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.
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.
I Used to Thinkwas a writing and thinking prompt developed for students, part of the work done by Project Zero. Lately, we haven’t been all that interested in what students think, or how their thinking might change, given more information, dialogue and cogitation. Instead, we’ve been interested in raising their test scores by asking them to simply reproduce knowledge–or keeping them six feet apart and masked until they’re tested again.
The last four years have radically changed a lot of what I think. For example:
I used to think that choosing the right Secretary of Education was the first critical key to strengthening public education across the nation. I really enjoyed the game of proposing/comparing people who, from various perspectives, would be great Education Secretaries. My standard of excellence was always Richard Riley. Riley was Governor of South Carolina, where he did a great deal to recruit teachers of color and address poverty in public education, before being tapped by Bill Clinton as EdSec. He was not, however, an educator, and he presided over a time when education reform was considered a good thing. But now—I am uninterested in digging up years-old board memberships and former jobs of prospective candidates for EdSec. I am not convinced that being a long-time educator is a prerequisite for success on the job. Experience in the political and policy realm really matters. I’m not even interested in writing a blog about it. Heresy, I know. But there it is.
I used to think that bipartisanship was a good thing, that moving government forward necessitated both collaboration and compromise. I thought policy creation was sausage-making—everyone gets to put in a little something. I thought having a broad range of opinion, from progressive to conservative, was how the country remained stable, and loyal, and patriotic. But now, I agree with Rebecca Solnit: We shouldn’t meet criminals and Nazis halfway.(Read the link—it’s fantastic.)
I used to think that churches, in spite of their many flaws, were trustworthy organizations that, on balance, did good in their communities. But now, even though I work at a church that is a beacon of kindness and acceptance in a small town, I am horrified at how far astray from core, all-religions wisdom—the universal, do-unto-others stuff—that many Evangelical Christians have wandered. They say there are no atheists in foxholes—and we’re all living in a kind of viral foxhole these days—but I am heartily sick of driving around and seeing God’s Got This! signs in my neighbors’ yards. I think everyone—believers and non-believers, all creeds and traditions—needs to wear a mask, stay home, wash their hands, and stop pretending to be compassionate or ‘saving’ people.
I used to think that racism springs from acute flaws in human character—hatred, and ignorance, likely instilled early by family and community. But now—thanks to Ibram X. Kendi—I recognize that what has held deep-rooted racism in place in America for 400 years is not a continuous stream of benighted people, but policy. White people stole, platted out, and sold land that Indigenous people lived on, hunted and fished, for centuries: policy. Majority-White public schools have always had far more resources and advantages than the schools Black children attended—and policies that nominally have been established to increase equity have also increased segregation. A country that was literally founded on diverse expression of thought has built its own caste system, through layers and layers of interwoven policy. The good news is that it’s possible to change policies.
I used to think that free and fair elections were the cornerstone of American democracy, and that most people saw election day as a kind of Norman Rockwell tableau, a cherished opportunity for everyman to have their say. I thought the peaceful transfer of power was inviolate. But now… I don’t even have to finish this one. Turn on the television.
I used to think that voluntary academic disciplinary standards were a useful way of organizing curriculum, and the occasional standardized test (say, three or four between kindergarten and graduation) didn’t hurt anyone, and provided some valuable baseline information. But now, I think that standardization, and the widespread belief that more data will improve public education, is pure folly, an illustration of the old saw that a man whose only tool is a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Rewritten: To a man with a computer, every problem looks like data.
I used to think that I was a pretty good music teacher–way above average, in fact. But now, watching music teachers struggle, every single day, with how to teach music online—and, incredibly, succeeding, I am humbled. Even more important, I’ve witnessed them forming communities on social media to help each other tackle these challenges and share resources and innovations. I’ve seen them have in-depth conversations about core pedagogical issues and the future of their profession. Humbled, I say. Seriously humbled.
I used to think putting up a Christmas tree before Thanksgiving was sacrilege, part of the ugly, metastasizing commercialization that has spoiled a once-simple holiday. But now—this year—I think that, in this season of kindling light against darkness, any cultural or religious tradition that brings joy is spot on, and the sooner, the better.
[Many years ago, at my husband’s class reunion]: Inebriated classmate starts rhapsodizing about the extreme superiority of the education they all got at their well-regarded co-ed Catholic high school in the suburbs of Detroit, back in the day. His monologue derails (did I mentioned he was sloshed?) and he turns to yammering at ME (a public school teacher) about how terrible schools are today (he has no children) and that the public schools—well, they’re the worst of all. Everybody knows that.
I bite my tongue.
I’m used to people assuming that private and religious schools are, somehow, automatically better than public schools. On the face of it, if ‘you get what you pay for’ is a truism, private schools ought to be better than public schools. Depending on your definition of ‘better,’ of course.
Part of the cachet of privately funded education is exclusion. You’re paying for the privilege (a carefully chosen word) of sending your child to a school that other people can’t afford, and having them taught using a set of values (religious and otherwise) that your family has chosen, not been assigned to by location.
You are making the decisions, finding a school with a socio-economic level close to yours, probably, in the hopes your children will make friendships with similar children. There may be scholarship money for students with fewer economic resources, but that involves a different kind of screening and exclusion.
A religious school or an independent private school may be the right choice for your child, and however you get them there, knowing you support the school you chose (financially and values-wise) will help your child understand that you are committed to their education. And that–is huge.
However. I would have to say that the cause dearest to my heart right now is saving public education.
By saving, I don’t mean preserving a nostalgic, return-to-the-past version of public schools where the curriculum was homogenized, the Common Core a distant memory, and everyone sat in straight rows.
I mean saving public education from going under, totally, being dismantled and sold for parts.
Lots of truly ghastly things have happened to public education in the past couple of decades, the pandemic merely being the worst. Teachers have had large chunks of their professional discretion taken away, and their salaries remain in the basement. The accountability movement has turned the mission of public education from citizenship and job training to improving test scores.
And the conflicting parties are not red or blue, conservative or liberal. They’re public and private.
There are some things that need to belong to all of us, be cherished and tended and utilized by all of us, each chipping in as they can, because we understand these things are best accomplished by communal resources and effort: Parks. Libraries. Roads. Hospitals. The Post Office. Museums, theatres and auditoriums. Schools. The people who keep our food supply safe and put out forest fires. And of course, things we must have, like the military, police and prisons.
Public things.
Most pushback against public initiatives and investments stems, as far as I can see, from two impulses:
It’s my money and you can’t have it.
I don’t want to share anything with them. [Fill in your own personal ‘them’– people who don’t ‘deserve’ to enjoy ‘our’ parks, libraries, hospitals, etc. People who don’t belong.]
For many people, public funding for things like recycling or early childhood services or a new library represents taking away their right to choose. If you don’t read, recycle or know anyone with small children, maybe It feels like money out of your pocket, your ‘right to choose’ overridden.
You take care of your own, right? You shouldn’t have to meet the needs of others. That this is a profoundly anti-democratic idea doesn’t even occur to you. Selfishness and power-mongering are featured, every night, on the TV news. Its us vs. them—freedom!–not all of us, together.
Of course, many games were cancelled, championships will forever be listed with asterisks, and there are literally hundreds of stories about how teams played without positive-for-COVID stars (or with them, accidentally–or surreptitiously).
We are at a tipping point with public education—either it is recognized as one of the most useful institutions of community-building and progress, or it becomes just another example of scare-labeled ‘socialism.’ Ironically, we used to use public schools to advance public goals—an educated citizenry, training everyone to be productive and innovative, places to vote and be immunized against disease, places to learn the basic concepts of our American government, a genuine melting pot.
It’s time for that national conversation we keep talking about, but never have: What is the real mission of public education? Forget the over-under on who will be the new Secretary of Education. Let’s clearly define the purpose of public schools and stop supporting exclusion with our tax dollars. It’s well worth the fight.
Exclusion precludes belonging. Racism is a close cousin to nationalism, as America has been reminded. They both depend on scapegoating or persecuting “the other”; on the idea, as Kipling put it, that: “All nice people, like us, are We, and everyone else is They.”
My friends remember, vividly, waking up after Election Day in 2016. The shock. Their personal emotions, from disbelief to outrage, the sense of betrayal. Who voted this racist, sexist joker in? What can we do?
What was born that day, and later refined, by a vast web of progressive people, media and organizations, has been a big driver of my life for the last four years, beginning with the Women’s March in January of 2017. The Trump presidency daily impacts my beliefs and my actions—so much worrying about the country I love. Maybe it’s the retired teacher in me, but I want to help. I want to live in a more just and peaceful world.
I would have sworn, until yesterday, that all that Indivisble-ing and anti-gerrymandering and election challenging was going well in my state and in the country, in general. The Democratic listening tour, the inspired improvised campaigning during a pandemic, the fact that our candidate was mainstream and inoffensive—it all felt like it was going someplace.
A better place.
I’m writing on Thursday morning, so the election is No Sure Thing, although there’s reason to hope, and to be glad that Michigan shifted roughly 80,000 ballots—a paltry amount– in the right direction over four years. There may be other very modest but pleasant surprises, as the week wears on, but essentially, what I’m experiencing today feels most like grief.
In 2016, it felt like you’d just gotten the shocking, painful news that the country was sick—so you immediately went to work to heal it, with lots of energy and political expertise and innovative tools. In 2020, you realize that the country might actually be sick for a long, long time. Perhaps forever.
When they write about this election result in Michigan in the history books–and they will–let the record show that the state was saved for Joe Biden by black voters in the state’s largest cities–Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids.
The same people who have had their drinking water poisoned, their public schools de-funded and emergency managed into disrepair, their cities gentrified. In general, these voters have been abused by their state’s former Republican governor and a Betsy DeVos-funded and directed state legislature who has never treated the African American community in Michigan with even a modicum of respect or common human decency.
It won’t be the first time Black voters have saved white Michiganders from themselves. Thank you.
In my county, three overtly bigoted County Commissioners were all handily re-elected, even though only one of them even bothered to answer questions from citizens about a major dust-up over openly racist language in countywide offices.Even though the County went blue, overall, for the first time since 2008, finding out that my neighbors are fine with Commissioners who think racism is somehow tied to abortion rates, and deeply respect a sheriff who refuses to enforce a Governor’s pandemic restrictions? That’s sobering.
None of this is a matter of win-some/lose-some politics. The proverbial pendulum. We’re used to that—and 2016 was an upside-the head reminder that turnout and voter enthusiasm are always the issue. The difference between 2016 and Tuesday night was the bitter knowledge that MORE of the people in your state, not fewer, think Donald Trump is a better choice. That his four-year reign of incompetence, lawlessness and even death is preferable to whatever mild-mannered Uncle Joe is selling.
I’m also worried, now, about future elections. The vote-suppressionists have been developing an effective ground game under Trump. Even if he goes down tweeting in 2020, the people who are happy to see low turnout and unquestioned, careless lying (and I know who they are, locally anyway) got a good grip on how to screw with elections, in perpetuity: De-fund the Post Office. Phony drop boxes. Refusing to mail absentee ballot applications to every voter, even when they were legally ordered to do so. And so much more.
Rolling back suffrage gains that have been hard-fought, in American history.
Garrison Keeler: For the first 50 years of American elections, only 15 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote. Thomas Dorr was one of the first politicians to argue that poor people should be given voting rights. As a member of the Rhode Island legislature, Dorr argued that all white adult men should have the vote, regardless of their wealth. He incited a riot to protest the governor’s election of 1842 and went to prison for treason, but most states began to let poor white men vote soon after. Women won the right to vote in 1920, and many African-Americans were prevented from voting throughout the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Widespread voter suppression still happens today, sometimes against specific groups or with specific political motivation.
So what did I do to support the cause? I was an Election Challenger who was sequestered with the Absentee Vote Counting Board in my (rural, red) township. I arrived, with my badge, on Tuesday morning. The Township Clerk met me at the door and—in front of the 2R/2D counting board—loudly proclaimed that I would be sequestered with the counting board until 8 p.m. when the polls closed. But I would not be able to use the restroom at any point during that time.
The counting board’s heads went up—wait, what? Did you say we couldn’t use the bathroom? No, said the Clerk—not you, just her. One of the Dems asked why. Because you’re a hired, trained board, she said (that turned out to be not completely true, vis-à-vis the training). But she’s just a (air quotes) ‘volunteer.’
That was not my first encounter with an in-person lie from a local Republican official. I had the Secretary of State’s full description of what I could and could not do, printed out, in hand. Township Clerks can’t prevent sequestered observers from using the bathroom at breaks in the action. I sneaked out once, unnoticed, when the whole group took a bathroom break—but wondered about why local officials felt it was OK to leave me alone in the counting room, with opened ballots laying on the table, but not to use the restroom. Where did they learn to be petty and punitive?
In 2018, all indicators showed a modest ‘blue wave’ which I assumed was the slow turning of the great ship. I am doubtful about that now, as I have witnessed armed militias and kidnapping attempts.
No matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.
People sometimes ask me if I struggle to find things to write about. The answer is no. Essentially, never. But this week, I have three unfinished blogs about education sitting on my desktop. Blogger block.
I’ve been blogging pretty much since blogging become a thing—and started getting paid for doing it in the early aughts, which made it feel more like reality and responsibility and less like some cool edu-techie thing, where—look!—you’re on the World Wide Web!
Before 2000, I wrote an occasional column for the local daily newspaper—perhaps once every couple of months. I got this gig because I was Michigan’s Teacher of the Year in 1993, and I also was friends with the paper’s Editor. I was highly circumspect in my opinions and wrote about ordinary classroom issues, but my getting published in the newspaper made administrators at my school exceptionally nervous. To the point where I was finally directed to cease and desist with the op-eds. I complied.
I didn’t have a regular writing gig in 2000 (which is probably good; we were directed not to ‘dwell on’ the craziness going on in Florida, post-election, with our students). By the time I had a blog for a national education nonprofit, we were past 9/11 and into the 2004 campaign. Because I was writing for organizations (and being paid by those organizations) and because I was in the classroom for most of the next 15 years or so, my election-time blogs in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 were also…circumspect.
I went back to look at some of those pieces.
I was surprised to see how heartbroken I was in 2004. I was hardly a huge Kerry supporter, but the very ugliness of the campaign—Swift-boating an actual decorated veteran—was dismaying. It seemed like a new and disgusting level of dishonesty. We went to a concert at the Wharton Center for Kerry—Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Guy Clark—and while hanging around with other 50-something Boomers, thought for an evening that yeah, we might actually get rid of Bush. Good times.
I wrote several blogs in the Fall of 2008, more than any other election season. I was writing a lot about hope and change, and the building certainty that we had a paradigm-shifting election on our hands. We were definitely getting rid of Bush and there was this great Democratic candidate. It was time. So much optimism.
We pictured Margaret Spellings taking her mandated tests and mean-spirited ‘accountability data’ and getting out of Dodge. We pictured a new focus on equity and social justice in public education. So many pictures.
I was blogging for a national publication in 2016. Although I wrote a few tepid blogs about the race, they were mostly around the prospect of our first female president, another paradigm-shifting moment. I also wrote about how the Trump we saw during the campaign (!) was a bad role model for kids.
But those 2016 blogs were tempered by a bad feeling that we weren’t seeing the whole picture. I thought about Bernie Sanders winning the Michigan primary (I voted for him). And the Tea Party, which hadn’t gone away, in the white Midwest where I live.
I went to the Women’s March in D.C. in January of 2017, and wrote about that. And discovered, over that year, that I could no longer blog about school issues only, divorced from politics, because everywhere you looked, public education was being pummeled by terrible policy-making (and policy destruction, misinterpretation and flouting). Sweet freedom whispered in my ear, as someone once said.
Basically, I started my own blog in 2018 because I was sick of holding my political opinions in a separate suitcase, under control. I wrote gleefully about the midterms, where the five top elected offices in MI went to Democratic women, all of whom have done a fine job of governing, and a couple of whom have had their lives threatened for their trouble.
I wrote about the jammed field of teacher bloggers and politics. I was tired of teachers saying that talking about racism or sexism or equity or justice in the classroom was not allowed. I was tired of pretending that the future of public education didn’t depend, 100%, on who gets elected and runs the show. Time to stop being pushed around by people who have no respect for the common school. Or the kids and parents who rely on public education.
I wanted to write for myself. To advocate freely. So here I am.
This year feels most to me like 2008. There’s a big change coming. And rolling into it will not be easy. In 2008, I worried about violence. And I’m worried now, about violence. In my state. At my tiny little Township Hall. Toward my governor. And throughout the lame duck session, and beyond the Inauguration. You can see what’s coming, every night, on the news, as tens of thousands are lined up to vote, masked, and carrying hand sanitizer and a lawn chair.
Voting is what makes this nation progress, or stall, or go completely off the rails. I’ve written plenty about terrible things this administration has done to public education, and which Democrat I wanted to be President. I’ve also written about Joe Biden, whom I believe may be able to hold the country together, perhaps even better than my first choice.
If I’m having a hard time writing about this election, it’s because it feels surreal, more dissected and more consequential than any other election in my lifetime. In 1968, my father vociferously voted for George Wallace and my mother quietly voted for Nixon and I watched cops beat up college kids in Chicago. That one seemed pretty consequential, as my life goal at that point was moving out of the house to become a college kid, who could say what she thought.
In the meantime, like many of you, I’m having a hard time letting go of the daily doomscrolling and cable news addiction. But let go we must. The election is happening, around the clock. Time to protect all those votes.
We need to save our strength and smarts for after the election, too. There should be little 10-second TV spots saying: Make a Plan for all the days after November 3, too!
In the 1970s, we had the MEAP test for 4th, 7th and 10th grades—two to three days’ worth of testing blocks, in the fall. Teachers understood they were tests of basic skills, and the best strategy was simply reviewing traditional concepts. A couple of times, one of the elementary schools in the district where I taught had a 100% pass rate. Because, on the MEAPs, students either did well enough to meet the grade-level benchmark, or they didn’t.
Schools with low pass rates got more money. The state legislature thought more intensive instruction would help children whose critical skills were weak. For the rest, well—the annual check-up was over.
Those were the days.
What this means is that Michigan stands as the first state to have 50 years of testing data, from a wide array of tests. We had state-created tests, aligned with state-crafted standards. For a while, all our juniors took the ACT, whether they were college-bound or not. We’ve used our own, written-by-MI-teacher standards and common standards. We implemented a rigorous, college-bound “merit” curriculum for all, in the hopes that it would raise test scores.
We had cutting-edge hands-on 8th grade science tests, performed in lab groups, where teams of students caused a tubular balloon stretched over a narrow beaker to inflate and deflate, as the gasses inside heated and cooled. That one was fun.
And now, we have students taking computer-based tests at home. In front of their parents. Leaving aside the very real aspect of invalid data, parents are observing, in real time, the testing process. A friend got this message from one of her former students, now a parent herself:
Just had to share how horrified I am by the NWEA tests. Our school this year is allowing us to take them from home and today [my second grader] took the reading and math assessments. He was immediately discouraged by the math (his favorite subject) as the first few questions were things he hasn’t been exposed to yet. This set him up to fail on questions he could answer because he was upset and “feeling stupid”. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have to proctor these assessments for a group of kids and have your own success as an educator be judged by the results of these awful exams.
Thank you for being such a strong voice advocating for all of our kids and for educating educators. I’m so grateful for the amazing teachers I was blessed with all throughout my time at XX and for the fantastic educators my kids have had thus far too! Are there places or people that would be helpful to contact or to share our experience with, in order to help propel change?
The ‘strong voice advocating for all our kids’ this mom is addressing is June Teisan, a nationally recognized teacher leader. And while the thrust of the comment—I had no idea how damaging these tests could be until I saw them for myself!—is more and more common, it’s the last sentence that sets it apart.
Just who needs to know about this? What can parents do?
The Opt-Out movement is still alive, and parents have more reason than ever to reject standardized tests. But this may well be our window for changing, once and for all, our pointless and wasteful love affair with standardized testing. They don’t tell us what we need to know, and they harm kids who don’t deserve harm. It’s as simple as that.
Ask any teacher: What are the real outcomes of using standardized testing? Cui bono?
The scariest thing to me is that any teacher who’s joined the profession in the last 15-20 years is thoroughly familiar with The Tests, and may in fact see them as something we’ve always done, something necessary. Something, without which, we will be flying blind. They might perceive school as a place where all decisions are best made off-site by ‘experts’ and ‘authorities,’ without whom there would be no ‘accountability.’ A lawless place that needs plenty of guardrails and consequences.
It wasn’t always like this.
June and I had a short conversation about this—who might be able to help parents, teachers and school leaders assemble the strength to buck the corporate test-makers and non-profits? Those who depend on the data generated by tests to make proclamations and influence policy-making?
This is the apparent purpose of the paper; selling testing. People are starting to realize standardized testing is a complete fraud; a waste of time, resources and money. The only useful purpose ever for this kind of testing was as a fraudulent means to claim public schools were failing and must be privatized.
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in that industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid.
The series correctly concludes that state accountability systems have not improved student achievement or closed achievement gaps over the last decade. Despite this conclusion, however, the series puzzlingly insists that state testing and accountability systems must be reinstated in 2020-21 and must focus on schools with the lowest performance levels.
Reports overstate some research conclusions and ignore a large body of research about factors that influence student outcomes. Specifically, the reports do not acknowledge the critical need for access to quality educators and fiscal resources, which are foundational to any serious effort to improve student outcomes. Moreover, the reports focus very narrowly on test scores as the primary outcome of schooling and ignore outcomes such as critical thinking, media literacy, and civics that are more important than ever.
If there were ever a time when testing ought to be suspended, re-examined and scaled back, it’s now.
Why scaling back and not eliminating them, cold turkey? Because I’ve been on this earth long enough to know that it’s not likely that grant-funded education nonprofits and test manufacturers will go down without a fight.
And try explaining to any forty-year old college-educated Dad that tests don’t matter any more, his children don’t have to take them, and every teacher will just be trusted to do their best from now on.
Ideas like ‘accountability’ have seeped into our national consciousness. Fear of ‘falling behind’ has been the subject of any number of local news stories. And let’s not even start with the beating teachers have taken, during a pandemic, when the idea of neat and tidy, leveled learning goals turned into flaming Zambonis.
We’re not getting rid of tests that easily. However.
Now is the perfect time for school leaders to strip off expensive unnecessary standardized tests, using budget crises and lack of technological infrastructure as an excuse. It might be time to put a focus on critical thinking, media literacy and civics, rather than drilling on testable items. Time to support parents who want to opt their children out.
For fifty years, Michigan has been testing, testing, testing. It’s time for a re-think. And it’s time for parents to turn to teachers and school leaders and demand change.
My friend Mitchell Robinson, of Michigan State University asks: Am I the only teacher who finishes a Zoom class, during which I’m sharing a slide show, moderating class discussions, posing questions on assigned readings, and trying to respond to students’ questions in a thoughtful way, only to find out after ending the Zoom session that there was a whole other class happening in the chat window that I couldn’t see because my cursor had disappeared under the 25 windows and tabs I had open, juggling apps and programs?
Ah, yes. The chat box. My theory is that the chat box, used by adults and college students, contains what people want others to believe they’re thinking (cute jokes, pithy observations, deep questions) but don’t want to say out loud. What they’ve always been thinking, in fact, as a ‘presentation’ was occurring, in real time and real life, as well as online: a mishmash of random thoughts, tentative assertions and show-off remarks. Perhaps, in some contexts, a little flirting.
You might even say the chat box contents, especially in a well-run virtual classroom, is what participants will be taking away from this class—not the official material, as displayed, but their reactions to those ideas. Content on the slides will always be there for you, to refer to, like facts in a book. The chat box, and ongoing dialogue following are where the learning juice is found.
Brilliant lectures or important speeches are much better when there is a backchannel conversation going on. Sort of like watching political debates and Twitter at the same time, as people offer bon mots about, say, having a fly on your head, but also more cogent ideas about national leadership.
That’s what Dr. Robinson found, too—his students were ‘sharing their raw and deeply personal “takes” on the day’s discussion prompts that somehow didn’t make their way into the video feed…’
For several years, I facilitated seminars for an online graduate course in teacher leadership. Sometimes, I had guest speakers–including a few well-known authors and thought leaders in education. This was before using an electronic meeting platform was commonplace–and we had to set aside a half-hour before each seminar to help guests and students learn to use the platform, which was called Elluminate.
I wouldn’t dream of outing anyone, but there were more than a couple of people who fly all over the country and get big speaker fees who were adamant that they did not want to ‘talk on the internet’ or have people see them on camera. Can’t I just call in, they’d say? On the phone?
Elluminate had a chat function, too. The chat box was always on the screen unless the moderator made it inaccessible. Some of our participants (mostly teachers) found it maddening or terribly rude that backchannel chat was going on while the class speaker was presenting.
There were speakers who sharply asked participants to HOLD THEIR QUESTIONS until they were finished. Often, it was just get-to-know-you chatting, as participants came from all over the country. Worse, speakers would stop to read the chat every time something was posted, including private messages posted between individuals. Awkward.
They couldn’t relax, and trust that folks were following along, while simultaneously questioning or extending what they were learning.
I started telling guest speakers that this represented the real way students and adults processed any content. I had teachers tell me that this was the problem in education today—nobody had taught their students how to be quiet and pay attention. It was disrespectful.
Questioned, most would admit that they didn’t listen respectfully to every word an administrator said in a mandated staff meeting. And they especially didn’t pay attention to what students communicated to each other during their conventional classes unless it was an Official Discussion where students were Supposed to Contribute. There was a hierarchy of respect, it seems, and you know who was on the bottom.
I think of the chat box as a tool for democracy of thought. Of course, I have mostly used it with teens and adults, who could construct a sentence or express a thought.
But I am guessing that, in spite of the fact that it’s absolutely the wrong way to teach early elementary grades, by the end of the year, many of our youngest students will have absorbed the road rules, democratic or not, of the online classroom. To chat, or not to chat. To type a word, instead of speaking or writing it by hand. I can’t decide if that’s progress or tragedy.
Mitchell Robinson, after marveling at the riches and throwaway thoughts in his chat box, said this, about his students, who are learning to teach and learn in new ways, leapfrogging over traditional practice:
This next generation of teachers is so smart, so thoughtful, and so empathetic. During a time when everything looks so dark, these young teachers offer the promise of a brighter future–it’s just up to us to get them ready to take over. And then get out of the way.
The first time I learned about the 1918 flu pandemic—in school, probably junior high history or civics class—I came home and asked my grandmother (who lived with us) what she remembered about the great flu pandemic. She would have been 28 in 1918, still single and working in a grocery and dry goods store.
Not much, it turned out. None of her nine brothers and sisters or their spouses and children had succumbed, nor any friends. She couldn’t remember being ill herself, although she was notorious for living with pain and discomfort. When she was in her 90s, she fell off a stepladder while washing windows. She broke her hip, something that wasn’t verified for a couple of weeks while she hobbled around saying it wasn’t bad enough to go to the hospital, where they might hold her overnight or give her unwanted drugs.
Grandma was no Donald Trump.
World War II broke out when my mother was a freshman in high school. Many of her classmates left school before graduating, to enlist. When they came back, they were offered GEDs and the GI bill to further their education. There were good-paying, middle class jobs for those who just wanted to work, buy a home or start a family.
Their education was disrupted—but hey, duty calls. What’s put off can be reclaimed.
Since K-12 public education has been widely operational—for a century, more or less—we have experienced wars, depressions and recessions, 9/11, civil unrest, discriminatory school closings in the South and health scares. School has continued, to the extent possible, during all of these national crises. In fact, in the most degraded and troubled places in this nation, public education is one of the few constants: Kids show up. Kids get taught.
Grades, tracking attendance, grade-level content, and opportunities for acceleration are a must. Pass-fail or pass-incomplete, optional attendance, and a focus on remediation will lead to a lost year whose damage could extend into the future.
As Chalkbeat points out: The projections rely on the assumption that students learned nothing (or worse) once schools shut their doors. How could students have lost hundreds of days of learning from missing 60 or so actual days of in-person school?
It has to do with how CREDO converts learning loss, measured in standard deviations, into “days of learning.” The approach is controversial among researchers.
No duh. It also vastly overestimates the real-life utility of testable knowledge students are being fed, the stuff necessary to generate all the predictive data. Test scores—as we all know—do not equate to life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. They don’t even equate to the social connections necessary to get a good job. Even worse, they’re a distraction from the challenges that teachers (the real front-line heroes) now face in trying to figure out how to teach under limited and often dangerous circumstances.
Let me say it again. Test-data estimates, alarmist language and shady research do nothing to help us with the most critical problem we have right now: keeping kids connected to their schoolwork and their teachers. However that’s offered and as imperfect as it may be.
Paraphrased Tweet I read recently: Can you name one school or district that has actually reimagined education?
Well-heeled education nonprofits now depend on things NOT being reimagined—deeply ironic for those who call themselves reformers. Without tests and data and uniformity and seat time and standard deviations, we’re just back to good old public school, doing our best under the circumstances.
It’s been another tough week in Teacher Land. My music teacher buddies in Michigan are writing about coming inside from the cold, after a few weeks of humming softly in a circle on the grass, playing ukuleles or meeting under a canvas canopy with tubas and flutes.
How to make music safely, indoors: a challenge I never had to meet, but creative teachers are figuring out, on the fly, every day. Kudos, and more kudos, to every teacher struggling to make whatever form their instruction is taking effective. Y’all rock.
But imagine you are the 8th grade Social Studies teacher who assigned watching the Presidential debate, asking for a one-paragraph response or trying to discuss it via Zoom. You anticipated lots of fireworks, and actually hope that your students get hung up on the bad behavior. Because otherwise you’ll have to explain who the Proud Boys are–and the fact that a serving president has already falsely deemed the election a fraud, five weeks in advance. Try being ‘neutral’ and pro-civic engagement after that.
There have been lots of jokes today about needing a middle school teacher at the next debate. Ha ha and all that, but as a veteran, 30-year middle school teacher, let me lay down the law: No more debates.
Media outlets and sponsoring organizations don’t need mutable microphones or better rules. (Better rules and guidelines are a feeble solution to a much bigger problem—something every classroom teacher comes to understand, eventually.)
It’s not about Chris Wallace’s failure—and it was a botched job– to control Donald, either. It was clear to anyone who watched Wallace’s credible interview with him, a few weeks back, that the president was getting his revenge on Wallace and Fox, in a deliberately crafted (and rehearsed) strategy: Dominate. Flood the zone. Humiliate your opponent.
Trump openly abused everything: His opponent. Family loyalty. Voters’ intelligence. Norms of civility.
Turning off the president’s microphone is the political equivalent of making him write ‘I will not interrupt’ one hundred times on the chalkboard. It also opens up the possibility that he would walk offstage, as is his habit during ‘briefings’ at the White House. None of this is something children of any age should witness, if we want to preserve a democracy and civic dialogue.
What we need is a consequence with teeth that also protects the whole country from the harm: No. More. Debates.
There’s enough time for media outlets and sponsoring organizations to make other plans. Maybe they’re just done. Maybe they offer Town Halls around policies, with candidates appearing separately. Whatever. But what our children and our country saw last night on television should not happen again. It wasn’t rough-and-tumble, bare-knuckle politics. It was, instead, obscene.
Biden, in what I thought was one of his best moments last night, turned to the camera and assured us that we could use the institution of free and fair elections to save the republic. Just vote, he said. Trump followed up by declaring the election a fraud and a joke. That’s another thing we don’t want our children to see or believe.
One more teacher story: An award-winning teacher I know in Mississippi started a post today by saying ‘I really need you to read this.’
She said that as a first grade teacher, she had a student whose mother had a blog. After ‘Meet the Teacher’ night, blogging mama wrote about my friend’s ‘weird’ (and ethnically Asian) last name and what she thought about her child having a teacher with that last name.
It was incredibly hurtful, my friend said. Mama ended up pushing to remove her kid from the class. When administration wouldn’t remove him, she withdrew him from school.
I think this is the first time I’ve talked about this, my friend said. It is hard to do. A lot of people never experience racism and xenophobia themselves, so they just aren’t aware of it. I get it. That was me when I was younger too.
She said: I unequivocally denounce white supremacy. I ask that my friends and family join me. I want to see all of my friends and family come out strongly against white supremacy to show love and support of me and my children, as well as love and support of our brothers and sisters who occupy this wonderful planet with us.
She posted two hours ago, and her post has dozens of ‘I denounce white supremacy’ comments, and commiserations from other teachers about dealing with racism in the classroom.
What if every public school teacher said to their class today, in developmentally appropriate language, I unequivocally denounce white supremacy. I denounce it in this classroom. I denounce it in this town. I denounce it in this great nation. White supremacy is—and always has been—wrong.
When I was a junior in HS, my American History teacher was in a serious car accident in the fall, and did not return to teaching. This was 1967, and Social Studies teachers weren’t thick on the ground. The situation was personally worrisome: I had somehow persuaded this history teacher to let me take his required class as an ‘Independent Study’ so I could take both band and choir (which were infinitely more important to me than American History).
As rounds of fill-in teachers appeared, I was basically living in fear that my arrangement with Mr. Gilbert would be uncovered. He apparently left no record that I was even part of his class load. I might have to drop out of the choir—and I loved the choir—being coerced to return to conventional, one-chapter-a-week-test-on-Friday American History. It could go on my permanent record, or something.
Then fate smiled. My school district hired a young, spanking-new graduate of Western Michigan University, in December. She was cool with my studying American History on my own, added my name to the official grade book, and offered me her college history texts. Assignments would be short papers—and conversations with her. She recommended paperbacks I might enjoy.
In one of those conversations, I mentioned that her college Am-Hist textbooks presented things differently from our HS text. Things like the smallpox-infested blankets and how Andrew Jackson might not be a totally upright guy.
She smiled her praise. Good work, she said. You now understand that the people who write about history are usually the ones who benefited from the outcome. There are many ways to interpret the events of history—the ones you’re getting here in high school are pretty sanitized and one-sided.
This was a revelation to me, and made me vastly more interested in (and suspicious about) reading history. Most of my teachers seemed to regard their anthologies and textbooks as gospel truth, and thought we should, too. A fact is a fact.
Learning that there are lots of reasons to argue with the bland, evasive rhetoric found in textbooks was a great gift. I am still friends with that teacher—Marjorie Foster Trapp—and we still poke at each other’s thinking on social media. I got lucky.
As I said, this was 1967, the first year I ever saw those black and white diagrams of how enslaved African people were shackled, head to foot, in ships’ holds. When the Detroit race rebellions were still in the headlines, and in the thick of the Civil Rights Revolution, American students (at least in my school) were reading columns of sterile information about Whigs and Custer’s Last Stand. Has there been significant change in the teaching of our nation’s history?
Let’s hope so.
We’ve got vastly more resources at our fingertips now—the Library of Congress, in fact. A well-read teacher can serve as expert guide to artifacts and stories about important historical events and issues, across the developmental spectrum. History could be engaging, even fascinating; more importantly, students could understand what can be learned from mistakes made in the past. We might even teach them to be suspicious of believing much of what they hear or see on Instagram. To be informed citizens.
I believe this is happening in many, if not most, American classrooms. And I also believe that the teachers in front of those classrooms should be able to select the right materials to challenge their students.
The 1619 Project is not, as some have suggested, a curriculum. It’s a set of digital materials—essays, photo stories, editorial pieces and features—on the impact of slavery on all people and institutions in the United States. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay, America Wasn’t a Democracy until Black Americans Made It One, would be a great assignment to tackle at almost any point in the traditional HS Social Studies chronology. A little close reading, even; there are easily a dozen provocative ideas about American history in this one piece.
Naturally, Mike (Fordham) Petrilli had to weigh in. The Fordham folks think Trump’s proposed anti-1619 response, the 1776 Commission curriculum (as yet mostly unwritten, but absolutely going to be chock-full of real patriotism and heroes), is our window of opportunity to craft an all-American curriculum that does the impossible: pisses off nobody but instills reverence for our exceptionalism, with all the usual Important Dates and lots of winning. Petrilli has several nit-picking critiques for a contemporary media series on the legacy of having been a slave-owning country for 250 years, and other sources:
‘Take the famous Howard Zinn textbook, A People’s History of the United States. Central to its narrative is the premise that the world is, always and forever, divided into oppressors and the oppressed. This is a deeply cynical idea, though resurgent today in discussions of “anti-racism” and “critical race theory.” Do its adherents expect conservative-leaning parents—scratch that, most parents—to welcome this ideology into their children’s schools with open arms?’
First–anti-racism is real, not a word you put in quotes.
And what is Petrilli’s big idea? He is going with Trump’s 1776 Commission. No, seriously. He wrote that Trump was right to question the too-liberal teaching of social studies in our public schools. We need a commission.
You have to wonder what Fordham thinks high school history teachers do all day.
What pedagogical and philosophical errors could they be making, that would somehow be fixed by a Commission? A Commission inspired by Donald Trump’s petty rage over a successful media launch involving the NYT and a topic critical to the health and progress of the nation—dealing with our racism problem? A topic of high interest and importance to teenagers, as well.
To all American History teachers: hang in. Teach your students to embrace America, ugly warts and all, and to vote as if their lives depended on it. Our highly imperfect democratic republic is worth saving, and they’re going to be in charge some day.
Teacher in a strange land 