Month / December 2020

by nflanagan

Stop Trashing Joe Biden’s Cabinet Picks

Especially his choice for Secretary of Education—but lay off the nit-picky nastiness around the others, too. Yes, YOU might have chosen others. Your favorite candidate may have been left behind. But much of Cabinet-choosing is inside baseball, beyond the ken of Joe Citizen. Stop bellyaching.

Biden’s selections all seem pretty experienced, professional and well-known to Biden or people he trusts. And hey—given what he’s got on his plate, and the worrisome lack of information coming from some quarters—I’d be reaching for the tried and trusted, as well.

There are always Cabinet members who don’t pan out, who are gone in a year—and there are people Biden wants who give me serious pause, too. Biden was far from my favorite Democratic candidate, but he displayed qualities which made him President-elect in the most contentious election in modern history. It doesn’t serve us well to flyspeck untried and unconfirmed Cabinet members, because there’s someone we imagine might be better. I’m taking a wait and see approach.

Frankly, 90 per cent of the people who are raking prospective Cabinet members across specific, overheated coals don’t know much about any of the nominees. But they’re willing to retweet some old error, a comment from years ago– or speculate about just how bad someone will be, based on some pretty limited evidence, or a single issue.

Here’s the thing: we’re not dealing with an ordinary transition, where progressives can realistically hope for big-transformative-ideas Cabinet members. We’ve got a pandemic to deal with, for at least six more months, in addition to a dozen political crises that are raw and bleeding—and dangerous.

Not every advisor and policy chief will be anxious to break new ground. Some of them are going to try to please multiple constituencies. Most of them will be lucky to reverse a stunning amount of damage, a lot of which has yet to be unearthed. They also have to pass through a confirmation process with a hostile Congress.

What is important right now is remembering whose policies and advice left us with the mess we’re in, and working to right the ship. I still have hope for an FDR-level change, eventually, but there’s work to be done first.

Like most teachers, I’d never heard of Dr. Miguel Cardona until about four days before he was nominated. But unlike many teachers, I was reluctant to name ‘my’ preferred candidate for ED Secretary. I have seen utterly inappropriate people elevated as ideal candidates–most of whom, thankfully, understand the range and scope of the job, as well as the politics, and said so.

Both Dr. Cardona and Dr. Leslie Fenwick, the other rumored finalist, seemed like good bets, people who had worked across the range of K-12 education and had deep understanding of how well-meant policy initiatives actually played out in public schools.

I heard Cardona’s acceptance speech on the radio and it felt sincere, even inspiring, to me. Biden appears to be honoring his pledge to nominate someone with classroom experience. And frankly, I don’t think there is a magic number of years in the classroom that makes a person qualified to be EdSec. Cardona enthusiastically trained to be a teacher via a public university—he didn’t come into education as a temp. To me, that’s enough.

Dr. Cardona has been a teacher, a school administrator at multiple levels, and a state superintendent during a pandemic. He’s been embedded in public education–as object of policy, administrator of policy and creator of policy.

Scrolling back through all the Secretaries, in Republican and Democratic administrations, he seems pretty close to what teachers have always said was essential, and what they wanted: someone who believes in the critical importance of public education and understands the people who do the work. Cardona will be only the 12th Secretary of Education, but compared to the previous eleven, we’re getting closer to that ideal.

Some folks disagree with Cardona’s prioritizing face to face education during the pandemic, especially for children in poverty—and others agree. He led a state with only 24 charter schools, involving less than .02% of CT students, so his mild remark about schools that serve children well hardly paints him as someone who supports destroying public education in favor of charters or choice. The question isn’t whether you like everything he’s said and done—it’s whether his CV shows him to be dedicated to the core principle of an equitable education for all children.

The Secretary of Education has little control over policy decisions that belong to states—but the rise of federal power in education policy has undeniably been steady, and onerous, for the past two decades. Cardona, as advocate for equity in public education, could be a powerful voice in reducing unnecessary (federally mandated) testing and creating conditions that make it safer for a return to in-person schooling. This might begin with federal oversight over real—not ‘alternative’—CDC recommendations, or, say, rolling out priority vaccination clinics for teachers as first step toward getting kids back to school.

My personal take on this: way too many people do not understand how inequitable virtual schooling is. There are high percentages of public school kids who do not have access.  And when I say ‘access,’ I don’t mean an internet hotspot via a bus parked near the projects. I mean enough devices in the home, some privacy and quiet, someone to help you when you run into trouble, and—most of all—adequate bandwidth to run all the programming.

There are plenty of pressing needs right now, around public education. It’s in crisis—and there’s even limited evidence that some of the strongest advocates of choice and standardization are now claiming that the pandemic has laid bare all the inequities and petty rule-making that have bedeviled public schools since NCLB sent us down the ‘accountability’ path.

Biden seems to have mostly sent us nominees that will be able to get through the confirmation process. There is SO much work to be done. I might eat my words in a year or two (Ghost of Arne Duncan floats into view), but for right now, I don’t want to waste time wishing someone else was president-elect, choosing candidates whose perspectives mirror my own. As someone once said, it is what it is.

Miguel Cardona, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Education, speaks after being introduced at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del., Dec. 23, 2020.
by nflanagan

Christmas Past

If you watched Stephen Colbert’s show-length interview with Joe and Jill Biden last week, you heard Joe, acting like the nation’s corny but well-meaning grandpa, describing his annual habit of spreading fake snow, made with Ivory Snow flakes, on the branches of the family Christmas tree.

Joe really got into it, adding a lot of detail about placement of single strands of tinsel, and how this was a midnight tradition handed down from his father. The future first lady was bravely smiling, in political wife fashion, but she had that look women get when they want their husbands to stop rambling on.

But personally—I was charmed. It was geezer talk, all right, but it’s refreshing to hear the next Leader of the Free World get all nostalgic about past Christmases and his father. Joe Biden is an unabashedly sentimental empath—and an empath is what we need when there are monsters lurking.

When Joe Biden started getting specific about tinsel, I flashed to my mom. My mother was a post-war bride who saved tinsel, year to year, tied with ribbon. When the newspapers (remember them?) published stories about the high lead content in old-style tinsel, she phased it out, but prior to that she was a single-strand person, carefully doling out the silvery magic, making it last, teetering on her step stool.

As a 30-year music teacher, I wrestled annually with what others—parents, students, administrators—thought was my job during the holidays. I recognize that Christmas cheer is often false and corrosive in public settings, not to mention a thoughtless privileging of one quasi-religious tradition over all others.

Still—all major religious and cultural groups have some kind of ‘turning of the light’ festival, often featuring a hopeful story, feasting, music and merriment. A friend who identifies as a Pagan humanist celebrates the Winter Solstice and puts up a Yule Tree—which from the road looks just like every Christmas tree on her block. When she put a picture of it up on Facebook, however, I was surprised at how many commenters poked at her terminology—reactions ranging from cynical snottiness to genuine antagonism.

Donald Trump knew what he was doing when he bragged that under his reign tenure in office, it would once again be OK to say Merry Christmas. He understood, at some level, the mystical, murky power of nostalgia, and the distress of having your cherished memories and beliefs challenged. He also pumped up the idea of a threatened majority–Santa Claus Matters!

The truth is that people whose memories do not include candlelit midnight masses and glorious, present-saturated dawns with all the trimmings are American citizens, too—and when it comes to family holiday celebrations, religious belief matters less than resources and circumstances. Christmas and other winter holidays are fueled by memory as much as reality.

On Twitter yesterday, a guy named @MohammadHussain wrote this: Growing up, my Muslim family never celebrated Christmas. This year I am not going home, because pandemic, so my roommates are teaching me how to have my first proper Christmas. I am approaching this with anthropological precision.

Hussain’s Tweet thread is hilarious, including the observation that Christmas ornaments fall into two groups: the “fillers” and the “keepers”. The fillers are the generic ones. The keepers are meant to be more special and unique. This second stream is stored in your family’s reliquary to be one day passed on to the children.

In our family reliquary, there are the usual travel souvenirs and construction-paper photo frames. Because I taught band and choir, half the keepers are music-related. There’s also a chipped Hot Wheels rendition of the General Lee (the orange Dodge Charger that the Dukes of Hazzard kept airborne), attached to a string, and hung on a Christmas tree, back in the 1990s by my son, who’s always been a car guy.

Christmas is perfect only in memory. And sometimes—like the Christmas between the diagnosis of my dad’s brain cancer at Thanksgiving, and his death in early January—the memory is dark and riven with sorrow. But it’s still there, reminding me that healing is possible, if you give it enough time and eggnog.

Social media has been filled with trees and lights and So Many Packages. Plus an out-of-control festival of baking. On Tuesday, I will be baking my mom’s caramel butter cookies to take to the local nursing home.

Lest you think my mother was a creative master baker—no. She was an indifferent 1950s cook. Lots of jello, dishes based on cream of something soup, and pedestrian box-mix cakes. But at some point in the 1960s, she was given a cookie press, and I was there watching her (probably because of the novelty) attempt to make caramel butter cookies from the little booklet that came in the box with the press.

Pressing out cookie shapes is harder than it looks. The dough must be the right consistency. She tried adding water. Then extra flour. Then she put the dough and the press in the fridge. The dough went from a food-colored toothpaste-ish ooze to the texture of chilled, unset cement. The cookies were brightly colored disaster-blobs. But I can’t remember ever laughing so hard, tears running down our cheeks. And when my mother died, in 2000, the one thing I wanted was her cookie press.

The right-wing press was really hard on Joe Biden’s interview with Colbert, but it went down well at our house, where we are leaning heavily, in 2020, on hope. It reminded me of Maya Angelou’s poem:

Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls.

by nflanagan

Republicans

I was tempted to begin this reflection by saying ‘some of my best friends are Republicans’—but that’s not true, these days. I myself voted for years in the Republican primary, because it was the only way to have some say in who would be representing me, in my ruby-red district. My friends and family run the gamut from fire-breathing leftists to what we in Michigan call Milliken Republicans, after our longest serving, environmentally progressive governor.

Unlike the classic maturation template–moving from idealistic liberalism as a young person toward pragmatism, security and conservatism while aging– I seem to be going in the opposite direction. Fewer and fewer people in my inner circle cop to the label ‘Republican’—with or without qualifying adjectives.

Perhaps what is most true is this: Republicans used to be different.

Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, signed a major Civil Rights bill and promoted peace at critical foreign policy junctures, saying that war was ‘brutal, futile and stupid.’ My kinda guy. Unfortunately, he left office when I was in the fourth grade.

Whereas, last week, MY Congressman (Jack Bergman (R), MI District One) and MY Representative in the Michigan House (Jack O’Malley (R), District 101) demonstrated what the Republican party currently represents, by signing on to disenfranchise their own constituents. Because evidently, if you didn’t vote for Trump, your vote shouldn’t count.

Nobody, in 2020, needs to make an evidentiary list of the norm-busting behaviors of latter-day Republicans. We can start with the most recent: The Clown Coup. Plus: The Race War. Abandoning democracy. The Shame of the Nation. Bootlicking Bill Barr. Even rock-ribbed Bret Stephens admits that there’s been long-term damage done, although he points his well-manicured finger at Trump.

And that’s the second thing about Republicans: It’s not just Trump, although he’s the most colorful spotlight hog. It’s the whole range of elected Republicans, shutting down the common good—projects that benefit us all, the proverbial rising tide that lifts even the shabbiest boat. The Republicans are just pure nastiness at this point, indulging their deepest fantasies, abandoning those who need good government the most, protecting billionaires and corporate giants.

It wasn’t our institutions or norms (things conservative Republicans used to revere) that saved us from a second Trump term where absolutely nothing gets done to benefit the people of these United States, although the courts did their part.  

The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.

But–what about the Lincoln Project and its needle-sharp anti-Trump ads? What about Michael Steele and Steve Schmidt and John Kasich? What about all the other Democrat-come-latelys?

That’s the third thing: Please stop with the admiration for Brad Raffensperger types—he merely did his job, and is now trying to re-burnish his Republican credentials by trashing Stacey Abrams and her righteous quest to, you know, make it possible for everyone who’s eligible to vote. He’s just one of the most visible Republicans to back away slowly from the Trump administration, pretending that he wasn’t 100% on board, weaseling around with voter purges and shutting down polling sites.

And that’s the last thing: Democrats persist in trying to be nice, to find common ground, to work cooperatively, yada yada. In a different age—say, a few decades ago—this was actually possible. But not after Republicans broke our political system. Gleefully.

Did Republicans really inflict permanent damage? Yes. They have—whether intentionally or not—released domestic terrorism on this nation. During a pandemic, no less, when millions are destitute. What else do they have to do—or fail to do—to prove that their party loyalty is destroying us?

I see you raising your hand over there, asking who ‘we’ are. Or saying that Democrats have also, throughout our history, been corrupt and greedy and feckless. Or that all political parties are flawed. To you, I say: Bingo. The perfect time to re-build a party or start a new one is now, after the SIX WEEKS it took to (probably) nail down a secure national election result. Go for it.

In the meantime, we have two big and viable political parties running the show, and I will turn to the voice of the most experienced Congressman in national history, the late John Dingell of Michigan, to suggest a framework for fixing elections and, in the process, our democratic Republic:

In December 1958, almost exactly three years after I entered the House of Representatives, the first American National Election Study, initiated by the University of Michigan, found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” As of December 2017, the same study, now conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that this number had plummeted to just 18 percent.

There are many reasons for this dramatic decline: the Vietnam War, Watergate, Ronald Reagan’s folksy but popular message that government was not here to help, the Iraq War, and worst of all by far, the Trumpist mind-set. These jackasses who see “deep state” conspiracies in every part of government are a minority of a minority, yet they are now the weakest link in the chain of more than three centuries of our American republic. Ben Franklin was right. The Founders gave us a precious but fragile gift. If we do not protect it with constant vigilance, we will most certainly lose it.

Read the whole piece. You won’t be sorry. It’s full of commonsense suggestions under which we could all benefit. Even those with an inclination to fight until the battle is won.

I saw former Governor Bill Milliken in downtown Traverse City a couple of years ago, shortly after he was unceremoniously removed from the local Republican party by a Trump-supporting party hack, after being quoted in the newspaper about his decision to vote for Hillary Clinton.  He was coming out of Grand Traverse Pie Company, holding what was probably his dinner. I was tempted to speak to him, to say I was a fan, but declined, thinking he might appreciate a little privacy and a tuna-fish sandwich.

He died about a year ago, in his 90s. I am sorry I didn’t take the opportunity to thank him for his service. He was one of the good ones.

by nflanagan

Norms, Ethics and Civility. Plus Education.

Early in 2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president, the question emerged: just what percentage of the population actually endorsed his brand of brash white nationalism? It always felt impossible that more than a small sliver of the country would honestly embrace (not just tolerate) his behaviors and proclamations.

A lot of us were counting on norms, ethics and civility—plus our historic institutions—to make a Trump presidency more like All Other Presidencies. Now we’ve seen how that turned out. Do we still get to call for reasonable and ethical behaviors?

There was a gut-wrenching piece in the Washington Post yesterday about a mask mandate in Mitchell, South Dakota. If there ever were a place where neighborly norms and civility ought to reign, where people would be willing to help others, it’s small-town South Dakota. A friend of mine used to live there. Her husband was a Methodist minister. If people in Mitchell were like Donna and Dick, they’d be masked up, washing their hands, and dropping food off on ill neighbor’s porches.

But it turns out that they’re not. In fact, many of them are adamantly anti-mask, anti-science. As beloved coaches and grandmothers are dying, they’re insisting on falsehoods. These people aren’t evil, and it’s wrong to dismiss them as dumb and worthless. They are still following community norms. It seems to me that what’s missing is a genuine education—accompanied by a widespread terror that education will change minds and hearts.

Because education has the power to do that. It’s not automatic. But if you have absorbed the habit of being curious and interested in things, education has the power to change your mind. Not always in predictable ways.

When I went off to Central Michigan University, in 1969, I thought I understood what was true and correct in the world. I thought there was a good reason why we were in Vietnam (to stop communism, which I naturally believed was evil). I thought that men in Congress (and they were pretty much all white men) knew more than I did about war and the economy and the rule of law, and were best positioned to make important decisions about war and peace.

I saw my high school classmates and guys who graduated a year or two earlier go off to ‘serve their country’ and saw parents proud of those sons who (like the previous generation who fought in WWII or Korea) ‘did the right thing.’ I saw a couple of them come home in a box, too. We were supposed to be really proud of them because they ‘gave’ their lives, at the same age I was, before having a chance to work, own a home or start a family.

All of those were a result of norms, ethics and civility.

During my freshman year, I started listening to people other than my parents, Walter Cronkite and local politicians. I stopped believing that there was one right way to look at everything. My sociology prof introduced me to Margaret Mead, and I went to lectures, to see Jane Fonda, and William Kunstler. I also went to church.

My professors started pushing on my thinking in both liberal AND conservative directions–after the Kunstler lecture, my philosophy professor called him a ‘greasy ambulance chaser.’ I started to understand the structure of argument and evidence, and to read and talk about things that were wildly divergent from the middle of the road, white, working-class, church-going discourse I’d been surrounded by. Cracks started to form in my mental model of what was true and correct.

The big issue then was, of course, Vietnam. I began to wonder what good it had done for the neighbor kid–Joey Hoeker–to have gone to war and been killed. I grew up with him. He was a big, goofy guy, a couple years ahead of me in school. I found it difficult to believe that he went to Vietnam to fight communism. He went to Vietnam because he was 18, had a low draft number and wasn’t (as they said out loud, back then) ‘college material.’ And he died.

For the first time, it occurred to me that tens of thousands of boys who were killed were just like Joey–kids who didn’t have big plans for their lives, and so were sent into harm’s way. I started showing up for anti-war demonstrations on that basis alone—long before I read about Robert McNamara and the politics of war, I was playing ‘Fortunate Son’ on my little two-speed record player.

I started questioning pretty much everything and reading all the time, including a lot of stuff that wasn’t assigned, like MS. Magazine, newly available in the CMU library. Having access to a top-flight university library was key to any transformative impact on my character. In case you think I was a flaming radical, I also dropped out of school and got married at age 20.

All this happened to me at mild-mannered CMU which was hardly a hotbed of revolutionary thought. I would have to say that most of the students in my music classes or my dorm did NOT go to demonstrations and were uncomfortable with anti-war, anti-government rhetoric. Some of their brothers were serving. Some of them were academically rootless, only in college to avoid the draft and because their parents could afford it. Their dads and moms were Republicans. They claimed to be apolitical.

Norms, ethics and civility were the order of the day.

But–for me–it was education, my first opportunity to soak in diversity of opinion, to dare (and dare is the right word) to think that maybe what I’d been taught, and believed, was mostly whitewash. It was where I learned that a call to ‘unity’ is often whitewash, too, and that norms are not necessarily moral or fair, even though everyone agrees to abide by them.

We’re now looking at the after-effects of Trump’s end game. It will take years to erase the illiberal, undemocratic policies and we’ve suffered unimaginable losses. And the percentage of people willing to believe his con is larger than it was before. Calling for civil behavior before untangling the moral questions that emerged from this election is silly. We have some educating to do.

by nflanagan

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf

I just finished reading A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Berkshire and Schneider are co-hosts of the podcast Have You Heard, which is the best $2 I spend every month—and, as journalist and historian, both bring interesting perspectives to the ongoing discourse about what used to be called, without a trace of irony or bitterness, education reform.

It’s not a long book—217 pages plus another 40 pages of notes and references—and it’s eminently readable. It would be an excellent choice for anyone who cares about public education—parents and grandparents, policy-makers, teachers and school leaders—to use as concise handbook explaining what the hell happened to public schools over the last couple of decades. There’s a bit of history, a good look at failed-over-time policies, and a clear analysis of the intersecting factors that got us to this point.

Who wants to see public education die, and why? Berkshire and Schneider tell you, but like all interesting and disturbing stories, you have to trace backward first, to the origins and mission of public schooling and the conflicting values America assigned to education, as a start-up nation. This sounds tedious, but it’s not. In short, succinct chapters, the authors spend the first quarter of the book laying the groundwork for the rapid changes—the dismantling of a once-noble idea—we’ve seen in the 21st century.

Ernest Boyer once said that public school is a stage upon which Americans play out their most deep-rooted ethics, and the book deftly illustrates that principle. It takes us through the decline of labor unions, the elevation of the deregulated gig economy and ‘choice,’ and the overwhelming impact of technology on every aspect of American life, school included.

I have lived experience with nearly every theory, concept and action mentioned in the book, from teacher professionalism (or lack thereof) to the DeVos model of privatizing one of the few remaining public goods. Any teacher, at any level, who has been paying attention for the past couple of decades will be familiar with the carefully curated observations and supporting data presented here.

The great benefit of the book is that it connects hundreds of established dots into a flashing arrow: this is the end game, the crushing of once-healthy public schools, monetizing their resources and selling them off for parts. It accurately represents where we are, in the midst of a pandemic and constitutional crisis. The wolf is truly at the door.

Berkshire and Schneider are careful to remind us that the well-heeled will always have school as we know it. Their children will always have creative teachers and challenging curriculum and actual classmates, in a real-life setting, because that is, in the end, the optimum way for students to learn. The question is (and always has been) who’s paying for it, and who gets to share it. The primary goal has never been maximizing each child’s potential, contrary to the thousands of mission statements hanging in front offices everywhere. It’s been ‘What’s in it for my child?’

Although some of the data are optimistic—there is still strong support from parents for their children’s public schools, and for teachers’ demands for adequate funding and resources, even via walk-outs—the authors do not prescribe clearly defined solutions.

I don’t see that as a weakness. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the future is utterly unpredictable. In a time when we might be taking a breath, rethinking our values around what matters most in public education, and thanking public school teachers for doing their best under some pretty dire conditions, reformers are busily selling yet more glossy rhetoric (don’t miss the chapter on ‘personalizing’ education) and questionable data analyses.  

So—read this book, whether you’re a veteran educator or a kindergarten parent. It’s accurate and sharp, the best education book I’ve read this year.