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.

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.