The Pandemic Counterfactual

If only.

If only the governors had just waited it out. Hung on for six more weeks.

Once Mike DeWine stepped up and declared Ohio’s children an acceptable sacrifice to media demands, most of the other dominoes fell. One by one the other governors joined in.

Ohio had just reported three cases on March 9th, three days before DeWine held that press conference. Montana had just one case when Bullock closed the schools, same as West Virginia. For all the talk today about California’s lockdowns, it had nearly 500 cases when Newsom closed the schools nearly a week after DeWine did.

Governors didn’t shut the schools because of perceived risk in their particular state. They closed the schools because the media demands were becoming deafening and it was the only way to placate opinionmakers.

But it’s one thing to send out some sort of vapid public statement to get the press off your back, quite another to shut down a massive government operation with enormous legally mandated responsibilities.

They didn’t really think it was a big deal. Shut things down for a few weeks, everyone realizes that shit’s going to happen, and will demand their lives back, creating an offsetting pressure to the media.

Their real error was assuming a uniform public response to the risk. Who could have predicted that race would be such a factor in fearing the virus?

(Answer: Me. Race is a factor in almost everything in America.)

If only.

What if governors had ignored the media and kept schools open? Fearful parents could have pulled their students. Teachers unions might have made noise, but it wouldn’t have gotten much traction: nationwide, just 450 active teachers have died of covid. Closing the schools might have prevented some deaths, but everything we know suggests that transmission just got delayed, not prevented.

If the schools had remained open for the rest of the 2020 school year, no one could have pointed to the increasing case and death tolls as a reason to keep them closed because hey, presto! They hadn’t closed. Add to that the nearly non-existent death count among children for those months. Six months of data with no clear answers would have made it considerably more difficult for special ed and 504 parents to threaten lawsuits that would tempt schools to close.

The schools were closed quickly, without any thought. Had they stayed open for months, powers that be would have had time to think about what a stupid idea it was.

But instead, well. This happened.

Here’s the question that long haunted me during my remote education purgatory:

Was I wrong about the pandemic’s original sin? Could catastrophe had been rerouted? Was there a path we could have taken that returned the schools to normal operating conditions in fall 2021 instead of a year later?

All the angry people demanding accountability think it was just a matter of teachers agreeing to go back to work, and that mean ol’ CDC setting unnecessary restrictions.

But this is due to their fundamental fuzziness on the real cause of remote education. Very few kids were forced into remote. Most kids were in remote by parent demand.

White parents in high-diversity urban and suburban areas have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, for understandable reasons. But like it or not, the non-white parents in their district felt differently. In large numbers.

Even in Florida.

Recall the Karol Marcowicz psychodrama? Regular readers experienced her shifting demands live, from “MR MAYOR, CLOSE THE SCHOOLS” to “STOP ABUSING CHILDREN OPEN THE SCHOOLS” to “THE FUTURE IS FLORIDA“. While New York City’s schools were open relatively early (December? Mother of god, woman, quit whining), she hated hybrid and wanted full-time. Finally, in desperation, she moved her kids to an 70% white elementary school in the Sunshine State, returning temporarily only to flee back permanently. Governor DeSantis, she proclaimed, “put children first.” Her children were finally back in school full-time. Not for Florida all that zoom time, the kids locked up at home, the horrible academic results, right?

Wrong.

Karol’s school, Marsh Pointe Elementary, is in the Palm Beach district. 60% of Palm Beach students chose remote in September 2020. By the time Karol transferred her kids, just 60% of students opted for in-person. So just a third of the students who chose remote in September had returned to school by the end of the year.

Thus it was that Palm Beach County test scores plummeted that year, particularly in math. And that, readers, is why it’s unsurprising that California outpaced Florida in the NAEP scores that year. Not predictable. Just not surprising.

Karol never mentioned that, did she? I’m not even sure she knew, given how thoroughly her opinions are derived from that little white cocoon she wraps her life in.

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Florida was great for Karol and family. But DeSantis didn’t “put kids first”. DeSantis gave parents equal rights, rather than privileging parents’ preference for remote, as most other states did.

That’s no small thing! Had all governors followed DeSantis’s lead, the 15% of parents living in majority non-white districts trapped in endless remote would have had much less to bitch about. We all would have been spared a few thousand op-ed pieces by pissed off urban white moms clueless as to their minority status.

But the academic damage was caused not by parents forced into remote, but by parents choosingremote. Preventing that damage required ending remote. Take away the choice entirely. That is, ultimately, what got everything back to normal. It wasn’t parent protests or union settlements, but wise blue states taking away choice, as I wrote in my very first piece on this topic two years ago.

So going back to the question I posed, the only way to undo the original sin of closing the schools in March 2020 would have been to eliminate the option of remote instruction in fall 2020 instead of fall 2021.

Was that an option? Is there some way we could have pushed out remote instruction a year early?

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I want to say yes. I can’t shake the longing for the counterfactual. Like maybe if Trump hadn’t tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!” in July 2020, well, schools might have ended optional remote education at local schools.

Certainly, the response to Trump’s tweet doesn’t leave much room for hope. Trump was ;widely accused of politicizing issue with his “open the schools!” tweet by the left and the media, if that’s not the same thing, but with the conservative media not far behind. National Review criticized him for not getting covid19 under control and demanded more testing. Some conservatives wondered why Trump was closing schools–wouldn’t it be better for school choice and home schooling if all the schools stayed closed? The Bulwark was aghast at his very suggestion that schools should be open–how could little kids follow safety protocols?

But Trump was a lightning rod. By demanding that schools be open, Trump put everyone’s hackles up on both sides of the political wisdom aisle.

What if Trump hadn’t said anything? If white Democrat parents hadn’t seen open schools as a victory for the Orange One, they might have used their political power effectively at a time when it might have done some good. If public schools have learned one essential lesson from fifty years of policy errors, it’s that you don’t piss off white parents. Had white parents in majority non-white districts had understood that accepting remote education in September meant remote education for several more months, might they have made their displeasure clearer when it would have mattered?

I want to believe we had a shot at business as usual until July 2020 not because Trump was wrong–in fact, he was right, even if no one but me will say so–but because if he hadn’t raised the issue maybe…maybe. Maybe it would have been safer for someone else to suggest the possibility. Maybe more Democrat white parents would have realized the risk from failing to open immediately.  Maybe support would have been enough that schools would have told fearful parents that their opposition wasn’t sufficient rationale to service their remote education needs and give them a list of online charters.

I want to be like everyone else, in short, arguing that the One True Path was there, if only. But I can’t. For two big reasons. First, opening the schools had already become political, and I just don’t think white Democrat parents would have sided with MAGA folk demanding schools open at that time. Like the governors in March, they probably assumed everyone sane wanted schools open and once Biden was elected, schools would open. They could wait. But even that wouldn’t matter, because like Karol Marcowicz, those parents would only give a shit about their own schools. Like Karol, they don’t realize the mores of Marshmallowland aren’t universal.

But the larger reason I can’t convince myself that 2020-21 could be saved is best characterized by the actions of Deborah Birx, Coronavirus coordinator, aka Scarf Lady. She made the roundsto everystate, meeting with every governor, pushing masks, warning of contagion risks, pushing distance learning, strengthening the case for parents to oppose in-person education. She openly opposed Trump’s push to open schools. In short, Birx was ;a walking amicus brief for a class action lawsuit by furious parents demanding the right for their kids to view their teachers on a computer screen.

No governor was going to risk forcing in-person instruction on parents. No governor was going to tell parents they couldn’t have their own local school on zoom. No governor was going to force parents to sign up for a virtual option or find a virtual charter. No, not even DeSantis. Not in 2020. Not with Congress and the states having waived attendance laws. It just wasn’t worth the bother.

I’ve reluctantly abandoned all belief in a counterfactual. There was no chance, ever, that schools would return to business as usual in the 2020-21 school year. Parents would be guaranteed remote instruction in their local school. No one was going to force them back to in-person instruction or make them enroll in a virtual academy. Not that year.

So alas. Closing the schools was the original sin from which there was no redemption. The penalty must be paid.

If you’re looking for bright spots, consider the bullet we dodged. What if legislatures hadn’t acted to remove the remote option?

In spring 2021, plenty of evidence showed that at least 30% of students were remote education, and of that group, 90% chose it. By fall 2021, polls showed 20-25% of parents still wanted remote education. That winter, when omicron took hold, a Pew poll showed only 1 in 4 non-white parents wanted full-time inperson instruction. 61% wanted “a mix”. Reams of anecdotal evidencesuggests that non-white parents were more likely to be freaked out about returning to in-person instruction, both in the fall and during the rise of omicron.

Given the demographic skew of schools….it could have happened again. Polls and revealed preferences strongly suggest that non-white parents in many districts would have had sufficient majorities to demand remote instruction. White parents in those urban districts, including all those Republican moms with op-ed columns, would be deeply pissed off. More importantly, low-income non-white children would continue getting half as much education, if that, on zoom.

None of that happened.

By the grace of God, the Fates, karma, or simple happy circumstance, we got a window.

From November 2020 to June 2021, everyone believed the vaccines would end covid. For a few months in early summer, that seemed to be the case. And during that brief window, a miracle happened: blue state legislatures took action.

No, really.

Even better, those legislatures took the right action. They wisely passed laws taking away a parent’s right to choose remote education at their public school. That’s not what the laws said, of course. They said that schools couldn’t offer remote instruction. Ultimately, it’s the same thing.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd.

Am I really saying that once the schools closed there was no way out of the damages followed?

That giving parents a choice guaranteed that millions of kids would learn much less and never be able to recover?

That rather than look for people to blame we should simply thank the summer 2021 pause that the damage didn’t go on for longer?

And most ridiculous of all, that we actually have politicians’ quick action to thank for it ending as soon as it did?

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Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

Just one more thing to drop onto the “crazy shit” pile.

It’s hard to face, given the damage caused by keeping kids at home, but it could have been much worse had legislatures not acted swiftly and correctly.

Go figure. Government worked.

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I really don’t know why I’ve kept up this series. Lord knows, the prevailing winds of discourse have hurricaned against me. But hey, what else is new. I think it’s finally out of my system.

On the Cause and Fix for School Closures and Remote Education

• Tradeoffs in the Era of Covid-19: I’d forgotten I’d written this! Not really about policy, but proves I said closing schools was a bad idea from the very beginning.
• The Real Reason for School Closures: The data showing how strongly parental race determined parental preference for remote and that race, not unions or politics, drove school decisions about remote education.
• Principal Responsibilities in the Pandemic: A look at the way adminstrator responsibility changed during the pandemic, and the role these changes played in school decisions on whose needs to prioritize.
• The Pandemic School Policy Power Differential: A key difference in parental rights during the pandemic went entirely unreported, but explains so much of the difference between perception and reality. Parents who wanted remote were primarily non-white and were guaranteed this choice in 2020-21. Parents who wanted in-person were primarily white and were not guaranteed their choice. White parents tend to be loud when they don’t get their way. But rather than argue for equal rights, they just assumed that they were speaking for a majority. Bad call.
• Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?: The pandemic narrative insists that teachers were paid to do nothing. In fact, teachers were the school district employees with the most to do, the jobs that were least unchanged in terms of time, and most changed in terms of delivery.
• The Pandemic’s Original Sin: Closing the schools in March 2020 pretty much guaranteed all the disasters that followed.
• Wise Blue States Take Away Choice: Chronologically, this was my first pandemic piece. I’m kind of proud of that, because late 2021 was pretty early to realize how essential it was that legislatures removed the means of committing further educational damage.

Teaching Life in the Pandemic:

• Life During Lockdown
• Five Things I Learned Remote Teaching Summer School
• Post-Pandemic Update

Larry Cuban: Understanding the Stability of American Schools

(Disclosure: Larry Cuban is a friend, but my opinions on his value originated long before I met him.)

Over 20 years ago, Franklin Foer extolled conventional wisdom (CW) and its avatar,  David Gergen, arguing that Gergen’s relentlessly conventional wisdom was based on his deep expertise, which led him to unflashy but unerringly correct conclusions.

Until starting this piece I’d forgotten the author, the date, and the publication. My memory said the CW exemplar was David Broder, which made finding the article nearly impossible. 

What stayed with me was the plainly correct observation that flashy, controversial and ultimately flawed “takes” are given more public attention than accurate analyses yielding  prosaic outcomes reflecting the status quo.

Larry Cuban is a writer, historian, teacher, and educator who built a career pointing out that no Big Idea, whether it be driven by technology, “science”, money, standards, leadership, or organizational mandates, is likely to change the implacable stability of American education. And he gets it right. A lot.

Just as David Gergen has been banking on his “boring” takes for decades, Larry has been successful in education policy despite his avoidance of bold, controversial policies and predictions. Popular Stanford professor and co-author of a  famous text on education reform, he has made Rick Hess’s list of prominent edu-scholars every year since it came out in 2012.  

In ed school, we were assigned a chapter Larry wrote on problems versus dilemmas, a frequent topic on his long-running blog.  I initially dismissed his observations because I confused his insights with the teachers’ values. One wanted to support her students by advocating rent control but she might lose her job, for example. But we reread the piece after seven months of student teaching and I realized that the dichotomy was essential regardless of the examples. Today it’s hard to avoid the reality that most if not all education policy debates are dilemmas  wrongly pegged as  problems.* Accept this reality and it’s a short step to understanding that little will change.

Larry recently wrote a memoir, one I strongly recommend, although my  book reviews usually run to multi-part articles filled with examples and arguments on the author’s many misconceptions. (No David Gergen, I.) 

Larry structures his life story around America’s three eras of education reform, which correspond with his own education and career. His childhood took place in the fading days of the  Progressive Era, characterized by rapid secondary school expansion and increased focus on education administration and methods. His immigrant parents worked in New York City until they could buy n their own grocery store in Passaic, New Jersey, where Larry was born. Forced into bankruptcy by  anti-Semitic boycotts of all Jewish-owned stores, they relocated to Pittsburgh to be with family. An average student who preferred history and science, Larry’s memories of school are quite fuzzy, although he clearly recalls lessons of both traditional  and progressive approaches. More vivid memories involve sports and friends, a core group of whom he has stayed in touch with for seventy years.

The next section, my favorite, focuses on the Civil Rights era in education reform, from the late 50s to the early 70s. Larry majored in biology and history education. His first job was as a science teacher, but his strong desire to teach US history led to employment in a 99% “Negro” school in Cleveland, Ohio, a job that set the trajectory of his career. Lecturing to bored students five classes a day enervated and depressed him, so he started typing up primary sources of black history in an attempt to create classes more like his graduate seminars.  In a few years he became a notable teacher expert at engaging black students, qualifying for a year seminar in Yale. 

From there, Larry’s career becomes a roadmap of major 60s initiatives. He was invited to Washington, DC to head the Cardozo Project in Urban Teaching initiative, training returning Peace Corps volunteers to teach and build curriculum, originally a one-year project that his successful leadership converted into continued extensions. Ultimately the model was adopted first as DC’s Urban Teacher Corp and then as a model for the National Teacher Corps. He tried federal employment as a director of race and education at the Commission on Civil Rights, but he wasn’t a happy administrator. The horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination created racial tensions in the diverse office staff, so he left and enjoyed a few months of unemployment as a stay at home dad. He then went back to the DC district and worked in staff development until office politics drove him out. 

 Larry’s blazing early success in teaching drove his initial belief that curriculum and engagement could close the achievement gap and drive societal change. Witnessing the politics and obstruction of his ideas at the federal and state level changed his opinion: the  “best unit of reform” was a leadership position. But the ability to influence and reform as an administrator would require either  experience or more education.  Although Larry had kept teaching all through this period, covering one or two periods of history a day at a local school, he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to start an administrative career–and doing so would take a number of years. So off he went to Stanford to get a doctorate as a shorter path to a leadership position.  

The Civil Rights era of Larry’s career offers wonderful insights into teaching and education politics of an earlier era**. Larry’s brief recollections of ed school as well as his efforts to teach in a manner consistent with his training also sounds really familiar. I’m reminded again that many aspects of the education debate have a much longer timeline, one that most ed schol  critics ignore.

In person and writing, Larry is calm and laid back, making it easy to miss the ambition drove many of his career decisions (although his deep love for wife and daughters as well as his long-running friendships come through).  His decision to pursue a doctorate for professional advancement led to his superintendency at Arlington Schools superintendent, which begins the book’s third section on the Standards Based Reform Movement, from the 70s until today. He was hired by a politically liberal school board (including Ann Broder, David’s wife–how plate o’ shrimp it would have been had Broder been the CW maven!). The internet still yields a  number of stories that support Larry’s recollections, including an epic revenge reversal that’s hard not to enjoy as sheer story-telling despite the outcome, which ultimately led to his ouster when a more conservative electorate flipped the school board.  

Larry’s account details the national shift from focusing solely on black  achievement to managing the needs and challenges of an economically, racially, and academically diverse student body. While he never neglected the practical aspects of superintendency–keeping the lights on, parental communication, board relationships, learning and test scores–both his memoir and contemporaneous reporting reveal his emphasis on instruction and instructors.  He visited classrooms weekly for all seven years of his superintendency and had a standing offer to join teachers for lunch and discussion. He offered workshops on observations and  inquiry-based questioning skills. He’d sub from time to time. 

Biiennial surveys during his seven year reign showed increasing parental satisfaction. Test scores in elementary school improved, while secondary school scores stagnated. (Twas ever thus.) Significantly, Larry’s successor lasted only one term and was fired when the school board flipped back to the left. By then, Larry had returned to Stanford where he’s been ever since, publishing over 20 books since retiring in 2001.

Larry’s memoir does much to explain his scholarly focus and philosophy. His sketchy memories of his own school experiences renewed his perspective on the relative importance of education: Or, as he says in the memoir, “Life educates.”

His success in improving engagement led to his conviction that meaningful curriculum and trained teachers would lead the way to greater learning. When he found constraints, he sought to broaden that “best unit of reform” –first trying policy, then in district management. Ultimately, Larry realized that his initial belief that “better schools could make a better society” had the “causal direction wrong: societal changes alter schools far more than schools remake society”.

His scholarship continually reflects this theme. Larry’s seminal work Tinkering Towards Utopia, written with his friend and colleague David Tyack, informed and warned passionate choice and accountability advocates about the cycles of earlier reform eras.  In 1995, the modern education reform movement was gathering steam, the federal government was enabling charters to “compete” with public schools so they could “end the achievement gap”. National curriculum reform was being attempted in every academic subject. Triumphalism was the tone of the day. Meanwhile Cuban and Tyack were pointing out how often this had been tried–and failed–before. ESA and voucher advocates would be wise to take note.

In As Good As It Gets, he explored a decade of Austin’s school reform under the same superintendent.  Larry observes that relatively little changed in the classroom and to the extent it did no link to management policy implementation could be ascertained. The title is double edged, praise with a shrug: hey, you want reform? This is about as good as it gets. 

As reform movements sought to use technology as the new tool to transform the classroom,  Larry reported the actual impact. Oversold and Underused, captures his thesis: computers in the classroom haven’t changed much about instruction or curriculum.

Larry’s books continually remind us of the strength of the conventional education models: for all we argue, nothing in education changes much. He views American schools’ implacable resistance to change with cheerful equanimity.  It is what it is, something to be accepted and even cherished, despite the inequities. I suspect Larry wouldn’t object much to Arnold Kling’s Null Hypothesis of Education Intervention. 

Although Larry supports charter schools, his message often runs contrary to reform rhetoric. Once he participated as a panelist in a 2015 AEI round table on classroom changes wrought by “billionaire philanthropy” for education reform. His presentation included this deeply Cubanesque slide predicting that most reforms will disappear, and the ones that don’t will actually strengthen the conventional form of public education. 

Howard Fuller, up next, responded with doleful humor: “It’s always difficult to read Larry’s stuff because then you want to go back in your house. It’s like ‘why did I leave my house today?’ you know, given how little leaving my house means to anybody…but after having fought through that, I decided to get on the plane anyway.” 

Acceptance doesn’t mean indifference. As I first observed over a decade ago,  Larry is one of just two well-known education policy experts who has significant experience as a teacher, a job he dearly loved and that clearly influences his research and findings. Above all, he seeks to inform his readers on the act of teaching and its disconnection from the far more visible policy debates. He loves to visit working classrooms. His books carry multiple, careful and detailed lesson observations, either those he witnesses himself or those he culled from archives and news reports. Anyone who simply wants to know what happens when teachers shut the doors in  America’s classrooms would be well-advised to read his work.

In years, decades, and even centuries to come, when historians are snorfling loudly at publishers who promoted nonsense like Richard Reeves’  treatise arguing we should keep boys back a year, they will still be reading Larry’s books for insight into America’s teaching force throughout history.

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*Examples in my own work: Algebra 2, the Gateway Course, The Day Of Three Miracles, The Push for Black Teachers, Minneapolis Style. Another ed school author who made much more sense on the second reread was Grant Wiggins. 

**Teaching History Then and Now has more such stories for those interested.

The Problems with Accountability

For years, I’ve rolled my eyes at all the earnest people talking about student learning, particularly in high school. Like the occasional think pieces on credit recovery, questioning them as an effective tool for student learning. I mean, my lord.

In fact, it was one of those think pieces on credit recovery by Nat Malkus that actually led to this article, which I started years ago and just found in my draft folder. I’d been trying to figure out a way to express my admittedly cynical hilarity at these, but had a hard time figuring out how to start until this sentence caught my eye:

“Education reform in recent decades has focused on raising standards, pushing more students to reach them…”

Wait, what?

Education reform in recent decades insisted that ALL students MUST reach them, and they must meet them by the same levels in all SES, racial, and educational categories.  NCLB went so far as to demand that all students must be above average.

But leave that aside for the moment. Malkus is still wrong. The standards movement wasn’t about pushing students. Standards are about pushing schools.

Federal and state governments don’t hold students responsible for failing to meet goals. It’s the school that lose control and funding.

Education policies don’t hold students accountable for their own low  test scores.

This seems obvious, trite even. Naturally the students can’t be blamed for the schools’ many  failures!

But that’s not why we don’t hold students accountable.

Consider the only time in recent education history that students faced actual accountability for their own failure to meet the mandated levels of achievement.

I speak, of course, of the high school graduation test.

Refusing to grant high school diplomas to those who failed the test was a reform that at its height was implemented by 27 states.

Keep in mind that these high school graduation tests didn’t actually assess what we’d like to call high school knowledge. My own state required middle school math and some basic grammar, and since all states had upwards of 90% pass rates, it’s a safe bet that all states set competency at roughly the 8th grade level. These tests nonetheless posed a tremendous challenge for small chunks of the population with the usual suspects of race playing their usual part, and thousands of students never passed. As Matt Barnum’s brief history of the exit exam fad discusses, the research on exit exams revealed reduced graduation rates and no increase in proficiency or college attendance. It’s all bad news.

Results: Most states eliminated their efforts in the mid-teens after barely a decade of traying. A few created  several workarounds to allow graduation for those who fail the tests.

That’s it. That’s the only time America has in any way held individual k-12 student advancement hostage to their tested proficiency. And boyoboy when states backed away, they really backed away. California and Georgia went back and handed out retroactive diplomas to anyone who hadn’t been able to pass the test.

When Malkus says that education reform pushed “more students” to meet “raised standards”….well, he misspoke. Education reform created higher standards and demanded that schools provide evidence that students met those standards, but at no point penalized students for failing to meet the standards by general assessment.

Here, in fact, is what happened during the education reform heyday: students were given no choice but to take demanding courses. They couldn’t opt out of Algebra 2. They couldn’t take composition instead of writing critical essays on Shakespearean plays. Schools couldn’t place students who counted on their fingers into a basic math course, or give reading instruction to kids reading at third grade level. They had to put freshmen in “college prep” courses.

Despite this ruthless curriculum restriction, the only attempt at enforcing student accountability gave passing scores for knowing middle school math and the proper use of capitalization. Meanwhile, schools were criticized and often penalized for not graduating enough students who the states required to take increasingly advanced courses to get those diplomas.

What did they think would happen?

Transcripts and grades have been fraudulent for decades, even without reaching the depths of the Maspeth scandal.

I’ve often discussed this reality, of course. Teachers ignore universal standards and set their grading policies to the average ability of their students.  In cases where teacher rigor is too much for their students, these teachers either adjust or don’t last long at that particular job.

But consider how this reality plays out in the context of the aforementioned credit recovery system. If schools give passing grades based on the average student ability, credit recovery shouldn’t be necessary.

It’s not as if teachers are out there holding all their students to the expected standards. Go seek out the million stories bewailing the low student test scores accompanying grade inflation going back decades. Failing a single class doesn’t lead to credit recovery. Students can take a class two or even three times and still be on track to graduate, as happens quite a bit in math. Or they can take the expensive version of credit recovery known as summer school, where students exchange seat time for a certain pass.

And yet with all the lowered standards, all the multiple opportunities, all the efforts, there are kids who still can’t get their ass to school each day, or get to school and treat it as social hour, or cut classes so often they can’t get a passing grade even if the teacher wants to give it because they’ve missed the minimum number of instructional hours (look for states to end this requirement).

These are the students for whom online credit recovery is designed. Can schools get them into a classroom to sit still long enough to click through courses? And, as any principal will tell you, there are students who can’t even manage this much. But many can, and so yet one more selection criteria emerges–students who fuck around endlessly but straighten up enough to click through credit recovery and students who continue to fuck around endlessly.

Low ability students in schools with lots of low ability students generally pass if they want to. Most will pass the first time, but some will either screw up or get stuck with a teacher whose standards are higher than they  can deliver. Then they’ll take the course again, or go to summer school. Learning has little to do with it. Maybe 1 in 100 kids who retake a course says “Yeah, I learned a lot.” The vast majority jumped through the hoops they needed. A depressing number of students miss, jump, pass, miss, jump, pass all the way through high school.

Credit recovery isn’t for kids who didn’t learn. Credit recovery is for the kids who dodge all of the schools’ expert techniques at convincing students to do enough work to get a passing grade.

Credit recovery is just one part of a massive, expensive endeavor to shepherd unwilling students through school long enough to give them a diploma. Worrying about whether or not they are learning really misses the point. Worrying about what students learn in a world determined to pretend all students can learn the same subjects is likewise missing the point.

Any effort to improve education has to hold students accountable. But in order to hold them accountable they have to be given choices.

Schools do need to teach their students. But in order to hold schools accountable, they need to be able to accurately place students based on their ability and interest to help them progress.

All sides of the education debate refuse to acknowledge this.  They refuse to acknowledge ability and motivation. They refuse to acknowledge that low student ability isn’t a moral failing: not the student’s, the teacher’s, or the school’s. That’s why all their efforts will fail–including the ridiculous parent choice initiatives libertarians and choice folks are currently celebrating. That’s why the problem is now getting worse, with colleges abandoning their previous metrics of student accountability (test score admissions and remediation).

I don’t know what the answer is. The 80s is the last time our country gave students choice and schools the right to place. It was roundly rejected in the 90s by lawsuits against tracking and education reform’s demand that “all students succeed”.

I’ve been depressed by educational changes made post-pandemic. The left is pretending all kids are traumatized, the right is convinced that all parents share the rage of the roughly 15% who wanted in-person education but didn’t get it. The left is eradicating standards for college, the right is busy giving illegal immigrants $7K to homeschool their kids, and celebrating grifters who open voucher schools. Things start to feel grim.

Then I look at my kids and remind myself that the real miracle is how many kids do learn. How schools still do the best job imaginable at finding smart kids and helping them out. How despite all the insane rhetoric coming from all sides, most of us in school–students, teachers, and administrators–get the job done of helping kids navigate their way through childhood to meaningful adulthood.

And I feel better.

Baraki, Caldeira, and Foolish Hysteria

(hey,kinda rhymes)

Back in November, Abigail Shrier, a journalist who achieved notoriety by pointing how much of the trans movement involves girls in their early teens,  revealed, with much fanfare, How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids: (Yes. A while back. I’ll explain the delay.)

Two California middle school teachers, Kelly Baraki and Lori Caldeira, of Spreckels Union School District, gave a presentation at an October union conference about their struggles and triumphs running a gay-straight alliance club. Based on the recordings, though, their primary focus appeared to be helping “trans” kids find themselves. Highlights of their claims:

• They advised finding alternate club names (UBU instead of GSA) that didn’t alert parents to the club’s purpose.
• They didn’t keep club meeting rosters to keep parents unaware of their child’s participation.
• They were concerned about club attrition and their efforts to keep the kids motivated and attending the gender awareness clubs.
• They described “stalking” kids’ online activity during the pandemic to identify students who expressed interest in exploring sexuality.
• They discussed the best ways to “integrate” their gender preference instruction into their anti-bullying presentations so the students are less likely to mention it to their parents.
• They mocked parents who complained about their kids being exposed to sex-ed. They crowed that with tenure,  the principal might “flinch” but couldn’t respond to parents’ concerns.
• In every way they presented their club as a recruitment project, in which parents were to be ignored and subverted whenever possible.

Shrier, as is evidenced by the title of her piece, characterized their presentation as “insight…into the mindset and tactics of activist teachers themselves.”  She saw this presentation as education and instruction.

I read about this at the time and several things immediately seemed obvious, pointing to a real failure on Shrier’s part to do any reporting or analysis.

First, and this is fairly minor but it speaks to the hysteria: Shrier was reading way too much into “union conference”. She clearly sees it as indoctrination. It’s not. Most teachers are required to document seat time for recertification; all of them have to come up with educational credits to move along the pay scale. These union conferences serve as seat time for recertification and, for extra money, can be converted into credits. Plus, Palm Springs! Take the kids, sit by a pool. Nobody–but nobody–sitting in that conference was being educated, advised, or instructed.

Clearly, Shrier didn’t know enough to ask the right questions. Namely, who was paying? Were teachers listening to this swill on district time? Were Caldeira and Baraki getting paid by the district to present? I did some research on union conferences, and am reasonable satisfied that districts don’t pay for teachers to attend. Someone ought to make sure, though.

Regarding the content of the presentation, I was stunned. Tracking kids’ internet activity? Total control over morning announcements? Not keeping attendance at club meetings? Mocking angry parents and gloating that tenure protects them? Smugly talking about the principal “flinching” but being forced to back them?

Why would anyone believe all this?

Teachers can’t hold club meetings and keep them secret. Morning announcements aren’t the personal domain of a teacher. No teacher is stupid enough to think pissed off parents can’t change her existence, especially with a principal who is privately flinching at her behavior but feels forced to comply. Tracking a student’s internet activity…that was so weird I googled and found out about GoGuardian, which freaked me right out, as I teach for one of the 90% of schools who don’t use it. I think it’s only for Chromebooks? And in the classroom I could see it being useful. But either way, I don’t believe any teacher, even one with the worst intentions in the world, could “stalk” kids internet use without singling them out ahead of time or running reports after the fact. No teacher would brag about the first, and there had to be controls on the second, which meant they were lying.

So most of what Caldeira and Baraki were recorded as saying was utter bullshit and obviously, once the tapes came out, these two tearchers were toast. If their presentation was accurate, they’d be fired now that it was public. If they were lying, as seemed likely, they were going to be fired for embarrassing the district.

I commented to this effect on Shrier’s blog. And I was right.

The district, upon learning from Shrier about the recordings, instantly sent out a response, suspending the club, requiring principals to sign off on announcements, and denying some of the claims the teachers made. As I expected, the district emphasized that Baraka and Caldeira were using personal days and not speaking as school representatives. The two teachers were placed on administrative leave while a formal investigation (done by a lawfirm, not the district) took place.

In early July, the lawfirm released the results of a thorough investigation: 1600 documents reviewed, 21 witnesses. The text of the report is very specific on a key point: Baraki and Caldeira made “harmful and disruptive comments” during the presentation that “were not reliable evidence of their actual conduct.”

That is, they lied.

Baraki and Caldeira never put any gender-related comments in the announcements. They didn’t mislead kids during their lessons. While they generated 30 reports of student activity between 2015 and 2019 (which doesn’t strike me as a lot, but I can’t be sure), but all of them had some other purpose. They did notice a student clicking on a link, but never followed up with that student. The only two kids they invited to the club meetings had first approached their teachers about joining.

Baraki and Caldeira resigned and were not fired. They almost certainly would have been, although it might have taken a couple years. But no administrator or district official would forget the shit those two caused by, let’s not forget, lying.

The details were reported sympathetically by the SF Chronicle which talks of the teachers being cleared but glossing over the fact that they lied. Oddly–or maybe not so oddly–Shrier wrote five stories on this in six weeks last winter but hasn’t mentioned this update in three weeks.

Brief aside: this has to be bad news for Jessica Konnen, mother of a former Caldeira student who went through a phase of believing herself transgender while attending the middle school. Konnen was notified by Caldeira and the principal, where the two made it clear that they’d known about this for a long time. After hearing the tapes, she was convinced that Caldeira had unduly influenced her daughter and got lawyer Harmeet Dhillon taking her case against Caldeira and the district, which was filed in June. The recordings were a key part of the evidence and now a law firm investigation has shown the teachers were lying.

What Shrier et al. see as an appalling example of business as usual in our public schools is, in fact, exaggerated or rule-breaking behavior the teachers are bragging about in order to impress their audience.

Of course, that’s still bad.  Baraki and Caldeira are bragging to make themselves look good The dreary reality, in their minds,  is that school procedures prevent them from finding all the potentially confused kids to straighten out. They don’t have the control they claim to have over morning announcements, student clubs. But they want to project a voice of authority to impress their audience–an audience, they presume, who is excited as they are at finding transgender kids who need their help. You want evidence of a polarized country? There you go. Many people support helping kids find their identities, as they think of it. 

But they aren’t the cause! Yes, Baraki and Caldeira want to “find” (convert, to Shrier et al) more transgender students. Yes, they want to run over the rights of concerned parents. Yes, they want to “educate” (indoctrinate) kids by making their club seem exciting, by normalizing gender issues in school, by growing their club. And yes, the union staff setting up the conference see those goals as admirable. All of these are, in my view, horrible objectives and reflect a terrifying mindset.

Except they can’t achieve their goals. School and district policies prevented it. Parents were leery and districts heeded parents. In fact, when the district learned that Baraki bragged about controlling announcements and not keeping a roster, it instantly created policies forbidding that control–policies that normally wouldn’t be needed, because if Baraki had indeed been sliding in propaganda, someone would have noticed. Doesn’t matter. Avoid the risk, mandate signoff. Mandate attendance lists (something common in high school, anyway).

So if the teachers like Baraki and Caldeira have to lie to pretend to have any power, they certainly aren’t the ones preventing parents from being told their kid is transgender. Who’s doing that? 

State and federal governments, that’s who.

I’m in this weird situation where I get reviled by progressives for being a hateful anti-trans bigot and yelled at by conservatives for being a pedophile groomer. I think  “gender dysphoria” is at best a phase and at worst a mental illness.  I am comfortable with finding adults finding whatever gender solution works for them. I am against younger kids taking medical steps. Use of proper pronouns is polite, but should not be required or forced at risk of social and economic obliteration. Any discussion of gender with young kids is wildly inappropriate, whether it’s a doctor, teacher, librarian, or drag queen raising the subject.  Kids should not be actively taught about sexuality….ever, as far as I’m concerned. Let them figure it out for themselves. All of this is enough to get me reviled by progressives.

But the people, whatever their ideology, who are appalled by this radical ideology and the insistence on demands and requirements that seem to violate the laws of reality seem to have no idea of what’s causing it and the wrong idea on who to blame. Once again they focus on unions, teachers, ed schools. 

Smug parents bragging that they homeschool are fooling themselves. Pediatricians think screening kids for gender is a great idea. If it’s not already a state requirement, just wait. Their churches probably won’t comply but why are so many corporations are coming up with DEI initiatives? 

The institutional capture people need to worry about is not teachers and ed schools but state policy makers and legal overreach. If you want to know why schools take a particular action, don’t look to unions but policy, laws, and accreditation–not just of K-12 schools but also colleges, universities, and every organization you can think of.  If states don’t play along, the feds can just devise some sort of mandate to qualify for funds.

This article is too long already, but in researching this story, I found a very troubling expansion that may illustrate the real perpetrator. From the most recent Chronicle article on Baraki and Caldeira:

The California Department of Education says that school staff should not disclose information about students’ gender identity without student permission under AB1266, which protects transgender students’ rights and went into law in 2014.

The first link goes to the CDoE policy which is a full page of things California schools must do to support transgender students because of AB1266–including restrictions against telling parents. The second is a link to AB1266 which says that California Education Code 221.5 shall be modified. It’s not specific about the modifications, which necessitates a look back to 221.5 as it existed in 2010 to learn that 221.5 had five clauses, a-e, and AB1266 added one more:

(f) A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.

That’s it. 

Well. That’s enough. That’s the wording, undoubtedly enacted in many states, enabling males to compete as females and the bathroom confusion. But there’s no mention of parents. 

So the CDoE is attributing a near total mandate forbidding schools from notifying parents (with a few weasel words for cover) and using as its rationale legislation changes that don’t mention parents at all. 

Now, go back to the CADoE FAQ and it’s clear that all the legal text added in that section is rationale. Someone took this opportunity to interpret privacy laws and create a whole slew of school mandates that were not in the original legislation. You have to wonder if that’s what Tom Ammiano, the legislative sponsor, had in mind. An attempt to recall the legislation failed. 

By the way, this change to California law happened back in 2014. Long before anyone was paying attention. 

Think it’s only California and those wacky progressives? Trump SecEd Betsy DeVos resisted his order to change policy on transgender students and bathrooms. GOP bastion South Dakota legislators passed a law to force transgender students to use the bathroom matching their biology in 2016, but the governor, a Republican, vetoed it. Even today, Governor Noem was willing to kiss any shot at the presidency goodbye by vetoing a ban on transgender athletes.  I see plenty of GOP opinion folks mocking Rachel Levine; far fewer mocking Dierdre McCloskey.

Understand what forces compelled Noem to veto that law despite the overwhelming support in her state and why DeVos resisted ending transgender access to bathrooms. Accept that people who pushed this started things in motion long before most people were paying attention. Remember  that schools, the institutions most subjected to these pressures, still care about parents and political pressure. Push them hard and they’ll close gaps. Ensure minimum compliance with laws and don’t allow overreach.

Untangling this craziness while still allowing self-determination will be a long process and the other side on this has a head start. But there’s an obvious state law that should be made immediately, one that reporters making their bones on transgender outrage should immediately support:

Mandate  schools to immediately notify parents should their child express a gender identity different from his or her biological one. Specifically: student confides as transgender to school employee, school employee notifies administrator, form letter goes out to parent. If the school’s opinion is the child would be endangered by parental notification, school notifies child protective services who takes it from there. Schools are not allowed to keep this information from parents.

This is a no-brainer. And quite apart from the logical reasons to support this change, there’s one additional positive side effect:  ending or at least wildly curtailing the clubs and activities that seem to encourage student gender confusion. It is perversely easier to force teachers to hide secrets from parents than it is dealing with really pissed off parents blaming the school’s UBU club for their suddenly transgender kid. 

 

 

Same Thing All Over Again–But Events Happen

Many, many irritating things happened during the omicron phase, things that sent me into a mild depressive episode. One happy note, however, was that the union obsessive pretense that covid19 is dangerous meant we could have staff and department meetings on Zoom.

Our staff meetings occur before school, so we start the actual school day late. But the meeting start time is half an hour earlier than the normal school day beginning. So I have to get to school half an hour earlier on a day when school starts half an hour late. This induces a cognitive dissonance that eleven years at the same school has never entirely resolved, and every week, I’m at best five minutes late. Zoom meetings allows me to actually leave later in the day and listen to the meeting in my car. On time. Given that two years of school insanity has never once played in my favor, this feels like win.

Anyway.

Our department chair, Benny, was explaining….wait. Before I begin this story, I want to be clear that I’m not really criticizing anyone involved, including Benny. I should also mention, as I have before, that our school is blissfully indifferent to test scores. Admins really don’t care. This exercise I’m about to describe is about as far as we get to caring. Also relevant: since Common Core, juniors take a test that has multiple levels but from a practical standpoint is binary. Students are either “college ready” or they aren’t.

So Benny was asking for volunteers to run brief 30-minute math tutorials designed to help students review topics. We have an intervention time after lunch that can be used for this purpose. Nothing new; we’d done this for the two years pre-pandemic. Except.

“So we’ve identified the kids who failed algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 and give them the opportunity to come to tutoring.”

Wait, what? Kids who failed what?

In years past, we had all agreed that kids who failed algebra I and geometry had not a single chance in hell of testing as college ready.  I had argued, unsuccessfully, that we should still tutor those kids and bump their failing grade if they got….better. To use SAT terms: “college ready” is around 600 Math (top 30%). Any junior who was still working on algebra 1 or geometry would be rocking that test at 450.

I know kids in our school who made it to precalc and got a 500 on the SAT math section and did not pass the college readiness standard.

So Benny was suggesting that kids who’d had multiple shots at algebra 1 and geometry would somehow be able to pick up all they’d failed to understand the first time as well as all the topics they needed in algebra 2 in ten 30 minute sessions.

He’s also suggesting we give this tutoring to the kids who failed algebra 2. But in a good year, pre-pandemic, 60-70% of the kids taking and succeeding at algebra 2 don’t test as college-ready. Kids who failed algebra 2 were not good candidates for passing the college readiness marker. And tell them that if they succeed at an impossible task, we’ll change their grade but only if. Not just for trying.

I said nothing. All hail Zoom.

“If they go to all the tutoring sessions and make college-ready on the test, we’ll change their F to Pass.”

“What about the students that are marginal but passed algebra 2, trig, or pre-calc? We should give them the same tutoring. And kids who flunked pre-calc or calculus, they’d be eager for that deal.” suggested Pete.

In a good year, pre-pandemic, these were the kids we tutored. We spent time identifying the students who had it together enough to pass three or four years of math with a C+, a B, or even a shaky A, and gave them support. That’s what you always do, if you’re looking to get maximize kids across a finish line. These were the kids who had a shot at passing the test.

“No,” responded Benny. “The test only goes through algebra 2 material. Kids who’ve passed algebra 2 should be able to pass this test without tutoring or an incentive.” 

I said nothing. I didn’t volunteer, either. All hail Zoom.

*********************************************************

In the early days of my blog I would have immediately documented this craziness to provide some insight into how things work. Benny is, like all my colleagues, a progressive Democrat. But in math teacher typology, I’m the woke-conversant social justice warrior. Benny’s the traditionalist (check out our pass rates in this algebra 2 article). I know for a fact Benny doesn’t think his target group is up to the task he’s set. I know this because four years ago, we all agreed that the tutoring pool should be comprised of strong, motivated juniors taking algebra 2 or trig, along with any pre-calc students with Cs. This was the group whose pass rate we might be able to move from 0-10% to 30-50%.

Even more notably, in years past, I would have spoken up to make this very observation. I wouldn’t have been alone, either. Yet no one spoke up.

I’m not sure which is more worthy of comment: I’ve stopped bothering to write about the crazy unreasonable plans that show up in my teacher life, or I’ve stopped pushing back on crazy unreasonable plans that show up in my teacher life.

The first is easier to explain: events, dear boy, events. Both progressives and education reformers upped the nuttiness. The SAT changed to be a much harder test, then became irrelevant. Common Core spent billions on nothing. Two of education reform’s three legs got chopped off.  There was a pandemic and most of the craziness in that era I couldn’t bitch about because it was more central to my location than I usually allow online. Moreover, I try to say it once or maybe twice and then move on, linking to the original article to say “still this.”

The second question is more interesting because it’s not the usual answer. I’m not burnt out. I’ve not given up. I still care. I gritted my teeth and actually picked up my phone to put an observation in the chat yes, while driving, but Benny had set “Chat to Host Only” and so I didn’t end up driving into a ditch while typing a carefully worded but cynical comment.

If I have one Big Idea on high school math instruction*, it’s this: teach less and learn more. Find your comfort limit and develop your skills. Move on if you’re interested.

Kids who struggle with math could productively learn to apply arithmetic, geometry, and a little bit of algebra. The next group, the bulk of high school students, could do a huge amount of math with all that plus second year algebra, basic trig, and some stats. Top tier really should stop at analytic geometry, functions, and more trig. We could teach so much math that calculus could wait until college.

We will never be able to do this, because everything in education is about race. Astonishing, really, why more people can’t grasp that basic reality. Pick any education proposal you like, apply race, and you’ll realize it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But individual schools like mine can still focus on helping kids at every point of the spectrum, even if we have to work through the state mandated structures for class sequencing. In terms of test prep, state tests might only focus on how many students were “college ready”, but we could focus on our average score. Maximize everyone’s score and celebrate that our lowest achievers worked hard to get every question right. This is, in fact, what we did the year before the pandemic. Absent that, we could focus solely on the students who are near the line and increase their pass rates, as I mentioned above.

My first five years at this school, I spent hours advocating for my vision. Chuck, the math coach, and I did our best to find a math path in our existing curriculum to route weaker students through. We differed on end goals–Chuck felt students should fall out by failing, I thought any plan that had students getting Fs by design was absurd–but we both shared the goal of homogenizing our classes so we could teach more content to those who were able and willing. In 2019, we took the top half of algebra 2 juniors, along with the non-honors precalc students and gave them prep sessions. This *dramatically* increased our college ready numbers to nearly half, when in prior years, before and after Common Core, we were happy with low 30%.

In early 2020 we had just started our tutoring groups for the state tests. Juniors still in A1, geo, and bottom half of A2 got skill review on the basics, to raise their confidence and willingness to try on the test. We also prepped the A2/Precalc students as described above.

Then the pandemic shut everything down. No tests in 2020, no prep in 2021 because of a different schedule. We get back in 2022, and the policy is now back to “let’s only give tutoring to kids who have no prayer of passing the test and promise them something they really need but only if they pass the test.”

And only as I wrote this did I realize that Chuck retired at the end of 2019.

Chuck, who endlessly advocated and presented at the district and administrative level. Chuck, whose emails reminding me to be sure to fail more kids annoyed me, but who was at least on the same page. Chuck, who was far more successful than I understood until he left.

Personnel matters.

That’s not the reason I originally began writing this, but once again, writing things down helps me find insight. Need to keep that in mind.

A couple other points.

When I mention events in the title, I wasn’t thinking of Chuck’s retirement but two other major ground shifts. For four years or more, major state university systems and their community colleges have completely abandoned remediation (See “Corrupted College” for details). In all the coverage, left and right, approving and disapproving, of the wholesale abandonment of SAT/ACT requirements in college admissions, no one mentions an obvious fact: grades are worthless. If grades are worthless, then schools up and down the selectivity food chain are going to acquire thousands of students whose transcripts say 4.0 but whose abilities are at the ninth grade or lower level. It seems to me that this will necessarily lower standards dramatically for college diplomas.

While improving math achievement for all students is a worthwhile goal and one I sign on to, my original advocacy for tutoring on state standardized tests was sourced in my desire to help students avoid expensive college remediation and for those of those who needed it, give them a better leg up to pass those remediation classes.

That’s pretty clearly  no longer going to be an issue. Thus, while I still think this approach is crazy and cruel, my concerns about their future in a degraded college system is less acute.

The second shift comes in answer to a question some might be wondering about: Why not Ed for Chuck?  Why don’t I volunteer for Chuck’s work?

My first response is hahahahahaha. Chuck’s job not only needed diplomacy and adminspeak, but also organization and focus. I’m 0 for 4. Moreover, Chuck had spent years teaching at an elite local (public) high school and had transferred here specifically to take on this task. He cared about teaching, but wanted to run a program, and taught less as a result. I care about teaching, and don’t like teaching less.

But the second response came a bit more slowly. Over the past five years, I’ve also undergone a shift in teaching topics, one that utterly gobsmacked me. If you’d asked me a decade ago how I would branch out, I’d have said my druthers were to still teach math, but up my quota of history and English. Ideally, say, in an AP Lang/Lit/US History class designed for bright kids who can read well but hate homework. I also predicted I’d be doing more mentoring.

None of that came true. Instead, I’m teaching with no prep (yay! more money, more variety, less boredom!) and running a program that I don’t talk about because it’s too specific**. But I am making a difference at the individual student level (from remedial to excellent) and the school-wide level with tons of money (which I need***) and  visibility (which I don’t).

Now, we can all agree that I’m an ornery cuss who seeks out the hard way every time. But surely, if I’m not looking for something that falls into my lap, I should take it and run with it rather than beat my head against a wall on an issue that is contrary to stated policy, requires endless handling and maintenance, and gives me no visibility except as a troublemaker?

Don’t worry, though. After I began this piece our district ended staff and department zoom meetings. Back to in-person, where I will inevitably mouth off.

*********************
*Actually, all subject instruction.
**Please don’t speculate, particularly to others. Remember how I wear anonymity.
***Not me personally. For the program.

Ten Most Read, Ten You Should Read

Eight years ago, on the second anniversary of my blog, I asked, “Am I a hedgehog or a fox?”  Hilarious, that I could ever be so deluded. I understand why my brain thinks itself a hedgehog, but it will just have to cope with reality.

I am a fox. Even at my lowly level of the word, this is a list only a fox could produce.

Ten Most Read Articles:

1. More than Gotcha: Kamala’s Busing Blunder— June 28, 2019
   The only item past its sell date. Most of my work maintains its relevance. But this article, outdated though it is, has a good number of my strengths on display. First, unlike the entire media class, I know how to search for and use relevant history. No one listening should have thought anything other than “that’s bullshit” when she claimed to have been on the frontlines of segregation in Berkeley, CA. But no journalist bothered to do the research. Next, I understood as no one else seemed to that she was essentially coming out in favor of busing.  At a time when most of the media (and all of Twitter) was wowed, I  pointed out she’d almost certainly have to walk that comment back. The other strength: sometimes I really hate people while many other folks are like, man, why is Ed hating on her and then later they go oh, I get it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
2. Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud–October 8, 2013
   I’ve kind of cornered the market in Asian immigrant criticism–not of the people, but of the culture, which I think is very damaging to American education. I wouldn’t make such a big deal out of it if everyone else weren’t determined not to notice. This was the first time I wrote about it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
   
3. Functions vs. Equations: f(x) is y and more — May 24, 2015
   A math curriculum piece in third place? Blew me away. But as I mentioned, curriculum searches are specific and get through Google’s recency bias, so they’re the one article category that still gets fed via search engines. I keep meaning to revisit this article because it had a very bimodal reaction. Mathy readers who didn’t teach were aggravated and confused by the article and told me I didn’t understand the math. On the other hand, a number of professors on Twitter understood my point  instantly and were very appreciative (and some later commented as well). I think the mathy folks thought I was confusing a system with a function, whereas the professors understood I was using an example of multiple equations that wasn’t a system to show students a difference they hadn’t seen before.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
4. Homework and grades–February 6, 2012
   I have relatively few strong views about what teachers should do. Homework is the exception. Homework is insane. Grades are fraud.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
5. Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing— August 19, 2012
   My first really huge piece, and one I’m still quite fond of. It’s getting harder to find data easily; more states are hiding racial and economic distinctions. But if you look at current data, you’ll see the same pattern: poor whites do about as well as non-poor blacks and Hispanics. Been like that for decades.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
6. Philip Dick, Preschool and Schrödinger’s Cat — April 5, 2013
   Canonical Ed on IQ.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
7. Binomial Multiplication and Factoring Trinomials with The Rectangle— September 14, 2012
   Another curriculum piece. I took a long time to make sure the figures and explanations were thorough. I hope other teachers get good use from it. Still the best way to teach factoring, even if your kids don’t use it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
8. The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”— July 1, 2012
   This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s all true, still. Every word. And new teachers have to come to grips with it every year.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
9. The SAT is Corrupt. No One Wants to Know.–December 31, 2014
   I am adamantly opposed to grades-based college admissions. But the College Board is corrupt. The international SAT is corrupt. And they’ve changed it in ways to make it far less useful, all in the hopes of ending the score gap, which was never going to happen.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
10. The Gap in the GRE–January 28, 2012
    Another of my favorite pieces that asks a very good question: why are genuine high achievers in verbal tests so less frequent than in math tests? Note that in the intervening years, the College Board and the ETS have eliminated all the verbal difficulty in the SAT and the GRE.

So there’s my ten most popular.

Then I just looked over all my articles and looked for favorites that also captured my zeitgeist (can people have zeitgeist?). I was particularly looking for self-contained articles–a lot of time I go down one rabbit hole and then get to the main point. (Yes, I’m thinking of those for my rewrite plans.) I also wanted a good sample.

1. Teacher Quality Pseudofacts, Part II–January 15, 2012
   This is a top 20 all-time post and was a steady performer for years. I almost didn’t include it; today it seems kind of old hat. But in fairness, that’s like saying 1933’s 42nd Street is cliché because it uses all the old tropes about movie musicals. It didn’t use them. It invented them. When I wrote this article, it was common wisdom that teachers were low-skilled, low-quality, and not very bright. Only the terminally uninformed, the amateurs and the hacks,  have made that claim in four or five years.  I like to think Pseudofacts has had something to do with that change,  because of the very easily found data I brought to light.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
2. The false god of elementary school test scores–July 30, 2012
   Another one I almost didn’t include because it definitely has the rabbit hole problem about Rocket Ship at the beginning. However, like Pseudofacts, it’s an early example of my actually looking at readily available information and pointing out the obvious. Plus, great title.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
3. The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform–September 7, 2012
   I wrote a history of modern education reform throughout much of 2020-21. This was a history of earlier policy. But the definition of fallacy I include here holds for the entire era.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
4. The Day of Three Miracles— April 28, 2015
   I don’t often talk about colleagues, mainly because for years my relationship with them was….fraught. Not bad, just…there. But this is not only a colleague story, it captures a conundrum that few people in education policy seem to understand. Access or rigor. Not both.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
5. Citizens, Not Americans— June 16, 2016
   I love this piece. By the way, Dwayne is married, has a kid, and is in the military. Abdul went to a top tier school and majored in pharmacy, and when he told me I want “Gack!” and he said “yeah, I know. Stupid move.” and now he’s getting an MA in nurse practitioner, or whatever it’s called. Haven’t heard from Chuy. Wing and Benny still teach. One of them is now department chair, and I had a lot to do with it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
6. “Get Out” a scathing satire? Get Out.–January 22, 2018
   I love movies, and I know as much about American diversity as anyone in the country, and I think this is a terrific review that isn’t at all what you’ll expect.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
7. Algebra 2, the Gateway Course–January 28, 2018
   Another story about colleagues, students, and really stupid education policy.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
8. Making Rob Long Uncomfortable–December 24, 2018
   Silly title, but you can listen to the podcast and see what I mean. It’s well-written, and captures a certain mindset among the centrist conservative punditocracy. As I wrote: “You could practically hear Rob’s toenails shrieking against the tiles as he braked to a stop.  This was not the conversation he’d signed up for. He was there to lightly mock feminists and social justice nuts, not crack witty, on-the-nose jokes with Heather about the racial skills deficit.”
   ignore me, lazy way to space
   
9. The Students of My Christmas Present— December 25, 2018
   I don’t often get sentimental. And I’ve put up Christmas trees most years since.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
10. Idiosyncratic Explanations for Teacher Shortages–May 31, 2019
    Here I raise an issue that seems quite obvious, but isn’t. We have thousands, if not millions, of unemployed PhDs who will never get a tenured job and work as poorly paid adjuncts. Why don’t they become teachers? After all, everyone says we need smarter teachers, right? There’s a cognitive dissonance revealed in the fact that everyone understands that a poorly paid PhD is acting rationally in refusing to take a better-paid, more secure job with great benefits.
    ignore me, lazy way to space
    I thought I was done, but 2017 spoke up, really pissed off. Why nothing? I tried reassurance. It was nothing personal. I wrote some good shit that year. Besides, 2020 and 2021 aren’t represented either. But it would not be assuaged and as my mother isn’t doing well, and this is a not only an ode to American schools but also a lovely story about my mom, an extra…
    ignore me, lazy way to space
11. What the Public Means by “Public Education”–March 19, 2017
    When education reformers wonder why everything went wrong, they should think about the thoughts expressed here.

Thanks for reading.

Celebrating the Decennium

December 31, 2011. I set a goal. The first ten years of the new century were a bit stressful and unfocused. The dot-com bust hit me hard. I found work but had a lot of down time. New Years’ goals helped force me to use the downtime in search of some other goal. in forcing me to me structure the year. In 2001 I vowed to follow through on grad school, a goal I achieved, but left me with more down time. The ironic outcome of meeting that goal was a radical and permanent career change in an direction utterly unrelated to my field of study–no surprise, really, given that my first degree was in English and I went into tech. On December 31, 2007, having spent five years comfortably living as a test prep instructor and tutor, I decided to get a teaching credential. I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach full time,  but it’d be a good thing to have in the back pocket. I got my applications done in a week, entered a program in June of the same year. Six months later the 2008 crash revealed that “tutor” is a luxury item that the rich cut when their stocks tank, so I decided I may as well use the credential I was studying for. Six months after that I got my third college diploma and second master’s that, for the first time, was actually related to my future career plans.

In 2010 I left off professional goals and decided to lose weight, and did, and kept it off  until I started sharing a house with my brother five years later. He was like an invasive species on my eating habits and it took me another five years to recover.

My track record with New Year’s resolutions having been pretty successful in the oughts, I decided to see if I could set a goal for my writing. By this time, I was deeply cynical (although certainly adequate to the occasion) about the prospects of regular publication. Most teachers who get published do so by singing the song someone else wants to hear: union advocacy, education reform, school choice, merit pay, anti-union. Find a think tank who needs a shill. That way wasn’t going to work for me. Some teachers get published because they write deeply and well about their topic (Ben Orlin, Michael Pershan), but I don’t drill down on any one thing. I had been published, and that pathway was clear:  write an 750-word op-ed with an uncomplicated narrative and easily grasped data and hope it captured some editor’s eye. I did this successfully twice, and three other times came close. But “750 words in an uncomplicated and easily grasped op-ed” doesn’t describe me very well.

By that December evening, I hadn’t even tried to write anything for publication for a year. I missed writing. But I also acknowledged another truth: getting published in the traditional sense would require endless attempts and eternal rejection.

Consider one of the more popular teacher writers, Roxanna Elden. She became a teacher in 2003,  came up with her book idea in 2005, spent four long years workshopping her book in writing conferences while looking for an agent. She started a standup routine to increase her name recognition. Her book got published in 2009 by a publisher that abandoned her category shortly afterwards, picked up again in 2013. Then she quit teaching.

I wouldn’t call Elden a teacher. She’s a writer who spent every waking hour outside of her teaching job working on getting published. Hey, more power to her, but I actually want to teach, not spend ten hours a day building a writing career.

Besides, it’s not just that I don’t want to take Elden’s route, but I actively find it….repellent. I love my job, and that means I don’t want to spend 80% of my time outside of work shilling and planning for a career in which I pretend to be an expert at a job that’s just the venue to what I really want.

By 2011, I’d long since accepted that a constant in all my careers was my disinterest in selling my wares. Fifteen years as a consultant and eight (by then) as a tutor had revealed a life path that didn’t requir active promotion. As a consultant, I got work through interviews for open positions, great references and an awesome niche resume. As a tutor, I got work because parents thought I was fantastic and told others. I never had a website, never did outreach. (The teacher hiring process came as a huge shock to me, and I still count myself lucky I found work, considering all my disadvantages and the lousy hiring environment in 2009.)

People who want excellence or experience and don’t care about niceties find me via word of mouth.  You don’t build that sort of reputation by spending all your outside time focusing on an entirely different objective. Besides, if endless marketing and pitching repels me, rejection outright horrifies me. So if my goal was to continue writing, I had to accept that my past two years of failure to publish would probably continue. I wouldn’t be capable of making the changes in my writing, focus, or behavior that might–just might–get me more recognition.

That night, I thought hey, why not a blog? I could write what I want, develop ideas, find an audience–and more importantly, find an audience my way, find people who liked my ideas without having to sell a middleman.

And so I began.

The first three years of this blog were successful beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I joined Twitter in June 2012, which did a great deal to build my immediate audience, but the vast majority of my referrals came from search engines. In 2016, something changed. Despite the fact that I was writing as much, my traffic dropped dramatically.  In the years 2013-2016, I got between 50 and 60 thousand search engine referrals–the vast majority of it for older articles.  Starting in 2017, search engines dropped to 30K and then kept going down. My writing output didn’t decrease dramatically until 2020, so that’s not the reason. My Twitter referrals have actually increased over that time, with a slight dropoff in referrals in the last two years, but nothing drastic.

I’m pretty sure my blog got hit by  Google’s recency bias, which really hurts writers like me who aren’t super well known but have high data value posts.

(For an example of recency bias that anyone can understand, try a one word search, without specifics. Like recently, I googled “Aladdin” and got hit with a billion entries for the 2019 Will Smith version. The Disney 1992 animated version is just out of the top 100 movie box office hits adjusted for inflation, and was the 8th biggest moneymaker in the country two years in a row. The Will Smith version had crap reviews but did hit #8 in the box office in 2019, disappearing from sight the next year. And as long as we’re being thorough, there’s a pretty famous book in which Aladdin made his first appearance? Nowhere to be found. Brave’s results (shoutout to Brenden Eich) are better–still top heavy for Will Smith but does include a lot of results for 1992 film and even a Time article on the character Aladdin.

That’s recency bias. No sense of context. If you don’t create really specific searches, then Google is going to reward whatever was in the news last.)

I am not blaming Google for my reduced output, nor am I terribly upset about the decline in traffic. The first three years of my blog exceeded my wildest dreams, but I’ve been happy with my audience and from a prestige standpoint, my Twitter audience is appropriately think-tanky, academic, and media-ish. But the impact of Google’s recency bias does bother me. In 2015, Amy Wax quoted my blog in a response to a letter. That was cool. I don’t think Amy Wax reads me (and if she does, someone should let me know!). She probably found the article in google, and that’s the kind of find that Google is making harder.

Coupled with my non-existent marketing and promotion department, it becomes quite possible that more and more of my work is just disappearing into the bowels of the internet, undiscovered by all but the most dedicated googler. That 2013-2015 had so many hits is proof of how many  people found my articles through searches. A lot of my one-off audience isn’t finding me anymore.

By far the biggest challenge I face in keeping this blog going is not “google algorithms are biased against me” but rather “I quit writing.” Beginning in 2018, my work was more sustained and took a lot of research. I enjoy doing that, but it was definitely reducing my output. The real crash began in late 2019, when I took on the Bush/Obama era history of education. I don’t regret the focus, but the timing was terrible. The work on that, added to the rise of covid19, the closing of schools, a complete reworking of the daily tasks of my job, my rage at the whole idiotic response and not incidentally, the disappearance of coffee shops to write in for most of a year, all contributed to a profound drop in output.  I couldn’t even write about classroom action, although I gave some thought to coming up with a Zoom chat session of my students and me. But the editing would have been brutal (removing names) and my god, in remote ed there was always grading to do or curriculum to change or Desmos activities to build.

Then, as I wrote recently, I’ve been having some trouble organizing my thoughts to set the groundwork for future writing. So nothing was easy.

I’m coming out of it. No promises, but I am back to thinking about writing and working on writing rather than having an idea float through my head but get overwhelmed by all the meta involved in crafting the argument and thinking ah, fuck it, I’ll tweet.

The last ten years have been a wonderful and productive era. I began my blog during my third year of teaching, just before  starting with my current district. I have used all my credentials; my boss knows my value. If my teaching career has veered in directions I didn’t expect, it still has brought me tremendous satisfaction. My blog recounts many of the experiences during that time, but also thoughts and analysis of and on a wide range of educational issues, and I’m very proud of it. Consulting and tutoring are short-term gig jobs; I have largely floated through life; outside of family, the list of people I’ve held as friends for more than a decade is a short one. Not just people, either. Behaviors, habits, hell, even restaurants before 2010–I drifted away after a phase or three.

Since I began teaching, I’m a bit more settled, for obvious reasons. While my closest work friend, Bart,  has left teaching (I still mourn him weekly, at least), I am now the fifth most senior teacher in my department (whoo!), and because of my multiple credentials I have contacts with colleagues throughout the school. I am known at the district, and for the right reasons.  The tech guy, principal’s secretary, and attendance clerks all take good care of me, and I still give them presents.  I even have more stable relationships with restaurants, particularly many local Starbucks and my favorite sushi bar.

I want to leave the area, but not teaching, in the next few years. That’s been a consistent objective,  and I’m taking steps to make it happen. However, finding a teaching job as a sixty-something isn’t easy, and I’ve got backup plans in mind.

But for the blog, I’ve got one ask and some plans.

The ask: While I can’t make Google change its recency bias, I would like to make sure my articles are getting read and found. I’m one of those writers who is read but not mentioned by a lot of people with large followings. To those people, I’d ask: hey, mention my work more often. I love the notes and letters. But from an audience perspective, even a critical review of some of my thoughts would probably do me better. Retweet my stuff. Mention it in your own columns. I realize the problem–professional writers are bound by clicks, and my stuff is rarely timely. But if you could do it occasionally, I’d be grateful. It’s about the only productive step that might get Google to recognize me more.

Plans:

1. Write more about curriculum. A review of my most popular articles shows that the curriculum articles are doing very well. Teachers looking for curriculum are specific in their searches, and they’re finding me. I’ll give them more to find. Let’s say, three articles on math curriculum.
2. Remind people of what I’ve already written. I’ve got about 350 articles on this blog. Hell, I don’t even remember all of them. So I will pick three topics and write the Ed equivalent of a position paper. My three identified topics: impact of Asian culture in US education, update on teacher credentials, and boy, wasn’t I right about how college admissions corruptions and fraudulent grades were combining in evil and awful ways.
3. I want to produce a book on my articles–not really because I think it will sell, but because it’d be fun. I’ve started this. So my goal is to complete “Great Moments In Teaching” before next year, with at least two new articles.

Regardless, I will write more.  I get too focused on one article that will take a long time, and resist putting it aside. The reasons for that are obvious (I have almost as many unfinished as finished articles on this blog) but it’s clear that unfinished articles are a price I pay for a reasonable amount of output. I hope to keep remembering that.

Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year.

False Positives

I quit writing about tests. And test prep.  Five, six, years ago? I still taught test prep until this year, always giving in to my old employer’s pleas to teach his Saturday classes. But I largely quit the SAT after the last changes, focusing on the ACT. I still love tests, still enjoy coaching kids for the big day.

Explaining why has been a task I’ve avoided for several years, as the doubt is hard to put into words. 

It was an APUSH review course, the last one I taught, I think. Class hadn’t started for the day, but one of my five students was sitting there highlighting notes. She was a tiny little thing, perky and eager but not intellectually remarkable and it was March of what would have been her junior year.

“This is my last test prep course. I’ve taken the SAT for the fourth time, took AP Calculus BC last year, and I’m all done.”

“Yay! How’d you do on the SAT?”

“2400,” she said, casually. “I got 2000 the first time, but I spent the whole summer in two prep courses, plus over Christmas.”

Boom.

Like I said, she was….ordinary. Bright, sure. But her APUSH essays were predictable, regurgitating the key points she’d read in the prep material–pedestrian grammar, too many commas. Her lexile level was unimpressive. Nothing terrible. I gave her some tips. 

This girl had placed in the 99th percentile for the SAT but couldn’t write a grammatically complex sentence, much less an interesting one. Couldn’t come up with interesting ways to use data (graphs, statistics). Couldn’t accurately use the words she’d memorized and didn’t understand their nuance in reading text

She was a false positive.

I’ve known a lot of high scoring students of every ethnicity over the years–and by high scoring, I mean 1400-1600 on the 1600 SAT, and 2200-2400 on the 10 years with the three tests. 5s on all AP tests, 700+ on all Subject tests. Until that conversation, I would have said kids had high test scores were without exception tremendously impressive kids: usually creative, solid to great writing, opinionated, spotted patterns, knew history, knew the underlying theory of anything that interested them. I could see the difference, I’d say, between these kids and those slightly lower on the score scale–the 1200s, the kids who were well rounded with solid skills who were sometimes as impressive, sometimes not, sometimes a swot, sometimes a bright kid who didn’t see much point in striving.

Every time saying it, though, I’d push back memories of a few kids who’d casually mentioned a 5 score, or a 1600 or 2400, that took me aback. That particular kid who didn’t seem all that remarkable for such a high score. But in all these cases, I was only relying on gut instinct and besides, disappointingly high IQ folks exist.   For every Steven Hawking there’s a Ron Hoeflin. Or a Marilyn vos Savant, telling us whether or not larks are happy.  Surely the test would sometimes capture intellect that just wasn’t there in the creative original ways I looked for. Or hey, maybe some of those kids were stretching the truth.

But here, I had my own experience of her work and her scores were easily confirmable, as my employer kept track (her name was on the “2400 list”, the length of which was another shock to my prior understanding). She got a perfect score despite being a banal teen who couldn’t write or think in ways worthy of that score.

Since that first real awareness, I’ve met other kids with top 1% test scores who are similarly…unimpressive.  98+ percentile SAT scores, eight 5 AP scores, and a 4.5 GPA with no intellectual depth, no ability to make connections, or even to use their knowledge to do anything but pick the correct letter on the multiple choice test or regurgitate the correct answer for a teacher. Some I could confirm their high scores, others I just trusted my gut, now that I’d validated instinct. These are kids with certainly decent brains, but not unusually so.  No shame in that.  But no originality, not even the kind I’d expect from their actual abilities. No interest in anything but achieving high scores, without any interest in what that meant.

It probably won’t come as a shock to learn that all the kids with scores much higher than demonstrated ability were born somewhere in east Asia, that they all spent months and months learning how to take the test, taking practice tests, endlessly prepping.

The inverse doesn’t hold. I know dozens, possibly hundreds, of exceptional Asian immigrants with extraordinary brains and the requisite intellectual depth and heft I would expect from their profile of perfect SAT scores and AP Honors status. But when I am shocked at a test score that is much higher than demonstrated ability, the owner of that score is Chinese or Korean of recent vintage. 

I don’t know whether American kids (of any race) could achieve similar scores if they swotted away endlessly. Maybe some of them are. But my sample size of all races is pretty high, and I’ve not seen it.  On the other hand, I’m certain that very few American kids would find this a worthwhile goal. 

Brief aside: when I taught ELL, I had a kid who was supposedly 18. That’s what his birth certificate said, although there’s a lot of visa fraud in Chinese immigrants, so who knows. He didn’t look a day older than fourteen. And he had very little interest in speaking or learning English. Maybe he was just shy, like Taio, although I’d test him every so often by offering him chocolate or asking him about his beloved bike and he showed no sign of comprehension. But then he’d ace multiple choice reading passages. Without reading the passage. He had no idea what the words meant, but he’d pick the right A, B, or C, every time. I mentioned this to the senior ELL teacher, a Chinese American, and she snorted, “It’s in our genes.”

I don’t think she was kidding but the thing is, I don’t much care how it happens. If American kids are doing this, then it changes not a whit about my unhappiness. It’s not a skill I want to see transferred to the general teenage American population. (That said, the college admissions scandal makes it pretty clear that, as I’ve said many times, rich parents are buying or bribing their way in, not prepping. And unsurprisingly, it appears that Chinese parents were the biggest part of his business.)

Now, before everyone cites data that I probably know better than they do, let me dispatch with the obvious. Many people think test prep doesn’t work at all. That was never my opinion  When people asked me if test prep “worked”, I’d always say the same thing: depends on the kid. “Average score improvement” is a useless metric; some kids don’t improve, some improve a bit, some improve a huge amount. Why not pay to see if your kid improves a lot? But I also felt strongly that test prep couldn’t distort measured ability to beyond actual ability, and I no longer believe that.

But I didn’t believe what critics at the time said, that test prep worked…..too well. I didn’t believe that false positives were a real problem. And the terrible thing is–at least to me–is that I still believe normal test prep is a good thing. Distortion of ability, however, is not.

As the push to de-emphasize tests came, as test-entry high schools came under attack, as colleges turn to grades only–a change I find horrifying–I could no longer join the opposition because the opposition focused their fire almost exclusively on their dismay at the end of meritocracy and the concomitant discrimination against Asian immigrants. I oppose the discrimination, but I no longer really believe the tests we have reliably reveal merit to a granular degree. The changes I want to see in the admissions process would almost certainly reduce Asian headcount not by design, but by acknowledging that specific test scores aren’t as important.

I have other topics I’ve been holding off discussing:

• why I support an end to test-based high schools in its current form
• why we still need tests
• how the SAT changes made all this worse
• how the emphasis on grades for the past 20 years has exacerbated this insanity
• why we need to stop using hard work as a proxy for merit

But I needed to try, at least,  to express how my feelings have changed. This is a start. It’s probably badly written, but as you all know, I’ve been trying to write more even if the thoughts aren’t fully baked, so bear with me.

 

 

Three Covid19 Lawsuits We Need

I was against masks and lockdowns and school closings in March 2020, so I’m close to losing my mind at this point.  I find this return to lockdown and masks infuriating, and no media institution seems up to the job of explaining just why it’s horrible. From Commentary to National Review to The Dispatch to Richochet to Fox News, the message is “Get vaccinated” and “it’s not our job to care about the people who don’t get vaccinated.” Sure. Fine. Whatever. I agree. That’s not the point, and by missing the point everyone taking that stance is little more than an appeaser.

What we need are lawsuits. I’ve been amazed at how few we’ve seen. Let the suing begin.

I’ve identified three lawsuits that need to happen. Two are obviously the source of much government fear. The other one isn’t even mentioned, from what I can see.

Lawsuit 1: Can Vaccines Be Mandated?

I am assured endlessly by Twitter folk that this is a no brainer. I’m….skeptical. Assume the FDA approves one or more of them.

The federal government can require immigrants to vaccinate, and I’d like to know why they are only now getting around to adding  covid19 to the list. The feds can also make life unpleasant for its own employees (and probably contractors) who don’t get vaccinated, without going so far as demanding they get “the jab”, as some so loathesomely describe it. Military vaccination mandates are  But permissible. I couldn’t find any source that disagreed with the  Kaiser Family Foundation:

The federal government’s authority to institute a general vaccine mandate is unclear, and has not yet been tested in the courts, though it is likely limited at best.

As the KFF goes on to point out, states have much more clearly defined authority (cf Jacobson vs Mass, Zucht vs King), although no state has ever mandated vaccines for adults. Employers? Health care workers live with mandates. Some states ban employer mandates. 

Bottom line, really, is that anyone who says vaccine mandates are a done deal are ignoring the fact that federal government has no case history supporting mandates, and states have never required adult vaccinations.  And the real thing I wonder about is whether the case law supporting state mandates ever intersected with the ADA? 

Finally, schools are an excellent control point for ensuring vaccinations, and while they do a very good job, it seems that a percentage escape vaccines without exemptions.

So 5% have exemptions, and another varying percent just gets away with not vaccinating. If that’s true for all the states, then even with mandates, it’s going to be tough to get full coverage.

Are Vaccine Passports Constitutional?

The difference between a vaccine mandate and a vaccine passport (proof of vaccine) strikes me as a bit fuzzy around the edges. Let’s restrict the term vaccine mandate for a requirement imposed by the federal or state government, while a passport is something that can be required by either government or private business in an environment where no vaccine mandate exists.

So for example, a private business requiring that employees and customers be vaccinated would want to see a vaccine passport, preferably one superior to a piece of paper with a scribble and a stamp. A government might not mandate a vaccine for everyone, but require evidence of vaccination to enter an official building.  Or a business could require proof of vaccine for employees and customers to be unmasked, but still employ and serve the unvaccinated. 

 Some argue  that proof of vaccine is constitutional; others say it’s not clear cut. I have no idea. Seriously, not even an opinion, although I’m far more in favor of the government just adding one more vaccine to the school list than I am a vaccine passport which in this era will see all sorts of new requirements once it’s created. That said when I consider the contortions that schools experience because of the judicial rights granted by the ADA and, separately, disparate impact, well. Let’s have that lawsuit, shall we? 

Can Governments Require the Vaccinated to Wear Masks?

I care not at all about vaccine mandates, am more troubled by vaccine passports, but am seething with rage at this one, and no one else seems to care.  Many call for people to ignore the mandate, but how will that help employees or government demands? Or, in the case of teachers, a government employer? 

There are dozens of lawsuits protesting mask mandates, for children–unvaccinated children.   Think about that.  Everyone is up in arms about protesting mask mandates for the unvaccinated, and best I can see there are no lawsuits challenging the right of the government or employers to demand that vaccinated people wear masks. 

Why not?

I asked a lawyer friend who shrugged and said first, no one is interested in challenging these mandates. He also said that the courts would defer to health emergencies for some amount of time. Great, I said, for how long? He said that a lawsuit might result in a government response that explained their standards, and most likely a protest that the mandate would be of short-term. Well, I said, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Once the government made that response, wouldn’t a judge be more likely to use that standard–or even question the standard? He agreed that was a decent possibility. I’m depressed that a judge would defer to the government for a vaccinated mask mandate under any conditions, but as absurd as that would be, at least a judge would at worst demand the government prove its standard and duration. 

So why no lawsuit? I am really boggled by people like Tim Carney and Jonah Goldberg, who agreed on a recent podcast that they were fine with a mandate if it prevented lockdowns (Carney said it again in an article.) I can’t bear such thinking and that it comes from “the right”, it’s downright disgusting. (When Carney and Goldberg moan that the right has moved inexplicably away from them, I hope they remember how willing they were to bend the knee to this bullshit.)

So where’s the lawsuit?

Do people not realize that if the government starts mandating masks for covid19, it’s a short step to mandating them for measles outbreaks, diptheria, pertussis?  You may think that’s absurd, and I hope it is, but there’s literally no difference. If the government no longer accepts vaccines as the last word in prevention. And yet I can find no one challenging this demand legally–and legally is what matters.  God help us all if the court system holds that the government can force citizens to wear masks any time it wants to. 

I am reasonably certain that the government is mandating masks for everyone because they are afraid they’ll lose the first two lawsuits. The loopholes for disabilities and disparate impact in the other two challenges seem obvious. And maybe all the zealots in pursuit of zero covid19 understand how reluctant everyone is to challenge a mask mandate for the unvaccinated. Because reluctance is the only word I can see for it, given all the brave, bold people calling to ignore the mandate.

As regular readers know, I’m getting back into writing after a long hiatus (and long intermittent spells before that) in part by abandoning the research component that would normally send me down a bunch of enjoyable rabbit holes learning the ins and outs of Jacobson vs Massachussetts and Zucht vs. King or the Public Health Service Act. But I am a damn good internet researcher and I can’t find any serious legal analysis of forcing vaccinated to wear masks and on that point, I’ve been looking hard. Misleading headlines of worried articles, sure.  But even a cursory discussion of the legal issues involved in forcing vaccinated people to wear masks, I can’t find. Maybe I missed something. By all means, let me know. Here’s a starting search. I went down four pages. 

Meanwhile, everyone left right and center is righteously demanding that the unvaccinated comply. Why the hell should they, if the government can randomly demand we wear masks despite the fullest medical protection any time they feel queasy? 

Far too many conservative commentators are more interested in mocking liberals and using the child mask mandate to push for their favorite school choice initiative. If you don’t see mask mandates for the vaccinated as the single most pressing issue–worse than making unvaccinated kids wear masks, worse then refusing vaccination, then you are doing it wrong. We need start there, if we’re going to push back. 

I don’t bargain with these control freaks and think the many conservative appeasers who originally backed or demanded these mandates and are now whining did much to lead to this appalling situation. I think it’s all a horrorshow. Back when most of the media was calling for a temporary lockdown, I was warning that it was a foolish overreaction that would be hard to undo. I don’t care if people get vaccinated and find the lectures are articles on “persuasion” to be offensive and condescending. I oppose vaccine passports. I don’t think children should have to wear masks. But none of these are as bad as forcing masks on people who have vaccinated. So let’s start with the most important idiocy.

Coins Dropping, Lights Dawning, and Other Impossibilities

So I was just snotty to Aaron Sibarium last night and now I feel mean. 

I should be gracious to the guy who took on a topic I’ve been howling about for months. My point: for all the hysteria about “leftists taking over public schools” as the ads on NRO podcasts bleat, parents have far more control over public schools than they do private schools and charters. The real CRT insanity is taking hold at the most elite private schools and is a much bigger problem at charter schools than it is at public schools. (When I was in ed school over a decade ago, one of my adjunct professors was leaving to start an all black charter school that was devoted to critical race theory, although she didn’t call it that).

Not that Sibarium mention charter schools at all, or even correctly identifies the problem with private school wokeness. I mean, he’s completely wrong in arguing that an ideological cartel of gatekeepers is keeping Dalton and other elite private schools from abandoning DIE dogma. That’s hilariously nuts. But he gets closer to the point here:

The challenge for both proposals is the college admissions process. In interviews with the Free Beacon, multiple parents expressed concern that elite universities would not look kindly on schools outside the accreditation establishment, which could handicap their kids’ odds of getting in. “The better the school, the more woke it is,” one mother said—”because all the best colleges are woke.” If Dalton is held hostage by the accreditors, parents are held hostage by the meritocracy.

The last sentence is where he goes wrong: like there are Dalton administrators blinking in code: “Send help. End cartel.” But the rest of it correctly identifies the real problem, which is that parents are more interested in access than education.

But the real reason I approve of Aaron’s article is here:

All this poses a problem for market-based education reform: For many parents, there is no market. Far from offering more choice than public schools, private schools may offer even less.

Hahahaha. Yeah,  no shit, Aaron! Well done!  Seriously–he’s maybe 25 years old and says the unsayable. 

And I was mean to him anyway, because first, he’s wrong about the cartel nonsense, but most importantly because of a tweet comment:

If you want school choice to actually offer choice, you’ve got to go after the woke bureaucracy that stifles market competition.

The sound you hear is the point whizzing over Aaron’s head.

The less important wrongness is, again, that Aaron gets the cause completely backwards. As he already pointed out, parents choose these schools for access, not education. The “woke bureaucracy” isn’t the reason there are no excellent conservative private schools that are a pipeline to the Ivies. Elite colleges manage that gatekeeping all by themselves. The “woke bureaucracies” aren’t gatekeepers. While I haven’t looked into it, my first guess is that the various organizations and consulting groups are full-employment mandates for well-connected spouses, much in the way we pretend that Michelle Obama had an important job at a hospital when in fact she got the job when her husband got important. They aren’t powerful. The jobs aren’t powerful. The jobs are mostly wife sinecures. That’s my guess, anyway.

But the really important issue here is way meta, and it’s in the opener: “If you want school choice to actually offer choice”…

Think about it.

Thirty years. THIRTY YEARS conservatives have been pushing school choice. THIRTY YEARS they’ve been howling about the evil public school cartels. THIRTY YEARS their only solution to any education problem was the wholesale destruction of public schools.

Result? Almost every initiative they won during a 16-year reign of bipartisan state and federal legislation was ripped out and declared a total failure by the voters and general public. If education reform organizations were held to the same criteria they demand for teachers, Rick Hess, Michael Petrilli, Nat Malkus, Matt Chingos, and a host of other think tankers would be on unemployment.

I do believe it’s finally sunk in that the institutions, private schools AND charters, that conservatives have been pushing as the right and proper solution to “government schools” are unrelentingly dedicated to the wholesale destruction of everything conservatives hold dear: free speech, merit, academic achieve ment, high standards. Everything that conservatives held the evil teachers’ unions responsible for is now more present, more powerful, and more destructive than before.

But here’s Aaron, offering a fix: “If you want school choice….”

Dude. Some humility.

If nothing else, the smoking, hulking wreck of conservative dreams should give them all pause. Perhaps–I’m gonna just throw this idea out there–perhaps school choice isn’t going to do a damn thing to achieve your goals. In fact, perhaps school choice is an actively wrong answer. Perhaps, given that the organizations you dreamed of are dedicated to your obliteration, you should stop trying to obliterate public schools.

Just a thought.

But in any case, stop offering fixes, Aaron. and everyone else. It’s time to acknowledge that school choice has failed in critical ways to advance conservative or even Republican agendas.  Be a little less flip with solutions.

As a Republican, if not a conservative, who knows public schools are a lot better and far more responsive to communities than the choice shrines, I have no definitive answers. But I have some thoughts. 

School choice gives power to schools, not parents.

The right to attend a local public school is near absolute. The right to attend charters, magnets, and private schools is non-existent. The school choice movement works on the fringes, appealing to the parents who don’t have the money to choose their kids’ peers. It’s not a serious universal solution. Parents know this very well. Schools of choice can always reject the kids and teachers they don’t want, which allows them to enforce ideological demands.

Public schools respond to community demands. Private schools don’t have to.

Naturally, conservatives get this entirely backwards. Never has this been more obvious than in the recent pandemic year. Yes, private schools were more likely to offer in-person instruction. Duh. Why pay for zoom school when you can get it for free? But charters were as likely to be in hybrid or remote as publics were, and for the same reason: parent demand. It was parents, coupled with idiotic state-wide restriction, that kept schools in remote. Every single take blaming teachers unions is goofy. Don’t believe me? Maybe Andrew Smarick, conservative and choice advocate in good standing, will convince you:

The comfort of citizens and parents in any particular geography—not missives from the CDC, studies from universities, or prodding from politicians—is proving to be the key factor in returning to normal. Indeed, though school systems have gotten lousy press for months on end, there might come a time when we see the behavior of American K-12 education during the COVID era as typifying decentralization and democracy in action.

And remember this: anywhere schools opened, teachers went back to work.

Right now, while private school parents are chafing at the woke theology their kids are subjected to, public school parents are voting out school boards and demanding their legislators ban CRT instruction. Public schools are a hell of a lot more democratic than they’re given credit for.

While I’m supportive of CRT laws, remember they’ll only go so far precisely because of local control. Go into any inner city school and odds are the history teachers are using CRT lessons to keep their kids engaged. Try the same thing in the suburbs of Tennessee or Florida and the teacher will be summarily canned.

1 in 3 teachers are Republicans

Do you know who they are? Have you bothered to talk to them? I don’t mean the Fordham Institute-sponsored puppets who mouth the choice dogma that gets them published, but rather the every day teachers who vote for Republicans but don’t think public schools are irretrievably broken. Like me, except probably in red states where it’s not instant suicide to come forward.

Might want to find out who they are, what they think, and how you could support them and maybe make more of them. Hint: best not talk about how useless teachers are, and “we don’t hate teachers, just teachers unions” line won’t reassure them.

Focus your energy on college, not high school

I have been writing about the wholesale destruction of college diplomas for years. It’s a huge problem. Conservatives correctly complain that college isn’t for everyone, but no one is pushing Congress to do anything about it. 

Weakening private colleges and strengthening state colleges is key to addressing the gatekeeping issues that Aaron correctly observes in his article. 

The best solution: Mandate a minimum demonstrated ability level for college loans (Congress) or state universities (state legislatures): Nothing too high. Something like a 550 SAT section minimum, or a composite 25 ACT. Be flexible–we could use more competition in the test market. This suggestion has HUGE disparate impact problems and will be the subject of endless lawsuits, so get started on it now.

I realize all of these suggestions, as well as a host of others I left off because of time and focus factors, are anathema to the people in a position to work on enacting them.  Because Sibarium’s article makes it clear that no one is rethinking things. The coin ain’t dropping. The light ain’t dawning. Textbook definition of insanity runs all through his piece.

But I’m a teacher in a Title I school, which makes me an expert in teaching people who take a long time to learn.

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This the first actual Ed_Realist article I’ve been able to write in months, so I’m not going in depth on these and didn’t have time to support with links to things I consider obvious. Spending time trying to craft this would add it to the large pile of unfinished pieces in my draft folder. So I just decided to put these thoughts out there rather than endlessly mull the best way to write this.