Not Choice, But Capture

There are people who really do support school choice, but over on the right, you will find those aren't really interested in school choice at all, and every once in a while, they say so. Take this post from Daniel Buck, former teacher and current Young Conservative Facer at the Fordham Institute (we've met him before here and here and here). 

This is not fond hopes for the day when dozens of different sorts of schools bloom and everyone can pick the one that best suits them. 

This is not about choice. It'[s about capturing the education system so that young humans can be taught the correct way to behave and think. It's about trying to eradicate a way of thinking and being that folks on the right disapprove of. 

Buck is certainly not the first or only person to make versions of this argument.

Parents Defending Education, an activist astro-turf group, has published viewpoints like an "investigative report" complaining that LGBTQ charters are "indoctrinating: kids at taxpayer expense. More than a few politicians who wave the school choice flag also oppose school choice involving Certain Viewpoints. And there's an absolutely ridiculous piece of "scholarship" from the Heritage Foundation trying to discredit charter schools for being woker than public schools, because choice is supposed to provide a variety of educational viewpoints, except not Those Viewpoints.

For large chunks of the choicer world, the whole "school choice" argument is a smokescreen, a mask, and a lie. There is no interest in any sort of robust educational ecosystem-- just an educational system that is full of their preferred worldview.

When someone like Ron DeSantis or Ryan Walters tells you that he favors school choice and he also favors making illegal all references to certain "divisive topics" and gender stuff, he is telling you that all his talk about school choice is bullshit. 

It's one of those times when you can tell what someone's goals are by what they don't say. A school choice fan who believed what he was saying would look at a city where Woke Academy was next door to MAGA High and say, "Look! This is working just like it's supposed to." Not "We have to either burn Woke Academy to the ground or regain control of it by restaffing it with anti-woke teachers. 

For many pretending to be choicers, the real goal is a two-pronged capture. One hand works at capturing the public system with rules that impose the preferred anti-woke values on public schools, while the other hand seeks to replace the public system with a system that follows only the preferred ideology. Neither of these hands is interested in actual school choice.

There are conversations and debates to be had about the topic of school choice and the topic of ideological "purification" of the country's education system, but it's hard to have those conversations when some folks insist on pretending that they're talking about one thing when they're really talking about something else. 

OK: License Stripping May Have Been Illegal

The Saga of Summer Boismier, the teacher who dared to provide students with a link to a library that would loan books, is still not over. If you're new to this tale, I'll provide back story here, but if you're ready for the latest installment in this tale of education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters and his quest to punish wokitude, you can skip down the page.

Our story so far

Back in September of 2022, after Oklahoma had unveiled HB 1775, its own version of a Florida-style reading restriction law, Norma High School English teacher Boismier drew flak for covering some books in her classroom with the message "Books the state doesn't want you to read." Apparently even worse, she posted the QR code for the Brooklyn Public Libraries new eCard for teens program, which allows teens from all over the country to check out books, no matter how repressive or restrictive state or local rules they may live under.

She was suspended by the district, which said that this was about her "personal political statements" and a "political display" in the classroom. Boismier told The Gothamist

I saw this as an opportunity for my kids who were seeing their stories hidden to skirt that directive. Nowhere in my directives did it say we can't put a QR code on a wall

The suspension was brief, but Boismier decided this was not the kind of atmosphere in which she wanted to work, so she resigned, citing a culture of fear, confusion and uncertainty in schools, fomented by Oklahoma Republicans.

That wasn't enough to satisfy Walters, at the time campaigning for office. The whole business had been a high-profile brouhaha, so Candidate Walters popped up to put his two cents in via a letter that he posted on Twitter.

Saying that "providing access to banned and pornographic material is unacceptable" and "There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom," Walters called for Boismier's license to be revoked.  He made hounding her a campaign platform. And he called her out by name, arguing that the public do not want "activist teachers in classrooms" and that it's super important that "we continue to protect our kids from indoctrination. "Yes, this the same who later mandated that every teacher must use the Bible as a teaching tool in their classroom.

That, of course, led in true MAGA fashion to a flood of vulgarity and death threats directed at Boismier as reported by KFOR:

“These teachers need to be taken out and shot,” “teachers like this should not only be fired but also should be swinging from a tree,” “If Summer tried this in Afghanistan, they’d cut out her tongue for starters,” are just a minuscule fraction of the threats pouring into Summer Boismier’s inbox.

Boismier was unwilling to put up with all of this. When Walters continued to try to strip her teaching license (even though in December of 2022 she took a job at the Brooklyn Library), Boismier used a quirk of Oklahoma law to demand a trial-like hearing to dispute the department of education decision.

At that hearing in June of 2023, Assistant Attorney General Liz Stephens recommended against taking Boismier's license, saying the state failed to prove that Boismier had broken the law. Let me repeat: the Assistant AG of the state said that Walters had no case.

Boismier wasn't done. In August of 2023, she filed a defamation lawsuit against Walters. Walters filed a motion to dismiss in January of this year, and U.S. District Court Judge Bernard Jones (Oklahoma's first Black magistrate and elevated to the district court by Donald Trump) denied the motion to dismiss. Walters had alleged that Boismier was a sort of public figure, and that malice on his part couldn't be shown. The judge disagreed, saying her case looks solid enough to proceed. So that lawsuit will continue winding through the court.

Meanwhile, the state board and Walters continued to move forward to take Boismier's license. As reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman, they decided hold yet another hearing to "finalize the revocation" in March. Only there's a problem with that plan. In March, all of the department's attorneys quit, so they had no lawyers with which to hold a legal-type proceeding. They've postponed action until May. Once again, Walters had shot himself in the foot by just being lousy at his job.

In June, a revocation order was written, charging among other things that she violated HB 1775 including the charge that she "intended to entice her students to seek out and read" naughty books. Spicy stuff. By August, the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to strip Boismier of her license. Reported M. Scott Cart and Murray Evans for The Oklahoman:

“She (Boismier) broke the law,” Walters said [speaking to reporters after the meeting]. “And I said from the beginning, when you have a teacher that breaks the law, said she broke the law, (and) said she will continue to break the law — that can’t stand.”

Walters said he wanted Oklahomans to be very clear that Oklahoma State Department of Education would hold teachers accountable. “The Legislature passes laws, we have rules, teacher code of conduct that goes along with those things ― those will be enforced. I wanted every parent to know they have the best teacher possible in their kid’s classroom.”

The Newest Update (And Newest Screw-Up From The Department of Ed)

"We have rules" turns out to be a pretty flexible statement in light of what was revealed when folks finally got a look at the revocation order.

Way back in 2021, a whole coalition of folks filed a lawsuit against HB 1775, and in June of this year, a federal court granted a preliminary instruction to halt significant portions of that law, including the parts about teaching banned concepts in K-12 classrooms. 

Specifically, the injunction was issued almost two weeks before Walters office wrote up the order to revoke Boismier's license for violating the law they had been told they couldn't yet enforce.

You might think that maybe they just hadn't gotten word yet, as Walters office is kind of a mess. But no -- they knew HB 1775 was stayed because they included a footnote saying that nothing in the revocation order relied on parts of HB 1775 that were subject to the preliminary injunction. So it was based on some part of HB 1775 not covered by the injunction, and that part would be...? The revocation order does not say. It does not point to which part of HB 1775 they say she violated.

As State Senator Mary Boren put it (as quoted by Spencer Humphrey at KFOR) :

They didn’t even dissect anything out of 1775. I think that’s very curious to me that that they think that they can get away with enforcing House Bill 1775 and try to cover themselves in a footnote.

 Boismier herself sent a statement to KFOR:

As we expected, the order we received today doesn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny. It should be an easy call for the courts to overturn it, since Walters chose to throw out the actual facts and law in the case to get the results he wanted and campaigned on. We will be heading to district court soon to do that. But sadly, until we get that court order, Oklahoma teachers now apparently have to fear getting their licenses revoked for criticizing the wrong politician or showing students how to get a library card.

So the end of this story is not yet in sight. There are still lessons to be learned about whose rules matter and who has to follow them and what happens when ambitious politicians decide to make harassment part of their campaign platform and go all cultural revolution on Americans. Stay tuned. 

 

ICYMI: CMO Birthday Weekend Edition (9/15)

This weekend we're celebrating the birthday of the Chief Marital Officer here at the Curmudgucation Institute. The board of directors has selected some nice gifts, and there will be cake. May your weekend have some cake in it as well. But for right now, here's some reading.

Motivation to learn is just as important as intelligence, study finds

There's not a lot of rigor in this article, but there are some charts.

Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows

At Hechinger, Jill Barshay adds another item for the "Research Proves Things You Already Knew" file. Scaling up tutoring to fix pandemic learning loss turns out to be a not so great plan after all.

Who Knew Tutoring Wouldn’t Be a Huge Success, or How I Learned to Frivolously Spend Tax Payer Money Without Really Trying

That study was in Nashville, so TC Weber has some on-the-ground observations about the whole thing. Turns out he could have saved the researchers a little time.

Tennessee parents, teachers, advocates push back against school voucher proposal

Meanwhile, the voucher debates are still raging in Tennessee. Tori Gessner covers for WKRN.

Texas Jews Say State’s New Bible-Influenced Curriculum Is ‘Wildly Problematic’

What a shocker. Greg Abbott's Christianity-infused curriculum is filled with issues for people of other faiths. Linda Jacobson covers the story for The 74.

Oklahoma schools resist the order to teach from the Bible in classrooms

NPR picks up the ongoing story of school districts in Oklahoma saying "No, thanks" to Ryan Walters' directive to teach the Bible. Short but sweet.

'I want to throw up': Committee members dismayed over social studies standards draft

Walters hired a bunch of right wing amateurs to concoct social studies standards for Oklahoma. Now the members of the original committee have seen the results, and they are not happy.

Another Oklahoma Education Blunder

So many, but Thomas Ultican writes about the fake test score improvement and a few other of Walters greatest hits.

Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders Need Help!

Nancy Bailey reports on the mental health crisis among children, and what we are or are not doing about it.

5 local school board members say doing more with less won’t sustain Utah public education

This story is from Utah, but the subjects under debate are familiar in all states. And that includes the growing concern over mental health issues.

America is over the ‘Moms For Liberty’ culture wars

Svante Myrick at The Hill offers another piece suggesting that Moms for Liberty are past their sell-by date. Their last summit, she reports, "was a flop."

In Red States, the Bill for School Voucher Bait-and-Switch Is Coming Due

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider point out that the privatizers defunding the schools project is well under way. Worth battling The Nation's super-annoying website to read this.

NC public schools feel "suffocated" by lack of funding as voucher deal advances

North Carolina continues its race to the bottom by hollowing out public school funding so that rich folks can have a private school tuition rebate. Alexandria Sands at AXIOS Charlotte.

Most NC adults don't support private school voucher expansion, new WRAL poll shows

Not that it matters to the heavily-gerrymandered legislators who pushed this through.

In 2020, President Trump Set Out to Impose His Own Preferred U.S. History Curriculum on All U.S. Public Schools

Jan Resseger looks back at Donald Trump's attempt to impose patriotic education on US schools, and why it's one more warning about the damage he would do in a second term.

Voucher Boondoggle: House Advances Plan to Give the Wealthy $1.20 for Every $1 They Steer to Private K-12 Schools

The feds are back to looking at yet another variation on the DeVosian national tax credit scholarship program. This one has some wrinkles to make it profitable for the rich folk involved. This piece from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy is an excellent explainer of how this kind of program would work.

We Need a “Freezing Cold Takes” for Education

If you can get past the extreme irony that it's Rick Hess writing this, it's a fun piece calling for "professional accountability for the empty suits who flit from one edu-fad to the next."

All-charter no more: New Orleans opens its first traditional public school in nearly 2 decades

Speaking of failed edu-fads, remember when New Orleans would be proof-of-concept for an all-charter school system? Yeah, that didn't work, and now the tide is turning. Ariel Gilreath at Chalkbeat.

Disaster

Andy Spears writes briefly about the charter school that nobody wanted and which students are now deserting in droves. 

Post-apocalyptic education

Ethan Mollick is talking about the AI-fueled homework apocalypse, which he says has already arrived. Now what?

High Schoolers Need to Do Less So That They Can Do Better

An actual high school teacher writing a guest essay for the New York Times, arguing in favor of stopping the teenaged rat race

I was busy elsewhere this week. At the Bucks County Beacon, I wrote a piece about Pennsylvania's premiere right wing school board policy shop trying to look more secular. 

At Forbes.com, a look at an attempt to undo decades of school funding reform, and the surprise move by the South Carolina Supreme Court to strike down their voucher program. 

Also had the experience--again--this week of having META take down a posting of one of my pieces because some bot judged it to be spam. These days substack seems the most reliable way to get my stuff out into the world. Consider signing up if you haven't already. 

CO: A Bonkers School Choice Constitutional Amendment

While other states are stumbling over constitutional language that aims public dollars at public schools (e.g. South Carolina and Kentucky), voucher fans in Colorado have proposed a constitutional amendment that comes up for a vote soon. And it is a ridiculously ill-conceived and hastily crafted mess.

The language is simple enough-- here's the whole text, originally known as Initiative 138 and  Amendment 40, now known as Amendment 80. . 

SECTION 1. In the constitution of the state of Colorado, add section, 18 to article IX as follows: Section 18. Education - School Choice

(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION.

(2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.

The proposal comes from Advance Colorado, a right wing anti-tax, let's shrink government until we can drown it in the kitchen sink, kind of outfit. They're headed up by Michael Fields, who previously headed up the Colorado chapter of the right wing Koch brothers astroturf group Americans for Prosperity, then became AFP's national education policy leader. Then on to Colorado Rising Action where he kept his interest in education. Back in 2012-14 he spent two whole years as a Teacher For America product in a charter school. 

Advance Colorado was founded in 2020. Their leadership team also includes former state GOP chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown.

The amendment has also drawn support from House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, who is also a "fellow" with Advance Colorado. The actual filing came from Fields and Suzanne Taheri, a former official with the Secretary of State's Office, a former candidate, and former Arapahoe County GOP chair.

Why does Colorado, a state that has long offered many forms of school choice, even need this? Supporters of the amendment are arguing that they are trying to enshrine and protect choice, just in case those naughty Democrats tried to roll it back some day (Colorado's Dems once tossed out the pro-choice, not-really-Democrats Democrats for Education Reform). And though they aren't saying this part out loud, the amendment would be a great set-up for school vouchers.

The language proposed is, however, strictly bananapants. And I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the people who would most regret passing this amendment would be those who support it.

Let's say I want to send my low-achieving, non-Christian child to a top-level Christian school. Let's further presume that I can't afford even a fraction of the tuition cost. Does this amendment mean that the school has to accept them, and that the state has to foot the entire tuition bill? Wouldn't any answer other than yes be denying my constitutional to equal opportunity to access a quality education and my constitutional right to direct my child's education? Does this mean that to have full access the state must also transport my child anywhere I want them to go to school?

What if East Egg Academy has far more applicants than it has capacity? Must it scratch its entire admissions policy and use a lottery instead? 

The major obstacles to school choice are not state policies. The major obstacles are, and have always been, cost, location, and the school's own discriminatory policies. Virtually all voucher policies are set up to protect those discriminatory policies. Wouldn't an amendment like this require those to be wiped out? 

Wouldn't this language amount to a state takeover of all charter and private schools? 

And that's not all. Wouldn't this amendment also allow parents to intrude into every classroom. If I have a constitutional right to direct my child's education, does that not mean that I can tell my child's science teacher to stop teaching evolution? Or start teaching evolution? Can I demand a different approach to teaching American history? How about prepositions? And how will a classroom teacher even function if every child in the classroom comes with a parent who has a constitutional right to direct their education?

You can say that's silly, that "obviously" that's not what the amendment means. But that's what it says, at least until some series of bureaucrats and courts decide what exactly "direct the education of their children" means.

Kevin Welner (National Education Policy Center) has it exactly right-- "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act."

Supporters say this doesn't establish a right to public funding of private schools, and I suppose they're sort of correct in the sense that this does not so much establish a right to public funding of private schools so much as it establishes an obligation for public funding of private schools as well as obliterating private school autonomy. Unless, of course, some judge steps in to find that the language doesn't mean what it says, which is, I suppose, not impossible.

Nobody on any side of the school choice debate should be voting for this amendment. It's exactly the kind of lawmaking you get from people who have wrapped meaning in particular rhetoric for so long that they have forgotten that the words of their rhetoric have actual meanings outside the meanings that they have habitually assigned them. Here's hoping the people of Colorado avoid this really bad idea. 

ALEC Has A New Voucher Push

ALEC has set a new goal-- 25 by 2025. That means having 25 states adopt school voucher programs by the end of next year. To push that goal, ALEC has a new initiative called the Education Freedom Alliance, and it is a scary crew.

Who is ALEC?

The American Legislative Exchange Council is a bill mill. It brings conservative legislators and conservative business folks together to write legislation that the legislators then take back to their states. They used to be fairly under the radar, but for the last decade, folks have been catching on. 

ALEC was co-founded by Paul Weyrich, who also co-founded the Heritage Foundation. The group was launched in 1973 as the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. Their interests extend to pretty much every area of legislation, and that includes an Education and Workplace Development task force.. They get piles of funding from the Bradley Foundation and Charles Koch, and you can spend hours traveling down the ALEC rabbit hole. They have many goals, including huge ones like rewriting the Constitution and just generally turning America into a right wing paradise. 

Who are their partners this time?

Teaming up as leads on the EFA are the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and the Job Creators Network.

Job Creators Network was founded by Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder. Herman Cain had a hand in it, too, though JCN later disavowed him. They have big ties to Rick Berman, a "win ugly" anti-union media guy who specializes in front groups. Their CEO, Alfredo Ortiz, had a hand in helping pass the tax cut bill in 2017. They were big on reopening school buildings during COVID, and helped promote hydroxychloroquine. Funded by small businesses? Unlikely. 

The Committee To Unleash Prosperity is cut from similar cloth. Founded by Arthur Laffer (the Laffer Curve guy) and Stephen Moore, both ALEC stalwarts, along with Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow. Moore is the founder of Club For Growth, yet another right wing budget-killing activist group of rich folks. Their goal was to "take over" the GOP fundraising and drag the party far right; they have been reliable Trump allies. Moore has been in a variety of thinky tanks, including CATO and the Heritage Foundation.

The CUP website says of its Executive Director that he "keeps the trains running on time." 

So this is ALEC teaming up with a couple of other right wing outfits. And though this is not news, I will point out that none of these groups has the slightest bit of expertise in actual education. Just saying.

Besides the three coalition leaders, there's a whole list of partners, including American Federation for Children, Americans for Prosperity, Center for Education Reform, EdChoice, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Kansas Policy Institute, James Madison Institute, Parents Defending Education, Reason Foundation, Stride, and yes every kid. It's a Who's Who of privatizers (and a pretty good list of people who abandoned the charter and school choice cause once they smelled a chance to go full voucher).

So what's the plan here?

There's nothing new in the rhetoric from EFA. Here's the welcoming paragraph from their home page:

The Education Freedom Alliance believes public education dollars can and should follow the student, not the system. Our current “one-size-fits-all” system of public education simply does not work for every student or every family. While there are plenty of students who do perform at their highest level in their local public school, every child is unique, and states should provide parents with options for their children to thrive through policies promoting education freedom.

It's the current voucher pitch-- we're no longer trying to sell them as refuge for students stuck in "failing" schools, because we now know that the data shows that vouchers aren't better at all. And voucherites have fully adopted the goal of universal vouchers because A) it gets them closer to full privatization and B) rich, well-connected people make way better political allies than poor people.  

There's an assortment of "updates" aka PR pieces for the cause that reflect another key tactic-- to go after vouchers state by state. "Fighting for parental rights and education freedom--one state at a time" is in bold font on their page. Voucherites in Congress haven't given up--the House just advanced yet another bill for national vouchers (also ALEC-spawned). But it's likely doomed like all the previous attempts, and EFA's state-by-state strategy may also be a recognition that the election in November isn't necessarily going to result in a friendly administration. IOW, ALEC may smell some Trumpian flop sweat.

If you're wondering whether or not you're on ALEC's voucher hit list, there's a map. There are all the states where they hope to install universal vouchers by the end of 2025. In some cases, the efforts are already under way, and in others they have tried over and over. 

Of course, in zero cases do they plan to achieve their goal by putting it to public vote, because when taxpayers choose, vouchers lose.

But that's the scary part--because crafting and passing legislation that favors their priorities is what ALEC does. They have the connections, the pipelines, the money, and the experience doing this sort of thing, and they've lined up all the privatization heavy hitters to help out. It's one more reason to get involved in the upcoming election and to pay close attention to what your legislature is up to. Privatizers believe their time has come, and they are ready to push hard.

Why Do State Report Cards Stink

Morgan Polikoff (USC Rosier School of Education, FutureEd) and some folks at the reformy Center for Reinventing Public Education along with the Data Quality Campaign wanted to put together a report on what state report card sites had to say about pandemic learning loss trajectories. 

What they found is what lots of us could have told them-- the state school report card sites kind of stink.

The report itself is pretty brief. Do state sites provide longitudinal data? Only a few provide it, and not in any manner that is easy. Most commonly they provide Big Standardized Test data, graduation rates, a few other odds and ends, again, not always easy to find. 

And "Overall, state report cards were remarkably difficult to use." Sometimes technical issues. Sometimes too much data in unwieldy format, and some just damned near impossible to navigate. I'd add to the list sites with a whole lot of edu-jargon that parents will need to translate. Add on top of that that most of the sites are hard to locate in the first place. In the process of writing about education for over a decade, I have often gone looking for information about particular schools, and not once has a search engine directed me to a state's report card site.

In his frustrated take over this adventure, Polikoff asks the right questions. For instance, "who is the intended user?" Is there an audience for these sites? One theory, favored by some reformy types, is that parents trying to pick a school will head to these sites to shop for a school. But most of the information that a parent would want is just not there at all, and maybe some folks should finally release the dream that parents will choose schools based on Big Standardized Test scores (and not sports programs or location or who else has kids going there).

It's that same childlike faith that transparency and data will drive the education marketplace towards excellence, which is doomed because A) excellence in education defies transparent data collection (BS Test results are not it) and B) that's not how the marketplace works, anyway.

I'm not sure there is any audience for these sites at all. It's the kind of thing I think of as a library publication--something that puts down information that needs to be stored somewhere, because it's important and the odd researcher or historian may want it at some point. Like the big 19th century history of your town, or your family genealogy, or a book of instructions for household plumbing repair. It doesn't have an audience in the usual sense of the word, but it's information you put somewhere just in case someone needs it.

If there is an audience for these sites, it would probably be some federal regulatory office that gave states the impression that they would be held accountable for some assortment of these data. So like a lesson plan-- somebody told you you have to do it, but that doesn't mean they (or you) are going to look at it. Perhaps a state could use this information to actually direct assistance to schools, and certainly some states have used public school performance data to target those schools for privatization. But do either of those processes require an actual state report card website? 

Is there an audience at all? I checked Pennsylvania's Future Ready site on a traffic checking site and found that it averaged 737 visits a month since April. Florida, a more volatile education state, shows around 950 per month during that time (and 4% of the traffic is from India). Now maybe if we drill down into pages within the site, we find better results. But should state functionaries be putting in much effort for that kind of traffic. Or should they be trying to drive traffic there to justify its existence? 

So Polikoff's last question, based on an observation made by some members of his committee.

Are state reports doomed to be compliance exercise?

Well, yes. Yes, they are. Compliance exercises are the special hallmark of state governments, especially in areas like education where politics demands answers but actual meaningful answers are hard to come by. And as Rick Hess has observed, while it may be easy to make someone do something, it's hard to make them do it well. Particularly when it's unclear why you're doing it.

The Weightlessness of History

We Americans are extraordinarily gifted at throwing off the weight of history. If it didn't happen to us, it didn't happen. As we move through the years, events start to shift and fade from our collective memory.

Sometimes its surprises, even alarms us, as we watch the major events of our own lives circle the memory hole for the generations that follow us.

I think about this phenomenon every September 11 as teachers across the country try to somehow convey to students the importance and impact of that day. In 2022, almost 25% of the population was under the age of 20, meaning 9/11 is some distant noise, a thing that adults like to talk about and it seems to bother them, but it's about as real as D-Day and the Tet Offensive. Yet somehow teachers are supposed to get it all across to students, even as today's media landscape is occupied mostly by the Presidential debate and Taylor Swift's political endorsement (make your bets now on which will have a greater effect on the election). 

What are teachers supposed to convey? What are the lessons of 9/11? Why do we want young people to remember it?

I think some of it is really basic-- this happened and it was awful and we want to make sure that everybody gets it. There is something in trauma that seeks confirmation, an acknowledgement that the awful thing really did happen.

In fact, I think part of the appeal of 9/11--well, I hesitate to call it nostalgia, but there are always a few people who express that they miss the moment when Americans all came together. Often that's expressed as a moment of patriotism, and that was certainly part of it, but I think the root of that moment was that, for just a day or two, we shared an actual consensus reality. We all agreed on what had happened and how we felt about it. 

Now, what we wanted to do about it was another matter. Everyone bought an American flag and stopped badmouthing the President. But also, right up the road from me, a man waited in a high school parking lot to accost a student after school because she was vaguely Arab-looking. 

And very shortly, the consensus reality broke down, and we've felt a little sad about that ever since.

9/11 anniversaries are a reminder that one of the rarely discussed functions of schools is to build that consensus reality, to give a generation common narratives. It's a task that is increasingly challenging. We've got politicians now who don't just promote a spin on events, but insist on narratives that aren't even based in reality. We've got a whole movement promoting the idea that we should let folks send their children to schools differentiated by the different narratives that they teach and promote, consensus reality be damned.

It's not a simple balance to strike. Some of the consensus reality if 9/11 was not true, and insisting that everyone agree to one unchallenged, unexamined consensus version of reality is central to authoritarianism. 

It's our challenge as humans. We are limited, limited in time and space and experience and perception, and feeling the reality of events outside our direct experience is hard. Sometimes, the result is trivial (if you weren't in a theater seeing Star Wars for the first time in the summer of 1977, you don't really get it). Sometimes it's larger (if you haven't been through divorce, you don't really get it). And sometimes it is fundamental to our identity and understanding of the past (what is the story of our nation's founding, really). 

It's part of our fundamental struggle as humans-- how do we bridge the gap between what we feel and know in our own bones with the feelings and knowledge of other humans. How do we convey the narratives of the past in any meaningful way? Can we give the world and its history some real weight, enough to tether ourselves to it? Can we do it before that past becomes so weightless that it simply floats away, lost to generations yet to come?

Language is our tool. That's why we make young humans learn it--because it is the main tool to bridge the gap between themselves and everything and everyone else (not because it helps get high scores on a Big Standardized Test). It is how they grapple with the question of how to be their best selves, to become fully human in the world. That's education. Some of us may feel all of that a bit more sharply today, but it's the mission every day.