I’ve spent a lot of time considering this graphic.
IS education the fault line in American politics?
First shock: There are 33 states with more-educated people than (purple) Michigan, where there are world-class colleges and universities. What makes us an under-achiever?
2nd: Consider Trump’s mouth-blabber remark: “I love the poorly educated.” As well he should. They’re his base.
Digging deeper– what makes someone with a college degree more likely to vote Democratic? Does a college education make someone more broad-minded, more aware of the social and political factors influencing their well-being? Or is this all just about economics– being able to afford a college degree?
And personally–something I have been wrestling with since 2016–is there something I could have done, as a teacher, to model that broad-mindedness to my students?
It feels weird to be opining about professional development when teachers in Minnesota are dealing with the effects of mayhem in the street, poisoning the normal ebb and flow of public schooling.
Coincidentally, it was a group of dynamic teachers in the Twin Cities area who first showed me what it really could look like to be in charge of their own professional learning. More on that later.
First, let me say the obvious. Teachers actually are, and always will be, in charge of whatever they decide they need to improve their teaching. For some, it will be a career-long quest to learn and try new things, building a practice with what works best. Others might be less enthused about the latest mandated program. You can lead a teacher to PD, but you can’t make them believe it’s useful.
This is an evergreen issue, of course. My district dabbled in a ‘choose your own PD’ model for a few years, giving teachers the choice to work in their own rooms or attend planned presentations. The lure of hours of uninterrupted time to plan lessons, run copies, review new materials, catch up on grading or chat with a partner teacher was irresistible.
Going home without a tote bag full of work? Priceless. But when only a handful of people showed up for the paid presenter? Embarrassing for the administrator who did the hiring. I say this having been one of those presenters once, setting up for 35 attendees and then having only four show up for a half-day workshop on National Board Certification.
In fact, it was a group of National Board Certified Teachers from a public high school in Minneapolis who proved to me that teacher-led professional development could be incredibly exciting and precisely targeted to the work of teaching specific students.
The name of the HS is not important—but it was a school with a high percentage of immigrant students, so there were ESL issues and poverty issues and old-building facility issues. Sometimes the assigned curricula just did not work for the students they had.
A progressive principal bought into the idea of genuine teacher leadership and re-arranged the classic HS schedule so that he was teaching classes daily, opening up time for teachers to take on traditional administrative tasks. Like professional development.
Teachers surveyed their colleagues—What do you need to know to teach your students well? What issues do you want to talk about?—and set up weekly brown-bag lunch chats and after-school gatherings at a local restaurant, with snacks paid by the school budget. There was intensive mentoring for new teachers and regular time set aside for teachers to tweak curriculum, as they were teaching it. Peer observations and conversations were built into daily practice.
A lot of what they were doing was around the use of time, shaving it off here and adding it there—only an experienced teacher can understand the difference adding 20 minutes to lunch makes, where some of the best professional development happens spontaneously.
The most impressive thing was not that teachers were ‘in charge of their own PD’—but that teachers were collaborating to build professional learning and conversations that made sense to them, on the fly.
The first question from the audience (of teachers): Did everyone in your building buy into this new, ongoing PD model? Answer: No. A couple left the building for what they saw as greener pastures. But several skeptics stayed and eventually became converts. And now, they said, when we hire, we let new teachers know they will be surrounded by support in that first year. It’s who we are—a team.
We didn’t start this fire. But teachers—beaten down and dissed by our own government—will have a role to play in rebuilding the idea of representative democracy. Right now, that’s our best hope.
Their music and media tell them individualism will pull them out of squalor. The people behind those messages shove the economic ladders from underneath them. (Jose Vilson)
One of the most stunning bits of clarifying data I’ve seen in the past few weeks is this chart from Media Matters, with data from February 2025:
It’s a graphic of most listened-to online news and commentary shows, color-coded and sized to represent the magnitude and political leanings of the American audience. It’s year-old data, remember—but it goes some way toward answering the question I’ve spent the past year obsessing over: Who ARE these people and how could they have re-elected the corrupt man who led the insurrection against their pretty-good government?
I’m old enough to remember 2008, when Barack Obama’s online media savvy and fund-raising prowess was attracting voters and the envy of the other party, stuck in Walter-Cronkite land. Kids who were primary consumers of social media then, are in their 30s now, and apparently have shifted to eating up Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes.
But what are kids listening to in 2026? I think the JLV, in two sentences, above, sums up what I’m thinking: They’re young. They’re being bamboozled by glitzy media and music, convinced that their own swagger will save them. And then it doesn’t. In fact, they’re a generation that almost certainly will experience less prosperity and fewer prospects than their parents’ generation.
I volunteer in an after-school program for middle-schoolers, usually on afternoons dedicated to homework (or missing assignments). It’s no secret to any teacher that a lot of incomplete and missing work happens because the students don’t know how to do it. They will finally tell you—I don’t get this—after making excuses and going to their locker or the bathroom three times. This happens a lot with math, but also with conventional Q & A, end-of-chapter reviews and short writing assignments.
Our kids have their own Chromebooks and most of the teachers provide several vetted information sources beyond the textbook, which is great. But only if students go there, and wade around. Unfortunately, chatbots have now given them a get-out-of-jail quick option.
These students are—I emphasize—not dumb (or any similar but less insulting word). After homework is completed, we often play board games or cards. They understand and can negotiate things that the games require—similes and other wordplay, strategy and logic, memory. Some are also readers (passing around personally owned books that I never ask to see). There are conversations full of humor and current music and YouTube video references.
But at age twelve or so—where are they getting their information about the world at large? On the day after the 2024 election, our coordinator stopped by to remind volunteers NOT to speak about the election. Not that any of the kids mentioned it. It was as if it hadn’t happened.
If we can’t count on legacy media, who’s going to sort through those red and blue bubbles of independent media? It’s going to take more than hope and good will to teach kids to be critical consumers of media and music, to discern the difference between glittering generalities and sometimes unpleasant truth.
Of course, teachers are proscribed from sharing their opinions on the best sources of accurate and unbiased information, lest they be labeled DEI or woke. Makes you wonder how the public opinion on DEI and woke, two ideas that were once debatable if not accepted, solidified into broadly understood negative concepts. Where did that “information” come from?
Because I hang out with middle schoolers on the regular, I don’t think it’s too late to take a stand for discretion around the truthfulness of media sources. But simply letting the red bubbles win is a mistake.
“A generation raised under the [moral tone set by FDR] went on to build the modern middle class, defeat fascism, and help construct a postwar world that valued democracy, human rights, and shared prosperity.
Contrast that with the bigoted, hateful, revenge-filled claptrap children have heard for the past decade from the emotionally stunted psychopath currently occupying the White House.” Thom Hartmann
My goal in blogging—something I’ve been doing for almost 25 years—has always been to write about what it’s like to be a teacher in the United States. I wanted to focus on teacher leadership, to write about the ‘inconsistencies and inspirations, the incomprehensible, immoral and imaginative, in American education.’
Because—back in 2001, when I got my first paid gig writing on the internet (there were unpaid local newspaper columns before that), there were many inspiring things to write about, from my own experience as a classroom teacher. There were also important questions about instruction, thorny policy issues and curricular problems to solve, but it really felt as if public school educators were on the same page—valuing democracy, human rights, shared prosperity, as Thom Hartmann says.
You could see a turning point coming. Topics from my December 28, 2016 “best blogs” review when I was writing for Education Week:Charters aren’t the answer. Women are disrespected even in a field where they’re a huge majority. We still don’t know what “teacher leadership” looks like—or might accomplish. Standards may shape practice, but they don’t automatically raise achievement. Competition and marketing aren’t the answer, either. And the future of public education is in serious jeopardy.
Going through the blogs I wrote this year was an exercise in dismay. Although I had many rewarding experiences volunteering in schools, in 2025, pulling the camera back to see where we’re going in pubic education is – no other word—monumentally depressing.
Here are 10 blogs from 2025 that I think represent our current trajectory, such as it is. Wish I could offer readers better news:
Speaking as a person who has spent decades working in public schools and with public school teachers across the country, schools are generally among the most conventional and cautious institutions on the planet, subject to pressures and opinions from a wide range of (often clueless) critics. And likely headed by someone who adamantly does not want to get phone calls from honked-off parents.
If we were to sit down together over a cup of coffee, I could tell you dozens of stories from my teaching career that illustrate both moral clarity in my classroom, as well as times when I absolutely failed at establishing a trusting, collaborative ecology. It’s probably enough to say that I got way better at it, over 30+ years.
Why would we abandon public schools’ infrastructure and experienced personnel? Crushing public education is not policy—it’s vandalism. It makes no sense.
Maybe the question is not: Is Public Education Over? Maybe the question is: What’s worth saving in public education?
Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.
Actually, if you’re taking away (via federally approved punishments and reduced funding) inclusion, equity and diversity, what you’ve got left is exclusion of non-preferred students, discriminatory distribution of resources, and separation of student groups based on physical characteristics. In other words, Arkansas in 1957. What happens when a latter-day Orval Faubus emerges?
While it’s important for boys to have personal agency in their learning, and be trusted by their teachers, boys need to have role models, as well. Who are we offering up as heroes, men whose lives and actions are worthy and admirable? Men worth emulating, who care for their spouses and children, men whose values serve as guardrails, men who are civically engaged?
When I first heard about Elon Musk’s email blast to over two million federal employees directing them to submit approximately five bullet points of what they accomplished in the previous week, I was reminded of a couple of school administrators from my past.
Eugene Robinson called Musk’s scheme “an exercise in contempt”—also a great description of some of the so-called professional development teachers routinely endure. When a principal doesn’t trust their professional staff to know what they’d like to do with time available for their own learning or planning, you end up with meaningless exercises like “five things I did last week.”
Ultimately, it’s about control.
Who’s in Favor of Authoritarianism? For the current administration, bent on “saving” federal dollars for their own preferences, breaking up this monolith will be a giant display of power that impacts some 50 million students and their families. Think you’re in charge of your local school, your classroom? Think again. Easy peasy.
No, the federal government–and supporting Republicans and conservative courts–say. No, we don’t want your media literacy classes. No, we don’t want kids nosing around in issues like fairness and equity in our recent history. No speaking Spanish. No arts classes or events to help students make sense of the world they live in. No vaccines to protect them, or accurate health information.
It represented a sentiment I hear all the time: I can’t believe there are people who think Trump is the second coming. Who in their right mind could see him as a transformative leader? Who does not perceive the grifting, the rank incompetence, the prejudice, the lies—and the danger to a functioning democracy?
Yeah—I know. You read this stuff, too—eye-popping, outrageous stories—and ask the same questions.
Maybe you’re wondering if teachers—underpaid and overworked—could have done more to establish the habit of questioning authority, discerning which evidence and rhetoric are reliable. Examining biases, looking at turning points in history, and so on.
‘Some large portion of voters do not appear to understand elementary, objective aspects of reality.We have jobs and lives, too. If we can understand reality, then they should be able to as well.
It does seem as though the last Democratic administration focused like a laser on economic issues. It managed the economy well, avoiding a recession and achieving a soft landing. It passed major, bipartisan legislation around Kitchen Table Issues like infrastructure spending. It kept the economy strong, with historically low unemployment and real-wage growth. It did not try to ban assault weapons but instead passed a gun-reform bill so sensible that it received bipartisan support. It successfully negotiated the most hawkish immigration reform bill in American history, only to have it sabotaged at the last minute by Donald Trump. These are actual things that happened in the real world over the course of 48 months.
Yet somehow all of this activity was invisible to voters? While these same people were highly attuned to the number of times LGBTQ appeared in the Democratic platform?
Which is it? Are the voters oblivious? Or are they discerning? Or does it depend on the situation: Willfully blind to some facts, but hyper-attuned to others?
Another theory is that voters are largely incapable of discerning reality, so expressed policy preferences matter much less than atmospherics and vibes. This theory holds that voters will respond more to entertainment or projections of strength than to a policy-based focus on the Real Issues.’
So. Here’s the real nub. If a third of American voters can’t tell fact from ugly fiction, or actually prefer to be governed by racists,quacks and the mentally diminished, if they are Republicans, what are we to do? Is this a permanent shift in American politics? Or are there ways to rebuild trust in our neighbors, our institutions, our national pride?
‘The writer had already lost his home, his livelihood, and most of his family. Rumors were spreading that deportations east meant death, and he wrote “We hear that being deported East means they are going to kill us, but there’s just no way the Germans would do that.”’
Lately, I have tried to focus on ways to reconnect with those who might regret their vote, or whose habitual partisan roots might finally seem like a bad habit. People who are becoming increasingly alarmed at seeing Bad Things happen, even though they remain safe and unharmed. Two thoughts:
‘This is the Ditch Principle: Your ditch neighbor may disagree with you about everything except keeping the water running — so you start there. The neighbor who might pull you out of a snowbank doesn’t stop being your neighbor when you disagree about politics. Rural communities practice interdependence because isolation kills.’
‘How has Mamdani, an unapologetic socialist—and progressive Muslim and advocate for Palestinian rights—pulled off the feat of likely winning against the odds, against the tide, and against all early predictions? In part, I think, by calling forth the best from voters, rather than kowtowing to existing polling data.’
As a veteran educator, I hate saying this—but I don’t think this is something learned in required coursework, no matter how great your Civics curriculum is. Schools are a kind of stage, where society plays out its biases and beliefs, bad and good. Incorporating content standards into becoming a more responsible and caring human is something that can be modeled—but not tested and ranked.
There is no class syllabus that prescribes pulling your neighbor out of a snowbank—but if your dad pulls over on a snowy day to get a speeding classmate out of the ditch, you’ve learned an important lesson in interdependence. Likewise, there are teachers who call forth the best from students, by integrating facts and skills with compassion and curiosity.
I wish I had answers for these questions. What do YOU think?
I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan hosting General Electric Theater, on Sunday nights, when he would look sincerely into the camera and say “General Electric, where progress is our most important product.”
Presumably, progress was both inevitable and desirable—a mashup of American technologies and innovation, bringing (GE again) good things to life. On television, anyway.
Who would stand in the way of progress? Certainly not schools, who were educating rapidly increasing numbers of Boomer kids, using the modern look-see method of reading instruction, and embracing New Math.
According to family legend, my first grade teacher sent home a note asking my mother to stop letting me read to her, in case she said or did something wrong, impeding my literary progress with pre-approved books about Dick and Jane. She stopped immediately. Teacher knew best.
“Examples of progress are all around us. I carry in my pocket a computer that gives me access to almost all the existing knowledge in the world. That same device allows me to instantaneously connect with family and friends thousands of miles away. I can flip a switch and light my kitchen. If my heart gives out, I can get a new one. I can fly in the sky and travel almost anywhere on the planet. Nearly everywhere I may go, I will meet people who know how to read.
The world is a wonder. Let’s not doubt it. The creative power of humankind has yielded a modern world that is safer, richer, more connected, more mobile and full of opportunity for more people than our ancestors could have imagined.”
Where did all this progress come from? In addition to the inherent creative power of humankind, progress is nurtured by education, wherein creativity and curiosity turn knowledge into progressive action: Machines. Ideas. Institutions. Literature and art.
Maybe even better government.Countries, for example, where everyone has health care, and citizens embrace collective efforts to address global issues like climate change. Progress—if you define progress as moving forward to solve problems, bring good things to life.
Possibly you’re raising your hand right now, itching to tell me that there are multiple definitions of progress and progressivism, or that the opposite of conservative is not liberal, but progressive. I would suggest that what we’re seeing now—the movement to damage public education—is not conservative. It’s authoritarian vandalism. But let’s try to agree on a definition of what it means to be progressive.
Miriam-Webster: A left-leaning political philosophy and reform movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere.
It was not surprising to read this, in a must-read piece by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica: “In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.”
Progressive control of schools? Seriously?
Speaking as a person who has spent decades working in public schools and with public school teachers across the country, schools are generally among the most conventional and cautious institutions on the planet, subject to pressures and opinions from a wide range of (often clueless) critics. And likely headed by someone who adamantly does not want to get phone calls from honked-off parents.
I also say this as a person who taught fourth graders about systemic racism, in a general music unit from our REQUIRED music textbook, a collection of songs (Follow the Drinking Gourd; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot;Bring Me Little Water, Silvieand others) plus some pretty neutral fourth grade-appropriate text about the African formal and rhythmic roots of American popular music.
We were sitting on the big, round rug and one of the fourth graders asked why so many African-American songs (again, songs in our traditional music series) were about God. If their lives were so bad, he asked, why did they believe in heaven? It was a good question and led to an equally good discussion about what happens when people are oppressed—how they maintain cultural traditions, and hope.
If progressivism is about advancing the human condition, who’s against it? Besides the handful of people running the fatally compromised US Department of Education? The very people to whom diversity, inclusion and equity—progressive values– are anathema.
Convincing people that public school educators are a) raging leftists and b) persuading their students to defy their parents and adopt outrageous worldviews, then calling that progressivism is a fool’s errand. And 70 percent of the people who have first-hand experience with that—parents—generally believe that their public schools are doing the job they want them to do.
But societal shifts happen when false and unsubstantiated statements are repeated so often they become common knowledge. So be prepared to hear a lot of blah-blah about “progressive” public schools in the near future.
I haven’t written much about AI and education, for several reasons.
First, there are already many people writing compellingly and with considerable expertise about the uses and misuses of AI in the classroom. Some of those people will show up in this blog. Follow them. Read what they write.
This came to a head when I was invited to be part of an online panel on ed technologies. Presenters sent me the language they planned to use to introduce me—did I approve? I confirmed, and then they messaged back: the bio had been created by ChatGPT. Ha-ha.
Finally, I haven’t written much about AI because I just find it hard to conceptualize how it could be useful in the classroom. In other fields, perhaps—with a lot of caveats, oversight and suspicion—but it runs contrary to the essential purpose of teaching and learning. Doesn’t it?
It’s never seemed right to let machines do the ‘thinking’ or ‘creating’ that is better done, or at least attempted, daily, by children. In short, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been enlightened? So—shut up already?
For starters, who’s cool with Big Data collecting info on our public school kiddos’ engagement with their products? NEPC Report on digital platforms:
‘While educators may see platforms as neutral tools, they are in fact shaped by competing interests and hidden imperatives. Teachers, students, and administrators are only one market. The other market involves data on performance, usage patterns and engagement—data flowing to advertisers, data brokers and investors, often without users’ knowledge or consent.’
“AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced that will be “privately owned and sold to us.”
Why not take a pause—let’s call it a shutdown—on the race to embed AI in our schools? Why not sort through those competing interests and hidden imperatives? We’ve been bamboozled by climbing on attractive but ultimately damaging educational bandwagons before. Just who wants us on this one?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to approach this transformative technology with great caution, holding fast to the evergreen principle of teaching and learning being a social endeavor? To look at the available research before being bedazzled by something new?
‘Participants, mostly undergraduate and graduate students, who constructed essays with the assistance of ChatGPT exhibited less brain activity during the task than those participants who were asked to write on their own. The AI-users were much less likely to be able to recall what they had written and felt less ownership over their work. Independent evaluators who reviewed the essays found the AI-supported ones to be lacking in individuality and creativity.’
If you want to read better pieces on AI, many are hyperlinked in this blog. But here are a few folks whose words and thoughts come from places of deep knowledge and experience: Audrey Watters, the best Ed-Tech thinker on the planet, for my money.
Pete Buttigieg, who thinks ahead of trends. Stop worrying about when he’s going to run for President and start absorbing his ideas on politics and relevant policy. Including AI.
Lucian Truscott, who writes about many things and made me understand why AI may ultimately fail: The men who run the big AI companies would do well to think through what they are doing with all those big buildings and all that electricity they consume. The “answer,” such as it is, to what they are seeking to accomplish may not exist, or it may be simpler than they think.
My friend Peter Greene does a better job of debunking AI crapolathan anyone I know. I credit this to his decades of classroom experience, during which he Paid Attention to Things—things more important than launching new products and making the big bucks.
So why should anyone pay attention to what a tech skeptic writes about AI in schools?
Because we’ll all be lured into making photos come to life, or relying on a questionable AI answer to an important question, or laughing at Russ Vought as Grim Reaper. Sticky and fun, but ultimately shallow, inconsequential. Not what school-based learning should be.
Earlier this year, on a day when I made a (delicious) strawberry pie, I clicked on a song-writing app. Give us some lyrics, and a musical style, and we’ll write a song for you.
We need to make sure our coverage is rooted in enduring principles and values. We need to make sure we don’t “both sides” the issues when it comes to objective truths. We need to speak and deliver news with moral clarity. (Ben Meiselas)
I would imagine that most sentient people—red- or blue-leaning—would agree with Meiselas, an activist attorney and founder of Meidas Touch news network. To be more specific—most teachers would acknowledge that there are objective truths, common values upon which we have built our most enduring institutions, including public schools.
Anyone who’s spent considerable time in front of a classroom knows that dispensing assigned content is only a small fraction of the job. The easiest part, in fact. It’s much harder to get students to care about that content and agree to practice useful skills that will serve them well as adults.
In addition, classrooms serve as involuntary communities, places where kids will spend somewhere between 180 and 1000 hours together over the course of a school year. And functional communities have common values.
Any teacher who’s ever posted her list of classroom rules (or, God forbid, the Ten Commandments) and then been surprised when her students blithely ignore them, understands this principle. It takes time to establish what you might call moral clarity in a classroom.
How do you build a classroom community with common values? Some teachers initially rely on threats, fear and punishments to get what they want: compliance. Sound familiar?
Threats and fear will work on some kids, especially younger ones, for a time. But they don’t establish trust or a genuine sense of belonging, two enduring values in a classroom where everyone feels safe enough to learn (or disagree—or even act out).
‘In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.’
I like Gay’s word choice: respect. Classroom interactions built on respect will, over time, build communal trust, but only if the respect goes three ways: teacher to students, students to teacher, and students to students. Which means that every day, every lesson, is fraught with opportunities to build a functioning community that can actually absorb content, discuss Big Ideas and build skills.
Or tear it all down with a false remark, impulsive action or empty threat. Roxana Gay is right—if you don’t respect your students and what they bring to the table, don’t expect them to respect you or follow your rules, let alone learn what they’re supposed to be learning in your classroom.
What are the hallmarks of moral clarity in a public school classroom?
Mutual respect
Truth telling—kids are excellent lie detectors.
Purpose—Every teacher should be prepared to answer questions about why we’re doing this, and how it will be useful in the future. And that answer should never be “because it’s on the standardized test.”
Modeling behaviors that reflect intellectual curiosity, humility and forgiveness.
That last one? Admitting you don’t know everything and apologizing when you have wronged a student? Very humbling—and very important. I remember standing on the podium in front of 60 middle schoolers and apologizing for losing my temper the previous day and verbally castigating a couple of boys in the back row. I’m sorry, I said. This performance means a lot to me, but that’s no reason to jump all over somebody. I apologize.
There were several beats of shocked silence. I picked up my baton. And we proceeded to have an excellent, focused rehearsal. And after class, the two boys apologized to me.
Modeling.
In fact, if we were to sit down together over a cup of coffee, I could tell you dozens of stories from my teaching career that illustrate both moral clarity in my classroom, as well as times when I absolutely failed at establishing a trusting, collaborative ecology. It’s probably enough to say that I got way better at it, over 30+ years.
Moral clarity has been on my mind lately, as the country’s 250th birthday approaches, and the Department of Education launches its America 250 Civics Coalition with about 40 national and state organizations, including many conservative and religious groups, that will create curriculum for K-12 and university students in civics education.
If there ever were a subject that requires moral clarity, truth-telling and purpose, it would be the study of our nation’s history, government and values.
As events of the last week unfolded, it struck me that the blurry kids in the video would now be about the same age as Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk. Were they now part of the cluster of young white men who spend all their time online, getting radicalized? Do they follow Nick Fuentes or hang out on 4Chan?
Or—best case scenario—had they merely been immature, clueless, early-adolescent jerks whose irresponsible, harmful “prank” of insulting and perhaps scaring classmates of color, was made clear to them by a community of teachers and parents? In one of the news clips from 2016, the Royal Oak Superintendent talks about how the perpetrators will be dealt with summarily, keeping in mind that youthful mistakes can be learning experiences.
Because—despite the persistent myth that teachers should just spout content and inculcate skills, nothing more—learning happens in context. When some part of your class feels rejected, afraid or angry about being harassed in the cafeteria, nobody learns. Much of what we absorb in school are lessons about right and wrong. Civility and respect.
Things that weren’t on the lesson plan–no matter how old your students, or which subject you’re teaching. School is where students learn to deal with personal differences, taking turns and not always getting your way. And teachers—witness the illustration for this blog, just posted by a friend in a series of photos of her classroom—create materials, lessons and discussions to that effect, right out of the gate, even though it’s often considered not their job or, any more, none of their business.
We are at a point, this week, where teachers in twelve states have been fired or suspended for making remarks online about Charlie Kirk’s murder. In some states—you can guess which—state officials are inviting anonymous tips on teachers who may have said something in class that offended somebody, although the veracity of who said what, reported by students, then routed through parents, has to be uncertain at best.
Not to mention a giant waste of time at the beginning of the school year, as teachers are trying to build community and trust. Nor is any of this reducing the likelihood of the most politicized and terrifying violence in our classrooms: school shootings.
While teachers should absolutely keep their partisan loyalties to themselves, speaking about political violence is speaking about current events. As Brittany Page says:
“Political violence” isn’t just a conservative activist getting murdered.
Political violence is a Supreme Court that gives the green light for people to be stopped and detained based on their perceived race or ethnicity, what language they speak, where they work, and where they happen to be standing.
Click on the link. It’s a powerful piece, proof that we are all wading around in political violence every day, no matter how much they want us to shut up about it. It’s evil. To pretend it doesn’t exist makes it even more dangerous for all of us, including children.
‘Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Times change; people change.‘
The best part of that quote comes at the end. Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.
Robert Reich: ‘If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.
The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity.‘
Every clause in that last paragraph ought to be taught every day in every classroom in America. It’s the antidote to political violence.
It’s August. I admit that I am a sucker for the cute back-to-school photos—students holding little chalkboards, shiny floors and carefully stapled bulletin boards. Special props to veteran teachers, posing for their 26th year of sixth grade or new job as Dean of Students. Online, there are cheery little edu-pieces about team-building exercises and how to set work-life boundaries.
To which I say: Hahhahhahahhaa (deep breath) hahhahahhahahah.
I can see you veteran teachers in the back of the room–surreptitiously writing lesson plans during the mandated PD–muttering about plenty of other terrible First Days, like the year they were on strike or the year the building had black mold–or the August when the district was short nine certified teachers and just who was going to teach those kids?
And that, actually, is my point. No matter what’s going on in the world, and how it impacts children (who actually are, as the songwriter said, our future), public schools open their doors every fall and teach children. All the children. Including those that the private school refused to enroll, and the charter school declared ‘not a good fit’ last year.
And teachers? Robert Reich:94% of teachers have had to dip into their own pockets to buy school supplies. An estimated 1 in 6 have second jobs during the school year to make ends meet. The average Wall Street employee got a record $244,700 bonus last year. Something has gone terribly wrong.
With all due respect to Robert Reich, one of my personal top five political-thinker heroes, something went terribly wrong over a quarter-century ago. But—again, this is my point—nobody believes that the bus won’t come, the teacher won’t be meeting kids at the door, and school won’t start when they say it will. There may be too many kids, and too few resources, but our public schools will step up, one more time, and do their best.
In short, the news about public education is both terrible—and steadily getting worse—while simultaneously heartening. No matter how punitive the policy, how insulting the rhetoric, public education is still reliably America’s best idea.
It’s a great piece, all about how kids learn to obey (or not) in our classrooms, and what that means in a city–or society–facing police and military suppression. Are public schools doing students a favor by insisting on authoritarian classrooms? There’s a great topic for educators: How we manage our classrooms has an impact on the world that we want to live in. Discuss.
We could use a little bit of magic – a dash of deus ex machina – to lift our chances of surviving this. But we can make what looks like magic happen by applying steady pressure. Magic is when your opponents defeat themselves.Pressure creates the conditions for self-defeat.
Fighting on multiple fronts exhausts our opponents (don’t believe we’re the only ones who are exhausted). Showing resolve makes your opposition doubt their invincibility. A sense of humor infuriates them. Creating beautiful things and showing love and compassion utterly confuses them. Remaining focused and strategic exposes their weak spots. Showing you’ll go to the wall increases their fear. Showing up with successive waves of troops confounds them.
And that’s my wish for teachers everywhere, headed back to school:
Make your classroom a conduit for the country you wish to live in. Create beautiful things for and with your students. Show them love and compassion and dedication. Ignore threats. Break rules. Show resolve and especially, a sense of humor. Generate steady pressure against the forces that would destroy your important world-building work.
Teacher in a strange land 