither an iron rod or a floppy dishtowel, but somewhere in between. So much of the debate in education is commandeered by people out on the extremes, but the answer is almost always somewhere in the middle, and exactly where in the middle (which matters because, remember, teachers run on specific choices in the moment, not sweeping generalities) varies from day to day, moment to moment. If that looks like waffling, so be it. Or as that great waffler, Walt Whitman put it:

Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large. I contain multitudes.)

A classroom is large. It contains multitudes. And backseat drivers on the educational bus, hollering out "Hey, first you steered one way and then you steered the other way. Don't you know what you're doing?" are no help at all.

h/t TC Weber who started me down this particular path.

ICYMI: Father's Day 2023 Edition (6/18)

Did you know that the President who finally signed Father's Day into national holiday status was-- Richard Nixon? Yeah, go figure. Happy Father's Day to those who celebrate it. Here's some reading for the day.

'Bankrupt our state': Expected school voucher surge to cost Arizona taxpayers a lot more money

This is the story, over and over-- universal voucher programs cost way more than anyone pushing them predicts. 

Iowa could pay millions more than budgeted to help families pay for private school

Yup. Everywhere there are vouchers, states are coming face to face with a huge price tag.

Indiana’s school voucher program use at all-time high, but there are fewer low-income families

Indiana's program continues to bring financial relief to the well-to-do and not-particularly-needy.

Literacy and NAEP Proficient

This time it's Tom Loveless trying to explain to people what NAEP proficiency really does and doesn't mean. 

DeSantis kicks off feud over College Board's AP psych class

Lots of versions of this story out there, but thanks to MSN here's the Politico story without a paywall. DeSantis's Florida wants AP Psych without the gay, but the College Board says they learned their lesson from the Black History debacle, and they aren't going to budge. 

Testing Vendor Scores $40 Million Contract Increase in Tennessee

Pearson scores big in Tennessee. Andy Spears has the story.

Kentucky school district considering bringing back remote learning

Interesting tale of a district that can't compete for teachers financially with its neighboring district, so instead of thinking outside the box. Teachers, we can't pay you more, but how would you like a four day live work week with one cyberschool day?

School board must find new insurance provider or take guns away from staff

Insurance company decides that having a bunch of armed amateurs in a building is a liability. Who would have guessed? Okay, just about anyone, but here we are. Jay Waagmeester reports for Iowa Capital Dispatch.

CREDO Charter Study Shows Trivial and Inconsistent Gains

Yes, if you read here, you probably also read Diane Ravitch, but this one is too important to miss. The CREDO study and its claims of charter awesomeness are being reported everywhere. Carol Burris has looked at the real numbers-- and not so fast.

DEI education in America actually dates back to the 18th century

At the Washington Post, Penn State professor Bradford Vivian reminds us that DEI is not actually all that new.

Soon We Won’t Have Enough Kids to Fill Our Schools. That’s a Problem.

Jessica Grose at the New York Times on a demographic trend that may spell trouble for some school districts.

Central Bucks seniors don’t want officials ‘who have made high school harder and more painful’ handing them their diplomas

Maddie Hanna at the Philadelphia Inquirer goes to a county where district leaders have been all about book bans and gag rules, and its graduating class is unimpressed.

Controversial book policy in Ludlow fails

In Massachusetts, a school board suggests that book ban supporters go home--to whatever place outside the district they live.

Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Sarasota County in Florida is Ground Zero for far right anti-inclusive policies. Kathryn Joyce looks at this very Florida place for Hechinger Report. 

LA Lawmakers Force “In God We Trust” Signs Down Public Classroom Throat

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at a new Louisiana plan to get a Godly poster in every classroom. Good luck with that. 

Drummond: Approval of Catholic charter school drove a stake in the heart of religious liberty

One of the most vocal opponents of that new religious charter school in Oklahoma is-- the Republican Attorney General of the state, who wrote a whole op-ed to further explain why he thinks it's a bad idea. 

Do the homework on Moms for Liberty-affiliated school initiatives

The York Dispatch in York PA is a smallish paper in a smallish place, but they know enough to recognize a "right-wing fever dream" when they see one. A whole editorial board wrote this take-down of the Moms.

Did a North Carolina Democratic lawmaker throw the party under the bus for the charter school industry?

Jeff Bryant looks at the defection of Tricia Cotham, and how it is tied to charter school politics.

I'm an educator and grandson of Holocaust survivors, and I see public schools failing to give students the historical knowledge they need to keep our democracy strong

Boaz Dvir, a Penn State professor, looks at the cost of shortchanging the teaching of history.

Rethinking Localism in Education Law and Policy

Okay, maybe a little wonky, but this is an interesting conversation with Derek Black about the problems of local approaches to education.

Things that Make Teachers Go Hmmm

Nancy Flanagan on Teach for America's newest recruitment drive.

Mississippi Malarkey

Nickolas Kristoff thinks Mississippi pulled off a miracle. Thomas Ultican is unimpressed. 

As always, you're invited to join me on substack for a more reliable in-you-inbox reading experience for whatever I've cranked out lately.

NC: Vouchers For Ghost Students

In 2017, a Duke Law School study looked at how North Carolina's voucher program was going. Here's just a slice of what they concluded:

In comparison to most other states, North Carolina’s general system of oversight of private schools is weak. North Carolina’s limited oversight reflects a policy decision to leave the quality control function primarily to individual families. Under North Carolina law, private schools are permitted to make their own decisions regarding curriculum, graduation requirements, teacher qualifications, number of hours/days of operation, and, for the most part, testing. No accreditation is required of private schools.

Those first three of the voucher program also saw 93% of voucher students attending private religious schools. 2017 was also the year that the legislature set out to pump millions more into their voucher system, and this year they've been working at expanding it even more by expanding it to include the wealthy and those who already send their children to private school. 

So it's worth noting the analysis just released by Kris Nordstrom, senior policy analyst at the Education & Law Project at the North Carolina Justice Center. 

Nordstrom checked some simple figures. How many students did the school report enrolling? How many vouchers did the state send them?

In 62 instances, the state sent schools more money than the school reportedly had students. 

Some of these could easily be clerical quirks, particularly in some of the tiny schools involved. Increase Learning Center Rockingham (faith-based daycare) reports an enrollment of 4 and received vouchers for 5. Okay. There are lots of explanations for that.

But here's Brittain Academy Guilford reporting 72 students enrolled and 87 vouchers. North Shore Academy Onslow in 2020 reported 14 students and received 17 vouchers; then in 2021 they reported 14 students and received 38 vouchers! Riverside Christian Academy-- 16 students enrolled, and 55 vouchers! At $6492 per student, that's a heck of a windfall. Mitchener University Academy reported an enrollment of 72 and collected 149 vouchers-- so about $230,000 of taxpayer money handed over for non-existent students.

Those voucher dollars add up. Nordstrom figures about $2.3 million in fraudulent payments of taxpayer money to private schools.

And that's not counting the 23 schools that kept receiving vouchers even though they stopped reporting to the state (DNPE) altogether. As Nordstrom notes in one example, Crossroads Christian School of Statesville stopped reporting in 2020, but still collected $57,300 in voucher money that year.

If you're a person who cares about accountability for taxpayer dollars spent or someone who wants to see greater transparency and efficiency in education spending, this can't be the sort of thing you have in mind.