I’m in the last day of a 3 day workshop sponsored by AERA looking at LGBTQ issues in education.

Yesterday, one of the sessions was beyond depressing. John Easton came in from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences where he is the Director. A good chunk of the session was spent discussing data infrastructure needs (building large datasets). Most of this would be a snoozer for me since methodologically I’m a historian. But when Dr. Easton was pushed to include a mere few questions regarding a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity on the survey behind the database, he quickly slapped down that suggestion. Furthermore, the entire manner in which that idea was throttled was incredibly condescending. Various scholars brought up the issue of the high rate of suicide with queer youth and just getting a baseline number of “how many” would be helpful. Second, it would end arguments that, “we really don’t have any queer kids in our district or state.”

But nope. Nothing doing. You would have thought we were asking for 100,000 Joan Jett Blakk (as in drag star and political activist) public schools to be built and staffed across the US. I came away with the strong impression that Dr. Easton would prefer that the queers shut up and go away. It was a brutal, brutal session