TX: Dumb Fight On Hair Mountain

There are roughly 14,000 school districts in this country, and on any given day, someone in one of them is doing something stupid and then doubling down on it. Choosing to die on a particularly dumb hill of hair is the superintendent of the Barbers Hill Independent School District.

This is the district that kicked off the year by kicking Darryl George into alternative ed for having hair they didn't like. It was, I guess, their special way of celebrating the passing of the CROWN act, a version of an act passed in several state in which it takes a state law to keep some school administrators from discriminating against Black students for having Black hair.

Superintendent Greg Poole has doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the punishment. It has been one suspension after another for George since last September. George's family has sued the district over their apparent violation of the CROWN act. Poole says, no, they were just enforcing the school's dress code rule about male students' hair length, which is not protected by the CROWN act:

Male students’ hair will not extend, at any time, below the eyebrows or below the ear lobes. Male students’ hair must not extend below the top of a t-shirt collar or be gathered or worn in a style that would allow the hair to extend below the top of a t-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes when let down.

Just to be clear, this is a dumb rule, and all the noise about statistics showing that strict dress codes result in higher student achievement doesn't make it any less dumb. Who knew we were going to have to relitigate the long-haired hippy freak panic of the 1960s. 

So the argument is that George's dreadlocks, it not coiled on his head as they usually are, were unleashed, his hair would dip too far below the Naughty line.

Not convinced yet? Poole was so put out by the negative coverage that he received in The Chronicle that he took out a full-page ad (even though the editor says they "tried to work with Dr. Poole’s staff on an op-ed that we would have published free of charge." 

Poole argues that they have given religious exemptions to Black students who asked for them. He points out that George came from a neighboring district "that allows long hair on males," so I guess implying that George is bringing along those slack values from Those People? And in the most-quoted section:

Our military academies at West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs maintain a rigorous expectation of dress. They realize being an American requires conformity with the positive benefit of unity, and being a part of something bigger than yourself.

Yes, being American requires conformity. He said that. In fact, he typed it out so he had time to think about it, and that is still what he submitted to the newspaper.

"Barbers Hill ISD will continue to make decisions to protect and fight for the rights of its community to set the standards and expectations for our school district even if that path takes us to the U.S. Supreme Court," Poole wrote. "We will not lose sight of the main goal — high standards for our students — by bending to political pressure or responding to misinformed media reports. These entities have 'lesser' goals that ultimately harm kids — just as keeping students out of school in response to the COVID-19 health crisis ultimately did and lowering student expectations will."

Poole also cites his four decades of professional education experience, which is how he knows that if he lets this one kid wear his dreadlocks today, the whole school will be collapsing into anarchy and failure tomorrow. 

The full page rant was paid for by Barbers Hill Education Foundation, a sort of PTA-esque fundraising group for the district.

Meanwhile, the author of the CROWN act is planning to go back and amend it so that guys like Poole who want to observe the letter and ignore the spirit of the law will have one less avenue to do so.

Folks of a Certain Age will recognize this whole flap. Yes, it's about racism and sexism and even generational foolishness. But it is also about running a school on demands for compliance. These are Cartman Rules, where the rule itself doesn't matter so much as demanding that the student Respect My Authority, and pretty soon here you are--a grown-ass man drawing national press attention because you got yourself in a fight with a teenager over hair. 

And while it pains me to do so, I must also note that Poole invokes "local control." It's a thing I value in a school district, but it has to be remembered that local control (like states rights) can be invoked in the service of ridiculous and harmful policy. 

Poole claims that the family's lawyer said she wants to "bankrupt" the school district, and after the student's junior year has been so thoroughly disrupted, I don't have a hard time imagining that she might have. Poole and his district have picked a dumb hill to die on; we'll see what the court has to say. In the meantime, the district has to reckon with the Rule of Dumb Rules, which says that whenever you throw an institution's weight behind a dumb rule, you diminish its ability to enforce smart ones.

 

Students and Deadlines

On the social media and in Larry Ferlazzo's EdWeek piece on the topic, the old debate about student late work has been churning again.

This debate will always churn, because three things are true:

1) Deadlines are a real thing in the world, often carrying some serious penalties.

2) Giving a student a grade on being late means you haven't actually assessed the skills and knowledge that were supposed to be involved in the work.

3) Some students face much larger obstacles to meeting deadlines than others.

A teacher needs to balance all three true things in their brain. 

A hard and fast, take no prisoners approach to deadlines is unnecessarily brutal. These are, after all, not full grown adults. Requiring them to meet deadlines without support or slack is setting them up for failure. 

A lose and floppy "just hand it in any time" approach is not doing anyone any favors. It's not fair to students that one gets three days to complete the assignment and another took a month. And it is absolute nightmare fuel for teachers, who face a jumbled mess of grading.

I taught a course that was heavy on writing assignments and therefor heavy on deadlines. In a typical 9 weeks grading period I had 50-60 grades in the book. That's a lot of paper to process, and a lot of deadlines to meet. Here are the principles I followed that kept me sane and my students mostly on track.

No surprises. Let them know what is coming, and then keep telling them it's coming, and then keep telling them how long until the due date. You don't have to be irritating and naggy about it; just keep them informed. But unless you have some reason to include memory skills in your class learning objectives, there's no reason to make students depend on the memory capacity of their half-wired brains. 

For larger assignments, give more than enough time. Don't make the mistake of giving students the amount of time that would be enough, but only if those students didn't have any other classes or responsibilities in their lives. 

Mix it up. Not all deadlines need to be created equal. My students could usually hand regular homework assignments in whenever. But I also had assignments that were "Absolute Deadline" assignments. Just be explicit, so that they know what's coming and can organize accordingly.

Provide supports and scaffolds. One of my biggest mistakes in this area was the first year I pioneered a massive research project. We talked about it and I gave reminders, but there were no actual deadlines until the final one, and for some students it was disastrous. In the following years, I added secondary deadlines and check-ins (just come to my desk and show me what you've got) as part of the process; it helped keep them from digging themselves into too deep a hole. And when they dig that hole, help them create a plan for climbing out. 

Be open and humane. Run the kind of classroom in which a student feels safe to come to you with whatever struggles they're facing doing the work. I've had students miss critical class time because of terminal illnesses of parents. Once a student's house burned down with her work in it. 

Be selective about what hills to die on--and then hold the line. My policy was that small assignments like homework or mini-essays written in class time could be turned in late at any time. But at the end of the nine weeks, when my own grades were due, the final absolute deadline was absolute. If it wasn't in, it was a zero. Absolute deadline assignments worked the same way, with steep penalties for lateness. 

Not everything in life is a hard and fast deadline, but it would be misleading to suggest that such deadlines do no exist. Our major local employer has a simple policy, written by management and union together-- after a certain number of unexcused hours, you get a warning, then a meeting, and when you hit the max, you're fired. 

It helps to keep your focus on what you are actually trying to teach and therefor what you actually want to measure. 

But it's also fair to include "responsibly meeting deadlines" to the list of things you're teaching. Meeting deadlines is, I think, one of those things that most adults do without any consciousness of how we do it or when we learned how. But human beings are not born with innate knowledge of how to meet human-created deadlines, how to organize a project and apply the time and resources to it. Too often the only advice we have for young humans is "well, just do the work" or "buckle down" when they don't actually know how to do that. And if they are in a chaotic life situation that they cannot control because they are at the mercy of adults, then simply repeating "work harder" or "clearly you just don't care" is no help. You'll also see students dealing with task paralysis, a situation where they have so much to do that they literally cannot figure out what to do next, and so time passes and more work piles up and their anxiety rises and they fall further behind rinse repeat--they are unlikely to break out of that without someone helping them chart a path. 

None of this means abolishing deadlines and consequences for them. It is no help for students in the long term to be taught that no deadlines really matter and you can just do, or not, as you wish. But it is also unhelpful to simply point at a deadline and say, "The hammer is gonna fall, kid, so you'd better deal with it, somehow." 

Part of what we're supposed to teach is not just how to pack knowledge into your head, but how to transport it out of your head and into the world, and to do it, sometimes, in a timely manner. To teach the learning without teaching the How To Get It Out Of Your Head part is incomplete teaching. Deadlines, with consequences, are part of that learning. But requiring deadlines and penalizing deadline failure without providing support is like giving a unit test without teaching the content of the unit. 

So, yes, deadlines and penalties, but not always deadlines and penalties and not just deadlines and penalties. 

NH: Ramping Up Vouchers

There was a time when we used years to measure the gap between "We need this small, limited voucher program to serve this very needy population" and "Free money for anyone willing to walk away from public education!" 

Arizona passed vouchers in 2006, got them thrown out in 2009, tried again in 2011 with a super-special voucher program just for students with special needs, then proceeded to expand that program year after year until they finally passed universal vouchers in 2022. Lots of patience in that crowd.

But nowadays, the voucher crowd is about as patient as a hungry labrador looking at a huge pile of doggy treats. And this year, they want to chomp away at some more goodies.

In the past, legislatures have gone slow because, despite the rhetoric, school vouchers are not particularly popular with voters. What has changed is the boldness with which legislators simply ignore that hurdle. The path to universal vouchers in Arizona involved sidestepping voters twice, most recently when voters forced a referendum on universal vouchers, the vouchers lost, and then legislators just passed them anyway. 

New Hampshire has a similar tale. After years of fruitless attempts to privatize public ed in the Granite State, the GOP captured the legislature in 2020, and immediately began pushing again. A proposed voucher bill drew over 3,000 people to testify against it. So legislators waited till the last minute, stuck it in the budget bill and passed it anyway. In May of 2021, supporters promised that the vouchers would cost a measly $130,000. Within two years that estimate proved to be off by roughly 11,000%. Currently the voucher program is up to a $23.8 million price tag. 

But that is not enough for some folks, and so the new legislative session is considering an assortment of bills intended to simply open the door wider, so that more folks can enjoy free public dollars for their private choices. 

SB 442 is the first one down the chute. Right now there's an income cap of 350% of federal poverty line on New Hampshire vouchers, but SB 442 would remove the cap for any student who requested transfer to a new public school and was denied. Another suggests raising the cap from 350% to 500% (that would be $140,000 for a family of four). Another removes the cap for students in under-performing districts. Another removes the cap for students who have been bullied or who have been diagnosed with mental illness, as well as students who identify as LGBTQ. That last is a particularly cynical move as those are precisely the students that many private schools prefer to reject or expel. And according to Rick Green at the Keene Sentinel, there's also a bill to just plain remove the income cap and go straight to universal vouchers.

That last bill at least has the virtue of honestly not pretending that there is any other sort of goal here. The other proposals are all about widening the door as a way to build up to universal vouchers. 

Have New Hampshire legislators been conned by voucher lobbyists into thinking the public really wants this? Are they simply pursuing their own agenda? Have they correctly noted that as much as voters make noise about schools and education, it's generally not an issue that influences their vote? Whatever the case, the New Hampshire GOP is ready to keep expanding and pushing their costly voucher program so that taxpayers can help foot private school bills for the well-to-do. 

Will New Version Of Snow Days Make Districts Wimpier?

I don't know about you, but when I was in school, we walked uphill, both ways, in the snow. And if the snow got deeper and the air colder and kept the buses from running, we strapped cables onto our backs and dragged the buses to school ourselves. And school was never, ever canceled, because we were not wimps. Grrr.

Last Friday, the Board of Directors here at the Institute had a snow day. Well, not really a snow day. A Flexible Instruction Day. We were alerted by messages from the school and from each boy's First Grade teacher, letting us know to get out the big envelopes with FID materials for Day One and complete them, because this would count as our children's attendance for the day. 

If you haven't been through this, here's what's going on. At the beginning of the year, each teacher sent home a big envelope with a few sets of pre-created materials. The district's whole program is prepared well ahead of time and subject to approval by the state. Also, during that day teachers were available via text or whatever other avenue they had set up. 

This is obviously a remnant of pandemic closure procedures, and for precisely that reason not all districts are doing it. 

A district right next door also has a FID plan in place-- materials collected and created, approved by the state, all put in place over a year ago. But when the teachers union proposed some language about these days in the last contract, the board said, "No, we're never doing that." Knowing the general cultural and political bent of the district, I would bet that what they had in mind is that they would never fall for a made-up fake anti-liberty pandemic ever again.

So while my kids were home with their FID materials, that district was operating normally.

And if you are bemoaning the death of Snow Days, I will note that the twins finished their pack of materials in about ten minutes, leaving them with plenty of snow days.

One other important note. The inclement weather conditions never appeared. And honestly, the indicators were not all that awful ahead of time. If my district had to consider the costs of making up the day later, I'm not sure they would have pulled the plug, because it wasn't all that bad, nor were there strong signs that it was going to be. 

So I'm wondering if this new-found flexibility that allows a district to cancel school basically for free--I'm wondering if this is just going to make districts wimpier.

I sympathize with the issue. I am involved in activities that require me to make a weather-related call that affects a bunch of other people and it's stressy and fraught and often involves a decision that will absolutely be wrong no matter what you decide. But I don't think this was that. And while there may well have been some more rigorous blizzard buckets in higher grades, the twins absolutely had a day off almost indistinguishable from any other day off. Their school year is now shorter by one day. I guess as the winter rolls on we'll see if this is a trend or a blip.

Unbundling and Dismantling

One of the beloved dreams of privatizers has been the unbundling of education. Why get all your education in one place? Why not assemble it yourself-- a math class from this tutor, a literature class at the local college campus, other classes from an assortment of vendors. Sometimes it's described as "a la carte," though that really only fits if you are imagining an a la carte meal where you get each dish from a separate restaurant.

At any rate, it looks like Indiana is going to consider legislation to unbundle education.

Indiana is all in on vouchers, but as with many states, the program is not having much penetration in rural and low population areas, because a voucher is useless if there's no place to use it (and nobody is rushing to start private schools where there's not much market to be tapped).

Microschools have been one proffered solution to the issue, but unbundling is another one. No private school to attend in your neighborhood? Just piece together an education together from various vendors.

If you're a voucher fan, this is a way to extend the blessings of choice and the free market to more families. If you are a voucher cynic, it's a way to promote this conversation:

State: We'll give you several thousand dollars to abandon public education!

Family: Yeah? Where would we spend it?

State: Um--look! Unbundling!

There is another, darker aspect to unbundling. Particularly when one considers the wave of laws that have been chipping away at child labor laws across the country. The folks behind the broadening of child labor "opportunities" have a serious overlap with those interested in chipping away at public education. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out on the dead bird app:

That full speech is here.

Yup. When DeVos and her crew talk about finding an education that's the "best fit" for the children, they're talking about an education best suited for that child's Proper Station In Life. Sure, the wealthy Betters have no intention of having their own children listen to educational podcasts during lunchtime at the meat packing plant, but the assumption is that for some children, Those Peoples' Children, that would be an excellent and appropriate option.

Unbundling would be an unregulated free market nightmare for many households required to shop for their child's education piece by piece. I'm not sure whether it would be easier or harder to navigate an education that is fit in around the demands of a job. 

But it would open up the market to lots of folks who would like to make money with an education-flavored product, and it would help further cement in policy the idea that education is not a public good or a service to the community, but just a commodity the purchase of which is strictly the responsibility of the individual parents. Ran out of money before you put together a full program? Turned out your math provider was a fraud? Your kid spent so much time working that she didn't get an actual education? We washed our hands of you when we handed you a voucher; you're on your own. 

ICYMI: Seriously Winter Edition (1/21)

Okay, that's plenty of cold weather. Not that we got the promised blizzard (the one that tricked my old district into calling an unnecessary Flexible Instruction Day) but still, the season is landing with both feet right now. 

But even if the weather outside is frightful, there are still some pieces to read from the week (and share). So here we go.

Time to End Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and The Ultra-Rich

Jake Jacobs reminds us that charter schools provide a sweet, sweet financial deal for investors and a great way to cash in on some tax breaks. Maybe we don't need to be doing that any more. 

A woman hired to investigate racial harassment in a Utah school district says she experienced it herself

NBC News reports on the story of Joscelin Thomas, who was supposed to help a Utah school district deal with its racism issues. Instead, she was on the receiving end of the behavior.

Most Georgians oppose school ‘vouchers,’ support Medicaid expansion

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did some polling and found, once again, that the popular support for vouchers that voucher supporters keep insisting is out there--it's not out there.

“My Research is Better than Your Research” Wars

Nancy Flanagan is always worth a read, but this week's is particularly good. A look at the disconnect between education research and actual teachers.

What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation

Tik Root at the Guardian joins the ongoing cell phone fray.

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Technology author Cory Doctorow takes a look at how badly standardization serves schools (looking at you, Common Core).

Moms for Liberty activists starting taxpayer-funded charter school

This story has been bouncing around the interwebs, but the original reporting is right here at Popular Information, courtesy of Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby. 

Protesters gather as Charleston Co. Board Chair attends Moms for Liberty meeting

And here's the sequel, courtesy of Molly McBride at WCSC, who visited with the protestors who showed up at the board meeting.

'Unjust' survey for Arkansas deaf and blind schools stirs concern over hidden state agenda

Arkansas has schools for the deaf and for the blind, and they haven't been very well cared for, but now the supporters are getting nervous about what the state intends to do next.

As Private School Choice Grows, Critics Push for More Guardrails

Mark Lieberman at Education Week notices the growing complaints about how vouchers are much like dumping taxpayer dollars down a dark, discriminatory hole.

You Couldn't Sit With Us

Jose Luis Vilson reflects on the noise folks make about teacher professionalism. 

John Eaton, Hero of American Education

Cool history lesson from Thomas Ultican, about a 19th century figure who furthered the cause of public education.

What to Do About the Surge in Student Absenteeism?

Jan Resseger looks at some of the ideas out there, both the good and the not so much. 

Tax dollars are wasted in states with school vouchers

Kentucky's choicers are warming up to try again, and John Schaaf at Florida Phoenix says it's a lousy and costly idea.

Two pieces at Forbes.com this week-- one about a new report looking at the parents' rights movement and the other about the new set of recommendations to fix PA school funding. 

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Dear TC: About School Vouchers

I saw you emerge onto the dead bird app and proceed to get into a couple of school voucher related flaps, and I found myself in the not-unusual position of wanting to say something and being too lazy to boil it down to tweet-sized construction ("Too lazy to tweet about it" would make a good sub-heading for this blog). I'm going to give it a whack here, in part because you are my favorite kind of education writer: not ideologically blinkered. not paid to have a particular opinion, and more interested in light than heat. Also, we only agree some of the time.

My impression is that you see a lot of the debate over vouchers as being tied up with people over-interested in devotion to their particular team, and that's a valid critique of some arguments out there. And I think you often capture nicely the gulf between arguing over good state policy and trying to decide what's best for your own kid. 

Watching you talk about what's wrong with the voucher debates challenges me to go back and rattle around in my own skull to think about what my objections to vouchers are. For what it's worth, here's some of where I land.

In particular, you had a reaction to someone tossing this well-worn graphic up:

Your response was 

And why is this a problem? The idea that children should have to sacrifice a year of their schooling years as some kind of "purity" test is more about serving adults than children.

I agree that there's some no-zero number of parents who are scraping to get their kid into private school. If Tennessee goes the way of Iowa and Florida and sees vouchers followed by tuition increases, the voucher won't really help those parents, but it won't hurt them, either. This is definitely one of those places where the personal and policy perspectives are different animals. Will universal vouchers widen the gap between rich and poor? Almost certainly. But it's not fair to make that an individual parent's issue to solve.

The universal vouchers for students already in school creates a taxpayer problem, because it increases the number of students that the taxpayers pay for. Taxpayers are paying for 100 students at the public school. 10 leave for a private school. 25 already at the private school get a voucher (and why wouldn't they? what sense does it make to turn down free money?) But now taxpayers are paying for 125 students. If that money comes from the school of origin, that school can either cut programs or raise taxes. Universal voucher programs get really expensive, really fast. 

One of my objections to choice in general and vouchers in specific is that policymakers aren't willing to be honest about the cost, but instead lean heavily on the fictions that A) money doesn't matter in education and B) we can run multiple school systems for the same money we're spending now. 

Even if I accept that vouchers are a benefit to families (and there are plenty of reasons to debate that), they are a benefit that is only available to some. Every voucher system in this country holds sacred the providers right to serve only those they want to serve. Families can be rejected or expelled because of religious beliefs, being LGBTQ, or having special needs. In Pennsylvania, we've got a voucher school that reserves the right to reject your kid for any reason AND to refuse to explain why they've done it. Plus, of course, the financial barriers still in place for the priciest privates.

And so somehow we end up with a government benefit that is only available to some people, and that availability is decided on the basis of such criteria. 

That points to what I find most problematic about the voucher movement, which is the implicit attempt to change the whole premise of education in this country. Instead of a shared responsibility and a shared benefit, we get the idea that education is a private, personal commodity. Getting some schooling for your kid is your problem. From there it's a short step to the idea that paying for it is also your own problem and not anyone else's.

Do I think that we'll ever see Milton Friedman's dream of a country in which the government has nothing more to do with education than it does with buying cars? Probably not, but I'm less confident than I was a decade ago. I do think we will see in some states a public system that is shrunk down, if not down to drown-it-in-the-bathtub size, to something small and meagre and basic. And we have right now states working on the DeVos vision of kids who mostly work, pick up a couple of courses on the side, and that's good enough. So probably not the end of public education entirely, but a new multi-tiered system of very separate and very unequal education providers. 

The irony for me has always been that I can imagine a system of school choice (see here and here) but the modern reform movement of charters and vouchers strikes me as headed in a completely different direction, making a lot of worthwhile promises that it does not particularly try to deliver on. 

See, this is why I don't tweet more. I reckon you mostly know this stuff, but once I start, I have to work all the way through.

I hope people subscribe to your fine substack and avoid saying silly things to you on the tweeter (charging you with being a Lee shill was an extraordinary reach). Stay safe and warm.