Category / Anti-racist teaching

by nflanagan

How Do German Schools Teach Their Political History?

It was Ernest Boyer who declared that public education functions as a stage where Americans test and play out their deepest values and convictions.

Everything that happens around us shows up in public schools. Ask any teacher about keeping the outside world out of classroom dynamics. Ask any scolding pundit or self-righteous parent just how to stick to phonics and fractions when the very ground has shifted.

Can’t be done.

This might be a good place to quote Adolf Hitler: He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.

A word about playing the Hitler card. I have been justifiably criticized for raising the specter of actual fascism in school politics. This is not a thing to take lightly, I know; hyperbole always weakens an argument.

But I want to write here about a nation that once had a lot of explaining to do on that front, and has—from available evidence—been able, over the long span of three generations, to reconcile their role in what happened in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, triggering global catastrophe. Maybe we ought to pay attention.

Ten years ago, I had the revelatory experience of touring the Nazi Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, and visiting the Documentation Center there with an extraordinarily well-informed German guide, a doctoral student who was moonlighting as “World War II Tour” escort and educator.

It was a six-hour tour, and pricey, and you could sense the Americans we were traveling with growing weary of the information dump, wondering if the Christmas shop would still be open once the bus dropped us back off on the restored town square.

We wandered around the rally grounds and the man-made lake surrounding the building, once a Nazi headquarters and now the site of an extensive display of memorabilia and analysis. Our guide began by telling us that the impressive, forbidding structure we were looking at across the placid lake was not a museum.

Museums are for sharing cherished cultural artifacts, he said. There are plenty of those in Germany, and we encourage you to visit them. A documentation center, on the other hand, is a public record of a human failure—one for which Germany was responsible. It was Germans’ moral duty to keep the archived memory alive at the Documentation Center, in concentration camps, and courtrooms.

I wasn’t taking notes—I signed up for the tour with little foreknowledge of what I would see, how it would impact me. I remember a great deal of his running spiel. Our guide was an earnest, 30-something man in a plaid shirt, crooked tie and glasses, who carried two notebooks full of tabbed information and could give the veteran who asked precise information about range of Messerschmitt war planes.

A lot of the questions, in fact, came from men asking about military equipment and strategies, and not so many about the Holocaust or impact of the rise of fascism in Europe.

Asked whether Austria had a similar urge to document their own involvement with racial and religious discrimination, our guide made a face and declined to comment. Lesson Number One is that we always speak for ourselves, he said.

He spoke of regional political differences pre-War, how a country in acute financial distress could be utterly divided about causes and solutions. He talked about generational differences and how it took Germans three full generations to understand how a handful of men turned a fundamentally decent people into killers, persuading those for whom horrific prejudice was just not a deal-breaker, if Germany could be restored to greatness.

His grandparents, he said, were impressionable young people, just starting their family, during the rise of the Third Reich. They were gone now, but as a child he had been instructed by his parents not to listen to what Oma said about the terrible war years. She’s old, he’d been told. We’ll respect her for that. Don’t ask, and maybe she won’t tell.

His parents were the generation that bore their parents’ guilt. Then, as grandchildren of the Nazi legacy, his generation could finally claim to have actively worked to make sure it never happened again. In Germany, at least.

Questioned, he shared extensive data about the skinhead movement, a serious worry for the moderate government. But then he compared incidents of far-right violence in Germany to gun violence in America, a sobering contrast for anyone who was inclined to feel superior.

Someone asked the obvious question: How on earth could so many rational people buy into Hitler’s psychosis?

Ah, he said. This is where people from every nation must pay attention. Hitler was a genius at using available media and technology. Crystal radios were made cheap, and the same sticky message—an alternate, economically driven message of national pride—was pumped into all homes. “News” was what the party decided.

Public rallies were enormously effective. The Nuremberg site was chosen because it was cheap and easy to get to by train, and surrounding farms could house families and large groups of people from a single town, camping and sleeping in haylofts.

Everyone could participate—government was no longer centered in the industrial, better-educated north. A common enemy had been clearly identified, the future was brighter because there was a plan for everyone, not merely the political elites. The ultimate community-building success.

A man asked about the crumbling rally grounds, an “amazing historical facility.” Had there been any thought to restoring it? Our guide’s face darkened. “Let it rot,” he said. “Good riddance.”

I asked, as a teacher, what German schoolchildren were taught about Germany’s role in World War II. It was part of their national curriculum, he told us. They began with equity and community in early childhood, accepting differences and playing together. When students were 12, they read Anne Frank.Media literacy and logic and an intense focus on preparation for good, attainable, satisfying jobs were part of the program, in addition to history, economics and the predictable disciplines. We do not avoid our history, he said.

So what do you do in America, he asked?

Back in 2016, an honored fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and recognized expert on World War II was suspended from his job after a parent complained when he pointed out parallels between Nazi Germany and the 2016 election to students. It took a national petition and a global spotlight to get him reinstated.

Also in 2016, in the nation’s leading McNewspaper, Rick Hesse and Checker Finn called the actions of teachers and school leaders attempting to calm their students’ real post-election fears “histrionics.”

That was eight years ago. And look where we are today.

by nflanagan

Work Hard. Be Nice. Or Don’t.

I hate it when retired teachers comment on how glad they are not to be in the classroom in 2024. Their reasons range from academic and justifiable (“teachers have lost their professional autonomy”) to annoying (“kids today…”) to reflections on teaching in the era of Trump, when general nastiness is perceived as strength.

When teachers leave the classroom early in their careers, we lose something that was once commonly understood, across a diverse nation: teachers as respected members of the community, educated people whose opinions were valued. Teachers taught kids to wash their hands, tie their shoes and read books, and hauled them up for threatening weaker kids on the playground.  And parents appreciated those efforts.

In between critical content, from calculating sales tax to constructing a coherent paragraph, teachers must build little communities where kids can work productively together, pass safely through the halls, and experience the parameters of getting along with others.

Are all teachers successful in nurturing this? Of course not.

But all teachers do understand that there is not a lot of learning happening without order, structure and consideration for others. Every single teacher, from green newbie to grizzled veteran, struggles with this.  And there’s turnover every year, a new set of behavioral challenges that need to be addressed.

It’s the foundation of that recently vilified educational concept: Social-emotional learning.

I am currently running for school board in the community where I (happily) live—a school district that is well-run and offers solid programming, a place where students are known and cared for. I attended a Board retreat last week, and as part of the goal setting process, the facilitator invited attendees to name teachers or other school staff who are doing an outstanding job.

A dozen hands went up immediately, and the comments made by Board members, administrators and parents were all about things staff members did to enhance students’ personal growth and well-being. In other words, social-emotional learning, woven into curriculum, instruction and school climate.

Understand: all teachers either consciously include social-emotional elements in their daily practice, or benefit from good SEL, instituted by other educators in the pipeline, teaching kids how to behave in school along with their ABCs.

This—empathically—does not refer to pre-packaged “character” curriculums, as one size never fits all. You can’t buy genuine social-emotional learning. It has to be custom-tailored to the kids in front of you.

If you try to remove genuine social-emotional considerations from instruction and classroom management, you’ve created more problems for yourself. It’s the old saw about kids needing to know the teacher cares and will try to make their classroom a safe space for everyone.

So they can learn.

I’ve read lots of pieces about the corrosive effects of SEL, which generally boil down to the fact that SEL, as a set of pedagogical ideas, is not value-neutral.  And that’s true. Social-emotional learning reflects the values of the teacher and school, whether explicitly expressed or not.

That’s really not what anti-SEL commenters are worried about, however. As self-titled “Instruction Geek” Daniel Buck says: At its worst, SEL is a means to slip progressive politics into the classroom.

Gasp! There’s the rub, all right. Things like examining evidence for truth? Not in my school!

In fact, there’s always been social-emotional learning in schools, from the dunce cap to the hand-slap ruler wielded by Sister Victorine against misbehavers in your fifth grade. Labeling it and examining it—whether you call it character education, or classroom rules—is a good thing. What are we trying to teach kids, besides Algebra and World History?

I’ve always been intrigued by the KIPP Charter Schools’ founding motto, established in 1994: Work hard. Be nice. Those are certainly two explicit values, values embedded in what I think Americans want from their public schools—academic rigor and cooperative students.

When the KIPP organization decided to drop that motto in the summer of 2020, here’s what their CEO, Richard Barth said: It ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.

Which the Wall Street Journal and a dozen right-wing bloggers called “woke nonsense”—and worse.

If KIPP schools can re-think their expressed values, for the benefit of students, so can public school teachers. It’s possible for schools to reflect the values of their community, as well as cultivating the characteristics of civic engagement, kindness and diligence.

It’s how you build a learning community.

by nflanagan

In Praise of Social Studies

In my long and checkered career as a classroom teacher, I taught instrumental and vocal music, mathematics, ESL and the occasional oddball middle school class necessitated by the fact that, as a (qualified) music teacher, my music classes could contractually be huge—so I could be assigned a class of kids left over in the scheduling process by putting 75 students in one beginning band class.

I learned a great deal while teaching things I wasn’t technically qualified to teach. But I never got to teach my favorite non-music subject: Social Studies. (Notice that I didn’t call this subject History or Economics, two narrowly defined class titles that are approved by the anti-public school mafia.)

I think that poor, maligned Social Studies, the last outpost of mostly-untested subjects, is probably the most critical academic field for K-12 students to explore, if we want them to become good neighbors and engaged citizens. It’s where they learn (theoretically), what it means to be an American.

But ask any third grade teacher what gets short shrift in their daily lessons. Or ask which secondary curricula is the most scrutinized by people who haven’t been in a classroom in decades.

When you hear people talk about how we need more Civics education in this nation, what they want is a range of social knowledge: history, of course, but also government, geography, sociology, political science and early-elementary trips to the fire house and the public library.

What it means to be an American. How we got to where we are—arguably, the most powerful nation on earth. What values we claim to embrace. How physical and historical features, and population migrations, shaped our culture.

Isn’t that critical, essential stuff? Not to mention engaging—when taught with the mindset that this is the content that one needs to know, to become a fully functional adult in the United States?

Today, which used to be the day we honored Christopher Columbus for a bunch of shady reasons, might be a good time to ask some questions about social studies, and their current place in the school curriculum.

My fear is that Social Studies, an incredibly rich and applicable field of interrelated content, will be further squeezed out of the curriculum, or become a dry, testable, bunch-of-facts sequence, none of which bears relevance to the diverse, often catastrophic world our students live in. What Hess calls catastrophism might just describe how passion has always shaped our politics.

And politics, civil or not, is just the means to get the world we want.

A couple of years ago, the Michigan Democrats posted a statement on their Facebook page:

The purpose of public education in a public school is not to teach students what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.”

The statement was quickly criticized—Parents’ Rights!—and walked back, but I think there’s some truth there. Parents want their children to be literate, and numerate, for sure. But when it comes to understanding what science tells us about climate change, or encouraging 18-year olds to become informed voters, should a subset of parents be able to shut that whole thing down?

Here’s a toast to social studies teachers everywhere, as we approach November 5. You go.

by nflanagan

Bomb Threats in Schools

Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced a bomb threat in your school.

I have, perhaps a half-dozen times over the span of a few years, teaching at both a middle school and a high school. The first time was mostly confusing. There was a P.A. announcement, and—following fire drill procedures—we led our classes to the far edge of the parking lot, where they stood in ragged lines. Most of the students were nervous and joking about who might have called in a bomb threat. The police came, with dogs, and went through the building. Nada.

The next time it happened, that year, it was cold and snowing. Kids went outdoors without coats. Buses were dispersed as soon as the drivers could get there, and 600 shivering kids were sent to the HS, two miles away, and sat in the auditorium for a couple of hours. They were bored and restless and had to go to the bathroom NOW because it was AN EMERGENCY.

Teachers clustered in the aisles, quietly sharing the names of kids who were absent and speculating. Someone found a VCR in the projection booth and put on a G-rated movie, which acted as an ineffective numbing drug.  We ended up losing close to three hours before the building was cleared and we could go back.

Then it happened again. Kids were bused again. But this time, the Superintendent came in and tried to scare them straight. We WILL find the culprit, he said. He WILL be expelled, and maybe spend time in Juvie. If you’ve heard anybody say they know who did this, tell us. We’ll protect you and it’s the right thing to do. Just tell the principal or one of your teachers.

Now—I taught in a nearly all-white, suburban school, where most parents had college degrees and came to parent-teacher conferences. They didn’t want their kids to lose learning time because a couple of delinquents thought it was funny to call in what amounted to terrorist threats.

I mention that it was an all-white school not because Black or Hispanic parents would expect or tolerate bomb threats – they wouldn’t, then or now—but because there was no small, minority group of students to automatically blame (as, let’s be honest, would have happened, evidence-free). Whoever called in the threats was most likely one of our own white kids, living in a nice subdivision with their mom and dad.

The fourth time it happened, teachers were privately notified by notes sent from the office. See anything unusual in your classroom? Restrooms will be closed during passing time. There will be cops in the hall. There had been a bomb threat at the high school, too (where I was supposed to be headed, later in the afternoon). Rumors swirled.

In Michigan we take bomb threats very seriously. The worst school disaster in Michigan—the Bath School Massacre, nearly a century ago—killed 38 children and 6 adults, injuring 58 others. It was a homemade bomb, planted and set off by a school board member, angry about taxes. (Really.) Sometimes, tragedy set off by idiots actually happens.

The bomb threat caller at my school was eventually identified and known only to officials. Teachers were not informed, nor was the public, leading one to believe that the bomb caller was probably in the 7th grade or thereabouts. They disrupted learning, cost the district significant money and made a lot of people apprehensive. They made school leaders’ lives miserable, and spurred parent demands.

They metaphorically yelled FIRE! in a crowded theater. But nobody was injured or dead.  These days, when real-life school shooters have terrified, injured or killed more than 338,000 kids in the past quarter-century, that’s a success story.

Those calling in bomb threats to elementary and middle schools in Springfield, OH—not to mention a hospital and City Hall–are terrorists, all right. And the targets of their wrath are innocent children. They fall into the most dangerous category of would-be school bombers: Hate bombers. Those who would kill the vulnerable for ideological, racial, religious or ethnic reasons.

And, as the harried Mayor of Springfield correctly noted: It was their words that did it.

Whose words? Why, their own Senator from Ohio, who admitted he may have “created” the story of abducted dogs, cats and geese. And his blabbermouth running mate, who wants to run American Carnage Nation again.

Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s Press Secretary on the migrant pet hoax: What is happening here is an attempt to tear apart communities … maybe we should not have leaders who fall for fake internet conspiracy theories. We should think about that.

But, of course, Trump saw the pets-for-dinner story on TV. So it must be true.

I wonder if he saw the smashed windows and shutdowns. Or the Proud Boys.

Fomenting violence! Against children! What a disgrace.

If you’re still hanging around Twitter (and good on you if you’re not)—look up New York Times Pitchbot, authored by @DougJBalloon. Who may have made the most bitterly satirical post about the whole bomb threat situation in Ohio:

I have never been a supporter of Donald Trump. But if Democrats cannot keep his diehard fans from making bomb threats to schools, I’ll have no choice but to vote for him for a third time.

by nflanagan

How People Vote. How People Choose a “Good” School. Is it Common Sense?

When my son—a Korean adoptee—was in 5th grade, he had a student teacher who was Korean-American. Alex idolized Mr. Thacker, one of the very few Asian faces in our 96% white community. Mr. Thacker took him fishing. When the district hired Mr. Thacker to teach 6th grade, I requested that Alex be placed in Mr. Thacker’s class the following year.

Alex’s 5th grade teacher caught me in the hallway after school, at the end of the year. You know Mr. Thacker is a newbie teacher, she said—and there are some excellent choices among the 6th grade veterans. This will be his first year of teaching. Someday, he’s going to be a great teacher, but…

I’d already had that conversation in my head—and gone with my heart. What mattered most to me was having a great role model. Even if that role model was still filling his instructional toolkit and mastering the curriculum. Kids learn more when they’re seen, acknowledged for who they are.

I think that’s how people vote, as well. When the candidate—for County Commission, Township Supervisor or President—acknowledges YOU and your beliefs, rings your chimes, you’re going to vote for them. Even if they’re racist, traitorous and don’t make a lot of sense.

Some of this is partisan, some mere habit. But driving downstate, along the western Michigan coastline last week, through largely white, economically stressed communities, I was stunned by the number of Trump signs. These are the people who think they were better off when their loved ones were dying from COVID but gas, which OPEC couldn’t get rid of, was $2 a gallon.

A couple days after Trump was elected, in 2016, there was a dust-up in a middle school cafeteria in Royal Oak, Michigan, with kids shouting “Build That Wall.”  It was handled quickly by school personnel, but a video surfaced, and was widely shared by teachers.

Here it comes, we said to each other. Chaos and racism have been set loose.

For anyone who has spent lots of time in a classroom, it’s clear that the attitudes and speech and actions of the wider world (and especially parents) show up– quickly– in the things their children do and say in school.

The campaign to demean public schools and teachers, ongoing since 2016 (and put on steroids in the pages of Project 2025), is reflected in the despicable remarks of the right-wing commentariat. Despicable remarks about Gus Walz and Ella Emhoff—not going to link to those—and top-of-ticket candidates will draw some voters in.  And those remarks will harm kids. Kids in our schools.

It’s easy to label them low-information voters—they are, in fact. But they’re also responding to old beliefs and stereotypes. They’ve been explicitly taught to reject mainstream media and fact-checking. They go with their gut and “their own research,” such as it is.

From a great piece in New Yorker:

Scott, who works in private equity, stuck by his guns… “I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” 

Maybe “common sense” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Or easy to define.

Maybe “common sense” lies in a PR firm’s ability to give people license to embrace their biases, as well as their fantasies: Morning in America.  Boots, not flip-flops.  Make America Great Again.

With the wave of education ‘reform’ that started when Boots-not-Flipflops took office, and tried to recreate the Faux Texas Miracle nationally, lots of people who should have known better got on board. Tests! That’s the ticket! Now we’ll know how to identify a good school—data!

School choice orgs and spokespersons revved up the charters/vouchers machine. Every child deserves a good school—who could disagree? Not me, certainly.

But as the whole NCLB juggernaut lurched along, many of those reformers were dismayed to notice what choices untrained, garden-variety parents valued: Winning sports teams. Transportation. After-school childcare.  Programming for their kids that didn’t necessarily result in higher test scores, like an orchestra, drama club or robotics.

Maybe people choose schools—or teachers—the same way they vote. With their gut.

I taught school with guys like Tim Walz for more than three decades—the coach who taught Social Studies. Walz, as Jan Ressenger notes in this fine piece, is an unabashed apologist for public education:

What does it mean that after two decades of attacks—first with No Child Left Behind’s branding schools by their test scores as “failing,” and now since 2019, with blaming schools and teachers for school closures during COVID—someone running for Vice President of the United States just casually drops a comment celebrating public schools as America’s great contribution?

My favorite Tim Walz meme, making the rounds right now: This is a real thing that happened: Tim Walz was inducted into the West Mankato HS Sports Hall of Fame. He stuck around after the ceremony to help put the chairs away.

As I said—I know this guy. And thousands like him. The kind of teacher and coach who draws families to the local school, so their kids can have a role model. Someone who sees their kids and acknowledges them for who they are.

For those who think this is low-information, sentimental baloney: Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

So there’s your policy.

As for Mr. Thacker? Still teaching. Still taking kids fishing. Still the kind of guy who hangs around and helps put the chairs away.

by nflanagan

I am a Patriot

I am a patriot and I love my country. Because my country is all I know.

Jackson Browne

Of all the things manifested by the upheaval dividing this nation politically, the appropriation of the concept of patriotism by the right wing troubles me the most. Why? Because my country is all I know–and I am loyal to its virtues and principles, while fully recognizing its many tribulations.

I’m sure that every citizen registered to vote in November feels the same way: they’re voting to save the country from sliding into despotism, to secure freedom, the blessings of liberty, yada yada. The fact that the two distinct roads to said patriotism diverge in a black forest of confusion, even violence, is terrifying, however.

Who’s the patriot? And who deserves to have their lives and values suppressed?

Watching the news, and reading—one laborious, revolting chapter at a time—Project 2025, it’s pretty clear that the authors of that document feel that their activist zeal to change the nation is driven by patriotism, their love of country, And if that drifts over the line to white nationalism, well… many of our leading Senators are down with that, too.

It’s funny. One of the things I was never uncomfortable teaching or promoting in the classroom was an explicitly pro-America, patriotic point of view. Musically, and culturally, I endorsed patriotic traditions and celebrated the musical innovations that sprang from so-called melting pot.

Kind of ironic, considering how I felt about the Vietnam war, and the arguments I used to have with my father, a WWII veteran. My country, right or wrong, was his modus operandi. But I thought then, back in the 1970s, and even now, that loving the place where you live, where your ancestors settled, where you’ve put down roots and built community, means you can also be clear-eyed about mending  its every flaw.

I am a patriot. And I love my country.

I love the idea that it took decades of discourse for the early, 18th century Rebels (by no means a majority) to organize in resisting colonial rule, fighting the imposition of taxation without representation (which still resonates today). I think all children in America should know the truth about our Founding Fathers, and their multi-racial legacies.  I think elementary schools should hold mock elections and HS Social Studies teachers should organize voter registration drives. I think flying the national flag—right side up—is everyone’s prerogative.

I also think the Superintendent of Schools in Norman, Oklahoma, who declared “We’re not going to have Bibles in our classrooms”—after a memo from Ryan Walters, their moronic State Superintendent specifying that all OK classrooms will offer Bible-based instruction—is a patriot.

A patriot who understands our foundational principles–the separation of church and state, for example. Perhaps even a patriot who sees citizenship-building, not just job training, as a core purpose of public schools.

Can patriotism be taught?

E.D. Hirsch just published a book in which he states that we can:

 “…transform future citizens into loyal Americans.” Hirsch feels that “patriotism is the universal civil religion that our schools need to support on moral and pragmatic grounds as the glue that holds us together.” He believes the foundation of patriotism is in a shared knowledge base, which all citizens must have to participate together in a community or engage in communication. Hirsch states, “we can create specific standards, so each classroom becomes a speech community whose members all understand what is being said, because they all possess the needed relevant background knowledge.”

This is classic, evidence-free Hirschian blah-blah. If only everyone analyzed the Articles of Confederacy together, or memorized the Gettysburg address, or studied Julius Caesar in the 8th grade (using Hirsch’s handy-dandy curriculum guides, of course), we’d all get a boost of love-yer-country loyalty? Because we’d all be on the same academic wavelength?

Having spent decades hanging out with actual middle schoolers, who were taught a fairly universal set of ideas and skills, I can tell you that more standardization will not make anyone more aware of the virtues or drawbacks of real life in a diverse democracy. Furthermore, the whole idea is vaguely reminiscent of other, failed social movements.

You can model genuine patriotism. You can teach patriotic–and protest–arts and literature, to enlarge students’ perspectives on what it means to endure hardship and sacrifice in the service of one’s country. You can toss out provocative ideas—Should everyone be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance?—and your average fourteen year old will undoubtedly have an opinion, which you can then dissect and examine.

But you can’t make kids love the United States of America.

No T-shirt or baseball cap, let alone a traditional school curriculum, can do that. It comes from maturity, and the heart.

My Country ‘Tis of Thee (Land of Inequity)  Song by Reina del Cid

Hate Definitely Has a Home Here

If there’s one question on the minds of my friend group these days—old friends, fellow teachers, new acquaintances, anyone paying attention—it’s this: How can anyone, let alone a third of the population, look at current events in the United States in the past year, and believe that we are on the right track, doing OK,…

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Oh, Canada!*

We went to see Come From Away this week, at the Stephenson Theatre, part of the Phoenix Art Museum complex. It’s a show I’ve wanted to see for some time, recommended by friends and—well, it’s a musical. It was stunningly good, a show about the 38 planes stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, diverted there after 9/11—and…

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Gifted and Talented Redux

I got my master’s degree in gifted education—actually, a master’s in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on identifying and serving gifted students, but whatever. At the time—the 1980s—I was focused on the ‘talented’ part, as a music teacher. What could I do, I wondered, to better understand and challenge the exceptionally proficient students who…

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by nflanagan

Just How Bad are Things?

I have to say this: the left side of the aisle has WAY better memes than the right side. From the bold, white-on-black “I Dissent” to the Martha Gelhorn quote—“If we mean to keep any control over our world, we must be interested in politics”—Dem-flavored bon mots have more wisdom and wit (“Come celebrate our last Fourth of July!”) than bible-verses-with-guns Tweets from the right.

But damn. This has been a rough few days for those of us who believe Martha Gelhorn was right.

Anne Lamott is right, too: It’s so horrible to have to deal with last night etc without Molly Ivins, but I know exactly what she would say: “Sweetpea, let’s have this conversation in a week or two.”

And for most of us, that’s about the best we can do. Right now.

Wait and see.

Choices will be made. We can decide to live with them, and act accordingly. Or not.

I was in the classroom for a long time. And many times—many, many times—we rode rough political waves, and I would think (after a third millage loss, or the Governor establishing our state-based employees as Right to Work, etc.) that All Was Lost.

I remember thinking, more than once, that we had reached rock bottom as a school district. Maybe it was when the Superintendent hired armed guards to hang around and threaten picketing teachers? And some of those freshly trained armed guards were our recent graduates?

I also remember being pregnant in the 1980s, and having a conversation with a similarly pregnant mother about our reservations at bringing children into the kind of world that would elect Ronald Reagan.

I’d call what I thought was disastrous then, compared to what’s happening right now, a failure of imagination.

That pregnant friend? We had healthy political discussions, once our girls were born, about how to resist the greed and trickle-down economy by teaching our children and students about diversity and equity, the things that made our country great. OUR schools were going to make a difference in kids’ lives. Give them skills—and hope.

That was then, of course.

I never, ever would have predicted what has happened to public education—the organized and well-funded attacks, the false accusations—back then.

Nor, of course, would I have foreseen the outcomes of the Trump presidency:  the criminal indictments, the election denial, the January 6th insurrection, the collapse of the Supreme Court. The Covid deaths. The loss of reproductive rights, and danger to women’s health.

Yeah, it’s really bad.

But the trick is not losing hope. Thinking creatively, rather than defensively. 

Otto von Bismarck said—Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable… We have certainly been shown what is attainable, this week—overturning centuries of precedent to save one man. But there are possibilities for the left, as well. We need leadership.

What can Joe Citizen do, right now?

Stay informed. Read selectively. Express yourself to friends, with receipts. Stay calm—take your vacation and unplug, and come back ready to pitch in, whatever you can spare, to ensure a safe election. Because this one really matters.

My best friend and I drove down to Washington D.C. in January of 2017, for the Women’s March, to be part of history and to fan the flames of hope. To think: We are not alone. Four years later, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and a few thousand friends broke into the Capitol. I am guessing they were there to feel connected as well.

What happened in those four years?

by nflanagan

A Semi-Elderly Teacher’s Reflection on the Digital World and Education

So—I’m a retired teacher, with more than three and a half decades of classroom practice under my belt. Supposedly, I should be sitting at home, enjoying sunsets and repeating how glad I am that I’m no longer in the classroom.

I actually know a few retired teachers like that—glad to be golfing, disinterested in educational politics—but not many. For those of us who invested our lives in public education, what’s happening in public schools right now is an insult to the low-paid, little-understood work we did to build good citizens in divergent communities; it’s a betrayal of our commitment to our students.

Watching curricula being destroyed and public schools defunded by voucher schemes is soul-crushing. Maybe the most frustrating thing is the naïve belief that technology is going to save us, that students most need screen-delivered, standardized content, not face-to-face human relationships with well-educated adults, who can help them make sense of disciplinary knowledge.

Every aspect of becoming truly educated depends on our students’ ability to comprehend and evaluate information. To think that students aren’t negatively impacted by the unfiltered digital stew surrounding them is worse than naïve. We have not served our students well, offering up their test data (legally mandated, of course) to corporations, or letting them zone out digitally, while in school with their fellow humans.

I remember, back in the 1990s, my colleagues’ collective consternation over Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, when they were the hot ticket with our middle schoolers. Does spending six hours a day in front of a screen, shooting things or wrecking cars, have an impact on students’ curiosity or kindness or any other pro-social habits? Guess we were going to find out.

I thought of that when I read this headline: Uvalde families sue Instagram and Call of Duty maker over deadly school attack. ‘Unholy trinity’ of Instagram, Activision and Daniel Defense accused of ‘working to convert alienated boys into mass shooters.’

The NYTimes recently ran a feature article on a family whose 13-year old daughter was spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

The benefits of learning to live without dependence on social media seemed pretty obvious to me. Communication with her family would happen the old-fashioned way: letters, via snail mail. A school year like that—this was a boarding school, in the Australian wild, hundreds of miles from home—could shape a personality, even a lifetime. A year at this school also costs $55,000.

So—some people are willing to pay big bucks for their children to develop apart from 24/7 connectivity. And there seems to be a building wave of acknowledgement that digital media has done a number on teenagers. Not to mention our neighborhoods, civic organizations, schools and families.

Half of all adults in America get ‘at least some’ of their news from social media. And the results of that—the mistrust of mainstream media, the ease of delivery, the alternative facts—means that ‘truth’ is illusive in the political realm, a situation that matters greatly right now.

We used to argue, back in the day, about the advisability of using white boards, if the ability to ‘publish’ student work online would make them more motivated, and whether calculators would render students unable to, well, calculate. One-to-one devices were going to be the saving grace.

But it turns out that corporations were way ahead of us—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, X, Tik-Tok—and pretty much in control of what our students see and potentially think. For better and for (much) worse, schools are now fighting for their share of the attention economy.

Social media outsources the monitoring and managing of this colossal data load to poorly paid workers in Africa and Asia. Ever had your innocent Facebook post taken down as “inappropriate?” That’s why. Mis-information and dis-information are now central to public life.

No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.

I just finished reading (old-fashioned book) Our Biggest Fight, the in-print manifesto of Project Liberty: ‘leading a movement of people who want to take back control of their lives in the digital age by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.’ 

Sounds good, no? I’m less sanguine than the CEO of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt Jr.. about the prospect of a citizen-led withdrawal from the addictive hold social media has on American adults, and especially on American kids. McCourt says we need great stories to turn this around, and reclaim the power of the internet—and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that teachers and schools have been trying to tell great, non-digital stories about our history and values for decades, and it’s an uphill battle.

You may have noticed that this semi-elderly retired teacher has so far avoided the topic of AI. I’m only too familiar with being pitched on the magical powers of a developing technological marvel to make things “easier” for schools, teachers, learning, etc. etc. Peter Greene has posted a number of great blogs on the folly of believing AI is what we educators have been waiting for.

Here’s Sarah Kendzior’s take:

What gets marketed as “artificial intelligence” is plagiarism: scraped off bits of real people’s ideas, devoid of context or credit.

Google’s AI Overview is worse, though. It seems set on killing you.

“How many rocks should I eat each day?” people asked Google. AI Overview responded that people should eat at least one small rock per day because they contain healthy vitamins and nutrients. The source was an Onion article, but AI cannot discern satire.

And so it goes.

by nflanagan

What about Homeschooling?

Families who choose to homeschool their children have never been on my negative/activist radar, as a veteran public school educator. I have had both positive and not-so-positive experiences with students who were homeschooled–from a pair of shy, well-behaved sisters who fit seamlessly into the middle school music program due to years of independent music lessons, to a sweet boy who had never really learned to read in the 7th grade and tended to wander aimlessly around the music room, once his mother finally decided to send him to school at age 12.

My ambivalence about homeschooling is likely because I became a teacher in a time when homeschoolers were often young hippie parents who worried that schools would suppress their children’s natural gifts in favor of compliance and standardization.

This was the era of Paulo Freire and Summerhill, and—perhaps my favorite book about education— “Teaching as a Subversive Activity,” by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. The subtitle is worth mentioning:  A No-Holds-Barred Assault on Outdated Teaching Methods-with Dramatic and Practical Proposals on How Education Can Be Made Relevant to Today’s World. (1971)

Today, homeschoolers are often escaping what they see as Godless classroom chaos, or a curriculum that acknowledges certain truths about our diversity and honest national history. The pandemic and its aftermath pushed parents on both sides of the masking question into involuntary home academics, and left people frustrated.

So much for drama and relevance, letting children direct their own learning, at their pace and honoring their interests. Instead, as David Labaree and Deborah Malizia note:

Schooling moved from a shared learning and cultural experience that generated a sense of community and common purpose to an individual competition for the grades, credits, extra-curricular achievements and degrees that determine students’ future life chances.

Once college enrollments surged in the mid-20th century, the struggle became a contest to gain admission into the most selective college possible. Rising levels of income inequality have only intensified the competition. One result is the devastating increase in student stress and social disconnection, in a setting where every student becomes a potential adversary in the race for extrinsic achievement, and the relentless pressure hurts students at all levels. 

This is not how schools were supposed to evolve—they were supposed to be sites for building citizenship, democratic equality and opportunity. But here we are.

Still. If Mama wants to educate her little ones at home, I’m OK with that, as long as my tax dollars are not paying for skiing lessons or $500 LEGO sets, part of a misguided voucher scheme.

We are likely to see those kiddos at some point, in the public system, perhaps middle school or high school when the home-school teacher’s curricular expertise across the board founders. Or when one of the kids wants to play in the band, join the chess club or the public school basketball team.

Just as public schools have tried to adapt to their surroundings and unplanned events, like a global pandemic, families have tried to custom-tailor their children’s education. I’m not saying that I think all of those pull-your-kids-out choices were good ones –thinking here about that 12-yr old non-reader, or kids whose parents reject the idea of getting along with people who are very different from you, in a pluralistic society.

But–a strong public school system, built on quality teaching and rich curriculum, still can serve multiple perspectives in a healthy  community, including the desire to educate one’s children at home.

Where I get off the homeschooling train is when homeschoolers refuse to follow community-driven policies. Vaccinations, for example. If you want a free, high-quality public education, or the opportunity to use public schools, at any point, as a springboard for your children’s ultimate goals, you may have to follow a few rules.

The Michigan Legislature is currently considering a registry of all school-age children. Homeschoolers would have to, by law, notify the state that they were homeschooling their children. Beyond that—things like curriculum and testing, which are largely controlled by legislation, for example—there is a great deal of freedom for homeschoolers.

This feels like common sense to me, much like a census or licensing vehicles. Where are the kids being homeschooled—are there are large number in a particular district? Why? Can we expect to see them return to the public school and prepare for that? Where are the kids who are not being schooled at all, home or otherwise—and are they safe? Why do homeschoolers find a simple registry threatening?

It’s interesting how many homeschoolers see this as government interference. Given the increases in homeschooling, this seems like critical data to have: Michigan is home to roughly 1.7 million school-age children, and 1.36 million are in public schools, while 182,000 are in private schools, according to 2022 Census data. That would leave about 150,000 students who are either homeschooled or have dropped out.

That’s a lot of kids. I’d be willing to bet that not all of them are being lovingly homeschooled by teachers with the skills to help them move forward academically.

by nflanagan

The Return of the Tradteacher

Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and control the finances. Reinforcing patriarchal norms and glorifying the satisfying and ‘natural’ role of housewife.

If you’re hearing a touch of cynicism there, well—I lived through a time when the tradwife, even if she was working, could not get a credit card or substantial business loan. While I certainly defend any woman’s right to stay home and support her children and spouse in places other than an outside workplace, the whole “tradwife” schtick (especially combined with the rollback of Roe) makes me itchy.

It also strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.

I also see lots of pushback against untraditional teaching, curriculum and school organization models. The whole “Science of Reading” battle rings very familiar to those of us who started teaching in the 1970s, when teachers were pushing back against the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” –because teachers theoretically weren’t teaching phonics–crusade in the late 50s.

Nearly all of the folks who taught me were tradteachers, using trad methods, and when I entered the classroom, many of my teaching colleagues were 100% traditional-minded as well: Straight rows, direct instruction, textbook-based, daily homework, and off to the principal should you disobey orders. And some of those folks were effective teachers.

But lots of the opinion writing I see from Moms4Liberty, NYT columnists, conservative politicians and ed-bloggers focuses on how different education looks and feels from the classrooms they remember, decades ago—classrooms that may have been racially and economically monolithic, and headed by a series of teachers who did things in the same way.

Peter Greene recently had a good piece about Gloria Jean Merriex, a Florida teacher who broke out of her traditional mold and had some great success. A couple of lines jumped out at me:

Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.

Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself. She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her.  Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.

For many, perhaps most, teachers, their first years in the classroom might look very much like the way those newbies themselves were taught. It was certainly that way for me, wanting to be the World’s Greatest Band Director and following the exact procedures and ideas I had experienced in bands and at music camp in high school. For many years, I too was a competent-but-not-exceptional teacher, like Ms. Merriex.

I also broke out of the traditional mold, and while not all of the things I tried were big successes, I was able to redefine what I wanted students to take away, for the rest of their lives, from being in my classroom. I accomplished many of those goals. I read social media for music teachers now, and I see great changes in thinking about the Big Ideas—from competition to creativity—in music ed.

Traditional teaching—and like tradwives, the definitions are murky—is not always or even often the best bet. Especially if that teacher’s goal is to move every student under her watch forward.

Stanford Professor Jo Boaler is something of an iconoclast in non-traditional math education, and recently–no surprise–there’s been yet another dustup over Boaler’s ideas.

She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking.

Right there in the first sentence, there are three uber-traditional practices—tracking, timed tests, and doing a series of problems to iron in an algorithm, to get the right answers rather than seeking to understand the concepts underlying the calculation. And who’s out to get Boaler? Well, men who have been the beneficiaries of understanding and excelling at traditional mathematics.

It’s an enormously complex endeavor, teaching. Sticking to the habitual, and ignoring students who check out, only works for awhile. BUT—listen to legislators and parents talk about schooling, and a lot of what you’re hearing is somewhere between nostalgia and flat-out misinformation. The book-banning, faux CRT, Tik-tok blaming, skeptical-of-teachers crowd hasn’t got a clue about what it’s like to teach kids in 2024, beginning with some clarity about the purpose of public education.

As Jess Piper says, in a wonderful column called You Don’t Like It? Move!:

None of us is safe so long as there are folks living in states that are unsafe. They will roll over us first, and you next. The billionaires are using my state AG and other regressive state AGs to file suit to dismantle public schools. They sue to ban abortion and the medicine for self-managed abortions. They sue to stop college loan forgiveness. They sue to overturn civil rights and anti-discrimination policies.

As Piper says—hey, we can’t all move, or teach in a private school where we can craft our own processes, research and convictions. But returning to traditional methods isn’t the policy answer. You have to move forward. It’s the way of the world.