Erika Christakis: Active-Shooter Drills Are Misguided - The Atlantic

Erika Christakis: Active-Shooter Drills Are Misguided - The Atlantic

Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided
There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.

AT 10:21 a.m. on december 6, Lake Brantley High School, in Florida, initiated a “code red” lockdown. “This is not a drill,” a voice announced over the PA system. At the same moment, teachers received a text message warning of an active shooter on campus. Fearful students took shelter in classrooms. Many sobbed hysterically, others vomited or fainted, and some sent farewell notes to parents. A later announcement prompted a stampede in the cafeteria, as students fled the building and jumped over fences to escape. Parents flooded 911 with frantic calls.

Later it was revealed, to the fury of parents, teachers, and students, that in fact this was a drill, the most realistic in a series of drills that the students of Lake Brantley, like students across the country, have lately endured. In the year since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last February, efforts to prepare the nation’s students for gunfire have intensified. Educators and safety experts have urged students to deploy such unlikely self-defense tools as hockey pucks, rocks, flip-flops, and canned food. More commonly, preparations include lockdown drills in which students sit in darkened classrooms with the shades pulled. Sometimes a teacher or a police officer plays the role of a shooter, moving through the hallway and attempting to open doors as children practice staying silent and still.

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These drills aren’t limited to the older grades. Around the country, young children are being taught to run in zigzag patterns so as to evade bullets. I’ve heard of kindergartens where words like barricade are added to the vocabulary list, as 5- and 6-year-olds are instructed to stack chairs and desks “like a fort” should they need to keep a gunman at bay. In one Massachusetts kindergarten classroom hangs a poster with lockdown instructions that can be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”: Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door / Shut the lights off, Say no more. Beside the text are picture cues—a key locking a door; a person holding up a finger to hush the class; a switch being flipped to turn off the lights. The alarm and confusion of younger students is hardly CONTINUE READING: Erika Christakis: Active-Shooter Drills Are Misguided - The Atlantic

ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? – Wrench in the Gears

ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? – Wrench in the Gears

ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan?

A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”

Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?

Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?

And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment CONTINUE READING: ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? – Wrench in the Gears

ALEC and Corporate Reformers Make It Hard for Teachers to Cement Gains from Last Year’s Strikes | janresseger

ALEC and Corporate Reformers Make It Hard for Teachers to Cement Gains from Last Year’s Strikes | janresseger

ALEC and Corporate Reformers Make It Hard for Teachers to Cement Gains from Last Year’s Strikes

How can we rid our states of all the education “reform” that has, over the past two decades become part of state education laws—or which legislatures friendly to corporate reform continue to introduce? All this state policy seems hopelessly locked in place despite that we are learning from experience and growing academic research that state takeovers devastate communities, for example, and a growing charter school sector will suck essential funds out of its host school district. The policies have been discredited—thanks especially to striking school teachers this year—but we can’t seem to get rid of them.

Last week Valerie Strauss examined what is happening today in the legislatures of three states where teachers walked out last spring to protest the under-funding of their schools and their salaries.

In Oklahoma, bills have been introduced to put a stop to future walkouts by teachers. One law would demand a fine in advance of $50,000 for any organized protest of more than 100 people at the state capitol.  Another bill would make it illegal for school employees to strike.

Arizona’s House is considering a bill requiring that teachers be ruled by a code of ethics that bans “politics” in public schools—including teachers’ strikes.  Lawmakers in Arizona are also considering a bill to ban the shutting down of school except on holidays and another prohibiting payroll deductions for union dues.

These bills are designed to get back at teachers for what lawmakers consider their unseemly aggressiveness for standing up for the needs of their schools and their own livelihoods.

In West Virginia, the punishment would affect not only teachers but also the state’s entire education system.  An omnibus education bill that just passed in the West Virginia Senate CONTINUE READING: ALEC and Corporate Reformers Make It Hard for Teachers to Cement Gains from Last Year’s Strikes | janresseger

CURMUDGUCATION: Portfolio School Management For Dummies

CURMUDGUCATION: Portfolio School Management For Dummies

Portfolio School Management For Dummies

One of the issues that was hanging over the Los Angeles teacher strike is the idea of portfolio management; the UTLA asserts that Superintendent Austin Beutner already has a plan prepared for converting the LAUSD to a multi-portfolio model. In Denver, the model has already been rolled out,to less than stellar result. It's a challenging issue to discuss because so few people understand exactly how a portfolio model is supposed to work.

So here, with issues over-simplified and corners cut, is your dummies' guide to portfolio management.

The first thing to understand about the portfolio model is that nobody anywhere knows exactly what a portfolio model is. Back in 2010,  it took three writers at Education Week (Jeffrey R. Henig, Katrina E. Bulkley, & Henry M. Levin) to come up with this pretty good explanation:

The strategy is, rather, a loosely coupled conglomeration of ideas held together by the metaphor of a well-managed stock portfolio and its proponents’ unshakable belief that the first step for successful reform must be to dismantle the bureaucratic and political institutions that have built up around the status quo.

That's the second thing to know--that "portfolio" here is based on the idea of an investment portfolio (Austin Beutner, for what it's worth, made his bundle in investment banking). With an financial portfolio, you move your money in and out of various investments depending on how they're performing and what your goals are. With a school portfolio, you move your resources in and out of schools--all schools including public and charter--based on how those schools are performing.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, a Washington state ed reform thinky tank, has tried to work up a portfolio model strategy guide, and they list seven characteristics of portfolio strategy: CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Portfolio School Management For Dummies

“Hard” and “Soft” Effectiveness in Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“Hard” and “Soft” Effectiveness in Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“Hard” and “Soft” Effectiveness in Schools

The idea of students learning “hard” and “soft” skills in school has gone viral among educators and policymakers in the past decade (see here and here). “Soft” skills refers to people skills of communication, sensitivity, and social awareness that permits students to collaborate with others and work smoothly inside and outside organizations. Here is one listing of such skills:

• Integrity
• Dependability
• Effective communication
• Open-mindedness
• Teamwork
• Creativity
• Problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Willingness to learn
• Empathy

Measuring such skills in schoolchildren and youth is tough to do but work proceeds in developing instruments and metrics to do so (see here and here).

“Hard” skills refers to the technical proficiency children and youth acquire and use in different situations such as reading, writing, math, and operating electronic devices learned in and out of school. Measuring such skills has a long history of paper-and-pencil tests and real-life demonstration of skills and are readily available.

Now here is the segue I want to make from “hard” and “soft” skills to a conceptual level of determining school effectiveness by proposing “hard” and “soft” forms. I aim to expand the constricted definition of a “good” school that is judged effective now to one that has more to it than the familiar numbers used today.

“Hard” Effectiveness

This is the easy one to define. What measures policymakers, practitioners, donors, and parents use to judge a school today as “good,” “excellent,” “high performer,” “effective” or similar terms are easy to list: CONTINUE READING: “Hard” and “Soft” Effectiveness in Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

NYC Public School Parents: Many questions remain as to the reliability of the state’s new list of struggling schools and why some schools were taken off the list and others not

NYC Public School Parents: Many questions remain as to the reliability of the state’s new list of struggling schools and why some schools were taken off the list and others not

Many questions remain as to the reliability of the state’s new list of struggling schools and why some schools were taken off the list and others not

On January 17, 2019, Commissioner Elia released a new list of “struggling” schools under the new accountability system created by the state to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act, that replaced NCLB in 2016.  As an article in Chalkbeat explained,

Eighty-four of the city’s schools are on the lowest rung — known as “Comprehensive Support and Improvement Schools” — and will be required to craft improvement plans approved by the state. The remaining 40 schools are only in need of “targeted” support and will face less intense oversight.

Yet the state formula used to develop this list of struggling or CSI schools is complex, confusing, and unreliable. Moreover, the Commissioner exempted certain schools that would otherwise have been identified as CSI schools through a decision-making process that is puzzling and obscure.

Thirty-eight in NYC and 84 statewide were designated as “good standing #”, meaning according to the spreadsheet that their “Accountability status is based on a finding by the Commissioner of extenuating or extraordinary circumstances”. Why certain schools were taking off the list of struggling schools by the Commissioner due to “extenuating circumstances” and others were not is nowhere explained.

There were at least two very controversial issues that repeatedly were raised by parents, teachers and advocates during the hearings and comment period that preceded the adoption of the ESSA state plan. First was how opt out students would be counted, which is an especially critical issue since about 20% of the state’s eligible students in grades 3-8 have opted out of the state exams every year since 2015.

NYSAPE, Class Size Matters and other groups opposed the state plan to count these students as having failed on the state exams – and instead proposed a different system, called Opportunity Learn index, which would measure whether schools provided their students with the conditions for success.
If test scores had to be used, as the federal law required, then we recommended that the scores of opt out student scores should be assumed as average for that school and their subgroup.

The state rejected our proposals, however,  and instead adopted a complex formula that incorporates two variables – one called the Weighted Average Achievement Index, which counts opt out students as having failed in terms of test score proficiency, and another called the Core Subject Performance Index, which removes them from the formula entirely.  These two variables are combined to create a Composite Performance Level, in a mathematical process that is difficult to understand. [See this memo that attempts to explain how the two variables will be combined.]

Sure enough, at least two highly regarded NYC schools, Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies (BCS) and Central Park East One (CPE1) both designated by InsideSchools as CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Many questions remain as to the reliability of the state’s new list of struggling schools and why some schools were taken off the list and others not

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts
Newsom working with legislators to improve charter accountability, transparency

In response to growing concerns about unregulated charter schools siphoning public funds away from neighborhood public schools, Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a study on the impacts of charter school growth on local school districts statewide, and announced he is working with the Legislature to improve charter school transparency and accountability.

Newsom asked Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to convene experts to closely examine how charter schools impact school district budgets and to provide recommendations by July 1. The governor is also working with state legislators to mandate transparency for charter schools to ensure tax dollars spent on education only support schools that are accountable to the public.

“We commend Governor Newsom on asking for this study. It is an important and long overdue step toward holding charter schools accountable,” says CTA President Eric Heins. “California leaders must have an accurate picture of the impact that charter expansion has had on many traditional neighborhood public schools.”

Newsom’s plan to shine a light on unregulated charter schools comes on the heels of the historic United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) strike, which led to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education’s call last week for a state study of charter impacts and a moratorium on new charter approvals until the study is complete.

The NAACP has also been active in seeking more accountability and transparency for charter schools, adopting a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion until these issues are resolved. The NAACP created a task force to investigate charter schools nationwide, eventually issuing a report that found a “wide range of problems” with charter schools. NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson says many charter schools’ practices are troubling.

“For the NAACP, we have been far more aggressive toward bad public schools then we’ve ever been against charter schools,” Johnson says. “We aren’t going to change our approach because there is a market-driven concept to education. We believe the same for public schools should apply to charter schools.”

For more information about the impact of charter schools on community public schools, visit Kids Not Profits.

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

THE KIND OF POLICY WE MUST NEVER MAKE AGAIN
“Race To The Top” education funding showed every bad tendency of contemporary liberalism…

Detroit’s public schools suffer from widespread maintenance issues. Facilities need half a billion dollars worth of repairs, which officials admit are simply not going to happen in the short run. Here’s a 2016 description of “appalling” conditions at a local elementary school:

The gym is closed because half of the floor is buckled and the other half suffered so much rainwater damage from the dripping ceiling that it became covered with toxic black mold. Instead of professionally addressing the problem, a black tarp simply was placed over the entire area like a Band-Aid. That area of the school has been condemned. The once beautiful pool sits empty because no one has come to fix it. The playground is off-limits because a geyser of searing hot steam explodes out of the ground. What do our kids do for exercise with no gym, playground or pool? They walk or run in the halls.

It’s with these steam geysers and moldy gyms in mind that we should evaluate the “Race to the Top” (RTT), the Obama administration’s signature education policy initiative. RTT gave $4.3 billion in funding to U.S. schools through a novel mechanism: Instead of giving out the aid based on how much a state’s schools needed it, the Department of Education awarded it through a competition. Applications “were graded on a 500-point scale according to the rigor of the reforms proposed and their compatibility with four administration priorities: developing common standards and assessments; improving teacher training, evaluation, and retention policies; creating better data systems; and adopting preferred school-turnaround strategies.”

Note what the disproportionate focus is here: quantitative measurement and assessment procedures. Race To The Top emphasized teacher evaluations, the introduction of new technology, the collection and sharing of data, and other “innovations” thought to more efficiently produce student achievement. When the administration promoted RTT, assessment and data collection were spoken of first, along with “revising evaluation and compensation policies to encourage effectiveness.” The Obama administration also wanted states to adopt policies favorable to charter schools—Education secretary Arne Duncan said explicitly that “States that do not have public charter laws or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund.”

The Race to the Top was an overwhelming success, if success is defined as getting states to adopt the policies the Obama administration wanted. The majority of U.S. states instituted at least some of the reforms RTT rewarded. Ordinarily, it is very CONTINUE READING: The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

Test Two may be more daunting — namely, explaining why [Austin Beutner] put a scandal-plagued and #MeToo-accused former State Assemblymember on the district payroll as a lobbyist.

-Bill Raden, Capital & Main

Instead of meeting with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in the days leading up to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) strike, Superintendent Austin Beutner and Board President Monica Garcia were in Sacramento in an effort to “drum up lawmaker opposition to the teachers strike.” They were accompanied on this trip by Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (SRT), the son of “powerful L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas (MRT)”. While not publicly disclosed at the time, SRT was there as a paid lobbyist for the District.

As if a District pleading poverty while paying a lobbyist during labor negotiations was not bad enough, the choice of SRT is particularly bewildering. It appears that, under Government Code §87406, the former Assemblyman was legally prohibited from lobbying his former colleagues “for one year after the end of the term to which” he was elected, a waiting period that he had not met. The younger Ridley-Thomas resigned from his elected office on December 27, 2017, citing “health reasons.” He “was the subject of two sexual harassment complaints at the time he stepped down”.

SRT was then hired as a professor of social work and public policy by USC despite his not having a graduate degree. Shortly afterward, MRT “made a $100,000 donation from his campaign coffers to the social CONTINUE READING: The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor.
Policy makers need to question their assumptions about what makes a good school.

During my first campaign to be Chicago’s mayor in 2011, I promised to put education reform at the forefront of my agenda. Having participated in Washington policy debates for the better part of two decades, I felt confident I knew what to do. Then, as now, education reformers preached a certain gospel: Hold teachers solely accountable for educational gains. Expand charter schools. Focus relentlessly on high-school graduation rates. This was the recipe for success.

Three years before that, when President-elect Obama tapped me to be his White House chief of staff, I argued that leaders should never let a good crisis go to waste. I was now determined to take my own advice. At the moment of my inauguration, Chicago’s schools were unquestionably in crisis. Our students had the shortest school day in America. Nearly half of Chicago’s kids were not being offered full-day kindergarten, let alone pre-k. Teacher evaluations had not been updated in nearly four decades. During my first months in office, I hit the ground running, determined to change all that. Then, much to my surprise, roughly a year into my reform crusade, circumstance prompted me to begin questioning the wisdom of the gospel itself.

My initial doubts emerged four days into what turned out to be the first Chicago teachers strike in three decades. After a series of arduous negotiations with Karen Lewis, the union president, we’d arrived at the basic contours of an agreement. In return for higher salaries, Lewis accepted my demands to extend the school day by an hour and 15 minutes, tack two extra weeks onto the school year, establish universal full-day kindergarten, and rewrite the outdated evaluations used to keep the city’s educators accountable.

One key issue remained: the autonomy of principals. The question was whether individual principals would have the ability to hire faculty of their own choosing, or whether, as Lewis preferred, principals would have to select from a limited pool maintained downtown with the union’s strong input. Honestly, since I’d gotten everything I really wanted, I was tempted to fold. The reform gospel doesn’t pay much mind to principals. Moreover, the new accountability standards promised to rid the schools of bad teachers.

But while I was preparing to brief reporters assembled at Tarkington Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, Mahalia Ann Hines, a former school principal (who happens to be the artist Common’s mother) pulled me aside. Hines, who holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois, had spent 15 years as a principal, at grade levels from elementary through high school. If we were CONTINUE READING: Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate
A quarter century later, the verdict is in: Charter schools aren’t the panacea their proponents hoped. Now let’s lay down our arms and help the kids.

The recent LA teachers strike, and the school board’s vote to recommend a moratorium on new charter schools, reignited the a long-standing debate on charter schools—one that seems so dated.

The strike brought back memories of my first experiences with education policy as President of SEIU, America’s largest non-teaching union. It was around 2005. I replaced Sandy Feldman, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, as a judge for the LA-based Broad Foundation prize for urban schools (later I became a board member). Unions promoted education reform—but different kinds. The AFT’s iconic president, Al Shanker, backed “the greatest possible choice among public schools,” while the competitor union, the National Education Association, promoted charter schools’ role in “incubating innovation within the existing public education system.”

A man named Mike Garcia was then the president of the SEIU’s janitors union in Los Angeles. Though he headed a militant immigrants’ union, he became committed to a role for charter schools after learning that his members’ highest priority—after wage increases—was for the union to assist in the educational success of their children.  Janitors’ kids lacked the opportunities of the city’s wealthier parents to move to better-funded or higher-performing school systems, manipulate the public system, or enroll in a private school. Mike went on to serve on the board of union charter operator Green Dot Public Schools. And as a board member, I became familiar with many dedicated charter school missionaries pushing against the status quo to advance their vision of educational excellence and equity.

• 
  
  

  F-

  
  Betsy DeVos’ Charter Schools Sucked Public Schools Dry

  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  Elisha Brown

  
  

  
  
  
  

  

  
  

But now, 25 years since Minnesota passed the country’s first charter school law, I think it is time for a candid evaluation, from both reformers and opponents, of charters’ role in the future of education and 21st century innovation more broadly.

THE MATH IS CLEAR—CHARTERS ARE NOT THE FUTURE

Despite two decades of world-class effort, startup capital for facilities, and massive philanthropic support for curriculum, college prep, leadership development, and technology, along with the support of high-quality talent organizations—Teach for America, The Broad Center, and TNTP, formerly known as the New Teacher Project—today’s charter school report card is the following:

1) The total number of public charter schools is approximately 7,000 out of nearly 100,000 schools. CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business

Charter school supporters and promoters have long been severely obsessed with comparing charter school and public school students’ scores on expensive curriculum-narrowing high-stakes standardized tests produced by big corporations. They fetishize test scores and believe such scores are useful and meaningful in some way, despite what extensive evidence has shown for decades.

One reason charter school supporters and promoters dogmatically fixate on pedagogically meaningless test scores is because they do not want to draw anyattention to the real underlying problem with charter schools, which is that they are privatized, marketized, corporatized, deregulated, deunionized, non-transparent, pro-competition, political-economic arrangements that siphon billions of public dollars from public schools every year and make rich people even richer while drowning in fraud, corruption, waste, arrests, scandal, and racketeering.

Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are contract schools that operate outside the public sphere and benefit mainly major owners of capital, even though they are portrayed as a way to “empower parents.” Test scores do not change this. Whether students’ scores on unsound tests produced by for-profit companies are high or low, it does not make the looting of billions of dollars in public funds by charter schools from public schools acceptable. Test scores cannot cover up this large-scale theft and destruction. Scores on tests not produced by educators and lacking a human-centered perspective necessarily serve retrogression.

Even if every student in every charter school in the country scored well on tests produced by big business, there is still no justification for the existence, let alone expansion, of charter schools and the massive looting by the rich of public funds and facilities from the public.

Charter schools have no right to public funds because they are not public schools; they are privatized deregulated arrangements based on the outmoded ideologies of competition, individualism, and consumerism. This is why CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color

Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color

When acceptable attire depends on the color of your skin
Parental dress codes are a thing in some educational institutions

Every day educators teach students the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Many are familiar with the biblical verse, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed that one day we’d live in a nation where children (and their parents) “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” All of these sayings are saying the same thing — yet what does it say about us when we judge someone by the most superficial cover of them all: their wardrobe?

While wearing a respectable suit and tie, Donald Trump announced a policy that separated children from their parents coming across the border; he looked businesslike as he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as “shithole” countries; he was dressed formally as he signed the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history into law; and he looked like an upstanding citizen when he likened torch-toting neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers to antiracist activists in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots. Trump may have been appropriately dressed on all those occasions, but his actions betrayed the dignity of the White House.

Still, he wasn’t wearing his pajamas, or exposing his body parts, like some parents do when they take their kids to school, and that’s the important thing, you know.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” Tennessee State Rep. Antonio Parkinson said on the NBC show TODAY in January.

Related: Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Parkinson is making waves, writing dress code policy for public school parents who he’s told are “wearing next to nothing,” and while walking their children to school no less. These loutish parents, CONTINUE READING: Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color