PA: Public Dollars For Private School Psychologist

It's not just vouchers: public taxpayer dollars can be directed to private schools through a variety of paths.

For instance, in Pennsylvania, public tax dollars are used to fill a gap in private school services.

Passed in 1974, Act 89 created funding streams specifically for providing psychology services for private/nonpublic schools in Pennsylvania. Per the state department of education website:

Act 89 evaluations occur at the request of the nonpublic school and with parent consent. Evaluations may include reports on students’ academic ability, academic achievement, social/emotional development, and behavior. The Act 89 evaluation, however, does not determine a student’s eligibility for IDEA services.

The psychologist is hire through the state Intermediate Unit (in PA, these are regional offices of the state department of education), and it is the IU that determines what exact type and scope of services are provided.

One can argue that the state would take on providing these services as a way of making sure that students don't skip through the cracks just because they are attending a private school. But the effect is that of reducing costs for the private school (which, as always, may discriminate as it wishes and in ways that public schools may not). It's a public subsidy for a private school that gets to play by its own rules on the public dime. I suppose it's also a good deal if you're a school psychologist who doesn't want to deal with public school students.

This isn't Pennsylvania's private school subsidy. In the commonwealth, any public schools that provide transportation for their students must also provide transportation for private and charter school students in their district, which is handy for students but constitutes one more publicly funded subsidy for private and charter schools.

It's not just about the vouchers. There are many ways to have taxpayers help fund private schools.

The Other AI Problem

Let's imagine that rather than instead of typing on a keyboard in the classroom, pulling up answers effortlessly from some unseen, students had to do something else. 

To get to the source of their "assistance" teachers had to load them, just a few at a time, into large three-miles-to-the-gallon coach bus that would take them fifty miles to the "assistant."  Along the way, the bus would pass over a major body of water, where it would dump the contents of the rolling indoor outhouse into that body of water. All so that a few students could get some help with a writing assignments or math instruction or just plain have someone do the assignments for them.

There's been much written about the intellectual, pedagogical, artistic, and philosophical issues of generative AI, which is all important when considering the mental impact of AI.

But maybe we should spend some more time talking about the actual physical impact on the world.

The amount of electricity used to power generative AI is literally incomprehensible. Researchers estimated that creating little old GPT-3 consumed 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity and generated 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the equivalent of 123 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year. And that's just to set it up, before users actually started getting it to do its thing. Or before its keepers give it its latest update. Or consider this from an article published just last year at Scientific American:

But a peer-reviewed analysis published this week in Joule is one of the first to quantify the demand that is quickly materializing. A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.

It's remarkable how few specifics are out there. The training phase and the asking-it-to-answer-a-prompt phase don't take the same amount, but how they compare seems fuzzy (writers seem to feel that the asking for response stage uses more). Besides sucking up electricity, which is not an infinite resource, that sucking has implications for the gases generated by meeting the need to produce more power. According to NPR, Google says its greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over 5 years primarily because of AI data centers. 

Here's a chart from Earth.org that provides a little perspective:

That bar for AI (the way taller than any other) represents only the training phase. If cars and people flying in private jets bothers you. generative AI should positively freak you right out.

Jesse Dodge, research analyst for Allen Institute for AI (founded by Paul Allen, so not tech haters), told NPR that a single query will use the electricity that could light one bulb for twenty minutes, which doesn't seem like a lot until you multiply it by a million times a day. That is way more than, say, a typical search--though of course tech companies have baked their AI into search functions, so you're generating an AI prompt all the time whether you want to or not. Some researchers advocate for solar power, but that doesn't solve all the problems. 

It's not just the electricity and the carbon footprint. Data centers require huge amounts of water to keep cool. Cindy Gordon writing for Forbes says that the centers consume "significant" water, evaporating about 9 liters of water per kWh of energy used. AI's projected water usage, says Gordon, could hit 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027. That's on top of the water "withdrawn" for hydroelectric generation of the power that AI needs. 

Right now, all of this is kept behind a curtain, out of view of the average AI user. But if we are going to use computer magic to answer prompts like "Write me a five page paper about Hamlet" or "Whip up my lesson plans next week," we really ought to understand the cost. 

It's not just that generative AI doesn't produce magic results--it doesn't use magical techniques to get those results, either. 

ICYMI: Privateers Edition (9/8)

Josh Cowen's book The Privateers is coming out this week. I've already got my copy, and you should get a copy of your own, because the book has a lot of insights into the voucher debates as they currently stand.

In the meantime, this week's reading list is a particularly good one. Let's see what we've got here.

The fight over vouchers is an existential battle for America’s public schools

Linda Blackford at the Charlotte Observer has an interview with Josh Cowen about the book (pro tip-- you can just x out of the request for your email address and just read the op ed).

How a Fifty-Year-Old Supreme Court Decision Fuels School Segregation Today

You know all about Brown v. Board, but how much do you know about Milliken v. Bradley? It's a decision that continues to enable segregation today. Here's a great explainer by Halley Potter at the Century Foundation.

What I saw at the Moms for Liberty summit: a diminished and desperate group

Olivia Little and Madeline Peltz went back to the Moms for Liberty summit this year, and what they saw does not bode well for that crew. Little writes about it for Media Matters. 

Trump (Momentarily) Talks Education at M4L Summit

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at Trump's brief lurch into education stuff at the M4L summit. 

Donald Trump’s Incredible ‘Transgender Thing’

At the M4L summit, Trump made some crazy-pants claims about the "transgender thing." Elaine Godfrey takes a closer look for The Atlantic.

GOP Attacking Trans Kids

Thomas Ultican looks at the question of where parental rights start to strip children of their rights.

The Dark Money Defunding Rural Schools

Maurice Cunningham is an expert tracker of dark money in the education world, and this excellent piece collects everything he's dug up so far about our favorite parental rights' groups. This is a must read. From Barn Raiser.

5 Things Teachers Need to Know, According to Larry Ferlazzo

I don't know if these are things to know exactly, but Larry Ferlazzo at Ed Week shares five good education ideas, including on for $10,000.

How Metallica Is Helping Front Range Community College Students Get Jobs

Machael Mazenko reports for Westword about how the heavy metal titans have spent $10 mill on trade education.

Republicans pushing Christianity into public schools are hitting resistance — even in red states

Turns out lots of folks know this is a bad idea. Andrew Atterbury and Juan Perez Jr report for Politico.

‘A personal political gimmick’: Oklahoma superintendents say no to Walters’ Bible directive

More details from Oklahoma, where StateImpact sent out a survey of superintendents for even more details.

Appeals court rejects long-running pregame prayer lawsuit involving Tampa high school

It's a complicated case involving standing and a new state law and announcements at championship games. It also includes a rough judicial opinion regarding the likelihood of this coming up any time soon: 

“Hope springs eternal but standing cannot be built on hope,” the opinion said. “With all due respect to the Cambridge Christian Fighting Lancers, there’s nothing to suggest that the team’s participation in a future football state championship is imminent or even likely.”

Why thousands of Florida students are not being taught sex ed

Judd Legum at Popular Information explains why Florida's attempt to micro-manage sec ed has resulted in the program simply disappearing from some schools.

The Madness of EdTech: All or Nothing Options

Emily Cherkin guest posts at Nacy Bailey's blog about the frustrating half-assery that is ed tech in so many schools.

Texas schools are hiring more teachers without traditional training. They hope the state will pay to prepare them.

There's a lot to grasp here, but let's start with this stat-- almost 40% of Texas new hires were uncertified. That's in public schools. Charter schools are closer to 60%.

Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests

Jill Barshay looks at some totally unsurprising research at The Hechinger Report.

Why AI Isn't Going To Make Art

This essay at the New Yorker by Ted Chiang is worth burning one of your free peeks behind the paywall. It's thoughtful and well-crafted and helps to articulate the unease that so many feel but can't explain. Love what he does with the idea of intention. Another must read for the week.

What do you notice, what do you wonder?

Benjamin Riley looks at some of the visionary AI work being done in education, and ew...

The Democrats Are Finally Running a Teacher. What Took Them So Long?

After decades of sucking on education, the Democratic Party might get its act together. Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire walk us through the history for The Nation.

AZ State Board Says No to School Voucher Dune Buggy Purchase

Turns out there are actual limits, sort of, to what Arizona will let you spend your voucher superbucks on. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the story.

What Do Parents Know About Public Education?

Reformsters argue that parents need more information about schools. Nancy Flanagan suggests maybe there's a better idea.

Keeping the Dumpster Fires Burning

TC Weber provides a history of ed reform leadership in Tennessee and golly bob howdy but it's a sad and winding tale. But instructive, too.

We Don't Have to Get Over It

Like every teacher, Jess Piper has been through some awful active shooter training. 

Over at the Bucks County Beacon, I looked at a new study showing that cyber charters are especially damaging to Black and Hispanic students,

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.