ICYMI: Hell Of A Week Edition (6/2)

Yeah, I'm not even talking about what you think I'm talking about. This week kicked off with an ambulance ride to the hospital for my mother (she's doing okay now) and then mid-week a young driver slammed into The Curmudgucation Primary Transport Unit while it was parked in front of the Institute (nobody was injured). So fun times all around.

But we still have stuff to read. No, nothing about That Thing That Happened 34 Times.

Reports Show How Phonics Crowds Out Quality Reading Like Picture Books

Nancy Bailey took some heat for suggesting that Science of reading folks don't dig picture books--not even fun ones. So this week she's back with some receipts.

A Semi-Elderly Teacher’s Reflection on the Digital World and Education

I refuse to accept the notion that Nancy Flanagan is semi-elderly, but her thoughts about the digitized world are spot on.

No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.

The New ChatGPT Offers a Lesson in A.I. Hype

Have you heard about all those cool things the new ChatGPT can do? Well, it can't. And there's an important lesson about technohype in there. Brian Chen in the New York Times.

Judge defends right to teach Beyoncé, strikes down law restricting lessons on race and gender

New Hampshire's license plate motto is "Live Free Or Die," but in recent years, it might as well have been "Think Right Or Else." They had gotten themselves a nice Florida-style "don't talk about race issues" law, but a court just threw it out. Judd Legum at Popular Information has the story.

What Would Religious Charter Schools Mean for Public Education?

From Kevin Welner, an on-the-nose look at the implications of Oklahoma's proposed Catholic charter school. It's in Education Week, but if you have a way past the paywall, it's well worth it.

OSDE Supt. Walters blames Biden after missing out on nearly $1 million grant

Speaking of Oklahoma, let's see what Education Dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters is up to. First, he's blaming that million in missed grant money on Joe Biden. Specifically, for not being aligned with Oklahoma values. 

'Not acceptable': Committees pass ban on OSDE public relations spending

Some Oklahoma Republicans are kind of tired of Walters. Specifically, they are tired of him spending OK tax dollars on PR to increase his national profile. So they are shutting that down. Tom Ferguson at KOKH has the story.

‘He’s the guy that pulls Ryan Walters’ strings’: Subpoena reveals highly-paid OSDE advisor has no formal employment contract

They've also got questions about Matt Langston, Walters' former campaign chief, who now earns a six figure salary, apparently without either leaving Texas or technically being hired for a job that comes with no actual job description. Yeah, it's a lot. Spencer Humphrey reports for KFOR.

Will State Board Rule Allow Display Of The Ten Commandments In Classrooms?

In the midst of other standards-shifting shenanigans, Florida appears to be sneaking some more christianism into its classrooms. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains how.

Florida educators trained to teach students Christian nationalism

Also, in the sneaky christianism department, Judd Legum has the story of some sneaky professional development.

Ohio public schools are releasing kids for religious instruction during the school day. Soon, they could be required to do it.

Speaking of creeping religion into schools, meet the group that's doing it in Ohio--and maybe your state next. 

NC teacher turnover is rising. Why experts say pay alone isn't the solution

No surprises here, but it's always nice to see some reporter catch on, even a little. This time it's Emily Walkenhorst at WRAL.

Uncovering the Cover-up: How Republican Pennridge School Board Directors Secretly Banned Books

Think your district has put a stop to that whole book banning thing? Don't be so sure. Darren Laustsen writes for the Bucks County Beacon about his struggle to get to the truth of how his district was secretly getting rid of all sorts of books.

Survey: Most Wichita teachers don't like where the school district is headed

Wichita teachers like their district and their school, but they see trouble on the horizon. This story from KAKE may seem familiar.

The Siren Song of “Evidence-Based” Instruction

Alfie Kohn doesn't blog often, but when he does it's well worth the read.

Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools: You’re Paying For It, So You Deserve to Know Where Your Money Goes

State Rep. Joe Ciresi explains why cyber schools are a raw deal for taxpayers and students.

For Pa. cyber charter schools, there’s little accountability but plenty of profit

There's a certain pleasure that comes when a mainstream outlet may not be citing you, but it sure feels like they've read your stuff. The Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Inquirer explains why PA cybers are a profitable piece of educational bad news, and taxpayers deserve a break.

Well Funded Public Schools Are Not the Priority of Ohio’s Super-Gerrymandered, Supermajority Republican Legislature

Jan Resseger's stuff is always thoughtful, grown up, and well sourced. You should be subscribing to her blog and reading her weekly.

New Report Documents Obstacles to Educational Opportunity for Young Black Men

Or even twice a week. Here Jan Resseger looks at an important report from the Schott Foundation about one of the great gaps in our education system.

Pennsylvania Treasurer candidate pledges to “fight” school vouchers

You know an issue has penetrated outside the edububble when someone running for a state office that is not education related makes school vouchers part of her pitch.

A Hallucinogenic Compendium

Eryk Salvaggio substacks at Cybernetic Forests. In this post he looks at why large language models like ChatGPT make lousy search engines. Also, a look at the many and varied hallucinations they produce.

At Forbes.com, I look at how Nebraska's GOP is trying to maneuver school vouchers around the state's voters. Oh, that pesky democracy.

Join me on substack. It's free, easy, convenient, and free. 

Universal Vouchers and Privatization

A shift in Florida is being covered, but I'm not sure many folks really understand what's happening. 

Politico reported that Florida school choice programs have been "wildly successful," and both of those words are doing a megacrane's worth of lifting. More to the point, they are accepting the DeSantis definition of success, which is the replacement of a public school system with a privatized one.

“We need some big changes throughout the country,” DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.”

Politico reported on this "success" in the context of many public school districts in Florida shuttering buildings due to dropping enrollment.

Let's acknowledge a couple of complexities here. First, the under-18 population is dropping everywhere in the country. Second, Florida's choice programs are exceptionally opaque, making it hard to know what, exactly, is happening, though there are indicators that, as in other states, a large number of voucher students never set foot in public school to begin with.

Florida's supremely underqualified choice-loving education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., says that all these closings are motivation for public schools. "But what they need to do is continue to innovate and provide programming that is attractive to parents so, on that open competition, they have the best option for those parents to choose."

Florida has long pursued the technique of draining resources and support from public schools, along with imposing a terrible testing system, doing their best to make charters and private schools look better by comparison. And in all fairness, it should be said that some Florida districts have shot themselves in the foot. 

The general trend in Florida has been to pursue Milton Friedman's dream of getting government out of the education business. And in that respect, Florida has been wildly successful.

But here's the important part.

Privatization is not just about privatizing the folks who get to provide education (or education-flavored products). It is about privatizing the responsibility for getting children an education.

Getting government out of education means ending the promise that every child in this country is entitled to a decent education. Regardless of zip code. Regardless of their parents' ability to support them. Regardless of whatever challenges they bring to the process. 

End that promise. Replace it with a free(ish) market. End the community responsibility for educating future citizens. Put the whole weight of that on their parents. End the oversight and accountability to the elected representatives of the taxpayers. Replace it with a "Well, the parents will sort that out. And if they don't, that's their own fault and their own problem."

This is billed as "freedom," and it is freedom of a sort, just like every citizen is "free" to get whatever means of transportation they can afford. You didn't want to depend on a badly used bicycle? You should have thought of that before you decided to be poor.

Except that it's not even that. To make the analogy more accurate, we'd need to imagine a country in which car dealers and bus companies could refuse to sell to you because you don't go to the right church or love the right people or because they just don't want to. 

Parents are free to pursue whatever education options they want for their children. Except that if the voucher won't cover the ever-increasing cost of that private school, and that other private school won't accept your child, and the neighborhood school that would have accepted your child no matter what is now closed. You could always start your own microschool, with a computer connection (hope you have internet) and some adult to hang out as a "coach." 

This is where universal vouchers fall right in line with other modern reform classics-- they propose to solve a problem that they absolutely do not solve.

Part of the pitch has been that poor families should have the same choices as wealthy families. Universal vouchers absolutely do not do that. Like any other sector of the free market, a privatized system provides plenty of great (and over-inflated, shiny) options for the wealthy, and lousy options for the not-so-wealthy. And it does it while chipping away at the one good option that the not-so-wealthy were promised-- a well-resourced public school.

Has the US public school system always lived up to the promise? Absolutely not. But canceling that promise and replacing it with the "freedom" at accept whatever lousy options the market deigns to deliver is not a step forward.

Reformsters have had a lot of success in convincing folks that education is a consumer good provided to families and not a human service provided for the benefit of the entire country. But the other undiscussed feature of the Florida plan is that it disenfranchises the community. It doesn't just say that educating children is no longer your responsibility; the Florida plan says that if you are a taxpayer with no children, you have no say, no power. And if anyone thinks that this won't eventually lead to shrinking voucher amounts, I have a bridge over some Florida swamplands to sell them.

We already know what this mostly looks like. It looks like our privatized health care system, where the people at the top get everything they need, and the people at the bottom skip medication and treatment and, periodically, die. But the health system just kind of grew that way, so nobody had to convince people to give up access to health care. Just periodically holler "No socialism! Freedom! Murica!" every time someone brings up single payer universal coverage. 

Universal vouchers, ironically, do not promise universal education for all students. The traditional public school system does. State by state we are being pu8shed to give up that system without ever having an honest conversation about what's really being proposed. 

Parents Defending Education Goes Anti-Immigrant

Parents Defending Education is primo astroturf, a group of seasoned political communications professionals with the usual connections and deep pocketed backers, pretending to be a grass roots organization.

PDE has come out opposed to Black Lives Matter At School. They are staunchly against choice if it involves choices on the wrong side of culture panic (like a charter school with an LGBTQ focus). Their website notes:

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom -- and for the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

Their main shtick is to encourage people to turn in schools doing naughty indoctrinaty, CRT/DEI/SEL/MOUSE things and, in some cases, aim some litigation at them. Central to this culture panic battle is their IndoctriNation map along with the opportunity to submit an Incident Report. 

The "incidents" include schools with Gay Straight Alliance chapters and "restorative practices." Fairfax County is reported for using terms like "marginalized group" and "protected class." Hosting drag performers. DEI hiring. And more recently, any school critical of Israel in current war. You can search under categories like ethnic studies and critical race theory and affinity groups. All aimed at catching districts, schools, or teachers doing naughty stuff.

But two days ago, PDE added a new category and a new incident report.

Influx of migrants strains public schools in Springfield; schools are struggling to teach and provide for migrant students with no previous education

This is not a typical PDE report of administrative leftiness or some teacher getting all LGBTQ-accepting or anti-racist. This is strictly a complaint about immigrant children in Massachusetts. 

In reviewing thousands of documents retrieved by Parents Defending Education via the Freedom of Information Act, there are indicators that show how this mass influx of migrant families has impacted schools in this northeastern state, particularly in the city of Springfield.

Thousands of dollars in local resources have been allocated to accommodate “newcomer students” and their families. This programming has included training sessions for teachers, administrators, and staff, as well as mental health support and translation services (both written and oral), which have included translating school documents in at least 17 different languages. Additional purchased documents include translation dictionaries for at least nine different languages.

Teachers admit there's an influx. Interpreters for at least six different languages were requested to help with parent-teacher conferences (Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Spanish). Talk about buying translation dictionaries. At least 135 migrant students in one city.

PDE does not critique districts' handling of this influx, so one assumes that the panic here is over all those furriners coming into our schools, and costing us money to educate and care for them. Apparently, on top of the usual culture panic, PDE will now add some Foreign Others panic. There's not even an attempt this panic to undocumented immigrants--this is just any immigrants at all! No recognition that, hey, these new folks might have jobs and be paying taxes. Just "These folks don't talk 'murican and that costs us money and aren't you outraged by that?"

Is it really necessary to explain, again, that immigrants have lifted this country up, and that children, who have no say over where their parents take them, deserve an education because they are young humans and the world will be marginally worse if they don't get one? That yes, this is hard, but that's no excuse not to do it?

PDE is now right up there with the Heritage Foundation, which back in February said Supreme Court decision be damned, let's charge undocumented immigrant children tuition to go to school. Even other conservatives knew this was a pretty odious stance.

I suppose this fits with PDE's general stance of championing intolerance and opposing money spent on Other People's Kids, but somehow this seems like stooping even lower. I guess we'll see whether being anti-immigrant is a big new part of their portfolio. 

KY: A Constitutional Voucher Amendment

School privatizers wanted school vouchers for Kentucky. But they ran into two problems:

1) A constitution

2) Judges who can read the constitution

Lawmakers had passed a tax credit scholarship program, the kind of program where rich folks can send money to a private school instead of paying their taxes. 

Tax credit scholarships are popular with voucherphiles because they allow folks to argue, "Hey, this isn't giving public dollars to a religious school, because the state never touches the dollars in the first place." 

This is not a good faith serious argument. I often explain it this way:

You love a certain brand of pickle. Your spouse says that the family already has some perfectly good pickles, and under no circumstances will they allow you to spend household budget money on your brand of pickles. So you make a deal with your employer; when it’s time to pay you, they will spend $50 of what they would have paid you to buy pickles instead, the give you the pickles and a check that is $50 lighter. Go ahead and tell your spouse that there's no reason to get upset because you didn't spend any money on pickles. Your spouse is still fully aware that the household budget is $50 short.

Section 184 of the Kentucky constitution has some straightforward language about funding education, including:

No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation

Kentucky’s Attorney General, arguing for the voucher plan, tried to assert a reading of the law that allowed for tax credit scholarships. The court replied, “We respectfully decline to construe the Constitution in a way that would avoid its plain meaning.”

“[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition is unconstitutional.

Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes wrote “Simply stated, it puts the Commonwealth in the business of raising sum(s) . . . for education other than in common schools.”

Put another way by the court, “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds, rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

In short, the Kentucky constitution says "No taxpayer dollars for anything other than public schools. And that includes those tax liabilities y'all are trying to sneak behind your backs there."

That was back at the end of 2022. Then, another setback for choicers. A year later, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled against the funding law set up to promote charter schools in the state.

Wrote Shepherd in his ruling, “Whether the charter schools envisioned by HB 9 are good or bad, they are outside the scope and definition of the ‘common schools’ defined by our Ky. Constitution.” Citing the many ways in which the charter law allows charter schools to operate outside of the laws governing public schools, Shepherd concluded

This charter school legislation is effectively an attempt to bypass the system of common schools, and establish a separate class of publicly funded but privately controlled schools that have unique autonomy in management and operation of schools... This “separate and unequal” system of charter schools is inconsistent with the constitutional requirements for a common school system.

Shepherd also pointed to Section 186 of the state constitution, which he quoted in its entirety:

The violation of Section 186 of the Ky. Constitution is even more clear. That provision requires that “All funds accruing to the school fund shall be used for the maintenance of the public schools of the Commonwealth, and for no other purpose, and the General Assembly shall by general law prescribe the manner of the distribution of the public school fund among the school districts and its use for public school purposes.” (Emphasis supplied). To take tax dollars to support these privately owned and operated charter schools is flatly inconsistent with the mandate of Section 186 of the Ky. Constitution.

Frustrated Kentucky privatizers only had one real option, and that option was proposed in January of this year. HB 2 proposes a constitutional amendment that would fix all that restrictive public school language and make it okee dokee for taxpayer dollars to be spent on charter and voucher schools. It's not complicated; the new language says

The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools. The General Assembly may exercise this authority by law, Sections 59, 60, 171, 183, 184, 186, and 189 of this Constitution notwithstanding.

HB 2 will put the new language on the November ballot in Kentucky. The debate is the same old same old-- the GOP says "we need to give poor kids a chance" and the Dems say "So, give more support to the schools that most of them already attend."

Kentucky is way behind the curve on these issues, so much so that journalists include lines like "Advocates of government support for private and charter schools refer to such efforts as 'school choice' initiatives." just in case readers don't know what "school choice" refers to.

Protect Our Schools KY has been launched by public education supporters, including teachers, administrators, and other supporters. Louisville Puiblic Media reported from Perry County.

Sawyer Noe, a recent graduate of Knott County Schools, said the constitutional change would divert funding from public schools.

“Not only are we being asked to allow our tax dollars to subsidize a private education for the select few, but we are being asked to do so at a time when public schools are having to cut critical services,” Noe said.

The actual question on the ballot will be

To give parents choices in educational opportunities for their children, are you in favor of enabling the General Assembly to provide financial support for the education costs of students in kindergarten through 12th grade who are outside the system of common (public) schools by amending the Constitution of Kentucky as stated below?

Here's hoping that public school supporters are able to muster a hefty heap of "no" in November. 

ICYMI: Memorial Day Washout Edition (5/26)

No parade tomorrow, which is a bummer, but the incoming weather has spooked the parade's organizers. Won't feel quite right without the annual march down our main street, but sometimes the weather just can't be ignored. Have a good weekend, and here's a whole big lot of reading for you.

The Texas School District That Provided the Blueprint for an Attack on Public Education

From the New Yorker, by Jessica Winter. I'm reading Mike Hixenbaugh's book about Southlake, and you should, too, but in the meantime, here's a quick overview of the events that turned out to be the cutting edge of the new wave of culture panic.

Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools.

For ProPublica, Jennifer Berry Hawes travels to Camden, Alabama to remind us that that thing we like to think we don't do any more, we absolutely still do.

Tacoma teachers, students demand school district take care of 'rodent infestation' 

A reminder that sometimes the issues of education on the ground are not big, deep policy questions.

FAQ: Education Savings Accounts and private school tuition in Iowa

Last month Jason Fontana and Jennifer Jennings published a working paper showing that vouchers led direction to tuition increases in Iowa. That was followed by a bunch of privatizers complaining, "but-but-but..." So here are the answers to all of those objections.

Evidence That KIPP Is Still Abusing Students

At Schools Matter, James Horn points to a new case that suggests KIPP hasn't entirely cleaned up their act.

If You Give The Moms A Majority…

In Florida, Sue Kingery Woltanski with a close-up look at one district where the board has gone off the rails, thanks to Moms for Liberty and their good buddy Ron DeSantis. 

Columbus school board members at odds over leaked task force document

If your plan is to screw over your teachers and gaslight your constituents, maybe you shouldn't write the plan down.

A Meaningless Education

John Warner in Inside Higher Education writes about the student search for meaning and for money. Fun tidbit: "selling out" is no longer a thing.

They're still not like us

Jose Luis Vilson on math and society and much more.

How Arizona’s school voucher program turned into a tax break for the wealthy

Copper Courier with a simple, brief overview of Arizona's voucher boondoggle.

Horticulture, horses and ‘Chill Rooms’: One district goes all-in on mental health support

Javeria Salman visits Pittsburgh's Northgate district for Hechinger. A look at a big time investment in mental health supports for students.

Black Teachers Matter. Why Aren’t Schools Trying to Keep Them?

Shariff El-Mekki addresses the issue of retaining Black teachers and offers some resources.

Conservative groups stand in way of governor’s private-school vouchers

Sam Stockard for Tennessee Lookout describes the terrain in Tennessee when it heads into the next round of headbutting over vouchers.

Feeding La. Gov Landry’s Universal School Voucher GATOR

Louisiana has its own push to expand and extend vouchers (plus a snappy name). The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the story.

Moms for Liberty to spend over $3 million targeting presidential swing state voters

Somebody (they'd rather not say who) has given M4L a cool $3 million to go help the GOP win swing states, further fulfilling their role as conservative political operatives.

Vouchers undermine efforts to provide an excellent public education for all

From the Economic Policy Institute, a pretty direct analysis of what vouchers do and do not do.

Under Ryan Walters, Oklahoma lost federal funding to help schools respond to tragedies

Walters continues to be not good at his job.

Ryan Walters’ PR Contract Should Be Banned, GOP Lawmaker Says

Meanwhile, members of his own party think maybe taxpayers should be bankrolling his personal PR campaign.

How a Lancaster charity linked to a private Christian college influences public school policy in Pa.

Here in PA, the Independence Law Center has been the one stop shop for districts that want to ban books and make culture panic policy. Here's one piece of the puzzle of where they get their money.

Pennsylvania Treasurer candidate pledges to “fight” school vouchers

1) She articulates an absolute hard stand against vouchers in PA. 2) Look, vouchers are an issue in a non-education state race.

How Community Schools are Transforming Public Education

In The Public Interest with a look at the community schools movement and what's going on these days. It would make a good model for true public education.

‘Scary’: public-school textbooks the latest target as US book bans intensify

From The Guardian. Now they're coming after chapters in textbooks, like the chapters about vaccines and climate change.

The Schools Where the Western Canon Is King

Kiera Butler for Mother Jones takes a look at the classical schools movement and its ties to certain brands of conservatism.

Broad Coalition of Religious and Civil Rights Organizations Condemns Use of Chaplains as Public School Counselors

The movement to use "chaplains" to sneak Christianity into schools has stirred up opposition among actual chaplains. Jan Resseger has the story.

On your mark, AI is set. Go?

Benjamin Riley's substack Cognitive Resonance is a new addition to the Curmudgucation Institute blogroll, with lots worthwhile to say regarding AI in education. Plus in this one he quotes me.

My dying high school writing teacher has one more lesson. Don't wait to say thank you.

Rex Huppke with a personal piece in USA Today. I agree. Don't wait.

A Reporter's Guide To The New Apostolic Reformation

You'll see NAR pop up more and more, a dominionist hard-core far right christianist movement. This guide from Religious Dispatches covers the basics.

Clarence Thomas attacks Brown v. Board ruling amid 70th anniversary

Want something else to worry about for the future? How about a Supreme Court justice who thinks Brown v. Board is a mistake that needs to be reversed.

A Message From Your Child’s New ChatGPTchr©

Jay Wamsted envisions a whole new first day of school.

I was busy this week. Not one, but two pieces about a new report from Ed Voters PA showing waste in PA's cyber charters. A nice focused one for Forbes, and for Bucks County Beacon, a deeper dive that looks at the historical context of cyber-shenanigans.

Also for Forbes, in Idaho, the attacks on libraries has led to at least one public library becoming adults only. 

Join me on substack. It's free and easy!

Who Really Needs SEL?

I like TC Weber's work because he manages to so adeptly fuse looking at policy and policy maker shenanigans with the more on-the-ground view of how students and parents experience schools.

There's much worth reading in his most recent post, but this is the line that really jumped out at me:

I continue to be amazed at the amount of money we sink into social and emotional learning while failing to implement those meaningful practices into adult interactions.

I've made my points about SEL before. I think attempts to formalize it and teach it in deliberate classroom instruction are a mistake. that at best they are just kind of silly and at worst result in entering a Human Decency Grade in a student's permanent record. At the same time, actual SEL is inseparable from the classroom. That's because young humans are always learning social-emotional stuff, always learning how to function like human beings in the world. Every adult in a child's life is modeling some sort of social and emotional behavior. Every "this teacher changed my life" story an SEL story.

Folks who want to somehow get SEL out of education and just go back to learnin' reading, writing and 'rithmetic are asking to eat chicken soup without any both, to be married without having another person involved. This is the empty view of education as some sort of content delivery system, a process by which facts are poured into a young human's brain, perhaps by the latest version of computerized algorithmic "education." 

Except here's the thing-- even that approach includes SEL, even if the SEL lesson delivered is "Your humanity doesn't matter" or "Life is strictly transactional" or "Only some peoples' feelings matter" or, in the case of your AI personalized computer program, "Some people are not worth bothering to have human interactions with."

So even folks like the "premiere pronatalists" who believe Certain People should have lots of kids, but who raise their own kids by hanging an iPad around two year old's neck and smacking a toddler in the face for bumping a table-- well, they certainly imbue their children with all sorts of SEL lessons. Will a school program overwrite the SEL lessons taught at home? 

Every school is chock full of SEL in the form of the school's culture and the teacher's classroom culture. This is a big reason that so many schools are absolutely wasting money on formal SEL programs. A nice little program teaching tolerance and kindness for thirty minutes a week cannot hope to make the slightest dent in a school where adults emphasize meanness-enforced compliance all day every day. 

If your administrators and teachers spend every day grinding down students to get them to fall in line and do as their told, that is your SEL program. Research shows that some schools and some states have huge disparities between Black and White students when it comes to suspensions for defiant, disruptive, or disorderly behavior; if you are one of those schools, that's your SEL program. My school, for a time, had obviously selective enforcement of dress code; whether an outfit was a violation or not depended on how good you looked in it. Don't think for a moment that our students didn't learn some social and emotional lessons from that. 

If you want students to learn grace and kindness, your faculty and staff and administration have to model grace and kindness (recognizing that grace and kindness can wear a wide variety of faces, and not all of them are warm and fuzzy). If you want students to develop socially and emotionally healthy interactions with each other, the adults in your school have to model socially and emotionally healthy interactions with each other (again recognizing that there are sooooo many ways to do that).

None of this requires sacrifice of time that could be devoted to content, because SEL is embedded in all the work of a school. It's not a what, but a how. 

Who really needs SEL? The adults in the building. If they aren't up to speed, all the "Character Strong" sessions in the world will not make a difference. Soft skills, human decency (whatever you think that looks like), kindness, grace, respect, integrity, honesty--these all run downhill in any organization, and in schools, students are at the bottom of the hill. It requires leadership and personal commitment. It's up to adults to be thoughtful and deliberate about what they send rolling down that hill. 

OH: Vouchers for Jesus

I can vaguely remember a time when the Heritage Foundation didn't wear its conservative christianist heart on its sleeve, but those days seem gone.

Witness this latest award from Heritage. Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include outfits like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, The Claremont Institute, Feds for Freedom, Immigration Accountability Project, and the Center for Christian Virtue.

CCV is an Ohio organization that started out in 1983 as the Citizens for Community Values. 

The First Amendment ensures that people of all faiths are free to exercise their beliefs in their day-to-day lives. For Christians, this freedom is essential because our faith compels us to act – to seek the good of our neighbors and follow God’s word daily.

Yet throughout the country, laws are in place to restrict religious freedom, and to punish people of faith because of their beliefs. For this reason, protecting religious freedom is our top priority at CCV. 

I often think that ancient Christians would be baffled by what modern christianists consider "punishment" for their beliefs. The modern definition of punishment seems to be stuck on things like "not allowed to discriminate freely against people of whom we disapprove" and "not allowed to grab as much taxpayer money as we wish." 

As punishment goes historically, it seems like tame stuff. But CCV is there to stand up against it by pushing "lifesaving legislation, including bills to prohibit abortion at the moment a heartbeat is detected in an unborn child, expand Ohio’s school choice programs, and protect religious freedom."

CCV leadership include president Aaron Baer, a comms professional (Ohio University '09) from Arizona, where he was a policy advisor for the attorney general's office. He helped launch the Ohio Christian Education Network, most noted for successfully suing the Ohio health department for closing Christian schools during the pandemic. OCEN has its own executive director, Troy McIntosh, a private Christian school vet. 

CCV isn't particularly coy about where they stand on the whole public education thing, as they explain in their release about winning the Heritage award:

CCV will receive a $100,000 award to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system. The award will expand CCV's Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN) model, which helps churches operate full-time, in-person Christian schools Monday through Friday. CCV plans on leveraging Ohio's EdChoice program to offer a moral and quality education to students at little to no cost, especially to those below the federal poverty line. CCV intends to launch dozens of schools across Ohio and export this model to other states to serve and save children across the country.

 I'm not sure exactly when we shifted gears from simply alleging that public schools didn't educate very well to also accusing them of being morally corrupt. But Baer is sure that we have an "educational crisis" because "agenda-driven bureaucrats are pushing political ideologies in the classroom."

And Heritage is right there with him. Upon delivering the award, Heritage president Kevin Roberts declared:

So much of our nation's societal decay stems from our education system, and institutions like CCV are spearheading the effort to save our children and restore morality and sanity in our schools.

It's all a reminder that Ohio's voucher program is about replacing a public non-sectarian school system with one that is explicitly Christian, and to do it in a way that circumvents any actual national discussion about whether this is a good idea or not. But I guess a conversation like that would be punishment.