ICYMI: Tech Sunday Edition (2/8)

I'm directing a community theater production of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, a show you probably don't know but should. 4 actors play 52 characters in 20 vignettes about love and connection. The show starts with getting ready for a first date, conducts a wedding before intermission, and finishes up in a funeral home. It is warm and tuneful and captures a lot of the beauty and hilarity of ordinary moments. The cast has worked hard, and this is the week we do the final work of getting ready before opening next Friday night. If you're in the neighborhood, by all means, stop by. 

This is part of how I stay charged up, because if you gaze into the contentious abyss that is our current national state of debate about every damn thing, you can forget what is great about being human in the world.                          

And now, this week's reading list.

Legislative Extortion bill would withhold more than $4.3 billion from 700,000 Ohio public school students

Stephen Dyer has been on a tear lately, but so has the Ohio legislature. I wrote about this extortion bill this week, but this post gives more details on just how much damage this would do.

Mobile Co. Public Schools request US Education Secretary McMahon visit rescheduled

McMahon's right wing history tour hits yet another snag. What a shame.

"A deliberate effort to circumvent the law"

Steve Nuzum reports from South Carolina about some voucher-loving senators who are sad that home schoolers are getting in on their pile of money.

I Can't Learn It For You

Matt Brady with some words that most teachers will recognize in reaction to too many familiar student claims.

Unanimous committee vote halts wide-ranging education overhaul

Mississippi was thinking about a big fat voucher bill, but after the House passed it, the Senate has (as promised) shot it down.

Ramaswamy’s proposed rule for public schools highlights Ohio’s lack of rules for private schools

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for Ohio governor, and he has a bunch of dumb ideas about education. But Denis Smith points out that at least some of his pronouncements have a different side effect.

Teens should read great (but hard) books: 'Macbeth' is better than 'Hunger Games'

Joanna Jacobs weighs in on and aptly summarizes last week's online discussion of the place for "hard books" in the classroom.

Stop trying to make the humanities 'relevant'

I missed this essay by Thomas Chatterton Williams when it first ran in The Atlantic a month ago, but here it is on MSN out from behind the paywall, and worth a read as he considers teaching the humanities in the rise of ChatGPT. 

NYS: Why Are Authoritarian Entities Needed to Create Charter Schools if They Are So Popular?

Shawgi Tell asks the million dollar question-- if the public really really wants charter schools, why don't leaders use democratic means to create them?

Why some Texas private schools are not accepting school choice vouchers

Texas has kicked off its taxpayer-funded school voucher program, but not all private schools have signed on. Lacey Beasley at CBS News interviews a private school head who explains why she's not on board. Short, but you'll recognize some of the issues. 

Debunking the latest The74 miracle charter school story

Gary Rubinstein checks out the latest miracle school headline and finds, once again, no actual miracle in evidence.

How to Teach Authentic Christianity in Public Schools

Nancy Bailey has the answer (hint: it doesn't involve throwing immigrants in detention centers).

When "Parental Rights" Become a Shield for Child Abuse

"Parental rights" are headed for several courtrooms. Bruce Lesley breaks down the implications and problems connected to the Texas case and the problems of child abuse.

What Are “Parental Rights”?

Steve Nuzum takes a deeper dive into the legal and ethical aspects of parental rights and "parental rights." 

Rent-a-Human, When AI Becomes (Almost) Everyone’s Boss

Julian Vasquez Heilig warns that AI is not just stealing your job-- it's stealing your boss's job, and that means work is getting lousier for you.

I used AI chatbots as a source of news for a month, and they were unreliable and erroneous

From the file of things that are so obvious nobody should have to say them, except that I know too many people who need to hear it. Jean Hugues-Roy ran a little French experiment.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at an exceptional new book about the "miraculous" T.M. Landry private school in Louisiana. Great work by journalists Katie Brenner and Erica L. Green. 

Why tenors like to gather in groups of three I do not do, but thank heaven they do.

The Administrative Plague

In the last year, Commonwealth Charter Academy (the 800 pound gorilla of cyber schooling in PA) has poached an assortment of teachers from the public schools in my area. I'm not a fan of the choice, and I fear they may live to regret it, but I understand why they did it.

Why would excellent public school teachers leave for a profiteering edu-flavored business. You may think the answer is money, and money was certainly involved, but the answer seems to be much simpler; it was respect. Many of those teachers felt disrespected, and not just once, but systematically and repeatedly over time; CCA treated them like valued professionals, and that made a huge impression.

It reminds me that teacher exodus is largely fueled by local issues, and that old saying that people don't quit jobs--they quit bosses. 

Disrespect has always been endemic in education. Teachers are too often treated like children. Teachers are too often treated as a management problem to be solved rather than valued professionals to be supported. Teachers can feed into the dynamic themselves. Teachers tend to be rules-followers, especially compliant in buildings that can be built, top to bottom, on compliance culture. But that doesn't absolve those administrators who are bad managers. And bad management, I'm quite certain, is at the heart of many teacher shortages around the nation.

Administration's main job in school is to A) hire the best people they can find and B) provide the conditions that allow those people to do the best teaching they can. Failing to do so leads to many of the problems facing schools.

You can look through stories about our knowledge of why teachers leave or why they stay (try here, here, here, and here). Let's take a look at the list.

Low pay looms large, particularly in some states. I'll give administration a pass on that one. 

Lack of support from administration and the community. Yes, there is a steady background hum of accusations ranging "teachers stink" all the way to claims that, somehow, vast numbers of teachers are secretly engaged in criminal activities. Administrators don't create that buzz (mostly), but they are the folks who should be dealing with it. 

We don't need more cowardly admins who fold every time a cranky community member complains. Should admins be responsive to the public? Absolutely. Should they base district policy on the goal of avoiding any conflict with any parent ever? No. If admins policy is "Don't ever mention anything in any way related to gender or race or sex, because if you do, I will throw you under the bus so fast you won't have time to cover your face," they are part of the problem.

There are plenty of lists that talk about "empowering teachers" or "elevating teacher voices," but it can all be simplified to "Treat teachers with respect. Treat them like trusted professionals." 

Working conditions: other staff. You know who hates that one terrible teacher in the building almost as the parents of that teacher's students? The teachers who have to work with her--particularly those who have to clean up after her the following year. 

That terrible teacher is not a union-caused problem. It's an administration problem. It may be that the hiring process is broken. It may be that the admins have failed to support that teacher into a better place. Edward Deming had a saying to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, then either A) it was dead when you hired it or B) you killed it. Behind every teacher who's failing at her job, there's an administrator who isn't doing his. 

Working conditions: student behavior. Blame the parents if you wish, but the front office has so much to do with this. Students know whether "getting in trouble" means minor inconvenience, free break time, or an actual reason to make better choices. The employment of empathy and understanding does not mean there shouldn't be consequences. 

And if the teacher is botching the job, then an admin should be right there helping her do better.

Long, long hours and heavy workload. Yeah, a problem forever, but admins have the power to help. Cut administrative burden on teachers (does that new computer program save work, or transfer the work from your secretary to the classroom teacher). Cut class size. Cut timewasting baloney (do you really want to pay someone with a Masters degree professional level money to watch children eat). Reject the notion that teachers are only doing Important Work if they are in front of students.

Respect, respect, respect. This drives everything else. Do not subject your teachers to treatment that you would not tolerate were it directed at you. And do not let them be subject to treatment by others that you would not tolerate for yourself. 

And that includes listening to them when they have something to say about how the school is run, how classrooms are managed, or how education will be delivered. And when they run into the bumps of life happen, you can step up with empathy, or you can treat the teacher's problem as if it is an inconvenience for you ("Why did your father's funeral have to be held on a busy Friday at the end of the grading period!")

Nor can we blame individual weaknesses for all of it. There are systemic contributors to bad school management. The reform movement of the past few decades has dumped a ton of responsibility on administrators while stripping them of ability to deal with it. Our regime of bad high stakes testing created an almost impossible challenge, hog tying many better administrators and chasing others out of the building, to be replaced by people whose grasp of the job is, well, limited. 

I'm not saying a great administrator cures all ills and solve all problems. And, like teachers, there are administrators who may be great at one part of their job and terrible at others (there are so many ways to be a bad administrator). But bad management is grievously under-discussed as a contributing factor in education problems in general and teacher retention in particular. State leaders aren't having the discussion, and the feds certainly aren't going to, but that doesn't mean you couldn't be talking about it in your local district. 

My Local Paper Bites The Dust

My local newspaper is shutting down.

The newspaper is published as two newspapers (same content, different mastheads). The Derrick, as the name hints, goes back to the days of the oil boom in Western Pennsylvania. The News-Herald is the fusion of two newspapers that merged a little over a century ago. A few decades ago, they were combined into one news operation. Like many other news outlets, they also entered the online world, experimenting with different versions of paywalls. They were about to be sold, but that deal fell through, and the company, citing the usual (drop in subscribers, drop in advertisers). The last issue will be published on March 20.

It is hard to describe just what a gut punch this is to the community. The newspaper is where people read about local sports, school board meetings, city council meetings, obituaries, and a wealth of stories about local people and activities. The newspaper has been doing just what a small local paper needs to do-- providing news and coverage that local folks couldn't find anywhere else. 

Will someone pick up that slack? There are no radio stations with local content. We are located about halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh (which has newspaper problems of their own), too far outside their media markets for them to bother with coverage of our area. We have a local county-level web site that so far has had about one reporter, and has depended on looking over the newspaper's shoulder for much of its content. They are now advertising an initiative to scale up, but that's going to involve creating basically a whole news organization from scratch.

For local organizations and government bodies looking to communicate with the community, the prospects are now much dimmer than ever. 

The newspaper was our newspaper of record. Who lived here? What did they do? What were their stories? All of that was set down in print. Now what will become of all those stories of all those lives? How will history be recorded? Will history be recorded? A big city may have other avenues for creating those sorts of records. We do not. 

The loss feels very personal. Pieces of my own history are in that record. A photo of my family when we moved to town. High school graduation stories. Pictures of my kids in local events. My father's obituary ran in the newspaper; when my mother passes, where will that life be noted?

And, as longtime readers may recall, I have written a weekly column for that newspaper for almost 28 years. The pay was--well, I don't think cutting my pay would have saved the paper-- but the chance to create something that added to a unique local flavor gave me a sense of giving a tiny something to my community. And the writing discipline required to meet a weekly deadline has shaped who I became as a writer and a teacher. It's a big chunk of my life to say goodbye to. 

Journalism has always relied on a problematic business model ("We will gather a crowd and sell you access to their eyeballs") married to a sense of civic responsibility with an occasional too-large helping of political opportunism ("You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war"). I wonder, too, about the effects of our economic split-- particularly the finding that the wealthiest 10% drives 50% of the spending. What does that mean for areas like mine where the wealthiest 10% don't live? 

Our new situation is already the situation of many communities across the country, news desserts now lacking one of the main sources of glue that holds a community together. People make a lot of noise about how journalism is important for keeping an eye on officials and bringing to light shenanigans and misbehavior, but local journalism is also hugely important for telling and sharing the stories of the people share community with. The small triumphs, the minor milestones, the rich and varied stories, the slow unrolling of history, and all the other part of the small town narrative that the AP is never going to pick up-- that's what we lose.

Instead we're left with the sloppy ephemera of facebook gossip and other social media baloney. It sucks.

I am sad for all the people who are losing their jobs and all the stories that now will not be told and the huge gap this will create in my county. This is terrible news; ironically, it may be the last terrible news that the newspaper reports. 

More Federal handouts For Charter Schools

Among the various bills thrown at Congress is one that finds new ways to throw public money at charter schools.

HB 7086, the "Equitable Access to School Facilities Act," proposes to send money to charter operators, via the state, to buy and build facilities for schools.

The cost of coming up with a building to put charter schools in might seem like part of the cost of being in the charter school business, but charter operators don't much care for having to fork over the money. In some states, legislators have solved the problem by just allowing charter schools to just take public property. Florida is rolling out a law that lets charters take public school real estate in whole or in part just by saying, "Hey, we want that." It's an extraordinary law, sort of like the opposite of eminent domain, in which the facilities that taxpayers have bought and paid for suddenly belong to a private business. 

HB 7086 wants to propose a similar federal solution, delivering grants to any states that come up with clever ways to gift taxpayer dollars to charters that want to build or buy some facilities, or want to come up with fun ways for charters to grab taxpayer-funded buildings.

The bill comes courtesy of Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, who just wants to make sure that every school is a great school. In a press release, he explains:

Sadly, access to appropriate and affordable school buildings for charter schools continues to be one of the biggest barriers to growth. Unlike district schools, charter schools aren’t guaranteed access to school buildings or traditional access to facilities funding sources like local property tax dollars.

Yeah, I was going to open a restaurant, but access to food and cooking supplies was a big barrier to growth, so maybe the taxpayers would like to buy that stuff for me?

Or maybe when you decide to go into a business, you do it with a plan that takes into account the cost of being in that business. Certainly the notion that building and financing facilities is easy peasy for public school systems is disconnected from reality. When West Egg Schools want a new building, they have to convince the taxpayers or else that school board will find themselves voted out of office. 

If you want to get into the charter school biz, you need a plan about how you'll manage the cost of getting into the charter school biz. "Well, get the feds to drain taxpayers to fund it for us," is not such a plan.

Also delighted by the bill is BASIS Educational Ventures, the big honking charter chain that may have the occasional financial issues, but gets a pass on having to display financial transparency. 

The bill does display one of the lies of the charter movement-- that we can finance multiple school systems with the same money that wasn't enough to fund one. Not that I expect any choicers to say so out loud. But no school district (or any other business) responds to tough money times by saying, "I know-- let's build more facilities." The inevitable side effect of choice systems is that taxpayers end up financing redundant facilities and vast amounts of excess capacity, which means taxpayers have to be hit for even more money. Legislators continue to find creative ways to A) ignore the issue and B) legislate more paths by which taxpayer money can be funneled to choice schools.

This bill hasn't died yet. Tell your Congressperson to drive a stake through its heart.

OH: Legislature Considers Extortion and Revenge Against Public Schools

This is just wild.

In Ohio, over 330 local school districts and a bunch of public school parents has sued the state over two of the state's five taxpayer-funded school voucher programs, charging they violate the state constitution. And they've been doing pretty well. 

The assertion has been that the voucher program is unconstitutional because it funds private schools. As the judge wrote in the first round win (this case will inevitably work its way up to the state supreme court) for the plaintiffs:

Defendants argue that EdChoice is not unconstitutional because the State has always funded private schools. Though this may be true, the State may not fund private schools at the expense of public schools or in a manner that undermines its obligation to public education.

Well, Rep. Jamie Callendar has decided that while the case is working through the courts, the legislature should throw some muscle around and try a little extortion and revenge against those school districts.

Callendar is a long-time rep (first elected in 1997, then taking a term-limit break before returning in 2018) who has been a big player in school privatization in Ohio. 

His HB 671 is pretty simple. The state will withhold funding from any school district involved in the lawsuit. The money will go into escrow, and the school district can't have it until they drop their lawsuit.

This is bananapants. For one thing, this is not even clever or subtle extortion. This isn't even "Nice school district. Shame if anything happened to it." It's just flat out, "Let me do what I want, or I'll set fire to your district."

For another thing, this does not really set up a great defense for a case in which a main point is that the legislature, by creating voucher programs, is doing financial damage to public school systems. That brings up the question of the legislation's intent ("Gosh, we didn't mean to hurt public schools with our voucher program!") and this bill really undercuts any protestations by the legislators that they would never, ever try to hurt their beloved public schools.

One can only hope that this bill will die a quick and definitive death, but in Ohio ("The Florida of the Midwest") nothing is certain.  

When the State Takes Over Religion

Tennessee Republicans want the state to join the club of states pushing the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms. It's a move that ought to set up alarm bells in Christian churches all across the state.

House Bill 47 uses the standard dodge for justifying this violation of the First Amendment-- the Ten Commandments sold as a "historically significant" document.

Louisiana has similar dopey law on the books, currently being challenged in court as unconstitutional (which it is). Texas also currently requires to post the decalogue in classrooms, and that's in the courts, too.  Indiana is trying to run a bill through its legislature, though like Tennessee, it's trying to hedge its bets by making the posting of the commandments voluntary rather than mandatory, because maybe if you violate the First Amendment just a little on a local level, it's not quite so unconstitutional (spoiler alert: it's still unconstitutional).

The loophole that states try to fly through is one that suggests that if you teach Bible stuff for a secular purpose, that's okey dokey. Hence the repeated technique of calling to post the commandments next to documents like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (presumably none of the supporters would be cool with a caption reading "Post THIS violates THAT"). Tennessee's bill just includes the Ten Commandments in a list of other documents.

Violation of the First Amendment? Absolutely. But Christians ought to be alarmed. 

This is the state telling people of faith how best to understand their own sacred texts ("The Ten Commandments handed down by God are just like the Constitution written by humans"). This is, in fact, the state telling everyone what the sacred text actually says (there are, in fact, multiple versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, and any state-approved version is also a state-edited version). 

And this is the state playing religious favorites. In Louisiana, the Hindu community said that if we're posting "historically significant" scripture, the Bhagavad Gita belongs up there, too. Expect other religions to do the same (and probably the Satanic Temple, too), requiring someone in state government to declare which religions are or are not "historically significant." In the case of Tennessee, the law's list includes "and other significant documents," meaning the local school board is going to get to make big decisions about both religion and history. There's no way that can end badly.

Folks who applaud these kinds of bills always imagine that their own version of religion will be the winner, that their version of faith will be ascendant. They should develop better imaginations. Giving the state the power to pick winners and losers in the world of religion is just dangerously dumb. It has never ever in history worked out well, which is undoubtedly why the framers were so committed to keeping government out of religion. 

I wish I knew who said this originally, but I'll keep repeating it-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. Laws like the ones proposed in Tennessee and Indiana ought to have everyone lined up in opposition, and Christians ought to be in the front of the line. 

WV: Removing Accountability From Private Schools

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they've been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million. 

With that kind of money on the line, you'd think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know-- so the taxpayers know what they're getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.

SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order-- with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here's the list of rules slated for erasure:

* The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.

* The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.

* The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.

* The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.

* Since there's no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.

* The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, "the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens." Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal. 

So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.

The bill does add one bit of new language:

As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.  

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes. 

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as "No accountability at all." A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I'm guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test. 

Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we'd get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the "hard data" showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools-- but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against. 

This is not about choice. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it's about making sure those schools aren't accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It's another iteration of the same argument we've heard across the culture--that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it. 

We've been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off-- the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn't what's being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.