Category / Community

by nflanagan

Political Messaging, Schools and Republicans

I just finished Rachel Bitecofer’s feisty, punchy book on political messaging, “Hit ‘Em Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.”

Recommended—although not, as the subtitle suggests, to beat Republicans at their own despicable, even shocking, game. Recommended because we’re in crisis, and being smarter and nicer is no longer cutting it.

In December of 2020, I wrote a blog entitled Republicans. Up until that point, in my political perspective, there were country-club Republicans who were conservative, in the traditional sense of keeping things that preserved beneficial aspects of their lives in place. And there were the rabid right-wing crazies who emerged like locusts after Barack Obama was elected. But the two were merging, and the outlook for keeping two distinct parties that counterbalanced each other’s policy goals, for the good of the nation, was dim. The Republicans were ruining democracy. On purpose.

I took some grief for that blog, from die-hard moderate Republicans (who are thick on the ground where I live and work), and also from some Democrat friends who thought it took me way too long to outright reject and stomp on anyone who voted Republican in the past two decades.

From the standpoint of March 2024, and Rachel Bitecofer’s crisp and direct prescriptions for saving democracy, however, my hardcore Dems friends were right: You don’t get anywhere with a mushy message, a bunch of facts, and reaching across the aisle. And you can’t share those great policy ideas unless you can get elected.

I blame my 32-year career as a public-school teacher for this habit of equivocating and looking for points of agreement. I spent most of my time trying to reduce conflict, banish name-calling, find common ground, and build functioning communities in my middle school classroom.

So many communities. I was partially successful at this, more so toward the end of my career. If kids don’t get along, after all, they can’t make music together. This is the single most important reason I stopped having chairs and challenges, and tried to avoid unnecessary competition. Teachers everywhere want their students to be able to work together despite differences. It’s what we do.

Bitecofer’s take on political messaging is that Republicans have zero interest in working together to solve problems. They just want to retain power. It’s time for Democrats to boldly claim the high moral ground, she says, rather than using data and reason to present their detailed policy plans, no matter how forward-thinking and appealing they may be to Democrats.

We’re getting beat up, she says, by sophistry. Time to call a lie a lie. To fight back. To take back the word freedom, for starters. We are clearly the party that supports freedom, around the globe, and here at home. Why aren’t we claiming that? The losses that we are suffering now—reproductive freedom, the freedom to vote, the freedom to breathe clean air—have not come from Democratic actions.

She points out that education has generally been seen as a Democratic issue, back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s (along with minority rights, infrastructure and health care), but the 2021 Gubernatorial election in Virginia turned that around—with a big fat passel of lies about what was happening in public schools.

You remember— charges that teachers were making white kids feel guilty via CRT, encouraging transgenderism and putting out kitty litter for the furries. The kinds of things Dems responded to by politely explaining that critical race theory was an advanced concept, first introduced by Kimberle’ Crenshaw, interrogating the socially constructed role of race and institutionalized racism in society, yada yada.

All true. But completely overridden by the Republicans’ simple, dishonest message: Schools are taking away parents’ rights! (Even though parents have always had rights.) Bitecofer, lurking in the background, would say: Don’t bring reality and truth to a Republican messaging war, because Republicans trust feelings, not facts.

Democrats have, for decades, rallied around more resources and equity for public education. They have gone to schools and registered newly minted 18-year-old voters. They have defended the wall between church and state, pushed back hard against vouchers for the wealthy. Time to claim credit.

America is a uniquely apolitical country, Bitecofer says, with little civic culture. This benefits Republicans, who count on people to vote out of old partisan habits, not new information.

Occasionally, someone will claim that more or better Civics classes would improve engagement in electoral politics in the United States. I seriously doubt that, especially since the things that make the study of Civics engaging and sticky are precisely the things that Ron DeSantis is passing laws against. Kids learn to be good citizens by watching adults—a statement worth pondering, in this election year.

Pick up Bitecofer’s book—it’s a short, easy to digest read. Then pull on your metaphorical boxing gloves.

by nflanagan

In Defense of School Sports

Confession: I have never been a huge fan of school sports programs.

Mostly, this stems from 30+ years of being a school band director, and the various slings and arrows sent my way (and toward my student musicians) by irrational coaches and egotistical student athletes.

Maybe I should expand my confession, to something like this: School sports have the potential of great benefits for students, in terms of their physical health and confidence. Kids can learn how to be both good winners and good losers and fill their after-school time in worthwhile ways. When this happens, school sports are a bonus for both student athletes and the student body. But (and this is a big but)—school sports also have the potential to do great harm. They can impair health, destroy fledgling confidence, and suck up more than their share of resources for a small subset of students.

Also—for all of the potential problems in school programs, when sports are made free for all students they offer kids a platform for growth that is not available elsewhere and can build community within a school district.

Several summers ago, my family hosted a French foreign exchange student. Our summer daughter, Elodie, was an accomplished and award-winning gymnast. During the time she was with us, my district opened a brand-new middle school. We went for a visit, as the physical education teacher was inventorying new equipment, ordered as part of the bond issue. Elodie was stunned at the parallel bars, balance beam and rings—and so much more– and wondered who would be using this equipment. Standing in the middle of the new gymnasium, she asked if all the school buildings in our little town had a gym—yes. All seven of them, including four elementary schools.

On the way home, she noted that none of the public schools she’d attended had a gymnasium. Her gymnastics career was accomplished in a for-pay local gym, with for-pay coaches. As were all sports played by secondary students in France. My friends all do sport, she said—but not at school.

It didn’t seem like the right time to comment on the costs of HS football stadiums in Texas.   

The biggest problem with school sports is that they’re not what they used to be. The era of the three-sport, varsity-letter high school athlete, and the math-teacher coach urging students to go out for cross country to stay in shape for basketball is fading, supplanted by expensive private travel teams and “professional” coaches, for those who can afford them.

Jessica Grose had a great piece in the NYT last month: Why So Many Kids are Priced Out of Youth Sports. Grose notes that private youth sports are now a $30–$40 billion dollar industry, and the pandemic has made things worse, with parents now feeling that their kids have “fallen behind”—seriously– in their potential sports careers:

According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, in fall 2022, the average amount spent on a single child’s primary sport per season was $833. For families with household incomes at or above $150,000 a year, the average is $2,068. No wonder that around half of those who’ve played or have children who’ve played youth sports say they’ve struggled to pay for it, according to a 2023 Project Play report. That doesn’t even address the difficulty parents have getting their kids to practice, particularly in families where all the adults work outside the home. The difference between the haves and have-nots when it comes to youth sports are bracing: 34.1 percent of kids from the poorest families were on sports teams or had coaching outside of school, compared with 67.7 percent of the wealthiest families, according to the 2020-2021 National Survey of Children’s Health.

I recently dropped into a conversation between several parents of student athletes. All of them were part of the Athletic Boosters organization for a mid-sized school. They were talking about how to best use the funds they were raising (which seemed like a lot of money to this retired band director, whose entire career and school programs were accomplished via fund-raising).

One of the suggested uses of the money was to allow all students in the district to take part in sports without having to pay to play. In Michigan, only 41% of schools currently charge for participation in sports—down from 57% in 2013-14, but that’s still a lot of student athletes having to come up with some scratch to do something that ought to be offered free to all kids.

It was heartening to know that the parents in this group included some very good athletes, including my niece Ashley, a full-ride volleyball player at Kent State, now a mom of three budding athletes. All of these folks saw the benefit of a school sports program open to all students and were willing to raise the cash to make that happen. Thumbs up.

When you boil this down, however, it’s just another question of resource allocation in public education.

If school sports are good for kids, they need to be based on the right values and funded in a way that provides benefits to students across the board, from wealth or poverty, with elite-level skills or just a good attitude and willingness to learn.

When kids drop out of school programs, in favor of private instruction and competition, it weakens public education. It has an impact on parent support for all the things a public school is supposed to offer—quality academics, the arts, a safe and welcoming facility, and a range of extra-curriculars.

The number of public schools struggling to keep programs afloat ought to be a national embarrassment.

by nflanagan

Do Core Democratic Values Belong in Schools? Some Say No.

I try, when thinking about the path this nation is currently on, not to immediately jump to worst case scenarios or inept comparisons. The uptick in the language of fascism shouldn’t be ignored, however—comparing certain people to Hitler or bemoaning the loss of democracy might not be overkill in the political soup of 2024.

It’s been sneaking up on us, like the proverbial frog in hot water. When looking at curricular change over the past five years—immediately preceding the onset of the COVID pandemic—it’s easy to see that there were plenty of precursors to the anti-woke, book-banning, teacher-punishing mess we find ourselves in as we slowly recover from that major shock to the public education system.

The scariest thing to me about the abuse teachers are taking, across the country, is its impact on curriculum. Here’s the thing: you really can’t outsource teacher judgment. You can prescribe and script and attempt to control everything that happens in the classroom, but it doesn’t work that way.

Several years ago, my school district brought in a Big Famous Ed-Presenter to do an August workshop on lesson design. Because she was expensive, surrounding districts were invited to send interested teachers, those who wanted to learn how to craft engaging lessons and units with aligned performance assessments and instructional strategies. All the teachers would be creating their own curriculum using the MI Grade Level Content Expectations—the standards documents issued by the MI Department of Education.

Once we had been seated in rounds by subject area, the presenter asked us to come up with a common, overarching topic to turn into age-appropriate instructional sequences. We at the humanities table quickly settled on ‘Core Democratic Values’ which were part of the MI Social Studies standards. We then went around the room sharing our chosen topics.

The presenter held up a hand when she heard from our table. No—you’ve misunderstood, she said. I meant something like “Westward Expansion” or “Industrial Revolution”—a topic that’s a key concept in your state Social Studies standards. We all believe in core values, of course, but this is about disciplinary content.

All the K-12 teachers in the room hastened to assure her that Core Democratic Values were indeed a key topic in the state standards, pulling up documents and published units to prove it. The presenter conceded, saying that she did this work all over the country and had not yet encountered such a broad concept—open to a range of interpretation and uses in instructional practice—anywhere in the country.

It felt like a point of pride, really, having these core democratic values as an anchor in the Mitten State standards. I’m not even a Social Studies teacher, and I could think of a dozen ways to insert the core values into lessons in the band room.

Here’s the official definition: Core democratic values are the fundamental beliefs and Constitutional principles of American society, which unite all Americans. These values are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and other significant documents, speeches and writings of the nation.

And here’s a list of those identified values: Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, the common good, equality, truth, diversity, popular sovereignty, and patriotism.

Things we all agree on, right?

Not so much, anymore.

Speaking of precursors, when Michigan was updating its Social Studies framework, back in 2018, there was a major kerfuffle over Core Democratic Values (and a bunch of other hot-topic stuff):

References to gay rights, Roe v. Wade, climate change and “core democratic values” have been stripped from Michigan’s new proposed social studies standards, and the historic role of the NAACP downplayed, through the influence of Republican state Sen. Patrick Colbeck and a cadre of conservatives who helped rewrite the standards for public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade. “They had this term in there called ‘core democratic values,'” Colbeck said. “I said, ‘Whatever we come up with has to be politically neutral, and it has to be accurate.’ I said, ‘First of all, core democratic values (is) not politically neutral.’ I’m not proposing core republican values, either.”

This wasn’t only about rhetorical confusion between ‘Democratic’—the party—vs. ‘democratic’ (the time-honored. foundational principle of our government), although that’s the first thing that comes to mind with the protestors. In fact, reading the article would be a great classroom exercise for older students. The assignment might be: Read and discuss the diversity of opinions shared here, in a representative democracy with a free press.  Who should determine what students learn in a public school?

The proposed conservative edits went deep. They were about redefining concepts like equality, diversity, justice, the common good—and truth. ‘Civil rights,’ for example:

A high school standard about the expansion of civil rights and liberties for minority groups cut references to individual groups, including immigrants, people with disabilities and gays and lesbians. The new proposal includes teaching “how the expansion of rights for some groups can be viewed as an infringement of the rights and freedoms of others.” Colbeck told Bridge he added that phrase.

Surely, most public-school social studies teachers aren’t down with suggesting that not everyone deserves equity and civil rights, because granting those rights might infringe on someone else’s beliefs or “freedoms.”

After months of wrestling over these—yes—core values, the State Board adopted new Social Studies Standards in 2019. The changes they made were reasonable—you can compare the old and new. And core democratic principles and values are woven throughout the curriculum. Surprised that this story turned out OK? The battle is far from over.

The original definition and explication of core democratic values Michigan schools adopted were spot-on, nested in that most traditional American ideal: a free, high-quality fully public education for every child. One that would prepare them for active, informed citizenship. To become good neighbors, stewards of our collective environment, smart consumers and engaged voters. Community builders.

Aren’t core democratic values just about the only thing worth fighting for, in 2024?

by nflanagan

Quote of the Day

Sometimes, Facebook bubbles up a worthy glimpse of the past. This awesome quote– from 12 years ago– appeared on my page this morning, causing me to reflect on how much we’ve lost in the past decade. Wood is reflecting here on a remarkably different era– where Michelle Rhee was on the cover of TIME magazine, brooming out “ineffective” teachers, and Teach for America was growing, not shrinking and re-branding. His school was building on the reforms of the 1990s, with student-focused programming and the valuing of teacher expertise. If nothing else, it rebuts the tired cliche’ that “factory model” schools have not changed in the past century– schools have changed radically in just a dozen years. George Wood’s school was in Ohio, where “reformers” see their #1 goal as expanding private school vouchers.

“For the past 18 years, I have worked as a HS/MS school principal alongside a dedicated staff and a committed community to improve a school. In that time, we have increased graduation and college-going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior Project and Graduation Portfolio).

But reading the popular press and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools. You see, we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work.”

George Wood

by nflanagan

Woke/Not Woke

A few years back, in 2016, I read a blog post from a national teachers’ union leader, a white woman, proclaiming that she was now woke. I’ve met this woman a few times and have no doubt that she is sincere and well-meaning and totally on the right side of social justice issues, but the blog, about her aha moment, struck me as tone-deaf.

Most of the time, white educators who care about justice are working on opening their minds, at being better humans. Maybe the best white people can do is increase their understanding and awareness of all the injustices that are built into living in the home of the brave. Closer to woke, maybe, but always gazing at justice and equity from a layer of privilege. Doing their best until they can do better, etc. It’s not for us to decide, yup, we’re woke now.

When I read that blog, however, I never anticipated a US Governor would proclaim that his state is where “Woke goes to die.”  As a campaign strategy, no less—a campaign based on freeing people of privilege from any guilt about exercising their biases, discriminatory actions, and outright bigotry against everything from Gay Days at Disney World to telling high school students ugly truths about Black history.

And now, Florida lawmakers are moving full-speed ahead to push minors off social media. They’ve empowered schools to ban cell phones, remove books and limit history lessons, with more restrictions on the way.  Students interviewed in the linked article are incensed—they understand that it’s their learning that’s being limited, not their social lives. They don’t feel protected—they feel cheated.

How did we go from striving for more equity and inclusion as a nation–to proudly announcing that the last thing we want our children to feel is responsibility for the well-being of others? What was the turning point?

Spoiler alert: It’s no coincidence that the Governor who wanted to excise woke-ism thought that strategy would resonate with a particular group of American voters. Having stirred that Group4Liberty up, Desantis is now reaping the consequences, politically, in Florida. Bad ed policy will always catch up to you, with increasing teacher shortages and hollowed-out libraries. And so many headaches and complaints.

When you’re stirring the pot, to get political mileage out of parent anger, you’re doing a grave disservice to the foot soldiers who are teaching in your state, the ones who are trying to put together functioning classrooms full of diverse kids–and then teach them something worth learning.

And, as Peter Greene points out, succinctly: It’s a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it’s a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it’s a luxury that many teachers don’t have.

Stripping critical topics and materials out of the curriculum because they may be interpreted as ‘woke,’ makes that curriculum sterile and empty. Trying to keep students from accessing their own answers on the internet is futile. And attempting to control teacher behaviors via professional development is downright creepy.

Teachers who are experiencing all of these anti-woke procedures can feel isolated and angry, understanding that the very reason they chose to become teachers—building the next generation—has been abandoned by school leaders with feet of clay.

There are a lot of ways to interpret ‘woke’—but it’s a factor in every school building in America: Who accepts whom? Who is comfortable and able to learn? Who is expected to do well—and who is given short shrift? How do we get along, and respect each other’s differences?There are systems of oppression, however subtle, in every school, public and private.

Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them,” according to DeSantis’ general counsel, as reported by The Washington Post.

Denying that there is systemic injustice, instead substituting the systemic practice of avoiding unpleasant truths, ducking issues that cause conflict and barring critical thinking by students, is the worst possible basis for making education policy.  Instead, ed policy is now based on chasing test scores, cutting economic corners, and presenting a mendacious view of the world to our future leaders.

If anybody needs to pursue wokeness, it’s school leaders and education policymakers. Because—guess what—there ARE systemic injustices in American society. And one of the purposes of American public schools has traditionally been forming a more perfect union through education. Carol Burris:

In the beginning, the purpose was to create a literate American citizenry to be able to participate in democracy. Our founders realized that if they were going to give citizens the ability to actually shape government through elections, they had to have some knowledge base on which to make decisions.

Returning to the critical question here—how and why did wokeness become something to sneer at, to stamp out of school discussions and materials?

I keep thinking about the video shot at a middle school in Royal Oak, MI right after the 2016 election, with students chanting “Build that wall!” Or the lawsuit filed in 2022 against another Michigan middle school for suppressing the first amendment rights of students, by forcing them to take off their “Let’s Go Brandon” hoodies.

Add in a pandemic, which tilted many perspectives—equity, safety, privilege—and it’s easy to see how the past eight years have caused a political abyss to form. Teachers who forthrightly proclaim they are woke, in 2024, risk being fired.

It’s time for action. Step one: voting.

by nflanagan

Do Public Schools Suck?

Some years ago, John Dubie, then a high school senior in Vermont, posted a very personal, autobiographical blog entitled “Big Picture Saved My Life.” John meant that statement literally—the Big Picture curriculum and program at South Burlington HS was the thing that kept him going when he was thinking about checking himself out.

I was stunned by the aftermath of the piece, which was picked up, reprinted and dissected in a number of other blogs. I was especially surprised by those commentaries that suggested John’s life was saved by leaving traditional public school.

The irony? Dubie spent much of the blog describing the first eight years of his education in a Catholic school, where he was generally seen as a disruptive loser by the faculty. And– the Big Picture Learning program he credits with making all the difference was housed in a traditional public school, in Burlington, Vermont,

Because I was the person who suggested John tell his story in public, this re-interpretation of his autobiography made me see red. I said as much, in the comments, noting that his generosity shouldn’t become a cheap excuse to slam public education again. I said: What I’m worried about here is protecting a young man who graciously shared a deeply personal reflection having his story–and his face– used to promote the idea that public education sucks.

The response I got: Seriously? Of course public education sucks.

Do public schools suck? Is that the conventional wisdom, the reflexive, global response these days? Do we have to start with the conviction that public education has failed, before we can transform or improve, regenerate or revitalize a fully public system?

I say no. In fact, the best time to change public education is now, while its strengths, resources and merits still exist.

What questions should we be asking about public education, before reflexively tearing it down? What facts shape the argument that public education, as a concept, is well worth saving?

  • All governance models–public, chartered, independent, parochial—have produced exciting schools and disastrous schools. There are plenty of students who thrive under direct-instruction, highly structured, traditional content-delivery models. And others who learn best through self-directed exploration of ideas and subjects that interest them. There is no one best way to learn.
  • Public education remains the Big Kahuna of governance models in the U.S. Why would you tear down the considerable and historic infrastructure of a system that has educated–however imperfectly–generations of (successful) Americans, instead of updating it, repairing its cracks and flaws and outright malfunctions? Other nations have retrofitted their public systems, using both research and imagination. Why wouldn’t we?
  • When and where public education is not meeting the needs of students, why is that so? Public education has been radically re-shaped in the last two decades, driven by “reform” policies and experiments that clearly aren’t yielding the expected results (and that’s a very sanguine assessment). If public schools suck, we certainly haven’t found the magic formula to fix them. Probably because the answers involve hard work, multiple strategies and serious investment.
  • Public education is the only “choice” when other options are exhausted, so public schools are filled with our poorest children, those whose parents cannot provide transportation or uniforms or help with algebra homework. Some of those schools are creatively addressing problems, building communities and family relationships, persisting even if testing data remains low. Do they suck?
  • Who’s saying that public education sucks–and why are they saying it? For some parents, the fact that their child doesn’t get a custom-tailored learning experience or enough attention is reason enough to believe that all public education is substandard. For others, there is a knee-jerk assumption that the only good education is a series of competitive-admission, high-ticket private schools. Much of the anti-public education drumbeat springs from a politicized, media-fed conviction that public schools have failed, based on testing data alone. You have to ask: What’s in it for the most vocal and persistent public school critics?
  • You don’t really know what a particular school or classroom is like until you’re there. We’ve all read the polling data that shows parents generally think the schools in their community are pretty good; it’s the schools in other places–scary urban places, or maybe just the next district over, or public schools across the nation–that are terrible. I’ve been in plenty of classrooms in Detroit Community Schools where there was order, curiosity, learning–and joy (and usually, about twice as many kids as there should be). In the middle of poverty, there are pockets of triumphant accomplishment.

Shouldn’t we be shoring up public education, as America’s best idea? Shouldn’t we be investing in repair, enhancement, innovation? Let’s stop with the facile pronouncements on the failure of public education–they reveal failure of imagination and democracy.

by nflanagan

The Mental Energy of Teaching

Interesting tweet from @EdFuller_PSU:

The one thing non-teachers simply do not and cannot grasp is how MENTALLY EXHAUSTING IT IS TO TEACH ALL DAY. There are very, very few jobs that require the constant mental attention that teaching does. I’d love to see all the people criticizing teachers to teach for a week. (Caps are Fuller’s.)

There are over 750 responses, running about 30 to one some form of confirmation, most of which are from teachers or parents. The odd pushback (i.e., @Angrydocsx: Surgery, nursing, working on an oil rig, construction, being a lineman, etc… Teachers are great but get over yourself.) are either from people who feel their jobs are equally taxing, or your garden-variety anti-teacher/anti-union/you-suck-so-shut-up tweets.

Side note: I think surgery and nursing are also incredibly demanding and find @Angrydoc’s immediate shift to oil rigs and linemen in cherry pickers—dangerous, outdoor male-dominated jobs—telling.

Fuller (who, not coincidentally, was a HS teacher before moving into higher education) puts his finger on the thing that makes teaching exhausting—you’re on all the time, making decisions on the fly and—if you’re doing the job right—taking sincere responsibility for teaching…something, to students who may not particularly want to be taught.

He did not say teaching was the most mentally exhausting job in the world—there are others where you can’t take a break or turn your back—only that the need to constantly pay attention and adapt were factors that many folks did not perceive, when they thought about teaching. A number of the tweeted responses, in fact, were from people who thought they’d give teaching a try, but concluded that it wasn’t the job they thought it would be.

Larry Cuban recently compared teachers’ decision-making to playing jazz and rebounding in basketball—two complex skills that depend on prior learning and practice for automaticity. He includes two footnotes about the number of decisions teachers typically make:

*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

Cuban notes that those studies are older, and invites readers to share any newer research—but those figures ring absolutely true to me. Interactions, decisions, re-direction, pop-up questions, wait time, modeling, judgments. On and on and on. Teaching is all about an on-your-feet response to whatever crops up. It’s the essence of unpredictability, and every day is exhausting.

What Fuller’s tweet and the plethora of responses clearly illustrates: There is no such thing as successful scripted teaching or “effective” fidelity to pre-constructed lessons. Also: the more you teach, if you’re paying attention, the more fluid the decision-making becomes, and the more tools in your mental (and emotional) tool bag. Experience matters. Perception matters. Judgment matters.

When I had been teaching for more than 25 years, I took a two-year sabbatical to work at a national education non-profit. There was an opportunity to pursue an alternate career in our contract language, but even though I knew I could return to teaching, I was certain that this new job was my off-ramp.

At first, it was great. I had my own cubicle, with a computer and a phone and–get this–a secretary. We took an hour for lunch, occasionally going out to a restaurant (and, also occasionally, having a glass of wine). We could use the bathroom as often as we liked. I could pop into someone else’s office and have a long chat about some issue that had arisen. I could leave early to go to the dentist. We were doing a lot of conferences and workshops—on weekends, because our clients were educators—and if we were in another city for the weekend, we didn’t return to work until Wednesday or Thursday: comp time!

I found the workload easy and the pace relaxed. I liked the people I worked with. But after the first year, I started thinking about going back to teaching. It took a long time to work through the reasons. Teaching offered less money, less prestige and way more what might be called mandatory time on task.

What I finally concluded was this: When I left the school building at night, and walked across the parking lot, I could describe the good I had done that day, things students had learned, progress made. I didn’t get that daily confirmation at the non-profit (which was much-admired). Lots of days were focused on strengthening the business end of the non-profit’s work. I didn’t get to hang out with kids, either.

I taught a lot of subjects and varied grade levels during my career, speaking of mental exhaustion. I taught large middle school and high school band classes (65+ students), and 7th grade math in the first year of a new, “connected” curriculum that the old math teachers loathed. I taught vocal and instrumental music in every grade from pre-K to 12. By far the most mentally challenging class I ever taught was general music to a group of 12 Pre-K children, mostly four years old, in my last year in the classroom.

These kiddos were all over the place, maturity-wise. My biggest challenge at first was getting them all to sit, not sprawl or run around, on the circular rug in my classroom. I had them for 50 minutes, twice a week (yup—too long, I know, but that’s the way the schedule was set up), so the first time they came to my room, I prepared a lesson plan with seven different activities, from listening to marching. Seven!

They ran through that plan in about 20 minutes. I remember thinking: I’m supposed to be good at this! I hope nobody makes an unscheduled visit to my room.

Although I got much better at teaching very young children, thanks to the generous suggestions of my colleagues, it was a mental attention marathon, day in and day out. Did they understand that word? Why aren’t his hands coming together when he claps? How much time is left? Wait— is she actually spitting?

When we speak of teacher professionalism, we think of content knowledge, instructional expertise, being a respected contributor to a school learning community. But a big part of professionalism is accepting responsibility for what happens in your worksite, for expending the continuous mental energy to create a successful and skilled practice.

The last word about the way the public sees teacher professionalism, from Jose Vilson:

Over the last few decades, pundits and policymakers have derided the professionalism of teachers because “accountability” or whatever. No matter how many degrees and certificates they get, how many years of experience they accumulate, or student commendations they collect, American society looks at teachers and says “Oh, that’s nice!” but also, “How do you do it? Couldn’t be me!” “You and your union make the job easy, right?” and my personal favorite, “I couldn’t stand me when I was a child. How does that work out with 30 of them?!” In other words, even though many people think only a special set of people can do the job, they also think anyone can do it.

by nflanagan

The Twelve Best Books I Read in 2023

Last week, Emma Sarappo, in The Atlantic, cautioned against setting reading goals for 2024:
Quantifying my reading, whether by titles finished, pages read, or another metric, doesn’t capture the quality of my attention to each book. In 2024, that’s what I’m most concerned with, and logging, rating, and sharing on the social web might pull my focus away from the moment and back to my phone. 

Well. La-di-dah.

I’d be hard-pressed to describe the quality of my attention to the 112 (Oops! Quantifying!) books I read in 2023. I logged them all, wrote a paragraph or a sentence about each and rated them, one to five stars.  Is that enough quality attention?

I log the books I read mostly so that I don’t accidentally bring home previously read books with interchangeable names—thrillers and series, especially—and so I can remember the best stuff. Barack Obama names his favorite books, each year. Why shouldn’t I?

In my top dozen this year, five non-fiction and seven fiction titles.

I liked two of the non-fiction titles so much that I wrote separate blogs (click on book titles) outlining their excellence:

The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Tim Alberta)

The Teachers: A Year inside America’s Most Vulnerable Profession (Alexandra Robbins)

The other three:
Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Dahlia Lithwick). This book was a gift from a man who plays in my local flute ensemble, a retired lawyer who bought me a copy as a gift. The book is a fascinating review of amazing women who took the law into their own hands, often facing subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination. What makes the book outstanding, however, is Dahlia Lithwick’s semi-snarky, to-the-point prose.

The 1619 Project (Nikole Hannah-Jones) Actually, the NY Times Magazine collection of essays and commentary that frame the eventual book give the reader the rich essence of the multi-author big book. It took me a month to get through the whole volume, reading a chapter or two at a time. But the book deserves such contemplation. History is complicated, and always debatable, but what happened to Hannah-Jones after publishing the book is reprehensible.

Gender Queer: A Memoir (Maia Kobabe)I decided to read it because it was the book most often on lists of books—so MANY lists!—targeted for banning in schools and public libraries in 2023. What surprised me was how gentle, even tender, the book was, how sweet the drawings. Yeah—there is one drawing of sexual contact (which occurs between two consenting grad students) but my overwhelming impression was how incredibly helpful such a book, which reflects kindness and caring in interpersonal relationships, might be to a confused teenager. Also: props to this Massachusetts teacher.

Seven Fictional titles:

Tom Lake (Ann Patchett) Best book I read this year. I have recommended it to many friends, and lots of them have had lukewarm reactions, but the novel hit my sweet spot. Not only is it set, mostly, in the Grand Traverse region of Michigan, where I live, much of the action takes place during the pandemic. Nobody writes with the humor and humanity Ann Patchett infuses into her novels. I loved this book.

All the Sinners Bleed (S.A. Cosby) I’m with Barack Obama on this one. It’s a great read, as a crime thriller, but the uneasy racism and ‘Merica values that infuse the writing make it special.

The River We Remember (William Kent Krueger) I’m a fan of Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series, but I especially love his standalones, beginning with Ordinary Grace. “River” traces a crime through the eyes of a law enforcement officer still suffering from what we’d now call PTSD, after World War II, and the elderly female lawyer who helps him prosecute the guilty. Krueger is a master at creating memorable, complex characters and turning ordinary stories into reflections on human nature.

My best friend gave me a copy of The World Played Chess (Robert Dugoni), a beautifully layered book that looks at the long-term damage done to men who served in the Vietnam war. The novel’s structure, following a narrator from his teenage years, when comments on the war were vastly different from the way we perceive the conflict now is beautifully structured. This was the first Dugoni novel I’d read, and it sent me off to read more of his work.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ,and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin) I am totally not the audience for this book about the development of video games. I’ve written a lot about how I think technology is oversold. I have zero interest in the gaming culture. But I loved it. I can’t really say why.

The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger) I read Holsinger’s The Gifted School and liked it, but this novel is the ultimate dystopian fiction around a Category Six hurricane hitting Florida’s wealthiest coastal residents. Utterly believable, occasionally funny and scary as hell, the book somehow ends up being heart-warming.

Small Mercies (Dennis Lehane) Lehane, whose work is always good and always dark, says this may be his last novel. If so, it’s a barn-burner, centered around tough-broad Mary Pat Fennessey, and set in 1974, during the Boston school busing protests. Lehane spares nobody in this book—the dialogue is brutally authentic, and it’s hard to find a character to root for, at first. In the end, the book will break your heart.

by nflanagan

Where Were You in the Blizzard of ’78?

From The Gander Newsroom: The story of the Great Blizzard begins in late January 1978, during a winter that had already been fiercely frigid. The closing days of January saw snow falling in the Great Lakes Region on Tuesday, Jan. 24. Just as soon as that snow system was wrapping up Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service issued a Special Weather Statement: “Another Winter Storm Threatens Lower Michigan.”

As the Detroit Free Press reports, what would turn out to become the massive winter storm the Great Lakes Region would see in the coming days resulted from two different weather fronts in the US: single-digit temperatures coming from the north and moisture climbing from the south.

On Thursday morning of Jan. 26, the NWS’ Ann Arbor office issued the following special weather statement: “A Great Storm is Upon Michigan.” As the heavy snow fell, strong winds created whiteout conditions across the state. Michigan became paralyzed as air and land travel came to a standstill.
NWS Ann Arbor Meteorologist in Charge C.R. Snider wrote the following in a summary of the event:

“The most extensive and very nearly the most severe blizzard in Michigan history raged throughout Thursday January 26, 1978 and into part of Friday January 27.

About 20 people died as a direct or indirect result of the storm, most due to heart attacks or traffic accidents. At least one person died of exposure in a stranded automobile. Many were hospitalized for exposure, mostly from homes that lost power and heat. About 100,000 cars were abandoned on Michigan highways, most of them in the southeast part of the state.”

Over the course of the storm, snowfalls across the state included 30 inches in Muskegon, 19.3 in Lansing, and 19.2 in Holland.

I was a young teacher, living in Ann Arbor, in January of 1978. The weather had been crummy all week, making my 30-mile commute to work (in a lightweight Toyota Corolla) dicey. On Wednesday afternoon, I white-knuckled my little car to my boyfriend’s farmhouse–a guy named Flanagan– on the north side of Ann Arbor, sliding into a snowbank in his driveway and killing the engine. The weather was bad and supposed to get worse. And boy, did it.

It was the only time in my life where I was truly snowbound, unable to get out or go anywhere, and unclear about when the dirt road might be plowed or whether my car would start again. On TV, it was The Blizzard of 78, all the time, with terrible pictures of wrecks on the freeway and stories of people freezing in their homes.

I remember it, however, as a gloriously fun, responsibility-free five or six days. We never lost power, so we were warm enough and safe and able to talk to people on the phone and pull random stuff out of cupboards and the freezer to eat. We watched movies on TV and listened to lots of great music and shlumped around wrapped in quilts and two pairs of socks. At night, however, as the winds howled around the old drafty house, it was possible to imagine living on the prairie a century ago, wondering if daybreak would bring an end to the storm. Or our lives.

It’s stormy here tonight, events cancelled, social media full of “grow up people, this is Michigan” scolding and warnings about charging your devices and keeping a flashlight handy. We’re going to get a foot of snow or more, all told. I have a sturdier house, a better car (with better tires), more food and the miracle of technology, should things go south.

Still– I’m nostalgic for those two in the farmhouse, under that quilt.

by nflanagan

Star Tech: The Next Generation of Record-Keeping

In her last year of a degree program in Justice Studies, my daughter took a course called “Surveillance in Society.” The readings and discussion were around intrusions into personal privacy and data made possible by technology. Dear Daughter and I had many amusing conversations about some of her assignments—“Are Bar Codes the Mark of the Beast? Discuss.”—which struck me as paranoid in the extreme. Her professor was obsessed with our imminent loss of civil liberty, always urging his undergrads to be suspicious of anyone asking for personal information, and, presumably, scanning the sky for black helicopters.

However—I have been thinking a lot about the use of technology to gather data and “streamline” normal school processes, like testing, attendance and grading, to present an image of a “21st century school.”  Here is a simple story about data collection and our belief that All Technology is Good.

In 1998, my district opened a new middle school, full of state-of-the-art technological systems. We were the envy of the other buildings, with fully networked software to handle all our data needs. We got some training and the big pitch—our new procedures would save time, paper and man-hours, give us more accurate data, impress parents with e-communications, yada yada,

Under Old Attendance procedures, every teacher took attendance once, at the same time every morning, recorded it in their grade/attendance book, and sent a student to the office, with an attendance form, printed on scrap paper from recycle bins. Secretaries recorded these on a master list, and handled absence data for students who came/left during the day. Teachers got a copy of the master list, to help confirm absences when students needed to make up work.

Under New, Improved Attendance procedures, every teacher had a computer, with separate attendance book and gradebook functions. Teachers were now required to take attendance every hour and enter absences and tardies on the computer within a five-minute window. We were not allowed to keep the attendance program open on our computer desktops (because our gradebooks, protected by the same password, might be accessed by devious students)—so we had to log in every hour.

Because this was 1998, the server’s horsepower was severely strained by 40 teachers logging in simultaneously, and it would take 30-60 seconds for the program to load. Teachers who forgot to take attendance within 5 minutes would be called by the office (where a secretary now sat, monitoring the data coming in every hour), disrupting teachers’ lessons. If someone had a missing assignment, you had to toggle between attendance and grade programs to discover whether the child had actually been absent.

A process that had taken two minutes of teacher-time daily suddenly began to take two minutes every hour. Best-case scenario, teachers would lose ten extra minutes of instructional time each day: 50 minutes/week, four class periods per month, 36 class periods per school year, or six full days of instructional time. Taking attendance.

Lest you think I’m being overdramatic (or are dying to tell me that faster computing and better software have eliminated problems and made attendance-taking an absolute joy)—I tell this story not to whine about record-keeping, but to question our automatic goal of “efficiency” and the uses and purposes of all K-12 tech-enhanced data collection.

The state requires daily absent/present data, and that to ferret out kids who aren’t actually attending school but were counted for funding purposes. A student who went AWOL would not necessarily be picked up any quicker under the new system, and most of our mid-day leavers were signed out to go to the orthodontist with their mom, anyway.

The new system made data-entry mistakes six times more likely and kept a secretary busy checking on students who were marked present one hour, but absent the other five due to teacher error. I had great sympathy for “careless” teachers who rushed through the attendance procedure to get started on, you know, teaching—only to be monitored and chastised later. I was one of them.

Nobody in the office could explain why or how, precisely, the new system was helping us do a better job of serving kids. The on-line gradebooks also came with unanticipated problems—teachers who didn’t post enough grades (remember when formative data included things that weren’t numbers?), the amount of time now required to deal with anxious parents, and so on.

The most obvious reason to question always-available online gradebooks is that responsibility for turning in work and monitoring a running performance record should belong to students, especially in secondary settings. We have always had periodic reporting to parents—four or six times a year, or in some cases, weekly progress reports. Any more than that elevates grades over actual learning and encourages students to let mom be in charge of their education.

Tech-based surveillance of students is now on steroids. In a thoughtful post entitled How Much Should I Track My Kid? Ann Helen Peterson says this:

My parents trusted me because I had earned their trust. Sometimes I stretched that trust, but I was constantly figuring out what felt too risky, what felt right or wrong, who I didn’t want to get in a car with. Maybe that sounds like a lot of discernment for a teen. But how else do we figure out who we are? My parents could’ve lectured me about “making good decisions” all they wanted; I only knew how to make them by finding myself in situations far from them where I had to.

The same principle applied to my grades, to my online use, to how I talked to boys and figured out friendships. In high school, I would see my exact grade around twice during the quarter, when a teacher would distribute printouts that included all graded assignments and your current percentage.

Schools pay attention to what they value. We collect data first, and decide how to manage it later, a pattern repeatedly endlessly in thousands of schools. We assume that everything can be done faster, cheaper and better through technology. Sometimes, the rationale runs backwards—we adopt the technology, and then invent reasons for why we need it.