FL: Affirmative Action Revived for Some

You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis has a project to take over Florida's New College and turn it into a conservative bastion. Manny Diaz, Florida's unqualified education commissioner said their hope is "that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

You may also recall the DeSantis is a staunch opponent of affirmative action, proudly telling the Moms for Liberty crowd that he goes even further than simply not doing AA. 

It's a standard MAGA talking point-- decisions should be merit only! They take considerable pleasure in quoting Martin Luther King Jr on being judged by content of character rather than color of skin.

But now it turns out that maybe a little affirmative action is okay-- as long as you're affirming the right thing.

New College hasn't just dismantled the gender studies department. That's old news. Steven Walker reported for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about the new wave of students at New College, and, well, academic excellence does not seem to be their defining feature.

Overall, the average ACT and SAT scores for the incoming fall class at New College were lower than the previous year. The same group's overall GPA was also lower than in fall of 2022, according to data obtained by the Herald-Tribune and confirmed by the college.

Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school's $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships.

 New College is recruiting heavily for athletes because Richard Corcoran, interim president and former head education privatizer for Florida, announced back last March that the school was going to build an athletics department. From scratch. Walker reports that of the 328 incoming students, 115 are student athletes. They scored 47% of the merit scholarships. Note: New College doesn't have athletic facilities, nor have they been accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

They are also mostly men. Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, gets an explanatory quote from MAGA culture panic leader and New College trustee Chris Rufo:

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

Well, heck. Even Reason, the very Libertarian magazine/website knows what that is. Emma Camp hit it under the headline "New College of Florida Embraces Affirmative Action for Men." They picked up the above quote, as well as noting that Rufo afformed that the whole point of expanding athletics was to draw more males. Rufo has written and ranted before about the "problem" of "the great feminization of the American university."

There are all sorts of issues here, but I'll let the Libertarian right call the college out on this:

But even if one accepts the premise that female-led institutions are more left-wing than male-led ones, New College's response—to engineer a more conservative institution by reducing female participation in it—is inherently in conflict with the strong defense of meritocracy and opposition to affirmative action espoused by Rufo and his allies.

Young women are outpacing their male counterparts in the academic sphere; girls now comprise roughly 60 percent of college students. While young men's failure to academically compete with their female classmates is worth our concern, the solution is not to lower the bar for men to obtain collegiate gender parity (something many selective colleges have been quietly doing for years). Nor is the solution to an illiberal left-wing campus culture to engineer a more male—and supposedly more conservative—student body.

Is the problem simply that MAGA doesn't like women very much? Sure seems like it some days. But for the moment let's just note that they are perfectly okay with affirmative action for dudes, which sure seems to support the theory that they were never against affirmative action--just the people they felt it was affirming, and the whole meritocracy argument was bad faith baloney.

But hey-- they are on the way to more closely resembling Hillsdale, with its student population of 865 men and 813 women. 

AI Can't Imagine Future Humanity

It's a minor throwaway article, but it is a fine example of how people who aren't paying close attention both accept and perpetuate huge misconceptions about what AI is or can do.

The headline from a story that originally ran on Tom's Guide, but was picked up by MSN (which is itself a bad sign) is "I used AI to imagine humanity in 50,000 years — here’s how it went."  The piece is by Ryan Morrison, the AI Editor for this tech-centered website. The first three paragraphs tell us how far into weeds we are headed.

I’ve always been a daydreamer, leaving my mind to ponder the possibilities of what could be to come. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, I can turn those ponderings into something I can actually see and even interact with.

Recently I found myself talking about space travel with ChatGPT, asking it about timelines and the impact terraforming a smaller world like Mars might have on human physiology. This later led to me having ChatGPT outline how it perceived humanity over 5,000, 10,000 and 50,000 years of evolution.

I also had it come up with ways humans might change if left isolated on different terraformed planets such as Mars, with its lower gravity or even the moons of the gas giants. I then used Freepik’s impressive Mystic 2.5 image model to bring them to life.

Morrison goes on to talk about how he offered ChatGPT different parameters and asked some other pointed questions. It all seems built around the notion that when he asks ChatGPT these questions, ChatGPT goes and looks at all the scientific research surrounding Mats and human physiology and gravity and whatnot and works up a series of theories based on a rational consideration of all the pertinent science. "Well, what if human civilization splits with no contact for a few millennia?" he asks, and ChatGPT strokes its chin and says, "Well, let me consult some sources and run some numbers." 

The article is laced with references to his "conversation" with ChatGPT. The program went on to "outline" how it "perceived" human change. He asked it to "imagine" humans in 50,000 years. 

Of course, ChatGPT doesn't do any of that. The stochastic parrot strings together an assortment of probable words in a probably string given the prompt, and given whatever training it has on sources that string together words near words similar to the prompt words. 

People like to think of "artificial intelligence" as the equivalent of some really smart, extraordinarily well read professorial type, or perhaps any of the artificial personalities we know from popular fiction. People who have AI products to sell like that picture of AI very much-- but Artificial Generalized Intelligence like that is not here yet, and may never get here. GPT-5 also not here. 

In the meantime, people who really ought to know better keep pretending that Large Language Models like ChatGPT are really something far more advanced (and useful) than they really are. But here's Morrison, saying his website bio has been written for him by ChatGPT, a "silicon-based life form."

This is the kind of stuff that trickles down to the general public and teachers and administrators and leads them to put all sorts of faith in "AI" that it does not deserve and cannot live up to. If we're going to have conversations about AI's proper place in the classroom, they will have to be based on reality and not marketing puffery and the imagination of over-excited commentators.

 

ICYMI: Fire and Ice Edition (1/12)

Whether you are being hit with a blizzard or a fire, I hope you are staying safe this weekend, and that you are coming through with minimal damage, and that you get the help and support that you need. For the rest of us, here's one researched list of places to which you can contribute to help folks in LA.

Here's some reading from the week.

Schoolhouse Crock

From The Baffler, Jennifer Berkshire's very excellent review of Adam Laats's very excellent book about one of the first great education con artists. 

Burning Down the Schools

Anne Lutz Fernandez and the impact of climate change on schools.

Writing Process: Scholarly/Academic Writing Edition

Paul Thomas shares practices and ideas surrounding the teaching of writing. He's an expert. 

Ryan Walters is blaming teachers for New Year’s attack. Has he forgotten Oklahoma history?

Ryan Walters, the education dudebro-in-chief of Oklahoma, continues to make it hard to believe that he was once a respected history teacher. But I guess if you have a Trumpian desire for press attention, you just have to keep saying stupid things loudly.

The Danger of Miseducation

Jess Piper connects Dylann Roof, January 6, and the problems that come with the rewriting of history.

Undoing EdTech's Death Grip on Education

At Restore Childhood, Denise Champney does some outstanding work breaking down just how deep and bad the edtech hold on education has become. 

Technology is supposed to decrease teacher burnout – but we found it can sometimes make it worse

"Use this app! It will save you time!" Here's some actual research to back up why every new piece of tech fills teachers with existential dread.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Audrey Watters connects some techno-dots, starting the Power School data breach, in which somebody got their hands on a bunch of student data that the company was probably sell anyway.

The Ugly Truth About Vouchers

Paul Bowers at the ACLU explains why South Carolina's love for vouchers is just a bad, bad idea.

Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims that NJ teachers 'don't need to know how to read'

You may have heard President Musk's complaint that Jersey teachers will no longer need to be able to read. This piece from Lori Comstock explains why he's full of it, with all the details so you can explain it to your MAGA uncle.

Hundreds of Charter Schools Will Fail, Close, and Abandon Thousands of Families in 2025

Shawgi Tell looks at the research and lets us know what we can expect from charter schools this year.

AI Wants to Help Me Write– But With Disclaimers

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider tried taking an AI writer out for a spin, and while some results are predictable, take a look at the caveats that the AI company puts on its own product!

EnronAI

Back when he was a baby lawyer, Benjamin Riley worked for Enron. Yes, that Enron. He was on the inside for the early stages that led to that famous collapse (in a department trying to keep it from happening) and for him, much of the AI industry has a familiar smell.

Committee Moves to Ban More Books

In South Carolina, one committee can ban books from every school in the state. How efficient! Steve Nuzum reports on their most recent targets.

Newton Falls implementing Armed Staff Program

This is in Ohio, where a district is starting to arm its staff "to act as a deterrent and a force multiplier." Yeah, I'm sure that will work out.

Honor President Carter: Save and Improve the U.S. Department of Education!

Nancy Bailey says if you want to honor Carter, help protect and improve part of his legacy.

Mississippi Association of Educators Opposes Private ‘School Choice’ Efforts

Erica Jones, head of the MAE, will say it again-- don't strip funding from public schools to give it to private schools.

Trump’s Immigration Proposals Would Traumatize Children and Schools and Jeopardize Children’s Civil Rights

Jan Resseger dives into the question of what Trump's professed intent to throw out all the immigrants (that don't work for his friends) might do to their children. 

Is 2025 the Year to Eliminate Florida’s High School Exit Exams?

Florida is usually in the forefront of bad trends. Could they actually join the crowd on a good one? Sue Kingery Woltanski looks into it. 

Scandalling Up in Ohio

David Pepper profiles J. D. Vance's likely replacement, whose previous achievements include enabling one of Ohio's biggest privatized education scandals.

At Forbes this week, I explained why this is the heart of the school year, and looked at a scary bad new bill in Indiana for dissolving public school districts.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to my free substack and get all of my stuff in your email inbox. 

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.