Ben Carson Wants To Talk To Your Little Patriots

Ben Carson wants a piece of the Patriotic Education For The Youngs action, and what he's come up with for Little Patriots is...well, not awesome.

After he finished serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. Carson created the American Cornerstone Institute, a sort of conservative thinky tank/advocacy group/instrument for pushing whatever thought is ambling through Carson's brain. It had a director of policy--Eric Blankenstein, who found then need to exit the Trump administration a bit earlier than Carson, but he appears to have exited in February. Otherwise, it's not clear that ACI is anything other than Ben Carson. 

Cornerstone touts this goal:

Guided by our cornerstones of faith, liberty, community, and life, we will strengthen the bonds that hold our country together by promoting conservative, commonsense solutions to the issues facing our society.

"We will create unity by selling our team's view" seems a bit counterintuitive, but in talking about ACI Carson has generally emphasized unity and peaceful communication. As with his years with the previous administration, Carson doesn't seem to quite get where all this divisiveness might be coming from, but give him credit--his message is not "We have to obliterate those evil bad guys on the other side." For a conservative in 2022, that's something. 

Incidentally, if it seems as if "cornerstone" isn't a more common part of political rhetoric in this country, that may be because one of the better-known historical "cornerstones" is the Cornerstone Address, in which Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, explained that the cornerstone of the new nation rests "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

It's a curious oversight on Carson's part, particularly since one of the things he/ACI wants to do is teach children history.

Whipping up patriotic instructional stuff has become a staple of the right, and Carson's entry that three-legged race is Little Patriots. 

The program appears aimed at grades K-5, and it emphasizes the four "cornerstones" in the quote above. It involves some fairly thin lessons and activities (from the K unit on Discovering America, "Have you ever wanted to find something new? You too might be an explorer.")

But the big central feature appears to be a series of animated episodes of Star Spangled Adventures. It looks like there are supposed to be 25 eventually; right now there are 4. 

The production crew for these episodes is not a bunch of amateurs. Producer/director Robert F. Arvin has done work in Hollywood on movies and TV shows you've probably watched, from Inspector Gadget to JAG to Shanghai Noon as a digital artist, working mostly on pre-visualizations. Writer Jeff Holder has worked in mainstream kids media as a writer and VP of development at Hanna-Barbera. Songs are by Bradley Skistimas whose most recent claim to fame is getting his defamatory song about Dr, Fauci taken down by Youtube. Main voiced actor Cheryl Felicia Rhoads has worked professionally for a long time. 

So these are people who are pros, and yet somehow, their finished product is not great. Consider Episode Four about the Declaration. 

Open with the theme, which sounds kind of like a C&W singer doing a John Wayne imitation. "So come on all you patriots, let's go."

The animation for these pieces is bobbleheaded and flat, like cut scenes from a 90s-vintage video game. And although animation allows us to go anywhere and see anything, most of this episode is set in a room with Thomas Jefferson sitting at a table (while his wife cleans up, serves guests drinks, and says encouraging things). 

The host for the series is Liberty, a giant eagle in a tri-corner hat, voiced by Rhoads as a sort of discount Angela Lansbury. The video underlines a theme that tensions and conflicts have been getting worse, and the only cause hinted at is King George's tyrannical belief in his divine right to rule. Jefferson is mad at that "plundering tyrant," all of which seems aimed at making it seem as if England is vastly different from the US and has no idea of representative government, no such thing as Parliament, etc. Nor has anything like the French and Indian War ever occurred, creating the debts at the heart of the taxation debate. You can say that's all too complicated for the K-5 crowd, and I don't disagree, but what you choose to include or leave out when you simplify tells us a lot about your message, and the message the  here is that the Revolutionary War was caused by a monarch mistakenly believing in a God-given right to rule when in fact only we understood what God really meant.

Writer Jeff Holder has a career in children's television, really, so I'm thrown by lines like reference to Thomas Paine's "salient points" or "yes, his discourse on role of government is brilliant" and "the magnitude of what we are saying is staggering."  There's a background jazzy score that just loops away without responding to what's happening, not even when we get to the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" part that is a focus of the episode.  And then the eagle says "The world's may be old fashioned, but what they mean are timeless." And yes, that's a subject-verb agreement error. And before someone points it out, yes, I know it takes a good ten seconds to find an error within the confines of this blog, but I'm not a paid professional who has been typing for a living for decades.

We take a moment to explain that "all men" back then meant "all humanity" which...okay. And we are heavy on the God-given part. Also, leaning on "those who are governed are over those who govern." 

After Congress deliberates, we get a song that rhymes "get it done" with "independence." Then we get a scene of King George being hacked off about the Declaration while the eagle whispers incomprehensible pieces of it in his ear and he rants (and happy jazzy piano plays), because I guess doing something doesn't really count unless it upsets someone else. 

The eagle tells us that Jefferson always regretted that the Congress cut the part about slavery. But Congress thought it would cause more arguments, which is a clever way of skating past the fact that members of Congress were the ones arguing. But one theme of this series is the idea that the Founders were a united body, and not a bunch of squabbling men who had major disagreements about just about everything. This matters, because there's a huge difference between understanding ourselves as a nation founded on disagreement and compromise and understanding ourselves as a nation founded on one single inviolable Truth shared by unified founders. But Little Patriots leans on the second version all the way. Of course, the eagle does not mention that Jefferson kept human beings enslaved even as he called slavery an abomination. I don't care how young a person is--you are never too young to understand that people are complicated.

You'd better off showing the musical 1776.

There are some short slide-show style videos that are actually more watchable. There are also a couple of books that Carson co-authors with Valerie Pfundstein and which emphasize things like the Judeo-Christian values of our founding. 

Through lessons and cartoons rooted in our American history, the Little Patriots Program focuses on America’s four founding pillars: faith, liberty, community, and life, and celebrates all the values that make our country exceptional.

The whole program favors a simplistic view of our history anchored in religious faith and national exceptionalism and the awesomeness of entrepreneurial marketeering, with a few head nods to little corrections we made along the way (Jackie Robinson integrates baseball, and MLK Jr. leads some marches and says that character thing). There's a bibliography (the Kindergarten lessons are sourced mostly from the Brittanica online version). There is, at least, no apparent signs of the sort of "And then dirty socialists tried to undermine the work of our Founders" that other patriotic history curriculum are fond of. 

Not to mention irony, as when another video about liberty explains that it means "to follow a new and perhaps different path than others before you." As long as, you know, it's an acceptable right kind of different path.

I don't think Little Patriots is going to fix the nation. It may pad out the work for the private schools, homeschoolers, and grandparents that it's aimed at, but I can't imagine it benefiting actual children. Pass on this. 

ALEC's 2022 Education Goals

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is that special group that drives the legislative bus right over any pedestrian notions of how a bill gets to Capitol Hill. And they had some educational ideas for this year. Let's see how things are going.

ALEC is a special collection of legislators and business folks. The "exchange" in the title is a misnomer; mostly ALEC appears about well-placed business leaders getting to tell legislators what they'd like to see enshrined in law. Committees whip up "model legislation" which legislators than carry back to their own state to get passed (Sourcewatch calls it a "corporate bill mill"). ALEC is one reason that from time to time we see remarkably similar laws popping up at the same time all across the country.

So when ALEC says they have some items on their wish list, it's worth paying attention.

What did they want from the education sector this year? See if you recognize any of these priorities from a state capital near you. On their list of "essential policy ideas," under "Education and Workforce Development," we find the following:

Academic transparency to enhance parental rights

In fact, they've even got a model American Civics and History Act that would require all social studies instructional materials to be available online for parents to view, require schools to offer US history and government, and forbid anything that might force students to agree with a particular view on controversial subjects (so I guess no more expressing disapproval of kids wearing nazi paraphernalia or confederate flags). 

This one seems to be going well for them, with lots of states demanding some version of "no controversial subjects" and requiring both sidesism in class (like that school in Texas where teachers were told they'd better hit both sides of the Holocaust). 

Alternative credentialling

This item mentions how the certification process places undue burdens on teachers, which is an odd thing to say, since a person isn't a teacher until they've been certified and hired. But the real concern here is how a certification process can "limit the pool of qualified professionals." 

How much better to have a really large pool to choose from, because that would make the cost of such labor cheaper. Hence a whole lot of talk about the teacher shortage and how we can fix it by repeatedly lowering the bar so that any warm body can be put in charge of a classroom. For years, reformsters tried to McDonaldize teaching by pushing teacher-proof curriculum in a box, but recently we seem to have moved past that an on to just saying, "Screw it" and redefining the job requirements so that any human with a pulse qualifies.

Expanding educational freedom

"Education freedom" is a term that tests better with audiences than "vouchers," but that's what they mean. At the opening they were salivating over the impending Carson v. Makin case that, along with the Espinoza decision, would help blast a big fat hole in the wall between church and state. Big enough to drive a bus through, a bus full of money headed for your favorite "religious" school, while simultaneously getting closer to establishing education as a private commodity that you have to go purchase on your own in an unregulated marketplace that, like all marketplaces, offers a hell of a lot more to the rich than to the poor.

And wouldn't you know it-- ALEC has some model Education Savings Account (super-voucher) legislation for your use. Take a look--I guarantee it will look familiar, right down to the clauses guaranteeing "autonomy" for the participating vendors so that they won't have to abide by any of those pesky regulations that the government likes to throw around; they'll be free to discriminate to their hearts' content.  

Those are the big three for ALEC this year, and as you can see, it's been going pretty well for the quest to drive the bus right through the public school walls and just dismantle the whole thing. And if the bus in your state looks a lot like the bus in other states, well, now you have an idea why. 

High School Theater and Changing Genders

I came across this story over the weekend-- the Central Academy of Technology and Arts in North Carolina has drawn the ire of Moms for Liberty and other reactionary folks by staging a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar in which casting was done without any consideration for gender. 

I had several thoughts, including flashing back to my high school days in the early 1970s when Superstar was all the rage and was also stirring up all the rage. The title song was a radio hit and so many pearls were clutched , and then clutched even more when folks discovered that the single had King Herod's Song on the B side, which in retrospect strikes me as some top quality trolling, because taken out of context that song certainly seems a tad blasphemous. I also vividly remember that in the world of church youth ministries, Superstar was greeted with great enthusiasm. The JCS flap was my introduction to that phenomenon in which many people who get all offended on behalf of religion are not actually all that involved in the church. 

But mostly my thought was that gender flipping of roles in high school theater is not remotely new.

I've been involved in amateur and school theater for ages, and here's the thing. Shows are written with heavily male casts. But in school and community theater, mostly what you get coming out are females. School and community theater are, in some respects, harder on directors than a big Broadway production. In the pros, you can say, "For this part I want an actor who's 5'10" with blue eyes and blonde hair and can dance, act and juggle fire." In the school and amateur world, you get what you get, and you have to figure out how to make a show out of it. 

So you do what you have to do. I cannot even count the number of times I've switched role genders. Some don't make the slightest bit of difference--the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat could be anybody, or even a couple of anybodies. And why not older female authority figures, like Mr. Lundie in Brigadoon. I've done Once Upon a Mattress a couple of times; it's a great little show and it has a brace of main characters who can be either gender. It's also a great example of a show that's just more interesting if you mix it up rather than just using a stage full of male characters.

That's part of what you discover when you start casting women in roles originally written for men; it unlocks all sorts of cool stuff. Make Bell's crazy father into her crazy mother in Beauty and the Beast and all sorts of little things shake loose. 

I once directed an in-the-park production of Hamlet, costumed to look like a generation story in the sixties, and turned Laertes into Ophelia's older sister, and that creates some really interesting dynamics as well as adding a female character who's not a terrible mess (and don't come at me about "historical accuracy" in a work by William "I giveth not one fig for thy true historie" Shakespeare. 

Or a production of The Fantasticks in which the fathers are played by women playing men. Or the gazillion chorus members that have been asked to cross dress. The list goes on and on. Make the changes a few times out of necessity and you start seeing that musical theater's endless tendency to use male characters as a default setting deserves to be challenged and ignored.

That's really at the heart of all our arguments about gender and race in fiction--the long-standing idea that a straight white male is the default setting for all characters and you can have other types of characters only as long as you can make a case for them--but the straight white male is the character that you never have to make a case for. High school theater upends this by making a very simply case--not enough guys came out for this show--but once you've broken the habit, you can start thinking of casts without that default, and it opens a whole world of rich possibilities. 

(And that's before we even get to the "straight" default, which is not obvious to the audience, but how many young LGBTQ performers have come up playing straight characters on stage.)

CTA has a famously successful theater program; I suspect their decision had nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with opening up more opportunities and possibilities for their cast and production. I'll also bet dollars to donuts that none of the M4L crew has much experience with high school theater (not even as audience members) because to anyone who spends time in that world, cross casting is not a shocking new surprise. In that respect, necessity pushed high school theater productions ahead of the culture at large. No reason they shouldn't stay there. 

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/9)

Once a year, my small town transforms into the site of a three-day festival that is a combination of every craft fair you've ever seen, plus a race, plus a car show, plus food, plus a combination homecoming and fall festival. Our excuse is a tenuous connection to John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) who lived in the area briefly before heading west, apple stuff in hand. But it is one of the big highlights of the year here, and a chance to run into all sorts of folks. This year we have the bonus of the twins, who are never not amazed and excited to see someone from school outside of school. 

Despite all that activity, I've still got a reading list for you. Remember to share your favorites. Amplifying voices is how the word gets out.

Big tech is co-parenting our children. Yes, be afraid. 

The New York Times looks at Susan Linn's "searing indictment of corporate greed" and the tech companies who target children, as well as the lawmakers who make it easy. 

Some Politicians Count on Teachers Staying Silent. We Can’t Afford To

At Education Week, Monte Bourjaily says it's time for teachers to speak up and push back against the wave of gag laws.

Tennessee charter school commission accused of 'enormous conflict of interest'

NewsChannel 5 out of Nashville has been all over the state's charter school shenanigans, including this story of how the state has handed charter advocates the power to overrule local government. 

An ever-growing disconnect

While we're talking about Tennessee shenanigans, it's useful to check in on Dad Gone Wild

Dallas Schools Turn to NFTs to Boost Student Engagement

From the file of Dumb Things That School Districts Buy Into. 

The Reckless Rankings Game

The Chronicle of Higher Education will only give you a couple of free articles, but this should be one of them. Akil Bello offers this scathing look at the U.S. News college ranking racket.

Gaming the school rating systems

Gail Sunderland notes that parents mostly like their schools, so reformsters have created school rating systems that are far more about politics than about education. 

Foot soldiers for Ron DeSantis: The right-wing money and influence behind Moms for Liberty

Nobody tracks dark money influences like Maurice Cunningham, and in this piece for Our Schools (this link will take you to LA Progressive, but you can find the piece in several outlets) he plays connect the dots with Moms For Liberty and entirely too many other of the usual shadowy players.

Book bans part of coordinated assault on public education

Jonathan Friedman of PEN America put out this op-ed explaining why there's more to worry about than just the book bans.

NC virtual charter schools continue to have poor performance yet high demand

In news that will come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention, North Carolina Public Radio discovers that the state's cyber-schools aren't very good at educating students.

Reading the College Board's 990

I'm sending you to Tik Tok this time, and a user whose whole thing is reading non-profit's federal 990 forms. This time she breezes through the College Board's form and golly bob howdy but do those folks make a ton of money. This includes David Coleman's salary. Yikes. 

A broke marching band parades on Capitol Hill to practice. Magic ensues.

There is perhaps more to unpack here than Lizzie Johnson at the Washington Post gets into, but it's still a cool piece, especially if you're a marching band person.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes, I took a look at the federal audit of the Charter School Programs grant program, which finds, once again, a hellacious amount of waste and mendacity. And I took a look at North Carolina's terrible merit pay plan and how it seems to have come via some shadowy backroom dealings. 

One More Misguided Call To End School Boards

At reformy publication Education  Next, Henry Smith calls for the elimination of school boards. Smith has been the mayor of a small town (Dover, NH), and an assistant secretary of education under Bill Clinton; currently he's an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Once upon a time, he interned for a member of Boston City Council.

His takeaway from his experiences is that politicians can be self-aggrandizing and more interested in gaining political power than doing the right thing, and that school board members are often politicians, and therefor do many Naughty Things. And he rattles off some recent scandals, without even getting around to the hijacking of boards by the right-wing anti-public ed crowd. 

While the recent school board scandals and demagogues echo the old ones, such activities are just a few of the many reasons to call for the elimination of school boards in the 21st century.

So let's see how he makes his case. He offers four arguments.

First, technology. Parents can communicate directly with schools and staff. "Parents no longer need to rely on the board’s political capital with individual schools when they can learn about their children’s progress by speaking directly and daily to the system’s staff themselves." This has been true since the invention of the telephone, a pre-21st century invention. This point seems to rest on a misconception of school board's role. "Since school boards rarely use their political clout to connect parents to principals and teachers, they have made their job of constituent outreach and representation mostly obsolete." Was that ever a school board's job? Have teachers and administrators been surrounded by a mysterious barrier that only school board members could breach?

Second, Smith says, that school boards "tend to roll over for the expertise of the school administrators." So the complaint is that the board hires folks with educational expertise to run the school district and then... listens to them? "It often looks more like the school boards are managed by school administrators instead of the other way around." Well, yes. That's exactly what school administrators are hired to do. Is Smith also upset that members of Congress set policy for social security, but do not actually manage social security offices themselves? 

Third, "voters are long past showing much interest in engaging with school boards." He means as far as elections go. Nobody is voting in school board elections and so school board elections have "devolved into contests in which mostly just teachers and community rabble rousers participate." I don't even know what to do with this one--the average ballot, especially in an off year, is filled with offices for which few people vote, from county coroner to 5th Level Adjudicatory Judge of Appeals Court of 157th Subdistrict. What an interesting world it would be if we simply eliminated every office for which voting fell beneath a certain level. 

Fourth, Smith blames contract negotiation difficulties the fault of the board. 

Direct contract negotiations between the school administration and the teacher unions, without the machinations caused by the additional layer of school board politicians, would eliminate one layer of government and, thereby, accelerate those contract negotiations.

Oh, Honey. There are two problems here. The first is that there is zero reason to believe this is actually true. Second is that direct negotiations of this sort would risk poisoning the working relationship of teachers and their managers. Okay--three problems, and I'll get back to the third one in a second.

So how, in Smith's world, are school districts run?

[F]or parents who want to advocate for their children and the schools’ programs, Parent Teacher Associations offer numerous advantages over school boards. PTAs simply do a better job of giving parents political and social capital within the school system.

Have you noticed what's missing from all of Smith's grand ideas and complaints? Every taxpayer who is not a parent. In direct teacher-administration negotiation, nobody represents all the taxpayers who will foot the bill. PTAs do not include non-parent taxpayers. 

Smith also like mayoral control, citing big-city mayors Boston’s Michele Wu, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, New York’s Eric Adams, and DC’s Muriel Bowser as folks who "need no assistance from school board politicians" and it is true that mayors like Eric "Swagger My Way Through Massive Budget Cuts" Adams have provided excellent examples of politicians who don't accept input from much of anyone. 

Smith hates the politicking and grandstanding and the "political battlefield" that school boards represent, but he somehow imagines that "mayors, families, PTAs, and school systems, working together, can do a better job" on issues like children's test scores and resegregation problems. This imagines that mayors, families, PTAs and school systems will somehow not involve people who are interested in political maneuvering and self-aggrandizement or "extremist political exploitation," which is just a silly thing to imagine. Mayoral control in particular leaves schools at the mercy of one person's bad ideas, and appointed boards are at least as political as elected ones, if not more so.

Less silly, and perhaps more important, is that Smith's idea cuts a whole vast number of taxpayer stakeholders out of school governance, leaving a critical group paying taxes and having no say. I can't imagine that such a system wouldn't stir up some political battles of its own.

I get it. There isn't a teacher who has taught for more than a week who hasn't felt frustration and/or rage over their local school board and the whole business of being a trained professional who ultimately answers to a batch of elected amateurs.

But a democracy-ish system in which government is run by a bunch of elected amateurs is fundamental to our country's operation. It as, as the saying goes, the very worst system except for every other system. Nor is there any system that cannot be bent to politicized shenanigans if citizens simply stop paying attention and exercising due diligence. I get Smith's frustration, but his solution is no solution at all.

A No-Cost Gift Schools Can Give To All Students

Slack.

It's been seven years since Robert Putnam published Our Kids, a book that laid out a lot of depressing evidence that the wealthy of this country are, in every way, leaving the poor behind. 

One of the things that wealthy families have that poor families do not is what you can think of as either a big web or a large account of social capital. It's a web of connections, the ability to call a guy, the chance to get some slack in a difficult situation. You can think of it as privilege or social capital or simply the power of family reputation. 

It shows up in a variety of ways. Some are extra bonuses, like having the right web of connections to get your kid extra help with an area of his or her interest (Little Pat is suddenly interested in widgets, and I know a guy who runs a Junior Widgeteer Club). Some are the chance for a do-over--Pat steals money from the school concession stand, but people decide to give Pat a second chance. 

When you're a kid, you learn about slack pretty quickly. I was halfway through high school when I realized that I was coded as a Good Kid and could wander the halls and skirt rules in ways that some of my peers could not. 

Some students get slack. They get extra opportunities and extra chances to bounce back from mistakes.

And the thing is, schools can give that kind of slack to everyone. From the classroom to the front office, schools can extend slack to each and every student no matter the circumstance.

Mind you, nobody should get infinite slack. I always told my students that I would trust them until they proved to me that I couldn't, and every year there were a couple who proved to me that I couldn't give them slack.

But you have to start with the slack. Even if you have Heard Things about that kid. Even if you remember How Their Older Sibling Was, or you've lived around the community long enough to know about the Parental Units' various failings.

It's exhausting and wearing to live your life as if you are just one misstep away from disaster and loss. It's hard to fix that in the world at large, but not so hard to fix it inside a school.

That means cutting slack for getting work done, for minor misbehavior, for being surly and uncooperative, for not Getting It yet, for violating some rules. It means not getting pissed at a student for what you imagine they're probably going to do. It doesn't mean a license for assault or otherwise creating an unsafe environment for teachers and other students.

There are many ways in which we cannot give some students the kinds of privileges that come with wealth and station and, well, privilege. But you can treat every single student as if they are from a wealthy, upstanding family. 

The Fake Furry Story That Will Not Die

There it was again, this time on my facebook feed, One of my friends had shared someone else's post, a four-picture collage of a teen girl wearing some ears and makeup, costumed to look catlike. Could have been a Halloween shoot or just a dress-up photo, but of course it was accompanied about pearl-clutching text about how some school was allowing some girl to attend school self-identifying as a cat, and What Are We Coming To These Days.

"Not true," I responded with some context. "I guess," others replied, "But still..." while others responded with various mixtures of horror, derision and outrage.

It's the lie that will not die, and it should be laughable, but it tells us something about the far right bubble and how quickly it can spread baloney even as it remains impervious to actual facts.

Folks started noting the spread of furry panic back at the beginning of this year. There are schools, the story goes, that allow students to self-identify as animals, wear their furry costumes, eat sitting on the floor, do their business in litter boxes. So far there has not been a single factual foundation for any of these stories. Nor, for that matter, do the stories get it right when it comes to Furry culture and behavior  (furries do not, for instance, wear their outfits to work and insist on acting as animals or pooping by their desks). But it doesn't matter. 

In Colorado, the GOP candidate for governor has tripled down on the claim that students are self-identifying as animals throughout the Denver with the support of their school districts, despite repeated debunking and denials. 

Minnesota also has a GOP gubernatorial candidate who repeated the litter box claim, despite debunking.

In Tennessee, school leaders had to take time to respond to a litter box claim by a state senator. 

South Carolina districts felt the need to respond to litter box stories. In Wyoming, parents told a board they were worried that furries were covered in equality policies. And Rhode Island. And Pennsylvania. And New York. And Illinois. And Oregon. Oh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, too.

And so far we're just talking about stories in the last month (h/t @KyleClark).

If we go back over the last year, we find more. In Nebraska, in a rare apology, a state senator had to admit that the furry rumor he had repeated was baloney in March. In Texas, a GOP house candidate went with the relatively milder "lowered tables" story in January. A South Dakota school district had to explain to a parent in July that no, they would not be putting in litter boxes for furry students. Maine was battling back the litter box rumors in May. In April, a Wisconsin school district had to explain that they have no "furry protocol."

Patient Zero for this fake story seems to be Michigan's Midland Public Schools board meeting in December of 2021, at which a mother spoke claiming she was informed that litter boxes had been added in bathrooms for students who "identify as cats", calling it a "nationwide" issue and pointing to an "agenda that is being pushed" (a "nefarious" one). The co-chair of the Michigan GOP promoted the stories ("Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools), and before you could say crazy-pants disinformation campaign, the story was being covered by Buzzfeed, USA Today, and the New York Times. 

Since this post went up, several readers have pointed out that the story also traces origins back to the post-Columbine practice of keeping an emergency bucket in classrooms in case of an armed siege--including kitty litter for the trapped students. 

And you can find all this coverage and more quickly and easily by just going to the Wikipedia page about this whole loonie story.

Regrettably, almost none of the coverage asks obvious questions. Like, do furries self-identify as animals? And do furries use litter boxes? The answer is no to both. Furries are best understood as animal cosplay, and like your neighbor who dresses up as Captain Kirk or Wolverine or a Rennaissance Faire sword-bearing barbarian, they know who they are in "real life" nor do they wear their costumes to work.

But the "identify as" that folks use when they spread the stories is a tell-- furry panic is a barely-masked version of LGBTQ+ panic, cut from the same cloth as the old "If we let the gays get married today, will people be marrying their dogs tomorrow."

Furry panic highlights several features of the current landscape. It is ready-made for the parents' rights movement, which is in turn ready-made for the current election cycle. It also dovetails nicely with the drive to reduce trust in public schools so that they can be dismantled and replaced with a privatized system. It's a story that serves too many peoples' purposes to be allowed to die. 

And it reminds us of the societal cost of destroying trust in everything outside a particular propaganda bubble. Because these stories should absolutely have stopped by now. The repeated denials by school officials of every stripe should have mattered. The fact that after almost a year, nobody can point to an actual incident should matter. There's one story about a kid who got in trouble for barking at a teacher, and someone on my Twitter feed says a student told him that kids at school get away with wearing horns and a tail, and that's all a far cry from allowing students to identify as animals and use litter boxes at school. 

But we are once again in the land where facts don't matter--or, rather, only information that comes from people in the bubble can be treated as a fact. Objective reality is not a thing; only my far-right rumors and outrage source can be trusted. Ironically, it's likely that actual furries probably have a better grip on reality than some of the people who are indulging in this groundless panic.

Furry panic is also a reminder of the power of repetition. Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes that thing that you heard somewhere and hey, if I keep hearing it--well, where there's smoke, there's fire right? This is one of the best tricks of the far-right outrage complex--just keep bouncing the same picture of smoke around and around and eventually folks believe that there's a fire, when there isn't even really smoke. That's why the "mirrors' in "smoke and mirrors" matter. The notion of "I'm correct, so if I just explain it once, clearly, that should be enough to make it stick," is sweet, but not an excellent plan.