July 24, 2026

The Cognitive Barrier to Teaching

By educationrealist

When people want to mock ed schools and the low IQ of the students within them, they often go straight to the coursework. Millions of pages mocking absurd ed school projects have been offered up as evidence that lordy, America’s teachers are none too bright.

Do not confuse my disdain for those mockers as defense of ed school courses. I myself did my best to avoid ed school and those projects. I failed. Teacher credentials are a pay to play activity. We all bulldoze through the bullshit irrespective of our views.

However, those courses have nothing to do with demonstrating teacher intellect.

Tests, not coursework, define the entry barrier to teaching1.  The licensure tests never get mentioned in the “teachers are stupid” corner. Even in more respectable journalistic outputs, the tests get a single sentence halfway through the article in the polite wailings of low teacher ability. I’d wager that a survey of every single American who holds the uncritical opinion that teachers are of uniformly low intellect would reveal a full 80% of them don’t know about credential tests. The other 20% have heard of credential test, but point that that the pass rate is 100% so the tests are a joke. All teachers pass the tests, so the tests are easy.

They’ve got it backwards. People who don’t pass the tests don’t become teachers.

Again: The cognitive barrier to teaching is the subject matter licensure test. 2

The licensure tests (also commonly described as credential tests or competency tests), play two roles that are often ignored in teacher policy issues.

First, the tests are a significant obstacle for would-be black and Hispanic teachers (see the footnotes for links to further discussion). Most think pieces on the dearth of “minority” teachers avoid mentioning that close to 60% of blacks and half of Hispanics fail the elementary school credential tests. Fewer blacks and Hispanics even attempt to become high school academic teachers, so the fail rates are slightly lower, but still in the 30-40% range.

Here are Texas pass rates by test but not by race, which would do more to explain why there are far fewer black and Hispanic high school teachers, and why TEA has been dishing out emergency credentials and handling massive cheating scandals.3

Illinois pass rates do publish by test and race. Of the 601 black teacher candidates who took the elementary school test in 2022-24, 59% passed. Hispanics do much better at 89% of the 1629 who took it. Middle school science teachers sound pretty good with blacks at 61% and Hispanics at 85% until you see that just 75 and 110 in each category took the test in two years. High school math? 27 out of 81 for blacks, 129 out of 204 for Hispanics, and 960 out of 1,177 for whites. Illinois does have a middle school math test that passed 94 out of 135 blacks, 211 out of 237 Hispanics, and 1,292 out of 1,353 whites.

Similar pass rates are found in every state. And that, readers, is a major reason why most American teachers are white. 4

Please, let these pass rates guide you to grasping an essential point: yes, ed schools focus pervasively on DEI. But they can’t commit affirmative action. In the 90s, ed schools would graduate candidates without requiring the test and those teachers could get an “emergency credential” that was in fact permanent—until NCLB changed the law, ending emergency credentials, requiring a licensure test, and didn’t grant any grandfathering.5

The institution of the required credential tests and published pass rates severely constricts education schools. They can’t credential underrepresented minorities using a different standard. Candidates have to pass the licensure tests to get the credentials. And the fail rates reveal they represent a significant cognitive challenge that are keeping out thousands of low achievers nationwide.

The institution of credential tests and closed loopholes ended a number of teaching careers, created a much-noticed dearth of black and Hispanic teachers, and led to three separate credential test cheating rings (one of which was just uncovered last year).6

To the extent credential tests are mentioned in public conversation (a rare occurrence), their impact on black and Hispanic teacher pools are the sole reason.

But there’s another important but unmentioned role: the tests keep a non-trivial percentage of whites and Asians out, too. This fact isn’t explored or discussed because the inevitable conclusion is that many college students and graduates who would like to become teachers and pay non-trivial sums to take the credentials tests can not, in fact, pass those tests.

How difficult are the tests? Elementary school teachers have to pass a knowledge test at about the tenth grade high school level—algebra1, fractions, ratios, grammar, reading comp. Harder math than was on high school graduation tests when states required them, considerably more science and history.

Note the irony: I’m defending the intellect of elementary school teachers by observing they can pass a high school test.

But if a tenth grade credential test is such a low bar, why are so many college graduates tripping over it? Elementary teachers have to clear a hurdle that washes out others who either have or end up with college degrees. Are elementary school teachers on the low end of the intellectual heap of college majors? Absolutely. Low end of general intelligence? Not even close.

This is a sad commentary not on ed schools, but on the college diploma, the value of which has been corrupted for decades.

Secondary academic teachers are far beyond that minimal standard, and one of the true lies of the education reform and conservative movements is their continued determination to ignore the cognitive differences between k-6 and 7 -12. Secondary teachers have to pass tests roughly equivalent to an Advanced Placement test in that subject. These are not easy tests. They assess a lot of content knowledge.

Anecdotal example: My best GRE scores are 800Q, 790V (man, I begrudge that last miss). But the GRE at that time was an IQ test, not a content assessment. In the same two year period I took the GRE, I also took licensure tests in English, history, and math. The English and history tests were a blast. Not simple, but challenging and interesting tests that were clearly testing a wide range of knowledge. The math tests were a comprehensive assessment of the entire high school math curriculum: linear algebra, plane geometry, analytic geometry, statistics, trigonometry, and calculus. I took that series expecting to fail the first time, since my content knowledge back then had gaps and I needed to know what I was missing. I passed one, but had to learn some more content before I completed the series.

Point being: the secondary education licensure tests aren’t easy for smart people to fake their way through. They are achievement tests, not IQ tests. The elite pundits who lament America’s poor teacher quality probably couldn’t pass the science and math tests. Scientists and mathematicians could not, in all likelihood, pass the history tests. Many couldn’t pass the English tests.

The tests aren’t impossibly difficult at all. Professionals could in most cases pass the tests in their field. The math and science academics would, I suspect, consider their subject tests ludicrously easy; I’m less certain that’s true for wordcels and the English and history tests.

What concerns me about the mainstream failure to understand the impact of credential tests is that the educational institutions would dearly, dearly love to be rid of them. Since “the discourse” holds that teachers are already barely functioning idiots, there is very little public awareness of the crucial gatekeeping function these tests actually perform. Texas is now hiring about a third of their new teachers absent any credential test and no one notices, while you can still find ignoramuses declaring that New York ended all credential tests, when in fact no, it only ended the one that didn’t involve subject matter knowledge.

The California State University system (CSU) boasts that it turns out half of California’s credentialed teachers and 1 out of every 25 teachers credentialed in the US. Despite the many people spiking the ball about “colleges bringing back the SAT”, the state colleges that educate millions of students have not brought it back, or never did. The CSU system has no plans to, and it’s not alone. State systems turn out the most teachers. Credential tests not only ensure we have reasonable intelligent teachers who know the content, but also in today’s SAT/ACT-free world they are the only thing preventing purely illiterate teachers.

The credential test barrier is important. Preserve it. Welcome it. That means acknowledging that the barrier is real, creates the shortage of black and Hispanic teachers that everyone bewails. We should absolutely examine the barriers, particularly for those teaching the youngest students, to see if they need to be as high. But stop ignoring them. Today’s standards may not look like paradise, but you don’t want to know what you’ve got when they’re gone.

 

1I’ve covered a lot of the history of the rise of subject matter tests, their pass rates, and why they are the most important aspect of teacher credentialing. Here’s a partial list: Ed Schools and Affirmative Action, It’s the Test Zitbrains!, Oh Woe! No Teachers of Color!, The Available Pool, Teacher Credential Test Cheating, Radio Silence on Clarence Mumford.

 
2Someone uniformed will say “Yeah, but New York did away with its test!” New York did away with the ALST, which was a required test IN ADDITION to its subject matter competency tests. New York still has subject matter competency tests. It has had them since the 80s.
 
3See my article: Teacher Credential Test Cheating
 
4I’ve skipped Asian numbers because a) they’re small and b) conflated with Pacific Islanders. Suffice it to say that even in math, whites have a higher pass rate. I’m not sure if this is due to the Pacific Islanders or the cultural preference that is illuminated by the following wisecrack I made back in ed school. A classmate said “It’s weird how our program brags about its 30% diversity when all the diversity is Asians.” “Yeah,” I said. “And every single Asian here has a really fucking disappointed parent.”
 
5There’s a complete history of this in my article aptly titled Ed Schools and Affirmative Action.
 
6Again, check out Teacher Credential Test Cheating

2 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in history, teacher certification, testing

July 7, 2026

The Paths to Teaching

By educationrealist

“Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students”—Thomas Sowell, 1993 (and thousands of others before and since)

Writing about teacher certification procedures should be simple. There are a few well-known pathways, they differ in obvious ways, and any reasonably organized person could lay them out in a taxonomy that would satisfy a curious reader in about 800 words. Well, except I can’t do anything in 800 words. But certainly under 1500.

Despite thousands of pages of helpful instructions on How to Become A Teacher, there aren’t a lot of general purpose explanations of the academic paths available to obtaining a credential. And most of the supposedly helpful instruction pages are generally wrong. For example, US News, the link above, says “There are many paths into the teaching profession. Some people enter the field immediately after receiving a bachelor’s degree in education, which typically takes four years, while others decide to become teachers after pursuing a career outside the education sector.”

Bad dichotomy. Yes, some people enter the field immediately after receiving a BA in education. Many do not. Many enter the field immediately after receiving a BA in an academic subject earned concurrently with a teaching credential. Others enter the field after receiving a degree in anything other than education and then go straight into a credential program, without pursuing a career outside the education sector. Some go into a Master’s credential program instead of just the credential.

There you have it. Those are the four primary pathways of becoming a K-12 teacher1.

  • BA in Education
  • BA in a secondary school academic subject with an education concentration
  • Post-BA credential program, often called a “fifth year” (regardless of how long it actually takes)
  • MA in Elementary or Secondary Education, with a subject concentration

But what about….? Pick your poison. It doesn’t matter. TFA? Fifth year. Second career? Fifth year or MA. What about alternate certification? They’re all fifth year programs.

A teaching credential is not a degree. It’s a certification. As a rule, a teaching credential requires a degree. Any degree. The teaching credential is a state defined series of courses coupled with a demonstration of subject matter knowledge and a clear background check. An MA credential program just adds more courses to that list.

The primary difference between alt cert and “traditional” certification used to be whether it was offered by an ed school or private organizations. But today the primary difference between alt cert and traditional is whether the teacher gets a job while gaining the credential (usually called internship) or after gaining the credential (requiring student teaching). Ed schools have offered internships for a decade at least now.

In perusing dozens of those thousands of “How to be a teacher”, I often see reference to “ the traditional pathway”. This is very misleading. There is no single “traditional pathway”. There’s “credentialed concurrent with BA” and “credentialed subsequent to BA”, and all of those have been available for the past 50 years. I would still consider “alt cert” to be a program outside the auspices of an ed school, although that’s not formally how it’s defined these days. But understand that “alt cert” requires all the same ed school courses.

It’s bizarre that I have to write all this out, but I can’t find any state or federal government source that clearly defines these pathways.2 With about 95% confidence, I’d say something like 90% of teachers come through the four pathways outlined above. Here are other asserted facts you’ll have to take my word for, although please, if you find evidence to the contrary do let me know.

  1. “BA Education” means elementary. I know of no education degree simply called “BA in Education” that confers the ability to teach secondary academic subjects. An unqualified education degree with no subject specified is an elementary credential, which used to be K-8 until NCLB, and is now K-6.3
  2. Some states split the BA in Education by level. Alabama, for example, offers separate education degrees for elementary and secondary. But the secondary version is the exception; the unmodified “BA in Education” defaults to elementary.
  3. Subject-area education degrees are secondary only and live in the subject department. This is where it’s helpful to understand again that “credential” is just a series of courses that anyone can take. States that allow a four-year secondary credentials require a major in the subject, owned by that department. The ed school only provides the credential courses. These credentials are only for 7-12 single subject.
  4. In most cases, subsequent credentials require subject matter knowledge only. The credential courses can be attached to any number of credentials. I had passed all the tests for three academic credentials before I even began ed school. My MA Ed diploma says “Single Subject Math”, but upon graduation I was instantly eligible to teach in all three subjects. This is true for all the single subjects, and a single subject can likewise qualify for multiple credential just by passing the test.4
  5. Every state allows BA + credential. These programs are open to anyone with a BA, are split into elementary and secondary tracks. Most public ed schools offer a credential alone or to a master’s degree alongside it. Elite ed schools (Harvard, Stanford, Columbia) don’t offer a fifth year, only an MA.
  6. Some states don’t allow BA-Only credentials. California, the most populous state in the country and the one that produces more teachers than any other, banned the four-year education degree in 1961. Banned it by statute. For fifty-six years. California ed schools were slow to respond when the elementary school ban was lifted in 2017; even today very few programs offer a four year BA in elementary ed. Secondary teachers are still banned from a four-year degree. Texas banned 4 year degrees in 1987 for 32 years. Massachusetts effectively eliminated it in 1990; I don’t believe they’ve undone that legislation.

Given how hard it was to find text clearly defining the pathways, I abandoned any hope of getting good data on how many teachers take each pathway. I did find a good Goldhaber/Walch article from 2014 pointing out the rise of postgraduate teachers.

“the share of prospective teachers gaining formal teacher preparation…through a graduate rather than undergraduate program has risen sharply over time, from about 45 percent in 1990 to about 63 percent in 2010. … Of teachers who report having one year or less of teaching experience, approximately 26 percent entered teaching with a master’s degree in 2007–08 compared to 17 percent in 1987–88.”

The gap between 26% of teachers entering with MAs and 63% entering through graduate programs is the difference between Master’s and five-year credentials (BA + credential).

But even back in 1990, just a couple years before Sowell sneered about education majors, close to half of all credentialed teachers were, in fact, majoring in something other than education. Fifteen years ago, it was well over half. I don’t know what it is now. The 2020-21 questionnaire has the data that would allow the search, but it’s not instantly available and I’m just not convinced it has changed that much.

The modal pathway to obtain a teacher credential is probably fifth-year, in which both elementary and secondary candidates first get a BA in something other than education. Elementary school BAs would be my guess for second place, and all subject matter BAs combined are probably next? but MA Ed may be more I’m not sure.

Now the modal path for elementary school teachers might be a BA in Education. But even in that limited category, fifth-year programs will be a strong second.

So remember that, please, the next time you read that states should ban education degrees to improve education outcomes, make teachers major in an academic topic and then get a credential. Three states banned education degrees for decades. Somewhere around half of all teachers in the country majored in something other than education. Go check and tell me if it made a difference.

1I’m ignoring CTE for this article.

2 Take, for example, this idiotically bad description from an NCES publication:

“While the traditional route to certification typically requires the completion of a postsecondary degree in education, many alternative route programs are designed for individuals who have already completed a degree in a different field without teacher education courses.” -Characteristics of Public School Teachers Who Completed Alternative Route to Certification Programs (emphasis mine)

OK, this is a really…bad piece of writing and evidence of the kind of rabbit warrens I investigated in an effort to find a definitive description to help my readers out.

“While the traditional route to certification typically requires Route A, Route B is available for those who didn’t take Route A.”

I first interpreted “Route A” as “BA in Ed” until I realized that “any postsecondary degree in education” includes both BA and MA. So “Route A” is “BA/MA Ed”. But this is likewise wrong, because by definition, any MA Ed is someone who “completed a degree in a different field”. So if “Route A” is “BA/MA Ed”, “Route B” hasn’t changed and is still “any postgraduate credential program” and thus MA Ed is counted twice.

The authors add to the confusion in their article on alternate certification by only defining alt cert in a footnote. But the definition clears up a bit of confusion about their purpose: “a program that was designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career (for example, a state, district, or university alternative route to certification program)”

So the authors see “alternative” as a credential only program for BA holders. Except hey, there are lots of credential only programs that aren’t alternative! And all credential programs are designed to transition nonteachers to teaching careers! Their intended meaning only comes through when understanding that the operative word here is “expedite”. And I describe that in the article.

But I imagine most people blitz through this and assume that “Route A” is a BA in Education”. It’s nonsense like this that keeps me from writing much.

3Given the many middle schools that are being repurposed from 7-8 to 6-8, I imagine it will be K-5 real soon.

4Moving from elementary to secondary may require a course or two in subject matter pedagogy, depending on the state.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in policy, teacher certification

October 27, 2025

A Word on Gender and Work

By educationrealist

I’ve mentioned that I disagree with Helen Andrews’ Great Feminization treatise, just as I disagreed with her Boomers Fucked the World Up book. I like Helen Andrews in much the way I like Rick Hess—we see the world the same but then they state their conclusions and I’m like, huh? No. I am Valentin to their Peter, for Ender’s Game nerds.1 Like Megan McArdle, I readily acknowledge the existence of “toxic feminism”, which I personally find much worse than toxic masculinity. Like Matt Yglesias, I think it’s completely obvious that mandating female equal representation by civil rights law has not led to the equal representation in many fields, although he argues that’s evidence of sexism and I disagree.

I actually started this article to correct something Matt Yglesias said but I’ll do that in my next piece and instead will write instead of tweet some other thoughts.

First, I think Andrews’ point about HR being female is off-base. HR is not a field invented by women. It is a field invented by lawyers. HR is not your friend. It’s not your buddy. It’s not there to represent women or make the workplace more comfortable for women. HR exists to avoid lawsuits. However. HR is a field that doesn’t require specialization and does require organization and conflict-avoidance thinking. Unsurprisingly, women find that job description appealing, whereas men would be expected to prefer to actually do something rather than nag. But a female-dominated HR becomes a place that isn’t your friend in a very different way than a male dominated one would be and some of what Andrews observes is a result not of the civil rights law but of a preference set encouraged by the preponderance of women that might be different if men were more represented in HR workers and management.

My other comment is anecdotal. I spent 20 years in a very male dominated profession—tech—and have now spent 17 years in a very female dominated profession. Granted, it’s been 20 years since I was in tech, but my experience spans from corporate IT (the most female of tech worlds) to startups (the most male) and I was both an employee and a consultant in large and small firms in many states. My sample size for tech is pretty solid. On the other hand, I teach the subject with the highest percentage of males (math) in teaching communities with the highest percentage of males (high school), so my sample size there is more limited. But I know a lot about the legal settings for teachers, so there’s that.

Many, many jobs in tech require far more “female” traits (cooperation, conformity, conflict avoidance) than teaching does. Back in the day, I had to learn how to eat with chopsticks just to be included in the lunch meetings and not because anyone on the team was Asian. But in the 80s and 90s, teambuilding was premised on the fact that everyone on that team knew the difference between Szechuan and Cantonese. Group work is definitely a thing in tech. Bitching about team members is not a good plan, nor is confronting them directly. I never went into management, thank god, but every manager I knew (most of them male) said they spent a lot more time soothing group dynamics than they expected. But this demand for what would be described as female-dominant traits has done little to make the career more attractive for women technologists.

Teaching is the most independent of jobs. We have tremendous security, and it’s very hard to tell us what to do. A principal isn’t really a teacher’s boss. Admin has some domains, teachers have others. This is, in fact, something that reformers finally noticed after 30 years of passing laws that teachers were legally allowed to ignore. . Any time you hear a teacher say “Other teachers make me do [some bullshit thing]” laugh at them. Other teachers can’t make their colleagues do fuck all. Principals have limited ability to make demands, but colleagues have none. Similarly, whenever you hear a teacher talk about how great their “team” is, snicker quietly. No teacher has to be part of their team. Even if they’re on the team, they can just ignore it and any close inspection of “teacher teams” leads to the conclusion that they are temporary and voluntary and often filled with non-compliers that no one mentions. And so, the job of teaching is comprised primarily of abilities and attributes and power that men find attractive, but this has done nothing to make the job more attractive to men.

Teaching is still dominated by women because it’s a flexible, secure job that doesn’t require advancement and men who become teachers are much more likely to become administrators for the higher pay. Technology jobs are dominated by men because…well, frankly, I’ve never figured that one out. But I do think that men’s preference for advancement and pay is a preference factor that plays into fewer male teachers.

By the way: It’s very common to complain that boys are squelched and thwarted from their natural boyness by an overwhelmingly female teacher pool and forgive me, but that’s 97% bullshit. My male high school students are not a feminized, beaten population whose natural spirit was thwarted by evil elementary teachers. But even if the occasional elementary school teacher is a sexist shit who thinks boys are noisy and dirty, her ability to impose these mandates is not one granted by her co-workers. She doesn’t have to give a shit about her co-workers.

It would be a very bad idea to actively solicit more male teachers into elementary school. Leave the job for those women and minority of men who are naturally drawn to elementary without encouragement. Because an effort to make teaching little kids a more male-oriented profession would remind us of another male-dominated trait: sex offenders.

OK, on to my next piece on correcting Matt Yglesias.

Comment Contest: predict what the correction will be.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in general, teaching, teaching life

September 29, 2025

Teacher Credential Test Cheating

By educationrealist

The Clarence Mumford case broke thirteen years ago; I was one of the few people who wrote about the arrest, which didn’t leave a splash. The indictments sparked two days of Twitter snark about ‘dumb’ teachers cheating on credential tests. Then uncomfortable details emerge and discussion stops. Few follow-ups other than dry recitations of judicial outcomes. Reporters, quick to Google a subject’s history, conveniently skip these details when the story resurfaces. So, for example, when Cedrick Wilson Sr, ex-NFL wide-receiver, was hired as a high school coach just five years later, the reports didn’t mention that he’d paid Clarence for someone else to take a credential test for him.

In October 2024, just a year ago, the Texas teacher cheating arrests hit the news. I only learned about it not through Twitter or Real Clear Education, but when my phone mentioned it in between zucchini recipe innovations, Southwest policy change outrages, and updates on major 70s rock bands. As with the Mumford case, local coverage was thorough—one outlet had a detailed explanation of the cheating process before October ended. The list of offending teachers and their district employers has been continually updated since December, with another burst of stories in February when 60 more teachers were identified. The NYTimes, CNN and NBC covered it briefly, but it’s not like cheating American teachers are a missing plane from Malaysia.

When I first read about the Texas fraud ring, I checked Grok for Mumford updates (there weren’t any). In responding, Grok mentioned almost offhandedly (OK, not really, but it *felt* kind of “by the way”) yet another criminal collaboration on teacher credential tests from the late 90s. Long before online testing, prospective Arkansas teachers were allowed to leave the Praxis testing center and take the test in a kitchen with a helper. This story received almost no coverage. Catherine Gewertz’s 1998 Edweek article remains the best overview of the Arkansas test scam available online, as follow-ups were nonexistent. Democrat-Gazette archives, locked behind a paywall, offer more details on the teachers and ringleader Linda Easter.

Arkansas, Mumford, Texas—three scams. Each a decade apart. Each went unnoticed for years.

There may be others escaping detection. Still, there’s reason to believe the Arkansas case might be the earliest. Credential tests for elementary school teachers only became required in the 90s, so the timing tracks.

On the other hand, ETS didn’t report cases of cheating so the legal system would never have been involved in earlier cases. A NY Times exposé on ETS’s failure to investigate an unrelated cheating case likely forced the company to tighten oversight.

These cheating rings all have several common aspects:

  • The scandals went on for a long time unnoticed.
  • A public school administrator, usually a vice principal, was involved, either running the program or finding candidates willing to pay.
  • All the known cheating rings took place in the southern US.
  • All relied on either impersonation (someone else took the test) or, in the earliest case, taking the testers to another location where the designated “smart man” just provided the answers.
  • In two of the three cases, the testing-site administrator was part of the cheating ring. In the 2012 case, Mumford created fake ids, removing the need for a complicit administrator.

The discovery of the fraud varied. In the 1998 case, the ETS noticed that very similar wrong answers appeared on tests taken the same day at Philander Smith College. They notified the FBI, which arrested and then “flipped” Linda Easter, the test administrator and professor, to get evidence on everyone else. In the Mumford case, it was the test-site staff who uncovered the scheme, when James Bowen showed up twice in one day—impersonating a male tester in the morning, then returning in the afternoon with the driver’s license of a female tester. (Presumably, he wasn’t pretending to be a woman.) ETS investigated for a year, then turned it over to the FBI.

Since Texas writes its own credential tests, the fraud, discovery, and prosecution all remained local. All the teachers were from Texas. The Texas Education Agency was tipped off to the fraud, identified the process, and caught the imposter tester (and assistant principal) Nick Newton in the act. The overworked impersonator was taking two tests simultaneously on two different workstations.

The Mumford fraud broke very early in my personal blogging history. But I was already so thoroughly steeped in credential test knowledge that I could instantly spot the collaborators’ connection. That common thread wasn’t addressed in the Mumford story. Nor was it discussed in the recent Texas conspiracy. The connection explaining the partnerships and their cause goes so thoroughly unnoticed that I can’t affirmatively state the pattern as fact, even though it is oh-so-obviously true. The news reports don’t state directly what is screamingly obvious. To accept the reality, people rely on cultural tendencies, common sense, and what I’ll call psychological credibility:

The three cheating rings were almost certainly run by and for the benefit of black Americans.

None of the stories on any of these cheating rings mention this….well, I can’t really call it a fact because the media doesn’t even mention race. Still, consider the various aspects.

Look at the names: Jeryl Shaw, Darcel Gardner, Jadice Moore from the Mumford case. Altermease Brown and Orlando Gales from Arkansas. Shavodrick Beaver, Devonta Burns, TyQuandrick Conner, and Taisha Holt from Texas. Not all have distinctively African American names, but even this partial list shows the pattern is clear

White pass rates on the Praxis Multiple Subjects test run 75-82%. Black pass rates? Much, much lower. Statistically, “failing the elementary teacher credential test” and “black college graduate” are highly correlated.

The ringleaders ran operations at majority-black schools: Washington B.T. (50% black, 50% Hispanic), the disaster that was L.C. Humes Junior High, and Philander Smith College, an HBCU. The paid impersonators who got photographed? Black.

The psychology tracks as well. Would desperate white teacher candidates really seek out black impersonators? Would black administrators risk felony charges to help white candidates pass—even for money? I couldn’t determine whether Stanley White, the 41-year-old machinist from Leland, Mississippi who served as the “smart man” for the Arkansas ring, was black. But a black man without a degree taking pride in helping others succeed and, by extension, help black children? That seems credible. A white guy doing the same, especially for very little money? Not so much.

And then, of course, there’s the dog that didn’t bark. Call it the Ann Coulter Variant. If white teachers were paying to pass the credential tests, there wouldn’t be media silence.

The silence would be irritating evidence of media gatekeeping even if there weren’t clear policy implications in these stories. But in context, the refusal to engage with these cheating rings is damaging, because an open discussion of the motivations in play would connect to many other factors under regular discussion in teacher qualification considerations.

In no way am I advocating an end to the teacher credential tests. We must have a basement set on teacher ability.

Texas doesn’t agree, though.

For the past decade, Texas has allowed districts to employ “uncredentialed teachers” through its District of Innovation loophole. Uncredentialed teachers either haven’t taken a sequence of education classes or haven’t passed the required credential exam for their subject. Looping these two requirements together with an either/or is much the same as a doctor saying “well, either it’s a hangnail or it’s cancer.”

Ed school classes aren’t a meaningful restriction on subject matter knowledge, to put it mildly. The credential tests are. It’s one thing to hire welding instructors who haven’t taken Adolescent Development. Quite another to hire academic teachers who haven’t passed the subject matter test.

But that’s exactly what Texas has been doing. Haven’t passed the test? No problem—get hired at a District of Innovation. Of the 30,000 teachers hired in 2024-25, fewer than half were certified. In most cases, the failure was tests, not training. Over a thousand Texas districts of the roughly 1,500 are Districts of Innovation.1

Hundreds of teachers are being prosecuted or fired for cheating when many could have simply been hired by districts that don’t require the test scores they were paying for. It’s reminiscent of the Atlanta scandal, where hundreds of teachers were prosecuted for creating fraudulent student test results to save their jobs—only to see the “high expectations” driving those demands evaporate a few years later.

And they’re all, or mostly, black.

I share these details not to criticize or defend cheating teachers—I don’t condone their actions—but to highlight the lack of reported context in each of these stories.

The initial coverage feeds the reformer propaganda machine who hoot about how stupid teachers are that can’t pass simple tests without cheating. Interest fades as it becomes clear that the implication is really “Black people are dumb.” To the extent the national media covers the stories at all, they treat them as isolated scandals, never as recurring rings that pop up every decade, never as evidence of a deeper pattern. One or two quick hits, then back to lamenting the shortage of teachers of color and the cycle of states raising credential standards only to lower them again. Left unmentioned in these stories are those very cheating scandals as well as the abysmally low black pass rates on the credential tests, or the uncomfortable fact that affirmative action pushes many of the most academically capable black college graduates into fields other than teaching, shrinking the available pool for black teachers even further.

The final unpleasant reality to toss into the mix: research consistently fails to find any meaningfully large correlations between teacher ability and student outcomes, while consistently succeeding in finding meaningful positive impacts when black students have black teachers.

When the Mumford story first broke, I suggested that researchers explore the student outcomes of those fraudulent teachers to see if they are noticeably different from teachers who did pass the tests. No one has taken up that suggestion yet. But then, no one is acknowledging that the test cheaters are all black.

Cheating is bad. I don’t approve. But a paragraph from Wrong Answer, a New Yorker article about that widespread Atlanta school testing fraud, in which teachers and principals spent hours changing all the student answers to meet absurd test score requirements, has always stayed with me:

“Righton Johnson, a lawyer with Balch & Bingham who sat in on interviews, told me that it became clear that most teachers thought they were committing a victimless crime. “They didn’t see the value in the test, so they didn’t see that they were devaluing the kids by cheating,” she said. …those who cheated at Parks were never convinced of the importance of the tests; they viewed the cheating as a door they had to pass through in order to focus on issues that seemed more relevant to their students’ lives.”

Those teacher candidates who committed fraud to get their credentials wanted to work at a demanding, often soul-crushing job. They wanted to teach in some of the country’s most desperately poor schools, helping students who often spent the year with rotating substitutes because so few people who could pass the tests were interested in teaching in these schools. I find the constant of black school administrators serving as ringleaders very significant. Sure, they made money. But they almost certainly saw themselves as helping their schools.

Just as the Atlanta teachers didn’t see value in the tests they so thoroughly laundered, so too does it seem credible that black administrators and desperate black teacher candidates would see the test as a meaningless obstacle, “a door they just had to pass through to focus on issues that seemed more relevant”—helping black kids learn, staffing schools that many teachers who don’t struggle to pass the test also don’t want to teach at, and making communities stronger.

It’s easy to romanticize this too far. It’s not easy, at least for me, to dismiss their motives entirely.
****************************************************
1There’s a bill introduced to end this practice. Let’s hope it succeeds.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in philosophy

July 18, 2025

The “In Case I Get Hit by a Truck” Assignment

By educationrealist

I originally planned on following up on my group projects assignment within a week, but got distracted by semantics. I’ll probably put that in another piece some day.

Like many people, I conflate the terms “group work” and “group projects” in discussions. But they are totally different activities.

“Group work” in the educational world refers to a pedagogic strategy in which small groups (3-4 kids) are given the same task to complete. The tasks themselves are often designed to be open-ended. It’s part of the “collaborative learning” theory, explicitly designed for heterogeneous (untracked) classrooms. (I wrote about group work and collaborative learning a while back.) When people gripe about “expecting the smart kids to teach everyone else” in the context of group work, they are usually wrong. Teachers using collaborative learning often rebuke the kids who come up with “the answer” as opposed to allowing “everyone to contribute”.

“Group projects” have occasioned whining for decades longer than group work. But they can be a legitimate academic device to help students acquire certain skills. For example, students need presentation experience, but thirty individual presentations is torture to experience, never mind grade. Other times there just aren’t thirty topics to assign in depth. “Explore key events leading up to the Civil War” or “key playwrights in the Elizabethan era”. So for many reasons, group projects are educationally appropriate in certain cases. (Never in math, though. Unless you’re teaching a homogenous class of overachievers and have some spare time. hahahahaha.)

And yeah, group projects also prepare you for real life. Sure, one person might do the work while others get the credit. But slacker team members aren’t the only obstacle. Obsessive naggers, passive-aggressives, domineering fascists….all part of the interpersonal experience. Is it any wonder I spent life as a self-employed specialist and then went into teaching? Independent contributor, am I.

So how does a teacher assign meaningful group projects while maximizing the possibility of productive activity and minimize the impact of freeloaders, bossybritches, and control freaks?

My advice is to start by carefully considering group assignments.

  1. Most of the time, form groups by ability. This is important. It allows me to monitor the low achieving groups either to help them as they genuinely work or kick their asses if they slack off.
  2. Every so often, allow the kids to form their own groups BUT be up front that there will be no orphans. If there are kids who don’t have friends in the class, I generally put those kids together and then monitor them closely. Sometimes, I’ll have to add kids to an existing group and it helps to have made it clear up front that there will be no whining or exclusions.
  3. Also every so often, on carefully selected short-term projects, I do random group formation. Sometimes I use birthdays. But if I want to be sure the random groups are age or gender based, I feed the list to Grok or Claud and then review it (they often skip names or put someone twice in a group).

I always include a lecture up front. I expect to be informed of unhappiness. Ideally, ahead of time. If someone in on the phone constantly, I should notice and make that person unhappy. But if I don’t, tell me so I can proceed with the unhappiness. Hurt feelings, no one is listening to you? Tell me. . I may tell you to speak up more and stop sulking. I might also decide that you’ve got a steamroller who isn’t listening to anyone. Unhappy with your inferior teammates, having to do all their work again? Tell me. I’m going to order you to stop redoing everyone’s work and stop being such a damn control freak. I may also tell your teammates to step up and work harder.

And so on.

Most important of all: I always include a (forgive the ed word) reflection as part of the assignment. So the students turn in the group work as a collective effort, but each individual has to write a reflection. I grade the reflection as part of the project but it could be done independently as well. The reflection includes analysis of how the team worked together.

This not only gives me insight into any problems the team had, but also gives me a good idea of the relative participation of each member. It also allows me to modulate the grade so that slackers in particular get a lower grade. In fact, slackers often don’t turn in a reflection, which automatically drops their grade to a C.

A variation on this I’ve used when I’m suspicious that a lot of kids aren’t working is the “In Case I Get Hit By A Truck” assignment. I will suddenly announce in the middle of class to drop everything, pull out a piece of paper, and write down what has happened in the group thus far. Include diagrams, decisions, some flowcharts if needed. No talking. No consults. Just get it on paper.

Why? Because in the real world, your co-worker may suddenly disappear and your boss will expect you to take over. It’s….not fun. Don’t be that guy. And then, of course, I tell them that I never documented anything, so do what I say, not what I do.

Pedagogically speaking, an assignment like this early in the class will do much to discourage slackers. It’s also very useful to learn who needs to be watched carefully. Plus, they won’t get an A when someone else did all the work. Grade grubbers everywhere can rest easy, you obsessive competitive freaks. Kidding. Kind of.

Hey, under a thousand.

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May 11, 2025

Freeloaders, Bossybritches, and Control Freaks

By educationrealist

Back in the day when I taught “book club”, one of my students (they were all Asian, this one was Chinese American) wrote this really fantastic narrative about a team project he had that I’ve vividly remembered for close to 20 years. Patrick (his “American name”) was, to his horror, paired with Kevin, one of the two white kids in his class at his 90% Asian middle school class. He didn’t work very hard. He didn’t care that he got Bs because even though he was smart, he never did his homework and his parents didn’t seem to mind. Patrick included descriptive details and exchanges in his story, and Kevin’s every sentence started with “Dude”.

Kevin and Patrick were assigned a presentation on predators. Patrick studiously took notes on their resources as their teacher had recommended because (and he included this over and over) he always obeyed the teacher. Kevin joked with his friends, but then scribbled down some thoughts on predators. Patrick went to the teacher and observed that Kevin’s work was not neat, should he redo it? Absolutely not, the teacher said. Patrick went home and redid all Kevin’s work. Kevin noticed the next day and said “Dude, what’s up? I liked mine better” and redoes it, adding more details and scribbled pictures. Rinse and repeat for three days as Patrick frantically looks up every bit of information he can regurgitate about predators and Kevin horses around throwing spit wads but getting some work done that Patrick deems unacceptable and redoes. He complains to the teacher that Kevin isn’t following her rules, teacher sternly tells him to accept Kevin’s work, Patrick goes home and spends hours redoing it, Kevin notices (“Dude!”) and cheerfully redoes it again, with more messiness and more pictures. Patrick is coming unglued. They are making their Power Points and Kevin’s all “Dude, this picture’s great! Look, the shark is ripping the fish in half!” while Patrick deletes the image for, I don’t remember, but probably the food chain or something.

Comes the time to present. Patrick doesn’t want Kevin to present at all and Kevin doesn’t object—”Sure, dude, if you want to, but you gotta include the story about the falcon”—but the teacher says that they both have to speak. Patrick frontloads the presentation as much as possible, leaving as little as possible for Kevin. Teacher calls “time”, but he plows on to include more facts, so they won’t be downgraded for Kevin’s failing. But finally, he has to yield to Kevin.

And Kevin killed it. The beauty of Patrick’s narrative, which as I said has stayed with me for years, is that he understood that Kevin’s presentation was far superior to his own dry recitation. Kevin included facts—facts he’d scribbled down, but also some of Patrick’s research which he’d clearly read. He edited his commentary to leave out the parts of his assigned topic that Patrick had bogarted into his own talk and instead illustrated Patrick’s facts with illustrations. He gave examples of the difference in behaviors between preys and predators. He told all the cool stories. The class was enthralled.

They got three grades: one each for their presentations, and then a team grade on the report. Kevin got an A. Patrick got a B. Their report, which Patrick had completely rewritten, also got a B. Kevin is ecstatic. “Dude, a B! That’s the highest grade I ever got on one of these reports. But I think you should have kept the pictures in!”

I laughed my ass off and called Patrick up. “That’s such a great story. With a happy ending, even! I hope you learned a lot.”

Patrick was too polite to be upset, but he was clearly shocked. “You think it’s good that Kevin got a higher grade?”

“I do. For one thing, you consistently ignored the teacher. Which is kind of weird, isn’t it? You mention how important it was to listen to the teacher and then….didn’t. Maybe that’s why you got a lower grade?”

“I always listen to the teacher!”

“No. You nod when the teacher tells you to do something, and then do exactly the opposite. In your story, you talk about all the times you asked the teacher if you could redo Kevin’s work. Does the teacher ever say sure, redo it?”

Patrick sat back, astonished. “I never thought of that. You mean….being polite to a teacher isn’t the same thing as obeying the teacher.”

“You’ve now just described my childhood. I obeyed, but always told everyone the rules were bullshit. You’re probably better off sneaking around.”

“But do you think Kevin deserved the higher grade?”

“Well, I don’t have the work itself to judge but your narrative is excellent and honest. Don’t you think he did a better job on the oral presentation?”

“But I did all the work.”

“If you did all the work, there wouldn’t have been any of his work to redo every night. No, Kevin was learning and doing and goofing around and making you very unhappy. But by your own telling he read your research, did his own research, and integrated it all into a presentation that the class loved. Meanwhile, you can’t blame him for the report because it was all your work. You explicitly rejected his contributions.”

Patrick mulled this. “I’ve seen this since then, too. Like, there’s something about not working too hard.”

I laughed. “Yes, particularly in presentations. You have to find the sweet spot between on the one extreme actually not working at all and just winging it and on the other showing how hard you worked to the point of being tedious about it.”

“So…be more natural? That’s why he did better despite doing no work?”

“Kevin was definitely more natural, in your telling. But your telling also made it clear that Kevin was working. He was smart. He used facts. That’s where your cultural and personal biases come into play. You are being—forgive me—racist.”

Patrick was shocked. “Kevin’s white. How can I be racist?”

I snorfled. “Come on. Your whole story reveals your unhappiness with this white loser. White kids can’t be smart. They don’t work hard. They don’t care. They goof around too much. Now, I agree that these are more cultural than racial biases and also—as you observe—it’s practically impossible to get condemned for prejudice against whites. But it was all over your story. Again, that’s what makes your story so fantastic. Your narrative includes details that increase the complexity and makes the reader side with Kevin. ”

“Well, not all readers,” Patrick grinned. “That’s just you being white. Chinese kids would hate Kevin.”

“hahahaha!”

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

This was before my smartphone, or I’d have taken a picture of Patrick’s story. I have work from students going back to 2009. But my memory is very clear on the key plot points.

The rise of AI has given rise to a multitude of think pieces and tweets from professors who are shocked at the near-universal invasion of cheating on every aspect of college work. Sean Trende has observed several times that a fix for this is oral presentations and group work, as well as in-person tests. This gave rise to the universal complaint about group work and this typical exchange:

A lifetime of listening to swotters and dogooders whine about group work has left me unmoved by their bleats. Boohoo. You didn’t get a lower grade, someone else got a higher grade.

OK, I’m kind of kidding. But only kind of. In all my years of education, I only have two clear memories of group projects. Both were in my first stint of grad school, and both were given top honors. In one case, the professor borrowed our slides and continued to use them in his class until he retired. And in both cases, there was a slacker or two in the group. Didn’t bother me at all.

Do not confuse this as an apologia for group assignments. I oppose any kind of group projects in high school math, which are almost entirely A Very Bad Thing. Giving math students a group task, sure. Not with all those bullshit roles , though. And grouping by ability is essential. But never group projects. There’s no time in math for group projects anyway.

In other subjects, at all levels of education, group projects are reasonable and normal and collaboration is an essential skill in the real world. For teachers, group projects presents assessment challenges. The three primary interpersonal difficulties in group work are:

Freeloaders

Bossybritches

Control freaks

I do not deny the existence of freeloaders. They exist and I have ways of identifying them. But let’s give equal time. Control freaks and bossy britches (aka domineering assholes) represent personality types that can be death to co-operative work. Honestly, I don’t think I can improve upon my explanation to Sean Trende:

There’s not just one group dysfunction. There are several. It’s just that you rarely hear anyone complain about the problem of bossybritches and control freaks in the context of school group projects. Possibly—I mean, I’m just speculating—because all the people bitching about freeloaders often might just be, like Patrick, control freaks who don’t recognize participation because it doesn’t mean their exacting (and sometimes inferior) standards.

The trick for teachers lies in finding the dysfunctional ones and making their lives unhappy until they learn to change, rather than do away with group projects entirely.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in pedagogy, philosophy, teaching, teaching life

February 19, 2025

Kindergarten Intifada: Reading It Like A Realist

By educationrealist

Original publication: 01/02/25

In late October, The Free Press published Abigail Shrier’s1 article Kindergarten Intifada. Shrier’s charge that “[t]here is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel” would benefit much from a better understanding of important issues in education.2

So I thought I’d explain how to read the article like an, er, education realist.

Activist Organizations Pushing Curriculum

Shrier accuses schools, teachers, and advocacy groups of formulating “anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight”.

I am unclear why she finds this fact newsworthy. School districts are inundated with curriculum offerings of various activist groups. Getting special interest lessons for free is business as usual in American education. Likeminded people form groups, raise money, create lessons, and push their wares on busy teachers. Better yet, they push politicians to require curriculum on given ethnic groups, which vary by location. With a few simple googles you can find a picture book on Carter Woodson3 Anne Frank lesson plans. Welcome to Argentina booklets for Hispanic Heritage Month. American Muslim teens talking about the immigrant experience. Post Schindler Viewing Discussion: The Persecution of the Rohingya and the Persistence of Genocide. As you might tell from the list, Jewish advocacy groups consistute a major chunk of the curriculum donators.

But of course, the gravamen of Shrier’s charge is that this curriculum offends Jewish parents. To which the pro-Palestinian groups would say “backatcha”, pointing to the legislation to redefine antisemitism and control how it’s covered in k-12 curriculum.

Examples abound of Jewish advocacy groups building and pushing curriculum that could easily offend immigrants of other countries. Burmese4 aren’t thrilled with curriculum linking Rohingya policy with the Holocaust, and various Rwandans might object to the USC Shoah Foundation’s lessons on their civil war as a genocide.

Given this context, it’s hard to see any basis for dismay at what Shrier terms a “conspiracy”. States, districts, and individual schools accept curriculum created by well-meaning activist groups seeking to affect American children’s values and beliefs every day.

There’s probably not any unique attribute of the pro-Palestinian curriculum that couldn’t be used to characterize some other advocacy group’s lesson plans. Dull? Check. One-sided? Check. Offensive to other American communities, immigrant or native? Check. Including information that other American communities find false or offensive or both? Check, check, check.

Want to ban advocacy groups distributing curriculum? Passionate, dedicated, committed Jewish advocacy groups with all the good will in the world will be hit first and hardest.

Jewish parents are extremely pissed off about teachers using Palestinian-sponsored curriculum. They would probably support distribution of lessons favoring the Israeli and Jewish viewpoint.

Ox, meet gore.

Never Forget the First Variable

Ed’s Rule of Education: education in America has everything to do with race, so any discussion of school has to include some scrutiny of that difficult topic. This rule was recently reaffirmed during and after the pandemic.5

But living in high diversity areas tends to change your perspective in ways that aren’t transferable. For example my first thought upon reading Kindergarten Intifada was to wonder what was the race of all those students who were singing “From the river to the sea” and donning those keffiyahs and Palestinian flags, or wearing those FREE PALESTINE teeshirts, or shrieking “ISRAEL SUCKS!” at the top of their sixth grade voices.

Were those mean, misbehaving students all white? Maybe a black student wrote that ‘white ass privileged boy’ text? The girls in headdresses might be Middle Eastern Muslims. But mostly white?

Because Shrier is using stories mostly from court cases and complaints involving six high schools in California’s Bay Area to declare a public school conspiracy to indoctrinate students with antisemitism6, and Bay Area high schools are very rarely majority white.

Shrier doesn’t mention the schools’ demographic profiles, but they are instructive.7

Three of the schools are 40% white, but Woodside and Menlo Atherton have as many or more Hispanics as whites. Fremont High is in Sunnyvale, a lesser known Silicon Valley suburb three times the size of and far more diverse (read lots more Hispanics) than Cupertino High, which is over 70% Asian, most of it Chinese. University Preparatory Academy is the charter Shrier doesn’t mention by name (the court case is easy to find): 50% Asian with the rest split mostly between Hispanics and blacks at 19% and 18%.

Shrier also includes a recording from a United Teachers of Los Angeles conference (more on this later) that she asserts is evidence of teachers unions “pushing”anti-Israel activism9 work at majority Hispanic schools.

This demographic data provided as context for a serious question: is Shrier contending that every racial group of school kids in America are being indoctrinated into antisemitism by progressive teachers? Or did Shrier, like most people, read the court cases and just assume that the bullying students were all white?

And of course, many of my own readers might be thinking what the hell? What does it matter what the race of the kids is? I’ve been discussing this article with a friend of mine who is Jewish and lives in a high diversity area but with lots more white folks than my region of the world. He says it’d be totally normal and unsurprising if Hispanics and Asian kids bought into “Israel is colonizing Palestine” storyline and consequently hate Jews. I’m like….what? Really? Like, you wouldn’t even stop to wonder if the same story line convinced whites as blacks as Hispanics and so on?

He explained that Orthodox Jews, for example, look different. As a highly visible group, it’s easy to slip them into a different narrative. I’m like wait, routine exposure to Sikh turbans, Muslim burqas, and Norteno red dress and tattoos wouldn’t numb the distinctive impact of payot and yarmulkes? They don’t have that where he lives?

It was a terrific and enlightening conversation. I still think he is confused about my argument. I’m not denying that Hispanic and Asian kids living in cocoons might be swayed by an antisemitic or even pro-Israel doctrine. Nor am I denying that some kids of all races buy into progressive dogma. I personally would bet against the prospect of progressive teachers showing slides and talking smack about Israel persuading kids of any race living in a high diversity area being particularly convincing. But I could be wrong, and I have no energy vested in arguing that.

What I am arguing is that education stories centered in highly diverse, majority non-white regions like California’s Bay Area and Los Angeles need to mention race.

If all these teachers are convincing Chinese and Dominican kids to taunt Jewish kids wearing the Star of David, I’m ready to read that story. But *that’s* the story. Some focus needs to be on how the indoctrination intersects with the race of children in an area where there’s already no common cultural touchstones.

So give me a story like: “Surprising surge of antisemitism among Dominicans” or “Chinese immigrant students have suddenly become pro-Palestine—is this a function of their education or influence from back home?” Or even “White kids sink into antisemitism, but Hispanic and Asian kids have other concerns”.

But none of that’s in the article. And without that specificity, I advise caution and suspicion in accepting the story at face value.

Israeli vs Jewish

Not only is this issue fraught with the race question, but also the immigration question. An education realist two-fer.

Many of the students in these complaints Israeli immigrants. Turns out Sunnyvale, home of Fremont High School, has the largest cluster of Israeli emigrants in the Bay Area. So all the Fremont High School students mentioned in Kindergarten Intifada are Israeli. The Cupertino High School and University Preparatory students are both Israeli.

At least one of the families in the Sequoia Union High School lawsuit11 and, as the recording of the tense January 17 board meeting on the offensive curriculum reveals, a lot of the parents who complained are Israeli.

Ella Hassner, profiled in Kindergarten Intifada, has Israeli citizenship and while at Fremont High put up posters of missing children. She sang a song in support of Israel in the student talent show. She was passionately committed to identifying and purging what she saw to be antisemitism in her four years at Fremont. She is, in short, an Israeli activist deeply committed to representing Israel’s interests.

Ellie Miller, the middle schooler at University Preparatory Academy referenced int he article, has cousins in the IDF who have lost dozens of friends in the fighting and says she experienced a lot of bullying from Muslim students. Her mother, Elisa provided the principal “with a letter from the Jewish Community Relations Council… which offered many suggestions as to how educators could help combat antisemitism, as well as ways to talk to children who are affected by war.”12
There’s a huge and understandable difference, it seems to me, between “I am a Jewish American appalled by the 10/7 atrocities and feeling somewhat attacked by all these demonstrations supporting the other side” and “those motherfucking monsters killed my cousin and how dare you express even the faintest tangential support for their cause?”

But how do schools handle their demands? For example, one of the teachers identified is Hadi Kaddoura, a Palestinian Muslim. The filing makes several complaints about him that strike me as very not-credible.13 He is also charged with appearing in video where he “claimed to have been discriminated against due to his Palestinian Muslim identity and criticized diaspora Jews who claim a right to return to Israel”. If Jewish teachers and students can put up posters of missing children from October 7, shouldn’t Palestinian students and teachers be able to talk about their experience?

While both lawsuits are filled with hearsay horror stories with no documentation, it seems to me the real impetus of the cases are a demand for civil rights, either federal or state.

In the Sequoia Union High School court filing, the plaintiffs assert the school district “violated Plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment rights through a widespread or longstanding practice or custom that discriminates against Plaintiffs and their children based on their ethnic and religious identity as Jews, and their belief in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation, which they consider a fundamental aspect of their shared Jewish heritage.”

In the UPA case, the school, district, board, and every education official up the line “allowed Ella to be subject to the intimidation of her classmates because of her Israeli-American, Jewish and perceived Zionist identities in violation of the Ralph Civil Rights Act” and the Fourteenth Amendment.14 I’m skeptical those claims will work.

American schools have a long history of teaching “civil rights” as a tale of good guys and bad guys, going back to the 60s. Many teachers have used examples of American and foreign repression (as they see it) to draw parallels with our own history in lessons often describe as “critical thinking”. Increasingly progressive teachers have strayed further and further into opining

This has created tension as black and Hispanic civil rights activisms offends conservative communities, and vice versa. If a powerful ethnic community joining forces with a small but related immigrant community with demands to get equal treatment—well, I’m just not sure how it works.

I am all for American teachers being prohibited from promoting their own political views during history lessons. But the Israeli/Jewish lawsuits want *their* political views promoted within the school system, while squelching those they find offensive.

What should American schools do when serving immigrant populations whose countries of origin are at war with each other? How is a public school system going to privilege Israeli immigrants over Palestinian immigrants?

Which ones do we keep? Which ones do we leave out? Americans can’t even agree nationally on the curriculum topics for our own history. Now schools have to run their Holocaust curriculum by the Burmese and the Hutus. Maybe the Pakistanis will start demanding we rip down those Gandhi posters.

Both parties here, whether Israeli or Palestinian, are best-served by treating this as a Fourteenth Amendment case. It’s not the best time to remind Americans about the tensions created with increased immigration.

But that’s what this tension is about.

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

Reading this like a realist is why I suspect that, like Shrier’s other foray into educational reporting, this story and these cases don’t go far. Israeli/Jewish factions do have this in their favor: courts *hate* public schools. Left and right, judges could give a shit about the practicality of running a wildly diverse education system under rules designed for a world of majority whites with a smaller black community that had endured under slavery. So sure, they could make some impossible decree to complicate schools lives.

But everything else about the story suggests they’ll lose, or the issue will fade out. We ain’t called The Blob for nothing, people.

Studying all this has given me new appreciation for the many immigrant communities that show up here and don’t make a fuss about the wars of their home countries. Mad props, for example, to the millions of Indians and Pakistanis living here who don’t torment public schools with lawsuits.

I actually began this writing effort to discuss the genuine problem with Shrier’s article—one that factcheckers should have caught. That’s my next piece. I hope.

1
While I just wrote 1500 words on Abigail Shrier’s lack of bio, I’m totally over that. I’ve got other issues to be irritated about. Also, while I think this article is weak and distorted, the problems lie in common views that Shrier and her profiled individuals share, so this is not really focused on her journalistic sins.

2I tend to stay away from any issues involving either the Jewish faith or Israel’s existence. But once again, she has invaded my turf and talked about schools. So please keep in mind as I am addressing these issues as a matter of education policy, without much brief for one side or the other. It won’t feel that way, I know. Sorry about that.

3Irony alert: Carter Woodson was the father of curriculum by advocacy groups movement, inventing Negro History Week.

4Myanmar (terrible name) isn’t even thrilled at anyone using the word Rohingya.

5For data on this, see The Real Reason for School Closures and my many other pandemic pieces.

6Which is odd, given that the title of the piece implies this is an elementary school phenomenon.

7Fremont High School: 43% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 17% white, 1% black
Cupertino High School: 71% Asian, 10% Hispanic, 10% white, 1% black
University Preparatory Academy: 49% Asian, 19% Hispanic, 18% black
Berkeley High School: 41% white, 22% Hispanic, 12% black, 8% Asian
Menlo Atherton High School: 39% white, 39% Hispanic, 9% Asian, 4% black
Woodside High School, 51% Hispanic, 40% white, 5% Asian, 1% black

8UTLA is the Los Angeles Unified School District union.

9David Feldman, Santee Education Complex Ron Gochez, Maya Angelou Community High School, Guadalupe Carasco Cardona, Roybal Learning Center, Will Shattuc, John Adams Middle School, and Ingrid Villeda, 93rd Street Elementary School.

10I mention a few aspects of this and the University Preparatory Academy lawsuits, but I don’t go into them in detail. Most of the charges are student claims. Others may differ, but it is probably unwise to accept any of these claims on their face. I very much doubt the schools and districts are allowing rampant racial abuse to occur. But if they are, that’s a separate issue from the curriculum and conspiracy charges and thus not what I’m addressing here.

11I wouldn’t know a “Jewish” name, but Igor Bershteyn sounds non-American.
12Irony alert: the mother was offering the school curriculum that promoted her point of view.

13“On the same day the video aired, S.B. was waiting outside a classroom when Kaddoura approached her and asked why she was there. When S.B. replied that she was “waiting for friends,” Kaddoura responded with a sneer, “You have friends?” He then asked S.B. if she was Jewish, claiming that he could tell by her nose. The interaction left S.B. feeling humiliated and publicly shamed.”

Claims like this need video evidence. I’m not defending the guy. But he’s a math teacher by examination, by which logic dictates he’s not a moron, and “he’s a moron” is the only way this story is credible on its face.

14and so she should be reimbursed for private school hahahaha good luck with that.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in philosophy

February 19, 2025

Another Someone Who Came from Nowhere

By educationrealist

(originally published: 12/25/24)

I first noticed Abigail Shrier when she made the podcast rounds to discuss her first book. I didn’t like her style, but didn’t think much of it. Then she wrote a series of blog posts that claimed to show how “activist teachers recruit kids” into….being transgender, I guess. I wrote about her articles and their shocking ignorance on basic school policy, because it was clear the teachers were lying.1

She ventured again into school issues with the Free Press article Kindergarten Intifada, once again using shoddy reporting with little understanding of education and, as I was preparing to write about her again, it occurred to me to wonder: Abigail Shrier describes herself as a journalist. She’s published two books to much attention: the first on the danger of transgender treatment, the second on the damage of teen therapy. She recently wrote about teacher unions conspiring to convert students to anti-Israel beliefs for the Free Press.

But how did she become a journalist? What was her history?

I began with her Wikipedia bio, which describes her as an “opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal.” Two paragraphs further down the description changes to “wrote opinion columns for the Wall Street Journal” and those are not the same thing.

The next sequence of events is why I don’t write much2

Wikipedia first describes Shrier as an “opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal” but then two paragraphs further down changes the description to “wrote opinion columns for the Wall Street Journal” and those are not the same thing. Besides, the WSJ gig was from 2018 to 2020 and Wikipedia lists nothing else.

Wait, what? She’s in her 40s. What did she do before the WSJ?

I checked a long list of Wikipedia references. One is Dan Markel’s pleased announcement of her 2007 wedding, which confirmed my assumptions about her age; the other a 2107 op-ed piece she wrote about her conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Every other piece in the long list is from 2018 or later.

Her education is a whole Wikipedia paragraph with nary a date. I googled interviews with her figuring that at least one of them would include her providing a brief overview of her professional history. But none of the references included such information.

Looking for any other data, I found that her Twitter account opened in 2011 but wow, she wasn’t commenting about anything back then except books and momming. Putting this together along with the education history and wedding announcement, I learned she is the daughter of two judges, went to law school, married a rich guy and quit work to have kids.

And honestly, that’s kind of it for the first decade of the century.

Starting around 2014 or so, she started writing for the Jewish Journal, a publication that she wrote for far more than for the Wall Street Journal. If the bylines are any indication3 she just wrote random one-offs for each publication, and didn’t write very much. Overwhelmingly, her articles centered on Jewish issues of one sort or another.

So until she came out with her first book, Abigail Shrier’s footprint was “Jewish mom who once was a lawyer, dilettante writer”. It’s hard to find her work.

So she wrote very little, then suddenly she’s an author being described as a journalist. She started with the transgender issue, segued into the child depression moral hazard business, and is dabbling now in the schools are biased against Israel brouhaha. Both her books were put out by conservative publishers (Regnery and Sentinel) but she’s not treated in the media like a conservative, you know?

So if you thought Abigail Shrier was a hardworking reporter who had finally put in enough time to get a book published, update your priors. Shrier is one of those people who just popped up from nowhere, from nobody to journalist and intellectual in two easy steps.

Is she a journalist? Maybe if you define the term reeeeeeaaaallly broadly. Not that mainstream journalism has an accuracy and objectivity that’s anything to brag about, but many of her stories involve education and her ignorance is incredibly obvious, untroubled with basic facts that would have been caught by a mainstream publication. She’s not dishonest, I don’t think—just ignorant.

There was a time, long ago, when I naively believed that people coming into public acclaim or recognition did so via some kind of filtering process. If a new author hit it big, it was because some publisher was fishing through a slush pile and found gold, or an agent was wowed by the draft and pitched it hard to publishers. Resumes and research was doublechecked. A book about a topic was written by a person with some knowledge of the topic. People who were in the news as journalists and experts were actually journalists and experts.

And that just ain’t so. JD Vance probably got his book published because he knew Peter Thiel. Emily Hanford has been switching through causes for a decade or so, trying to find advocacy that other groups will shill. In the smaller education world, Doug Lemov massaged his bio into a creation myth that gave him a lot more teaching experience than he actually had and credit for founding a school that he didn’t. I don’t know how Abigail Shrier got her book deal first book deal with Regnery, but it wasn’t her vast experience with transgender, her sterling research, or her superlative written expression.

I’m reminded of the Abe Mikva’s attempt to work in Chicago politics:

When I first came to Chicago, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas were running for governor and senator,” he said. “I had heard about the closed Party, closed machine, but they sounded like such great candidates, so I stopped in to volunteer in the Eighth Ward Regular Democratic headquarters. I said, ‘I’m here for Douglas and Stevenson.’ The ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Who sent you?’ And I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’ ”

Maybe nobody nobody sent gets hired, or called, or published.

Eh, it can’t be that bad. Olivia Nuzzi’s a loathsome scumbag but she did actually get noticed as a high school junior by local news editors who spotted her talent. I do believe, really, that genuine talent coupled with drive and reasonable ambition gets people where they want to go. But while genuine talent and intellect is sufficient, it’s not necessary.

What bothers me is reflected in a conversation I had with a very well-known education writer years back, while I was researching the Doug Lemov story. I mentioned my research showed that he hadn’t been a teacher for any period of time, hadn’t founded the school he’d been credited with, and almost certainly wasn’t writing his procedural teaching Bible out of his deep pedagogical knowledge.

And the education writer said something to the effect of “what does this matter? Do you think his work has value? then who cares if he’s misrepresenting his resume or making up his experience? If people believe his work and become better teachers, isn’t that the point?”

I’m not often silenced by astonishment.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Important people think Shrier’s work has value because they can promote her work as support for their own opinions, thus reinforcing the causes they advocate for. She got sent by the right somebody. What does it matter that her past is a blank page, if her work allows others to shill for a good cause?

Fine. But she shouldn’t call herself a journalist, and she shouldn’t allow herself to be described as an opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal if she just wrote opinion pieces for them. She’s a polemicist and a lot of her work is uneducated credulous bullshit, even if it is in support of impeccable causes.

***************************************************
1And indeed they were, but Shrier never updated her story to mention that.

2Realize I was checking for some brief stuff to write for an intro to get into my article on kindergarten intifada, and ended up on an hours long delve trying to trace her work history. I need to NOT DO THAT. This is the sort of sinkhole that stops me writing.

3“Abigail Shrier is a writer and graduate of Yale Law School living in Los Angeles” or “Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.”

Leave a comment | posted in philosophy

February 19, 2025

Teaching is a Great Job

By educationrealist

Originally published on substack: 11/3/2024

A third of teachers like their jobs, and while that’s a little less than the half of Americans who enjoy their work, it’s not so far off that we shouldn’t explore other reasons for this difference. Like, say, teachers are disproportionately attracted to the career for the public approbation and the increase in negative rhetoric makes them feel unappreciated. Or maybe certain school demographics are in fact getting harder to handle and these are the teachers now giving the job lower rating. I dunno.

Regardless, it’s rapidly becoming conventional wisdom that teachers are overwhelmingly, and righteously, upset about dystopian working conditions. Everyone seems ready to offer an explanation as to the cause of this teacher discontent: public disapproval, students rendered depressed, transgender, and feral by a pandemic lockdown, book bans, lousy pay, political mandates, whatever.

I have many opinions about these claims. Mostly, they’re bullshit.12

Teaching is a joyous, wonderful occupation.

I call this a counternarrative, but it shouldn’t be. There’s a whole category of teacher movies for a reason. Nonetheless, teachers don’t get published or quoted for saying they love their job. Yes, I know, it’s only news if teachers are unhappy. But if “teachers under fire” stories are a thing, and they are, then media outlets should remember to offer up some opposing viewpoints.

So.

I love my job. It’s endless joy and loads of fun: a performance job that has me on stage four to five hours a day. Add in hundreds of behind-the-scenes hours go into that performance—building curriculum, grading tests….what else? Some meetings. I run the security lines at dances now. I work the hours I want. I want to work a lot of hours. What’s not to like?

I have held this opinion every day of my sixteen years in, regardless of the money I got to in return.

Pay heed, one and all: a teacher with no complaints about salary.

My first year salary was under $50K, which cracked me up. I didn’t think it was possible for any college graduate in my area to make under $50K as a serious salary in the late 2000s. But honestly, I found the low pay amusing, not offensive or irritating. I’d spent most of my career contracting or self-employed, so sick leave, paid time off, and pensions were magical concepts. That first year was the only time I thought my salary was ridiculously low, and I largely abandoned my tutoring business by my fifth year because I didn’t need the money. Once I started working extra preps, most of the years between 2013 and 2023, I never thought about salary again. I didn’t even know how much I made most years.

These days, I get paid a lot.

How much? Well, I looked it up just for this piece. Not counting pension payments, I’m just under the 90th percentile for my age. Counting pension payments puts me well over 90th. Irony alert: I’m making about $40K less this year because I don’t work the extra preps much. Annoying. But still.

Adjusted for inflation, my highest lifetime income was twice my current salary during my consulting years of the 90s. But cash flow was always a fear, I paid for my own benefits, no pension, my son was younger and I had more expenses. I’m economically secure today, getting a guaranteed paycheck every month, no matter how many hours I work. Plus I’ll make somewhere between 40 and 50% of my salary when I retire on my teaching salary alone, and that’s not counting Social Security and my own savings. I pay the whole nut of my health insurance, around $13K/year, but it’s really great insurance.

Am I maximizing my income? No. Not as a teacher, anyway. My district has middling pay. The district I live in, as opposed to work in, would probably hire me in a heartbeat. I’d bump my salary $20K, plus they pay the full nut on insurance, so a net boost of $30K. The highest paid district in the area, I’d get close to a $55K bump, if they’d hire me, which they probably wouldn’t. You only hire young ‘uns at that pay.

(Lest you think I’m bragging, please recall teacher pay comes from a table. I can take credit for going to ed school in my 40s and maintaining employment despite fairly rampant age discrimination, but after that, it’s row x, column y. For what it’s worth, I’ve had four straight evaluations of “Outstanding” and that’s quite rare.)

My comfortable salary actually led me to change my near future plans. Ultimately, I want to retire while I’m still young enough to work as a teacher in another state—something that used to to be a pipe dream, but never think that teaching shortages are all bad. From 2020 on, two things kept me in place: my mom and my commitment to my school. My mother’s dementia is a lot for her husband to handle, and I wasn’t leaving the area until she either died or was safely in a facility, which she is and doing very nicely. Last year saw me leave the school I loved so much. Retirement and relocation should have followed.

Except I looked at the teaching salaries in other states and like, what the actual fuck. Why walk away from this money? Save more! So I cut back on sushi and bumped my savings. Three years max and then I really do hope to kick in the retirement move.

So I love my job and enjoy my high pay.

Until I landed work in my current district, the only negative emotion I felt was existential fear that I wouldn’t be able to teach. I got laid off from my first two jobs, despite being a damn good new teacher, but while the job hunt wait was terrifying3, I never altered my bedrock certainty of the awesomeness of my job.

Realize, too, that I’m not one of those milk-of-human-kindness martyrs longing to do good. Trump voter, immigration restrictionist, IQ realist, hardnosed boomer who swears like a truckdriver and thinks school libraries and cafeterias are a boondoggling waste of taxpayer dollars.

I have no real point to this essay.

Well, wait. I have been absolutely blocked for months and even before then putting out new articles has been a huge effort. I do research, read up, and then when I’ve got the data I want I sit watching TV, away from my laptop, AWAY FROM TWITTER, rather than realize I can’t write. I am busy. I have a lot of interesting living going on. But that never stopped me before. Just putting something on paper….hahahaha, see what I did there…..seemed important. So I walked away from all the interesting writing projects to focus on straight conversational mode, no analysis or deep dives. See footnotes for how much effort that required.

Then, I wanted to kick off my substack newsletter4. Please subscribe. I will never ask you for money for the same reason my Twitter moniker will never have the blue check. I value my pseudonymity. Well, maybe after I retire, but if I ever get around to passing the hat feel free to remind me of my great retirement package.

Finally, the meta-point—and where would we be without meta? (no, not Meta): Instead of telling, I’ll show. The next time you read an article about the dire state of schools and teaching—or better yet, the next time you write an article on same—take a look at some absolutely authentic teacher tales, all but a couple from my experience teaching low income students at a high functioning Title I high school in mostly math, but also ELL and US history. All of them propaganda moments that movies would be proud to include. All of them a totally normal part of my daily teaching life. Remind yourself of the third of teachers who think the job is amazing, because we don’t tend to show up much in the media.

You don’t have to quote me or cite me or link me (although any of the three would be nice). Just keep the awareness of happy teachers firmly in mind.

Classroom Connections:

  • A Clarifying Moment: a student returns two years after graduation to rebuild from a painful failure.
  • Graduating My Geometry Class: First graduation I ever attended, at the school where most of these stories took place.
  • Push the Right Buttons: prodding two young men into productivity while subbing.
  • When It Had To Be You: How two credentials helped me help a young Chinese kid who “didn’t get the memo”.
  • Teaching Trump: I taught US History the semester after Trump won in 2016. This was the first lesson.
  • From Dead Animals to Disney: It’s good to help a student. It’s even better to make it clear that nothing is more important in that minute than helping that student.
  • Song Blue: ELL students and metaphors
  • What it Looks Like In Practice: Fine, you’re transgender. Pick ONE name, thanks.
  • 2020 Thankfulness: only part of this is about teaching, but I spent my entire 18 months teaching during the pandemic in a state of fury, and the one thing that kept me sane was teaching and making a difference.
  • Post Pandemic Update: Apart from tardies the first year and absences the second, everything’s ok. (Two years later, the absences are still a bit much.)
  • All Geometry All the Time: Changing schools was upsetting, and a terrible loss. But leave that aside. The really awful thing was just one prep.
  • Ending the Year a Decade Later: But it got better.

Conversations with Teachers:

I love talking about teaching. Here’s some of my best exchanges.

  • Two Math Teachers Talk: I’m pleased to say that Dale and I have maintained our friendship for thirteen years, through three job and location changes for both of us. We still meet up for barbecue and beer a couple times a year.
  • The Day of Three Miracles: I kept my mouth shut and achieved an unexpected consensus.
  • Teacher Federalism: A geniune epic about a group of unlike-minded teachers finding a manageable consensus that lasted formally for three years and informally for six.
  • In Which Ed Explains Induction: Bart was my very best teacher friend. He left the job after the pandemic because he found a girlfriend in a different state. I still miss the guy.

Math Specific

Unlike ELL and History, some math articles need expertise, but these are still some great propaganda moments.

  • Gwen and Bob and Lines of Best Fit: I know an unseemly amount about musicals, but rarely do I find a way to mix my fixation with math.
  • The Charge: Thirty minutes before a rally, kids won’t shut up, and shazam. It’s too bad you have to know the math to get this story.
  • Teaching as Stagecraft: For me, *all* teaching is stagecraft, but this 15 minute lesson on making kids realize they’ve “seen” pi never fails to deliver.
  • Max, Homer, and Wesley: the intellectual joy of using tests to see progress.

Teaching is an intellectually challenging, emotionally satisfying way to make a living. Few careers available to ordinary folk have more impact on more lives. I’d ask the media, reformers, policy wonks and the rest to remember that and try to represent the enormously complicated field with a bit more nuance.

To teachers: If you don’t like the job, go do something else. If you choose to stay in the field because you love it so much, quit complaining.

Advocate for change, absolutely! Demand more money and change jobs if the pay isn’t enough. I’m not proposing anyone subserviently accept bad conditions. But never forget you get a ton of time off, benefits, and job security the rest of America can’t even really comprehend. Try to keep that in mind.

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

1As an example of what’s been *killing* my writing output for a couple years: I started to give examples of bullshit then began looking for links to cite then thought gosh, I should reorganize this and rewrite and refocus it and then an hour was gone. Stepped away from the keyboard, I did.

So I will not be specific about the claims and education common wisdom these days that is complete and total bullshit, as opposed to mostly bullshit, as opposed to correct but misdiagnosed, because I don’t seem to be able to produce these pieces right now.

2Then I had to intervene a second time because I wanted to delay to develop four paragraphs describing these various categories of bullshit.

3Damn, got distracted for another hour trying to find ancient articles about that anxiety.

4I have decided to keep wordpress as a repository. It’s much simpler, even if I hate the banner.

Leave a comment | posted in philosophy

July 23, 2024

Government Class Gonna Be LIT! (plus a coincidence)

By educationrealist

The last time I taught US History was in spring 2017, and it was the shit. Trump had just won and as my readers know, I live and teach in deepest of blue blue lands. Thirty students who’d never really thought much about politics, assumed any Trump voters were evil, had been assured that Republicans hated immigrants and Mexicans, and had never once considered that Hillary might not be their next president. Even the most disengaged among them was ready to hear some explanations.

A couple days before school was out, I was talking to a young teacher. By “young”, I mean this Indian American had been in high school when Trump won. In fact, he’d been in my high school. He’d been a junior in my high school, the year I taught my last history class, and the only reason he hadn’t been in my class is that he took APUSH, like most Indian American kids in my district. (Yes. First I had to deal with colleague’s my son’s age, now I’m dealing with colleagues who were students during my only 15 year teaching career. Gack.) He graduated, went to an extremely selective public university and straight into ed school, getting credentials in English and history. I shall call him Vivek. 

So in a passing hallway conversation, Vivek mentioned he’d be teaching Government and Econ the next year, and I was jazzed.

“I’d kill to teach that this year.”

“Yeah, but I’m teaching Econ first semester. It’d be fun to cover the election in real-time.”

“Oh, mix it up.”

“What? Like, not do the curriculum?”

“hahahahaha. Yeah, like not do the curriculum. It’s allowed. I’ve been remembering a lesson I did in US history that would be a fantastic starting point and you could update it. Start at 2016 and have the students go through and assign the winner. I had them do their best guess first, then look it up. Then do the same thing for 2020, and then the polls for 2024. That will bring home the notion of ‘swing state’.”

“Wow, that sounds great. Can we talk more about this? Meet up for coffee later on, after we’ve started to get bored from summer?”

By the time we met six weeks later,  I’d spent an embarrassing amount of time mulling curriculum ideas, determined to get some vicarious joy out of seeing someone else implement them.

“OK, I want to start with a fundamental premise and I apologize if it offends you: to do this class right, you have to start by telling them the world won’t end if Trump wins. That in order to really learn and engage and hopefully have a hell of a lot of fun, they have to accept that either candidate might win and that accepting this isn’t some sort of betrayal. Because….”

Vivek was already nodding. “Yes! It is amazing that Trump won narrowly, lost narrowly, and is back and is from all appearances winning! They have to see that, even if they think he’s a villain. Look, our kids live in a blue bubble. I want them to really understand the issues that make every race lately a close one.”

“Oh, great! You’re a young pup, you can totally sell them on the idea that they’re living in an exciting moment in history, when people genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen. I see that as essential.”

“But I’m supposed to do Economics first semester, not Government.”

“There’s so much in this election about economics! Immigration affecting wages. Tariffs. Inflation. Supply chain problems in the pandemic.”

“Oh, my god, you’re right. Manufacturing, the chip shortage, China! I never thought of it that way. But how do I mix it up? I have to give them a grade, right?”

“Short answer: mix it up, tell the kids they are getting a grade each semester and what do they care? Longer answer: pick a day or three a week and do lessons from the Econ curriculum during first semester, Government during second.”

“I could also do intros in semester one and in-depth semester two.”

We mapped out some lessons:

  • Start with my electoral college lesson updated to bring home the nature of our split electorate. Emphasize importance of geography, no one around here votes for Trump, but whole swathes of the country do. Possible assignment: find a Trump voter! Quiz on states–red, blue, swing.
  • Tariffs: Go back all the way to Hamilton’s financial plan, discuss how tariffs provided the federal government with funds. Why not income tax? Look at Constitution to see what their powers are. Go through differences between tariffs and “direct taxes”, history of Revenue Act of 1861 and 16th Amendment. Then–“if we don’t need tariffs for income anymore, why use them?” “Back to economics. Protectionism. Manufacturing. China. Maybe some American Compass for pro and old school Heritage Foundation for con. Possible assignment: short essay on differences, or worksheet.
  • Inflation–that will link straight to whatever text is used (useful in case of observations). Then look at the historical rate of inflation and go through a few of the different periods, putting the current rate in perspective. Possible assignment: quiz on inflationary periods and causes, examples of current products and price increases over time.
  • Political parties: when did they start? Maybe go through political systems briefly. (surely we’ve moved towards the seventh by now).  Should political parties control the candidate selection? Needs more work to flesh out–might be too much to do well.
  • Election tracking: watch the polls, discuss the difference between national polls and swing state polls. Compare over time. Assignment: a class spreadsheet with pages for 2016, 2020, and 2024. Maybe introduce RCP and The Silver Report?
  • Immigration and economics: the border appears to be playing a huge role in political support. How does education and economic opportunity play a role in this support? What differences exist between an economic view of immigration and its impact on US policy and the individual level? Assignment: not sure, maybe none.
  • Key milestones in a campaign–primaries, primary debates, delegates, conventions, debates. We weren’t yet sure what assignments or how to do this yet, but given the change in debate timeline, followed by Biden’s disastrous debate, some context would be useful and interesting.
  • Voting: Each student designs essay (or some other activity) on whether or not they’d vote. Include eligibility (citizenship, age), but regardless, what would they do? Find examples of people who actively refuse to vote. Final project of some sort.

So we met July 9th, I think? Such a long, long time ago. Here’s some ideas I’ve texted him since:

  • 25th amendment!!! Wooohoo! 
  • Branches of government: Nancy Pelosi and the heads of the legislative branch seemed to play a large role in persuading/forcing the President to step down from his re-election campaign. Is this a constitutional issue, or a political party issue? How do they conflict? 
  • Amend the election poll tracking. Same assignment, because the differences will explain why the pressure was on Biden to do the debate, then tracking how they change with Harris ascension.
  • How many people would vote for Biden even knowing he’s not competent? Find examples in the media, possibly in their circle of friends and family? Compile examples and discuss. 
  • Speaking of the media and its involvement, there’s got to be something to do there.

I’m jealous. But I might be teaching stats this fall and if so, I’ve decided to center the first semester around the election. Data collection mostly, as they won’t have the tools to analyze until later in the year.

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

“It’s so great to be able to talk about this analytically, with the interest in education instead of catastrophizing Trump’s possible election.”

“Well. It doesn’t hurt that I vote Republican and am rooting for Trump. Don’t tell anyone else, though. I’m new at this….”

“WHAT?”

“I…”

“You’re kidding. I can’t believe…..”

“Wait. You? You can’t be. You’re gay, Indian, and what….twenty three?”

“Four.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Don’t tell anyone. I don’t have tenure.”

“No fear.”

So for the first time I have four people to text about the election! That’s really cool.

And what the hell are the odds?

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in history, pedagogy, politics

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