OK: More Mandatory State Religion

Education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters continues to test the line between church and state, as well as testing the line between fulfilling a state job and auditioning for a federal one. No sooner had Dear Leader cemented his return to the power, then Oklahoma's leading pick-me boy was in the news again, for yet another attempt to ram his version of Christianity into classrooms and homes.

First, he announced the formation of the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism (which, if you stop to think for even a second, makes as much sense as the Department of Bicycles and Vests With No Sleeves) which he promises will align with incoming President Donald Trump’s aim of protecting prayer in schools. They'll be going after anyone who dares to interpret the First Amendment to mean that a public school shouldn't be endorsing any particular religion. Like this example:

Walters cited a September 2023 incident in which a Skiatook school removed Bible verses from a classroom at the urging of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which contended it was unconstitutional for a public school to allow religious displays. At the time, Walters said the removal was “unacceptable.”

Note the term "unacceptable," as if Walters is saying the fault is not that they broke some law, but that they personally displeased him. That's the language you use when you want people to understand that we're not talking about the Rule of Law, but the Rule of You.

“It is no coincidence that the dismantling of faith and family values in public schools directly correlates with declining academic outcomes in our public schools,” Walters said in a statement Tuesday. “In Oklahoma, we are reversing this negative trend and, working with the incoming Trump Administration, we are going to aggressively pursue education policies that will improve academic outcomes and give our children a better future.”

Walters taught AP History; he knows this is ahistoric bunk. But it fits in with his other activities; calling church-state separation a “myth,” ordering Oklahoma districts to teach from the Bible, buying Bibles with taxpayer funds and trying to open a Catholic charter school. Those Bibles they bought-- 500 Lee Greenwood "God Bless The USA" bibles, endorsed by Dear Leader. 

Walters followed that up with a mandatory watch party, demanding that all schools show all students a 90 second video, in which Walters announces the new department, complain about the radical left, say they "will not tolerate" the erosion of religious liberty. Also, "we've seen patriotism mocked and a hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers unions." I guess he cut out the part where he says "like the teacher standing next to this screen, who is evil and woke and out to get you, so don't pay too much attention to her today." Again with the "we will not tolerate that," which I guess is the royal "we." No mention of actual laws so far, just the royal preferences. He wants everyone to be patriotic and their religious practices to be protected. 

Then comes the prayer. He says students don't have to join, but he's going to go ahead. He folds his hands and bows his head. 

Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you've given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions, I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country. I pray for our parents, teachers and kids that they get the best education possible and live high quality lives. I also pray that we continue to teach love of country to our young people, and that our students understand what makes America great and that they continue to love this country. Amen.

And cut. Also, Walters wants districts to send the video to all parents. 

Many districts have indicated they will not be showing the video, and state Attorney General Gentner Drummond says Walters has no authority for any such demand.

"Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents' rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights," said the attorney general's office spokesperson Phil Bacharach.

Not the first time Drummond has told Walters to back it up a step. But history suggests that Walters will just ignore and end up in court over it, which won't really matter, because he's already made his points-- people in positions of authority can too lead prayer in school, teachers are terrible commies, that it is people in power and not laws that rule the land, and he's just the kind of guy that Dear Leader should want with him in DC. Undoing the edict doesn't really unring any of those bells, and the fight looks great on the audition reel for the Presidential transition team. 

ICYMI: Blue Skies Edition (11/17)

Roughly thirty years ago you could have found me logging onto my Compuserve dial-up pay-by-the-minute service to spend some time on the Prodigy BBS (bulletin board system). Soon the isp's started offering all-you-can-eat pricing. "Well," muttered the old timers, "There goes the neighborhood. We'll be crowded out by basement-dwellers who will just never log off." 

Then came faster connection speeds that allowed loading images that looked better than an 8-bit character at a thousand yards. I gravitated to ICQ (an instant messenger program) and the chat rooms (channels, some folks called them back in the day) and made some actual friends (Hey there, #hatrack). Because my daughter was at Penn State, I was an early adopter of Facebook (I skipped MySpace). Found other social havens, like Cafe Utne. Sometimes I would set up an account at a site and it would sit until I could figure out what to do with it (still haven't figured out Pinterest). 

Social sites online come and go. There are problems that nobody has fully solved, like how to deal with people who simply want to kick things over and be an asshat, and yet still respect that whole freedom thing. There also seems to be a bit of an attention span thing; after a while, what seemed interesting and new in a site or online person gets old and predictable. I've watched my audience turn over fairly regularly. I don't think I'm pissing anyone off; it's just that if you've been reading me for ten years, I probably won't surprise you any time soon.

The old conventional wisdom was that a social site burns out in about two years. Facebook beat the odds by turning into something else, and Twitter... well, I'm not sure what it's done. I've been telling you for weeks that I've been warming up my Bluesky account, and this week, a whole lot of people made that jump. Millions of people, though still a drop in a Twitter-sized bucket. But my followers there have gone from about 100 to closing-in-on-700 in a week. Meanwhile, my Twitter numbers have been slowly dropping as many people leave completely.

There are lots of reasons to abandon Twitter, including its conversion as of 11/15 to an AI training source. I'm not leaving entirely (there's too much that I still want to see, and I don't deal with the level of abuse and crappery that some do) but I think it's fine and natural that folks do. Meanwhile, Bluesky has drawn enough people to become interesting, unlike certain failed attempts of the past (looking at you, Google+). Hard to know what comes next; the only thing I'm certain of is that it will be something different.

Sorry--that was a lot. Here's some reading from the week.

Can Trump Force Schools to Change Their Curricula?

There were a zillion takes on Trump and the education department this week. Alyson Klein at EdWeek had a good look at one particular aspect of this looming question-- how does he enforce a woke prohibition?

Closing the U.S. Department of Education: A LOSS for Children with Disabilities

Nancy Bailey looks at how Trumpy education policy may affect students with special needs.

The trans school sports rule the Democrats didn’t talk about

The GOP hammered on trans athletes, and Democrats let them do it. Rachel Cohen digs into the issue, and the Democratic middle-ground proposal that everyone just sort of forgot about. At Vox.

Scam Education Study from Denver

A new study says that choice really helped education in Denver. Not so fast, says Thomas Ultican.

How Do German Schools Teach Their Political History?

Nancy Flanagan suggests that Germany might have a thing or two to teach us about dealing with a problematic past.

Will Trump’s Education Policies Accelerate Support for School Privatization?

Jan Resseger is asking the question and is, as usual, doing all her homework to come up with answers.

Trump and Education

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider also consults the Trump tilted crystal ball.

Will Florida Preempt Local Zoning Laws and Fund Expansion of Near Capacity Private Jewish Schools?

More Florida shenanigans, explained by Sue Kingery Woltanski.

Ohio passes sweeping college trans bathroom ban, first in nation after election

Come on, Ohio. Be better. Everyone else? Pay attention. 

One Alabama school system responds to rise in immigration: ‘What they deserve’

Rebecca Griesbach reporting for AL.com tells the story of how one school district rises to meet the challenge of immigrant children in schools. 

At Forbes.com this week, I also did a Trump take, pointing out that a contradiction in his plan means that he will not be able to do all the awful things he wants to. Also, Adam Laats has written a fabulous book about the first failed con-man driven education reform in this country. 

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.

November 14, 1960

Things got busy here at the Institute this week, so I missed posting about this anniversary on Thursday. But I don't want to overlook it for another year.

On November 14, Ruby Bridges was six years old, three months younger than the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education. Six years old.

She had attended a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. The district gave Black children a test to see if they would be allowed to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Six passed. Two decided not to go through with it. The three other girls were sent to a different all-white school; Ruby Bridges would be the only Black student desegregating William Frantz.

Her father was not sure he wanted to put her through that. Her mother argued it had to be done for her daughter and "for all African-American children."

This was three years after the Little Rock Nine were escorted into school by the National Guard. Conditions in the South had not improved. A crowd came out to hurl insults and threaten a six year old child. 

"What really protected me is the innocence of a child," Bridges said at an event last Thursday. "Because even though you all saw that and I saw what you saw, my 6-year-old mind didn't tell me that I needed to be afraid. Like why would I be afraid of a crowd? I see that all the time."

But it is still shocking to see pictures of the protests. They made a picture of a coffin, with a Black baby in it, and paraded it around the school. Along with a cross. Bridges was the only child in her class-- white parents pulled their children out, and many teachers refused to teach. The boycott was eventually broken by a Methodist minister, but Bridges still was shunned, her father fired, her family barred from some local businesses. 

It's Ruby Bridges portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With." one of his first works after he left The Saturday Evening Post. It earned him sackfulls of angry mail, calling him, among other things, a "race traitor."

This week, many schools celebrated a Ruby Bridges Walk To School Day in schools all around the country.  

There is a common narrative, that in the sixties we pretty much settled all the racial issues in this country and that demands for equity ever since have just been a political ploy to grab undeserved goodies. "We fixed that stuff," the argument goes, "so we shouldn't need to be talking about it now. You sure you don't have some other reason for bringing it up?" It's the narrative that brings us to a President-elect who claims that since we fixed racism in the sixties, it's white folks who have been the victims, and who need reparations.

But here's what I want to underline-- Ruby Bridges is alive. Not even old lady alive, but just 70. Presumably most of the children gathered around that coffin and cross are also alive, probably a few of those adults as well (Bridges's mother died in 2020). 

This is not some episode from the distant past. It's not about some form of schooling that belongs to some dead-and-gone generation. The anniversary is a reminder to do better, to be better, a reminder that it really wasn't very long ago that a whole lot of people thought it was okay to threaten a six year old child with abuse and violence. White folks don't need to hang their heads in shame and embarrassment, but neither should they say, "That was people from another time, long ago and far away," as a way to feel better about the whole business. It can happen here. It just happened here. Pay attention and do the work to make sure it isn't happening tomorrow.

Heritage: How To Make More Babies

I'm not sure where to start--this is the most mind-blowingly boneheaded "report" I have ever seen come out of a reformster activist group in maybe ever. This is not off the rails or in the weeds. It has left both rails and the weeds far behind, careening into some parched plain where the blazing light of political desire has dried up every drop of sense. Let the record show that I am perfectly capable of engaging in serious discussion with serious making serious ed reform arguments, but this is spectacularly unserious.

The title of the blog post masquerading as a report is "Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate" produced by Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke for the Heritage Society, and it needs a "Not The Onion" label, but I suppose it signals yet another tack for the culture panic crowd. Heritage made this point with a little less verve just last year, and it was bunk then, too. I've read it so you don't have to. Let's dive in.

The Problem We're Trying To Solve

The United States fertility rate has dropped below the replacement rate, and that is Very Bad. Fertility rates are dropping all over the planet, and resist policy efforts. 

While no silver bullet can increase the married birth rate, developing pro-family policies is essential if Americans want to maintain their political and cultural traditions, avoid economic decline, and strengthen national defense.

Spoiler alert: by "pro-family policies," they do not mean what you think that means. This will not be a discussion of how to provide support for young families, nor will we talk about how the US trails the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to family leave. We just love to talk about supporting families in this country as long as it doesn't inconvenience employers or involve spending taxpayer dollars. 

Sure, some governments try financial incentives and subsidized services. But that, they argue, doesn't work all that much. Besides, raising kids has always been expensive. So with a quick wave of their hands, they dismiss any economic concerns that might be holding young folks back.

No, they argue, "the decline in the number of children is driven primarily by values and priorities." Kids These Days lack the moral fiber to have kids these days. Why, back in 1970s (when, they remind us, that birth control pill was first legalized) the standard of living was lower, the GDP was lower, but people were popping out babies left and right. Now people have more wealth and less inclination to spend it on children.

Now, there's a ton of research out there about this very question, but Greene and Burke aren't going to bring any of that up. Some of it actually offers some support for their idea that we're seeing a slightly selfish values shift (and some of it says "Shut up, Boomer-- you're the selfish ones"), but it also brings up a host of other concerns, including economic worries, the environment, the general state of the world. But never mind any of that. They have a different thought.

"The general standard of living and overall societal wealth" are up compared to 100 years ago, they point out, and at this point I, a non-academic non-sociologist, would question how those "general" terms break down. Averages hide a lot of highs and lows, and lots of folks don't get to participate in "overall societal wealth." But never mind. People are getting married later than they used to. If you know actual young people, a hundred possible explanations may spring to mind, but we aren't looking at any of that, because Greene and Buke have a different culprit in mind.

College. Specifically, college financial aid.

People are spending more time in college. "Much of the trend can be explained" by the "subsidy-induced explosion" of college enrollment, and college campuses don't include many young student parents. 

Put plainly, massive and unnecessary education subsidies are artificially steering people into delaying or even foregoing marriage and children.

Has college enrollment exploded? Has college financial aid exploded? How "non-existent" are married parent students? These all seem like points for which actual data exist, but none will be mentioned here.

And if you were getting to make the excuse that the job market demands increased skills and education, Burke and Greene say no, it doesn't. Only a third of secretaries have degrees, compared to 9% in 1990, which proves... something? There are too many "excess" credential requirements, and too many subsidies keeping too many people in college for too many years, postponing markers of adulthood. 

I have more questions. Like, if college is the culprit, what part of the population does that affect? About five seconds of research reveals that roughly a third of the adult population had a bachelors degree. So what about everyone else? Are they slacking off, too, or is the college crowd just dragging the numbers down all by themselves? 

Finally, a Heritage post about education wouldn't be complete with a demand for privatization:

Finally, to reverse the tide of declining fertility rates, it is necessary to consider barriers to parents educating their own children in ways that increase the likelihood that those children will have pro-fertility values.

They call this "universal education choice," but it is clearly meant to be one particular education choice. They want it for "all families" which of course means "wealthy families already using private schools." 

Let's Drag Religion Into It

Here comes the Institute for Family Studies, another Bradley and Koch funded right wing outfit creating a basis for policies right-tilted folks want--in this case, traditional straight parents raising children with mom at home. IFS has connected the lower birth rate with a decline in religious connection. Church attenders make more babies, and fewer people attend church so the decline accounts for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.”

Now, other countries with higher religious observance don't have higher fertility, admit the authors, but that's because the politics, economics, and culture are different. There's a lot implied and suggested by that observation; the authors will not be examining any of it. We're just going to leave it at the idea that religiosity differences affect fertility differences within countries, but not between them. Because, I guess, there's no such thing as meaningful political, economic, or cultural differences within a country. It sure would have been interesting to examine, say, fertility differences between the different sub-cultures and regions of the US, but we're not going to do that.

Anyway, religious people put more value on children, making parents "more greatly appreciate the personal, societal, and even eternal benefits of having more babies" and therefor not mind the cost.

Now we get to some big time baloney.

When the government compels parents to enroll their children in school and then provides secular, public schools as the only tax-supported option, it is erecting a significant barrier to parents giving children a religious education.

This is simply not true. I've made the long argument before, but this time, let me offer a simple observation. If we're looking for data, let's consider that the decrease in religiosity in this country has occurred at the same time as the rise in school choice. Most of the religious people making this argument themselves came through public school with their religious devotion entirely intact. That's because not telling you what to believe is not the same as telling you what not to believe. Public education leaves the religion spot in a student's life wide open for the family to fill in as they like. 

Conservatives like to argue that they don't co-parent with the government, but this complaint amounts to a demand that the government should co-parent with them, to back them up on a faith that apparently they can't inculcate and grow in their children without someone else's help. 

Then there's this:

Families must be able to afford to pay twice—once in taxes supporting the district public school, and a second time for private school tuition—to be able to access instruction that matches their faith and values.

No. Families don't even pay for tuition the first time. That's the beauty of the system--nobody pays all of the tuition ever. This is especially true for some quiverfull family with multiple children. Do they also suggest that it is unjust for folks with no children at all to pay taxes? (They do not). But the unspoken premise of modern choice is that education is a service provided to families; it ignores the notion that public education is there not to serve only families, but to serve the public as a whole. 

Nor do religious private schools serve even a large number of families. The authors argue that vouchers put religious private schools on a level playing field with public schools. They do not, at least not as long as private religious schools retain the right to reject and expel students for any and all reasons. And not only do they pick and choose which families to serve, but they frequently fail to serve society by failed and unaccountable teaching.

Greene and Burke argue that religious private schools make children more likely to grow up religious, and gee, that's a pretty thought, but it also shows for the gazillionth time that this is not about actual school choice at all--it's about replacing a public system with a particular, limited set of values. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools. "Parents should have a choice of schools--as long as they choose a properly religious school."

Education savings accounts, tax-credit-supported private school scholarships, and vouchers should be viewed as key pro-fertility policies. Lowering barriers to families selecting a school of their choice, including religious education for their children, increases the odds that parents will have children and that a larger share of those children will retain religious beliefs and practices that boost marriage and fertility.

"You know, Ethel, I wasn't really planning on having children, but now that our state offers school vouchers, let's go ahead and pop out a bunch."

Early family formation and damn that college racket

Greene and Burke lead with a bunch of stats showing that the median age for getting married and for having children are higher than they used to be, and pair that with the assertion that "fertility is significantly reduced for people who delay" those activities. 

Now for some research slight-of-hand. The next paragraph will start by saying that while "many factors" contribute to the late start, "one of the most important is the longer period of time that people spend in school." This is followed by a lot of stats showing that people spend a lot of time in school. Is there anything to connect the cause and effect, other than putting sentences together in one paragraph? There is not. Data about what percentage of late starters are college-educated? Nope. 

They note that grad student population increased from 2.9 million to 3.2 million from 2010 to 2021. So... those 300,000 grad students are the cause of the nation's fertility drop? They blame that hop on the Grad PLUS loan program. That has "likely" played a key role, they argue (without data). Some number of people are spending 6 to 10 years in higher education. What number? "Most of them" put off marriage. How many?

We do finally at some data. 43% of women with degrees wait till 30 to have children; of high school diploma women, the figure is 8.5%. Of degreed women, 22% will never have children; for diplomas, it's 11.5%. How do men figure in this? 

The authors decry businesses that "chase degrees," which they do in part because those damn "overzealous" enforcers of civil rights have "made it exceedingly difficult for businesses to administer job-related pre-employment tests, and I would love to learn more about this thing that I've never, ever heard of before, but there is no source cited for this widespread practice. But you know-- emphasis on degrees over merit has tricked people into pursuing credentials that they don't need, but which keep them from taking advantage of their peak baby-making years. It's that damned government "free" money in the form of loans (which are kind of the opposite of free money, but if they want to argue that 19-year-olds don't fully grasp that, I won't disagree) and those loans create a huge debt load that further delays baby-making.

Here follows an assortment of data to support the notion that college is expensive and doesn't pay off for lots of folks. Again, I won't argue this. 

Now, you might think that a logical conclusion here might be to argue that the government could hand out more grants instead of loans, or that colleges should be restructured to be less money-grubbing, or that government needs to address the economic weaknesses that result in so many people stuck in so many crappy jobs that pay subsistence wages while still allowing employers to demand credentials just because they can further fueling the notion that a college education is important for involving life in the bottom of America's economic barrel.

But this is the Heritage Foundation, so no. Instead, the proposal is for the government to stop helping people go to college and just start working at a young age so that they get straight on to that baby-making. I am sure that everyone at Heritage, and their many fine rich donors stand behind this and refuse to put any of their children through college, insisting that they get out there and get a job. But I get the feeling this is aimed at the poors.

Proposals to cut subsidized student loan programs should therefore be seen as key pro-fertility policies.

The actual agenda here--  "An Education Reform Agenda to Increase the Married Birth Rate and Support Families"

Here's what Burke and Greene say the states should do.

Adopt Universal School Choice.

Well, not choice exactly. But if taxpayers would fund religious private schools so that more students would attend them, more students would grow up religious and go through the "success sequence" by graduating high school, getting married, getting a job, and then having kids, just like Jesus wanted them to. 

Eliminate Teacher Certification Requirements

Speaking of too much emphasis on college, how about teachers? Why get certification? Just let school leaders hire folks "whom they deem to have sufficient subject-matter expertise to teach in K–12 classrooms" so that teachers can get straight to baby-making (though I'm not aware of certification lengthening teacher college time). They cite some research from reformsters that I am not going to take time to chase here to argue that certification doesn't make teachers any better. 

Eliminate Bachelor’s Degree Requirements for State Government Work.

Eliminate degree requirements for government work, because surely a high school diploma is enough. Hell, over the next four years, we may find that a high school diploma is too much. 

Eliminate PLUS loan programs

Both Grad and Parent loan programs should be tanked. Go get a private loan, or a job. 

So, to summarize our argument so far, in K-12, lack of resources should not deprive families of educational choices, but after high school, if you are too poor for college, tough noogies. Also, if government aid causes tuition inflation in colleges, will it do the same in K-12 (spoiler alert: yes).

End Student Loan Cancellation

This seems backwards--after all, if you want young adults to stop worrying about their debt and start making the babies, making the debt go away seems like a productive choice. But the authors are afraid that such largesse encourages more debt. Better to make sure that young men and women understand right up front that college will mean crippling debt, and maybe they should just not bother with such aspirations beyond their class and get on with the job and the baby making.

Revive Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs (IRAPs) to Expand Apprenticeships.

Also an excellent path to getting to work and making babies sooner without wasting time at college.

Good Lord in Heaven 

So many questions, and so little curiosity. Why are young adults putting off family stuff? What are the economic and cultural factors? Are there any patterns surrounding where, and among whom, this does or doesn't happen? Are there other policies that could support family formation, like doing something about the world's worst family leave, plus other measures that would make it possible for women to have a family and a job (maybe even make it as easy as it is for men)? What about minimum wage? Are there any possible solutions that fall outside the preferred social engineering policies of right wingers? How effective are religious schools at creating religious adults? Are there any actual data connecting college and late-starting families? If college is an issue, are there other policy solutions to the weight of extra years and financial burdens? What does the data tell us about who does and doesn't follow the "success sequence" and why? What does the data tell us about people who follow the sequence and end up with a crappy job and a family they can't support (and is that related to a reliable supply of meat widgets who can't afford to leave no matter how poorly their employers treat them)? What is really behind the drop in church attendance in this country (hint: there are whole books about this)? How do schools add religion without needing a government bureau of religion approval? Wouldn’t increased immigration be a possible help here? Oh, and do private voucher systems produce good educational results that benefit society as a whole?

There is a whole lot of territory to cover in questions about national birth rates, national religiosity, college and university policies, changes in family structure, and credentialling for various professions. But Greene and Burke show no interest in actually examining these areas--they are simply intent on hewing out a path that leads to their pre-selected conclusions. 

Do they hit on some worthy points along the way, like the effects of over-selling college to a generation? Sure. But mostly they craft an incurious case to support the policies they want to support. This "report" is just a blog post in a tux.

One thing to note--this adds to the list of items revealing some sort of baby panic on the right, an apparent fear that they will somehow run out of pliable meat widgets. It lurks around forced birth policies, the end of child labor laws, the attempts to create parallel education system (one for the haves and one for the have-nots), as well as the concern that a social safety net makes it too easy for the poors to walk away from crappy jobs. The hum and buzz suggest that a certain sector of the country is really worried that they're going to run out of cheap laborers, that our meat widget supply is in trouble. Whether Greene and Burke share that fear or are simply playing on it to sell taxpayer subsidies for religious schools is up for debate

Eating Our Education Vegetables

We may never be done talking about accountability. Back before the election (roughly a thousand years ago), Rick Hess was contemplating another possible directional change in the Politics of Education.

Hess considers the Bush-Obama years and the serious concerns of Dems and the GOP , and he points at accountability (which he labels a GOP concern) as a point of difficulty.

While accountability appealed in the abstract, its allure curdled pretty quickly once voters saw it in practice.

Hess called this Eat Your Vegetables education policy and goes on to explain how visible and immediate sacrifice tends to beat out invisible and long-term reward, and that's what happened to education reform ideas from the BO days.

I have an easier explanation (maybe two, actually).

The accountability systems of the BO era were not Eat Your Vegetables policy. They were Eat These Sharp Pieces Of Plastic That We Swear Will Be Good For You. Also, when you complain that the shards of plastic are hard to swallow and aren't much like vegetables, we are going to accuse you of being against vegetables because if you had to eat them everyone would see what awful teachers the unions are trying to protect.

Teachers are all about accountability; it is baked into the job, right down to the instant accountability of the classroom--deliver a crappy lesson and your class will punish you for it immediately (not by critiquing your pedagogy, but by making your life miserable for 45 minutes). Teachers are not opposed to accountability.

But the Big Standardized Tests foisted on us were not good accountability tools. They did not--and still do not--give a useful, accurate, fair, valid or reliable measure of student achievement or teacher quality. I cannot say this hard enough (and I've been saying it for decades). Watch students take these damn things. Read the questions. Look at the crazy-pants results (last year Mrs. Teachburger was distinguished and this year she's in need of remediation). Read books like The Testing Charade by test expert Daniel Koretz. Sift through the many kafkaesque tales of teachers evaluated by the results of a test on a subject they don't teach taken by students they don't have in class.

BS Tests were like examining elephant toe nail clippings and using them to assess the elephant's hearing. 

You get my point. If not, reference the sixty gazillion posts I've already made on the topic. TLDR: the accountability systems created and nurtured back in the BO days did not actually provide accountability. 

Also-- if we see the ed reform world as Team Burn It Down and Team Make It Work, with educators far more sympathetic to Team Make It Work, test-based accountability faced another problem because it harbored so many people who pretended to be Team Make It Work ("We'll use these accountability measures to locate weak areas and provide resources to strengthen") but turned out to be Team Burn It Down ("Your scores are too low, so we're going to charterize it and/or encourage everyone to flee").   

The other problem with accountability vegetables is that opposition has emerged from the school choice crowd, which has largely resisted accountability and whose new allies, the culture panic crowd, doesn't care for accountability at all.

Hess posits that further discussion of the education menu benefits from "setting aside the main course of culture-infused policy fights" and just talk about the side dishes, which has a kind of "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" feel to it. 

Hess consigns Career and Technical Education and teacher pay to the sugar-frosted stuff list. I'd argue that they're essential parts of making the system work well, but I think his point is that they are sugar-frosted because they (and some other items) are easy political sells (though teacher pay is a good example of an issue where politicians need only express support without ever actually delivering). He tosses some other items into the discussion (wisely sidestepping reading wars) including, of course, choice, which is complicated because the benefits and adverse consequences are both immediately evident (I'd argue that the benefits are both small and visible only to a small number of beneficiaries). 

Hess ends by making his predictions for the years ahead (remember, he's bravely doing so before the election). First, there will be a tug of war between political promises and actual costs of things. Well, yes. And the sun will probably rise in the East as well.

Second, we might see budget cuts, but Hess argues there's "no obvious appetite for them." Now we know there's a huge appetite for them among billionaire unelected Presidential advisors, so we'll see how that plays out. Right now I like George Will's line-- "The world's richest man is about to get a free public education." 

Third, he sees an uphill battle for accountability fans, and makes a last pitch Eat Your Vegetables ed policy. But here's the thing, over and above all my bitching about the accountability we were served in the BO days-- it was never, ever about eating vegetables.

Educational accountability is hard--desirable, but really really hard. The whole pitch in the Bad Old days was that it would be really, really easy. "We'll just give students a single standardized test. It'll be quick and simple and hardly interfere with the school year at all. And it will generate a bunch of data! In numbers! And that magical absolutely trustworthy and valid data will make it easy to see who's doing the right thing and who's doing the wrong thing, and that magical data will make it easy to design policies that will totally fix all our education system."

Accountability was never vegetables. It was pitched as a bucket full of sugar that would make the medicine go down, and it turned out to be those damned shards of plastic.

If accountability hawks really want to try this again, here's my advice. Rewind way, way, way back. Back to the point where some damn person apparently said, "Instead of talking about what we want to measure and discussing how we could possibly measure that, let's talk about what we can measure in ways that generate easy, sexy data points." 

Then start over.

Answer some basic questions. What is the purpose of education? How can we tell whether that purpose has been achieved? How can we use instruments that are valid and which do not immediately trigger Campbell's Law? Who are the intended audience for the accountability system results, and what do we expect they'll do with those results? And how will we manage the inevitable shortcomings of whatever system we come up with (pro tip: pretending they don't exist won't help)?

Yes, these questions are incredibly complex and difficult, but we now have 25-ish years of demonstration that when you try to skip past them or shortcut your way to an answer, you end up with junk, a wheelbarrow full of Twinkies that have been left in the sun too long, a pile of stuff that neither nourishes nor delights. 

I swear-- go after accountability that provides real, valid, reliable measures with actionable results, and educators will gladly snap it up like a hearty meal. 

Curiosity Saved The Cat

A critical quality for education--a quality too rarely discussed-- is curiosity.

We spend a lot of time talking about things like "critical thinking" and other items that are supposed to help students get good at learning things and knowing things and using the knowledge that they've acquired. But one doesn't really start working on the question "What is true here" unless one first wonders about the truth.

To answer a question, one has to want to ask the question.

For the last half of my career, I felt some frustration around this issue. Here were my students living in a world in which it was increasingly easy to get an answer to any question, and yet, they just didn't. Lord knows I modeled it for them. "I'm not sure, but let's find out," I'd respond to some random question, and turn to my friend Dr. Google to find out. But sitting there with their smart phones and school-issued netbooks, they rarely showed enough curiosity to move to consult the collected knowledge of the internet.

It ought to be one of the great shifts of the last half-century. Used to be that when you wanted to know something, you had to find an expert or dig out a book or slog through a long search. Now you search. Granted, a double layer of curiosity is needed, because after you find an on line answer, one needs to ask, "I wonder if that's right."

But we seem to live in an age of the incurious (check out these "undecided" voters who mostly just weren't curious enough about the candidates to try to learn something about them). There's a good case to be made that Tea Partiers and their MAGA descendants are fueled largely by people who don't understand how stuff works and are angry about it. Go back and look at how many 2020 Big Lie proponents simply didn't understand how voting works. When Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion from the US budget, I have to conclude that he just doesn't understand the budget or how the country works. If some voters are "low-information" in this day and age, it's because they choose to be. See also, anti-vaxers. And lord knows that ed reformsters from all across the political spectrum have demonstrated that they don't understand how schools work and never bothered to try to find out.

The great enemy of curiosity is believing that you've got things All Figured Out. If that is a central part of your identity ("I'm the guy who has all the answers") then curiosity becomes a threat, particularly if there's a mountain of evidence piled just outside your window. 

Like many important features of the classroom, it shouldn't be taught instead of the course content, but is part of how to teach that content. Curiosity is one of those qualities that clashes with test-centered schooling ("Don't be curious-- just answer question, correctly, RIGHT NOW!")

In all my years in the classroom, curiosity was one of the factors I chased with limited success. It may well be that this is one of those areas where home is where the students acquire it (or don't). Children learn that it's okay to be curious (or not) and that the world is for exploring in search of all sorts of answers (or that there's just one answer, so when you can, just skip ahead to that one answer). They may even learn that adults know the One True Answer and questioning that is an act of insubordination.

So what's a classroom teacher to do? Ask questions. Be curious. Make the classroom a safe place to be curious (and not a place where asking the wrong question gets you mocked or belittled). Model feeding the curiosity itch. Train yourself NOT to say, "That's interesting, but we don't have time to look at it right now." 

Also--and some folks may disagree--don't underplay the importance of direct instruction. Curiosity rests on a platform of prior knowledge; one can't be curious about something without the something. Requiring that students be curious all the time in order to collect even the smallest bits of understanding--that's a self-defeating approach. 

And of course, teach the practical skills to sorting out the information that a search for answers will turn up. There are a gazillion guides to evaluating online sources that can be found, yes, on line. 

The world needs more curious people, needs them desperately. It's a critical part of life long learning, and therefor a worthy emphasis for classroom teachers, even if it doesn't affect Big Standardized Test scores. 

Is It Time For Conservatives To Get Back To Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio was at AEI after the election to wonder if the time had come for conservatives to get back to the ed reform biz. It's an interesting question, partly because Pondiscio has correctly called the winds of change in the past, partly because a new Trump administration is a fine time to consider how "conservative" and "liberal" don't precisely map onto the education debates. I haven't changed my mind about ed reform; I still love public education and disagree with massive critical chunks of the reform agenda. But for purposes of this discussion, that's momentarily beside the point.

Did conservatives go somewhere?

Here's my over-simplified history of the modern school choice movement.

Since Milton Friedman helped birth the modern choice movement, its heart has been small government, free market conservatism--and that has never been enough. At first the only people to run with it were pissed off post-Brown racists. Reagan tried to set the stage with A Nation at Risk, beginning the process of eroding public faith in and support for public schools. 

Skip ahead to No Child Left Behind, a policy project that was either an attempt to improve public education or an attempt to start loosening the bolts so it could be dismantled. Either way, it birthed a new bipartisan movement centered on accountability, standards and charter-style choice (and in barely a whisper, vouchers). 

That coalition required a sort of bargain. For conservatives, an emphasis on market-empowered choice, and for their partners, a promise that choice would be aimed at improving equity in education for marginalized group. That deal was hard to maintain, especially as it emerged that 1) choice didn't really fix America's equity issues and 2) free market conservatives didn't really mind. Some conservatives complained at being pushed out of the coalition, but then Trump was elected and the coalition was pretty much blown apart-- the social uplift side was not going to have anything to do with Trump, but there were some conservative issues as well.

Meanwhile, dating all the way back to the Obama administration, a new anti-public school wave was building, a culture panic fed by opportunists like Chris "Critical Race Theory Is Scary" Rufo and wackadoo scares like the Great Imaginary Litter Box Panic. 

In February of 2022, we could the closest thing to a formal announcement of a new partnership. Jay Greene, who in a somewhat symbolic move left academia to join right-wing activist group the Heritage Foundation, published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." He argued that trying to pretend to care about things that lefties liked such as equity and uplift wasn't helping the cause (also, the growing body of research showed that, academically, vouchers are a losing proposition), so instead, why not throw in with the culture panic crowd.

Which they did. The problem for conservative free market fans is that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in school choice. They have worked for two goals-- a taxpayer-funded public system that is dominated by their values, and a private taxpayer-funded voucher system dominated by their values. So instead of arguments for letting a hundred education flowers bloom and to each their own, Greene went on to cobble together fake research to show that school choice would end wokeism in education. 

So what could be changing now?

Pondiscio sees an opportunity within the election results, specifically the observation that the GOP made big goals in Florida and Texas, two states that have pushed school choice hard. Pondiscio also notes that "Republicans’ 'red state strategy' has been a yielded important victories, particularly passing universal Education Savings Account (ESA) programs in about a dozen states in the past few years."

He also sees the need to try, because (as Pondiscio regularly points out) the vast majority of students are educated in public schools, so walking away from public ed reform is essentially giving the other team a bye. "The majority of American children—future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens—will continue to be educated in traditional public schools for the foreseeable future. Surrendering these institutions to the left would be an act of educational and cultural self-destruction."

There are obstacles and opportunities

It’s also an opportunity for thoughtful conservatives to re-evaluate past missteps and even make amends. That means engaging with public school teachers, a group that has borne the brunt of conservative ire in recent years. As I argued recently in National Affairs, while it’s true that teachers’ unions have often been obstacles to meaningful reform, there’s more common ground between conservatives and teachers than most people realize on a host of issues including teacher training and pay, school safety, student discipline, even curriculum.

Well, yes. It has been a couple of decades, starting with No Child Left Behind operating on the premise that a bunch of teachers were everything wrong and failing in public education, continuing with Common Core premised on the idea that no teachers could do their jobs without careful direction, and all the way up through assertions that teachers are satanic groomers and pedophiles. Not all of that is the fault of conservatives, but is true that conservatives--or anyone else--who wants to work with teachers (and they all should) will have to first apologize and second prove they aren't there to punch teachers in the face again. 

The bigger obstacle is hinted at in Pondiscio's piece. Choicers may have gotten voucher bills in many legislatures, but vouchers were on the ballot in three states and they all lost, decisively. The path to implementing vouchers remains what it has always been-- around the voters and through the legislature.

The presents a problem for conservatives, because the folks in legislatures are increasingly MAGA, and MAGA is not conservative in any traditional sense of the word. Sure, they have some of the language down, but consider, for instance, the Trump MAGA plan for education, which boils down to 1) we want to dismantle the department of education because the federal government should have no control over local schools and 2) we would like to exert total control over what local schools may and may not teach.

Actual Queen of Rumania

One key problem with choice has been accountability. Market forces do not create accountability, certainly not the kind of accountability needed to protect the educations and futures of young humans. Likewise, the argument that we can't "just trust" public schools with all those taxpayer dollars, but handing those dollars to private or charter schools is just fine-- that's not particularly conservative accountability. But MAGA is not real big on any accountability at all, which means more choice legislation that forbids taxpayers from knowing how their money was spent.

That's why I have my doubts about conservatives finding a path back to the heart of education reform, because that path is being guarded by MAGA, and if MAGA is conservative, I am the Queen of Rumania. 

But there is a useful piece of an idea here, because I'm going to argue that you can in education find plenty of conservatives involved in education. The place is schools.

Conservative and liberal and education

I have been surrounded by conservatives my whole life. My grandmother was a staunch GOP legislator in New Hampshire for much of her life, and my father was a faithful Republican as well. My ideas about conservatives come from direct contact, not what the liberal media says about them. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about political labels, and I have never fully understood exactly how political labels track onto sides of education debates.

Free market conservatives are a fine old tradition for conservatives; I think their belief in the invisible hand is sometimes sorely misplaced, but I get it. The supposed leftie allies of ed reform? That never tracked for me. Democrats for Education Reform was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a palatable political package for Democrats. Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates-- liberals? Neoliberals seem like Friedman's nieces and nephews. 

Trying to track a Dem-GOP divide in education seems fruitless, particularly now that MAGA has squeezed most actual Republicans out of their own party. Too many actors are just muddying the waters by using party affiliation to cover their actual affiliation, which is to power and money.

In education, let's instead divide the teams up this way-- Team Burn It All Down and Team Make It Work. 

Conservatives and liberals, nominal Republicans and Democrats can be found on both sides of the debates. But I would argue that "Let's take this time-tested institution and simply trash the whole thing" is not a particularly conservative point of view. Likewise, I think we would find among choice fans both people who want to trash the current system to make room for choice and people who want to use choice to make the system work better. Unfortunately, MAGA and the culture panic crowd are largely Burn It Down--and they just won an election.

As for public schools-- most everyone working in the school wants to make it work better (I suppose it's theoretically possible that there are schools which everyone believes cannot be improved, but I doubt it). Preserve and improve the institution is a fundamentally conservative position, and if you look closely, I believe you'll find that most schools have adopted policies that draw objections not because they are trying to embark on a leftie crusade, but because they believe those policies will help the school work better. Teachers mostly support free lunch and breakfast for students not because they want to promote socialism, but because students are easier to teach when they aren't hungry. 

In other words, education debates can go so much better if folks worry more about the goals and less about which team jersey the policy is wearing.

This is not to say that there isn't a huge divide between the Burn It Down and the Make It Work folks, as well as some huge and definitive differences of opinion amongst the Make It Work crowd. And as with every issue in America these days, the entire field is clogged with unserious people who are simply trying to find an opportunity and angle; red and blue don't matter much to someone focused on green. 

So what were we talking about, again?

Could traditional ed reformsters from outside the Burn It Down crowd get involved in the education debates again? Are there bridges that can rebuilt and fences mended? Can any of it be done while Trump is unleashing God-knows-what over the next few months, and the Burn It Down crowd rules the discussion? And would you like to argue that all I've said is void because you disagree with my definition of conservatism?

Lots of maybe's there, but I do know this-- the last few years we've had lots of really loud reformster voices hollering nonsense. It surely wouldn't hurt to have more rational voices concerned about education rather than politics, and maybe not burn everything down.