ICYMI: Helene On Earth Edition (9/29)

My heart goes out to the folks caught in the massive flooding and destruction that kicked off the weekend. That is some scary stuff, and I can't imagine how heartbreaking it is to lose someone to this kind of overwhelming force of nature. Stay safe and hug your loved ones.

A little bit of reading this week. Here we go.

A ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Michigan Advance does an interview with Josh Cowen about his book The Privateers (worth a read). Some good questions in this particular sit-down.

Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know

Jan Resseger looks at yet more research showing that vouchers do not deliver on the promises made for them. 

Poetry and democratic education

This paper by Nicholas Tampio is sitting behind one of those academic journal paywalls, so you may or may not be able to get to it. But it's an interesting topic-- is poetry writing just too impractical and not-on-the-test for schools, or is that an important function being overlooked.

“Necessary But Not Sufficient”

John Merrow weighs in on the topic of cell phone bans in school. Is it enough of a good thing?

Are You an Instruction Geek?

Nancy Flanagan has kind of had it with the yappy bowties out to vandalize public education.

Learning Systems: Shaping the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Bellwether has a trio of papers about AI in education. There's a lot to chew on here, and some doses of reality included. But if you're looking for a comprehensive pile of ideas to burrow through, this might work for you.

PragerU Collaboration Proves South Carolina Is Banning Books

Steve Nuzum looks at South Carolina's continued effort to limit what students can read. 

FLBOE Requests Budget That Doesn’t Keep Up With Inflation… Again

It's as if Florida's leadership doesn't want to fully fund education. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains the details. 

A school choice star is unborn

One of the most thoughtful takes on the current fall of Corey DeAngelis has come from Chris "Citizen" Stewart. Yes, that Citizen Stewart, the long-time school choice advocate. 

The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

From back in July-- Scientific American's editors, of all people, pointing out that SCOTUS is off the rails, and some of their school decisions are on the list.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I wrote about a report that shows that history teachers are not indoctrinating students, and a school district in Florida has buckled to pressure to put their books back on the shelves.

Join me on substack, where Zuckerberg can't take down my posts for no apparent reason. Always free. 

How Can Schools Respond To Racist Incidents

Tishomingo schools in Oklahoma made the news earlier this month when six students decided to celebrate Homecoming with some racist misbehavior. 

It was a simple enough Homecoming activity. "How do you spell victory?" said the signs. Students were to wear black t-shirts and receive random scrabble tiles they would use to make the highest-scoring word. Instead, six white students decided to use their tiles to make the N word, and took a picture of it, and posted it on line. The resulting uproar resulted in canceled Homecoming events. 

I'm well familiar with the teen boy mindset that enjoys the thrill of deliberately transgressive actions (we all are, because a whole lot of boys carried it out of their teens and onto the internet). It comes from two realizations-- one is that words can shock people who take them seriously, as if words mean something, and two is that you can disown the meaning of your own words by declaring they're a goof. Put those two together and you get people who enjoy the power of poking people in the eye with your language even as you discover the liberation of amputating your own empathy. In short, there is a point in teen development (coming somewhere around reading your first Ayn Rand novel) when one gets a kick out of being a performative asshat.

So maybe that's what these six were coming from. But there's no excuse for someone in 2024 not understanding that 1) this act would be really wrong in a non-funny way and 2) the internet is not private. 

I feel for some of the staff. There is a unique kind of gut punch that comes when students make you ashamed of your school. 

But what is a school supposed to do?

Is it part of the school's job to teach students not to act like racist asshats? And how do you even do that? Is it the school's job to help students grow to be decent, civilized human beings, and are we really going to have to argue with people who want to argue that learning to be a decent, well-educated, civilized human being doesn't necessarily mean unlearning racism, or, at a bare minimum, learning to keep your racist asshattery unspoken and unshared?

At many schools, an incident like this might prompt some soul-searching and mission-tweaking in the school district, a determination to address the issue programatically.

But this is Oklahoma.

Oklahoma where HB 1775 was passed in 2021, the first of those anti-CRT "divisive concept" bills meant to forbid teachers from saying The Wrong Thing in class about race. This is where the Tulsa chapter of Moms for Liberty said, sure, teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre, but don't go blaming racist White folks for it. 

Oklahoma is where, to make sure everyone knew they were serious, the state Board of Education under dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters threatened the accreditation of two school districts over lessons about racial bias and cultural competency. And they did it without clear and specific charges, so that districts could wonder anxiously just where the fuzzy, vaguely drawn line actually lies. 

Oklahoma is where Black teachers had to take it upon themselves to teach critical pieces of history on Saturdays, outside of school. Which means, of course, that students like those sic White boys from Tishomingo were not getting the lessons.

This is an issue we haven't successfully discussed or responded to as a country in ever. Do we use education to further certain values because society, particularly a society that includes folks from a whole lot of backgrounds, would be improved by them. Do we do it even some people don't share those values. We have no problem with the question when it comes to values like "work hard" or "be honest," but when it comes to "don't be a racist asshat," we stumble. In the Land of the Free, should racist parents have the right to raise racist children? And does the school have to step aside and let them be?

There's no reason to expect schools to navigate racial issues any better than the country as a whole. Schools exist downhill from the culture, and when the culture includes elected officials who traffic in racist rhetoric, that will inevitably trickle down to schools (and that's before we even get to the non-zero number of racist teachers and administrators).

But I know this--stunts like the one pulled by six White students at Tishomingo are not okay, and schools must find ways to help students do better, and that doesn't include passing laws to prevent children from hearing unpleasant truths about the nation's history.

VT: Court Backs Unqualified Education Chief

Vermont Governor Phil Scott installed an education chief of dubious qualifications over the objections of state legislators. Now the court is covering her butt. 

Our Story So Far

First, a recap of how the state arrived at this point.

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSA was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

 
Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department.

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens.

And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes (okay--one whole day) after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either.

In June, two state senators (Tanya Vyhovsky and Dick McCormack) sued the governor and Saunders for "purposefully circumventing" the Senate' authority to confirm or deny appointments. As reported by Sarah Mearhoff at VTDigger, another news site that has stayed on stop of the story:

“This is now no longer even about the secretary of education,” Vyhovsky told VTDigger in an interview. “It’s about separation of powers and the right of the Senate to do the job that it is constitutionally and statutorily given.”

So now...

Yesterday, the two sides got to speak their piece in Vermont Superior Court in front of Judge Robert Mello. Mello was appointed by Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2010. 

Mello promised a quick decision on Thursday, and sure enough-- he issued his ruling today (Friday).

Judge Mello dismissed the lawsuit:

To the extent that the Senators argue that the Senate’s decision to not confirm Ms. Saunders prevents the Governor from reappointing her, whether on an interim or permanent basis, the court disagrees...When the legislature has wanted to so limit the Governor’s appointment power, it has simply said so.

The reference is to legislative action that specifically forbid the governor reappointing someone to the Green Mountain Care Board after the Senate rejected them. Apparently since the legislature didn't specifically list another time that the governor is not allowed to overrule them, well, too bad. 

What comes next? We'll have to wait and see, but in the meantime Saunders can keep treating the job as hers, "interim" notwithstanding, because there's no sign that the interim is going to conclude any time soon. 

 

Power and Priorities

This week the Washington Post ran a story about the millions of Americans who do not control the thermostats in their own homes. It's a feature of a deal that many folks make-- in exchange for a cut on their utility costs, they let the electric company take control of the HVAC in their home. It's one more way that the US is finding to cope with a demand for electricity that is, a certain moments, outstripping the ability to generate and deliver the needed power. These deals are pretty commonplace; at my folks house, certain major appliances cannot be run during certain mornings of the week.

This is wrapped up in a larger issue--a power grid that is struggling to keep up. Experts have been sounding the alarm for a few years now. Our electricity supply is not infinite, and our ability to deliver electricity is not limitless. 

More humans means more demand, and as demand increases, the grid is more inclined to stumble. 

Which takes me back to the conversation that we aren't having about AI.

We talk a lot about the ethics of students using AI to cheat. We talk about the various techniques and methods for taming the AI beats by embracing it in the classroom. 

But we generally have these conversations as if there is no cost to the choices we make. And that's a false assumption.

Should a family do without heat or air conditioning for part of the day so that a group of seventh graders can cheat on their homework? Should a home go through a brown out so that someone can get AI to generate a picture of Donald Trump riding a unicorn? Should anybody have their HVAC turned off so that Google can generate a bad summary of search results that people ignore anyway?

Plus, you know what happens to a commodity when it becomes more scarce--it becomes more expensive as the folks competing for it bid the price up and up. Are we all going to pay more for electricity so that AI can crank out more mind-numbing content for internet advertisers? Is steady, dependable electricity going to become a luxury item only available to the well-to-do?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of one of America's most alarming nuclear accidents, to help power their AI data center. 

AI is a big part of this, but Crypto also eats an awful lot of processing power. And for people who love their electric vehicle because it runs on cheap, readily available energy--well, that's what folks thought about automobiles for decades. 

And all of that is before we even start to talk about the other rare resource involved, used to cool the server banks that make the magic happen. AI is sucking up mega-gallons of water. 

Maybe clever people and market forces will sort all this out. But I would feel better if we were having an actual conversation about the cost-benefits ratio involved in using precious resources to create state-of-the-art CGI porn and help Junior whip up an Animal Farm book report. AI isn't a lot of things, and one of the things it isn't is free. 

Regulation Via Phone Call

This week Leslie Postal wrote a piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel covering the new edict from the state sex education in Florida must henceforth be non-sex education. 

Florida has told school districts around the state that they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence, according to district officials and an advocate for comprehensive sexual health education.

This is all sorts of a mistake for which future generations of Florida men and women will pay a price, but there is something else worth noticing in the story.

As several folks on Twitter have pointed out, the story indicates in several spots that the state's instructions were delivered via phone calls and discussion. In other words, not via anything actually written down. 

That's a problematic choice in Florida, where the government's most common reaction to complaints over a new law or policy is "You just didn't understand it right." The "don't say fay" law wasn't saying that at all. The book not-really-bans were being implemented so bizarrely and haphazardly because people were misunderstanding it or even trying to deliberately make it look bad. Or that chaplain law, where DeSantis was thrown off by the actual words printed in the law. 

It gets hard to keep reinterpreting rules on the fly when they are actually written down. So why not simply avoid leaving a paper trail at all. Deliver your edicts verbally so that nobody can prove that you said something in particular. "What?! Well, we never. Clearly these folks misunderstood the instructions we gave them." 

Delivering directives verbally also allows a level of tone that the printed word does not. It's a way to go if you don't think a memo is intimidating enough.

If this is the new SOP for Florida's department of education, there are more difficult times ahead for educators trying to do their jobs and keep their butts covered at the same time. Good luck to them playing a political game of telephone.

 

Why These Sex Scandals Matter

I'm old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he's been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn't picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate-- Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren't wasting so much time panicking over other peoples' business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal-- the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose--matters for several reasons. 

For one thing, whenever someone puts on a public display of super-strong beliefs, the question always hangs in the air-- is this person a true believer, or is this all just a performance. As Rotherham writes, "it's not the heat, it's the hypocrisy." At a minimum, the hypocrisy shows us that there are extra qualifiers in their belief system ("Gay stuff is evil and bad-- except when it involves people I know personally"). At most, it shows us that they didn't believe a word of what they were saying and were just launching opportunistic attacks. And if even they don't believe in it, why should anyone else?

But that in turn reveals another problematic layer, which Rotherham touches on here:

As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn’t mean you should.

It is one thing not to feel empathy or compassion for people who are different. But what sort of empathy deficiency does it take to avoid empathy for people who are, in fact, like you? What does it say about you as a human being when your private personal life does not inform your public life in some positive way?

There are layers to consider here. How can we live in an era in which it is so easy to dig into someone's background, and yet vetting seems to be failing so often--particularly when this same culture war story is repeated over and over and over again? What's the bench strength like in the privatizer world-- will a new chief choice evangelist step up soon? 

I don't wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don't wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can't spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

All of these folks are young enough to have a second act ahead of them. Maybe time will pass and their patrons will declare them born anew, and they'll be back at the same old grift. Maybe they will take a moment to look inside and come to some sort of peace with themselves; living a lie is really exhausting. Maybe it's just a chance for the rest of us to practice grace, a quality far too rare in our culture today, thanks in part to folks like DeAngelis.

In the meantime, voucher debates and culture panic will rage on and we will all have to continue sorting out people who want to have serious conversations from those who just want to play games for personal ambition.

Read To Read

Back in high school, our band director offered a piece of advice to us. When someone offers you a gig, he said, take it, no matter what it is. Playing leads to more playing. 

The Board of Directors has been bitten by the reading bug. This is not a surprise; we have read to them daily since birth and still today, even though as wild old second graders, they read independently. They are surrounded with books. There are all sorts of conditions attached to getting items like toys or Pokémon cards, but they get books often. I pulled this same trick with my older two children, the idea being to raise them thinking that of course every livable home has food and shelter and books and music in it. 

So it's pretty cool that they will read, unprompted, as a high-ranking leisure activity.  

But, lordy, the stuff they read. Some of it's pretty unobjectionable (if you have kids in this age group, I recommend the Branches imprint of Scholastic ). The Investigators are a fine time (got that pick from my grandchildren). But they've also latched onto Dog Man and golly bob howdy but those are hard to take, from the sort-of-humor to the failure to observe some basic grammar of comics (e.g. a page is a paragraph). But it's aimed at a particular audience, and boy does it hit that mark.

I don't really care about any of that. Because reading leads to more reading. 

Every one of us who is a reader has the stories. I read every Hardy Boys I could find and then I found out that Nancy Drew mysteries were cranked out by the same syndicate. I read adventures and someone handed me The Lord of the Rings and then someone saw I was reading that and handed me Gormenghast. You get older and you find your own ways to find The Next Book. Some don't click (there was this gorgeous copy of Black Beauty but I could never get through it). Some are hard to find, or were, back in the day. You keep looking. Reading leads to more reading. 

I think of all this every time I come across someone arguing that students must read certain things in a certain, like the libraries where students are only allowed to take out books that are properly leveled, or the yahoos who still insist that reading a graphic novel doesn't count. Reading leads to reading. 

I also think of this when I find people (sadly, sometimes teachers) advocating for audiobooks or summaries or excerpts, which are sort-of-reading, but not actual reading. Skimming and scanning for answers to a dumb question on a pointless quiz is not reading. Drilling discrete "skills" that are supposed to be components that can be slapped together like an Ikea bookshelf to form actual "reading"--those are not reading. 

Do we scaffold, hand-hold, help them get over technical bumps in the road, or otherwise support students as they read? Sure. But not-reading and sort-of-reading do not lead to reading. Reading leads to reading. 

Am I speaking from the place of privilege as someone who was raised in a reading house? Sure. But I am also speaking from a place of 39 years of teaching students, many of whom were not "natural" readers (nobody is a natural reader--we naturally learn to speak but nobody naturally learns to read). If you can clear out whatever obstacles are in their path, from trouble decoding to a lack of background knowledge to disinterest to a reluctance born of a history of failure to etc etc etc and get them to read--reading leads to reading.

Reading programs (scientific or not) can wander into the mistaken idea that the purpose of reading instruction is to get students to score well on reading tests. But reading tests are not the path to reading. Reading-- being on the receiving end of ideas, emotions, and information put into the world in written form-- is the one thing that reliably leads to reading. Do what you have to do to facilitate that, to make sure that students can read successfully. But do not forget that the point is not testing, but actual reading.