Stride Sued For Securities Fraud

Stride, Inc. (formerly K12), the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber charter biz, is the subject of a new class action suit alleging securities fraud. 

The lawsuit is tied to some legal problems that I've previously covered, so let me recap. 

New Mexico Issues

Stride was hired by the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a New Mexico district that covers almost 5,000 square miles, including some reservations. There are 12,518 students enrolled. 48% of the children in the district live below the poverty line. Stride was supposed to run an online program for the district, but when the district checked to see how things were going, things didn't look so good.

* Graduation rates in GMCS's Stride-managed online program plunged from 55.79% in 2022 to just 27.67% in 2024.
* Student turnover reached an alarming 30%.
* New Mexico state math proficiency scores for Stride students dropped dramatically, falling to just 5.6%.
* Ghost enrollments and a lack of individualized instruction further compromised student learning.

At the special May 16 board meeting to terminate the contract, the board was feeling pretty cranky.

The district said that the company is failing to meet requirements outlined in their contract. “This is something we’ve literally been working on since the beginning of the year with stride, and we just finally had a belly full of it and we’re ready to make a change,” said Chris Mortensen, President of Gallup-McKinley Schools Board of Education

The board voted unanimously not just to end the contract, but to seek damages. Stride filed a motion for a restraining order to keep the board from firing them. The court said no.

Mortenson has had plenty to say about the situation. From the district's press release:

GMCS School Board President Chris Mortensen stated, "Our students deserve educational providers that prioritize their academic success, not corporate profit margins. Putting profits above kids was damaging to our students, and we refuse to be complicit in that failure any longer."

Stride CEO James Rhyu has admitted to failing to meet New Mexico's legal requirements for teacher-student ratios, an issue that GMCS suspects was not isolated. "We have reason to believe that Stride has raised student-teacher ratios not just in New Mexico but nationwide," said Mortensen. "If true, this could have inflated Stride's annual profit margins by hundreds of millions of dollars. That would mean corporate revenues and stock prices benefited at the expense of students and in some cases, in defiance of the law."

"Gallup-McKinley County Schools students were used to prop up Stride's bottom line," said Mortensen. "This district, like many others, trusted Stride to deliver education. Instead, we got negligence cloaked in corporate branding."

Stride appears to have dealt with all this by mounting a PR campaign to smear the district's superintendent.  

But you'll notice the charges that Mortensen leveled against the company go beyond a simple "They cheated us" and went all the way to "They are cheating their shareholders." And apparently somebody heard that message.

The Newest Lawsuit

On November 11, Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP filed a class action lawsuit against Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN) and senior executives Donna Blackman (CFO) and James Rhyu (CEO) for securities fraud after significant stock drops resulting from the potential violations of the federal securities laws. Investors have until January 12, 2026 to ask the court to be added onto the case. The suit was filed in the Virginia Eastern District Court.

The suit appears to charge that the complaint filed by the district caused the stock value to drop from a closing price of $158.36 per share on September 12, 2025, to $139.76 per share on September 15, 2025. Then in October, Stride had to fess up that “poor customer experience” resulted in “higher withdrawal rates,” “lower conversion rates,” and drove students away. Stride estimated they had 10,000-15,000 fewer enrollments and predicted a "muted" outlook. That led to a drop of $83.48 per share-- more than half the value.

So, in short, the suit argues that Stride got its great investment results by cheating at its business, and once it got caught cheating, those great investment results went down the toilet. The business fraud facilitated the securities fraud. Folks invested because of claims the company could do a thing when it was just faking doing the thing. Fraud.

Is This a New Problem for Stride?

Are you kidding? Since Stride was founded as K12, they haven't gone a year without some sort of legal problems.

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison, who both kicked in money for K12.

Also investing in K12, very quietly, was the financial giant Blackrock, founded and run by Larry Fink. Larry graduated from the same high school as Milken. Larry's brother Steve is a member of the Stride board, and at one point ran the division of Knowledge Universe. Larry Fink is noted for his privacy about family, and a search for the two brothers’ names turns up only one article— a Forbes piece from 2000 which notes that Steve Fink, in 1984, moved next door to Micheal Milken and went on to become “one of Milken’s most trusted confidants,” a “guy he’s relied on to fix business trouble.”

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12's schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about “the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12 to start a new enterprise.

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors." K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

In November of 2021, K12 announced that it would rebrand itself as Stride.

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride was still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

In 2023, Stride found itself wrapped up in a lawsuit with one of its own division over broken promises and attempts to lie their way out of commitment.

In 2024, analysts at Fuzzy Panda were warning investors away from Stride, saying that, among other things, Stride was lying to investors about how many schools were operating and ghost students being used to inflate enrollment numbers-- in other words, these guys absolutely called it. Later that year, Senator and noted MAGA doofus Markwayne Mullin was in trouble for shenanigans with his Stride stock.

CEO James Rhyu used to be CFO for Stride, and before that had a prolific career as a bean counter for companies like Match.com. I've read a variety of Rhyu depositions, and let's just say he doesn't come across as a straight shooter. Here's an example that captures his style pretty well:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

Is it? Is that a hard question to answer? Because I feel as if even a dishonest-but-correct answer isn't hard to concoct. But that's Rhyu (for a more detailed story of his slipperiness in action, read this).

For Stride, Education Really Isn't the Point

Stride has never really been in the education business. Stride is in the investment business. Just look at the people who founded and have run it-- not an educator in the bunch, but plenty of high-powered and/or shady investment guys. I've talked to more than a few Stride teachers (none of whom want to go on the record) and the picture that emerges is over-worked widgets whose main job is to keep the numbers looking good, because student "success" is an important part of marketing, whether that success is real or not.

So if investors manage to claw back some of their money, I guess that's fine. Stride has proven remarkably resilient when called out on its misbehavior. I suppose a laser-like focus on its main business helps, but we should never imagine that that business is education. 

OK: Court Axes Social Studies Standards

After Ryan Walters decided to officially leave the job he hardly ever showed up for in order to take a cushy anti-teacher union job, leaders in Oklahoma decided that maybe they would like to have someone leading the department of education who was actually interested in, you know, education.

So they tagged Lindel Fields for the job. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. He does not appear to be the kind of guy who will hire a personal publicist and spend his time running off to wag his jaw at Fox.

Instead, he and others have been busy cleaning up after Walters. Given two weeks to decide if he wanted to keep Walters's Trump Bible In Every Classroom mandate, he took one day. He scrapped it. Attorney General Gentner Drummond started digging into where exactly Walters had been flinging money. And by the time Fields showed up, the state supreme court had already put a hold on Walters's beloved new social studies standards. 

The standards were the center of yet more Walters drama. That's probably because they are bad. They feature everything from a mandate to teach the Big Lie about Dear Leader's 2020 election loss as well as other awesome things he has done, plus the usual ahistoric baloney and attempts to insert a particular brand of Christianity into the classroom. 

I would love to say that their badness ultimately proved fatal, but in a piece of poetic justice, the standards have been thrown out by the court because Walters was always very bad at just doing his job. Here's what happened. Walter started the new year with new members on his state board of education, members hand-picked by Governor Stitt, who had finally decided, after having elevated Walters in the first place, that his favorite education dude-bro was a giant PITA who needed some grown-ups to babysit him. So Stitt canned three board members and replaced them with three people not slavishly devoted to Walters's brand of Trump Lite, and Walters was not happy.

So he took the standards that had been out there for public comment, added a bunch of stuff without saying anything, handed them to his board and told them they had to sign off on these push push push. He did not mention that he had changed stuff, and they did not realize that was the case until it was too late. 

As Sasha Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman reported for NonDoc, Walters was not trying very hard to imitate a grownup:

Asked after the meeting why Walters did not at least notify board members of what changed between the initial version of the standards and the final version, Walters declined to give a reason besides saying he made it clear to board members that the version of the standards given to them less than 24 hours before the meeting was the updated and final version.

“I don’t control when Gov. (Kevin) Stitt put these board members on here. That’s what he chose to do,” Walters said. “It was at the very end of the process.”

The court was unimpressed by this passive-aggressive hissy fit. Making last minute changes without notifying the board, especially when those changes result in final document that is substantially different from the document released to the public-- not a winning strategy. 

So the Christian [sic] Nationalist standards are out, and Oklahoma will go back to the standards adopted in 2019. 

And who knows-- maybe the state will eventually finish cleaning up after Walters. Meanwhile, his new anti-union union has enrolled almost 7,000 teachers-- which is not exactly a whopping slice of the 4 million-ish teachers working in this country. 

Parental Roll of the Dice

The death of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hand of their son, is a terrible story. And it reminds me of too many other stories of children who have gone off the rails.

Yes, there are children who are raised by parents who simply aren't up to the task ("better off raised by wolves" we would sometimes say). Like any teacher, I can tell you stories that would break your heart, stories of parents who were simply unable to rise to the occasion of parenthood. 

But there are also the wild card children. Their parents did all the responsible things, gave them a good home, took care of them. Maybe they even grew up in a home with siblings who turned out just fine. And yet, somehow, somewhere, something happened, and that child ended up in a mess. 

Maybe it was something chemical or biological. Maybe just a wrong combination of peers and circumstances. Sometimes we really don't have a clue-- not a single damned clue.

Again, any teacher can tell you stories. Heck, as someone who taught in the same small town for almost forty years, I know stories where two generations of perfectly fine parenting somehow led to a sad and challenging outcome for one child. 

We look for simple explanations. If a child turned out to have big problems, then we blame the parents. If there's nothing obviously dysfunctional about the parents, we start to conjecture and whisper darkly-- there must be something bad going on in that home that we just don't know about. If the child turned out to be troubled, it has to be a parental screwup. 

It has to be something those parents did. Please, God, it has to be those parents. Because if it isn't the parents, if it's some wild roll of the dice that isn't completely under of the responsible humans, then we are all vulnerable. It could happen to any one of us. No no no no no no, no. It has to be the parents. It has to be something they did that I am definitely not doing.

This is where I sympathize with the parental rights crowd's distress. "We did everything right. We kept tight control of this child so that they would turn out the right way. And instead we got this!" I get the urge to cast about for someone or something to blame.

Some folks set the bar for a Child Turned Out Bad a lot lower than others. The child doesn't follow our religion, doesn't respect us the way we want them to, doesn't identify with the traditional gender roles. Others have tried their hardest and ended up with children who have actual challenges and dysfunctions, not just disagreements with their family of origin.

I get that some folks experience a powerful impulse to tighten control over your children, to force them to become the people you want them to be. I even understand how that desire can turn into a desire to control every other person who comes in contact with your child. 

I could argue that trying to exert this kind of control over another human being, even a human being for whom you are responsible, is not morally or ethically sound. But I think it's enough to point out that it is an unreliable approach, a parenting approach that is likely to end in failure. 

I like the work of Russell Barkley, a psychologist whose work is largely in the area of ADHD. "You do not get to design your children," he argues. 

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

Barkley suggests that parents think of themselves not as engineers, but as shepherds.  

You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything--everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them, and what they do, and if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong when in fact the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather you would stop thinking of yourself as an engineer, and step back and say "I am a shepherd to a unique individual." Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog. Ain't gonna happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do, all the time.

And sometimes, for reasons that nobody could have predicted or controlled, the sheep run out of the pasture and get in trouble-- maybe a little bit, or maybe a whole lot. 

Three things to remember, I think.

First, beware of guilt and blame. Parents blame themselves. Others blame them. Okay, sometimes the guilt is earned. But if you are manufacturing guilt, particularly based on some hypothetical alternate universe in which the parent said or did a magic something that Fixed Everything-- maybe a little grace is in order.

Second, remember that sometimes a dark chapter is not the end of the book. As long as it's possible to move forward, there is hope. Some people find their way out of the weeds, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The real tragedy comes when they do something unredeemable; until that happens (and sometimes even after), there is still hope.

Third, beware any person or system that claims that we can keep young humans safe by taking total control of their lives, their environment, their contacts. The fundamental argument for authoritarianism is always an appeal to fear, a claim that "If I have total control, I can guarantee that the Terrible Thing will never happen to you." That version of safety is an illusion; jailers do not keep us safer than shepherds. 

Sometimes the shepherd just isn't enough, despite all of their best intentions and efforts. Doesn't mean we should stop making out best efforts. But my heart breaks for the parents who did the best they could and still, somehow, lost their child to the dark. 

Whole Books and Slow School

Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simple referral to Dana Goldstein's New York Times piece about how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It's a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible). 

The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on "Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here]." Also variations on "Aren't books over, really?" and its cousin "I didn't read any books and I am just swell."

Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it's great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name). 

One problem is the Core's focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn't matter what or how much you read. If today's lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn't matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don't need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.

And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem. 

The Big Standardized Test doesn't just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o'writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work. 

To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.

If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading "skills," then you have to take the time to pursue it.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room). 

And look-- I don't want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it's worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren't even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don't read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy-- "Kids These Days don't remember the old songs and stories any more."

Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial "skills" over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read. 

If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world. 

The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.

Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we'll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.

Zeroing Public Ed

As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.

The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world. 

That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024

I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.

The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.

The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.

The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole "regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers" baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump's education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months). 

It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:

I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.

So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.  

It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education. 

 

Sandy Hook Etc Etc

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend. 

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."

And it wasn't.

"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children. 

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives. 

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.

That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself." 

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence. 

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children. 

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care. 

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry. 

ICYMI: Graduation Edition (12/14)

The CMO has finished another degree because she is both beautiful and smart, as well as exceptionally determined and hard working. The Board of Directors procured a most excellent and very chocolatey graduation cake, which we enjoyed yesterday in honor of the occasion.  

Hope people at your Institute are also accomplishing fine things. In the meantime, here's the reading list for the week.

The REAL Elephant in the Room

Sue Kingery Woltanski continues to provide chapters in the ongoing story of Florida's attempt to pretend that they are not hammering taxpayers by giving away the real estate they paid for (but still making them pay for the upkeep).

Florida's Wild West Voucher Scheme Loses Students, Runs $400 Million Over Budget

Some more details from the disaster that is Florida's taxpayer-funded voucher scheme.

Florida student holding clarinet ‘as if it were a weapon’ sends school into lockdown: report

Mind you, a clarinet in the wrong hands can create some terrible disasters, but this Florida school's super-duper security AI may have gone a bit overboard.

In Wisconsin, health care costs are overwhelming teacher salaries

Wisconsin Public Radio has this report that is just one more different way to illustrate how underpaid teachers are.

Ohio School Boards Association conference reveals growing reaction against vouchers and lawmakers

Just maybe some folks in Ohio have had enough. Denis Smith reports.

As New Hampshire education freedom accounts double, percentage of low-income recipients drops

New Hampshire is one more state where it turns out that taxpayer-funded vouchers aren't really saving poor students "trapped in failing schools."

Are Schools the Problem?

Nancy Flanagan saw the New York Times op-ed about the terrible troubles in the public school system, and she wanted to address some of the conclusions in that piece (which is not on this list because her response is way more read-worthy than the original column).

Charter Schools in a Racist Big Easy

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the history and data from charterized New Orleans.

Accomplishing Project 2025: K-12 Edition

Not for the faint of heart. Anne Lutz Fernandez runs down the Project 2025 checklist for the year, including education.

High Expectations and High Standards: The Chatter is Nothing New!

Nancy Bailey looks at the same old chicken littling that's making a comeback these days. Low expectations! Low standards! Oh nooooos!

Uncertainty and Arrogant Reformers

Larry Cuban talks about the things we know, sort of know, and don't know for sure, and why ignoring those categories makes for bad ed reform ideas.

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

Jan Resseger looks at a report about the conquest of Americas by billionaires, and what that means for education.

Randolph commissioners dismiss entire library board after book controversy

In North Carolina, local government nukes the whole library board because they don't like a trans character in one book.

Three simple steps to take to help protect NYC kids from damaging AI

Sure, Leonie Haimson is writing about New York City, but it's not like that's the only place kids need some protection from AI.

Groups made up of OU professors, college Republicans reject student's religious discrimination claim

A quick news report following up the flap. Spoiler alert: the college Republicans say her paper is terrible and she's wasting everyone's time that could be better spent on substantive issues.

Permission Structures

Matt Dinan on how AI-skeptic professors can still help students write papers.

ChatGPT’s Self-Serving Optimism

Every time soneone takes a closer look at ChatGPT, they find baloney. Here's Vauhini Vara at The Atlantic asking, among other things, what the chatbot thinks "objectivity" means.

Right-Wingers Are Winning The War On Vaccines

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost looks at how the culture panic playbook is being used to make schools less safe for children (but super for diseases).

AI is breakin' the law

The judge told him, "Using AI to bolster your self-lawyering is a really bad idea." He did it anyway. It did not end well. Ben Riley has the story.

I grew up watching these guys. They were the first album I ever bought with my own money. And yes, they were manufactured cheese, but they had their moments.

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