Category / Curriculum

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

Ten Non-Standard Ideas for the Beginning of the School Year

I had a colleague, a long-time third grade teacher, who spent most of August sorting books into leveled baskets, going steady with the laminating machine, and running up colorful curtains for the door to her classroom. Her husband, a secondary social studies teacher, would mark the beginning of the school year by wandering around the house, trying to find his thermos. This was immensely irritating to her, of course. But it’s hard to say who was the better teacher.

I had more than 30 first days of school as a teacher. Here’s my—very non-standard—advice for teachers, on gearing up for the new year.

1. Don’t work too hard at unimportant things, like fancy bulletin boards. The most important thing you can do before school starts is think about the curriculum and the kids you’re teaching. You’re not likely to achieve a high-functioning, intellectually cooking Day One, anyway. You’re aiming for Day Four or maybe Day Eleven, once you have a sense of who’s sitting in the desks (or on the floor), and how to get them to work together.

This is not a half-baked “make it up as you go along” theory of instruction, by the way. I know that curriculum has never been less open to creativity—and Important Metrics are looming. You’ve got a big job to do. But—as the salesman says, in The Music Man—you gotta know the territory.

2. Walk around the building and say hello to all of your colleagues. Even if the interaction lasts 30 seconds, and you’re not particularly fond of the teacher / aide / principal / secretary / custodian in question. There is nothing more effective than a school building where adults get along, respect each other and have the same goals. I am always amazed when teachers bitterly complain about the kids bickering in their classrooms, then proceed to ignore or castigate their fellow staff members. Build a few relationships. Welcome newbies. Thank the custodians for the shiny floors.

3. When it comes to advance planning, keep your options open. Don’t write detailed lesson plans for a semester. Plan for a week, maybe, just to ensure you have enough rabbits to pull out of your stovepipe and keep the kiddies busy. Set overarching goals, for sure. But it’s folly to think you have the flow of instruction and learning for the next six weeks under your control. The watchword: learn as you go.

4. Corollary: For now, plan grandly, not precisely. Think about the things students need to know for the next decade, not the next standardized test or unit quiz. Not even the end-of-course or college admissions exams. Focus on things they need to master and understand before adulthood.

Very soon, you will be dealing with the ordinary grind: daily lesson plans—plus assemblies, field trips, plays, the school newspaper, the spelling bee, the science fair, yada yada. Those are the trees. Think about the forest. What do you want your students to take away, forever, from your teaching? Which big ideas? What critical skills? It’s easy to forget the grand picture, once the year gets rolling. Take the time to do it now. Dream.

5. Make your classroom a pleasant place for you, too. In addition to being a place where students learn, it’s the place where you work, both with and without kids. (And, yes, I spent a year on a cart, so I know this recommendation may seem specious.) Most of us teach in a place that, stripped to its essentials, feels institutional, to some degree—if not downright unsightly. Find a way to have comfortable seating, task lighting, pictures or tchotchkes that make you smile. It doesn’t have to be pretty and color-coordinated—many wonderful classrooms have that “kids’ playroom/teenage basement” aura. Still, forget those admonitions about too much personalizing—a classroom should feel like home.

6. Don’t make Day One “rules” day. Your classroom procedures are very important, a hinge for functioning productively, establishing the relationships and trust necessary for individual engagement and group discussions. Introduce these strategies and systems on days when it’s likely your students will remember them and get a chance to practice them. This is especially important for secondary teachers, whose students will likely experience a mind-numbing, forgettable parade of Teacher Rules on Day One.

7. Instead, give students a taste of disciplinary knowledge on the first day of school. Teach something, using your most engaging instructional techniques. Perhaps a game, a round-robin, a quick-response exercise with no wrong answers. Bonus points for something involving physical movement. Beware of empty ice-breakers or team-building exercises—your goal is to have students going out the door saying “I think this class is going to be fun, and I already learned something.”

8. Keep your expectations about the first few days modest. You will probably be nervous (and have bad dreams), even if you’ve been teaching for 30 years—I always did. The students will be keyed up, too—it takes a couple days for them to settle in and behave as they usually do. Wait for your teacher buzz to kick in—that happy moment when you see engagement, maybe even laughter, and you know you’re on the right track. It takes a while, but when it happens, it’s like the first flower in the spring garden.

9. It’s the first day of school for parents and families, too. They’re at home, wanting to know that their kids are OK, that this year will be a good one for little Tyler. One idea for immediate parent engagement that I used for many years (thanks to Middleweb): asking parents to tell you about their child, in a million words or less. Very simple, and very powerful.

10. Tie your classroom to the world.  Even if you teach kindergarten—or chemistry—you can’t avoid election-based chatter in your classroom. Use the daily news as backdrop for modeling civil interactions and substantive debate on the content you teach. Read picture books on immigration. Take your AP Stats class to polling sites. Assign your physical education students to watch YouTube videos of the Olympics for amazing physical feats as well as examples of sportsmanship. What are YOU currently watching, reading or discussing? Share. Help your students analyze issues or find role models.

by nflanagan

Critical Issues and Minutiae of Public Education

I have been fascinated, in the past 48 hours, by online conversations about the tumultuous political week we have just lived through—especially the comments and questions generated by teachers.

Non-teachers are heartbroken or thrilled or both, by the Biden step-down. They’re nosing out the negative PR and potential VP picks of the presumptive new nominee. There are running threads and analyses around the assassination attempt, a mass shooting where everyone knew the intended (again, presumptive) target, a change from the faceless victims—many children, damn it—of other mass shootings.

So much is in flux. So many building blocks of democracy, teetering on the edge. Including public education.

But we’re approaching (in many parts of the country) the beginning of the school year. Much of the ongoing cyber-conversation around public education centers on clearing back-to-school lists (i.e., teachers begging for essential supplies the school can’t afford), the futility of professional development for yet another silver-bullet reading program, why teachers aren’t paid for setting up their classrooms and other garden-variety School Stuff. The kinds of issues and beefs we see annually.

There are a hundred things that weigh heavily on teachers’ minds as they prepare for another year. What I’m wondering is if teachers are focused on the trees, rather than the destruction of the public education forest. Because focusing on bulletin boards and class lists instead of the section of Project 2025 that deals with education feels do-able, not overwhelming. Or terrifying.

Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax posted a letter about a “rude” teacher who created individual certificates for each of her students at the end of the year. The mother who wrote the letter was upset that individual kids were nicknamed Class Clown and Social Butterfly and–gasp!–her daughter was designated “Miss Manners.” So upset that she reported her ire to the superintendent, after the principal gently suggested these certificates were warm-hearted, not criticisms of children’s character.

Aside from the fact that many parents would be delighted or relieved were their child awarded recognition for having excellent manners—the letter bothered me way more than it should have. Because I have been that teacher, striving at the end of the year to recognize and acknowledge students’ achievements, but also their individual quirks, their signature traits, their contribution to the musical community we built.

Hax rightfully chides the mom for attacking a well-meaning second grade teacher, on the last day of school, no less. But what most folks—non-teachers—will miss is that the success of any teacher, broadly defined, lies in building honest relationships with kids who bring varying intellectual and emotional strengths to school.

Not everyone is an academic superstar or natural helper. Many students will need to be coaxed or cajoled into effort, participation and belonging. Those skills are just as important as content expertise, a full toolbag of instructional techniques and endlessly logged data.

My own end-of-year awards included every band kid. Now—decades later—I still hear from students who remember the last full day of school (after the instruments were all oiled and stored for the summer, the music sorted and filed, and the sink—yuck—cleaned and shiny): The thank-yous. The in-jokes for band members. The Jolly Ranchers. The camaraderie. I recently heard from a woman who remembered winning the “Most Improved Section” award—and she was the only oboe. She included a smiley face.

The Hax column drew hundreds of responses from teachers.

Today, I have been watching teachers on social media saying:  Be kind to the social studies teachers in your building. We’ll be working on overdrive!

Well, yes. You go, teachers. The world is on fire, and your job is to pretend that the only thing that matters is following the prescribed curriculum and keeping your head down in the classroom. We get it—and we love and support you.

But as we launch 2024-25, it is incumbent upon all of us whose livelihoods are not threatened by free speech to keep education policy and the very real threat to public education bubbling up every day on social media and in our friend groups.

 It’s been a wild couple of weeks. But keep your eyes on both the threat and the prize.

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

 What Has Your Mother Given You?

Confession: I appropriated this prompt from Steven Bechloss, who provides such a thought-starter most Saturdays. He wrote about Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother—inspiring—and, in what can only be described as striking contrast, the mothers of Lee Harvey Oswald (angry, controlling) and Nixon (per Nixon, a saint). I’ve never been very excited about Mother’s Day. For…

nflanagan's avatar by nflanagan

I Write the Songs

As a music educator, I was always interested in having my students create music, a goal that gets a lot of lip service in the profession (including being one of the four pillars of the National Music Content Standards).  It’s a seductive idea—you’ll see music labeled as a  creative art in all the curriculum literature.…

nflanagan's avatar by nflanagan

Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

The title of the article made me laugh out loud: Should Teachers Get Overtime? Subtitle: EdWeek Readers have some thoughts. I’ll bet they do. Fortunately, the readers who responded to EdWeek’s LinkedIn poll obviously had some experience in teacher compensation, not to mention common sense. Because the answer to this question is obviously that teachers…

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by nflanagan

Ignoring the Real World in the Classroom

Are you reading Jess Piper? If not—start now.

Piper is a Missouri educator (among other things) whose commentary on teaching in a bright red state, and having been raised in a fundamentalist church, rings my chimes, again and again. She ran for a position in the MO State Legislature in 2022, and lost—but her blogged reflections on that experience amount to an answer to the question uppermost on my mind in 2024: How can people vote for a confirmed liar and obvious scam artist? Who are these people?

Today, her Substack blog described teaching on January 6, 2021, as the US Capitol was being overrun by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and assorted other rage-filled people with improvised weapons:

What would I say when I started class?

I told them the truth. I told them the US Capitol was under attack. They asked by whom? Again, I told them the truth. By Americans.

My students wanted me to turn on the news, but I decided against it, fearing they may see something they would never be able to unsee. I am of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster generation, and I was always overly-careful about what they saw in my classroom.

I don’t remember how much 7th hour accomplished that day, but I’d say it was minimal. I think we talked about what our country was experiencing…the division.

And next, of course, came the classic example of chickenshit leadership in schools: A warning from the Superintendent not to discuss the biggest news story of the year, a story that has had an impact on everyone in the United States for the past three and a half years.

Her story resonated with me. I’m considerably older than Piper, and I can remember many times when teachers in my school were directed by an administrator not to talk about a headline story—stories that were easily, overwhelmingly available and playing constantly via whatever media was being piped into our students’ homes and brains.

I remember discussing Anita Hill—I believed her—in the teachers’ lounge, and watching my male colleagues smirk about Clarence Thomas and a certain Coke can.  Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky—something happening on TV, day in and out–was similarly verboten.

A friend teaching in my district was written up for responding to a question from a student about the Jonestown Massacre, when 901 Americans died by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, influenced by cult leader Jim Jones. And the Flint Water Crisis, happening 20 miles up the road from my school, was “not in the curriculum” and not to be mentioned in class.

What happens when teachers can’t take questions about the daily news? It makes us look like idiots, for starters. Uninformed content-dispensers, unable to connect facts to causes or outcomes. What have our students learned from our unwillingness to discuss national crises, like 9/11? 

In November of 2000, when the outcome of the Presidential election hung in the balance for more than a month, the room across from mine was occupied by an 8th grade social studies teacher. Every morning, we would stand together in the hallway—bus duty—as students streamed into the building and went to their lockers, talking under our breath about What Was Going on in Florida, the Brooks Brothers riot, and so on.

She’d been directed by administrators not to discuss the election results. I don’t believe I was so warned, but that’s likely because someone thought teachers only talked about things that fell into the realm of their assigned disciplinary standards, and 8th graders took American history.

It was absurd. We were making history, but teachers had to wait until ‘the facts’ had been approved and inserted into textbooks. And you know what they say about who writes history.

There are, of course, times when students aren’t mature enough to process terrible realities and should be shielded. It would be difficult to share stories of what’s happening in Gaza with a class of preschoolers, for example, although children of the same age are tragically losing their brief lives there. There are political, religious and psychological reasons to keep kids innocent of global horrors and inappropriate sexualization.

But even small children are impacted by the Big Issues and Big Stories. If we can teach first-graders what to do when there’s a shooter loose in their school, we can talk—age-appropriately—about why terrible things happen. We should think about devices and platforms—but the only way for children to interpret news stories is via dialogue with an educated adult.

In April of 1994, when Kurt Cobain was discovered dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, word of his death was being shared during homeroom, and many of the girls in my class were crying. It would have been an easy call for a traditional band teacher to silently sniff about Nirvana, and steer around any discussion of suicide by starting class.

I wasn’t sure the girls could articulate why they were crying, but it seemed appropriate to say something kind about Cobain’s music, and note the pain he must have felt to contemplate taking his life. Then I stopped talking—and they talked. I think it was a shock to be 13 and have someone’s music speak deeply to you—then learn that the music’s creator didn’t want to live any more.

I don’t remember how long we talked about his death—10 minutes, maybe—before turning to our usual band class. But I do remember the absolute silence in that very large class, when I mentioned Cobain’s name, and how simply acknowledging students’ feelings was a better way to start class than pretending nothing happened.

Jess Piper resigned, after 16 years of teaching English, in February 2021. She was planning to run for office, and you can’t teach school and run for office in Missouri.

Think about that.

by nflanagan

What Schools SHOULD Be Teaching

…that isn’t in the regular, designated curriculum.

So many things, right?

You’ve undoubtedly seen the memes: Why aren’t schools teaching personal finance, including credit cards and taxes? What about home and car repairs? Insurance? First aid? Time management? Study skills? Stress relief? How to find a job, feed yourself and do your laundry?

Frequently, the post will draw supportive comments, ranging from unwarranted criticisms of what schools actually DO attempt to teach, to nostalgic memories of the days when all the boys had to take woodshop in 9th grade. There was never a shortage of handcrafted birdhouses in those days, by golly.

And—dipping into fantasy here—wouldn’t it be great if schools picked up responsibility for teaching all the life skills one needs to be a fully functioning adult? In addition to math, languages, history, sciences and literature, of course.

The ones that really get to me are the folks begging schools to teach good interpersonal communication and conflict resolution, with maybe a dash of leadership thrown in, but then picket the school board because Mrs. Jones has launched a social-emotional learning through mindfulness (SEL) program for 4th graders, and you know what that means.

A friend just posted a meme reminding us that 100 years ago, students were learning Latin and Greek in high school, and now, high school graduates are taking remedial English in college.

There are multiple responses to that one, beginning with an accurate explanation of just who went to high school in the 1920s—and what percentage of students go to college today.

The utility of studying Latin and Greek (or Logic and Rhetoric) in 2024—as opposed to, say, Spanish or robotics—is debatable, as well, but everyone understands the underlying purpose of such a meme: Schools today are failing. Tsk, tsk. Discuss.

If you’re a long-time educator, you learn to take these comments in stride. Just more evidence that everyone’s been to school, and thus believes they understand what schools and teachers should be doing. It’s an evergreen cliché that happens to be largely true.

But there are a couple of points worth making:

  • The required curriculum is overstuffed already. Way overstuffed, in fact. Michigan—which has a tightly prescribed “merit curriculum” for HS students– just added a requirement that all students take a semester-long course in personal finance. This can take the place of a math course—or a fine arts course, or a world languages course. Every time a requirement is added via legislation, students who want to take four years of a foreign language, or play in the orchestra for four years, have to juggle their schedules and make unpleasant choices.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to cover everything—and it’s maddening to have someone at the state Capitol directing your path by limiting your choices.There are lots of important things to know about adulting, and you only get so much time to go to school for free, in the U.S. Expecting schools to teach things that used to fall squarely into the purview of parent responsibilities, without providing additional time and resources, is unfair.

  • This is educators’ professional work. Let’s take Mrs. Jones, the 4th grade teacher who decided to incorporate an SEL program into the daily life of her class. She’s doing that for a reason, I can assure you. Either these techniques have worked in the past to create a happier classroom atmosphere, or this class is particularly conflict-prone. She’s trying to make it possible for students to learn the other (required) things, by focusing first on communication and techniques that calm students, helping them focus.

Do educators sometimes get students’ curricular and personal needs wrong? Sure. But they are the first line of defense, and best positioned to incorporate non-disciplinary work (like time management, stress relief and how to properly thank someone) into the classroom. And all of them appreciate these things being reinforced at home.

  • You can’t get away from teaching things that fall into the wider scope of how to be a successful adult and citizen, as a schoolteacher. You’re always, always modeling, correcting, observing and suggesting behaviors, whether your students need help getting into their snowsuits or help in getting over a failed romance. Even if you’re teaching AP Calc, there will be inadvertent lessons in addressing challenges, persistence and the value of studying something so abstract and elegant.

There is a prevailing belief, especially in the past couple of decades, that the only way Americans can compete in the global economy, maintaining our preeminent position, is to “raise the bar.” This usually translates to harder coursework, required earlier in a student’s academic career, monitored by increased testing. More top-down control. More competition.

When you drill down far enough, what’s missing is a clear objective for public education. Are we, indeed, trying to help every child reach their full potential (in which case, bring on the handcrafted birdhouses and mindfulness)—or are we trying to strengthen the economy by creating skilled and compliant workers?

by nflanagan

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read

I mostly stay out of the Reading Wars. Not because I don’t have opinions on reading instruction. I emphatically do.  I avoid the controversy because—as a lifelong music teacher—expressing that opinion inevitably leads to a pack of Science of Reading enthusiasts pointing out that I am not a reading teacher, and therefore what do I know?

This is deeply ironic, as those same SOR fans also spend lots of time criticizing experienced reading specialists. Also–I have taught in the neighborhood of 4000-5000 kids, over 30+ years, to read music, relying on a wide array of pedagogical techniques.  But that form of reading instruction evidently carries no water with the SOR bullies.

I was intrigued today by a story in NY Times Magazine about Benjamin Bolger:

Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Overall, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s.

Bolger, who is now 48, got off to a rough start, with a disastrous car accident when he was two years old that seemed to trigger the breakup of his parents’ marriage.

Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.

It would be easy to project the next part of the story—he somehow “learned to read” and then caught up to his classmates. But that’s not what happened.

At 11, he began taking classes at Muskegon Community College. Still reading below a third-grade level, Bolger needed his mother to read his assigned texts out loud; he dictated papers back to her. At 16, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, moving with her into an off-campus apartment. He recorded his lectures so he could listen to them at home; his mother still read to him. Majoring in sociology, he graduated with a 4.0. He was 19.

There were some failures (as we traditionally define failure). Bolger dropped out of law school at Yale due to the heavy reading load. But then, of course, he got back up on the academic horse, and pursued other degrees—including a PhD from Harvard, successfully completed. He also married and has two rather beautiful children, for whom he’s designed an experience-intensive home-schooling program.

What’s interesting to me is that the NYTimes Magazine article doesn’t dwell on Bolger’s inability to read well (whatever that means). Only on the fact that he has more degrees than only one other person in the nation (who’s also from Michigan, for whatever that’s worth).

Given the laser focus, in 2024, on determining which reading program yields the best test scores, I am surprised that a long-form article in a major publication does not explore the question of how one gets a master’s in the Politics of Education from Columbia, for example, without being an expert at deciphering complex texts, close reading.

But the “does he read or doesn’t he?” question—the one where we now expect to see evidence or data—never gets raised again. The article does say he has multiple master’s degrees in writing, obtained after his dissertation was completed.

Things that ARE apparent in this article:

  • Third grade is WAY too early to label ANY child a non-reader (or punish them by retaining them). It’s too early for labels, period.
  • When it comes to effective learning (the kind that sticks, and can be applied), experiences trump worksheets.
  • Continuously reading to your children, even when they are supposedly “reading to learn” at age eight, is absolutely the right thing to do.
  • Visual interpretation of text symbols is not more efficient or of higher value than hearing that text read aloud.
  • Many, many children are “bright but different.”

This is where we morph into wondering why every child in America doesn’t get the hothouse treatment Bolger did, with his own personal learning coach/secretary/guidance counselor/mom. Worth noting: Bolger’s mother, at the time of the accident, was a schoolteacher.

I would be the first to say that such an individualized education is far beyond what any public school could be expected to provide for a bright-but-different child. Given the ongoing strenuous campaign to strip resources from public education, we’re not likely to see public schools turn their limited energies and resources to meeting individual needs in whatever ways parents demand.

Nor is this a pitch for home-schooling. Most kids are educated in public schools, and if the hundreds of pictures on my social media feeds are any indication, kids in 2024 are graduating, going to college, working at summer jobs or finishing the fourth grade a little taller and smarter. Bolger, in other words, just got lucky.

This is a pitch for not writing students off, at any point in their academic career.

You may be wondering what Benjamin Bolger does for a living. He’s a full-time private college-admissions consultant, charging clients $100K for four years’ of services, which I was surprised to learn is kind of cheap in Admissions Consultant World.

I find Bolger’s story rather amazing, an exploration of what it means to be intelligent, and well-educated. Many historical figures bypassed traditional education models and found their way to greatness and influence via their natural smarts and leadership. Bolger embraced the traditional path to success— degrees from prestigious colleges—but got there without the benefit of the K-12 college rat race. Or the ability to read at “grade level.”

There should be a lesson for the SOR devotees in there somewhere.

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

Just Who is Trashing Public Education?

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get upset about. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country. So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school plays and songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

Occasionally, you’ll see someone put forth a visionary principle for public education, like the meme that wonders why schools don’t focus on their students’ strengths. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Small classes, focused on individual talents and gifts, kind of like Corey DeAngelis’s magnet school. A warm and welcoming community of learners. Ample resources. Ask yourself WHY we don’t have that in every public school (worth noting: some schools get pretty close).

It’s not because educators—or schools, if you will– don’t want to meet student needs. They do.

Just who is trashing public education—and what are THEIR ultimate goals?

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.