Yass And DeVos On The Attack

If AFT president Randi Weingarten had to pay rent on all the space she occupies in some right-wing minds, she would be bankrupt in a week. I don't really understand why, for instance, some on the right decided to adopt the talking point that Weingarten personally kept school buildings closed during the pandemic, or why she is depicted as the mastermind behind every pro-public school stance taken by teachers unions. NEA president Becky Pringle doesn't have to take this kind of shit, nor does Pringle get critiqued on her personal family dynamics. 

Maybe the theory is that it's easier to personalize policies you oppose. Maybe they think Weingarten makes a good target. Maybe she really does just get under their skin by being so unapologetically pro-public education. Maybe she bothers them by being an uppity female (I've heard her speak and she is kind of shouty). 

After the end of the Democratic Convention, Jeffrey Yass and Betsy DeVos, two Very Rich People who are devoted to the privatization of education, felt the need to team up (or at least assign someone on staff) to write a piece that ran in City Journal-- Democrats Heed Randi Weingarten at Their Peril. Because, you know, if the Democratic Party does pro-public education stuff (finally), it will be because Randi Weingarten talked them into it. Think I'm exaggerating (again)?

The Democratic National Convention is over, but the party’s attack on families who want better education for their children has just begun. The Democrats’ platform, adopted last week, is even more radical than the 2020 version. It unequivocally states that the party opposes education-freedom policies that empower families. Paired with Kamala Harris’s running-mate pick of teachers’ union loyalist Tim Walz over school choice semi-supporter Josh Shapiro, it’s clear that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is calling the shots.

Yass and DeVos then play all the old hits. "While national Democrats kowtow to teachers' union bosses," the "overwhelming majority of public-school students" and "struggling to learn and falling behind." Some states are "empowering families to find better schools." These (not Democratic-run) states are "rejecting a union-first, students-last platform."

This tired baloney, indifferently sliced. The overwhelming majority of public school students are not falling behind. Choicer states are not empowering families, because they only get the choice that private schools allow them to have. They even write the laws to protect the private schools' "right" to discriminate freely against any students who are not the right faith, the right sexual orientation, even the right level of achievement. The supposedly-beloved right of the student to choose is subordinate to the right of the private school to operate--and discriminate-- as it wishes. This is not students first. 

Nor does this sort of choice favor "better" schools. Decades of research tell us that charter schools are on the whole no better or worse than public schools. And research tells us that, at least by the lousy measures favored by reformsters, voucher results are far worse. 

It is possible that by "better," Yass and DeVos mean "don't include Those Peoples' Children" or "freely indoctrinates students in my favorite religious ideology." In that case, we'll have to discuss the actual meaning of "better" when it comes to schools.

Nor do they address the feature of universal of vouchers that has become so popular--using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school choices that the wealthy have already made, which rather falls outside the "non-wealthy folks need money to escape their failing public schools" narrative.

Yass and DeVos point to the victory of Glenn Youngkin and the defeat of Andrew Gillum and blame Weingarten for both. They do not explore any of the other issues in the elections. Though if they want to talk about the voters, they might discuss how no voucher policy has ever been approved by a state's voters, hence the need to install friendly politicians who will implement vouchers anyway.

They point to Philadelphia and Detroit to say, "Look at all the charter users there." Philly has its own history of disaster and mismanagement, but DeVos should well know the policies she helped promote to cripple Michigan schools so that choice could look more attractive. Tim Walz should know better, they suggest, because charters started in Minnesota and the union leader (I suppose they mean Albert Shanker) liked them fine, which he did before they turned into money-grubbing businesses instead of a chance to teachers to expand their work.

And Kamala Harris gets the old "shame shame" for sending her step-chldren to private school for $50K a year. How can she oppose policies that would low-income families to make similar choices. Except that no policy proposed by Yass and DeVos would give poor children those same choices. They will also attempt to shame Chicago union leaders and members. 

Yass and DeVos cite a survey by EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation), a group devoted to pushing choice policies. Unsurprisingly, their research shows that 75% of the public support Education Savings Accounts (super-vouchers) when asked a totally not loaded question. Also in that survey-- lowest choice policy support is for charters, and the big surprise--only about 25% of parents are aware of whether or not their state even has ESAs. 

But if Yass and DeVos are so certain that there is massive public support for vouchers, why not push to put vouchers on the ballot? But here comes the finish.

Democratic leaders will apologize for not using your preferred pronouns, but they’re not sorry for requiring your children to attend a government school system that fails to teach what a pronoun is in the first place. Families are waking up to this fact, and they’ll increasingly wonder why the Democratic Party stands with teachers’ unions over struggling children. The party ditched Joe Biden out of cold electoral necessity. Maybe it should think about doing the same with Randi Weingarten.

Credit where credit is due--somebody wrote a sharp first line for that paragraph, even if it disconnected from reality. 

It's the disconnection from reality that gets me about a piece like this. It's not just that I think they're wrong on the issues (though I surely do) but that their narrative is so bizarrely off target. 

Who is this article for? Is it meant to convince someone, because to make useful, convincing statements about your opponents, it's handy to understand what actually motivates them. I suppose if you're super-rich and you're used to simply overpowering your adversaries, you don't spend any time trying to understand them. Maybe they were just trying to work out some thoughts they have, which is what I'm often up to here, but I'm a retired teacher with a blog, not a gazillionaire writing for publication in a serious albeit right-tilted publication. 

I'm going to go with the "reinforcing right wing narrative" answer. That leaves the question of whether they actually believe this baloney or if they're just using it as a political posture. Neither is particularly admirable. 

It cannot be healthy to let an obsession with Randi Weingarten haunt your days and nights. Hope these two feel better soon. Randi, too-- it has to be exhausting having the entire Democratic Party kowtowing to you all the time. 

Are Grade Level Texts The Magical Cure? (The Ghost of Common Core)

At The Hechinger Report, Suzanne Simons wants to complain about English Language Arts instruction in middle and high schools. It's a familiar kind of mess, but I promise a tiny twist at the end, which might almost make up for the length.

Simons is the Chief Literacy and Languages Officer at Carnegie Learning. Before that she worked at The Equity Lab, before that National Geographic Education, before that Literacy Design Collaborative, before that American Reading Company, before that adjust professor at Drexel, and she's done some consulting. All that since 2007. She has a couple of M. Ed.s and a doctorate in education leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. Her LinkedIn profile does not list any classroom work.

I'm not going to suggest that classroom teachers have nothing to learn from academics and edu-biz operators. But what Simons is both familiar and unhelpful.

Her main complaint is that "too many students are working on below-grade-level tasks using below-grade-level texts." This, she claims, will not be "preparing students for life after high school. Is it any wonder that reading scores haven't improved in 30 years." 

I'm always puzzled by the idea that test scores should rise in perpetuity, like the stock market. Why, exactly, should that be? There are almost thirty years between my two oldest children and my two youngest-- should I expect that my young children will be smarter than the older ones? Mind you, I will never argue that teachers should ever, ever say, "Well, that's enough, I don't need to teach any better, harder, or more than I have so far." But the notion that every year's students should outperform the year before them treats students like assembly line toasters and not actual human beings. 

To bolster her insistence on the value of grade-level materials, she uses an unfortunate source: the Opportunity Myth, a piece of faux research from TNTP, some slick baloney I've addressed here. It's a lot of silliness, but the key point here is that it doesn't actually support--or even address-- her point, which is that "grade-level tasks and texts should be the start — not the finish — to strong instruction." It focuses strictly on "proving" that many students get instruction with materials below grade level.

Simons also trots out the NAEP results (from 2019) showing 37% of 12th graders are "academically prepared for college in reading." By that she means that they have scored either proficient or advanced. But there is research missing here, like the 2007 study from NCES that showed that half of the students scoring a lowly Basic on the NAEP went on to complete a college degree (Bachelor's or higher). She also cites a report that employers think young people lack proper language skills. 

Reformsters are great at defining problems, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so much. But does Simons have a solution. 

She points to a study done by Learning Design Collaborative, an outfit that sells standards-based curriculum, professional development, and some other programs. Their CEO is John Katzman, founder of Noodle, the Princeton Review, and 2U. He sits on all sorts of boards, including the boards of the National Association of Independent Schools, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools.

They have a board of senior advisors. Suzanne Simons sits on that board.

Let's talk about the study. It's a big, fat 240 pages, and I'm not going through it with a fine toothed comb. But here are some things that jump out.

There were two cohorts of schools involved. In the first cohort, two thirds of the teachers dropped out after the first year, and half of the remaining teachers dropped out after the second year. Cohort 2 didn't do much better. So, the primary effect of the study was that people stopped using the LDC model. Given that the original sampling was heavily elementary, this left them with a very tiny sample of middle and high school students--the very students that Simons is writing about in her piece.

The results are taken from SBA tests (you remember these Big Standardized Tests from back in the day) and then pushed through some magical math model that compares the students in the study with students not getting the LDC treatment. 

Cohort 2 showed some "significant" results. These are presented as a gain of "four to nine months of learning," which is an academic baloney method of rendering test score gains (.25 of a standard deviation = 1 year). Because if we said X makes scores on a single large standardized test go up, people would not much care, but if we say they gained a year of learning--well, somehow that meaningless phrase strikes some folks as compelling. However, my own rule of thumb is that anyone who talks about days/months/years of learning is trying to sell something.

This study and the product it's pushing falls in the Standardized Closed Loop model of learning. It works like this: 

Pat runs a group of fashion schools, and Pat personally believes that you are never fully dressed without a smile. Pat tests students and finds that only about half of them qualify as well dressed. So Pat trains the school's teachers to understand that you're never fully dressed without a smile, and the teachers implement the Smile Design Curriculum. They teach students various types of smiles they can perform and practice performing them and especially drive home that performing these smiles will be needed to score well on the Well Dressed Test. 

Test time comes and--voila!--the scores go up! 9 months of fashion learning gained!

Set the standard. Train to the standard. Test to the standard. What's missing, of course, is any objective proof that you are fully dressed only if you wear a smile. What we have actually set here is a fairly limited proxy for being fully dressed. Students who forgot to wear pants still test as fully dressed because they are smiling. Students who are impeccably dressed, but bad at smiling, test as not fully dressed. 

The Standardized Closed Loop model can be bolstered by blowing lots of smoke. Use a lot of jargon that's not very clear but sounds important. Stress that your system is standards-based, but don't talk about where the standards came from or what they are based on. Worked great for Common Core!

LDC manages all of this. And they've won awards.

But back to the article. What problems does Simons diagnose?

The culture of low expectations. Simons will trot out The Opportunity Myth again, claiming that students are being assigned below-grade-level work, because--

Teachers are not assigning grade-level tasks and texts (even though, she points out, the Common Core came out in 2010). These two subjects--expectations and grade-level texts--often bring non-teachers to the fore (like Common Core author David Coleman). Actual classroom teachers know there is a delicate balance here, a sweet spot you have to locate. Students need to experience success, but not be bored. Push them above their frustration level, and they will simply shut down, decide they're "not good at this s#$!" and it'll take you weeks to get them back. Standards fans have this habit of insisting that you get students to read on grade level by just, you know, insisting real hard.

The "reading on grade level" also skips over the whole matter of prior content knowledge. What "grade level" a student reads on is partly a factor of what the text is about. A student with love and knowledge of baseball will demonstrate a higher reading level for a text about baseball than he will for a text about Macedonian economic theory. 

Simons also points out that this use of below-level text has increased since the pandemic. Well, duh. A teacher's job is to meet students where they are, and where many students have been since the pandemic has been not where students of that grade typically are. 

Simons also faults teacher professional development. Well, yes. And also curriculum programs are weak and claim to be standards aligned when they really aren't, though how teachers are supposed to distinguish between faux and real standards alignment is not clear. I believe that she knows of an organization that can help, though I give her points for not specifically plugging LDC by name.

So to turn things around we should...?

Start with grade level tasks on day 1, not by day 180. Which leads one to ask--is there a difference between grade level on day 1 compared to day 180? How about grade level on day 180 of last year compared to day 1 of this year? Is grade level slightly different on every day of the 180? 

Grade-level thinking is not a destination; it requires daily practice. Teachers (and curricula) need to assume that every student can read, think and write about rich and complex ideas using complex texts. Teachers and curriculum programs can target instruction to meet individual needs while engaging all learners in the same rigorous grade-level texts and tasks.

Yes, but what does that actually mean? And if every student is using the same text and doing the same task, exactly how does one "target" individual instruction? And have reformsters been trying to make "rigor" happen longer than "fetch" and if so, can we quit. Like many teachers, I spent many cumulative hours in PD listening to some presenter try to explain, clearly, what they meant by rigor. "No, it's not the same as 'hard.' No, it's not necessarily a higher reading level. No, it's not 'easy' with a lot of assigned tasks piled on top."

Shift from "what students consume to what they produce." Which is just an update of the old Common Core reformster focus on "deliverables." Let's focus on "outputs" and not "inputs." An oldie but a goodie, but if true, why do we care whether the texts are on grade level or not?

And of course standards training for teachers so that they "can deepen their understanding of the standards and be able to recognize students’ demonstrations of specific standards."

Research demonstrates that when a student is given grade-level tasks driven from grade-level standards, and their teacher is trained to teach those standards, both will rise to the challenge.

Is this supposed to refer to the LDC research? Because the large majority of teachers did not rise to the challenge at all. Is there any other research that could be used here?

So what have we got?

It's the ghost of Common Core. If you wondered whether that old "standards based" concept was still around, here's a whole organization promoting it. Swell.

However

One aspect of LDC's program (barely hinted at by Simons) is worthwhile. They focus on authentic writing. Write like a historian or scientist and, well, "like members of the academic and professional disciplines they will one day inhabit." Now, I don't know how well their materials actually deliver on this promise, nor do I know what they propose for students whose future disciplines will be blue collar work, but I will stand and applaud anyone who champions writing as authentic communication rather than a student performance of writing-like activities for an audience of nobody. 

So that's the twist. In the midst of all this refried Common Core bean and baloney, there is something that could conceivably be quite swell. Okay, so I looked at one of their rubrics and wasn't overwhelmed, but still, it gives me hope that even these folks who have wandered so far into the weeds can still find something beautiful out in the swamp. 

It's The Guns. But It's Not Just The Guns

We can sleepwalk through this. At this point, we can recite all of the arguments from all the sides. The unfolding of news from the latest school shooting is barely denting social media. Hell, we're not even on track to beat last year's all time high of 82 school shootings (only 45 so far).

There are of course an assortment of details emerging. The shooter was questioned over online threats last year. A warning yesterday morning. The student who didn't let the shooter back into the classroom because they saw the gun. An AR-platform weapon (cue gun folks mansplaining what AR really does or does not mean, as if that matters in this context). Fast word to authorities because teachers had only just been given Centegix cards--basically a panic button you can carry in your pocket.

On social media yesterday, the usual thoughts and prayers from Georgia GOP legislators, led by Governor Kemp, followed by thousands of people pointing out that these same legislators, this same governor, had rolled back virtually every gun regulation in the state. Kemp's campaign ad resurfaced--the one where he playfully chats with a kid who wants to date his daughter, including threatening the boy with a gun. Har.

We could trot out the same old stats. The US leads the industrialized world in gun violence, gun possession. The states with more gun regulation have fewer gun deaths. The same old cartoons. That Onion headline, released yet again ("No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens). But today, less than 24 hours later, everyone (except the people in Georgia directly affected) has moved on. 

It's the guns. It has always been the guns. It's the worship of a distorted view of the Second Amendment that says your right to own the means of killing other humans matters more than my child's right not to be killed. Your pursuit of happiness beats my life and liberty. Heck, just last week, a conservative federal district judge ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. We're about to mark the anniversary of 9/11, an event so shocking that we still tightly regulate riding on an airplane. 

It's the guns. No fourteen year old was going to school yesterday and killing four and injuring nine more with a knife. But we know that. Some of us just don't care enough to do something about it.

It's the guns. But it's not just the guns.

According to CNN, the three years with the most school shootings are 2021, 2022, and 2023. Which certainly tracks with the mental health crisis among young people that we've been talking about. And while lots of folks have theories (phones! absent fathers! space aliens!), we haven't really got a handle on it yet. Of course, the same people who love the Second Amendment and blame school shootings on mental illness also voted against expanding mental health services. (And if you think it's mentally ill people with guns who are responsible, wouldn't it make sense to put rules in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to get their hands on guns).

I have to believe that it's past time to look hard at our own culture. It's not just that the past fifteen or so years have seen the country more divided and polarized. It's how some of us talk about that polarization.

We're going to destroy the opposition, obliterate them, use power and force to dominate them and silence them, drive them out of the public arena. So many of our conflicts are discussed with the language of violence and war. This is not new, but the intensity and frequency is. There was a time when most folks understood that much of this was figurative language; nowadays, we have too many people who don't. The MAGA narrative is that we are living through apocalyptic times and the Enemy has to be stopped by any means necessary. We've seen a violent attack on the Capitol. We've seen so many campaign ads featuring guns blowing away some Bad Thing. We've heard leaders, nominally Christian ones at that, suggests that a revolution is coming and there might be blood.

We don't talk about how to get along with people that we think are wrong. We talk about how to wipe them out.

And if you are young, it has been like this for most of your life. 

I fear that we are mostly numb to the constant rhetoric of violence, the tendency to frame everything as a war or a battle or a fight rather than simply a debate or disagreement. Debate and disagreement are not strong enough to stir the hearts of potential donors or supporters. So we get constant high drama, calls to action, declarations of doom unless we fight back hard.

Most of us kind of know better. Some of us do not. In a culture that glorifies violence, even presents it as a path to glory and achievement, some people buy in. Some just accept a worldview of existential dread and battle, like Lindsey Graham explaining that "joy doesn't exist in the real world." Some hunker down into angry powerlessness. And a few pick up a gun.

It's one of the things I appreciate about the Harris-Walz campaign--not just the hopefulness (I've been promised "hope" before, and I'm skeptical) but the minimal violent rhetoric, the absence of rhetoric suggesting that we face an apocalypse and we must be prepared destroy those who are a threat. 

It's ironic-- as much as we love throwing around hypothetical and figurative violence, we've stopped trying to have meaningful conversations about the real stuff. Since Sandy Hook, when school children die in another shooting, we move on. Well, all of us who didn't lose someone. Nothing is going to happen; we've established that as a country we don't have the will to address the problem, the guns.

Because it's the guns. It's also a culture that makes violence seem like an excellent solution to conflict. 

Shifting a culture may be even harder than trying to get politicians to show the will to get common sense gun regulation. But as citizens we need to work at both. I'm not about to look at another shooting and argue that this is not who we are; it very clearly exactly who we are. But that doesn't mean we couldn't become something better. 

Moms For Liberty and Trans Panic Recruiting

Moms For Liberty is experiencing a new rush of membership, and they have trans students to thank.

In the world of culture panic, one brand of panic dominates all others. Project 2025 is absolutely loaded with it. Donald Trump just claimed that schools are performing unauthorized trans surgery on students during the school day. And where better to field test such raw baloney than at a Moms For Liberty gathering, because M4L appears to be investing in trans panic as a way to reverse what of late seems a bit of a downward trend in their fortunes.

Time was that this momwashed group of political operatives was a hot ticket in election season. Okay, that was just one year. Since then, their ability to recruit members and get them onto school boards seems to have dipped. In the past couple of cycles they've even cut back on endorsing candidates, but even so, their success rate just keeps dropping. Even in their home state of Florida, the last round of elections didn't go their way. Not to mention their fervent embrace of Candidate Ron DeSantis, back before they went all in on Trump.

But M4L has scored one big victory, and it seems to be spreading their name. U.S. District Judge John Broomes ruled, in a lawsuit brought by M4L,two other groups, plus four states, that the Buden expansion of Title IX would be stayed. His injunction stopped the feds from extending the protections of Title IX to LGBTQ students. Then in August, the Supreme Court let the injunction stand. 

Broomes is a 2018 Trump appointee. He's a Navy veteran, and logged three years as a project manager for Koch Industries before hanging out his lawyer shingle. Since taking his seat, he has blocked pandemic rules restricting religious gatherings, and he just ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. 

The tricky part of Broomes's injunction has been the question of exactly where it applies. The four states-- Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming-- all fall under the injunction. But because one of the plaintiffs is Moms For Liberty, Broomes extended the injunction to cover any school attended by a child of a Moms For Liberty member. M4L asked to expand that to any school in a county where M4L members lived, but he said no. 

However. 

The injunction applies to any "present or prospective" member of Moms For Liberty. In other words, you just have to say you're a member of the group, or that you might someday become a member of the group, and you can block the new Title IX from your child's school.

M4L is responsible for sending the list of schools to the court, but they have won the right to supplement that list as new school names come rolling in. And they have provided the means to keep them coming.

On their website, there is a page devoted to the lawsuit and the ruling. At the bottom are FAQa and a button to push so you can "become a member of Moms For Liberty for FREE today!" Under the news items, there's this:

Join today and opt your school out of the new Title IX! 

Is it working? Well, according to the M4L webpage, my county and one next door do not have M4L chapters. And yet in all but one district, someone has come to school board meetings to announce that they are M4L members and they have added the schools to the list, heading off local school board plans to update local policy to match the new Title IX rules. 

So keep your eyes peeled, particularly if you're in a county without a M4L chapter, for newly minted M4L members that show up at boards to stop trans children from using the wrong bathroom. There are no membership requirements to be a member of M4L, no hoops to jump through, nothing really to prove you belong. Anyone can do it, and lots of folks in the grip of trans panic are doing it right now. Will this improve M4L's fading fortunes? Who knows. Does this preserving parental rights is less important than making sure certain students don't have too many rights? Perhaps. Will it make life more difficult for young LGBTQ human persons? No doubt. 

PA: Trying To Shut Down A Discriminatory Charter School

Charter schools can't discriminate, claim their supporters, because they must allocate their seats by a random process, not by creaming or selecting only the students they want. It's a lottery. How can it be stacked?

So the success of Franklin Towne Charter High School in Philadelphia, a Blue Ribbon (aka high test score achieving) school, must be a testament to its great work and achievement. Right?

Except that about a year ago, the Philadelphia Board of Education began the process of shutting down FTCHS based on allegations reported by Maddie Hanna, Kristen Graham, and Kasturi Pananjadi at the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 2023.

A top executive at Franklin Towne Charter High School said this year’s lottery was fixed, with students from certain zip codes shut out, and others eliminated because they — or their older siblings — exhibited academic or behavioral problems. Some children were also excluded because Franklin Towne’s chief executive didn’t want to take anyone from a particular charter elementary school, in the event he might have to pay for their transportation.

Patrick Field, Franklin Towne’s chief academic officer and an administrator at the school for 17 years, said the lottery tampering was ordered by Joseph Venditti, the longtime former CEO. Venditti abruptly resigned Feb. 27, citing health reasons, after Field alerted the charter’s board chair about the lottery issues.

So, we can call them "allegations," but they look an awful lot like "accurate reporting by someone on the inside."  (Meanwhile, Field was immediately put on administrative leave by the school and filed his own lawsuit for retaliation by the employer).

Nor does it look like a recent aberration. The school opened in 2000. As reported by Carly Sitrin for Chalkbeat, the 2014 application that won the school a National Blue Ribbon Award reported school demographics of 2% Asian, 8% Black/African American, 14% Hispanic, and 76% white. The demographics of the city in which FTCHS operated--  42% Black and 36% white. 

The Board has said that they don't necessarily want to shut the school down-- just get them to shape up and cease "blatantly racist practices", and revocation hearing would be the way to do that. Instead, the proceedings have turned into a year long slog.

The hearing should have started in October of last year. But Franklin Towne challenged the particular hearing officer the board hired, Rudy Garcia. Folks expected a quick decision. Instead, no ruling for ten months. Meanwhile, Franklin Towne ladling more charges against the board, including a challenge to Pennsylvania's charter law, saying both that Garcia was biased and that he couldn't run the hearing ad decide the school's fate.

The case is in front of Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle, a GOP judge (though a Democrat when she first ran for the seat). She's drawn some complaints from the Defender Association and a "not recommended" from the Philadelphia Bar Association. In 2020, when the state was trying to use emergency releases to thin out jail populations and slow COVID spread, Coyle denied every single request. She was a Philly Assistant DA from 1986 through 2002. And she was a member of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School Board of Trustees.

Coyle's work on this case has been less than spectacular. Kristen Graham reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer notes that, according to court records, Coyle posed this question to school board president Reginald streamer-- if there had been lottery manipulation, "why would that cause a concern?" If they had broken the law and actively discriminated against minority children, why is that a big deal. 

Streater, presumably after he had picked his jaw up off the floor, replied that the board takes seriously things like inequitable treatment of students and breaking the law. 

Last week Coyle finally issued her order. Franklin Towne gets its request to remove Garcia, but not its challenge to sections of the charter law. Sher ordered a thirty-day stay of the revocation hearings, as well as a hearing in her courtroom to address further stays. If this all drags on too long, she'll require Franklin Towne to show her that they are complying with lottery-based admission requirements.

Coyle doesn't appear very sympathetic to the board. For one thing, the school is so valuable--

Realistically, should this successful high school be forced to close its doors, not only would the attending children, their parents, teachers, and administrators be adversely affected, so too would the entire community. This would permanently deprive all future students from the zip code(s) that the school board believes had been disregarded by Franklin Towne’s former administrators.

In other words, revoking the charter because it won't admit certain students would deprive those students of the chance to attend the charter that won't admit them. 

Also, she thinks the whole revocation procedure is deficient and that the board was displaying "bullying and biased appearance." And this, from the Inquirer:

Coyle wrote that her order “aligns with the public interest of promoting trust in the legal system and the integrity of our public institutions and preventing overreaching of governmental functions.”

 This seems to suggest that charter school authorizers are not supposed act like charter school authorizers, that somehow performing their actual function of holding charters to the rules and regulations that govern them is somehow an "overreach." You could almost assume that Judge Coyle doesn't quite understand how charter law works, if not for the fact that she sat on the board of a charter school. 

The charter system was sold with the idea that charters would be accountable to authorizers, that they would have to earn the right to operate and continue earning it to maintain that operation. The Franklin Towne situation shows a different framing, one that is too common in the charter world--once established, the charter doesn't have to earn its continued existence. It doesn't need authorization from anyone; instead, authorizers build a case to close down the charter. Authorization to operate, once given, can never be withdrawn without protracted legal battles.

This is and the tradeoff of autonomy for accountability that we were promised. "Look," the charteristas said, "Authorizers watch over the charter school, and if at any point they determine the school is not living up to the rules of its charter, the authorizers just shut it down." Instead what we've got is, "The authorizers okayed this school twenty years ago, and they have no right to take that away."

Who knows how the Franklin Towne charter situation will work out. One hopes that, at best, they have actually started to function according to the rules, though what that will do to their remarkable "success" would be a whole other story. But the whole business is a fine demonstration of how the charter school system we were sold is not how things actually operate.

ICYMI: Labor Day 2024 Edition (9/1)

It's that time again. Put away your white, set out the grill, and try to remember that the labor movement in this country created a whole lot of things that we now take for granted. Once a year seems hardly often enough to take that out and look at it.

In the meantime, here's the reading list for the week.

School vouchers are conservative billionaires’ Trojan horse

Josh Cowen's new book The Privateers is about to drop, so he's doing press and talking to people and getting the word out about vouchers and the culture panic. Here he is talking to Maureen Downey.

Dune buggy boondoggle shows a crying need for better school voucher oversight

Laurie Roberts of AZCentral tells the story of how dune buggies became an educational expense (the occupational therapist said so) and were initially paid for with voucher money. The state board has reverse that decision, but the whole mess is a look at how the vouchers are really working in Arizona.

The Perpetual Dream: Machines That Think, Diagnose, and Teach

Larry Cuban looks at the dream of taking human touch our of human service.

The Death of School 10

Alec MacGillis at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into the closing of a Rochester school and the larger issues racing towards us over school closings.

The Donald Trump-Moms for Liberty-Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Alliance

Maurice Cunningham at the Bucks County Beacon reminds us just who partners with Moms For Liberty, and what the goals are.

Moms for Liberty goes to war with New York school over five library books

The Independent reports on yet another M4L attempt to stamp out reading Naughty Books. Only this time it's not going over so well.

Moms For Liberty Goes All In On Transphobia

At their big gathering, M4L leader tell Huffington Post that there is no such thing as a transgender child. It goes downhill from there. Turns out that "safe and welcoming" are danger words at a school.

With schools, money does indeed matter; so does how we spend it

From the Seattle Times, a piece that pushes back on the continued assertion that money doesn't matter (so schools shouldn't get more of it).

Diagramming Sentences and the Art of Misguided Nostalgia

Paul Thomas reminds us that diagramming sentences doesn't help develop writing skill (it does not-- don't @ me) and quotes some expertise from 70 years ago.

Teens are losing interest in school, and say they hear about college 'a lot'

Make of them what you wish, but NPR writes up some results from a major poll of students, and some things are not looking up since last year.

Challenging The Myths of Generative AI

Addressing some of the myths surrounding AI. "Most concerning is the illusion that LLMs are retrieving information rather than constructing word associations within a broad corpus." Excellent AI read.

The Harris-Walz Vision for Public Schools

Jennifer Berkshire writes for The Nation about how Harris-Walz could (finally) be a course correction for the Democratic Party.

Breaking Down the Harris/Walz Education Plan

Nancy Bailey looks into the details of the Harris-Walz education proposals.

Youngkin’s Privatization Team Makes Its Move on Virginia’s Public Schools

Having had a chance to see how school takeovers pretty much never work, Virginia is ready to try their hand. Cheryl Binkley at 4 Public Education.

Talking Back to the Failing-Schools Narrative

Mark Hlavacik and Jack Schneider at Kappan break down decades of schools-are-failing coverage and how they have affected discussions about public education.

DeSantis and M4L target incumbent school Board members in Florida. They win anyway.

Missed this last week, but here's Sue Kingery Woltanski's breakdown of the Moms for Liberty candidates fared in Florida (spoiler: not well).

Rockets on butterfly wings

Benjamin Riley takes a look at an AI guide that actually brings a little sanity to the discussion.

New Book Bans Have Begun in South Carolina

Oh, South Carolina. Steve Nuzum examines the new wave of anti-reading activity.

States want to reduce qualifications for teachers. That’s a huge mistake.

The Center for American Progress is emblematic of Democrat wrong headedness about public education. But Paige Schhoemaker DeMio of CAP is on point with this op-ed. Deprofessionalizing teaching is not a solution for anything.

The Safe Space Where America Goes To Debate Its Most Painful History

It's Williamsburg, of all places. But there's a lot to see in this Politico piece about how to discuss difficult topics with sensitivity towards all audiences.

Who Are the Adults in Charge?

TC Weber builds a great piece out of reaction to my post about calling students by their names. He also says many nice things about me, making me both grateful and embarrassed. But the post is a good one.

Masculinity in an Age of Individualism

From The Dispatch, by Joe Pitts. I don't think about "masculinity" as a thing nearly as often as I think about "humanity," but I found a lot to chew on in this essay about the non-toxic version of masculinity.

At Forbes.com, I looked at two reports-- one suggesting that teacher strikes do, in fact, work, and one warning about some hazards of AI in the classroom. 

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About Those Childless Teachers

Yet another piece of J. D. Vance foolishness has surfaced, this one a 2021 audio in which he tries to get in a dig at Randi Weingarten by saying that teachers without children , well--

You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. And that really disorients me and it really disturbs me...

It's a bullshit argument, not the least because it assumes that adult human beings are incapable of caring about children unless they've birthed one. Too bad for you, every nun and priest ever. Not to mention that back in the day, pregnancy and motherhood quickly disqualified women from teaching.

But honestly, Vance is not the first person I've ever heard make some variation of this point, this notion that teachers without children aren't really qualified to be teachers.

When I hear this point, I have questions.

Should the teacher have children the very first year she starts working? As in, right after college graduation when she is probably 22 years old? Should these children have been conceived and delivered during her undergrad years? Should she have gotten married so that they are "legitimate"? If children should be a requirement for teaching, does that mean she should have the child before being accepted into the teaching program? How should high school guidance counselors work this into their conversations with students?

If your reaction to all of that is, "Of course not, silly," then what do we do about all those inadequate teachers at the start of their careers in their early and mid twenties? Do we let it slide as long as they make a commitment to settle down and make some babies by a particular date? Should we fire them if they don't make the baby deadline? What would a good deadline be? Do we just have them sit and do paperwork till they produce offspring, or should they work in some other field, their teaching degree gathering dust, until they are a parent?

What is the critical part? Raising the kid or actually giving birth to it? If it's just the raising part, does adoption count? If so, how young must the child be? Does this also apply for step-children? Being a step-parent has been discounted by folks like Vance-- is that because the child was too old, or because it didn't pass through the parent's birth canal? If it's the latter, does that disqualify all men from being teachers? What about dead-beat absent dads who neither gave birth nor child-rearing support? Are they disqualified? 

Does a bad parent make a better teacher than a non-parent? Should we interview their children as part of the teacher accreditation?  Is there a qualitative difference between a childless cat lady and a non-parent incel?

Are there other jobs that non-parents shouldn't have? Should we keep non-parents on an island somewhere? Should we just assume that anyone who isn't a traditional parent is some kind of grooming indoctrinatey threat to every child they encounter, or is it only in classrooms that they are suspect?

"Teachers ought to have kids of their own" is one of those things that seems pretty sensible right up until the point you start to think it through. There is no question that having children of your own can add to your teaching perspective. It is also true that having no children can also add to your perspective. It is most true that having a variety of perspectives in the teaching staff is super-valuable. 

But the next time you hear someone propose that only parents can be good teachers, see if you can get answers for any of my questions.