OK: Walters Wants To Explain Woke

Oklahoma's head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question--what the heck does "woke" mean? (I'll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don't recommend clicking through). 

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I'm a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the "to wit" and remember that "restore back" is more clearly "restore." 

But he's right. The term "woke" does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, "restore American education back to its foundation" is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don't Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn't. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at "opponents of this movement." If we don't know what the movement is, we don't know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let's press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they're terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It's a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it's okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what "woke" actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well....

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don't even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he's talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he's not going to do that. He's going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that "naturally, this faction of individuals" is after schools to spread their "radical propaganda." Still no definition of woke in sight. No--wait. This next start looks promising--

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That's not helping, either. "Projection" is an odd choice--when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn't change. There's "projection" when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here ("I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world") but that's probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one "forces" projection. "Inaccurately-held" is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they're being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple "inaccurate" would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are "anti-education," because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect "education" means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of "nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means" which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

He does finally offer two specifics. 

We are going after books like “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” that are nothing more than thinly veiled porn pushed onto our students. We are going after classroom lessons telling students that people should be treated differently because of their sex and race.

So, sex stuff and race stuff. "Books like" is doing the lifting here. Gender Queer is a fine (and popular) example of a book that reasonable people can disagree about--who is it appropriate for, and when? But is And Tango Makes Three a book like Gender Queer? Is it really porn? And is someone "pushing" it onto students, or is it just sitting on a shelf in the library? 

And on the race side, Oklahoma's record is not stellar. Last year some Oklahoma districts banned books by Black authors including I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Raisin in the Sun and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Do those books tell anyone that some people should be treated differently (from whom? from what? from the way you would treat people not like them? from the way you intended to treat them before you read this book?). 

There's a thing I used to tell my older children when they were growing up--just because something makes you feel bad does not mean that the person who did it meant to hurt you. The hurt may have come inside from you, not outside from them. Your result does not prove their intention. I think of this often when I'm reading about a white person who is upset by a story about racism.

But back to our search for a woke definition.

"There is no place," says Walters, "for this sort of teaching in any part of society, much less in public schools." Is he going to tell us what sort of teaching he means, exactly? Np. But I am curious about the use of the word "public." This sort of teaching has no place in society at all, so will he be cracking down on any private schools that dare to harbor this sort of thing. Or is the autonomy of private, voucher-grabbing schools, more sacred than these values?

He names some culprits pushing in this direction. The teachers unions "attempting to consolidate more power," because in right-to-work bright red Oklahoma, that teachers union wields so very much power--that's why so many officials in the state are teachers union selected (I will bring you that list just as soon as it is delivered by unicorn courier). Also, President Biden "desperately trying to win re-election by listening to his far-left handlers." These are the people who have decided this is what should be taught in school. How the President has any say over what is taught in school is unclear. 

Instead of radical taxpayer-funded indoctrination, we need an actively anti-woke education system that is rooted in traditional values and practical subject matter.

Indoctrination into what? For what purpose? Which traditional values? What practical subject matter? Will he explain. Well, some. Hold on for the next paragraph.

In order to achieve this goal, we need to actively root out and remove any elements of indoctrination present in the school system and push for an education system that returns to a traditional model that ensures that the goal of every aspect of the school system is student success, rather than a radical political agenda.

What "traditional model"? Segregated schools? Warehousing students with special needs in some special room? 

We need more support for subjects like the science of reading, math, and other concepts that provide real, tangible educational value for the students. We need curricula that will prepare kids for the workforce, no matter which career path they want to pursue.

So, strictly vocational? But is women are going to follow a traditional path of stay-at-home mom, does that mean they don't need schooling beyond Home Ec? And if you're going to talk about college and career workforce prep--well, wasn't that what Common Corfe was going to do? Don't you already have that in your state standards? And anyway, weren't business leaders on your conspirators' list at the top of this piece-- should these future employers be trusted?

We need a value-based education system that ensures students come out of the school system as beneficial members of society.

What value will it be based on? And the idea of students who are ready to be beneficial members of society is such a grandly vague notion that you'd be hard pressed to find A) one person who disagree with it and B) any two people who agree on what it means.

Our kids shouldn’t be taught what a company, union or elected official feels like is the cheapest way to garner support at the time.

But- but- but-- how will you make students workforce ready if you're ignoring all these people? Is there some way to sort out their insincere ignorable utterances from their useful career education guidance?

Yet unfortunately, In pursuit of desperately trying to win the approval of and clout from the social media “smart set”, woke corporations and officials like Biden have decided to use our education system to score woke political points. It is foolish, superficial, anti-student, and it is sacrificing our children’s future on the altar of public approval. Students deserve better than radical, taxpayer-funded brainwashing, and so does America.

Clout from the social media smart set, charges the guy who has posted videos from his car regularly as a way of raising his profile and political fortunes. All of this sacrifices our students "on the altar of public approval," but if this isn't what most of the public really wants, how can one get public approval for espousing it. This seems to be a feature of wokitude--it is both powerfully omnipresent in every corner of life, and also a minority opinion of a small handful of people. 

We've arrived at the end, and there is no actual definition of woke in sight. Just a word salad of key phrases, trigger words, and empty constructions that sound cool but don't actually say anything.

If Walters somehow ended up reading this, he'd likely dismiss me as a bad faith social media clout-seeker. But I've at least said what I meant. I accept that a certain percentage of anti-woke crowd can't define exactly what it is that troubles them, and another percentage probably could, but if they said it out loud--well, they know on some level that that would be disturbing. And a certain percentage of the anti-woke crowd is deliberately vague, because that keeps the anti-woke tent big and inclusive. 

But Walters--well, I can't quite figure out his deal. He projects as a right-wing Christian nationalist dudebro, but he's an educated man. He taught, and did, from what I hear and read, a pretty good job. So how did he come to this place, so recklessly anti-teacher, anti-public school, anti-government

The headline for the piece says "If we can't define woke, we can't win the battle for our schools." And then he fails to define woke. I don't know if he can't, or he just doesn't want to. I don't know how far he wants to ride this anti-woke train, nor is it clear how far this cloudlike train on its vaporous tracks will actually run.

But the failure to define is largely a feature. Like the broad definition of critical race theory and the vaguely worded laws passed to stop divisive concepts, it empowers conservative folks to take aim at all the things that make them uncomfortable--the race stuff, the gender and sex stuff. And by making about The Children, it makes their desire to lock the country into a Golden Past that never was a noble undertaking and not something more selfish.

I'd still like to see a clear definition of woke, a clearer explanation of what exactly the panic is about. Hell, I'd love to see an actual honest conversation about it. But I don't know if either will ever happen. They certainly aren't happening in this piece.

A Treat, not a Treatment

Harold Pixley, one of my high school band directors, used to have a saying that summed up his programming philosophy; 

Give the audience a treat, not a treatment.

His thinking was that the music should not be some kind of unpleasant medicine--good for you, but unenjoyable, a painful cure for what ails you.

Some education discussions remind me of Pix's words. There's this continuing thread, this notion that the Youngs all suffer from a variety of maladies, all distinguished by what the children lack--knowledge, understanding, skills, etc--and it is the job of schools to give children a treatment to fix them.

Education Treatment fans assume that the correct treatment will fix the deficiency in all students, so their focus is on the deficiency itself and the treatment to fix it, not the students. If students find the treatment joyless and unpleasant, well, that doesn't matter. In fact, some folks are pretty sure that the unpleasantness is a sign that this is the Correct Treatment, and conversely that if a child is enjoying themselves in school, they are really receiving treatment for their deficiencies.

Education treatment fans dismiss the premise that a teacher needs to know or know about the students. The right treatment will always work. And because they focus on the deficiency, education treatment fans often display an absurd lack of understanding about human children or the education thereof.

Take Jordan Adams, the Hillsdale product who has launched himself as a one-man anti-woke consulting firm. He appears to be hilariously bad at his job (teach 6 year olds American history) and not too sneaky about his far right christianist agenda, but the only thing separating him from far more successful educonsultants is that he appears to have underestimated the number of districts just waiting to hire him and help him fail upwards. 

Adams comes from the treatment school-- if we just apply the correct anti-woke treatment to students, they will turn out the way we want them to. 

He's certainly not alone. State legislatures often take this policy approach: "Young people don't know enough about widgets, so let's pass a law that requires schools to apply one Widget Knowledge Treatment to students every year." Center stage at the Reading Wars is regularly occupied by someone (these days it's the SOR folks) declaiming, "If we just apply a treatment of This Proven Reading Poultice, all students will be cured of not being readers."

Nor is it confined to folks on the right. The worst of the DEI or SEL programs come with the premise that if we just take this program out of the box and aim it at the students, they will become more empathetic and accepting and loaded with soft skills. 

Nor is it confined to education amateurs (though that's certainly where the majority come from). Every school building has at least--at least--one teacher who's sure that if they're making their students miserable, like children being force fed hay soaked in castor oil, then they are doing their job.

Can you go too far in the other direction and create a classroom that is focused primarily on making everyone warm and fuzzy and happy? Sure. But for the moment, I'm focusing on what it looks like in the more common cases where we go too far the other way.

The related premise of the treatment school of education is that children are pre-humans, being prepper for their Real Life, which hasn't actually started yet. Therefore, the daily concerns of things like joy and accomplishment and building relationships and figuring out how to be your best human self in the world--none of those things should matter. 

Apply treatment. Measure result. Apply more treatment.

Educational treatments are done to students, not with them. For them in the sense "this is for your own good, so suck it up."

End result: too many students who come to school anticipating only the "extra" class that is their treat, like band or chorus or their sport, because that's the one where they feel as if they're living their lives. 

Another bad side effect: if we think that those students just need The Right Treatment, that opens the door for all sorts of snake oil salesmen who would love to sell us the next miracle cure for the deficiencies that our treatment is supposed to target.

Again, I don't mean that every class should be sunshine and lollipops and a happy land of Do As You Please; that extreme is ultimately not a treat, either. Learning to read and enjoy the world that reading unlocks is a treat. Building your brain muscles with skills and knowledge--that's a treat, too. People like treats. 

Yes, some students will be hard to convince that learning to understand how gerund phrases function is a treat; that's just one reason that the teacher needs to understand why it is (pro tip: "because it's on the test" is a treatment answer). And the wind in policy circles has been blowing steadily in the direction of treatment, that education is something we do to students to make them be the way we want them to be, some day, when they maybe become real persons. 

As my children and grandchildren move through school, the most fundamental thing I want for them are teachers and a school system that treats them like real, live human beings. Get that right, and everything else will follow.

Momwashing

As expected, the Moms For Liberty soiree in Philadelphia drew press attention, and some of the journalists covering it perpetuated a recurring phenomenon in M4L coverage.

From soccer moms to parent activists: Moms for Liberty harness a powerful political movement\

                                   ---Washington Examiner headline

Moms for Liberty started with three Florida moms fighting COVID-19 restrictions in 2021. It has quickly ascended as a national player in Republican politics, helped along the way by the board’s political training and close relationships with high-profile GOP groups and lawmakers.

                                    ---Ali Swenson, AP

“I think moms are the key political force for this 2024 cycle,” DeSantis told the crowd, whom he and other speakers hailed as “mama bears.”

                                    ---quoted in Washington Post

They call themselves joyful warriors -- but this group of conservative moms are mad.

                                    ---Brittany Shepherd, ABC

They're getting better at it, but too much of the M4L coverage still leans into that word "moms," and I suppose that they are, in fact, mothers of children. Still, if you can't see anything wring with calling them a bunch of moms, let's try a few other formulations.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded by six Tennessee dads who were initially looking for a social outlet...

The Associated Press, started by a dad who wanted to connect with some other dads about progress in the Mexican American war...

Communism, a set of ideas worked out by a German dad...

The Committee to Re-elect the President, founded by some dads with an interest in the candidacy of Richard Nixon...

Anthony Fauci, a Georgetown dad with a big interest in communicable disease...

The John Birch Society, a group started out by a dad with some concerns about government policies...

We don't have to skew conservative. We could call the Center for American Progress "a discussion group formed by some moms and dads with concerns about government" instead of "a group of seasoned political operatives looking for ways to keep Clintonian policies alive."

But you get the point. Using "moms" makes it seem as if these are just homespun amateurs who never asked to be thrust into this role, but darn it, they couldn't bear to just sit at home with their knitting any more. They never asked to be activists fighting public education.

Except that, of course, they totally did. Two co-founders of the group had already been working privatization politics since 2015 (I've detailed their origin story here and here), and some of them were already communications professionals. They quickly gained access, exposure and money, probably courtesy of one's husband, who specializes in doing exactly that. This is yet another story about a band becomes an "overnight success" after working their instruments and trying to find just the right sound for years and years. 

But the word "moms" just washes that away. It reassures us that they aren't really coms pros and experienced political activists. They aren't even the kind of uppity women who would upset a Southern Baptist. "Moms" are women who know their place. It's a term that erases any notion that these women might get pushy, like a Kamala Harris or a Jill Biden or a Michelle Obama. They're here to support the menfolk. It is an artful balancing of "we are strong fighters" and "we are not any sort of danger to male leaders." They want to support the governor and President, not run for the office themselves.

There are some complicated nuances to female terms in right wing world, which Steve Nuzum summarizes nicely as part of his post about the M4L gathering:

This selective binary between “moms” and “women” is a large part of the “parent’s rights” narrative, which seems to count as parents only those who are a particular brand of cultural conservative. For example, “the teachers unions” were presented as the bogeymen throughout the day, because they're opposed to “women” and/ or “moms,” despite the obvious fact that teachers unions are composed mainly of women/ moms, because most teachers in the US (about 77%) are women.

Parents of LGBTQ kids aren't "moms." Women who are married to other women certainly aren't "moms," no matter how many children they have. Just the Right Sort of People are moms.

Hats off to whoever designed the title for this outfit. Momwashing instantly erases so much, cleansing the group of any whiff of professionalism, scrubbing away any stain of partisan political professionalism, and replacing it with a fresh scent of nostalgia for the days when women stayed him, made cookies, stood up for their kids--but certainly never strayed into areas that were best left to the men. 

There's no denying that in some markets, Momwash is a popular product. I just wish more people would see past it. 

Would Legalizing Discrimination Improve Education

Corey DeAngelis is one of the young choice bros, working for the DeVos American Federation for Children, CATO, Reason, Education Freedom Institute, etc etc. And while I can remember a time when one could have a civil Twitter exchange with him, nowadays he's followed by a fairly aggressive Twitter swarm. But he's one of the young guns in the privatizing world, a mover and shaker and "choice evangelist" that has been there to boost every piece of privatizing legislation of the past couple of years, so it's worth taking a look at some of his earlier pieces of work to get insights into his thinking. 

So we head back to 2016 and the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian thinky tank founded in 1946; they cut their teeth on opposition to New Deal stuff. In 2016, their chief was Lawrence Reed, who had previously run the right-tilted Mackinac Center and was also a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The DeAngelis piece has a catchy title-- Legalizing Discrimination Would Improve the Education System-- and a thesis that Milton Friedman, the granddaddy of the Let's Just Get Rid Of Public Schools movement, would appreciate. 

Friedman's view on segregation and vouchers has been debated. Friedman was anti-segregation, and also anti-forced desegregation. His championing of school vouchers came along at just the right time for folks who were looking for ways to avoid the results of Brown v. Board; whether that was just a remarkable coincidence or Friedman taking advantage of culture wars to promote an anti-public ed policy depends on how much credit you want to give the man. 

Likewise, Friedman either argued that A) school vouchers would inevitably lead to more segregation or B) school vouchers would lead to more integration, or possibly C) he didn't really care one way or the other. Your choice will depend on A) what pieces of stuff you read and B) how important it is to you to preserve his standing as a sainted father of rational and objectively true belief in a Free Market that should be Ruling Society. 

If he was using culture war panic over segregation to feed a privatization agenda, he certainly wouldn't be the last.

At any rate, DeAngelis offers a more civilian-accessible version of how the voucher system could be expected to weed out Bad Discrimination. 

We can all agree that the intentions behind this policy are well-meaning. We don’t want public funding to go to schools that are run by malevolent people. For simplicity, let’s assume that people running private schools are indeed racist, sexist, evil individuals. Even if we allow all types of discrimination, the evil individuals in charge of the private schools will financially pay for the act.

For example, let’s assume that the people in charge of school X are racist. They can choose to hire a teacher of race 1 or race 2. If they are racist against race 2, they will likely choose to hire race 1, regardless of the actual quality of the teacher. If an alternative school, Y, does not practice the same discrimination, they will benefit by having a larger pool of teacher candidates. Ultimately, this would lead to a competitive advantage for school Y for not being racist! Families would recognize this advantage, choose school Y, and force school X to face a shutdown condition. Allowing families to choose their schools will only work to eliminate unhealthy discrimination such as racism in hiring.

It would be generous to call this idea ahistorical. The post-Brown landscape, complete with segregation academies and racially gerrymandered districts, provides ample evidence that there is a robust market for racist schools. Furthermore, the current landscape provides ample evidence that there is a robust market for schools that discriminate on the basis of religion or LGBTQ status.

But DeAngelis is going to say "Bad discrimination will be quelched by the market" and move on.

Then he shifts to examples of "healthy discrimination." He offers basically two types.

First is what we might call "magnet school" discrimination. If you're setting up a school for the performing arts, it would not be healthy to force the school to accept students and faculty who have no background in the performing arts. He uses a sports school example along the same lines.

Second is "ability level and learning styles" discrimination. If we accept students with low achievement levels just because they are athletes, that would be hard on top academic students and teachers. 

This "healthy discrimination" is also to be done away with, leaving students to just crash on the rocks and, as he admits, "hurt their confidence level."

But behind his distinction between healthy and unhealthy, there are other distinctions. Like the distinction between discrimination based on relevant factors (like background in the material the school teaches) and discrimination based on irrelevant factors (race, religion or sexual orientation of the student). 

Or instead of "healthy" and "unhealthy" we could say "legal" and "illegal." "Not a performing artist" is not a protected class. "Not in the top percentile of academic achievement" is not a marginalized group. But DeAngelis, like Friedman, wants government out of the whole thing.

Although there are certain types of unhealthy discrimination, it is not optimal for bureaucrats to determine which types are permissible for the rest of society. Instead, we should allow families in society to choose the schools that do not partake in the discriminatory practices that they deem to be non-permissible.

And here we are, back at the same old problems. First, there's the libertarian paradox--if we allow people the freedom of choice to discriminate as they wish, that automatically robs other people of their freedom to choose. Second, if a bunch of people choose poorly, all of us suffer (including losing our freedom to choose). Society has a vested interest in limiting the spread of racism and ignorance, not just because those are morally and ethically bad, but because they make society work worse. Unhealthy discrimination is unhealthy for society as a whole.

In all fairness, it's not just a libertarian problem. It's also a democracy problem; freedom to have your voice is great and necessary, but when you use that voice to promote damaging vile stuff, we have a problem. Plenty of districts have managed to implement and maintain discrimination using democratic processes.

But as hard as the problem is to wrestle with, "Just let the free market sort it out" is not a solution. To be clear, legalizing discrimination would not improve education--it would (as it always gas) provide coiver for bigotry and unhealthy discrimination, thereby making education so much worse for people who get the short end of the stick.

And I'm not sure that DeAngelis and Friedman actually think the free market really will solve segregation, so much as they think the free market should be the primary value driving policy, and if that results in segregation and inequity, oh well, that's just the price of Freedom. 

Music vs. Sports

Among the various ways to divide Americans into two groups, I like my brother's model. He has long argued that everyone is either a band geek or a sports geek. 

Band is a cooperative venture (yes, this would include chorus, too). You work together with the other people in the group; the trombones don't try to "beat" the clarinets--okay, sometimes they do, but they generally stop because for the group to succeed, everyone has to do their part. Everyone has to work together and put the achievement of the group first. 

Sports are a competitive venture. You're there to beat the other side, not to work along with them. Your success requires their defeat. You get better by learning how to defeat strong opponents.

Bands are not zero sum. If four bands play in a single concert, they can all be excellent and successful. There is an infinite supply of audience applause.

Sports are zero sum. Somebody can only win if somebody else loses. 

There are occasional attempts to bring elements of one into the other. There are, for instance, actual band competitions in which bands play "against" each other and some band wins. These are stupid. Why should a band that delivered a great performance be told that they're losers (those of you who are sports geeks are right now saying "because that's how the world works"). These competitions inflict a more subtle harm; there is a whole body of band composition that is designed not around a great musical idea, but around elements that a band would need to demonstrate to win a competition. These compositions are kind of lousy.

Meanwhile, it's the band geeks of the world that invented participation trophies and other ways to try to convince people who clearly lost the competition that they are somehow winners (you band geeks are saying "But why should someone who played their guts out be told they suck"). But if we tell folks involved in a competitive situation that they didn't lose when they clearly did, that's no help in dealing with reality, nor in improving.

Each has elements of the other. Sports teams have to cooperate within themselves in order to win. Not only that, but in the competitive world, the people who can best understand, appreciate, and respect   what you're doing are your opponents. Band members, sometimes openly and sometimes subtly, jockey and compete for leadership positions within the group. We may be working together in this band, but we also know who the best players are.

There's some complexity and nuance here, but we're still talking about two fundamentally different ways of viewing how the world works. People steeped in the competitive model can be dumbfounded, frustrated, or even dismissive of people who don't seem to understand that it's a dog-eat-dog world. People steeped in the cooperative view can be dumfounded, frustrated, or even dismissive of people who insist that battling is the only path forward.

In education, the folks who insist that a competitive marketplace is the only way to get better are speaking a foreign language to those who believe in the cooperative model. Meanwhile, those competitive folks can't figure out why so many educators don't understand that it's impossible to get better if you aren't trying to beat someone. And both suspect that the other side is just pretending to believe in a model that, dammit, no rational human being who can actually see the world would honestly believe.

The model you see depends a lot on how the world was revealed to you when you were young. But I think the big trick is to grow past that model so that you can see the value of both. There are times when the competitive model is the way to go, and times when cooperation is the secret.

When considering competition, consider what the terms of engagement will be--what will the basis of the competition be? My town has an annual America's Got Talent style singing competition where the actual terms of the competition are getting audience support, and so the context actually measure which contestant is best able to get the most supporters to come sit in the audience. So it's not really a vocal competition (which is a mystery anyway, because how does one objectively measure the "best" singer); it's a popularity competition. In any competition, you have to ask if you're really competing over what you say you're competing over.

In education, leaders keep trying to set up competitions between schools and districts based on educational excellence, only instead they're really competitions to see who can get students to get the highest scores on a single math and reading test given once a year. The competition is not really about what it pretends to be about.

Cooperation has its own pitfalls. I play in a community band, and we long ago made the conscious decision that we were more interested in being an inclusive community activity than the most awesomest band in the state. So we have welcomed (and continue to do so) players who don't bring a lot of musical aptitude to the table. That's an appropriate choice; we're a community volunteer organization making music, not a professional team trying to get to the Super Bowl. But you can worry so much about avoiding competitiveness that you stop paying any attention to relative achievement at all.

But in education it's possible to lose the plot, to worry so much about not subjecting students to competition that you stop subjecting them to any meaningful evaluation. I get the impulse to eliminate gifted and talented program, especially when the competition for spots is based on dubious measures (my own district for years appeared to base the program on the student's parents' job). But that doesn't really help anyone. 

Policy and politics folks seem to skew to the sports side. You can certainly see it in moments like the Moms For Liberty professional coms advice to never apologize, because it shows weakness. And you can't beat people that way. The mindset, so very common in the public-facing world of politics and policy, is at odds with teachers, who are largely cooperative model types, and often have trouble dealing with the various actors currently trying to beat teachers, beat public education. 

It's not a perfect model, but it's another way to understand some of the gulfs that energize some of our debates. As always, the solution is moderation, balance, and bridges built by grownups who are willing to live with nuance and complexity. 

ICYMI: Glass Slipper Edition (7/2)

 Wrapping up the first weekend of the local production of Cinderella. This time I'm just doing some trombone honking in the pit. Find a way in your life to make something, whether it's music or art or a cabinet or a project. I added this to my rules for life list years ago because for a teacher, who rarely gets to see the end project of what you work on, it's nice to have a project that makes something and has a finish point. It is particularly helpful during weeks when people are chiseling away at some of the progress we have made as a country. 

Anyway, here's some reading from the week.

I Watched the Moms for Liberty Conference...

Steve Nuzum watched some of that thing going on. He has both some reporting of what was said, and some good insights into the baloney that was sliced.

Vermilion Education’s Debut At Pennridge School District Flops

The Bucks County Beacon (which has a once-a-month spot for me) has been on an absolute tear this week. Here's a great piece about Vermilion, the baby consulting company (aka one guy who used to work for Hillsdale) and their first contract. It's a mess. Fun fact: the one guy is with the Moms for Liberty this weekend for a session on how to get your "flipped" schoolboard on the right ideological path. You should read about this guy if for nom other reason than he could be coming to your district some day.

A breaking point: A look at the reasons why some Rochester-area teachers have left education

That's Rochester, Minnesota. This is a good nuts and bolts look at the teacher exodus in that state. No surprises here, but at least it confirms what we already know.

The teaching profession is facing a post-pandemic crisis

Matt Barnum (the most reliably on-the-ball reporter at Chalkbeat) did a two-part series at Chalkbeat looking at the troubles with the profession. Some solid data here. The follow-up piece proposes some solutions.

As Always, Budgets Reflect Priorities. For Florida’s Public Schools, the 2023-24 Budget Is NOT Worth Celebrating.

Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down the Florida budget, and separates depressing truth from the hype. Oh, Florida.

Without paid family leave, teachers stockpile sick days and aim for summer babies

This piece ran on All Things Considered on NPR. Beth Wallis looks into an under-discussed issue with the lousy family leave policy in so many schools. (E.G., the board of directors were born in early June, just as summer vacation started, and that was no coincidence.)

College Board Getting Into the Curriculum Biz

Teacher Gregory Sampson got some email from the College Board folks. Apparently they intend yet another expansion of their product line. 

What Feeds Bias in Education World?

Nancy Flanagan takes a thoughtful look (which is what she does with great regularity) at bias of all kinds in the education world.

Pulling Back The Curtain On The Leadership Institute’s Dominion Over Moms For Liberty

Another Bucks County Beacon piece, this time from Maurice Cunningham, a leading scholar of dark money in education. This time he takes a look at what's really going on with the Moms.

Charter school lost case over skirts rule for girls, but debate over charter autonomy isn’t over

The AP's take on the Peltier case, including an observation from Preston Green. Good summary of the issues at play.

Is Mississippi Shifting to Online Teacher Education with Reading Universe?

It's just amazing how so many states, faced with a teacher exodus and trouble filling spots, makes stupid decisions. Nancy Bailey looks at the latest bright idea in Mississippi.

What makes a social studies textbook "woke" in Ron DeSantis' Florida

Judd Legum at Popular Information takes a look at what, exactly, bothers the DeSantis administration about some of those naughty textbooks getting woke cooties on people.

Why state schools Supt. Ryan Walters sees an opening to push Christianity in schools

Ben Felder at The Oklahoman with a good piece placing context around Education Secretary Dudebro's drive to push Christianity into public schools.

The Blessings of Liberty Still Exist– But for How Long?

Yes, there was already a Nancy Flanagan piece on the list. But they're both good. And with the Supreme Court shredding on this July 4, it's worth thinking about. Also, I totally play in the local version of the band concert she describes.

When One in Nine Children Lives in Poverty

At Notes from the Education Trenches, some thoughts about poverty and its impact on students and learning, plus some disturbing stats.

Judge Strikes Down AR Law Banning Gender Care: Details from the Ruling

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the decision that struck down (and struck it down hard) the Arkansas anti-trans care law.

AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists

Yes, this is happening. Amazon pay for play added to AI nonsense equals more nonsense

Summer Schools Can Boost Learning, But Only If Students Attend

At EdWeek--don't use a free paywall pass for this. I just wanted to show you the leading contender for the silliest headline of the year, so far.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon, I did a big fat deep dive into the Moms For Liberty story. And at Forbes, I was doing news-- the SCOTUS decision not to weigh in on Peltier and the nature of charter schools, and the attempt to get vouchers in PA. 

If you want a handy way to stay up on all the stuff I'm writing, sign up for my substack newsletter for free!

ID: A Baffling Hiring Decision And Another Type Of District Takeover

There's another type of school takeover happening out there, and for one example we'll look to Idaho. There the West Bonner County School District has decided they'd like to hire Branden Durst as their next superintendent. It's a baffling decision, but it tells us a lot about the way some winds are blowing these days.

Who is Branden Durst?

The broad outlines of his career are pretty simple. Born in Boise. Attended pacific Lutheran University (BA in poli sci with communication minor), grad school at Kent State and Claremont Graduate University (public policy, international political economy), then Boise State University (Master of Public Administration). In 2022, he went back to BSU for a degree in Executive Educational Leadership.

His LinkedIn account lists 20 "experience" items since 2000, and Durst seems to have bounced quickly from job to job until 2006, when he was elected as an Idaho State Representative for four years. Then in 2012 he was elected to the state senate, a job that he held for one year. He did all that as  Democrat; in 2016, he switched his party to the GOP.

Then independent consultant, a mediator for a "child custody and Christian mediation" outfit. Then an Idaho Family Policy Center senior policy fellow. IFPC advocates for the usual religious right causes, but they have a broader focus as well: "To advance the cultural commission." They see the Great Commission in a dominionist light-- the church is to teach "nations to obey everything Jesus has commanded." And they suggest you get your kid out of public school.

Durst's current gig is with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right tilted thinky tank that wants to "make Idaho into a Laboratory of Liberty by exposing, defeating, and replacing the state's socialist public policies." The run a Center for American Education which, among other things, maintains a map so you can see where schools are "indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense." They recommend you get your child out of public school. 

Nowhere in any of this will you find Durst holding any sort of education or school-related job. He's never been a teacher or any kind of school administrator. Not so much as a two-year Teach for America tourist visit to the job. He did claim, at some point, to have worked as a substitute teacher and coach.

You would think that would be kind of a red flag.

Speaking of baggage...

Durst comes with some baggage. That one year tenure in the Senate? Durst resigned because the press got ahold of the fact that he was actually was living in Idaho only part time; his wife was working as a teacher near Seattle was living there at least part of the time with his family. KTVB, the station that followed the story, "observed his home looked empty of furniture when stopping by to knock on the door last week." Durst insisted that his bed and clothes were there. And he blamed the split living arrangement on Idaho schools:

There's a big difference between living out of your district for an entire year, and having a family member who is a teacher that doesn't get treated well because they live in Idaho and have to find employment someplace else. I think there's a big difference, Durst said.

For a while, it looked like he would fight the charge. But in the end he resigned his seat.

2022 was not a great year for Durst. After the Idaho Senate failed to advance the parental rights bill that he was promoting, Durst confronted Senator Jim Woodward with enough aggressiveness that Woodward called the cops on him. After blowing off a meeting with GOP leadership, Durst blasted senators on social media. The Senate GOP majority wrote a letter condemning Durst for "spurious attacks against members of the Senate, meant to coerce votes and influence elections." In a press release, GOP leaders condemned Durst and said his actions "demonstrate egregious conduct unbecoming of anyone, especially a former legislator and current statewide political candidate."

The "candidate" part refers to Durst's run for the office of state superintendent. He told EastIdahoNews, “Parents are tired. They don’t feel respected or trusted and they want some real change in their school superintendent. They’re all talking about the same things. They want to stop the indoctrination that’s happening in their schools, they want to (be able) to make decisions for their kids." He ran on three priorities-- end common core, stop critical race theory, and school choice ("fund students, not systems"). He came in second in the GOP primary, losing to Debbie Critchfield by about 25,000 votes.

Durst had remarried in 2016 (in Washington state), and in 2022, his wife and ex-wife got into a scuffle that almost blew up into abuse allegations against Durst and his wife over a whack with a wooden spoon on a 14-year-old child. He explained later, “The child wasn’t being respectful, wasn’t obeying … It wasn’t even very hard, but things can happen in the political world where things get taken out of proportion, and that’s what happened here." Certainly his candidacy made the story bigger than it might otherwise have been.

His candidacy for school superintendent

Durst's proposed contract had some unusual features. One was that he would be hard to fire-- the trustees would need a super-majority to vote him out. The draft contract also required the district to provide his legal counsel, requiring the district to protect Durst and his wife from “any and all demands, claims, suits, actions, and legal proceedings brought against the Superintendent for all non-criminal incidents arising while the Superintendent is acting within the scope of his employment.” (This seems to speak to his experiences with his ex-wife). The proposed contract also included a vehicle, a housing allowance, and district-provided meal services. Plus an ability to work remotely. 

All of this would be contingent on Durst being provisionally certified to hold a superintendent's position. That's usually given to someone with relevant experience in education, but Durst says he's like to see the process opened up so that districts can have "the flexibility they need to make the right hiring decision for them." One has to wonder what sort of district feels that the best fit for them is someone with no actual qualifications. 

West Bonner School District has issues of its own

The district has been through three superintendents in one year. The interim superintendent was Susie Luckey, who has spent nearly four decades in the district as teacher and principal. She was the other candidate considered for the job--the one that the board didn't hire.

I told you all about Branden Durst not to badmouth him. I probably disagree with him on pretty much everything about education, but I don't have any reason to think he's an evil man. But one has to wonder what exactly qualifies him to be a school district superintendent.

So, why?

Trustee Keith Rutledge voted for Durst (it was a 3-2 vote), and explained via email to The Spokesman:

“He has a vastly superior understanding of the legal, financial, administrative, and educational philosophy aspects of the job,” Rutledge wrote, adding that Durst is popular among Bonner County voters and “has the broad support of the nearly 13,000 residents of our district.”

That last is an apparent reference to Durst's campaign for state superintendent; he took 60% of the vote in Bonner County. Given that Durst has no apparent experience in the legal, financial or administrative aspects of the job (certainly not more than a four-decade veteran of classroom and administration), it seems likely that it's Durst's philosophy that attracted the board, and we've seen where he comes from in that department.

Educational philosophy is certainly part of the superintendent job, but there are also a host of nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day, keep the lights on and the buses running aspects to the job. It takes practical acumen to make it possible for teachers to do their jobs and students to get what they need. 

Some community members say he's just what they need. Jim Woodward, the GOP lawmaker that Durst accosted, has a different assessment, per the Coeur d'Alene Press:

"I think is that he's an emotional person," Woodward said Thursday. "He couldn't control himself in the Senate committee room. How would you do any better in a school setting? He can't control himself and I think the real takeaway here is not only that he has a history of different problems in interacting with people. But he also is not qualified for … being a superintendent of a school district."

This kind of district take over--the installation of an unqualified leader with the "right" philosophy--is usually attempted by states (see, for instance, the takeover of schools in Lorain, Ohio). But nowadays, as hard-right candidates take over school boards, they are performing their own version on the school takeover, installing district members who are ideologically pure, even if they have no real qualifications for the job. Heck, it worked for Betsy DeVos's bid for the US Secretary of Education post.

That's a feature, not a bug

The conservative agitation group, Moms for Liberty, told us this was the goal. This was Tiffany Justice on the Steve Bannon show:

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?

JUSTICE: Absolutely. We're going to take over the school boards, but that's not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they're going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system.

There are multiple problems with this, starting with the idea of having public schools run by people who want to either convert them to centers for promoting only a single point of view (theirs) or else simply gut them and replace them with private schools. But for parents, the problems become more practical-- a school where things don't work because the person in charge doesn't know how to make them work. 

Despite some uproar over literal backroom shenanigans, the trustees appear committed to hiring Durst. For his part, Durst says he's ready to talk to those who oppose his hiring and convince him of his good intentions. Which is at least non-combative, but intentions and goals and philosophies don't, by themselves, run a district.

I'll let a parent that The Spokesman spoke with have the last word here.

Hailey Scott-Yount, a mother with two kids attending school in the district, said picking Durst as superintendent was “asinine.”

“Why on earth would you hire a mechanic to bake your wedding cake?” Scott-Yount said. “It’s terrifying.”