OK: Ed Secretary Ryan Walters' Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Year

To wrap up the year, Education Dudebro Ryan Walters has been subpoenaed by House members of his own party to explain what the hell is going on in the department of education under his leadership.

Once upon a time, Walters was a history teacher, and pretty good at it by many accounts. But his trek to the higher levels of Oklahoma politics has been accompanied by lurch into MAGAville, where he somehow became a chosen buddy of Governor Stitt. That's despite the fact that he mismanaged a bunch of federal relief funds in an attempt to boost vouchers. He tried to make an example out of a school librarian who let students, you know, read books.

Once Walters was elected to the State Superintendent spot, he made it clear that his brand would be culture war baloney; one of his first acts was to take down the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame pictures, and when folks protested, he offered a statement:

All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.

Walters drew headlines for moves like explaining that Tulsa Race Massacre was not about race. He called the teachers union a "terrorist organization." He also proposed a host of rules for restricting reading, mandatory outing of students, searching out the dread CRT, and backing it all up with threats to take away a district's accreditation if they dared to defy him. In fact, just today followed the Chris Rufo playbook and announced his intent to ban DEI from all schools. 

By February, Rep. Mark McBride of the Education Committee was ready to "put this gentleman in a box" and "focus on public education and not his crazy destruction of public education." 

Things have not improved since. Walters has tried to push school prayers, the proposed religious charter school, and a variety of other hard right christianist supremacy noises. 

But while Walters' ideological activism may draw the headlines, there also seems to be a problem with basic competence in the job. 

Employees have been fleeing the department--80 gone by September. In May, one departed whistleblower said that Walters office had simply failed to follow through on millions of dollars in federal grant money. Terri Grissom estimated between $35 and $40 million hasn't been given to districts to spend, and uncounted other millions hadn't been applied for at all. And Grissom says that Walters simply lied to legislators about the state of grants. This fall, districts have discovered that Walters' office has somehow gummed up the works so badly that millions in federal grants are not getting to the schools where they could do some good. 

Another resignation came from Pamela Smith-Gordon, a handpicked Walters ally who left out of frustration with the lack of leadership. She sent an angry letter that said in part:

While desperately wanting to support you, the lack of leadership and availability within our own OSDE is impossible to ignore. If your physical presence is not required for leadership, then the question arises as to why the position exists with a salary attached to it. 

The lack of Walters physical presence in the office has been a recurring theme. Reported Rep. Jacob Rosencrans

We’re hearing from folks that are looking in and they're all saying the same thing. Ryan Walters isn’t there. I talked to someone who is a constituent of mine who said that he is not a mean guy. He is always there with a handshake and a smile, but he is never there, literally.

In response to Smith-Gordon's departure, McBride (who is an actual Republican) said, “I really don’t know what’s going on over there. Nobody does. There is some lack of transparency.”

Walters' department, which regularly cranks out Trump-style PR about how Walters is "driving change in education for Oklahoma students like never before" doesn't just stonewall the legislature--they thumb their nose at it. When McBride made a second request for certain basic information from the department, Walters' top advisor Matt Langston sent a note--which someone slipped under McBride's office doors--saying "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." (Fun fact: Langston allegedly lives in Texas.) In another response was a letter from Langston, on OSDE letterhead, calling McBride a "whiny Democrat."

In response to this petty dickishness, House Demnocrat Mickey Dollens proposed the "Do Your Job Act" aimed directly at Walters and his department. Well, he's a Democrat, and angry at that.

But McBride and House Speaker Charles McCall and Rep. Rhonda Baker are GOP, and they signed off on the subpoena to get Walters to show up and answer some questions, including details --but not to the legislature. In interviews, McBride just sounds tired and frustrated.

“If there's nothing there, show me,” said Rep. Mark McBride, ( R) House Education Budget and Appropriations Chair. “There's no ‘I gotcha' question’ here. It's just questions about public education that any appropriator would ask.”

McBride says he tried to work with Walters and his chief policy advisor Matt Langston, but after many requests for basic information were left unmet, he says he had no other option but to issue the subpoena.

And McBride's more formal statements don't seem aimed at grinding axes.

As Chairman of the Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee, I am constitutionally bound to ask questions and statutorily entitled to have them answered of the leadership of the legislatively appropriated OSDE. As those questions have not been answered, and no voluntary answer is forthcoming, I have exercised my power as chairman to subpoena the superintendent to produce the records and communications requested by the committee. Where taxpayer money is concerned we must be diligent. The time for playing political games is over, and the time for answers is at hand.

Walters' office has responded with its usual grace. Langston has called McBride a liar. And after initially not responding to the subpoena, Walters decided to give an "exclusive" to Fix affiliate Fox23, in which he said stuff like this:

It's disappointing to see some folks in my own party decided to sell their souls for 30 pieces of silver from the teachers union, but I'm never going to stop or back down. I'm going to keep fighting for the parents of Oklahoma [and] the tax payers of Oklahoma. Your kids are too important. The future of this state is too important,

He also claims that his has been the "most transparent" administration. And he touts his "town halls," some of which have been pretty contentious. And while Walters has often pointed to his meetings with superintendents around the state as a sign of his outreach and transparency, a survey of superintendents found that 150 of the 190 who responded had met with him exactly zero minutes. A touted Zoom meeting was about 15 minutes long, superintendents were not allowed to speak, and no questions were answered. They reported a "continued silence." And they report that Walters' culture war concerns do not reflect the day to day issues they actually deal with in the real world.  From an NPR story:

Matt Riggs is the superintendent of the small, rural district of Macomb. He said Walters’ portrayal of schools is like a “caricature… so far outside of what is real.”

“What he has done through his entire approach to public life, from what I’ve seen, is create dragons for himself to slay,” Riggs said. “Do we have students here that, you know, some may identify in different ways? I’m sure we do. But our charge is to try to make those students’ lives better. Our charge is not to make them part of some kind of political conversation.”

Riggs said those dragons — leftist indoctrination, pornography pushing, terrorist teachers’ unions — just don’t exist. In a high-poverty area like Macomb, there are real problems, but Riggs says he doesn’t see a point in bringing those issues to Walters.

But the legislature sees a point in bringing Walters to address those issues. He might even have to explain his desire to slay his imaginary dragons instead of getting school districts the support they need and that their taxpayers deserve. 

In the end, the worst thing about Walters may not be his Trumpian bombast, his thirst for media attention, his obsession with culture wars, or his ideological certainty that he need answer to nobody. The worst thing about Walters may be that he won't actually do the job for which he campaigned so hard. Is incompetence worse than intolerance? I'm not sure even a legislative hearing can determine that one, but Walters is both, and that's bad news for the children of Oklahoma.

Walters has till January 5 to answer the subpoena. Mark your calendar. 

MO: Another Ugly Anti-LGBTQ Bill

Missouri House Bill 1739 was prefiled earlier this month. Another "Parental Rights" bill, it has some of the most heavy-handed features found in such bills. It's an ugly, nasty piece of legislation.

Some of the standards are here. There's a bunch of transparency language, allowing parents the right to inspect materials and even make copies, unless there are copyrights involved, because while we aren't concerned about professional rights of teachers or personal rights of children, we wouldn't dream of infringing on the rights of the corporations that produce instructional materials. 

There's boneheaded language like this:

No nurse, counselor, teacher, principal, contracted personnel, or other administrative official at a public elementary or secondary school or public charter school shall encourage a student under eighteen years of age to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation.

Of course, traditional heterosexual is a gender identity and sexual orientation; the definitions offered in the bill even recognize this. So, for instance, this bill would make it illegal for the school to sell "couples" tickets to dances--particularly if it also had a requirement that couples tickets are only for boy-girl couples (as identified at birth, of course). Gender-specific bathrooms would also be illegal. And any reading materials that portrayed any gender identities at all. In fact, the law defines "sexual identity" 

[O]ne's actual or perceived emotional or physical attraction to, or romantic or physical relationships with, members of the same gender, members of a different gender, or members of any gender; or the lack of any emotional or physical attraction to, or romantic or physical relationships with, anyone.

In other words, you may have been thinking, "Good lord! This means that schools could only model persons with no romantic interest in anyone at all, but that is also a sexual identity under this law, meaning it is literally impossible to comply with it as written. 

There's the popular No Nicknames clause. Sorry, Robert, but I can't call you "Bob" without a note from your parents.

Then we get to the ugly stuff.

If a student approaches a school official to express discomfort or confusion about the student's documented identity, the school official shall notify the student's parent of the discussion within twenty-four hours.

Same rule if a student asks for different pronouns. 24 hours to notify the parent. No exceptions provided for students who have reason to believe that such a revelation might make them unsafe at home. The student has no agency, no choice, no rights. So we can expect the student to exercise the only agency they have left--to not tell anyone, but to stay isolated. 

These mandatory outing laws will not stop LGBTQ students from being LGBTQ. What they will do is transform school into one more unsafe space for the students who already lack sage spaces. LGBTQ students are more at risk for suicide and homelessness. Mandatory outing laws will not make these students safer. 

The bill doesn't skimp on the penalty phase, either. 

A teacher who is found to have violated any of this will have their license suspended or revoked. A school official found in violation will be immediately terminated and will be ineligible to work in any school for four years. 

The Attorney General can bring civil action against a school or school district. Any parent can bring civil action against the school or school district for violation of any part of the law. 

So if the student is not already afraid of being outed, teachers and staff will also be strongly motivated to never get involved in any difficult conversation. "Mrs. Kindface, I just have to talk to somebody about these feelings I--" "Stop right there, Robert! Are you trying to get me fired?? Hush up and go away." 

The bill comes courtesy of Doug Richey, a three term GOP representative who has run unopposed in his last two elections. He's a Baptist pastor, veteran, and law enforcement chaplain. He once proposed a bill that would let churches disclose credible allegations of sexual abuse without being sued. He once proposed a bill to stamp out DEI programs. And critical race theory in schools. And an earlier version of something called a Parental Rights Bill. Yes, he's that guy. And he's the chair of the damned Joint Committee on Education. Alao, he's running for a Missouri Senate seat, about which he has this to say:

I was born into a Christian, blue-collar family that raised me in a small town. I know my roots. I know, and am deeply convicted by, our shared values and principles. To me, political involvement isn’t my identity, it’s a stewardship responsibility in the effort to preserve our constitutional liberties and to hold government accountable to its purpose. I stand ready to serve the folks of this district.

Well, some of the folks. Not the LGBTQ ones. And not the youth and children. But then, they don't vote.

The bill is prefiled for the 2024 regular session. Here's hoping that it does not successfully make the journey to becoming a law.

Increasing Profitability

There was a gut wrenching article in yesterday's Washington Post, all about how the rise of investors in the assisted living biz are causing real human damage.  And it has implications for the privatization of education.

The piece opens with the story of the Balfour chain that realizes they need to hire additional staff for one of their facilities. But to do that, they have to ask their owners, the Welltower investment firm, a real estate investment trust that invests in healthcare infrastructure. And here's how that went:

Executives at Welltower balked.

“Their position was: We are trying to increase our profitability,” said one former Balfour executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “Care is an ancillary part of the conversation.”

Care is an ancillary part of the conversation.

This will forever be the problem with handing over any organization doing the work of caring for human beings to a profit-driven free market operation. 

This is the problem with all investment fund ownership of any business at all-- whatever the business is supposed to be doing, from making widgets to selling breakfast cereal, becomes an ancillary concern. It is a Kafkaesque world in which a business's business is not really its business. In the hands of hedge fund vultures, its main business is profitability; whatever its nominal purpose becomes just a means of increasing profitability, and if that means gutting workforce or increasing prices or lowering quality or any number of things that soak the customers without adding value. 

This is bad enough for widgets and breakfast cereal, but it is intolerable if the work is any sort of human service, like medical care or nursing homes or schools. There the interests of the investment firm will always be in conflict with the interests of the human persons being served. And that's how we arrive at "We're not going to provide better care for these people because it will cut into our profits." 

That's how we arrive at "Care is an ancillary part of the conversation." 

Any economic system can be abused by people with a busted moral compass. I have no beef with the free market--it has and can accomplish some great things. But even in the best of hands, it is ill-suited as a tool for managing the care of human beings.

Education should not be an ancillary part of the conversation about a school and the students in it. Ever.

Where Have All The Teen Athletes Gone?

An alarming number of young teens are quitting sports, and It isn’t a recent phenomenon.

That's a lead from an article that has been bouncing about lately (it even turned up in my local newspaper) by Nadia Tahir (a probably-real freelance writer) and from a site called Wealth of Geeks. WOG seems to be an otherwise unremarkable content farm site, but this article has apparently touched a few nerves, or at least moved a few editors to pick it up. 

A popular headline is "Is Social Media A Major Reason Kids Quit Sports?" But that's not really the thrust of the article. A lot of young teens drop sports, for some reason. Whatever could it be?

Tahir's piece is basically a light rewrite of a PR release about one study. That study cited several causes, but it surveyed 70 current or past athletes from ages 8 to 18, and that is not a sample size I find particularly compelling. But it has moved a lot of ink since it was presented at the fall American Academy of Pediatricians conference. The study was actually conducted by The Nemours Foundation, a foundation funded through the will of Alfred I. du Pont in 1936 and dedicated to children's health. It's the foundation that put out the press release. 

One previous study found that 70% of children quit sports by age 13, and by 14 girls quit at twice the rate of boys. That study was a poll conducted by the National Alliance for Youth Sports back (and cited in article after article in the years since). That study also noted that only 1 in 3 go on to college sports. That study prompted a ton of press with ideas about why the phenomenon was occurring. Here in NW PA, we like our sports, and many observations seem on point. 

Katie Arnold at Outdoor Life observed that Back In Her Day, a student athlete could play several sports a year, but nowadays sports seasons run year round. In my neck of the woods, this may translate into school league, private independent league, "open practices" (which are non-mandatory because there are actual rules about how soon school sports can start practicing; these rules are observed about as closely as the speed limit on your local back road). City leagues, traveling teams are all the rage. My elementary-grade nephew (and his parents) spent a chunk of the year traveling every weekend to some soccer match somewhere, often many hours away. 

A story at CNN Health (2016) cites injuries, Young bodies are growing, muscles and connectors are stretchy and not fully set. Nor do young athletes always make great choices; I cannot count the number of times a student in my class seriously weighed "subject a broken bone to playing stress weeks before my doctor says it would be safe and thereby risk permanent injury" against "my team really needs me for the big game." 

The CNN piece includes an interview with Mark Hyman, a bit of an expert on youth sports, who points out that if Wal-Mart were losing 70% of its customers, changes would be made, "but in youth sports, we seem to be very satisfied with a 70% dropout rate." That matches an observation by Julianna Miner in the Washington Post (2016) that "our culture no longer supports older kids playing for the fun of it." In other words, the 70% departure rate is a feature, not a bug, as sports are aimed at "weeding out" the non-stars. In my community, the regular Little League season is pretty much over at the beginning of summer vacation, because the purpose of the regular season is not so that kids can play ball in the summer, but to sort out who will be selected to play on the All-Star teams--those are the teams that have a summer season and play the Important Games.

As Miner puts it, "It's not fun anymore because it's not designed to be." It's serious business, and children who aren't willing to give 100% are seen as a drag on the team. The demands are constant. As a person who worked in the performing area, I was always envious of coaches who could set the time for practice on the day of practice, with the expectation that athletes will, of course, prioritize practice over anything else in their lives. 

All of this is exacerbated by the decline in teacher-coaches. Back In My Day, coaches were all teachers, and while they could be pretty driven (and who didn't know at least one teacher was only a teacher because he wanted to coach), but they were aware that students had other responsibilities. Civilian coaches, who are much more prevalent now, are much more likely to imagine that students do not have any lives outside the sport. 

And why have so many teachers stopped coaching? In part, it's parents, who have shifted more toward the idea that the team is there to serve the needs of their athlete, and not vice versa. Overhyped parents aren't affecting only coaching; in my neck of the woods, it has become harder to get officials to work games. In our league, some schools must have Saturday football games because there are no longer enough officials to cover all games under Friday night lights.

The other reason for the loss of so many young athletes, I'm betting, is simple burn out. Some sports start out at 5 or 6 years old, and very quickly start talking about commitment and dedication and moving the sport to the center of the child's life. Fun? That's for losers who don't take the game seriously enough. By the time they are 13, they have spent half of their lives playing the sport, and they're done. 

I'm also going to point out that the athletes that they would have interviewed for that 2014 study would have been the first wave of students to grow up under No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, Common Core, and high stakes testing, all of which went a long way toward making school itself less fun and more high-pressure.

Also, we don't seem to have figures on pre-2014 sports drops. But the further back we go, the harder it would be to measure, because the further back we go, the less we see of 5th grade sports and year-round sports. We can't talk about people dropping out of sports by age 13 because for many that was when they started. All of which is in itself a measure of what's different about sports.

The more recent study (of 70 whole students) cited a correlation between screen time and sports involvement, but correlation doesn't tell us much. The three factors that the researchers noted were "coaching issues, poor body image comparison from social media and the competitive pressure of the sport." Are students quitting sports because they don't look as good as sports folks online? Meh. Maybe. But student athletes absolutely quit coaches rather than the sport itself, and the high pressure part goes along with everything we've already noted. 

It's sexy to suggest that this is one more thing we can blame on social media, but I'm not convinced. I can imagine that taking a beating on social media over a poor performance could be a factor, but it seems less likely that potential athletes are quitting basketball so they can spend more time on TikTok.

Nemours suggests "parents need to understand coaches' impact on youth sports participation and ensure that coaches have proper training to foster a positive environment for participation." Which is good advice, although I'd bet that in many cases, the coach hiring interview consists of two questions-- do you have your clearances, and are you willing to do this job.

Back in the original lead, Tahir calls the number of departing athletes "alarming," but I'm not sure who exactly is alarmed. School sports are set up to separate the championship wheat from the unserious chaff, and as such, I'm pretty sure that the system is working just as some folks think it ought to. 

Youth sports are great for so many things. We're just not sure, collectively, which purposes we want to pursue. Build character? Provide fun and activity for as many students as are interested? Grow future champions? Get lots of numbers in the win column? Feed egos? Provide valuable formative experiences for young men and women to carry into other parts of their lives? Foster school spirit? There are lots of possible choices, but I don't think we can pursue them all. The loss of participants tells us something, but it's not clear what, or if anybody really wants to know.

End the Rat Race

There's an unspoken assumption behind much of education, and it needs to go away.

For years, I directed dozens of high school productions, both musicals and the school variety show, and in talking to the auditioners, there's a basic point I have always tried to make. Goes something like this:

This is not a competition between students to find the best. For the variety show, we're looking for variety, so you have the best shot if you're offering something unique for the audience. For the musical, remember that someone who's the best singer, actor, and dancer might not be the best for a particular role. 

In short, every student who auditions is not in the same race to the same finish line.

It's understandable that students imagine a singular race to a singular goal because that idea is reinforced by virtually everything they encounter. Their world is soaked in the rat race mentality.

It's not just schools, but lord knows that schools reinforce this notion that all of the students are in a rat race against each other, all on the same track aimed at the same piece of cheese on the same finish line--and there will be winners and there will be losers.

Get the best grades in the best class. Get the best class rank. Collect the most tokens to build your GPA and your extra-curricular resume. Get into the best college. Show all the merit. Win the prize in the rat race and you get... well, something. Besides, winning is the way you avoid losing, and losing means your life is a terrible failed mess. 

Look, there's no doubt that students need to do their very best, that they need to make good choices, that they need to pack up as many tools as they can for the years ahead. They need to achieve and succeed and all that good stuff. I'm no advocate of "sit on your ass and insist that the world take care of you." Drop out and turn on was not very helpful advice sixty years ago, and time has not improved it.

But if schools are a garden (and I like that particular metaphor), then they are a garden filled with a variety of different plants. I used to teach an excerpt of a Ralph Waldo Emerson that includes this line:

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

And I like that as far as it goes. But our garden in school includes roses and carrots and sunflowers and apple trees and cacti and we too often we approach that garden as if the only thing that matters is who can grow the biggest apples the fastest, and instead of trying to get each growing thing into the circumstances that will best help it grow into the best version of itself, we treat them as if they're all apple trees. 

For most of my career, I taught high school juniors, who get the worst of this. Make your college and career plans. Whatever the top students are doing, you do that too, only do it harder. So on they race, shooting frightened side-eyes at their fellow students and pushing on driven by the fear that if they finish too far back in this singular race, Something Terrible will happen to them which will, besides condemning them to a sad, stricken life, confirm that they are Less Than, somehow Not Worthy. 

Nothing filled my heart like a student who knew who she was and who moved along a path aimed at making the most of that, whether that path was Ivy League scholar or top-shelf welder. 

I've described education often as the work of helping students become their best selves while growing in understanding of how to be fully human in the world. That's not necessarily leisurely work; we don't live forever and the clock is ticking for us all. But it's not the work of a frantic rat race, scrambling toward we're-not-sure-where for we're-not-sure-what-reason, running out of fear and anxiety instead of hope and aspiration. 

Fear is a terrible motivation. It makes people run, but not toward anything. But sometimes we just want to see them move, dammit. Sometimes we are afraid for them, and we project that fear at them, like a screaming siren. Sometimes the rat race is just the easiest, laziest way to try to motivate.

W. Edward Deming was crystal clear that an organization works best with a system that drives out fear and builds up trust. I wish more schools, more parents, more public figures really understood that. The rat race is all about fear. Our children deserve better. We all deserve better. 

PA: Dammit, Democrats

For a hot minute, it looked like Pennsylvania Democrats would stand up for public education. But no.

Josh Shapiro continues to support the notion of vouchers in Pennsylvania. And his fellow Democrats have once again indicated that they will gladly throw public education under the bus in order to try to win.

I should say that Shapiro supports more vouchers. We've had tax credit vouchers for years, from before when people understood what they were. And nobody has learned much about them because the law that created them expressly blocks any attempt to collect any data about who's using them. 

But Ed Voters PA studied the data on who was getting them, and that was more than enough to make clear that, as with most states, the vouchers are being used to create a taxpayer subsidy for discrimination. Mostly against disabilities and LGBTQ, but really, anything-- here's the policy from one voucher-accepting religious school:

We maintain the right to refuse admittance at our discretion and to suspend or expel any student who violates the standards set down and defined by the administration. The administration also reserves the right of not defining the criteria or reason when applications are not accepted.

So, of course, the legislature increased the funding for the voucher program by $150 million. And Shapiro continues to discuss vouchers as something he wants to get a deal done on, even after his earlier deal with the GOP fell apart..

The state democratic party was set to issue a rebuke of Shapiro's voucher love. First they were reportedly going to address him directly, then were softening to a more general and generic condemnation of vouchers. But what they actually did in the end was jack and squat. 

What happened? Chuck Pascal, a democratic lion for public education, was apparently ready to go. But according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

State Sen. Sharif Street (D., Philadelphia), who chairs the state party, said the rules committee tabled the anti-voucher resolution after the Democratic National Committee reached out to him with concerns that the party would appear divided going into the hotly contested 2024 election.

“Right now, what we need to be focused on is winning and beating the Republicans,” Street added.

So there it is. As far as the national party is concerned, public education support can be sacrificed easily in the name of party politics. Taxpayer subsidies for religious and discriminatory private schools? Not as big a deal as beating the GOP.

It's not a huge shock. Democrats have been failing public education for decades, to the point that I have doubts that most even know how to defend it at this point. But if the message in Pennsylvania is supposed to be "We need to unite behind the governor while he unites behind the GOP," I'm not sure who that is supposed to impress. As Pascal told the Inquirer:

“It’s still bad policy, and I don’t care who the governor is,” Pascal added. “We’re not here to have a slavish agreement with any elected official.”

Or as Joseph Klein on the dead bird app put it

What good is it to prioritize defeating the GOP is the Democrats' policies are the same?

Shame on the state party for folding, and double shame on the national party for asking them to. It is an endless source of frustration that public education remains a political orphan, especially since it's actually popular with the voters. Dammit, Democrats.

ICYMI: Handel Holiday Edition (12/17)

For somewhere approaching thirty years, my small town marks the holiday season with a rendering of (portions of) Handel's Messiah. It's an increasingly impressive performance. From year to year I'm either in the chorus or the orchestra. I'm orchestra-ing it this year, which provides extra opportunity to listen and soak it in (because Handel deployed trombones sparingly in the piece). It's a moving way to spend an evening, more so if you add the small town element of knowing the people stepping up to present a solo. My pastor, who is also a theater guy and whose wife (also a theater person) I've worked with various times over thirty years--anyway, he has a solo in the production for the first time this year, and he kicks the heck out of The Trumpet Shall Sound. And an old friend is returning to her signature solo "Rejoice Greatly" after having been sidelined by illness for a few years, and her voice might not be quite as powerful, but it still conveys so much joy. 

I could go on and on. Music makes community, but it comes out of community as well. Sometimes the community makes up for weaknesses in the presentation, but when the performance is strong on its own, like this year, it just all adds up to something transcendent. I can use some deep held tradition this year, and the only thing that's missing is my wife doing a solo (she was ready for a break). And being there in the middle of all that sound ("And He Shall Purify" is kind of meh in recordings, but when you're singing it live, it's a banger). So here's hoping that you have something in the big seasons of your year that gives you an extra shot in the heart. 

Anyway, here's the reading from the week. 

Conservatives Want to Destroy Public Schools. Communities are Fighting Back.

Jennifer Berkshire in In These Times takes a look at the growing tide of responses to right-wing attacks on local public schools. She's been calling this one for a while.

The Rise and Fall of Moms For Liberty

Maurice Cunningham, the dark money expert, thinks it may be time to put a fork in Moms For Liberty. From The Progressive.

Moms for Liberty Isn’t Going Anywhere

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider take the opposing view. Though in the end, Cunningham, Berkshire and Schneider agree about the kind of threat M4L presents. And they both use the same Chris Rufo quote.

Florida private school vouchers have expanded so lawmakers are looking for more organizations to administer them

One continuing story out of Florida is that vouchers have grown so much that they need help managing them, because the company tasked with the job can't quite handle it.

Difficult for Whom

Jose Luis Vilson takes a look at uncomfortable conversations, and just who is feeling uncomfortable about them. Who exactly are we deciding to protect?

For Educators who get in trouble but want to stay in their profession

It's a Jose Luis Vilson two-fer this week (he did say he was getting back to writing). This one looks at the business of being a teacher who takes on activism and keeping their job all at the same time (and he should know).

One of California's largest charter school networks lacked years of records to justify tens of millions in spending, state audit finds

Kristen Taketa, writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune, looks at an audit that finds the Inspire network has been collecting a lot of money without any records to prove that they deserve those dollars.

Book bans are the new norm in school libraries across the country

An insightful bit of coverage that just happens to come from the student newspaper at my alma mater. 

Bradley Funneled $86 Million to Right-Wing Litigation, Policy, Media, Youth Groups, and Higher Education in 2022

The Bradley Foundation is a major funder of conservative causes, including education issues, David Armiak takes a look at where they spent $86 million last year.

The Problem with Jingle Bells

A while ago I started with Jingle Bells and spun that into a discussion of the canon. Now Nancy Flanagan jumps off from their into even bigger questions difficult conversations and anti-racism.

Will The Real Recess Stand Up? It’s NOT Playworks, Phys. Ed., Meditating, or Brain Breaks!

Nancy Bailey reminds us of the various attempts to co-opt play for not-much-fun and profit.

2023: The Year School Vouchers Became an Entitlement for Wealthy Children

2023 was the year we got lots of vouchers. Jan Resseger (who, as always, has done her homework) reminds us just what sorts of vouchers we got.

M4L Supports Parental Rights Except When It Doesn’t

Sue Kingery Woltanski points out a moment when Florida's M4L was not so very interested in what parents wanted. Surprise, surprise.

I has a really busy week at Forbes.com and cranked out three pieces for them:

* a Kentucky court once again slapped down the forces of school choice

* a Satanic Flap in Iowa brings up why the wall between church and state is a really good idea

* speaking of which, more lawsuits seek to widen that hole in the wall

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