Texas Stepping into Evolution Debate

Texas is getting ready to put its boot-print on the evolution debate in America. 

The issue has been going on for a while and I have been following it here, but now national media has noticed -- putting Texas in sort of a no-backing down position here. 

Dr. McLeroy [chair of the Texas Board of Education] believes that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago.

He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection, an argument popular with those who believe an intelligent designer created the universe.

The textbooks will "have to say that there's a problem with evolution -- because there is," said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. "We need to be honest with the kids."

So, later this week we'll know whether one of the largest textbook buyers in the country is going to demand that science teachers question evolution in front of their students and in their textbooks (meaning that evolution questioning statements will appear throughout the United States in the textbooks). Apparently this is going to be a close vote this week, with one member of the Texas Board of Education serving as the swing vote.

Got to love it when a dentist (who I have serious questions about anyway) controls education and our understanding of biology for millions of school children.  

But, as Clay Burell notes, some Texas legislators introduced legislation to reign in the State Board and he has even started a petition to put pressure on legislators. 

Those dang open meetings.

School boards really struggle with the Open Meeting Laws (sometimes called Sunshine Laws). Like this one in Iowa (h/t S.M.).

Here is a compendium of every state's Open Meetings laws.  

Also, most states have a handbook on Open Meetings laws for new board members and most are online. NSBA has some of them here. 

This strikes me as a great opportunity for an instructional video in states. Law firms could really help themselves here because one of the first things a new board member would watch is an instructional video with your name on it. Just saying ... 

Overruling the Spirit of Pickering

I'm now conformable making this statement: Garcetti expressly overruled the spirit of Pickering.

Consider this from Pickering:

However, the only way in which the Board could conclude, absent any evidence of the actual effect of the letter, that the statements contained therein were per se detrimental to the interest of the schools was to equate the Board members' own interests with that of the schools. Certainly an accusation that too much money is being spent on athletics by the administrators of the school system ... cannot reasonably be regarded as per se detrimental to the district's schools. Such an accusation reflects rather a difference of opinion between Pickering and the Board as to the preferable manner of operating the school system, a difference of opinion that clearly concerns an issue of general public interest.

And this from Garcetti:

Employers have heightened interests in controlling speech made by an employee in his or her professional capacity. Official communications have official consequences, creating a need for substantive consistency and clarity. Supervisors must ensure that their employees' official communications are accurate, demonstrate sound judgment, and promote the employer's mission... If Ceballos' superiors thought his memo was ... misguided, they had the authority to take proper corrective action.

What's fundamentally different is how the Court views the employer. In Pickering the Court found that the public interest in schooling is determined not by the Board of Education, but by the court of public opinion ... manifested in our democratic structures. The Court in Garcetti takes exactly the opposite view equating the employer with the public interest. The school board's opinion is the only manifestation of the public interest that matters and all others are subservient or possibly threatening to this public interest. Using Pickering's quote above ... "cannot [YES IT CAN] reasonably be regarded as per say detrimental to the district's schools."  In this way, Garcetti directly overrules the spirit of Pickering.

In many ways Garcetti shows a fundamental mistrust in the structures of democracy that compensate for dissonance. Consider this:

Ceballos' proposed contrary rule, adopted by the Court of Appeals, would commit state and federal courts to a new, permanent, and intrusive role, mandating judicial oversight of communications between and among government employees and their superiors in the course of official business. This displacement of managerial discretion by judicial supervision finds no support in our precedents.

Yes it does. Pickering, in the above quote, just said it was comfortable with that and is comfortable with the idea that the public, through the democratic structures, which include but are not limited to the court system, will find a way to resolve it. Sometimes it was ignoring teacher speech. Sometimes it was other teachers helping to control it through social means. Sometimes it was principals sitting down with a teacher behind closed doors. Sometimes it was the PTA acknowledging but not acting on concerns. Sometimes it was firing the teacher on other grounds. Sometimes it was the Union getting involved. And, yes, sometimes it even hit the Court system (although in no way can we say the Courts were overrun following Pickering). But sometimes, and maybe even relatively few times, the expression actually changed something.

Democracy is messy. Democracy is rightfully messy. It has to be messy - you have to be willing to throw thousands of ideas at a wall in the hope that just one will stick. You have to trust our teachers. You have to trust our administrators. You have to trust our communities. You have to trust our Courts.

Pickering trusted democracy. Garcetti didn't.

This post is part of the Scholarly Series on Garcetti and Schools.

Edjurist TV: Episode 3 - Interview with Dr. Kevin Welner on his New Book: NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling

Hooray, it all worked this time! This is how I envisioned these sessions and hopefully how the rest will be from now on.

Today we have Kevin Welner, an associate professor at the University of Colorado - Boulder, talking about his new book: NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling (it's pretty cheap folks, I recommend picking it up!). Enjoy (the resources are below):

Resources:

A decent introduction to the issue of tuition tax credits from the Center for Education Reform.

All the work that EPIC has done on tuition tax credits and vouchers.

A review of the book at the Education Policy Blog.

Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (Supremes - permitting Cleveland voucher program as constitutional).

Kotterman v. Killian (Arizona - permitting the tuition tax credit system).

Bush v. Holmes (Florida - striking down the A+ voucher program).

The Arizona Appeals Court case from this week on corporate neovouchers. 

More Kevin! (he's everywhere - ASU, Berkeley, Chapel Hill - it's amazing).

AEI Presentation on CSPAN. (Video)

EdWeek Pub (registration required).

Surprisingly good radio interview on Religious Talk.

Next Episode: Episode 4 is scheduled for late April. Kevin Brady will be my guest and we will discuss a few issues including cyber charter schools and some of the work we have been doing lately on education law online research. It's possible I might do an AERA episode in the meantime, though, to promote the SIG a little.

Upcoming CRP Conference at UNC

Too many acronyms?

The Civil Rights Project is co-sponsoring an upcoming conference with the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights and the University of Georgia Education Policy and Evaluation Center on the future of desegregation.

Here's the title of the conference: Looking to the Future: Legal and Policy Options for Racially Integrated Education in the South and the Nation

Here is the brochure. It is April 2, so it is coming up, and it is cheap ($50 / $10 for students!) - but you need to register by the end of the week. I have exceeded my travel budget for this year already, so I won't be making the trip, but it does sound very interesting and they have a lot of great panelists ... including the guy I interviewed for Episode 3, which should be up in the morning.

The Price-Tag

These Court cases cost a lot of money, especially when you lose. You might remember that a few years ago some counties in Kentucky wanted to put the Ten Commandments in the courthouse. The case was calledMcCreary County v. ACLU, because the ACLU sued to have them removed. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the counties lost. Well, not only did the counties have to pay their own lawyers (to lose the case), but they now have also been ordered to pay the ACLU of Kentucky more than $400,000 in attorney's fees.

There is a price-tag to these things and I am amazed how often people are willing to pay it for relatively silly cases. In this Kentucky case, the law was pretty clear that the Ten Commandments was not going to fly in a new display in a public courthouse, even before they ever posted them. They would have been wise to listen to their counsel and forget about it - instead, local taxpayers are going to have to foot the (sizeable) bill.

Should Schools Publish the News?

If you haven't noticed, lately newspapers have been hitting the floor like birds at Chernobyl. 

The Rocky Mountain News ... done.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer & Detroit Free Press... online only.

The New York Times ... massive layoffs.

Tribune Company & Philadelphia Newspapers ... bankrupt.

Even Yahoo News had to reorganize.

And our own EdWeek has experienced alleged ... "staff reductions".

In total, in the last quarter of last year newspapers sales fell 2 billion dollars.

And, those are the big names you are hearing about. Rural newspapers have been hurting for decades and many are now already gone.

Here is James DeLong's conclusion:

If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions. Decay and decline are always options, and—unless some mechanism is found to let producers of information monetize their work—inevitabilities. Absent institutional invention, a government-funded news service seems not just possible but likely, possibly supplemented by privately funded organizations with varying axes to grind.

So, if the government is going to have to be a bigger player, the question is whether there is a role for schools to fill this void? As schools become more technologically savvy and have more and more publishing equipment on hand, perhaps they can play some role in producing local news? Even if it is just online. In some small towns the local news is literally the beautyshop, the church bulliten and the school newsletters. In many rural communities the local newspaper basically was the school marketing arm anyway, publishing everything from sports photos, to the honor roll, to the cafeteria lunch schedule. In urban communities, as the companies cut-back local positions and purchase more and more of their content from AP like sources, the local school events are being ignored.

I think schools need to be better at media and marketing anyway. What if they just took some responsibility to produce a little local news in whatever form they had the capacity to accomplish? I know it is one more thing, but I could see quite a few benefits. First and foremost, from an administration standpoint, you get to control the local narrative. That's very important. But, also, this could help student writing if they wrote most of the stories. They would also learn more about their local communities. Students might go to city council meetings, for instance. It would also help communities by continuing to give them a voice and identity.

This wouldn't be the first time that schools assumed a community role. The downtown playhouses of the past are now just empty shells, but the auditoriums are still in our high schools regularly putting out South Pacific. The school has the local band. Hosts local dances. Provides weekend entertainment with local football and basketball games. In a lot of ways the schools have slowly been becoming the local hubs of entertainment and information anyway. Could this be next?

Something to think about when the local paper closes shop in your community.

What happens when ...

the kids don't come back. It's all just junk - or worse than that, pollution. This reminds me of a recent book I read, The World Without Us. Never thought an American public school would be reminding me of this book, but check out this amazing photoessay on permanently closed Detroit Public Schools.  

h/t Andrew Sullivan. 

Weekend Snippets - March, 2009: Gender Segregation

Some snippets for your weekend perusal: 

Anti-Bullying Debate in North Carolina and Oregon. Popular, popular, popular. 

Here in Kentucky, if the legislators can negotiate it in confernece, it looks like we may get a new testing package. We are also possibly eliminating tenure at our community colleges. 

A Washington appellate court upholds a lower court decision denying relief to school districts in a special education finance case. But, Washington does move forward on its school finance reform in the Legislature. And, just one more from Washington, a community college there denies a student's request to post anti-abortion signs - student sues. 

A New York Times article on gender segregation in schools. 

Changes to Hartford, CT's school choice policy angers parents. 

An Illinois School Funding Q and A. 

South Carolina advances on their student - teacher sex law. 

And, Montana is moving toward a pretty big distance learning program. Nice to see rural states getting on board with this. 

Weekend Fun: The Dow was UP for the week. Can't believe it.  

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Why Public Schools Exist

This little recession of ours is a good reminder of why public schools exist. They don't send kids home when the bill is not paid, like private schools do.

So far this year, 7 percent of children enrolled in privates have transferred back over to publics, according to the latest Time Magazine.

Just a little reminder.

The Fine Line of Teacher Regulation (Because They Do Dumb Things)

I think probably the thing I post most about on this blog is teachers doing dumb things. These stories are just always going to catch headlines. For instance, just this week we have: 

Teachers at a mental health facility building a "fight club" where students were allowed to fight one another while teachers watched.

Two (2!) middle aged teachers at the same school having sex with a 13 year old student (without each other's knowledge --- just wacky). 

To compensate for that, states regulate teachers through various means. But, that can go too far and become impractical. For instance, Iowa doesn't know what to do about their driver's ed. teachers that get into accidents. They have a policy in place that those teachers should be suspended, but they don't have the bureaucracy in place to actually enforce that. In my mind, that is too much state involvement. No doubt that teachers of driver's ed. should be good drivers, but do we really need state oversight on this? Do we really need someone at the state combing through driving records and determining what is and what is not worthy of suspending driver's ed. teachers? Probably not as this can be taken care of at the local level (if at all).

So, it's a fine line on teacher regulation and one that is going to continue to generate lots of stories into the future.

H/T Scott McLeod

Showing on Education, But Not Telling

President Obama today is going to devote a little time to education. I say a little because this is just for show - nothing is actually happening, don't worry. 

But, this will probably advance the national standards debate a little further because it seems he plans to hint at that in the speech. He'll also mention merit pay again, but until something is actually on the table, it is hard for me to get too excited about any of this.

The administration is going to have to get far more serious about education before I start to care. The stimulus money was helpful and we are just now beginning to see everything it was being spent on, so I am not going to speak ill of them yet. But the lip service is getting a little old (but, like I said before, maybe its for the best anyway).   

I'll post a link to the speech when it is available. 

Update: Full Video

AP Video Cut of the Speech - AP Story

Whitehouse Blog

A Professional School of Education?

Sorry, a little off topic today, but I have spent the better part of the last week in redesign meetings here at the University of Kentucky. We are (re)designing our teacher leadership Master's, our principalship post-master's and our Ed.D. (and Ed.S. and instructional supervisor, etc. ... it's all on the table ... which is both cool and scary). 

Anyway, with everything on the table, I find myself thinking perhaps we should make a professional degree for teachers akin to that of law, medicine, veterinary, dental surgery, etc. It would not be the inital degree, but here in Kentucky the state has mandated that all teachers receive Masters degrees within 10 years of taking their first job. So, every teacher in Kentucky is going to be doing graduate work anyway ... so what about doing that in professional schools? 

Consider this definition from the Council on Education for Public Health:

"A professional degree is one that, based on its learning objectives and types of positions its graduates pursue, prepares students with a broad mastery of the subject matter and methods necessary in a field of practice; it typically requires students to develop the capacity to organize, analyze, interpret and communicate knowledge in an applied manner."

"A research or academic degree program is one that, based on its learning objectives and the paths its graduates follow, prepares students for scholarly careers, particularly in academia and other research settings; it typically prepares students to investigate, acquire, organize, analyze and disseminate new knowledge in a discipline or field of study."

Seems like the former rather than the latter is what teachers need, right? I'm not the first to suggest this. In fact, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has this consideration as one of its central tenets (and UK is a Carnegie Project University) and some of these universities are openly stating it should be considered along similar lines to the J.D. and M.D.  

But, if it is to be a "professional degree" it must come with the benefits of the "professional school." 

For me personally as a professor, the flexibility granted to professional schools is what is most attractive. Living in the law school world and the ed. school world are two totally different experiences. It was not that law was more flexible per say, it was just that flexibility was within reach instead of 6 meetings away, like it is in the education world where there is committee approval after committee approval. For instance, while at SIU I started a J.D./M.E.A. joint degree. On the graduate side I had to do faculty senate meetings and lots of others. On the law side, the Associate Dean said "go" and that was basically it.  

I also like the prestige that comes with professional school degrees. The J.D. is not equal to the Ph.D. in the eyes of academia, but pretty much everywhere else it is. I see no reason the Ed.D. could not serve a similar purpose in becoming a professional degree instead of an academic "doctorate" per say. At most places the Ed.D. is a somewhat less substantial degree than the Ph.D. anyway, so why not package it into a professional model? It would certainly be hard to pay teachers so little with a "D." in the letters after their name. If "doctor" is too much for your taste, perhaps we could offer the Ed.S.? 

I don't know. I am just playing with the idea, but I think it has some merit. There are obviously a lot of issues to work out, such as the number of students (I would venture that there are four-times as many teachers as doctors and lawyers combined ... do you try to get them all the degree?) - but I don't think it is an idea that should be dismissed out of hand.  

Sex in the Student Paper

What else are high-school kids going to write about, right?

So, no, student's as journalists don't have a right to, like, write about whatever they want. They are students ... not journalists (and, heads up Grady, journalists don't either because they work for companies like News Corp.).

The long standing rule here since Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (which had a pretty similar fact pattern with pregnant students) is that school's can regulate school sponsored speech on legitimate pedagogical grounds. Since the school publishes the paper, it gets to determine what's appropriate to put in it (in that way, I guess it sort of is like the Wall Street Journal). So, this time the school let it slide ... but since this story got on CNN ... I promise they won't next time.

h/t Scott McLeod - by the way, you should read his series of Des Moines Register posts ("does the Des Moines Register just print anything?"  ... just kidding Scott).

Edjurist TV: Episode 2 - Podcast with Dr. Jesulon Gibbs on Doninger v. Niehoff and Off-Campus Student Speech

Episode 2 is ready. I'm excited about this one because it is with probably my closest friend in the field, Dr. Jesulon Gibbs. It's on Doninger v. Niehoff and off-campus speech generally. I don't have our video problems worked out just yet, but I'll get it another try on the next one (see below for information on the next episode). Enjoy. 

Resources:

Doninger v. Niehoff - Second Circuit

Doninger v. Niehoff - District of Connecticut (first hearing)

Doninger v. Niehoff - District of Connecticut (back from appeal - dismissal on summary judgment). 

Citizen's Media Law Project

Harvard Journal of Law and Technology

Dr. Gibbs' Dissertation (university login necessary)

My previous post on this (in the very first Friday Snippets)

Next Episode: Kevin Welner, J.D./Ph.D. on his new book NeoVouchers: The emergence of tuition tax credits for private schooling (Amazon). If there are any questions you would like me to ask, let me know. 

A Little Justice O'Connor with Lunch

I have been eating more in my office lately, so I enjoyed a little Justice O'Connor over lunch and I thought you might too. Head's up ... she doesn't remember her decisive vote in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.

IndecisionAn Indecision Exclusive!

Sandra Day O'Connor Pt. 1

Funny Political Video
Political Games

Joe Biden Jokes
Barack Obama Jokes

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Sandra Day O'Connor Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

A Twitter Story

This is a nice little story on how Twitter crossed geographic boundaries to inform a school principal of a threat against her and her school.

The Public Pension Problem

We got a pretty big problem folks and it is an elephant in the room that no one is talking about. I've mentioned on here before about the pension system disaster that is looming, but its time to talk about it again. 

First, read this article from Bloomberg on the potential 1 trillion dollar bailout that may be necessary to keep these systems afloat (it's long but stick with it).  

Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion.

With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion.

I have researched a little in this area (view report on midwestern systems here) and I can tell you even before the economic collapse these systems scared the hell out of me. The assets just don't really justify the payouts. These pension systems need to make upwards of 8 percent interest every year to try to cover that difference, but even in good years an 8 percent return on investment is difficult. To get there they need increasingly riskier investments, which when the bottom falls out like it has these past months, plummet like rocks leaving the pension system with -30 percent returns, like we have seen: Indiana, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Alabama, etc. Then, absurdly, some legislators have even proposed borrowing against what's left in the pension fund - effectively putting everything at risk. On top of that, we learn in this Bloomberg article that these weird accounting rules mask the real danger and allow legislators to continue to underfund these systems ... basically guaranteeing future failure unless either a) the economy shoots up like a rocket or b) our children and grandchildren try and figure something else out.  

And, we should note that this is NOT a social security problem. Just because you hear reports out there that social security is solvent until 2030 or whatever does not mean state defined-benefit pension systems are. In fact, social security potentially is the much more healthy entity here, as is Medicare. Think about that for a second ... social security is the healthier entity!

We need to start seriously considering some changes to these systems, for financial solvency purposes if nothing else. States are making guarantees to teachers in lieu of paying them more up front, which is fine, but if you are putting off payment obligations like that you should also be storing away the right amount of money to cover those obligations, which the states are not doing. Vanderbilt just had a conference on this very issue, but we need more than talk right now. Some states are beginning conversations, but I have not seen any substantive progress yet. As the nation tightens it's belt, states should consider serious pension reforms among the various options. I love a defined-benefit plan as much as the next guy, but if the benefits are not going to be there because a) the benefits are never delivered or delivered in a reduced capacity (most likely) or b) the benefits get put there but bankrupt states (less likely but very possible given our current habit of trillion dollar spending sprees), then it is not really a plan at all. Right now, our plan is see no evil, hear no evil and certainly for the love of god don't speak any evil.  

Weekend Snippets - What's In A Name

NCLB will likely get a new name.

Like universities, K-12 schools have resorted to recruiting students to stabilize budgets.

University of Arizona's College of Education is one of the first I have seen to go to program cuts.

Georgia's voucher proposal gets through it's first hurdle.

Gearing up for a second Georgia school funding lawsuit.

Districts with tax caps are struggling this year all over the place. But those that tied it to the Consumer Price Index are especially hurting.

Think your state's Board of Education is wacky ... Connecticut just put a WWE executive on their Board.

Illinois will appeal the Moment of Silence ruling. Good - that will make for some good caselaw.

UK College of Ed. graduate (yeah, yeah ... a little promotion) Ted Strickland seeks to change Ohio's school funding formula.

Texas is thinking of allowing concealed weapons on its college campuses ... um, no? These are the dumbest proposals.

The Supreme Court denied cert. to the Boyd County student that challenged a policy limiting criticism against homosexuality.

Tennessee is thinking about strengthening their anti-bullying law.

Weekend Fun: Kid is starting to get this online thing, so I have been spending a little time on PBSkids.org. Not so sure it will be fun for you, but it is fun for your kids.

Slate's Education Cartoons Are Back

More than once I have spent twenty-minutes clicking through these. They are a great resource for education teachers generally, but especially so for education law teachers.