Nancy Flanagan is an education writer and consultant focusing on teacher leadership. She spent 30 years in a K-12 music classroom in Hartland, Mich, and was named Michigan Teacher of the Year in 1993. She is National Board-certified, and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. She divides her time between wondering how things got so messed up and dreaming up ways to re-energize America's best idea--a free, high-quality education for every child.
After a delightful holiday weekend, everyone rejoicing in the qualified return to things we love about an American summer, it may feel like a downer to post this. But.
It’s been six months since the Capitol was breached by insurrectionists. You’ve probably heard about the 40-min video, much of it new footage, that was created by the NY Times.
And you’ve probably thought: Forty minutes? I don’t have that kind of time. Besides, I’ve seen all the carnage and violence. No need to wallow.
Well, I’m going to recommend 40 minutes of focused watching. What happened on January 6 wasn’t a one-off accidental mutiny, spontaneous. It was planned, nurtured and carried out by people from all 50 states. People who sincerely believe that the election was fraudulent, who wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence.
Some 500 of them have been arrested–but all are still out there, communicating underground, re-grouping.
Watching the video, for the first time, I felt genuine fear. There were things on the video I’d never seen or even contemplated. ‘Assault on democracy’ is an apt descriptor, not at all a rhetorical flourish.
It is very like us, the nation that calls itself ‘blessed’ and ‘exceptional,’ to see ourselves as beyond rioting in the streets. We see ourselves as entitled to peace, sunshine, picnics on the beach and concerts in the park.
It’s time to remember that the exceptionality and safety we enjoy was hard-earned, over centuries, and often came at the expense of people of color and immigrants.
It’s time to have those conversations about what we truly value, and who the ‘real’ Americans are. This video is an excellent starting place.
Every now and then, someone will ask about favorite books, the ones you’ve re-read repeatedly. Books that influenced your life. Answers often range from classics (‘Little Women’) to the Bible. I have my own list of a dozen or so—but it’s easy for me to share the book that most influenced my life: The Handmaid’s Tale.
I like what the Washington Post said about it in an early review: Published in 1985, this is a novel of such power that the reader is unable to forget its images and its forecast. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. “A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex.”
Darker interconnections, indeed.
When I first read the book (sometime in 1986, shortly after it was published), I was a new mother; my baby daughter was born in 1985. I was also a full-time teacher, with a 45-minute commute, who didn’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading or meandering trips to the library.
I had, however, read and liked Surfacing, one of Atwood’s early works that was on many short lists of early feminist reading—The Golden Notebook, Yellow Wallpaper, The Bell Jar, and the like, those now-classic novels about women figuring out how the world works. I checked Handmaid out from the library, and hoo boy—that book was one powerful, dystopian reading experience.
Some years later, I read an interview with Atwood (by then, one of my favorite authors), where she noted that there is real-life precedent for everything in Handmaid’s Tale. This truth re-emerged when Hulu created a TV series based on the book in 2017, and viewers commented on the dark and violent nature of the story—I can’t watch! It’s too violent! And totally unrealistic! Umm—nope.
Lest you think I was a raging, underwear-torching feminist back then—hardly. I was happily married, and embarrassingly grateful for my low-wage, womens-work career as a teacher. I went to exactly one consciousness-raising meeting, and came home with a headache, thinking that these women were whiners who needed to solve their own problems rather than waiting for The Movement to change their lives.
And yet. All the way back to my first day as a band teacher, in 1975, I knew that it was a man’s, man’s etc. world, and the power in K-12 education was firmly in male hands. Although the percentage of women who hold down K-12 teaching positions has steadily increased since the 1960s, I was in a heavily male-dominated subset of teachers: band directors. In the late 70s, working on my masters thesis, I acquired the mailing list of all secondary instrumental music teachers in MI. There were seven women holding down HS band jobs in the entire state, somewhere between one and two percent.
That number has slowly, gradually shifted—but it’s taken forty years, and we’re not anywhere near parity yet. I have dozens of humiliating stories about being the only soprano in a room full of tenors and basses, the designated secretary and coffee-maker at professional meetings. Some of them still hurt. Occasionally, on social media, a female band director will share a story about inappropriate remarks made by a male colleague—and there will still, still be men who defend the other man as ‘well-meaning.’
All of this reminds me of a passage in Handmaid’s Tale where Offred–June, for those who know the TV series—reminisces about the day her bank account is frozen, and her husband Luke says not to worry, he’ll take care of her. And he intends to—because he means well. Luke, Offred thinks, is a little too sanguine about all of this—and he’s one of the good ones.
A lot of the sexism in education flies way under the radar. It’s subtle. So subtle that the people who are exposing it in their own behavior don’t see their own words and actions as sexist. This cluelessness is not surprising. Unrecognized, unacknowledged sexism is everywhere—in politics, media coverage of current events, everyplace from childbirth practices to cooking.
Supporters of [a bill to prevent transgender students from participating in sports] heavily centered their arguments around athletic differences between cisgender women and cisgender men. Gabriel Higerd, a former adjunct professor of exercise science who researches transgender sports policy, said “biological females are one of our nation’s greatest treasures” and argued that this bill is necessary because it protects cisgender female athletes from competing against transgender female athletes. I have never heard any single group of Americans described as “one of our nation’s greatest treasures” as if they were some sort of commodity and not human beings.
And there you go: Biological females, a great treasure to our nation. We’re back in 1985—or 1947, as women (white women) were forced out of the post-war job market and persuaded their place was in the home, caring for as many children as they could bear. Go back as far as you like. You’ll find sexism. Atwood took us to a place in a not-distant future when men acted on the principle of female fertility being a ‘great (and biblically designated) treasure.’ Not hard to fathom, at all.
I am a big fan of the beautifully filmed Handmaid TV series which uses Atwood’s book as starting point, and of her sequel novel, The Testaments. I did not re-read Handmaid for 30 years. When the series was announced, I bought a digital copy. I remembered all kinds of things about the characters, passages of text, the plot and the utterly chilling world that Atwood created: Gilead. It rang true—or at least possible—in 1986, and just as plausible, if not more so, in 2016.
I also know that every time I have written a blog, over the past 17 years, about how women and their talents have been suppressed in EdWorld, I have received pushback. Some of it has been downright ugly.
I don’t know a single teacher—not one—who has never left school on a Friday afternoon wondering if, just maybe, they should have gone into real estate instead. Under the best of circumstances, teaching is ridiculously hard work, dependent on never-guaranteed intrinsic rewards, rather than perks, benefits and salary, to maintain employee motivation.
The autonomy and supports necessary for a well-resourced, custom-tailored occupational package for professional educators have been in short and diminishing supply for a couple of decades now. Worse, the profession drains our energies, taxes our personal and communal resources, and has become increasingly driven by top-down data collection. Teaching, as Lee Shulman famously said, is impossible.
And then we had a pandemic.
The papers are full of stories about people quitting or not returning to their crappy (and even lucrative) jobs—for a variety of reasons. If you talk to the ‘back to normal/virus is overblown’ crowd, this is a function of their getting enough government money to live on, and general indolence.
But there is another story: Americans are ditching their jobs by the millions, and retail is leading the way with the largest increase in resignations of any sector. Some 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking such data more than 20 years ago.
People are leaving because they discovered they liked working from home, or because they’re taking care of children or elders now, as the world is still too dangerous for Previous Normal behavior. Or the pandemic has forced them into paths (not commuting, cutting back spending) they’re planning to maintain.
They have re-balanced their personal values, decided that life is, indeed, too short to waste doing junk work.
You can see this as bad for business, particularly the service industry. Or you can see this as economic optimism—the chance for a fresh re-start: One general theory is that we’re living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses that could have profound implications for the future of work.
Veteran educators are used to charter operators and superintendents–like LA’s Austin Beutner–discovering that running a school, a classroom, or a large urban district is not all apples and playgrounds. Beutner’s observation–“We are humans. We have families. We have partners, spouses, kids, our own life responsibilities. For better or worse, schools become a magnet for all of the challenges which face society. . .”—is the story of their working lives, for decades, not a trial period as CEO.
What is interesting to me is the anecdotal evidence coming out of the news about schools, their leaders focusing on what’s good for students—the core of their work—rather than what the legislature or governor thinks students need.
There’s the whole Critical Race Theory divide, for starters. Go ahead—tell us what we can and can’t teach, including the truth about our own history.
But there’s more: virtually every Michigan school has decided to go around legislation that requires them to flunk third graders who are not testing at grade level in reading. Bridge Magazine calls this a ‘revolt’–but superintendents and teachers just laughed at legislators trying to move the mandated flunking up to 4th grade. This is akin to soldiers returning from blood-soaked battlefields, informing the generals that their orders are crazy-pants, not gonna work.
If the pandemic has revealed anything about public education, it’s that K-12 schooling is an integral part of the economic engine, and the good parts of Previous Normal will not return until the kids are back in school, 180 days a year.
There are lots of stories I could tell about my dad. Some are heroic and wonderful, others not so much.
My dad died young, at 58, of brain cancer, and one of the greatest blessings in my life was that, by the time I was 28, we had reconciled all our old grudges and battles.
Here’s one story: A few years before my dad got sick, my very young marriage had failed, and I was moving downstate to start my first teaching job. Of course, I had zero money and no car. But I did have the promise of a job in September, so Dad took a day off work, drove me three hours up to where I’d been living, then three hours back downstate to help me move my few possessions (think card table, mattress, stereo) into a teeny tiny upstairs flat in Howell.
One of those possessions–probably the most expensive thing I owned at the time– was a refrigerator.The apartment had a rickety outside staircase. After everything else had been moved up those stairs, all that was left was the fridge. We didn’t have a dolly or strong young backs available.
So my dad, using the trailer strapping, strapped the fridge to his back and carried it up those stairs, and plugged it in. It still worked. We drove home (another two-hour trip, to the west), where he sold me his car (a brown Buick LeSabre) over the kitchen table, with excellent, low-interest terms. He happily got himself a new Buick the next day.
I paid that Buick off, $50/month. And later sold the fridge, to pay my phone bill, watching the newlywed who bought it strap it to his back.
Down is better than up, when it comes to moving refrigerators. And dads are what you need, when you’re down.
“You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
But it ain’t like it used to be, all popsicles and playground lanyard-making, a break from routine.
This year, ed reformers are using the Buckminster Fuller principle in a post-pandemic attempt to make traditional schooling—180 days, face to face, the existing reality—die, once and for all. Drown it, in a bathtub full of unvaccinated kids, dispirited teachers and mandated-but-meaningless test data.
If I were excited about the new model, it would be different. But I think we—and by we, I mean veteran public school educators and public education supporters—have missed the opportunity boat, that crisis-opportunity thing the pandemic put in motion.
Not surprising, given what teachers, school leaders and public districts have been dealing with for the past 15 months. Folks are exhausted. Whipped. They desperately need a re-charge (and some are seeking a new job). Even the most articulate and positive thinkers (shout-out to the new MI Teacher of the Year, Leah Porter) admit that this year was a whole new level of challenging.
Meanwhile, in their air-conditioned homes and cubicles, grant-funded reformers (whose updated computers, broadband and tech support are provided by their non-profit, not their own modest household budget) are planning the Next Big Thing: Universal Online Schooling (with class loads of 300 kids). More charters.Vouchers with creative, obfuscating names. Hybrid this and alternative that.
The more imaginative disruptive initiatives they can come up with, the better—each one chips away at good old outmoded public education. The pandemic conveniently paved their way, too, seeding parent mistrust and frustration, and further dividing communities, politically.
Public school teachers are left hoping that vaccines will be approved for second graders, sometime soon, and parents will maybe take their kids to the library this summer.
Education historian Jack Schneider recently posted a can’t-miss Twitter thread, articulately pointing out that we really do have lots of solid information about teaching and learning, as well as school leadership and climate. We know how to build a good school, in context. But we’ve been pretending that schools with high test scores are the One True Way.
We know how to tweak existing reality, in Bucky’s words, and don’t necessarily have to dump the apple cart, make neighborhood schools obsolete and move on to some Big Sexy reform idea rooted in private profit.
Schneider says: Our measures of “good” schools are so impoverished. Our current measures fall short in three ways: they lack the necessary validity, they are woefully undemocratic, and they fail to advance equity. The result is that we have valorized schools with high test scores and engaged in dangerously wishful thinking about “replication” and “scale.” Meanwhile we have blown one opportunity after another to actually invest in strengthening our schools (which, by the way, are better than we give them credit for).
We can’t look to the Biden administration, stuck in Obama-era thinking, to bail out public education. The federal money will help, but lots of it has gone to charters and other anti-public ed measures. If fully public, community-based education can be saved, it’s up to the people who love it best and see its long-term value to the nation.
When it comes to public education, I have been a glass half-full kind of advocate for a long, long time.
I am old—old enough to remember when Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, and always came on the 30th of May. For many years, I went to the cemetery with my grandmother–also named Nancy–on Decoration Day, with a pot of geraniums for her husband, my grandfather, who died in the 1930s. Her parents, and some of her siblings, were buried in the same cemetery. We went to visit them all, with flowers, taking care not to step on the green beds where they lay.
There were always little flags on veterans’ graves, but so many men (and a few women) were veterans that it seemed like half the people resting in that cemetery had a flag. A graveyard full of citizens who served their country, sometimes dying for that very cause, surrounded by their loving families.
In 1969, May 30 was a Friday. It was an unusually hot day. My high school band played in the local parade, and band parents met us in the park, after the parade, with galvanized tubs full of ice and glass bottles of Coke. I was a senior, playing my last parade on the first day of a long weekend, wearing the stifling gray wool uniform with its little satin-lined red cape, and the flat-topped hat.
It may have been a dare. Or it may have just been the oppressive humidity, and the fact that I’d never have to march in a parade again (or so I thought—ha). But after opening the Coke, I pulled out the braided neckline of my uniform jacket, and poured the icy cold soda right down the front of my body. There was a moment of delicious coolness and some hilarity among the group where I was sitting.
And then the Band Booster president, an officious mom who was in charge of fitting and maintaining 100+ plus band uniforms (and whose two perfect daughters would never dream of despoiling one) came storming over and read me the riot act.
Did I know that I, personally, would be taking my uniform to the dry cleaners? Did I understand HOW MUCH THOSE UNIFORMS COST? And that they had to last for 20 more years? And (this was the real indictment, an uptick in the charges)—did I not respect those who died for our country, those whom we remembered on this sacred day? For shame.
Actually, on that score, she was wrong. I remembered, all right.
I grew up hearing stories about my Uncle Don, who died at 19, in the first wave of Marines on Iwo Jima. My dad’s favorite brother, the handsome one, the rebel. Buried on Iwo Jima, then moved to Rock Island National Military Cemetery, after the war. My dad, after learning his brother had been killed, went AWOL from his own unit in the Army Air Corps, and was busted from Sergeant to Private for the offense. Although he never talked about his own wartime experiences, he never let any of us forget.
In 2021, those who died on the battlefield are a relatively small handful. Thank God, or whomever can be credited with the policies and foresight to keep us out of war.
But in the past year, as more people died from coming in contact with a deadly virus than were killed in combat in WW II, it’s been easier to understand what it feels like to see daily, mounting death tolls in the news. To personally know folks who were sick but survived, to see friends with longer-term disability from COVID, to know families forever riven by death.
Many of them, to use a worn-out phrase, served their country, as well—as stock clerks and bus drivers, teachers and nurses. They died before the vaccine was available, gasping for air, often without family, victims of a different kind of war—an ugly political war, partly created by our own elected leaders.
As an adult, I have experienced Memorial Day in dozens of ways—leading my own school bands in local parades and cemetery services, playing in or directing community bands, and—just two days ago—playing Taps with the Leelanau Flute Ensemble on a friend’s balcony.
Every year, the day reads a little differently. I don’t think it’s disrespectful, or not-sacred, to reflect on all the other things, besides our always-honored war dead, that need remembering. You’ve probably read snippy memes about the difference between Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Both spring from the same source: Let us pause to remember what we’ve done—the noble and the despicable acts, the proud and the shameful. It’s who we are, as a nation.
When we adopted our son, from South Korea, more than 30 years ago, our wonderful adoption counselor warned us that we would experience racism, having a child who did not look like us.
She shared incidents from her own parenting of children from three different parts of the world, ranging from the clueless—When she begins to talk, will she speak English?—to the downright repellent. She suggested that we think first to educate, before getting angry.
This was advice that resonated with me—teaching acceptance. Enlightening strangers in the grocery store to the beauty of diversity. Celebrating all the ways families are made. And so on. When a neighborhood kid, whose father had served in Vietnam, called my son a ‘flat-faced gook’ on the school bus, however, I had to re-think.
Some things—racism among them—are always wrong. And you can either face that fact and deal with it, straight on, wherever you encounter it, including schools, or you can employ any number of empty, defensive sophistries.
You can do what Rick Hess does here—spend half a column patting yourself on the back for pushing back against racism while simultaneously building a theoretical parent-defense straw guy the size of Burning Man, using lots and lots of (you guessed it) data, Impressive Academic Vocabulary and political shading:
More than two-thirds of adults say they oppose having schools tell students that America was founded as a racist nation, 70 percent say schools should not teach students that their race is the “most important thing about them,” and more than 4 in 5 oppose using classrooms to promote political activism.
I don’t believe these adults would be enthusiastic about the Biden Department of Education holding up as models of civic education a scholar who teaches “there is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy” and that “only racists say they’re not racist,” and a history program that teaches America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Now, I’ve found that anti-racist diehards tend to respond to such numbers like undergraduates in a Gramsci seminar, by muttering about false consciousness and hegemonic schema.
Hess closes out with a few more self-assured slams against Ibram X. Kendi, whose books have introduced multitudes of Americans to the idea that racism is deeply embedded in centuries of policy-making, resulting in entrenched neighborhoods, discrimination on dozens of fronts and endemic personal prejudice.
If two-thirds of adults actually do oppose telling kids that America has racist roots, where did that false idea come from? And what about the other third—the ones who think that maybe introducing children to the fact that we’ve always been a deeply inequitable society is a good first step? Don’t they count?
As for children, we don’t need to teach our students that their race matters to society. By the time they get to school, they already know. Or they find out on the bus.
During nearly an hour of public comment on the resolution Monday – which was only on the agenda for discussion, not adoption – several parents criticized the document and the overall work of the Social Equity Task Force, saying it amounted to indoctrination and was pushing an agenda that would divide and not unite students. “I find this resolution also to be offensive, degrading, inappropriate, condescending, and detrimental to all TCAPS students, parents, and community members”… the “negative rhetoric” of the resolution “imposes toxic assumptions on our children.” Multiple parents worried the curriculum review would force “critical race theory” onto the classroom.
There they are, the two-thirds of parents Hess identifies, and uses as substantiation and support for keeping “toxic” discussions of race out of the classroom.
Teaching young people about racism is not indoctrination, but rather teaching viewpoints and providing factual data related to racism that they otherwise are not likely exposed to. Young people need to make up their own minds about how to think about race, but the better informed they are, the more thoughtfully they will do so.
When people start referring to a cultural phenomenon with initials—CRT for ‘critical race theory,’ say—you know that whatever that thing once was, it’s now morphed into something completely unrecognizable. Made less complex. Reduced to stereotype. And in the case of CRT, politicized.
In my long years of classroom practice, pedagogical strategies and hot topics went in and out of fashion. Back in the 70s, values clarification was all the rage. Parents were a little iffy on having students discuss their values, however—probably because they assumed those values were not securely embedded in their sixth graders. And God forbid a teacher should attempt to inculcate values. Or even discuss them.
After values clarification, there was lots of talk about character education. My school had a multi-year project on Reason, Respect and Responsibility. Our project was home-grown, but you could buy pre-packaged character, it seemed—complete with manuals, posters, workshops and student day planners. Every package seemed to come with a testimonial—57% reduction in suspensions!
Today, I see lots of teacher-chat about mindfulness and trauma-informed education. If you think I’m skeptical about the efficacy of these programs—I’m not. I am strongly in favor of whatever it is schools are doing to encourage students to consider their thoughts and behaviors, to elevate the community over impulsive personal actions, to dig deeper into things that are, well, wrong in our society.
I write all this to point out that teachers incorporate lessons about fairness, caring, harm, self-control, diversity and authority in their classrooms all the time, whether it’s part of an organized program or just daily practice in teaching disciplinary content.
There is no subject or developmental level where values and character aren’t a part of the curriculum, whether intentional or accidental. You couldn’t strip values and character out of teaching and learning if you tried. But try they will.
[CRT] is an evolving practice that questions how race, as a social construct, perpetuates a caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. I agree with critics who say that CRT often elevates storytelling over evidence and reason and devalues the racial progress that Americans have made, despite the challenges that remain. Real critical race theory is better suited to graduate students than kids. But we don’t do ourselves any favors by hiding good information about this nation’s diversity that can help all of us to better appreciate the “united” in the United States.
So how is that scary? And how is it not relevant to every American citizen? An evolving practice indeed, tangled up in all the things schools are supposed to do: Build American citizenship. Establish workforce skills. Encourage curiosity. Learn how to get along.
That still leaves a boatload of foundational work to be done, by people of all ages, and lots of that work falls into the character and values bucket. Simple concepts like: Don’t pre-judge people by external characteristics. Race is a social construct. We have a history of injustice. We all do better when we all do better.
Also: Go ahead and pass anti-CRT laws. You might scare a few teachers. You might reassure white parents that their children won’t have to hear anything ‘unpleasant’ about our history, laws and subtle forms of discrimination. You might score a few seedy political points.
You might also have to set up a whole new and thoroughly unpleasant teacher policing system to make sure liberal Ms. Flanagan isn’t talking to her students about the roots of the music they listen to, 24/7, and cultural misappropriation. Is that CRT? Who gets to say?
You cannot keep the issues of race and racism out of schools. Schools are a stage where social values play out every day. It isn’t critical race theory that’s dividing the country. It’s fear.
No. We’re not going to get back to normal. The pandemic has changed everything.
You’ve probably seen the meme: There isn’t a ‘teacher shortage.’ There is a ‘Masters-level professionals willing to work for $35,000 shortage.’
And maybe you’re thinking… yeah, no, beginning teachers make a lot more than that. Well—not so much more, if at all.
And then there’s this–In no state are teachers paid more than other college graduates. The situation has been steadily growing worse. And then all those underpaid teachers were asked to risk their lives, during two school years. Incredibly enough, nearly all of them did.
But COVID was the proverbial straw on the educational camel’s back. Teachers are getting out while the getting’s good. How many? Depends on who’s asked, and whether they can continue to work at a career that doesn’t support a middle-class lifestyle (and risks their health), even if they love the work and find it fulfilling.
You have probably—speaking of what gets circulated on Facebook—also seen people grousing about how unemployment benefits are preventing people from returning to work. Why should (presumably slothful) people show up to work or apply for Joe jobs, when they can stay home and make just as much? That seems to be the knee-jerk thinking.
The poster-child answer? This headline: How Local Companies are Filling Open Roles. It’s about the ice cream parlor that doubled starting wages (from $7.25 to $15.00) and found themselves—surprise!– with plenty of applicants.
What if people weren’t lazy — and instead, for the first time in a long time, were able to say no to exploitative working conditions and poverty-level wages? And what if business owners are scandalized, dismayed, frustrated, or bewildered by this scenario because their pre-pandemic business models were predicated on a steady stream of non-unionized labor with no other options? It’s not the labor force that’s breaking. It’s the economic model.
I certainly don’t feel bad for McDonalds franchises, ‘forced’ to offer $14 an hour. But won’t it bankrupt small businesses, when they offer a reasonable wage? Well. If you think about growing the economy, one way to feed it is paying people adequate money to spend on the things they need. Just saying.
When people are well-paid and well-treated, you’re not constantly re-hiring and training. Your customers get better service. Your business grows, and your employees are buying food, cars, homes. Maybe even thinking they can afford a family. This includes teachers, by the way.
This cycle is well-known in other prosperous first-world countries. Why are we trying to get more for less here?
In Michigan, 67,000 adults without college degrees are going back to school, on the state’s dime. Part of a multi-phase project to upgrade the workforce, Michigan offered tuition to any adult wanting to learn something new and useful, at a local community college. To their surprise and delight, 67,000 people applied—people looking for a better deal in life. They’re not lazy.
It’s security. Health care. Time off for traveling and their families. Good schools. No college debt. Trust in their government. Convenient public transportation. Healthier lifestyles. Ample parental leave.
Adequate wages.
Earlier in the pandemic, there were lots of buzzy stories about people moving across the country, after discovering that they could work from home. It turns out that many of them aren’t moving to verdant pastures (with good broadband). They’re moving for financial or family reasons.
They’re moving to scale back. To be happier—or simply to survive. To be closer to the people they love.
Godspeed to the 67,000 people starting community college in Michigan. A you-go to every employer who is biting the bullet and paying employees more, permanently. Blessings on those who have juggled to keep their families intact. And thank you to everyone who has gone above and beyond during this pandemic, sacrificing for their communities.
So here we are, once again ‘celebrating’ Teacher Appreciation Week, with all the teachers saying—no, no, don’t get me a $10 Starbucks card or (better yet) a $50 bottle of champagne. Instead, write me a sincere note of gratitude. Here, write it on my Facebook page. Feel free to embellish.
But sometimes, I feel like the Grinch Who Stole Teacher Appreciation Week–seriously, what we actually need is a Teacher Appreciation Decade, during which we encourage promising young people to pursue professional education training, craft a new conception of teacher compensation, and look to other nations for guidance on how to build a select teacher workforce, valuing diversity and creativity above all.
We just returned home from a couple of weeks away, and at the bottom of our mail tote was a TIME magazine with this cover: ‘The Lost Year: How the pandemic changed a generation of students.’The article is much less inflammatory than that title—it’s about high school seniors, and the difficulty they’re having taking the required tests, filling out FAFSAs and setting their sights on the most desirable (and selective, of course–it’s TIME magazine) colleges.
I am intimately familiar with puffed-up headlines on general-readership magazines. But geez. The Lost Year? A Generation of Students?
We’ve lost some things, all right. One of them may our blind faith in the value of testing data—another might be the elitist belief that a student must go directly to a four-year college, or forever be consigned to slogging along with a Joe job and a sub-par life.
I know that colleges and universities—especially those that serve the middle class—are in for tough times and lower enrollments. Institutions with huge endowments will be fine, on all fronts. If Biden’s plan to pay for community college comes to fruition–spoiler: I’m a fan–we may have a whole new layer of society with upgraded skills and no debt.
The Way Things Were has been upended. But like any year where there are transformative events, the outcomes are hard to predict. Is going to community college for a year, while you get your academic ducks in a row the worst thing that could happen? This generation of students—K-12—has faced new challenges. But what they’ve learned has not been lost.
After I read that TIME headline, I was so incensed that I posted a Tweet:
Hey, media.
How do you think teachers feel, after gutting out the most difficult year in their already-difficult career, when you refer to ’20-21 as a ‘lost year’??
A few hundred people liked and Retweeted it and many added thoughtful commentaries.
Like this from Julie Wright: Students, too. I have so many who’ve been working hard and learning… in some ways way beyond what 8th graders generally know. No, it wasn’t the best or easiest way to learn for most kids, but they’ve done so much. Don’t treat them like passive victims.
From Ashley Stanley: How do we think students feel about these narratives after they left it all on the field? These kids SHOWED UP for their LEARNING this year. These last few weeks, I’m all about helping Ss know that the work they did was real, important, and meaningful.
Jennifer Robbins of Montana: I have worked so hard to support students’ writing, reading, and thinking. As I read poems, essays, & narratives at the end of THIS year, it is not a lost year. They’ve grown by leaps and bounds, and it’s especially clear during 2020. No lost learning in Columbia Falls, MT!
@NShrubs said: Yes! My 2nd graders made lists of all the kinds of things they’ve learned, from fixing their own lunches to subtraction with regrouping to coaching each other on tech stuff via Zoom. My 3rd graders wrote about what they learned about themselves – learning online, reading, etc.
And—sadly–@VictoriaCherry said: How do the kids feel about hearing their own parents complain about having to care for them?
There was lots more. Teachers most definitely do NOT feel that this was a lost year—and, in teacher-like fashion, spoke up in defense of their own students’ hard work under tough conditions. So there you have it.
Who appreciates all the out-of-the-box things kids have had to do this year, in unfamiliar formats and time frames? Their teachers. In my music ed wheelhouse, I have now seen at least three dozen unusual spring concerts, accomplished by students and their ultra-creative teachers, using technology, germ-bags on horns, edited literature to match those able to play. Each one, in its own way, a triumph. And each submitted as evidence: See? We’re getting stuff done.
So—not a lost year. Thanks to the kids. Let’s appreciate them, too.
