ICYMI: May Mart Edition (5/5)

The first weekend in May in my small town is a big festival of growing things, with both parks filled with vendors selling plant and plant-related stuff. My own interactions with plants are limited to A) appreciating them and B) killing them. But this is still a cool thing. And it takes some of the sting off the sadness of the closing of our theater production today. 

But this week it's a large reading list, so enjoy and share and I hope it's pretty where you are.

Remember Betsy? Michigan education leaders blast Trump for ‘abandoning’ public schools

From The 'Gander, Kyle Kaminski interviews some education leaders who point out the obvious--if you care about public education, Trump is probably not your guy. Includes an appearance by Friend of the Institute Mitch Robinson.

Does ‘Grading for Equity’ Result in Lower Standards?

At EdWeek, Risk Hess interviews Joe Feldman, who proceeds to gently explain how a recent Fordham critique of equitable grading was pretty much wrong. 

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Yes, the US News rankings are junk. Jan Resseger explains.

Pennsylvania Taxpayers Are Funding Discriminatory Religious Schools

Catherine Caruso covers a report that I reported on as while back, but she does it in The New Republic, so hooray for more people getting the message about Pennsylvania's crazy discriminatory voucher program.

NC school voucher dollars are funding Christian Nationalist indoctrination

It's not just PA. Justin Parmenter has been running down all of the religious indoctrination and discrimination being funded by taxpayers in North Carolina, and it's a lot.

The Making of Michele Morrow

Speaking of North Carolina, they've got a woman running for state superintendent who is Ryan Walters-level right wing. Carli Brosseau at The Assembly has produced the best deep dive into Michele Morrow seen so far.

Iowa legislator opening his own private school, to be funded by vouchers he voted for

Yes, really, Help pass a law to help people get rich, then go cash in. Also, put your wife on the board. You'd think it would all be illegal, but no... Ty Rushing covers story for Iowa Starting Line.

Reynolds’ voucher program is about destroying public education

A former Iowa superintendent doesn't think much of Governor Reynolds' plans for public schools in Iowa.

Ohio’s *School Vouchers for All*: Expanded, Expensive, but Not Audited

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider details some of the shenanigans surrounding Ohio's voucher program (a program that is currently being dragged into court).

What Is That New Car Smell?

Florida is the petri dish in which a thousand school choice bacteria bloom. For instance, would you like some of the tax you pay for your new car to go to fund home schoolers? Sue Kingery Woltanski will guide you through this bizarro voucher grift.

A San Diego charter school may shut down its high school by the end of this school year

The San Diego Union-Tribune reminds us that charter schools are routinely unstable. Turns out amateurs have trouble making them work.

A controversial group looks to join school chaplain program under proposed OK legislation

Yet another state decides that allowing faux chaplains into schools might be another way to get Christianity in there, and so another states gets to say Howdy to the Satanic Temple. Welcome to the club, Oklahoma.

Do Schools Really Need To Give Parents Live Updates on Students' Performance?

Lenore Skenazy at Reason, of all places, points out that maybe the ever-available grade portals are doing at least as much harm as good.

Ultra-conservative lawmakers target Louisiana libraries as culture war rages on

Piper Hutchinson at Louisiana Illuminator runs down the many ways that some lawmakers are trying to stomp down libraries.

The PA mother who’s standing up against book bans—and the Dems standing with her

Ashley Adams at The Keystone  looks at one mom fighting for reading rights in Chester County.

NEPC Review: The Reality of Switchers (EdChoice, March 2024)

EdChoice created a "report" claiming to show that vouchers are a money-saver for taxpayers. Voucher scholar Josh Cowen explains why the report is pure bunk and hackery.

A new lost generation: Disengaged, aimless, and adrift

Robert Pondiscio at the Fordham Institute blog attempts to put school absences in a larger context. 

School Wars

Since it was Star Wars Day yesterday, let's go back to that time that Mr. Finkle managed to spoof Star Wars and school testing all at once.

At Forbes.com this week I looked at vouchers and their transparency problem.

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Should We Voucherize Title I?

Spoiler alert: no, we should not.

However, not everyone agrees, as witnessed by this "policy brief" (aka "blog post with footnotes and letterhead") from Ray Domanico for the Manhattan Institute, the same right-tilted thinky tank that employs Christopher Rufo, chief promoter of critical race theory panic.

Domanico opens with some history. Title I was born of the civil rights movement post Brown v. Board. And if you're wondering why folks on the corporate right aren't fans, it could be that Title I dramatically increased the federal government's share of education funding. In 1957, the feds kicked in 1.3% of K12 district revenue: in 1977, that was 8.1%. In 2021, the percentage temporarily goosed with Covid funs was all the way to 10%. That translates to billions and billions of dollars.

Next up-- a literature review of anything that helps prove Domanico's assertion that Title I has failed in its goal of improving "academic outcomes for the disadvantaged." This assortment of papers from the Manhattan Institute and other right-tilted advocacy groups finds that Title I wasn't working, and that it was even involving things like Whole Language!

But achievement gaps--aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test as distinguished between the poor and the not poor--were not reduced. Therefore, fail. Because education has no purpose except to improve student scores on the BS Test. In fact, as Domanico correctly points out, Title I became another justification for more emphasis on the BS Tests.

Domanico is also not keen on how the Duncan-Obama administration used threats to Title I funding as leverage to push their policies, and I do not disagree, just as I do not disagree of his story that shows imposing Common Core was a big mistake, and if I could find anything from the Manhattan Institute at the time objecting to Common Core I would gladly link to it, but all I can find are pieces like this one, in which the Institute scolds conservatives for opposing Common Core when it's clearly such a worthwhile thing. In other words, Domanico is both correct and about a decade late.

He winds around to arguing that Title I is a mess because its original intention is lost in current ed policy debates and federal overreach is super-unpopular. Also, it didn't fix the test score gap. 

His proposed solution? "Modernize" Title I funding.

Using federal powers to address social inequity and education for all is a policy that "emerged in a political environment that has expired." Federal involvement in educational equity is so last century. 

Now, what you could do, Domanico suggests, is turn the Title I money into vouchers, specifically education savings accounts, where you just hand the money to families and wash your hands of any obligation to try to get them a decent education let them spend the money as they think best. The state's could also fund math and reading tutors, or "distance learning for advanced coursework for lower-income students in rural areas." Because that distance learning thing has been super-popular the last few years.

Of this idea:

The best thing that could happen to Title I is for it to be turned into a national scholarship or tax credit program for lower-income families to use for tuition in the school of their choice.

This was Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom plan, though she at least proposed a national tax credit voucher program without gutting Title I at the same time. But Domanico not only wants vouchers and to end federal funding of Title I, but he wants to be clear that, given recent SCOTUS decisions, private religious schools should get some of those sweet taxpayer dollars. In fact, he likes the idea so much that he sort of botches the wording--

Given recent Supreme Court rulings—clarifying that a state need not offer school choice but if it does, it cannot exclude religious schools—Title I funds should flow directly to religious schools chosen by the families of eligible students, ending the practice of funding local school districts to provide services to eligible religious-school students.

 Flow directly to religious schools? I thought the money flowed directly to the families, thereby avoiding charges that we were using taxpayer funds in violation of the First Amendment. Huh.

In conclusion, he really wants vouchers. Also, the feds should stop using Title I funds as policy leverage.

It's an argument that has been repeatedly made, though this is a rare chance to see it all laid out in one blogpost policy brief. It has the usual feature of so many reformster arguments-- let explain the problem to you in great detail, and then propose my solution while skipping the part where I provide an argument for how my solution actually solves anything. 

It also shows how some folks on the right cannot see what is plain to some other folks on the right. If a big problem with Title I is that federal funds come with federal strings and levers attached, then why would those same strings and levers not stay attached when Title I funds are used as vouchers?

As a sort of tag, Domanico suggests that if the feds won't shape up, maybe a state would like to just reject Title I funding. Because that clearly won't negatively affect any of the high-poverty schools that depend on those dollars. Because maybe Title I, which has all the lumbering clumsiness of any federal program, still provides a bit of a lifeline to underfunded schools and the students in them and would be better off expanded rather than gutted. 

PA: Serpents and School Boards and the ILC, Again

Here's one more story of how Pennsylvania's leading right-wing law firm wiggles its serpentine way into local districts. 

Central York School District in Pennsylvania was one of the early poster children for reactionary culture panic board take overs, and they leaped right into book banning--and then leaped back out because a Large Fuss was raised. And then continued to wrangle over book banning, particularly banning that seemed aimed at erasing LGBTQ and non-white voices. 

This was a place that made its banning choices by looking at a list of 300 works recommended by a diversity committee and saying, "Nope" to all of them, including works like Brad Meltzer's I Am Rosa Parks (a children's book). 

In the midst of all this noise were board members Vicki Guth and Veronica Gemma, who back in August of 2020 faced calls for their resignation over comments questioning any need for teaching ab out tolerance and racism. 

Gemma was the president of the board at that time, and when she didn't resign, voters took the old-fashioned route and voted her out of office, hard. Gemma did not quietly; as a lame duck, she tried to mount an investigation into the book ban controversy, taking a slant that would be used later by Ron DeSantis, arguing that some people just meddled with the list to make the board look bad. "It was a collaborative effort to destroy our reputation for political reasons," Gemma said. Because, you know, the banning of diversity texts wouldn't have looked bad on its own.

Gemma found herself a job that seems to fit. She now works as a district office manager for York County state Rep. Joe D'Orsie (R-Mount Wolf). D'Orsie introduced legislation exempting school employees from honoring the pronouns of LGBTQ+ students, similar to a policy drafted by the ILC and passed by the Red Lion Area School Board last year.

But that's not her only new gig. She's also Director of Education for the PA Economic Growth PAC. The PAC is headed by John Davis, who owns a mall in York, along with Kristen Rohrbaugh, a "seasoned brand specialist" and Don Yoder, all of whom contributed a small pile of money to the group. The group stands for "championing freedom, preserving capitalism, demanding transparency, and empowering the people," though as with many right wing groups, those stances come with asterisks.

For instance, that one about transparency.

Here's Gemma talking to Epoch Times about her gig, to combat critical race theory and DEI.

PAEGPAC did a lot of mailing work for campaigns (with Rohrbaugh's company apparently doing the design work), though they did chip in $500 to the 1776 Project PAC, a million-dollar PAC that targeted school board elections.

But now The York Dispatch has unearthed emails that show the PAC has been doing more than just sending out mailings.

Meredith Willse, writing for the dispatch, shows how Gemma put together some secret meetings to play matchmaker between York school boards and the right-wing law firm, Independence Law Center, the firm that specializes in crafting anti-LGBTQ, anti-DEI, anti-book policies for districts all across the state. 

In a March 4 email, Gemma invited members from 12 school districts across York County, warning them specifically not to bring more than four members because any more would make the meeting subject to Pennsylvania's sunshine laws. Turns out the PAC's interest in transparency has some exceptions.

Ther secret meeting was on March 15 at an East York warehouse, located in the rear of a strip mall, with catering by Round the Clock Diner. You will be unsurprised that nobody answered Willse's request for a comment.

The email referred to the ILC, a firm that many York County districts have been hiring this spring. And the email makes clear that this is a regular get together: 

We finally nailed down a date that works for most. Keep in mind we will have these meetings every quarter so if you miss this one, we can see you at the next.

In a separate editorial, the York Dispatch Editorial Board does a good job of connecting the dots. They look back to a 2005 meeting with ILC's chief counsel Randall Wenger, who had worked with another firm as counsel in the case that ultimately threw out Dover School Board's attempt to inject creationism into science classes. His take was that the board members had been too clear and transparent about their intent to inject religion into school. 

He told attendees: “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.”

So now ILC and their allies show their commitment to acting like serpents, because lying and sneaking are super-consistent with Christian values. 

Secret meetings seem to be a special technique of, which has also set up secret meetings with board members in my corner of the state. 

At this point, it's best to assume that if your board is making noise about anti-LGBTQ, anti-book policies, ILC is in your neighborhood, slithering and you just need to start turning over rocks to find them. 

It reminds me of a saying that friend used to keep on his fridge. It's about using any means to an end, to the effect that since we rarely fully achieve our ends, we are much more defined by the means we use. If you get really good at being a serpent, don't be surprised at the end of the day when you find you can't shed your skin. 

Enough Secret Sauce Coverage

It's 2024, and we're still getting education "secret sauce" stories.

Here's one from New Jersey, where Joe Malinconico provides this puff piece for Paterson's College Achieve Charter School, for which the headline says "Here's the 'secret sauce' this Paterson charter school used to boost its test scores." Malinconico has the credentials of a hard-hitting investigative reporter, but this piece is strictly unexamined PR for the school.

College Achieves is a charter chain with some presence in Paterson. Niche finds it be a middlin' school, but perhaps they don't know about the secret sauce. The chain was founded by Gemar Mills, a Paterson native famous for being a young principal leading Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

So what secret sauce does Malinconico find?

Well, there's a staff PD meeting every Friday for two hours. Since Niche says that half the staff has 3 or fewer years of experience, that could be helpful, depending on how they spend the time. They also get ten days of PD in August.

The sauce, as always, involves a very narrow definition of success, aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test went up. Malinconico did not ask any questions about how much test prep that required, nor what was eliminated in order to make room for it.

But Malinconico's education background may be a bit thin, as witnessed by this line:

The summer training focuses on preparing educators for handling classrooms in which students break down in small groups for something called differentiated instruction, essentially tailoring assignments to pupils’ various academic levels.

A quick google might have told Malinconico that differentiated instruction is neither new nor secret.

What else? Well, some classrooms get a second teacher to focus on students in need of extra help. And they've increased ELA instruction from two to three hours. 

Parents touted the high expectations, including the classrooms named for various colleges.

Malinconico did note that while the Paterson district has 16% of students with disabilities and 29.3% with English language difficulties, the charter student population shows 5% and 10.6% respectively. Charter advocates shrug and say, "Open enrollment." 

Malinconico might have looked at other features of CAPS, like the "astonishing" taxpayer-funded salaries they pay their executives, or the sweet deal in which they lease their own facilities from a related third party (taxpayers fund that, too). But no--this puff piece is just about their secret sauce.

So the secret sauce? More hours on tested subjects. More teacher supports. Fewer students who are harder to teach.

I don't fault the school--it's doing what it should do, which is use the best tools it can lay its hands on to help its students achieve. 

But we are well past the point where anyone should be providing this kind of superficial credulous coverage. It's a school. There are no silver bullets, no secret sauce, no miracle formula, and every single person on the planet, including journalists, should know better. Educating students is long hard steady work with lots of grind and very little flash. And no miracles.

Good AI Is Not Good Teaching

I would not have expected to share anything from Dan Meyer, but this is worth a look.

Meyer is one of those guys. He bills himself as a math teacher, a job he did for six years back in the 00s. Mostly he's been a consultant and thought leading ed talking head guy. These days he's working for Amplify, that abomination of an ed tech company that was Joel Klein's big project after he was done screwing with NYC schools. 

So, yeah, Meyer is one of those guys.

But I'll listen to anybody and consider the message, not just the source, and I think Meyer just said some things worth listening to. At the ASU+GSV gathering to celebrate the AI Revolution in Education, Meyer stood before an audience of ed tech fans and explained why AI is not going to revolutionize teaching (and while he's doing it, manages to take a swipe at the "silver bullet" thinking of previous ed tech revolutions.)

I keep passing along these sorts of pieces because my sense is that a lot of teachers have a bad feeling about AI in education, but can't quite articulate what the problem is, and this is another presentation that helps fill that gap.

Meyer, for instance, talks about how teaching is about inviting and developing student thinking, and AI cannot do either of those things. He also provides an interesting model built on the first mile and the last mile, which explains why AI-assisted teaching may seem to create more work than it saves. And he explains how context is important to teaching, and teachers can consider that context while AI cannot. 

Meyer can be a bit floppy in the mouth, and I don't think it's too cynical to assume that Amplify is pre-disposed to see AI as a malevolent business threat, but the talk is only 19 minutes and I think they're are 19 minutes well spent. 

What Does A High-Quality School Look Like

We are not going to identify high quality schools by focusing on scored from the Big Standardized Test. In fact, by treating those scores as the single defining feature of a HQS, we encourage school leadership to move in the wrong direction. 

So what are the defining features of a high quality school? 

Reflects Local Values

Long, long ago, I spitballed a school evaluation system that started with massive data collection about what the taxpayers of the district most valued. I still think that's a good idea. The story of the last twenty-five years is the story of state and federal government pushing their own ideas down on local districts, and I'm not sure that has improved a thing.

A high quality school would be very much of its community, reflecting local values, tradition, and style. 

Now, this comes with a huge caveat, because there are communities whose values arguably include "Keep Those People's Children away from mine." The HQS represents its entire community, so that includes issues as well. I'm not comfortable with the federal and state government telling a local district what and how to teach, but I'm perfectly okay with them telling the local district who to teach, and that they may not try to deprive Certain Students out of a complete quality education. So--

Quality Education For All

This means the rich kids, the poor kids, the kids of every race, the LGBTQ kids, the kids with special needs. It means that the school is a safe and welcoming environment for all students, physically and emotionally. It also means the students with various different goals and talents and inclinations. Because a HQS would provide

Multiple Paths For Students To Succeed

Test-centered schooling accentuated the worst tendency of traditional public education, which is to treat education as if it's a single race on a single track to a single finish line. In fact, students are headed in a thousand different directions, racing, strolling and stumbling toward a thousand thousand different life destinations. 

A HQS would reflect that, allowing students to pursue excellence in every direction from welding to nursing, music to accounting. A HQS embraces the idea that student achievement looks like a million different things, and it celebrates, supports, and encourages all of them. It is also structured so that students can switch and mix and match easily. Students graduate from the system with a sense of confidence and direction about their own future, whatever that might be.

A Culture of Attainable Excellence

In a HQS, students, teachers, and administrators believe that excellence and achievement are attainable, and the school culture is centered around the pursuit of that excellence (which is definitely not the same as attempting to stifle non-excellence), and the recognition that excellence is always a moving target.

That also goes with a culture that supports the idea that more learning leads to more life choices. 

Education

My HQS doesn't have a single "how." The teacher part of my brain is, when it comes to the classroom, far more pragmatic than ideological. What works today? Let's do that. 

My frequent definition-- helping students identify and build the best version of themselves, grasping what it means to be fully human in the world. I realize that may sound warm and fuzzy, but it's not-- you get there by learning a ton of rich content and creating a vast library of skills. How? It depends--we're talking about building a personal relationship with the world, and like any relationship, it's shaped by the person involved.

I Have Deliberately Skipped The How

I'm not sure I've said much radical here. The root of most education debate has been either "Okay, how do we create this" and "That sounds expensive--could we come up with a cheaper version."

I'm not going to address the "how" because I don't think all HQS look the same, and there are multiple pathways to get there. And we'll disagree about that--I don't think you ever get there with a classical academy, with its insistence that there is one set of always-right answers and "being educated" means learning that list. Nor do I think market forces (part of the Twitter thread that sparked this post in the first place) will ever get us HQS for more than a select few. I also have thoughts about how such a school should be managed and funded, but those are other long posts. 

This is the long rambling post I promised Mike Petrilli, who asked the question. Here you go, Mike. There's more in my two part post about how to do education choice (Part I and Part II). Maybe some day you can invite me to DC to sit on a Fordham panel. Thinking about what a high quality school would look like is always worthwhile--perhaps more worthwhile than all the "how" conversations that continue to rage.

TX: Greg Abbott Wants Teachers To Dress Regular

Correspondent Steve Monacelli of the Texas Observer turned up a clip of Texas Governor Greg Abbott at the Young Conservatives of Texas convention in Dallas, splaining how folks ought to dress. 

In Lewisville, Texas… just a month ago, they had a high school teacher, who is a man, who would go to school dressed as a woman in a dress, high heels and makeup. Now, what do you think is going through their minds of the students that are in that classroom? Are they focusing on the subject that that person's trying to teach? I don't know. What I do know are these two things. One is this person--a man, dressing as a woman--in a public high school in the state of Texas--he's trying to normalize the concept. "This type of behavior is okay." This type of behavior is NOT okay! And this is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.

Now, as with many moments of culture panic, this one has some factual issues. As Wayne Carter reported for Channel 5, what actually happened was that students encouraged a popular chemistry teacher to dress up for a spirit day. Students laughed, life went on. But then someone put a picture of the teacher on line, and all culture panic hell broke loose. The school district did a policy review and determined that no dress-up day rules had been broken, but so many folks decided to release a barrage of hateful and threatening comments that the teacher resigned. 

Carter spoke to students ("He's never brought his sexuality or any of his political ideas into his teaching. He's always teaching chemistry. It's always chemistry") and parents of the school (We're conservative, but this is silly and hurting students). 

So you can file this specific incident in the file right next to the periodic panic over supposed school litter boxes for student furries aka "Things That Upset Certain People But Did Not Actually Happen."

Also, at least some of Abbott's motivation here is pretty clear, as he pivoted directly from "This Terrible Thing Happened" right over to "Parents ought to have school vouchers so that they can get their kids away from this sort of Terrible Thing That Didn't Actually Happen."

But. All that aside, we've still got a governor arguing that behavior that doesn't conform to his particular idea of gendered behavior should be outlawed and stomped on. Kind of takes me back to all those years when women weren't supposed to wear pants, or smoke cigarettes. Author Kate Chopin walking around in pants a century ago scandalizing Louisiana bluebloods. Boys wearing earrings!!Dogs and cats living together! 

There are, in fact, Christian discussion groups out there still debating the lady pants thing, and often coming to the entirely reasonable conclusion that different cultures at different times have different ideas about what male and female clothing should look like. Meanwhile, we've had a whole court case over whether or not a charter school can forbid girls to wear pants (it can't, and the Supremes aren't willing to chime in).

I can't even imagine how Abbott would draw up the Texas Code of Heteronormative Behavior for Teachers. And would the penalties be a kind of sliding scale, or would a shiny earing or bit of rouge receive the same punishment as a flowing sequined ball gown? Are skinny jeans allowed? Would Texas Rangers drag the offending teacher out in cuffs so that any non-conforming students can fully get the message that Their Kind are NOT okay or welcome in Greg Abbott's Texas? Will Texas be outlawing any and all behavior that looks kind of LGBTQ-ish, or will this just be for teachers? Is Abbott's dismay go beyond regular LGBTQ stuff and extend to all non-conforming behavior, like funny hats or ugly sweaters? 

I'm leery of the word "normal," which always has lots of heavy lifting to do. But I do like the word "ordinary," as in, LGBTQ people are an ordinary part of the human experience, as are people who fall outside of whatever standards of behavior are considered Properly Conforming. Should teachers refrain from choices that might cause distraction in the classroom? Sure. But that's a far cry from tagging all non-conforming teachers for harassment and firing and whatever else Abbott meant by saying he wanted to end that type of behavior.