Links and Commentary 4/11/25

Dangerous Learning, Cutting Funds for CTE in Florida, Religious Charters Backfire, Fertility and the Attack on Education

Author

James Shanahan
April 11, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Dangerous Learning

I mentioned an essay several weeks ago by Yale law professor Justin Driver. In that essay, he spent time examining a kind of present-day nostalgia for the separate but equal era of American education. In the end, despite a sense that Black Americans were able to maintain parallel institutions and cultivate a kind of excellence of their own, Driver marshals the perspectives of those who excelled under the segregationist regime to show exactly why it needed to end. It serves, also, as a warning today given the seeming reemergence of segregationist attitudes.

Another law professor, Derek Black of the University of South Carolina, recently published a new book, ostensibly history, that contains some important lessons for the present, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy. 

Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out.
 
This book describes the violent lengths to which southern leaders went to repress Black literacy and the extraordinary courage it took Black people to resist. Derek W. Black shows how, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of Reconstruction, literacy evolved from a subversive gateway to freedom to a public program to extend citizenship and build democratic institutions—and how, once Reconstruction was abandoned, opposition to educating Black children depressed education throughout the South for Black and white students alike. He also reveals the deep imprint those events had on education and how this legacy is resurfacing today.

Peter Greene has a review here. I think one takeaway that is going to drive me to buy and read the book is just how much controlling education, literacy, and even white society’s perspectives has remained the same over the last 250 years. Today’s book bans and attempted erasure of Black people from public recognition are seemingly a repetition of past injustices.

Florida Cutting Funds for CTE, AP, IB, other acronyms?

Kevin Drum (recently deceased famous old-school blogger) once called Florida’s schools an “almost insane basket case” because it was the only state in the nation where kids lost ground between 4th grade and 8th grade. Florida’s big policy change was to begin holding back 3rd graders who failed a literacy test. This, of course, spiked 4th grade state test scores but also ballooned the population of third graders. Unlike, say, Mississippi where they coupled a 3rd grade retention policy with added tutoring and literacy instruction, Florida just had the kids repeat 3rd grade. It helped but beyond that one-time spike in scores, there hasn’t been sustained growth since.

I think of this often because I learned recently that Florida is proposing to use its $2 billion dollar budget surplus to fund a tax cut. They’re also hoping to slow the amount of funding running to schools, in part by removing a special addendum calculation that adds funds for specialized programs. The programs fall into two main baskets. One set is college preparatory programs like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate. The other are career and technical preparatory programs like CTE.

Florida lawmakers are proposing significant cuts to funding for college and career readiness programs in high schools, despite previously celebrating their success. While state leaders debate $5 billion in tax cuts, the proposed education budget slashes incentive funding for Career and Technical Education (CTE) and college-level programs (AP, IB, DE, AICE) by a full 50%. Despite a projected $2 billion surplus, proposed budget increases for K-12 education are minimal (0.7%-1.5%), failing to keep pace with inflation.

Now, I kind of expect states like Florida to want to send fewer kids to college. College is a major target of today’s culture warriors, and it seems like they’re going to do anything possible to damage the institution from top to bottom. What surprises me, however, is the cuts to CTE. These are programs that would prepare people for careers as electricians or plumbers or mechanics. These are the kinds of programs that conservatives seem to wish schools would have more of. Yet, here we are with Florida’s legislature proposing cuts anyway. Imagine that.

Could the Fight for Religious Charters Backfire?

A 2023 article from the New Republic came across my desk recently. Adam Laats makes the case that charter proponents pursuing court cases to allow more direct funding of religious charters might find themselves in an unexpected situation.

But the Oklahoma case presents conservatives with only losing possibilities. Say, for example, that a truculently conservative Supreme Court majority rules that the Oklahoma charter school can be religious because it is, in fact, a private school. By pushing charter schools out of the realm of public education, they will have effectively crushed the “all things for all people” promise that conservative charter school proponents have been building for decades. They will be going against even the staunchest conservatives, like Betsy Devos, who insisted throughout her tenure, with an ever-increasing crescendo of implausibility, “Charter schools are public schools.”

He makes the point that charters live in a grey area where they’re not quite public but aren’t private either. Losing that status, becoming either clearly public or clearly private, means they’re no longer useful for conservative political agendas. It also brings to mind the importance of charter schools in the now broken treaty between conservatives and liberals. If viewed through the treaty lens, it makes perfect sense why conservatives no longer care if charters stay in the “all things for all people” grey zone.

Fertility and the Attacks on Education

There’s a phrase one of my co-authors and good friends used to describe a tendency in international development circles to be obsessed with women’s education: the girling of development. I’m sure it came from some article or research somewhere but I haven’t bothered to track it down. The basic idea is that there’s been a massive focus on improving women’s education and economic prospects in developing nations. Saving the world required elevating women, getting them in schools, and reducing the number of kids they needed to support. This was, I think, not unique to development circles. In the US, too, we saw a generation-long effort to open educational and career opportunities for women. One of the consequences is, apparently, that women have fewer kids.

Now, I think this is probably complex problem that we should think about in a broadly social way. Like, let’s provide daycare and paid maternity leave and subsidize other barriers to childbearing. Others, conservatives, JD Vance, seem to think of it more mechanically. If educating women means they have fewer kids, then making women less educated should result in more kids. That is, I think, the quick and dirty version of Jennifer Berkshire’s recent post, Connecting the Dots. “BAs are out, babies are in,” she writes. You should read it.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!