#American public school core

[lendmeurheartandilljustletufall]

lmao guess who just worked up the courage to google whatever the fuck a shovel talk is and gods am I embarrassed rn. It deadass just means "Hurt them and I will hurt you" and my American public school dirty mind was SO confused because I thought it was something inappropriate I cannot right now

[visuac]

our carefree escapades

[guardianspirits13]

Crazy how many formative events in our lives happened on a school bus

[gowns]

Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading - It's Not Just Screens

A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group. A friend recently told me that her child’s middle-school teacher had introduced To Kill a Mockingbird to the class, explaining that they would read it over a number of months—and might not have time to finish it. “How can they not get to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird?” she wondered. I’m right there with her. You can’t teach kids to love reading if you don’t even prioritize making it to a book’s end. The reward comes from the emotional payoff of the story’s climax; kids miss out on this essential feeling if they don’t reach Atticus Finch’s powerful defense of Tom Robinson in the courtroom or never get to solve the mystery of Boo Radley.

... Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of taking a narrative journey, making an emotional connection with a character (including ones different from themselves), and wondering what will happen next—then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.

-- article by katherine marsh, the atlantic (12 foot link, no paywall)

[black-fist-order]

This gentleman was a college professor in political science. He gives some intriguing insights here...

"Friends,

A political disaster such as what occurred Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.

This is known as The Lesson of the election.

The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.

And therein lies its power. When The Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom — when most of the politicians, pundits, and politicians come to believe it — it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives, and journalists approach future elections.

There are many reasons for what occurred on Tuesday and for what the outcome should teach America — about where the nation is and about what Democrats should do in the future.

Yet inevitably, one Lesson predominates.

Today, I want to share with you six conventional “lessons” you will hear for Tuesday’s outcome. None is or should be considered The Lesson of the 2024 election.

Then I’ll give you what I consider the real Lesson of the election.

None of these are The Lesson of the 2024 election:

1. "It was a total repudiation of the Democratic Party, a major realignment."

Rubbish. Harris would have won had there been a small, less than 1 percent vote shift in the three main battleground states. The biggest shift from 2020 and 2016 was among Latino men. We don’t know yet whether Latino men will return to the Democrats; if they don’t, they will contribute to a small realignment.

But the fact is America elected Trump in 2016, almost reelected him in 2020, and elected him again in 2024. We haven't changed much, at least in terms of whom we vote for.

2. "If the Dems want to win in the future, they have to move to the right. They should stop talking about 'democracy,' forget 'multiculturalism,' and end their focus on women’s rights, transgender rights, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, civil rights, and America’s shameful history of racism and genocide. Instead, push to strengthen families, cut taxes, allow school choice and prayer in public schools, reduce immigration, minimize our obligations abroad, and put America and Americans first."

Wrong. Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights. While Democrats might reconsider their use of “identity” politics (in which people are viewed primarily through the lenses of race, ethnicity, or gender), Democrats must not lose the moral ideals at the heart of the Party and at the core of America.

3. "Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda. They won over young men because of a vicious alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers and podcasts appealing to them. The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built."

Partly true. Misinformation and right-wing propaganda did play a role, particularly in reaching young men. But this hardly means progressives and Democrats should fill the information ecosystem with misinformation or left-wing propaganda. Better messaging, yes. Lies and bigotry, no.

We should use our power as consumers to boycott X and all advertisers on X and on Fox News, mount defamation and other lawsuits against platforms that foment hate, and push for regulations (at least at the state level for now) requiring that all platforms achieve minimum standards of moderation and decency.

4. "Republicans cheated. Trump, Putin, and election deniers at county and precinct levels engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress votes."

I doubt it. Putin tried, but so far there’s no sign that the Kremlin affected any voting process. There is little or no evidence of widespread cheating by Republicans. Dems should not feed further conspiracy theories about fraudulent voting or tallying. For the most part, the system worked smoothly, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to election workers and state officials in charge of the process.

5. "Harris ran a lousy campaign. She wasn’t a good communicator. She fudged and shifted her positions on issues. She was weighed down by Biden and didn’t sufficiently separate herself from him."

Untrue. Harris ran a good campaign, but she had only a little over three months to do it. She had to introduce herself to the nation (typically a vice president is almost invisible within an administration) at the same time Trump’s antics sucked most of the oxygen out of the political air. She could have been clearer about her proposals and policies and embraced economic populism (see below on the real lesson), but her debate with Trump was the best debate performance I’ve ever witnessed, and her speeches were pitch perfect. Biden may have weighed her down a bit, but his decision to step down was gracious and selfless.

6. "Racism and misogyny. Voters were simply not prepared to elect a Black female president."

Partly true. Surely racism and misogyny played a role, but bigotry can’t offer a full explanation.

--

Here’s the real Lesson of the 2024 election:

On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy — and their votes reflected their class and level of education.

While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.

In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90 percent is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.

The real lesson of the 2024 election is that Democrats must not just give voice to the anger but also explain how record inequality has corrupted our system, and pledge to limit the political power of big corporations and the super-rich.

The basic bargain used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do better and your children would do even better than you.

But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.

Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.

Democrats embraced NAFTA and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations gain enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.

They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.

They welcomed big money into their campaigns — and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.

Joe Biden redirected the Democratic Party back toward its working-class roots, but many of the changes he catalyzed — more vigorous antitrust enforcement, stronger enforcement of labor laws, and major investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, semiconductors, and non-fossil fuels — wouldn’t be evident for years, and he could not communicate effectively about them.

The Republican Party says it’s on the side of working people, but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous antitrust enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.

If Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts. As in 2017, these lower taxes will benefit mainly the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — their objectives for decades.

Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class.

They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.

In doing this, Democrats need not turn their backs on democracy. Democracy goes hand-in-hand with a fair economy. Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, as seems likely, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America. Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.

The Democratic Party should use this inflection point to shift ground — from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrism” — to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

This is and should be The Lesson of the 2024 election.

What do you think...?"

Robert Reich...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.

We're a decade and a half into the "common core" experiment in educational standardization. The majority of the country has now signed up to a standardized and rigid curriculum that treats overworked teachers as untrustworthy slackers who need to be disciplined by measuring their output through standard lessons and evaluations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core

This system is rigid enough, but it gets even worse at the secondary level, especially when combined with the Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which adds another layer of inflexible benchmarks to the highest-stakes, most anxiety-provoking classes in the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.

But the joke's on the middle-class families who backed standardized instruction over standardized funding. Their own kids need slack as much as anyone's, and a system that promises to put the nation's kids through the same benchmarks on the same timetable is bad for everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/give-me-slack-2/

Undoing this is above my pay-grade. I've already got more causes to crusade on than I have time for. But there is a piece of tantalyzingly low-hanging fruit that is dangling right there, and even though I'm not gonna pick it, I can't get it out of my head, so I figured I'd write about it and hope I can lazyweb it into existence.

The thing is, there's a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA "car cigarette lighter") didn't just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs. The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.

Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications. Think of the EU's requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There's a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs). USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it's so flexible that some people complain that it's not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.

And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up. We've continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I'd happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.

The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization – a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system – without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there's a massive opportunity for a commons to go with the common core.

For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about "persuasive rhetoric" like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of "Indian atrocities."

It's good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it's a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can't imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.

But there's nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds – for example, kids could also read core Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.

But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized "essays" for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they're easy to grade in a standardized way).

That's where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What's more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA. And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.

The closest thing we have to this are "marketplaces" where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials. As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.

Like I said, I've got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I'd be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.

It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like Git, but there's already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019's Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that's hosted at scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch's online version is basically a kid- (and teacher-)friendly version of Github. Find a project you like, make a copy in your own workspace, and then mod it to suit your own needs. The system keeps track of the lineage of different projects and makes it easy for Scratch users to find, adapt, and share their own projects. The wild popularity of this system tells us that this model for a managed digital commons for an educational audience is eminently achievable.

So when students are being asked to study the rhythm of text by counting the numbers of words in the sentences of important speeches, they could supplement that very boring exercise by listening to and analyzing contemporary election speeches, or rap lyrics, or viral influencer videos. Different teachers could fork these units to swap in locally appropriate comparitors – and so could students!

Students could be given extra credit for identifying additional materials that slot into existing curricular projects – Tiktok videos, new chart-topping songs, passages from hot YA novels. These, too, could go into the commons.

This would enlist students in developing and thinking critically about their curriculum, whereas today, these activities are often off-limits to students. For example, my kid's math teachers don't hand back their quizzes after they're graded. The teachers only have one set of quizzes per unit, and letting the kids hold onto them would leak an answer-key for the next batch of test-takers.

I can't imagine learning math this way. "You got three questions wrong but I won't let you see them" is no way to help a student focus on the right areas to improve their understanding.

But there's no reason that math teachers in a commons built around the (unfortunately) rigid procession of concepts and testing couldn't generate procedural quizzes, specified with a simple programming language. These tests could even be automatically graded, and produce classroom stats on which concepts the whole class is struggling with. Each quiz would be different, but cover the same ground.

When I help my kid with her homework, we often find disorganized and scattered elements of this system – a teacher might post extensive notes on teaching a specific unit. A publisher might produce a classroom guide that connects a book to specific parts of the common core. But these are scattered across the web, and they aren't keyed to the specific, standard components of common core and AP.

This is a standardized system that is all costs, no benefits. It has no "architecture of participation" that lets teachers, students, parents, practitioners and even commercial publishers collaborate to produce a commons that all may share and improve upon.

In an ideal world, we'd get rid of standardization in education, pay teachers well, give them the additional time they needed to prepare exciting and relevant curriculum, and fund all our schools based on need, not parents' income.

But in the meanwhile, we could be making lemonade of out lemons. If we're going to have standardization, we should at least have the collaboration standards enable.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

[moniquill]

Watership Down - first the film, then the book, is one of the most formative media influences in my life. I’ve written about it briefly, here https://i-blame.tumblr.com/post/69030937937/moniquill-moniquill-kucala-moniquill

but having watched the above video essay, I want to say more.

The first time I saw a deer up close was in my grandfather’s back yard; I was about four years old. I don’t remember the reason that my mom dropped me off at my grandfather’s house for an afternoon, but I know that it was unplanned - because he was in the middle of processing a deer. It had been field dressed, organs already removed, and was hanging by its ankle tendons from the t-shaped steel pole at one end of the backyard clothesline. I was startled, worried, concerned that the animal was hurt. There was blood! There was flesh!

My grandfather responded by calmly explaining what he was doing, step by step. Explaining why he was skinning the deer, and quartering it, taking it from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venison

He talked about hunting, and about gratitude, and about humans and our proper place in the world - what meant to live in a good way.

By the time my grandfather was cooking tenderloin medallions and plating them up to me with grape jelly (don’t knock grape jelly on meat until you’ve tried it!) and instant mashed potatoes, I wasn’t startled or concerned anymore. I had a deeper understanding of the way the world worked, of my role as a consumer, a predator. Of the responsibilities that entailed. I couldn’t have explained it then, of course, with my 4-year-old mind and vocabulary - but Philosophy had been set into motion. This is a core memory for me. 

I did not have nightmares about the butchered deer. 

I was six when I first saw Disney’s Bambi. I DID have nightmares about that; between Bambi and The Land Before Time, I was absolutely convinced that my mother was going to die. That I was being presented with these media themes to educate and prepare me for that eventuality. I am the youngest daughter of a youngest daughter, and I have an extended tribal family. My grandfather died when I was six. His was one of many funerals I attended at that age; his generation succumbing to age and illness. I was aware of mortality. 

I wasn’t a ‘normal’ child, by the standard of the community that I went to school in. I was too poor, too indigenous, too very obviously autistic (without being diagnosed). I had very different media influences and interests than the other kids at my public school. No one else was deeply obsessed with David Attenborough’s documentaries (Life on Earth 1979, The Living Planet 1984, Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives 1989). No one else had even heard of Dot and the Whale. No one else in my class had Lifeways Lessons classes, because they didn’t have tribes.  

I wasn’t terribly interested in most media intended for children; it was boring because it was simple. I didn’t feel motivated to watch Disney movies over and over. Don Bleuth films had more staying power in my mind; An American Tale, All Dogs Go To Heaven, The Land Before Time. More complex stories, stories that confront suffering and death. My mom read me CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein, Jack London and EB White - lots of other stories that were not ‘age appropriate’, stories that were written for People, not Children.

I watched Watership Down for the first time when I was about five, and my mom read the book to me when I was about six. I was not disturbed by the violence, being far more interested in the themes explored in the video essay above. I had, by this time, seen a rabbit skinned IRL. I’d eaten rabbit stew. 

I did not have nightmares about Watership Down. 

I failed to make friends with the kids at school, for the most part - I primarily socialized with my cousins. In fourth grade (age 9), my class did a unit on tropical rainforests, and I brought in this video: I did not think that there was anything at all controversial about it, but at about 32 minutes in David Attenborough talks about the Guarani people and their traditional ways of life. There’s footage of an unclothed man climbing a tree. His penis is briefly visible. THE CLASS WENT WILD, and the teacher rushed to turn the video off, and I was sent to the office. It caused a school-wide incident, and bringing in videos was thereafter banned. I was deeply, deeply confused by this series of events. The video had come from the public library - how could it possible be offensive? But the incident became a vector of bullying that followed me until middle school - the adults had confirmed to the kids that I had done something taboo, that I was fundamentally wrong in some way. I quietly came to the conclusion that Most People(���) are very stupid and very reactionary, that one has to carefully coddle and explain things to them. 

It took me many years to only mostly overcome that conclusion.

Later that same year, I had my first real success in making a childhood friend - someone who came to my house after school and had sleepovers and such. She had transferred from another school and didn’t know I was THE WEIRD GIRL the way my other classmates did. I remember trying to introduce my favorite movies to her, as she introduced her favorites to me. She was a Horse Girl(™) and much more interested in Age Appropriate Girl Things than I was, but we shared a love of My Little Pony - I had a bunch of episodes on VHS, recorded off TV. She thought that https://mylittleponyg1.fandom.com/wiki/Rescue_at_Midnight_Castle was ‘too scary’ and preferred https://mylittleponyg1.fandom.com/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_The_Movie. 

I showed her Watership Down. She freaked out about it. It gave her nightmares.

She was, as many people, deeply disturbed by the violence of the film. She had not, at the age of nine, seen animals butchered. She didn’t seem to care about the deeper meanings and philosophical treatises presented; the fact that there was violence and death was too shocking.

I’m not sure how to conclude this essay, except with this: Watership Down is now a litmus test, for me. If a person is aware of it and appreciates it, we’re intellectual compatible. If a person’s whole reaction is shock and disgust and cries of ‘nightmare fuel!’ then we are not.

[eternal-echoes]

The poll

I don't think it's just that; I think more and more people are realizing that every child deserves a mother and a father and legalizing gay marriage deliberately deprives a kid of one of them. Orphans and children of single parents always long for their missing parents.

While there are unfortunate circumstances like death of a parent or divorcing an abusive spouse that makes it inevitable, ultimately since children are made through the biological union of a man and woman, their spiritual relationship with them should be preserved.

Since we're not just a material being, we're also of both body and soul. Not Cartesian dualism but Hylomorphism where the union of body and soul makes one nature.

The only two ways a gay couple can have a baby is either through surrogacy and/or adoption. Along with its ethical concerns with buying a baby, a gay couple taking a newly born baby from his/her mother is depriving that child with the much needed bonding time with the mother (i.e. breastfeeding, cuddling, etc). It's illegal to sell a puppy within 8 weeks of birth because it would be too cruel to separate it from its mother,* then how much more devastating would it be when it comes to a human child? And a child's need for a mother doesn't stop when he/she no longer needs to be breastfed, the mother is essential for the child's emotional maturity as well.

Here is a video of Ryan T. Anderson back in 2014. I'll highlight some important points but the whole video is really good.

Marriage exists to unite a man and a woman as husband and wife to then be equipped to be mother and father to any children that that union produces. It's based on the biological fact that men and women are distinct and complementary, it's based on the anthropological truth that reproduction requires a man and a woman, it's based on the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father. ... Marriage is the institution that different cultures and societies, across time and place, developed to maximize the likelihood that that man commits to that woman, and then the two of them take responsibility to raise that child. Part of this is based on the reality: there's no such thing as parenting in the abstract; there's mothering and there's fathering. Men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise. Rutgers sociologist professor David Popenoe writes, "The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender differentiating parenting is important for human development and the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable." He then concludes, "we should disavow the notion that mommies can make good daddies, just as we should disavow the popular notion that daddies can make good mommies. The two sexes are different to the core and each is necessary, culturally and biologically for the optimal development of a human being." ... The impact of marriage. So why does marriage matter for public policy? Perhaps there's no better way to analyze this than looking to our own president, President Barrack Obama: "We know the statistics that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They're more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundation of our community are weaker because of it." ... President Obama sums it up very well: what we've seen in the past 50 years since the War on Poverty began, is that the family has collapsed. At one point in America virtually every child was given the gift of a married mother and father, those numbers right now: it's more than 50% of Hispanics children are born outside of wedlock, more than 70% of African Americans are born outside of wedlock. And the consequences for those children are really serious. The State's interest in marriage is not that it cares about my love life, or your love life, or anyone's love life just for the sake of romance. The State's interest in marriage is ensuring that those kids have fathers who are involved in their lives. ... If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads, how will we insist that fathers are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional? ... Think about the social consequences if that's the direction the slippery slope in which marriage redefinition would go. For every additional sexual partner I have, and for the shorter lived those relationships are, the greater the chances that I create children with multiple women, without commitment with either to those mothers or to those kids. It increases the likelihood of creating fragmented families and then big government will step in to pick up the pieces with a host of welfare programs that truly drain the economic prospects of all of our states. ... So for all those reasons this is why the State and all states have an interest in preserving the definition of marriage as a union, permanent and exclusive of a man and a woman.

Also an article supporting some of Ryan T. Anderson's points:

It’s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you’re not poor.

The reason for this is that fathers tend to be the disciplinarian in the family. They provide the moral framework in his children's lives.

Reminder that even though the Catholic Church does not support gay marriage, it doesn't mean that she hates gay people. There is a ministry called Courage International where people with same-sex attractions are encourage to live chaste and holy lives.

*Original wording taken from here.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bridget Phetasy

Published: Jun 22, 2023

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why?

In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”

“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Glenn Greenwald largely agrees: “What destroyed the culture war consensus was their cynical and self-interested decision to transform the LGBT cause into one that no longer focused on the autonomy of adult Americans to live freely — which most people support — but instead to demand the right to influence and indoctrinate other people’s children.”

“They are calling them ‘trans kids’ and medicalizing them at an early age. Lying about puberty blockers. Lying about young girls getting irreversible surgery and so on,” says trans man Buck Angel.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and with bipartisan support it seemed there was a consensus on this one culture war issue, as well as broad support for the legal rights of trans adults to be free from discrimination. The war was largely won. But rather than shutting up shop or refocusing their efforts on parts of the world where gay and lesbian people faced serious discrimination, activists and NGOs moved onto the transgender issue.

“There are countries in the world where you can be executed for being gay,” says James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “That’s what the Human Rights Campaign [America’s foremost LGBT campaign group] should be saving its ire for.”

An average person will likely refer to this shift as “woke” and wonder how “the trans stuff” is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Parents are baffled when three out of four of their twelve-year-old daughter’s friend group “identify” as boys or, even more confusingly, nonbinary. People started putting pronouns in their social media bios, on their work résumés and in their email signatures. Biological men are competing in women’s sports and being placed in women’s prisons. In medical magazines and birthing classes, women are suddenly referred to by dehumanizing terms such as “birthing persons” and “uterus havers.”

“It’s like a new enforced public holiday thing and people smell a rat,” says Douglas Murray. “The wiser people realize that something weird is being smuggled in. This isn’t just like, ‘don’t beat up your gay neighbor.’ It’s like ‘there is no such thing as gender.’ ‘There is no such thing as sex.’”

We’ve arrived here thanks to a confluence of forces. Perpetual victimhood pushed by activist groups that need a reason to exist and continue collecting money. The corporatization of Pride. The hijacking of the movement by gender ideology.

“You can’t dress toddlers up in extreme political propaganda while lecturing the parents on committing child abuse for not transitioning their kids and expect everyone to keep quiet,” trans writer Chad Felix Greene tells me.

To a normal, not especially political person going about their life, it can seem like gay culture is everywhere. Pride was once just a day to have fun, go to a parade, and “for those who have just come out as a way to cement their self-confidence in public” as Sullivan says. Now every June it becomes “the Holy Month of Pride” as Murray dubs it. Corporations change their social media logos to rainbows (unless, of course, it’s their Saudi account). Pride™️ has become so accepted it’s inescapable. 

On the surface this might look like capitalism at work. These companies just want the gay dollar! Though there’s some truth to that, there’s also an undertow dragging these huge corporations down. They aren’t making decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders; they are acting out of concern for their social credit score.

“These corporations aren’t getting any gay dollars from these fiascos. Gays hate corporations at Pride,” said publicist Mitchell Jackson. “Worst of all, these corporate campaigns just backfire on LGBTQ people. Gay rights are now being threatened again because big-box stores needed to sell tucking underwear.”

Jackson is exasperated that corporations listen to the advocacy groups in an attempt to do the right thing: “Corporations go to these groups for advice, hoping to avoid a woke controversy, and they get led into a hornet’s nest — and then these non-profits can fundraise off of the Bud Light controversy of the week.”

“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” Greenwald says. “When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up. They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”

“It’s so tragic because we’ve reached this moment when gay people have finally won mainstream acceptance for the first time in, like, 2,000 years of history,” Kirchick said. “It’s OK to be gay pretty much everywhere in America — and there are obviously pockets where it’s still a problem, I’m not gonna deny that — but majorities of Republicans support gay marriage. I’ve seen it in my own life as a thirty-nine-year-old gay man: it’s a lot easier to be gay now than it was six years ago. And just when we’ve reached this moment, these activists have decided, in our name as gay people, to just piss off America and to make them think that we are a threat to their children.”

“I am so upset that my community has been co-opted and has been used for some other agenda,” Angel told me. “The work we have done to get here is profound and should never be forgotten. All we want is to live our lives just like you, but of course that’s not what you see now with the people driving the LGBTQIA+++++ bus.”

The real slippery slope hasn’t been the gay rights movement, as right-wing pundits often say. “When I see some of them going after Pride, they appear to blame gay people for the nonsense peddled in the name of Pride today — when in truth gay people are the victims of it,” comedian Andrew Doyle said. 

At the heart of the problem is the fact that LGBT was never the package deal that most people consider it to be. “LGBT people don’t exist,” says Sullivan. “We’re very different from each other.”

Generally speaking, it’s “the Ts and the Qs” that insist it’s all or nothing. Trans activists demand acquiescence to all their demands no matter how insane and pseudo-scientific, push to allow men in women’s shelters and allow kids to be put on puberty hormones or you’re committing genocide. People are are increasingly saying, “OK — it’s nothing then.”

“I think gays and women in general are bearing the brunt of the gender ideology nonsense,” Murray said. “And it has itself piggybacked like some kind of parasitic entity onto gay rights.”

“Gender identity ideology is essentially anti-gay,” said Doyle. “Gay rights were secured through the recognition that a minority of people are instinctively orientated towards members of their own sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to break down the very notion of biological sex and claim that it is unimportant.”

Underneath the rainbow facade are illiberal forces such as “queer theory” that have been eroding the classically liberal foundation of the original civil rights movement that won gay and trans folks the rights they have now. We’ve gone from “love is love” to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist. 

If you’re confused, that’s the point; confusion and contradiction are features, not bugs. In order to understand how this happened, and why, you need specialized knowledge. The average person can’t explain exactly what’s going on, because it’s nonsensical, you can only intuit it; but call it out and you’re dubbed a bigot — and so you retreat, keeping your head down while the gender borg marches on.

The temperature has been raised further by the Biden adminstration’s unambiguous embrace of this ideology. The White House is quick to paint anyone doubting the wisdom of what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” for minors as a knuckle-dragger, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans support a ban on such care and many liberal, tolerant European countries have banned it or scaled it back.

No wonder dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who disagree with the idea of biological men in women’s spaces — or are confused about the pseudo-religious idea that you were born in the wrong body, and wonder whether or not pausing puberty is even possible — are terrified to speak out. 

“It was once ‘live-and-let-live’ said Sullivan, “Now it’s ‘embrace the ideology — or else.’”

Herein lies the problem with Pride. You can no longer opt out of the ideology. The trans activism changed everything. It is coercive. It is everywhere. Big Tech acts as an enforcer, in conjunction with the state, policing language, pronouns, exacting punishments for refusing to repeat the mantras “trans women are women” and “gender-affirming care is reproductive freedom.”

“I know many gay activists from yesteryear who are coming out of retirement to address this new anti-gay movement which has usurped Pride,” said Doyle. “It doesn’t help that all criticism of Pride is interpreted as homophobic or transphobic. These are important conversations. Like most culture-war issues, we need to stop thinking of this in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. These things are irrelevant. There are left-wing gay people and right-wing gay people — and all of them are harmed by Pride in its current form.”

The backlash is veering into a full-blown moral panic. “I’m seeing a lot more people online talking about gay people as though we are all pedophiles who want to groom children into becoming cross-dressing strippers, and a lot of what’s going on feels like good old-fashioned bigotry rearing its ugly head once again,” said Herzog.

Might the public backlash to Pride push moderates and independents to the left the way the overturning of Roe v. Wade did? From an optics perspective, attacking Pride can often look like attacking the whole LGBT community; just from what I’ve witnessed online, an unsettling amount of homophobia is rearing its head, using boycotts as cover for bigotry. Last week a video went viral that showed Muslim children stomping on the rainbow flag while their parents cheered them on.

“I don’t want to name names but there are certain conservative commentators who are using the backlash against LGBTQIA plus to include a backlash against gays,” says Murray. “But I think it’s inevitable because not enough gays try to do the decoupling that I’ve tried to do myself in recent years and say, ‘Sorry, not my party.’”

Yet the decoupling has begun and it seems to be the only way to navigate our way out of this moment without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. #LGBwithouttheTQ and the #LGB have been trending on Twitter almost every day in June. Even if people don’t understand the forces at work, I think most Americans are smart enough to make the distinction between their gay loved ones and friends and some of the more insane gender stuff.

Like most things, this requires nuance. “You have to say, ‘we respect the rights of adults to undergo a gender transition,’” says Kirchick. “And ‘we want full equality and non-discrimination for transgender people in society, but there are real live debates about at what age it’s appropriate to administer these sorts of medical treatment to kids.’”

“Keep biological sex as a central characteristic in the law and culture,” Sullivan says. “Gender can be added, but can’t replace.”

“I think many LGBT people see this mess but are scared to lose friends and community if they speak up,” said Angel. “But it’s our duty as LGBT members to call this out. To show the world that these people are not a representation of us.”

[bitterrobin]

Things I hate/dislike about Fanon-Damian Wayne

AKA me just bitching about the various icks of Damian portrayals in fanon that range from weirdly racist things to a blatant misunderstanding of the core character.

Whitewashing - not only in art, but in descriptions; making Damian pale or white, an "exact copy of Bruce" and having blue eyes. He'll share features with Bruce of course, but it's rare I see anyone describe him with traits from Talia or Ras or Melisande. Y'know he's still half Arab/Chinese despite Bruce being white. He should have, at the very least, a shade of brown skin and non-blue eyes.

Describing Damian like an animal (hissing, biting, clawing), calling him feral or rabid - I already have a post about how its pretty racist to constantly describe a poc character like this, so I won't go any further here. Also, rabid, really? Anyone who calls Damian that will die by my hand because it's so genuinely ignorant that I just can't excuse it.

Overuse of terms like "Blood Son", gremlin, "Demon Spawn", "Satan" - these spawned completely in fandom and its gotten to the point that I will immediately click off something if its included. Just stop using these as shorthand to describe him or joke about him. Come up with something else, or maybe just don't include Damian in a fic if he's only there to get made fun of.

Connected to the "Blood Son" term, making Damian obsessed with his biological status as Bruce's child and making him demean his adopted siblings/other adopted characters - he's only had a couple instances of this in canon comics. Once, in his introduction in the fight with Tim written by Grant Morrison when his character was still being fleshed out. Again, in a fight with Tim in Red Robin when Damian is mostly being written as an antagonist and not a character of his own. It frustrates me to no end when this is brought up because Damian's status with being Bruce's son has nothing to do with biological connection or genetics. It has everything to do with just being a son of a father that doesn't put any effort to knowing you and seeing him have deep connections to other kids that you have been raised to see as competition, not family.

Constantly having him carry around a sword/katana - this does happen in some comics, but its really not the main weapon he uses as Robin. A good majority of his time as Robin he just used the standard stuff (batarangs, grapple etc). The really aggravating part is when fics insinuate that he'd carry one around in public or in school.

Making Bruce's half of the family his good white saviors, while also making the al Ghuls evil abusers - if you demonize Talia and then prop up Bruce as a good dad who's done nothing wrong to Damian then I'm going to assume that you don't read comics and you don't have a good understanding of Damian's relationship with his parents. If you make Dick or Jason the good protective big brothers while putting down Talia or Ras or Mara, again, I'm going to assume the worst. Dick did not like Damian when they first met. Tim spent most of their time together as Red Robin/Robin hating him. Jason shot Damian point blank in the chest the first meeting they had, and then continued to threaten his life. Damian has never had a great relationship with anyone in the batfamily when he first appeared. Yes, not even Stephanie or Cassandra or Duke. With everyone, it took time for him to be tolerated much less liked or understood. Making them the ones who understood him and babied him from the start ruins his character development and his relationships with them. Only if you're writing an au where Damian is raised by Bruce, then it's excusable but still not the least bit right when handling the al Ghuls.

Making Damian ignorant or plain stupid, especially when comes to white American concepts - Damian is insanely smart. He knows what riddles are. He knows what metaphors are. He knows that Gotham is a city in New Jersey in America, and that American concepts like school clubs and sports teams and cliques and dances exist. Sometimes it sounds you're making Damian intentionally an idiot when you imply he doesn't know what a video game or a tv show is. Just because he grew up sheltered does not mean he's fucking blind. He's a kid who grew up Middle Eastern, not in another planet.

nitpick but Damian calling Bruce "baba" at every turn or throwing in "habibi" when you write ship content - I am not Arabic, but i'd feel the same kind of annoyance if someone wrote Damian calling Bruce "papa" or "padre" all the time, or randomly listing off Spanish endearments in ship fics. In moderation, it can be cute and appreciative. But sometimes it reads like you just discovered a new funny word and you're throwing it around for no reason.

Insisting that Damian should have learned morality or been punished severely by any of the bats when he first showed up - I must stress that none of them did jack shit to teach Damian any kind of morality when he appeared. Bruce met him, yelled at him, fucked off for a mission, came back and then promptly left him behind with Talia before they were presumed dead by explosion. Then Bruce straight up died. Bruce had very little to do with Damian in the early era. Dick, also, didn't really do anything in terms of actually sitting Damian down and explaining the Bat code or just general "killing=bad". He taught Damian to be Robin, and by that process, gradually got through to him about being a hero and a good person. You cannot expect good behavior from a child from the get-go if you've done nothing to teach that child. On that matter then, implying that Damian should have been kicked out of the house or beaten up on behalf of Tim as a form of punishment or a "teaching moment" is genuinely insane. You're going to abuse the already abused ten year old because he hurt your favorite character? Really? You're truly the pinnacle of an adult figure that he should respect /s.

Being annoying about Damian's attitude towards other characters - he's sarcastic and rude on purpose. It's pretty clear from the start to Damian that no one likes him, so he chooses to not like them back. If you cry about him calling Tim names, then I honestly think you don't have a high opinion of Tim at all if you think a seventeen/eighteen year old teenager would be hurt or psychologically scarred by a ten year old calling him a mean name.

Exaggerating Damian's violence and making people terrified of him - calling his fights with Tim "attempted murder" both undermines what murder actually is and undermines Tim's skill levels. The cutting the line incident for example. Obviously the action of cutting it was dangerous, but if you genuinely believe that Tim would have died from it or that he would regard it with any PTSD-level importance is (imo) kind of stupid. We always hear about the actions Damian takes around other characters, but never the canon reaction. In the 2009-2011 era, Tim was angry and annoyed about Damian. Whenever Damian did anything to him, he fought back. He would shoot back remarks, land a blow. Tim wasn't scared of Damian. They didn't even live together long enough for Tim to feel "unsafe in his own home." The second Damian became Robin, Tim left. They never lived in the same house since then, until the reboot, and even then Tim has been pretty independent and Damian has been away from Gotham more often than in it. Same deal applies to Dick and Steph and Jason and Cass, they never took Damian's actions lying down. He's just a mild annoyance to them. In fact, Damian doesn't attack them in their sleep. He doesn't try to kill them every chance he gets. He doesn't plot their demise. Every instance of Damian fighting someone in the family has either been; protective impulse, a reaction to a fight they instigated, or a sparring-type situation where neither of them are taking things seriously.

[specialagentartemis]

We talk a lot about reading comprehension and misinformation on this website, but learning how to slow down, assess sources, and fact-check is a skill. A skill a lot of us have not been called on to demonstrate since high school, but a skill that's vitally important in the modern world.

I'm in graduate school for the social sciences (anthropology) - critically assessing sources is part of the skillset we are taught. I've had people ask on my post about historical misinformation, "How can I only reblog things that are true? How can I tell?" And it's a good and important question!

A couple core questions to ask, about history, science, or current events, are:

Who is saying this?

Where are you seeing this information? Is it a legal scholar, a historian with a PhD, a museum curator, an on-the-ground activist, a rando twitter poster, a Mormon conspiracy theorist? For scholarly questions, look for people with PhDs and published articles; for questions of current events, look for what people who are actually there are saying and showing.

Who agrees with them?

Can you find articles from other sources corroborating this, or is it just one guy who is saying this? Conversely, do you see anyone disagreeing and correcting this information? Who?

Does this person have an ideological bias that might cause them to discount conflicting information?

Everyone has biases, of course, but some are obvious. A lot of revisionist American history is put out by Mormon groups to try to prove the literal truth of the Book of Mormon; ditto for history that seeks to prove various things in the Bible. It may be easy for us to laugh at that, but a lot of tumblr revisionist history involves inventing gay historical figures out of flimsy sources because we want it to be true. Is there a reason that the person making this claim might want this to be true? This doesn't necessarily make it false, but it does mean you have to require more robust claims.

What sources do they cite?

Do they cite well-documented research or well-provenienced archaeology? Do they have photographs of what they're claiming happened? Or do their claims rely on nameless, dateless, "I can't show you my sources yet" or "I swear I heard about a guy..." Do they cite any sources or is it "just trust me bro"? Are those sources that they do cite reliable, or are they circular? Do the sources they cite actually say what this person is claiming they say? Are they cutting out half of a quote, or ignoring conflicting evidence presented in the same source?

Is this conspiracy theory thinking?

Is this making claims that an individual or a group is secretly hiding information from the general public? Is it blaming one individual or group for widespread societal problems? Is it claiming that the only reason this isn't common knowledge is because Somebody is suppressing it? Is it claiming that the solution to a complicated political problem is actually simple and everybody knows it but people just don't want to do it for nefarious reasons? That's conspiracy thinking, and it's almost never as clean or easy as the claimant wants you to believe.

Just because someone is saying something confidently doesn't necessarily make it true, but also, just because you don't like something doesn't necessarily make it false. Ask these questions when you see a claim that makes you feel angry - or makes you feel righteous. Look for journalists, scientists, historians, legal scholars, who present their credentials and their sources. Look for multiple independently verified news reports or scientific articles. Determining The One Truth about things is not always easy and sometimes not possible, but asking these questions helps you assess what you're reading critically and evaluate claims.

[keep-both-eyes-on-trump]

I grew up in a swing state, in a rural county, surrounded by white people and steeped in traditional Catholic values. I grew up staunchly conservative surrounded by similarly conservative people. My neighborhood was all white. My mom once told me a story about how a black family had been run out of our small town. My school class had almost one-hundred fifty students with one black girl who’d been adopted into a white family and one native american boy. In high school there was one out gay boy who wasn’t even in my grade and six teen pregnancies that were in my grade. 

As I was approaching official adulthood, the ripe old age of eighteen, I was already drawing away from some of my family’s core values. I was no longer attending church on Sundays, to my father’s existential horror that he had failed to save my soul, having reached the conclusion that their teachings on the sins of queer people and the expected submissiveness of women were wildly off base. I was generally in favor of then President Obama’s policies despite my family’s overt assertions that he was one of the worst presidents in recent history. Though I had been a supporter of John McCain in 2008, unable to vote, by November 2012 I was in my first semester of college surrounded by more diversity than ever before and tentatively supportive of Barack Obama and even more tentatively hopeful he would win again. 

When asked, I told my parents truthfully that I hadn’t voted and received a lecture on my failure to uphold my civic duty. I did not mention that I was more than satisfied with the outcome of the election. 

Like many who attend higher education, especially those in my chosen field of social work, I became more and more democratic with my views during my three years spent completing my degree. By the time I moved to one of the largest cities in my state to complete my graduate degree, I was what Trump would refer to as “radically” and “dangerously” left and, as you know from my first post, voted for the first time for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

This time, when asked if I voted, I lied. I also began to test the waters, bringing up topics to discuss that I had previously avoided only to discover that my family was as conservative through and through as I remembered and more than a few of them were openly dismayed at how college had “libralized” me even though I had admitted to nothing. 

Since then I’ve remained silent when politics are brought up, when racist or sexist comments are made, and when my cousin called her gay principle “disgusting” for having a family photo on his desk. I’ve said nothing when family called President Biden a failure or a “fucking idiot”, claimed that women shouldn’t be president, and believed Trump did the best he could with COVID-19 pandemic, if they even acknowledged it as a pandemic at all. 

I stayed silent out of fear. I was, am, afraid of their reactions, of what they would say to me and about me if I voiced just how divergent my opinions are from theirs. If I said outright, “I am Pro-Choice, I believe in supporting LGBTQ+ rights and protections and teaching comprehensive sex education to children, I agree with universal healthcare and free public post-secondary education and student loan forgiveness.” 

I’ve lied out of fear too. Lied about voting, lied about getting flu and COVID vaccines, lied about being queer. 

And now it’s time to stop. And this is the first step. Putting metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper, shouting out into the void and entrenching myself in what I used to ignore. It may take a moment before I challenge anyone in my life outright but that’s okay. It’s the steps forward that count, it’s holding on to what you believe and speaking out in whatever way is achievable for you. 

If you, like me, find yourself surrounded today by those who subscribe to far-right beliefs, remember: they may be louder, they may be meaner, but you are not alone. We are here with you. 

The Watcher

[beardedmrbean]

A coalition of parents attempting to block a state law that would require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms by next year have won a legal battle in federal court.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued an order Tuesday granting the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction, which means the state can't begin its plan to promote and create rules surrounding the law as soon as Friday while the litigation plays out.

The judge wrote that the law is "facially unconstitutional" and "in all applications," barring Louisiana from enforcing it and adopting rules around it that require all public K-12 schools and colleges to exhibit posters of the Ten Commandments.

DeGravelles, who heard arguments over the legislation on Oct. 21, also ordered the state attorney general's office to "provide notice to all schools that the Act has been found unconstitutional."

The law had dictated that schools have by Jan. 1 to comply. Attorney General Liz Murrill did not immediately respond to the judge's ruling but is expected to appeal.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the GOP-backed legislation in June, part of his conservative agenda that has reshaped Louisiana's cultural landscape, from abortion rights to criminal justice to education.

The move prompted a coalition of parents — Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious — to sue the state in federal court. They argued that the law "substantially interferes with and burdens" their First Amendment right to raise their children with whatever religious doctrine they want.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have supported the suit.

In their complaint, the parents said the law "sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments ... do not belong in their own school community and should refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state's religious preferences."

Steven Green, a professor of law, history and religious studies at Willamette University in Oregon, testified against the law during the federal court hearing, arguing that the Ten Commandments are not at the core of the U.S. government and its founding, and if anything, the Founding Fathers believed in a separation of church and state.

At a news conference after the hearing, Murrill dismissed Green's testimony as not being relevant as to whether the posters themselves violate the First Amendment.

"This law, I believe, is constitutional, and we've illustrated it in numerous ways that the law is constitutional. We've shown that in our briefs by creating a number of posters," Murrill told reporters. "Again, you don't have to like the posters. The point is you can make posters that comply with the Constitution."

In August, Murrill and Landry presented examples of how posters of the Ten Commandments could be designed and hung up in classrooms for educational purposes. The displays included historical context for the commandments that the state believes makes its law constitutional.

One poster compared Moses and Martin Luther King Jr., while another riffed off the song "Ten Duel Commandments" from the musical "Hamilton."

Murrill said no public funds will be required to be spent on printing the posters and they can be supplied through private donations, but questions remain about what happens to educators that refuse to comply with the law.

The state has anticipated that the case could go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last weighed in on the issue in 1980, when the justices ruled 5-4 that Kentucky's posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools was unconstitutional.

Another state, Oklahoma, is facing similar lawsuits over a requirement that the Bible be part of lesson plans in public school grades five through 12, and that the Bible be stocked in every classroom.

When asked what he would tell parents concerned about having the Ten Commandments in public schools, Landry said in August: "Tell your child not to look at them."

[danketsuround]

An Informal Guide to Writing about School in Japan

Sorry for posting this so late! Thank you for your patience.

This post should be used as a general reference for when you're writing something that takes place in a Japanese school. I made this because there have been a few stories (and even real articles!) written by people who seem pretty... uninformed about how Japanese schools actually work, but please use this as a framework for your story rather than a complete Bible.

Note: This post is informed by two things - my experience working at Japanese public schools, and being an American. The things I include in this post will be things that stand out to me as someone from the states. That being said, Japanese and American schools operate very differently, so there will be a lot!

A Year Overview

1st semester begins in April, and ends right before summer break in June. 2nd semester begins in late July or August, and ends before winter break in December. 3rd semester begins in January and ends in late March.

There is a very short spring break between 3rd semester and the entrance ceremony in which teachers/staff are told if they will be moving to a new school or not. This is specific to public schools. Academies/private schools likely don't adhere to this exact rule since they're contracted for a certain amount of time.

Grades and Classes

In large schools, each grade is divided by class. Each class has about 25+ students in it depending on the size of the school. In elementary school, junior high school, and high school, classes are either divided by letter or number.

For example, if you are a JHS 2nd year in the 1st class, you will be in 2-1. If you are an ES 5th grader in the B class, you will be in 5-B.

Kindergartens and daycares divide classes differently, and are called things like "Rabbits" or "Lions" - I don't think there's any real meaning behind what animal they choose, though. The word for "class" in Japanese is 組 ("gumi"). When referring to a certain class, we usually just say - using the same examples as above - ichi-gumi (Class 1), B-gumi (Class B), usagi-gumi (Rabbits)

Ages and Years

Elementary school - 1st grade through 6th grade (Ages 7 to 12)

Junior high school - 1st year through 3rd year (in the states, we would call it 7th through 9th grade. Here, they say JHS 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year) (Ages 12 to 15)

High school - 1st year through 3rd year (same note as above, 10th through 12th grade) (Ages 15 to 18)

Homerooms

As stated above, each grade is split up into sections, called homeroom classes. In JHS and HS, a teacher will be in charge of one homeroom class as well as one main subject. Not all teachers have their own classrooms (depending on the size of the school, sometimes you have more subjects to teach than students!) but most of them do. However, that doesn't mean there is a dedicated "math room" or "English room" - instead, teachers will move to different classes, and students stay in their homeroom. In elementary school, your homeroom teacher will typically teach every subject. Of course, there is a teacher per subject per year. For example, if you're in a mid-sized junior high school, there would be 3 English teachers.

Between classes, students have a 10 minute break or so. This is so students can use the restroom and drink water (they can't do it during class) as well as prepare their materials for the incoming teacher. Class leaders will also go to the teacher's office and will sometimes be tasked with carrying materials to class or preparing something separately (like turning on the projector, the TV, getting white boards, etc.)

School Subjects

Besides the core subjects (English, social studies, math, science, Japanese, P.E.), Japanese schools also have calligraphy and home economics.

Homeroom teachers will also be asked to teach sougo (interdisciplinary studies) and moral education. I believe sougo is a fairly new subject that was added to Japanese curriculum a little over 20 years ago - from my understanding it's kind of like a psychology, economics, and sociology class all wrapped up into one. Moral education, on the other hand, has been described as "very Japanese" by all of my coworkers - it's like a "here's how we follow the rules", "here's how to be polite", "here's why having good behavior is beneficial for everyone" type of class.

Japanese schools also do not offer advanced classes. All students are expected to take the same class unless they have been put in the special needs classes for learning disabilities, mental health problems, or behavioral issues. Special needs classes tend to be taught at a lower level and sometimes a mix of grades as well. Special needs students "belong" to a specific class (like, 1-1 or 2-B...) but they study in separate, smaller classrooms (sometimes just called Special Needs 1, Special Needs 2...) Some students who need special care but are willing/able to join regular classes will have a support teacher with them. One of my students is partially deaf and needs careful instruction but can otherwise sit and participate in class like everyone else.

The Teachers Office

All teachers' desks are in the teachers' office. There, we prepare for class, have meetings, take a short break, drink coffee... etc. - and teachers who do not have a homeroom class also eat lunch there. Typically, all teachers who are in charge of the same grade will sit together.

Students are allowed in the teachers' office, but they have to state their name, their grade, class, and their purpose for coming. An example would be: "Excuse me. I'm Momo Taro from Class 3-2. I've come to see Kaguya-sensei. Excuse me."

Then, when they leave, they have to say: "Pardon me" (失礼いたしました). Some of my students get in trouble if they don't announce themselves properly or make a mistake in front of the wrong teacher!

And, a small bit about teachers' names

There are some Japanese last names that are extremely common. Did anyone see that article that claimed everyone in Japan will have the same last name by 2531? Funny stuff.

That's why a few teachers go by their first name. It's not rude at all when half of your staff is Suzuki and the other half is Sato.

Teachers, of course, follow the same formalities that students do by using [Name]-sensei with each other. It would actually be considered highly HIGHLY inappropriate to refer to another teacher with -san or -chan in school - unless you're extremely close and just joking around...AND you're both female...a male teacher would not survive doing that.

A Typical School Day

It varies, but schools often start around 8:10 or 8:30 in the morning, and students go home around 4. There are typically 6 periods in a day, with an hour break in the middle of the day to account for lunch and recess - yes, junior high school and high school students get recess, too! Though, older students often use it to study or have a meeting with their club. At my school, my students are required to read in the morning.

Students are really busy and have jobs around the school. There are class leaders - who come to the teacher's office to ask what needs to be prepared for class - and there are students who run the morning, lunch, cleaning ("souji"), and end of the day broadcast, and students who are in charge of grabbing and setting up school lunch in the classroom. Of course, there are club leaders and student council as well.

Uniforms (students)

Uniforms are required for both public and private schools in Japan. Some elementary schools do not require uniforms, and others do. It's extremely rare to find a JHS or HS that doesn't require uniforms, but they exist.

Some schools are more strict than others. The main points are: no piercings, no makeup, no unnaturally colored hair (yes, this includes blonde, but not brown, as some Japanese people do have naturally brown/light brown hair!) - skirt length, shoe color (white only), wearing a hat, jewelry, manicures/nail polish color all have rules mandated by the school. Some schools even have certain haircuts they require students to follow! If a student has long hair, they will usually be asked to wear it in a low ponytail. Of course, not every student follows the rules anyways.

They also have outside clothes called "jerseys" that they wear under their uniform. This way, students are able to change freely in the classroom before/after gym or recess.

Uniforms (teachers)

Teachers are not exactly held to the same standard, but it depends on the school. While private schools are apparently waaaaay more strict about what their students and faculty wear, public schools don't really enforce it at all. The typical uniform is a collard shirt and slacks, but teachers who are in charge of a sports club can get away with the occasional jersey/sport shirt and shorts.

Everyone who comes into the school must take their shoes off and change into slippers or indoor shoes (shoes you bought that you have decided are only for wearing inside and have never ever touched the outside ground before...)

We take our shoes on and off.. a lot. That's why most teacher's inside shoes are comfortable slip-on sneakers or loafers. I've never in my life seen a teacher lace up their shoes before. Hell, my inside shoes have zippers. It just takes too much freaking time!

The Thing About Shoes is...

I said some stuff about shoes above, but I wanted to note that the student and teacher entrance is different. Students have rows and rows of lockers to switch out their own shoes, which is (often) conveniently placed near the school grounds where they play sports.

The teachers' entrance is the regular front entrance, and we have our own lockers as well. There are shelves of slippers that belong to the school for any guests who come in, or students who forgot their inside shoes that day, lol.

Yes, yes, yes - we are required to wear inside shoes with no exception. One of my students was injured and in a wheelchair and he still had to change out his shoes, so..

Discipline

It's basically impossible to get expelled, and things like ISS simply don't exist in Japanese schools. Don't be mistaken - that certainly doesn't mean students do not have behavior issues - MY STUDENTS ARE BAD!! But they don't really get punished for it in ways you would see at an American school.

Most discipline is delegated to the homeroom teacher (or whoever else's class you're failing, lol). Some problems are severe enough to be escalated to a meeting with your parents or the vice principal ("kyoutou-sensei"), but I've honestly never seen the principal do any student discipline, and I've never seen a student be suspended or expelled.

Japan is really keen on making sure everyone gets an equal opportunity for education, even for students who have behavioral issues or would do better if they were homeschooled.

Now, corporal punishment is illegal in Japanese schools. Making students stand outside of class holding buckets of water because they forgot their homework (or whatever you might have seen from slice of life comedies..) is a thing of the semi-distant past. That being said, there is still no shortage of verbal harassment from strict teachers onto their students. I think the most common form of strict discipline that is *still* accepted is a teacher laying it on a student in the office, then sending them back to their homeroom in tears.

Yes, while humiliation sometimes hurts even worse than a ruler to the hand, no one says anything about it. That's the older teacher style. To be honest, younger teachers aren't strict enough with their students sometimes. Including me, cause I'm a pushover, lol.

Club Activities

Club activities are my students' entire LIVES. My students really like handball and track, and are sometimes staying after school 5-6 days of the week. It's not uncommon for students to go to school on the weekends or during summer/winter break. It's also not terribly uncommon for students to be part of multiple clubs, so long as they don't intersect with each other too much.

Clubs are typically anything to do with music or sports. It's not unheard of to have debate clubs, English clubs, literature clubs, calligraphy clubs, theater clubs, etc. either - but I would say that's more common in cities where schools have more opportunity to compete or perform with many other local schools.

A note about mandatory Education

Once you graduate junior high school, your period of compulsory education ends. In other words, you can stop going to school and you don't have to go to high school. You also do not have to have a high school diploma or GED to attend college, but you still have to find a college that will accept you.

Other random stuff (and debunking anime-ish myths)

In summer, students go swimming! They are required to learn how to swim from elementary school.

Teachers don't have smoke breaks during class. No one has time for that, and if you're caught by a student or another teacher, you're fucked. We do it by the 7/11 after school like normal people.

Cram school ("juku") is a thing and a LOT of students are in it. One of my students is in a swimming cram school.

Being openly LGBT in Japan is hard, but it's not impossible. There are some openly LGBT students, especially in large cities. For teachers, they don't really talk about their personal life very often (I think it's a bit taboo..) so I wouldn't imagine anyone would feel pressured to out themselves at all.

Bullying is a big problem, but it's also one of the most widely studied and discussed problem regarding Japanese schools. Some people like to say that it's much worse in Japan, but I would argue it's fairly similar to the states. Severe bullying (in which a student is physically tormented or abused) is less common than things like spreading rumors, singling out someone, or cyberbullying.

Extra credit is not a thing, but some teachers are more lenient than others about deadlines.

Yes, students are able to express themselves freely. They often do, very loudly and opinionated...ly. Or, uh, mine do.

On a test or worksheet, circles are good and checkmarks are bad.

Schools have a lot of various events, assembles, festivals, and school trips - all of which are organized by students and homeroom teachers who don't get paid enough to stay as late as they do ;D

We don't use substitute teachers. Usually the schedule will change or another teacher will fill in during their free period.

Annnnnnd that should be it. If you have any specific questions or need clarification, you are welcome to reply to this post or send me a message! I can try and answer them to the best of my ability. Every school is a little bit different, but this is truly a "general" "overview" of school life in Japan.

Thanks for reading!

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

The settlement of a federal discrimination suit filed by Jewish students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has severed their obligation to pay dues to the school’s Graduate Student Union (GSU), a major victory precipitated by the union’s endorsement of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Represented by the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), a nonprofit founded in 1968 which aims to abolish mandatory union membership, the students filed their complaint against GSU in March, arguing that its embrace of anti-Zionism discriminated against them as Jews as well as their religious belief that the Jewish people were always destined to return to their homeland.

The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, refusing to pay dues, but union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union.”

With the settlement, they are released from an obligation which they said violated their core beliefs and freedom of association.

“The foundation-backed MIT graduate students who fought these legal battles have earned well deserved victories,” the organization’s president, Mark Mix, said on Wednesday. “Forcing GSU union officials to abandon their blatantly discriminatory dues practices is only the tip of the iceberg: because Massachusetts lacks Right to Work protections, GSU still has the power to force the vast majority of MIT graduate students to subsidize some portion of their activities.”

Mix added that NRTW intends to challenge compulsory union membership in unions pursuing controversial political aims at other universities, including the University of Chicago and John Hopkins University.

“Foundation attorneys are continuing to provide legal aid for all those who challenge the imposition of radical union agendas at the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, and John Hopkins, and they are doing so for adherents of both Judaism and Christianity,” he continued. “But this ordeal at MIT should remind lawmakers that all Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason.”

NRTW is currently litigating another similar case brought by six City University of New York (CUNY) professors who sued to dissolve their membership in the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) public sector union after it passed an anti-Israel resolution during the country’s May 2021 war with Hamas. The measure declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity.

[mariacallous]

Few things are more fundamental to a society than its traditions. They guide our actions through difficult and changing times. They keep us grounded and steady. They build on the wisdom of our forerunners. At least, that is the way conservatives, usually, look at the world.

But on one issue—school vouchers—some conservatives are playing the role of radicals. The general goal of vouchers is to allow families to use government funds to pay tuition at private schools, including religious schools. The idea has been around for more than a half-century but had gone almost nowhere in the U.S., until very recently. In just the past few years, it has gone from the political desert to a core issue that is sweeping across Republican-led states.

The general idea of vouchers is radical enough, but the particular form of these new programs is far more so. Fourteen states and counting have now passed legislation creating voucher (or education savings account) programs that share some key properties. They are universal (or nearly universal), meaning that all families are eligible. They involve no meaningful public accountability or way to judge their success. They allow private schools to charge tuition over and above the voucher amount. And, finally, they are flexible in that funds can be used even to cover homeschooling expenses and other educational goods and services, such as computers and tutoring.

These aren’t just any vouchers. They are “super-vouchers,” as I call them, that promise to produce the most radical change, of any kind, in U.S. education in at least 70 years. It represents not just a change in policy or strategy but a rejection of three foundational traditions: separation of church and state, anti-discrimination, and public accountability for educational processes and outcomes funded by taxes.

In this post, I describe the threat that today’s universal voucher programs present to these traditions, and I attend to some potential counterarguments from voucher supporters.

The separation of church and state tradition

America’s education traditions can be traced far back in our history. While the U.S. Constitution does not mention education, it was an issue actively discussed by the nation’s founders, and other elements of the Constitution have a heavy bearing on education. The First Amendment includes the Establishment Clause, which prevents Congress from either supporting or limiting the free exercise of religion. This language has long been understood to imply that governments should not fund religious organizations (including religious schools), especially in a way that preferences one religion over another.

As a result of education’s omission from the Constitution, primary responsibility for education was ultimately delegated to the states. Education is one of only a few topics covered in every state constitution—with all states guaranteeing universal access and most specifically mentioning public education. To many, this means that education should be not only funded by the government but accessible to all, subject to public oversight, and, yes, non-sectarian (non-religious).

It’s easy to see how vouchers, especially the new breed of them, violate these principles. Vouchers provide government funds to churches, despite the historical separation of church and state. Voucher advocates argue that today’s voucher systems are legal, and our current Supreme Court seems to agree, but that doesn’t change the fact vouchers will entangle the government and religion. With any voucher program, the government must decide which schools are eligible to receive funding. Will the public—in particular, citizens in red states where universal ESA programs are most popular—be just as willing to fund Islamic, Hindi, Mormon, Jewish, and atheist schools as they are Christian schools? That’s not clear. Even if states treat all religions equally, some very public battles over religious schools will surely follow. Already, many voucher-supported religious schools have been the subject of front-page newspaper headlines regarding their most controversial teachings. We should expect this to continue.

Voucher proponents sometimes try to refute the idea that the separation of church and state for schooling even applies, pointing out that publicly funded schools taught religion in the early 1800s, with children reading from the Bible. However, a more complete telling of our history would note that the need for a separation between church and state became clearer as the country—and its students—grew more diverse. We shouldn’t use past wrongs to justify making the same mistakes today.

The anti-discrimination tradition

The U.S. Constitution, under the Fourteenth Amendment, establishes equal protection before the law. Ratified in the wake of the Civil War, this was meant to remediate the blatantly unequal treatment of Black people in every aspect of life, created by slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment can be viewed as reinforcing the accessible-to-all principle embodied in state constitutions.

This was not nearly enough, however, to provide meaningful access to Black Americans. Civil War Reconstruction efforts on education were modest and short lived. The Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision also established the principle of “separate but equal.” Even that low standard for access was not achieved, as few states provided more than a pittance in funding for Black schools. They were anything but equal for at least another half century. Then came the Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment and rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine in schools. The decision began to slowly reorient public education towards an anti-discrimination tradition. Solidifying it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin, and expanded the federal government’s authority to enforce anti-discrimination law in publicly funded programs (including public schools).

Most forms of vouchers undermine the anti-discrimination tradition. While private schools cannot legally discriminate based on race because of the Civil Rights Act, they can discriminate on most other dimensions, including religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, income, and disability status. Moreover, the protections against racial discrimination are stronger in public schools, with additional avenues for recourse available to public school students through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Discrimination issues often arise in admissions, and private schools leaders believe strongly in their right to selective admissions requirements. Put another way, private school leaders feel they should be able to determine which students get in and which get turned away. While not all admission requirements are inherently problematic, private school admissions practices leave the door open for discrimination. And with potential discriminatory treatment hidden behind opaque admissions practices, it will be exceedingly difficult to identify discrimination where it occurs. When schools are allowed to discriminate on one set of factors, it is difficult to prove that a student is discriminated against based on other factors, such as race.

This is not just an abstract argument. The conflict between integration, discrimination, and vouchers was plain to see in the wake of Brown. Segregationists searched for ways to sidestep the Court’s decision. One main solution they stumbled upon: school vouchers. They understood well that vouchers would allow them to continue their discrimination.

Voucher advocates might resist my argument about the tradition of anti-discrimination, pointing to supposed examples of discrimination in public schools. For example, public schools “discriminate” against children who do not live within their geographic boundaries. It’s true that some families cannot afford to live in expensive neighborhoods with well-resourced schools. However, public school boundaries, for all their faults, are designed to ensure that all students have access to a public school—one of the core tenets of public education. When parents drive by a school, their children might ask, “Can I go to that school?” There’s a big difference between answering with, “No, dear, because we don’t live in this neighborhood” and “No, dear, because the school doesn’t want you.”

It’s worth noting, too, that voucher advocates need the universal accessibility of public schools for voucher programs to work. With voucher-supported schools allowed to discriminate in admissions, it’s the guaranteed availability of a neighborhood public school that ensures that no child will be denied access to any school at all.

The public accountability tradition

In the U.S., school districts operate under (typically elected) boards that provide public accountability—specifically, democratic accountability to the electorate. This approach has been the norm since the early 1900s. So, both in word and deed, public accountability has been a core principle for longer than anyone reading this can remember.

More recently, state and federal governments clawed back some of that power from local districts, especially through test-based accountability policies. One driving force behind the push for state and federal accountability was rising education spending from these levels of government. Taxpayers wanted to know what they were getting for their money, and test results were one way of measuring the return on their investments.

Even if one prefers a heavier dose of market accountability—giving families more choice—the government is still an important partner. If we want families to have more choices, then we should also want them to have more information, which the government is well positioned to provide.

Today’s voucher programs are unwinding our accountability traditions. They’re allowing families to use public funds to send their children to schools that do not operate under elected school boards. These schools are subject to little, if any, test-based accountability, and they need only meet the minimal bar of accreditation to participate. The recent crop of universal vouchers even fails in providing the information needed for market accountability. Yes, some students in some voucher states will be required to take some type of standardized test. However, it’s unclear whether and how these results will be reported, and even if they are widely available, parents will not be able to compare across disparate tests.

Voucher advocates sometimes point to programs like Social Security and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as programs that provide benefits to eligible recipients to make their own consumption decisions with few strings attached. But these programs give little reason to overthrow the public accountability tradition in education. This is basically saying, “yes, our voucher program ends the public accountability tradition in an area so important that the Founding Fathers and every state constitution includes it, but that’s okay…because we also give money to the elderly to make sure they can buy groceries.” If you find that logic confusing, I don’t blame you.

The Great Unwinding

It is no exaggeration to say that universal vouchers are unwinding two centuries of public education tradition, from the nation’s founding days to the present. We are not just talking about any traditions. These are traditions with roots in the First Amendment and our state constitutions, and ones that have shaped the foundational contours of K-12 education in this country.

Voucher advocates might point out that the Supreme Court has reversed itself on vouchers in recent years, giving reason to believe that today’s programs are legally permissible. But U.S. and state constitutions aren’t just legal documents to be interpreted by lawyers and judges. They convey larger, foundational principles and traditions at play that have guided American life, including education, for centuries. The public broadly supports these traditions, regardless of what the courts say.

We do need to upend traditions from time to time. Brown v. Board upended the disgraceful mistreatment of and discrimination against Black Americans. That was a widely accepted step forward. Is it time to end church-state separation, public accountability, and anti-discrimination? You be the judge.