Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.

I'm reading "Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept./A friend and financial backer of Donald J. Trump’s, Ms. McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration during his first term, remained close to him during the campaign" (NYT):

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education....

So it's just something to talk about, not actually do. So what is McMahon really going to try to do? She's the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

[T]he America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding voucher programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.

The best-seller list is "a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression."

"Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence. I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept. I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular."

Said the literary agent Andrew Wylie, quoted in "When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job" (NYT). The NYT interviewer, David Marchese, had prompted him to talk about A.I. 

I'm amused by Wylie's blithe snobbishness: That's got nothing to do with those of us who deal in literature.

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in the style of Salman Rushdie and assigned a topic — the subject of the previous post on this blog — home schooling. Here's the result, which I presume Rushdie would find hilariously inept:

The president of the American Federation of Teachers performs vague surprise that "the reply-guys" wanted to blame her for the flight from public schools.

Ah, I see that the reply-guys are out in force attacking this tweet.

Look at the data: if we dealt w/ gun violence, had robust anti-bullying programs & provided more services for special needs students, many of these parents wouldn't feel compelled to homeschool.

— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩‍🎓 (@rweingarten) November 13, 2023

If you're not seeing the replies there — I know I'm not — then read "Randi Weingarten gets educated about exactly who is to blame for the rise in homeschooling/The American Federation of Teachers union boss shared an article on 'What's behind the increase in homeschooling'" (Fox News).

Is there some way "Twitter" empowers users to undisplay the responses to their "tweets"?

"Since beginning online learning, she explained, Saige has been liberated from hearing negative tropes about Black girls in the lunchroom and hallways."

"For one, the eighth grader can control her exposure to racial microaggressions. When a classmate wore a 'Make America Great Again' hat — attire that some people see as a symbol of racism — during a video class session, Saige simply changed her settings to view only the teacher. 'Although the violence is still there, she has the ability to maneuver in a way that she didn’t have when she was in school,' Ms. Aryee-Price explained... [S]ome Black families value keeping their children at home... to protect them from racial hostility and bias.... More than 40 [Black] parents [of 373 in a private Facebook group] said they appreciated virtual schooling because it allows them to, as one put it, 'hear how the teacher speaks to children.'... Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate education professor at the University of Georgia, studies why Black families choose to home-school. 'I’ve never had a parent tell me it was one particular factor,' she said. 'It’s a multitude of factors, and a lot of them revolve around what I would just plainly say is racism.... If Black children so much as wiggle, it’s "Keep still!" White kids are wiggling, and they don’t say a word. It’s nothing but misgivings, misinterpretations, mis-whatever about Black people moving,' she said. 'They feel like they’re being picked on.'...  Dr. Aryee-Price, a former public-school teacher... said while she truly believes in education, she sees schools as 'sites for anti-Blackness.'" 

 From "'You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School'/When learning is virtual, Black parents can watch for unfair treatment" (NYT).

And yet teachers — as a group — seem to take special pride in their anti-racism. But it's hard to be a teacher. They have to interact with so many students at once. How can you serve them all well? Maybe students with a strong need for physical activity should be be in a different group and using different methods from the ones who easily sit still and adhere to book-learning. I sympathize with these parents who see their own children stigmatized — or believe that's what they are seeing. 

I'll bet a lot of parents of male children would make some similar observations. It's deeply disturbing to see your own child treated as a problem, when your own child is simply an individual with needs that don't align well with the needs of the group. And it's so much more disturbing if you think it's not just that your child is an individual who isn't appreciated for her individual characteristics but that your child is seen as a member of a group and the group is regarded — intentionally or not — as inferior. 

The urge to take your child out of school altogether is strong. It's the parent's primal urge to protect one's own children. What's new, with coronavirus, is the real experience that has been imposed on all parents — a different mode of learning, with the child required to be out of the classroom. It's harder to go back to a less-than-perfect situation than it is to keep going. Stopping school created an occasion for reflection and judgment, and re-opening school creates a new occasion for decision-making. The child's resistance to school is a familiar occurrence in normal times. But abnormal times have arisen, and all the resistance is coming at once.

"But while my husband and I knew the pressure of a traditional school day could be challenging for [Izac, my lanky, serious-faced 15-year-old], we didn’t realize exactly how miserable he was."

"It felt like he started breathing again the day in-person school was canceled. He started smiling again. This happiness was profound.... [T]here’s... a group of kids who, whether because of bullying, mental health issues or simple overscheduling and pressure, struggled at school in a way that’s been made undeniable by the way they’re thriving at home amid the pandemic. Parents like me are having to contemplate whether traditional school — a staple of American childhood — in fact hurts our children.... During quarantine, Izac hasn’t just finished schoolwork with more ease — he’s dived into hobbies and subjects he’s actually interested in: mountain biking, cooking and practicing archery at the local outdoor range. He even makes his own pizza crusts and sauces from scratch. It’s been painful for my husband and me to realize that in the years leading up to this pandemic, he was driven to exhaustion every day. But, we thought, doesn’t everyone hate school from time to time? Isn’t every teenager tired? So we nudged him back onto the hamster wheel, assuming that was the alternative to becoming 'helicopter parents' who cushion and coddle their kids into lifelong dependency. We never questioned whether we were pushing him into suffering. Now we have to ask: Will we do it again when his school reopens?"

From "What if Some Kids Are Better Off at Home?/For parents like me, the pandemic has come with a revelation: For our children, school was torture" by Joanna Schroeder (NYT).

Excellent illustration by Christine Almeda at the link.

I'm sure — I hope — that Izac agreed willingly to this invasion of his privacy. It gets back at the bullies and shows him in a much nicer light that it seems he appeared at school.

"I don't think [Madison public school] teachers are qualified to give online instruction, and my experience in the spring would confirm that."

Said a man identified only as Mike, who "was initially considering forming a learning pod with a small group of neighbors and hiring a teacher to help with virtual learning" but is now "renting a house in Columbia County where he can send his children to in-person classes before returning to Madison next June."

Quoted in "Expert cautions learning pods could worsen Madison's achievement gap" (Wisconsin State Journal).

You can see from the headline that public school officials and proponents are worried about the least-privileged children falling behind, but every parent is going to be most concerned about his or her own children, and this isn't even a situation where taking less for your child will leave more for someone else's child. Why would anyone be deterred from setting up a learning pod for the benefit of their own child? What good could it do to hold more children back?

How privileged are learning pods anyway? What if someone with almost no money to spend wanted a great learning pod for his or her child? How is that done? Googling, I did not find it easy to see how to set up a learning pod without spending much money. I assume the experts in education want to keep people focused on public schools, not on showing that it's easy to set up an alternative.

The schools themselves are working on their alternative — on line instruction by public school teachers. But if you've got parents like Mike who are seriously unsatisfied with that option, then I would expect the "learning pods" alternative to be something the public school proponents would want to make hard to figure out.

But if it's hard to figure out, then the least privileged families — the ones the experts are supposedly so concerned about — will be impaired in doing what they might be able to do on their own to close the achievement gap. The experts are working hard to drive home the message that you can't do it, that your kids are losing out, that you need the public schools, and that those other people over there — the privileged people — are taking advantage again and their advantage is your disadvantage.

IN THE COMMENTS: ellie said:

I am a homeschool mom who normally utilizes a cooperative. We cannot meet in our building this year due to covid. I've set up a "pod" in my home. It was easy. All the moms got together and talked over what our kids needed for the year, then we divided the classes. Each mom took what they were good at or could reasonably handle. No money involved at all for us. We set a schedule for 2 days a week, and the other days, work is assigned for home.

"As school districts across the nation announce that their buildings will remain closed in the fall, parents are quickly organizing 'learning pods' or 'pandemic pods'..."

"... small groupings of children who gather every day and learn in a shared space, often participating in the online instruction provided by their schools. Pods are supervised either by a hired private teacher or other adult, or with parents taking turns. At face value, learning pods seem a necessary solution to the current crisis. But in practice, they will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap within schools.... For parents who need to work and can’t supervise their children’s learning, joining a pod may feel like the only way they can educate their kids and keep their jobs.... Paradoxically, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a national reckoning with white supremacy, white parents are again ignoring racial and class inequality when it comes to educating their children. As a result, they are actively replicating the systems that many of them say they want to dismantle.... The history of public schooling in this country is one in which white parents have repeatedly abandoned public schools, or resisted integration efforts at every turn.... We can either take this moment to continue that pattern by retreating into the comfort of our own advantages, or...." Or what?

I'm reading in "The Latest in School Segregation: Private Pandemic ‘Pods’/If they become the norm, less privileged kids will suffer" by Clara Totenberg Green, a social emotional learning specialist in the Atlanta Public Schools (NYT).

"There's never been a film before about a family that home educates its kids. Very few people in the movie world have had that experience..."

"... so I don't think it's a subject that would be treated objectively. It's a runaway, underground, counter-culture kind of thing - that's why it hasn't been done," said Charles Webb, quoted in "What happened next? (the author will let you know after he dies)," a 2005 article in The Guardian, which I'm reading this morning after blogging the NYT obituary for Charles Webb yesterday.

Webb, the author of the novel "The Graduate," signed away the rights to the characters in his story when he sold the movie rights, and the characters were based on himself and his wife. Webb did write a book about their later life, called "Home School." I was able to purchase this book at Amazon by paying a hefty shipping charge to have it sent from the UK. The 2005 Guardian article says that Webb didn't want the book published until after his death, because he had long ago signed a contract that would allow a film to be made without his consent.

"He had a very odd relationship with money. He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money."

Said Caroline Dawnay, who was, for a while, the literary agent to Charles Webb, quoted in "Charles Webb, Elusive Author of ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 81/His novel was turned into an era-defining movie, but he was never comfortable with its success, and he chose to live in poverty" (NYT).

At his second wedding to [Eve] Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes — he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry. Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street, recalled that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony, wearing the only clothes they owned....

Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg....

In the late 1970s the couple moved back to the West Coast and took their sons out of school, choosing to home-school them, which was not sanctioned at the time.... Charles Webb worked menial jobs: clerk at a Kmart, itinerant farmworker, house cleaner. The couple were caretakers at a nudist colony in New Jersey, earning $198 a week....

In case you were wondering what happened to Elaine and Benjamin after that bus ride they're taking in the end of "The Graduate."

ADDED: One of the sons is "a performance artist who once cooked a copy of 'The Graduate' and ate it with cranberry sauce."

AND: Eve Rudd's brother was the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd:

Why are those German home-schooling parents seeking asylum in the United States?

Germany is in the European Union, which has a right to free movement, and Ireland, for example, offers a right to home-schooling. Here's email I received after yesterday's post about the case:

"Attorneys for Christian parents who fled Germany in order to home school their children but have been denied U.S. asylum..."

"... said they are preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case and were working with Congress to try to change asylum law."

In May, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said the family did not meet the criteria for asylum, finding that Germany does not single out religious minorities for persecution. The court found that Germany treats all truants the same regardless of the reason, religious or not. Earlier this month, the court declined to revisit the issue.

ADDED: Why do they need to come to the United States? Germany is in the European Union, so they have a legal right to relocate to other EU countries, including Ireland, which has a right to home-school. 

"Along with her new Catholic school, the 6-year-old daughter of Katie and ex-husband Tom Cruise will have a uniform..."

"... when she's in school, and 'normal kid' clothes when she's out and about."

This is the 6-year-old "fashionista" with $3.2 million worth of designer clothes and custom-made shoes.

Previously, the child was home-schooled within a Scientology milieu.

"Sometimes when people ask what do you do for your fun time, he says I just learn, and people just don't understand that."

Tanishq Abraham, the brilliant 9 year old.



His mom: "Home schooling is much better than normal, regular school." (Because there's no way for regular school not to be boring.)

Tanishq: "It's never boring, talking to any college student... With my friends from kid classes, you get to play with them, and that kind of stuff... I kind of miss having friends, I guess."

In the end of the video, we hear him say he'd like to be a scientist or a President of the United States. As President, he'd "make the United States more healthy for us and more efficient."

"The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school."

Writes Penelope Trunk (in a post titled "Blueprint for a Woman’s Life," which she wrote last August but keeps in her sidebar under the heading "Big Ideas"):

We all know that learning is best when it’s customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

It’s clear is that homeschooled kids will rule the world when Generation Z enters the workplace. So figure out a way to alleviate mommy guilt by homeschooling your kids to get them on that path. You don’t have to do the teaching yourself. You can pay someone. But you need to get your kids out of a system that everyone knows does not work. (Note: I just realized this. This month. And last week, I decided: I’m taking my kids out of school.)

It was interesting reading that right after reading this HuffPo piece by George Lakoff (and a co-author) called "The Wisconsin Blues." The main point is that progressives need better messaging. The conservatives always manage to put things in terms that resonate with people better, don't you know? Anyway, in his effort to improve left-wing propaganda, Lakoff has this about public schools (which I feel like calling government schools):

[D]emocracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public....

Public schools are essential to opportunity... They are also essential to democracy, since democracy requires an educated citizenry at large, as well as trained professionals in every community. Without education of the public, there can be no freedom.

At issue is the future of progressive morality, democracy, freedom, and every aspect of the Public -- and hence the viability of private life and private enterprise in America on a mass scale. The conservative goal is to impose rule by conservative morality on the entire country, and beyond. Eliminating unions and public education are just steps along the way. Only progressive moral force can stop them.

Discuss!

What is the argument against allowing home-schooled kids to play on high school sports teams?

"Legislation to allow home-schooled students to play varsity sports at public schools passed the Republican-controlled Virginia Assembly on Wednesday," writes the NYT as it sets up a debate — there are 7 commentators — under the topic "Should Home-Schoolers Play for High School Teams?" I guess since a "Republican-controlled" legislative house voted for it, the NYT had to phrase the question as if the presumption was against letting these kids play, but it was hard for me — without reading the essays — to think of any reason not to let the kids play. After all, their parents pay taxes, and by home schooling, they are saving the school districts money. 

Ken Tilley, executive director of the Virginia High School League, contends that "participation in school activities is a not a right, it's a privilege." To win the privilege, the kids who go to a school have to meet various requirements, some of which, like GPA and passing X number of subjects, don't align with anything the home-schooled kid can meet. Tilley also notes that there are sports programs for home-schooled kids, and we shouldn't let the best home-schooled athletes opt to play on regular school teams, because "we should be helping [those programs], not poaching from them." Poaching from them? We're talking about a human being making a choice about where to play. Tilley is picturing the action from the perspective of the people who run the teams, and — if you wake up that dying metaphor poaching — he's analogizing the student athlete to an animal that might be stolen from its proper owner.

Lawprof Michael McCann cites the argument — which he finds "unpersuasive" — that there's something wrong with a high school having a team with too many home-schoolers. If the coaches pick the best players, it might turn out that the teams are full of kids who don't go to the school. Is that a problem? Robert Ferraro, founder and chief executive officer of the National High School Coaches Association, suggests that there be a rule that the home-schoolers can only play on teams at the school that they'd attend if they weren't home-schooled.

Ferraro's suggestion sheds some light on the "poaching" issue. There could be some abuse if coaches could roam about looking for the best home-schooled athletes, and excellent athletes might choose home-schooling for the specific purpose of being able to participate as free agents in a market that could get very aggressive and that could hurt a lot of kids (and parents) who dream about sports achievement — Tim Tebow! — and undervalue schoolwork.

"You could ask, ‘Why should it be free?’ But why shouldn’t it be free?"

"The core of our mission is to give material to people who need it," says Salman Khan of the Khan Academy, described in this NYT article:

Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help children puzzle through a concept than drill it into their heads....

Today, the Khan Academy site offers 2,700 instructional videos and a constellation of practice exercises. Master one concept, move on to the next. Earn rewards for a streak of correct answers. For teachers, there is an analytics dashboard that shows both an aggregate picture of how the class is doing and a detailed map of each student’s math comprehension. In other words, a peephole.

Diane Tavenner, chief of the Summit chain of four charter schools, said that at first she was ambivalent about using Mr. Khan’s software. It would require buying laptops for every student and investing in more Internet capacity. And she found the Khan Academy model of instructor and blackboard — albeit a digital one — to be a bit too traditional.

Rote learning. Teacher and blackboard. Traditional. You'd think the teacher herself would be perfect at doing what this website does.

In the past, math class at the Summit schools was always hands-on: the class worked on a problem, usually in small groups, sometimes for days at a time. But getting an entire class of ninth graders to master the fundamentals of math was never easy. Without those, the higher-level conceptual exercises were impossible.

That is where the machine came in handy. The Khan software offered students a new, engaging way to learn the basics.

So.... let the website do the traditional work of teaching the fundamentals so the teacher can spend more of her time subjecting the kids to group projects?

ADDED: Pollcode isn't working right now. The options should be:

How do you feel about group projects in school?

1. Loathe them. What this article does is point the way to home-schooling.

2. They're part of a nice mix. It's good to free the teacher to spend more time on what she loves.

3. Love 'em. Let the computer do the technical stuff and bring on the group projects!

I'll turn it into a poll if I can get the site to process the code.

IN THE COMMENTS: TMink says:

The Kahn Academy stuff is killer. I use it with my kids and recommend it at work every week. There is nothing about the Kahn approach that necessitates group work in my understanding.

The thing that teachers HATE about the Kahn approach is that it is detail rich and gives tons of info regarding how well each student is doing at the touch of a button. It requires the teachers to teach because it takes away excuses through data.

"We are not living off the grid as much as we are creating a new grid, a more wholesome grid."

Conservative Christians drop out.

"We are following a different path that we think is healthier, promotes better families, and better communities."...

"Christians should be looking for a way to take care of one another without forcing their neighbor to contribute to their welfare. In essence that's coveting your neighbor's goods through the agency of the governments you create."...

"Making the government an idol is the problem. That's what stands in the way of Christian sanctification... It's hands off mainly things like our family, our children, our bodies, our health, and even our money, the fruits of our labor. These don't belong to government."...

"We originally anticipated thousands and thousands of people overwhelming these smaller counties.... We had people moving, that were moving, but they were kind of putting the cart before the horse, because they weren't living independently. They were just showing up and saying 'Okay, where's my house and where's my job?' We're like, 'Uh, no, it doesn't work like that. '"....

"Personal secession are things like homeschooling, house churches, home gardening, home-based economics, just regaining privacy and a sense of community rather than worrying about what's going on in Washington, D.C... What's the latest thing from the Supreme Court?"

The "unschooling" movement.

CNN reports:

Welcome to the world of "unschooling" -- an educational movement where kids, not parents, not teachers, decide what they will learn that day.

"I don't want to sound pompous, but I think I am learning a little bit more, because I can just do everything at my own pace," said Nailah Ellis, a 10-year-old from Marietta, Georgia, who has been unschooled for most of her life.

Nailah's day starts about 11 a.m., her typical wake-up time. She studies Chinese, reading, writing, piano and martial arts. But there's no set schedule. She works on what she wants, when she wants. She'll even watch some TV -- science documentaries are a favorite -- until her day comes to an end about 2 a.m.

An extension of home-schooling, "unschooling" is when parents give their children total freedom to learn and explore whatever they choose.

This is great... if you've got a Nailah. But, of course, your child is a Nailah? Right?

Enforcing strict secularism in France.

The NYT reports:

To enforce its new law banning religious symbols from public schools, the Ministry of National Education has decided to get tough.

This week it held formal disciplinary hearings and began expelling students who violated the law. The goal was to get rid of those defined as hopeless cases before the 10-day All Saints school vacation that ends with a national holiday honoring all of Catholicism's saints.

The classic problem with secularism is the way the majority doesn't notice or care how much it accommodates itself.

Go to the link to see the photograph of the teenaged girl who is shaving her head bald so that she can stay in school. She "showed up for school in Strasbourg wearing a large beret [and was] barred from class by an administrator who called it a religious symbol." What seems to Americans to be a symbol of France, a beret, was construed by a French petty official to be an Islamic veil. Isn't the shaved head on a young girl a much more conspicuous outward demonstration of religious faith?

"They drove me crazy and tried to brainwash me so much that I got fed up and I did it - I shaved my hair off," she said. "Now I feel alone; I feel like a monster. It's like being naked on the street."

The French are pleased at how many young people they have pressured into compliance. Note that the those who will not yield are essentially forced into home schooling, because there is only one Muslim high school in France.

Here's the leaderboard....

... for the U.S. Open. I'm rooting for my nephew, Cliff Kresge, who starts at 8:30 eastern time.

Here's a cool front-page article in the NYT about the fancy RVs some golfers live in on the road. Like the Osbournes, some golfers just bring their whole family along with them as they tour. The PGA Tour provides day care for the kids, and, according to the article, is looking to provide "home schooling," as there are 467 kids who travel along with the Tour. It's kind of a glamourous lifestyle, traveling around in a $500,000 RV. But though you may have "granite floors, plasma televisions, lamp-shaded wall sconces and retractable bay windows and awnings," it's packed into 500 square feet of space. And what if the golfer has had a bad round and needs to get it together for the next day and the kids are tired of everything revolving around dad's mental state?

UPDATE: Cliff has finished Round 1. The good news is: he's tied with Tiger Woods. The bad news is: that's only 61st place (right now--not everyone's finished). Tomorrow will be important.

FURTHER UPDATE: At this point--Friday at 7:42 CDT--the 2 over par finish is at 42nd place, as some players are still trying to finish the first round and others are beginning the second round. So I'll never be able to get the place number right for the first round, taken alone. Cliff starts at 1:30. Good luck!