Voucher Bankruptcy's Feature Future

It is no longer news that school voucher programs lead to increasing costs, costs that swiftly balloon to suck up extraordinary piles of taxpayer dollars in state after state, threatening to bust the budget. 

Public education advocates have been pointing this out in state after state, arguing that vouchers are way more costly than any of the advocates promise.

It's a legitimate point, a solid reason for states to think twice before jumping on the voucher money wagon. 

Unfortunately, I can easily imagine a future in which this same argument (and perhaps the critique that voucher programs yield unspectacular results) comes back from an entirely different source. Right now we're at this early voucher policy stage:

Let's give vouchers to everyone and make choice freely available far and wide!

But further down the road, once the voucher system is firmly entrenched and the traditional public school system has been largely gutted, we may find ourselves turning a corner, and suddenly a bunch of folks will be disturbed and alarmed by the high cost of a voucher program. 

Boy, we are spending so much on school vouchers in this state (and not even getting great results). Surely we can cut the amount we're spending per pupil on this private school entitlement.

Maybe there will be special carve-outs for specific students, so that it's not so obvious that poorer families are being cut loose or driven into sub-prime private schools. But once the voucher system has captured a critical number of students and cut its public competition off at the knees, it could safely be squeezed. 

A portion of the education choice and reform crowd has always been folks who don't want to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children. For those folks, vouchers, including the ballooning costs and the lousy results, are another way to get to that world in which everyone has to pay their own way. 

Vouchers get us to the place of considering education a privately-purchased commodity instead of a public good, a service provided to and for all citizens. Once we've established that it's a privately-purchased commodity, then vouchers are just one more bit of welfare, another entitlement to be cut so that the Poors aren't a drag on the folks with resources. 

So for some folks, the huge cost of voucher programs is a feature, not a bug. It's just a feature that won't be activated until the time is right. 

IA: How Federal Judge Gets It Right, Blocks Don't Say Gay

At last, someone with authority gets it right.

Iowa has its own version of a Don't Say Gay law (complete with civics instruction and reading restrictions), and Senate File 496 has the same problem as others--so broad as to be meaningless and unenforceable.  And a federal judge just called them on it, and blocked portions of the law. 

Injunctions against the law had been filed by the GLBT Youth In Iowa Task Force and by Penguin Random House Books. The ruling came from U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher. Locher was made a U.S. magistrate judge in December of 2020, then recommended for the district court post by GOP Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst in the beginning on 2022.

Locher blocked two provisions of the law. 

One adds to the definition of "age-appropriate:

“Age-appropriate” does not include any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act as defined in section 702.17

That led to some great news headlines such as "What is a sex act in Iowa?" Turns out that 702.17 gives a fairly specific list. The bill does give special exemptions for human growth and development materials, and the Bible. 

As other states have seen, this definition is so very broad that everything from John Steinbeck to John Milton gets swept up. From Locher's ruling:

The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault. The sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.

Locher also notes that the writers of the law had another option-- they could have chosen an "obscenity light" standard and simply used the already-existing law which criminalizes the dissemination and exhibition of “obscene material” to minors. For all the noise about protecting children from actual porn, the folks supporting this law wanted to cast a much broader net. In other words, the broad vagueness is a feature, not a bug, a vagueness born of intention, not error.

But even broader and worse were the Don't Say Gay portions of the law because, as many of us have noted repeatedly, they are written so broadly that they really mean Don't Say Anything About Any Gender Or Orientation At All Ever. From the law

A school district shall not provide any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion, or  instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through grade six.

Say it with me one more time: heterosexuality is a sexual identity, and traditional straightness is a gender identity (and Iowa law agrees) 

Locher points out that the law is written in neutral language that also makes no distinction between "cisgender or transgender identity or gay or straight relationships." So...

Meaning: on its face, the law forbids any programs, promotion, or instruction recognizing that anyone is male or female or in a relationship of any sort (gay or straight). The statute is therefore content-neutral but so wildly overbroad that every school district and elementary school teacher in the State has likely been violating it since the day the school year started.

Right. If you taught your first graders to use the boys or girls bathroom, you delivered instruction about gender identity. If you read any books that contained couples of any kind, you delivered instruction on sexual orientation. It is, as Locher says elsewhere in the injunction, "staggeringly broad."

Based on the neutral definitions of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” Senate File 496 unambiguously prohibits instruction relating to any gender identity (cisgender or transgender) and any sexual orientation (gay or straight)...

It follows that any teacher in grade six or below who incorporates gender identity or sexual orientation into the curriculum in any way has violated section 279.80. This would include, for example, teachers or other licensed professionals like the Educator Plaintiffs who make books available to students that refer to any character’s gender or sexual orientation; which is to say, virtually every book ever written. Similarly, a math teacher will have violated the law by requiring students to take an exam stating that Sally bought eight apples and ate three and asking how many “she” has left. This is a forbidden “test . . . relating to gender identity.”

Exactly. While some on either side of these suits say his examples are "absurd," Locher repeatedly points out that the language says what it says and can't be interpreted "according to stray comments by individual legislators." 

Locher notes that the state's defense doesn't address this issue, but "their briefing and argument leave the unmistakable impression that they believe the law only forbids programs, promotion, and instruction relating to transgender people and non-heteronormative relationships." Locher gets into this in depth, but really, his wry heading for the section says it all:

The State Defendants’ Promise to Only Enforce the Law in a Discriminatory Fashion Does Not Solve the Constitutional Problem.

Locher also notes, when discussing standing, that one elementary student who was part of the suit would be forbidden to join a student organization formed to support LGBTQ students, which would interfere with that student's First Amendment right to free speech in the form of freedom of expressive association.

All of this should be equal reason to strike down a host of similar bills in other states. 

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds is sad, and also clueless. “Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation has no place in kindergarten through sixth-grade classrooms,” Reynolds said, using the exact same language that got the law in trouble with Locher in the first place. "The real debate should be about why society is so intent on over-sexualizing our young children. It’s wrong, and I will continue to do my part to protect their innocence.”

Attorney General Brenna Bird had more of the same. "Sexually explicit books do not belong in our elementary-school libraries or classrooms. Not only is it common sense, it’s the law. As attorney general, I will keep on fighting to protect families, enforce the law and keep inappropriate books out of the hands of children in school.”

Whether it's a rhetorical trick or just sloppiness, both demonstrate the way that reading restrictionists insist on conflating a variety of issues and treating a wide variety of books as if they are all the same thing. Courts should have been calling out these laws in all states where they've cropped up, but at least Iowa has slowed them down a bit. It's not a perfect judgement; Locher left Iowa's mandatory outing law in place. 

But this was a heck of a step in the right direction, a win in Iowa for the First Amendment.

Will the tide shift in Iowa? Who knows. But Iowa is one more state in which the Moms for Liberty electioneering bus seems to have lost some steam and their legislative priorities are just a shade less anti-First Amendment than they used to be. DEI is still on the M4L chopping block, but not Naughty Books and-- wait! what? Eliminate Common Core? 

Expect the legislature to attempt to retool the law so that it can clear judicial hurdles. People who have decided they want to render books and LGBTQ persons invisible do not give up quickly or easily. At least in Iowa they'll have to go back to the drawing board. 

Rufo, Horse Racing, and Bullying

Christopher Rufo is on the dead bird app bragging that he took down the president of Harvard and announcing that he's going to start "plagiarism hunting," which sounds so much better than "going after liberal Black academics."

It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he's about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down ("Well, you know the president of Rufo's New College won't get caught plagiarizing because he's never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!") as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their "Harvard president taken down by plagiarism" takes as if that's the real story here.

I do not particularly care what happens at Harvard, a school that is emblematic of very little of the vast bulk of higher education. But I am interested in how Ryfo pulls off this trick again and again, and I've come across a take that does a good job of explaining.

On his substack, Jamison Foser just put up "Christopoher Rufo & Elise Stefanik understand the New York Times" in which he offers a useful analysis of How Rufo Does It, quoting himself from earlier pieces, because Foser has been onto the game for a while.

From July:

The most perverse thing about all of this is that describing himself as a propagandist and announcing his intent to deceive didn’t hurt Christopher Rufo at all — to the contrary, news companies like The New York Times take him more seriously because of it. Describing himself as untrustworthy was a marketing ploy, and it worked on his intended audience: The nation’s leading journalists and editors. If Rufo was just some run-of-the-mill right-winger, the Times (probably) wouldn’t have published him. But because Rufo announced a grand strategy behind his lies, the Times views him as an important voice and hands him the world’s most valuable op-ed space.

In response to the amazement expressed by many (including me) that Rufo just tweets out his intent 

Those tweets are marketing tweets. They don’t endanger his success; they are central to it. Rufo uses them to brand himself a master strategist; the news media uses that brand to justify taking Rufo seriously and behaving the way he wants them to.

Foser attributes the NYT (and others) complicity to a desire to amplify right-wing talking points.

They want to inflate academic jaywalking by Harvard’s president into a massive scandal worthy of weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. But it obviously isn’t, and so they need an excuse, both for their readers and for themselves. Rufo and Stefanik provide that excuse: Influential conservatives are talking about this, so we have to cover it. And that’s where Rufo’s public announcements of his dishonest propaganda campaigns helps.

Maybe-- I'm not sure how far I go along with Foser on this. But what I believe may apply is that, by announcing his latest propaganda idea as an explicit strategy, Rufo is able to activate the press's horse race coverage mode,

We know this mode. A candidate or politician announces a particular idea, and rather than examine the idea's accuracy or merit, the media focuses on the question of whether or not that idea is helping the team win. Don't ask if it's a good idea; ask if it's a winning idea. What Rufo understands is that part of winning is getting the media to talk about it. 

So when Rufo announces that X is his new strategy, he's just cutting to the chase, signaling the media to gather around and watch to see how this lands (rather than, say, checking to see if Rufo is actually full of shit). "Remember that time I made got everyone to freak out over critical race theory? Come watch me do the same thing over DEI!"

Rufo has adapted classic bullying tactics, a simple process. 

First, pick a target. Second, pick a thing to bully them about. Yes, that's the order. Kids in school are rarely targeted because of the subject of their bullying. The bully picks a target for any number of reasons, and then they look for a point of vulnerability and go after it. You don't get the bully to leave you alone by getting contacts so that he won't call you "Four Eyes" any more; he will simply switch to some other point of attack. Nor do you get him to stop by mounting a considered rational explanation of why glasses are reasonable and by the way, doesn't his best friend wear glasses, too?

The bully has targeted you for reasons of his own, maybe as simple as feeling that he can raise his own standing and acquire more power and attention if he knocks you down. And when he announces on the playground, "Watch me make this kid lick the swings," the crowd that he draws to watch are not there because they have strong feelings or thoughts about swing-licking, but because they want to see how this attempt to overpower someone else works out. 

Because bullying also involves the principle of the First Follower. The idea of the First Follower is that leaders don't really become leaders until the first person falls in behind them, encouraging the rest of the crowd to join in. 

Bullies need an audience. "Watch this," is a critical part of bullying language; imagine your bully announces "I'm going to go make him lick the swing" and everyone on the playground shrugs and ignores him. He would be done.

Chris Rufo says, "Hey, watch this. I am going to use charges of plagiarism to make Harvard lick the swing," and everyone comes running because they've allowed themselves to become convinced that if Rufo can pull this off, that's an Important Story, a horse race worthy of attention. Worse, now that they've fallen for his "Hey, watch this" for crt and transparency and DEI et al, they have to believe this is an important horse race because they've covered all his other horse races. 

Rufo's no genius, but he is patient. If his plagiarism hunt doesn't draw a crowd, he'll just throw something else at the wall, because sooner or later the press will show up again. I wish his confidence were misplaced.

FL: New Puritanism vs. An Old Puritan

The Orlando Sentinel took on the arduous task of rooting through the list of Naughty Books that Orange County Schools pulled from both libraries and classroom collections, in order to comply with new Florida laws HB 1069 and 1467) that seek to eradicate all books with "sexual conduct" and the list of 673 works is something else. 

The law requires media specialists to check every book and holds them responsible for every naughty book that gets past them. The state did offer some training, in which they reminded these specialists that they could face criminal penalties and loss of license if they approve an "inappropriate book."

As Florida has well-established, vague law + severe penalties = super-chilling effect. It is unsurprising that media specialists went hard against books that depict sexual conduct in any way shape and form. It has been the pattern across the state, like the district that yanked "In The Night Kitchen" because it has a picture of a little boy's bare butt (great book, in which Maurice Sendak pays homage to Winsor McKay's classic Little Nemo comic strip). Or the district that didn't even wait for books to be challenged, but just pulled them if they'd heard other districts had pulled them.

One of Orange County's board members is Alicia Farrant, who ran for office as an advocate for "medical choice, parental rights and restoring morality & standards." She's also a Moms For Liberty and Florida Freedom Keepers member, and she was on stage with Ron DeSantis when he signed HB 1467. On that occasion she spoke out fiercely against "pornographic and sexually explicit" books.

The problem, of course, is that Florida (and other states) have gone way beyond "pornographic and sexually explicit." Not only have they gone way beyond that, but they've done it in broad and vague terms then thrown in large penalties to encourage schools to pull a huge number of questionable choices.

Farrant herself criticized a school district's choice to yank "No, David!" by David Shannon.

“We can’t be living in a state of fear and removing every single book,” Farrant said. “I don’t like the book,” she said of “No, David!,” by David Shannon, “but a book like that shouldn’t be removed because a kid is running down the street with his butt showing.”

But that's pretty much what the law demands a school do. What does the law actually say? In 2023-105 we find that it's a school board's duty to provide every "parent or resident" the opportunity to "proffer evidence" that a work violates one of several strictures, including that it 

Depicts or describes sexual conduct as defined in s. 847.001(19),

 And 847.001(19) defines sexual conduct:

“Sexual conduct” means actual or simulated sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality, masturbation, or sadomasochistic abuse; actual or simulated lewd exhibition of the genitals; actual physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or, if such person is a female, breast with the intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of either party; or any act or conduct which constitutes sexual battery or simulates that sexual battery is being or will be committed. 

You'd think that would rule out "No, David," but would you be willing to bet your career that no parent or resident will come after you over the book? 

The rule aims right at Gender Queer, the book conservatives want to get rid of with fire. And it aims at popular fiction like John Green and Stephen King books. But it also takes us into a dicey grey area. Yes, East of Eden by John Steinbeck and The World According to Garp by John Irving both definitely have some sex in them, but it exists in service of the characters and the story. Yes, Toni Morrison books include sex, but none of it is titillating and all of it serves the work of literature. 

Slaughterhouse Five keeps turning up on these lists, though all it includes is a crude drawing of breasts and some reference to sex without depiction. And then these lists just get nuts. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? Jude the Obscure? Brave New World? Ayn Rand's decidedly unappealing opaque depictions of hate sex? All on the list.

The fear-fueled vagaries of Florida law have taken us from "pornography" to "any depiction of sexual conduct" to "any book that depicts a world in which we are somehow led to believe that sex sometimes occurs."

But no book on this list better captures just how far off the deep end they've gone than John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton was born at the beginning of the 17th century (just as Shakespeare was shuffling off this mortal coil), which put him in the right place and time to be part of the great revolution, that moment in which conservative Protestants overthrew the monarchy and replaced it, eventually, with Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. Milton was a big fan, and his religious writings were aimed at the newly purified protectorate.

Short form: John Milton was an actual Puritan. The modern fans of puritanical suppression have suppressed an actual Puritan.

Is there sexual conduct in Paradise Lost? Well, yes. Here are some hot Adam and Eve samples. First, before The Fall:

Handed they went; and eased the putting off
Those troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused

Then, after The Fall:

Carnal desire enflaming; he on Eve

Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him

As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn

Till Adam thus ‘gan Eve to dalliance move

Pretty hot stuff. There's some other stuff as well. Satan has sex with himself, giving birth to Sin, who is raped by her son, Death. All in prose nearly impenetrable to the average high school student and all with the intent of explaining the ways of God to humankind. And all contributing to a minor message in the work, which is that sex without God is Bad Stuff. 

We could argue the various merits of these works all day and then spend the night questioning the goals of these sorts of laws. But these growing lists, with their increasingly absurd reach, are a reminder of one important factor.

It's never enough.

There will never be a point where these modern puritans will say, "Yes, that's good enough. We can stop trying to root out Naughty Books because I think we've done enough." They will never stop on their own, never be satisfied, never stop searching for the next Most Dirty Book that might be out there. To expect that they will simply subside is a pipe dream. As long as nobody is standing up to them or stopping them, they will simply keep whittling away (or creating situations in which someone else is motivated to whittle for them) until there is nothing left. 

 

School Letter Grades And Staffing

A story dropped in Tuscon last week that is among the least surprising education stories of the year.

Arzona has school letter grades. The argument for this dumb idea is that it allows parents to get a quick yet clear idea of how the schools are doing. This is supposed to help with the problem of asymmetric information, a condition you get in a market where the people who are trying to sell something have way more information than the people trying to buy it. So in a school choice system, where education has been turned into a commodity, school grades are supposed to create pressure on the school to Do Better, and they are supposed to help families make choices.

You know who else makes choices? Teachers looking for jobs.

The story out of Tuscon is that five schools with a grade of D are having trouble filling staff positions.

Well, duh. 

What does a D grade tell a teacher who is considering a job at that school?

It tells her that the school is under-resourced, that it likely serves a poor community but does so without the extra support needed to succeed against the obstacles that come with such a school. It tells her that the school leaders have their backs against the wall, that they are focused on raising their grade which means raising test scores which means the Big Standardized Test and prepping for it are central to the school's mission. And, since in this case she's considering a job in classes directly related to testing, it tells her that she will be under the gun for test prep and test focus from day one. "I wanted to get into teaching so that I could get students ready to take one big standardized test," said no teacher ever.

It tells her that morale may well be rather low. It tells her she'll be associated with a school that's being held up as an example of how public schools are failing.

Does any of this add up to an attractive job?

Certainly there can still be some takers for a variety of reasons, from roots in that community to loving a good challenge to not being offered anything else.

Nor do Big Standardized Test scores and the grades that they generate reveal previously hidden secrets. But slapping that grade on the school, making it a defining piece of the school's identity just adds a whole other layer. 

It's not the only reason to ditch the letter grades for schools, but making "Come work at our failing school" as a recruiting pitch is certainly a lousy way to strengthen that school's future. 

ICYMI: New Year Already Please (12/31)

Well, this was not a vacation that unfolded as we would have hoped, between injury and illness and absent family, but sometimes that's just how it goes, and what we as humans get for pinning hopes on a particular date set for us instead of just making events fit our own timing. Hope your break has been a good one, and whatever it is you do tonight to celebrate the calendar rolling over, may it be fun and rewarding.

Here's a bit of reading from the week.

Meet Three Of The Neighbors Who United To Defend Public Education In Central Bucks School District

From the Bucks County Beacon, a profile of three folks who stood up in Bucks County, God bless 'em, taking on one very rich guy and a bunch of the Moms for Liberty crowd.

Judge blocks parts of Iowa law banning school library book, discussion of LGBTQ+ issues

The court serves a setback to Iowa's book banning Don't Say Gay law.

Ohio’s Republican governor vetoes trans care restriction and sports ban

Governor Mike DeWine takes the radical step of going to talk to parents and families and people who work in the hospitals before making one of his occasional decent human decisions. NBC news on the story.

Tired of Being Tired (Toward a Better 2024)

Here's the thing. Jose Luis Vilson isn't just back to the blogging thing--he's cranking out several posts a week. So go read this one about approaching the new year, and then click on the [subscribe] button, because you should be reading him regularly.

Public Christian schools? Leonard Leo’s allies advance a new cause

Heidi Przybyla at Politico dives deep into the conservative folks working hard to make taxpayer-funded religious public schools a thing, including the same people who brought us the end of Roe v. Wade.

Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to Say ‘Slavery’? History Has the Answer

Joshua Zeitz at Politico uses Haley's boneheaded fumble to remind us of the story of the Lost Cause and the rewriting of Civil War history. Not directly about education, but this is what some folks want schools to teach.

Retired teachers forced to pay thousands

From New Mexico, a reminder that when retired teachers answer the call to come back and help out, they need to make sure they get the paperwork right.

Angry About Your Kid’s After-School Satan Club? Blame Clarence Thomas.

Adam Laats at The New Republic explains why after school Satan Clubs are just the religious liberty crowd getting just what they asked for.

The Long Lineage of Conservative Mother Movements

Adam Laats again, this time being interviewed at WNYC studios about the history of Moms for Liberty style movements. You can listen or read the transcript.

The Post reviewed 1,000 school book challenges. Here’s what we found.

Hannah Natanson at the Washington Post writes up their study of so very many book challenges and finds, among other things, that the majority came from just 11 people.

Right-Wing Activist Chris Rufo Calls for “Siege” of University at UT

The message, as reported by Brant Bingamon at the Daily News, was the usual Rufo riff. But when it came time for Q&A, things didn't go so well for him.

Making it a Job to be Happy

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at happiness, the new year, and education. A good read to kick off the new year.

Sad news. Among the reporters taking the buyout offer at the Washington Post is education stalwart Valerie Strauss. At her space, the Answer Sheet, Strauss was always a voice of education reason at an otherwise reformster-friendly outfit. She boosted my work more than a few times and was always supportive and a lovely human being. I'm going to miss her work at WaPo.

Finally, this week I did the obligatory prediction piece for Forbes (I have no desire to look back at 2023, which was pretty rough all around). If I turn out to be wrong, we'll just pretend I never wrote my education stories to watch piece at all. 

If you want to have my stuff just conveniently pop up in your email, subscribe to my substack.

Virginia Lee Burton: An Appreciation

I grew up with Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, and I have lots of company, including my own children. It's a book that encourages the reader to imagine an author as some aged, retiring, nostalgia-soaked children's book author, but Virginia Lee Burton is something else entirely. Today, I'm setting aside the usual eduranting to look at this extraordinary American author.

The author of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was just thirty years old when it was published, in the midst of a life that was rich and adventurous and even a little unconventional. (For this next section, I depended mainly on Barbara Elleman's brief but illuminating biography of Burton)

Virginia Lee Burton was born in 1909 in Newton Center, Massachusetts. Her father was Alfred Burton, an engineer who was the first dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A widower with two sons from his first marriage (one ended up as a Supreme Court Justice, the other an architect), Alfred met the eccentric young Lena Yates on a walking trip in France; they soon married, though she was about 22 years younger. They had three children. In the late teens, citing health issues, Lena took the children to California, ending up in the bohemian art scene of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

After Alred retired from MIT in 1921, he joined the family out West, but in 1925 Lena ran off with Carl Cherry, a man 24 years her junior (and the eventual inventor of the Cherry rivet, leading to the founding of Cherry Aerospace, still kicking today). Virginia was 16; she involved herself in arts, especially dance. In 1928 she was prepared to follow her sister back East and even had a contract with a dance troupe when her father broke his leg. She went to take care of him instead, and her dancing career evaporated. 

In 1930, she took work as an illustrator for a newspaper, eventually signing up for a class with George Demetrios, a teacher of drawing and sculpture at the Boston Museum School. In 1931, she and Demetrios married. After a couple of years, the ended up in a small, turn-of-the-century home in Folly Cove, Gloucester, Mass. 

Burton's first attempt at a children's book was, she said, disastrous. But she learned an important lesson, and ever after she fine tuned her stories by telling them over and over to her own children; the parts where children's attention lagged were targeted for rewrites and tweaking.

Burton did illustrations for other peoples' work, but her signature works are her own. Burton was not so much an illustrator as a designer, working text and layout and art all together. Folly Cove itself became a vibrant center of art and design, energized constantly with music and dance and parties and gatherings and Burton's own work as a teacher of design. 

Burton's body of work is actually not that large. She illustrated (and in a couple of cases adapted) six books, and created seven works of her own. You probably already know a couple--you should know them all.

Written for her son Aris, Choo Choo (1937) tells the story of a little engine who runs away, then gets lost and stranded in a dark wood until her crew find her and bring her home. It is rough and chunky in the illustrations. 

That was followed by Mike Mulligan (1939), written for son Mike. She worked on it for a couple of years, slowly developing and tweaking the story, including the final plot solution offered by a young man at a friend's house. A steam shovel that is outdated finds one last big job.

Calico the Wonder Horse (1941) was conceived as a sort of comics format, but it's graphically very cool. It's a western adventure, with Calico up against some Bad Guys in an adventure that comes down to Christmas Eve.

The Little House (1942) won a Caldecott medal. It was based on their own home. Adapted as a Disney short, but you can skip that. The house starts in the country, and the city grows up around it.

Katy and the Big Snow (1943) is about a snowplough that must rescue the city of Geopolis (based on Gloucester) from a tremendous snow storm.

Maybelle the Cable Car (1952) reflects Burton's school days in San Francisco, and tells the story of the movement to rescue that cable cars of that city when they were threatened with replacement by modern buses.

Life Story (1962) is in many ways Burton's magnum opus. She spent eight years on it, and it tells nothing less than the history of the world, from the Big Bang through life in her country home, all presented as if a stage play. It challenges any sort of categorization. 

There are certain threads that run through the works (beyond the attention to graphic design). Curiously, in all books, human beings are secondary characters. And there is an obvious thread of constructs, like Mary Anne and Maybelle and the Little House, that are threatened with being left behind in a world racing forward into modernity. As Elleman does, I see these not as a romanticizing of the past, but as stories of adaption. Stuff happens, and you find a way to move forward; it's certainly not hard to hear that as an echo of Burton's own childhood and youth in which, faced with challenging events, she kept moving forward without bitterness or anger.

There is a gentleness in her stories. In the end, everyone is okay. Choo Choo decides that her work is not so bad. Stewy Stinker and his Bad Men decide to join in the Christmas celebration. Big Bill the bus decides to be a friend, not a rival, to Maybelle. And of course Henry B. Swap finally smiles in a way that is not so mean. 

When I read these books to the board of directors, I'm struck by one other theme which I think particular fits Burton's own life. It's not about past versus future, city versus country. It's about finding the place where you fit and making it your own. Burton and her family made Folly Cove their own, where they were able to pursue their passions and sing and dance and live the lives they wanted to, and in doing so, made it the center of a larger community as well as the foundation of a whole group of artists and designers. There were classes. There was food. There was a giant slab of an outdoor table, made of slightly irregular quarry stone, that could be a picnic table or a dance floor.

Every one of her characters does this, comes down in the place just right by being willing to move forward to become what they can be. Life Story may seem like it's hunting bigger game, but in the final pages it brings the focus from the entire existence of the world to the passing of the seasons and life in a small house in Gloucester. And here are the last two pages:

And now it is dawn--dawn of a new day, a day in spring. Minute by minute the light brightens in the east, turning from cold gray to deep blue to delicate pink. The birds are singing gaily as they await the return of the sun. Down in the green meadow there is a new baby lamb. Now I leave you and turn the story over to you. Look out of your window and in a few seconds you will see the sun rise.

And now it is your Life Story and it is you who play the leading role. The stage is set, the time is now, and the place wherever you are. Each passing second is a new link in the endless chain of Time. The drama of life is a continuous story--ever new, ever changing, and ever wondrous to behold.

You lose a little without her perfect design, but you get the idea. She has spent seventy-six pages rendering the vast spread of history and the world, and you have a place in that vast picture, you, right here, in this moment. 

Burton had worked forever on a book about design that she never finished. Her last years were dominated by her cancer. She passed away in October of 1968. Her husband created a sculpture to her memory, dancing, smiling, kicking joyfully at the sky. 

Like the best of those who create works for "children" she had made some big statements about life, about art. I'll read through the stack again in a few days and raise a glass to her in the new year when Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne celebrate their 85th birthday.