Links and Commentary 5/2/25

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.

SCOTUS Education Tea Leaves

Education continues to be a politically relevant battleground in the culture wars. While the Trump administration’s changes to the federal Department of Education have gotten most of the attention, there are some arguably more impactful cases in front of the Supreme Court right now. Although they have not issued their ruling, court-watchers often try to infer the outcomes based on how oral arguments went.

The first case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, is ultimately a case about whether students with disabilities need to prove malice or “gross misjudgement” when suing schools for discrimination. Outside of schools, persons with disabilities who sue for discrimination only need to prove unintended negligence. For example, imagine there is a government building without a wheelchair ramp. Someone wheelchair bound sues for discrimination. They are not required to prove that someone intentionally refused to install a wheelchair ramp or who proactively discriminated against the disabled. Courts in the past have determined that it is simply enough for there to be unintended negligence. The standard is that there is a lack of something important, regardless of the intentions of the people or organizations involved.

Osseo Area Schools argue that schools should be judged according to a more strict standard. If someone wants to sue a school for discrimination against the disabled, they should have to prove the schools were either actually acting with malice or that they made a severe error in judgement. This would create a dual standard, a strict one for schools and a more lenient one for everyone else. Notably, it seems like some misbehavior by the lawyer representing Osseo schools may have pissed off the judges.

From SCOTUS Blog:

Not a good look! I’m glad it seems like the dual standard would be rejected. Public schools should be held accountable to educating all students and allowing them to have a stricter standard for misbehavior would mean they can deny services more freely.

Now, to Oklahoma, perhaps today’s leading innovator of bad education ideas. The second case, Oklahoma Charter v. Drummond, addresses two issues.

I’ve noted before that charter schools have been successful at operating in a grey area wherein they’re quasi-governmental. In a sense, they’re having their cake and eating it too. They get public funding and claim to be public schools but also want to operate more like private schools when it suits their needs, such as when curating their student body or when failing to educate students with disabilities. The more rulings we get, however, the more defined charter schools become. So, if SCOTUS says, yes, religious charter schools can exist and receive public funds, they’re also saying charter schools are, in fact, public schools. This would make them far more subject to the rules and regulations of public schooling than they are now. It would be a bittersweet victory, however, because ruling in favor of Oklahoma Charter would mean dismantling the separation of church and state. There would also be far-reaching consequences for school law more generally:

 We have good reason to expect the Supreme Court will side with religion here. The question for me is just how broad they will make their ruling.

The third case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, concerns “whether public schools burden parents" religious exercise when they compel elementary school children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents" religious convictions and without notice or opportunity to opt out.”

The justices appeared sympathetic to the parents’ concerns and seem likely to rule in favor of opting out.

I do want to point out that the practical considerations here are a bit mind-boggling. Schools already allow a wide variety of opt-out procedures based on which topics will be covered. The question here was more about extending the opt-out to topics covered incidentally as part of the normal course of teaching. That is, if anything objectionable to parents comes up, even if it is not the focus of the lesson, then schools have to remove students from the classroom setting. So, as noted in the case, using a book during a normal English lesson that happens to mention a pride parade is grounds enough for kids to be taken elsewhere. What is unclear is exactly how that should work in practice. After all, how can you predict what will be upsetting to parents? What happens if a gay teacher has a picture with their spouse on the desk? (We already know they’re going to be fired, who are we kidding here?) What if a student has same-sex parents? Should kids have to leave every time Susan talks about here two moms? What if their objections go beyond obviously controversial issues? In the end, I expect this will mean teachers will deeply sanitize their teaching materials, removing anything they assume could be objectionable. Sounds like schools is about to be much more boring once scrubbed of anything interesting or relevant. Sadly, the court provides no guidance here.

Data for thee, not for me

Stephen Dyer takes a loot at a study published by the pro-voucher Urban Institute. One thing he takes them to task for is using the lack of data about the outcomes of voucher recipients to simply assume they’re outperforming public school students.

Perhaps one of the underrated problems with the conservative dismantling of systems that gather data is that it allows them to misrepresent what’s happening.

The War on Children

Despite pretensions of pro-natalism, the actual policies of our country are distinctly hostile to children. Catherine Rampell calls it a War on Children. Eli Hager sees an increase in child abuse and neglect as the administration’s preferred outcome. We’re deporting children who are US citizens because their parents are illegal and the president shrugs. And of course there’s the estimated 8 million children who will die around the world as a result of cancelling important aid programs — not to mention the estimated 25 million people in total. That’s quite the body count for someone who hasn’t even started any wars. But hey, we saved 0.2% of our federal budget! Bond vigilantes rejoice?

John Cena Child Sex-Bots

Nobody wants AI companions but it really seems like our benevolent tech overlords are intent on producing them quickly and without concern for our wellbeing. Meta (can we go back to calling it Facebook?) has designed a chatbot that uses John Cena’s voice. There’s only one problem. It seems like it wants to fuck underage children.

Now, these are thankfully testers who are identifying this behavior and not real children. Meta will undoubtedly fix it. The bigger problem is that nobody thought of this from the get-go. We’ve trained these generative systems on pretty much the entire internet which means they’re bringing all the smut and perversion with them. It seems like the people designing these products do not care and would do anything that keeps children engaged with their social media product. That’s the business model, I guess.

Thanks for reading!