NC: A Truly Terrible Candidate For Education Chief

Catherine Truitt was no prize, a stalwart friend of the school privatization movement who served as a senior education advisor to Governor Pat McCrory, a chancellor of an online college, and most recently as North Carolina's superintendent of public instruction. In that role she was a friend to the wealthy, the privatizers, and the Trump crowd.

And yet, she apparently wasn't friendly enough, because in the primary she got her incumbent butt handed to her by a spectacularly unqualified opponent, who is now the GOP candidate for the state superintendent post.

That's bad news for North Carolina, because Michelle Morrow could easily be one of the worst state education leaders in the nation.

Morrow couldn't even win a school board election just two years ago.

Morrow has no background in education. She was a nurse. She's homeschools her own children and is virulently opposed to public schools, calling them "indoctrination centers" and "socialism centers" and urged parents not to send their children there. When running for school board, she said, “I think the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” She argued for more money for tutoring which could be paid for by cutting spending on "nonessentials items" such as "social activism," though she couldn't provide examples of such activity, but she'd, you know, heard stuff.

Morrow's board campaign also included complaints about books with sex acts in them. Just child porn she claimed, and was among some folks in Wake County who filed police reports against the board over naughty books in the library. 

Morrow was at DC on January 6, though she says she stayed out of the capital- just there for a homeschooling civics lesson for the kids. Except that her video, which starts out "Hey patriots" and announces that she's at the capital "because that's where I President asked us to come" pans her surroundings, and there are no kids in sight. Maybe the educational experience was going to be delivered second hand. "If you are going to commit treason, if you are going to participatre in fraud," she announces, "We are coming after you."

In March of 2021 she was still out on the streets for Trump and MAGA (here's some video) for Liberty First Grassroots PAC.

CNN dug into her social media activity and found, among other things, that she would "prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad," in response to the notion of sending Barack Obama to prison at Guantanamo Bay. "Death to all traitors" she tweeted under a fake Time Magazine cover showing Obama in an electric chair. She also shared plenty of QAnon stuff. In one particularly thorough post, she wrote

Obama did it. Hillary did it. Schiff did it. Comey did it. Yates did it. Holder did it. Clapper did it. Gates did it. Fauci did it. Time for #WeThePeople to DO IT and #DrainTheSwamp!!!!! #NoJusticeNoCountry #DeathToTraitors #ProsecuteThemNow #TakeBackAmerica .@dbongino #KAG,

She has called Islam evil. She has ranted about Deep State Globalists. She has the backing of Moms for Liberty chapters in North Carolina. 

 Does she get the whole campaign as a public figure thing? In a video, she complains that CNN "stalked" her and tried to get her to answer questions after a gathering (questions like, Do you stand by your demand that Barack Obama be executed?) You can watch the video of what happened--it looks a lot like typical reporter asking a candidate questions that she would rather not answer.

Then she moves on to arguing that the CNN reporters don't really care about North Carolina students, or they'd be asking questions about the failing schools and the "74% of eighth graders that are not competent in reading, math, or science." So, more failure to understand what "proficient" means on the NAEP (it means above average, not competent). North Carolina voters are too smart to be fooled by "these people from other states and these left-wing media." She's a victim. Soon they will see how she returns the schools to awesomeness (though why it has failed terribly while the GOP has had control of everything in the state is not explained).

She's been on Steve Bannon's show. He asked why "they" are hating on her so much, and she explains that the Democrats know it's a swing state, and "the other thing is I've been speaking truth about how we want to get back to the basics of education and exposing what's been happening in our schools, the failures of the left in the radical agendas and the political and sexual and racially explicit stuff that's that's poisoning our children's minds and keeping them from getting a good education."  And I will remind you that Morrow home schools and that North Carolina Republicans have enjoyed a well-gerrymandered majority for years (and a super-majority since 2023). Also, they lied and smeared President Trump and she's just "next on the hit parade." 

Her own campaign video claims she is facing "the most radical extremists the Democrats have ever run" and accuses opponent Mo Green of spending six years "leading a progressive organization that funded efforts to destroy families, public schools, and everyone's safety in this state." She means, I think, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic group that does grants aimed at improving communities in North Carolina. 

It goes on and on. There's the time she had a meltdown over being in a Dollar Tree with a bunch of people who didn't speak English. There's her desire to do away with the department she wants to run.

Or a week or so ago when her campaign spokesperson Sloan Rachmuch flipped out over a pride flag hanging on the wall in a school's administrative wing, posting, “Yet another example of the socialist indoctrination camps @MicheleMorrowNC talks about.” It's a diabolical plot. Rachmuch is the head of the Education First Alliance and Pen and Shield Media, a pair of right wing outfits that have their very own rabbit hole. 

It appears that North Carolina, between Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow, is about to field test just how much juice is left in the far-right Trumpian victimhood culture panic approach to politics. If it has enough to elect this woman, that will be bad news for folks in North Carolina who care about education (and also for those who don't, but it will take them longer to realize it). Let's watch this race. 

A Voucher By Any Other Name

Voucher supporters have one major problem: school vouchers are unpopular.

The tern doesn't test well. Measure of public support is iffy-- if you ask people if they would like every student to have the chance to ride to a great school on their own pony, people say yes, but if you ask a more reality-based framing ("should we spend education dollars on public schools or subsidies for some private schools") the results look a bit different. 

But one clear measure of public support for vouchers is this; despite all the insistence that the public just loves the idea, no voucher measure has ever been passed by the voters in a state. All voucher laws have been passed by legislators, not voted in by the public. 

Voucher supporters have developed one clear strategy-- call them something else.

The basic school voucher idea is simple-- the state takes money that it was going to spend on public education (either after that money has been paid in taxes, or by having someone trade a "contribution" to a voucher fund in exchange for tax credit) and giving it to parents, who in turn can go out and buy education services on their own. 

They're not taxpayer-funded vouchers--they're "tax credit scholarships." They're not vouchers-- they're an Education Freedom Account. And if you want to get in a twitter battle, go ahead and call education savings accounts "vouchers," because part of the whole point of education savings account was to create an instrument that was both a super-voucher and not-something-we'll-call-a-voucher-at-all-so-stop-doing-that-dammit.

I expect that behind the curtain there have been folks fervently doing messaging testing on other names for vouchers, and from the results around the nation, we can deduce that words that tested well were "education" and "freedom" and "scholarship." Also, "empowerment" is coming on strong. States with education savings accounts have the chance to play with the initials ESA. 

So what pops out of the branding machine is Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (Arizona), Education Freedom Account (Arkansas, New Hampshire), Family Empowerment Scholarship Program (Florida), Choice Scholarship Program (Indiana), Opportunity Scholarship Program (North Carolina), Education Choice Scholarship (Ohio), and, of course, who could forget Betsy DeVos's national tax credit scholarship voucher program, the Education Freedom Plan. 

You can mad lib your way to a voucher program of your own. Education Freedom Scholarship Opportunity Program! Family Freedom Education Scholarships! Family Freedom Empowerment Education Scholarship Opportunity Choice Program Plan! Just don't call it a voucher.

Bonus credits to Louisianna, where someone took the trouble to write a bill pushing the Louisianna Giving All True Opportunity to Rise-- LA GATOR. And in California, legislature voucherfiles are trying "Education Flex Account" for their latest attempt to pass an ESA voucher.

But a voucher by any other name still smells the same. It's a payoff to parents so that they'll exit public education, a false promise of education choice, a redirection of public taxpayer dollars into private pockets, an outsourcing of discrimination, a public subsidy for private religious choices, a means of defunding and dismantling public education as we understand it in this country, a transformation of a public good into a market-based commodity. Call it what you like. There isn't enough air freshener in the world to make it smell like a rose.

ICYMI: Easter Knee Birthday Band Edition (3/31)

Happy Easter to those of you who observe the occasion. We're fans here at the Institute, though this year it caps off a busy time.

Today is the birthday of the Institute's West Coast Executive Vice President, and tomorrow kicks off the season for the town band to which the CMO and I belong (it celebrates its 168th anniversary this year). 

And earlier this week I had some arthroscopic surgery performed on a knee. I had pretty much the same meniscus-trimming exercise performed forty-some years ago. Back then the post-op protocol was to immobilize the leg in a hip-to-ankle cast. I had to trade cars with my brother (switching a 1979 Opel hatchback with standard shift for a 1954 Buick with an automatic). The after six weeks the cast came off to reveal a pale imitation of a functional leg. Nowadays, the Best Practices are to get up and humping around on the leg ASAP, which I'm doing with limited grace. But at least I won't need three months to fully recover from the whole business. Makes me wonder what would have happened if the state legislature had, forty-some years ago, passed a law mandating the protocol as the only legal treatment. Do you think they could have shifted as nimbly as the actual medical professionals. 

At any rate, here's some reading from the week to go along with your tasty chocolate treats.

The false promise — and hidden costs — of school vouchers

Voucher expert Josh Cowen explains what's really happening and why Pennsylvania in particular should not get on the voucher train. It's at the Philadelphia Inquirer, so my apologies if you can't get to it, but if you can, you should.

School voucher proponents spend big to overcome rural resistance

The Arkansas Advocate reports on the big push in Texas and elsewhere by deep pocketed fans of dismantling public education, including DeVos's AFC Victory Fund.

Success Academy eyes Florida expansion as Schools of Hope operator

Eva Moskowitz can small Florida dollars all the way from New York City. You'll have to hold your nose a bit for this news, which reports without examination the charters claims of high test scores and full college placement (but not its hard work in getting rid of students who might mess up its numbers). 

Research from pro-charter school group makes case for halting the approval of new charters

Kris Nordstrom explains how the Fordham Institute inadvertently made the case against more charter schools in North Carolina.

Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare

MSN pulls up a Rose Horowitz article from the Atlantic that explains why the FAFSA is throwing a giant monkey-wrench into college application this year.

What My Professors Never Told Me About Teaching

Jherine Wilkerson at EdWeek with a listicle of items that teachers will recognize.

A Grim Anniversary, A Useless State Report Card, and New District Chiefs – Its Easter Time In Tennessee

More on the ground reporting from TC Weber

Will Untenable Voucher Expansion Threaten Public School Funding in Ohio?

Ohio has joined the ranks of states writing a choice check that its taxpayers can't cash. Who's going to end up paying? Jan Resseger looks into it.

Ohio school board may raise teacher license fees as budget shortfall looms

Of course, if they're really strapped for cash, they could always try to squeeze some more out of teachers.

Another Crusade Against "Diversity" in Education

Steve Nuzum tells the story of a bill that seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion without explaining what they mean.

West Virginia governor signs vague law allowing teachers to answer questions about origin of life

West Virginia tries one more way to get creationism into the classroom.

Secret recording shows pressure on Republican lawmakers to vote for school vouchers

In Tennessee, yet more recordings showing that lobbyist tactics on the school voucher issue are pretty direct and threatening.

Public school leaders slam bills to fund private schools 

Those same folks are in Louisianna trying to ram through yet another privatization bill. 

Many Houston charter schools are violating state transparency laws.

Texas is home to one of the biggest charter school scams in the nation. Yet, as this report by Miranda Dunlap for Houston Landing shows, there's still an awful lot of non-compliance when it comes to transparency.

Why I Am Not Going To Use a Chatbot to Do My Writing For Me

David Lee Finkle is the creator of Mr. Fitz, an outstanding comic strip about teaching. He also blogs occasionally, and this latest piece has lots worth reading to say about AI as a classroom tool. 

Fostering Authority in Student Writers

Paul Thomas with some excellent thoughts about how to teach writing. 

LGBTQ activist group 'Free Mom Hugs' delivers cease and desist to Moms for Liberty

Moms for Liberty called them groomers, then doubled down. So now they can deal with some lawyers. 

What the hell, Oklahoma?!

Oklahoma gets a whole section of ICYMI this week. Start with the Politico profile of education dudebro Ryan Walters, collecting all his sad and infuriating story in one place. Also, maybe his department is misusing federal money to plug a substitute teacher problem they helped create. Meanwhile, as lot so folks line up to grab the limited public comment spots in a OK Department of Education board meeting, the department locked itself in by tying doors shut with extension cords. And while his department now has a shiny new School Choice Department, it apparently no longer has any lawyers. Quite the operation out there.

Kids as young as 14 were found working at a Tennessee factory that makes lawn mower parts

More frontiers in child labor. Well, child immigrant labor. 

Also, at Forbes.com, I wrote about why the push to legislate Science of Reading would be a bad idea even if Science of Reading was a legit good idea. 

Join me at substack. I'd love to have more readers, and it's free and easy for you. 

The Trouble With Classical Education

Classical education, despite the fact that most people who use the term appear to know exactly what they mean, is a wide, messy category. A recent Emma Green piece in the New Yorker captures much of that, from the original concept of Dorothy Sayers to the controversial stances of Doug Wilson, granddaddy of the Association of Classical Christian Schools to Jeremy Tate's relentless pitching of the Classic Learning Test, the supposed alternative to the SAT and ACT. 

Classical schools have been commandeered by a variety of folks, from far right conservatives to the christianist nationalists of places like Hillsdale to others who, well, are not in tune with those ideologies. But they all give me a hinky feeling. I would never put my child in a classical academy of any sort. The reason boils down to this quote from the Green piece:

Classical education is premised on the idea that there is objective truth, and that the purpose of school is to set kids on a path toward understanding it. This principle is often framed in philosophical shorthand—classical educators love talking about “truth, beauty, and goodness,” which can sound like a woo-woo catchphrase to the uninitiated—and it’s paired with an emphasis on morality and ethics.

Sure, there is truth, beauty and goodness--but only one version.

That's an attractive approach for anyone whose belief system is centered on One Truth, whether that's a secular truth or a religious one, so we shouldn't be surprised by the sorts of folks who are attracted to the classical school approach.

Any why not, some folks are going to argue. 2 + 2 = 4. If you jump off the top of a building, you will fall to the ground. There are absolute and objectively true things in the world, so why not make our foundation solid by resting upon them?

Here's my problem. That statement of premise (as Green acknowledges elsewhere in her piece) is only half complete.

The real premise in classical schooling (and fundamentalist religion and hard line culture politics and other One Objective Truth world views) is this:

There is an objective truth-- and I know exactly what it is.

It's the "I know exactly what it is part" that is the major hitch. It's that part, that "Trust me because I am right about everything 100% of the time" part, that I simply don't believe.

If you're going with, "Well, if you don't believe in an objective Truth, then you must just believe in some sort of relativistic, higgledy-piggledy, situational ethics, spinning moral compass view of the world," well, that's not it either. I believe that the universe is a solid, real thing, that history happened, that words mean things, but I also believe that the universe is a big, complicated, possibly-infinite, quantum-fueled creation beyond human comprehension. We humans have as much chance of Understanding It All as the chipmunks in my back yard have of grasping differential calculus. 

We are limited creatures, and our ability to perceive is seriously limited and influenced by what we can see from where and when we stand. On top of that, we humans like to make all sorts of stuff up, sometimes in an attempt to reduce Vast Confusing Reality to a manageable symbolic representation, and sometimes in attempt to create an illusion of power and safety for ourselves.

The One Truth view can be a refuge for frightened folks, folks who want desperately to believe that the One Truth is graspable and, when grasped, will yield a set of rules that will keep us safe if we just follow them. It also appeals to people whose insular, self-important view of the world is threatened, in hopes that they can nurse their special little flower safely, waiting to get back to their imaginary position of deserved domination. That despite a rich human history that shows no such thing is true. 

We wrestle with all of this regularly. Ralph Waldo Emerson became a dean of US letters and philosophy with his essay "Self-reliance," which helped set the argument that we weren't going to find the One Truth by studying classical dead white guys, and that what truth we could find would have to be rediscovered anew in each new day (including, it should be noted, truths about ourselves). 

These are scary times (maybe not objectively scary, maybe not as scary as the world-falling-apart 1930s or the nuclear Armageddon any day now 1970s, but with fear as a major political currency, we regular convince ourselves the times are scary) and in scary times, folks like something solid and reassuring, like a belief system that says the One Objective Truth can not only be known, but has already been pretty much mapped out by a bunch of ancient guys, so if we just study that, we'll be safe.

Plus in an education system, the One Objective Truth makes organizing education is so much easier. "Critical thinking" just means "thinking that leads you to the One Correct Answer." All tests are objective tests (easy to score). And you can foster the belief that those who know the One Right Answer are better than those Others. Congratulations, young meritocrat.

Are there classical schools that avoid the One Objective Truth trap. Probably. Certainly there have been people who used their classical education training as a tool to bust out of their classical education training (Emerson and many of his buddies would be examples). 

Any education system based on the notion that there is only One True Answer for any of life's complex and complicated and eternally shifting vantage points is not a system that I'm interested in. Too much of life is looking for One Better Answer or One Answer That Works Reasonably Well or One Answer I Can Cobble Together With The Tools At Hand, not to mention One New Revised Answer Now That I've Had A Chance To Think Abou What I Said Yesterday. It's not all higgledy-piggledy land of do as you please; most of the time some answers are definitely better than others.

But to attempt to build a fortress out of One True Answer is folly. It's a small, brittle fortress that confines more than it protects, and doesn't even protect particularly well. 

Let me try one more explanation. You could, for example, enter into a marriage saying, "Here's a list of rules. This is what you're supposed to, and here's what I'm supposed to do, and here are the rules for how we'll interact, and we'll just follow those rules for the rest of our lives, so we don't really ever have to talk about this again." But that's not much of a marriage, not really a relationship between two living, breathing humans.

Some folks want to try that same sort of thing with their God or their understanding of the universe. "Just give me a list of rules, and I'll follow them carefully every day, mostly, and we don't ever have to talk again." But that's not a living, breathing relationship. 

I don't know how you have a static relationship with your spouse, your friends, your God, your universe, your understanding of yourself. But that's what One Truth promises-- a static relationship where, once you Know the Truth, nothing ever changes. This is not my idea of a functional relationship with the world, and it strikes me as particularly ineffective to try enforcing this relationship on children and youths, for whom change is constant and unavoidable. When you're young, your perspective on yourself and how to be fully human in the world is constantly changing.

Maybe that's meant to be the appeal of classical schooling-- in a world that seems to be constantly changing, here are some eternal Truths to latch on to. But only I know them, and you will have to trust that my One Truth is the correct one ignore all the other truths floating around, and I promise, if you just stay in this tiny little bubble, everything will be okay. Good luck with that. 

What Ever Happened To Coursmos (Or, How Those MOOCs Doing These Days)

Once upon a time, internet-delivered courses were the Next Big Thing. Outfits like Udacity were promising to deliver a college education, digitized and personalized. In a Wired article on "The Stanford Education Experiment [that] Could Change Higher Education Forever," Sebastian Thrun predicted there would only be ten universities left in the world and that his online education company Udacity would be one of them. That was in 2012. Ten years are up.

Read Audrey Watters piece, "I Told You So" in which she takes a deserved victory lap in the wake of Udacity's sale to a consulting company. 

Back ten or so years ago, plenty of outfits wanted to get in on the biz. Let's look at another one and see if its story has a happier ending than the story of Udacity (spoiler alert: it does not).

In 2013, Coursmos launched, promising to fill a "soundbite-sized gap in the e-learning delivery space," a sort of mini-MOOC for your phone, "e-learning for the Twitter generation." Coursmos was a Russian start-up, co-founded by Roman Kostochka, Kateryna Seledets,  Pavel Dmitriev, Alex Sinichkin, and Pavel Konan. The team included Kostochka (CEO), Dmitriev (CMO), Vyacheslav Grachev (CTO), Seledets, Konan (Lead developer), Igor Pahomov, Todd Gibons (Growth Hacker), Paul Shuteyev, Pedro Sanchez de Lozada, Igor Shoifot, Brian Sathianathan, Igor Ryabenkiy, Jon Nordmark, Dmitry Ufaev-- a team assembled from USA, EU, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.  

The company opened up shop in San Carlos, CA. Kostochka had previously founded EdKarma in Silicon Valley. Seledets had had worked at the Happy Farms Business Incubator, the American-Ukranian business accelerator that helped launch Coursmos. Sinichkin doesn't list Coursmos on his list of startups.

The model was basically a learning brokerage. Instructors could sign on, and students would find them, and Coursmos would take a cut for being the educational matchmaker. Their own pitch found them a bit behind others in the field (Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, etc) both in funding and courses, which they cleverly spun as Coursmos offering the best dollar-per-course ration. 

The idea was to set up a phone app, so they hit the Apple Store first, then later added Google play. "Mobile first" was supposed to be their "disruptive" element. Their exit strategy was to be acquired in 2-3 years, possibly by Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Benesse, the Washington Post Company, or Apollo Group. (Spoiler alert: that did not happen).

Coursmos did its seed rounds of investing in 2014 and 2015, then in 2015 went after venture capital. It was a half-million here, a half-million there some of it from the Russian Imperius Group. By 2015 it was claiming a half million registered users and pushing itself at corporate users, saying its strongest markets were in U.S., Russia, the U.K., India, Brazil and Indonesia. 

The website pitch was "Education for generation distracted." At first. By 2016, the pitch was "Build your online education business" and aimed clearly at folks providing the course materials. It bragged 1.7 million students, 36,032 courses, and $2.5 million in sales. They even had a wikipedia page.

But by 2016, the buzz had died down for the micro-learning platform. Kostochka's LinkedIn profile says he co-founded and CEOed a new business in January of 2017-- in Hong Kong. The Coursmos Twitter account went dormant in October of 2016 (except for one random post in May, 2018). The barely-active Coursmos Courses account likewise stopped in September, 2016. And a Coursmos R&D account opened up in August of 2013 with "Today we are launching it in the AppStore-- in Russian--then posted a total of 19 times. 

In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, the website was pitching a "leading-edge training solution that enables your company to efficiently train employees and build a modern corporate learning system" with a "new generation SaaS LMS platform" boasting 5000 "off-the-shelf business courses." Then the wayback machine archive shows Coursmos going silent-- with nothing but 404 messages or a message, in Russian, that the domain registration has expired.

But the Coursmos story isn't over yet!

In December of 2023, a promise that "our website is coming soon." 

And sure enough, on January 1, 2024, Coursmos was back. Same logo, same web address, but a slightly different mission. "We turn your stress into straight A's" the bold print promises.

We're your writing wizards. Custom essays, research papers, and dissertations on any topic. We cover everything from online class help to exams to homework and assignments. Our academic superheroes take your strain. So you can stress less and score more.

 Yeah, one of those sites. The current Coursmos offers services ranging from "essay writing help" and "dissertation help" to "do my assignment," "do my homework," "take my online exam," and "take my online class." There are links to industry recognition articles, all written about the old Coursmos. 

There are glowing student testimonials that all follow the same basic outline, making sure to mention the course involved in the first part of the first sentence (Couldn't make it to my psychology class, My literature essay was a breeze, Tackling environmental science was tough, I was kinda lost on my biology thesis, History can be tricky sometimes, For my business dissertation, etc). 

A broad business like this would seem to require a whole lot of inhouse experts to help the customers cheat study. Unless you had a whole library of previously created educational content that you could just tap.

There's also a friendly chat that immediately offers help, as soon as you give it your email and phone number. That was "powered by Brevo," a firm that automates customer relationships, but my chatter said she works for Coursmos.

I asked the chat (Samantha) who the CEO is, but didn't get much in the way of an answer, though she did indicate that the business has been taken over. The whole ownership and operation of the biz is mysterious. They have a blog, which weirdly today put up some posts about some gamer codes, in German, and I'm just not going down that rabbit hole today. The rest are more closely related to the actual cheating business of the site, with none from before January 1, 2024.

Three names turn up in the blog. Tom Baldwin, Garfield Conner, and Dave Franklin. Of the three, I could only find Franklin, who just happened to set up a profile on M5Srack Community two weeks ago. From this we learn that Coursmos HQ is now in a Los Angeles "coworking and office space" location. On this page, Franklin describes Coursmos as a platform that offers "bite-sized courses on a wide range of topics," but on other profiles the "academic writer" is clearer that "we offer cheap online class help in USA." 

We could chase leads all day. There's Andrew Stevens, a guy from New York whose LinkedIn profile names him the CEO of Coursmos from 2014 till the present. Of course, almost everyone who's linked to Coursmos doesn't note an end date.

But mostly what we have here is the lifecycle of a piece of education-flavored entrepreneurialism. Coursmos was never started to make an important advance in teaching people-- it was created to be just good enough to attract a deep-pocketed buyer so everyone could cash out. When that didn't happen (because MOOCs are not a great idea and miniMOOCs are even less great), there was a brief attempt to tap a different market, and then Coursmos went into a coma until someone bought up all the "content" aka all those courses that folks created for them, and sold it to someone who decided the content library could be used to help students cheat. 

Is there a lesson here? I guess. Every ed tech has a story, and very often it's not a story about education. Pay attention. 

Tim Alberta And The Mystery of What Happened To The Church

Are you a Christian who has spent the last decade or so wondering what the heck happened to your church? Have you been wondering if there are any serious Christians left who have not been swept up in some version of MAGA madness? Good news. They exist, Tim Alberta is one of them, and he's got a book.

The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory: American Evangelism in an Age of Extremism is a hard look into the heart of what has happened to the conservative Christian church. Alberta does not, like some authors, push back against the rise of Christian Nationalism by attacking the Christian part, and this book may be a tough slog for folks who do not embrace the faith.

But because Alberta is an evangelical Christian himself, he develops a clear view of where they lost the plot. As Chris Winans, the pastor who followed Alberta's pastor father, and who opens and closes the book, observes, the problem with American evangelicals is that "too many of them worship America." And power over it.

The book is a series of chapters organized around locations and the people Alberta has traveled there to interview. Some carry more weight than others--Lynchburg gets two chapters, as Jerry Fallwel's Liberty University serves as a particularly pointed example of how the pursuit of money and power completely overwhelms real attention to the Gospel. 

Alberta notes the particulars of how MAGAfied evangelicals have lost the plot. Of Trump pastor Robert Jeffers, he writes that he "no longer cared about fighting evil with good. He just wanted to fight evil--period." At a Ralph Reed event he notes:

Character didn't matter. Truth didn't matter. Honor and integrity didn't matter. Those were means, and all that mattered was the ends: winning elections.

Quoting from another pastor he interviews.

The great fault in the evangelical movement today is that we're disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.

Alberta talks to some religious leaders who seem honestly confused and lost, and others who are wrestling with the understanding that if they don't get political in the pulpit, they will lose those parishioners-- the ones who think the sermon on the mount is too woke.

He has particular concern over the folks like Charlie Kirk, who, he notes, don't even pretend to that the goal is to glorify God, but simply to "take back America." He is disappointed in figures like Ron DeSantis who pretend to care about the faith, but barely nod toward it, and never in a meaningful way. 

Politicians, he notes

 saw the pointlessness in talking about servanthood, about humility, about unity and peace and love for thy neighbor. The market for such a message had long since disappeared. The demand was for domination, and Republicans like Trump and DeSantis were happy to supply it. Their appeal to evangelicals had everything to do with acting like champions and nothing to do with acting like Christ.

Of the culture wars being waged these days, Alberta is direct: "This effort to assert dominance over the culture is but a precondition for dominating the country itself."

Champions of Christian nationalism would have you believe that these efforts to rule the country are inherently theological; that they are in service of a broader effort to reclaim America for God. This is a lie. 

For Alberta, it's small potatoes. The God of All Creation has far larger concerns than the political victories of one political party in one country on one planet in one year. For Alberta, that is just another brand of idolatry.

In Alberta's travels and interviews, I see plenty of what I call the People of the Tiny God-- a god so small and powerless that electing the wrong politician for even the most trivial of offices will somehow threaten that god's existence. 

If you want a book that will explain why the chriustianists are wrong and bad because they oppose humanistic, progressive ideals, this may not be your book.

But if, like me, you've been looking around the past many years listening to alleged Christians valorize decidedly unChristian behavior, to insist that they cannot exercise their religion without being free to strike out at those of whom they disapprove, to express an ideology that seems laden with hate, to disdain any principles except the pursuit of power-- if you've been looking at all that and thinking that it does not resemble the faith that you grew up in, then this is your book.

It is discouraging to read just how far and deep and ugly some of the rot is. But it is encouraging to read that there are some folks who have not lost the plot and who embrace a faith that would even allow those of who disagree (and I am sure there are points on which Alberta and I would disagree) to coexist in ways that would still honor and energize and be energized by that faith. 

It's a big book, thorough, bolstered by interviews that run wide and deep (when you're a noted reporter for The Atlantic, people answer your calls). I've bought copies for some of the people I love, and I recommend you get your hands on a copy as well. 

 

ICYMI: Wavin' Those Palms Edition (3/24)

Every year I wonder just how many palm frond suppliers out there. It can't be that lucrative a business, yet once a year demand must spike enough to provide children across the nation with the opportunity to poke a tickle their friends and siblings in church. 

For those of you new to the blog, this is the every-Sunday collection of links to things that I think are worth reading (but did not already mention or link to in anything I wrote last week). You are encouraged to share from the original link and give the writers a little love and attention. Tips and suggestions always appreciated.

Here's the list for the week.

City Council Races Could Complete Andrew Wommack’s “Takeover” of Woodland Park

Logan Davis re4ports for the Colorado Times Recorder about how one religious right group is working to take over the schools and the town in Woodland Park.

5 Things I Would Never Do With My Own Kids After Working As A Teacher

A perfectly fine HuffPost listicle, including an appearance by Jose Luis Vilson.

No, Teachers Are Not in a Panic About ChatGPT

Anne Lutz Fernandez puts ChatGPT panic in the proper context of student authentic work and the larger history of student writing assignment integrity (looking at you, Cliff's Notes).

My curriculum not the reason kids can’t read

It probably won't me a thing to the Hanford fanfolks, but Lucy Calkins has finally written a response to all the criticism of her work (or at least the portrayal of her work that gets criticized).

The Great Textbook War

An NPR Throughline audio episode, featuring Charles Dorn and Adam Laats, reminding us that we've seen this movie before, and it always ends the same way for the book banners.

Banned in Boston: Coverage of Walton Family Spending on K-12 Interest Groups

Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham takes a look at just how much money the Walton's have been spending to push privatization. Then he looks at how little it has been reported by certain newspapers.

What Choice Do We Have

Jose Luis Vilson takes a look at school choice, how it has led to some rot, and how it ignores the larger purpose of schools.

Classical Charter Schools of America Pays ACLU $1.456 Million in Gendered Uniform Lawsuit

The lawsuit involving that North Carolina charter that wanted its fragile girlfolk to wear skirts has finally reached a settlement. 

Dark money group goes after GOP House member for opposition to Tennessee school voucher plan

The DeVos family's American Federation for Children is going after voucher opponents in Tennessee (just like they did in Texas). This is how out of state billionaires work to get their preferred policies passed.

Gayle Greene on How to Build a Human

I wrote a review about Gayle Greene's book a while back. Short version: buy it and read it. Here's Bob Shepherd with another good argument for picking up this excellent argument for human education.

Where are all the teachers? Breaking down America's teacher shortage crisis in 5 charts.

USA Today of all places ran this set of charts drawn from some of the research out there. Florida, Arizona, and Nort Carolina have the highest demand. Hmmm, go figure.

'Free Mom Hugs' volunteer labeled 'groomer' by hate group. Here's how she responded.

A nice account of one group's response to more M4L baloney. Not updated to include the post in which M4L doubled down on the groomer accusation, but they did, because of course they did.

Competency-based education failure raises concerns with new standards

CBE continues to be a great system except when you try to actually implement it. New Hampshire reports on its troubles trying to make it work.

Bad Governance with Education Vouchers

Thomas Ultican looks at the latest in voucher fraud activity, and why we can expect plenty more. 

My Kid's Textbook Doesn't Know We Elected a Black President

Jess Piper looks at some of the direct effects of refusing to fully fund schools. Like history textbooks that are old enough to vote.

Will Reforms by Texas and an Audit by Federal Charter Schools Program Be Enough to End Shady Practices at IDEA Charter Schools?

The IDEA charter chain has been a source of shady shenanigans for quite some time. Jan Resseger asks if there's any reason to believe that things will get better.

Who Carried You?

TC Weber offers a parental perspective on laws that mandate schools outing LGBTQ students. 

Open season on scholars of race

Wondering what Chris Rufo's been up to lately? Don Moynihan reports on the building of "plagiarism" as a tool for going after scholars of color.

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies

The New York Times reports on another frontier in the surveillance state. That computer in your car is not your friend.

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about the sequel lawsuit to Carson in Maine (about making religious schools follow antidiscrimination rules if they want to collect voucher bucks) and looked at the great book about grading by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt.

Also, at the Bucks County Beacon, a look at how Pennsylvania stacked up (a middling C) in the NPE report on how well states support public education. 

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