Some Reformsters Just Won't Let It Go

A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.

Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman's career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state's education system. 

Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn't approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.

He became one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

The ASD was Huffman's audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run "district." The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

 Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying, 

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that "top 25%" stuff). Huffman couldn't close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing. 

Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman's WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown's Annenberg Institute found that the ASD "generally worsened high school test scores." It also didn't help on ACT scores and "data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either." Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.

But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They're particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.

So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially-- because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get. 

Huffman likes the "gains" in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests. 

But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were gibing in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then "following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them."

It takes a person whose educational "experience" is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.

Huffman argues we need "strong national leadership around education policy," which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn't happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants "the best basic education for their children." I don't know what to do with that "basic" in there. 

How do we get it?

For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.

God, one of my least favorite forms of management-- management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like "sell more." But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target-- test scores.

Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with "a return to nationwide education goals" along with accountability measures. Ans also, grants for states that "pursue ambitious education reform" as, one assumes, defined by the feds.

In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn't worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man-- it all didn't work the first time, and not just "didn't work" but "did more harm than good."

But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don't have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says "if we just use X, every student will learn Y" they are wrong.

He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).

Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their "responsibility to push school districts toward success," a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world). 

The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into "education expert" on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets. 

God Disapproves Of Bluey

You may be old enough to remember the flap over gay Teletubbies. Well, here comes the critique of Bluey for violating God's gender roles.

There have been, apparently, some complaints from "Christian moms" about sassiness and mysticism in the popular kids show (note: we don't follow the show here, but both of my granddaughters are big fans, and they are both brilliant). And there some thoughtful and positive views of the show on Christian media. 

But over on Align, a website that is part of Blaze Media, we find a different take. Blaze Media is the current version of The Blaze, the right wing outfit that started life as Glenn Beck TV, a pay television station that was Beck's attempt to build a career after Fox canned him (it was 2011, so Youtube was still a baby and Tik Tok didn't exist). TheBlaze was also his right wing website. The channel has wandered around, while giving space to the usual crew of right wing commentators. 

The article is written by Jeremy Pryor, who has run an assortment of christianist businesses, including Family Teams, which promotes families as "teams" with everyone taking a traditional role.

Pryor seems like a pleasant enough person (he notes that people don't think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood "besides a particularly annoying youth group song" and I hear that). But he's got some Strong Ideas about how Bluey represents a new version of fatherhood that "embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father." And Pryor has a problem with that.

God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order.

 Pryor argues that lacking a strong symbolic depiction of fatherhood has left us "untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities."

Pryor's doesn't get too far into what that "objective" vision of fatherhood and masculinity looks like in this piece, though we do get a reference to "the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood." So this modern fatherhood typified by Bandit is all backwards--  

It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions.

Pryor has apparently gotten into this elsewhere, and he does acknowledge that even among Christians, his beef with Bluey is a minority view.

Pryor's argument hinges on a feature of right wing thought. It's the belief that there is One Right Answer to life's big questions (in this case, "what should fatherhood look like") and that this One Right Answer is "objective" and unaffected by human society and culture. A video about raising boys with biblical masculinity includes the tag line "it's NOT a social construct.".

I don't want to go down the rabbit of either biblical inerrancy or cultural views of family roles (as parsed for various classes and cultures and ages etc). But Pryor is following in the footsteps of plenty of cultural conservatives who identify what they are comfortable with in cultural roles and then identify a source (the bible, pseudo-science, their own personal genius) to cement the notion that their personal cultural beliefs are actually the One Right Answer according to [insert authority here]. 

Sometimes this trick is performed in a deliberate, self-serving manner, and sometimes it comes from a sincere belief. My sense is that Pryor is sincere enough, and he seems conscious of how his ideas can be co-opted by folks who are off track. But for these folks, education can be a huge threat.

In another podcast video, Pryor explains that schools can be bad for family teams. "What I will not tolerate," he says, is when the child at school starts to think they are on another team, where they have an allegiance to their peers over their family (aka the process that most teens go through). In other words, daring to think that they have an independent life outside the family, some sort of existence in which they are not subordinate to the (properly masculine) father. 

Family Teams has a ton of videos including ones that point out that girls probably shouldn't go to college, nor should a wife earn more than her husband. There is also remarkably little rhetoric about God Himself. 

I occasionally bring up the 5% rule: 95% of everything is just stuff that human beings make up and then pretend is Really Important, and only about 5% of everything is Actually Important. The trick is that we don't agree on what the 5% is. There will always be folks who not only are supremely confident that they have 5% (or more) that is correct, but that it is divinely ordained by some higher authority and therefor Objectively True. In a pluralistic society, not to mention the school system that serves that pluralistic society, there will always be tension between these folks and everybody else. And they will always be arguing for their own favorite social construct and insisting that it's the One Right Answer straight from a Higher Authority. This particular social construct is problematic because it requires women and children to be subordinate to the "team leader." And that's why Bandit, the animated cartoon father who is too much like a mother, is in such trouble.

Another Choice Advocate Gathering

The Interational School Choice and Reform Conference has been a thing since 2010. Here's the goal:

The goal is connect scholars who engage in rigorous research about school choice in ways that illuminate current policy debates.

The conference is historically held in Fort Lauderdale over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend (though last year it was in Madrid). It claims to be "academically sound" with a "rigorous peer-review process." This year they're at the Sonesta Fort Lauderdale Beach hotel. 

This year's list of sponsors isn't up yet, but it doesn't seem to change much from year to year, so we're looking at last year's list. It tells us what kind of operation we're talking about.

Top two Platinum sponsors are EdChoice (previously the Friedman Foundation, the grand mac daddies of school choice policy) and Stand Together, part of the Koch web of philanthroactivism. Those are $30,000 spots.

At $20K Gold level, we had The Heritage Foundation. For Silver ($10K) The Hoover Institute, National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, the Walton-funded and choice-pushing University of Arkansas College of Education, and Stride, the 800-pound cyber-guerilla of the virtual charter biz. In the cheap seats, CREDO (the "research" outfit that studies choice), the Education Freedom Institute (the outfit run by Corey DeAngelis), Kennesaw University (in Georgia), VELA education fund (a joint Koch-Walton that funnels money to choice), and the American Federation for Children. 

The planning committee is folks from universities, plus Drew Catt, the executive director of EdChoice; also Jay Greene, formerly at University of Arkansas and now with Heritage Foundation. The ISCRC "partners" with the Journal of School Choice, which is edited by Robert Maranto at the University of Arkansas. The editorial board includes Neal McClusky (Cato), Rick Hess (AEI), Robin Lake (CRPE), and Mike McShane (AEI). 

To attend, you register as a senior scholar, junior scholar, grad student or as guest of a regular attendee. So clearly we're heavy on the academics at this thin, even as it clearly has advocacy aims-- fostering what Josh Cowen quotes voucher advocates as calling "soldier-scholars" or "counter intelligentsia."

If that doesn't provide enough of a hint of where this is headed, we can look at the schedule. It lists topics and not speakers

The History of the School Choice Movement (Part 1)
Breaking Through Lines: The Impact of School Choice Assignment and Zoning on Education Opportunity 

School System Reform: Cross-Country Insights on Drivers of Student Achievement 

Identities, Ethics, and Rights 

Rural and High School Charters 

Success and Quality in Virtual Schools 

Teachers and School Choice 

Imagining a Free Market in Education: Concepts, Accountability, and Barriers 

Charter School Authorization and Access 

Education Freedom Tax Credits

Regulating Private Education Choice

School Choice Victories: Woo-Hoos and Whoopsies

That's just Day One. I'd come back on Saturday for a couple of topics that invoke the culture war, market research on choice, implementing and measuring school choice, charter school accountability and ROI, and "ESA's: Strengthening This Ever-Growing Option."

The nature of many topics lead me to suspect that some sponsors are also presenting some of their own stuff.

It looks like a fun time. The website pitches it as not too large and therefor great for networking. And it's one more thing to watch for whatever the next reformster pitch is going to be, to see what sort of germs of school choice advocacy will be grown in this particular petri dish. Note: It's not too late to register, if you've got the academic credentials. 

Ted Cruz's Trans Attack Ad

Ted Cruz is running for re-election in Texas and has decided to make trans panic one of the features of his campaign. And it is just everything that's wrong with attempts to target teenaged trans athletes.

The ad shows images of female athletes at a track meet, while a caption says his opponent U.S. Rep Colin Allred has "voted to allow boys in girls sports." How messed up is this ad? Let's count the ways.

1) The track meet is taking place in Oregon.

2) Despite the implication of the caption, the girls are not trans.

3) Nobody with Cruz's campaign asked for permission to use the girls' images.

It's the hundredth iteration of how trans panic ends up causing trouble and trauma for actual young human beings. Over and over again. Like the time some disgruntled parents of second and third place winners filed a protest that they wanted the first place winner's gender checked. Or the various times that states have proposed bills that required winning athletes (female, because for some reason there is never concern about trans men) to submit to a barrage of tests to "prove" their gender. Or the nice folks in New Hampshire suing for the right to harass transgender teenagers. 

There are folks who are going to raise actual issues. What about the safety of players when a trans woman brings "extra" strength to the sport? I get that concern, but does that mean we will also establish some sort of limits on women's strength levels? You can only play a woman's sport if you're not more strong than X, regardless of your birth gender? 

We also hear about fairness, which is part of a larger conversation. Is it fair that one high school athlete's family can afford a personal trainer and coach and another cannot? What about performance enhancing substances-- how much enhancement should qualify as too much? 

All complicated issues, but in the meantime, attempts to use regulations and laws to somehow drive trans women out of any public place come down to trying to make miserable the lives of very specific, real, actual human teen age girls. You can't enforce any of this stuff without violating the privacy of teen athletes, both trans and not.

Cruz's use of actual young human beings as campaign props and additionally making them targets for harassment is just a particularly striking example, but this is what trying to "save women's sports" ultimately ends up being about. Ohio's Governor DeWine gets many things wrong, but when he was presented with a Save Women's Sports Act that promised more harassment of vulnerable teen athletes, he was right on the mark:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

Sacrificing real human beings on the altar of political performance is inexcusable, I don't care how important you think that issue may be.

ICYMI: Canvassing Edition (10/27)

While I hang out with the Board of Directors, the Institute CMO is out canvassing our side of town for the Harris campaign, an activity that she enjoys slightly more than having her teeth pulled, b, as she said, she doesn't want November 6 to come and feel as if there was something more she could have done. 

Since, as far as media go, we are well into the noise and nonsense stage of the campaign, perhaps you'd like to read about other stuff, like education things. So here's your list for the week. Also, Happy Halloween.

The Lionization of Testing and other weird metrics

Did you know that the Operation Varsity Blues mastermind is out of jail, and back in the same business? Testing guru Akil Bello knows, and he also knows that old test scores make a weird sort of credential.

US public schools burned up nearly $3.2bn fending off rightwing culture attacks

The Guardian works out the price tag for defending public schools against culture panic artists and holy smokes but that's some expensive panic!

Teaching as loving grace

I referenced this piece earlier in the week, but it's good enough that I'm putting it here, too. Benjamin Riley writes "an ode to human teaching."

Work Hard. Be Nice. Or Don’t.

Nancy Flanagan reminding us that SEL is always in the classroom.

Latest OCPF Filings; and the Larsen A. Whipsnade “Never give a sucker an even break” Media Awards

Maurice Cunningham gives credit where it's due to Massachusetts media that don't bother to dig into what's behind certain "parent" groups.

Juan Soto and the Trouble with Progressive Education

Jose Vilson on baseball, the five c's, and what progressive education is, maybe.

Early Developmental Competencies: Or Why Pre-K Does Not Have Lasting Effects

At Defending the Early Years, Dale C. Farran with an excellent, research-based, and layperson-friendly explanation of why jamming academics into four year olds is so often a losing proposition. This post is two and a half years old, but it's been circulating again recently and it is just so good, so here it is again.

My Uber Driver Doesn’t Get the Fine Art of Fighting for Education Freedom

This is Rick Hess at Education Next and I know, I know-- I disagree with him on a whole bunch of stuff, too. But he can be one of the most intellectually honest of the reformsters, and this piece uses one more imaginary Uber driver to point out some of the problems with reformster rhetoric.

Florida Creates New Restricted Classical Teaching certification, Bypassing Subject Matter Mastery,etc.

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports on the latest Florida shenanigans to devalue the profession

Republican Attorneys General to Court: We Demand More Pregnant Teens

Yes, really. Madiba Dennie at Balls and Strikes has the details.

First SC state-level challenges include 1984, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, YA titles

Steve Nuzum passes along news from South Carolina, where naughty books can be challenged on the state level. Surely there's no way that can end badly.

From Politics to Hate: Exposing LGBTQ+ People to Extremist Content

We don't hear a lot from Alaska, but Matthew Beck blogs about the state at The Blue Alaskan. Here's a story about a lady who wants to play with the Libs of TikTok crowd, to the detriment of education.

Doomed to Fail

A new Network for Public Education report about charter failure is out and, we have looks at the results from Jan Resseger and Thomas Ultican. 

Charter school enrollment has grown, but research shows they have long performed worse than traditional schools

Meanwhile, other research in Minnesota reaches the same conclusions.

How Americans See Men and Masculinity

Pew Research releases a multipage collection of data and charts and graphs all about how Americans of various ages and genders and politics view masculinity. Nothing about education exactly, unless of course you want to talk about the education of young men. Fascinating stuff.

Over at Forbes.com, I took a look at a proposal in Wisconsin that would make more explicit the idea of two different systems (and tiers) of education. 

I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

Never Mind The Presidency

Look, it's not that I don't think the Presidential race isn't critical. It is. But when it comes to education, A) if you don't have enough information to make up your mind yet, I don't know how you even dress yourself in the morning and B) there are other races that public education supporters need to pay attention to.  

The Presidency matters for education, mostly to the degree that the White House can muck things up. That includes, as we have seen, installing judges who would like to turn the wall between church and state into dust. But again-- if you don't already know that the race for President is a critical choice between a catastrophic mess of a candidate and someone who wants the country to work well, nothing I can type will help (and if you think voting for Jill Stein is a great move, you are truly beyond rational help).

Congress? Also critical, as they control a lot of what can actually happen. We need more people in DC who are interested in actually governing rather than throwing ideologue hissy fits. 

But I want to encourage everyone to pay attention to the state and local contests. 

It is at the state level that the real crazypants regulations happen. It's legislators who drive the pushes for vouchers in states, and they do it largely with impunity because rarely do the voters punish legislators for trying to kneecap public schools, thanks to gerrymandering, doing the damage in the dark, and the electorate's short memory. Anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity, anti-reading-- that stuff happens at the state level.

However, when it doesn't happen at the state level, it happens at the local level. Take Pennsylvania, where the legislature has been Democratic enough to forestall the worst ideas. Instead, right wingers have adopted a district-by-district strategy.  The Independence Law Center is the legal shop for the Pennsylvania Family Institute, whose goal is "for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished."

Though they try to keep their religious motivations quiet, these are Christian fundamentalists trying to impose their view on districts. They offer free counsel to any school board that wants some help with creating some culture panic regulations, and one at a time, they have been providing school districts to be just as repressive as state legislatures in Oklahoma or Florida.

Nor has Moms for Liberty given up and gone home yet. In fact, if you think you don't have a local chapter, you might want to check again. Anti-LGBTQ folks found they could block the new Title IX simply by having a Moms for Liberty member with students in the school, and lo and behold, there are suddenly M4L chapters well beyond those listed on the national group's map. 

People are used to sleepwalking through local elections. Heck, in most years, school districts in my region can barely get enough people to run to fill empty seats. But as someone who follows this stuff, I can't tell you how many times I've come across a story of voters in a local school district declaring, "What!??!! Dang, but I should have paid closer attention to that last school board election!"

Pay attention. Educate yourself, and then educate the people around you. The Presidential election is noisy as hell and will only get noisier, but you are going to feel the effects of those local elections for years. Vote. Come for the Presidential race, stay for the local officials. 

Outing LBGTQ Students

One of the culture panic hills one which some folks want to battle is the issue of schools outing LGBTQ students to their parents. The culture panic crowd is not only in favor of it, but they demand it, and quite a bit of perspective is being lost over the issue.

Take this from a recent Helen Lewis piece for The Atlantic--

Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”

Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed.

A kernel of truth? Letting children pick their pronoun or bathroom is akin to performing what Trump called "brutal" surgery on children. 

Parents Defending Education has a whole collection of outrage-stoking stories of schools with policies that allow students to decide whether or not they want information about their status to be shared with their parents.

Here's just one example-- a story from New Hampshire, where a school allowed "radical LGBTQ group" GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance) to run a professional development center.

GLSEN was founded in Massachusetts by two teachers; in 1994 it branched into other states. Their goals have been centered around making schools into "the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve." For the culture panic crowd, GLSEN is a promoter of "gender ideology" aka "acknowledging that LGBTQ persons are, in fact, human beings." 

But GLSEN told staff things like this:

Although it may be hard to believe, there are students whose emotional and physical safety were jeopardized when school staff outed them to other students and even family members

And that, we're meant to understand, is self-evidently terrible, a crazy thing to tell teachers. 

Except that it's the truth. Here's a graphic taken from a report by the not left-wing Bellwether Partners. 

None of these are great, but consider the homelessness statistic-- more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ young persons experience homelessness, and that's going to be mostly due to being thrown out of their home. Also, LGBTQ youths who feel supported at home reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who didn't feel that level of support. And the picture surely hasn't improved since the pandemic pause.

So we need to ask-- what is the point of an out-to-parents requirement, exerted through either local school regulations or state law? What is it that supporters of such regulations want to achieve?

Lots of these folks seem to believe that LGBTQ persons never occur "naturally," that LGBTQ folks are made, not born, through some combination of indoctrination, seduction, and peer pressure. So perhaps the idea is to create more social pressure to just not "choose" to become LGBTQ. This is a technique that has never worked in the history of LGBTQ persons (which coincides with the history of the world). 

In some cases, the aim seems to be to assert control over children, as if they are a piece of property belonging to the parents. No, the child does not belong to the school. The child also does not belong to the parents, nor to anyone else, because the child is an actual live human being. It is a normal and natural thing as a parent to worry about the twists and turns your child may go through growing up. As old as stories about changlings, the visceral fear that your beloved child may be mysteriously replaced with some stranger. But "if my child has to tell me they think they're LGBTQ, then I'll be able to make them stop it" is not a winning plan.

But a non-zero number of parents react by trying to overpower their children and forcing them to become the person those parents want them to be. (see also "children going no contact")

Separate from them are the folks who want to overpower other peoples' children, as if government power can be used to force LGBTQ persons into nonexistence.

Supporters argue that these rules are about protecting parental rights, but which rights are we talking about. The right to control your child? No such right exists. The right to erase a child's privacy and step over any and all boundaries? The right to know everything about your child? It's a weird dance that the far right does--when the child is a fetus, its rights are supposed to totally overrule the rights of the parent, but once born, the child loses all rights to the parent. 

Whatever folks on the right think mandatory rules will accomplish, the actual results are not hard to predict. Children who feel safe and loved and supported at home will continue to freely share information about themselves with their grownups. Those who don't feel safe at home will quickly understand that they are not safe at school, either. So young people who are at a vulnerable time dealing with difficult questions of identity and their place in the world will be further isolated in world where social media makes teens more vulnerable to all manner of awful stuff.

I have no doubt at all that there are schools and school personnel out there who, in their desire to help, are over the line on these issues. But making wholesale outing of LGBTQ students without any concerns or safeguards for the rights--and safety-- of that student is irresponsible and, sometimes, dangerous. The rules have to treat those LGBTQ persons as real human beings and not faceless threats to a traditional gender orthodoxy. We have to do better.