TALAS E-newsletter – November 18

The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience. 

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country. 

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted charges brought against educators offering “pornographic” books to students after pointing out two LGBTQ memoirs as examples.

A trial that’s been years in the making could spur drastic changes to Pennsylvania’s school funding scheme, long considered among the nation’s most inequitable and one that plaintiff districts accuse of creating a “system of haves and have nots” between low-income communities and their better-off neighbors. 

Beginning Friday and available via livestream, the trial centers on a state funding system that relies heavily on local property taxes that plaintiffs allege provides inequitable state money to districts in areas with low property values and less personal wealth in violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s equal-protection provision. The current system fails to meet the commonwealth’s obligation to provide students with a “thorough and efficient system of education,” their attorneys argue.

At a September school board meeting in Southlake, Texas, a parent named Tara Eddins strode to the lectern during the public comment period and demanded to know why the Carroll Independent School District was paying counselors “at $90K a pop” to give students lessons on suicide prevention.

This is not what we signed up for. Nobody else who entered the field of education years ago did. For 27 years, I have loved my job and never dreaded going to work. I have certainly faced many challenges in my times as a teacher and principal, but nothing compares with what school is like in 2021. In fact, the face of education has shifted significantly since I began my career in the classroom.

Today, parental involvement is down, if not totally absent. Too many families are overstretched and cannot give the support to their kids that they need to make parent-teacher partnerships work.

Amanda Amtmanis, an elementary physical education instructor in Middletown, Connecticut, handed out cards with QR codes to a class of third graders, and told them to start running.

The kids sprinted off around the baseball field in a light drizzle, but by the end of the first lap, a fifth of a mile, many were winded and walking. They paused to scan the cards, which track their mileage, on their teacher’s iPad and got some encouragement from an electronic coach — “Way to run your socks off!” or “Leave it all on the track!”

In education, policy is power, said Christina Kishimoto, a former state superintendent of the Hawaii State Department of Education. 

“If you take a look at your district’s policies, especially your district’s financial policies and you follow the money, you get a clear sense of the story of the equity of access in your own district,” Kishimoto said during an “Equity in Rural Life Ted-Talk Panel.”