Some things to read from across the country

 It's a whole big country out there, and, even though it is summer, there is stuff happening around schools:

• People in Worcester may or may not remember this--I believe it was in the fogginess of everything being remote, meetings happening seemingly multiple times a week, and state guidance changing nearly as fast--but there was an effort at one point to implement a surveillance of students' online activity under the guise of mental health. This was (appropriately!) brought to the School Committee, that weighed in against it.
  If you're wondering what that then would have looked like, please read this piece from May McCoy in the Kansas Reflector about what it's like to be a student at Lawrence High School in Kansas:
  

  It would be easy to describe what’s happening to students at Lawrence High School as Orwellian, but that would be an easy and not exactly fitting metaphor. It does resemble in general the dystopian novels we used to be assigned to read in high school — “1984” and “Brave New World” — but a more accurate comparison is to a science fiction novella you may have never heard of.

  In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” published in 1956 and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002, a predictive policing system is used to arrest people before they have the chance to commit the crime they are expected to. Dick’s story — like the use of Gaggle — pits authoritarianism and conformity against creativity and individual liberty.

  Read it, because the sales pitch here to school officials is how "safe" it will make their students, while, of course, doing no such thing. Watch for this one.  

• Even though Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a "mandate" that every public school in Oklahoma would teach the Bible, a growing number of them are saying that they aren't going to do that, leading to this great column by Clay Horning, asking what Walters really wants, and what he's actually getting: 
  

  ...making Walters looks even smaller, dumber, simpler and more ridiculous than he previously appeared, which is hard to do.

   Go, Oklahoma districts! 
  

• The New York Times Sunday Magazine covered the push to deny undocumented students or even the children of undocumented immigrants an education. 
  This is of course not only dumb--it poorly serves the country not to educate children who are here--but would reverse current regulation and policy.
  That's a gift link. Please read it and share it.