Speaking of Indoctrinatin' Literature: Ayn Rand in the Classroom

So here comes the umpteenth set of protests/complaints/caterwauling over literature in schools "promoting critical race theory," aka "any books with Black people in them." The Northampton Area School District of  Northampton, PA was offered a a stack of books by The Conscious Kid, an organization that plans to donate 120,000 books "that foster anti-racist conversations and action" to 3,000 schools nationwide. 

These books are not donated to the school library, which means nobody has to read books like Hair Love or a Ruth Bader Ginsberg bio. And just in case anyone's still worried, the board specifically resolved that acceptance of any gift or donation does not constitute an endorsement. Nevertheless, at least ten folks are vocally upset because that's just where we are right now.

The Conscious Kid is not the first group to discover how excitedly schools react to the phrase "free books." No, we have to look elsewhere for that title.

In fact, the child probably got the books in English class.

The Ayn Rand foundation has long offered complete class sets of four Rand novels to... well, anybody teaching anything in a school. You can also enter your students in an essay contest, but it's not required. In fact nothing is required, but hey--free books!

Here are the available choices, with a quick summary just in case you've never had the pleasure.

Anthem It will come as no surprise to readers that Rand first came up with this as a teenager. Vague to the point of barely cloaking her argument in characters and plot (Characters in totalitarian collective dystopia fall in love and run away, pledging to bring back individuality). 

We the Living Three young people struggle to pursue their own happiness and individuality against the backdrop of post-revolution Russia. Rand's first published work. Middle class life and individuality are crushed under the Soviets, and all three characters meet a wretched end. It stands out from the other works by virtue of not including her heroically perfect ubermensch; that and its anchoring in actual history makes this the most tolerable Rand for some readers.

The Fountainhead Howard Roark, an architect, is Rand's perfect man, and everybody else is a two-dimensional character created to represent one of society's terrible flaws, allowing Rand to explain exactly why the stupid world doesn't deserve Roark's awesomeness. Thick, but readable, and matches Lord of the Flies as a book that can launch a thousand essays about symbolism because the use of symbol-heavy characters is a subtle as a two-by-four. But watch out for the rapey angry sex parts.

Atlas Shrugged Randian polemic at both its Randiest and polemickiest. It actually starts with a fun narrative hook-- steel magnate Hank Rearden and his lover Dagny Taggert are investigating the mysterious disappearance of various US captains of industry even as industry falls apart. Turns out that Rand's superman, this time named John Galt, is convincing the great business leaders to run off to a mountain hideaway for a general strike, waiting to come out and rebuild/save the nation once all the incompetent jerks have run it into the ground. Eventually Rearden and Taggert are swooped off to the Heroes' Retreat. Taggert leaves Rearden for John Galt, but that involves zero drama because Rearden recognizes that Galt is The Man, so of course she wants to trade up. Somewhere in the middle of this monster, the narrative drive grind to a halt under the weight of Rand's preaching. Then, about 100 pages from the end, Galt takes over the world's media and starts to deliver a speech and you think, "Well, he'll talk for a bit, and then all the plot will be resolved" but no-- he talks for a really, really long time. In a whirlwind finish, Galt is captured, humiliates his captors via their suckiness, and announces that now his bunch o'heroes can now come back and save the world. This is a terrible, terrible novel, but Rand considered it her magnum opus because she said most of what she had to say. Twice, even. Every politician who's ever talked about "makers and takers" has, I guarantee, read this one.

I keep dreaming of the day when someone objects to teaching these books on the basis of Rand's virulent anti-religion feelings. And in fact there's a whole sub-group of folks who connect Rand to Satanism. But sadly, no mobs are storming school boards to chase That Woman out of the classroom. Maybe crediting her as the mother of Satanism is a bit extreme, nut conservatives who believe that Rand's objectivism and Christianity are compatible are kidding themselves. Rand was abundantly clear. For instance, in Anthem, she writes:

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.
This god, this one word: I.

Or this 1959 interview with Mike Wallace:

Mike Wallace: You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?

Ayn Rand: Yes. I am the creator of a new code of morality.

You can see how Rand's brand of individualism can be a hit with some teenagers--you owe nobody anything, and the highest moral good is the pursuit of your own desires and goals. I'm just not seeing that as a great message to pass along. Nor do I think Rand's work can be justified by virtue of any particular literary excellence. At best, she might make an appearance in a study of far right ideology.

But hey-- free books!!

The website says 65,000 teachers have grabbed up these books, and I'd be curious to hear what they have to say about why these works in place of all the other available works in the English-speaking world. I wouldn't for a moment propose that these books be banned, but I find it just weird that we've got to have panic attacks over books like Hair Love, an adorable book that was selected by Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, about a Black father helping his Black daughter style her hair, even as we let Rand slip into the schoolhouse with nary a peep. 

Where Is A Teacher's Staff?

I read about Penn State sports--not because I particularly care, and not even because my non-sporty daughter graduated from there, but because my nephew is a sports writer whose beat is mostly PSU. He's a good guy and the only person in my family who actually supports himself by writing. 

He recently dropped this piece about the coaching staff for Penn State football, and the stories of how they came to follow head coach James Franklin to Happy Valley.

It's one of those moments where I felt I was gazing into a completely different world. Imagine if every teacher came with her own personal support staff. What a world.

Imagine. Instead of offering detailed high quality curricula that was supposed to lessen the teacher workload or super-duper AI-branded software that was supposed to take some of the load of teachers, teachers with actual support staffs--one, or even more than one, live humans who helped that teacher do her job. Imagine a world in which "staff meeting" refers to the daily meeting a teacher has with her support staff. 

Imagine a teacher who's backed up by a group of expert specialists that she can tag in for lessons in particular areas, or who work with students with particular needs or academic issues, some of whom used the experience to launch their own teaching careers.

How cool would it be. A teacher with an office that includes desks for her various staff members, who regularly bounce back and forth between working with the students and getting work done (planning, clerical, design, etc) in the office, where they are regularly able to interact and discuss students and educational issues for the class. Educators working as a team rather than in isolation. A teacher with so much support that she doesn't have to decide which part of her job (or her life) is not going to get her attention today. And the little things--Heck, if you're not a teacher, you may not be able to appreciate what a liberating game changer it would be to be able to say, "I need a set of copies of this paper--please go get them for me right this second." (Or, for that matter, "I have to pee--would you step in and teaching this for just a minute.")

Imagine a staff of 70 teachers who don't have to share the same secretary (who really doesn't work for them, but for the administration) or the same copy machine.

We can even imagine the teachers' staff dumping a cooler of water and ice over the teacher's head after a batch of great test results.

Imagine, in short, that teachers got the same kind of support as big time coaches.

Sure, it would require a redesign of school buildings, and the personnel costs would be huge as well. This is the kind of fantasy that belongs to the whole category of "Things we would do if we really thought that education was a money-is-no-object priority." 

But wouldn't it be cool.

Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools (Ex. #152,377)

In North Carolina, Charter Day School back in 2016 was sued by parents who objected to a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, jumpers, or skorts. They just won that suit, sort of, but revealed somethiung about themselves in the winning.

This is a school whose mission involves communicating through the arts and sciences. Charter Day School is part of the network of charters operated by Roger Bacon Academy, one of the charters that focuses on a "classical curriculum" in a "safe, morally strong environment," which meant, apparently, none of those pants-wearing girls in their school (It also supposedly means things like sentence diagramming in Kindergarten and Latin in 4th grade, but then, Baker is an electrical engineer, not an educator.)

You're in trouble now, missy.

RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr., and if that name seems vaguely familiar, it's because he is one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. That's where the Roger Bacon Academy, a for-profit charter management company comes in. 

In 2019, a federal judge passed down the ruling that any public school in the country would have expected-- a dress code requiring skirts for girls is unconstitutional. The school quietly retired the item in the dress code.

But that wasn't the end of it. Monday (Aug 9) a federal appeals court tossed out the 2019 ruling--sort of-- in a 2-1 ruling.

The two judges, both Trump appointees, ruled that contrary to the assertion of the lower court, that charter schools should not be considered state actors, and are therefore not subject to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This is yet another way for the courts to work their way around to declaring that charter schools are free to discriminate in any ways they wish. But it also makes one thing perfectly clear--

Charter schools are not public schools. They are not state actors.

The opinion told the lower court to go check and see if the rule violates Title IX (spoiler alert: it does). The dissenting opinion said they should have just plain upheld the lower court ruling. 

Meanwhile, Baker (now 81), still thinks it's a good rule:

“We're a school of choice. We're classical in our curriculum and very traditional. I believe that the more of the traditional things you have in place, the more they tend to reinforce each other,” he said in a phone interview. “We want boys to be boys and girls to be girls and have mutual respect for each other. We want boys to carry the umbrella for girls and open doors for them ... and we want to start teaching that in grammar school.”

It's a perfectly reasonable stance for a school owned and operated privately and for profit by one guy. It's not okay for a public school, but as the court has declared, Charter Day School is not a public school. 

Do 3rd Grade Tests Predict Anything?

The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) is a program of the American Institute for Research (AIR) along with an assortment of universities. They've just released a working paper version of some research that some people think is pretty significant. I've read it so you don't have to. Let me explain what they found, and why nobody needs to get excited about it.

AIR is better known for their work in test manufacturing and marketing, which gives them a dog in this particular hunt, but I'm not sure that really need concern us here.

"Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students' High School Outcomes" was written by Dan Goldhaber (AIR/CALDER/University of Washington), Malcolm Wolff (University of Washington), and Timothy Daily (EdNavigator). EdNavigator is a business positioned to help parents navigate a complicated education-flavored-products market--again, I'm not sure we need to be concerned here, other than to note that many of the involved parties are not exactly disinterested observers of the Big Standardized Test biz. Oh yeah--the Carnegie Foundation did some of the funding for this. 

There's a lot of fancy math in this paper, but the outcome is pretty straightforward--studying student test results in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Washington, the researchers found that third grade test scores correlate with high school outcomes, namely, high school test scores, advanced course-taking in high school, and high school graduation. 

The result is that third grade tests correlate with those factors about as well as eighth grade tests do. They also found that poverty and race/ethnicity correlate with a drop of those high school outcomes. 

There is nothing surprising here. They have been painstaking in their figuring and crunching and mathing the crap out of their data. But ultimately, they have asked the wrong question.

Because--say it with me--correlation is not causation.

We know, via many many many pieces of research, that Big Standardized Test scores are directly tied to socioeconomic status. Both third grade and high school tests.

We know that socioeconomic status correlates with other life outcomes, like graduation and jobs etc. We can even talk about how it correlates with baloney like the Success Sequence (which just puts things ass-backwards, declaring that if you wear large clothes, that's what caused you to get bigger). 

We know all about these correlations, and they point pretty clearly to SES as a cause. So research like this, while not a total waste of time, because I suppose if third grade scores were a terrible predictor of high school stuff, we'd know something was definitely cattywumpus somewhere in the system-- research like this isn't helpful because it's asking the wrong question.

What still remains unproven is this-- if you take a student who would have scored 60 on the third grade test and somehow get them to score 80 or 90, would that improve the student's later outcomes? 

We have (and have had for years) evidence that the answer is no, that raising student test scores does not improve student outcomes. 

We have been subjected to a multi-decade parade of reformsters asserting and assuming that raising student test scores would unlock a host of benefits for our students, our economy, our entire nation. But instead of proof, we've just had tautological research proving that students who do well in school do well in school., or evidence that your socioeconomic background is well-measured by the Big Standardized Test no matter what grade you're in. 

What we really need is research that asks the right question. This paper is not that.

ICYMI: Counting Down To School Edition (8/8)

 Yes, the clock has started at our house. I'll be heading off to be a trombone consultant for an old friend/student's band camp starting tomorrow, and my wife's summer days are numbered. Here it comes, lurching towards us like a misaligned tractor with a flat tire and three bales of hay stuck in the wheel well. In the meantime, here are some reads from the week.

Dyslexia Industry Scores California Court Victory

Well, that's one way to commandeer a district's reading program--use the courts. Thomas Ultican has the story of the California district where students will now get an extra helping of DIBELS, among other things.

Students Say Teach The Truth

From Learning for Justice. An award winning teacher asked actual human students about the "crt" panic. I missed this a month ago, but it's still worth your attention.

"Public education sucks" is a weak argument for school choice

Yes, Robert Pondiscio is a choice fan through and through. But he's not wrong when he picks apart one argument choicers use to make their case.

A $5 million fine for classroom discussions on race?

Well, yes. That's what Tennessee has proposed, and now a Mom for Liberty is taking the new law out for a spin. From Eesha Pendharker at Education Week.

Texas teachers say GOP's new social studies law will hinder and entire generation

The Texas Tribune talked to some actual teachers about how Texas's new anti-race stuff law will diminish a generation's understanding of the country's history.

Innovation Invites Hucksters

This New York Times piece isn't writing about education, except it kind of is. Beware technology soaked in snake oil.

Machine Learning Sucks At Covid

Cory Doctorow takes a look at some AI tools, and he hits hard. I'm going to give you the lead because it's kind of awesome:

The worst part of machine learning snake-oil isn’t that it’s useless or harmful — it’s that ML-based statistical conclusions have the veneer of mathematics, the empirical facewash that makes otherwise suspect conclusions seem neutral, factual and scientific.

If you don't trust A.I. yet, you're not wrong

Completing this trio of pieces, a pair of law professors in the New York Times explain why AI is not the special magical soup it's sold as. And what Europe is doing about it.

A very McCarthyism feel

As I've posted previously, Idaho has an education indoctrination task force, headed up by their ambitious Lt. Governor. Ed Week checks in to see how that's going (spoiler alert: very scarily).

Time for a four-day school week?

There's innovation, and then there's innovation. Nancy Flanagan offers some thoughts about reimagining education. 

What I Don't Want My School to be Like This Covid Year

Steven Singer contemplates the measures that need to be on the table for the coming fall.

FL: Bullying By Mask

 Florida (state motto: Death to public education!) has been leaping to capitalize on the current COVID disaster, as witnessed by this extremely on-point headline: 

Florida Will Pay for Parents to Move Kids Into New Schools if They Experience ‘COVID-19 Harassment’

That's a very apt way to characterize a voucher program--the state will pay you to pull your kid out of public schools. 

You may have been wondering how Florida made the leap to a voucher for covid harassment, but the fact is, they were already halfway there. Florida already has the Hope Scholarship, a voucher program that allows students to get a voucher if they allege bullying. Note that under this program, the state will pay you to leave your school based on the allegation alone--there doesn't need to be proof that it actually happened or that the school failed to remedy the situation. 

So all that this new policy really did was just expand Florida's definition of bullying to include “any threatening, discriminatory, insulting, or dehumanizing verbal, written or physical conduct an individual student suffers in relation to, or as a result of, school districts protocols for COVID-19, including masking requirement, the separation or isolation of students, or COVID-19 testing requirements.” So, basically, anything at all having to do with the pandemic.

Of course, private schools are not subject to Ron DeSantis's mandate that public schools may not have a mask mandate, and so some private schools are going ahead and mandating masks (and some are waffling and, supposedly on Twitter, legislators are offering to find masked schools for parents who are searching). But then, some private schools in Florida are maintaining their right to bully and discriminate against LGBTQ students. So once the state pays you to pull your kid out of public school, you may or may not be able to find a more agreeable option (and you may or may not have enough money to do it, as vouchers don't necessarily cover costs). 

This may all seem kind of hypocritical or nonsensical, but you just have to remember--all education policy in Florida is aimed at getting kids out of public schools and into private, profitable schools. Everything else can be tweaked to meet that single policy goal.

Raging Against Reality, Crisis, and Education's Kobyashi Maru

So here comes yet more panicky news from NWEA, hollering that Learning Loss is consuming New Jersey. It is, in many ways, baloney. First, everyone keeps ignoring the loss of standardized test prep and practice that is a factor in test results, and second, the Learning Loss here is reported based on what NWEA imagines the scores on last years test would have been had students taken them. 

I'm a little tired of pointing out the many, many, many problems with the continued chicken littling about Learning Loss, pushed most often by people who intend to make money by selling a solution. 

We are being subjected to a constant crisis narrative, and as well chronicled in this post at Your Contractual Obligations, certain folks have been trying to drive education in a particular direction for decades, using a tale of impending doom soaked in deficit language. The great Pandemic Learning Loss tale is the same story, with one critical difference. 

All previous crises, from the handwringing of Why Johnny Can't Read to the imminent national collapse of A Nation at Risk, have depended on a manufactured problem. NCLB and RttT made the crisis manufacture process more efficient, by requiring test scores that could be then used as "data" that "proved" what dire straits the country was in. 

What's new this time is that there is some basis in objective reality.

There's no reason not to believe that students mostly learned less last year than in a "normal" year. When people squawk about Learning Loss, they're not making up an issue out of thin air. As education crises go, that's kind of a first.

However.

Dealing with that reality is turning out to be a challenge that the world of policy and edu-business is ill-equipped to face.

First, we don't know exactly what the problem is. Edu-pundits keep calling for data and measurement, but we don't have an instrument to do that. We've wasted the past couple of decades developing Big Standardized Tests that serve no real purpose except as a tool for policy makers--not educators. A bad measure of some math and reading multiple choice questions is not going to give us a full picture of where students are educationally (and it never has). We've been using a foot-long wooden ruler to measure clouds, and now that we'd really, really like to get an accurate cloud measurement, all we have at hand is a crappy useless box of rulers.

Teachers know--or will know, after a few first fall weeks--what specific students need. Some parents know. But none of this helps bureaucrats and politicians set global policy and objectives.

So we don't know on a large scale level what, exactly, students are missing. And we have a batch of bad solutions for filling the gap.

Accelerate. Sure, teachers will all just somehow teach a lot more, faster, because they've always been able to do that--they just chose not to. 

Tutoring. The idea of tutoring is sound enough, but the number of people required to tutor 55 million students (give or take a few million) is daunting. Not to mention training and paying them.

Teacher differentiation. Best shot we've got, since teachers do it already. But every week filling up last year's gaps is a week less spent on this year's usual material. Meaning that even in a best case scenario, the pandemic pause will ripple on through the coming years. Remember--this year's high school seniors haven't had a "normal" year since they were freshmen.

Do some big outside the box thing. Now is a good time to question some of our assumptions about what public education needs to look like. Just don't imagine that you are coming up with some cool idea that will Totally Fix Everything.

There's a lot of raging and anger about this, and it just like the raging about masks and vaccinations and the prospect of more pandemic disruption in the fall, in that they all boil down to simple gut-level cry of "I don't want things to be the way they are!!! I want to do something to make them Not This Way!!"

It's education's Kobyashi Maru. In Star Trek, a training exercise in which all options are bad to serve as a test not of how trainees can come up with wins in a no-win scenario, but to see how they would deal with it. We can't make the gappage not be there, and there is no simple program that will suddenly reset education and students to the place they would be in some imaginary non-covid alternate universe. Some of us are not dealing with it well; instead, they're getting kind of ragey.

Raging at people because they will not create/implement any such magical fix won't help. It especially won't help if one's version of raging is to try to spur people to action by trying to raise the panic level ("An entire generation of students is falling behind and they will all end up jobless and eating dog food off a hot plate while living in a van down by the river!!") Nor does it help to get personally angry at people because you've convinced yourself that they could Fix All This but they just won't, perhaps for nefarious reasons. 

The pandemic pause happened. The interruption of "normal" schooling happened. Most students missed out on some stuff. Nothing is going to change any of that.

There will not be a single Big Fix for this, which is actually true of every education issue ever, though people tend to forget it. The good news is that humans are actually pretty resilient. It's also useful to remember that the whole list of standards that students Have To Meet by a certain grade are relatively recent, and many students have already met the standards for their age from a generation ago; your state standards were not lowered on stone tablets from a burning bush, but were made up by some guys just a decade or two ago. And some benchmarks, like "read by third grade = later success," are matters of correlation, not causation. Many of the factors that drive markers, like high scores on the Big Standardized Test, are not school-related at all, which is one reason why all of this mess will probably hit poor students harder than wealthy ones. 

No single Big Fix. Just steady dogged work to help our nation's young humans, student by student, to get back in educational gear. And it won't help any of them if folks insist on freaking out.

James T. Kirk dealt with the Kobyashi Maru by cheating. We don't have that option. We can, instead, suck it, take a deep breath, hunker down, and do the painstaking work. And that will still be true whenever the pandemic pause finally ends.