The Failed Case for Super-NAEPery

At The74 (the nation's most uneven education coverage), Goldy Brown (Whitworth U and AEI/CERN) and Christos Makridis (Labor Economics and ASU) have a bold idea that involves putting fresh paint on a bad old idea--the national Big Standardized Test.

Their set-up is the usual noise about how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked around 2013, which is true if you also believe that the rise that carries I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats is also a peak. They are more accurate when they say that "student outcomes" (aka "Big Standardized Test scores") have "largely stagnated" over recent decades. 

Yep, it's a roller coaster

Let me digress for just a moment to note the oddness of that idea of stagnation--as if test scores should keep rising like stock prices and property values. Each cohort of students should be smarter and better than the one before, a thing that would happen... why? What's the theory here? Each year's children will be genetically better than those that came before? That every teacher will significantly up her game with every passing year (because the students rotate out at a much higher rate than the teachers)? Schools get better at gaming the tests? If the expectation is that each successive group of students will score higher than the group before, what is supposed to cause that to happen? And how does it square with the people who think that education should be going "back" to something like "basics"? I mean, doesn't the vision of non-stagnating test scores include students who are all smarter and more knowledgeable than their parents? 

Okay, digression over. The authors also point out that Dear Leader and his crew have "downsized" the staff that oversees the NAEP (while simultaneously insisting that NAEPing will continue normally)-- but they argue that the kneecapping will "create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play."

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Yikes. I checked quickly to see if Brown and Makridis are over 15 years of age, because if so, they should remember pretty clearly that the feds have tried this exact thing before. Every state was supposed to measure their Common Core achievements by taking the same BS Test, except then that turned out to be two BS Tests (PAARC and SBA) but then those turned out to be expensive and not-very-good tests and states started dumping them, while folks from all ends of the spectrum noted that this sure looked like an illegal attempt to control curriculum from the federal level.

With national standards and national testing, supporters argued, we would be able to compare students from Utah and Ohio, as if that was something anyone actually wanted to do. As if in Utah parents were saying, "Nice report card, Pat, but what I really want to know is how your test scores compare to the test scores of some kid in Teaneck, New Jersey."

No, these guys have to remember those days, because they are well versed in all the same bad arguments made at the time.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

Right. Test scores would be great for unleashing free market forces in a free market, education-as-a-commodity choice system. Also, competition doesn't unleash anything useful in education. Also also, choice fans have mostly stopped using this talking point because it turns out charter and voucher schools don't actually do any better on BS Tests. Get up to date, guys-- today it's all "choice is a virtue in and of itself" and "parents should get to choose a school that matches their values."  

The writers call for the NAEP to be cranked out every year instead of every other, and for every student instead of the current sampling. No sweat, they say, because every state already has stuff in place for their own state test. 

But an annual universal NAEP would be great because it's a "consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance." There's a huge amount of room to debate that, but it only sort of matters because the writers have fallen into the huge fallacy of NAEP and PISA and all the rest of these data-generating numbers. "If we had some good solid data," says the fallacy, "then we could really Get Shit Done." We would Really Know how students are doing, we would Really Know about how bad the state tests are, and we would Really Know where the issues in the system are.

It's an appealing notion, and it has never, ever worked. For one thing, nobody can even agree on what critical terms like "proficient" mean when it comes to NAEP. But more importantly, the solid data of NAEP never solves anything. Everyone grabs a slice, applies it to the policies they were busy pushing anyway, and NAEP solves nothing, illuminates nothing, settles nothing. 

The writers also want to use the test illegally in a method now familiar to both political parties. Tie Title I funding to compliance with NAEP testing mandates and presto-- "States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations." In other words, test + money = federal control of local curriculum. Not okay.

They would also like the test to provide feedback to parents about their individual students. This also repeats a critical error of every BS Test to come down the pike. Tests are designed for a particular purpose and one should not attempt to apply them to a host of other purposes-- doing so gets you junk. Also, I still don't believe that conversation in Utah is happening. But this notion--

A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Producing a test that generates data useful to all three groups is less likely than capturing a yeti riding a unicorn that is pooping rainbows.

The writers also argue that states could save money if the feds forced them to replace their current batteries of BS Tests with NAEP instead in just 4th and 8th grade. I suppose that depends on the test manufacturer who secures this national testing monopoly.

Their last argument is that universal NAEPery would "offer a balanced form of federal oversight." That means "less intrusive than programmatic mandates" which are not so much intrusive as they are illegal. At any rate, national standardized tests intended to drive programmatic choices are still pretty damned intrusive. 

Now for the wrap up. Starting with this understatement:

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results.

Yes, and theater trips to see "Our American Cousin" have historically produced mixed results for Presidents. Of the whole list of "mixed" results, they include just the Obama era attempt to use test scores to drive teacher improvement (well, not "improvement" exactly, but teaching to the test in order to raise scores). 

They say one right thing, which is "that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts." But they follow that with "designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria." And no, no it wouldn't, and we know it wouldn't because the last time we tried this national BS Test thing, it went very poorly. This is such a classic reformster construct-- "Historically this thing has failed, so we think the solution is to do it some more, harder."

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

Is that what parents, e3ducators, and policymakers are calling for, really? Doesn't matter, because NAEP provides nothing special for accountability (certainly not before we have a long, long conversation about accountability to whom and for what) and it certainly doesn't provide flexibility, not even under their repeat of the old argument that states could decide how to meet the national test standards, which is like telling someone "You can get to Cleveland any way you want as long as you arrive at E.9th and Superior within the next six hours seated in a blue Volkswagon, listening to Bob Marley, and eating a taco. Totally up to you what meat is in the taco, though. See? Flexible."

You know what's really flexible? An end to federal mandates for a nationalized Big Standardized Test. 

AI Is Bad At Grading Essays (Chapter #412,277)

A new study shows results that will be absolutely unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. ChatGPT is not good at grading essays.

A good robograder has been the white whale of the ed tech industry for a long time now, and failing with impressive consistency. Scholar Les Perelman has poked holes in countless robo-grading products, and I've been writing about the industry since I began this blog. And this comment from the Musings of a Passing Stranger blog in 2011 is still applicable:

What Pearson and its competitors do in the area of essay scoring is not a science. It's not even an art. It's a brutal reduction of thought to numbers. The principles of industrial production that gave us hot dogs now give us essay scores.

The main hurdles to computerized grading have not changed. Reducing essay characteristics to a score is difficult for a human, but a computer does not read or comprehend the essay in any usual understanding of the words. Everything the software does involves proxies for actual qualities of actual writing. This paper from 2013 still applies-- robograders still stink.. 

Perelman and his team were particularly adept at demonstrating this with BABEL (the Basic Automatic B. S. Essay Language Generator), a program that could generator convincing piles of nonsense which robograders consistently gave high scores. Sadly, it appears that BABEL is no longer on line, but I've taken it out for a spin myself a few times-- the results always make robograders look incompetent (see here, here, here, and here).

The study of bad essay grading is deep. We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here. And as the classic piece from Jesse Lussenhop, part of robograding's problem is that it has adopted the failed procedures of grading-by-human-temps. 

Like self-driving cars, robograding has been just around the corner for years. If you want to dive into my coverage here at the Institute, see here, here, here, here, here and here for starters. Bill Gates was predicting it two years ago, and just last year, an attempt was made to get ChatGPT involved which was not quite successful and very not cheap. Which is bad news because the "problem" that robograding is supposed to solve is the problem of having to hire humans to do the job. Test manufacturers have been trying to solve that problem for years (hence the practice of undertrained minimum wage temps as essay graders). 

That brings us up to the recent attempt by The Learning Agency. TLA is an outfit pushing "innovation." It (along with the Learning Agency Lab) was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and a couple of Teach for America types. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.

TLA is not new to the search for better robograding. The Lab was involved in a competition, jointly sponsored by Georgia State University, called The Feedback Prize. It was a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal was to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results; and the whole thing is highly technical.

Now TLA has dug through data again, to produce "Identifying Limitations and Bias in ChatGPT Essay Scores: Insights from Benchmark Data." They grabbed their 24,000 argumentative essay dataset and let ChatGPT do its thing so they could check for some issues.

Does ChatGPT show bias? A study just last year said yes, it does, which is always a (marketing) problem because tech is always sold with the idea that a machine is perfectly objective and not just, you know, filled with the biases of its programmers. 

This particular study found bias that it deemed lacking in "practical significance," except when it didn't. Specifically, the difference between Asian/Pacific Islanders and Black students, which underlines how Black students come in last in the robograding.

So yes, there's bias. But the other result is that ChatGPT just isn't very good at the job. At all. There's more statistical argle bargle here, but the bottom line is that ChatGPT gives pretty much everyone a gentleman's C. To ChatGPT, nobody is excellent and nobody is terrible, which makes perfect sense because ChatGPT is not qualified to determine anything except whether the strong of words that the writer has created is, when compared to a million other strings of words, probable. ChatGPT cannot tell whether the writer has expressed a piercing insight, a common cliche, or a boneheaded error. ChatGPT does not read, does not understand. 

Using ChatGPT to grade student essays is educational malpractice. It is using a yardstick to measure the weight of an elephant. It cannot do the job.

TLA ignores one other question, a question studiously ignored by everyone in the robograding world-- how is student performance affected when they know that their essay will not be read by an actual human being? How does one write like a real human being when your audience is mindless software? What will a student do when schools break the fundamental deal of writing--that it is an attempt to communicate an idea from the mind of one human to the mind of another?

This is one of the lasting toxic remnants of the modern reform movement--an emphasis on "output" and "product" that ignores input, process, and the fact that there are many ways to get a product-- particularly if that's all the people in charge care about. 

"The computer has read your essay" is a lie. ChatGPT can scan your output as data (not as writing) and compare it to the larger data set (also not writing any more) and see if it lines up. Your best bet as a student is to aim for the same kind of slop that ChatGPT churns out thoughtlessly.

Add ChatGPT to the list of algorithmic software that can only do poorly a job it should not be asked to do at all. 

AI And Dead Writers

Every day brings a new AI abomination. Today it was the New York Times reporting on an on line writing class taught by Agatha Christie. 

"Isn't she dead?" you ask.

Why yes. Yes, she is. For almost fifty years in fact. But that doesn't mean she can't be dug up and re-animated as some sort of AI zombie. In this case, the exhuming has done by BBC Maestro, with the full cooperation of Agatha Christie Ltd., run by her great-grandson James Prichard, a British film producer who was six years old when the author died. 

In a world-first, the bestselling novelist of all time offers you an unparalleled opportunity to learn the secrets behind her writing, in her own words. Made possible today by Agatha's family, an expert team of academics and cutting-edge audio and visual specialists, as if she were teaching you herself...

As if.  

In the NYT, Amelia Nierenberg writes that AI was "only" used to create her likeness. Prichard said, "We just had the red line that it had to be her words, and the image and the voice had to be like her."

This is just so wrong on so many levels. Using her words doesn't make it better, because those words were used in different contexts for different purposes with different audiences. Hell, someone with access to the words that I have myself published on this blog could make me say pretty much anything. But to pretend that since these words are taken from interviews she conducted and things she said or wrote about writing, so that's what she would say if she were alive and teaching today is just half-assed mis-representation of a woman who is way too dead to say, "Hey, wait just a minute." 

This AI pipe dream that we can use a program to represent people from the past, like putting AI versions of historical figures in class, is gross and creepy, and that's before we even get to the issue of scholarship, of the sheer ballsiness of some computer crew saying, "Sure, there are scholars who have spent a lifetime trying to get an idea of how this person was, what made them tick, how they moved through the world, what drove them--but we think we can wrap all that up pretty quick with this chunk of software. Also, you don't mind if we just go ahead and steal some of those scholar's work to help program this, do you?"

A team of academics combined or paraphrased statements from Christie’s archive to distill her advice about the writing process. They took care to preserve what they believed to be her intended meaning, with the aim of helping more of her fans interact with her work, and with fiction writing in general.

Combined. Paraphrased. What they believed to be her intended meaning. Would you sign up for a course entitled "The advice that we think Agatha Christie would have given you if she were here."

We have made attempts to portray dead figures of interest before, from historical fiction to Hollywood biopics to wax museums to re-enactors. What those all had in common was clear signals that they were fictions, attempts to recapture the real thing but not actually the real thing. This AI zombies take the fakery up a notch. How many people will come away from the course feeling that they have really "met" Christie and "know" her personally, even though they haven't and they don't.

Maybe the day will come when savvy live humans will look at something like this and correctly dismiss it as an expensive deepfake. But right now too many people believe that AI is omniscient wizardry. And you know this is going to get worse. AI will finish unfinished manuscripts, or create new AI-generated works by dead authors. The AI roster of dead speakers will grow. 

This course, and all the similar crap, is a lie. Prichard says, “We’re not speaking for her. We are collecting what she said and putting it out in a digestible and shareable format.” Yes, well, a book is a digestible and shareable form, and this course is a lie. I will give the family the benefit of the doubt and assume they're doing this because it would be cool and modern and not, please God, because they figure they can dig up great-grandma to make a buck. But they are going to be followed by people with no such scruples. 

And if you haven't heard, yes, there's already a whole industry out there that will create a chatbot fake of your dead relative so you can pretend to talk to them. Except you aren't talking to them. And that isn't them, and it's not even a valid imitation of them.

And one more layer of irony-- a writing course cranked out by an industry whose idea of writing advice is to fine tune the prompt you give the AI so that it can write the piece for you. If I were a successful writer, I would be making damned sure that I left behind some ironclad legal work that forbid anyone from digging my work up and creating a deepfake version of me. You probably can't stop AI from stealing your work, but maybe you can prevent one more case of computerized identity theft. 

What Do They Mean By "Gender Ideology"?

One of the key terms of the culture panic crowd is "gender ideology." No gender ideology in schools! Don't indoctrinate our children with that gender ideology! The teachers are all busy pushing that gender ideology?

But what does that mean, exactly? One might guess that its meaning is something along the lines of "Now that we have overturned Roe v. Wade, we need a new hot-button issue to mobilize the base," but I'm not sure anyone at Heritage is going to fess up to that. So what is the explanation for the"gender ideology" thing?

The Heritage Foundation, one of our country's leading producers of culture panic, is willing to provide an explanation, courtesy of Jay W. Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation, where he is a fellow (his conservative credentials are deep). It's an instructive piece. 

Richards frames the piece with the notion that reporters working on culture panic stories ask what the term means and where it comes from , and he's pretty sure the whole business (which includes outfits like the Associate Press and Wikipedia) is "part of a larger media campaign to discredit this and related terms." His argument is basically that everyone understands what it means.

Richards shares a definition of the term that he once popped out on Twitter: 

Gender ideology is the theory that the sex binary doesn’t capture the complexity of the human species, and that human individuals are properly described in terms of an “internal sense of gender” called “gender identity” that may be incongruent with their “sex assigned at birth.”

Though he says he would replace "theory" with the less forceful "view." 

You may be looking at his definition and thinking, "Well, that sounds like a True Thing. What's his problem?" Well, he'll tell you.

Richards accuses "gender ideologues" of playing "verbal shell games" with words like "gender" and "sex." "Fender," he argues, is now treated as short for "gender identity" and "sex" has become "sex assigned at birth" which in his view turns sex into a social construct instead of "the real biological difference between male and female human beings." Okay. It may frustrate him to be left without terms that reflect reality as he understands it, but redefining terms to fit the view you hold is a long-time advocacy tool of all sides of all issues (he can ask Chris Rufo how it works). 

As Richards lays out his objections, it's clear that we have here, at root another version of a basic right wing complaint. 

The plain truth: Gender ideology does not accommodate the reality of sex—the reproductive strategy of mammals including human beings. Sex, in this reckoning, is not an objective truth about men and women. We are not male or female by virtue of our body structure or the fact that our bodies are oriented around the production of sperm or eggs. Human beings, are, in essence, psychological selves with internal senses of gender—like disembodied gendered souls. These “gender identities” are independent of, and can be incongruent with, the bodies that God gave us and that medicine has come to associate with “male” and female.” These “sex” categories are mere conventions, says the gender ideologue, not facts.

Richards says that "gender acolytes" will "rarely speak so bluntly," because he is apparently certain that to just say what he just said would offend and upset people. I'm not so sure. It seems like a fairly food definition; what's less clear is why it's objectionable. 

The standard right wing complaint seen here is one we've seen again and again-- there is One Objective Truth and we know it and people who disagree are stupid or nuts or evil. Learning to be in the world is all about learning the One Objective Truth about everything (as discovered by some dead white guys); "critical thinking" is about learning how to unfailing arrive at the One Objective Truth. People who talk about different points of view are just trying to cause trouble. This has animated endless arguments since the Mayflower docked, and it is the foundational principle behind the classical school movement. 

The other argument here is a less common one, but Richards seems to be arguing that human beings are just flesh and bone, and talk about psychological selves or souls is just silly. God gave us a body, but our psychological selves, our souls, come from... somewhere else? There's a more obvious flaw with this part of the argument-- God does in fact give people bodies that are a wide variety of intersex (also, am I in trouble because I wear glasses and had cataract surgery to correct the eyes that God gave me at birth). But I am fascinated to see the christianist Heritage Foundation arguing against the idea of souls and asserting that we are just meat sacks, and the nature of the meat sacks determines all that we are. 

Ultimately Richards falls back on depending on "what you know to be true" in resisting the gender ideologues who try to tell you that human beings are varied and different, because "you know" they aren't. Nor does one have to search far to find the same right wing folks arguing that not only are there just two sexes, but the correct ways to be a real man or woman are limited to only a few choices (go get to making some babies, missy). 

We're talking about fundamentally different ways to view the world, which is why these arguments inevitably land in schools and debates about whether students should be taught about how to navigate through a rich and complicated world or whether they should be taught that for every question, there is one Right and True answer and all others should be avoided and suppressed-- not even mentioned or acknowledged to exist. It is one thing to disagree with a point of view, and a whole other thing to insist that it not even be mentioned. Maybe, the hope goes, if we can commandeer education and teach only the One Objective Truth and suppress all the rest, children will grow up to see the world as we do. Good luck with that.

ICYMI: Star Wars Edition (5/4)

If you don't know, I don't think I can explain it to you.

If you are of a Certain Age, you have a story. In the summer of 1977 we didn't have a movie theater in my county, so I trekked down to Butler, 45 minutes or so away. The within a week, I went back again. It was part of the new phenomenon of Star Wars-- Jaws had invented the summer blockbuster just two years earlier, the movie that everybody had to see, but Star Wars was the movie you had to see more than once, just to see everything and hear everything. I was a broke college student but I still went three times (the third in Hampton Beach while on a summer trip with friends) and it still didn't seem like enough.

There are things you just can't understand second-hand, and most of them, unfortunately, are things that suck. But some are moments of uplift and excitement that stick with you for a long time. One more amazing part of being human in the world.

Here are your bits of reading from the week.

Drawing a Line

Jennifer Berkshire looks at how communities are stepping up to protect immigrant members.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court Approve Oklahoma’s Proposed Religious Charter School?

Jan Resseger looks at the big decision coming down the road. I sure wish it was a harder decision to predict.

The Rise of the Unqualified: Inside the Kakistocracy Running American Education

Julian Vasquez Heilig has been writing up a storm lately. Here he explains why, exactly, kakistocracy sucks.

The New Teacher of the Year Shares Her Secrets for an Engaging English Class

She's from Pennsylvania, and she has some non-silly ideas. Sarah Sparks reports at Education Week.

Tina Descovich must leave Ethics Commission after Senate again fails to take up nomination

A Moms for Liberty co-founder doesn't make it onto a state ethics commission? What a surprise. Okay, in Florida, land of infinite grifter tolerance, it is kind of a surprise.

K12 Education, Meet Trump 2.0 Chaos.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider tries to assemble a timeline of Trumpian education shenanigans.

San Diego's Edtech Lollapalooza

Thomas Ultican takes a look at ASU+GSV and its varied AI grifting.

Court says no rights violated when Michigan school told girl to remove hat with image of a gun

Dad sends third grade daughter to school with a hat bearing an image of a AR-15ish gun and "come and take it" in all caps. School told her to take it off. Dad sued. He seems like a swell guy.

Are Women the Cause of Reluctance to Read?

Well, no. But Nancy Flanagan explains herself a bit more thoroughly than that.

How would the Trump Administration budget impact American education?

Steve Nuzum looks at the Trump wishlist for the budget and what it would mean to education (spoiler alert: nothing good). 

Separation of Church and State: Critical for Public Schools and America!

Not sure it can be said too many times, but separation of church and state is a good thing. Here comes Nancy Bailey to make sure it's said again.

Exceeding Student Expectations of Teachers: A Way to Achieve “Good” Teaching

Larry Cuban looks at the importance of expectations for academics and behavior.

Battle lines being drawn

Benjamin Riley is taking names of those organizations that have decided that technofascism is super cool and totally fine with them.

As Predicted: Florida’s Voucher Expansion is Gutting Public Education

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports on the progress of Florida's program to end public education. 

And now, Happy May the Fourth

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"Religious Liberty" is the new "State's Rights"

Last week Adam Laats reminded us of why conservatives are so worked up about Harvard's tax-exempt status. It goes back to a 1980s case that tells us a lot about the moment we're living in, and why "religious liberty" is the new "state's rights."

Bob Jones University was founded as part of the culture panic wave of a century ago, a wave of right-wing anguish centered around evolution and the Scopes Trial. Bob Jones University would be a bulwark against modern naughty culture. As Laats quotes Bob Jones himself, “Fathers and mothers who place their sons and daughters in our institution can go to sleep at night with no haunting fear that some skeptical teachers will steal the faith of their precious children.”

Resisting modern evils meant, when the fifties rolled around, resisting desegregation. Bob Jones University remained stubbornly committed to keeping Black folks out, well into the 1970s refusing to bend and staying proudly unaccredited (note that college accreditation is yet another Trump/Project 2025 target) by refusing to bend and accept Black folks on its campus. 

It tried some tricks (let a Black employee register for one class) and then even accepted a few Black men as students (as long as they were married and therefor less of a threat to the purity of white co-eds). Then the Carter administration got aggressive, threatening to remove the university's tax-exempt status, as well as those of other segregated universities.

The 1980 GOP platform and candidate Reagan promised to stop this use of the IRS to attack the schools. Not that he could publicly argue in 1980 that keeping Black folks off a campus was a perfectly okay goal. Instead, using BJU's fictitious desegregation as a fig leaf, he instead declared that this was all about religious freedom.

So when Donald Trump declared the launch of a Religious Liberty Commission, he was following a well-established right wing playbook. 

What religious liberty is being protected? The freedom to discriminate.

The Supreme Court has ploughed the road for this for over a decade. From Hobby Lobby on through Masterpiece Cake Shop and up to the trinity of cases being invoked in the St. Isidore Catholic charter case, SCOTUS has been insisting that the Free Exercise clause beats the Establishment clause. And not only is Free Exercise the part that matters, but no Christian can freely exercise their religion unless they are free to A) discriminate against people they disapprove of and B) get supported by tax dollars to do it. 

There's a case from Maine working its way to decide just that-- the schools that won Carson and the right to collect voucher money for religious education now want to be free to collect that money while discriminating against LGBTQ students , a right that many other voucher states already recognize. Free Exercise for folks operating certain religious schools means the freedom to reject and degrade students of whom they disapprove.

So Trump's Anti-Christian Bias Task Force is set to root out any policies that get in the way of that Free Exercise. Martha McHardy reported on the first meeting for Newsweek:

Attorney Michael Farris, speaking on behalf of a Virginia church, said the IRS had investigated it for alleged violations of the Johnson Amendment, which requires churches to refrain from participating in political campaigns if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. Representatives from Liberty University and Grand Canyon University also claimed their institutions were unfairly fined because of their Christian worldview.

Additional allegations included the denial of religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for military personnel, biased treatment of Christian Foreign Service Officers, and efforts to suppress Christian expression in federal schools and agencies. Critics further accused the Biden administration of marginalizing Christian holidays while giving prominence to non-Christian observances, and of sidelining faith-based foster care providers.

Speakers also alleged that Christian federal employees were retaliated against for opposing DEI and LGBT-related policies that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

"Faith-based foster care providers" turn up in these complaints because of a Biden era policy that put protections in place for LGBTQ minors. But the religious freedom argument is that folks should be free to foster kids even if they believe certain types of kids are terrible sinners who need to be Straightened Out.

The claim that some folks are discriminated against for religious positions on "DEI and LGBTQ-related policies" is another way to say those folks aren't allowed to discriminate against persons on the basis of race or gender identity or sexual orientation. It's the same claim as the people who don't want to do their job issuing marriage licenses if gay marriage is involved, or who don't want to provide health care to naughty women who have sought an abortion. 

The Religious Liberty Commission edict follows a similar pattern. What's the complaint here?

Recent Federal and State policies have undermined this right by targeting conscience protections, preventing parents from sending their children to religious schools, threatening funding and non-profit status for faith-based entities, and excluding religious groups from government programs.

"Conscience protections" is another favored construction, as in "my conscience tells me that I shouldn't treat Those People like people and how dare you infringe on my right to do that."

The modern rejoinder to someone claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about state's rights is to ask, "The state's right to do what?" The answer, of course, is "The state's right to perpetuate a system of enslavement." 

When someone on the far right starts talking about religious liberty, the question is "The liberty to do what?" The answer is, "The liberty to enjoy a position of high privilege from which we can decide which people we think are worthy of civil rights." Or more simply, "The liberty to discriminate against others without consequence." 

It all makes me sad because it is the worst testimony ever for the Christian faith. It's the kind of thing that makes my non-believing friends and relatives point and say, "See? Religious people are just as awful as anyone." There are actual Christians in the world, and they deserve better than this. There are people who daily wrestle with how to live out their faith in the world in challenging situations, and they deserve better than this. If your assertion is that you can't really, truly follow Christ unless you are freely enabled to treat certain people like shit, then you are talking about some Jesus that I don't remotely recognize. You are not talking about religious liberty; you're talking about toxic politics with some sort of faux Jesus fig leaf.

TX: Furry Panic Is Back

It has been three years and change since the Great Furry Panic first swept school policy circles. 

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

There's also a theory that the post-Columbine practice of keeping an emergency bucket in the classroom  in case students are trapped there by another gunman. Some schools include kitty litter in their emergency bucket.

At any rate, the story spread through the far right dope-o-sphere. Folks started noting the spread of furry panic back at the beginning of 2022. There are schools, the story goes, that allow students to self-identify as animals, wear their furry costumes, eat sitting on the floor, do their business in litter boxes. So far there has not been a single factual foundation for any of these stories. Nor, for that matter, do the stories get it right when it comes to Furry culture and behavior (furries do not, for instance, wear their outfits to work and insist on acting as animals or pooping by their desks). But it didn't matter. 

2022 was a banner year for furry panic.

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

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

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

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

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

The whole hoax even has its own Wikipedia page. 

There has never been a single confirmed incident, ever.

And yet.

Texas has HB 54, "Relating to the display of and allowance for non-human behaviors in Texas schools." Also known as the "Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S.) Act." The bill has five legislators signed on as authors, and a whopping 51 co-authors. Governor Greg Abbott backs the bill. There are 22 pages of public comments compiled, and some of them are just as silly as you expect.

[W]e are tired of DEI, distractions, and affirmation of FURRY behavior in schools. Children should be learning how to read and excel in math, not playing make-believe at school. Please specifically write into the Code of Conduct that this behavior is not acceptable in schools or in society. In all K-12 schools.
Keatha Brown

Moms for Liberty, Montgomery TX

Children attend school are there to learn reading, writing, math, science, etc. I do respect each person has their own individual style when they dress but what I don't approve of is children attending school dressed like an animal and pretending, acting and portraying that they are indeed an animal. Its a distraction to other children attending classes at school and teachers and staff already have enough challenges in schools and they don't need these additional types of behaviors to deal with. Children shouldn't be acting like animals, making sounds like animals, wanting to eat like or dressing like animals. If they truly feel like they are an animal, they should be referred to a mental health professional. This would also go along the lines of a child wanting to be an alien
Jennifer White

Moms For Liberty Williamson County Round Rock, TX

Please support HB 54. I have been in education over 45 years. Non- human behaviors should not be accepted or catered to in public schools. What cat learns to read?
Susan Perez
Citizens for Education Reform
Lubbock, TX

And more in the same vein. The vast majority of the comments are opposed to the bill, hitting it with terms like "silly," "ridiculous," "stupid," and "waste of time." The Libertarian Party of Texas opposes it. Many accused the legislature of trying to solve a non-existent problem. Many tell stories of small children who like to play in ways that sometimes include animal noises. The parent of an autistic child explains how fur-like materials soothe the child. 

The bill itself is remarkably specific in defining "non-human behavior" with nine or so items on the list of "behaviors of accessories" not typically "displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species."  No animal noise, tails, ears, or licking yourself for "purposes of grooming or maintenance." There are exceptions for Halloween and school mascots or plays. 

But it's worth noting that the bill goes way beyond the standard furry litter box panic to target any sort of animal-ish behavior-- ears on headbands, tails, animal noises (like children don't make inhuman noises on a regular basis). 

The bill comes from Rep. Stan Gerdes. Gerdes was endorsed last year by Greg Abbott when he was up against Tom Glass, who was endorsed by AG Ken Paxton. Gerdes did vote for vouchers, but he also voted for the impeachment of Paxton. He previously worked under Rick Perry both when Perry was Texas governor and as US Secretary of Energy. He won his first election to the House in 2022, then again last year. Both campaigns were pricey-- $600K in 2022 and almost a million in 2024 (just for the primary). 

At Tuesday night's hearing, he claimed that the bill was in response to stories about furries that have been denied by the district superintendent. Asked if he could cite a single confirmed instance of a school making furry accommodations, Gerdes said he could not, even though he originally came out swinging, as reported by Benjamin Wermund at the Houston Chronicle:

When Gerdes introduced the legislation last month, he said he fully expected members of the subculture he was targeting to show up at the Capitol "in full furry vengeance" when the bill was heard.

"Just to be clear - they won't be getting any litter boxes in the Texas Capitol," the Smithville Republican said in a press release announcing the bill.

But there were no so-called furries or litter boxes at the late-night hearing Tuesday. Instead, the four people who showed up to testify against the measure included a public school teacher and a Texan who worried the measure could affect students with disabilities.

Rep. James Talarico labeled the bill as one more attempt by Abbott and his crew to discredit public schools:

That's because if you want to defund neighborhood schools across the state, you have to get Texans to turn against their public schools. So you call librarians groomers, you accuse teachers of indoctrination, and now you say that schools are providing litter boxes to students. That's how all of this is tied together.

 It's a bill designed to create furor over a non-existent problem. Currently the bill is sitting in committee, and if there is a lick of sense left in some corners of Texas, it will never emerge from there.