PA: In Central Bucks, Students May Have To Certify Gender

The Central Bucks School District board keeps looking for the bottom.

The wealthy, white, Philly suburban district has been an example of how far off the rails a right wing batch of culture warriors can drag a district. By December of 2021 they were already the subject of a New York Times story demonstrating how a board could get wrapped up in arguments about masks and culture war issues while the day to day needs of the district went unaddressed.

They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the christianist nationalist Pennsylvania Family Institute ("Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.") Both the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Education came after the district for creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students-- so they hired a noted anti-LGBTQ lawyer to do an internal investigation; the resulting report might not have been entirely forthcoming (but it was expensive).

They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a "gender identification procedure". No name changes without a note from home. 

They created such an atmosphere of hostility distrust that last June, some graduating seniors requested that the superintendent and board president not give them their diplomas, asking instead to receive their sheepskin from a board member who actually values equality, diversity and inclusion. This summer, the board rewarded its superintendent's loyalty to their right wing agenda by making him the second-highest paid superintendent in the state (the district has 17,000 students). 

Now the board is considering, again, a gender id policy (apparently also written for them by the ILC). This transgender athlete policy restricts athletes to the sport designated for their gender at birth. Like most such policies it's really only aimed at trans women, and argues that it's "safer" this way. Parents/guardians can designate the student's sex for school records, but if "the Superintendent or Athletic Director has reasonable cause to believe that the student's sex is other than designated" then the parents will have to produce a birth certificate "certifying the student's sex to the Superintendent or Athletic Director."

Heaven only knows what "reasonable cause" is likely to mean in practice, but I have a hard time imagining any such circumstance that wouldn't be a hammer blow to a tween or teen girl's ego. "Sorry dear, but the superintendent of schools thinks you're too ugly and awkward to be a real girl, so we have to take some paperwork in." The most likely scenario is, of course, one we've already seen -- "That so-called girl just beat my daughter in the 500 meter again-- I want that kid's gender certified right now!"

There are other possible scenario, but I can't think of any good way to tell a teen that she has to prove she's really a female at a point in her life when she's naturally wrestling with identity and self. Teenagers already have a million issues that play out just in getting dressed for school; sure, let's just add "Does this make me look too much like another gender" to the list.

There are policies and laws like this popping up all over, and they are all bad, all oppressive to LGBTQ students and to straight ones as well. Governor DeWine of Ohio, of all people, had the right idea when he vetoed an anti-trans law a year ago:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

But the Central Bucks board has been putting their own agenda ahead of students for a while now. Will they hit the bottom any time soon, or will the voters of Central Bucks finally start voting with children in mind?

TX: Intolerance and Classroom Politics

Your first reaction to this story is probably going to be that this is more dumb stuff from Texas. But there's another layer to examine.

Trustee (board member) Melissa Dungan in the Conroe school district expressed a desire to "crack down" on certain items, ostensibly because members of the public had contacted her because of their big big concern.

"I wish I was shocked by each of the examples that were shared with me, however, I am aware these trends have been happening for many years," Dungan said.

When pressed to share one of those examples, Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.

"Just so I understand, you are seriously suggesting that you find objectionable, a poster indicating that all are included," Stacey Chase, another trustee, said.

This is pretty clearly a narrative of epic baloniosity, though I suppose the lack of clarity in pronoun usage leaves the door open for the possibility that it was the parents who were "upset" by the multiracial handholding. 

So there are a couple of things to note here.

The first is that, yes, there are people who are this crazypants racist in this country.

The second is the argument that Dungan makes for getting rid of the Scary Poster.

Citing "a number of parents reaching out to her about supposed displays of personal ideologies in classrooms,"

she wants to avoid "situations like that" by having the board adopt stricter standards and adhere to state policies already in place, prohibiting teachers from displaying political items not relevant to curriculum.

We've heard this argument before. Black Lives Matters shouldn't be brought up because it's a political statement. Any kind of pride flag or rainbow should be taken down because it's a political statement. We have allowed everything to become politicized, and so now, all statements are political statements.

People of different races should get along? Political statement. Vaccinations are good? Political statement. Posters with bland homilies like "be kind"? Political statement. All students should feel safe and accepted? Political statement.

The effect is that when something in school challenges someone's ignorance and intolerance, they don't have to try to defend their ignorance and intolerance--they can just call the challenge a political statement. "It's not that I want to promote a racist or intolerant idea," they declare. "It's just we don't want political statements in the classroom." And then all we have to do is label everything counter to ignorance and intolerance a political statement, creating a license to silence anything you disagree with.

Meanwhile, a classroom operates on a human scale, not a political one, and having the human being who is in charge make sure that all the human beings who are students can feel welcome, safe and supported. "It's okay that you exist, and because you exist you are entitled to respect and decent treatment," is not the sort of thing that should be banned from a classroom, nor can it be illegal to suggest that human beings of different backgrounds can and should get along and treat each other kindly. And if that's a statement that runs counter to your politics, what the hell do you stand for, anyway?

ALEC Has Bad Plans for Education

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is, says The Nation, "a toxic alliance of corporations and state legislatures that work together to ensure that corporate interests stay at the top of legislative agendas across the country."

It's a group where conservative lawmakers and corporate leaders sit down together and draft model legislation that the legislators then carry off to propose back home. ALEC is one reason that nearly-identical conservative bills pop up in many states at the same time. 

The Center for Media and Democracy runs a whole website devoted to ALEC shenanigans. From that site, we can learn that ALEC is funded by many of the usual gang--Koch, Bradley, Searle and Coors plus money laundered by way of groups like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. You can also check to see which legislators from your state are ALEC members.

ALEC has a variety of "task forces" including one devoted to education, and they want all the usual rightward things. But you don't hear a lot about it directly because ALEC is pretty diligent about keeping out riff raff and journalists. 

However, if you're a legislator, you can just waltz right in, which is what two Democratic state reps from Wisconsin did. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton signed up and went to the annual ALEC meeting (in Orlando). The Wisconsin Examiner wrote up their little adventure (Shelton also tweeted the events), and the whole thing is worth a read, but I want to focus on the education part.

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

Nothing new there, though they don't always say the quiet part out loud. Shelton told Wisconsin Examiner that people were remarkably open and frank with the two lawmakers (assuming, perhaps, that they were among friends). 

But there you are. Universal vouchers. No government oversight. Taxpayer dollars for religious schools. Education focused on making meat widgets for corporate consumption. A future in which every state is Arkansas. That's the assortment of destructive, counter-democratic, privatizing ideas that ALEC has in mind. And if they aren't already pushing them in your state legislature, they'll get to it any day now. 

ICYMI: Final Stretch Edition (8/13)

Final stretch for the summer, and I can't say I'm sad about it because this has been a less-than-optimal summer here at the institute. But we have your reading for the week. I'll remind you that if you find something in the weekly compendium that strikes you as valuable, you can support the writers by sharing them on whatever social media platforms you're using these days. Cutting through the online fog is hard, and you help by amplifying the things that you think should get through that fog.

School choice debate not over as Nevada’s governor has a plan to fund private school scholarships

The AP looks at the Nevada governor's latest attempt to make vouchers happen in his state.

Staff sues Woodland Park school district over new 'punitive' media policy

From the Gallery of Bad Policies, we have Woodland Park schools in Colorado, where the district has declared that teachers and staff can't post anything about the district without superintendent approval. 

Idaho Professors Sue Over Law Threatening Prison for Teaching About Abortion

Meanwhile, college professors in Idaho are pushing back against a "don't mention abortion" law. Kylie Chung reports at Jezebel.

“Betsy DeVos Was a Disaster. I Think Erika Donalds Could Be Worse.”

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones with a well-detailed look at Erika Donalds, the queen of school privatization in Florida. The hook (that she could be Trump's next education secretary) is a stretch, but the rest of this is excellent. Bonus: at last, a mainstream outlet covers the actual origins of Moms For America.

Next frontier in Fla. education wars: Climate

Arianna Skibell at Politico looks at one of the effects of letting PragerU into Florida classrooms.

Florida says it doesn’t want indoctrination in schools — but look at the materials it just approved

If you can use an introduction to PragerU and their propaganda machine, Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post has you covered.

AI Chatbot ‘Ed’ Will Be L.A. Unified’s Newest Student Adviser, Superintendent Says

EdWeek picks up a piece from the LA Times about the newest step forward in the dehumanizing of student care.

A new AI app lets users ‘text’ with Jesus. Some call it blasphemy.

Fiona Andre at Washington Post writes about one more awesome use of AI, which could not possibly end terribly I'm sure.

Arkansas education department nixes AP African American Studies course at last minute

Well, hell. Allegedly the state has said that students can take the course--they just won't get graduation credits from it. We'll see.

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Steven Singer looks at TFA and the teacher exodus and how the bad ideas of one hjelped feed the other.

Big-City Mayors Are Getting Kicked Out of Schools

Interesting take from Alan Greenblatt at Governing-- are we finally getting mayors out of the school-running business (at which they mostly sucked)?

John White, “Chief Success Officer”(?)

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the highly dispensable, and yet somehow still failing upwards, John White

Critical thinking education trumps banning and censorship in battle against disinformation, study suggests

What's most effective way to combat misinformation? Probably not banning the source. From PsyPost, a look at a study on the topic.

Progressives Are Defeating Conservatives in School Board Elections—Even in Ohio

Some folks have been saying this all along (I see you, Jennifer Berkshire)--being a far right book-banning anti-LGBTQ right winger is not a winning strategy on the local level. From David Pepper in Washington Monthly.

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings

Jill Filipovic at the Atlantic questions trigger warnings and whether they might have had the opposite of their intended effect.

Democratic lawmakers attend ALEC meeting to see what might be on the Legislature’s agenda

What a fun piece. A couple of Democratic lawmakers report from inside a gathering of the corporate right-wing bill mill. It is... illuminating.

Banned in Boston (Globe) II: the Barr Foundation/Hostetter 2021 Political Team

Maurice Cunningham with more view inside the dark money machinery that the Boston Globe carefully avoids noticing.

The Case for Vouchers Collapses

At Carolina Forward, an explanation of why voucher programs are a bad idea for education policy.

Grand jury investigating bid-rigging involving DeSantis’ education department

Billy Townsend was following this story forever, but now the feds are involved in the wacky story of that time that competing corrupt officials got in each others' way. Because Florida.

The Education Policies Governor Ron DeSantis Has Enacted in Florida Are Just Plain Scary

These things hit the fan one at a time, so it helps every so often to back up and look at a slightly bigger picture. Jan Resseger is here to help do that.

HISD Suffers With ‘New Education System’ Turnaround Plan

Speaking of summing up a barrage of bad policy ideas, Gary Rubinstein takes a look at the junk that's hitting Houston schools after the state takeover.

Middle Schoolers: The Myth and the Reality

Should officials loosen work requirements so that 14 year olds can work in bars? Should officials have their heads examined? Nancy Flanagan with some reality checks about middle schoolers.

Ron DeSantis Announces He Will Live As Slave For One Year To Prove It Not Bad

The Onion. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, at Forbes. com, I look at a study that shows social-emotional development really matters. 

Join me on substack. It's free!

Children's Books To Really Avoid

Want to talk about books that really shouldn't be allowed in your school's library?

AI "publishing" is just as busy a business as the various versions of AI homework-- well, the generative language algorithm has spurred the proliferation of euphemisms for "cheating." I have lost track of how many ads I have seen for an AI product that can "help" me "create" my book. Reuters wrote a whole story about how some salesman became a children's book author with the "help" of ChatGPT  

Using the AI software, which can generate blocks of text from simple prompts, Schickler created a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in a matter of hours, offering it for sale in January through Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) self-publishing unit.

In the edition, Sammy the Squirrel, crudely rendered also using AI, learns from his forest friends about saving money after happening upon a gold coin. He crafts an acorn-shaped piggy bank, invests in an acorn trading business and hopes to one day buy an acorn grinding stone.

Sammy becomes the wealthiest squirrel in the forest, the envy of his friends and "the forest started prospering," according to the book.

(Do take a moment to read the whole story, which is both hilarious and terrifying).

Recognize that when the story says Schickler "created," it means he gave ChatGPT a prompt. And yet he says, "I could see people making a whole career out of this." But a human "author" is really just another customer for the AI grift, and is not really necessary at all. 

Meet Bold Kids publishing.

I can't tell you much about them, because they don't appear to have a website. Nor do any of their books have an author. Their blurb on their Amazon page says this:

At Bold Kids, we take stride in ensuring that children can learn and find our books useful. Our books are specially made for young readers who actively want to learn more about interesting and quite intriguing children's book topics. With a special care dedicated to specific grades, curriculums, and subjects, we can ensure that children can learn something new inside our books.

If that sounds as if it comes from that special place in the uncanny valley between "English is not my first language" and "I am not actually a human being," well, let's take a look inside the books. 

Sondra Eklund is a librarian in charge of selecting children's and young adult books for a large public library system. She ordered Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book and on her blog (a great resource for book reviews) wrote about what she found inside. First she was struck by poor wording and organization; then she got to some Very Special pages:

A rabbit has a male and female counterpart. A male rabbit is called a buck. The two types of rabbits have different characteristics. A doe is a baby rabbit, while a buck is a mother. All types of rabbits live underground, except for the cottontail, and their habitats are often called warrens.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of feeding a rabbit, you’ve probably wondered how they reproduce. The answer is simple: they live in the wild! Despite being cute and cutesy, rabbits are also very smart.

They can even make their own clothes, and they can even walk around. And they’re not only adorable, but they’re also very useful to us as pets and can help you out with gardening.

Amazon carries the books (though none that I found with a "look inside" feature. Eklund notes that they are carried by some major vendors and distributors like Ingram, but are "non-returnable" which generally means they are Print On Demand--the book isn't printed until someone orders it. POD is not automatically bad (I've self-published a few books that way), but it is certainly the model preferred by many AI "publishers." Give a prompt, generate a manuscript that then lives on a hard drive until you can convince someone to buy it. 

Bold Kids appears to have almost a thousand books in print. Earliest I could find was published back in September of 2018. Best title: Sheeps: Children's Book Filled With Facts, which on Goodreads (yes, there are 940 Bold Kids books listed on Goodreads) comes with the totally child-friendly blurb: "Sheeps are a domesticated ruminant mammal, and they are part of the Artiodactyla order, a group of even-toed ungulates. They have a long, lanky body, and are generally docile and peaceful."

Or perhaps you'd like Mountain Lions: Discover Pictures and Facts About Mountain Lions For Kids! A Children's Jungle Animals Book because who isn't interested in the animals of the North American jungles?

Or their "children's physics" book Light Energy, with this blurb on OverDrive

Did you know that light is an amazing form of energy? The speed of light is so fast that nothing can slow it down, including the human body! The study of light is called photonics. It teaches kids about the nature of light and how we can make it useful in our daily lives. However, you should remember that it has no mass. There is no way that we can live without it. In fact, we can't even see the Sun without seeing the moon.

World War 2 For Kids!

World War II is one of the biggest wars the world has ever seen. It’s a war everyone should know about, and your child can learn some cool, and not so cool facts about this war. Get a copy of this today so you can teach your child about this war, and the aspects of this.

Capitalism: Discover Pictures and Facts About Capitalism For Kids!

Many children hear about capitalism in schools, but do they know what it really means? Well, they can learn about this type of government, and what it means for them in this. They will learn about the ins and outs of this type of government, and why some criticize this structure for what it entails.

I could go on all day, but you get the idea. They also offer at least a couple of titles in Spanish and German. 

Here at the institute, we're well aware that terrible children's books that appear to have been cobbled together with clip art and terrible writing are not a new thing (or even just mediocre frankenbooks--looking at you, DK), but generative language algorithms (which possess no intelligence, artificial or otherwise) have unleashed a whole new level of terrible. Combine that with what Cory Doctorow has called the enshittification of Amazon, resulting in an "endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality" and you get just a whole new level of bad.

Eklund points out many of the warning signs with Bold Kids. No authors. No professional reviews. POD or other signs of self-publishing (which is another crappy side effect of the AI explosion; I keep hearing that publishers are being inundated with algorithm-produced manuscripts, making it harder than ever for new human authors to break through). 

The whole business is a reminder that what generative language algorithms can do is crank out tons of crap very quickly. It's flooding the internet, and it's trying to flood the world of print as well. Here's hoping that librarians don't get too busy trying to clamp down on mentions of race and LGBTQ persons so that they can keep libraries free of just plain old junk. 

Yes, Engage

Intuitively, you'd think that student engagement was a clear positive. As a teacher, I certainly found it easier to teach a student who was engaged and involved than one who was checked out.

And there is, in fact, a boatload of research that supports what we intuit. But there is also research that suggests no correlation, that engagement does not raise grades or improve understanding. For a certain brand of conservative, engagement is a fuzzy-headed idea, part of that whole misguided approach to engender warm fuzzy feelings in students instead of just teaching them to read and math.

The whole business of trying to promote engagement is a thorny one as well. It can be an unfortunate first cousin of that terrible educational idea--"making the material relevant." If you decide you're going to make the material relevant, you've already lost because your premise is that it's not inherently relevant and only becomes relevant when you perform some teacher trick. So if you're trying to make course content interesting or engaging, you're in trouble. You should know why the material is important for your students; if you don't know why, instead of trying to make up a reason, ask yourself why you're bothering to teach it.

Not everyone has the same version of the engagement challenge. Most (not all) primary students will engage with the dirt; high school students, not so much (there is research that supports the notion that students get less engaged as they move through the system).

Engagement is tricky because it's so relationship-based, so what works for one teacher-student combination may not work for another. Then there is the special form of teacher ju-jitsu involved on getting a student to engage with the content even as they avoid engaging with the teacher, which is a necessary trick to master unless you want to move yourself from teaching to gatekeeping ("Nobody can come to the content except through me"). 

For all of these reasons, some teachers will skip the whole engagement thing. "It's just my job to stand up here and dispense the content, and if students don't get it or even care if they get it, that's not on me." This attitude is encouraged in schools that have gone for scripted programs in a box, as scripts generally don't include "engage students here." The pedagogical approach that assumes that learning can be engineered, a set of responses programmed into students, doesn't particularly care about engagement, either. In fact, since engagement sometimes means pushing back 

But beyond the question of whether or not engagement matters, there's another reason that students should be encouraged, nudged and otherwise convinced to engage.

Because this is their life.

Students and the adults around them can slip into the mistake of thinking that their lives are waiting for them somewhere in the future, that all of this--living as a child, working through school, acquiring skills and knowledge--is just stocking up for some day years from now when their lives will actually begin.

But this, right now, is the student's life. Not all of it, maybe not even the most important part of it, probably not the best parts that will ever be, but not some sort of null sidebar either. 

Do not sleepwalk through your life. Do not check out and figure that somehow, later, further down the road, you'll claim your life and start living it. 

This lesson is not on the Big Standardized Test, but I don't think anybody is too young to hear it, or at least some scaled down version more easily comprehensible for children. Be present. Pay attention. Be engaged, not because it might raise your tests score, but because this is your life, not just something to try to skip to the end of. 

And all of that goes double for teachers. One of the most important ways to convey this to students? Model it. Engage with your life. 

Is This Your School Board?

This was passed along to me as a screenshot of a reply on Facebook. I know who the individual is, and this is not my first encounter with their work. But I'm not interested in targeting the individual; what I really want you to look at is the ideas and attitude included.

Here's the reply:

I'd have to disagree with you on this one. So called "educators" that are introducing students to homosexuality are the ones that need arrested.

All of these students that turn homosexual or transgender come from broken homes. They are hurting people. They are looking for hope, but what they are being offered is a life of misery. They are searching for fulfillment that they will never find without Jesus.

Brainwashing teachers need locked up. They take advantage of hurting kids and ruin their lives. Hurting kids need help. True help. 

This is one of those ideas that won't die, the notion that nobody is born LGBTQ, but rather all LGBTQ persons were "recruited," probably as children, and probably because they were already messed up. 

Another post from this person:

Yes, my voting as an elected official is based off my faith in God. The only foundation for truth is in the Bible. Nothing makes sense without God. Education has no value without first establishing a basis of truth--the Bible.

CHRISTIANS, WAKE UP!

This person is a school board member, and their misinformation and personal version of religion do indeed inform their choices as a board member. And if you're thinking this sounds like your conservative grandfather, well, this is a young person. 

This person is running for re-election in the fall, and they're doing so with a full slate of like-minded candidates, ready to ban some books and clamp down on any teachers who so much as suggest that LGBTQ persons exist (as anything other than twisted and damaged wretches).

Is this person running in your district? If you don't know, you should. Folks of this christianist bent are running all over the country, some with a pleasant mask to cover their radical tilt and some letting their anti-freak flag fly. But elections have consequences, and so does voting on the assumption that school board candidates are uniformly bland and unlikely to have any sort of major effect on what happens in your local schools. 

Is this person running in your district? If you don't know, you should find out before you vote. This is not a season to sleep through one more election.