Three Lessons from Management Guys

The Algorithm shows me a lot of stuff about management, and I encourage it because I'm fascinated by the issues surrounding management because 1) I think so many problems in this country are caused by plain old bad management and 2) the overlap of management stuff and classroom teacher stuff is fairly large and useful.

This clip gets better the longer it goes. It's Ben Askins, one management stuff guy, reacting to another management stuff guy clip, and they go through three things I want to touch on.

Asking questions.

This has the most limited use in a classroom. I am not a 100% inquiry learning guy-- many times it is quicker and simpler to just go ahead and explain the concept that you're trying to teach than forcing students to stumble around in the dark. Even  if you want to be the Guide on the Side rather than the Sage on the Stage, well-- do some guiding. If you are not in a classroom to share greater knowledge and understanding of the content, why are you there?

That said, if you simply hand students every answer every step of the way, they get mentally flabby and don't retain as much as you'd like. So the questioning approach has value.

Non-punitive accountability

Part of getting students to own their screw-ups (both academically and behaviorally) is to expect that accountability but at the same time not beat them up over it. That wrong answer they just offered does not have to prompt an expression or tone that suggests the student is a dope. Decoupling academic performance from their intellectual ability or worth as a human being avoids a world of hurt and trouble. And really, it's just basic respect for their humanity. Bonus points if you demand they show the same grace to each other. It's fundamental to making a classroom a safe place (I'm pretty sure it's the solution to the Great Cold Call Debate-- cold calls in a safe and respectful classroom aren't a big deal). 

A safe classroom doesn't mean a classroom in which a wrong answer is as good as a right answer, but it does mean a classroom where the students who gave those different answers are treated with the same respect. It's okay to be explicit; my response to wrong answers was sometimes, "No, that's wrong. But you are still ok, and you will still go on to lead a full and happy life." 

Same principle holds true for behavior issues. I have often told my Miss Gause story. She was my elementary music teacher, and one day she caught me in the back of the room mocking her conducting arm flapping. She called me up to the front of the room and paddled the flap right out of me (it was 1968). But what stuck with me was not the paddling, but the aftermath-- there was none. She didn't go on to treat me like some Bad Kid who would forever live in the shadow of that bad behavior. To put another way, the immediate consequence was the only consequence; too often teacher "consequence" for misbehavior is a lingering disrespect for the guilty student.

Fostering creativity and expression

Finally the point that if you tell your people you want them to "think outside the box" but you are "bellowing at them by 9:15 because of some tiny mistake" you will get zero creativity or innovation.  Same for the classroom. If there is only one right answer, and it is your answer, and all others will be shot down mercilessly, then your classroom will not be about exploring ideas or finding ways to express them-- it will be about trying to divine and reproduce the teacher's preferred answer.

This is doubly deadly in an ELA classroom. If you want students to express themselves freely, if you want them to practice forming and developing ideas and interpretations, then you have to support them in their attempts, no matter how far into the weeds they get. For students, every attempt to complete an assignment, respond to a question, participate in a discussion--that's taking a risk, and as the teacher, you get to manage how much of a risk that might be. If you want students to take risks, you have to make trying and coming up short an unintimidating prospect. 

This is so important in a classroom, where students are not just learning how to spit out the Right Answer, but learning how work out a Right Answer on their own. 

SCOTUS Won't Take On Parent Protest Lawsuit

You will recall, back what seems like a thousand years, folks like Chris Rufo whipped some counter-factual frenzies about the supposed presence of Critical Race Theory in public schools, with a side of masking and LGBTQ panic for good measure. 

This led to some parents absolutely going off the rails in school board meetings. This in turn led to a bunch of school board members (who in the majority of districts are simply citizen volunteers who did not sign up expecting violence and death threats) getting scared and sending up flares for help. Which led to the National School Boards Association asking the Biden administration for some kind of help.

That request included the unfortunate choice to liken the most extreme protestors to "domestic terrorists." The NSBA backed that bus right up and apologized, but anti-public school folks smelled blood and decided to press on the attack. In the process, folks on the right sort of fuzzied up the use of the phrase "domestic terrorists" so that in many retellings, it was Merrick Garland who was using it, even as he sicced the Department of Justice on parents just trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

That counterfactual narrative was useful for stirring up outrage, and that in turn led to a lawsuit back in 2022. The plaintiffs were an assortment of parents from Loudon, VA, and Saline, MI, and the law firm was the American Freedom Law Center, a Christian conservative shop that proudly went to fight against "lawfare."

The suit itself was not based on actual reality. In their press release about the suit, AFLC charged the "AG has pejoratively designated these parents and private citizens as ‘threats’ and ‘domestic terrorists,’" (he hadn't) and "that he was calling upon the FBI and federal prosecutors to use the overwhelming power of the federal government’s criminal justice system to target those parents who dare to publicly criticize the local school boards that are indoctrinating their children with a harmful and radical left-wing agenda disguised as school curricula" (nope, just the violent and death-threaty ones).

The plaintiffs kept losing all the way up to the Supremes, and I suppose they had reason to be hopeful, given that SCOTUS has been willing to overlook facts in order to hand victories to christianist folks before. 

But the Supremes passed on this appeal, so the lower court ruling stands, despite arguments citing authorities like an article in the Washington Examiner. The arguments for the AG pointed out some of the holes in the case.

Petitioners only have standing to sue if they show that Garland's memorandum targeted actions they were expecting to take. The memorandum was very clear that it was focused on "threats of violence and similar unlawful conduct." So unless the petitioners intended to break the law as their way of complaining, the memorandum had nothing to do with them. 

At no point does the AG actually call the petitioners "domestic terrorists." To that point, "Neither the Attorney General’s memorandum nor the FBI email refers to petitioners at all, much less brands them with any labels."

Some of the government's arguments are disingenuous, like the "just because we're collecting information and making files, that shouldn't be intimidating anyone." But there is also the reality of what happened next. The DOJ received (as of March of 2023) 22 reports of threats against school officials, and only six of those were referred to local authorities. So the massive crackdown on parents who just wanted to yell at board members about CRT programs never happened. Kind of like the Obama then Biden program to take away everyone's guns. 

At any rate, it looks like maybe this particular legal flap is over and done with. 

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.