ICYMI: Christmas Eve Edition (12/24)

Later today I'll see my grandchildren, some of whom have flown in from the Left Coast. The Board of Directors, upping their game from previous Christmases, have bounded out of bed early every day this week. And not only are stockings not hung, but unwrapped presents are stashed in various corners of the house and car. At the same time, this is an odd holiday for my family; sad for some reasons and joyous for others. However you meet the season, here's hoping that it's a good one for you.

And yes, I still have some stuff for you to read, if you have a spare minute.

Newly Surfaced Video Of Moms For Liberty Advisor Reveals Religious Extremist Agenda

Jennifer Cohn at the Bucks County Beacon has been doing some tremendous job tracking both the Moms and the christianist right. This piece does some tremendous dot connecting.

What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Cory Doctorow considers the future of AI. "AI is a bubble, and it’s full of fraud, but that doesn’t automatically mean there’ll be nothing of value left behind when the bubble bursts."

The Community Schools Movement Is Running Headlong Into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s Hard-Right Agenda

What happens when schools designed to meet the needs of communities and families run into the DeSantis agenda? Jeff Bryant has the story.

Utah charter schools want student data from school districts — so they can advertise to families

Yes, competition is swell, but charter fans would like to give their schools some extra tools to help them "compete."

Fighting Book Bans in Kentucky Schools—and Beyond

At The Nation, Ramona Pierce looks at how reading repression is playing out in Kentucky, where students and the community are fighting back.

Harvard student goes viral for takedown of Moms for Liberty co-founder in Florida

I loathe headlines with "takedown" in them, but this piece highlights Zander Moricz. You may remember him from his graduation speech in which, forbidden to mention gay students, he talked about those with "curly hair" instead. He went back to Sarasota (he's a student at Harvard now) to take Bridget Ziegler to task for condemning publicly what she herself does privately. It is a great speech.

Federal judge rules school board districts illegal in Georgia school system, calls for new map

Gerrymandered school remain a popular segregation tool. A federal judge has told Georgia to shape up. Jeff Amy reports for the AP.

About the “Bizarre Coalition” Weighing Standardized Testing “Big Changes,” and More.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the strange coalition that has come up to fic high stakes testing, and how it compares to some bizarre coalitions of the past.

Someone complained about a book in a Great Barrington classroom. Then the police showed up

Once again, this time in Massachusetts, somebody decided to call the law to go into a school to look for a naughty book. Quite a surprise to the English teacher who was still in the classroom when the cop showed up.

A peek into the experience of a student journalist at New College

Chloe Rusek is a journalism student at New College, the one that Ron DeSantis is trying to turn into a conservative powerhouse. This is her story of trying to interview university president Richard Corcoran. And trying and trying. 

Why Youngstown State matters more than Harvard

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer says that what's happening is not as important as what's happening at the many public universities where most students attend. And what's happening is a version of The New College--party hacks are being put in charge.

Panic! Pandemic Learning Loss!

Thomas Ultican reads the latest chicken littling from The 74 and says, "Hey, wait a minute." And he has data.

A Crowded Table

Nancy Flanagan offers a holiday reflection. 

Dominionism for Dummies

If you've been hearing the term Dominionism and keep wondering, "Well, what is that, anyway?" this post is for you (if you already know, you can correct me in the comments).

The conservative world of Christianity is not one homogenous blob, but a continuum. Along that continuum you can find folks who believe that a public official's moral and values matter and folks who believe that Christians make better leaders that non-Christians. But way out beyond them, you'll find the Dominionists, who believe that Christians (their kind of Real True Christians) should rule the country.

Watch for references to the Seven Mountains. These "mountains" are religion, family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business, and Dominionists believe that their brand of Christian should rule all of them. The Seven Mountain Mandate showed up in the 1970s; here's the origin story from Elle Hardy in The Outline 

The Seven Mountain Mandate came into being in 1975, when God allegedly delivered a concurrent message to missionary movement leader Loren Cunningham, Campus Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, and televangelist Francis Schaeffer to invade the “seven spheres.” The largely dormant idea was resurrected in 2000, when Cunningham met with “strategist, futurist and compelling communicator” Lance Wallnau, and told him about the vision of 25 years earlier. The “prophetic” Wallnau, a 63-year-old business consultant based in Dallas, with a “Doctorate in Ministry with a specialization in Marketplace” from Phoenix University of Theology immediately saw the idea’s potential and began promoting seminars and training courses on the theory as a “template for warfare” for the new century. Its real surge in popularity began in 2013, when Wallnau co-authored the movement’s call to arms, Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, with Pastor Bill Johnson from the prominent California megachurch Bethel Church.

I added some links and emphasis there. Lance Wallnau is one of the names to watch for.

These are not your father's evangelicals. Back in the days of the Moral Majority, it was enough to try to bring people to Christ or thwart abortions or pray away some gays. Dominionists want to remake the country in their image.

Dominionists and Christian Nationalists are not exactly the same thing, but the Christian Nationalists serve an important function in the Dominionist argument. Fake historians like the beloved David Barton make the argument that the framers absolutely intended to set up a theocratic Christian nation, and that Godless secularists have derailed their God-given intentions. The United States, they argue, was set up specifically to have Christians take dominion over.

There's a subtler version of this as well. When, for instance, christianists argue that secularism is not an absence of religion, but a form of religion itself, which serves as a way of quietly resetting the argument to say, "Look, the country is already a theocracy. All that's left to argue is which God should be in charge."

New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is another term to look for. These are Dominionists as well, led by guys like Dutch Sheets and Jim Garlow, who are well-connected in the political world to a multitude of figures, including new House Speaker Mike Johnson. Jenifer Cohn has covered all of this at great length; here's her quick background on NAR:

The NAR was named and organized by the late C. Peter Wagner, who wrote in 2007 that the seven mountains had “become a permanent fixture in my personal teaching on taking dominion,” adding that “our theological bedrock is what has been known as Dominion Theology.” He explained that, “Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society. In other words, what the values are in Heaven need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings … So we are kings for dominion.”

If this all seems very non-democratic, well, yeah. As Katherine Stewart points out in her book The Power Worshippers, the idea is that "legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage."

That authoritarian bent is why Domionionism can get along so well with Donald Trump. He may not be very Christian, but he is certainly amenable to sweeping away all the Others that Dominionists see as an obstacle to taking their rightful dominion over the nation. And Dominionists like Paula White, the Trump "spiritual advisor," stay close. 

Dominionism has been on the fringes so long that it has become adept at sliding by under the surface of other movements. Cohn has just laid out the ties of Moms For Liberty to the movement. The move to commandeer school boards often has a Dominionist flavor. 

This is a deep and twisty rabbit hole, and it prompts one to repeatedly ask, "They can't really be serious about this, can they?" Watch enough video and you realize they are. Realize too that these are not crazy-pants mouth-frothing obviously-out-there folks. The man in this mountain-buying couple is a guy I graduated from high school, as regular a guy as you'll ever meet. Good Rotarian. Nice person. 

It should go without saying that not all of us of the Christian faith want to take dominion over every aspect of the country. There are plenty of conservative Christians who don't dream of "taking back" all seven mountains and turning this into a nation where all are required to bow before God.

But Dominionists are out there. They are not interested in democracy or compromise (you don't make deals with Satan and his demons), and in the most extreme cases, they are willing to do whatever it takes to get power.

If you'd like to know more, read Stewart's book (written in 2019, and about to become the basis of a documentary by Rob Reiner). A new book by Tim Alberta, The Kingdon, the Power and the Glory, is also useful.

On the dead bird app, follow @KiraResistance, @jennycohn1, and @mentack, at least for starters. 

These folks absolutely want to replace the current public education system with one focused on their particular concept of God and faith; whether that system is private or public is immaterial. Either way they'd like it financed by taxpayers. When they talk about religious freedom, what they mean is the freedom for their conception of religion to dominate the system to the exclusion of all others (aka "the wrong ones"). Their goals are incompatible with a democratic pluralistic society, and with God’s help, and to His glory, and for their own power, they intend to come out on top. 

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.