Month / September 2026

by nflanagan

Educational Guilt

From a piece by Steven Mintz:

[Yom Kippur is] a very different conception of moral responsibility from the one modern liberal societies generally favor. We tend to think guilt should track individual action and intention. I am responsible for what I did, you for what you did.

Yom Kippur preserves an older idea — that human beings are also implicated in families, institutions, communities, and histories, and that moral responsibility may extend beyond the narrow boundary of personal culpability.

As a teacher—a middle school teacher, primarily—I am fascinated by the concept of moral responsibility in an educational community. Occasionally, I read (OK, usually in the comments of some “self-researched” social media post) that teachers should teach, you know, content and only content.

It’s our job to drop facts into brains, then test those brains to see how the facts are holding up. Not to consider values or, God forbid, moral responsibility. To stay in our facts-only lane.

Leaving aside the obvious truth (to teachers, anyway) that knowledge without a place to apply it has a short shelf life and not much utility, I would suggest that all classroom interaction and all learning are impacted by our collective sense of right and wrong.

Everything that happens in schools reflects the prevailing norms and beliefs of that classroom, that school and that community. From scientific research to understanding literature to world history, right down to the playground and bus behavior—it’s all value-based. Students learn in context. It’s never about a disconnected bunch of facts.

Which means that even unpleasant emotions—shame, guilt, fear, ambivalence, boredom, anger, loneliness—will be present in the classroom, and dealing with them is part of the process of both teaching and absorbing new knowledge and skills. You cannot run a guilt-free classroom; every now and then, bad behavior will pop up and will impact the rights of the (edu-word alert!) learning community. Feeling remorse will be an essential step in regaining equilibrium.

The party line pushback against DEI is that white kids should not be made to feel guilty because their great—times five or six—grandfathers kept slaves or slaughtered the tribal folks who lived on the land where their subdivision now sits. Because they are not (to quote Mintz) personally culpable.

I belong to a handful of local organizations which begin their meetings with a land acknowledgement. And yes—it’s easy to let a spoken paragraph or two feel rote or performative. But—like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Lord’s Prayer, which nobody seems to find problematic—it feels right to me to include this at every gathering, especially in a state that had functioning Indian Schools until the 1980s and contains a dozen reservations, with their own tribal governments.  

There are plenty of non-historical things to critically examine for opportunities to balance the moral scales, and the current zeitgeist—where school board members openly fret about “weaponizing empathy”– is, IMHO, moving us rapidly in the wrong direction. And this unwillingness to take moral responsibility for the community will impact everyday life in the classroom.

Here’s an example: Vaccination rates are dropping precipitously here (and elsewhere in the U.S.). Sifting through the data, it’s clear that private schools and charter schools lag far behind public schools, where basic immunizations used to be mandated upon entering kindergarten. Vaccination protects your child—but also the unfortunate child who is medically unable to tolerate a vaccine.

Do people understand this? Is vaccinating your child who will (probably) survive measles just too much empathy? We’re certainly not getting any moral responsibility from our nominal political leadership.

I have many friends who are also retired teachers. And speaking of guilt, a frequent topic of conversation is whether we were too circumspect around what were considered “controversial” topics. Most teachers I know were careful—very careful—about expressing political beliefs and taking sides on moral questions.

But maybe that was wrong. Maybe we should have been standing for justice, modeling moral responsibility, channeling MLK’s observation: He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

So—a belated Shana Tova. And consider the idea presented by Yom Kippur—we’re in this together.

by nflanagan

Labor Day. Happy Birthday to Me.

So—I just had a birthday. A big, round-number birthday.

All my life, my birthday has taken place in and around Labor Day weekend, and—fairly often—happened on the first day of school. For my entire elementary school career, my new school shoes, binder and pencil box were ‘birthday presents.’ (Sad trombone.) Kindergarten:

But I didn’t mind. The whole Labor Day weekend–in my experience–represents the new year, academically and seasonally, a fresh start. One year older, one year wiser, roll up your sleeves. A day to honor my personal antecedents, who were Dutch farmers and hands-on laborers. Country builders. People who truly appreciated the respite of a long weekend and family barbecue.

When you turn 75, your past divides neatly into thirds (and lets you plan, as Gloria Steinem did, to live to 100). Although neither of my parents (58, 73) celebrated their 75th birthday, my grandmother (also named Nancy) made it to 103, so a century does not seem out of reach.

I do not remember most of my birthdays. Who does? But I do—clearly—remember #25 and #50. Thinking about them is a good way to reflect on what I’ve accomplished and what I have left to do.

I turned 25 in Aspen, Colorado with my then-boyfriend, now husband. I had already been married at 19 and divorced, returned to school to finish the degree and started my first big-girl job as a middle school band director, although it took at least two dozen humiliating interviews followed by rejections. Mostly because who ever heard of a woman band director?

It was a fun birthday, camping at Maroon Bells in the Snowmass Wilderness area. On my birthday eve, we went bar-hopping in hippie-town Aspen. Things are a little blurry, but we had five days to drive across the country and get back in time for teacher report day, the Tuesday after Labor Day. It felt as if my life were finally falling into place. Adulthood. In Colorado:

The chunk from 25 to 50 was all about family and professional goals. We were married, had two children, and I learned what it meant to be fully engaged in both motherhood and putting equal energy into becoming an accomplished teacher. We bought a house and lived there for 10 years. Then we bought another house and lived there for 20 years.

I both earned (National Board Certification) and won (Michigan Teacher of the Year) some awards for teaching. Early on, I completed a master’s degree in education at Michigan State. We took some amazing vacations, seeing at least 20 National Parks. A month before I turned 50, we went to South Korea for two weeks and Maui for another week.

I turned 50 on September 2, 2001, just nine days before 9/11. My sister and brother, spouses and kids came for a Labor Day weekend picnic. My sister wrote a snarky poem about how old I was, and there was a paper crown.

But 9/11 was a turning point. I had been teaching for more than 27 years, same job, no formal advancement (teachers everywhere, I see you nodding your heads). I felt restless. I took a Teacher in Residence job with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for two years—then, because the grass isn’t always greener, went back to the same school district.

I was welcomed back with open arms by parents and my colleagues. But not administrators, who suddenly saw me as Too Big for my Band Director britches. I got politically involved. I helped plan the Save Our Schools rally. I got bounced from job to job in the school district; I was a person who could no longer be trusted to put her head down and cooperate.

This third quadrant of my life has been—creaky knees excepted—by far the best and most rewarding. I retired, and launched into a PhD program in education policy. I did the coursework, but stalled, ABD, when my advisor (a famous educator) blocked my proposed dissertation topic. Instead of diligently working through this conundrum, I thought about how much more I knew, having been a target of education policy for 30+ years, than my doctoral cohort of 20-something Teach for America dropouts.

So I quit, something I hadn’t allowed myself to do for 60-odd years.

Since then, we have moved to paradise, aka the Little Finger of the Michigan mitten. I’ve had a half-dozen part-time jobs teaching, writing and directing church musicians. We have traveled every year, and spend February in Arizona. We attend lectures and go to concerts.

Best of all, I have been able to pursue the thing that got me into college, the first in my family to do so: music. I play in multiple community groups. I have time to practice. My new friends are mostly musicians.

And I muse about the maiden/mother/crone sequential archetypes in the lives of women—I am now the third, the wise woman who cares little about what others think, pursues important goals, advocates for long-term change. Also: hangs around the house, drinking wine and binge-reading.

In the past month, three of my role models have died—Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem. It was Steinem who got me out of that first, disastrous marriage, by starting MS. Magazine, a revelation to me, and my first magazine subscription, because it was not available at the drugstore.

The NYT called Steinem “the personification of the Women’s Movement”—and I think that’s right. I read all her books, checking them out of the library. Revolution from Within was my favorite, but each of them reminded me that my voice mattered. And also that I deserved to have a credit card and my own checkbook.

I was born on the same day as Mark (still delicious) Harmon. Chrissie Hynde turns 75 today. There are plenty of us still kickin’ and taking names. And—it has to be said—trying to get us out of the ugly morass we find ourselves in. I hope to be part of the movement that sees him and his sycophants gone, although I know it will take more than 25 years to cleanse and re-direct the nation.

Here’s Steinem, again:

Four days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, she wrote an entry called “Staying Hopeful: One of the uses of a long life is remembering when things were worse, and also remembering that when bad times do come, so does an outpouring of community and energy amongst those dedicated to justice.”

Amen. (Below, Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany.)

by nflanagan

Unsubstantiated Things People Say about Public Education

There are plenty of unsubstantiated clichés people have traditionally expressed—and probably believe– about education: Private schools are better than public schools. Sports keep kids in school who would otherwise drop out.  We should flunk 3rd graders who struggle with reading. Public education is broken, and choice is the only solution.

I could go on. And on. One of the problems with improving schools—and every school could serve students better—is the time-worn observation that because everyone’s been to school, they think they accurately recognize the problems in public education and know what would fix those problems.

Nine years ago, in the summer of 2017, I was part of a project that canvassed Democrats, Lean-Dems and Independents in the county where I live. We knocked doors and asked folks about the 2016 election—what their issues were, and what they’d like to see Democrats focus on in the 2018 midterms. We didn’t ask who they voted for, but plenty of them told us.

One very elderly gentleman we visited invited us into his spotless home and offered us coffee. When asked about issues, he mentioned that his grandson was a senior at the local public HS and had never taken shop class. He was genuinely outraged, and that was his primary education issue—the local HS didn’t even offer shop class anymore!

I explained that the regional CTE Center now offered two dozen courses in machining, auto repair, welding and building construction. All public school students in the county could access a half-day of up-to-date instruction in the hands-on trades, for free.

He was not impressed. When he went to school, they had shop class, in the building, and it was the best part of his day. He pointed to his kitchen cabinets, which he’d built by hand in the 1960s. He also told us he’d voted for Trump. Maybe Trump could get shop class back in schools, because the woman he ran against certainly would not care what boys learned in public high schools.

Imagine my surprise at seeing the candidate for Senate in Michigan, Mike Rogers, advance pretty much the same argument as a centerpiece of his education plan.

Rogers titles the piece “Education Crisis is the Civil Rights Issue of our Time,” a direct rip-off of Obama Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s catch phrase. He also references Martin Luther King a few times, as if that could erase his tight connection to the most racist president in modern history.

The rest of the piece reads like it was written in the1990s. There are a few menacing statistics from a literacy organization in Australia, re: how many kids will end up in prison because they can’t read, and the phony assertion that nobody teaches phonics anymore—’Getting kids reading again also means going back to the basics: teaching phonics to help students understand how letters and combinations of letters sound.’

Well. We’ve been trying to get kids “reading again” for decades, via a range of strategies including phonics, dude. (See: Dolly Parton.) Rogers also misinterprets the NAEP “proficiency” caption (which, to be fair, lots of education journalists don’t fully understand—it doesn’t mean grade level). And he’s completely onboard with flunking third graders until they learn to read, damn it.

And then Rogers comes down hard on the need for shop class:

 “Putting shop classes in every high school can make a real difference. Shop not only exposes students to skilled trades and high-paying jobs, but it also gives them a reason to apply math outside of the classroom. Measuring materials, calculating angles, and working with fractions help students apply math skills.“

Rogers mentions fractions (and the inability to read a measuring tape) multiple times in the column, which makes me wonder if he’s been in a public school math classroom since he graduated from Howell High School. My 7th grade math students—back in 2005—were using graphing calculators and doing single-variable equations. All of them, not just the advanced track.

And shop class, like a lot of other coursework, has been streamlined. Exit the birdhouse, and enter home construction, from rough carpentry to wiring and plumbing. Not to mention courses in cyber security and aviation, and so much more. I checked, and both the MI county where Rogers has just moved, in time to campaign, and the county where he’s lived for the past decade, in Cape Coral, Florida, have extensive career and technical education offerings in their public schools.

My friend and super education writer Jennifer Berkshire has been on a useful quest lately, in her writings— Education is a winning issue for Democrats: ‘Democrats once preached college-for-all, and were too soft on school privatization. They need to reverse course on both these positions—and make an unapologetic case for education as a public good that benefits all kids.’

Bingo. Especially if the folks running against Democrats can’t offer anything more exciting than retaining third graders, emphasizing fractions and retrofitting schools so they can offer woodworking again.

A recent survey from the Michigan Future, Inc. concluded that what communities and parents now want as takeaways from our public schools are critical thinking skills, facility in communication, and the habit of life-long learning.

We’re not going to get those with Mr. Rogers’ outdated and unsubstantiated ideas.