ICYMI: Picnic Leftovers Edition (7/7)

Weather and other stuff stifled the annual Fourth picnic this year. The plus side is that now I don't have to make food for a week. Making lemonade here.

In the meantime, here's the weekly list. Remember-- you can amplify the voices that you believe should be heard. 

What these states get wrong about the Bible and the Ten Commandments

Amanda Tyler's opinion piece for CNN is one of the better takes on the continued efforts to jam the Bible into the classroom.

Red states’ religious mandates for schools ignore basic history

Historian Kevin Kruse has some lessons for the Christianity-in-our-classrooms crowd.

As Ryan Walters mandates Bible instruction in public schools, Satanic Temple plans educational offerings

The least surprising development in this ongoing saga.

What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms As a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization

Some scholarly work from Elena Aydarova. You may want to skip past the scholarly part to the findings, which are pretty hefty all by themselves.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

It's test score time in Tennessee, and TC Weber has some thoughts about the "increasingly irrelevant" results.

Child Tax Credit Reform Languishes as Children Remain Invisible in U.S. Politics

Jan Resseger reminds us that at one point we made a real dent in child poverty. Now, we're just never-minding our way past it.

Conservatives Go to War — Against Each Other — Over School Vouchers

Alec MacGillis reports for ProPublica on the phenomenon of conservative supporters of local public schools.

A.I. ‘Friend’ for Public School Students Falls Flat

From New York Times. LA schools thought they could hire someone to replace support staff with a chatbot. Not so much.

That Way Madness Lies

Thomas Ultican takes a look back at Karen Fraid's reform-to-English dictionary, and it turns out that after more than a decade, it holds up depressingly well.

The Right-Wing Network Manufacturing the War Against Higher Education

Colleen Scerpella writing for the Center for Media and Democracy looks at some of the folks behind the recent alarms over higher education.

This week at Forbes.com, I reminded you (again) that you ought to pick up a copy of The Education Wars. 

And at The Progressive, I responded to some Corey DeAngelis talking points.

Join me on substack for free and complete updates on what I'm putting out into the world. 

Will Public Funding For Religious Schools Ease Culture Wars?

Mike Petrilli, head honcho at the Fordham Institute, has a theory. Maybe, he suggests, spending public tax dollars on private religious schools might actually ease some of the continuing cultures out there. 

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that, as more parents gain access to school choice, including the option of sending their children to religious private schools, we will see today’s education culture wars recede.

I don't think so. Here's why not. 

First, silos don't solve anything. Letting people of differing values retreat to their own separate silo has not ever solved the issue or reduced the conflict. The history of segregation in the US is as good an example as any; it did nothing at all for reducing racial issues and tension in this country. 

We've even tried this out in education before with the post-Brown segregation academies, where some parents were free to pursue their value of "get my kid an education where he doesn't have to be around Black kids." That didn't serve some Americans well, nor did it ease the tension caused by different values regarding race. 

What separate silos do is make it easier to target certain folks. All the Others are over there in that group, so we can easily rail away at them. The second part of the segregation academy movement was for white folks to say, "Now that this school system over here is mostly Those Blach Kids, let's stop funding them." Which they could safely say because their own kids were safely somewhere else in a different silo.

We've already seen that much of the culture panic is animated by folks who are not merely concerned about what values and books and humans persons that their own children are exposed to, but what varieties of human experience everyone's kids are exposed to. Hence the need to make sure that nobody's child can read "And Tango Makes Three." Hense the establishment of a school that centers LGBTQ students immediately becomes a target. 

Since we're talking about religious private schools, there's another problem. You will have noticed that within the Christian church alone, there are a gabillion sects. Thise exist thanks to centuries of doctrinal differences. In short, many churches are not only bad at welcoming pluralism outside their walls, but inside as well. Once our silo is established, then it's time to make sure that everyone inside is pure and in compliance.

And for some fairly vocal culture warriors, choice is not on the table. They will consider the culture wars over when their side has won and all the other sides have been silenced and/or obliterated. These are the allies the choice movement chose, and at some point it's going to bite choice in the butt.

None of these factors will ease the culture wars. In fact, not only will they not ease them, but they will lead to a side effect that nobody wants.

Battles amongst the various silos will escalate. Those will be exacerbated because despite reformster magical thinking, you can't run 15 parallel school systems for the same money that barely ran one ("Our business is running into financial trouble, so the solution is to open a bunch more branch locations" said no corporate operation ever). The religious schools will argue about which other religious schools should be allowed to exist, and they'll all be pissed off that the Satanic Temple is also setting up schools. Politicians will argue that Certain Schools are not run by Real Religions and therefor shouldn't be allowed to operate at taxpayer expense (spoiler alert: already happened). Others will argue that taxpayers shouldn't fund LGBTQ schools (spoiler alert: already happened). And even Petrilli notes that he's rather have some safeguards against schools that are strikingly low quality, though I don't expect any such school to say cheerily, "Yeah, that's us!"

So ultimately, the state will have to either sort it out or fork over a pile of money or defund education of all sorts. One end result is the State Department of Religious Okee Dokeeness, where state bureaucrats decide which religious schools can be certified 100% fresh and which cannot. 

Benefits to society? None. People don't learn tolerance of LGBTQ persons or conservative wingnut persons or persons of different races or religions if they spend their school years in a bubble where they never actually meet any of those humans. 

It is tempting to think that the culture wars will ease when we try to give people the impression that they have won, but the loudest culture war voices have shown us who they are again and again, and who they are are people who don't just want a quiet corner of their own, but to claim dominion over the whole education mountain. 

I love our Puritan forebears. Hell, I'm related to our Puritan forebears. For all their virtues, it's inaccurate (as I told my students) to say the Puritans came to establish a country where anyone could worship the way they wished; they came here to establish a country where everyone would worship the way the Puritans wanted them to. It was the ultimate attempt to solve a culture war by silo, and while in many ways it was better than their brethren's attempt back home to win a culture by killing the king and taking over the country, it ultimately didn't end the conflict. 

In short (okay, too late), public funding won't ease culture wars. It will likely intensify them, and most probably shift the battlefield to state and federal government, where the question of which values get to have their own schools and how much they get paid to run them will be endlessly relitigated. Maybe forever, or maybe until some wise sage discovers that the best way to preserve pluralism and religious freedom is a public school system that is inclusive about students and neutral about religion.  

Taxation Without Representation

America's favorite voucher evangelist and some of his friends stopped by my twitter feed yesterday to share some thoughts about my latest piece for The Progressive and he shared this bon mot

It's true. The public school system also uses tax dollars collected from childless taxpayers. But there's a difference-- a critical one.

It's not a point of hypocrisy. Some folks are going to say that the voucher-loving taxation-is-theft crowd are being hypocrites to say that they don't like paying school taxes except when it benefits them, but I'd argue that their point is more "If we're going to do this thing I hate, let's do it in a les objectionable way" or maybe "Watch me hoist these libs by their own petard." And that's as American as apple pie. 

It is certainly more accurate to point out that vouchers don't just give certain taxpayers their money back. And it is certainly problematic that a voucher system uses money not just from childless taxpayers, but from parents whose own children are not allowed to participate in the voucher system (too poor, too not-religious-enough, too LGBTQ, too low achieving etc etc etc).

But the big critical difference is that in the public system, childless taxpayers get to participate.

They get to elect board members who then decide how those tax dollars should be best used. They get a voice. Their voice may not always dominate, and sometimes the voices that do dominate are, well, not so awesome.

But today is a good day to remember that democratic governance (or a republic, either*) is not defined as "system of government in which I always get what I want." All democracy promises us is a voice. And that's one of the things that a voucher system denies. Private schools do not answer to the public, are not owned or operated by taxpayer-elected boards, and are not required to show the public jack squat about what they do with taxpayer dollars. To really hammer the point home, most voucher laws now come with hands off language, expressly forbidding the people's elected representatives from interfering in private school operation in any way.

One of the things that got us riled up as colonies was taxation without representation--taking our money without allowing us a voice. That denial of a voice to childless taxpayers is an undemocratic feature, and a distinct contrast with the public system which, though imperfect, provides avenues for taxpayers to be heard, to get some representation with their taxation

Undemocratic processes have been critical for school vouchers; no voucher proposal has ever survived a public vote, which is one reason that voucher evangelists have to evangelize to legislators and not the general public. 

It has been a long, slow process to give more Americans a voice since we were founded all those years ago. School vouchers seem like a step back for many reasons, but calling for more taxation without representation is definitely a backwards move.

Happy Fourth of July! Enjoy the day!

*Reminder for all those trying to make a distinction out there that democracy and republic are just the terms derived from Roman and Greek for "of the people."

PA: Bill Proposes $8000 Payoff To Ditch Public School

A new bill in the Pennsylvania Senate is a sort of super-voucher stripped of any pretense, because it simply pays parents to pull their child out of public school.

SB 1280 is short and sweet. Every parent who has a child not in public gets an $8000 payoff from the state.

The payoff comes in the form of a personal tax credit of $8000 per child. That's not an "up to $8000," either:

The tax credit under this section shall be applied against the taxpayer's tax liability. If the tax credit exceeds the taxpayer's tax liability, the department shall issue a refund under the procedures specified in section 346 of the Tax Reform Code of 1971.

In other words, if you  only owe $2,000 in taxes, you get a $6K check from the state. 

Governor Josh Shapiro has signaled that he does not support the speedwalked  bill, which was introduced last week (June 26) and will be considered by the finance committee this morning (Wed, July 3). 

There's no income requirement for eligibility, and unlike other vouchers, there's no requirement for how the money must be spent. It's just $8000 payoff to pull out of public school. It applies equally to private school or home schooling-- just so long as you get your kid out of public education.

Maddie Hanna and Gillian McGoldrick are all over the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer (and Steven Goldrick sent up the alert on Twitter), where they get this on the nose quote:

“We’ve just gotten a signal of what the end of the road is: the destruction of public schools,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. He called the expedited bill the “Episcopal Academy Assistance Act,” highlighting the Newtown Square private school where high school tuition tops $43,000 as one of the expensive schools that could benefit from such a proposal.

True enough. There is no pretense here of helping students from poor families get to better education. There's not even a pretense that this is taxpayer dollars directed at education. It is the baldest version of vouchers yet-- "We will pay you to abandon public education. We don't care what you do about educating your kid. Just get out of public education."

How expensive would this be? There are roughly 275,000 students in private school. Maybe 126,000 home schooled students. So that would blow a $3.2 billion hole in the state budget in a combination of taxes not collected and cash paid out. And that's just if nobody else jumped on the deal.

It's unlikely that the bill would get past the Democratic controlled House, though one never knows, and it's unlikely to get past Shapiro, who previously scrapped a proposed voucher bill.

This is based on the Oklahoma model (sponsor Senator Judy Ward pointed to Oklahoma as an example in the committee meeting Wednesday morning). 

Oklahoma's version was dressed up in lots of pretty language about families and educational choices. The Pennsylvania version is notable for how direct it is. Vouchers have usually pretended to be about "The state wants you to abandon public schools. We'll wash our hands of responsibility for providing a decent education for your child, and in return we'll cut you a check to help defray the costs, a little." 

This drops that whole game. "We'll cut you a check to just walk away from public education," is next level stuff. I want to call it a voucher, but it doesn't even pretend to be that. Just a payoff and an attempt to gut public education while washing the state's hands of even the most rudimentary attempt to help families provide an education. Here's your check, thanks for getting out, and good luck to you.

Mind you, this is Pennsylvania, where we're already looking at a multibillion dollar fix for a school funding system that has been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Maybe Ward figures if we can just pay everyone to leave the public system, we won't have to fund it. I'm not sure that's anyone else's idea of a solution. 

Update-- But I just realized something important. The bill says you claim the tax credit by filling out the app0ropriate line on your tax form, but Pennsylvanian's who make under $33K do not have to file income tax with the state. So much for benefiting the poor.

AI and Disengaging Reality

I'm fully aware that I'm going to sound like an old fart here, but I think much of what AI is promising to deliver is not just an advance in technology, but a lurch in the wrong direction and fundamentally bad in ways that all other technology up until this point was not.

For virtually all of human history, technology has helped us extend our reach, sometimes in incredibly powerful ways. Reading and writing allowed us to listen to the insights and ideas of people separated by time and space. The printed word increased that miracle by a thousand-fold. 

Centuries of advance in various media have extended our human reach. Just think of the ocean.

When my students would complain about the verbosity of authors from an earlier time, I would point out the limitations of the age. Back then, I'd say, the only way to see the ocean was to physically travel to the ocean and look at it with your own eyeballs. Maybe you could see a painting of it, though you could only see the painting if you were physically standing in front of it. So an author who wanted to evoke the ocean would have to do a lot of work to create that picture in the minds of readers who really didn't have much on which to draw. 

Then there came photographs. Then print, so that you could see copies of photographs and paintings. Then movies. Then photographs and movies in color. Then television. The color television, on which to watch the movies of the ocean, or maybe even live broadcasts from the ocean itself. Then the internet and the capability to share depictions or even live feeds of the ocean on a device you carry in your pocket, any time you wish.

The march of media technology has brought the ocean closer and closer to every human being.

Ditto for areas of human knowledge. Go back far enough and you're in an era in which the only way to learn some piece of information is by talking to a person who already knows it. Then writing made it possible for many people to get that piece of information, even if the person who originally possessed that information is currently deceased. The printing meant an incalculably large number of persons could reach out and grab that information, and digitized technology increased the number exponentially. 

Even the internet, for all the demonization and pearl-clutching about Kids These Days tied to their screens, has made it easier to connect with other human beings. Left-handed basket-weaving afficionados can now find each other and share ideas. My daughter and her family are on the other side of the country, and while they can only travel back here a couple of times a year, my grandchildren are growing up knowing my face and voice. 

The long march of media technology is toward increasing engagement, making it easier and easier to find and grasp and grapple with ideas and people and the world.

Media tech has steadily built bridges between individual human beings and the larger world around them. But AI promises something else.

AI builds a wall around the world, then sits on top of the wall and promises to tell us what it sees, more or less, kind of, with maybe some extra made up stuff thrown in.

This is not always a bad thing. If I want to know how many sheep are in my yard, I could go out and count them myself, or I could ask software to count them then report the number back to me. Useful.

But other wall building work is more troubling. I deeply love that for any question that occurs to me, I can google a variety of sources, look through them, learn about the answers to the question. Or I could skip actually engaging with the sources and just let the terrible AI from Google (or Microsoft or whoever) give me a quick summary of whatever it has scraped off the interwebs, more or less, with right, wrong and fictional all dumped into one big stew together.

Or like the ad that promises I can use AI to write up the notes from the meeting. I don't really need to pay attention. In fact, I don't even need to check in at all. Just let the AI monitor the meeting and then get back to me with the notes it compiles. No need for me to engage on my own. 

Or the many AI applications that boil down to "let AI deal with these persons so you don't have to" (or don't have to pay money to hire a human to do it). Los Angeles public schools paid $6 million to have a chatbot talk to students who needed academic and mental health help, building a wall around those students instead of bridge between them and another helpful human. The company just tanked.

In the classroom, I can skip reaching out to engage with the research and materials about the topic I want to teach. Just have AI look at the stuff and tell you what it found, mostly, kind of. 

Or the ultimate AI disengagement-- an AI writes the assigned essay for a class, and then an AI assesses the essay that the other AI manufactured, and no actual living humans engage with anything at all. 

AI threatens to foster a misunderstanding of what research and critical thinking are for. These mutated descendants of Clippy are predicated on the notion that the point is to look for a single answer which one then pours into one's noggin. Research should involve searching, collecting, evaluating, processing, and fitting together the bits of information, a process by which the researcher both fine tunes the results and sharpens and deepens their own understanding. Students have forever attempted to short-circuit that process ("Can't I just find the right answer and hand it in without all this mucking about?"). AI makes that short-circuiting simpler.

Tech and media have made it progressively easier to engage with the world; AI is a big bold step toward disengaging. AI tells humans, "Don't get up. I'll go look for you, and you just sit there and I'll bring you something." AI is not just a plagiarism engine, but a disengagement engine. A tool that moves its users away from the world instead of toward it, and there is nothing desirable about that.

Yes, maybe I am just a cranky old fart. (Okay, not "maybe") and perhaps there are ways that AI can be used to build bridges instead of walls. But my gut-level aversion to AI (and I have indeed played with it) is about this retrograde drift, this movement away from the world, the promise to build walls instead of bridges, the whole "You just stay on the couch and I will pretend to engage with reality for you" of it. I will yell at my own clouds myself, thank you.

ICYMI: Family Visit Edition (6/30)

The West Coast Field Office staff of the Institute have been here this week, and the field agents and board of directors have been enjoying themselves a great deal. It's a party. 

In the meantime, this week's reading list has been prepared for your enjoyment and edification. Remember-- you have the power to amplify voices that you find important.

Louisiana’s New Ten Commandments Law Could Not Be Any More Unconstitutional

Slate's legal team of Mark Stern and Dahlia Lithwick provide some of the best context and analysis for Louisiana's newest attempt to get (certain) religion into the classroom.

Ten Commandments Classroom Tips

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has gathered a few handy tips for teachers who now have to work with the Ten Commandments.

Religious leader wants to display Indian scriptures in Louisiana public classrooms

In a completely unsurprising development, a Hindu religious leader would like to have some ancient Sanskrit manuscripts posted right next to those Ten Commandments. 

Louisiana’s June 2024 Education Legislation

Finally, while the Ten Commandments are getting all the press, Louisiana just passed a whole lot of terrible education law, including a whole lot of culture panic stuff. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the rundown. 

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

An excerpt from Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's new book, coming out this week. Read the excerpt. Buy the book.

Inspire Charter School Legacy

Thomas Ultican retraces the history of Inspire Charter Schools, a chain that turned out to be a bit of a money-grubbing scam.

LGBTQ+ librarians grapple with attacks on books — and on themselves

I know we've seen many of these stories, but we should never let them numb us. This time it's a librarian in Idaho.

The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Limits of Long Tradition.

The New York Times goes looking for some perspective on the latest move in Oklahoma, and talks to Adam Laats in the process.

These Researchers Study the Legacy of the Segregation Academies They Grew Up Around

Jennifer Bery Hawes digs into the research covering one of the nation's more shameful school choice chapters.

South Carolina to Launch Biggest Censorship Campaign Yet

Sigh. Edith Olmsted reported for The New Republic, and Yahoo gets it out from behind the paywall. One more state sets itself to crack down on naughty books.

Arizona Shows The Voucher Money Shuffle In Action

Jef Rouner writing for ReformAustin takes a lesson in vouchers from Arizona.

Florida Has The Capacity, But Not The Commitment, To Adequately Fund Its Public Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski paints a picture familiar in many states. The state has money, but spending it on public education? That's crazy talk!

The Triumph of Counting and Scripting

Allison Pugh at Slate writes about a phenomenon all too familiar to folks in education--micro-management.

People thinking without speaking

Benjamin Riley writes about how people think, and how that's a thing that AI can't do.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I looked at what Oklahoma's Supreme Court had to say about a Catholic Charter School ("Don't").

And hey-- join us at Substack, where all my stuff lands in your email inbox for free!

OK: Bible Or Else

After the Pledge and a prayer, Ryan Walters opened the State Board of Education meeting on June 27 with a stern warning. The Board was set to consider taking a license away from a teacher who is accused of teaching "inappropriate"  materials that the state has outlawed. 

The state won't tolerate "activist teachers" and "indoctrination," says Walters. "All individuals need to be aware that actions have consequences, and if you break law, if you break statute, if you break rules, regulations, there will be consequences for those things."

From there, without a trace of irony, Walters moves on to railing against the Oklahoma Supreme Court, a group that specializes in determining whether or not you have broken laws, statutes, ordinances, rules, or regulations, and declares that their ruling that the proposed Catholic charter school broke laws, statutes, ordinances, and the state constitution--well, there should not be consequences for that particular rule-breaking because Walters is sure they are wrong, and therefor he'll be working with the school, lawyers, and parents to make sure that there are no consequences. 

But Walters had another shoe to drop. Rather than be out-christianed by the state of Louisiana (where they just declared that the Ten Commandments must be in every classroom), Walters announced that he was going to forcibly shove a Bible into every classroom in the state. (Because, as Walters will tell you, the Constitution doesn't mention the separation of church and state.)

His pitch is centered on the idea that the Bible is a "necessary historical document" and the "most foundational document used for the constitution and the birth of our country." Walters used to teach AP History, and should know better. "Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom," he declares. He announced that the memo will come out that day, and sure enough, it did. 

Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum across specific grade levels, e.g. grades 5 through 12.

The emphasis on the Ten Commandments is a telling one. After all, the Bible also includes the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes, but gosh, that whole "do unto others" and "blessed are the meek" stuff sounds awfully woke.

I'm also trying to imagine how teachers in the upper grades will manage to work the Bible into every single class. Home ec lessons on unleavened bread? Geometry lessons about cubits? 

And once again, let's note that culture panic support for school choice is skin deep. If a parent wants to send their child to a school without Bible instruction in it, Ryan Walters says, "No, you can't have that choice."

Walters, you may recall, previously called the teachers unions a terrorist organization, and has not exactly extended a great deal of trust to teachers, so it's curious that he would trust each and every one of them to properly use the Bible in their classroom. But it's comply or risk losing your teaching license. How effectively does one evangelize when you're spreading the Bible under duress?

The memo says that the Department of Education "may supply teaching materials for the Bible, as permissible, to ensure uniformity in delivery." Permissible by whom? But once again we arrive at the point where the state is going to tell students how to interpret the Bible. Or maybe teachers will just put their own spin on holy scripture. 

Maybe this will survive the inevitable court challenge, or the legal challenge to include other peoples' historically significant holy scriptures in classrooms. If so, I'm betting religious conservatives will rue the day that the state and its teachers were put in charge of religious instruction of their children. And if you decide, for whatever reason, you don't want the school being your co-parent when it comes to religion, you'd better not try to escape in Oklahoma, because breaking rules and regulations has consequences.