Curriculum As Foundation

I've had a tab open since July, an interview of Robert Pondiscio by Chris Herhalt looking at one particular chapter of the Hoover Institute's retrospective on the modern reform movement, which dates that movement to A Nation at Risk. That's one of the many bad signs about the tome, and there's plenty to disagree with, but I think curriculum is worth discussing.

Part of Pondiscio's shtick has always been one particular point: 

As I like to say, you go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. It’s just math, right? If you need four million of anybody doing anything, a number that large means a normal distribution of human talent.

I think you still have to take great care in how you say that. I was a teacher. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I think teachers are less than capable or cannot be trusted to make curricular decisions. If I said that, no one would listen, and rightfully so. The point is, we’ve made this job too damn hard for the teachers we have.

I'll admit that this point often raised plenty hackles for me, particularly back in the days when the modern reform message included "All educational problems are caused by the many, many terrible teachers in schools, so let's find them and fire our way to excellence." The terrible teacher theory was embraced by many sub-species of reformsters for a variety of reasons. For those who wanted to see teachers unions disempowered, firing a whole lot of teachers seemed like a good way to further that cause. For those who wanted to push school choice, it was one more way to sow distrust in public schools. For textbook manufacturers, it was good hook for selling a "teacher proof" program in a box. For technocrats, it dovetailed nicely with their belief that the whole system needed to be standardized, with all those messy individual human teacher variations smoothed out. Put all those together, and you got reformster ideas like hiring anyone with pulse to implement teacher proof programs as efficiently as a MacDonalds' fry cook. Or the undying idea that we can just find the super teachers and stick them in a classroom with a couple hundred students.

So when Pondiscio says you have take care in how you make the "teachers are only human" point, he's on the mark. 

I can quibble a bit. I do think the talent distribution for teachers skews toward the top of the bell curve because it is really hard to go into a classroom and suck day after day. The students will make your life miserable and drive you out the door well before any administrator ever gets around to putting you on an improvement plan. (On the other hand, given the huge number of underqualified teachers in class room these days-- roughly 7% of the teaching force-- maybe he's right).

The reformster theory of action for years was to use a big stick and threaten teachers into excellence, as if teachers all along knew how to be better but were just holding back until someone put the fear of God into them.

TLDR: A Nation at Risk ushered in an atmosphere in which teachers felt so besieged that it became hard to have a conversation about how they could be better.

But on this point I agree with him:

Any reasonable chance at improving outcomes for kids requires taking a good hard look at the demands that we make of the four million men and women that we have in our classrooms.

That list of demands is huger and getting steadily huger. Has been for years. Is there a problem in society that we want to see solved? Let's give it to the schools to fix it! Some of this makes practical sense-- schools might as well handle lunch programs because school is where students are at lunch time. Dealing with students issues stemming from trauma and difficult homes and societal problems etc etc etc-- we can say that shouldn't be the school's problem and teachers should "just teach," but when a student comes into the classroom, she brings all her baggage with her into the school and it will be hard to "just teach" her until we somehow find a way to help her set that baggage aside.

The thing Pondiscio believes can be lifted off teachers' backs is curriculum. However "the sun will go out," he says, "before we have a national curriculum in this country." So never mind that idea. 

I wish more folks would give up that dream. Waves of reform-- No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and decades of the Big Standardized Test can be understood as attempts to influence/control local curricula from DC, while circumventing the Constitutional prohibition against federal curricular meddling. But that's like trying to trim a bonsai shrub with a dull scalpel toed to the end of a forty-foot pole. Worse, so many of these attempts were steered by people who knew far too little about teaching. And yet in too many places, the Big Standardized Test became the de facto curriculum.

There is no doubt that being a teacher set adrift in a classroom with no scope or sequence or coherent materials just sucks, increasing the mental load of teaching by a hundredfold (I speak from experience). I'll also argue till my eyeballs dry up that a scripted, detailed curriculum (on Tuesday, at 9:15 a.m., the teacher will say "Today we will study the prepositions that begin with the letter b") is a straightjacket that kills any hope of excellent teaching. 

But I agree that all roads lead to curriculum. It's an important piece of teacher support as well as coherence across the system. It improves instruction, gives teachers room to breathe, and even helps with classroom management (step one in classroom management is to know what you're doing and do it with purpose). 

So what features does a curriculum need to make a good foundation for a system?

Content matters.

Here's a point on which Pondiscio and I have always largely agreed-- you can't teach reading as a set of discrete and transferable skills that exist in a vacuum, somehow apart from the actual content being read. Content and the background knowledge it fosters are critical for reading. But the standards movement and its Big Standardized Test have moved us in exactly the opposite direction, to the point that tests often feature topics about which students are unlikely to have any background knowledge (ancient Turkish political systems for elementary students) in an attempt to rule out background knowledge as a factor when testing for "skills." 

Pondiscio argues that a coherent and consistent body of knowledge can be part of the glue that holds us together as a society. That's a valid point. But it also helps build a ladder for learning. When I taught 11th graders Heart of Darkness, we could open up all sorts of new ideas by looking back at one of their 10th grade novels, Lord of the Flies. 

Flexibility.

This summer Auguste Meyrat wrote a piece for Real Clear Education entitled "How to fix the problem of rogue teachers" (in which Pondiscio is quoted on some adjacent issues). Part of the solution for "rogue teachers" is not to create a system that requires them to go rogue to use any of their own professional judgment. 

This is yet another education issue that requires a delicate balance that has to be checked and adjusted every day for the rest of forever. There is no set it and forget it. For an English class, that means the list of works needs to be revisited every year or two. It may mean a curriculum that leaves a spot for the teacher to fill as they best judge.

Two stories. One of my teaching colleagues regularly finished the year with her 12th grade honors class by studying Paradise Lost, culminating in a trial in which they had to argue whether or not Milton had successfully justified the ways of God to man in the work. The trial was run by one of the county judges, and the jury was a combination of teachers, former students, and local attorneys. Only someone with her love of Paradise Lost and with connections to local legal establishment could have pulled it off. Her seniors came back after their official school days were over just to work on this, and underclassmen begged to go watch. It was hugely successful on a variety of levels. Should it have been dropped so that we could adopt a different curriculum "with fidelity." Should her successor in the job have been forced to do the unit, despite not having the tools?

One unusual year, I had a group of fifteen-ish 11th graders, of whom nearly a dozen were either pregnant or parents. My reading and writing units ran on a great deal of discussion, and while every year the concerns and interests of the students are a little different, for that class, they were really different, and it affected the work that I assigned. These were not college-bound students, but they were not the kind of students for whom their life was some vague thing waiting off in the future. They were focused and interested in the things that mattered to them. Should I have been chained to a static curriculum that required me to say, "Sorry, I know you care about that, but we don't have time for it." 

Pondicsio says that it's universal for teachers to dismiss "boxed curriculum" as something that "won't work for my kids." I don't know about that. I expect more of us say something along the lines of "that won't work for all my students all the time." A district hires a teacher for her professional skills and judgement and her own body of knowledge. It seems like a waste not to give her room to use it, just as it seems a waste for her to just wander off into the Land of Do As You Please. Like I said, an endless job of balancing.

The flexibility is doubly important if we're talking about a state-level curriculum. A curriculum that is going to fit urban schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as rural schools in my county cannot be too narrow and inflexible to fit both.

Weather the Storms.

There are no new debates in education. The phonics debate has raged for almost as long as there has been print; "reading wars" is plural because there are so many of them. I was in my forties before I learned that the math world has a couple of camps, including the pure math camp (students need to understand the theories and principles behind the math) and the practical camp (just get the right damn answer). Think theoretical physicists versus engineers. 

Is Shakespeare in or out? And if he's in, should he have the dirty parts removed, because we also argue infinitely about keeping Naughty Books out of school. Who else should be in or out of the canon? Pondiscio is a fan of E. D. Hirsch, but not everyone digs Hirsch's particular canon.  Should special needs students be mainstreamed or have dedicated classrooms? There are business-based educationists who think schools should be strictly focused on preparing meat widgets to be useful to them. And all this is before we get to all the folks whose idea of curriculum is loosely based on What I Learned When I Was In School. I am regularly told, once folks discover I'm a teacher, that it's just awful that schools don't teach Latin or cursive any more (two subjects I am perfectly happy to see fade into obscurity). And I'm an English teacher who sees no value in teaching grammar as anything but a very specific tool for reading and writing. And when it comes to writing, I cringe at curriculum like Philadelphia's new sentences then paragraphs then essays program, a step back to decades past.

I could go on, but you get, I hope, the point--education includes a few hundred pendulums all swinging back and forth, goosed into action every time someone announces, "I know what's wrong and I know what we have to do to fix it!"

A solid curriculum must be able to weather all of these storms, surviving the wrenching back and forth. Way, way, way too many educational ideas are based on the premise, "Once X is implemented, all students will learn Y. X is right, so this debate is decided and will never be opened again." That trick never works. And it's a huge pain when a pendulum swings and leadership decides, "Well, we need to scrap the whole thing. Again. So we can pursue the next Big Education Miracle." 

This is part of why flexibility matters-- if the curriculum is too static and unbending, it will eventually break. 

Teachers in the loop.

If a curriculum is simply done to the people who have to implement it, it is doomed. 

My district, like many, went through regular cycles of "curriculum development," in which teachers were (sometimes) invited into a conference room, where our job was to come up with the correct answers for building a curriculum (aka the answers that someone else had already decided on). It's kind of amazing how rarely the product was not even finished, less amazing how rarely they were actually used.

Most teachers are also familiar with the program adoption in which someone comes in to explain that if you just change everything about how you do your job, this New Thing will be great. I have noted often how over the course of my career, the state's program presentations shifted from earnest attempts to get us to buy in over to "Shut up and do as you're told." 

The most useful curriculum I've had was developed by my department, on our own, because we wanted the kind of help that a structured scope and sequence would provide (I suppose we were what Rick Hess would later call "cage busters"). But we were a seasoned group with plenty of tools and a willingness to devote the time up front that would make our lives easier down the road. One advantage was that it was really easy to tweak and alter the curriculum as needed.

My experience is not possible in all situations, but teachers have to be part of the process somehow. That includes regularly asking them questions such as "Is this working?" and "What do you need to support using this?" on top of the usual supports for training and materials.

Bottom line

The ultimate measure of a curriculum is not its ideological purity or its alignment with the education fad du jour or, God forbid, raises test scores. The measure is "Does it help the teacher do a good job?" I freely admit that "good job" is doing planet-scale lifting here. Nevertheless, it's the measure that matters because it points us back at the flexibility--the beginning ordinary mortal teacher needs different supports than the seasoned veteran teacher.

When it comes to teaching materials, programs, policies, etc I was always a pragmatist-- things that help me do the job are good, and things that get in my way are not. A curriculum that is solid enough to provide a foundation for work and a framework for daily instructional decisions, but loose enough to allow me some freedom to adapt to the students in front of me and adaptable enough to change with reflection and shifting time-- that's a curriculum worth having. 

News From The DeAngelis Redemption Tour

Well, that was fast.

My expectation was that Corey DeAngelis would be redeemed and eventually return to his work, wiping the dust from his shoes after traveling through the village of Dark Past Secret. But I confess that I figured it would take more than a week.  

The only real sign that he was in trouble was being dumped from Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, but after a brief pause, a mountain of conservative school choicers stepped up to voice their support for him. Truth be told, I think better of them for it; AFT's move was pretty cowardly and cold ("Doesn't look like he'll be further use to us-- dump him"). Besides, while I hesitate to call any human being irreplaceable, I don't see any fledgling DeAngelis on the bench ready to leap into the gap.

But when word came that DeAngelis was back on the dead bird app, I wondered what DeAngelis 2.0 would look like. Humbled and more mellow? More feisty? Sadder but wiser? What, I've wondered, would his redemption look like.

Well, no need to keep wondering. It looks like this.  DeAngelis sat for an interview with Christian Broadcast Network News to "break his silence" unveil and DeAngelis 2.0, and he looks familiar. But now we know his origin story, and the rewritten version of history that goes with it.

The story of his decade-ago porn career is a familiar one. He was "drawn into pornographic work" as a young adult, and that's why he's fighting so hard now. 

“If I was able to be lured in to make bad decisions as a young adult in college, just imagine how much worse it could be for younger people,” he said, explaining how the experience became fuel in his fight for educational freedom and reform. “So I fought against this kind of material being included in the classroom. I’ve been consistent. I’ve changed my life. People change over time.”

It's a spin that has been popular in anti-drink revivals for ages. "I fell in with bad companions." It's also a good way to straddle a tricky line. “I did make those decisions. I’m not proud of those decisions, but I can see how it can be deceptive, and the entire industry can be deceptive, especially for young people," says DeAngelis. What's missing is an examination of why DeAngelis. among all his peers, was seduced by this deceptive industry. Not that he owes us an explanation, and if his explanation is "I wanted to" that would be a fine explanation. But if there were another one, it would be helpful in determining how to spot and help those uniquely susceptible twenty-somethings. We're left with kind of accepting responsibility and kind of not. He could just say, "I was a grown-ass man and it was what I thought I wanted to do at the time," but the problem for the brand is that if he accepts too much responsibility for his choices then that lessens the impetus to banish any remotely sexual stuff from anywhere young humans.

But that appears to be what we're going with, and it's an effective enough narrative. 

Then we get into the rewrite of history. The article says that the videos and images "intended for gay audiences, have led progressive advocates to mobilize against DeAngelis."

“There has been a cancellation attempt from the left, in particular, and my political opponents trying to accuse me of hypocrisy,” he said. “Their claims fall flat.”

Except that it wasn't The Left that came after him at all. It was a far-right wingnut website that broke the story (two whole weeks ago), and while I suppose "political opponents" is correct-if-misleading, the drumbeat came from a non-zero number of folks on the right who consider DeAngelis a tool of UNESCO and vouchers an attempt to extend government control over private schools, a sort of Leftist Trojan horse. 

There has certainly been some schadenfreude on The Left, though I would say it's been rather subdued considering the number of people DeAngelis and his troll army have harassed mercilessly. But does it really make sense that The Left is going to be after someone because they did gay porn? Yes, the hypocrisy thing has been brought up repeatedly, but he did not get canceled for being a hypocrite and he didn't get canceled by The Left-- he got canceled by Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, and I'm guessing that it didn't happen because Diane Ravich called DeVos on the phone and said, "You gotta get rid of this guy." 

The question with hard core voices in any debate is "Does he really believe this stuff, or is this just a performance part of the gig?" Two weeks ago it looked like we might have an answer in this casde. Now we're back to "who knows?"

DeAngelis makes a worthy point via Chris Rufo-- "cancellation requires consent." Which is sort of true. Nobody can make you shut up. They (and this is almost exclusively the people on your own "side") can take away your platform and your financial support and your audience can stop listening to you, but you can always keep yapping, especially in this day and age. 

DeAngelis goes on to talk about more personal attacks-- DMs to his wife encouraging divorce, messages telling him to kill himself, a whole bunch of ugliness. It's inexcusable shit, and no human being should have to endure it ever. I don't believe for a minute that it came primarily from his political opponents; that's not the crowd that ordinarily tells people to die because of gay stuff. And it would be awesome if, on the back of his experience, DeAngelis actively told his social media troll army to stop the ugly personal attacks on folks from the other side. Because nobody (and that absolutely includes DeAngelis himself) should have to go through that shit.

There is of course one more requirement for a good redemption story

One of the most compelling ways the dilemma has changed DeAngelis has been in the area of faith. Describing himself as a lifelong agnostic, he said the situation has brought him and his wife, whom he described as a “believer,” closer to church.

“We’re watching our local church on TV each Sunday,” DeAngelis said. “And, the first time that we tuned in a couple of weeks ago, just the things that the pastor was saying — it just brought me to tears.”

Look, as I've said more than once before, I don't wish DeAngelis ill. I disagree with pretty much everything he works for, and I find his online persona toxic and ugly, but he's a human being, and a relatively young one at that. Like him, I'm glad he doesn't have this chapter of his life hanging over him as potential blackmail material. And I would really love to find out that this whole redemption narrative is an authentic shift to bring the world a better version of the privatization evangelist, and not just a carefully calibrated tale to justify the same old shtick. 

Most of us who have reached a certain age have been Through Some Things--specifically, major missteps of our own creation. You learn a lot of stuff from those episodes. In my own case, one of the things I learned is that you are tougher than you think you are, which in turn means you don't have to strike out viciously at everyone you find in any way threatening. Save your strength for when you really need it.

At any rate, having written about the first chapter of this story, I felt obliged to follow up, especially since my first installment was wrong about what the next chapter would look like. We now have the new pitch-- DeAngelis was seduced by the gay porn industry and that's why he wants to protect students from naughty books in public schools. Also, vouchers, and maybe Jesus. And he's got a new job-- senior fellow with the American Culture Project, a dark money right-wing activist group and "stealth persuasion machine", headed up by John Tillman who also runs the Illinois Policy Institute. ACP has done fundraising by railing against "cancel culture" and general wokitude. 

So DeAngelis is going to be doing just fine. I hope the harassment of him and his family stops. I hope he's in a better place now, a receiver of grace rather than a momentarily useful tool. I hope all of his preferred policies fail, and that he abandons his toxic tactics anyway. As he told CBN,

You can change as a person. If you’re in a bad situation right now, you can get out of it like I got out of it.

ICYMI: Applefest 24 Edition (10/6)

This weekend is the major weekend of the year in my small town. We hang a festival on the small peg of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) having lived in the neighborhood briefly before he hit the road. There's an early breakfast, a big car show today, and yesterday the 5K race, which the Board of Directors ran yesterday (after they ran the 1 mile kids race), with the CMO. I play with our 168 year old town band, there are hundreds or craft and tchotchke booths, lots of food, we close the main street through the center of my very picturesque town, and you run into an endless string of people you haven't seen in ages, along with plenty of strangers, because when the weather is perfect as it is this weekend, well over 100,000 people come to town. I will have logged about 50,000 steps by tonight.

There's also a community theater production every year, and this year I was taking a break, but the trombone player took ill so I got to go in and sight read the part for three performances of Annie. Also, to round out the weekend, all four of us have colds. But the up side is that I've been almost completely off line and, golly bob howdy, you don't realize how toxic it is out there until you take your head out of it and spend time with live humans and sunshine.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying that I don't have a lot for you this week, and you should probably go get some fresh air if it's available where you are. Soon as I post this, we're headed back out.

Only One True God

Thom Hartmann at the Milwaukee Independent on the movement to taxpayers to foot the bill for one flavor of religious fundamentalism.

Kim Reynolds wants to privatize education. Iowa supports public schools.

Former teacher Cheris Mortice gives us a look at the struggle to preserve public education in Iowa.

Ryan Walters' school Bible mandate undermines freedom and faith

Clay Lightfoot at The Oklahoman makes the religious case against Ryan Walters Bible mandate.

'Trump Bible' one of few that meet Walters' criteria for Oklahoma classrooms

Yup. Turns out only a couple of Bibles being published meet the dude-bro-in-chief's definition of an appropriate Bible for schools.

Benson optimistic about repeal of school voucher law

A reminder that in Nebraska, there's a chance to roll back vouchers on the ballot.

Cynical Politicians Try to Frighten Us with Inaccurate Stories about Teachers and Public Schools

Jan Resseger reminds us that teachers are not the monsters certain politicians claim they are.

The Barr Foundation and the Boston Globe “Rig the Discourse”

Maurice Cunningham continues to unravel Massachusetts's example of how owning the press helps you rig the conversation.

Something Bigger Than Me

Jose Vilson talks about recruiting teachers with students and teachers. 

“Union Mouth”

Nancy Flanagan on the nastiness that certain privatizers have grown on line.

Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird

Indeed. The York Dispatch editors comment on the latest Inde[endence Law Center-aided attempt to shame LGBTQ students.

Peggy Jones and the Importance of Public Schools

Occasionally voters in Florida get it right. Accountabaloney highlights one such victory in the heart of Moms for Liberty country.

The AI-in-education conference circuit – what are the vibes?

Benjamin Riley brings word back from the world of the AI-education hustle.

Over at Forbes, I looked at a report about trouble filling teacher positions, and a reminder of the problems caused by centering The Big Standardized Test. 

Join me over on substack and get my stuff in your email to peruse at leisure. 

NPE Launches National Center for Charter School Accountability

I'm a member of the Network for Public Education, a group that does a lot of work in support of public schools in this country. Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch is the president, and Carol Burris is the executive director. 

NPE is not a particularly wealthy organization, with neither a hot line or dark money or union shilling, but it has created a number of reports researching charter schools, voucher programs, and state support for public ed, and they've just launched the National Center for Charter School Accountability. 

The mission is pretty simple:

The National Center for Charter School Accountability provides research and recommendations on increasing transparency and accountability for charter schools.

The NCCSA provides a collection of facts (e.g. 26% of charter schools close by year 5, 35 states allow charters to be run for profit, and 34 states do not require all charter teachers to be certified). An interactive map lets you see what the conditions are in any state, including ratings for the state on charter items like protections for students, and community input. 

The website is a quick, simple resource for some basic information about charter schools in the U.S.

NH: Suing For The Right To Harass Teenagers

New Hampshire is getting a lesson in the real cost of trying to crack down on trans teens. 

Like many other states, New Hampshire has seen many attempts to "protect" girls' sports from trans students. One attempt in 2021 to pass a legislative ban on trans athletes was shot down along party lines.

But in 2024, HB 1205 was passed, "maintaining integrity and balance" in sports by banning transgender girls from playing sports. That law was supposed to take effect this fall, but first the families of two transgender teens sued the state. 

One of the girls asked for a speedy ruling from the federal judge hearing the suit so that she could start soccer practice with her team. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty granted the request with just hours to spare. 

So Parker Tirrell, a sophomore, started the soccer season. 

“Playing soccer with my teammates is where I feel the most free and happy. We’re there for each other, win or lose,” she said in a statement. “Not being allowed to play on my team with the other girls would disconnect me from so many of my friends and make school so much harder.”

As that might suggest, Tirrell has long been accepted as a girl at her school. In fact, she has played on the team in previous seasons. So no problems here, right?

Of course not.  

Tirrell plays for Plymouth Regional High School. When parents of an opposing team from Bow High School caught wind that their daughter would be facing a trans player, they complained to the athletic director. He told them that the court decision tied his hands. So Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote chose another path. According to court documents, they bought some pink wristbands (not the tiny "cause" ones you're thinking of) and Foote wrote "XX" on each. Their daughters asked their teammates if they'd all like to wear the wristbands , but not everyone wanted to, so the team did not participate in this "silent protest." Foote posted on Facebook the night before that he would be attending the September 17 game against Plymouth to show "solidarity."

According to the parents' account, nobody wore the wristbands in the first half, though some other spectators asked for some as well. At halftime, Foote went out to the parking lot to put a Riley Gaines photo on his Jeep's windshield. Fellers already had a "Protect Women's Sports for Female Athletes" poster on his car. Then he and Fellers put on the wristbands for the second half.

School officials and a police officer told the parents to take the wristbands off. There were words. The First Amendment was thrown about. Fellers got thrown out. When others refused, a match official stopped the game and said that Bow would forfeit if they weren't removed. Two fathers were given no trespassing orders and barred from the school grounds, one for a brief period and the other for the fall term. Did the fathers take this moment to cool down and reconsider their actions?

Of course not.

They sued. They filed a federal lawsuit against the Bow School District, the superintendent, the principal, the athletic director, the policeman at the game, and the referee. Fellers and Foote each had some words:

“Parents don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the entrance to a school’s soccer field. We wore pink wristbands to silently support our daughters and their right to fair competition. Instead of fostering open dialogue, school officials responded with threats and bans that have a direct impact on our lives and our children’s lives,” commented Kyle Fellers. “And this fight isn’t just about sports—it’s about protecting our fundamental right to free speech.”

“The idea that I would be censored and threatened with removal from a public event for standing by my convictions is not just a personal affront—it is an infringement on the very rights I swore to defend,” explained Andy Foote. “I spent 31 years in the United States Army, including three combat tours, and the school district in the town I was born in—the one my family has seven generations of history in—took away those rights. I sometimes wonder if I should have been here, fighting for our rights, rather than overseas.”

I will readily admit that transgender athletes raise some issues, and that reasonable people can disagree.

But.

When you're setting out to publicly harass and embarrass a young human teenager, you have lost the plot. When you are arguing that the First Amendment protects your right to make a 15 year old human child feel unwelcome and unsafe, you have lost any right to sympathy.

The lawsuit has been brought by the Institute for Free Speech, a law firm that is based not in New Hampshire, but in DC. They were founded in 2005 as the Center for Competitive Politics. They have ties to the State Policy Network and the Council for National Policy as well as Koch, Uhlein, and Bradley piles of money. Their previous claim to fame is going to court to help establish SuperPACs as a thing. 

Plymouth is a town of under 7,000 people right in the middle of the state. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies there. How did they get connected to a big time DC firm?

Who knows. But the protesters aren't done. Though Foote and Fellers can't attend, the September 24 game drew a host of folks wearing the pink wristbands, including this fine group--

Jeremy Kauffman, an activist withe Free State Project, the storied attempt to engineer New Hampshire's takeover by Libertarians

Rachel Goldsmith, an activist with the FSP who also headed up the Moms for Liberty chapter that put a $500 bounty on any teacher caught violating the "divisive concepts" law

Terese Bastarache, an anti-vaxxer running for public office

Jodi Underwood, another free stater who tried to cut her school district's budget in half

None of these folks live in the Bow and Dunbarton School District. And despite their Libertarian streak, they seem to feel that some folks should not be able to live free. But that hasn't stopped a storm from being unleashed on the district, as captured by Sruthi Gopalakrishnan for the Concord Monitor and NHPR:

Alex Zerba stood before a crowded school board meeting in Bow on Monday night, scanning the seated crowd of unfamiliar faces around her in the Bow High School auditorium.

“We don't want you supporting our girls the way you are,” said Zerba, a parent of a girls varsity soccer player. “You are not a parent of any of these girls on the soccer team. We are asking you to stop your protesting. It is hurting our girls.”

But plenty of actual local residents also demonstrated that they don't get it, like Steve Herbert:

“I'm disappointed in every one of you,” said Herbert looking at the school board members. “You just silenced somebody who had a different opinion. There was nothing wrong. There was no voices, there was no mean words. It wasn't directed at anybody.”

Of course it was directed at somebody. As the superintendent pointed out, the pink bands were not intended to support women in sports, but to protest a specific player, to tell a young human being that she was not welcome, that she was not okay. 

This is the inevitable end of trans panic sports bans-- either a young athlete is attacked, her identity questioned, and her family forced to endure some kind of genital or dna check because the parent of a defeated opponent demands proof. I have never been entirely clear on what the purpose of trans sports bans is supposed to be-- convince young humans not to be trans because they won't be able to play sports? To drive young trans athletes underground? But the actual effect of these bans is quite clear; they result in the harassment and mistreatment of young human beings. 

Yes, I recognize there are many viewpoints and that this is a relatively new issue that we are collectively struggling to deal with. But if you cannot start from the foundational understanding that trans human beings are, in fact, actual real human beings, then you are not going to arrive at any place good. 

AZ: Fighting For Less Accountability for Taxpayer Funds

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona right wing advocacy group, has filed suit against the state because it thinks there are too many rules attached to the state's voucher program. Parents using the education savings account money shouldn't have to show that they've used the taxpayers' dollars for something educational. 

This is a battle that is a predictable crossroads on vouchers' path to their ultimate destination, and it deserves our attention for that reason.

When states started handing taxpayer dollars out as voucher money for families, two factors were always going to come into greater and greater tension.

On the one side, there will be people who want to spend their free money from the government with the minimum number of restrictions. "That money is ours now," the voucher parent argument goes, "so nobody should be able to tell us what to do with it." Look for the word "permissionless" as in "we don't need your permission to do whatever we think is best.

On the other hand, where taxpayer dollars go, calls for accountability are likely to follow. This is particularly likely for school voucher programs, every one of which was created and passed through legislative back doors, often over the objections of the actual voters. So there was always going to be a moment when those taxpayers said, "They spent my tax dollars on what now?" Lack of transparency and accountability are a systemic issue for voucher programs. 

Arizona is a prime example. Way back in 2018 news swept the state that $700,000 of voucher money was spent on items like beauty supplies, sports apparel, a host of other unapproved vendors, all caught only by state audits of the program. Since then there have been $900 Lego sets, Broadway tickets and espresso machines. It made actual news when the Arizona state board actually denied an appeal by a parent to approve use of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to buy three dune buggies (only after an appeal hearing officer okayed the purchase).

Enough of these sorts of shenanigans, and taxpayers are going to want to see some transparency and accountability.  

There are people on the right who already called this one, people who oppose vouchers because in vouchers they see one more way for government to get its sticky hands on the operation of private schools. They're not wrong. Taxpayers may tolerate a private school's desire to teach Flat Earth science or Aryan supremacy or whatever nonsense--until they discover they have to pay for it. Then they start demanding transparency and accountability.

For the Goldwater Institute, a good number of rules to attach would be "none." So they have launched a suit from a couple of homeschool moms who argue that the state should let them buy whatever materials they deem appropriate without tying them to any actual curriculum. One of the moms 

explains that she is “individualizing my child’s educational needs from minute to minute throughout the day,” meaning her curriculum is ever-changing. “It’s been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum,” Velia says.

The other mom, who has nine children and is homeschooling seven of them, complains that the government is putting more requirements "on the list." Goldwater has some other pieces to their argument, starting with the complaint that teachers don't have to prove paper and pencils are appropriate for a curriculum:

As Velia explains: “No other teacher in the state has to provide curriculum for purchasing things for their classroom.” So, requiring parents to jump through the hoop of documenting a “curriculum” for materials that are obviously educational does nothing to prevent abuse of the program beyond the extraordinary lengths parents already have to go to in submitting expense receipts for every purchase.

I believe some actual classroom teachers have some hoops they would love to show you. Then we can talk about what "obviously educational" could possibly mean.

The villain in the Goldwater story is Attorney General Kim Mayes, whose shtick is being a consumer protector. This whole "curriculum" business is just "a cynical, illegal attack on the ESA program, and it's making life harder for parents and children alike." Says one of the moms, Mayes should "actually be supporting ESA parents and children so they can get the education they deserve." In this context, "deserve" is a rather loaded term.

Hayes' office has a response:

The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education. With instances of voucher dollars being spent on things like ski passes, luxury car driving lessons, and grand pianos, it’s clear that providing documentation on spending is essential to prevent the misuse of taxpayer funds. Attorney General Mayes believes Arizonans deserve full transparency and accountability in how their tax dollars are used and will continue to fight for accountability and oversight in the voucher program.”

Goldwater throws out the old "nobody knows the child better than the parent" line, but that's not really the issue here. I know my children pretty well, but that doesn't mean I know best what materials should be used to teach them advanced calculus or conversational Chinese. Knowing your child well does not make one an expert in varieties of pedagogy. 

Nor does "I know my kid, so just trust me that these taxpayer dollars are being legitimately spent" make a really good argument. 

If you want to use the taxpayers' dollars, you owe the taxpayers an explanation of what you did with it. I know that's not the dream of folks like the Goldwater Institute, but this was always going to be the next voucher debate. We'll see which side the court decides to take. 

What The Heck Did Vance Just Say About Education??

Vance just spoke at a Christian nationalist rally in Monroeville (a Pittsburgh suburb), and some of it was about education. We need to look at the whole thing (I'll include the full clip at the end of the post so you can check my work).

The particular section people are buzzing about is kicked off by audience member Rose Owens who introduces herself as a former teacher who currently works at a homeschool enrichment center. She wants to know what we can do to save our schools and our children from socialism. 

Vance starts by complimenting her family, and then launches into the first part of his answer (at about 13:45). I'm going to add punctuation and paragraphs not to make it sound less awful, but to make it more readable:

Some of the stuff that they're teaching in American schools in 2024, that that's not just liberalism that is crazy and we've got to get it out of our schools or it's going to poison the minds of our young people. And we've got to start today in fact we should have started yesterday, and and ma'am what a big part of this-- and I I've tried to understand this I've been a senator for a couple years and I've tried to understand where is all this crazy curriculum coming from and the honest and unfortunate answer is very often it's paid for by tax dollars. 

In other words it's paid for by those of us in this room, and you ask how that happened is is the answer is well the Federal Department of Education pays a lot of money to develop curriculum that goes into our schools. Well, the money the people they give money to are very often some of the most radical organizations in the world that are developing curriculum that is pro- socialism I would say pro- racism that teaches really crazy ideas on gender that we just don't want in American schools. 

And yeah, I mean it has two negative consequences well first of all the American education system used to be the envy of the world rich or poor alike we believe in this country that every person deserves a quality education. Well, now we've got American children who can't add 5 plus 5 but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders, and I think both of those things are related because we're teaching kids radical ideas we're not teaching them the basics. We're not teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic-- the things that every child needs in order to live a good life.  

And that is to your point this creeping socialism in our schools we've got to get it out of there and I think we cutoff the money stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoned in the minds of our kids.

Lots of people are jumping on this to say that Vance wants to defund public education. I'm not sure that's what he said, exactly. In context, I think it's just as likely he meant to offer one more reason that he wants to end the Department of Education-- because it gives money to radical organizations that create socialist curricula that schools then use. I can easily believe that Vance and his buddies want to end public education; I'm not sure even they are foolish enough to say so out loud. 

There's lots else to unpack. The "envy of the world" bullshit that nods to the myth of a golden age of education that never existed. Those golden days were marked by low level of participation, i.e. many many school-aged children didn't finish school, or even come close. There is not point in history when we were beating the world at education. And I defy you to find any public school classroom in the country where a teacher is skipping 5 + 5 in order to teach about 87 genders. Who has time for socialist indoctrination?

Also notable, and problematic because so few people will recognize it as a lie, is this business about federally-funded curriculum development. That's a thing that does not happen, and which cannot happen because it is illegal for the feds to meddle in curriculum (c.f. a thousand arguments surrounding Common Core). Anyone who believes this is welcome to give me just one example of a curriculum that was developed with federal funding and/or distributed by the feds afterwards.

So if Vance wants to defund the Department of Ed to stop it from doing things that it doesn't do, that certainly seems to suggest that he would also target those folks who actually do it. 

There are other edu-nuggets in this discussion. While chatting with Owens about the challenges of homeschooling, he says this, with his characteristic lack of any irony:

Maybe it is the hardest job in the world to homeschool a seven year old.

Just imagine, JD, what it would be like to teach a whole roomful of them.

Vance also makes his plug for choice, noting that Pennsylvania "could have done a better job here" and then states one of the great mysteries of the culture panic choicer crowd:

We need to give every American Family choice and if we give American parents more choices, they're not going to choose socialism. They're not going to choose racial craziness. They're going to choose good education for their children, and that is the best way to cut out this rot in American public education.

 So even though schools board are elected by local voters, somehow those local voters would all quit the local school system if they could. Who has captured these local districts, and how have they done it? There's a culture panic story that says that back in the seventies, when lefties couldn't take over the country, they just took over key institutions and have been enforcing their ideology ever since, somehow. Teacher programs are all indoctrinating teachers (because one can easily convince a 20-year-old to jettison all their beliefs in favor of liberalism) and somehow all the elected school board go along with it.

Or maybe what Vance means is that Real Americans will want to get out of the public system and get away from Those Peoples' Children. 

Vance also recollects that he was "lucky enough" to go to school in the 1990's, when "we told American children that it didn't matter whether you were Black or White or any other skin color, it just mattered what your character was as a person." And even though he went to a low-ranking high school in Ohio, he got a good education. So maybe that Socialist takeover was more recent? Is Vance nostalgic for the Bill Clinton Presidency? 

The 90's are an interesting choice, because the 90's were the time of Outcome Based Education, an idea that sort of sept the nation and which was protested bitterly by culture warriors of the day like Phyllis Schafly and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, who were sure that it was part of a liberal socialist plot that was ruining American schools. So it's possible that Vance's problem is just early-onset Old Fart Syndrome ("Back in my day, we didn't have this ding dangy foolishness"). 

Or perhaps he just adopted an assortment of stances as a tactical maneuver for the election. But this anti-public education stance is in line with the position of the New Apostolic Reformation dominionist folks he was talking to-- public education must either be taken over or taken out. It's impossible how much of this is plain old lying and how much is just because Vance doesn't have a damn clue about how schools actually work. This is not someone I want to see anywhere near the White House.