The Default Is In Ourselves

"It's perfectly fine that those people exist. But I don't like it when they shove it in my face." 

"Yes, they're entitled to rights just like anyone else, but why do they have to ram their lifestyle down our throats?"

I have heard these sorts of sentiments a gazillion times expressed regarding persons who are not white, not straight, not Christian. The puzzling part is that, when pressed for examples of this alleged shoving and ramming, the speakers point to works or events that have themes such as "racism is still a problem" or "LGBTQ persons exist." Look, there's a Black mermaid! Oh no--there's a completely conventional rom-com that involves two same-gender leads! 

What's particularly ironic is that much of this outrage is backwards. The conservatives who argued for gay marriage got it-- much of this represents folks adopting mainstream values. It's not the conventional being disrupted, but marginalized people being co-opted.

But still--all this talk about being assaulted by some agenda. Complaints that certain things or people are being "normalized." The reactions seem so out of proportion to what they're reacting against.

Here's how I make sense of it. Defaults.

You sign up for new online software, and you're asked to set up an avatar. The program gives you a default avatar; if you want anything different, you have to make changes yourself. 

We have mental default settings for persons. Folks who write or create have for much of history had defaults for characters.

It's easy enough to see. Think smurfs--the default is a "regular" smurf, young, male, average intelligence, clean shaven, generally bland and undistinguished demeanor. Then the creator starts messing with the defaults--this one is smart, this one is old, this one wears glasses, this one is cranky. And this one is a girl. 

Or that classic puzzle-- a child and his father come in to an ER, and the doctor says, "I can't operate on this child. He's my son." Once upon a time that was a stumper, because everyone's default for "doctor" was male. 

Or there's an episode of the Dick Van Dyke show in which Rob Petrie becomes obsessed with the idea that his child might have been switched with a different child in the maternity ward. Finally he tracks down the other couple with a similarly named child and invites them over. The door opens, and the other family turns out to be Black. The audience roars, because it is so completely unexpected that characters on a tv would be Black when the default is so clearly white.

I could go on and on, from Marvel fanboys angered by female heroes to things as fundamental as the old rule that the single personal pronoun defaults to "he." The point is this.

The default requires no changes. If a writer uses the defaults in a story, then no actual choice is made. As any high school theater director dealing with a surplus of female actors and a surfeit of males, classic musical theater is filled with characters who are male, but don't have to be; the writer just went with the default.

But if the character varies from the default--white, straight, Christian, male--then that represents a conscious choice. At least that's how it feels to some conservative audiences. "You could have left that character as a natural default, a white straight male Christian, but you changed it." 

Anything different from the default represents a deliberate choice. You deliberately chose to make that character Black or LGBTQ or female, the reasoning goes, and therefor it feels as if you're shoving it in my face. 

Folks who think of themselves as tolerant can also fall into the default trap. "I don't see color" is another way to say, "I just treat everyone as if they are still on the default setting" or "I assume that underneath, everyone's self is based on the same default settings as mine." I can look past the differences of the other people because they aren't a foundational part of their identity, but just surface overlays of the default.

And when people can get most cranky is when they sense that someone is trying to change the actual defaults, to suggest that white, male, straight, Christian is not the default setting for all humanity, that there are other ways to be that exist as their own baseline and not in some sort of relationship with an imagined default. This is why a simple "LGBTQ persons exist and are ordinary" is seen as "shoving" because it's an attempt to change the default, to suggest that LGBTQ can exist as a sort of normal and not some degraded version of the True Normal. Some get cranky about "identity politics," sensing that it says something about having different identities that are not just simple skis placed over the default.

Why do we create default notions of what a person is? Heck if I know, though we've always separated ourselves into We People Over Here and Those Others Over There. We want to belong and we want to know that we're not Others. We soak in culture that tells us what the defaults are (and now get frustrated as culture splits and centers on a variety of different defaults and so we get grumpy and complain can't we all just be Normal Americans, like that's a thing). 

Why some of us are so resistant to the rich varied nature of human existence and experience I do not know. Humans have never handled that aspect of existence well. But education has an obligation to try.

We've learned in schools to discard some defaults. No teacher who's half-alert assumes that every student has two parents who are together in a family where everyone shares the same last name. We can do better. 

Students are always busy finding, examining, determining, and getting comfortable their identities. They need a better message from schools than "You're just a slight variation on this standard default human identity" or "You're so far from the standard default human identity that you're basically broken and possibly unacceptable." And that means that some of those students (and their parents) who are aligned with the old standard default will feel that something is being taken from them, that other ways of being human are being forced on them. 

Other ways of being human exist. Schools have to acknowledge that; students have to know that to successfully navigate the world. Telling people who live in the desert that rivers exist is not forcing water on them, nor is it demanding that the whole world be flooded. We can do better. We can expand our library of defaults, and be better for it. 

NH: What Ever Happened To Croydon's School Budget Slasher?

You may remember Jody Underwood and Croydon, New Hampshire. It's a story worth revisiting, because it tells us what may be down the road for some of the most extreme MAGA education policies.

The tiny town of Croydon was the scene of more than one big dustup over education. A few years ago it was the scene of a move to push school choice in the state. Underwood and Angi Beaulieu were among the advocates who pushed for a voucher system which allowed students from tiny towns like Croydon to have tuition paid to a school of their choice. In fact, the vouchers-for-some bill was called the Croydon Bill, and Governor Chris Sununu came to Croydon to sign it in 2017.

This was a true voucher program. Not a "here's a couple thousand bucks, good luck finding a place to get your kid an education" program, but a mechanism by which local taxpayers footed the full bill for an education at any public or private school they could get into (that included the school in nearby Claremont, where I started out life). It was not cheap; the taxpayers in the 800 person town paid $1.7 million for a local K-4 school and vouchers for the older students (80 students in all); it's more than they spend to run the town. 

Then, in early 2022, at a low-attendance annual town meeting, Jody Underwood, the school board chair, recognized her husband Ian from the floor, and he moved to cut the budget to $800K. The motion passed, and suddenly tiny Croydon was up in arms.

The Underwoods are part of the Free State Project, founded in 2001 with the intent of moving 20,000 Libertarians to New Hampshire with the hope that they might have an outsized influence on the small-population, liberty-loving state. Free Staters have been successful in landing elected offices in New Hampshire, even at the state level (most elected offices in the state are unpaid). Granite State Matters just released a paper about the FSP's progress dismantling democracy in New Hampshire. 

The Underwoods came to Croydon in 2007. Before moving, Jody had worked for the Educational Testing Service, and before that a researcher for NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as the Lead Learning Scientist for Intelligent Automation, Inc--that's Blue Halo, a company that works in the defense industry sector, and she has some legit credits in the AI world way before it was cool. Ian was a "planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researcher for NASA," a certified hypnotherapist, a "fourth generation wing chun sifu," as well as director of the Ask Dr. Math program. 

The Underwoods were ahead of the far right privatization movement. Asked how students were supposed to get into schools with $10K, Ian Underwood suggested that microschools like Prenda would be good enough. They had moved from "don't all students deserve the same sort of choices as rich families get" to "there are voucher choices that will be perfectly good enough for poor kids." I'll underline this point again--the Very Libertarian Underwoods had tried to cut the legs out from under, not a traditional public school system, but a true voucher-driven school choice system.

Thanks to a semi-obscure law, the opponents of the budget cut mustered the town and reversed the cuts by a vote of 377-2. 

After I wrote about the Croydon upset, Jody Underwood contacted me. She was not happy. She denied that she had ever known what her husband was going to propose, and she was furious with her opponents who, she felt, had lied and cheated to get the budget cut reversed. As Ian explained in an angry blog post, democracies are a big problem. Ian resigned his selectboard seat in August of 2022 by letter; the reading of the letter was applauded.

So what has Jody Underwood been up to in the 16 months since the budget cut lived its brief and unlamented life?

Almost immediately, citizens circulated a petition to remove Underwood and Aaron Mckeon from the board. The petition was non-binding (you can't petition elected officials out of office in New Hampshire, which seems like a smart rule). Other voices from the budget cut side called for an end to acrimony.

But apparently there was still some acrimony hanging in the air, because back in March, Underwood found herself running against old school choice ally Angi Beaulieu, who was pretty clear about why she felt the need to run. “Somebody needs to step up and protect what we worked so hard for with school choice,” she told the Valley News. “I wasn’t fighting for school choice to take money away from public schools.”

Asked by the Valley News what her plans were, Underwood offered this:

“It’s to move into the 21st century,” she said of her plans. The old ways haven’t worked, and too few children are meeting the standards set for them.

She was still certain that the true majority of Croydon voters support the idea of cutting education costs, which is in keeping with the far right notion that they represent the true heart of the country and they only ever lose because of nefarious shenanigans by their opponents. She also complained that "we've been supporting teachers as a jobs program for a very long time."

Three guesses how the election turned out. 

Beaulieu won 229-36. The town also voted, narrowly, to expand the board from three to five seats.

However, Underwood has landed a new gig. As an education reporter. 

Not just any education reporter. Underwood's new gig is with the Eagle Times. The news outfit (they are a website with few-days-a-week print editions) traces its roots back to the early 1800s in Claremont. They combined, merged, closed their doors in 2009, then reopened under ownership by an outfit in PA.

Then in 2022, Jay Lucas bought them. 

Lucas is an entrepreneur and business consultant. Graduated from Yake in '77, Oxford in '79, and got his MBA and law degree from Harvard in '82. He worked for Bain in the 1980's, the created the Lucas Group-- "a corporate strategy consulting boutique - a 'mini-Bain & Company' - focused on the specialized needs of Private Equity investors and corporate clients." He's from Newport, NH, and at some point he headed back home. He was a member of the NH House, and won the GOP nod for governor, then promptly lost to Jeanne Shaheen. He has been pushing various initiatives to make Newport a better place, and that includes the Sunshine Initiative which includes Sunshine Communications LLC.

That happened about the same time he bought the Eagle Times.

Lucas is a big positivity guy, who regularly writes op-eds for his newspapers like "Winning starts with beginning" and "The positive power of 'no'" The Eagle Times coverage is pretty small town vanilla, but just the editorial titles give you a sense of the publisher's philosophy. 

That publisher is Richard Girard, who had a radio show for six years out of Manchester. He's worked in politics and  has run for a variety of offices, but only ever successfully for a school board seat, where he's been a critic of oh-so-many things. He's plenty conservative; he ran his senate campaign pro ed-choice, anti-CRT, anti-abortion, and pro-gun. His two most recent editorials for the Eagle Times are "Closing Schools Was Foolish, Not Cautious" and "PragerU Isn't Indoctrination"

In short, this seems like a fine home for Underwood.

So far she's contributed a special report on the second Croydon post-election school board meeting (eight people in attendance) and the first two pieces in a series about how the pandemic hurt schools. 

The first piece focuses on Croydon schools, which represent a spectacularly tiny sample. The school has two classrooms--K/1 and 2-4. The principal teaches the 2-4 and the other teacher handles special ed. So it's not clear what is to be learned by studying their collective test results. But what Underwood arrives is the notion that it's that damn Fountas and Pinnell and what we need in here is some science of reading stuff. 

The second piece focuses on New Hampshire as a whole. Her point is that Covid didn't really seem to hurt New Hampshire achievement levels, but reading instruction is in terrible shape anyway. She is particularly bothered in both pieces by the fact that around half of students test as reading below grade level. She does not say whose idea of grade level she's talking about, but since many are based on the median score for students in that grade, a hefty portion of students must be below grade level, just as a large number of Americans are below average height. But she's upset that half of students are below grade level no matter what instructional methods are used. What can I say-- almost half of Americans have always been below average height no matter what changes we make to diet and exercise in this country. 

Six more installments are promised for this series, so Underwood has some work lined up here for at least a few more weeks. Whether she can make a go of this educational correspondent gig remains to be seen, but once again she's in tune with the conservative work, where every piece of activism turns out to be an audition for conservative media.

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. 

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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.