Category / Curriculum

by nflanagan

What Feeds Bias in Education World?

One of the most genuinely enlightening experiences of my professional career was the multi-day bias training offered (at that time) by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, required of teachers who were training to score portfolio entries of candidates seeking National Board Certification. The first thing we learned was that bias was inevitable in human judgment—and could be positive as well as negative.

That’s important to remember. Bias is often reflexively construed as harmful. Prejudice, a synonym for bias, is not a word we associate with healthy human interaction. All people, however, bring a basket of predispositions into every aspect of work and life, and it’s hard to extinguish those, even when we’re paying attention. Still, some of those characteristics can be constructive.

The trick is recognizing your own biases, as they emerge, and figuring out where those inherent preferences, dislikes and false beliefs are leading your responses. Not easy to do. But important. As Patricia Devine, a psychology professor and director of the Prejudice Lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison says:

“There are a lot of people who are very sincere in their renunciation of prejudice. Yet they are vulnerable to habits of mind. Intentions aren’t good enough.”

Worth repeating: Intentions aren’t good enough.

It strikes me that much of what we see in mainstream media about schools, teaching and student achievement is fed by widely held biases. Things like:

Public schools aren’t as good as private schools (because you get what you pay for).

Teachers in high-poverty schools aren’t as skilled as teachers in the well-heeled suburbs.

Getting into a selective college should be every HS graduate’s goal.

Most teachers come from the bottom of the academic barrel, and would have chosen another occupation, if they could.

The “learning loss” children have experienced due to a global pandemic is a crisis and must be fixed immediately; test scores will tell us when all is well again.

I could go on, pretty much ad nauseum. If an education journalist attended a pricey private high school and university, growing up with financial security and a well-fed ego, nurtured in school, it would be natural to carry those biases into reporting on education, making assumptions about the people and institutions who are most responsible for educating the nation’s children. Assumptions, that is, based on nothing more than ground-in thinking, and lack of personal time spent in schools where everyone’s on free and reduced lunch and the textbooks are 25 years old.

And yes—I realize that my own biases about why mainstream reporting on schools and teachers is so often inaccurate are glaringly obvious here.

The situation is worse in state legislatures, where “information” about “policies that work” is sponsored by deep-pockets funders with even deeper biases about the children who most need high-quality instruction, curriculum and resources in the classroom.

And we haven’t even started to talk about racial bias.

Is school the place to start chipping away at biases? Could we—and by “we,” I mean our racist American society—make a dent, a difference, a change in embedded biases by deliberating structuring anti-bias activities and mandating them in public education? Not if a host of Republican hopefuls have their way.

I’m not naïve enough to think that schools could turn hearts and minds in a K-12 generation. But could they do significant good, given the right tools and incentives?

Research doesn’t give us a lot of hope around this question. A study found that pre-school teachers expect bad behavior from black children, especially black boys—and the data indicate that black children are 3.6 times more likely than white children to be suspended. The bias begins in pre-school and plays itself out, endlessly and increasingly as children get older, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s hard to see just how bias training could turn this around. But maybe it’s worth a shot.

The most surprising part of the study:

Teachers [were given] a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class; there’s hitting, scratching, even toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five. White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students. Black teachers, on the other hand, did the opposite, holding black students to a higher standard and rating their behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

In the bias training for National Board Certified Teachers, there was a vignette describing a first grade classroom with straight rows and silent, head-down children receiving explicit direct instruction from the teacher: Put your finger on the X. Circle the X. Put your pencil down. All the children receiving direction are black—and the teacher is white.


Invariably, when asked about the quality of the pedagogical strategies, white teachers in the training (all of whom were experienced and interested in improving their practice) responded negatively to the rigid, low-level instruction:

Those poor kids! There’s no warmth or creativity! It’s clear that the teacher has low expectations for these kids.

When the training was held in Prince George’s County, Maryland, however, most of the teachers in the room were black–perhaps 80%. When they read the vignette, they thought the teacher must be doing something right, because all the children were quietly focused. When probed–Isn’t the teaching insultingly simple? —they agreed that yes, this lesson left little room for individual thinking or joy.

They were clear, however, that all children need to be taught to behave respectfully in a classroom, to follow conventions—for their own benefit and safety. They’re black children in a public school where their next teacher may give up on making demands on them all too quickly, teachers said. Plenty of time for creativity and laughing, down the line, but these children don’t seem threatened, simply willing to follow the teacher’s guidance. If you genuinely care about children, you’ll insist that they behave properly.

It was probably the most important thing I learned in bias training—good teachers don’t all see things the same way. What seems obvious to one teacher isn’t clear at all to another, equally committed and skilled, but working with a different set of biases—positive, this time.

Applying that principle of positive bias—let’s let this teacher decide what works best for these kids—is the fundamental building block of teacher professionalism. I may be biased, but I’m always going to cheerlead for teacher judgment and autonomy.

by nflanagan

 I Know It When I See It

“I know it when I see it.”

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to describe his test for obscenity, in 1964.

When it comes to K-12 curricular materials and library books, what, exactly, is “pornography”— and its corrupt cousin, obscenity? Do you know it when you see it?

Most parents, I think, have a good handle on what they think is appropriate reading / viewing for their children. As the omnipresent meme says, if you don’t want your children to read or watch something, fine—just don’t make everyone else follow your personal rules. I know parents who found Harry Potter frightening and disgusting, and parents who proudly say their children can read anything they like.

I actually think there are plenty of books that don’t belong in school libraries. But I worry way more about parents who let their school-age kids watch an unending stream of violence on TV, then tag along to the shooting range on weekends.

I don’t think books, per se, engender anti-social behaviors, especially when discussion follows reading. And while it would be lovely to think that schools can dish out value-free “content,” any teacher will tell you that managing classroom learning is a daily encounter with weighing and expressing values. The more you sterilize subject matter, boiling it down to a bunch-of-facts curriculum, the less sticky and engaging instruction becomes.

Thus—it bothers me to hear Christopher Rufo call school library books, even certain textbooks, “pornography.” He’s not just talking about sexually explicit stuff, either. He’s talking about a whole range of, well, values that he finds offensive: Delicate and careful discussions about race and discrimination. Questions around gender identity. The use of impious vocabulary. Characters who are decidedly not religious or Christian.

Pornography is something else.

I first encountered pornography in school, ironically enough. When I was in 10th grade, I was in the school play. It was a minor role—a half-dozen lines and maybe 10 minutes on stage. I can’t remember the name of the (forgettable) play, but my character’s name was Bunny. One of the other secondary characters was played by a girl named Pat, who wore copious black eyeliner and carried a metal rat-tail comb in her purse, both grooming tool and potential weapon.

There was a lot of waiting around for our bit on stage. Pat was always reading a paperback, sitting on the metal stairs up to the light booth. I didn’t think of Pat as an avid-reader type, but she was buried in that book. I asked her what she was reading—and she said it was really good, and I could borrow it when she was done.

It was a plain cover—no pictures. I stuck it in my tote bag with my geometry book and took it home. When I opened it up at home, holy tamales. It was—no two ways about it—porn. I read a little, then hid it back in the tote bag. I took it back to school and kept it in my locker for a few days, reading bits here and there—and, I have to admit, being exposed to things I never even heard of or considered.

We’re not talking about Lady Chatterley or Henry Miller or even Anais Nin. This was poorly written, printed on cheap stock, and raunchy. When I gave it back to Pat, she asked if I liked it. I said yes. And that was a true statement, even though it felt like a bomb when it was in my locker.

Did it hurt me, a relatively innocent 15 year old, to read that book? Nah. But there was a reason I kept it sequestered in my locker.

Nor did it hurt me to read Black Like Me, Naked Lunch or Lolita, all of which I read as a teenager.

Kudos to the Michigan Board of Education for proposing and passing a resolution last week supporting school librarians’ work as qualified decision-makers, when it comes to what should be shelved and available in their respective educational contexts (with the two Republican members voting no):

The board’s resolution calls on local school leaders to follow best practices in handling book challenges and affirms that school librarians have the professional skills to select age-appropriate materials. The board’s statement also recognizes that certified librarians have a positive impact on student’s learning and academic outcomes.

One of the two Republicans, Tom McMillin, promptly proposed another resolution to keep (here it comes) “pornography” out of school. That sentiment already exists in the School Code, so that feels just a bit performative, a chance for McMillin to say he fought for kids or some such. A chance to repeatedly use the word “pornography,” as if schools were the source of the actual porn that many teenagers consume.

 My friend, Reverend Jeanne Hansknect, an Episcopal priest, said this, in her comments to the Community Library Board, as they dealt with charges of offering inappropriate literature:  Reading breaks open our limited experiences one book at a time.

And that’s the real shame of restricting kids’ access to books: things that they learn from, and explore at their own pace, are labeled and locked up, making it harder to encourage broad perspectives and critical thinking. Making it harder for teachers to gin up enthusiasm for the basic process of reading, and harder to use language to teach rich, relevant content. Making it harder to look at the most challenging issues for all Americans, and think together about how to solve them.

None of this is really about skills—or even about obscenity or fake pornography.

 It’s about politics. It’s about trigger words like “pornography,” and unsupported accusations.  We know those unsupported words when we see them. And we’re not seeing them in school.

by nflanagan

Holding Kids Back

When Michigan passed a mandated retention law for third graders who were not testing at grade level, back in 2016, I thought it was a terrible idea. I wrote about it, in several venues—the idea that children who wanted to master reading, but had been unable to, for whatever reason, would be socially identified as “behind” by being retained. When they were eight years old.

I still think mandatory retention laws, no matter how they’re structured, are a punitive response to children who don’t deserve to be penalized. What surprised me most in writing those columns, however, was the number of people who shared what they considered positive stories about retention—how it was just the ticket for one of their children, a grandchild, a student with limited English, a student who had transferred from another school and used the shift to repeat a grade, etc.

Nearly all the stories had the same elements: The retention happened very early in the child’s school career. The child in question was either among the youngest children in the class, or simply immature—or had mitigating characteristics (like learning the language, or a physical disability). The parents, teacher and school leaders had all agreed that another year of, say, kindergarten would be beneficial.

Michigan has just excised the mandated third-grade retention policy from the School Code, keeping the language around supporting early literacy in public schools. This is excellent news, given the mainstream media’s obsession with the Faux Science of Reading and how Mississippi raised its fourth grade reading scores by flunking third graders who were struggling the previous year.

From a Chalkbeat article, yesterday: Should struggling students be held back a grade? Why researchers don’t have a clear answer. Despite decades of research, there’s no clear answer on whether grade retention in early grades is a good idea. Existing data is open to competing interpretations, and big questions about the policy remain unanswered.

The long-run effects of early grade retention are not clear. Perhaps the more important question about holding students back is how it affects them in the long run. 

For later grades, the research is fairly clear. Multiple studies have found that holding back middle schoolers increases their odds of dropping out of high school.

As a long-time middle school teacher, I sat numerous times with parents around a table in the office, after it became clear that their seventh grader would be failing three or four classes. Nearly always, the outcome was the same: every possible strategy, from tutoring to summer school to what might politely be called “incentives” (read: bribes), would be employed so that Jason would be entering the eighth grade, come fall.

A couple of times, however, parents dads wanted to retain kids who were passing all their classes with Bs and Cs, in order to give their child another year of physical growth so they could be more competitive in high school sports. Think about that—have there been studies on using retention to ensure that your child was beefier than other physically diverse freshmen?

Or this case: a fifth grade teacher I met in Louisiana, where the district mandated retention, had a fifth grader who turned 14 and was eligible for drivers training. He also had a mustache. The other 5th graders were afraid of him.

I’m with the Chalkbeat article: Existing data is open to competing interpretations.

What I do think: We have pushed all our typical benchmarks and expected yardsticks for intellectual growth and academic capacities down, and have accepted standardized testing data as Truth, when describing students and thinking about the best ways to educate them.

Just because some children can read at age four, or perform abstract algebraic calculations in sixth grade doesn’t mean that we should reorganize the curriculum to encourage more pushing down. Conversely, just because a child isn’t reading at grade level (whatever that is, and however it’s measured) doesn’t mean that repeating a grade will do anything for the child personally, even if failing a cluster of children artificially raises collective test scores.

It’s become a cliché—but note that Finland doesn’t start formal reading instruction until students are seven years of age, a year before we have decided that some of them need to be “held back.”

Even the language matters—isn’t it ironic, as we strive to leave no child behind, that we hold some of them back?

My school, twenty years ago, had a four-option plan for students entering the district as kindergartners:

  • Developmental kindergarten— a half-day “young fives” program for kids who may not be ready for regular kindergarten work, ascertained through Gesell screening for every child
  • Regular kindergarten—2 ½ days per week, in various schedules
  • Jr. First Grade—for students whose kindergarten teachers identified them as not yet ready for first grade work
  • First Grade

The majority of kids went to kindergarten and first grade. But students could utilize any two or three options, depending on their rate of development. It was an exit ramp off the sequential school conveyor belt without anyone being “held back”—an extra year to grow, with other kids who also needed that time. All placement decisions were made cooperatively by parents, teachers and school leaders.

It was an expensive program (as are all mandated retention programs, it should be noted—requiring an extra year of third grade is costly). And because of that, the bottom line, it was eliminated.

If kids can’t read by third grade, we can always retain them then, right?

by nflanagan

Would You Recognize a Good Lesson If You Saw It?

Here’s a scary headline: Michigan Democrats Look to Change Teacher Evaluation System.

Not so much the “Democrats” part—although I’d argue that not having a clue about evaluating teachers is common in both parties—but the implication that way fewer than 99% of public school teachers are doing acceptable work:

Consider: During the 2021-2022 school year, 99 percent of Michigan teachers were ranked either highly effective or effective on evaluations.

State Rep. Matt Koleszar, D-Plymouth, chair of the House Education Committee, told Bridge Michigan the state’s teacher evaluation system often leads to school administrators “checking a box” as they monitor teachers rather than using the process to help struggling teachers improve.

“I think when you have a better evaluation system and you’re supporting someone who needs that help and needs (those) resources, that ultimately is going to (filter down) to the student.”

I am decidedly NOT a fan of basing any percentage of a teacher’s evaluation on standardized test scores (it’s 40% in Michigan, under our current, Republican-developed system). And I am a true believer in the statement that teacher practice can be improved—and a good evaluation system (plus—key point—the time, trained personnel and resources to implement such a system) could help.

With so many moving parts, and the current handwringing (and bogus data) around low test scores in students emerging from a global pandemic, re-doing teacher evaluations which might be in place for decades seems precarious at the moment.

The questions, really, are: What are we looking for, in a teacher? What skills and qualities do good teachers exhibit—and are they measurable, with the tools we currently use? What outcomes are most critical for students—and what (easily measured) outcomes disappear quickly?

When the legislature can agree on answers to these questions—with input from the education community and invested parents, of course—let me know. Cynicism aside, how do we streamline teacher evaluation in ways that make it easy to capture and share expertise, help promising teachers build their practice, and excise the folks who shouldn’t be there?

There is, by the way, no shortage of ideas and research around teacher improvement; our international counterparts are already doing a better job of this. Anyone who’s looked at Japanese Lesson Study models, or meta-analyses on building effective learning environments knows this—but investing in viable teacher evaluation systems that also build capacity will not come about with a new written tool or protocol. It will take a new mindset.

Because I spent many years looking at videos of music teachers, while serving as a developer for the National Board’s music assessment, I also understand that there are limitations in evaluating teachers by observing their lessons.

For example: You have to know what the teacher’s learning goals were, going into the lesson, and have some context around who’s in the room. The core competency for nearly all teaching is knowing the students in front of you. You can’t build effective lessons without that knowledge. And that’s hard to evaluate.

I used to teach with a man who didn’t bother to learn the students’ names, because the classes were large—60 or more. His rationale was that learning names was time that could be better spent delivering content. He delivered a whole lot of content, all right, but never got great results, because there was no human relationship glue inspiring students to use that content.

Try to put that into an evaluation tool.

Dr. Mary Kennedy, one of my grad school professors, had a video library of teachers teaching. She would usually show two videos, and then ask us to compare and contrast—and roughly evaluate.  One pair of videos (and discussion) that I remember:

  • A man in a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops is facilitating a hands-on science experiment with a half-dozen groups of middle school students, clustered around lab tables. The room is noisy as students manipulate equipment and fill out lab reports, but the teacher is wearing a mic that picks up his comments and students’ questions as he moves from table to table. Several times, when students ask a direct question, he turns it back to them—What do YOU think? Why? Once, he claps his hands and asks the entire class to re-examine the stated purpose of the experiment. There is a beat of quiet, and then students are back to talking and writing. The video picks up students who appear to be off-task, as well, looking at the camera or talking to someone at another table.
  • A young woman is teaching a HS literature class. She is well-dressed and very articulate. The video begins with a Q & A exchange about the assigned reading, with a young man wearing a navy blazer and tie. The questions probe facts from the text—Who is the real victim in this chapter? Does this take place before or after the barn-raising scene and why is that important to the narrative? —and the young man has clearly done the reading, as his answers are all correct. The camera moves back and we see there are about eight teenaged boys in the class, all in blazers. She cold-calls the students, in turn, and they all answer her questions correctly. Other than the questions and short answers, the class is silent.

After watching the two videos, Dr. Kennedy asked: Which was the best lesson? Who was the best teacher? The class was vehemently divided—and remember, these were all graduate students in education. Imagine showing two similar videos to a legislator or one of the Moms 4 Liberty— then asking them to pick out the “best” teacher.

Ironically, the current quest to limit controversy and hot topics in public school classrooms makes it even more difficult to evaluate teacher practice. The best lessons—the ones that stick—are often messy and hard-won. And our best teachers—articulate, student-focused and creative—are being shut down by the very people designing their evaluation procedures.

We used to laugh at the inadequate teacher evaluation checklists—Is the teacher dressed neatly and well-groomed?—prevalent in the 1970s. But we haven’t solved the problem of how to evaluate all teachers fairly and productively. Yet.

by nflanagan

Where the Boys Aren’t: Why is Teaching Still a Female-Dominated Profession?

Last week, the Michigan Department of Education named Candice Jackson, a third grade teacher and instructional coach in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the 2023 Michigan Teacher of the Year.  Hearty congratulations to Ms. Jackson, and my heartfelt wish for an awesome year, packed full of opportunities.  In my (admittedly unasked-for) opinion, teachers in Detroit have been beaten up for decades, but are a talented, determined bunch—teachers with a mission. It’s especially wonderful to see one of them recognized, and their work showcased.

What I found interesting is that all ten of the regional finalists are women. They’re a diverse bunch, too, teaching across the K-12 spectrum in multiple subjects and contexts.

I’m old enough to remember when hiring men to teach in elementary schools was a district goal—we thought that men would serve as role models for younger children and were ecstatic when our new varsity basketball coach was hired to teach kindergarten.

Hiring women as administrators and in secondary jobs that usually went to male candidates (like—cough—band directors) was seen as progressive (by some school boards and hiring committees, anyway); the percentage of women in formerly male-dominated education roles has steadily crept upward.  Over half of school principals are women, in 2023, and a quarter of superintendents are female, a 12% jump over the past two decades.

There’s some research that suggests blended teaching cultures benefits students—that veteran teachers and novice teachers have much to teach each other—and there’s research that supports learning gains when students have teachers of the same race. But what about gender?

The K-12 teaching force has grown increasingly female, although slicing and dicing the numbers is tricky. States where teacher unions are still strong tend to have more male teachers, especially secondary teachers—which may be a function of higher salaries. In Southern, right-to-work states, the percentage of male teachers is lowest—about 18%  of the K-12 workforce in Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana.

An imprecise but useful stat: about three-fourths of K-12 public school teachers are women, across the United States. Interestingly, there are more men (white men, anyway) teaching in private schools than in public—and for considerably less money.

You may not have noticed, but this week is both National Nurses’ Week as well as Teacher Appreciation Week. A cynical person might wryly suggest that it’s efficient to double up these “honor women” weeks, get all this female recognition nonsense over with and let them get back to their underpaid service jobs.

But something has been happening in nursing careers. There are more men training to become nurses—nearly doubling their numbers from 2008 to 2021—and salaries are rising fast.

As we consider how to stop the hemorrhaging of the teacher workforce, the question might be: What is happening, in K-12 public education, that makes women stay—and excel in—teaching and aspire to school leadership positions? What is driving men away from education jobs? And why would men decide to pursue nursing, but not teaching?

I have some thoughts about that—but need to preface them with a disclaimer: None of this is hard evidence, let alone causal evidence, but it’s pretty clear that the female-dominated teaching profession, once the refuge of intelligent women who wanted interesting careers and couldn’t find them elsewhere, is in trouble.

Money is one obvious reason—although male teachers in the U.S. make about $2200 more than female teachers. Teaching is, always has been, a low-paying job, and it’s getting worse. As a society, we’ve moved away from the idea of a male breadwinner and female secondary income—the “my wife is a teacher so she can be home with the kids in the summer” syndrome.

When teacher unions began lobbying (and striking) for more (fair) pay, decades ago, the never-ending source of a low-cost, qualified female workforce for public education dried up. The response was not acknowledging the importance of public schools in building society, and paying up, but pushing back and even vilifying the unions.

But it’s more than salaries—because blaming it all on low salaries implies that women, more than men, are more willing to be servile, working for peanuts because women have always worked for peanuts and a good feeling. When you look at the puff pieces around Teacher Appreciation Week, it’s important to note that Americans have accepted the idea that public education programming and materials (not just salaries) are funded by goodwill, generosity and Donors Choose– and that’s OK.

The United States is also an increasingly technocratic society. We have not gotten over our love affair with STEM education, although it’s clear that fabulous STEM jobs have been way oversold. We don’t value the humanities or important work with very young children, two things that are absolutely dependent on skilled teaching and judgment. In fact, we’ve embarked on yet another wrong-headed reading war with the mislabeled “Science of Reading,” a triumph of misplaced faith in a one-size-for-all, science-will-save-us method for the ultimate individualized task, learning to read. A task, it should be noted, that is overwhelmingly accomplished by women.

I think teaching, despite a lot of empty rhetoric, has steadily lost social prestige. This is ironic, because (trained and certified) teachers today are better prepared and more skilled than teachers of yesteryear. There were enormous strides made, pre-NCLB, in teacher professionalism: increased education, greater selectivity, mentoring, innovative curriculum development, pilot programs in teacher ladders and a marvelous new tool—computers in the classroom.

All of that turned around, c. 2001, and the public education focus shifted from mastery to accountability. Good teaching was less about creativity, community and judgment and more about test scores and competition. If you were looking for autonomy, mastery and purpose, you were less likely to find it in a public school—this might explain why white men still teach in higher numbers in private schools, despite lower overall salaries: because their personal work is acknowledged as central to student success.

You would think that a global pandemic—which was devastating to nursing– would have sent more people out of nursing than teaching, but nursing is a growing profession, with more candidates than the available programs can handle. And more of them men, willing to do difficult, important work.  

The pandemic has upset occupational norms, goals and rewards.  Anyone who’s passed a McDonald’s advertising $21.00/Hour jobs understands that it’s a brave new world, a re-ordering of priorities.

The people who will be standing in front of classrooms in the future, the Gen Z educators who assume schools are for testing and competing, not nurturing, those fully accustomed to shooter drills and recurring violence—will they be willing to just follow orders?

Will we eventually lose the dedicated and talented female education workforce, too?

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by nflanagan

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and my Middle School Band

With the passing of Gordon Lightfoot, I have been surprised and touched by the number of folks posting Lightfoot lyrics and links. They’re not all aging folkies, either—lots of them are in their 30s and 40s, and some are my former students.

That’s gratifying. One of my best memories about teaching comes from a Gordon Lightfoot song—“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

It’s worth mentioning that the saga of the Edmund Fitzgerald is very much a Michigan story. When you grow up surrounded by the Great Lakes, you’ve probably spent a vacation or two watching freighters go through locks, or traverse the sightlines in front of your rented cottage. The sinking of the freighter—when the witch of November comes stealin’—has just the right combination of tragedy and seaborne terror to capture the imagination of schoolchildren.

But it is Lightfoot’s ballad, which was released in 1976, exactly one year after the vessel sank, that has kept the tale in memory. Lightfoot considered the song his masterpiece, and I agree. He captures the terrifying scene and the details of the voyage pretty accurately, while giving us lines like:

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
If they’d put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters

Listening to the song gives me chills, even today.

 When the song was released, I was teaching in Hartland (I was pretty much always teaching in Hartland…), and the students wanted to play it. I knew what was likely to happen, but when a band arrangement was eventually released—which often occurs years after the song was popular– I bought it.

The beauty of the song (and it IS beautiful) lies in the words. There are only four measures of thematic melodic material (in 12/8 time). There are some slight melodic variations in the intro and interlude, but it’s the same four measures, the same five-chord sequence, through the whole song. Musically speaking, it’s static (that’s a polite word). Lightfoot (and pop/rock artists everywhere) take these music fragments and make them come expressively alive with lyrics and production tricks—wailing guitar improvisations, synthesized backgrounds, strings. But mostly—people are listening to the words.

When the musical palette is “middle school band,” however, there’s not much you can do to vary what becomes the same short tune over and over and over. The kids, after learning the song (which didn’t take long), recognized that: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was repetitive and (here comes that word) boring. A whole lot of long notes.  

But–here’s the Lightfoot magic–we turned that band arrangement into a different lesson, around the two questions:

  • Why is the Gordon Lightfoot song so cool and moving, and the band arrangement so…static?
  • What could we add to or change in the band arrangement to make it more interesting, more like the GL song?

It was a great, inspired, discussion– resulting in percussion mallets on brake drums to add noises that sounded like ship’s gear. Someone brought in a ship’s bell, which we added to the intro and final measures. We improvised vocal noises like roaring wind. We fussed with the dynamics–to try to tell a powerful story without words, just moody chords and phrase shaping. We even put bits of the lyrics in the program, and two students read a verse to introduce the song to the audience. (It’s a long song.)

It was also a chance to learn about ballads, and music as storytelling. It turned into the most memorable piece on the concert, judging by parent and student feedback.

Rest well, Gordon Lightfoot. Michigan thanks you.

by nflanagan

Teaching 101: Lesson Planning in TX

Here’s a truism that educators repeat endlessly (and, apparently, fruitlessly): Just because you went to school, doesn’t mean that you understand how schools work.

It applies to all the logistical and philosophical details about schooling, from busing to teacher prep to grading. Just because you had three recesses per day in elementary school doesn’t mean that kids in 2023 have that essential play built into their days. Just because you took Algebra I in ninth grade doesn’t mean that your seventh grader won’t have single-variable equations in their homework packet. Just because teaching seemed easy (or dreadful) to you, as a child or teenager, doesn’t mean that anybody can do it.

And so on. You don’t know what’s going on in schools—or why—unless you’re there all the time and have deep knowledge of education policy and practice.

In a wonderful piece in his eponymously named blog, Tom Ultican writes about a deal going down in Texas:

 Under this new legislation, the state of Texas is contracting with Amplify to write the curriculum according to TEA guidelines. Amplify will also provide daily lesson plans for all teachers. The idea is to educate all Texas children using digital devices and scripted lesson plans while teachers are tasked with monitoring student progress.

This, of course, is not new at all. Education publishers and nonprofits have been hawking standards / curricula / benchmarks / instructional materials / “innovative” reforms—all of them ‘aligned’—for decades, ramping up this effort post-NCLB, and culminating in the Great National Project to Standardize Everything, the Common Core.

Tom does a superb job of deconstructing the fallacy of one-size-fits-all lesson plans, as well as giving his readers a heads-up about Who Not to Trust in Ed World and what they really want.

I was struck by this quote from the so-called Coalition for Education Excellence (“Reducing teacher workloads with State support”):

“Many teachers in Texas are currently working two jobs—designing lessons and teaching them—which is contributing to their exhaustion and teacher shortages. Access to high-quality instructional material can reduce teacher workloads and play a critical role in delivering quality education.”

I have no doubt that many Texas teacher are actually working two jobs, given that the minimum salary for 5th-year TX teachers (who have certainly created lots of lesson plans at the point) is less than $40K. I imagine asking that 5th year teacher if he would rather have more money or free (mandated) lesson plans, courtesy of Texas, which has already spent more than $50 million on the pre-designed, screen-ready lessons from Amplify.

Here’s where the lack of insider knowledge—”just because you went to school…”—comes in, at the intersection of curriculum and instruction. I guess that free (mandated) lesson plans might sound like a good idea to someone whose conception of instruction was formed by the conveyor belt of students with flip-top heads featured in “Waiting for Superman,” another artifact of the roiling education reform dialogue.

No amount of marketing pomposity can change the fact that teachers, in order to be effective, need some control over their professional work. Effective teaching goes like this:

  • Get to know the students you’re responsible for—their strengths, their shortcomings, their quirks. Let them know you care about them, and intend to teach them something worthwhile.
  • Using that knowledge, design and teach lessons to move them forward. Persist, when your first attempts fail or produce mediocre results. Check on their learning frequently, but let them know that you’re checking in order to choose the right thing to do next—not to punish, or label them. Re-design lessons using another learning mode, accelerate, cycle back to review, pull out stragglers for another crack at core content, challenge those who have mastered the content and skill with enrichment activities—and do all of this simultaneously, every hour of the school day.

In other words, designing lessons and teaching them cannot be separated, if you’re hoping to create a coherent curriculum or motivated learners. They’re entirely dependent on the students in front of you. Removing one of the two from the equation makes it harder, and more time-consuming, if the goal is crafting a learning classroom.

One of the phony reasons for adopting the Amplify curriculum TX state legislators have been fed is that students were being taught “below grade-level content.” 

It would be easy for those without experience as educators to assume that kids in Texas were being short-changed, left behind, by feckless teachers lazily spoon-feeding them easy subject matter.

There might be actual reasons for this: some curricula is best understood and applied when taught sequentially. A sharp teacher, getting to know her students, can identify gaps and address those before moving to the next stage—a far better and more efficacious plan than starting with whatever the state has designated as “grade-level.”

The grade-level curricula may be inappropriate for some kids (special education students spring to mind here). It may have been set by people who haven’t been in a classroom in decades, or don’t understand what the pandemic—or poverty—have done to students in any given state or town.

Lesson planning and its partner, effective instruction, are things that teachers get better at, year after year. They are a central part of what it means to be a good teacher. Taking lesson planning away from an entire statewide public school system is not an act designed to make teachers’ lives easier.

It’s about control over what gets taught.

by nflanagan

America’s Most Vulnerable and Important Profession

The Teachers: A year inside America’s most vulnerable, important profession (Alexandra Robbins) does what many other books about teaching are not able to do–take the reader right into the classroom, and describe what’s happening, with empathy and perception. There are lots of books about problems in American education, and lots of books that suggest solutions for those problems, but we seldom get to see examples, conversations and the people doing the work.

If you want a drone’s eye view of American public education—where it’s been, what bedevils the century-old movement to improve it—I would recommend Diane Ravitch’s trio of excellent books that follow education reform over the last couple of decades, or A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire.

But if you want to see what happens in the classroom and in the lives of teachers, Robbins accomplishes that better than any book I’ve read since Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren, written in 1989, which now feels like ancient history . The book is a tour de force—every teacher I know who’s read it agrees—unapologetically written from the POV of teachers without feeling the need to make excuses or backpedal.

Robbins chooses three very fine teachers and takes us through one year (immediately pre-pandemic) of their classroom and personal lives, deftly illustrating how those lives overlap, the pile-up of frustrations and issues bleeding into their emotional well-being.

All three teachers have huge and versatile skill sets and genuine dedication to kids as well as subject matter. Interspersed are data and editorial comment about education and current “reforms” (scare quotes are deserved here), as well as real-life anecdotes and comments that reveal just how far teaching and teachers have sunk, in public estimation.

Robbins highlights things that other education books don’t notice or can’t be bothered with–in-building teacher jealousies and vindictiveness, physical violence against teachers, the long-term effects of cuts to things once considered normal in every school, what it’s like to sit in an IEP meeting with a recalcitrant parent or clueless colleague.

One of her teachers is a middle school special education teacher who finds himself taking on every troubled kid, something that school administrators often push, seeing him as the ultimate “male role model.”  Another is an overachieving fourth grade teacher who knocks herself out to be the perfect teacher for every child, leaving her with no time to build a satisfying personal life (and illustrating, to readers, just how arduous differentiated instruction is, even in a building with adequate resources and good teachers).

The third teacher is a 20-year veteran, a sixth grade math teacher who has mastered the delicate art of getting the best out of her students and runs afoul of a clique of punitive teachers who resent her success and want her to punish kids who are doing well in her class for their sins in other classes.

(Here’s a story from my own experience that parallels her problematic relationships with the people who should have her back—feel free to skip it): We’re having a staff meeting, late spring, to talk about the imbalance of students in elective classes. The middle school bands keep getting bigger and bigger. I will have 93 students in my 8th grade band next year. What this means (besides a classroom management nightmare) is that other elective classes will be tiny, because “too many” students want to be in the band. The Woodshop teacher is outspoken—we need to limit the number of students in band, perhaps allowing the 93 students only one semester of band, in order to give him the minimal 12/class that will keep him employed in the building full-time, rather than splitting his time between middle school and high school, or forcing him to teach a second elective subject.

Everyone knows why all those kids want to be in the band, he says. I turn to him, surprised. I have no idea why kids sign up for band, beyond the fact that they like it.  Mrs. Flanagan gives them all As and Bs, he says. If we forced her to use a bell curve like everybody else, we’d see half of them drop out.

I look around. Nobody’s making eye contact, so it’s clear that this has been a topic of conversation before. And there’s some truth there—I do give a lot of Bs and As, mainly because the students are meeting the goals set for the class. Their parents are paying for their instruments and students must practice to do well in class. We do many performances—both band and individual players. The bell curve is stupid; have all my colleagues really been using it?

I can justify everything I do, but I spent the rest of the year eating my lunch in the band room, paranoid about disrupting the building schedule. And the next September, I have all 93 students in my first hour class. Nobody ever shows up to help. The Teachers is full of stories like this—real things that happen. There is no paradise, no perfect school, although there are many vivid examples of teachers bending over backwards for students and colleagues. Why aren’t we honoring this, financially supporting this work, applauding the folks who show up to teach every day, sacrificing their time and energy for other people’s children?

This book is also the first and best description I have read about the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning. There have been endless articles and research on “learning loss”–all rife with meaningless data and numbers–but nobody talks about the impact of being expected to position family needs as secondary to students’ needs. Robbins gets this right–there is a line between acting morally vs. choosing school over family, a choice that teachers were urged to make, and reviled when they chose their own families and their own health. We have not yet reconciled that, here in America—but the book makes a good start on it.

Highly recommended for everyone, but especially teachers. It’s a fairly fast and facile read, although well-documented with endnotes, and should give teachers a lift, knowing that their work and their dilemmas have been acknowledged.

by nflanagan

The Absolute Folly of Standardization

Remember the days when Arne Duncan insisted that having different ‘goal posts’ in every state was preventing us from improving public schools in America? Good times.

I wish I could say we’ve evolved since 2015, when Duncan stepped down. Or after it became obvious that the pandemic was rendering test data even more corrupt and useless than the test data we were enthusiastically generating early in the 21st century to solve our problems and raise that bar. (Sarcasm alert.)

Alas, we’re still hooked on the idea that a third grader in Manhattan should know and be able to do the same things as a third grader in rural North Dakota, that Algebra belongs in 8th grade (or is it 9th) and six year-olds should be starting to read, dammit. Because global competition, falling behind, blah blah blah.

In fact, one of the problems with the word “standards” and its etymology, is that everyone thinks they know what standards are supposed to mean and determine. A precise definition…

I’m not actually referring to standardized testing in this blog, although if you believe standardized testing is the only way or best way to understand how your child is doing in school, read this.

Nor am I particularly concerned about the standards (whether local, state or cleverly disguised Common Core Standards) that many educational institutions use to organize curriculum. It’s worth remembering that most of the first “national standards” (in the 1990s, spurred by the Nation at Risk report) were created by educators’ disciplinary organizations, with lots of teacher input—and were voluntary, with grade-span suggestions for what students should know and be able to do, and the order in which things were most effectively taught.

If that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because those standards sank like a stone. It’s hard to even find links to them by diligent googling, but non-educators rejected them for various reasons, most notably Lynn Cheney who went after the History standards in the Wall Street Journal. They often included updated instructional methods and curricular ideas (constructivist math, teaching English as a second language, hands-on science and, of course, new ideas about how America actually became a nation).

The first round of national standards weren’t attached to mandated standardized tests, either. They were about curriculum and instruction. When the second round of national standards—the Common Core– were developed, they were part of a standards-aligned tests package, part of the movement toward “accountability” (a word that should forever have scare quotes when mentioned in an educational context). Practicing teachers weren’t seriously invited to the creation process and the word curriculum was not mentioned.

If tests and curricular benchmarks aren’t standardization, what is? Here’s a quote from Nel Noddings that explicates this beautifully:

The worst feature of current moves toward standardization is the insistence that all kids meet the same standards, regardless of their interests and aptitudes. This insistence is claimed to be a gesture toward equality, but it really is a sign of contempt for the wide range of human talents and the necessary work done by many of our citizens.

Any parent of two, different children understands this at a cellular level. Contempt, indeed.

Can’t meet the standards? We’re placing you on the left downslope of the bell curve, when you’re eight years old. Because we’re pursuing equality. It’s science.

There is value in knowing at what age we can expect most, if not all, students to reach intellectual and developmental milestones. That’s not the problem.

The trouble arises when we use the tools of school—instruction, curriculum, assessment—to compare the students in our care, to label them, to sort them into standardized categories when they are very young. To essentially assign their potential. To show contempt for the wide range of human talents.

What about grade levels? Aren’t there specific skills and knowledge we should be demanding of 5th graders or sophomores? Shouldn’t they all be getting the same core content at the same time?

It’s important to remember that grade levels were an efficiency tool invented when there was a big push to get everyone to go to school, rather than relying on tutors, homeschooling—or no schooling at all. Anyone who has taught school can tell you that grade levels are ephemeral, an organizational fiction.

A room full of children of precisely the same age will always have different skill and aptitude profiles. That’s not to say that we should try to adjust groups to meet academic levels, because kids learn at different rates, at different times, and in different ways–and punishing students by keeping them from their peers is insulting and bound to backfire.  

Age-based grouping is probably as good a method as any for group instruction and socializing. The trick is providing children with educational experiences that match their interests and present skills. Teachers know this as differentiation—and it’s a major challenge. (One of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of a teacher who is trying to differentiate instruction for a wide range of same-age students can be found in Alexandra Robbins’ The Teachers. Mind-boggling.)

Here’s another thing Arne Duncan used to say: Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.

I actually think he was mostly right about that—and the fact that his phrase has been co-opted by ugly right-wing thinking and lawmaking may be proof that it’s a powerful thought, when it comes to actual equity and using our schools to support and encourage individual potential.

Which is the opposite of standardization.

by nflanagan

Girls. Period.

Alternate title: The Idea that Girls’ Menstrual Cycles are Shameful Information, Unless Important People Need to Know.  And you’re right–that doesn’t make sense.

Back in the day, when I was in junior high, girls were excused from taking showers after Phys Ed by discreetly telling the gym teacher, standing ever-ready with her clipboard, that they were having their “P.” She would dutifully note this on a mimeographed list of students.

This wasn’t done to assure that the girls weren’t chemically altering their bodies, thus making them superior athletes. In fact, girls weren’t even considered competitive athletes until Title IX. The reason for tracking girls’ menstrual cycles was to ensure they took showers unless their delicate condition and public embarrassment temporarily exempted them.

It’s clear—and it’s a good thing—that the old rules about even mentioning menstruation have long since crumbled. I spent 30 years teaching middle school band, and routinely kept menstrual supplies in my lower left-hand drawer, because you just never knew when a middle school girl would be surprised. And, possibly, mortified.

We didn’t have a school nurse, and the machines in the girls’ restroom were no longer refilled. Unless I wanted hapless girls canvassing 10 of their friends or making group trips to lockers and restrooms, freebie necessities were kind of like Kleenex and hand soap—donations to civilized life in the band room. Items not provided by the school—but nothing to feel embarrassed about.

Recently, a friend who is currently teaching at a local middle school emailed a cluster of friends and asked if any of us would be willing to donate pads and tampons. Not just for school-based emergencies, but also making it possible to send home overnight and weekend packages for girls whose families were not routinely supplying them. Because they’re expensive.

I keep thinking about that as I read the news out of (naturally) Florida—and other benighted states. Whose business is teaching girls—and boys—about menstruation, a natural human function? And why are legislators sticking their noses into what should be an everyday occurrence in schools, ho-hum?

Headline in the Washington Post: Florida bill would ban young girls from discussing periods in school. So—stop me if I’m wrong here—a child (and there are many girls whose periods start when they’re in elementary school; the age of menarche is getting increasingly lower) discovers that she is bleeding. In addition to needing some supplies and some friendly support, she will be breaking the law should she talk about it. According to some old man at the State Capitol.

Let’s name names:
During a Florida House Education Quality Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, state Rep. Ashley Gantt (D) questioned her Republican colleague, state Rep. Stan McClain, on his proposed legislation that would restrict certain educational materials used in state schools. House Bill 1069 would also require that instruction on sexual health, such as health education, sexually transmitted diseases and human sexuality, “only occur in grades 6 through 12,” which prompted Gantt to ask whether the proposed legislation would prohibit young girls from talking about their periods in school when they first start having them.

“So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” Gantt asked.

McClain responded, “It would.”

I guess that’s one reason why Florida girls might be given menstrual products before their first period—so they won’t have to ask for them, risking arrest, or subject a sympathetic teacher to law-breaking by doing what I used to do, all the time: quietly sending girls to my lower left-hand drawer.

I repeat: this is all normal and natural. It was a great day when Health and Physical Education teachers started delivering sex education information to mixed classes of boys and girls. I wish all schools provided free pads and tampons for girls who needed them. We could do better.

Although I agree that parents should be their children’s first and most influential teachers on the range of human sexuality topics, I was profoundly grateful that both my own children had great, no-nonsense sex ed teachers, beginning in 5th grade. Learning about your body—just the facts—and having your gender-based questions answered truthfully? What a gift to children approaching adolescence, a gift we can all benefit from.

As for the claim that FL Governor Ron Desantis is collecting information on girls’ menstrual cycles—well, that’s not precisely true. It’s the statewide High School Athletic Association that’s asking questions, and they’re saying it’s not about rooting out transgender students or embarrassing girls, yet again. There are legitimate reasons for caring coaches to watch for amenorrhea due to eating disorders or exercise stresses, for example. A student athlete who became pregnant would need special treatment. Here’s the information they want to know (click).

What if we were a nation where normal body functions were well-understood, and stuff like knowing how and why to delay pregnancy were agreed-upon knowledge for all pre-teens? I’d feel a lot better about the Florida HSAA asking girls how old they were when they began menstruating, and how many periods they had in the past year in that case.

In the current context, that information feels private, to me. There is trust lost, on all sides, between girls and young women– and whoever’s running the educational show in Florida right now.

And that’s sad.