Report: The Flaws In Charter Funding Research

You might be old enough to remember the days when part of the charter school pitch was that they could do more with less. That gave way pretty quickly to "Why should we have to do more with less?" And ever since there has been a steady drum beat of "reports" and "studies" asserting that charters ought to be getting more pf that taxpayer money. 

In a new paper for the National Education Policy Center, Mark Weber, educational finance expert, takes a look the problems with the "research" that pro-charter thinky tanks and faux academic departments. "Evaluating Research that Alleges Funding Disparities Between Charter and School Districts" is an excellent summation of the problems that have been repeatedly pointed out over the years. It's a worthwhile read, even if the title seems scary; NEPC is absolute aces when it comes to rigorous, legitimate research expertise, but sexy titles are not their thing.

Weber notes that third party reviewers have often called these folks on their errors, and while they have occasionally addressed the issues, "they have retained core deficiencies in their methods" with the result that "they continue to report large funding 'inequities' where none exist." Weber diplomatically skips over the question of whether this core deficiencies result from ineptitude or deliberate misrepresentation.

Here are the research flaws that Weber addresses.

Inadequate documentation of data

Not everyone reports financial data the same way, so that some deliberate steps are needed to deal with comparing apples to oranges. That means that sources for data have to be transparent, and it requires extra legwork to check your work. That means any attempt to compare public schools and charter schools will have limitations. Weber points out those limitations won't be fatal to research, but they necessitate a full explanation to the audience of where the numbers came from and how they were arrived upon. If you're going to tell me that you can make more applesauce with a pile of oranges than with a pile of apples, you need to show your work. In detail. Otherwise I might suspect you're juking the stats behind your back.

Misunderstanding of financial transfers

The first time I came across this criticism of some charter "research," I thought maybe I was misunderstanding, because nobody could seriously do this. But this "misunderstanding works two ways.

One. This deals with how public schools pass through the funding for charters. East Egg Public Schools get $1,000. Eggly Charter gets $250 of that for its students. That $250 gets counted twice, both as the public funding and the charter funding. Or, to put it another way, the public charter is counted as having $1000 when it actually ends up with $750. 

Two. The public system pays for things that benefit both public and charter (e.g. in California, food and special ed services). So some of that money is being spent on charter students, but it is only counted by these researchers as being spent only on public school students. 

Those two tricks misunderstandings would be enough to create "research" that "proved" that public schools were spending more per pupil than charters.

I'm not saying that Weber is being excessively generous in calling this a misunderstanding, but I am saying that when the misunderstanding was pointed out to researchers in a previous piece of research, they did not stop doing it.

Invalid conflation of individual schools and school districts as units of analysis

Weber argues that "the most relevant unit for school finance is the district." Charters function as single-school districts (though I'm curious how charter chains could be handled), but studies tend to compare single school to single school. 

That creates another data problem, because some district expenditures are attributed to the entire district as a whole, not individual buildings. That's not an insurmountable barrier, but Weber says researchers skip the work required by simply pretending that district-wide expenditures can be divided out as per pupil spending--except that this is generally wildly inaccurate, as districts may dispense some of that funding by methods other than simply per pupil.

Invalid comparisons of student populations

Huge amounts of spending disparities come down to students with special needs (particularly since public schools have many and charters have hardly any). So if you're going to break down per pupil spending, you need to look at what kinds of students the spending is aimed at. A school of 100 high needs students will spend more per pupil than a school with 100 regular students (and we know that public schools tend to be the former and charters tend to be the latter).

I'll note that if you're in Pennsylvania, it gets even wackier, because public schools sort students into different tiers of special needs, but charters are reimbursed as if all special needs students are the same. 

Invalid comparisons of the functions of charter and district public schools

Weber says that one report tries to make a distinction between purpose and work of schools in order to make the argument that, hey, public and charter schools are both for educating the public, so we should be comparing the money they take in, their revenue, rather than how they spend it. 

But, Weber correctly points out, they aren't set up for the same purpose. Public schools are set up to educate everyone, which means they have to have the revenue necessary to deal with all manner of student needs. It also means that public schools much maintain excess capacity, while charters can cap admissions. Some school districts are also set up to provide community services, adult education, and a variety of other purposes that involve revenue that is not spent on K-12 students.

Unaccounted for charter revenues

Public schools get money from the taxpayers. Charter schools, in many cases, get money from philanthropists. 

Charter proponents sometimes try to equate revenue from cafeterias and facilities rental with philanthropic giving. But the examples from public schools involve people paying for the costs of a service; philanthropists are not paying for anything (unless, I suppose, charter fans want to talk about specific services they provide their philanthropic donors).

Taken one or two at a time, or all together, these factors raise large questions about the accuracy of any comparisons between charter and public school funding and certainly have to be considered before accepting any claims that charters are put upon and underfunded. As Weber notes, charter advocates have cranked out many "reports" that suffer from these flaws. There may be conversations worth having about charter funding, but they aren't worth having if they aren't based in reality.

In the meantime, you can check out the full paper at NEPC. It comes complete with examples of various papers filled with these flaws, as well as explanations of how the flaws could be avoided. We can only hope that charter advocates take some of that advice to heart. 

Grinding Slowly

The mill of the gods grinds slow, yet exceedingly fine.

The expression is itself older than dirt, its originator lost in the dust of history. But I think of it today as teachers and parents face one of the great challenges of lurching forward as history shrinks in the rear-view mirror. 

Today, my local fire department is hanging an American flag, but my local newspaper has not a word about 9/11. My news feed has scanty mention of this anniversary. 9/11 , it would seem, has become one of those events that we mark on "special" anniversaries--the fives or tens. And yet, today, adults will try to convey to young humans the impact and import of 9/11 even as we grown-ups wrestle with the shuddering echoes of that day in our bones.

Nobody in elementary school, high school, college--basically nobody short of their mid-twenties--has any memory of that day at all, and we can show them films and news footage and dramatizations that struggle to keep the events fresh and alive and they won't get it. They can learn the facts, but they will never feel the impact, feel the shot down to the very bone, of that day and what came immediately after. Our priest yesterday quoted a four year old-- "September 11? Oh, that means they're going to show the planes again." We study the artifacts, the outcomes of events, but nothing recaptures the human gut-kick of living through it. 

It has always been this way. History is littered with these moments, some huge and important and some small and less significant. The Challenger explosion. The first Star Wars. The fall of the Berlin Wall. First steps on the moon. If you didn't live through it, you don't get it.

I was six when JFK was shot. I can't claim to have memories. Maybe memories or memories. Sad grownups. Look further back: JFK's death was as close in time to Pearl Harbor as we are right now to the 9/11 attacks. That day was supposed to live in infamy; how many Americans could name the date right now? Remember the Alamo? I doubt it.

The further back we travel in time, the further events get from the bone. The Norman Conquest meant a social upheaval of Britain, a displacement and sort of cultural subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons, and while most English speakers don't know the Battle of Hastings from the Isle of Sodor, we live with the effects today. Why are Latin-based words considered more refined, proper, and scientific? Thank the Norman Conquest. But the Conquest means nothing to us on any kind of emotional level. Ditto the earlier conquest of Brits and Picts by the Angles and the Saxons. We get the vaguest echoes of these events in tales of King Arthur, stories that in their various popular forms have become hopelessly jumbled, as if centuries from now folks watched stories about Marshall Dillon patrolling Seattle in a 1963 Corvette while armed with a laser pistol in hopes of protecting the locals from attacks by Egyptian soldiers riding elephant mummies. 

An awful lot of grief and pain and trouble has just been ground into dust by time, and that is a human thing, both on the macro scale and on the personal level. 

Part of the trick is to preserve the truth even past the point when people are carrying in their bones. And that's hard because when you feel that truth in your bones, you want to make other people feel it in theirs, and you mostly can't. You can try, as we see too many people do, to somehow conjure up those same feelings by trying to reproduce the rage and reaction to something that's so wrong. But manufactured outrage, like manufactured orange flavoring, always misses the mark, always turns out to be some other thing. Stray too far and you end up sounding ridiculous, like the author who keeps pitching to me about how white folks also suffer from racism directed against them. 

We seek remembrance in ritual as well, a song or act or form that we can repeat, so that something like a memory of a memory of a memory hangs somewhere close to the bone. But over time we lose the thing as the ritual replaces it, becomes the thing itself.

Once the path of raw, immediate, right-now feeling has been traveled to the bone, that path is closed off. It's the product of a particular moment, a particular intersection of time, place and the person, and nobody will ever stand at that intersection again. After that moment, another path is required, a path made of thought and understanding, of comprehension and constant wrestling with what it was and what it means. Maybe that path can be opened by a bit of genius art or writing, perhaps by laborious explanation and discussion and reflection and search. But once the wheels have moved past that moment and started to grind, you can never get back there again. 

Some older people are going to get frustrated, even angry with some younger people today. Some middle school student, confronted with a sober lesson about 9/11, is going to crack wise, fail to Take It Seriously. Some adult, trying to convey the impact of a moment that they will never, can never forget, will become frustrated, even angry, at some young people who just can't get it. That's okay. That's where we are; the place where 9/11 recedes into the past.

And this is what language is for. This is what teaching is for. We use language to convey our thoughts and feelings, to somehow move them over that wide gap that separates human from human. We try to understand and we try to explain and we try to help people get it, or at least some piece of it. Yes, we use language for simple things like shopping lists and IKEA instructions, and we use it for immoral things like trying to convince people that something not-real is real. But our best and highest use is to solve one of our most fundamental human problems.

We experience things, many of which hit right at the bone and shape our understanding of ourselves and the world and how to be in that world, and all of this is important enough to understanding ourselves and the people around us that we try to somehow convey it, to power it across the gap to other humans around us, and we have no better way to do that than grunts and symbols and marks created to symbolize those grunts and symbols, all resting on the very individual brain bank of experience and knowledge and perception. It is such hard work. Such hard work. And we never stop trying to do it, imperfect attempt after imperfect attempt. 

It is the hardest trick of history--how much weight to carry? To carry too much of the weight of history breaks us; it is natural and healthy that the wheels of time grind so much to dust, leaving just the important bits to carry. It is unspeakably hard for those who are trapped under the weight of a history they can't escape or carry alone. But there are always with us people who want to declare history weightless right now, to alter and reduce it to a weightless nothing so that we don't have to feel the discomfort of carrying the weight of too-recent sins. But weightless history is not good for us. Carrying some weight of the past strengthens us to walk into the future. The debate of what to carry, what to feel, what to understand--that's the challenge of history, of living as time-bound beings carried steadily into an unknown future and away from an unclear past. 

So I am in favor of patience for the people who are trying to do that work (and impatience for the people who are deliberately trying to distort and manipulate the process). And today, on top of everything else, I remember not just the complex and complicated horror of that day, but the miraculous struggle of trying to connect with each other, to share and convey what we think we understand about how to be fully human in the world. 

ICYMI: Here Comes Monday Edition (9/10)

Two weeks into school and we're now getting to our first actual Monday, and it will be 9/11, a date that now has no particular significance for anyone in school or college. This is one of the challenges of history--as events slide into the rearview mirror, a divide grows between people for whom they are a huge deal and people for whom they are simply old stuff that one hears about second or third hand. How do you convey to the following generations just what a big event something was to live through? 

Well, I don't have answers, but I do have your weekly dose of Stuff To Read.. 

Disney tickets, PS5s, and big-screen TVs: Florida parents exploit DeSantis' school vouchers

Judd Legum of Popular Information got a look inside the private Facebook group where Florida's voucher parents share tips about how to use their bundles of taxpayer dollars. It's jaw-dropping stuff.

School Vouchers Are Dysfunctional by Design

Sarah Jones, writing for New York magazine, responds to Judd Legum's piece about the uses and misuses of Florida vouchers. It's a great piece, and it gives us this line:

In the Facebook posts, parents treat the program like it’s their private candy jar. They’re right: It is.

If Teachers Are So Important To Student Achievement, How Are Your Teachers Being Developed Professionally?

It's professional development season, and Rann Miller has some practical advice for districts about how to make PD less sucky and more useful.

Give Teachers More Money

Nancy Flanagan noticed that the last PDK poll showed a lot of support for this idea. Could it be that post-pandemic, we've noticed that an awful lot of people are underpaid (and some are over-rich).

Important New Publication Explores How Inadequate School Funding is Intertwined with Race and Segregation

Jan Resseger takes a look at the edition of Poverty and Race guest-edited by Derek Black, and finds plenty to pay attention to about how race and segregation are tied to how we do school in this country.

State public education funding’s teachable moment

The courts have declared Pennsylvania's school funding system unconstitutional. Now what? And how might it affect issues like buildings that are barely functional? Come visit a Philly school.

“Some of our teachers can't teach because of a freezing building … We can't even plug in air conditioning or a computer without a plug going out,” Sax said. “All the kids here are watching you,”

Teaching in Pennsylvania’s Unconstitutional School Funding System

Speaking of which. Steven Singer talks about what it looks like in the classroom.

The Never-Ending Pursuit of "Scientific Instruction"

Paul Thomas offers some history and perspective on the problems with bringing "science" into teaching. 

Keri Rodrigues Lolling in Fox Love

Keri Rodriguez may not be an actual liberal Democrat, but she plays one on tv. Maurice Cunningham, dark money expert, reminds us where the National Parents Union and its leader actually come from.

NEPC Review: Think Again: Is Education Funding in America Still Unequal?

The Fordham Institute published a paper this summer declaring that the educational funding inequity problem was all fixed. Now, writing for the National Education Policy Center, education funding expert Bruce Baker explains just how much water the Fordham paper really holds (spoiler alert: not so much).

How anti-government ideologues targeted Wisconsin public schools

Ruth Coniff takes a close look at the attempts to undercut public education in Wisconsin and the work of such anti-public ed folks as Moms For Liberty and reform bro Corey DeAngelis

Voucher school expansion hurting public schools

Brief but pointed commentary from the news director of WIZM

A DeSantis Speech Too Dangerous to Teach in Florida

At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer points out that Ron DeSantis's attempt to address the murder of three Black Floridians runs afoul of his own rules about suppressing wokeness.

How to Reduce Gun Violence? Teachers Share Their Ideas

Larry Ferlazzo's column at EdWeek presents some thoughts from actual teacher about reducing gun violence. Spoiler alert: none suggest that arming teachers is the way to go.

‘I Was Not Done': How Politics Drove This Teacher of the Year Out of the Classroom

Madeline Will at EdWeek talks to Idaho's 2023 Teacher of the Year, and the story of how she was driven out of the classroom by the wave of culture warriors.

Largest Oklahoma school districts to opt out of lesson plans with conservative advocacy group

Ryan Walters can partner with PragerU all he wants, but that doesn't mean that school districts have to go along with it.

US ‘university’ spreads climate lies and receives millions from rightwing donors

If you want to know a little more about PragerU, the Guardian did a great explainer this week.

Research file: We watched every PragerU Kids video. Here are the lowlights. 

If you really, really want to know more, a team at Media Matters watched the whole library. A useful resource, even as it is a lot to take in.

Learning Loss

JD2718 blogs a response to the New York Times' latest anti-public school baloney.

The Supreme Court’s Fake Praying Coach Case Just Got Faker

I wrote about this story this week, but Mark Joseph Stern at Slate did a great job with it and highlighted a few details that I did not. 

Just Who’s Running the Show?

Tennessee is a state that really captures the effects of having ed reform run by a bunch of carpetbagging amateurs with more loyalty to their chums than the state's students and taxpayers, and nobody captures that web of baloney better than TC Weber, who does it some more this week. What a web.

Plausible Sentence Generators

In Locus, Cory Doctorow tells the story of his encounter with ChatGPT. It's full of insight and his usual entertaining style, and if I didn't already love it for "plausible sentence generator," I would love it for "In the bullshit wars, chatbots are weapons of mass destruction."

At Forbes this week I wrote about the widening perception gulf between local parents and everybody else. 

Join me on substack, and get all my regular output in your inbox, for free. 

 

Is Public School On Its Deathbed?

Rachel Cohen interviewed Cara Fitzpatrick, editor at Chalkbeat, for a piece at Vox about Fitzpatrick's upcoming book, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. Despite its depressing title, I've ordered the book, and I'll probably write about it once I've read it, but the interview triggered a few thoughts as Fitzpatrick teases some of what's in the book.

Is public education actually dead yet? That's a point that can be argued, but we're going to skip it for now. She may just mean "public education as we know it": in which case, sure, because the "as we know it" has died a few times already. I'll wait to see how she clarifies it in the book. (So, yes--I  asked the question in the title, and I'm not really going to try to answer it.)

There's the destruction of the wall between church and state/public schools. Fitzpatrick describes it as a "small legal window" that has conservatives have "cleaved open wider" over time, with the Supreme Court going after the establishment clause to an extent that she says has "gone even farther than school choice advocates thought it would."

Fitzpatrick says she wanted to keep things neutral, but help someone understand how we got to today's universal voucher situation. She talks about Polly Williams, who wrote the first choice legislation and soon repudiated it (she took to calling choice a Catholic movement) as a connection of sorts between the first choice wave (the racist, anti-integration one) with the modern "social justice and civil rights" one. I think we can reserve judgment on all of that until we see how she manages it in the book.

Fitzpatrick notes that education "can really change in a short period of time," but she also notes that conservatives successfully played a long game on vouchers. She also points to a shift in message, from "choice will drive improvements in the public system" to the current "government schools are full of pedophile groomers and we should burn them all down." 

I'm not sure that's a change in the message of choice so much as a shift in the allies that free marketeers, the true heirs of Milton Friedman, have put themselves with. When they were allied with Democrats like the Clintons and Obama, the fix public school rhetoric made sense. But now that they're linked up with the Chris Rufo-Betsy DeVos full-on burn it down wing, that message predominates. She correctly links to that Jay Greene piece advocating that long-time reformsters should use the culture wars to push their agenda. 

Fitzpatrick is curiously fuzzy on the research on voucher outcomes. Though she agrees that research shows  "that the programs haven't lived up to the promise of what early advocates wanted or assumed would happen," she finds that wading through all the studies out there "can be a little intimidating," which tells me that she didn't talk to Josh Cowen, who has been wading through that research for twenty-some years, originally with the intent of touting voucher awesomeness, and come to some fairly clear conclusions-- vouchers have lousy outcomes for students.

 Cohen asks her about the role of unions in the rise of vouchers, and Fitzpatrick says she doesn't see much difference being made by them, which I think is a short part of a complex answer, because unions, by getting behind the Democrats on issues-- especially Common Core (back when Dems joined up with conservatives on this stuff)-- helped fuel the narrative that US schools are "failing," which in turn fueled the push for vouchers.

And here she gets something almost on the nose:

With teacher unions, what’s interesting is that a lot of their fears about where the programs would go seem to have come true. Unions warned from the start that this was not in fact going to be just a little experiment, that these programs are not going to be just limited to disadvantaged students, and now we are seeing these universal programs pass.

Instead of saying their "fears" now "seem to have come true," let's say instead that their predictions turned out to be accurate. 

There are other points that she misses that I hope make it into the book.

For instance, voucher advocates needed to take a long game approach because the short game--having taxpayers democratically install vouchers--never works. Doing an end run around democratic processes takes a little time and a long game that involves getting key people in key spots. The problem on the voucherfied far right is the same problem as the problem they have with outlawing abortion and proving that Trump won in 2020--the majority of American voters don't agree with them. So part of the long game has been to deliberately chop away at public trust in the public school system. 

What I really hope made it into the book is an understanding of the larger implications of a voucher system.

It's not just about privatizing the education product; it's about privatizing the responsibility for procuring an education for your children. A world in which vouchers rule and public education is dead is a world in which getting your child a quality education is nobody's problem but yours. It's a world in which you have to find vendors you can convince to take your child on as a "customer," and if that's hard--well, that's your own problem. Hard to pay for that quality education on your own, even with your voucher pittance? That's also your own problem.

Voucherworld is all about ending society's shared responsibility for providing each child with a decent education, and letting the market decide who deserves what based on their ability to pay, just as the market decides who deserves to drive a new Lexus and who deserves to drive a used Kia. Who deserves a fancy prep school, who deserves a microschool of neighborhood kids gathered around a computer screen, who deserves an education composed of facts rather than church-approved "facts," and who deserves to get an "education" in widget building? In voucherworld, the marketplace will decide, and parents will have no avenue for appeal.

In short, I hope that Fitzpatrick's book is not just about what system may (or may not) be on the verge of death, but what U.S. citizens are expected to accept in its place.

Can district school choice help desegregate?

Spoiler alert: probably not.

The answers come from a piece of research by Rachel M. Perera, Deven Carlson, Thurston Domina, James Carter III, Andrew McEachin, and Vitaly Radsky and published way back in March of this year.

The paper has some limitations, the largest of which is that it's a study of a single school district, the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. 

The team, in a layperson write-up for their work on Brookings, suggests there are three big takeaways from their study.

Finding #1: Residential segregation significantly constrained WCPSS’s desegregation initiative

In other words, it's hard to beat the segregation-by-housing that defines a community. When Wake schools started out by assigning students a "base" school--basically the neighborhood school that geography pointed to-- the result was segregation.

Not a new insight--a lot of our school segregation problems are simply the result of tying school attendance areas to housing. That has gotten worse as districts gerrymander both their own borders and the borders of attendance areas. Wake's system for desegregating didn't really escape this issue.

Could a district set up a system that scrubbed the ties to housing? Perhaps, though such initiatives often result in complaints about letting "those kids" into "our schools."

Finding #2: Most families enrolled their kindergartners in their assigned base school

Other research has shown that families have a tendency to favor geographical convenience over most other factors. There's the issue of convenience, the desire for a neighborhood school. There's fact that choosing the default option doesn't turn school selection into a major undertaking. 

Some choicers have long held the dream of families researching and carefully weighing their options by studying their market options. But the fact is that lots of people don't like studying their market options, especially if they have neither the expertise or time or confidence to do so. 

Researching market options for anything can be a part time job all by itself. That's particularly true when you're bucking asymmetric information--the situation where the people vying for your money have far more information than you do, and are not sharing that information but are instead flooding the area with marketing. It's enough to make you throw up your hands and mutter, "Whatever. Just give me the default."

But the  interesting finding here is that the majority chose their default base school even Wake tried nudging the process by redrawing the lines of assignment of base schools, suggesting that choice was not the most critical part of desegregation, but was useful as a way to "soften" the re-assignment ("If you hate your new base school, you still have some other choices.")

Finding #3: If you give families segregating options, they’ll take them

Here, again, is one of the central problem of school desegregation-- lots of people like segregation, as demonstrated by uncounted vast numbers of shameful incidents and policies. School choice got its first big boost as a tool for segregation. District lines have been drawn to create segregation. The list goes on and on.

In this particular study, the researchers found that the more Black students in a base school, the less likely Asian or white families would choose those schools. Black and Latino families' decisions were unrelated to schools' racial makeup.

Segregation is bad for us as a culture, a society, a nation. School segregation is made even worse because it is so commonly accompanied by a segregation of resources-- it's not that we have Those Peoples' Children pushed into that school over there, but that we then make sure that school has fewer resources, less funding, less support. 

Choice over where to live. Choice over where to draw neighborhood lines. Choice over where to draw district lines. Separate but equal has always been a lie, and versions of "choice" have always been used to perpetuate that lie. This study is just one more data point in a familiar picture. 

Teaching the Preamble

This piece has been sitting on my desktop for months. It is from Education Nex, and it was written by Michael Poor, the interim managing editor of that publication. 

Poor has put together a piece that includes several points on which we disagree, but there are a couple of paragraphs that I would by God hang on the wall of my classroom if I still had one. 

Poor is talking about the preamble of the Constitution-- here's the text, in case it has slipped your mind:

We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Pretty good stuff, and as Poor points out, the result of some rewriting and fiddling, particularly pushing aside a dry, state-centered version. It was the Convention's Committee of Style that really punched it up into this expression of American aspiration. Poor thinks this should be centered in history and civics instruction; he even envisions it as a path away from "culture wars."

I'm not sure I much like the expression "culture wars," which presumes that two sides are fighting hard to impose their culture on US classrooms. But Porr is correct in noting that "American children are caught in the middle" of it all, and are asked to "absorb the legislative fallout of their elders' per causes."

I also don't care for Poor's false equivalence conveyed in this sentence: "They may be well protected from uncomfortable topics in their school curricula but not from the bumbling attempts of adults to help them recover from pandemic learning losses." He then goes on to suggest that the prevalence of hyper-partisanship as a citizen model may be related to the NAEP history and civics score drops, and I don't to go way down that rabbit hole because, mostly, who cares what NAEP civics and history scores are. And he does nod briefly at the fact that the Constitution was itself a highly controversial document. I'll say it again: Anyone who talks about what the Founders or the Framers wanted is cutting corners, because they disagreed fiercely about pretty much everything, with the possible exception of an aspiration to get things set up the proper way. 

But, Poor suggests, what if we went stopped bothering with entrenched cultural positions and went back to the preamble and the classroom, and then he unleashes two paragraphs that are as good as anything anyone has to say about teaching history:

Imagine a U.S. history class where the preamble is prominently displayed for all to see—not as a mark of patriotism but as a didactic referent for students to read and internalize the aspirational promises of the United States as identified by the founding generation. Imagine a teacher asking her students, “What does ‘a more perfect union’ look like? What did it look like in 1787? What wasn’t perfect about the United States then? What about today?”

Imagine a conversation in which students are made to feel neither proud nor guilty about the past but instead have an honest confrontation with how their country has been a force for good and how it has perpetuated wretched evils. And imagine students identifying the same characteristics in modern America and being asked, “What can you do to form a more perfect union today?”

And also this:

We do a disservice to American students when we catastrophize or mythologize our past instead of guiding them through the complicated, contradictory, and incomplete story of the world’s oldest democracy.

Despite the "world's oldest democracy" part, these strike me as far better aims that "instilling a love of God and country" or "helping students understand how the US is much more awesomer than the whole rest of the world."

 

The Praying Coach Quit After One Game

Maybe Joseph Kennedy's fifteen minutes are just up.

Who is this guy again? Let's recap the case that made him famous.

Joseph Kennedy is the assistant football coach at Bremerton who decided to take his performative christianism all the way to the Supreme Court, where the conservatives eager to further the destruction of the wall between church and state issued a decision that rested on a legal technique known as Making Shit Up. 

Justice Gorsuch wrote this one, and he's in an alternate reality in the very first paragraph.

Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.

Nope. Joseph Kennedy decided not to put in for the job for another season. Instead, he headed out on the celebrity martyr circuit. Nor was it a quiet prayer pf thanks.

Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters.

This line of reasoning was followed throughout. If you're on the clock, but can get away with dividing your attention, that counts as personal time.

Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic—whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment.

It's such a mischaracterization of the facts of the case one has to wonder, if Gorsuch is correct, how such a case could have been decided so incorrectly by lower courts. But Justice Sotomayor in her dissent at least records the actual facts, so at least they're on record somewhere.

Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The Court now charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the Free Exercise Clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion.

To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts.

Also, after noting that the majority just threw out the Lemon test, she writes

In addition, while the Court reaffirms that the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from coercing participation in religious exercise, it applies a nearly toothless version of the coercion analysis, failing to acknowledge the unique pressures faced by students when participating in school-sponsored activities. This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. I respectfully dissent.

The dissent uses pages to lay out the many details of how Kennedy was not quiet or brief, including his invitations to opposing teams to join in, and that very special time where he went out and led a student prayer right in front of the administrator who has just asked him not to. Why the District didn't just fire him for insubordination I do not know.

SCOTUS ordered Bremerton to rehire Kennedy for the job that he had never re-applied for and then--twist #1

Twist #1

Last fall the school sent out reinstatement papers. He didn't return them, because he was busy with other stuff. Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times tracked Kennedy's busy schedule. 

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

“Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.

It’s an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to “reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,” according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about “the prayer that got me fired” — even though Bremerton never actually fired him.

And now, Twist #2

But for the fall of 2023, Kennedy was back on the football staff. The school district had created some rules to allow for staff prayers under certain conditions (it has to be hard to set policy when the Supreme Court dings you for things that didn't actually happen). They played their first game of the season, and won. Then Kennedy took his photo op prayerful knee on the field, by himself this time. Was he happy to be back coaching football? 

Tonight was the milestone and where we wanted to get to. We fought eight years. What we asked for from the Supreme Court and all the courts was just to be able to be a coach and be able to pray after a football game.

So, football shmootball.

And then he quit. 

Not a huge shock, as he had apparently done what he came to do. And he's been living in Florida for the last three years. The firm that represented the school district was also unsurprised:

For years, Kennedy and his lawyers have said all he wanted was his job back. We were skeptical. And now, here we are, right where we warned the Supreme Court we would be.

His resignation letter is reportedly more in keeping with his victim stance. Reported Nina Shapiro at the Seattle Times:

In a resignation letter obtained by The Seattle Times, Kennedy said, “It is apparent that the reinstatement ordered by the Supreme Court will not be fully followed after a series of actions meant to diminish my role and single me out in what I can only believe is retaliation by the school district.”

He gave no indication of such feelings in an interview last week and declined to go into details Wednesday. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic and it wasn’t,” he said, adding that his “role and responsibilities” at Friday’s game were “not what I signed up for.”

Like any other humble high school assistant football coach, he had his PR firm issue a statement.

“I believe I can best continue to advocate for constitutional freedom and religious liberty by working from outside the school system so that is what I will do. I will continue to work to help people understand and embrace the historic ruling at the heart of our case. As a result of our case, we all have more freedom, not less. That should be celebrated and not disrespected,” said Kennedy.

“As I have demonstrated, we must make a stand for what we believe in. In my case, I made a stand to take a knee. I encourage all Americans to make their own stand for freedom and our right to express our faith as we see fit. I appreciate the people of Bremerton, the coaches, staff and especially the students and wish them all well. Bremerton will always be home,” he concluded.

Also, he's got a book (written "with" Stephanie Katz). And a movie in pre-production. And on his website you can book him for appearances. 

At the top of the website is the quote "No American should be forced to choose between their faith and the job they love," but I guess Americans should be willing to dump the job if they've got a better shot at fame and fortune. 

What a testimony!

If I seem to be mocking Kennedy's faith, it's only because he's made a mockery out of mine. I realize this is low-hanging obvious fruit, but I'm going to pull out Matthew 6:5 here--this is Jesus, giving instructions about praying

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."

Then a few verses later he lays out The Lord's Prayer. Nowhere in scripture have I ever read, "When you pray, make it a big public circus that is all about you. Also, if you can exert any authority you have to coerce others into praying, that would be cool, too."

Schools are absolutely loaded with teachers who are people of faith and who manage to do their jobs and keep their faith and avoid pushing it on young humans in their charge, and they do all three things at the same time. Kennedy's showboating and the attendant SCOTUS flubbery simply encourages those teachers who can't stay away from the coercion part to go ahead and put religion where it doesn't belong.

Kennedy had a responsibility to his players. He failed at it when he used his position to promote his personal religion, and he failed at it again when he made the football team subordinate to his desire to be a big christianist celebrity. It is telling that no crowd rushed the field to join him in his performance; I expect that plenty of folks in Bremerton have long since figured out that Kennedy is filled with something other than the holy spirit. 

I have no way of knowing what kind of faith witness Kennedy thinks he's providing, but this is a lousy testimony, prideful and selfish and far more interested in politics than faith. It's one more reminder of that old saw-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. It's hard to imagine anyone looking at Kennedy's actions and thinking, "Yeah, I'm really feeling Christ's call now."