Although we all hope that our students would be able to attend the school of their choice, sometimes this simply isn’t possible. Especially at sensitive times such as when they first come out, when they socially transition, and when they are going through medical transitions, transgender students often choose to transfer to Independent Study (IS), either permanently or on a short-term basis.
As you may have noticed, IS programs are under fire from California lawmakers. Starting with 2019’s ill-timed AB 1505/7 bills that restricted IS charter schools right before a pandemic, continuing with AB 1316 (which thankfully didn’t reach the governor’s desk), and now with Gov. Newsom pushing further restrictions in his rewrite of Independent Study law, transgender and other at-risk students are facing the clear possibility that they will not be allowed to seek a fair, free, and appropriate education.
The fact is that in-person, full-time schooling does not work for some students, and it is directly harmful for some. And the students that are most harmed by mandatory in-person learning are those who are the most vulnerable. Even restrictions like requiring mandatory daily contact with teachers places an undue burden on students who live in remote places, who are medically fragile, or who choose to homeschool in the real world, free of the narrow restrictions imposed by computer-based learning.
At different points during my children’s educations, we chose to homeschool. We were so lucky to live in Santa Cruz County, where we had our choice of IS programs. My students were full-time public school students while also getting an appropriate education. Both of them are now in college, one at a UC, the other at a small private college. They had their choice of colleges that suit their needs, just as they had their choice of K-12 education that suited their needs.
I beg you to keep our at-risk students in mind when you vote on educational matters. Restricting independent study, whether it’s through a district school or a charter school, is discriminatory and wrong. So many students are saved by that time at home, and go on to happy, healthy, productive adult lives. Furthermore, allowing IS programs to offer appropriate services to homeschoolers keeps those families in the public school system, a win on both sides.
Thank you again for taking time to consider the effect of your votes on at-risk, LGBTQ+ students.
Recently, Rep. Jimmy Panetta reached out to PFLAG to suggest a listening session about issues faced by transgender people, their families, and their communities. The meeting took place in the back yard of the Diversity Center with representatives from PFLAG Santa Cruz County and the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County,. We were graced with the fun sounds of a live band at the regular Friday midtown street party in the parking lot next door.
The goal of the meeting was not necessarily to solve any problems, but at least to gain a sympathetic ear and educate a politician about transgender concerns. Concerns that were discussed at length included three broad areas: healthcare policy, educational outreach, and continuing issues with access to support.
Healthcare policy
Andrea Damon of the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County cited a statistic from the Kaiser Family Foundation that in 2020: 67% of workers who got their health coverage through their private employer were in self-funded plans. What this means is that instead of contracting with a health insurance company to provide insurance to employees, the business creates its own healthcare group. These groups are not necessarily covered by federal or state law governing health insurance.
If you’re thinking ahead, you already know what comes next: many of these plans do not follow mandates written to regulate health insurance, including health coverage for transgender care mandated under the ACA. Often, business owners don’t realize there is an exclusion, and willingly add trans care when confronted. However, other owners can legally refuse to cover trans care through their self-funded plan.
Most workers have no idea that their “health insurance” isn’t legally required to cover transgender care, and it’s only when they are in crisis with a transgender child that they face barriers to getting appropriate, timely care for their children.
“TransFamilies has worked with several families over the last year who were faced with coverage being denied through their self-funded plans,” Damon says. Results have been mixed; some employers willingly added coverage, while in others, TransFamilies had to “apply pressure” to the board of directors, ultimately convincing two such employers to add coverage.
Rep. Panetta made an enthusiastic request to know more about when self-funded insurance isn’t required to follow insurance laws/requirements, since this is an area under federal jurisdiction.
Educational outreach
Santa Cruz County boasts a robust LGBTQ+ educational program supported by the Diversity Center. This program, Triangle Speakers, will send a trained panel of speakers into any school for any event for free. A similar speakers program in Monterey County is provided by Rainbow Speakers and Friends.
However, access to these programs is spotty, to say the least. Rachel Morales-Warne, a parent advocate whose children attend SLV schools, said that the Triangle Speakers hasn’t been invited to the district in at least the last ten years.
All of the advocates agreed that even when intentions are good, the lack of teeth in the FAIR Education Act (CA Senate Bill 48, 2011) means that it’s up to individual teachers, schools, and districts to decide how inclusive and supportive they will be.
“As an educator, 50 years now, I find it so frustrating that schools are not following what the law says, what we expected them to be doing,” said Lynn J. Walton, retired math teacher and PFLAG SCC Executive Board member. “There are no teeth in it. A lot of teachers have good intentions, but they don’t have the tools to go to the next step. We need to train our teachers so there’s harder conversations.”
Even in “liberal Santa Cruz County,” the treatment of LGBTQ+ students, including bullying, intimidation, misgendering/naming, and shaming, is common. The County Office of Education’s focus on equity in the coming school year, advocates say, is unlikely to make a substantive difference in the everyday experiences of queer kids in our schools if the training and support is not applied more consistently.
Access to support
Michelle Brandt and Andrea Damon (TransFamilies) offered the statistics that underpin everything that advocates do: Kids who grow up in families that support and affirm their gender have wildly better outcomes than kids who don’t.
“Having an affirming, accepting family is the number one indicator for a young person’s mental health, so that’s a big part of what we all do,” Andrea Damon explained. “PFLAG, TransFamiies, and the Diversity Center: for the kids—through the parents but for the kids.”
But support is applied unequally and sometimes it feels like parents have to keep refighting battles that had already been fought by a previous parent.
“You get tired and think, I can’t do this anymore,” Michelle Brandt says.
Rachel Morales-Warne responded more colorfully. “In our house, pardon my language, but I’m like, We’re fuckin’ still doing this?”
Neal Savage, also a PFLAG Santa Cruz board member, pointed out that the way to reach parents in the past doesn’t suit today’s parent population. “When you start expanding the population into Latinx and any kids who are in foster care, those families and those kids aren’t getting help. The number of families that can afford to go someplace on a Tuesday night for a meeting has gotten very small, given geography, money, two jobs. The PFLAG model from 30 years ago is in some ways a middle-class luxury.”
Morales-Warne agrees. “I talk to a cousin’s friend of a cousin because I have a child, because they can’t afford to go to these meetings or they don’t feel comfortable. It’s not necessarily a safe space to live in. I think some of the biggest obstacles are education and language. Not just language as in bilingual language, but the language around what it means to be nonbinary or trans or queer or gay or pan.”
Some takeaways
Rep. Panetta’s job is federal, which informs the areas where he is able to exert influence. Listening to the advocates at the meeting, he responded, “You see the continued need for the resources that are so necessary.” He shared his memories of a powerful meeting the week before about LGBTQ+ experiences moderated by our local State Senator John Laird and hosted by the Diversity Center.
It’s clear that transgender children and adults will benefit from a more focused, united push for understanding, inclusion, and legal protection.
I get lots of requests from parents regarding their students. I am used to accommodating all sorts of needs, and in the online webinar format, it’s very easy to do that. But there’s one request that I’ve received that I will never accommodate, and that’s canceling history or ideas from my courses.
Though “cancel culture” is in the news a lot, let me start by explaining how it works in an online course for children. [Here’s Wikipedia if you want more details.] No matter what subject I’m teaching, whether it’s language, music, or food, we face what I call capital-C Content. That’s content that may not be child-appropriate, may be offensive to some people, or may refer to subjects that are offensive to some people.
My job as a teacher is to decide how to deal with capital-C Content in an age-appropriate manner.
In some ways, this is easy. In my all-ages courses, I tend to skip the personal foibles of historical figures, for example. It’s not necessary to know about a composer’s bigotry unless it’s expressed in the music. But I won’t shy away from age-appropriate discussions that are more central to the subject we are studying, such as Roald Dahl’s unhappy childhood.
In my teen courses, I will address sensitive issues more in depth. I ask students to use our defined standards of behavior and language when discussing issues, but I don’t stop them from addressing them. Teens often have a deep interest in discussing topics that affect their lives, whether it’s a popular writer’s posts on Twitter or their own experiences with discrimination.
“Cancel culture” would have me avoid sensitive topics or cover them with platitudes. Cancel culture asks teachers to offer trigger warnings or to avoid entire topics altogether. Cancel culture also asks us to omit historical complexities when a topic doesn’t align with our modern sensibilities.
What comes up in the classroom
You may be surprised at the topics that come up in classes for kids.
In my music history class, I just had to tell parents that there was no way I was going to avoid all Content…especially in the week that we studied opera! Murder, rape, war, and cultural stereotypes abound.
In my class about food, Yum!, contentious topics come up all the time. Some of my students are vegan and others are dedicated meat-eaters, and that leads to potential conflict.
But it’s in my language courses that we are faced with Content on a regular basis. The history of the English language is fascinating and complex. It’s regularly the case that unsuspecting students share etymological information about a word without even noticing the, ahem, Content that comes along with it. Just think about trying to avoid sex, violence, religion, and bigotry when researching the many meanings and history of these words: head, buck, jazz—even intelligent!
One such situation comes up while discussing the word apoplectic in my vocabulary class. The history of this word really helps students understand just how angry you are when you are feeling apoplectic. Literally, the meaning derives from the symptoms of a stroke, which was referred to apoplexy, which was defined at the time the word was being used as “being crippled, struck dumb.”
Ouch, lots of Content in there. It leads to a discussion of the evolution of the word dumb, from a medical term for something that doctors didn’t understand (being “struck dumb” because of damage to the brain) to the current meaning, “stupid,” which derives from the prejudice that people had against deaf people in the past.
It’s very upsetting for a child to know that there is discrimination in the world, especially if that discrimination hits home. But if I were to cancel all the words with embedded discrimination in them, we’d be left with a language bereft of its complexity and history. Canceling words and their history isn’t the solution—understanding words and their historical context is the solution.
Keeping it age-appropriate
In my all-ages courses, of course, we don’t actually discuss offensive topics in detail. For example, if my student did research on the word jazz and the word gism was in the etymology, I would just simply ignore it and move on. If a student directly asked what it meant, I would say that it’s not appropriate for discussion in our course—and move on.
In one of my writing courses, a young girl used the word “bitch” in the text chat—quoting her teen sisters, who used that word (lovingly!) with each other. As I was reading her writing out loud to the other students, I just quickly said, “oh, whoa, that’s not a word we use in polite society” and moved on. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to discuss it further, so I sent her a private message later.
Teens need to explore ideas in depth
In my teen courses, the controversy over J.K. Rowling’s views about transgender people has been a topic of great interest. It brought up insightful discussions, such as the ethics of enjoying an artist’s work when the artist is someone whose views are repugnant to the reader. Teens are not too young or too fragile to find out that the authors of some of their most treasured stories were not necessarily morally upright people, and our discussions lead to a greater understanding of the interplay between literature and culture.
Nevertheless, I have been asked by students or parents to offer trigger warnings before such conversations take place. But we can’t offer trigger warnings for conversations, given that they haven’t been had yet. All I can do is enforce our standards for respectful discussion. If one of my students started to describe, for example, child abuse in detail, that would be clearly inappropriate and I’d interrupt the conversation. But to say that a teen can’t mention existence of child abuse because it triggers another student? I can’t agree to that.
We have clear rules about respectful language in our courses, and students almost always follow them. We encourage students to speak up when they feel uncomfortable, and they often do. Within the rules for respectful conversation, we have the most in-depth, insightful conversations about difficult topics.
When the student is the one who cancels
Students themselves sometimes buy into the ideas of cancel culture, believing that anyone or anything that upsets them should be dismissed. Those students are the ones who, instead of joining in the conversation or listening to see where it goes, disappear from the webinar with a click. Sometimes we never hear from them again.
This is when I wish I could keep them in the discussion. I always reach out to them after class to try to keep them communicating, because life, they will find out, will not always give them the opportunity just to close the tab and go back to a carefully constructed world. The day that they find out that a valued co-worker has views they don’t agree with, what will they do? Education is more than facts and figures; it’s a preparation for life.
Learn to be a confident messenger
Life doesn’t offer trigger warnings and won’t cancel history as you walk through it. I want my students to be confident messengers for their viewpoints. And in order to do that, they will have to face what the world puts in front of them.
Most of the time—let’s not forget—this world offers natural beauty, kind people, and an amazing and empowering history of humankind. But we do our children no favors by obscuring the challenges that we face in making a safer, kinder, more inclusive culture for all.
I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.
But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…
And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.
On the fringe of the fringe
Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.
The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.
The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.
Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.
Is this homeschooling?
In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.
Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.
However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.
The village raised the child
Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.
Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.
An older brother acted like a parent.
A friend in town acted like a brother.
A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.
A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.
As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.
A final rift
There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.
Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.
In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.
The ultimate homeschooler?
Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.
This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.
All of my teaching is informed by my most difficult parenting task. One of my children had undefined “developmental issues”—with an emphasis on undefined. No one could tell us why it was happening or how to help him.
Without a diagnosis, I started to research techniques used for students with various special needs. That’s where I happened upon the concept of “learning through success,” which upended my ideas of what education is for and how it works.
Traditional approach: learn through failure
Traditionally, a teacher in any discipline tells a student what is “wrong” with their work and gives them reason to correct it. Often, those reasons are based within reward/punishment systems designed to make students focus on their failures.
But students in special ed fail every day
By definition, a student who needs “special” education is failing in some way that a typical educational approach can’t remedy. So when a student is sent into the special ed system, it’s because of failure.
Imagine: If you were designing an environment in which students fail at the most basic tasks, what’s the worst design you could come up with?
Answer: Traditional school.
Why focus on success?
Good special ed teachers don’t focus on their students’ failures simply because there are too many of them. Focusing on success allows them to inspire their students and motivate them.
The fascinating thing about focusing on success is that lagging skills almost always come along for the ride. The teacher is aware of the lagging skills and taking them into account, but not asking the student to focus on them.
First of all, I believe that all students have special needs. But that’s beside the point.
Focusing on success, it turns out, is a more effective way to teach all students. Focusing on success doesn’t mean ignoring your students’ mistakes, but it does mean appreciating their successes and motivating them to do more.
In my classrooms, I notice that when I point out one student’s success in a task, other students who have failed in that task feel more motivated to work on it. And when a student’s success is pointed out, they feel more motivated to drag their lagging skills along.
All students learn asynchronously
State-mandated standards and curriculum can give parents the false impression that their student should always achieve in the center of some designated “typical” student. The truth is, all students learn at different rates.
Focusing on success allows students with lagging skills to feel motivated and successful in their areas of strength.
It’s about motivation
Focusing on success doesn’t mean giving students empty praise. And it doesn’t mean ignoring their mistakes and lagging skills. It does mean giving them the energizing feeling of making positive forward motion. And that’s what learning is all about.
And that’s why in my classrooms, we focus on success.
![](<a title="R M Media Ltd / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Success_hand-written.jpg"><img width="512" alt="Success hand-written" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Success_hand-written.jpg/512px-Success_hand-written.jpg"></a>)
