Another Choice Advocate Gathering

The Interational School Choice and Reform Conference has been a thing since 2010. Here's the goal:

The goal is connect scholars who engage in rigorous research about school choice in ways that illuminate current policy debates.

The conference is historically held in Fort Lauderdale over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend (though last year it was in Madrid). It claims to be "academically sound" with a "rigorous peer-review process." This year they're at the Sonesta Fort Lauderdale Beach hotel. 

This year's list of sponsors isn't up yet, but it doesn't seem to change much from year to year, so we're looking at last year's list. It tells us what kind of operation we're talking about.

Top two Platinum sponsors are EdChoice (previously the Friedman Foundation, the grand mac daddies of school choice policy) and Stand Together, part of the Koch web of philanthroactivism. Those are $30,000 spots.

At $20K Gold level, we had The Heritage Foundation. For Silver ($10K) The Hoover Institute, National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, the Walton-funded and choice-pushing University of Arkansas College of Education, and Stride, the 800-pound cyber-guerilla of the virtual charter biz. In the cheap seats, CREDO (the "research" outfit that studies choice), the Education Freedom Institute (the outfit run by Corey DeAngelis), Kennesaw University (in Georgia), VELA education fund (a joint Koch-Walton that funnels money to choice), and the American Federation for Children. 

The planning committee is folks from universities, plus Drew Catt, the executive director of EdChoice; also Jay Greene, formerly at University of Arkansas and now with Heritage Foundation. The ISCRC "partners" with the Journal of School Choice, which is edited by Robert Maranto at the University of Arkansas. The editorial board includes Neal McClusky (Cato), Rick Hess (AEI), Robin Lake (CRPE), and Mike McShane (AEI). 

To attend, you register as a senior scholar, junior scholar, grad student or as guest of a regular attendee. So clearly we're heavy on the academics at this thin, even as it clearly has advocacy aims-- fostering what Josh Cowen quotes voucher advocates as calling "soldier-scholars" or "counter intelligentsia."

If that doesn't provide enough of a hint of where this is headed, we can look at the schedule. It lists topics and not speakers

The History of the School Choice Movement (Part 1)
Breaking Through Lines: The Impact of School Choice Assignment and Zoning on Education Opportunity 

School System Reform: Cross-Country Insights on Drivers of Student Achievement 

Identities, Ethics, and Rights 

Rural and High School Charters 

Success and Quality in Virtual Schools 

Teachers and School Choice 

Imagining a Free Market in Education: Concepts, Accountability, and Barriers 

Charter School Authorization and Access 

Education Freedom Tax Credits

Regulating Private Education Choice

School Choice Victories: Woo-Hoos and Whoopsies

That's just Day One. I'd come back on Saturday for a couple of topics that invoke the culture war, market research on choice, implementing and measuring school choice, charter school accountability and ROI, and "ESA's: Strengthening This Ever-Growing Option."

The nature of many topics lead me to suspect that some sponsors are also presenting some of their own stuff.

It looks like a fun time. The website pitches it as not too large and therefor great for networking. And it's one more thing to watch for whatever the next reformster pitch is going to be, to see what sort of germs of school choice advocacy will be grown in this particular petri dish. Note: It's not too late to register, if you've got the academic credentials. 

Ted Cruz's Trans Attack Ad

Ted Cruz is running for re-election in Texas and has decided to make trans panic one of the features of his campaign. And it is just everything that's wrong with attempts to target teenaged trans athletes.

The ad shows images of female athletes at a track meet, while a caption says his opponent U.S. Rep Colin Allred has "voted to allow boys in girls sports." How messed up is this ad? Let's count the ways.

1) The track meet is taking place in Oregon.

2) Despite the implication of the caption, the girls are not trans.

3) Nobody with Cruz's campaign asked for permission to use the girls' images.

It's the hundredth iteration of how trans panic ends up causing trouble and trauma for actual young human beings. Over and over again. Like the time some disgruntled parents of second and third place winners filed a protest that they wanted the first place winner's gender checked. Or the various times that states have proposed bills that required winning athletes (female, because for some reason there is never concern about trans men) to submit to a barrage of tests to "prove" their gender. Or the nice folks in New Hampshire suing for the right to harass transgender teenagers. 

There are folks who are going to raise actual issues. What about the safety of players when a trans woman brings "extra" strength to the sport? I get that concern, but does that mean we will also establish some sort of limits on women's strength levels? You can only play a woman's sport if you're not more strong than X, regardless of your birth gender? 

We also hear about fairness, which is part of a larger conversation. Is it fair that one high school athlete's family can afford a personal trainer and coach and another cannot? What about performance enhancing substances-- how much enhancement should qualify as too much? 

All complicated issues, but in the meantime, attempts to use regulations and laws to somehow drive trans women out of any public place come down to trying to make miserable the lives of very specific, real, actual human teen age girls. You can't enforce any of this stuff without violating the privacy of teen athletes, both trans and not.

Cruz's use of actual young human beings as campaign props and additionally making them targets for harassment is just a particularly striking example, but this is what trying to "save women's sports" ultimately ends up being about. Ohio's Governor DeWine gets many things wrong, but when he was presented with a Save Women's Sports Act that promised more harassment of vulnerable teen athletes, he was right on the mark:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

Sacrificing real human beings on the altar of political performance is inexcusable, I don't care how important you think that issue may be.

ICYMI: Canvassing Edition (10/27)

While I hang out with the Board of Directors, the Institute CMO is out canvassing our side of town for the Harris campaign, an activity that she enjoys slightly more than having her teeth pulled, b, as she said, she doesn't want November 6 to come and feel as if there was something more she could have done. 

Since, as far as media go, we are well into the noise and nonsense stage of the campaign, perhaps you'd like to read about other stuff, like education things. So here's your list for the week. Also, Happy Halloween.

The Lionization of Testing and other weird metrics

Did you know that the Operation Varsity Blues mastermind is out of jail, and back in the same business? Testing guru Akil Bello knows, and he also knows that old test scores make a weird sort of credential.

US public schools burned up nearly $3.2bn fending off rightwing culture attacks

The Guardian works out the price tag for defending public schools against culture panic artists and holy smokes but that's some expensive panic!

Teaching as loving grace

I referenced this piece earlier in the week, but it's good enough that I'm putting it here, too. Benjamin Riley writes "an ode to human teaching."

Work Hard. Be Nice. Or Don’t.

Nancy Flanagan reminding us that SEL is always in the classroom.

Latest OCPF Filings; and the Larsen A. Whipsnade “Never give a sucker an even break” Media Awards

Maurice Cunningham gives credit where it's due to Massachusetts media that don't bother to dig into what's behind certain "parent" groups.

Juan Soto and the Trouble with Progressive Education

Jose Vilson on baseball, the five c's, and what progressive education is, maybe.

Early Developmental Competencies: Or Why Pre-K Does Not Have Lasting Effects

At Defending the Early Years, Dale C. Farran with an excellent, research-based, and layperson-friendly explanation of why jamming academics into four year olds is so often a losing proposition. This post is two and a half years old, but it's been circulating again recently and it is just so good, so here it is again.

My Uber Driver Doesn’t Get the Fine Art of Fighting for Education Freedom

This is Rick Hess at Education Next and I know, I know-- I disagree with him on a whole bunch of stuff, too. But he can be one of the most intellectually honest of the reformsters, and this piece uses one more imaginary Uber driver to point out some of the problems with reformster rhetoric.

Florida Creates New Restricted Classical Teaching certification, Bypassing Subject Matter Mastery,etc.

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports on the latest Florida shenanigans to devalue the profession

Republican Attorneys General to Court: We Demand More Pregnant Teens

Yes, really. Madiba Dennie at Balls and Strikes has the details.

First SC state-level challenges include 1984, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, YA titles

Steve Nuzum passes along news from South Carolina, where naughty books can be challenged on the state level. Surely there's no way that can end badly.

From Politics to Hate: Exposing LGBTQ+ People to Extremist Content

We don't hear a lot from Alaska, but Matthew Beck blogs about the state at The Blue Alaskan. Here's a story about a lady who wants to play with the Libs of TikTok crowd, to the detriment of education.

Doomed to Fail

A new Network for Public Education report about charter failure is out and, we have looks at the results from Jan Resseger and Thomas Ultican. 

Charter school enrollment has grown, but research shows they have long performed worse than traditional schools

Meanwhile, other research in Minnesota reaches the same conclusions.

How Americans See Men and Masculinity

Pew Research releases a multipage collection of data and charts and graphs all about how Americans of various ages and genders and politics view masculinity. Nothing about education exactly, unless of course you want to talk about the education of young men. Fascinating stuff.

Over at Forbes.com, I took a look at a proposal in Wisconsin that would make more explicit the idea of two different systems (and tiers) of education. 

I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

Never Mind The Presidency

Look, it's not that I don't think the Presidential race isn't critical. It is. But when it comes to education, A) if you don't have enough information to make up your mind yet, I don't know how you even dress yourself in the morning and B) there are other races that public education supporters need to pay attention to.  

The Presidency matters for education, mostly to the degree that the White House can muck things up. That includes, as we have seen, installing judges who would like to turn the wall between church and state into dust. But again-- if you don't already know that the race for President is a critical choice between a catastrophic mess of a candidate and someone who wants the country to work well, nothing I can type will help (and if you think voting for Jill Stein is a great move, you are truly beyond rational help).

Congress? Also critical, as they control a lot of what can actually happen. We need more people in DC who are interested in actually governing rather than throwing ideologue hissy fits. 

But I want to encourage everyone to pay attention to the state and local contests. 

It is at the state level that the real crazypants regulations happen. It's legislators who drive the pushes for vouchers in states, and they do it largely with impunity because rarely do the voters punish legislators for trying to kneecap public schools, thanks to gerrymandering, doing the damage in the dark, and the electorate's short memory. Anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity, anti-reading-- that stuff happens at the state level.

However, when it doesn't happen at the state level, it happens at the local level. Take Pennsylvania, where the legislature has been Democratic enough to forestall the worst ideas. Instead, right wingers have adopted a district-by-district strategy.  The Independence Law Center is the legal shop for the Pennsylvania Family Institute, whose goal is "for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished."

Though they try to keep their religious motivations quiet, these are Christian fundamentalists trying to impose their view on districts. They offer free counsel to any school board that wants some help with creating some culture panic regulations, and one at a time, they have been providing school districts to be just as repressive as state legislatures in Oklahoma or Florida.

Nor has Moms for Liberty given up and gone home yet. In fact, if you think you don't have a local chapter, you might want to check again. Anti-LGBTQ folks found they could block the new Title IX simply by having a Moms for Liberty member with students in the school, and lo and behold, there are suddenly M4L chapters well beyond those listed on the national group's map. 

People are used to sleepwalking through local elections. Heck, in most years, school districts in my region can barely get enough people to run to fill empty seats. But as someone who follows this stuff, I can't tell you how many times I've come across a story of voters in a local school district declaring, "What!??!! Dang, but I should have paid closer attention to that last school board election!"

Pay attention. Educate yourself, and then educate the people around you. The Presidential election is noisy as hell and will only get noisier, but you are going to feel the effects of those local elections for years. Vote. Come for the Presidential race, stay for the local officials. 

Outing LBGTQ Students

One of the culture panic hills one which some folks want to battle is the issue of schools outing LGBTQ students to their parents. The culture panic crowd is not only in favor of it, but they demand it, and quite a bit of perspective is being lost over the issue.

Take this from a recent Helen Lewis piece for The Atlantic--

Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”

Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed.

A kernel of truth? Letting children pick their pronoun or bathroom is akin to performing what Trump called "brutal" surgery on children. 

Parents Defending Education has a whole collection of outrage-stoking stories of schools with policies that allow students to decide whether or not they want information about their status to be shared with their parents.

Here's just one example-- a story from New Hampshire, where a school allowed "radical LGBTQ group" GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance) to run a professional development center.

GLSEN was founded in Massachusetts by two teachers; in 1994 it branched into other states. Their goals have been centered around making schools into "the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve." For the culture panic crowd, GLSEN is a promoter of "gender ideology" aka "acknowledging that LGBTQ persons are, in fact, human beings." 

But GLSEN told staff things like this:

Although it may be hard to believe, there are students whose emotional and physical safety were jeopardized when school staff outed them to other students and even family members

And that, we're meant to understand, is self-evidently terrible, a crazy thing to tell teachers. 

Except that it's the truth. Here's a graphic taken from a report by the not left-wing Bellwether Partners. 

None of these are great, but consider the homelessness statistic-- more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ young persons experience homelessness, and that's going to be mostly due to being thrown out of their home. Also, LGBTQ youths who feel supported at home reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who didn't feel that level of support. And the picture surely hasn't improved since the pandemic pause.

So we need to ask-- what is the point of an out-to-parents requirement, exerted through either local school regulations or state law? What is it that supporters of such regulations want to achieve?

Lots of these folks seem to believe that LGBTQ persons never occur "naturally," that LGBTQ folks are made, not born, through some combination of indoctrination, seduction, and peer pressure. So perhaps the idea is to create more social pressure to just not "choose" to become LGBTQ. This is a technique that has never worked in the history of LGBTQ persons (which coincides with the history of the world). 

In some cases, the aim seems to be to assert control over children, as if they are a piece of property belonging to the parents. No, the child does not belong to the school. The child also does not belong to the parents, nor to anyone else, because the child is an actual live human being. It is a normal and natural thing as a parent to worry about the twists and turns your child may go through growing up. As old as stories about changlings, the visceral fear that your beloved child may be mysteriously replaced with some stranger. But "if my child has to tell me they think they're LGBTQ, then I'll be able to make them stop it" is not a winning plan.

But a non-zero number of parents react by trying to overpower their children and forcing them to become the person those parents want them to be. (see also "children going no contact")

Separate from them are the folks who want to overpower other peoples' children, as if government power can be used to force LGBTQ persons into nonexistence.

Supporters argue that these rules are about protecting parental rights, but which rights are we talking about. The right to control your child? No such right exists. The right to erase a child's privacy and step over any and all boundaries? The right to know everything about your child? It's a weird dance that the far right does--when the child is a fetus, its rights are supposed to totally overrule the rights of the parent, but once born, the child loses all rights to the parent. 

Whatever folks on the right think mandatory rules will accomplish, the actual results are not hard to predict. Children who feel safe and loved and supported at home will continue to freely share information about themselves with their grownups. Those who don't feel safe at home will quickly understand that they are not safe at school, either. So young people who are at a vulnerable time dealing with difficult questions of identity and their place in the world will be further isolated in world where social media makes teens more vulnerable to all manner of awful stuff.

I have no doubt at all that there are schools and school personnel out there who, in their desire to help, are over the line on these issues. But making wholesale outing of LGBTQ students without any concerns or safeguards for the rights--and safety-- of that student is irresponsible and, sometimes, dangerous. The rules have to treat those LGBTQ persons as real human beings and not faceless threats to a traditional gender orthodoxy. We have to do better.

Computers And Defective Children

Kristen DiCerbo is the "chief learning officer" at Khan Academy, the hot new ed tech firm that is using computer programs to replicate some of the oldest problematic behavior in the educational universe. 

"If bringing AI into the classroom is a marathon," asserts DiCerbo in a recent article, "we’re 250 yards into this." I would argue that's a generous assessment.

See, Khan is one of the outfits betting on AI tutoring. But we can already see the problems, all completely predictable, emerging. 

Transcripts of student chats reveal some terrific tutoring interactions. But there are also many cases where students give one- and two-word responses or just type “idk,” which is short for “I don’t know”. They are not interacting with the AI in a meaningful way yet. There are two potential explanations for this: 1.) students are not good at formulating questions or articulating what they don’t understand or 2.) students are taking the easy way out and need more motivation to engage.

Oh, there are more than two possible explanations. Like 3) students aren't interested in interacting with computer software. Or 4) AI is incapable of interacting with students in a meaningful, human way that helps them deal with the material with which they struggle. 

I'm not going to expand on that point, because Benajmin Riley got there while I was still mulling this piece, and he's written a beautiful piece about what the profoundly human act of connecting and teaching with a struggling young human being requires. You should read that.  

But I do want to focus on one other piece of this. Because it's the same old mistake, again, some more.

In talking to teachers about this, they suggest that both explanations are probably true. As a result, we launched a way of suggesting responses to students to model a good response. We find that some students love this and some do not. We need a more personal approach to support students in having better interactions, depending on their skills and motivation.

In other words, the students are doing it wrong and we need to train them so that the tech will work the way we imagined it would. 

It's actually two old mistakes. Mistake #1 is the more modern one, familiar to every teacher who has had hot new "game changing" ed tech thrown at them with some variation of That Pitch--the one that goes "This tech tool will have an awesome positive effect on your classroom just as long as you completely change the way you do the work." The unspoken part is "Because this was designed by folks who don't know much about your job, so it would help them if you'd just change to better resemble the teachers they imagined when they designed this product." Raise your hand, teachers, if you've ever heard some version of "This isn't working because of an implementation problem." (The unspoken part here is "Let me, a person who has never done your job, tell you how to do your job.")

Mistake #2 is the more pernicious one, committed by a broad range of people including actual classroom teachers. And we've been doing it forever (I just saw it happening 200 years ago in Adam Laats's book about Lancaster schools). It's the one where I say, "My program here is perfect. If a student isn't getting it, that must be because the student is defective." 

Nobody is ever going to know how many students have been incorrectly labeled "learning disabled" because they failed to fall in line with someone's perfect educational plan.

We also sought to find the right balance between asking students questions and giving them hints and support. Some students were frustrated that our AI tool kept asking questions they didn’t know. If AI is to meet the promise of personalization, the technology needs to be aware of what the student currently knows and what they are struggling with to adjust the amount and type of support it provides.

You just measure what is in the brain tank, and if the level is low, pour in more knowing stuff! If this is all AI thinks it needs for personalization, AI has a Dunning-Kruger problem. At a minimum, it seems to be stuck in the computational model, a model floating around since the 1940s that the brain is like a computer that just stores data, images coded as data, experiences reduced to data. If you buy the brain-is-computer model, then sure, everything teachers do is just about storage and retrieval of data.

The brain-is-computer model has created a kind of paradox-- the idea that AI can replicate human thought is only plausible because so many people have been thinking that the brain is also a computer. In other words, some folks shrank the distance between computers and human thought by first moving the model of human thought closer to computers. If both our brains and our manufactured computers are just computers, well, then, we just make bigger and better computers and eventually they'll be like human brains.

Problem is, human brains are not computers (go ahead--just google "your brain is not a computer"), and a teacher's job is not managing storage and retrieval of data from a meat-based computer. 

Which means that if your AI tutor is set up to facilitate input-output from a meat computer, it suffers from a fundamental misconception of the task. 

This lack of humanity is tragic and disqualifying. We are only just learning how much can go wrong with these electro-mimics. There's a gut-wrenching piece in today's New York Times about a young boy who fell in love with a chatbot and committed suicide; reading the last conversation and the chatbot's last words to the child is absolutely chilling. 

AI is not human, and so many of its marketeers don't seem to have thought particularly hard about what it means to be human. If this is a marathon, then we aren't 250 yards in or even 250 feet in, and some of us aren't even running in the right direction.

Redefining Discrimination

Lexi Lonas Cochran, education reporter at The Hill, took a look at the steady conservative push on education and the Supreme Court decisions that have fed it. She got lots of things right, but I have some quibbles. 

As many of us have noted, SCOTUS has been knocking holes in the wall between church and state where it passes through the school yard, and conservatives have been both pushing on it and walking through the holes as they appear.

It's a tricky thing to chart cause and effect here. People on the right did not suddenly decide to take some of these positions just because the heist of three court seats gave them Big Dreams. At the same time, the far-right court has signaled clearly to people who have been waiting for their moment that the time is now. 

It's hard to precisely identify the juncture of political agenda and favorable court atmosphere. Neil McCluskey offered:

The most clear-cut example of what I have in mind is the Oklahoma Catholic Charter School, where it’s not so much that they see a friendly court, it’s that the courts are more friendly to school choice and have developed precedent now to support that kind of move.

Wellll..... It's true that the Catholic diocese and the christianist nationalists in political power didn't suddenly decide they'd like to hand taxpayer dollars to the private church schools. They've wanted to do that for decades. But it's also true that the diocese, and the board overseeing charter approval kind of put their heads together with Oklahoma Previous Attorney General O'Connor for a legal opinion about whether now was the time or not. Nor is anybody the slightest bit surprised that Oklahoma has asked SCOTUS to hear this case (digest version of the story here). So no, the court didn't lead to them deciding to do it all, but it surely influenced them to do it now.

This part of the discussion is an exercise in hair-splitting, but within the comments from Rick Garnett, the lawyer who's "involved" in the Catholic charter case, is a really important and deliberate mis-statement:

And more recently, there’s been a run of cases in the last, let’s say, five, six, seven years where the Court has said governments are not allowed to discriminate against religious schools. 

Nope. Nope nope nopity nope nope nope. At no point has anyone argued that governments may discriminate against religious schools, and that's not the hammer that lawyers have been using against the wall. 

Instead, what the court has done (with plenty of prompting) is to change the definition of discrimination.

The new definition has two key features.

First, the right and the court have declared that it's discrimination against religious folks if they aren't allowed to act out their own biases and prejudices. If I can't tell people that I don't want to serve them because I disagree with some aspect of their life, then that's discrimination against me. I can only freely exercise my religion if I'm allowed to throw gay people out of my cake shop or my school. 

Second, it's discrimination against religious organizations if the religious organization is denied taxpayer funds. It's not sufficient to avoid troubling or picking on a religious organization; if you won't let them have taxpayer money, that's discrimination.

And that also includes giving them those taxpayer funds without any strings attached (see "first"). The government must give the religious school taxpayer money even as it is forbidden to enforce any of the anti-discrimination rules that apply to all other government-funded organizations.

If a taxpayer-funded religious school refuses to hire an LGBTQ person as a teacher, that's the free exercise of religion. If the LGBTQ person refuses to let the school have their tax dollars, that's discrimination. If a public school football coach holds open prayers on the 50 yard line while still on duty, thereby clearly signaling to his players that failure to properly worship might put them on the bench--well, that's just free exercise of religion. If the school district fires the coach, that's discrimination.

If your religion tells you that you can't freely exercise that religion without collecting taxpayer dollars and being able to treat some people poorly, on purpose, just because, then I suspect something is wrong with your religion.

But set aside the religious and moral objections to this new definition. The practical concerns are bad enough.

Because who decides that something is a True Religion that deserves all these freedoms. If I've decided that my own personal religion also needs some taxpayer funding to start a school, who decides whether or not I get that? If I declare that I have really religious reasons for wanting to set up a private school that rejects all non-aryan families, and I want government funding for it, who settles that? Will the Department of Deciding Which Religions Are Real be a state or federal department?

Again--this has never been about combatting discrimination against religions, but about redefining what discrimination against religion means. That's the success that has paved the way for various initiatives that have been cued up for years.