It's my high school graduating class's 50th reunion this weekend, and a class reunion is always something. I suppose some day, when the education "system" is a loose free market where people switch back and forth, the idea of a special event to get together with the people you spent your youth with-- I suppose that will be quaint and unusual. But for right now, it's fun. I missed out on part of the fun because I am also conducting the pit orchestra for a local production of "Singin' in the Rain" so it's been a busy week. Well, who wants to be bored.
Here's the reading list for the week. Read and share.
Stephen Dyer looks at how a voucher program actually changes the fundamental nature of the public schools that are left with students the private schools don't want.
Vermont just passed a law limiting social media for schools, and it's a reminder of the many ways that students and social media don't mix well. Tracy Novick has some thoughts.
TC Weber gets into the picture on the ground in Tennessee, and this week it's a grab bag of various education shenanigans, from vouchers to test results.
Stephen Dyer again. As the feds decide to drop some more charter money on Ohio, he points out the sad, failed history of the last federal attempt to goose Ohio's charter industry.
Ryan Walters borrowed a TV studio to announce his resignation, then ran away from that station's reporter afterwards. The video of him swiftly escaping questions is a fitting image with which to end his reign of incompetence.
Yeah, the term they're searching for is "liberal arts."
I graduated from little Allegheny College, a school that used to proudly advertise itself as a liberal arts college. Students were required to meet distribution requirements by taking courses outside of their major, and every department offered courses for non-majors, which is why I graduated with a degree in English but courses in astronomy, geology, computer science, sociology, music, and theater.
I never doubted the value of a liberal arts approach for me as a future teacher; teaching is all about showing connections between stuff, and you can't really connect dots if you aren't familiar with more than one or two dots.
A liberal arts approach makes double sense to me in K-12 education. The more stuff you know about, the more choices you have. The more stuff you try, the better chance you'll find what you are in tune with.
“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”
Get those meat widgets ready to be useful and employable by corporations. There has been bipartisan support for the idea of measuring college swellness based on the quality of job that graduates get.
And with this focus on education as vocational training, folks have embraced the idea that education, even from early years, should be singularly focused on that future job. Come on, fifth graders-- pick your career!
The problem with this was always that it serves employers far batter than it serves students. Sure, it's great for Widget Corp with a need for 20 new widget makers annually if the local K-12 district cranks out 100 widget makers every year. Widget Corp gets to pick the best 20 of the 100-- great for them. But what are the other 80 supposed to do?
As described in the clip above, the situation can be even worse. Four years ago, going to college to be a computer programmer seemed like a no-brainer, and now it's suddenly a huge mistake. The employment landscape is shifting and changing, sometimes with catastrophic speed, and a person who trained for one particular career path can find himself in a real bind.
So we have this "new" wisdom-- instead of focusing all your energies on one particular deep pursuit, maybe broaden your education so that you are familiar with a whole bunch of stuff. Gives you flexibility (and maybe even makes you better at whatever job you end up with and maybe even also enriches your life).
This all dovetails nicely with the returning idea that reading proficiency is best built through teaching lots and lots of content, that students best learn to read by building a body of content knowledge.
So by all means-- let's bring back a fully rounded education aimed at fostering broadly educated complete human beings who have a fuller knowledge of being fully human in the world, because that not only gives them a better shot at living full and rich lives, but because it's also better protection against the wide swings of economy and business than, say, chasing whatever corporations demand for their meat widget supply.
His new gig is right in line with his work over the past couple of years. He will be the new CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, whose aim, Walters says, is to dismantle teachers’ unions and align school curriculum with “American exceptionalism.”
Teacher Freedom Alliance is yet another of those anti-union groups for teachers. They just launched in March of this year, and the special guest was Ryan Walters himself.
TFA (they really should have checked to see if the acronym was taken) is a project of the Freedom Foundation. 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.
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 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"
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.
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.
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.
But now he gets to steer this anti-union cultural warboat.
Meanwhile, Gentner Drummond, the conservative GOP state attorney general who has been a thorn in Walters' side has offered his own "don't let the door hit you" thoughts on the departure:
Ever since Gov. Stitt appointed Ryan Walters to serve as Secretary of Education, we have witnessed a stream of never-ending scandal and political drama. From the mishandling of pandemic relief funds that resulted in families buying Xboxes and refrigerators to the latest squabbling with board members over what was or wasn't showing on TV [porn, probably], the Stitt-Waters era has been an embarrassment to our state...
It's time for a State Superintendent of Public Instruction who will actually focus on quality instruction in our public schools. Gov. Stitt used to say he would make us Top Ten, but after seven years we are ranked 50th in education. Our families, our students and our teachers deserve so much more.
Spoken like a man who A) has found Walters a constant pain in the ass and B) is running for governor.
Walters was a culture warrior for christianist nationalism who could be found more often trying to raise his national profile than in his office actually doing his job. His departure is good news for Oklahoma (though it's Oklahoma, so I expect a pretty conservative replacement). As for TFA, their website proudly boasts a whopping 2,733 teachers signed up for their anti-union union, so if they're meant to be a big national player, Walters has his work cut out for him, but he may just be the unserious man for this unserious job.
Jeremy Clifton has some ideas about how to understand human understanding of the world. Maybe they could be useful for how we teach students.
Stay with me. This will take a bit.
Who is Jeremy Clifton?
Jeremy Clifton is an academic researchy guy. He's working at UPenn, where he's currently Senior Research Scientist at the UPenn Positive Psychology Center where he directs the Primals Project. Before getting back into academia, he worked for Habitat for Humanity, including in Sri Lanka. He earned a Bachelors in Philosophy in 2007 (Houghton University) and a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology in 2013 (UPenn). He started on his PhD in 2014 and founded the whole, well, field of Prinals. Also, while he was an undergrad, he worked as a firefighter with the Houghton Fire Department.
He is not an educator, and he has not set out to connect his primals research to education. We'll get to that part.
So what is this Primal stuff?
Everyone walks around with their own internal map of the world, their own ideas about how the world works. We don't always think about them or take them out and look at them, but we couldn't function without them. What kind of world do we live in? Our answer to that question dives a lot of our behavior.
What Clifton has done is to break down and quantify the answer to that big What Kind Of World Do We Live In question, and he calls them primal world beliefs. His team has sifted through a mountain of statements about the nature of the world, and boiled it down to three central questions--
Is the world safe or dangerous? Is the world enticing or dull? Is the world alive (with some sort of animating intelligence or direction) or mechanistic? Each of those three is an umbrella for several more specific primal beliefs. The 26 primals add up to how "good" or "bad" you think the world is. If you want to read a very academic paper that gets into this work and also addresses the overlap with philosophy, try this. For laypeople, there's a whole web site about this primals stuff, but here is the actual list:
I don't think Clifton has come up with anything profoundly earthshattering here, but I do think it's a very useful tool for breaking down how we talk about how we understand the world, and I find that really interesting for reasons I'll get to in a minute.
Some of what we can observe here is not hard to figure out. Psychologists know that if you enter a space that you see as dangerous and combative, you will enter that place on high alert. Clifton is talking about a matter of scale; iow, what if you think the entire world is a dangerous and combative place?
Here's a good brief explainer:
The line that resonates with me is "my job is not to say which one is true but I can give you insight as to how your answer might affect your life."
Clifton and his team are psychology folks, interested in how to get a handle on the levers and switches that explain and, maybe, help human behavior. But if you're a regular reader here, you already know who else deals with questions of what drives human behavior and how that might be shaped.
Generation Scared and the Mental Health Crisis
For most of the 21st century, when civilians asked me "What are students like these days," my answer was, "They are scared." I've written about it in one of my more widely read pieces. We've heard plenty about a mental health crisis among young people. We are collectively stuck on the question of why and what and who and how? Who is scaring our kids? How are they getting the idea that the world is a bad, scary place?
Clifton and his colleague Peter Meindl found that negative primals—seeing the world as dangerous, barren, unjust—“were almost never associated with better life outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less life satisfaction, worse health, more depression, and increased suicide attempts.”
Pondiscio argues that schools that we "marinate children in bleak narratives" about social injustice and democracy in trouble.
From trauma-informed pedagogy to social justice curricula, many well-meaning educators have embraced a mission of radical truth-telling—foregrounding systemic injustice, historical oppression, and future threats in the name of equity and authenticity.
Pondiscio argues that the well-intentioned idea of exposing students to themes of suicide, depression, abuse, suicide, and systemic injustice are having the unfortunate effect of developing a set of primals, a world view, that is bleak and potentially damaging.
I'll disagree on a couple of counts here. First, there are far more bleak factors influencing student world views than the mostly-lefty influences that he cites. Active shooter drills and the daily practice of various forms of security theater practiced in school send a constant message that violent attacks are a constant danger. Virtually all students in school right now cannot remember a time when a major political figure/sometimes President has not been announcing that this country is, in part or in whole, a terrible hellhole. Fear has been woven into all political rhetoric, 24/7, and if we don't think that isn't trickling down to young humans who lack the ability to distance themselves from political posturing, we are kidding ourselves-- and it's only worse for those exposed to an electronic anger-and-fear algorithm for their media intake. That's before they start to absorb all the information about how hard it is to find a decent job or buy a house or hopeless to try to pay for a college degree that may not even help. And by the way kids, the new NAEP scores say you are the worst ever. Yes, young humans witness a great deal of negative world-building these days, but I don't think we can pin the blame on any single political, cultural, or educational sector. Hell, name five major prominent cultural figures who consistently present a positive, encouraging, beauty-appreciating view of the world.
Second, Clifton's own work says that our experience does not shape our primals so much as our primals shape how we view our experience. Which is very human. We tend to seek confirmation of our pre-existing views, and find that confirmation whether it's really there or not. Ultimately, an awful lot of those primals are developed at home and are unlikely to be budged by school. I haven't found it anywhere yet, but I'd love to know what Clifton has to say about differences between those whose primals are shiftable and those whose primals are set in concrete.
I do agree with Pondiscio that as a society, we have convinced a generation (maybe two) that they are too weak to stand up to the rigors of the world, and they are struggling with that message. He is clear that he doesn't want rose colored glasses, and that's sensible-- one of the things that toxic positivity toxic is the message "Let's just pretend everything's fine, sweetie, because you are too weak and tiny to handle the truth."
I have personal feelings about this: one of my lessons from the meltdown of my first marriage is understanding that one secret of life is not finding ways to avoid Hard Things, but instead finding the strength to deal with the Hard Things that will inevitably come. This lesson never gets old. It's a central irony of MAGA, which is hell-bent on controlling everything so that they never have to deal with stuff outside their tiny-boxed view of the world, thereby broadcasting that they think they're too weak to deal with any outside-the-box stuff.
Pondiscio has become interested in ways to use Clifton's primal research in education, and I can see how that might work, because I kind of did it already.
Primals in the classroom
I'm not stunned by what Clifton has come up with; it's plenty of stuff that we already knew (people who see the world as a bad broken place tend to be kind of miserable). But I do like the framework he and his team have come up with.
In particular, it's interesting to think about how cultural shifts reflect and influence the various primal values that people in those cultures have. And the thing is, we already study that sort of thing.
For most of my career, I taught American Literature with a focus on the different -isms reflected in the culture and the writing. Puritanism, Age of Reason, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism-- each a different way to see and understand how the world works. We studied the ideas behind the isms and then looked for how those beliefs were reflected in the writings of the period. In discussion we often compared the isms by looking at particular beliefs. Who thought that humans were powerful and important, and who thought they were insignificant specks? Who thought that the world was given order and direction by a higher power, and who thought it was just a machine, and who thought that it was random senselessness? Could I chart every one of these isms on Clifton's 26-point frame? I certainly could, and it would be an interesting framework.
But more than that--
One of the subtexts of my year-long ism teaching was that different people could look at the same world and develop a different map of how that world worked. Sometimes their view of how the world works changed in response to changes in the world (e.g. the grit and downbeat darkness of realism was in part a response to growing unpleasantness of urban and industrial growth). Sometimes the changes happened because people chose to see things differently. Every one of these people of various beliefs was sure that their picture of how the world works was the true and accurate one.
My students would recognize my standard spiel before each time I would deliver the new ism. "I am not here to tell you these people were right, or that they were wrong. My job is to make their case as clearly and forcefully as they would make it themselves. Accept or reject it as you wish; I just want you to be able to recognize their beliefs in action." Discussion of the "How could they think X' variety was always met with "What I think they would say to that, and why, is..."
And so my subversive lesson over the course of the year was that people can see the same world and believe different things about it. Or to dig even deeper, there may not be one true way to understand the world (though that is itself just one way to understand the world).
Clifton's work, with its vast catalog of many different primal beliefs, fits perfectly with that.
Now, this whole approach implies a level of pluralism in the classroom that the right wing crowd sure doesn't seem interested in these days. It also assumes that young humans are capable of navigating complicated belief systems. I can absolutely see students enjoying Clifton's primal inventory as a way to put words, a framework, and definitions to their own personal understanding of the world. And I very much like the idea that this frames their map of the world not on how closely it matches "true" reality, but on how they fall on a human spectrum of different ways to understand the world.
Anything that assumes that there's a difference between "how you see the world" and "how the world actually is" strikes me as a good thing. Anything that doesn't sort world views into "right" and "wrong" strikes me as a good thing. And anything that suggests to young humans that they have options in how they understand the world, and that exercising these different options could help them find more positive and productive ways to move through the world-- that's good too.
I generally define education as helping young humans figure out how to be fully themselves and fully human in the world. I don't know that I see Clifton's primals framework as revolutionary, but I see how it can be useful.
As for the grownups in the picture
If educators viewed themselves as building or reinforcing primals in school, would it help?
I can't help noticing that some of the primals, like pleasure and beauty and wonder, involve exactly the sort of things that some administrators and stern conservatives dismiss as not serious or academically rigorous; if you want to reinforce the idea that the world can be beautiful and joyful and filled with wonder, you need to find a way to organize schools and classrooms that reflects those values, and a carefully regimented test-prep grindathon that emphasizes compliance is probably not your best bet. Certainly many of these primal values do not align with the Big Standardized Test (one more reason these tests should go away). In fact, if we really want to do work primals into our educational approaches, step one would have to be taking a cold hard look at what primals are promoted by all current practices, and not just the squishy lefty ones.
There is an undertone of spirituality to all of this (the video above actually comes from the Templeton Religion Trust whose "aim is to improve the well-being of individuals and societies through spiritual growth and an ever-improving understanding of spiritual realities and spiritual information") which means that attempts to incorporate this model into education is liable to raise backlash from folks on both the left (schools shouldn't teach religion) and the right (don't you dare try to indoctrinate my kid).
I can certainly see ways in which this research could be misused, including attempts to get students to understand the world in one particular way. But I can also say that I find Clifton's work interesting, and if I were still in a classroom, I'd be finding ways to get some use out of it. I welcome anything that puts the focus on what it means to be human in the world and not on how to crank deliverables in the form of data or product from a soulless plagiarism machine.
"Should People Be Polite To AI?" is, unfortunately, a real question featured in the latest issue of Time For Kids. It is not an encouraging moment in juvenile journalism.
Each side gets two responses from actual young humans, aged 10-12.
The yes votes? The first is based on the idea that being polite gets you better results. This is probably true for humans, but I have to question the 11-year-olds assertion that "...a person’s behavior influences AI’s responses. Using polite language in your prompts is a good idea. It can lead to better information with fewer errors."
The second yes starts with an unquestionable premise. "Our world needs more kindness." Therefor we should practice kindness, even to machines. So "... being polite to AI can help us become more thoughtful." Does it? Is it good thoughtfulness practice to reflect on our relationship with inanimate objects?
For the no's, we have a simple "AI doesn't have feelings." It's just a tool. The writer adds that too many polite words may confuse the AI and obscure the actual request. This 10-year-old reaches beyond the idea of politeness as simple "please" and "thank you" all the way to "mealy-mouthed." Don't ask AI "Please make some small tweaks in this paragraph" but just go ahead and say, "Rip the guts out of this and rebuild it to suck less."
The other "no" focuses on AI efficiency. Don't worry about politeness. "Just focus on being succinct."
Being polite to living creatures is important. But being sensible about the use of AI holds more value than worrying about being polite to a machine. Let’s lead our lives with honesty and kindness. But let’s also focus on using technology for efficiency.
Well, okay. But I have to ask-- why are we even asking this question at all? Would an editor have said, "Hey, let's ask kids if people should be polite to their toaster-oven." Should people be polite to their socks? Should you practice thoughtfulness by being polite to your screwdriver before you use it? Should you apologize if you decide to use it to pry something open instead of screwing a screw? Should you ask your front steps for their permission before you step on them? Should we have a chat with every single brick before we cement it into a permanent relationship with other bricks?
To even ask the question is to presume that a chatbot is a sentient entity. It is not. The correct answer is "This is a silly question," but the second best answer is, "Absolutely not, because we surely do not need to train young humans to think of this soulless word-extruding machine as a thinking, feeling being."
After a few years of false starts, this week we finally had a contractor here to refurbish the Institute's front porch, which was about a century old and getting a little spongy. The new deck should be able to support several small moose in a hot tub (though we have no such plans). It also requires entering and exiting through the back door, but is otherwise a pretty exciting development here. Another week of work ought to finish the job.
Meanwhile, it's time for the weekly reading list. If you're new around here, this is a weekly compendium of posts that I think are worth your attention, but which I did not get around to discussing in a regular post during the week. My recommendation is always to read and then share, from the original source, anything that strikes you as worthwhile. The one thing we can all do is amplify the voices that we think should be heard, so do your amplifying!
Maurice Cunningham heard that a Massachusetts representative had not heard from anyone opposed to legislation to mandate the Science of Reading, so he wrote a letter to correct that impression.
Another deserved loss for Walters. These are the standards that are loaded with Christian stuff as well as requirements to teach students that the 2020 election was filled with questionable irregularities.
Texas says the Ten Commandments have to hang in every room. Teachers are coming up with creative ways to deal with this baloney. NBC News has a report.
Jennifer Berkshire interviews Johann Neem who, in the wake of Mahmoud v. Taylor, thinks the courts are getting pretty close to declaring public education a violation of the First Amendment. Warning: this piece will not give you warm feelings.
From Canada, more AI nonsense. It took a committee 18 months to complete this report, and it still contains a bunch of AI slop.
Artie Shaw retired several times from the band business; he didn't love it. But he was good at it-- probably the only big band leader who never made a bad recording.
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Meet the Civics Education Coalition, a group put together by the federal Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon, who firmly believes that education should be sent back to the states, where the federal government will do all in its power to make sure the states do what the feds want them to do.
Past the imperative banner of "Know America. Love America," the America 250 Civics Education Coalition is a collection of all the top names in right wing anti-public education advocacy. The forty groups include America First Policy Institute (founded by Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow with McMahon as their founding chair), Turning Point USA (Saint Charlie), Hillsdale College, Alliance Defending Freedom (conservative christianist legal shop), Center for Education Reform, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Leadership Institute, Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, and PragerU. Somehow Bety DeVos's American Federation for Children is not here, but the shadowy secret Council for National Policy is.
Leadership includes co-chairs Erika Donalds and Ben Judge and some other MAGA worthies. I could dig into all that, but to really get a feel for where we're headed here with a video that went up just two days ago and packs a whole lot into just 1:35.
A lighthouse with an American flag flying nearby on a rocky island, with dark storm clouds and lightning flashes in the distance.
"American education was once a shining light guiding generations."
As the stern-yet-concerned male voice delivers that line, we flash between the lighthouse and images of
1) black and white picture of students in a classroom, a couple of hands raised
2) another classroom, this one in color but still clearly 1950ish with students standing, hands on heart, mouths open as they salute the prominently featured US flag
3) a fairly simple drawing of a cross on a hill
4) flag flying (in black and white)
5) students standing hands on hearts outside, another black and white image
"Built on faith, heritage, patriotism."
1) Students in a classroom, eyes closed, hands folded in prayer. Teacher stands nearby head bowed.
2) Black and white photo of some inscription; the visible words are "After God had carried/ and ?ee had by/ provided necessaries"
3) The cover of some edition of Who's Who In Ameria
4) A flag, followed by students standing and pledging
5) Fuzzy image of two young men dressed up on what might be some kind of campus but could just be a big lawn. This might be the most mysterious image so far, unless I'm supposed to recognize these guys.
6) Image dissolves with a hint of flame. Oh no! Danger!
We are twelve seconds in. We have seen an assortment of old-timey school images featuring a bunch of white students. Religious imagery is featured, but only images of a certain type of religion.
This is the worst kind of ahistoric nostalgia. What exactly do these folks miss about the fifties and early sixties? Could it be the widespread racial segregation of schools? Or was our education a shining beacon in 1965 when only 49% of people 25 and over had graduated from high school (today it's 91%)? Maybe they're thinking fondly of the days when the top marginal tax rate was 94%. Maybe they are waxing nostalgia about 1957 and Sputnik, which so awakened the US to the declining quality of our education system that an entire National Defense Education Act was passed to invest tons of resources in schools.
Now the music and narrator tune grow darker, because we must talk about what ended those golden shining days.
"But over the past 60 to 70 years, that brilliance has been dimmed. A great institution has been crumbled from within."
1) A partially folded flag on a shelf in an empty classroom
2) Helmeted police confront protestors. Oddly, they choose the split second when a cop pushes a protestor.
3) On a street, a vehicle is on its side
4) American flag hung upside down. Some young men stand nearby.
5) Black woman with an afro at a microphone. Neither Google nor I recognize her, but she's the first Black person to show up in this video.
6) Woman taking a drag on what is probably one of those evil maryjeewanna cigarettes
7) The light in the lighthouse goes out.
8) Someone sits alone on big wide steps. We are then inside a structure as stones collapse and fall apart.
"Overtaken by those who teach hatred for America, false revisionist history, and division."
1) Bill Ayers (not identified0 on BookTV
2) Smoke pours out of building
3) Some headlines about Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground member who was later hired by Columbia University as an adjunct prof. The most prominent headline is "Clueless at Columbia: Turning Terrorists Into Profs" from the New York Post. Nothing about turning insurrectionists into high government officials.
4) Very quick flash of burning flag
5) TV report of Columbus State Community College removing statue of Columbus.
6) At the moment that "revisionist history" is spoke, a 1619 project image.
7) Hat that says "America was never great."
Now cue a Barrack Obama quote over "Georgetown University hid religious symbols at White House request." Obama says "from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," while we see in quick succession
1) Critical Race Theory
2) Satanic Temple After School Satan Club
3) A phone video shot from back in a classroom and there is something on a screen that just looks like some big colored stripes. I'm not sure what is supposed to be awful about this. Watching art in class?
4) Someone holding up cover of Gender Queer
5) Kids lined up at door to something, with someone dressed like a clown at the door? I see some rainbowish colors so maybe these are supposed to be evil gay clowns?
6) Some drag queen story hour
Notice that none of these items are about the actual quality of education, but about complying with the preferred cultural norms of the right.
Screen goes to black. We are thirty seconds in.
Someone in silhouette comes through a door, American flag and lightning behind her. It's Linda McMahon, but we aren't ready to reveal that yet.
"Now, on the 250th anniversary of our nation, the Department of Education, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, and partners across America are reigniting that light, restoring understanding, and returning education to the states where it belongs."
Now the cuts come more slowly and less hectic, the music more heroic and punctuated with Terminator 2 style percussion. The narrator's voice is steeled with determination.
The still-unrevealed McMahon starts up the steps. Figures on a stand in front of a huge screen with 250 on it. A classroom bathed in light. Another where the lights are coming on. A flag sticker on a window. Government buildings in DC with audible helicopter, because this is an action movie (not showing how empty they are after being DOGEd, because now that MAGA are installed, government is heroic again). Teacher stands in front of class, hand on heart (chalkboard behind her says "renewable resources" so that might have been a mistake). Quick cuts of classrooms of students in classrooms, then, on a classroom door window, the America 250-- Know America. Love America. logo. School. Building flying flag. Open book with some Revolutionary War picture. Kids standing with hands on hearts doing pledge. Hand drawn picture of flag. Workmen repairing Statue of Liberty's crown. And a hand in a work glove is cleaning off a giant lens. Child looks out car window, wind in hair. Classroom with actual student of color-- the first we've seen. Some more hopeful children, including one in cowboy hat. Polishing flagpole. Flag. Kid coming home. Another child of color. Classroom with the word "excellence" on a poster. Drone shot of playground.
Light coming on in lighthouse. We're at 58 seconds.
"For this was once the shining light that inspired the world. And under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary McMahon (WWF announcer shouting "that's Linda McMahon") that light will be restored to guide our students and our nation into a brighter American future."
Recap of old timey students, the "Liberty" over the Statue of Liberty." Trump with a Presidential edict. Shot of Trump and McMahon. And now we see that it is McMahon who climbed up there and fixed the lighthouse light. Yay! It lights up again as the WWF announcer cheers. Some small children. Trump signing something. McMahon and the light again. Light beaming into classroom. Small child raising her fist in front of the Statue of Liberty, which is certainly an interesting reinterpretation of the statue's pose. A light on the flag on a person's garage. Trump in front of some people in caps and gowns. A kids book-- "We the People." Student in classroom looks up. Spotlight on flag in front of building. Close-up of small hand on heart (a child's, not Trump's).
And, just because, a shot of a map marked with the Gulf of America.
Graduate. Flag patch on sleeve. Student with backpack. McMahon hugging some woman. Fighter planes over the White House. Lighthouse with clear weather. Phew. Everything is going to be okay because McMahon climbed up there and polished some glass.
Trump's voice "Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours."
American flag sticker and America 250 sticker on classroom door as Trump speaks. Then ten seconds of the Civics Education Coalition logo.
Look, I expect a certain amount of patriotism-flavored nonsense for the 250th birthday. But this goes far beyond that.
This is nostalgic for a selectively remembered time that never was. And it's not about education. It's about fuzzy memories of a time when people knew their place and never disagreed with People In Charge. And it's about the very weakest, most fragile, most false form of patriotism.
Imagine that the person of your dreams says, "Yes, I can love you and be with you, but only if you're perfect." First, that's a heavy condition to lay on love. Second, it means that they don't really love you, but just some made up imaginary version of you.
So we get this fixation, this fragile country-love centered on the notion that history is uncomplicated, our past is without nuance or complexity, and anyone who says otherwise is Very Naughty. This approach is also deeply disrespectful of young humans, assuming that they cannot handle complex emotions or complicated stories about their country's past. Instead they must be carefully spoon fed a sanitized and imaginary version of their country's history, as if they couldn't possibly handle the notion that one can love something and still see its faults, that one cannot hold the reality of what something is in one hand and one's hopes for what that thing could be in the other.
I presume that we can expect the Department and its forty special friends to whip up some sort of nationalistic curriculum, and that once again conservatives who think the department should be eliminated will be unable to resist the impulse to use federal power to tell state and local educators what to do (despite the illegality of that move). I suppose that you will have to wait, depending on your state, to see how forcefully your state leaders will insist that you inflict this baloney on students.
It's too bad. I love this country, and wouldn't trade it for any other. And I can love it with an ever-evolving. rich and robust understanding of what it is and what it has done. and that seems like a so much more vibrant, enduring and rich way to love something than to forced to carry around an unexamined fragile construct composed of brittle dreams and fragile imaginings. A love of country that can be examined and enriched seems so much more desirable than something you are commanded to carry that must be protected from any question or examination.
