ICYMI: My Mom's Birthday Edition (11/12)

Wow, this week was a lot for a lot of folks, but here at the Institute it was the week my mother turned 90, so that was pretty exciting. She's had a challenging couple of years, but she still does her volunteer work, still sends cards to everyone for everything, and still gets on the floor to play with her youngest descendants. She's got a good heart and makes the world a better place, and this week was a reminder that we can always use a few more people like that. Lots to read--and remember, it's a lot harder to get things out and about on social media these days, so you can help by pushing out things that you think are worthy of attention.

Moms for Liberty members call the cops on Florida librarians

Adam Laats called this one a while ago--an organization that spreads like M4L has will inevitably end up empowering some over-the-top wingnuts who will proceed to make the brand look really bad. Judd Legum at Popular Information dug out this story of an attempt to get a librarian arrested for letting a 17 year old check out a fantasy book about gargoyles.

Moms For Liberty And The Dominionist Assault On America’s ‘Education Mountain’

Jennifer Cohn and the folks at the Bucks County Beacon have been right in the thick of things this week, connecting lots of dots.

Does Speaker Johnson really believe there’s no separation between church and state?

And if you're not really up on dominionism, it's getting time to study up, because you're going to hear the term more and more.

A Billionaire Megadonor Is Behind the Bill to Weaken Florida’s Child Labor Laws

Let's get those young 'uns back to work (and out of school). The wing of the reformster movement that is mostly pre-occupied with getting more cheap meat widgets for employers is, of course, active in Florida. Jason Garcia and Jordan Zakarin found some billionaire fingerprints on the Florida bill.

As Wyoming voters lose faith in churches, politics is the new religion

Ryan Burge is the expert used by the authors of The Great Dechurching, and here he's part of a piece by Kerry Drake that tracks a curious phenomenon--people who act out politically on the religious right, even as they don't actually set foot in church.

Pro-Trump Church Burns Pride Flags at Massive Bonfire

I missed this story when it ran in Newsweek a month ago. The church's name? Rod of Iron Ministries. Really. I suppose it's more subtle than The Church of The Mighty Penis, but it sure suggests that there are some other issues at play here.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Voters Give Pennridge Democrats A Mandate For Change In The School District

Pennridge is a Bucks County district that has been steered far to the right by conservative members (this is the place that hired Hillsdale's Jordan Adams to dewokify their curriculum). But that conservative slate lost hard this week. Jenny Stephens has some of the details for the Bucks County Beacon.

Youngkin’s disastrous night shows the right’s culture war has fizzled

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post looks at Virginia. Quotes a Dem consultant with this great line: It turns out that talking endlessly about critical race theory is not a successful way to win critical races.

‘Moms for Liberty’ endorsed candidates fail to win seats in Linn Mar school board election

Here are the Moms losing out in Iowa in another supposed-to-be-a-slam-dunk race. The article's really short, but still good news.

Mat-Su Moms for Liberty’s Impact on Candidate Wins: Not Even a Participation Trophy

A look at how M4L played their hand in Alaska's MAGA country. 

NC State Superintendent Catherine Truitt refuses to disclose “outside counsel” in controversial charter school decision

They couldn't get their charter approved, so they turned to Truitt, who consulted some mystery lawyers and discovered that the company (that donated to her campaign) should get an official okay. Seems totally legit. Justin Parmenter digs in.

Poisoned Water in Missouri Public Schools? Let The Kids Eat Cake.

Jess Piper has a conversation with a wealthy charter fan who figures that school choice is the perfect solution to lead-laced water in public schools. Because reasons.

The Plight of the Poorest Students in America’s Public Schools Is Hidden in Plain Sight

Jan Resseger... well, I won't say digs, because, as she points out, you don't exactly have to dive deep to see the problems.

Ohio GOP won't let democracy stand in the way of imposing their religion as law!

A reminder that these days, a certain brand of politician does not consider voting results a final word on anything. Ohio voted for women's health care rights; it remains to be seen if Ohio's GOP will let those results actually take effect.

Nonbinary teacher at Florida school fired for using 'Mx.' as courtesy title

Of course it's Florida. USA Today adds one more item for your "dumb reasons teachers can be fired" file.

Believe it or not, Generation Z prefers print books over digital, study reveals

This may or may not be news. For years, when I gave students links to readings on line, their first step was to print them out. But here's further evidence that the e-book revolution isn't coming.

How to Define Democrats for Education Reform Using Two Quotes from Democrats for Education Reform

Maurice Cunningham lays out why DFER isn't exactly what they pretend to be.

It’s Fall and I Have A Mild Case of Teacher Brain

Anne Lutz Fernandez talks about the effects of stress on the teacher brain, and what schools could do about it.

Andreessen Horowitz would like everyone to stop talking about AI's copyright issues, please

Turns out generative big language "artificial intelligence" wouldn't be profitable if developers had to actually pay for all the writing they steal borrow to "train" the algorithm.

I was busy at Forbes this week:

* Illinois becomes the first state to undo its voucher program

* Let's take yet another look at competency based learning

* Two key districts in Pennsylvania get de-MAGA-fied

I invite you to join me on substack, where you get regular emails that cover everything new I've cranked out along with old faves from the blog. It's free and it's easy and it's not subject to billionaire whims (so far). 

A Handy Guide To Privatizers

Maurice Cunningham retired in 2021 from an associate professor of political science post at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is an expert in the special art of tracking dark money and political connections, and his book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization is a must read for anyone who wants to make sense of how the wealthy stage manage attempts to privatize public education.

Now Cunningham has added another useful guide for folks trying to make sense of this. For the Network for Public Education, Cunningham has created A Citizen's Guide to School Privatization. It's a trim 18 pages packed with lots of information about the money and the organizations working to dismantle public education.

The guide highlights some well known names like the various arms of the Kochtopus and also draws some attention to the under-noticed Council for National Policy. There are regional players here, and that matters--remember that Betsy DeVos was long thought of as just Michigan's problem. So the Wilks of Texas, the Uihleins of Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania's Jeffrey Yass deserve attention even they seem to be operating far away from you.

Cunningham also highlights some of the activist groups (Moms for Liberty is not the only one out there), and some state-level privatization activist groups, like Awake Illinois, Coalition for TJ, Denver Families Action, Idaho Freedom Foundation. And he covers both the conservative side and the neoliberal-dressed-up-as-lefties side.

He offers these words of warning:

Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to improve upon it.

The guide is useful not only for providing information about these various groups, but for connecting the dots as well. These kinds of connections are important; these days many privatization efforts operate on a local level, and as local folks push back they can feel as if they are alone and isolated when, in fact, the same kinds of battles are going on in other communities across the country. You aren't alone.

The guide is also meant to be dynamic. That is, if you know of another organization that ought to be in the guide, it can be updated to include new information. A handy feature for a guide like this, as groups pop up regularly. Expect to see new configurations in districts that were recently flipped to public school supporting boards; privatizers aren't going to give up or go away, but they may hatch yet another group to implement their newest strategy. Privatizers are loaded with resources; it's only fair that citizens have access to more information to help them recognize the threat to public education when it appears. 

Why A National Christian Foundation?

Why is it that the continuing theme among certain folks is that this country was founded on Christian (or Judeo-Christian) principles? How does the myth of a Christian nation, and the desire to teach it to the young, fit in their larger picture?

We could devote an entire book or twelve to how that claim is incorrect, but the simplest end run around that argument is that this nation's founding fathers could not agree about anything-- not even whether or not they wanted to be founding fathers of this country-- and so we should understand any statement along the lines of "The founding fathers all wanted X" is automatically disqualified. 

The Christian nation myth is certainly about establishing the primacy of Christianity in American life along with a privileged position for its adherents. 

But for many folks, the nation established on Christian principles myth goes hand in hand with a disbelief in democracy. 

I know we all understand that some folks in this country don't much care for democracy, but I'm not sure we all understand just how much some folks disagree with democracy entirely. They could tolerate it for a long time while it was a game they were in a position to win. But as white Christians become an ever-smaller part of US citizenry, the dislike of democracy is becoming more open. 

Just this morning, we've got Rick Santorum saying out loud with his mouth the words "pure democracies are not the way to run a country."

Robert P. Jones, honcho of Public Religion Research Institute (part of Brookings), in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, made this point while talking about Mike Johnson:

If you listen carefully to Johnson and others on the right, they use the word "republic" and not "democracy." That is not just something pedantic. They believe in the rule of the virtuous, not in a "we the people" democracy where everyone is equally represented. What they're actually committed to is a particular outcome where America's laws and government and society correspond to God's laws as they see it. That's the only legitimate outcome for Johnson and other white Christian nationalists. Everything else is illegitimate. They will use the language of democracy and voting if it achieves their ends and goals, but Johnson and the other white Christian nationalists and many other conservatives at present are not committed to those principles and values if they come out on the losing side of a democratic election.

Katherin Stewart, in The Power Worshippers (a must-read) put it even more succinctly:

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.

I think there's one more layer to this. In the New York Times, David French responds to Johnson's claim about using the Bible as his chief policy guide by pointing out that Johnson, as a supporter of The Big Lie, is violating the Biblical principle of honesty. But I will bet dollars to dishrags that Johnson doesn't see it that way.

There's a phrase that my evangelical friends like to use-- "in the world, but not of it." It reflects a view that Christians are just passing through this world, but their task is to pass through without getting any of its cooties on them. I maintained that it was why Betsy DeVos as education secretary appeared to never even kind of try to be accountable to the legislature-- they are of this world, but she is not, and so she owes them nothing. 

Honesty is an ethical behavior we owe toward fellow humans, but when Christian nationalists look around, they don't see fellow humans. They see worldly sinners pursuing illegitimate goals through illegitimate means using illegitimately tools, like, say, democracy. Godly Christians owe those various layers of illegitimacy nothing. It's not wrong to lie to them, to manipulate them or abuse power to shut them up, because they are of this world and its sinful, illegitimate pursuits, and righteous folks are called to avoid compliance with them, called even to thwart them and battle them with whatever tools are handy.

Democracy is fine, when it's useful for truer pursuits. But for Christian nationalists, democracy is at best a tool, but not a foundational principle of this country. For them, the foundational principles are alignment with God's Truth (as they understand it), and everything takes a back seat to that. This is why attempting to argue that public schools are important democratic institutions, a foundation of a democratic nation--those arguments mean nothing to Christian nationalists who don't particularly value democracy in the first place.

The movement undoubtedly a mixture of true believers and opportunists. Either way, part of the push is for children to be taught that the foundation of this country is not democracy or Enlightenment principles, but the word of God (as they understand it), and to that end, to take public education away from the people who have made it "Satan's youth ministry." That's why injecting programs like the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum (which targeted history before any other subject matter) is a goal, and why this particular sub-sect of right wingers will continue to focus on how US history is taught-- because it's critical to their cause, and their power, that people grow up understanding that the country is meant to be ruled by only those who understand God's Immutable Objective Truth, and not just any shmoe that a bunch of people vote for. 

The Anti-Reading Crowd Is Never Satisfied

At the heart of the raging controversy about reading restrictions, there are books about which reasonable adults can disagree, even books that the most ardent free speecher might not want their younger children to read. This is why one tactic of the reading restriction crowd is to shove the most extreme excerpts and pictures in front of audiences. If you aspire to being a reasonable person in these debates, you probably accept the premise that there are some books that do not belong in the middle school library.

But no matter how reasonable you want to be, you have to remember one thing.

The book banners, reading restrictors, censors, ultra-conservative crowd, whatever you want to call them--the people out in front of this drive-- are never going to be satisfied.

There will never, ever, be a day when they will say, "Well, I think that's it. We are perfectly happy that the truly objectionable stuff is out of the school library, and we're going to go home now because our work here is done."

The Moms for Liberty members who call the sheriff because a librarian let a 17-year-old check out a young adult fantasy novel that barely counts as PG-13 for its sexy content. The people who count victories in terms of total number of books removed. They're not going to be satisfied ever. Ever.

We've seen lots of questionable book challenges, like the classic overly-sexy seahorses, but to see how this really goes, look at Collier County Public Schools in (of course) Florida. They've yanked a reported 300+ books from shelves in attempting to follow HB 1069, the anti-sex talk law that was noted for probably forbidding telling young girls about periods.

One local agitator explained what the Collier County book vanishing act was all about, as reported by Ryan Arbogast for NBC-2

“They’re Just requiring school districts to not indoctrinate our kids on things that our sexually inappropriate,” added Keith Flaugh, of the grassroots political organization Florida Citizens Alliance. “I often say, to folks that call it book banning, so … are you ok with prohibiting guns and drugs in schools? The Role of the school districts is to provide a safe environment.”

So what books did Collier County find as dangerous as guns and drugs? The list is long, but PEN America is sharing it; here are some highlights. 

Some of the usuals are here-- Steven King, Ellen Hopkins, Toni Morrison. But Ernest Hemmingway? Three are on the list, including The Sun Also Rises which I taught for years and while, yes, sex is obliquely (really obliquely) an idea in the book, digging out sexual content would be a hopeless quest. 

Dune Chronicles? Steve Martin's novel Shopgirl? One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey-- I mean, seriously, Clarke is one of the most asexual authors in all of SF. 

Many Waters??!! The Madeline L'Engle second sequel to Wrinkle in Time is, like the rest of the series, soaked hard in religious ideas, but Many Waters has for sexual content some heavy flirting. Flowers for Algernon, also regularly taught and unsexy. The Once and Future King, T. H. Whites four-book Arthurian doorstop that is the basis for both Disney's Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot and, again, not very sexy. 

Man in the Iron Mask, the final of Dumas's three Three Musketeers novels published in the mid-nineteenth century, when no literary characters ever had sex at all. This is one of several items on the list that lead me to suspect that, in the time honored tradition of non-readers, the compilers of the list skipped the book and watched a movie version instead.

And, believe it or not, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the two Ayn Rand cornerstones. Granted, I agree that nobody ever needs to read Atlas Shrugged ever, but if you feel so compelled, go ahead. Both books, other than presenting Rand's bizarro notions about romance and some very ungraphic depictions of what appears to be angry sex, these are not ban-worthy books. I mean, I deeply dislike them for their blundering prose and teenaged sociopathic egoism promotion, but I wouldn't ban them.

My point is this-- we can mock districts like Collier County and their scattershot book restriction lists, bur the important point is that they are not going to stop, ever. Appeasement will not stop them. They will not at some future point run out of steam and consider their work done. They will never run out of books to be offended by, and even as they go even too farther and allies step away from them, they will not see that as a signal to maybe cool it.

It will never stop until someone (or maybe a bunch of someones) stands up to them, gets between them and the power to keep culling books, and makes it stop. I sure hope you voted today. 

Life Is Not A Cabaret, Old Chum

My wife, an enormously talented human being, performed in the local theater production of Cabaret last weekend. Of course, I went to see the show, despite the fact that it is a tough-edged piece of Kander-Ebb genius, a dark, hard show to watch, all the more so because it echoes the times we live in.

If you're only familiar with the movie version, well, that's a much gentler take on the stage show. In particular, it removes an entire subplot that makes the show's point far less subtle.

On stage, Sally Bowles is still there, wild and free and oblivious, somehow falling in with Cliff, also oblivious, but getting less so as the show progresses. He's American and she's British. When he arrives in Berlin at the show's opening, he's befriended by a pleasant German fellow, Ernst, who hooks Cliff up with an apartment in the building run by Fraulein Schneider. Missing from the film is the Fraulein's December-December romance with Herr Schulz, a businessman and a Jew. Their stories are interspersed with numbers in the Kit Kat Club, hosted by the Master of Ceremonies, who insures us that inside the club, everything is beautiful. 

Denial is a major theme of the work. Schneider deals with her prostitute boarder by just pretending that's not what's going on. Schulz insists that politics don't matter; it will all blow over. Cliff is smuggling contraband for Ernst, raising money for a good cause, and he doesn't ask what. The club is the heart of an endless wild party that ignores the outside world. And the audience is swept along--what fun songs! What delightful dancing!

But at the end of Act I, at Schneider and Schiltz's engagement party, Ernst stops by, takes off his overcoat, and we see that the good cause of this affable, friendly man is the Nazi party. He is happy to find his old friend about to be married late in her life--until he learns that Schultz is a Jew. "You must not marry him. It is for your own safety," he tells Schneider. And then the crowd signs "Tomorrow belongs to me," now clearly a Nazi anthem. End Act I.

Act II is brief and brutal. The engagement is broken, and while Cliff and Sally offer Fraulein Schneider cheery bromides about togetherness and standing up for what you believe, she asks them (and the audience) what would you do? Cliff, rocked by all of this, wants to take the now-pregnant Sally to America, but instead she retreats to the club. Introduced one last time by a Master of Ceremonies who is no longer saucy and confident, but is now hollowed out and resigned, introduces her one last time.

This is where the song "Cabaret" comes in, a song that is familiar as a happy upbeat piece--but only when taken wildly out of context. In context--well, this was the part in the show where I was almost brought to tears. It is an anthem to denial in the worst of times. "No use permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away" sounds great, unless the prophet is correct. And the verse, about her old friend Elsie, outlines her aspiration to be a happy, young corpse who dies while the party is still going on. And then, after the last note, she collapses on stage.

It's downhill all the way. Sally gets an abortion. Schultz moves out to make things easier for Schneider. He's still confident that he will be fine because this will all boil over and her is, after all, a German himself; we know that he's wrong. Cliff leaves for America, alone and with a story about the end of the world and Sally Bowles (that is, of course, the novel on which the theater piece is based). The Master of Ceremonies ushers the characters into the mists of oblivion, the stage goes dark, and here, at the end of the show, nobody applauds.

Cabaret is a subversive work. It's about people who party and play and entertain themselves into denial while doom and destruction gather around them, and as we in the audience figure that out, we can say "These foolish people. Who just plays in the face of obvious evil," but then we have to confront our own hands, applauding the characters for those actions. And it becomes increasingly more difficult. There's a fun number with a dancing kick line that turns into a goose step. The Master of Ceremonies shares a cute song and dance with a gorilla that ends with an ugly gut punch of anti-semitism. Do we applaud, or not? 

When the show was developed in the mid-sixties, Producer Harold Prince was aiming for a show that would provide gritty moral dilemmas that evoked the moral struggles of the time. 

The song "Cabaret" joins the small group of misconstrued songs in musicals (see also "One" from Chorus Line and the finale to Kander and Ebb's other genius show, Chicago), songs that in context are about exactly the opposite idea that casual listeners ascribe to them. The real central song of the show, for my money (and not just because my wife sang the hell out of it every time) is Fraulein Schneider's "What Would You Do?"

With time rushing by,
What would you do?

With the clock running down,
What would you do?
The young always have the cure-
Being brave, being sure
And free,
But imagine if you were me.
Alone like me,
And this is the only world you know.
Some rooms to let?
The sum of a lifetime, even so.

I'll take your advice.
What would you do?

Would you pay the price?
What would you do?

Suppose simply keeping still
Means you manage until the end?
What would you do,
My brave young friend?

Grown old like me,
With neither the will nor wish to run;
Grown tired like me,
Who hurries for bed when day is done;
Grown wise like me,
Who isn't at war with anyone?
Not anyone!

With a storm in the wind,
What would you do?

Suppose you're one frightened voice
Being told what the choice must be.

Go on; tell me,
I will listen.
What would you do?
If you were me?

But Fraulein Schneider is not the hero of the story, either. What does one do, when evil comes in affable, friendly, familiar form, and your biggest impulse is to dance or hunker down, to try to hide from the storm and hope, somehow, that you are or those you love are not swept away in it. To try to party and sing loudly enough that you can ignore the other voices. To stay at the cabaret and leave the world outside to its own end, as if, somehow, that would not be your end as well.

We live through a many times and tides, and it sucks that right now the tides in education are dark and ugly, and it would be nice if we could all go hang out at some club somewhere and waited for the tide to shift. But there is one other notable feature of Cabaret the show-- everyone in it is on their own, with no ties, no other people depending on them. In fact the events show them unable to form those bonds even when they want to. But people who work in service fields--teachers, health care workers, etc--have those responsibilities, those ties, and so there is no retreating to the club without abandoning those who depend on us. Which doesn't mean we're called on to be superhuman, but we can't just check out, either. 

Nor should the club be shut down forever. There is always light in our lives, sometimes more than others. But there is a huge difference between celebrating life and hiding from it because it's ugly, because it demands something hard from us. There is a big difference between celebrating what is bright and good and pretending that the brightness is all there is, ignoring the darkness and letting it fester or grow. 

It's something to see a show like this brought to life by friends and family; it's a show that could easily be performed as so much less than what it is. Theater is supposed to hold the mirror up to nature, and sometimes in the mirror we see our best selves and sometimes we can see that we've got spinach in our teeth and schmutz on our foreheads, and both are ways to help us find our better natures. 

Some lessons framed in history are hard and uncomfortable and unpleasant, but there is no way to find our better selves without them. And sometimes the cabaret isn't a party or dancing or debauchery, but a happy fairy tale about a past that never was, a past in which we can hide (and encourage the next generation to also hide) from uncomfortable truths about our failures, even as we fail to confront those failures by hiding in the cabaret instead and insisting that our country has always been a bright, delightful party.

That's not the way forward. That's not the way up. Life is not a cabaret.

ICYMI: Fall Back Edition (11/5)

Enjoying your extra hour? Or is this just a sneaky plot to leave us groggy and disoriented when elections roll around on Tuesday (in PA, anyway). Either way, I have some reading for you from the previous week.

I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

Heather Stark has a girl empowerment book series that she pitches at homeschooling conferences. She writes for Huffpost about the stuff she has encountered ("I am 20 minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me. 'When are you going to talk about God in all of this?' she asks.")

Moms for Liberty and Bible “Porn”

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at Moms for Liberty's relentless opposition to naughty books, and holds it up against one book with many naughty bits.

Moms for Liberty unexpectedly finds itself at the center of a heated suburban Indiana mayoral race

Speaking of the Moms, Isabella Volmert reports for the Associated Press on how they've turned up in a mayoral race. I'm not sure how unexpected it is, but the Democrat in the race is using his opposition to the Hitler-quoting chapter to improve his own chances.

School Choice is Becoming Involuntary Tithing

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at how states have started to "separate taxpayers from more money on behalf of churches." I do like "involuntary tithing" as a way to describe it.

The Undead "Invest In Kids" Act Creeps Back into the Capitol

Illinois's voucher law is scheduled to lapse soon, and so lots of voucher fans are doing their best to keep it shambling about in undead form. Julie Vassilatos writes about it. 

What are "evidence mills?"

Let's say you need some evidence so you can call your new program product "evidence-based." Is there a handy place to order up some evidence? Why, yes, yes there is.

Neenah school district will raise taxes by nearly 4% as cost of voucher program jumps 44%

This particular example is from Wisconsin, but it's the same old story-- more vouchers = higher local taxes and/or fewer local services.

What Happens When Teachers Aren't Valued?

You already know, but Andy Spears lays it out here.

Texas tried to fix its teacher shortage by lowering requirements − the result was more new teachers, but at lower salaries

At the Conversation, the unsurprising news that when you lower standards, pay goes down, and when pay goes down, people don't to meet rigorous standards, and your clever solution to a teacher :shortage" just makes things worse.

How Teacher Apprenticeship is Changing Teacher Preparation

Here's a thing they're trying in some places.

A Texas Billionaire’s Associates Are Trying to Sink a School Tax Election via Their Dark Money Nonprofit

Your list of rich guys trying to mess with education should include Tim Dunn of Texas. Here's just one example of his special brand of shenanigans, from ProPublica

Mike Miles has some explaining to do. Great teachers HISD shouldn't be afraid.

The editors of the Houston Chronicle like some of Mike Miles moves for his school takeover, but even they have noticed there are problems when you install a culture of fear.

School Board Elections Could Make (or Break) Our Democracy

From The Progressive, a reminder that elections have consequences--even school board elections. Please pay attention.

Truth & Liberty Coalition expands culture war to 30 Colorado school boards

Steve Ravey at Religion News reports on the advance of Christian Nationalism in Colorado.

This Extremist Group Calls Itself A 'Parental Rights' Org. Now It's Targeting School Boards In 1 Key State.

Nathalie Baptiste breaks down Moms for Liberty's attempt to get a foothold in Pennsylvania. (I'm sure it has nothing to do with Pennsylvania's being a swing state for 2024.) I hope people are paying attention next Tuesday.

Will Adding Even More Vouchers Improve SUFS’s Customer Service?

Florida's voucher program is starting to collapse under its own weight. Sue Kingery Woltanski doubts that adding more weight will be a big help. 

Same Monkeys At the Wheel

TC Weber breaks down the latest school evaluation monkeyshines in Tennessee.

A Reflection on the Network for Public Education’s 10th Anniversary Conference

Jan Resseger presents some highlights from the Network for Public Education conference.

Grade Retention is Unnecessary!

Nancy Bailey looks at the ever-popular bad policy of retention for students who fail a reading test.

SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver Addresses School Librarians

Steve Nuzum looks at South Carolina's ed chief's address to school librarians, in all its counterfactual threatening awfulness.

A Tennessee high school let a Christian preacher lead the basketball team in foot-washing

Oh boy.

What Happens When Young People Actually Read “Disturbing” Books

A new study (admittedly a bit narrow) sees what happens if you just let middle schoolers just pick whatever they want to read.

Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback — but it never went away

A quick guide to some of the common themes of fake history.

The Great Social Media–News Collapse

At the Atlantic (beware the paywall) an analysis of what readers and big tech have done to news reporting.

At Forbes this week, I looked at a really interesting free market argument against vouchers, and a group out there trying to combat Moms for Liberty. 

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Rules and Charter Innovation (A Paired Text Exercise)

It's an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn't make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they're full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.

So let's pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as "laboratories of innovation," charter schools haven't come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of. 

But the "study" of the relationship between innovation and regulation comes from two guys who are not exactly unbiased. Jay Greene was previously of the University of Arkansas, where he was occasionally willing to hit reformsters with uncomfortable truths; nowadays he's at the Heritage Foundation, where his job is to push preferred policies. Joining him is Corey DeAngelis, the education dudebro logging many miles across the country as he lobbies hard for Bety DeVos's American Federation for Children. I'm old enough to remember when someone could have a civil conversation with DeAngelis on line, but these days "attack dog" and "unleasher of troll pack" seems to be part of his job description. Ian Kingsbury is also in on this; he previously worked for cyber school giant Stride (formerly K12) and the Empire Center; these days he's a senior fellow at the Education Freedom Institute ("Protecting and promoting school choice"). DeAngelis is the EFI executive director, and Greene is the Managing Senior Fellow. 

In short, this is a trio of people whose profession is pushing school choice.

A caveat here--the article is in Educational Research and Evaluation, part of the family of Taylor and Francis journals, and if I want to read the whole article, it'll cost me $50. That is far outside the Institute's budget of $0.00, so I'll be working strictly second hand here.

To "study" the relationship between regulations and innovation, they had to come up with a way to quantify innovatiness, so this is what they did. They considered five factors: the pedagogical approaches used to teach that academic content; the types of students they sought to serve; whether they delivered that education in person, virtually, or with a mixed approach; and whether they had a specialized theme, such as technology, art, or the environment. The judged 1,261 charter schools by cruising their websites and seeing how they stacked up on those five dimensions. That gave each school an innovation rating.

Having manufactured the innovation rating, they stacked those up beside state ratings from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), which the researchers see as based on how heavily regulated charters are in the state. 

Aha! they declared. The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it's simple--more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.

Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying "innovation" gives the charter points for being unusual, and that's problematic:

From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).

And he doesn't think "innovation" means what they think it means either, noting that many of their "innovations" aren't particularly new but instead include "longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene)." (That is Griffith's snark there, not mine).

So do they really mean "programmatic diversity"? Griffith says no, because their system really measures

how similar a particular state’s charter sector is to the national charter sector (rather than how many different types of schools a state’s charter sector includes). Which simply isn’t the same thing as diversity or innovation, no matter how much the authors may want it to be.

And some of that variation, he points out, can simply be a factor of location or the student population being served. New Jersey will not have the kind of rural-serving charters that Idaho might have, for reasons having nothing to do with regulation.

In short, Griffith finds their whole design junk.

All of which makes it hard to swallow the authors’ claim in a recent National Review article that “we know heavy charter regulation has this negative effect on diversity and innovation in the charter sector because we actually measured it in our new peer-reviewed study.”

No, we don’t. No, they didn’t. And the mere fact that a study is “peer reviewed” doesn’t mean it should be taken seriously.

All of which I agree with wholeheartedly. And it's a special day when I don't have to dismantle a reformster "study" because a Fordham guy gets there first.