FL: Higher Education Nightmare

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has issued a report from a special committee--Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System--and it is both thorough and alarming.

The report comes in several sections, opening with an introduction that marks the rise of Ron DeSantis and his anti-woke agenda, which in turn led to the creation of this special committee back at the beginning of 2023. It issued a preliminary report back in May, with four main findings: 

(1) the “hostile takeover” of New College is both a “test case” and a “blueprint for future encroachments on public colleges and universities across the country”; (2) academic administrators in Florida “not only have failed to contest” attacks on the system “but have too frequently been complicit in and, in some cases, explicitly supported them”; (3) legislation enacted by Governor DeSantis and the legislature, “taken collectively, constitutes a systematic effort to dictate and enforce conformity with a narrow and reactionary political and ideological agenda” and represents “a uniquely bold and dangerous program designed to reshape public higher education according to ideological and partisan political standards”; and (4) “the chilling effect on academic freedom of the governor’s and legislature’s efforts has already been felt by faculty and students.”

This final report says, "Yes, all that and more."

It's a long report, and I'm not going to dive deeply into all of it. But some lowlights are worth noting because, as always, Florida is in the front of the pack when it comes to repressive education policies.

The New College Saga

If you only sort of paid attention to this story as it unrolled, the report has it all collected into one coherent narrative. It matters because, as one resigning professor put it, "This is a test case for a conservative overhaul of higher education—and it isn’t going to stay isolated to New College or Florida."

DeSantis appointed new board members including Matthew Spalding (Hillsdale College), Charles Kesler (Claremont McKenna College), and Christopher Rufo (that guy). Chaos ensued. President was axed, tenure denied, DeSantis buddy Richard Corcoran installed as president. Faculty were fired, seemingly for being critical of the new board. More Faculty left, and Rufo et al chortled over the routing of "the old system of unfettered left-wing activism." Also, "New College will no longer be a jobs program for middling left-wing intellectuals."

One weird development-- New College began heavily recruiting athletes, even though it had never previously had intercollegiate athletics programs. Corcoran pushed a "classical" liberal arts focus, but also majors in finance, communications, and sports psychology. Course offerings became a messy hodgepodge fraught with gaps. 

And if the college isn't a jobs program for middling left-wing intellectuals, it does seem to be a jobs program for DeSantis loyalists. Deam Rancourt, new dean of student affairs, has been a GOP operative, a lobbyist, state director of elections, and deputy secretary of state, but he has experience in higher ed. Sydney Gruters is director of the New College of Florida Foundation; she's a former GOP aid and wife of state senator Joe Gruters (Florida loves its power couples). The newly minted athletics program has hired coaches only from Christian schools. And hostility to LGBTQ persons seems to be college policy as well.

This section of the report concludes

It may seem cynical, but the faculty leader who told the committee that the real goals of the New College takeover were but three—to reward Corcoran, provide a platform for Rufo, and fuel the culture war against the “woke”—may not have been all that far from the truth.

Academic Governance in Florida Higher Education

The state university system is overseen by a seventeen member board of governors; the governor gets to pick fourteen of them; this board in turn operates over individual boards for the universities. The report finds cronyism and pay to play a big piece of this picture. 

It is not simply that the entire board of governors (excluding the faculty and student representatives) and the great majority of trustees are now Republicans. What is most striking is that so many appointees are former political officeholders and professional political operatives. The board’s increasing tendency has been to follow the lead of the governor and his allies in the legislative supermajority. As one veteran faculty member at the University of Florida told the committee, previous board members, regardless of party, understood their role to be ensuring that the universities they led were thriving. Members of the current group, he continued, are concerned principally with their relationships with the governor.

Thern there's Senate Bill 520, signed into law by DeSantis in March of 2022, which creates sunshine law exemptions for candidates for state university presidencies. So that process, which has produced hires like Corcoran; and former senator Ben Sasse; and GOP legislator, DeSantis buddy and former rodeo clown Fred Hawkins

DeSantis doesn't much care for accrediting agencies ("The role that these accreditation agencies play, I don't even know where they come from.") He signed a bill requiring colleges to change accrediting agencies regularly. “Accreditation has become a target in red states and by right-wing politicians because they’ve learned that robust and well-regarded accreditation presents a barrier to their attempts to inject partisan politics into higher education,” AAUP president Irene Mulvey has stated. “They are dragging accreditors into this to dismantle that barrier.”

Academic Freedom

You can guess where this is headed. You may recall the flap in 2021 when University of Florida administration tried to block faculty members from providing expert testimony against the proposed voter suppression law. The administration ultimately lost that one, though the judge noted that "preemptive subservience" was in play--maybe the state didn't directly order them to do it, but in Florida, everyone now understands that their job is to keep DeSantis happy. 

The report does note that Florida has a long history of this kind of trouble.

In a move familiar to those of us in the K-12 world, DeSantis and the GOP have worked hard to erode tenure, with DeSantis calling “unproductive” tenured professors the “most significant deadweight costs” at Florida universities. To that end, Florida's legislature has keep working on "post-tenure review" aka "ending tenure entirely." Various versions of such policies have included scary ideas like challenging tenure of someone who gets too many complaints from students.

And of course they've tried their best to weaken the unions.

Bias and Discrimination

The report opens this section with some historical background on Florida's treatment of minority and LGBTQ persons. It has not been good. Segregated community colleges weren't integrated until 1966. Courts found that Florida was not meeting its requirement to desegregate higher ed as recently as 1977.

Much has been written about the Stop WOKE Act and other attempts to suppress teaching about racism or tolerance in Florida; this report offers some of the details from higher ed. The complaint is the same old one, sincere or opportunistic-- diversity, equity and inclusion are used “as cover words for transforming institutions of higher education into activist arms of the American left.”

At New College, gender neutral signage is banned. There are bathroom rules, and-- well, yikes. The State Board approved a new rule in August requiring disciplinary action for employees who do not use the bathroom corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth.

Colleges can under the rule “utilize a progressive discipline process” for first offenders, including “verbal warnings, written reprimands, suspension without pay, and termination.” However, “a second documented offense must result in a termination.”

The Human Toll

No job is worth selling out everyone below you.

—Dawn Rothe, professor of criminology and UFF-FAU president, Florida Atlantic University

My responsibilities to my students far outweigh Governor DeSantis’s presidential ambitions.

—Jeffrey Adler, professor of history and criminology, University of Florida

These governmental attacks from the State of Florida have made us unsafe.

—Carolyne Ali-Khan, associate professor of education, University of North Florida

The brain drain, both from red states in general and Florida in particular, is already the subject of news stories. This report captures more of that. New College lost 40% of its faculty, and other institutions are anticipating higher than usual turnover. An AAUP survey found that 95% of responding profs call Florida's political atmosphere "poor" or "very poor." 85% said they would not encourage grad students or professors in other states to come to Florida. 

For the folks pushing these policies, of course, the brain drain is a feature, not a bug. They are chasing away exactly the people they want to chase away.

Whether more restrictive bills can be passed or not is beside the point, as faculty members said that "the damage is done" and "they are already witnessing a culture of fear, censorship, and surveillance in their workplaces." And that carries over to students, too, especially LGBTQ students and students of color. Florida's universities have become a place where it hard for some people to live their lives, let alone pursue an education.

The Wrap-Up

The report wants to stress--really stress--that this is not just a Florida problem, but a soon-to-be-everyone-else's problem. It's worth noting that most of the new board members for New College are from out of state. 

The narrative that is driving this reactionary movement is not a local one. Rufo and others have articulated it before: the long-haired marxist radicals of the sixties decided they'd spend the seventies capturing universities and other institutions, thereby indoctrinating a generation of Americans in their evil socialist ways. That narrative dovetails with the one about how if young people are LGBTQ or voting against conservative policies, it must be because someone Got To Them, and we need to recapture those tools of indoctrination and have them indoctrinate youths the right way teach youths the true truth. Which also unfortunately dovetails well with the Dominionist cause.

I won't lie-- I don't always relate to the concerns of college professors, who seem to enjoy a lot more power and prestige in their institutions than folks working in the K-12 world. But it would be foolish to pretend that this attempt to gut higher ed and restuff it with conservative fluff isn't directly related to the K-12 world. What the hell does "college and career ready" even mean in a country where The New New College is what's ahead? And what happens to K-12 in a country in which this brand of right-wing indoctrination is what "education" means? 

We'll see what happens when DeSantis must finally face his destiny as another Florida governor who tried to ride to the White House on education issues, and failed miserably. But even if he fades back into the woodwork, folks are taking notes on his revision of education, and the rest of the states had better pay attention.

Choice v. Social Justice and Equity

One more sign that the pre-Trump alliance between choicers and social justice folks has completely blown up.

Jason Bedrick is a school choice guy at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, with a bit of EdChoice (The Friedman Foundation) in his past. I have a soft spot for him because he was once a New Hampshire legislator (so was my grandmother), and it's possible to have a civil exchange with him on line, but I'd bet we've never agreed on anything.

In this recent piece, he argues against DEI and wokeness, which is to be expected. He also rails against the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which is a bit more interesting.

Charter school authorizers are the folks who decide whether a charter school gets to exist or not. When charter boosters of the pre-Trump era argued that the deal was that charters would get autonomy in return for accountability, part of the accountability picture was supposed to be authorizers, who would make sure that a charter school delivered on its promise and decide if they could open, expand, or get shut down.. 

In "Charter Schools Must Avoid the DEI Blunder," Bedrick suggests that NASCA is a bunch of bossy lefties. To set that up, he starts by going full MAGA

A key reason many parents are fleeing the traditional public system is the concern that schools are indoctrinating students in radical “woke” ideology. Parents are watching as the left-wing ideologies clothed in the mantra of diversity, equity, and inclusion spread like wildfire across America's schools.

That's doing a lot of work. Are many parents fleeing? Do we have some reason to believe that those fleeing parents are freaking out about wokey stuff? Is DEI both a sneaky costume for wokey stuff and also a wildfire? But all of that is just a stepping stone to his main point, which is that a "prominent organization is working overtime" to force public [sic] charter schools to get all wokey. 

That organization is NACSA, the "publicly subsidized kingmaker in the charter school world." "Publicly subsidized" is an odd elbow to throw, since charters and vouchers and all the school choice options out there are publicly subsidized, but it seems to be aimed at painting NACSA with the same MAGA red brush used on the public school system.

NACSA believes that it is the true “expert” in determining what’s best for children, so it favors a regulatory approach that prioritizes its own judgment over parents' in deciding when charters should be opened, expanded, or closed.

NACSA has a "technocratic agenda" and DEI is an "integral part." And in states where that technocratic approach holds sway, NACSA favors "stronger adherence to liberal politics." 

Compelling schools of choice to adopt DEI principles is a bad policy on its merits. Parents, rather than “experts,” should be entrusted to determine what is best for their children.

This again. Of course, parents should be involved, but becoming a parent does not make one virtuous and wise. And it's unfortunate that in picking apart DEI policies, Bedrick focuses on race-related items.

Bedrick argues that ESA-style vouchers are better because they have even less oversight and accountability and are, in a phrase popular in the movement, permissionless (aka with accountability to nobody). It's a tell that we are in the Very Libertarian wing of choicer thought. 

There's more, most of it familiar, but it was his finish that really caught my attention.

A NACSA director once tweeted , “School choice for school choice’s sake is completely misguided … social justice and equity are the GOAL not some political tactic.” NACSA’s insistence on technocracy and DEI demonstrate why choice for choice’s sake must, in fact, be the goal.

It's one more explicit display of the fault line along which the great bipartisan pre-Trumpian choicer partnership fell apart. The left-tilted side of that deal was convinced that choice was a good thing, or at least tolerable, because it could deliver better education to students "trapped" in struggling public schools. But for the right-tilted side, that was never the point, not even a consideration. Choice for choice sake. Freedom and liberty. And if the taxpayer's money and students' time was wasted on a marketplace full of crappy schools--oh, well. 

Choice was--and is--the key value. Meaning an individual's choice. Meaning choice from among whatever few or many options that individual might have. Meaning your choices (or lack of them) are not my problem, and it's certainly not my responsibility to make more choices available to you. 

The most conventional explanation is that the alliance fell apart because, with Obama out and Trump in, an alliance with neoliberal Democrats was no longer necessary for folks on the right, and no longer tolerable for folks on the left who were not willing touch anything with MAGA smell on it (some on the right also balked, for about fifteen minutes. 

But nice direct, clear pieces like this one from Bedrick are a reminder of how far apart those two sides really were, and how much of a strain it was for them to ever team up in the first place.

 

 

Let's Do The PISA Panic Dance

Is there anything in education particularly useful or illuminating in the scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in this (or any) year?

Short answer: 

No. 

Long answer: 

Time for the PISA Panic Dance. You will hear, as always, that the US is woefully low in the rankings. We have always been low in these test scores gleaned from fifteen year olds. In fact, because everyone took some big hits this time, we actually climbed a bit. But we're still woefully low. 

Expect to hear from the usual suspects declaring that the woefully low ranking of the US is a monumental crisis of cosmic proportions and therefor we should rush to implement [insert name of the same policy that they push every other day of the week here]. 

Expect plenty of chicken littling. If you care to respond...

Long response to cries of "Our PISA rank is low! Our PISA rank is low!":

Do you have a research based context for your alarms? What can you tell me about the comparison-- is it between similar student populations, or do certain countries only test certain student populations? Additionally, can you cite any research that ties the PISA rankings to specific real-world outcomes for nations. For instance, Estonia routinely ranks high on these lists--in what areas do you believe Estonia is outpacing the US, and how would raising our PISA scores help counterbalance that?  

For instance, one authority says this: "Since a high ranking on PISA corresponds to economic success, researchers have concluded that PISA is one of the indicators of whether school systems are preparing students for the 21st-century global knowledge economy." Can you explain the difference between correlation and causation?

Short response to cries of "Our PISA rank is low! Our PISA rank is low!":

So what?

Okay, there are a couple of other pieces of data highlighted in the New York Times coverage that may shake up the usual PISA Panic Dance (despite the fact that NYT uses the "lost equivalent of three-quarters of a year" baloney). For instance, the US "lost less ground" aka "test score points" than some European nations that "prioritized opening schools more quickly." PISA also didn't find an increase in the gap between US highest and lowest students. 

But it's the final paragraph of Sarah Mervosh's article that is most concerning.

On other measures, the United States stood out for having more children living with food insecurity (13 percent, compared with an average of 8 percent in other O.E.C.D. countries), more students who are lonely at school (22 percent, versus 16 percent) and more students who do not feel safe at school (13 percent, versus 10 percent).

Here's hoping that someone in the education policy world chooses to stop the PISA Panic Dance long enough to look these data and declares that we should do something about them. Instead of worrying about our international bragging rights, maybe we could focus on the lives of the young human beings in our schools. That would be worth a real dance.

 

The Ziegler Story and the Trouble with Hypocrisy

Yes, we've heard the story. How could we not? It has been everywhere in the education space and the Florida news space and the people who are sick of culture warrior right wingers space. And I understand the impulse behind the social media memes, dark jokes, the general dance of schadenfreude.

But here's what we need to remember.

At the center of this story is a rape (alleged). In the aftermath, a woman so afraid that she wouldn't leave her home for two days. And while the police and media have dutifully withheld her name, there are enough details circulating that I expect every person in Sarasota County knows exactly who this woman is. 

They certainly know Christian Ziegler (Florida GOP chieftain) and his wife Bridget (Moms for Liberty co-founder, Leadership Institute director of school board program). They're supposed to be a rising power couple, with ties to lots of powerful Florida folks. Before Moms for Liberty, Bridget co-founded a conservative school board group with Erika Donalds, half of another big Florida power couple. 

For a simply layout of the facts, the police interviews, the pertinent documents, head over to the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, who has it all. It's all disturbing, right down to the detail that Christian Ziegler walked into the building at 2:29 and walked out at 3:07.

Nobody really appears to have denied anything--not the three-way a year ago, not the events surrounding the alleged rape. The only point of dispute is whether the sex in October of this year was consensual or not. 

Many have noted that we're only paying attention because the Zieglers have appointed themselves the morality police for so many others, and that's partly true, but I really want to hope that no matter what the surrounding circumstances, "GOP party chief allegedly rapes longtime friend" would be considered newsworthy all by itself. 

But the thruple sex. The fact that the victim was "mostly in for her" meaning Bridget. The extramarital aspect. This is the stuff that would get filed in the "consenting adults will do their thing" file if not for Bridget Ziegler's entire political career of castigating consenting adults, her heavy-handed help in creating and supporting "Don't Say Gay." 

And as a board president--remember when member Tom Edwards finally walked out of a meeting after the gazzillionth time of being publicly attacked for being gay. The actual moment was when a woman was attacking Edwards, the crowd was booing her, and Ziegler shushed the crowd and told them to let her finish speaking. This was in March of 2023, so roughly five months after she had gotten naked with another woman and her husband. 

Moms For Liberty at first tweeted out an indignant "How dare people pick on another powerful conservative woman" but seem now to have shifted to "You know she wasn't a M4L officer when she was doing all this, right?" Some days I imagine that Moms for Liberty leaders have permanent facial creases from slapping their foreheads as they cry, "She did what??!!" This Ziegler news comes right alongside a breaking story of M4L boosting a racist Christmas event from a racist group. 

Adam Laats called this long ago--a group like M4L inevitably has trouble controlling its message, falling prey to everything from attracting really out there members to local leaders who forget not to say the quiet parts out loud. And the Zieglers join an uncountably long list of people who are eager to impose their morality on others who turn out to have trouble following it themselves.

But people who holler "Hypocrites" and point loudly will be disappointed as well. Hypocrisy never, ever carries the kind of punch some folks expect it to.

That's mostly because hypocrisy as we understand it-- believing something but violating that belief yourself--is really, really rare. Yeti riding a unicorn while pooping rainbows rare.

We diagnose hypocrisy by observing, "That person is condemning A and doing B, and A and B are the same thing! Hypocrite!" But what's really happening is that for the alleged hypocrite, A and B are not the same at all. They see a critical difference between the two, and if you want to understand them better, try to see what difference they think they see, even if you don't believe it's there. This phenomenon is not reserved for villains; it's a basic human mechanism, a way that we make peace with the times we don't quite live up to our own standards. 

At any rate, the Zieglers may pay a price for all this mess. Christian is facing down noise from his own party  (thought not all), and Bridget is getting some bad press. But dealing with this kind of storm is what Christian Ziegler does damage control for a living, and it's not hard to see a pathway out of this for the couple. Christian is already declaring the sex consensual, so no rape, no crime. And the three-way sex? Consenting adults and nobody else's business, which is true, and I'm going to make my prediction now that there will be an argument somewhere along the lines of Bridget Ziegler didn't do gay stuff because A) her husband was there and B) it just a one-time adventure, and so she is completely not like all those terrible LGBTQ people who still should not be mentioned anywhere around impressionable young people. 

Furthermore, Bridget isn't accused of raping anyone. And Moms for Liberty has already invoked "She wasn't with us at the time." 

In other words, if you think this whole mess is going to knock the Zieglers out of power, I suspect you are in for some disappointment. If you think some key folks are going to realize that there is something rotten at the heart of the values by which they operate--well, I'm betting not. 

There will be some jousting in the days ahead. Damage control comes in two types-- the type that's for limiting and minimizing damage from a crisis, and the type that's about maximizing and targeting damage form a crisis, and most of our modern political crises are battles between those two forces. And it would be a positive thing for Bridget Ziegler to lose power (and in so doing cut power of the Florida branch of MAGA-dom), but she has the easiest path out of this by simply disassociating herself from her husband. 

It would all be interesting in a sad, horse-racey, political gamesmanship kind of way, if it weren't that the central (alleged) crime is a rape, a violation of a long-time friendship so traumatizing that a woman was afraid to leave her home for two days. 

ICYMI: Bonus Week Edition (12/3)

Every so often, Thanksgiving comes so early that we get what amounts to an extra week between Thanksgiving and Christmas. An excellent opportunity to get some additional procrastination in, if that's your thing.

In the meantime, here's some reading from the week. Share the stuff that strikes you as important.

Texas teachers are struggling financially. The school voucher war killed a salary raise. Texas teachers are struggling financially. The school voucher war killed a salary raise.

It's great that Texas legislators killed--repeatedly--the voucher proposal in that state. But Governor Abbott and his crew were holding teacher wage increases hostage, and now they are collateral damage.

Reasons Children Have Reading Problems that Corporate Reformers Don’t Talk About

Nancy Bailey takes a look at some of the destructive policies that reformsters aren't rushing to fix.

The Problem With How You Discuss Reading

Jose Luis Vilson doesn't write often enough these days, but he's a busy man. Here he explains what the conversations about reading keep missing.

Teachers say they can't live and work in Florida anymore

"Our job description is to instruct children and make sure that they're learning in a safe and comfortable environment, which is becoming increasingly difficult for no reason." By Nancy Guan for WUSF

Mysterious woman tells school board that Scholastic book sparked porn addiction

A right wing publisher really wants to push aside Scholastic in the school book fair biz. Turns out the publisher will go to extraordinary lengths to do it. Amazing story from Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information.

The Bogus Historians Who Teach Evangelicals They Live in a Theocracy

An excerpt from Tim Alberta's upcoming book about the Christian right, examining the issues they raise from an evangelical's point of view.

Ryan Walters continues efforts to join fight against AG's lawsuit over Catholic charter school approval

Colleen Wilkson for Fox25 looks at Ryan Walters's continued attempts to back the religious charter school proposed in Oklahoma.

Kentucky reaches a new low in white Christian nationalism

Teri Carter offers a first hand account of what happened when a Kentucky preacher told his followers to get to a school board meeting because the school had turned a young girl gay.

Pennridge School Board Bickering Comes To An End As Republicans Exit The Board

The conservatives of this Pennsylvania school board were ousted, so as expected, Jordan Adams and his one-man dewokifying consulting firm are out of work. 

Expect Georgia lawmakers to push school vouchers again with fake sympathy for the poor

Veteran journalist Jay Bookman has a pretty clear understanding of what school vouchers are about, and he lays it out clearly in this op-ed for the Georgia Recorder.

'Conservative education revolution': Tennessee leaders push statewide school vouchers

Tennessee wants to join the universal voucher crew. This report by Emily West and Chris Davis for NewsChannel 5 sums up the issues pretty clearly. 

Knoxville legislative and school board officials divided on school vouchers

A GOP rep speaks out against vouchers-- because they might fund some of that there Islamic education.

The Looming Danger to Rural Schools

Jess Piper on how the threat of growing privatization poses a major threat to the health and future of rural schools.

Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading

At the New York Times, Jessica Grose explains how the advent of online grading has turned into a nightmare for some teachers and families.

PROOF POINTS: The myth of the quick learner

Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report looks at a study that suggests that there's no such thing as a fast learner. Bad news for the "we'll recover from Learning Loss with accelerated learning" crowd.

California's new anti-fraud charter school task force will convene for the first time in San Diego Monday

California suffered charter school fraud (the infamous A3 case) so huge that they now have a task force set up to avoid a repeat. Kristen Taketa at the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Purge of LGBTQ+ Children's Books for a Kansas Public Library is "Deeply Disturbing."

PENAmerica has one more scary story from St. Mary's, Kansas.

Colorado conservatives call for law enforcement action to ban books

In El Paso County, Republicans (and a local pastor) are calling for the law enforcement to remove some books and arrest some folks. Kyle Clark reports for 9News.

Book Bans Erase the Stories that Affirm Students’ Identities

Jan Resseger looks at the Robert Samuels essay about being censored, and examines the question of who really gets hurt when books are banned.

For Republican Governors, Civics Is the Latest Education Battleground

Dana Goldstein at New York Times with latest developments in the drive for conservative attempted indoctrination of students.

Propaganda from The 74 and University of Arkansas

There's another "study" out showing that charter schools are awesome. Except, as Thomas Ultican explains, it doesn't really show any such thing. 

Dark Headspace—and Teaching

Nancy Flanagan walks us through a brief history of manufactured education crises. 

Lost in Translation: Science of Reading Edition

Paul Thomas looks at how journalism has this tendency to lose the truth of the science when turning it into something that sells a story. 

In Forbes this week, I look back at that long-ago time that school choice promised accountability, and the many ways that promise has been broken.

And you're invited to join me on substack, where you are connected to everything I crank out, regardless of where. It's free and easy.

Is Cardona Getting Off Easy

Rick Hess is still bothered by the double standard he sees in Secretary of Education coverage, arguing that "Media Should Stop Giving Secretary of Education Cardona a Free Pass" noting that the non-coverage of Cardona's various fumbles stands in stark contrast to the constant pillorying to which Betsy DeVos was subjected.

The double-standard is striking. Just a few years ago, when Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, the smallest of missteps (real or imagined) yielded overwrought coverage at these same outlets.

Hess has argued before that DeVos got a raw deal, and I wrote a long response to that. Heck, I wrote a lot about DeVos, partly because I find her kind of fascinating--we're the same age, and for someone who has spent most of his life in churchworld, she is a recognizable type. DeVos was worked over by the mainstream media in ways that weren't particularly accurate or fair; in particular, the use of her as a comic punchline painting her as a dope were unfair. 

It did not help that she was uniformly terrible at articulating her ideas. From her terrible confirmation hearing appearance to her terrible 60 Minutes interview to her various terrible Congressional hearing appearances, DeVos showed that thirty years of practicing checkbook politics really doesn't prepare you to make your case to people who are not either already in agreement with you or hope to be beholden to you. She was the queen of the non-answer, which added to the myth of her dopiness. I've argued before that the real explanation is some combination of her checkbook advocacy past and her conservative Christianist faith. She was also a good soldier for Trump, and spent some time looking at the underside of his bus.

But let's face it. Far fewer people were interested in understanding DeVos when it was easier to just hate her.

Hess wants to argue that she was a mostly-unknown outside-the-box candidate that was held to a double standard; he suggested that Miguel Cardona was not being held accountable for Connecticut schools in the same way DeVos was blamed for Michigan and Detroit's schools. But there is no double standard there. Cardona has barely been in office a year. Hess argues that DeVos never held a position of authority in Michigan, but that's disingenuous--DeVos spent decades using her fortune to bend Michigan lawmakers to her will. Remember this classic DeVos quote on her family's political spending:

I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.

Betsy DeVos deserves plenty of blame for her failed experiments in Michigan. But as Secretary of Education, she was largely ineffective. Yes, given her disdain for everything that she was set in charge of, DeVos did remarkably little real damage during her tenure; her ineffectiveness mitigated her worse instincts. But she came to the job brandishing an axe and a flamethrower, and people inside the education bubble reacted accordingly.

Miguel Cardona came to DC brandishing nothing in particular. He entered the office with lukewarm reactions from all sides of education debates. Hess points out that DeVos was met with "blistering attacks before she'd said a word," but of course DeVos had said plenty already as a private citizen with a deep disrespect for the institution she was being put in charge of. Cardona came to office with an unspectacular career working in the trenches. 

Cardona's department has announced various initiatives that are mostly--well, I called one a "bold bowl of oatmeal," a program so lacking luster that I wrote about it in April and then again in November because in the interim I had pretty much forgotten all about it. When it came to a "major speech" about the teacher exodus, I had this to say:

But teachers are kind of up against it at the moment, and a nothingburger of "We're going to do some more supportive stuff kind of like we've been doing all along, only maybe with more money"-- It's nice that Cardona notices and makes some of the right noises, but the plan doesn't really rise to the level of specific, concrete actions that can help.

Oatmeal. Nothingburger. Bureaucratic argle bargle. Sticking to the neo-lib party line on testing. The occasional really bad tweet. And the hook that Hess hangs his piece on--Cardona's bungling of a Ronald Reagan sort-of-quote. And Hess has a further list of missteps that he wants publicly assigned to Cardona's feet.

While in office, Cardona has aggressively carried the water for the administration’s unconstitutional $500 billion student loan “forgiveness” scheme, approached that same scheme in a shambolic manner that the Government Accounting Office found rife with possibilities for fraud, been notably quiescent as $200 billion in federal pandemic aid failed to deliver any obvious benefits, mounted an assault on charter schools, mutely watched as chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, and repeatedly stonewalled Congressional efforts to provide appropriate oversight.

I'm not sure Cardona has ever "aggressively" done anything. The "assault" on charter schools was simply putting some basic accountability rules in place (and I suspect that those rules have not actually impeded the flow of federal tax dollars to charter operators). The stonewall complaint is more about the loan forgiveness that conservatives really hate. Hess also nods elsewhere to low test scores for history and civics happening on Cardona's watch, and it's true that Cardona's response was more oatmeal. 

Has Cardona coverage been both less frequent and more gentle than what DeVos received? I have no doubts. Right-tilted media has tried to gin up some panic over his far left inclinations, but to little effect. And Cardona is never going to win that sector over-- he will always be either to ineffective or overstepping his boundaries. The far right has been clear that they want the entire department gone, so Cardona has to know that nothing he does will meet with their approval.

It may be that Cardona's secret super power is that he's a kind of boring bureaucratic functionary. I think it's more likely that the Department of Education in particular and education in general has never drawn much attention or interest from news organizations, where education coverage is both slim and also a stepping stone to a "real" beat. When education manages to penetrate the larger culture, it's for seemingly random inaccurate details. Betsy DeVos and her guns for bears are of a piece with jokes about Common Core math or, from decades earlier, jokes about New Math--neither entirely fair nor exactly accurate. People and media don't pay attention to education unless there's some special show going on to attract their attention (much to the frustration of many of us writing about education). DeVos provided a show. Cardona does not. DeVos was loud and threatening. Cardona is not.

Cardona is not a great Secretary of Education (I'm not sure there has ever been or will ever be one). But his bold oatmeal is never going to prompt the same sort of reaction as Betsy DeVos and her flamethrower. Nor do I think there's any reason to wish that he got as much unfair and inaccurate coverage as she did. I'd be happy to see him draw more scrutiny, and draw it for matters of substance rather than dopey quotes. I'd also be happy to see some of my hair grow back. But I'm not going to hold my breath for either. 

The Semi-Annual Attempt To Legalize Religious Discrimination

My U.S. Representative, used car dealer and insurrection apologist Mike Kelly, announced this week that he and Senator Tim Scott (who's now got some extra time on his hands) have introduced the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. What's that about? Here's the description:

This legislation protects child welfare providers from being discriminated against for acting in accordance with their deeply held religious beliefs and prohibits federal, state and local government agencies that receive federal adoption assistance funding from discriminating against child welfare service providers based on the providers’ unwillingness to take action contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.

In other words, if you are a religious agency that handles adoptions or foster care placements, the feds should not pick on you just because you refuse to deal LGBTQ children or parents.  

The legislators backing this frame it as the mean federal government picking on "faith-based organizations" and thereby depriving children in need, somehow depriving them of loving homes. "President Biden has discriminated against these faith-based providers," says Kelly, "because of their deeply held religious beliefs." And discrimination is bad, unless you're discriminating against LGBTQ persons. Then it's a religious necessity. 

I don't know who they blamed for this anti-religion discrimination when the same bill was proposed in 2017 under then-President Trump. Ditto when Kelly proposed it in 2019l surely he didn't declare the bill was necessary because of Dear Leader. Scott and Kelly also sponsored the same bill in 2021, decrying the religious discrimination as an "attack on the First Amendment." 

The bill appears semi-annually, like a insomniac locust, draws a bunch of religious oppression rhetoric, and then is quietly retired. 

The rationale is a familiar one at this point--some folks just can't properly and fully exercise their christianish faith unless they are free to discriminate against certain people of whom they disapprove. This always strikes me as a bizarre notion. If you think you can't fully and effectively follow and glorify Jesus unless you are able to treat some people badly, I have to believe that you are doing Christianity wrong. 

Perhaps the only point here is to be able to issue some press releases so that you can earn some points from the evangelical right. The whole business strikes me as an exercise in bad legislating and bad religion. Whatever it is, it certainly is no way to look out for children.