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Posts by nflanagan

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.
by nflanagan

Christmas Music: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly

Music is my life. I play several instruments and sing. I majored (and double minored) in music in college and am active in civic groups and church music as participant and conductor. I even went to flute camp (for adults) last summer. And I spent 30-odd years as a public school music teacher.

So– I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas music. Mostly love. But.

December can be brutal for musicians—and for school music teachers, brutal on multiple levels including community expectations and endless rounds of kids-on-risers. Music teachers become de facto activity directors, lurching from frigid parade to caroling at the nursing home. 

But still—there’s the rich opportunity to teach excited kids something about their cultural inheritance and surround. Which includes a clear definition of the divide between music as spiritual practice and music as auditory clutter.

Because you really can’t get away from Christmas music in America in December (or November), hard as you might try. People of other faith traditions, people who don’t believe in any of the Christmas iconography (like Santa or Jesus), people who loathe the downtown decorations and the Hallmark channel—we’re all stuck when Santa Claus comes to town.

For many people, Christmas music becomes irritating aural wallpaper, especially if they’re tuned into one of the omnipresent satellite radio Holly-day stations, or actually paying attention to what’s on the PA system as they’re perusing cheese in the dairy aisle. Because most of the commercial Christmas music readily available in businesses and on Sirius is, frankly, somewhere between uninspired and dreadful. I don’t want to hear—to choose just one example—Burl Ives at any time of year, let alone at holly, jolly Christmas.

I started listening to Christmas music on my little portable record player (Christmas gift from my parents), beginning with the LP records from the gas station ($1 will Fill-up!), where Percy Faith and Ella Fitzgerald were interspersed with the Chipmunks and the NY Philharmonic. When I got my flute, in fifth grade, I was invited to play Angels We Have Heard on High for the church Christmas pageant, a gig I kept through junior high because I liked the wings and halo, as well as the tune. I was hooked.

So I started collecting (and studying) seasonal music as a teenager, eventually making yearly cassette tapes of my favorite cuts. Cassettes morphed into CDs in the 1990s. I made annual gift CDs for family and friends—then eventually, due to the magic of iTunes, custom-selected CD playlists and discs for my regular customers. I requested multiple catalogs from folk and jazz artists and ordered new CDs, unheard, in the fall. At one time, I owned 500 holiday CDs, and had a catalog of over 3000 digital cuts on iTunes.

 Yeah, I know—when does a hobby become a sickness?

The last year I made CDs was 2018, when I realized most people no longer had the equipment to play a CD. I still make my own annual December playlists on Spotify—there are still arrangers and artists creating beautiful new seasonal music. I love listening, but I am really picky about what I am listening to.

Here’s the thing, though, about so-called Christmas music: it’s familiar, or will become familiar in time. A tune you recognize, when you hear it again, come December. We don’t have a lot of those commonly remembered classic songs anymore, holding our culture together. Nostalgia is a part of cultural norms.

For centuries, there was mostly sacred music—all of which has cultural value, whether the listener is a believer in the divine, or not. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel dates back to the 9th century, for example. How often do young listeners authentically interface with such a different time, except through music?

Commercial music has been shaped by the march of new technologies and low-bar popular opinion (lookin’ at you, Frosty). Children no longer know folk songs sung around campfires in the 19th century—unless they learn in school to cross the wide prairie with Betsy from Pike. We are losing bits of our cultural heritage, including traditional carols.

Whatever you want to listen to today is immediately available on your phone. But if you haven’t explored the truly glorious—magnificent or austere or funky–songs and carols of the season, how will you know what to ask for, to know what musicians have created from a simple tune?

In collecting mountains of Christmas music, I have favorite versions of all the songs, of course. But when I want to relax on Christmas Eve, with a glass of wine, this is what I put on: https://open.spotify.com/track/5c0sQY87Iw7qUu46N31f3v. 

by nflanagan

The Amazing Power of Snowpants

It started out as a simple Facebook dispatch from Detroit Public Schools teacher Ann Turner (now retired), an early childhood educator, on the day after southeast Michigan’s first real snowstorm.

We were not able to go out and enjoy the REAL stuff today as only two of my students have snow pants and boots. I would love to gather enough so that all 16 of my students can enjoy and love Michigan winters and snow as much as I do. I have four pairs of snow pants that my own girls have outgrown and two that I picked up at a resale shop. If your child has outgrown last year’s snow pants and/or boots and you would like to donate them to my winter closet, I would be so appreciative. Thanks!

Within two hours, there were 25 responders–fellow teachers and friends, sharing information about sizes, bargain sales and where to drop off donations and purchases. Ann promised to pass any extras on to the other teachers in the building, all of whom have “winter closets”–and know about the restorative power of recess in a Michigan winter. Ann’s next post, the Monday following:

I was SOOOO excited to get to school today because I knew that this would be our first GREAT snow day with all of our new gear! I am not sure who was more excited–me or the kiddos!! After everyone got suited up (that was exhausting), we headed out and we played and we played and we played some more. Some of the kids were amazed at how they could roll around in the snow without getting wet or cold. We made snow cakes, we walked in sled tracks, we made snow angels, we threw the snow, we laughed and we played some more.

When everyone was good and tuckered out, we went in and made hot chocolate. Isn’t that just the perfect day? The first thing they told their parents at pick-up? All about their adventure–and the last thing they said to me is “Are we going out tomorrow?” Thank you ALL for making a difference in the lives of children! Thanking everyone is difficult because some of you were the messengers or middlemen. I hope that you will be able to convey our gratitude to those who assisted in getting these babes suited up!

There’s more–photos and stories–and then, the collecting of snow gear morphed into a full-scale Girl Scout troop project, with the girls shopping the post-Christmas sales with their cookie money.

It’s important, however, to look past the do-good/feel-good aspects of this heartwarming story.

  • Only two of Turner’s students had appropriate clothing for winter–and, trust me, snowpants are vital for kids in a Michigan winter. What other essentials are missing in their lives and learning? How do these missing elements contribute to the media-fed narrative of “failing” schools?
  • Children in Finland play outside for 15 minutes after every 45-minute lesson. Because the Finns structure their school day using research demonstrating the necessity of invigorating free play for young children. While Turner goes outside to monitor and play with her students, teachers in Finland take coffee and chat breaks with their colleagues. Pauses, movement and conversation consolidate learning and make it stick–anyone who’s ever tried to gather up participants to return to a workshop PowerPoint after a break recognizes this.
  • Playing outside in warm clothing, using sleds and snow toys–with follow-up hot chocolate– represented a special treat to the children at Palmer Park Academy in Detroit, courtesy of a dedicated teacher and her kind-hearted friends and colleagues. Kudos to Turner. But–the children in her class deserve free play and a refreshing drink every day, year-round, as part of best pedagogical practice for very young children. The research on this is iron-clad.
  • Inevitably, there were questions about whether Turner’s foray to the playground was approved by administrators as an “educational” activity. Since Michigan’s former governor once proposed pre-kindergarten testing as a means of determining whether Michigan was getting a bang for its pre-school funding bucks, this is a legitimate worry for early childhood teachers. Will this healthy exercise reduce test scores–is it more important to stay inside and do some more worksheets?

Anyone who looked at Turner’s photos would have an answer for that. But people making policy around early childhood education aren’t necessarily paying attention to snow angels, rosy cheeks and face-splitting grins.

by nflanagan

We Need Hygge Classrooms in America

The ubiquitous FB meme:

In Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then you spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate. The tradition is part of a season called Jolabokafload, the Christmas Book flood, because Iceland, which publishes more books per capita than any other country, sells most of its books between September and November, due to people preparing for the upcoming holiday.

Nobody ever responds: That sounds awful! My family prefers watching our individual TVs!

Generally, commenters reply wistfully, longing for a country where learning is valued and books are ideal gifts, where the dark and cold are counterbalanced by intellectual curiosity and conversation.

Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland, they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded, every print-run is sold. Being a writer in Iceland you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions, they love them or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

Perhaps because I live in a region that gets 135 inches of snow each winter, these cozy, fireside literary chats are enormously appealing to me. As is the Danish concept of hygge:

The Danish art of contentment, comfort, and connection…a practical way of creating sanctuary in the middle of very real life.”

Hygge (hoo-ga), which has no direct translation into English—surprise!—is many things to many people: Woolen socks. Candles and other gentle light. Board games. Comfortable couches and cozy quilts. Warm drinks.

Although hygge seems to have Scandinavian roots, it’s not exclusively a cold-climate thing, evidently. A rustic cottage on a lake, with its beat-up furniture, mildewed paperbacks from the 1950s and second-hand bathing suits is very hygge, according to Meik Wiking, author of “The Little Book of Hygge” and, not coincidentally, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. The mere fact that there is a Happiness Research Institute, somewhere in the world, makes me—well, happy.

The interesting thing about hygge and Jolabokafload is their inherent intentionality. Citizens in Iceland and Denmark take contentment, comfort and connection seriously, and pursue them with deliberation. Choosing the right book for someone means you know that person, and what they might enjoy reading. Playing games with your family means connecting with them, laughing and teamwork.

So why don’t we pursue this, here in the land of the free, home of the brave? What keeps us, a nation that often proclaims itself the best country in the world, or at least on its way to becoming “great” again, from choosing to embrace contentment and connection?

Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to Wiking, Danes are free to become “aware of the decoupling between wealth and wellbeing.”

That decoupling between wealth and wellbeing is well-reflected in this headline: Children Need Homes, Not Charter Schools or Standardized Tests, and Definitely Not Tax Cuts for the Wealthy.

That’s where our intentionality lies in the U.S., where we’re spending our hard-earned tax dollars—canned curricula designed to raise test scores and alternative school governance models, endless expensive tests—when over 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless last year. According to former Senator Orin Hatch, we don’t even have money for poor children’s basic health care. As a nation, we have linked simple human well-being to wealth, and sealed it with the tamper-proof cap of low opportunity.

Many teachers try to add hygge touches to the classrooms where their high-poverty students meet and work every day—from beanbag chairs to classroom sets of snowpants for outdoor play, from little free libraries to Cocoa Day. If school can become a place of connectivity, warmth and safety, they reason, students will keep coming back.

Happy Hygge-days, Teacher in a Strange Land readers. Thanks for all you do for your students.

by nflanagan

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

So—it was just one of those re-posted memes: a chalkboard suggesting that the “old days”—when the very rich built and named hospitals, schools and libraries—were preferable to whatever the very rich are doing with their money today.

There are a lot of ways to argue against that tossed-off sentiment: We shouldn’t have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy in order to have good public services, for starters. Some of that wealth was ill-gotten, and some philanthropists were Not Good People, as well. Why can’t everybody be like McKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos)?

On the other hand, I was born in a hospital named for a local benefactor. I was a card-carrying patron of a Carnegie Library and attended college where every damned building seemed to be funded by someone with lots more money than I’d ever have.

Furthermore, Forbes magazine reinforced my belief that the 21st century uber-rich aren’t very forthcoming any more with dough for public buildings and programs: How generous are the super-rich, really? Not very, according to Forbes’ research. The members of the 2023 Forbes 400 list have collectively given more than $250 billion to charity, by our count—less than 6% of their combined net worth.

Which gets to the point of why I originally posted the meme: The mega-affluent today are busy going up in space in rocket ships, abusing low-paid, NON-unionized employees, and controlling national elections with underhanded tactics.

I’d rather have the theatres, hospitals, academic buildings and libraries. Or—here’s a thought—what about someone with fabulous wealth funding a climate change initiative? Or ending poverty?

Andrew Carnegie funded the building of 2,509 “Carnegie Libraries” worldwide between 1883 and 1929. Of those, 1,795 were in the United States: 1,687 public and 108 academic libraries. Others are scattered throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. He also funded museums, established an endowment for international peace, supported scientific research, and other civic initiatives, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He bought or upgraded pipe organs in over 7600 churches.

And, yup, Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron in the most derogative sense of the word, using violence and ruthlessness in controlling the ill-paid and exploited workers who built his fortune. He was also an immigrant, who came to America penniless, and you know how Americans love a rags-to-riches tale. Biographers suggest he had an attack of conscience as he aged, and spent more and more of his wealth on civic projects.

In posting the chalkboard meme, I drew a lot of commentary because I mentioned Carnegie and all those libraries. Surprisingly, a lot of the negative feedback came from librarians, who popped up with passionate responses about Carnegie’s insider trading, sending goons to beat up strikers and trying to suppress the uprisings of the great unwashed by building them libraries.

It occurred to me that those librarians were universally well-read and not about to blindly worship old, filthy rich, controlling white men. Although, you know, thanks for the library.

Still. Although nobody can exactly defend the Titans of the Gilded Age, they left a lot of architecture and institutions for us to use, more than a century later. What have our still-living titans done with their immense wealth?

Bill Gates has funded the building of computer science centers at four universities (including, ironically, Carnegie Mellon), and purchased 40 square miles in the AZ desert west of Phoenix to build his own city of 200K residents, among other projects. From Salon:

There’s a deep-seated belief in libertarian-rampant Silicon Valley that the government and our political processes are slow and messy; to that end, many techies, mad with power, have attempted to start their own partially or fully-privatized cities. Gates’ entire philanthropic vision, exemplified by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is predicated on the idea that rich people and technocrats know best how to manage the levers of society, and the rest of us peons should sit back and let the rich techies run our lives. 

If you’re an educator, you will have felt the Gates Foundation’s impact, from Common Core standards to teacher assessments to breaking up big schools into smaller ones. Have money, will implement. Then declare many of these “promising” concepts failures. Maybe the teachers weren’t following the curriculum with fidelity?

Honestly? I’d rather have buildings and state-of-the-art equipment than Billionaire Ideas changing our fundamental institutions.

Which brings us to Elon Musk, who has promised his and Donald Trump’s  proposed economic policies could lead to “initial severe overreaction” and “temporary hardship” in the economy if Trump wins the election. Trump’s mass deportations and Musk’s $2 trillion cut to federal spending could disrupt industries, lead to labor shortages, and increase prices.

Hmmm. Couldn’t he just build us a nice hospital or school or library?

Carnegie Library in Howell, Michigan.

by nflanagan

Gifts of Christmas Past

In a holiday-themed archetype of legislative overreach, Alabama passed an ethics law back in 2011, forbidding K-12 school teachers from accepting expensive presents.  Previous legislation set a $100 limit on individual gifts to public workers, but the 2011 law specified that gifts to teachers be limited to those of nominal value. The stated purpose: to reinforce ethical practices by state employees.

This was such a big deal that the AL Ethics Commission was receiving about 25 calls a day from parents who didn’t want to get their children’s teachers in trouble. The Ethics Commission released a detailed report, letting parents know that cookies, hand lotion and mugs are OK. What I found interesting was what was forbidden. Four examples: hams, turkeys, cash and “anything a teacher could re-sell.”

I was a classroom teacher for more than 30 years. I received hundreds of Christmas and end-of-year gifts over that time. And I never got a turkey or a ham. Maybe that’s an Alabama thing?

Nor did I ever get cash– and if I had been slipped a card with cash, I would have returned it immediately. In fact, I don’t know any teacher who would accept cash or an extravagant gift, especially if they thought the gift came with strings attached. The teachers I know have a whole shelf full of holiday mugs with “from Brittany, 1998″ written in Sharpie on the bottom.

Besides the obvious issues of unenforceability and heavy-handed mistrust of those charged with educating Alabama’s most precious resource, the whole brouhaha in Alabama had a kind of cheesy self-righteousness about it.

Does a $25 Starbucks gift card come with expectations built in? What if it’s given by a shy first grader who noticed his teacher often brings a Starbucks cup to school? When does the impulse to give a hard-working teacher a nice token of appreciation morph into a calculation of what special favors might be granted through a generous present?

Jim Sumner, director of the Alabama Ethics Commission, was in favor of clamping down on all public workers. No gifts, period:

It takes away the sense of entitlement that people have built up over the years that people serving the public need gifts.

Sense of entitlement?

Several states have laws limiting the gifts that public employees can receive. About ten states have even tougher rules, not even allowing public employees to get a free cup of coffee. Research tells us public officials and employees are rarely influenced by a meal paid for by a lobbyist or by a gift. But states send a message with firm ethics laws and build confidence among the public that leaders can’t be bought.

Theoretically.

Here’s what I wish I could tell Jim Sumner: Teaching offers many very rewarding experiences, but it’s not and never has been about the great swag.

I’m not sure I ever had a “sense of entitlement” as a public worker– but then, I never came in contact with lobbyists and don’t think most people consider non-elected teachers “public officials.” I’m not sure I ever had anything–like a legislative vote–that could be bought.

Alabama Ethics Director Sumner: “if [a parent] said, ‘I don’t care what the new law is, I’m going to give them a cruise,” that’s a different case …”

A cruise? I can’t speak for legislators–who, after all, can change much more than a mere grade–but I’d be hard pressed to find a teacher who regularly went on international junkets, courtesy of Pearson, the way state education officials have. Don’t we have much bigger fish to fry, educationally speaking, than fretting about setting strict guidelines for what parents can spend on a present?

The whole dustup felt sad to me– part of the impulse to punish and control something that happens rather naturally everywhere: kids giving presents to their teachers. All presents from students are good presents.  They’re appreciated, but the sentiments around giving are what’s treasured.

Thinking back over all the gifts I got –there must be 50 music-themed Christmas tree ornaments– one stands out. I had a kid in my 6th hour jazz band, who came to class the day before winter vacation with what looked very much like a tightly wrapped bottle of wine. “My mom says don’t open it until you get home, and keep it in your drawer today,” he said, all innocence.

When I got home, I unwrapped it. It was a bottle of wine–a very nice bottle, in fact. I saw the boy’s mother in the grocery store over holiday break. “About the gift…” I said and she held up her hand. “You absolutely deserved it,” she said. “We won’t speak of it again.”

by nflanagan

Help! I Can’t Read!

It started, frankly, back in July.

Like other Type A, rule-following teachers, I can’t just relax and retire. Reading is my favorite year-round way to spend free time, so you think I could just curl up and enjoy lots of books. But no. I have been setting reading goals and tracking the books I read, for the past 10 years.

I know. Get a life.

But I really like tracking what I read. First, it helps when you’re intermittently reading a series by the same author, and the titles are interchangeable. It’s a lot better than taking a book home from the library, and 10 pages in, when it’s starting to feel familiar, wishing you’d kept a list.

Then, there are the easily confused books. The Woman in the Window. Or the train. Or Cabin 10. Or just… The Women. (I’ve read ‘em all—can’t recommend any of them.)

For about 10 years, I’ve been trying to read 100 books a year, and for eight of those years, I’ve made the goal, and sometimes significantly exceeded it. It’s a nice round number. I give myself credit for physical books read as well as audio books (usually a small percentage of the total—they take more time). Fiction and non-fiction. And I only log the ones I finish.

But this year, I’m way behind. I blame Donald Trump.

The only other year that I didn’t make the goal was 2016 (and got off to a slow start in 2017, what with the Womans March and joining groups and deciding to run for office and knitting pink hats).

This year, I was about 8 books ahead of my goal in June. When Biden dropped out of the race, and Kamala Harris quickly became The One, I found that the long stretches of time dedicated to reading were transferred to activities centered around politics. Including a ridiculous amount of time spent where I am right now: in front of my computer.

It’s summer, I’d tell myself. Check a big fat beach read out of the library!
When I did, it would sit in my reading corner until I brought it back, a month later. A month filled with doom-scrolling, sign-delivering, attending debates, wading in hope, drowning in despair.

And in the last month? No books. Just endless commentary. Seventeen takes on the same depressing story (Matt Gaetz? Really?), each with its unique, snarky—and depressing—viewpoint.

Speaking as a person whose most-read column was a screed against the Pizza Hut Book-it Campaign, because it turned kids reading for pleasure into a competition where discounted pizza coupons were the prize, you’d think I could blow this off, and just be happy I read a lot of books.

It isn’t gone—the goals, the book discussion groups, the afternoons on the couch. I’m too much of an old-school reader to end up like the college students who can’t—or, rather, won’t—read.

Ever been in a reading slump? Got a title to bust through my ennui?

My reading corner, below.

by nflanagan

Public Education: The Bully and the Dream

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”   (R. Buckminster Fuller)

Buckminster Fuller’s well-known quote was a touchstone for me, in my 30-odd years—and some of them were really odd—of classroom teaching. Whenever things at school started feeling oppressive or dumb—there’s got to be a better way to do X—coming up with a new plan was always a better bet than complaining about the old way. Launch first, ask permission later.

I can pull dozens of examples out of memory here. One major shift I made, for example, as a result of disenchantment with competitive music-making, was dumping ‘chairs and challenges’ in seating my band students.  Nobody was doing it at the time. Here’s another: Starr Sackstein’s work on re-thinking grading in favor of different ways to assess student work.

Why fight back against typical practices, if you can devise a better way? School used to be the perfect place to institute new ideas. Let a thousand pilot projects bloom.

I was intrigued to see this, posted at Bluesky, from DeRay McKesson:

Our goal is not to switch places with the bully, but to end bullying. We focus on tactics—how do we beat the bully?—but don’t remember to prepare for the day when the bully is no more. If we don’t have a vision for our desired future, how can we plan to achieve it? When we confront the bully, we reclaim our imagination. 

If we confront the bully, we reclaim our imagination. We can create a vision for our desired future. Makes sense to me. Feels a lot like Buckminster Fuller: Come up with something better, then make it happen. Stop fighting.

Now– McKesson, a decade ago, was a Teach for America alum, a charter school supporter, and later, a school administrator. He seems to have left public education (and all its flaws) behind, focusing on activism, BLM, social media and podcasts. He wrote a book. He fought with people on Twitter. 

But– I think he’s right. If all we’re doing right now (guiltily raising hand) is re-posting that video clip of Linda McMahon getting body-slammed, we’re not helping preserve, let alone improve, public education. When our focus is on fighting bad policy, especially policy that hasn’t yet been enacted, we need to have better ideas—dreams, if you will—about what public education should look like in our back pocket.

I say this because the incoming administration has dreams:  

Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “ wokeness ” and  “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.

A bible in every classroom. Not to mention vouchers—or whatever visionary scholarship name you want to give them–for all.

Trump’s first term was full of rhetoric and short on action, all Betsy DeVos and grizzly bears, when it came to education policy. Lots more anti-public education non-profits sprang up (and some died), and lots of charter schools also sprang up, using public funds, then failed. But the Department of Education chugged on, as usual, and 85% of kids were enrolled in a public school, a slow slide down from 90% a decade ago.

Educators I know are prone to being frustrated when national political discourse doesn’t include ideas about public education.  But that can actually be a bonus. States and local districts are where the policy-making rubber meets the road, when it comes to making public schools better. Policy that genuinely improves what’s happening in public schools looks like what Tim Walz was able to accomplish in Minnesota.

Trump, on the other hand, has a lot of ideas that are deeply unpopular: What Trump will certainly do is pick splashy fights that he can win through executive orders. 

So—returning to Buckminster Fuller or DeRay McKesson—what does OUR vision look like?

Here’s one take on that question, from Steve Nelson.

 All human learning is interconnected. Depriving children of rich, complex experiences in the service of dull training for standardized math and reading exams actually stunts their math and reading development. Ironic and dumb.

We’re still fighting the bullies who instituted mandatory standardized testing for 8-yr olds, and use the data gathered to harm children. We’re arguing with the idiots who destroyed public education in AZ,  in favor of paying for ski lessons and Lego kits for rich kids. We’re brawling with Christian nationalists over Bible-based curricula in Texas public schools.

Where has all this verbal combat gotten us?

Maybe it’s time to create that vision of what schooling could look like—for the same money, with the same workforce, in the same buildings. Imagining that future.

I have a few ideas about that. What does your vision for public education look like?  

by nflanagan

Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform

When I first retired (from the classroom, not from working in education), I moved away from the school district where I had lived and taught. I’d been there for well over 30 years and had seen—up close and personal– the power of school boards to impact educational climate in a school district. I’d been watching through four decades of local policy-making— the good, the bad and the out-and-out malicious.

I’ve got stories.

And  I’ve written about the town where I lived and taught. In spite of its flaws, it was usually a good place to teach, if the definition of “good” is engaged parents, talented colleagues and kids who were encouraged at home to achieve.

The quality of school board leadership occasionally faltered over that time—with most of the squabbling over how to get by while spending a lot less—but there were long stretches where the school board served as a benign and supportive presence.

That was then. The Board now has morphed into something Christopher Rufo would be proud of. There was the podcast by Board members, sharing private information about student discipline. There was the “gender-affirming” bathroom policy. The anti-trans and anti-Pride policies. And so much more.

But I was dumbstruck on hearing this little clip from a recent meeting.

Board member says: This gets into the weaponization of empathy, where empathy is taught as the highest goal, the highest order. Do we teach empathy to the effect where students disregard parental authority—and accept anything and everything? Do we teach kids that any kind of judgment is bad?

Wait. What? Who is he accusing? And what is the weaponization of empathy?

Too much empathy leads to kids defying their parents, evidently. The moral ambiguity of school confuses students. That’s their big fear?

As a long-time classroom veteran who spent the beginning of every year working diligently to get kids to respect their peers, and care for other people’s feelings and property, this struck me as downright stupid.

Of course, empathy builds learning communities. It was right there in the (evidently outgrown) school mission statement:  “ …provide a positive environment for the development of productive and caring individuals of all ages.”

A social media convo developed around the clip, with commenters suggesting the end result of too much empathy was Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps.

Eventually somebody remarked:

It should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation has taken this term and used it as its own way of fighting against Social-Emotional Learning, and any other academic tools to help students.

If one of your school board members uses this term, they are in some way being educated by, or they are using talking points from the Heritage Foundation.

Then, the other shoe dropped. Aha. Weaponizing empathy is a Heritage Foundation thing, the concept of their plan, so to speak.

Click on this definition, from the Heritage Foundation’s own rhetoric.   It’s pretty vile.

EdWeek asks: Can Trump Force Schools to Change their Curricula? The Trump team’s best weapon for fulfilling this culture war campaign promise may be an under-the-radar office at the heart of the agency the once and future president has pledged to dismantle: The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which enforces laws barring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and disability status.

That’s a lot of legal wrangling—and yes, I understand that bureaucracies can change, when their leadership changes.

But hey—if right-wingers get control of a school board, they can micro-manage a district, with thousands of students, turning it into a place where empathy—caring for and about their fellow students– is forbidden or scorned.

God help us all.

by nflanagan

Boom! Boom boom! It’s Deer Season

So– we live in the northern Michigan woods. And beginning last Friday, we have been hearing shooting. Lots and lots of shooting. It’s deer season (firearms) up north.

Our little grocery store-cum-gas station has a deer pole, and offers butchery, so a drive into the P.O. involves passing a large pile of dead deer, awaiting their turn to be gutted and sliced. Not a pretty picture.

And yet. None of this bothers me.

I’m not a gun owner (or gun-owning defender). Deer browse my compost pile, and I try to remain quiet on the porch, so they can get a big mouthful of rotten pumpkins or potato peelings, while I watch. Venison? Meh, except in chili.

I’ve been run into by deer four times– most recently, an $8K hit on the truck–and I know that controlling the deer population is a benefit to us and to them. Balance of nature and all that.

Plus– the annual ritual of deer hunting just doesn’t faze me. The whole rigamarole of blaze orange and hanging out at pine-paneled bars and doe permits vs. how many points– it’s all OK by me. You (and a half-dozen of your unwashed, unshaven friends) do you.

Probably, this is because I grew up in Michigan. My dad was a hunter, going out with my uncles and great-uncles. Everybody I knew had a ramshackle place up north where the guys went to hunt, in November. Women stayed home, watched the kids, got together with the other “deer widows” to play poker.

The school district where I first taught took the first week of deer season off, mostly because it was too dangerous for kids to wait for the bus when the woods were full of hunters. The next place I taught only took Opening Day off, which I saw as a civilized upgrade.

I know there are people who feed their families with game, but that’s not the reason I’m down with hunting. I guess I see it as a throwback to earlier times, a connection to an era when people secured their own food in the wild. Men hanging with men, suffering from cold and tedium, relieved by gunshots and whiskey and flinging the carcass over the hood of the car and using the meat (instead driving past unused and grisly remains beside the road, a daily occurrence this time of year).

I was amused by Garrison Keillor’s description of deer hunting and fishing (we have ice fishing here, too, in northern MI):

“Men hunt for the same reason they fish, in order to escape the company of women. Minnesota is a state of thousands of lakes and each one gives men an opportunity for refuge, sitting in a rowboat or a fishing shack out on the ice where nobody will say, “When are you going to clean out the garage?” Or “You keep talking about going to teacher conferences at the kids’ school but when is this going to happen if ever?” or “Why do you insist on dribbling coffee down the front of the kitchen cabinet and not wiping it up?”

Not many women fish because they know they can buy excellent salmon, tuna, or halibut for a tiny fraction of the cost of a boat and motor and trailer and a pickup to tow it. Ever compare salmon and northern pike? God created pike for cat food.”

Just heard another shot. Boom. Deer season.

by nflanagan

Who’s Afraid of Anne Frank?


Last week, in Howell, Michigan, the town where I used to live, a local youth theatre group was putting on a production of the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank—probably the same version put on in my high school, back in the 1960s, when that kind of drama-club effort was considered a worthy stretch.

This performance was happening at—of all places—the local American Legion Post. And a few veterans were hanging around outside when some  junior Nazis, masked and waving swastika flags, showed up. They called the cops, who arrived promptly, then escorted the flag wavers across the street.

The “Constitutional” County Sheriff (the same one who hosted Trump in his parking garage on the first day of school in Howell) remarked that because the protestors were ‘peaceful’ there was no need to request their identification. They were just, you know, expressing themselves, which they had the right to do.

There have been other hate marches in the county this year. Not going to link to articles, but the same group of masked dudes with Nazi gear and Trump flags have been showing up on the regular around town, on overpasses and at outdoor events in the summer, mixing a little terror and intimidation into life in a small, generally placid, Midwestern town. Among my local teacher friends, there have been quiet on-line conversations—some colleagues have had these young men in class and recognize them.

We’re in for trouble.

It was predictable, no matter which way the election went. All the disreputable talk and threats and violence have been set loose; the election just gave them a bump. The particular young men who were being babysat by the Sherriff’s men told bystanders that they were protecting “Pureville.”  Doesn’t get more explicit than that.

And public schools, the stage on which society builds their hopes for the future, will suffer.

Nobody reading this, I’m confident, now believes that what’s been set in motion will die down quickly. To wit:

  • There is the ongoing flood of racist texts to Black students, including middle schoolers, across multiple states. These anonymous texts tell them to report to the plantation. Some of the texts address the students by name.  
  • There’s the whole “Your Body/My Choice” assault:
    Over a 24-hour period following Trump’s election, there was a 4,600% increase in the usage of the phrase “your body, my choice” on X. The phrase has made its way offline as well, with young girls and parents across the country using social media to share instances of harassment involving it.

And they are undeniably in the just-getting-started phase.

Most of what I’ve been reading in Ed World over the past two weeks have been pieces on education policy. Will Trump close the Department of Education?  What about Head Start, Title I and IDEA? Will RFK Jr. be crossing the country to destroy vaccine mandates?

In practice, both horrifying and devastating. But I’m more interested in the daily lives of schools, right now. As policies, guardrails and traditional practices fall, it will take time to vacate safety codes and equity-supporting statutes.

But right now, this week, tomorrow, I am thinking about a sea change in school cultures. What Jan Resseger describes as:
 
Fueling the racist, xenophobic, and homophobic attacks on public school curricula, teachers and school librarians, and on Black, Hispanic, gay and transgender children who are now portrayed by Trump and his MAGA crowd as dangerous or threatening.

On the first page of the introduction to Project 2025:  America under the ruling and cultural elite … children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

These are things that the chronic public school critics and disaffected students can address now: Redefining pornography. Tormenting kids who are trying to understand their own sexuality. Bringing a gun to school or taking one downtown. Terrorizing Black and brown classmates, for fun. Bringing that slut who refuses to go out with you to heel.

None of these involves changing policy or shutting down the Department of Education.

But they’re already happening.