ID: Doubling Down On Unwelcomeness

The West Ada School District administration (the largest in Idaho) has just flunked an important quiz, pulling failing grades in student support as well as PR management.

Here's the quiz.

Assume you are a district that recently told a teacher to take down an "Everyone is welcome here" sign that shows the message with hands of various tones. Your explanation is that it's "not neutral" to suggest that students of all races are welcome. The teacher goes national, drawing all sorts of attention to you district, and the country is wondering if "Some students are unwelcome here" is an official district policy.

There are protests and letters to the editor, and over the weekend, 400 or so people turn out to put "everyone is welcome here" messages in chalk all over the sidewalks and parking lots of your district.

Do you--

A) Go public with a statement explaining that this is all just a big understanding because of course in your district everyone is welcome and the whole things is just a communication mix-up.

B) Send an administrator or two out for a photo op with one of the chalk drawings and maybe a student or two, throw in a big smile and a thumbs up to explain that of course your district endorses this message and celebration of the diversity that makes this country great.

C) Hide like a coward in your office and hope that this just blows over before some MAGA goons turn you in to the DEI police for not firing the teacher immediately.

D) Send a message to your building administrators telling them to get the "vandalism" washed away ASAP.

West Ada admins chose D. They offered as an excuse that they didn't want students tracking the chalk dust into the building, and every school in the country that ever put chalk messages on the sidewalk for the first day of school or Big Test Day responds "Cough bullshit cough." At least one West Ada student told a reporter, "They chalk all the time for student welcomes and IB exams, but they don't power wash messages off then." Which would be the least surprising thing about this whole story.

I don't know the West Ada administrators, so maybe they are not actively trying to promote a policy of "Everyone is definitely not welcome here, dammit." Knowing school administrations, it strikes me as equally likely that this is more "How dare you defy my directive, and double-damn you for making me look stupid while doing it." Maybe they're just frustrated authoritarians; there's nothing authoritarians hate worse than people who don't properly follow orders. 

Nevertheless, I hope West Ada continues to draw attention. This is what anti-diversity, anti-equity, anti-inclusion looks like-- active suppression of any attempt to express welcome or support for people who are at all different. That's a stunningly inappropriate policy for any public school district in this country to implement, even if it's what the federal regime supports. For any district to suggest that some young people are not welcome, or to buckle to other people who want the district to take that position, is unconscionable and a betrayal of what we hope public education can be.

Thanks to Mike Simpson for the image

ICYMI: Eye On The Ball Edition (3/22)

This was the week that Trump indicated he was serious about axing the Department of Education, but I want to point out that what the executive order said, what people (including Trump) say he's doing, and what the law allows him to do are all wildly different things, so now is an excellent time to tune out the noise and pay attention to what is actually happening. 

Mission (almost) Accomplished

Stephen Dyer with some astonishing numbers on how Ohio's private school students are sucking up a disproportionate amount of the taxpayer's money.

What Is A Good College?

Akil Bello takes a look at the many ways this question is answered and suggests maybe there is bunk involved. 

In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire in Barn Raiser again highlights the opposition to school vouchers in rural red areas. 

Shelter Skelter: How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down some of the effects of the proposed federal school voucher bill. Surprise-- it helps out rich people with their taxes.

Trump Cannot Sharpie-kill the Department of Ed, and He Knows It.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the executive order and notes what it doesn't say.

Florida at the White House, Applauding Disaster

Along with children, Trump also used some governors as props for the signing. Sue Kingery Woltanski takes a look at the sad scene.

White House says test scores haven’t improved since 1979. That’s not true.

Sarah Mervosh at the New York Times provides the answers for when your MAGA uncle starts talking about how Dear Leader said that US schools just keep getting worse/

Is Academic Achievement Improving or Deteriorating?

Everybody knows that text scores just keep dropping, right? Well, no.

Texas lawmaker proposes bill targeting furries; measure seeks to ban 'non-human behavior' in schools

I include this report from Fox News so that you will understand that there is still idiocy loose in the world.

How Oklahoma’s Right-Wing Superintendent Set Off a Holy War in Classrooms

Linda Wertheimer at Vanity Fair takes a look at the career of Oklahoma's Head Education Doofus, Ryan Walters. Thorough. If you've been wondering what the big deal is about this guy, this is a good entry into the discussion of his various policies--and how even religious folks wish he'd knock it off.

Three Pillars for Decimating Public Education

Jose Luis Vilson breaks down the three foundational parts of breaking public education and making the country a worse place.

Ohio's Private School Vouchers

Quick fact sheet reminding us that vouchers are a nice benefit for wealthy folks, but that's about it.

Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at what may be one of the most devastating education cuts.

Questioning the Mississippi Miracle Again

Thomas Ultican explains why there is no Mississippi miracle, no matter how many people keep proclaiming it.

Trump and his “Aptitude for Music”

Trump wants to pretend he can hang with the band or theater kids. Nancy Flanagan knows better.

Computing versus Democracy

Audrey Watters reflects on the many crappy gifts that Bill Gates has given us, plus the usual assortment of valuable links.

"Everyone Is Welcome Here" and The Politics of Hate

Paul Thomas talks about that teacher in Idaho and the long political history of other-ing.

McTeaching: Online Instruction

Larry Cuban explains what there is to not love about online instruction, for both teachers and students.

Journalists and Advocates Share Key Resources to Address Public School Funding in Ohio Budget Debate

Jan Resseger provides a guide to some of the resources that have been published as part of Ohio's ongoing debates about education and whether or not Ohio can out-Florida Florida.

On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 3

Speaking of Florida, Gregory Sampson uses Florida to demonstrate why a one-party state is a big problem.

The Great Education Heist

For half of forever, Big Education Ape has amplified all the voices supporting public education, but occasionally Mike Simpson writes a little something himself. Here he looks at how Trump, Musk and the DOGE boys are playing Monopoly with our schools.

The Erasure of Black History in the Name of an Assault on DEI

Julian Vasquez Heilig looks at the alarming erasure of US history because diversity is too scary for some folks.

Mystified magicians of the mind

Ben Riley talks to Paul Cisek about the nature of AI and human thinking and which parts are not magic at all.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

AI has depended on stealing a whole lot of work from writers for "training" purposes. Now you can see what Meta stole to train their own AI bot. It's a Mount Everest of larceny.

Apparently I was busy at Forbes.com this week. I wrote about Idaho's attempt to jam the Bible into classrooms (just don't show there were brown people in it), the charter group that opposes the Catholic Charter in Oklahoma, and of course the executive order that says... something. 

For years, I have maintained a small piece of internet sanity by making a deal with myself-- no matter how much I'm stewing over stuff when I get up, I cannot post anything anywhere until I have first posted some piece of music. Music captures and expresses everything admirable and beautiful and deeply human about us, and so I remind myself of all of that first thing. I guess it's my version of a daily meditation/prayer. At any rate, I've decided to start including something with every one of these weekly digest posts. Because even though some humans have completely lost the plot and spend too much of their day being awful (and that is sad for them because good lord what is the point of being super-rich and/or super-powerful if you are still miserable and can only think to ease your gnawing emptiness by making others miserable)-- anyway, our humanity is meant as God's great gift to us and those around us and for me, at least, music is a major way to get in touch with that. 

Which is a long way of saying that I'm going to start tacking music on this list every week now.

As always, you're encouraged to join me on my newsletter, free today and always.

IL: The Sequel To The Dyett Story

Ten years ago, Dyett High School in the Chicago southside neighborhood of Bronzeville, was up against the ropes. I'll pull from some of what I wrote about it at the time (apologies if some of the links have died). 

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools decided to close Dyett, allowing the last freshman class to finish their education there if they wished. Only a handful wished (and they were reportedly pressured by CPS to wish differently), but they're done, and the time had come to decide what Dyett would become.

There were three proposals. In a poor, black neighborhood of Chicago, there was an outside proposal for entertainment industry, an outside proposal for sports, and a community proposal for science, technology and leadership. I respect athletics, and you know I love the arts, but you tell me which one of these proposals set the highest aspirations for the children of this community.

Bronzeville is poor, but they had worked hard for their school (back in 2011, just before the district dropped the hammer, they won a grant from ESPN to rebuild their athletic facilities with big fancy upgrades like working handles for doors). They were improving and growing stronger. There's no question they needed some help, but a search doesn't turn up stories suggesting that Dyett was some sort of notorious hellhole in freefall.

But Dyett was located in the northern end of Washington Park, a very desirable chunk of real estate that was one of the two locations in the running to be the location of Barack Obama's Presidential Library. In fact, the proposed location was within a stone's throw of Dyett.

In fact, Washington Park seems to have been in the crosshairs for many years. Back in 2008, when Chicago was feeling the Olympic love, Washington Park was called one of the hottest neighborhoods, a diamond in the rough, and there is still talk about turning it into a community that could attract and support business, arts, and all the trappings of gentrification. And gentrification is a concern in Bronzeville, just as many see it as a hallmark of Rahm Emanuel's tenure as mayor.

CPS stalled and hemmed and hawed and tried to avoid saying out loud "We are stripping Bronzeville of their community high school" and so a group of parents staged a hunger strike. First, they did all the right things, developing their own proposals, presenting them, petitioning, and getting ignored by Emanuel and his crew. So they moved on to a hunger strike.

The Chicago press ignored them, except when people wrote really stupid editorials about Dyett. When the new school year rolled around and the strike had been going on for a month, CPS tried to shut them up with a bogus "compromise" (for the announcement of that, the strikers were not allowed in the room). It was infuriating, and symptomatic of reformsterism at the time. As I wrote at the time:

Dyett is the worst of the reformster movement in a microcosm-- residents will be stripped of their local school, given no voice in what will replace it, because their Betters have decided what they need, what they deserve. And because small politicos want to make sure that local voices are shut out, that power is not allowed into the hands of ordinary citizens.

Dyett is all of us, sooner or later (and in some places, already)-- privatizers and profiteers shutting down democracy so that they can get their hands on those sweet sweet piles of tax money and keep their hands on the wheels of power.

Jitu Brown was a hell of a voice for the hunger strikers, and the strikers themselves were a strong statement, and the school was rescued from closure, becoming an arts-focused school with technology training. "New Century. New Needs. New Direction." 

Last week they held the third annual awards ceremony established in honor of the school's namesake, Chicago music educator Walter H. Dyett. Dyett was an accomplished musician who taught in Chicago schools in the mid-20th century. His students included Nat King Cole, Bo Diddly, Milt Hinton, Dinah Washington, and Redd Foxx. It's a big legacy.

The school's basketball team has been a state powerhouse, making it to the playoffs multiple years. But last week they made it all the way to the top-- the Walter H. Dyett Eagles beat Althoff Catholic High School to become AA state champions. Ten years ago, they were elementary students who had no idea where they might get to go to high school. Now they are state champs. You never know how these stories are going to turn. 

Content Knowledge Is Still Necessary

A couple of decades ago, we started hearing people say "You don't have to teach students that stuff. They can just google it." This was dumb, and wrong.

But now we're getting a new level of this with AI hucksters. Here's just one sample of the pitches it am sent many times a day:

In the 1967 classic The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was advised "one word: plastics." If it was remade in 2025, the one word would be AI.

Or the people who keep pitching the idea that AI can take over the difficult parts of student writing, like coming up with ideas, or writing a thesis, or maybe, you know, just have the AI write the assignment and then the student could do the rewrite. 

Relax, they say. It's just like when calculators arrived and math teachers freaked out.

Well, no, it's not. First, it would have to involved a calculator that gave the wrong answer a significant amount of the time. Second, there is no writing prompt that can be answered with only one correct essay. 

Content knowledge matters. This is so basic to education, and tech shortcuts do not change it. All aspects of learning rest on Knowing Stuff.

You can google for information all day, but if you don't Know Stuff, you have no way to sort the information wheat from the sludge-covered chaff. "Well, that's why students need the 21st Century skill of analysis and critical thinking," say the techphiles. But you cannot teach critical thinking and analysis like they are content-free skills, waves that exist without a medium through which to move.

My critical thinking skills are fine in areas where I have some content knowledge, or can connect the new information to knowledge I already have. I cannot apply critical thinking to areas in which I am completely ignorant and cannot connect to stuff I already know. As an adult, I have the advantage of having had years to learn lots of stuff, but children do not have that advantage.

Which is why the best thing we can do for small humans is give them the chance to learn stuff. I'm going to argue that it doesn't even matter what the stuff is. For years the Board of Directors here at the Institute were deeply interested in "work trucks"-- construction vehicles of all kinds. Now in second grade, we are deep in Pokemon territory. Do I love this for us? I do not. But they have absorbed a ton of information, and they have learned to organize and categorize large chunks of information in ways that they never could have if we had tried to teach organization without using something to organize. Plus a ton of vocabulary and math that they have picked up via these damned stupid delightful cards.

You can't acquire knowledge and skill second hand, nor can you do it in a vacuum. Of all the AI-for-student-writing advice I read, the most maddening may be "Have the AI write a rough draft and then have the students rewrite." How the hell does someone who has not written know how to edit a piece of writing? And how do you edit a piece when you have no idea what the author meant to say (or, in fact, the author is incapable of intent)? How do they develop the skill of figuring out what they think about a topic by having the AI spit out some topics for them? The only way this could be worse would be if the topic assigned was something the students had no knowledge of at all.

This kind of thinking puts product over process, but it also shows a failure to fully understand the product itself, like a builder who has built a house but neglected to put a foundation under it. 

Knowing Stuff is inescapably important. Writing requires thinking about stuff. Critical thinking is thinking about stuff. Evaluating sources and materials involves thinking about stuff. And you cannot think about what you know nothing about. And neither google nor ChatGPT can change that.

Blowing Up The Ed Department

The executive order has finally been signed, and it clarifies... nothing. Lord knows I have often beefed with the department and prayed it would improve, but this is definitely not that.

A photo op with children as a prop. The bulk of it is a bunch of bullshit about the many failings of education and a made-up number about what we've spent ($3 trillion? Really? Can I see the back of the envelope you got those figures from?). The actual meat of the order is this paragraph:

The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

If I were someone from Team Dismantle The Department, I would call this pretty weak sauce. Like that whole "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" thing-- within those limits the list of things they can do is fairly short. I can't believe I'm sending you to something from the Education Reform Now people, but these are crazy times, and they have a pretty handy quick explainer about who can legally do what. And it's not much.

Of course, that's within the restrictions of law, and under the current regime's legal theory of "Whatever Dear Leader Wants To Do Is Right And Legal And Anyone Who Disagrees Is A Traitor Who Should Go To Jail," "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" is meaningless tissue paper.

The regime also has at hand its favored tool for gutting departments-- firing everyone and making the department functionally non-functional (as someone on social media noted, when you remove 30% of the parts of a plane, it does not fly 30% slower). Trusk has already gutted the Civil Rights wing of the department as well as the Center for Education Statistics, which among other things ends the NAEP test that Trusk cited as proof that US education is sad. NCES would also be needed to come up with the numbers that Title I and IDEA would use to distribute funds, so that's another wrinkle.

The regime has made its basic talking point "Look at all the money we spent on this department, and we didn't get higher test scores." This is a misdirection. This post from Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX 29th)--

"We're going to send education back to the states" is also a baloney talking point-- the states already have responsibility, control, and most of the funding for education. Some would just like to exercise all that without any accountability to anyone. Also, some folks would like to be free of paying taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children.

We still don't know exactly what Trusk and McMahon are going to attempt specifically. Turn IDEA and Title I into block grants (then slowly zero them out) per Project 2025? Use the money to force compliance with MAGA culture panic edicts? Move some of the programs to other departments? Put Wells Fargo in charge of the college loan portfolio (after they buy a $100 million membership at a Trump golf course)? Cut the department to three people, let it fall apart, and declare victory? Cut IDEA and Title I funding to $1.50? Plenty of those things would be illegal, but that just means a fight in the courts, the results of which are double uncertain--uncertain they'll fall correctly, and uncertain that Trusk will pay any attention to the court ruling.

We don't really know any more than we did before the executive order, other than he's saying more loudly that he wants the department gone. So discussion continues to center on conjecture about what would result if X happened

That's stressful, because the one thing we know is that whatever he does, it will be bad-- bad for education, bad for students, bad for the country. 

David Coleman Is Still Clueless

You can be forgiven for having forgotten that David Coleman is a thing. He's been laying low-ish as head of the College Board since his days of dropping Common Core on the US education system like sewage-filled water balloon. But he's still around, still sharing his ideas about education and how to use the College Board's big products-- the SAT and AP courses-- to inflict his vision on students.

Yes, David Coleman. David "Don't Know Much About Teaching Literature" Coleman. David "I Don't Know How To Teach Writing, Either" Coleman. David "I'm a Genius" Coleman. David "I Messed Up the College Board" Coleman. David "I'm an Educational Amateur and That's Why I'm Awesome" Coleman. And, of course, David "Nobody Gives a Shit What You Think" Coleman.

For whatever reason, Alyson Klein at EdWeek sat down for a "far-ranging" interview with Coleman, and it is just one special Coleman moment after another. 

Klein says, "AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?"

This might sound like a challenge to AP tests, but that's not what Coleman hears. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI." For once, he's not entirely wrong-- by reducing writing to a simple algorithmic process divorced from expressing ideas, many educators have turned it into a task that a computer can do. You know what pushed us--hard--in that direction? Common Core, and the tests that came with it. 

Coleman says we have to make high school "relevant, engaging, and purposeful" by creating the next generation of coursework. "We," he says, "are reconsidering the kind of courses we offer." So I guess he's not going to address that whole "AI can beat your test" issue.

But it's this next exchange that shows how far off the rails College Board is ready to go.

Klein: College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?

Coleman: What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.

So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.

So, to expand their market, they're going to take the "college" out of College Board. Coleman says they might also take a whack at health care, sort of integrate chemistry and physiology and health care careers. 

Klein points out that employers want "tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking." Does Coleman have a plan for dealing with this stuff?

He does, and it's dopey. The big move will be AP Seminar-- less required content, more group work. Also, the business and personal finance course "has heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change, plus flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness. 

So how do you measure stuff like resourcefulness asks the man who still hasn't acknowledged that AI can beat his current set of tests. And he has another non-answer:

In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Okay, but how do you test them? Give them a multiple choice question with one answer that is the resourceful one? Is there a special resourcefulness rubric for the project? Coleman is skating past a huge question here-- how do you use a standardized box to assess how well a student functions outside the standardized box?

Klein steers him back toward AI. Could an AI write the paper for that Seminar class? 

The answer, buried under some verbage, is yes, and the student might be scored "whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. Also--

What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”

I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].

Behind all this argle bargle is... nothing. It's meaningless noise until it's turned into specific plans. How would those "checks and balances" work? There is nothing remotely insightful about saying, "Students should know how to work AI and they should know how to work without it."  

Will teachers be trained in AI or cybersecurity? Coleman's answer boils down to "Not really." Just give them enough resources to "stay a step ahead of their kids." 

But Coleman also answers a question that Klein didn't ask-- would the AI replace teachers? 

Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.

So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.

So, pretty much like the computer-delivered education models that don't require teachers-- just coaches to encourage and monitor.  

How will they keep courses up to date? The course framework will be a 'living portion," which is some great corporate baloney-speak. But hey-- Coleman never built any capability for update in the Common Core, so maybe he has learned something?

How about AP Data Science? Coleman says the AP Computer Science Principles really covers that. Also, the new verbal section of the SAT includes charts, because to be literate you can't skip the tables in a science article ("unless you're just gonna read fiction," and we know Coleman's not a fan). 

Also, they're not changing the AP African American Studies course, and states, schools, and students can choose.

Look, the College Board lost its way ages ago. The SAT division now trues to flood the market with variants, like a cookie manufacturer trying to some up with new flavors in order to suck up market shelf space. I look forward to the Fetal SAT, given in each trimester of pregnancy. The Advanced Placement courses and tests were arguably a good-ish idea, but they have lost their way (read Annie Abrams' Shortchanged for a fuller telling of that story).

But this is clearly not an improvement. Coleman has never shown himself to be a fan of the liberal arts, so perhaps it's a surprise that he hadn't already shifted the AP course from liberal, college level academics to some high end vocational training, but here we are. Never mind that artsy fartsy thinky stuff; let's dig out the graphs and charts. Dump those crazy abstract maths and get down to crunching the kinds pf numbers that corporate overlords are interested in. Maybe as colleges and universities shift away from liberal arts education and toward meat widget prep, the AP was destined to be dragged along with them.

Thing is, Coleman, at least in this interview, doesn't seem to have a real vision of where he's headed-- just some obvious platitudes and vague gestures. And he can make noises about next generation education programs, but that doesn't really address the problem that a LLM bot can breeze through his tests (and, one wonders, how much bots are being used to score that same test). 

Nothing here indicates that Coleman gas a plan-- just a vague impulse to get more vocational and computery. We'll see if that's enough to hang onto his steadily eroding market share. 

Another Anti-Union Teacher Union

Those wacky folks at the Freedom Foundation are at it again, trying to convince teachers to dismantle their own unions. And they have a new high-profile edubro to help.

Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

But now they've added a new feature to the mix. Meet the Teacher Freedom Alliance-- an alternative to those evil unions! It's even Free Market! (What does a free market union even mean? Shut up, you!)

They held a big launch party for TFA (they should have checked to see if that acronym was taken) with special guest ranter, Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters! Walters pointed out that the union fights him on cool stuff like merit pay and signing bonuses. Of course, merit pay has never worked and is usually just an excuse to lower base pay, and signing bonuses are a one-time raise that is useless for things like home loans. But Walters is sad that they draw opposition from those awful unions that he has called terrorist organizations (meaning either they are really awful or Walters is easily terrorized). 

Walters's part of the festivities is a greatest hits collection. Teachers union is on the run! The Left is mad about dismantling the Department of Education (cheers) because they want bureaucrats in DC to tell teachers how to teach math, how they should teach our kids that America's an evil racist country. He even brings up Common Core! Free market, which I guess turns out to mean that the market tells teachers how much they can have. That teachers union-- they don't care about teachers or students. And Trump is great. And we should put the Bible in classrooms. 

Walters has gone all-in on promoting TFA, which has led at least one Oklahoma legislator to ask the state attorney general if it's legal for the state education chief to use state resources to promote this thing. Just add that to the list of Walters's questionable choices in office. Meanwhile, he issues a typical non-statement statement in response as reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman

"Democrats and union bosses are grasping at straws because teachers finally have a real choice," Walters said. "My office will always communicate with educators about their options, no matter how much it upsets the political establishment."

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. The three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA. 

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer? 

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things. 

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative." 

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

That "free, moral, and upright" appears frequently. There's a blog post outlining the benefits of dismantling the department of education ("funding and decision-making authority" will shift to state and local levels, which is at least half right). There's a small assortment of news articles about education, including one from the conservative Illinois Policy website, a harmless Natalie Wexler article, a Rick Hess interview with Daniel Buck, an article from the right wing Daily Caller, and another from the wingnut right Daily Wire.

And you know, there's no reason that there can't be a right wing union for right wing teachers (though this is only the latest of many failed attempts), but their other repeated idea is "Excellence, not ideology."

We support the right of every educator in America to pursue excellence in the classroom free of ideological interference.

Except our ideology, because, you know, that's just "common sense." The fictional narrative is that teachers are too busy teaching Marx and Crazy Left Ideas to ever cover actual reading and math, which is a thing you can only believe if you have never spent any time in a public school. Anyway, by replacing Cray Lefty Stuff with academics laced with Common Sense (aka right wing ideology), we can Make America Smart Again. At the launch party, Withe said that their curricula would teach students “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.”

Now, how deeply they want to actually pursue this is anyone's guess, given that the organization's a wing of a group that has explicitly stated that they want to dismantle the teacher unions, which makes the actual mission of TFA secondary at best.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers. 

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate. 

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it. 

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar. 

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true.