Month / February 2025

by nflanagan

Five Things Your Child’s Teacher Accomplished Last Week

When I first heard about Elon Musk’s email blast to over two million federal employees directing them to submit approximately five bullet points of what they accomplished in the previous week, I was reminded of a couple of school administrators from my past.

Eugene Robinson called Musk’s scheme “an exercise in contempt”—also a great description of some of the so-called professional development teachers routinely endure. When a principal doesn’t trust their professional staff to know what they’d like to do with time available for their own learning or planning, you end up with meaningless exercises like “five things I did last week.”

Ultimately, it’s about control.

Eugene Robinson, again: Thus begins the inevitable power struggle at the court of Mad King Donald, between his various ministers of state and his billionaire Lord High Executioner.

No word yet on whether the soon-to-be defunct Department of Education will demand five bullet points of the 3.8 million public school teachers in the U.S., given that 13.7% of the funding for public schools comes from the feds, give or take.

But there’s no need to put teachers through that particular, umm, wood chipper. I can supply the federal government with five bullet points that apply to all teachers, summarizing their most recent contribution to the education of America’s youth.

Here are five things that all teachers accomplished last week:

  • They showed up. They showed up when the driving was treacherous, even when their own homes were threatened by floods. They showed up when they were sick or hadn’t slept, because it’s easier to teach with a cold than find a sub. They showed up because it was test day, or the field trip, or opening night of the school play, or because a particular student didn’t do well with strangers at the head of the classroom. They showed up, because thanks to a global pandemic, we now know that virtual school is not the solution to cheap and easy public education. Personal relationships matter.
  • They planned a learning experience that failed. That’s par for the course, by the way. Most lesson plans fail to accomplish their goals, 100% and immediately. That’s because kids learn differently, through different means and at different rates. The slam-dunk lesson plan that teaches everyone all they need to know, challenging the brightest and scooping up the laggards, doesn’t exist. What happens when a lesson goes sideways today? Experienced teachers adapt and adjust–and reinforce tomorrow.
  • They dealt with diversity, equity and inclusion, even the AP teachers with classes of 12 well-behaved senior calculus students. D, E and I are endemic in K-12 education—not the fake shorthand of “woke,” but the bedrock truth-in-practice of embracing student differences, playing fair as a teacher, and building a learning community where everyone is valued.
  • They exposed themselves to the viral miasma of 30 small, touchy-feely children, or perhaps 150 sniffly teenagers, in their role as caretaker. Let me repeat that: they acted as caretakers, with the school being a safe and (key word) free place for children of all ages to spend their weekdays. The lack of affordable childcare across the country makes schools a first line of defense in an economy where parents need to be in the workplace.  And parents send their kids to school when they’re sick. #Truth                       
  • They did the intellectual heavy lifting of observation, instruction, assessment and accompanying record-keeping on the learning of a large number of children. This, of course, is a teacher’s actual job, and it’s harder than it looks to the casual observer. Teachers take their work home—not just grading and lesson plans but worries and concerns. Keeping tabs on the students in their charge—so they could learn.

Here are some things your child’s teachers did NOT do last week:

  • Go out for lunch at a nice restaurant and indulge in a glass of wine.
  • Use the bathroom whenever the urge arose.
  • Spend most of their day in an office or cubicle, blessedly alone with their thoughts and their work.
  • Talk to other adults for an extended time–on the phone, or in casual conversation.
  • Duck out for a medical appointment that had to be scheduled during the workday.
  • Decide to knock off early, and get in a round of golf.

So—should the Billionaire Lord High Executioner come after public school educators, further annihilating America’s once-proud, once-functional institutions, keep your heads down and just say no to the five bullets.

by nflanagan

Bad Words in Schools

Over the past few years, I have volunteered in four local schools, in varied programs. And—as a retired veteran teacher—I understand why students’ identities and actions must be rigorously protected. But I want to share this recent experience, because—even with 30-odd years in various middle school and high school classrooms and plenty of exposure to Things Kids Say—it rocked me. Which school, which program—doesn’t matter.

It’s a marker about the coarsening of our culture—but the question is why.

So–there’s an 8th grade boy who’s talking to other middle school boys. They’re not huddling in the corner or trying not to be heard. The boy refers to a girl they know as a “Hawk Tuah girl”.  The other boys snicker. There is some head-turning in the room, including another adult volunteer.

What did you call her? she asks, curious. And the 8th grade boy proceeds to share an accurate definition of “hawk tuah”—out loud, with sound effects. Boys try to suppress their mirth, again. Girls walk away, clustering together. The other volunteer turns to me, wide-eyed, and says: Have you ever heard that word before?

Unfortunately, yes. Just didn’t expect to hear it explicated in a middle school classroom.

I’ve seen and heard plenty of appalling things in the classroom. I’ve heard angry students drop the F- bomb and nice girls call other nice girls ‘whores’ when their boyfriend showed interest. Also, if you haven’t been in a K-12 classroom since your own experience there, the line of what is acceptable and what will get you sent to the office has definitely moved over time.

My own vocabulary—both public and private—is hardly pure. Sometimes, I’m kind of like the dad in that You Tube video, trying to explain how the word fuck loses its power depending on how it’s used. Because this isn’t precisely about naughty words, per se.

Sending a kid who swears (especially if it’s not habitual) to the office isn’t ever likely to achieve anything useful. Plus—with social media and personally selected entertainment in every teenager’s pocket—it’s become harder and harder to say what is and is not overtly wrong.

The 8th grader learned how to define certain girls from watching videos and social media. He’s 13 and has no reliable filter for “inappropriate”—trust me—and he wasn’t swearing. So who do we blame for his language, let alone his idea that someone he knows and goes to school with just might be a Hawk Tuah girl, ha-ha? Do you call his parents? What will that yield?

I think about the well-meaning MI school official who compelled two middle schoolers to remove “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts—and how the school got sued, won in court, but are now looking at an appeal supported by the so-called Liberty Justice Center.  I’m thinking there’s probably an assistant principal who wishes he’d just let those sweatshirts and the prepubescent political prisoners-in-training wearing them go.

Because that’s where we are now. There is no reliable list (like George Carlin’s seven dirty words) of what words are OK and Not OK.

Early in my career, I was called into the office by my principal, who said she’d fielded a complaint about me swearing in class—and the parent had already called the superintendent. I was genuinely mystified. What did I (supposedly) say?

Ass, she said. You said [Student] was an ass. Yesterday. He went home and told his mom you swore at him in class.

Well, the truth of the matter was this: The kid (a percussionist) was dropping cymbals on the tile floor. I directed him to stop. So he started kicking over suspended cymbals and temple blocks, which are on easily tipped stands. I took him out in the hall for a cheek-to-cheek, and chatted with him (severely, I admit) about why was he back there acting like a jackass? He had no response.

His mom, of course, hadn’t heard that part of the story. But when she did, she said that dropping equipment was no excuse for a teacher swearing. Damaging expensive equipment that all the bands use? Not a factor, apparently.

Today, language is at the heart of the ongoing, month-long trashing of our entire federal government—way more trigger words than George Carlin ever dreamed of. From a piece in the Atlantic:

Fear that other words could run afoul of the new [anti-DEI] edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own. These included: Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.

Language is powerful. When we are afraid to speak freely, explore ideas, argue about meanings and outcomes from the language used in the classroom, we’re in real trouble. A whole lot of the purpose and success of a quality education depends on the language we use, and the way students understand it.

Should adults—calmly and dispassionately–explain to kids why their language may be offensive? I know that makes me sound old and out-of-touch.  

But I keep thinking about the girls in that classroom, listening to the boy describe sexual acts he’d heard about on social media, and the girls who were willing to engage in them. It felt like witnessing an obscenity, performed by someone who didn’t fully realize it was offensive, that it wasn’t just about sexual behaviors, but about denigrating all girls?

There’s been a cultural shift in schools.

Did it start with kids yelling “Build That Wall!” in November, 2016?

by nflanagan

Who is in Favor of Authoritarianism? Are Schools Authoritarian?

In 2014, we went on a much-anticipated two week cruise—the Grand European, from Budapest to Amsterdam. On the first day, we took a day-long tour of Budapest, with a charming and articulate guide. First stop: Heroes Square.

Our guide was a proud and patriotic Hungarian, well-versed in her nation’s history, all the way back to Atilla the Hun. I am embarrassed to say I knew very little about modern-day Hungary, except for the fact that Hungarian citizens are universally musically literate, because of Zoltan Kodaly, whose method of teaching music to children is internationally renowned.

As the distracted touring group wandered around snapping pictures of the impressive statuary, our guide completed her thumbnail history and then, very quietly, said that Hungarians—so brave and bold—were losing their democratic independence to their authoritarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

Glancing around, she spoke for perhaps two minutes about how he was suppressing freedoms and dismissing the courts, stealing money and power from the people. It was clear that she was nervous, and that this was not part of her assigned guide-spiel. Most of the Americans in this heavily American group were not paying attention to her final, whispered words: You Americans are lucky.

That was 10 years ago. Today, from a piece entitled The Path to American Authoritarianism:

Democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term.

While this is a powerful statement, it is not difficult to find a dozen pieces, by credible authors, in credible publications, saying pretty much the same thing, over the last three weeks. We are headed toward Hungary (Global Freedom Score: 65) or perhaps Saudi Arabia (GFS: 8), where our President is now going to sell out Ukraine (GFS: 49).

It’s clear we are not the land of the free anymore. Nor are we the home the brave. We’re the home of the partisan cowardly and the feckless appeasers.

It is easy to point fingers at the clueless voters who wanted cheaper eggs (and, one hopes, a corresponding end to galloping and threatening bird flu). It’s a short distance from there to wondering why schools are turning out more and more dumb people. If people understood the importance of preserving our liberties, we wouldn’t find ourselves with a completely incompetent president. Again.

This—the ‘let’s blame schools’ rationale—is always popular when things are shaky politically. Richard Nixon blamed ‘bums blowing up campuses’ for political unrest, rather than his own disastrous foreign policy. Academic and political scholars spent decades comparing Johnny and Ivan, invariably coming to the same conclusion: our schools suck, when it comes to preparing upstanding and industrious citizens. That we are now preparing to aid Russia in its criminal intent to capture some or all of a struggling democracy, Ukraine, is the ultimate irony.

Schooling is actually one of those public institutions where a kind of benign authoritarianism—because I said so—is commonplace, even approved. When Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville suggested that kids who have ADHD don’t need medication—they need to be whipped with a belt—there were plenty of MAGA types nodding in agreement.

The rise in book-banning, the faux outrage over the fewer than 10 trans athletes (out of a half-million) in college sports, the equally faux outrage over “CRT” and “DEI” (both of which should require scare quotes)—these are happening because public education is funded and controlled by the government (as accountability requires).

There’s a reason why the Department of Education is being so quickly dismantled. It’s not a business (as everyone is fond of saying). It doesn’t make money. It’s entirely dependent on a mixture of public funding streams. There are accountability strings (state and federal) on nearly every aspect of the way public education runs, from where the money goes, qualifications for workers, rules for instructional materials and practices, punishments for low test scores, how to get kids to school, even when they prefer not to go.

For the current administration, bent on “saving” federal dollars for their own preferences, breaking up this monolith will be a giant display of power that impacts some 50 million students and their families. Think you’re in charge of your local school, your classroom? Think again. Easy peasy.

No, the federal government–and supporting Republicans and conservative courts–say. No, we don’t want your media literacy classes. No, we don’t want kids nosing around in issues like fairness and equity in our recent history. No speaking Spanish. No arts classes or events to help students make sense of the world they live in. No vaccines to protect them, or accurate health information.

No, we don’t want you out there teaching kids to ferret out the truth.

I think about our Hungarian guide all the time, especially recently, watching Tucker Carlson gush about what an amazing, transformative job Viktor Orban has done. At the time, she seemed a little desperate, sharing her political beliefs with American strangers.

Now, she seems like a prophet. Guard what you have. You never know when you’re going to elect a despot. Before our schools crumble, I hope every teacher will gather up their courage and speak truth to power, even to first graders.

As Steven Bechloss wrote: Despite this onslaught of gaslighting, aggression and attacks on facts, don’t assume we are powerless to respond. This is our duty to the future and the truth.

by nflanagan

Diversity and Tracking

If you were in the classroom, as I was for well over three decades, you will have had some experience with tracking— ability grouping, or dividing the class into the Bluebirds, the Orioles and the Buzzards at reading time. And you will know that some teachers strongly resist the impulse to sort and label students, while others endorsed the practice of dividing students by their—key word alert!—perceived differences.

I taught 7th grade math for two (non-consecutive) years. Students were leveled into math groups both times, although the labeling process was different. The first time, there were four levels—Honors, Advanced, Basic and Remedial—and I taught Basic math.

The math faculty, understanding that ability differences were, indeed, perceived rather than scientifically determined—and that skills and understanding were also likely to shift, over the course of a semester or two—proposed testing the students quarterly, using the same test. Any student whose test scores were wildly out of line with their perceived peers could be moved. Up or down.

Except—this was a lot less feasible in practice. Most kids (and their parents) had internalized their math labels. Honors or Advanced? Try suggesting, after nine weeks, that their skills were really… kinda basic.

I also had a couple of kids in my “basic” group who, right off the bat, were obviously sandbagging. Their actual skills and math sense were so far above the norm that I wondered immediately how and why they were placed in the Basic group.

After a few weeks, however, I started to understand how behavior issues impacted the sixth grade teachers’ divvy-up process at the end of the previous year. Act like an attention-seeking four year old? No Honors for you! The only African American kid in the 7th grade? Basic.

Point being: Leveling students, in most academic settings, has limited and conditional value. More importantly, grouping students is often about things totally unrelated to academic ability or potential.

There is probably no education writer who has influenced me more than Alfie Kohn, whose book No Contest inspired me to stop using chairs and challenges, something band directors everywhere see as a normal practice. (I wrote about how that actually improved my school bands, HERE.)

Alfie Kohn just wrote a rather brilliant essay: Heterogenius; Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them. It’s well worth the read, packed with evidence-based observations and sharp analysis, and incredibly timely in an era when we have to be reminded that diversity, equity and inclusion are actually good goals—especially when teaching children—not merely “DEI,” a catch-all trigger for the people currently in power to run roughshod over the rest of us, including our future citizens.

Here’s a sampling from Kohn’s column, on the measurable, research-supported benefits of diversity:

The idea of minimizing homogeneity has a great deal to recommend it even on a biological level. Genetic diversity allows for adaptation to a changing environment. Species diversity makes for more robust ecosystems. Plant diversity (for example, through crop rotation) protects against pests and disease. Even nature, in other words, seems to be saying “Mix it up!”

As for human interaction, the experience of being in a heterogeneous group not only attenuates tribalism but can enhance performance on various tasks. Social psychologist Adam Galinsky put it this way: “Diversity increases creativity and innovation, promotes higher quality decisions, and enhances economic growth because it spurs deeper information processing and complex thinking…[whereas] homogeneous groups run the risk of narrow mindedness and groupthink (i.e., premature consensus) through misplaced comfort and overconfidence.”

It’s that last quote that explains why Trump, after raving about–and winning an election on—his goal of deporting millions of brown people, has now decided to welcome White “refugees” of European descent from South Africa.

It’s all out in the open now—how politicized the pushback against diversity and equity are. Long-time right-leaning ed-research houses like Fordham keep pumping out anti-diversity reports, in favor of reserving education goodies for the top layer of (white and Asian) HS students. However:

As the report notes, research does support the finding that many students are insufficiently challenged. The research is also mixed on how best to design schools to avoid any students languishing academically. But the report fails to take seriously the decades of research showing the harms of the tracking and ability grouping systems in secondary schools that have stratified opportunities to learn. After muddling the research evidence, the report then recommends the practice most harmful to equity: increased tracking (called, “readiness grouping in separate classrooms”).

Ah. You’re not tracking kids. You’re readiness grouping them. In separate—but decidedly unequal—classrooms.

A blithe quote from the Wall Street Journal:  On day two of his administration, President Trump ordered federal agencies to terminate “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs in the government and combat them in the private sector. The order follows through on his promise to forge a colorblind, merit-based society and to end the engineering of race and sex into every aspect of American life.

Jamelle Bouie: This is the “merit” two-step. First, you strongly imply or state outright that the presence of anyone who isn’t a straight, able-bodied white man is unfair “DEI,” then you argue that just because an institution is all-male and lily-white doesn’t mean there is discrimination. That’s just merit!

Been there. And had those conversations with my fellow math teachers, back then. One of the words to watch for: deserve.

As in: He’s going to be an engineer, like his Dad. He deserves to be in Honors math, even though his score is a little low. Or: She doesn’t turn her homework in—says she has to babysit. Even if she aces the test, she doesn’t deserve to be in Advanced math.

Because tracking (stratifying, merit-based clustering, readiness grouping, whatever) happens at the school level, it is something local schools and districts have some control over, despite Donald Trump’s empty threats against Stuff He Doesn’t Like in schools resulting in pulling federal funding.

Teachers, even threatened, fearful teachers, can hold firm to the time-honored principle of doing their best to challenge every child, to look for and support their strengths, without arbitrarily dividing them into academic stars and lesser lights. They can also honor the principle of diversity, knowing diversity makes a classroom, a school and society stronger.

As Alfie Kohn says:
That’s a message that children need to hear — and to see modeled for them — by the adults in their lives: a commitment to inclusiveness whose implication is that there is no future in tribalism, no justice in “just us.” Every day our kids should watch us encounter and talk about others in a way that highlights how those people are not alien beings; they’re like us with respect to the things that matter — and, at the same time, their qualities can’t be reduced to membership in any category.