Rewriting the Success Sequence?

You've probably heard about the "success sequence," the idea that if young people do the right stuff in the right order-- finish school, get a job, get married, have a kid-- they are less likely to end up poor. 

Conservatives had pushed this concept for a while, including some fairly overblown sales jobs, like the Brookings article "Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!." The data for the success sequence are pretty spotty, and one has to wonder if maybe its fans have things backwards; maybe being middle or upper class increases the likelihood that you'll follow the sequence.

Nevertheless, conservatives believed in the success sequence enough that Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute wondered if maybe schools shouldn't be teaching students to follow it, the better to improve their future prospects. I disagreed at the time, But now it seems that many folks on the right want to... revisit the terms of the success sequence.

The argument has been bubbling up for a while in MAGA-land. Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Society argued the country needs more babies, and the problem is that too many women are going to college and postponing baby-making. Joy Pullman at The Federalist argues that to get healthier Americans, we should get women to quit their jobs (so they can stay home and cook healthy stuff for their children). In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis wants to install Scott Yenor as a board member at the University of West Florida. This is a guy who has labeled “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and decried colleges and universities as "the citadels of our gynecocracy”

“If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers,” Yenor said, "not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

So you see, the problem is that women are actually trying to follow the success sequence by getting an education, then a job, before they get married and baby up.

Turns out that the success sequence is a Bad Thing when practiced by certain people, specifically certain people who ought to busy birthing, rearing, and feeding babies. 

One good way to make this possible would be to make it possible for a working man to support his family with his wages, but somehow none of these "a woman's work is to make babies and sammiches" folks is advocating for, say, a hike in minimum wage. Just advocating for women to be regressively focused on making babies and sammiches. 

But there's something else to note here. These are the same folks who want to privatize education, to make it every person's responsibility to get the education that best fits their station in life, without any support from the government. And when you put together "Get the education that fits what your kid needs" and "You don't need any education except maybe learning some cooking, Missy," you get a system that aims only to educate young men. You ladies just need how to cook a nice meal while you bat your eyes and try to land yourself a successful man who can get you properly impregnated.

I think it's pretty clear that for one part of the ed reform crowd, reforming education means making sure that women get less of it. It's not unlike the focus in some states on making sure that teenagers are "free" to ditch school and get out into the work force, unobstructed by any of those darn child labor laws. 

The underlying assumption is that for some people to take their proper place in society, education is unnecessary, even counter-productive. Success, it turns out, is only a worthy aspiration for Certain People.

This Is What State Takeover Of The Church Looks Like

You will recall that Louisiana has declared that every school room must display the Ten Commandments. That law took effect over the winter break. 

Which version of the Ten Commandments, you may ask. And indeed you should. Depending on your faith, you may be familiar with one of three versions. The Bible itself gives about three and a half versions of the decalogue.

So "post the Ten Commandments" is not a simple and direct order. Some clarification is needed.

And here comes the Attorney General of Louisiana to provide that clarification. 

Not just guidance, but four versions of the poster that schools should put up (images below).  

One uses the decalogue as a centerpiece under the heading "The House of Representatives and the Lawgivers and includes two equally-weighted images--one of Moses and one of Speaker Mike Johnson. Another equates The Lawgivers with the Supreme Court. Another argues for "Religion's Role in American Public Education" and the last one offers the Ten Commandments amongst four cases instrumental in eroding the wall between church and state.

And all include the state-approved version of the Ten Commandments.

This is what it looks like when the state takes command of religion. This is what it looks like when the state tells people of faith how best to understand central pieces of their faith ("Yeah, Moses was pretty much like the Speaker of the House in the United States in the 2020s"). This is what it looks like when the state shoulders pastors aside and says, "Hey, let me go ahead and explain that for you."

Yes, this is also what it looks like when the state violates the First Amendment in order to elevate one favored religious tradition over all others (including many nominally of the same religion, because this is an example of the weird far right Old Testament focused Christianity-without-Christ that stalks far right sanctuaries these days, but that's a discussion for another time). This is what state-inflicted religion looks like.

(For what it's worth, this is also what bad state-sponsored graphic design looks like.)

Absolutely nobody should be in favor of this. It's a violation of the First Amendment for the state to impose and promote a particular religion on students. It's also a violation for the state to take command of the church and force the state's version of a religion as the One True Form. That's why a federal judge has already said the law is unConstitutional. 

A suit challenging the law is already under way. May the court strike this abomination down hard. 

In the meantime, take comfort in knowing that these "posters" are required to be at least 11" x 14"-- the size of a sheet of a legal pad-- which will make the cluttered print tiny and easily ignored by students. 

ECCA Is Not The Center

I wish folks were paying more attention to the Educational Choice for Children Act, a federal school voucher program and tax shelter program. I've written about it (here, here and here), pointing out that it provides virtually no oversight or accountability (but plenty of tax dodging opportunities). But mostly it's being ignored.

Granted, there are plenty of possible futures to be alarmed by. But this bill, probably aimed to slip through the reconciliation process, would quickly force tax-payer funded school vouchers on every state in the union, whether they want them or not.

And when people do write about ECCA, they say really dumb things.

Take Juan Rangel. Rangel rose to fame and fortune running the UNO charter school chain in Chicagoland, and had a good couple of years before the truth about nepotism, fraud, and shameless self-dealing emerged. The SEC got him for fraud. He got sued by his former second-in-command. And yet, somehow, he is now the CEO of the Urban Center and on LinkedIn calling himself an "Experienced leader with a demonstrated 34+ year history of working in the non-profit industry." 

And the Chicago Tribune was willing to give him some space to make his case for ECCA, making the singularly odd argument that "embracing school choice will move Democrats back to the center."

Nope.

Rangel makes the usual arguments-- school choice gives families freedom, and the "usual criticism" comes from teachers unions. 

He cites the usual choicer-run polls that show the public just loves the idea of school choice. He does not mention the three states that soundly defeated voucher measures in the last election. 

What a tragedy, he opines, the Illinois Democrats allowed that states voucher program ride off into the sunset. That was the naughty teachers' union's fault. The decision, he says, "not only ignored public sentiment but also harmed the very communities Democrats claim to champion." Which is baloney-- the voucher program was a model of outsourcing discrimination to religious schools that rejected students for all manner of offense. Like most voucher programs, it was not there to serve poor communities, but to serve private schools who rejected anyone who didn't fit their preferred beliefs or who couldn't afford the school, even with the vouchers. 

Rangel's main beef is that Democrats are more interested in an alliance with teacher unions than they are in going along with conservative interest in school choice. Because school choice is bipartisan, but Dems are being partisan to oppose it. Which I guess is something that might make sense in Chicago. But if opposing choice is what a partisan Democrat would do, how can choice be bipartisan? 

But Rangel is one of the Reformster Democrats, folks like Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Rhee who are nominally Democrats but really love the conservative school privatization policies so much that they have little love left for public schools and none at all for the teachers who work in them. How this tribe can keep arguing that a bill that is exactly what Betsy DeVos always wanted and which will now be championed by Trump and comes with the stamp of approval of far right thinky tanks--how exactly is ECCA centrist?

But I guess this is going to be a feature of the next four years-- nominal Democrats talking about "compromise" and "reaching across the aisle" when what they actually mean is "give in to what those folks want." This seems like a bad plan, but then, we haven't had Democrat leadership standing solidly on the side of public schools in hardly ever, so if they want to listen to Rangel, whose credentials in education leadership are just super-impressive, it wouldn't be a huge change of pace. But, boy, would it be nice to have at least one political party that didn't think supporting public schools was a radical position.

ME: Demanding Religious Discrimination Funding

Once again, it's the argument that taxpayers must be forced to fund discrimination.

Maine ended up in this debate because they already had a voucher program, created so that communities that couldn't afford to operate a school could send students to schools elsewhere, including private schools. But on the heels of Trinity and Espinoza, some folks decided to see if they could get the courts to take their new version of the First Amendment one step further.

Could they successfully argue that it's religious discrimination and an interference with the right of Free Exercise if the state didn't force taxpayers to help fund the private religious school? Hence the Carson v. Makin case.

SCOTUS said, "Sure!"

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, had called this one after Trinity, writing:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes. 

In her Carson dissent, Justice Sotomayor also nailed it:

After assuming away an Establishment Clause violation, the Court revolutionized Free Exercise doctrine by equating a State’s decision not to fund a religious organization with presumptively unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religious status.

Not an exaggeration. Chief Justice Roberts offered that rationale for the decision:

In particular, we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.

But that, it turns out, is not enough.

Maine had put in place an amendment to its anti-discrimination law, saying that taxpayer dollars couldn't go to a school that was violating those anti-discrimination laws.

The schools in the original lawsuit said that under those conditions, they would not accept voucher money (in other words, you cannot pay them enough to accept LGBTQ persons or "un-saved" individuals in their schools). Don't take away their ability to discriminate.

Not that they admit to discrimination. The spokesperson for the American Association of Christian Schools gave the AP this swell quote back in 2022:

We don’t look at it as discrimination at all. We have a set of principles and beliefs that we believe are conducive to prosperity, to the good life, so to speak, and we partner with parents who share that vision.

This is not surprising rhetoric. There's a whole industry out there about helping Christian schools make sure they are only serving "mission-appropriate" families. It's not that they are discriminating against anyone; they're just refusing to serve people who aren't aligned with their values. 

The next step was, of course, a lawsuit. Bangor Christian Schools sued the state of Maine in 2023, asking first for an injunction against the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) restriction that bars them from receiving state money as long as they continue to discriminate. Their assertion is that the “poison pill” of human rights law in Maine violates their religious liberty, that they cannot exercise that liberty unless they can both receive state funds and continue to discriminate against students and prospective faculty that don’t meet their religious requirements.

They didn't get their injunction. So now the case, along with a similar case from St. Dominic's Academy in Auburn, has worked its way up to the U/S. Court of Appeals of the First Circuit, where arguments were heard on Tuesday. First Liberty Institute, one more Texas-based right wing legal firm, is arguing for the church. These folks were also part of the case of the paying coach, a no-LGBTQ bakery, and the original Carson case.

First Liberty is arguing a chilling effect, they argue. “The First Amendment actually does protect religious organizations from the very activity that the state of Maine is trying to impose upon them,” said lawyer Jeremy Dys. The "very activity" that the state is imposing is to stop discriminating against some staff or students. 

As the lawyer for St. Domonic's explained: “Non-discrimination law is important for everybody. But as important as it is, it can’t be used to deprive religious believers of their rights.” The "rights" we're discussing are their right to discriminate against people to whom they object. 

So this case still turns on the argument that people and institutions cannot freely exercise their religion unless they can freely discriminate and freely collect taxpayer money to do it. Therefor, taxpayers must help fund discriminatory, religious schools. And in keeping with soi many of these cases, the schools have not actually been required to do anything yet, because they have not yet applied to be included in the voucher program. In other words, their lack of taxpayer-funded voucher income does not seem to be keeping them from operating and exercising their religious beliefs.

You might be tempted to point out that there are parallels between the discrimination of either side, but there is one more distinction-- while the state's "discrimination" is "against" institutions and organizations, the school's discrimination is against individual human beings. 

It's a version of Christianity that I find puzzling. Did I miss the part of the Bible where Jesus said, ":et all the children come to me, except for those couple over there. The one looks kinda gay, and the other one doesn't seem to be sufficiently impressed by Me. Just keep them away." 

At some point we'll have a decision from the First Circuit, and it doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the decision will then be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court where the writing is probably already on the wall for more taxpayer funded religious discrimination. I'm going to go ahead and pray that I turn out to be wrong.

ID: Pushing Vouchers Again

Idaho is a GOP stronghold, but it has so far resisted the idea of school vouchers. Governor Brad Little has announced that he would like to change that.

Idaho has charter schools, and their public school system has implemented the most obvious solution for the old "education shouldn't depend on your zip code" complaint by allowing students to attend any public school in the state (though transportation is no small barrier in Idaho). 

The barrier against taxpayer-funded school vouchers has been Republicans. When the Education Savings Account bill failed in 2023, it hit a wall of GOP legislators who actually remembered some traditional GOP principles. As the Idaho Stateman reported:

“It’s actually against my conservative, Republican perspective to hand this money out with no accountability that these precious tax dollars are being used wisely,” said Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls.

Senator C. Scott Grow complained, "I have absolutely no clue what the dollar amount is on this.”

Citing the explosive growth of programs like those in Florida and Arizona, folks pointed out that the program could get pretty expensive, pretty fast-- and no oversight of how that was spent was included in the bill.

That failure undoubtedly shaped the program that Little proposed in his state of the state address.

Little declared, "Just like we do with every taxpayer dollar that is spent in government, we will ensure there is oversight in school choice." Any school choice measure must be "fair, responsible, transparent, and accountable." Also, he declared that "it must not take funds from public schools." He set the cap for the program at $50 million.

Little's speech came hours after just such a bill was announceed by Representative Wendy Horman at a pro-voucher event sponsored by the Mountain States Policy Center, yet another right wing thinky tank advocacy group tied to the State Policy Network and ALEC. Hornan has pushed for vouchers before, parroting the "civil rights issue of our time" talking point. 

Horman told that crowd that she intended a voucher law with no income limits; every family, no matter how wealthy, can have taxpayers subsidize their private school. According to the Idaho Statesman, Gorman said she's proposing tax credits of $5,000 for families whose children were not in public school. The proposal appears to be an education savings account style voucher, allowing families to spend their tax credit on any number of education-adjacent expenses. 

The tax credit is a familiar dodge that allows politicians to say, "No funds will be taken from public schools." Because the money never gets into the government's hands. But the credits still blow a hole in the government budget. The Kentucky Supreme Court struck down just such an arrangement; “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” 

It remains to be seen if this can fly. Huge areas of Idaho have no private schools at all, and resistance to taxpayer-funded vouchers is still strong. In a debate with Horman last month, Rod Gramer, former president of Idaho Business for Education, it’s an “existential threat” to public education and “the most expensive government handout in the history of the United States.”

The End of the Public Cyber-Square

It's time to let go of the idea that the internet will provide some sort of public square.

The latest wake-up call came from Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that Meta's already barely-existent and largely ineffective moderation system would be scaled back to even less (best coverage of the day-- The Guardian researching the watch he was wearing). There are still some standards in place, sort of, but mostly Zuck has signaled that he wants to be part of the anti-fact MAGA world. 

Mostly folks are missing that this flap is another sign of how far Facebook has strayed from its original promise. My Facebook days go all the way back to the era when you could only get an account as a student or parent of certain universities, so I can tell tales of the days when Facebook allowed you to stay in contact with friends and family. It was ingenious. You told Facebook whose posts you wanted to see, and Facebook showed them to you. 

It was an internet public square of sorts, a place you could go and be assured you'd see people you knew and wanted to stay connected to. You could find old friends and, in the case of teachers, former students. 

But that didn't last. Instead of simply showing you what you asked to see, Facebook started shoving other stuff at you, showing you what someone else wanted to see. The public square started to grow a thousand billboards and snake oil salesmen. Enshittification set in as Facebook tested its limits. How many people will leave if we tweak this feature? How much will people pay us to have their content shoved in front of everyone's eyeballs? How much violation of privacy will people tolerate as we mine their profiles in order to make our advertising sales better targeted? 

And so now we have the Facebook that we only sort of use, a stream of spam and ads that can't be trusted because nobody vets them, interspersed every ten posts or so by the stuff we actually want to see. If you use Facebook much at all, your reaction to the Meta announcement is a bit meh, because chances are you've had a post taken down for no discernable reason even as you scroll past blatant lies. 

Twitter, the other contender for a public square designation, has become President Musk's private playground. I love Bluesky, but it's not going to be the new Twitter, and it's the best in a long line of sad, failed attempts to create a new internet public square (Google Plus, anyone?). And let's not even start on social media accounts of people who are not actually people; AI is going to make us nostalgic for old-fashioned sock puppets; at least those fake people were real people.

It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release.

There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win. 

Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have. This is part of wearing your big boy and big girl pants in the grown up world-- most of the tools and services available to do your work involve dealing with sub-optimal people and companies. You have to make your choices and decide which compromises you can live with. Does the benefit you get outweigh the problematic nature of the tool you're using? Corporations will give us what they want to give us; it has always been up to us to sift through that for the things we can use.

I can scroll past the baloney on Facebook to keep in touch with people who matter to me. This blog is published on blogspot (owned by Google) and also on Substack, both of which are in some ways problematic. But it lets me do part of my work and be part of a network that, sitting here in a small town, I would never have otherwise connected with. On the other hand, I won't use AI images to spruce up the blog because the environmental, ethical, and reality-eroding costs are not worth making the blog marginally more pretty. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, which is its own little pang, because those calculations will hasten the break-up of the public space as people peel off to their separate new places.

It sucks that enshittification has been accelerated by a second Trump administration. It can feel like community is breaking down just as we need it, that our ability to build a consensus reality based on, you know, reality, is being broken down at the exact same moment that people who want to attack it are coming to power. It sucks, but there it is. Sometimes you wake up in Interesting Times and there's nothing really for it except to suck it up and do the work.

Teachers are especially well-prepared to deal with these sorts of times. It's pretty standard operating procedure for classroom teachers to find ways to do their jobs despite a lack of support from the people who are supposed to support them. For most of my career, I called teaching a guerilla job, a job in which you have to work around your administration and, increasingly, around the state and federal bureaucrats and politicians who seem to devote far more energy to making your job harder than helping you do it.

Many states have been hostile territory for public education for years; now, the whole country will become more hostile. But there was never a golden age when national politics were noted for boosting and supporting public education. 

So find your support network. I notice that many folks are patching one together out of several platforms, and that makes sense-- social media diversification protects you from the sudden collapse of any one platform (hasta la vista, Cafe Utne). But in the meantime, it's probably time to let go of the dream of some social media platform where everyone gets together, asshats are muted, and all the communicating you want to do can be done freely and safely at one URL. No corporation was ever going to be a reliable arbiter of the truth, and now they've at least said out loud that they don't intend to try. Let's get on with it. 

The Free Market In A Small Town

I live in a small town in a small town region. A little over 6,000 in the city, somewhere around 50,000 in the county. We're in northwest Pennsylvania, about halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, so not the kind of brutal isolation that a small town in Nebraska or Montana experiences.

We were fairly wealthy once upon a time 150 or so years ago, we were the heart of the oil industry, and our cities are still marked by some of the buildings that our local wealthy folk erected. But that was another time. We are not some sad and hollowed out disaster of a town. We have a functioning arts community, plenty of outdoor recreation, and some community festivals that light up the region. People move here because we are in many ways the picture of that idealized small town life that is part of how we Americans view ourselves.

We are, in short, probably better off than the average small town.

But there are too few of us, with too little money, to make us a very attractive market, and when you aren't a very attractive market, the invisible hand of the free marketplace just kind of waves at you on its way to some place a little more lucrative.

Much of what has happened here is a familiar story. A mall went up many decades back and kneecapped the downtown stores. Then Walmart came and kneecapped the mall. I would love to avoid giving the Waltons any of my money, but for many goods there are no alternatives here. Other than, of course, Amazon. 

If I want to "ethically source" some items, it becomes a chore. I don't know if you've shopped much at Walmart, but what I find remarkable is how little selection they actually offer. I needed a toaster-oven. They had only a couple of choices, all too similar to the one I bought from them the last time and which turned out to be largely useless. We have lots of nice little shops in the area that can sell some nice stuff, but not toasters, so I hopped on line to hunt down an acceptable toaster which I would have to select based on pictures and descriptions because I cannot see it or heft it. This is exponentially less annoying than trying to shop for shoes for my non-standard feet. After days of research, I find the item, and I even order it from someone other than the House of Bezos, though I can't be certain I didn't just give money to some different awful person. And I'm also aware that shopping for a more-ethical option is a privilege that not all my neighbors can afford.

The free market does not like places without a lot of money. You can shoot me messages about the latest thing proper lefties are supposed to boycott, but chances are there isn't such a place within fifty miles (Starbucks? Fat chance). 

We at least still have a hospital (through a bizarre fluke involving a lawsuit and a story too long to tell here). My niece lives a few towns over in a larger city that as of the new year has no hospital at all. We still have a large unit in the county, a wing of Pennsylvania's leading health care behemoth, but it is inadequately staffed with a group of folks who are trying their damnedest to compensate for their employer's neglect and disinterest.

For folks who are sure that the free market can do a better job than the United States Postal Service--well, UPS and FedEx have closed their customer facing offices here, so if you want to send something with them, you'll have to prepare and tag the package yourself before leaving it on a table at some pick-up spot (that you'll have to find by searching on line). As always, private carrier deliveries will only happen in town-- if you live out in the boonies, the delivery companies will hand your package to USPS to complete the delivery.

We have some nice local restaurants and for chains, just the basics of fast food. We have a small airport, but no commercial flights any more. We have may shops in town, many of which are "hobby shops" run by people who are more attached to the idea of running a business than making a living at it. 

When I think about the free market true believers and their approach to education, I wonder if they really understand how little the free market could accomplish here. Our local Catholic school system has shrunk to nothing but a single K-6 school. There is a private Christian school that controls costs by replacing teachers with computers. 

There are just over 5,500 students in the whole county. Cyber charters regularly bleed off a couple hundred of those (though that is often temporary). Like most small town areas, folks here consider the schools a big part of the community identity. And almost all of those schools are Title I schools, meaning that families aren't sitting on big piles of money they can spend for a quality private school (if such a school were available locally). 

I don't hate the free market, and it has done some mighty nice things for this community. But the free market likes marketplaces flush with cash and customers, and most small town and rural areas aren't. This is Dollar General territory, a store whose whole business model is "If we give folks with few alternatives the very bare minimum of service and product quality, maybe we can turn a profit."

That is not the business model we need for education. We already know that it's not working for health care--spotty-if-at-all, minimally capable service. Turning education into a free market, you're-on-your-own consumer good will not serve us well. If the goal is going to be providing the best possible education for every child in the country, the free market is uniquely unable to pursue that goal. 

Come visit us here. It's a beautiful place to live and work and even be a tourist. I'll give you a tour and show you the sights. But don't ask us to depend on the free market to get us top quality education for our children.