The History Christian Nationalists Want

Recently Oklahoma's education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they'd better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma. "If you can't teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York," he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they'd know. "Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them."

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he's auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he's just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like "In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We're not here for any kind of Joe Biden's socialist Marxist training ground."

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation's history as he believes it should be taught.

So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We've done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You've got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You've got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism-- the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values. 

With that as a foundation, it's safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power. 

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don't believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherin Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers--

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There's no systemic anything--just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor and the Jordan Adams stealth version. 

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances. 

To take another angle-- the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don't follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped. 

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated--those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth. 

So we counter that confusion with history like Walters'-- a history that is clear that our country is exceptional, its foundation fused with God's Objective Truth by men who were Good and Righteous. Some people have strayed from that path and tricked others into straying with them (just as today that evil axis of Biden, Democrats, unions and socialists are still trying). Extremism in the defense of God's given order (which includes keeping people in their proper place in the social order) is not only allowed, but is required.

You'll find some version of this everywhere you find christianist nationalists trying properly bring up the next generation to believe the Truth (it's only indoctrination when you try to lead people off the True Path--when you try to convince people to stay on that path, you're just standing up for what is Righteous and True). Where you find this, you'll find people who don't understand that when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And you'll find some other people who understand that all too well, and who understand that religion-flavored politics can be an excellent path to power. 

Can We Trust "Evidence-Based"?

We love to talk about "evidence-based" practices in education. We've even enshrined it in the federal laws about education-- the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as currently modified as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The idea is that education is supposed to use techniques, materials, etc., that are evidence-based and not just whims-based or best-guess-based.

But what does "evidence-based" actually mean? Not nearly as much as you probably think it means.

There are four tiers of evidence, four flavors of evidence that something works. And they aren't all necessarily all that evidency.

Tier 1: This is "strong" evidence. It requires "studies that have had a positive, statistically significant impact on student outcomes without any negative findings from well-designed, well-implemented experimental or quasi-experimental studies examining the same interventions and outcomes." In short, it's what most think of as "actual evidence." 

Tier 2: "Moderate evidence." One federal definition of this is--well, it's exactly the same as Tier 1. The What Works Clearinghouse site (that federal internet spot that is supposed to be a collection of effective and "evidence-based" materials for education use) distinguishes it by saying that the research study might come "with reservations" which means there might be some issues with the studies being used to back it up (not well implemented, questions about subject selection, just generally "issues that require caution." What a layperson might call "shaky" or "questionable" evidence.

Tier 3: "Promising evidence." Instead of a statistically significant positive finding, we'll settle for some correlation with controls for selection bias. There's no requirement for minimum subjects or a particular setting. So, what a layperson would call "hardly any actual evidence at all, but if you squint hard you can make something out of this."

Tier 4: "Demonstrates a rationale" This one doesn't come up as often, probably because it boils down to "We have a good idea for a practice and our idea makes sense and we did a tiny little study that seemed to get a tiny positive effect but mostly we're going to have to create another study to really test this stuff." 

All of them require the absence of any evidence from other "high-quality causal studies," which means, I guess, that studies from tiers 2, 3 and 4 can just kind of duke it out amongst themselves. 

These distinctions are worth making. But I worry that entirely too many non-academic-research laypeople, including classroom teachers, hear the term "evidence-based practices" and think, "Oh, there's proof that this practice works," when that's not necessarily true at all. Evidence-based is not the same as proven effective, and teachers should not throw out the evidence of their own eyeballs and experience because a practice has been declared evidence-based.

PA: Senate Proposes Guide To School's Naughty Bits

SB 7, proposed in April and just last week passed by the Pennsylvania senate, is definitely not the worst Naughty Book bill passed. It is certainly an improvement over its previous iterations. Certainly better than I'd expect in a bill co-sponsored by Doug Mastriano. It's goal is to give parents "control" over what their kids read. I suspect one of its major effects will be to demonstrate the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Much of the debate about this bill is hyperbolic. It's not the worst bill ever passed on the topic, but it's still a bad bill.

It gets one thing very right--under this bill parents can have a book restricted for their own child, but not for everyone else's. So, cheers for that.

What it gets particularly wrong is that it requires an opt-in-- no books with any naughty bits unless you have a note from a parent, so right off the bat we have an issue for divorced parents and parents who do a lousy job of returning school paperwork. Opt-in has the ugly effect of making restrictions on a students' reading the default. 

The law would require the opt-in form to have a very specific and somewhat sensationalized list of things that could be in the naughty books that you're green lighting for your child. The definition of "sexually explicit content" is rather vague:

Materials that contain visual or visually implied depictions of sexual conduct or simulations of sexual conduct. Materials that contain explicit AND EXCESSIVE written descriptions of sexual conduct. Materials that contain visual depictions of nudity accessible to minors in kindergarten through grade eight.

Some of this is doing heavy lifting. What would a "visually implied depiction of sexual conduct" be, exactly? And does the existence and restriction of an "excessive" depiction of sexual conduct imply that there is a "just enough" depiction of sexual conduct that would be okay? Even "visual depiction of nudity" is a fuzzy term--how unclothed must one be to qualify as nude? 

But "sexually explicit content" is basically anything that shows "sexual conduct," and that has a definition of its own:

Acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality or physical contact with a person's clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if the person is a female, breast.

And yes, as usual, the bill could be used to restrict access to many classic of literature and also the Bible.

The part of the bill requiring an alternative assignment for students who don't opt in sounds like a good idea. I've done the same thing in my class. But practically speaking, it's not particularly practical. Will the school be required to follow the students around and make sure that they don't get a peek at their classmates' copy of Slaughterhouse Five while in lunch? The end result of this is to harness the power of peer pressure in favor of the forbidden fruit. "All my friends are reading Song of Solomon" is way more compelling than "My teacher assigned Song of Solomon." (This, I suspect, is something the "ban this book for all students" crowd understands.)

The most unfortunate part of this bill is that the Venn Diagram of "students who really need to get some information about sex stuff" and "students whose parents forbid them to get information about sex stuff" has far too much overlap. As State Senator Amanda Capelletti put it “We all like to believe that every child grows up in a family that loves and values them for exactly who they are. We know that unfortunately, is not true. The kids who need books that explore gender identity and sexual orientation, are the most likely ones whose parents are denying them and their communities the right to learn from these books."

The gigantic time-sucking nuisance part of the bill is this one:

The opt-in form must include a list of book titles and materials scheduled to be used as part of curriculum and class discussion or available within the school that meet the definition of sexually explicit content.

Yes, the school must send home a list of every book in the school building that has any naughty parts in it. Presumably this will be a summer special contract for some teachers, who will kick the hunt off with professional development addressing what qualifies as "implied" depictions of sex, how much sexual content is excessive (as opposed to an okay amount), and what constitutes nudity. 

Then they will append this list to the opt-in form, making it the largest piece of paperwork any school ever sent home. 

So every district in PA will be creating and circulating a list of all its books with naughty parts. That's going to be a great tool for the people who want to descend on the district to demand an actual book ban. They'll be waving this list in meetings and declaring that if a work is on the list, it shouldn't be in the school. 

But if you've ever taught in a secondary school setting, I'll bet you can think of some other people who will find a use for the list. Yes, I predict the List Of All The Dirty Books In Our District will be popular among students interested in getting their rebellion on. It will die down pretty quickly once they discover that the Naughty Books aren't nearly as titillating as they expected. This plan reads like a bizarre new way to compete with the internet-- it's so easy to find naughty content on the internet, so let's make an index to make it easier to find in our school. 

This is not the worst bill of this type to ever appear, but it's still a silly bill, a bill that is far more useful as a political gesture than as an actual tool for schools and educators. 

A Little Monday Shakespeare

This clip popped up today, and it's just a masterful bit of Shakespeare delivered impromptu by Dane Judi Dench on the Graham Norton show. 

 

I recommend closed captioning, but also, here's the text of the sonnet

Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Maybe I'm just feeling particularly close to that one today, but Dench got to me a little bit.

And as a bonus, here's the Schwarzenegger clip referenced in the above clip. I taught Hamlet every year, and for many years showed the Olivier version, then followed it up with this clip, because part of the advantage of being educated and well read is that you get more jokes.

ICYMI: NPE in DC Edition (10/29)

I'm in the Washington DC this weekend for the Network for Public Education conference. I've done a bunch of these, and they are always a great opportunity to hear from some of the important voices advocating for public education and meet some cool folks face to face. And I got to get supper from a food truck. Here at the Institute, we do love a good food truck.

Talking About Public Education: The Good, the Deceptive, and the Destructive

Nancy Flanagan on the confusion around public good that has been cultivated for decades. And you should definitely click through the article she references as well.

Education Lies That Won't Die: Teacher Value

Paul Thomas takes a look at the persistent notion that whatever is happening in education, it's probably a teacher's fault.

West Bonner School Board accepts Branden Durst’s resignation, appoints 90-day interim superintendent

This saga, which we've been following here, might have finally come to an end, and the district might finally get a superintendent who is at least marginally qualified.

Moms For Liberty Has Council Rock School District In Its Crosshairs

From the Bucks County Beacon, this is what it looks like on the ground when M4L aims to commandeer a school board.

Rural schools near Austin say they feel left behind as governor pushes for vouchers

In Texas, the governor is still pushing vouchers, and rural schools are still fighting the threat. From Becky Fogel in the Austin Monitor.

The AI-Generated Child Abuse Nightmare Is Here

From Wired, some even worse news about AI.

Local Moms for Liberty chapter accused of manufacturing a ‘crisis’ before election

Hard to believe, isn't it. But M4L ion Warwick PA whipped up some outrage for a hearing, and just in time for PA elections. The Keystone has the story.

Pennridge ordered to produce library records, pay legal fees for dad challenging book removals

From Philadelphia Inquirer. I didn't set out to have a PA-heavy week, but these days the culture warriors are giving lessons in how they operate. Like Pennridge schools, where it turns out that the local MAGAs have figured out another way to ban naughty books.

On negative effects of vouchers

At Brookings. Let's go over this again--educationally, vouchers don't work.

F.A.S.T. Has Absolutely Increased State Testing Time

Sue Kingery Woltanski at Accountabaloney has the results of the DeSantis experiment in decreasing testing time by increasing testing. 

At Forbes, this week I took a look into the current legal mess involving Stride (K12) and the Senate attempt to make charter schools a bit more profitable.

And as always, I invite you to join me on substack. It's free!

Zuck's Tech Revolution That Never Happened

One of education journalist Matt Barnum's lasty pieces of work at Chalkbeat before departing for the Wall Street Journal was a retrospective about Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to bring tech revolution to education. It's a great read, and I'm here to encourage you to go read it even as I underline a couple of Barnum's points.

The jumping off point is a blog post from the education head at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Sandra Liu Huang, that says--well, it says a lot. It takes the tone of a long-view retrospective, a fond look back at the long journey she's taken. A journey of five whole years. Because tech folks (Huang is a former project manager) think five years is a long time, I guess, while in education after five years a teacher is still just getting started. Anyway, after this long road of five whole years, she talks about the "next chapter."

Since the start, CZI’s efforts in education have been defined by collaboration.

Sure. But one of her takeaways is this:

We’ve collectively developed resources that are cutting-edge, high-quality and research-based — but some of these resources are underutilized.

Here, in one sentence, is one of the core incompetencies of ed tech. Let me rewrite that for her:

We’ve collectively developed resources that are cutting-edge, high-quality and research-based — but some of these resources turned out not to be very useful.

It is the Way of the Education Techbro to always and forever assume that if a tech tool isn't being embraced and employed, the problem must rest with the end user. Never, ever conclude things like "this tool doesn't work very well" or "this tool is not helpful for the work that teachers actually do." So instead of trying to find out why their stuff hasn't been useful, why Zuck's repeated big bets on ed tech have failed to pay off time and again, CZI has some other ideas.

Use products like Along, yet another learning-communication-digitization platform, "with coherence." And so you don't think I'm exaggerating, here's how Huang explains it:

This is what we mean by coherence: By working in lockstep, not piecemeal, we not only develop better products, we make it easier for educators to adopt research-based practices to the benefit of their students.

Sure. Ed tech isn't revolutionizing education because teachers aren't being properly lockstepped into place.

As Barnum points out, Zuck's big bet for the last decade has been "personalized learning" (though it's never been clear that he really understands what that would mean), particularly on two companies.

The flashier one was AltSchool, a boutique wired-up private school model launched by Googler Max Ventilla. It was a hugely expensive model that involved super-surveillance and data crunching of students. Students and teachers would just sort of amble through the forest of education. Teachers would capture moments of demonstrated learning on video, students would do work on modules on computer, and it would all be crunched in a back room full of IT whizzes who would churn out personalized learning stuff for the students. The lab schools turned out to be market research labs for ed tech spinoff products; the schools were sold off, the products spun off, and Ventilla headed off to his next venture. 

The bigger bet was on Summit, which started out in pre-tech days as a personalized education operation, then teched up and spun its schools off into a software and school-via-computer operation. As Barnum notes, nobody knows for sure how well Summit in its current software form works. We have anecdotes from happy parents and news items like the school where students walked out in protest of being clamped to screens all day. Summit itself has turned out to be super-resistant to having its operation studied, and when people like the National Education Policy Center do take a look, they find far more sizzle than steak. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

But CZI hadn't bet on Summit to have mixed results; they were supposed to spared across the country and change the face of education. That did not happen.

The blog post asserts that CZI will continue to support Gradient Learning (a non-profit spun off from Summit that seems fully emmeshed in CZI) and Summit itself, though "We plan to help foster a careful and responsible transition of core features of Summit Learning to a third-party platform over the next year" sounds an awful lot like "we're going to break this down for parts."

Algorithm-based, screen-delivered, sort-of-personalized education remains a dream among some folks, including lots of folks who don't seem to understand how education or young humans work, and the pandemic and rise of generative language software have given them more hope, despite all these years of aspirational marketing copy, undelivered promises, and general failure. 

Barnum closes his piece with a quote that is hilariously on the nose. 

John Bailey, a fellow at CZI and the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote an optimistic essay about the potential of AI, with a headline that marked the end of one era and the dawn of a new one: “The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different.”

That is edtech, education's bad boyfriend, in one sentence. "Yes, we've lied to you every other time and never delivered what we promised, but, by God, this time it's going to be completely different." Sure. 

Are Moms for Liberty More About Elections Than Education

Never forget this quote from October of 2021.

I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.

That's Christian Ziegler, a political operative with a PR firm. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He’s buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy). He was at Trump’s January 6 rally. And in February, after had been “effectively… campaigning for the job for years,” Christian Ziegler was elected Florida’s GOP party chair.

And, of course, the husband of Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty.

Ziegler (as detailed here) had several years of anti-public education political work under her belt by the time she formed Moms for Liberty. That's not unusual--some days it seems as if behind every Florida Man who holds a political office, there's a Florida Woman working in political advocacy.

But it can be useful to look at M4L not only through the lens of aiming to dismantle public education but also through the lens of a GOP electioneering project. 

Four researchers put up a fascinating study for Brookings, looking at some of the details of the M4: deployment. It breaks down the deployment of M4L, looking at it by state and by the electoral leanings of the county. And most importantly, the researchers do it two ways--simply by the number of counties, and also by population. 

That distinction matters. Of the counties that have a chapter, 45% are in red counties, 25% in purple, and 30% in blue. But if we weight by population, blue populations account for 54% of M4L chapters and purple is 30%. Some of the findings are unsurprising-- M4L are most prevalent in the suburbs--by unweighted count, 31% of chapters are in rural/town settings, but weighted for population, rural/town makes up only 7% of M4L. They are more prevalent in counties where the white population is decreasing. 

The researchers also looked at M4L endorsements (and found a discrepancy--they found that M4L endorsed 340 candidates, not the 500 that M4L has boasted and which M4L declined to explain). The majority of those endorsements were in blue or purple counties. They were most successful in purple and red counties, and better in suburbs than elsewhere.

It is hard to know more specifics about the county chapters. When I looked at Pennsylvania, I found multiple county chapter pages listed in the M4L directory, but many of those had no actual chapter chief listed. In many cases, the Facebook page for the chapter was "run" by Pat Blackburn, the national organization's chapter coordinator. So there is some question about how organic and grass rootsy the organization is.

Looking at the Brookings map, one notices that chapters and members are clustered in states like Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, the Carolinas, but not, as the researchers note, in the red strongholds of the South and the Plains. 

Take the whole picture in, and it's believable that M4L is meant to function as a way to activate red voters in places where the GOP needs a win. Pennsylvania in particular is a swing-ish state that has been targeted by the christianist right, and here we sit with the second-highest number of chapters bumping up against the third-highest populations. We've got off-year elections coming up in about two weeks; we'll see if the M4L stir gets people to the polls to vote to boost the whole GOP ticket. 

M4L is not just about reactionary school policies; it's about realizing Chris Ziegler's long-ago dream-- activating suburban white ladies in 20s and 30s to help lift the GOP (or at least the MAGAfied version of it). Of course, it's not just Ziegler's dream-- it's the dream of other seats of power and money on the right who have been there helping get M4L launched since Day One. 

It's a natural fit. Like the GOP itself, M4L pushes policies that are not actually popular with the majority of voters, and so it needs creative ways to circumvent democracy to achieve its goals and to acquire power. P. J. O'Rourke's definition of politics-- the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit--applies here.

Yes, oppose Moms for Liberty for what they want to do to public education in this country. But stay aware that they are also warming up the deep fryer for larger fish.