This Is Where Attacks On Reading Take You

It seems like a minor, irony-soaked story. Erum Salam reports for the Guardian that the Indian River school district (in Florida, natch) has banned Alan Gratz's book Ban This Book. 

The book (summary here, if you've never read it) is the story of Amy Anne Olinger, a quiet 9-year-old who discovers that one of her favorite books (along with many others) has been pulled from the library because the PTA president thinks it will be harmful to children. So she creates a Banned Books Library in her locker. There are a variety of conflicts, culminating in a school board meeting at which Amy Anne and friends confront the school board and PTA president with arguments for removing every single one of the books in the library.

What the book doesn't have is any sexual elements. Nor any trace of critical race theory, and not a thing to make anyone feel they are either the victim or perpetrator of systemic discrimination. And yet, here we are...

The challenge came from Jennifer Pippin, head of the Indian River Moms For liberty chapter. She has lots of thoughts about books that should be removed from schools, including her crusade against a graphic version of Anne Frank's diary, which contains nude statues and is "not a true adaptation of the Holocaust." 

But Pippin has two M4L-backed board members in Indian River, and they joined a DeSantis-appointed member to vote 3-2 in favor of extreme irony. Kevin McDonald, the DeSantis appointee, offered this explanation of why the book had to go:

The title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them.

So, two problems. One is that it mentions the names of the forbidden books, thereby allowing students to, I guess, know those books exist (though the mentioned books include such Naughty Classics as Harriet the Spy and Juney B Jones books). Another board member had a charge as well--

This book is really just a liberal Marxist propaganda piece.

 It challenges the school board's authority! It gives students the idea that they can have a say in things or challenge adults. Goodness gracious! It must be Marxist propaganda, because only Marxist propaganda would suggest you can disagree with the People in Charge.

This is a tell of epic proportions.

There are (as I've said repeatedly) serious conversations to be had about what books are appropriate for which students at what time. But the drive to stomp children (and adults) under the thumb of Liberty Watchers reveals itself pretty quickly to be mostly about authoritarian impulse. That means--

First, they are never, ever satisfied. There never comes a day when they say, "We are satisfied that the library has removed the really concerning materials, and that there's a good policy in place to address future acquisitions, so you won't be hearing from us again." The librarians who say, "Okay, if we fold on this batch of books, then they'll be happy and go away" are doomed to disappointment. No, once they've gotten rid of the books that are 90% objectionable, they'll move on to the 80% books, and on and on and on. 

Second, authoritarians always have to defend their authority. Do not question them, challenge them, contradict them. In the case of book banners, challenging their authority can be as great an offense as putting sexual content in the library. There's nothing complicated or nuanced about it-- they have the power and you dare not challenge it.

The other layer of irony here is that Ban This Book is actually a pretty nuanced tale-- there are no blatantly evil villains, our heroine is not angel, and the book says a lot about how complicated these situations can be. But to three members of the Indian River board that doesn't matter. Like Eric Cartman, they will not allow anyone to question their authority.

And so what starts out being about books with sexual and CRT content and protecting the children ends up being about control and power and slapping down anyone and anything that challenges it. 

MO: More Book Banning Foolishness

Now that the book banning craze has had some time to find its legs, certain patterns of foolishness have emerged.

In many states, it has become a way to circumvent democratic processes entirely. We see over and over a tiny minority--sometimes just one person--demands to decide what everyone's children can read.  There's Vicki Baggett in Florida (at least 150 books). There's Washington Post's finding that  60% of book challenges came from just 11 persons. Adam Andre in Wisconsin challenged 444 books challenged 444 books. In Fort Bend, Texas, it was an actual board member, David Hamilton.

Hamilton is typical of another phenomenon-- the book challenger who has not actually read the book. 

This kind of blind attack on a book is facilitated by sites like Book Looks. Set up by some former Moms For Liberty, the site provides a quick, handy guide to all the Naughty Books. You don't even have to read them yourself (and if you're really lazy, you don't even have to check to see if the books are even in your library before you demand they be removed).

Here's a particularly striking example from St. Joseph School District in St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph exists in the shadow of the Herzog Foundation, one more far right organization created by a rich guy to impose his vision on society. This particular vision involves school vouchers, lots of GOP officials, and a goal to “catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education.” They are directly tied to some local churches, and they have lots of money to throw around.

Keeping an eye on Herzog shenanigans is Herzog-free SJSD. A Herzog official filed a Sunshine request back in December for a list of all books, and soon book challenges started to appear. See what you notice about the list of challenges:

Yes, reading is hard. I am particularly unimpressed with Lawrence, who could not find the time to read "And Tango Makes Three," which, to be clear, is a children's picture book with fewer than forty pages.

The group also shared some of the actual forms on their Facebook page (comments were added by HFSJSD

It's no wonder that one other frequent theme in book banning coverage is librarians who have absolutely had enough (here, here, here, and here). 

Are there serious discussions to be had about which books are suitable for which young audiences? Absolutely. But to have serious conversations, you have to have serious people on both sides, and some of these culture panic folks are not serious enough for any such conversation.

ICYMI: Party Day Edition (6/9)

This week the Board of Directors turned 7, and this afternoon we'll be celebrating with an assortment of classmates, cake, fruit, and a swimming pool. Good times. Also this week, the insurance company declared my car a total loss, so I've got that project to take care of. But the Board and the CMO are now officially on summer vacation, and the last day of school is behind us and summer is here. So we've got that going for us. 

Last day of school!

But meanwhile there is a whole heap of reading to do, so here's your list. Live it up!

You’re paying for Pa.’s cyber charter schools. You deserve to know where your money goes

Legislator Joe Ciresi joins the chorus of people begging to finally stop wasting taxpayer dollars on an overpriced service that doesn't deliver. He's not the only person ringing this alarm bell.Not by a long shot.

Data-Mining and the "Data Race"​ for Gold in Texas

If you have sort of let data mining of children and cradle-to-career tracking drift to the back of your mind, the folks who want to push that stuff have not. Lynn Davenport lays out some of the players involved these days.

Floridians come to Iowa bearing brilliant ideas

Todd Dorman has a column in The Gazette that deploys sass and facts to explain how Iowa Republicans are getting their ideas from wealthy Florida business folks.

 

Local school, run by group on SPLC 'hate map,' is part of state's voucher program

In New Hampshire, it turns out that one school hoovering up taxpayer-funded vouchers is an outfit so radical that the Catholic Church says, "uh-uh--they are not with us no matter what they say!" Christopher Cartwright reports for the Keene Sentinel. 

Judge issues ruling in Catholic lawsuit over Colorado universal preschool program

Catholic preschools in Colorado were sad because the state wouldn't give them taxpayer money without requiring them to not discriminate against LGBTQ folks (among others). The ruling doesn't help much, but there's a depressing twist-- the state has solved the problem by cutting the anti-discrimination language. Melanie Asmar at Chalkbeat reports.

Republican Pennridge School Board Director Wants Students to Be Taught Creationism

You might think this has already been settled, but a school board director in Pennridge would like to mandate the religious version of the origins of the universe. Jenny Stephens reports for the Bucks County Beacon.

An American flag, a pencil sharpener − and the 10 Commandments: Louisiana’s new bill to mandate biblical displays in classrooms is the latest to push limits

Charles Russo writes for The Conversation about Louisiana's attempt to get religion into the classroom.

Billions in taxpayer dollars now go to religious schools via vouchers

Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein do some honest to goodness reporting on just who gets the benefit of taxpayer-funded vouchers-- and who doesn't. It's in the Washington Post.

Florida revises school library book removal training following public outcry

On the USA Today network, a report on Florida doing its "Okay, now that we made a public splash by announcing a policy, let's adjust it a tiny bit to reality" thing.

Third Grade Retention: The Gool's Gold of Reading Reform

Paul Thomas is here to remind us that this dumb policy is a dumb policy.

Why “Fund Students, Not Systems” Is a Recipe for Disaster

On the one hand, it's behind The Nation's annoying paywall. On the other hand, it's Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, so you know it's worth a read.

An Illinois School District’s Reliance on Police to Ticket Students Is Discriminatory, Civil Rights Complaint Says

ProPublica reports on a district where they have real cops give real students real tickets. Guess who gets the greater number of them.

Dark Money Ran Through Texas’s Runoffs and Probably Just Delivered Win for Private School Vouchers

Marlissa Collier reports on how hard Abbott and some friends worked to get him his vouchers.

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read

Nancy Flanagan with a tale about reading and some assumptions we make about it.

Moms for Liberty Was Never About Protecting Kids

Maurice Cunningham for The Progressive and yet another Moms for Liberty spin on their bogus history.

Florida sticks by social studies standard teaching ‘benefit’ of slavery

Florida has some really dumb ideas about how the history of enslaving folks should be taught, so bad that even Byron "Jim Crows Was Great" Donalds objected.

Sex Discrimination Education Law

Thomas Ultican provides some history of Title IX

The Women Will Do It

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at the new book Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net.

Ask When Children Should Begin to Read

Nancy Bailey continues to shed light on the world of reading instruction and some of the actual research behind it.

An Unserious Book

Sal Khan is back once again to tell us another of his amateur-hour ideas about how to revolutionize education while disguising marketing as analysis. John Warner explains why you can ignore Khan's new book.

Both State Tax Cuts and the School Voucher Expansion Threaten Fair and Equal Public School Funding in Ohio

Ohio continues to do its best to become the Florida of the midwest. Luckily, Jan Resseger is there to explain their anti-public-ed policies.

Are we intelligent or are we educable?

Benjamin Riley explains some of the major theories about what makes human thinking unique.

The New Apostolic Reformation Wants God's Government Back

Texas Observer with more reporting on the NAR, that delightful group of anti-democracy dominionists that you should be paying more attention.

NAR 19-county plan

Religion Dispatches covers the plan to hit 19 particular counties hard for the next election. Some of these will seem familiar.

Join me on substack. It's free and convenient and easy. Tell your friends and help me build my newsletter audience. Then have a good week.

How Stupid Can A Shooting Drill Get ?

I'm bringing this up not in the heat or anniversary of some awful school shooting, but because once again some misguided adults tried an active shooter simulation on students. 

Active shooter drills are pretty upsetting in the best of times. I've been through them, and the experience was unnerving. the experience was unnerving. Add to that the non-zero number of drills that are handled terribly. 

Like the infamous Indiana drill in which teachers were shot with pellets ("This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing," the helpful police offered.) The Indiana legislature, hearing about this terribly upsetting drill, decided that-- maybe it's a good idea to shoot teachers with pellets. "It's got to do with reality and making sure they experience the emotions and adrenaline," offered the head of the state senate education committee who was also an ordained minister.

Or that time in Missouri, where the state mandates shooter drills, that students were outfitted with fake wounds and fake blood.

Firing blanks during a drill doesn't even count as unusual any more. As are discussions about the "right" way to conduct these drills (which just kind of skip over the if).

But local law enforcement can still find ways to surprise. Just this week, Burlington VT police officers teaching a class of high school students (in the police station) decided it would be a good idea to stage a surprise faux active shooter attack. Masked gunmen burst into the room and started firing (blanks, one presumes). The students thought they were there to tour the station and hear a presentation about how detectives solve crimes. The police thought they were giving a demonstration of eyewitness unreliability. The students were scared to death. 

Police said they'd used the same "realistic as possible" demonstration with adults and college students without trouble, but of course adults and college students are not regularly marinated in a system that reminds them constantly that even in a seemingly safe place, they could be brutally murdered at any moment. This is how we've raised a whole generation.

It is infuriating and enraging. Since Columbine we have insisted as a country on "hardening the target" which translates into making schools responsible to thwart attacks and students responsible for saving their own lives, but not--God forbid--in any way interfering with every American's born right to have at their disposal technology that has no purpose other than to rip bullets through human flesh as swiftly and efficiently as possible. 

Of all the things that schools are asked to fix--ignorance, poverty, racism, drug abuse, pregnancy, auto accidents, etc etc etc--the demand that schools and students somehow shoulder the burden for a nation with the worst death-by-gun figures in the industrialized world is the most unjust, unreasonable, unfair and unhealthy. It is also one of our societal tells, a clear sign that all our collective talk about how much we value young humans is just not serious talk at all. And it's not just every death that reminds us, but every child who spends a day (or more) shaking or crying because once again some adult has decided that the best way to handle gun violence in this country is to scare the living shit out of some children. 

Five Takeaways from "They Came for the Schools"

Mike Hixenbaugh has written a heck of a book about the newest wave of attempts to dismantle America's public schools. They Came for the Schools is centered on Southlake, Texas, the community that turned out to be the cutting edge of harnessing culture panic for political gains (it is, among other things, the district where an administrator famously told teachers to cover both sides of the Holocaust). It's the community that pioneered the "Southlake Playbook," the plan for the far right to take power in a district. 

Hixenbaugh focuses on Southlake, but he also puts Southlake in the national context, showing where this movement spun off into other locales. It's a good read, and I recommend it. Here are a couple of particular takeaways from the book.

Historical Context (Present)

There's a tendency to mark the start of current culture panic at the pandemic years of 2020-2021. But Hixenbaugh lays out a fuller timeline quickly and efficiently.

Barrack Obama is elected President, and a whole lot of white folks get uncomfortable. Donald Trump is elected, and a whole lot of built-up pressure and panic gets permission to uncork. The incidents of racism and abuse in schools climb during the Trump presidency, and schools all over country (including Southlake) start thinking, yeah, we need to address this somehow. George Floyd's murder puts an exclamation point on that idea, but 2020 is also pandemic closings and Trump's defeat, and folks on the far right see conspiracy, loss of cultural relevance and centrality, and a need to grab power before Those People go too far.

As Hixenbaugh describes it, it's a series of reactions, and each culture panic reaction is fueled deliberately by power-seeking opportunists, from birther Donald Trump through culture panic guru Chris Rufo. Hixenbaugh does a good job, through Southlake, of stitching together a fuller narrative of how we got here.

Historical Context (Past)

We've been here before, and Hixenbaugh walks us through some of the other iterations of culture panic. Here's Anita Bryant with the old "I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce; therefor, they must recruit our children."

The desire to silence certain voices, to put cultural and racial minorities In Their Proper Place, to inject certain religious beliefs into school while also sending taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools-- none of that is new. They have always been with us in this country.

Big Fish, Small Ponds

One of the recurring themes, from Southlake to Chester County, is that many of these contentious communities are the homes of people used to operating on a big budget national stage, and when they turn their money and resources to local school board races, regular folks can find themselves suddenly swamped. 

That holds true for individuals and corporations. Hixenbaugh highlights the work of Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that ploughs its resources into backing far right christian nationalists for local school board races and school policy. 

There are some stunning stories here, like the teacher who became a whistleblower on NBC news and found that opponents had access to the kinds of high tech resources needed to reverse the voice-disguising tech that the network had used to conceal her identity.

Relentless and Focused

The Southlake conservatives become a micro-MAGA, demanding absolute purity of those they support and relentlessly hound board members, staff, even students who do not fall in line.

Not only does this bar any sorts of compromise or attempts to coexist, but the culture panic crew shows an absolutely unwillingness to accept any view of events except their own--which is often untethered from reality. Sometimes that means ignoring part of the picture; they are concerned about a school's response to racist incidents, but not the racist incidents themselves. Sometimes it means a striking lack of interest in any nuanced understanding; their opponents are never people who mean well but may have chosen poorly, but are always evil and terrible. Sometimes they just lie. 

It's what always makes culture panic movements both dangerous and doomed. Dangerous because they accept neither reason nor compromise, and because they are never satisfied. No book banning group has ever said, "Okay, now that you've removed these books, we're perfectly happy and we'll stop now." That is also what dooms them. Their demonization of all opponents and their unwillingness to compromise becomes increasingly off-putting to folks outside the panic and debates. And their demand for complete fealty means that they often turn on their own people. 

Politics and Religion

Hixenbaugh lays out how christian nationalism and right wing politics are merged in this culture panic moment. If you aren't paying attention to dominionism yet, this book will help explain why you should. In the meantime, you know what I always say-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

While some of these folks come across as power hungry and selfish, there are also those who appear to have fallen for the seductive song of "the ends justifies the means." I have no doubt that there are many who sincerely believe that schools and the nation would be better off if christian nationalists had the power and public schools were required to push a particular brand of christianity, and that it's a goal so important that it should be pursued by any means necessary. Certainly Rudo and others have called explicitly for a certain ruthlessness.

The trouble with justified means thinking is that, since we so rarely achieve our ends, we are mostly defined by the means we choose. You may decide to use lying and other tools of politics to advance the kingdom of Jesus, but in the end that just makes you a liar and a politician. 

And More

There's a great deal more to Hixenbaugh's book. He does a masterful job of toggling between the local story of Southlake and the big picture nationally. There are some stories of hope here (though not from Southlake itself) and some successful attempts to work to preserve public education as we know it. It's a clear picture of what's driving much of the culture panic and the fight decide what gets taught and who gets to make those decisions. Well worth the read.

Whose Money Follows The Child?

"Let the money follow the child," say choicers repeatedly, but the more honest plea would be "Let your money follow my child."

But that's not how they present it. Take this quote from today's Washington Post piece:

“It’s the parents’ money to use as they see is best,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio. “We don’t necessarily see it as taxpayer money.”

Or the other framing one encounters on the interwebs-- the "I just want to use my money to educate my child as I see fit" version. Corey DeAngelis, choice evangelist, argued in a speech that all families should be able to take "their dollars" to the school they choose. 

Except this is bunk. Let's take me as an example. I have two children in school. I pay roughly $1,000 a year in real estate tax. If you give me my $1,000 back, can I educate my boys with that money? Nope. There is no voucher state in which my money would not have to be supplemented with the tax dollars of my neighbors.

I've heard the counterargument-- the voucher represents a return on my real estate tax dollars over my entire lifetime. Let's check that math. I have a grand total of four children, and in my younger years I lived in places that carried a far lower tax burden, but let's pretend it has always been about $1,000. So let's assume that I pay $1,000/year for 55 years, for a grand total of $55,000. Would that cover 13 years of annual vouchers for 4 children? No, that would be about a little over $1,000/year. 

But hey-- I'm a guy living in a small town area that is technically part of Appalachia, where we have the kind of housing prices that the rest of you only dream of (seriously--if you have a small town bone in your body, you should move here). What if we checked other parts of the country?

Well, in North Carolina the average real estate ballpark tax bill is about $1,663. So that's not going to work much better.

In Texas the average property tax rate is 1.80%, so if you have a $350K house, you'd pay $6,300. That gets us closer to voucher money-- as long as you don't have too many kids. Of course that's an average, so some folks in less pricey housing would be paying way less. In Bandera County, a $150K house would yield $1,755 in real estate tax money. 

We could run numbers for a variety of locations, or we could make a common sense observation-- if the real estate tax money from parents was sufficient to fund the public school system, we wouldn't need to tax any non-parents, which is a point I fully expect non-parental taxpayers to bring up in voucher states in the not-too-distant future.

If this is just giving the parents back their own tax payments, then do non-parents get a real estate tax exemption? Once my kid graduates from high school, do I get to stop paying taxes? Are tax-paying parents given a limit to the number of children they actually get credit for? Where do the taxes paid on business real estate go in all this? 

The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit--that's absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost. 

It's odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the "taxation is theft" crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor's tax dollars on a school that would forbit, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.

Your money should follow my child.

"Just give us back our tax money, and I'll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want," is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school--or getting your neighbors to chip in.

Your money should follow my child. 

Or maybe we could pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children.

Where Does High Quality Curriculum Come From?

Ollie Lovell's blog post is from Australia, but it fits with the ongoing discussion of the value of curriculum in this country. He notes that in a recent discussion about a variety of school issues, he kept coming back to the same place:

The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).

The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.

For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.

Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.

And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.

In all of these instances, the devil is firmly encamped in the details. Does "increase student achievement" mean "raise test scores"? Because that's not my idea of increasing student achievement, and as we've been seeing for twenty-some years, a rich high-quality curriculum is not needed, or even preferable, for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test. Can a HQC reduce workload? That depends on how easy it is to implement, how well it matches the needs of the students and the skill set of the teacher, and how much prep and adaptation it requires. I would have agreed that solid lessons and instruction help with classroom management; I'm not sure that post-COVID we aren't seeing new behavior issues that are more resistant to that solution. And I'm pretty sure this oversimplifies the problems with teacher retention in the U.S. Maybe things are different in Australia.

So Lovell may be overselling a tad, but having a high quality curriculum does matter. I worked most of my career in a district that couldn't quite get its act together on curriculum. We went through many curriculum development cycles, but the district leaders could never quite commit the district resources (teacher release time, paying for extra hours, some useful leadership and direction) to get the job done. 

It was frustrating, and ultimately my department created something we could use on our own. That was also frustrating; one department member didn't feel like following the plan, so she just didn't, and there really wasn't anything we could do about it. And while building admins were willing to recognize that what we had created existed, that didn't keep them from still shooting for that old standby, Curriculum By Textbook, insisting we insert test prep drill, and occasionally unilaterally announcing that a Certain Book would no longer be taught because somebody somewhere might be upset. 

I will skip past the unavoidable eternal arguments about HQC (what is included and who decides) other than to note that they add another level of complexity to all of this.

But Lovell moves on to an interesting question-- if we want some HQC, where do we get it?

Getting expert level resources requires expert level knowledge, the kind that Lovell says is "hard to build." Not only do we need expertise in the content area, but expertise in teaching, and expertise in the audience for the instruction. The standards movement kind of skips past all three, assuming that if one sets certain standards, the content takes care of itself, the specific audience doesn't matter, and the teaching piece is where you blame educators for faulty implementation. The curriculum/materials industry has limited expertise in the first two and assumes that its actual audience is the people who make purchasing decisions in districts, not the people in the classroom who have to deal with it.

High quality curriculum does not come in a one-size-fits-all box right off the instructional materials rack. It is not prepared by some company hundreds of miles away. It is not googled. And it is not, God help us, created by large language model computer programming. The place you are most likely to find the expertise required is among the master teachers in your district.

Even the best instructional materials and curricular design stuff doesn't become an actual high quality curriculum until it receives its final shape from the master teachers who turn it into classroom instruction. This has been a point of frustration for folks who want to fix schools by imposing standards and instructional design-- once it hits the classroom, it is going to be delivered and interpreted by the classroom teacher. Master teachers are doing curricular design and redesign every day. That's the expertise we need to tap.

And as Lovell notes, even if we tap the expertise of the teachers in the district, we hit the time issue. When, exactly, are busy, swamped teachers supposed to do this? And are they supposed to do it for free? 

There can be other obstacles. Our do-it-ourselves program was thin on details because we'd hashed those out in conversation. And that gets to one of the other challenges in building a curriculum--exactly for whom are you creating it? Most of the district-directed attempts we made were not curriculum designed for teachers, but curriculum designed so that administration could have something to show the state. They weren't to help us teach, but to help administrators and bureaucrats prove that we were teaching. 

Or the most insidious curriculum purpose of all-- "I want to know that if you drop dead tonight for some reason, I can hand this curriculum to your replacement and everything will stay right on track in your classroom." It is the education version of "I want you to train your own replacement."

In a district with low trust between administration and teachers, curriculum is collateral damage. Can I trust you to do your job? Can I trust you to let me do my job? I'm going to argue that the loss of teacher autonomy over the past few decades is directly connected to curriculum problems. "I am going to hand you this curriculum in a box, and you will implement it with fidelity or else" is another way to say "I don't trust you to do your job." Fear and control never make a system better than trust and support.

Okay, this is taking longer than I expected. Let's get back to the question--where does HQC come from?

Lovell suggests an intriguing idea

How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?

To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.

I like this idea. It still has some major holes to fill, like what format and organizational scheme should they use? We were several times required to use a format that was basically a response to the Common Core Pennsylvania State standards, so that the result, had we ever finished it, would have been geared to proving to the state that we were checking off a list by "unpacking" and addressing the standards and not giving a teacher direction and support in designing instruction for the year. 

It's one of the great curriculum traps-- a document designed to prove to the state that you're doing your job is not a document that helps you actually do your job. 

I also recognize that multi-school design looks hugely different in a big district where such a program would be inside the district and in an area like mine, where such a program would have to be intra-district. 

I think back to our teacher-to-teacher design work and imagine what we could have done with more time, more support, and more teachers to provide perspective on what works in particular grade levels. We did okay, but with the additional resources, we could have created something really cool and useful for students across the county. If we could have tapped the varied and rich professional experience and research across the county, we could have accomplished so much more.