It's The Guns. But It's Not Just The Guns

We can sleepwalk through this. At this point, we can recite all of the arguments from all the sides. The unfolding of news from the latest school shooting is barely denting social media. Hell, we're not even on track to beat last year's all time high of 82 school shootings (only 45 so far).

There are of course an assortment of details emerging. The shooter was questioned over online threats last year. A warning yesterday morning. The student who didn't let the shooter back into the classroom because they saw the gun. An AR-platform weapon (cue gun folks mansplaining what AR really does or does not mean, as if that matters in this context). Fast word to authorities because teachers had only just been given Centegix cards--basically a panic button you can carry in your pocket.

On social media yesterday, the usual thoughts and prayers from Georgia GOP legislators, led by Governor Kemp, followed by thousands of people pointing out that these same legislators, this same governor, had rolled back virtually every gun regulation in the state. Kemp's campaign ad resurfaced--the one where he playfully chats with a kid who wants to date his daughter, including threatening the boy with a gun. Har.

We could trot out the same old stats. The US leads the industrialized world in gun violence, gun possession. The states with more gun regulation have fewer gun deaths. The same old cartoons. That Onion headline, released yet again ("No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens). But today, less than 24 hours later, everyone (except the people in Georgia directly affected) has moved on. 

It's the guns. It has always been the guns. It's the worship of a distorted view of the Second Amendment that says your right to own the means of killing other humans matters more than my child's right not to be killed. Your pursuit of happiness beats my life and liberty. Heck, just last week, a conservative federal district judge ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. We're about to mark the anniversary of 9/11, an event so shocking that we still tightly regulate riding on an airplane. 

It's the guns. No fourteen year old was going to school yesterday and killing four and injuring nine more with a knife. But we know that. Some of us just don't care enough to do something about it.

It's the guns. But it's not just the guns.

According to CNN, the three years with the most school shootings are 2021, 2022, and 2023. Which certainly tracks with the mental health crisis among young people that we've been talking about. And while lots of folks have theories (phones! absent fathers! space aliens!), we haven't really got a handle on it yet. Of course, the same people who love the Second Amendment and blame school shootings on mental illness also voted against expanding mental health services. (And if you think it's mentally ill people with guns who are responsible, wouldn't it make sense to put rules in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to get their hands on guns).

I have to believe that it's past time to look hard at our own culture. It's not just that the past fifteen or so years have seen the country more divided and polarized. It's how some of us talk about that polarization.

We're going to destroy the opposition, obliterate them, use power and force to dominate them and silence them, drive them out of the public arena. So many of our conflicts are discussed with the language of violence and war. This is not new, but the intensity and frequency is. There was a time when most folks understood that much of this was figurative language; nowadays, we have too many people who don't. The MAGA narrative is that we are living through apocalyptic times and the Enemy has to be stopped by any means necessary. We've seen a violent attack on the Capitol. We've seen so many campaign ads featuring guns blowing away some Bad Thing. We've heard leaders, nominally Christian ones at that, suggests that a revolution is coming and there might be blood.

We don't talk about how to get along with people that we think are wrong. We talk about how to wipe them out.

And if you are young, it has been like this for most of your life. 

I fear that we are mostly numb to the constant rhetoric of violence, the tendency to frame everything as a war or a battle or a fight rather than simply a debate or disagreement. Debate and disagreement are not strong enough to stir the hearts of potential donors or supporters. So we get constant high drama, calls to action, declarations of doom unless we fight back hard.

Most of us kind of know better. Some of us do not. In a culture that glorifies violence, even presents it as a path to glory and achievement, some people buy in. Some just accept a worldview of existential dread and battle, like Lindsey Graham explaining that "joy doesn't exist in the real world." Some hunker down into angry powerlessness. And a few pick up a gun.

It's one of the things I appreciate about the Harris-Walz campaign--not just the hopefulness (I've been promised "hope" before, and I'm skeptical) but the minimal violent rhetoric, the absence of rhetoric suggesting that we face an apocalypse and we must be prepared destroy those who are a threat. 

It's ironic-- as much as we love throwing around hypothetical and figurative violence, we've stopped trying to have meaningful conversations about the real stuff. Since Sandy Hook, when school children die in another shooting, we move on. Well, all of us who didn't lose someone. Nothing is going to happen; we've established that as a country we don't have the will to address the problem, the guns.

Because it's the guns. It's also a culture that makes violence seem like an excellent solution to conflict. 

Shifting a culture may be even harder than trying to get politicians to show the will to get common sense gun regulation. But as citizens we need to work at both. I'm not about to look at another shooting and argue that this is not who we are; it very clearly exactly who we are. But that doesn't mean we couldn't become something better. 

Moms For Liberty and Trans Panic Recruiting

Moms For Liberty is experiencing a new rush of membership, and they have trans students to thank.

In the world of culture panic, one brand of panic dominates all others. Project 2025 is absolutely loaded with it. Donald Trump just claimed that schools are performing unauthorized trans surgery on students during the school day. And where better to field test such raw baloney than at a Moms For Liberty gathering, because M4L appears to be investing in trans panic as a way to reverse what of late seems a bit of a downward trend in their fortunes.

Time was that this momwashed group of political operatives was a hot ticket in election season. Okay, that was just one year. Since then, their ability to recruit members and get them onto school boards seems to have dipped. In the past couple of cycles they've even cut back on endorsing candidates, but even so, their success rate just keeps dropping. Even in their home state of Florida, the last round of elections didn't go their way. Not to mention their fervent embrace of Candidate Ron DeSantis, back before they went all in on Trump.

But M4L has scored one big victory, and it seems to be spreading their name. U.S. District Judge John Broomes ruled, in a lawsuit brought by M4L,two other groups, plus four states, that the Buden expansion of Title IX would be stayed. His injunction stopped the feds from extending the protections of Title IX to LGBTQ students. Then in August, the Supreme Court let the injunction stand. 

Broomes is a 2018 Trump appointee. He's a Navy veteran, and logged three years as a project manager for Koch Industries before hanging out his lawyer shingle. Since taking his seat, he has blocked pandemic rules restricting religious gatherings, and he just ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. 

The tricky part of Broomes's injunction has been the question of exactly where it applies. The four states-- Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming-- all fall under the injunction. But because one of the plaintiffs is Moms For Liberty, Broomes extended the injunction to cover any school attended by a child of a Moms For Liberty member. M4L asked to expand that to any school in a county where M4L members lived, but he said no. 

However. 

The injunction applies to any "present or prospective" member of Moms For Liberty. In other words, you just have to say you're a member of the group, or that you might someday become a member of the group, and you can block the new Title IX from your child's school.

M4L is responsible for sending the list of schools to the court, but they have won the right to supplement that list as new school names come rolling in. And they have provided the means to keep them coming.

On their website, there is a page devoted to the lawsuit and the ruling. At the bottom are FAQa and a button to push so you can "become a member of Moms For Liberty for FREE today!" Under the news items, there's this:

Join today and opt your school out of the new Title IX! 

Is it working? Well, according to the M4L webpage, my county and one next door do not have M4L chapters. And yet in all but one district, someone has come to school board meetings to announce that they are M4L members and they have added the schools to the list, heading off local school board plans to update local policy to match the new Title IX rules. 

So keep your eyes peeled, particularly if you're in a county without a M4L chapter, for newly minted M4L members that show up at boards to stop trans children from using the wrong bathroom. There are no membership requirements to be a member of M4L, no hoops to jump through, nothing really to prove you belong. Anyone can do it, and lots of folks in the grip of trans panic are doing it right now. Will this improve M4L's fading fortunes? Who knows. Does this preserving parental rights is less important than making sure certain students don't have too many rights? Perhaps. Will it make life more difficult for young LGBTQ human persons? No doubt. 

PA: Trying To Shut Down A Discriminatory Charter School

Charter schools can't discriminate, claim their supporters, because they must allocate their seats by a random process, not by creaming or selecting only the students they want. It's a lottery. How can it be stacked?

So the success of Franklin Towne Charter High School in Philadelphia, a Blue Ribbon (aka high test score achieving) school, must be a testament to its great work and achievement. Right?

Except that about a year ago, the Philadelphia Board of Education began the process of shutting down FTCHS based on allegations reported by Maddie Hanna, Kristen Graham, and Kasturi Pananjadi at the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 2023.

A top executive at Franklin Towne Charter High School said this year’s lottery was fixed, with students from certain zip codes shut out, and others eliminated because they — or their older siblings — exhibited academic or behavioral problems. Some children were also excluded because Franklin Towne’s chief executive didn’t want to take anyone from a particular charter elementary school, in the event he might have to pay for their transportation.

Patrick Field, Franklin Towne’s chief academic officer and an administrator at the school for 17 years, said the lottery tampering was ordered by Joseph Venditti, the longtime former CEO. Venditti abruptly resigned Feb. 27, citing health reasons, after Field alerted the charter’s board chair about the lottery issues.

So, we can call them "allegations," but they look an awful lot like "accurate reporting by someone on the inside."  (Meanwhile, Field was immediately put on administrative leave by the school and filed his own lawsuit for retaliation by the employer).

Nor does it look like a recent aberration. The school opened in 2000. As reported by Carly Sitrin for Chalkbeat, the 2014 application that won the school a National Blue Ribbon Award reported school demographics of 2% Asian, 8% Black/African American, 14% Hispanic, and 76% white. The demographics of the city in which FTCHS operated--  42% Black and 36% white. 

The Board has said that they don't necessarily want to shut the school down-- just get them to shape up and cease "blatantly racist practices", and revocation hearing would be the way to do that. Instead, the proceedings have turned into a year long slog.

The hearing should have started in October of last year. But Franklin Towne challenged the particular hearing officer the board hired, Rudy Garcia. Folks expected a quick decision. Instead, no ruling for ten months. Meanwhile, Franklin Towne ladling more charges against the board, including a challenge to Pennsylvania's charter law, saying both that Garcia was biased and that he couldn't run the hearing ad decide the school's fate.

The case is in front of Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle, a GOP judge (though a Democrat when she first ran for the seat). She's drawn some complaints from the Defender Association and a "not recommended" from the Philadelphia Bar Association. In 2020, when the state was trying to use emergency releases to thin out jail populations and slow COVID spread, Coyle denied every single request. She was a Philly Assistant DA from 1986 through 2002. And she was a member of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School Board of Trustees.

Coyle's work on this case has been less than spectacular. Kristen Graham reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer notes that, according to court records, Coyle posed this question to school board president Reginald streamer-- if there had been lottery manipulation, "why would that cause a concern?" If they had broken the law and actively discriminated against minority children, why is that a big deal. 

Streater, presumably after he had picked his jaw up off the floor, replied that the board takes seriously things like inequitable treatment of students and breaking the law. 

Last week Coyle finally issued her order. Franklin Towne gets its request to remove Garcia, but not its challenge to sections of the charter law. Sher ordered a thirty-day stay of the revocation hearings, as well as a hearing in her courtroom to address further stays. If this all drags on too long, she'll require Franklin Towne to show her that they are complying with lottery-based admission requirements.

Coyle doesn't appear very sympathetic to the board. For one thing, the school is so valuable--

Realistically, should this successful high school be forced to close its doors, not only would the attending children, their parents, teachers, and administrators be adversely affected, so too would the entire community. This would permanently deprive all future students from the zip code(s) that the school board believes had been disregarded by Franklin Towne’s former administrators.

In other words, revoking the charter because it won't admit certain students would deprive those students of the chance to attend the charter that won't admit them. 

Also, she thinks the whole revocation procedure is deficient and that the board was displaying "bullying and biased appearance." And this, from the Inquirer:

Coyle wrote that her order “aligns with the public interest of promoting trust in the legal system and the integrity of our public institutions and preventing overreaching of governmental functions.”

 This seems to suggest that charter school authorizers are not supposed act like charter school authorizers, that somehow performing their actual function of holding charters to the rules and regulations that govern them is somehow an "overreach." You could almost assume that Judge Coyle doesn't quite understand how charter law works, if not for the fact that she sat on the board of a charter school. 

The charter system was sold with the idea that charters would be accountable to authorizers, that they would have to earn the right to operate and continue earning it to maintain that operation. The Franklin Towne situation shows a different framing, one that is too common in the charter world--once established, the charter doesn't have to earn its continued existence. It doesn't need authorization from anyone; instead, authorizers build a case to close down the charter. Authorization to operate, once given, can never be withdrawn without protracted legal battles.

This is and the tradeoff of autonomy for accountability that we were promised. "Look," the charteristas said, "Authorizers watch over the charter school, and if at any point they determine the school is not living up to the rules of its charter, the authorizers just shut it down." Instead what we've got is, "The authorizers okayed this school twenty years ago, and they have no right to take that away."

Who knows how the Franklin Towne charter situation will work out. One hopes that, at best, they have actually started to function according to the rules, though what that will do to their remarkable "success" would be a whole other story. But the whole business is a fine demonstration of how the charter school system we were sold is not how things actually operate.

ICYMI: Labor Day 2024 Edition (9/1)

It's that time again. Put away your white, set out the grill, and try to remember that the labor movement in this country created a whole lot of things that we now take for granted. Once a year seems hardly often enough to take that out and look at it.

In the meantime, here's the reading list for the week.

School vouchers are conservative billionaires’ Trojan horse

Josh Cowen's new book The Privateers is about to drop, so he's doing press and talking to people and getting the word out about vouchers and the culture panic. Here he is talking to Maureen Downey.

Dune buggy boondoggle shows a crying need for better school voucher oversight

Laurie Roberts of AZCentral tells the story of how dune buggies became an educational expense (the occupational therapist said so) and were initially paid for with voucher money. The state board has reverse that decision, but the whole mess is a look at how the vouchers are really working in Arizona.

The Perpetual Dream: Machines That Think, Diagnose, and Teach

Larry Cuban looks at the dream of taking human touch our of human service.

The Death of School 10

Alec MacGillis at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into the closing of a Rochester school and the larger issues racing towards us over school closings.

The Donald Trump-Moms for Liberty-Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Alliance

Maurice Cunningham at the Bucks County Beacon reminds us just who partners with Moms For Liberty, and what the goals are.

Moms for Liberty goes to war with New York school over five library books

The Independent reports on yet another M4L attempt to stamp out reading Naughty Books. Only this time it's not going over so well.

Moms For Liberty Goes All In On Transphobia

At their big gathering, M4L leader tell Huffington Post that there is no such thing as a transgender child. It goes downhill from there. Turns out that "safe and welcoming" are danger words at a school.

With schools, money does indeed matter; so does how we spend it

From the Seattle Times, a piece that pushes back on the continued assertion that money doesn't matter (so schools shouldn't get more of it).

Diagramming Sentences and the Art of Misguided Nostalgia

Paul Thomas reminds us that diagramming sentences doesn't help develop writing skill (it does not-- don't @ me) and quotes some expertise from 70 years ago.

Teens are losing interest in school, and say they hear about college 'a lot'

Make of them what you wish, but NPR writes up some results from a major poll of students, and some things are not looking up since last year.

Challenging The Myths of Generative AI

Addressing some of the myths surrounding AI. "Most concerning is the illusion that LLMs are retrieving information rather than constructing word associations within a broad corpus." Excellent AI read.

The Harris-Walz Vision for Public Schools

Jennifer Berkshire writes for The Nation about how Harris-Walz could (finally) be a course correction for the Democratic Party.

Breaking Down the Harris/Walz Education Plan

Nancy Bailey looks into the details of the Harris-Walz education proposals.

Youngkin’s Privatization Team Makes Its Move on Virginia’s Public Schools

Having had a chance to see how school takeovers pretty much never work, Virginia is ready to try their hand. Cheryl Binkley at 4 Public Education.

Talking Back to the Failing-Schools Narrative

Mark Hlavacik and Jack Schneider at Kappan break down decades of schools-are-failing coverage and how they have affected discussions about public education.

DeSantis and M4L target incumbent school Board members in Florida. They win anyway.

Missed this last week, but here's Sue Kingery Woltanski's breakdown of the Moms for Liberty candidates fared in Florida (spoiler: not well).

Rockets on butterfly wings

Benjamin Riley takes a look at an AI guide that actually brings a little sanity to the discussion.

New Book Bans Have Begun in South Carolina

Oh, South Carolina. Steve Nuzum examines the new wave of anti-reading activity.

States want to reduce qualifications for teachers. That’s a huge mistake.

The Center for American Progress is emblematic of Democrat wrong headedness about public education. But Paige Schhoemaker DeMio of CAP is on point with this op-ed. Deprofessionalizing teaching is not a solution for anything.

The Safe Space Where America Goes To Debate Its Most Painful History

It's Williamsburg, of all places. But there's a lot to see in this Politico piece about how to discuss difficult topics with sensitivity towards all audiences.

Who Are the Adults in Charge?

TC Weber builds a great piece out of reaction to my post about calling students by their names. He also says many nice things about me, making me both grateful and embarrassed. But the post is a good one.

Masculinity in an Age of Individualism

From The Dispatch, by Joe Pitts. I don't think about "masculinity" as a thing nearly as often as I think about "humanity," but I found a lot to chew on in this essay about the non-toxic version of masculinity.

At Forbes.com, I looked at two reports-- one suggesting that teacher strikes do, in fact, work, and one warning about some hazards of AI in the classroom. 

Please join me on substack, where you can get all of my stuff right in your email--for free!

About Those Childless Teachers

Yet another piece of J. D. Vance foolishness has surfaced, this one a 2021 audio in which he tries to get in a dig at Randi Weingarten by saying that teachers without children , well--

You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. And that really disorients me and it really disturbs me...

It's a bullshit argument, not the least because it assumes that adult human beings are incapable of caring about children unless they've birthed one. Too bad for you, every nun and priest ever. Not to mention that back in the day, pregnancy and motherhood quickly disqualified women from teaching.

But honestly, Vance is not the first person I've ever heard make some variation of this point, this notion that teachers without children aren't really qualified to be teachers.

When I hear this point, I have questions.

Should the teacher have children the very first year she starts working? As in, right after college graduation when she is probably 22 years old? Should these children have been conceived and delivered during her undergrad years? Should she have gotten married so that they are "legitimate"? If children should be a requirement for teaching, does that mean she should have the child before being accepted into the teaching program? How should high school guidance counselors work this into their conversations with students?

If your reaction to all of that is, "Of course not, silly," then what do we do about all those inadequate teachers at the start of their careers in their early and mid twenties? Do we let it slide as long as they make a commitment to settle down and make some babies by a particular date? Should we fire them if they don't make the baby deadline? What would a good deadline be? Do we just have them sit and do paperwork till they produce offspring, or should they work in some other field, their teaching degree gathering dust, until they are a parent?

What is the critical part? Raising the kid or actually giving birth to it? If it's just the raising part, does adoption count? If so, how young must the child be? Does this also apply for step-children? Being a step-parent has been discounted by folks like Vance-- is that because the child was too old, or because it didn't pass through the parent's birth canal? If it's the latter, does that disqualify all men from being teachers? What about dead-beat absent dads who neither gave birth nor child-rearing support? Are they disqualified? 

Does a bad parent make a better teacher than a non-parent? Should we interview their children as part of the teacher accreditation?  Is there a qualitative difference between a childless cat lady and a non-parent incel?

Are there other jobs that non-parents shouldn't have? Should we keep non-parents on an island somewhere? Should we just assume that anyone who isn't a traditional parent is some kind of grooming indoctrinatey threat to every child they encounter, or is it only in classrooms that they are suspect?

"Teachers ought to have kids of their own" is one of those things that seems pretty sensible right up until the point you start to think it through. There is no question that having children of your own can add to your teaching perspective. It is also true that having no children can also add to your perspective. It is most true that having a variety of perspectives in the teaching staff is super-valuable. 

But the next time you hear someone propose that only parents can be good teachers, see if you can get answers for any of my questions.

OK: Stripping License of Teacher Who Posted LInk to Library

We have an update on the saga of Summer Boismier, and it's not a good one. Not for her, and not for the teachers of Oklahoma. I'm going to quote extensively from a previous post to refresh your memory.

Our story so far

Back in September of 2022, after Oklahoma had unveiled its own version of a Florida-style reading restriction law, Norma High School English teacher Boismier drew flak for covering some books in her classroom with the message "Books the state doesn't want you to read." Apparently even worse, she posted the QR code for the Brooklyn Public Libraries new eCard for teens program, which allows teens from all over the country to check out books, no matter how repressive or restrictive state or local rules they may live under.

She was suspended by the district, which said that this was about her "personal political statements" and a "political display" in the classroom. Boismier told The Gothamist

I saw this as an opportunity for my kids who were seeing their stories hidden to skirt that directive. Nowhere in my directives did it say we can't put a QR code on a wall

The suspension was brief, but Boismier decided this was not the kind of atmosphere in which she wanted to work, so she resigned, citing a culture of fear, confusion and uncertainty in schools, fomented by Oklahoma Republicans.

That wasn't enough to satisfy Walters, at the time campaigning for office. The whole business had been a high-profile brouhaha, so Candidate Walters popped up to put his two cents in via a letter that he posted on Twitter.

Saying that "providing access to banned and pornographic material is unacceptable" and "There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom," Walters called for Boismier's license to be revoked. And he called her out by name, arguing that the public do not want "activist teachers in classrooms" and that it's super important that "we continue to protect our kids from indoctrination." Yes, this the same who mandated that every teacher must use the Bible as a teaching tool in their classroom. 

That, of course, led in true MAGA fashion to a flood of vulgarity and death threats directed at Boismier as reported by KFOR:

“These teachers need to be taken out and shot,” “teachers like this should not only be fired but also should be swinging from a tree,” “If Summer tried this in Afghanistan, they’d cut out her tongue for starters,” are just a minuscule fraction of the threats pouring into Summer Boismier’s inbox.

Boismier was unwilling to put up with all of this. When Walters continued to try to strip her teaching license (even though in December of 2022 she took a job at the Brooklyn Library), Boismier used a quirk of Oklahoma law to demand a trial-like hearing to dispute the department of education decision. 

At that hearing in June of 2023, Assistant Attorney General Liz Stephens recommended against taking Boismier's license, saying the state failed to prove that Boismier had broken the law. Let me repeat: the Assistant AG of the state said that Walters had no case.

Boismier wasn't done. In August of 2023, she filed a defamation lawsuit against Walters. Walters filed a motion to dismiss in January of this year, and U.S. District Court Judge Bernard Jones (Oklahoma's first Black magistrate and elevated to the district court by Donald Trump) denied the motion to dismiss. Walters had alleged that Boismier was a sort of public figure, and that malice on his part couldn't be shown. The judge disagreed, saying her case looks solid enough to proceed. So that lawsuit will continue winding through the court.

Meanwhile, the state board and Walters have continued to move forward to take Boismier's license. As reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman, they decided hold yet another hearing to "finalize the revocation" in March. Only there's a problem with that plan. In March, all of the department's attorneys quit, so they had no lawyers with which to hold a legal-type proceeding. They've postponed action until May. Once again, Walters had shot himself in the foot by just being lousy at his job.

So what's happened now?  

Last week, the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to strip Boismier of her license. Reported M. Scott Cart and Murray Evans for The Oklahoman:

“She (Boismier) broke the law,” Walters said [speaking to reporters after the meeting]. “And I said from the beginning, when you have a teacher that breaks the law, said she broke the law, (and) said she will continue to break the law — that can’t stand.”

Walters said he wanted Oklahomans to be very clear that Oklahoma State Department of Education would hold teachers accountable. “The Legislature passes laws, we have rules, teacher code of conduct that goes along with those things ― those will be enforced. I wanted every parent to know they have the best teacher possible in their kid’s classroom.”

Brady Henderson, Boismier's attorney, said she would keep fighting, but first they'd need to see what made-up set of facts the board used to justify their decision.  

On Twitter, Boismier reacted to the decision:

While temporarily losing that teaching certificate feels a bit like losing a fundamental part of myself my Ss--especially those from LGBTQ+ &/or BIPOC communities--were (and still are) faced w/ a much greater loss, the loss of stories that tell their stories, stories that speak to the fundamental parts of themselves & the lives they recognize as similar to their own. I accept the consequences of my actions, though I will also fight those consequences w/ everything I have. But what I'll never accept are the consequences for young people whose stories are required by bigotry to be hidden behind butcher paper.

The Oklahoma State Board of Education (OSBE), the entity that enforces these draconian consequences, is currently composed mostly of members who have never held teaching certificates or taught in public schools or even taught professionally at all. Considering OSBE's proclivity for weaponizing teaching certificates@ the behest of OSDE, here's what #OklaEd Ts, your friends & family, could face for educating responsibly, possessing [books], affirming Ss, expressing opinions, or even just existing the "wrong" way.

At that same OKSBE meeting, two either teachers were under investigation. One for an ill-advised social media post after the Trump assassination attempt, and another for an "inappropriate" post including a photo of his children, one in a Trump mask and the others holding fake swords. 

That photo was posted in 2019; the teacher, Regan Killackey, is one of several plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit challenging HB 1775, the 2021 culture panic gag law. Probably just an incredible coincidence. Have I mentioned that Walters also brought on Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, who specializes in digging up social media of left-leaning persons spun to make them look as bad as possible.

So if you're a teacher in Oklahoma, best watch your back and make sure you haven't ever done anything that might hint of a "liberal political agenda" (other political agendas are, apparently, okee dokee), because education dudebro-in-chief is going to root out any ideological impurity in classrooms. Don't think of it as culture panic or a culture war; more like a cultural revolution.

When The State Takes Over The Church

When you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

Florida passed a law just before Christmas last year aimed at allowing schools to hire chaplains. It was carefully worded to avoid seeming as if it were promoting one particular religion to provide chaplains. The mere 26 lines of text include this sentence:

Parents must be permitted to select a volunteer school chaplain from the list provided by the school district, which must include the chaplain’s religious affiliation, if any.

Emphasis mine. That would certainly seem to indicate that a chaplain could have any religious affiliation, or none at all. 

Not so fast. In a completely predictable move, one of the groups that expressed interest in chaplaincy was the Satanic Temple. And Governor Ron DeSantis was not having it, never mind what the English language words in the law say. Only real, legit religions need apply.

So now we take the next logical step, in which the Florida Department of Education issues some "clarification" on what a chaplain should really be (never mind the law) in the form of a model policy for schools to imitate. Commissioner Manny Diaz announced that "Florida welcomes only legitimate and officially authorized chaplains to become volunteers at their local schools and to provide students with morally sound guidance." Sound moral guidance--there goes the original claim that chaplains would just be like counseling helpers.

The actual model (it's right here--at least for the moment) is just a two-pager, but it sets out to do so much.

It lays out some of the specific requirements for communication with parents. It layers on six more requirements for the chaplain job. The law only mentions one--pass a background check. But this adds on several other professional requirements, very much reminiscent of the job description highlighted by actual professional chaplains when objecting to the Texas version of this law. So things like an actual degree, and experience, and counseling training. And also, a "sincere desire" to do the job; the principal will have to desire how sincere the applicant is. It's unclear if an expressed desire to treat the school as a mission field would count here or not.

But beyond all of that, the model policy includes an official government definition of "religion."

Really. The policy offers definitions for three terms-- "chaplain," "local religious affiliation," and "religion." Here it is:

“Religion” means an organized group led, supervised, or counseled by a hierarchy of teachers, clergy, sages, or priests that (1) acknowledges the existence of and worships a supernatural entity or entities that possesses power over the natural world, (2) regularly engages in some form of ceremony, ritual, or protocol, and (3) whose religious beliefs impose moral duties independent of the believer’s self-interest.

This definition, of course, covers Certain Religions that Florida approves of, and rules out a few others, depending on who's judging what exactly is a "ceremony, ritual, or protocol" as well as what constitutes imposing moral duties. That "independent of the believer's self-interest" is yet another in a long series of ill-considered phrases-- if I follow religious teachings because I don't want to go to hell, is that not a moral duty that is all about my self-interest and not at all independent of it?

The ACLU has already noted that the model policy is "extremely problematic and raises several constitutional concerns." But it ought to outrage and/or scare the heck out of people of faith as well.

Look, once you open the door to religion in the public school system, and you don't like some of what walks through that door, you have two choices.

1) You admit that you really only meant for your brand of Christianity to be in schools. 

2) You set up state oversight of religion, a state agency that will decide which religions are legitimate and which are not.

Choice 1 probably won't be a winner in court (at least not yet), so you end up with Choice 2, and here is Florida, right on schedule, deciding that the state will decide what is a real religion and what is not, with a vague definition that will inevitably require someone (looks like it'll be the Department of Education for now) to sit and hold hearings over any religion that thinks it has been unjustly rejected. 

This is a terrible law now buttressed by terrible policy. Nobody on any side of the issues should support this. This is state-controlled religion, and it's useful only as a dynamic civics demonstration of why the Founders wanted a wall between church and state in the first place.