OH: Another Attack On Church-School Wall

Christianists continue doing their best to force public education to bend to their brand of faith. In Ohio, legislators are now trying to create a whole new church-issued Get Out Of School Free card.

It has long been an option for schools to release students from school for part of the day to receive religious instruction, and districts have chosen to exercise that option or not as they see fit. The bill proposed on Ohio makes one simple change--instead of "may," the law would read "shall." 

In other words, if parents demand their child be released for religious instruction, the schools must comply.

A key focus has been LifeWise Academy, an organization that has been capitalizing on the original Supreme Court ruling by delivering Bible study during the school day. Their focus is called The Gospel Project, and it is aimed at encouraging "true transformation that comes only from the gospel, not from behavior modification." Every session is "doctrinally sound and thorough," though whose doctrine, exactly, it follows is not made clear. 

LifeWise is the brainchild of Joel Penton, who was a defensive tackle for the Ohio State football team. He graduated in 2007 (BA in Communications and Media Studies), then after what appears to be a two year gap, Penton got into the Christian Speakers Biz, starting Relevant Speakers Network, Stand for Truth Outreach, and LifeWise Academy, all based in Hilliard, Ohio.

Stand for Truth was an earlier version of the release time Bible study model as well as school assemblies, with a filed purpose of assisting "youth, youth organizations, schools and churches by providing seminars, educational materials, inspirational and motivational materials, books and other programs to help youth reach their full potential." 

The LifeWise 990 shows that it is, for legal purposes, a Stand for Truth under a new name, with the purpose unchanged. At SfT, Penton was drawing an $87K salary to handle a million-and-a-half dollar budget. The 2022 990 for LifeWise shows Penton with $41K in salary and $69K in other compensation, while LifeWise is handling $13 mill on revenue (more than double 2022) from "contributions, gifts, grants" and paying almost $6 mill in employee benefits and compensation to... I don't know. The only other paid officials listed are Steve Clifton (COO) with $108K salary and $57K other, and treasurer David Kirkey with $31K salary. Almost $5 mill is listed as other salaries and wages, including program service expenses. They list no lobbying expense, but some mid-six figure numbers for advertising, office expenses, and travel. In all they took in almost $14 mill and spent about $9.5 mill. 

Board members include Rev. Stephen Hubbard, pastor at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Logan, Ohio; Brad Hulls, a real estate agent "and remodeling specialist" from Columbus. Figuring in the group's history is Tim Stoller, a founding board member for Cross Over The Hill, an organization with a similar message. It was Stoller who approached Penton, leading to a combining of Stand for Truth and Cross Over The Hill to form LifeWise Academy.  

LifeWise has expanded to multiple states, and it's their work that the new Ohio bill is primarily aimed at, by requiring every school in Ohio to offer a LifeWise option (or something like it). 

LifeWise has not experienced large growth by playing softball. One school board member recounted a story of being approached by LifeWise, first pleasantly, and then with veiled threats about re-election. "As a church, we can't endorse political candidates, but we can educate people." And last summer LifeWise got in a big fight with an Indiana father who volunteered for the group so that he could gain access to their materials, which he then posted on his website. LifeWise took him to court. The parent made a point that ought to be familiar to the culture panic crowd--that parents ought to be able to review the materials that were being used with students. LifeWise has also gone after a man who created a map showing the locations of LifeWise schools.

The Akron Beacon Journal is among those opposing the proposed law, calling it "a dangerous crack forming in the wall that separates church and state." 

Release time for religious instruction is a problem beyond simply breaking down the wall between church and state (though that is problematic enough). It also requires school officials to decide which part of a child's education is expendable enough that it can be replaced with religious instruction. Supporters have argued, "Well, they shouldn't be pulled from core classes" which brings us back to the old problem of labeling the arts, recess, even lunch time as unimportant parts of school, despite everything we know about the value of the arts, of free play, and even the social bonds built in the cafeteria. It creates two classes of students and has the effect of holding students up for social stigma based on their beliefs. Not to mention the issue of an outside entity that gives adults access and oversight of children that is not subject to state oversight.

It's a bad idea to force this on districts that don't want it (and not a great one for those that do) but Ohio has shown great determination to make itself the Florida of the Midwest. We'll see how this goes. 

Can Public Education Make a Deal?

At Hechinger Report, Johnathan Gyurko surfaces with a curious proposition. Donald Trump is supposed to be a dealmaker, he says, so maybe instead of getting alarmed, The Left should try cutting some deals about public education. But first, he needs to redefine a few terms.

Gyurko spins off the Network for Public Education's call to arms for heading into an administration likely to herald “a new era of federal hostility toward public schools.” (Full disclosure-- I am a member of NPE). 

NPE warns of deep cuts to federal programs that support low-income students and those with disabilities, more funding for charter schools, advocacy for religious education and a nationwide voucher program. The group also fears new curriculum mandates and a rollback of student protections.

A threat to public education, indeed, as NPE defines it. But that’s the problem.

The italics are his, because he wants to debate the definition. He says "the political left" has a single definition for public schools-- "district schools governed by local school boards, along with special purpose schools like magnet, vocational and agricultural tech schools run regionally or by state governments."

I don't know if I'm an example of the political left, but that's not quite how I would define public schools, but it doesn't matter for our purposes, because Gyurko is in the weeds in the very next sentence:

This blinkered view excludes 7,800 tax-funded and government-authorized charter schools that enroll 3.7 million children across 44 states and Washington, D.C.

It also excludes another 4.7 million children in private schools, many of whom receive tax-funded services for purposes important to the public.

He writes as if charter and private schools were somehow cast out into the darkness by public school advocates. But they cast themselves out there. School choice have consistently made the fact that they are NOT public schools central to their pitch. 

It's true that charters have, at times, claimed to be public schools, making arguments like "They get public funding so they are public schools." You will note that advocates (like Betsy DeVos) have never attempted to extend that argument to voucher-accepting private schools. But charter schools have only claimed to be public when it suits them. Just this week we got yet another example of charter schools refusing to open their records to the state and arguing that they aren't subject to the kinds of transparency laws that govern public schools. The privatizing crowd has tried multiple times to get the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools don't have to follow the same rules as other "state actors," either because they aren't public schools or because, well, they just don't have to.

Voucher-fed private schools have never pretended to be anything other than non-public schools, and voucher supporters have been all in on declaring that they are separate from and superior to public schools, those woke-infested dens of gender ideology and commie teachers. Voucher laws come with carefully-crafted "hands off" clauses, guaranteeing that private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers are still free to discriminate as they wish.

So let's not pretend that charter and voucher schools are not considered public schools for any reason other than they don't want to be.

Okay, so let's move on to his point. This is probably the time to note that Gyurko teaches education and politics at Teachers College, Columbia University, founded and runs the Association of College and University Educators, and has a book-- Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good. He's been on the Have You Heard podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, and he's had a chat with Rick Hess. His Hechinger piece is re-presenting some of his favorite ideas.

So how does he want revise the definition of public school?

Instead of focusing on types of schools, we should consider a school “public” when it (1) enrolls and educates any student who wants to go there, and (2) prepares them to be engaged citizens, productive workers, good neighbors and stewards of the planet.

I note quibbles and limits. His definition does not include any sort of accountability, but if you're going to spend public taxpayer dollars, there has to be some form of accountability to the public, and to this day, the choice sector resists that. 

It's hard not to notice that #1 disqualifies every voucher program in the country. Gyurko wants to note that attendance zones and real-estate-linked school funding are exclusionary practices, plus elected officials who only pay lip service to parents and community members, and learning standards imposed by experts without input from stakeholders. 

It's also hard not to notice that #2 leaves lots of room for interpretation, enough to accommodate the ideas of any christianist white nationalist academy in the country. 

But Gyurko wants to offer families a new way forward, and this is where he gets to his cutest ideas-- the negotiating part. 

The left should play some offense and propose a transformative increase in federal funding for all schools — district, charter, charitable and proprietary — with a catch.

Dollars would need to be used to end exclusionary practices and to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors and stewards of the planet.

I don't even know where to start, so let's begin with some of the specific "deals" that Gyurko imagines.

For example, could “hardening” schools against mass shootings also get us high-tech, 21st-century facilities? Would we trade vouchers to publicly purposed private schools for a national minimum teacher salary? Can we include patriotism in curricula that also respects everyone, equally? Might we eliminate caps on new charter schools if appointed charter authorizers were replaced with elected officials, thereby democratizing the charter sector?

Hardening for 21st century schools? Do you mean every single school building in America? I have no idea exactly what that might cost, but I'm guessing somewhere between a shit-ton of money and all the money in the world. "Publicly purposed private schools"?? That's not a thing, and our experience with vouchers so far is that no private school is going to take that deal since states already have made them a vouchers-with-no-strings-attached deal. Maybe you could get some pop-up crappy voucher schools that set up shop to cash in, but we already know that produces non-educating junk schools.

Patriotism and equity? Which part of the Donald "I Will Defund Any School With DEI or CRT" Trump administration do you think will sign on for that? Elected charter boards? I think that's a great idea, and I also think that the many folks profiting in the charter business have no interest in making such a deal.

And is there a reason for public education to offer to accept further privatization in hopes of some of these possible returns?

The central flaw in Gyurko's idea is that he is proposing to make a deal with privatizers in which they give up fundamental parts of their business model in return for stuff that they already get from their state government anyway. Or maybe the thought is to force states that have resisted voucher incursions to give up by offering some crumbs in return, but I have my doubts that privatizers would accept his conditions. 

The modern choice movement is based on competition with the public system. I appreciate Gyurko's notion that we could have one big public system that embraces many forms of schooling. I've played with that thought experiment myself. But the premises required for such a system are unacceptable to the folks in the modern choice biz. 

Public good, true non-profit and not free market? Public ownership, operation and accountability? No religious education? Honest discussion and support for the real total cost? Serving all students? All of those necessities for a public school system with robust choice--every one of them--has been pointedly and systematically rejected by choicers over the past few decades. They reject them either because they truly believe that a market-based competitive system is the path to educational quality for all, or because they don't actually care about educational quality for all as much as they care about profit, about a multi-tier system that keeps lessers in their place, or about pushing their own favored ideology. 

My impression is that Gyurko's heart is in the right place, but his head is deep in the sand if he imagines that Dear Leader or any of his underlings are interested in any of these deals. This may be a better pitch than the privatizers longing for the days that Democrats joined a coalition in order to roll over for right-tilted reformsters but not by much. This administration will, in fact, be plenty hostile to public education, and trying to get them to make deals when they imagine they can just take what they want is a pointless exercise.

Arne Duncan, Slayer of Irony

Year after his stint as secretary of education, Arne Duncan can still push irony so far that it collapses and implodes under its own weight,

Duncan appears in a recent EdWeek piece, one more asking the question, "What can Trump actually do to education?" This particular piece by Alyson Klein was considering how extensively Trump could rewrite curriculum. Klein notes that there are rules against that sort of thing, and that's when Duncan pops up with this- 

But Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary for seven years under President Barack Obama, doesn’t think wonky legalese will matter much to a chief executive who was found guilty of multiple felonies and was impeached twice by the House of Representatives—including for inciting a mob to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

“They could trample those. They could run roughshod over those,” Duncan said of ESSA’s prohibitions. “There are literally zero schools in America teaching CRT right now. That’s not a thing. It’s not reality.

“But he doesn’t live in reality. He creates his own reality,” Duncan continued. “And so, they can take money from schools and say they are teaching critical race theory. They can just make it up and move it to a state where people support him politically.”

 As I've noted elsewhere, we know that Trump could hang on to Title I funding and use it as leverage to extort compliance from the states. We know he could do this because we have seen that trick before. It was a feature of No Child Left Behind, with its "gate all your test scores above or else," and was doubled down by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who declared that states would adopt acceptable standards (with the hint that Common Core would be acceptable) and acceptable standardized tests or else. "Or else" means "or else no money for you." He used Title I funds to threaten California and any states thinking of following them into not adopting his preferred tests. 

Why does ESSA have provisions aimed at reining in the Department of Education? Because the one bipartisan agreement that Congress could reach was that Arne Duncan had overreached his authority way too much. And what was his reaction at the time? He told Politico that the department had lawyers smart enough to circumvent any guardrails that Congress erected.

And when it comes to disconnection from reality, we could turn to the part where Duncan wanted to shift special education oversight because "We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to robust curriculum, they excel." In this construction, "excel" is doing a lot of work, but Duncan seemed to think that students with special needs only really specially needed encouragement and expectations.

Or we could discuss the reality of the policy notion that testing would fix everything, that, as we used to say till we were out of breath, weighing the pig will somehow make it grow.

Or we could discuss how, since leaving office, Duncan has repeatedly attempted to retcon his administration and create a new historical reality (here, here, here ).

Look, I don't want to stay mad at Duncan forever, and I have no doubt that the Trump administration is going to do many wrong things to education. But the unrepentant and devoid-of-self-awareness Duncan is not the guy to call him out. Linda McMahon isn't going to "trample" anything so much as just follow a trail that Duncan had a large hand in blazing (and DeVos followed) and if she responds by referencing pots and kettles, she’s not wrong. It's one more example of how some feckless Democrats abandoned public education and set the stage for the far right, and until they fess up and apologize, they aren't credible critics of the coming messes. 

ICYMI: Another Thanksgiving Edition (11/24)

It's coming around again. Here's hoping you are able to enjoy it. In the meantime, here's the readings from the week.

A Tiny Victory in the Battle against AI-generated Stupidity

Remember the story about the student who used AI to plagiarize a paper, then sued the school for catching him? Benjamin Riley has the story on how that ended up, with spicy commentary from the judge.

ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom

I don't know who Emily is, but her takedown of ChatGPT's guide for teachers is a thing of beauty.

Back to the Future

I don't often dip into Slate, but when I saw that Adam Laats had a piece there providing historical perspective on what Linda McMahon may have in mind for education, I gladly burned one of my free views, and I wasn't sorry. Nobody puts across "We already tried that and it sucked" like Laats.

Donald Trump Cabinet picks: What Linda McMahon wants to do with the Department of Education.

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information provide a rundown of the various attempts to cram right wing christianism into schools.

FOX 25 uncovers the Heritage Foundation's sweeping influence in Oklahoma education

In one of the less-surprising reveals of the season, it turns out that Ryan Walters has been hand in glove with the Heritage Foundation, and Fox 25 has more receipts than you have time to read.

Segregation Academies

ProPublica has created a whole batch of stories about the segregation academies still operating in the South, including one that focuses on how many are soaking up taxpayer dollars via vouchers.

Google's AI Chatbot Tells Student Seeking Help with Homework 'Please Die'

Newsweek reports on one more example of an AI going off the rails.

New Board of Education member thanks God, DeSantis for fourth appointment

Welcome to the free state of Florida, where voters can resoundingly reject your campaign for board membership, and Ron DeSantis will just appoint you anyway.

Children experiencing homelessness have rights to a public education

Andru Volinsky is a New England lawyer who knows a thing or two about education law, and what some children are legally entitled to..

Special education staffing shortages put students’ futures at risk. How to solve that is tricky.

Kalyn Belsha reports for Chalkbeat on the big time shortage of special ed teachers. I'm sure the Trump administration is going to get right on that.

Trump’s and Project 2025’s Education Policies Would Dangerously Roll Back Civil Rights Protections

Jan Resseger looks at the outcomes for Trump education policies.

Is Liberty University Coming to A Florida School District Near you?

Sue Kingery Woltanski warns that some Florida districts could be getting a big helping of Liberty University baloney

Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform

Nancy Flanagan with the latest in creepy Heritage Foundation rhetoric. 

This week at the Bucks County Beacon, I looked at some bright spots in a dark election season. And at Forbes.com, looking at the current state of test-optional colleges (for all you parents of high school juniors). 

Bluesky is taking off. Personally, I've gains about 900 followers in 10 days. 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.

To Build The Wall

It's just the latest brick. Florida has moved past banning courses that are expressly about that woke stuff, and has moved on to removing subjects like sociology from course requirements. As the NY Times line on the post says, "conservatives in Florida have moved from explosive politics to subtler tactics to uproot liberal 'indoctrination' in higher education." The headline (at least right now) is more blunt-- "Republicans Target Social Sciences to Curb Ideas They Don't Like."

The idea of building a wall to keep out Those Others at the border is not just its own policy goal, but a ready-made metaphor for most of MAGA's culture panic reaction. 

Build a wall around the minds of people (especially young people), because if we can insure that they never see, hear, read about, or are touched by Certain Ideas then they will grow to be clean and pure and just the way we want them to be. 

The wall is built for brute force and fear. We must not allow them to see a certain view of the world, but we do not fight it with reason or argument, with persuasion or discussion. We don't meet that Other View and grapple with it. No, we must build a wall to hold it back, to block it out, to anticipate and search for every little crack through which it might creep. They use the wall because they rely on brute force to suppress those other views, and they do it because of fear. Just a taste, a touch, a look would somehow pollute the young, pollute the culture, seduce generations away from the One True View of the world and our country.

I've known MAGA types my whole life. In religious circles I call the followers of the Tiny God, a God so weak and helpless that He must be protected from disbelievers, from people who do not worship Him properly. He needs the support of human laws, human government, because if He were not soi protected and wreathed in human-made bubble wrap, he would be blown away on the wind. These are the folks who believe the Creator of all that is, the great I Am, the Being who made all and sees from end to end of the great sweep of time and eternity and the universe itself, vast and unknowable-- that God will be seriously threatened if Americans in 2024 vote for the wrong person to occupy a seat in the House of Representatives. That God waits to see if the right person will be elected to an office of secular, earthly government. 

That's the kind of fragility we're talking about. Is their Truth so weak that nobody must be allowed to challenge it, that they have no way to answer opponents except to shut them up. Their view of what is Right and True is absolutely and unassailable, except they live in constant fear of having it assailed. And so, a wall. To keep out people with the wrong beliefs, the wrong culture, the wrong background, the wrong ideas about gender, and if not keep them out, at least force them to keep their wrongness to themselves.

This is not an automatic feature of conservatism. Conservatives can absolutely be those folks who watch what appears to them to be dumbassery, call it dumbassery, and stand in opposition to it, patiently waiting to watch it play out, secure in the knowledge that dumbassery always falls apart, always fails to hold up against actual truth and facts and reality. Even when it builds a wall to keep all those things out. 

Unfortunately, building the wall comes with extra problems, extra destruction, anguish from grinding human bones to make mortar. And the terrible strain of denying what's out there, of maintaining your view of reality in defiance of the evidence. 

Yes, it all goes hand in hand with grasping for power, but power for what? Power to silence the banging of time and tide and reality and the growling beast reminding you that you are dust, that in another blink or two you will be dust again, with nothing left behind but the pieces of a wall and the imprint of your boots on too many necks. It's not wealth and power for joy-- do any of these MAGA wall builders look joyful? How can they be when they are exhausted by the daily efforts to maintain the wall? How can they rest when that hammering rings in their ears every hour of the day and night?

It is one thing to try to build a society up, to try to build the edifices and structures and supports that cause it to more closely resemble the ideal you envision by harnessing the heart and passion and love and bright rising humanity and, yes, even holiness that can lift it up into something a little more shining. It is another thing to try to mold that society by trying to keep all those human and divine forces from being able to act on it. It is one thing to try to bring all the pieces of a society together to create something awesome, and quite another thing to try to subjugate them and wall them up, to say "Only I can create here, and the first thing I will create is a wall that blocks all ideas and wills but my own."

There is no human system of government that cannot be twisted into an ugly and dehumanizing state, and none that cannot be turned to foster all the great beauty that humans are capable of, but certainly some systems tend more naturally one way or another. 

We can talk and argue at great length about values and morals and ethics, but some days I can see it simplified to a two-part question-- what are you trying to build, and how are you trying to build it?

Are you trying to build a garden that flourishes and grows and delights in all manner of living things that also grow and flourish, doing it by cultivating and nourishing and lifting up, or are you intent on building a wall to keep out all the parts of the world you don't like so that some sad, meagre little creature can gather power without ever being challenged by anything scary from outside that wall.

That wall-free garden is never going to be all fluffy bunnies and kum-bay-yah circles. Life is rich and complicated and sometimes hard and often contentious. But building a wall to keep away everything that bothers you is never a solution; it's anti-life and anti-human. It's destined to fail, and to sow chaos and destruction as it collapses. 

We are in an age of wall-builders, which makes it both harder and imperative that we not build our schools according to their specifications. It's a lousy way to educate young humans. We have to do better. Poke holes in the wall, and bring the world in through every tiny crack. 

Trans Panic Abuse

I first encountered trans folks in the 1970s, trans women who I was in high school with when they were guys. I've had trans students over the years. And if I'm honest, I still struggle with the issue. If one of my own children came to me to say they were trans, I would have all the misgivings-- how do I bless that kind of transition for someone who can't even decide which shirt to wear, who has a different plan for their toys every single day. I hope that I would get to a good place with my child, and throwing them out would not be on the table, but it would not be an easy journey to some form of acceptance. Sitting here right now, I can't say that I know what that would look or feel like. 

But I do know this--as difficult as it would be, I can't imagine how an edict from the government or my local school board would make any part of it easier.

Right now we are awash in trans panic. Project 2025 is riddled with it, in every single chapter. Writers of the conservative battle plan will be droning along in boring wonkese and suddenly erupt into lurid purple prose over the threat of trans persons. The GOP spent $215 million on ads attacking trans rights (that, says a civil rights attorney, is $134 per trans person). Moms for Liberty are recruiting heavily on the Title IX loophole that says your district doesn't have to adopt the federal rules if there's a M4L member parent in the district. Everywhere, at all levels of government, folks are passing rules to restrict trans persons' rights.

All policies that attempt to restrict trans persons are inherently cruel and abusive, and not just of trans persons. In response to Nancy Mace's ugly, personal bathroom attack on trans Rep-elect Sarah McBride, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez gets it exactly right:

“What Nancy Mace and what Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters late Wednesday. “Because if you ask them, ‘What is your plan on how to enforce this?’ they won’t come up with an answer. And what it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are gonna want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis and who’s doing what.”

“The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou in front of who — an investigator? Who would that be? — because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

This trans panic has been aimed disproportionately at high school athletes, because any attempt to push repressive policy works better if you attach "for the children" to it. But anti-trans rules open the door to all sorts of abuse. 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.

You can ban trans women from sports all day, but in the end, enforcement comes down to demanding that some teenaged girl prove she's a "real" girl by submitting to physical and/or genetic inspection. 

I get that there are some concerns that reasonable people can share. Does having trans women with bigger, stronger frames pose a threat to other athletes? I don't know. But does that concern mean that schools should also institute rules delineating maximum allowable strength for athletes? And what does it say about sports like football, in which we know that students are absolutely in danger of serious injuries with long-term effects?

There are real issues to be discussed, but not everyone involved in the discussion is serious. When Nancy Mace says "any man who wants to force his genital into women's spaces" is waging a "war on women," I have to wonder what that means coming from a staunch supporter of President Pussy Grabber. 

Pushing trans-restrictive rules for schools may make boards feel good and righteous and play well to the culture panic crowd, but the ultimate result is the abuse and harassment of actual individual live human beings, and while I don't know exactly how I feel about transgender issues, I know exactly how I feel about harassing and abusing live human beings, especially young ones, so that you can score some political points. 

Department of Redundency Department

Teachers ought to know. Marketers certainly know. Politicians ignore it at their peril.

Repetition works.

There is a tendency among certain brands of humans (I am one of them) to believe that one shouldn't have to explain oneself over and over and over again. One clear and cogent explanation of the point, and that should do the trick. To keep hammering on it is boring, inefficient, and unnecessary. Redundancy is self-evidently Not Good.

But that's not how humans generally work.

Marketers understand this. You boil your campaign down to one simple message, and then you hammer that message over and over and over again until people can't have even a passing thought about thirst without an image of Coke popping into their brain. 

It's understandable that some teachers are resistant to this idea-- explaining this idea over and over "wastes" the valuable and scarce commodity of class time. There are many textbooks that are built entirely around the "explain it once then move on" principle of instruction. But it's repetition that gets things to stick. If you're trying to drive a nail into a block of wood (I would tell my student teachers), does it work better to try to drive it all the way on with one mighty thwack, or a whole series of moderate taps? 

We know that repetition is effective even in the absence of actual explanation. Does Coke pop into our head based on the extensive evidence the Coca-Cola company has published on the bubbly sugar water's thirst-quenching qualities? 

How did "America's schools are failing" become conventional wisdom? Not through any credible evidence. Some folks have just been repeating it for forty years, accompanied by simple illustrations that don't rise to the level of credible evidence but make the statement feel more true. We're far from the top of international test results, they warn, ignoring that we're right where we've already been and Estonia hasn't conquered us yet. SAT scores! NAEP scores! I found this one teacher who said something stupid! Arguing with these is fruitless, because they aren't actual evidence-- they're just illustrations to underline the point, and the point is hammered home by a steady top-tap-tap of repetition.

I don't pay a lot of attention to "science of learning" arguments, which often have as much real-world salience as would an argument about the "science of marriage." But the idea of repetition has recently been bandied about as if it's a hot new idea (these days we're attaching to "cognitive load theory" stuff), and even if someone is announcing they've just invented the wheel, that doesn't mean that wheels don't work. Repetition and redundancy in the classroom absolutely work, even spaced out over considerable time.

I've known people in the education blogoverse who worry about redundancy. "I don't want to write about that because this other person already did" or "I already wrote about this once." Even I, with my noted lack of writing restraint, will sometimes contemplate someone else's piece and think, "Well, I don't really have anything to add to that." I'd argue that this is a mistake, that anything worth saying is worth saying a few hundred times. 

There are, for instance, multiple pieces noting that school vouchers went down to defeat in three states even in the midst of a red wave. There should be a million of them. It's an opportunity to connect a clear message ("Voters don't like vouchers and always vote them down") with a clear illustration ("In the 2024 election, three states with strong MAGA support still voted vouchers down"). It's true, and it's important, first, because legislators are repeatedly conned into supporting vouchers because "they're so popular" and second, because the Trump administration is signaling that it wants to impose school vouchers on the entire country.  

Defenders of public education should be saying it over and over again-- vouchers are not popular with United States taxpayers and voters. It's not just that they're a bad idea (they are, and should be fought on that basis), but they are an unpopular idea. We have the receipts.