My hunch is that this association comes from a similar place as the association with test-focused schools and misbehavior: the best way to get kids to buy into school, to cooperate with school staff, and to learn to deal with strong negative emotions in a healthy way, might be to model those things for them, to present them with trustworthy adults who are more interested in helping them than in punishing them.

Whether or not South Carolina continues to ignore the constitutional prohibition against funding private schools (or attempts to amend the Constitution to make vouchers legal), we can’t uphold the goals of both the 1868 and 1895 Constitutions at the same time.

How will school staff, in other words, “prove” that children are using the “correct” bathrooms?