Category / Education Policy

by nflanagan

Are Schools Responsible for the Racist Behaviors of Students?

In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all… Paul Simon, My Little Town

I spent the bulk of my teaching career—over 30 years—in a single small town in southeastern Michigan. When I started teaching there, the district was distinctly rural. There were several farmers on the school board, including one who came to board meetings in overalls. When I was hired, my principal described the district as the far edge of white flight.

Over time, a lot of that farmland was carved up into new subdivisions and a 600-lot mobile home park—folks moving out of the inner suburban ring around Detroit, looking for good schools and politically conservative neighbors. I thought about my principal’s remark all the time: white flight.

There was racism, all right. I experienced it in my own family. But I was never afraid to talk openly to my students about diversity and equity. Teaching music, I was determined to open their minds to the roots of the music they were marinating in.

I liked my students—and I liked the teachers I worked with. We probably didn’t talk about discrimination and intolerance as much as we might have; some of my former students, now adults, have shared their resentment at how relentlessly white and narrow-minded their classmates and neighbors were.

And it’s gotten worse, I believe, although I no longer live there. The elected school board has grown more conservative—and more vocal about issues du jour, including racism, sexual preferences, to mask or not to mask–and dealing with student discipline.  These days, there is a local incarnation of Moms 4 Banning Stuff, and packed, heated board meetings.

Now, the district is being sued over claims of racial harassment:

A former Hartland High School student is suing the school district and three district administrators, over what she claims was a relentless and cruel pattern of racism directed at her and other Black students while she attended the school.

Tatayana Vanderlaan, now 20, filed a lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District that claims Hartland Consolidated School District and administrators were negligent in failing to stop racist attacks that included students saying Vanderlaan “should get lynched.”

The suit describes repeated racism directed at Vanderlaan from the time she first entered Hartland High in 2019. Vanderlaan says white schoolmates directed racial slurs at her, including the N-word, and that administrators did not address the behavior, even as it escalated.

Vanderlaan says she’s seeking “accountability,” a word that strikes me as rather perfect—isn’t accountability the holy grail of all the school reforms we’ve been chasing for decades? And furthermore, just who is to blame for vile and racist behaviors in students? Are they being held accountable?

The behaviors are vile and racist—confederate flags, the N-word, lynching threats, references to the plantation and hurtful ridicule referencing personal appearance. The taunts happened at school, but also on social media. Administrators are named in the suit, and teachers painted as dismissive.

The U.S. Attorney’s office also opened an investigation, after Vanderlaan filed a complaint. I am not surprised that former students and those still attending this school described other racist incidents to investigators. Some things, I suppose, never change.

But who’s responsible?

I want to believe that teachers would interrupt these behaviors, that at least some students would stand up for what is right. But in another little Michigan town,  two brothers wore ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirts to school. They were ordered by teachers and an assistant principal to remove them, because they were vulgar and profane—and for that seemingly appropriate action, the school has been sued by the boys’ mother, for suppressing their First Amendment rights:

The slogan…has become a popular form of political commentary, appearing on T-shirts and bumper stickers and is chanted at right-leaning rallies, the lawsuit says. Even members of Congress have used the phrase during speeches on the House floor, the suit states, yet no one has been censored or punished.

So—if Congressional reps are making vile and/or racist remarks, it’s now OK in middle schools?

It would be nice to think that the courts would support public school educators in their quest to keep schools from being overrun by ugly “free speech” that disrupts the learning process—and trust me, vulgar and racist speech have the capacity to do just that. Big time.

It would also be nice to think that policymakers could have an impact on hate speech and resulting violence. But making laws is one thing—getting people to believe they are fair and useful, and willingly follow them, is another.

The small town where I used to live and teach is in Livingston County—which has just declared itself a “Constitutional County” (spoiler: there’s no such thing). According to the Sheriff, a Constitutional County’s policing personnel do not have to enforce laws they find “unconstitutional”—specifically, a package of gun safety laws recently passed by the State Legislature. So there’s that.

Something has changed in this country, all right. Respect for the rule of law, respect for civic order and civil speech, respect for all our fellow citizens.

Just who are we going to hold accountable?

In my little town
I never meant nothing, I was just my father’s son.
Saving my money
Dreamin’ of glory
Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun

Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town

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

Where Does Your State Rank? Your School?

When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who had recently moved to East Lansing, and was searching for the best elementary school for her daughter.  Michigan has long had school of choice language—intra-district and between public school districts, with some conditions.  She shared her experience in visiting a half-dozen local schools with my class—which ‘points of pride’ they promoted, how they welcomed new families, what the vibe was when touring the buildings.

If they led off with their high test scores, she said, we immediately rejected them from consideration. What we were looking for was a lively atmosphere, a diverse student body, a school leader who introduced us to teachers and students, and whether they asked questions about my daughter and her interests.

It was a class in education policy analysis. Every week, we were reading data-loaded books and detailed monographs about comparative school success. I was older than most of the students, and my children were in college, but my classmates often had school-age children. They were invested in good local schools for their kids, as well.

To hear a trusted professor say that she wandered around on school playgrounds talking to kids, and didn’t really care about how many computer labs they had–that was a thing, 15 years ago–was a bit of a shock. The professor and her spouse (who were white) ended up choosing the school with the lowest test scores and the highest percentage of children of color.

I trust my gut, she told us. Stuff like student artwork and kids happily practicing plays in the hallways means more to me than an extra four point-something in their statewide assessment scores.

Now—it’s worth noting that East Lansing is a majority-white town and home to a large university campus. While there are pockets of poverty, discrepancies in test data, economic differences and ethnic diversity are smaller than they might be in other places.

Still—her “I trust my gut” remark stuck with me. I think about it all the time, especially when I read articles like this: Michigan ranks 27th on 2023 national education ranking.

There’s a lot of blah-blah in the article about what seem to be factors that put us squarely in the middle of the pack, but there’s zero supporting data—just the headline. There’s this quote from “business leader” (and, unmentioned, former Republican Lt. Governor) Brian Calley:

 Michigan has fallen behind much of the rest of the country in overall education performance, student retention rates and reading and math scores at a time when education funding is at an all-time high.  “We know that it’s not just a money issue. We desperately need alignment between what kids are learning and what they need to be successful in an increasingly global economy,” [Calley] said.

Here’s some data that explains how “all-time high” funding is definitely not happening in Michigan, although it may well be in other states.

Here’s what I worry about: the average citizen reading the article in their local news outlet assumes it’s true—that credible sources have deemed Michigan to be 27th in a lineup of the 50 states, and any parent looking to move here might well be cautioned to seek some other state because they’re doing a better job.

The truth is, of course, that there are superb schools in every state—and poorly managed schools in every state, and you might have to do a little legwork, trusting your gut, to figure out which schools might be the best choice. For you, and your children.

Or — more likely—you won’t really have a choice. Your circumstances will dictate that you need a school where a bus picks your children up from your neighborhood, and offers after-school care so you can work. Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli can turn up their noses at families who choose schools because they provide transportation or have great sports programs, but those reasons may be way more valid and satisfying to parents and students than test score comparisons.  

Where does your school or state rank?

Why would anyone think they could accurately assess this—and why would any educator or parent brag about rankings? More money—whether tax-based resources or family wealth—produces better test results. Always has, always will.

But there is a broad and diverse array of factors that make schools good and useful, beginning with the people who work in them.

I went to the Graduate School of Education page at MSU to see if my professor was still there—and noticed that the first tab on the home page was “National Program Rankings.”

 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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.

by nflanagan

Thinking about Teachers at the Table

In the fall of 1993, the United States Department of Education (under Richard Riley, Secretary of Education) held what was intended to be the first annual National Teacher Forum. Organized by Terry Dozier, Special Assistant to the Secretary, state Teachers of the Year and their chosen outstanding teacher partners were invited to Washington D.C. to discuss how to bring the teacher voice into policymaking.

I’ve been to lots of conferences and seminars, but few impacted my life as a teacher leader more than the first National Teacher Forum. I can remember, verbatim, phrases—Honor what we know!—and aphorisms we used: Teachers want to be partners in, not objects of, education policy.

The idea of teachers at the policy-making table was downright thrilling. We deserved to be at the table—in fact, it was our table.  Our contributions could make a huge difference in policy around student learning and public school organization. We had answers to education’s persistent questions. Ask us!

We were all assigned a partner in the US Department of Education. We went to workshops (this was where I first heard of National Board Certification). We networked with the legislators and bureaucrats who were making policy around the work we did every day. We were encouraged to start our own state forums for accomplished teachers. Best of all, we started something few of us had heard of before this: an online bulletin board and discussion group. I was a moderator of that group—and still have many professional friends from that time.

I wish I could give you links so you could explore this wonderful program, and read the publications that resulted, but an hour of googling and a scouring of ed.gov have yielded zero information on the Forums (there were eight—the entire initiative and its published results were taken down in 2001, as No Child Left Behind turned education policy in a vastly different direction). I found two publications—Teachers Lead the Way, from the 1997 Forum, and a reprint of the 1994 Forum document, Prisoners of Time, which was apparently (and ironically) co-opted by the Education Commission of the States.

I share all this to illustrate the fact that teachers have long been interested in controlling their own professional work, and willing to share their expertise and perspectives with policymakers. Personally, I’ve been involved in several initiatives to bring teachers to various policy tables. After the National Teacher Forums bit the dust, State Teachers of the Year organized themselves—and even proposed Teachers at the Table legislation (which went nowhere). The idea keeps bubbling up.

Point being: the only people who think having a substantive teacher voice in education policymaking is a great idea are teachers. And, of course, their state and national unions—who represent the broad outlines of teacher-friendly policy via lobbying and advocacy, and are wary of independent teachers proclaiming their teaching expertise makes them policy experts, as well.

Publications and media about the teacher voice haven’t shut down in the intervening 30 years. Independent blogging, non-profits and social media have elevated pieces about the necessity of asking teachers whether a Big Sexy Idea about how to ‘fix’ issues in public education will work (usually, no) and what might actually improve teaching and learning.  

In short, as Jose Vilson says in his TED Master Class, no conversation about education should happen without the teacher voice front and center.

But—as with all things in education—there are caveats in thinking that gathering a group of teachers (even award-winning teachers) and asking for their policy ideas would be the fastest way to better schools.

Teachers aren’t trained to do policy creation and analysis. They can tell you, in excruciating detail, what bad policy does to student learning in their context. But good policy is written with measurable goals and specific outcomes in mind, accompanied by the supports and spurs that will get us there.  It requires imagining not only happy results but unintended consequences.

Policy is not (exclusively) mandates and incentives. Sometimes, it involves capacity-building, persuasion—or overt systemic change, which takes time and accrued data to analyze. Regularly asking teachers to comment on the changes wrought by policy shifts ought to be a no-brainer, however. Acting on educators’ feedback would be even better.

Here’s an example: My state instituted a third-grade retention law in 2016, wherein students who didn’t meet the third-grade standard for reading proficiency would be held back—a mandate, taking away a decision that had always been made by teachers and parents. Half the states in the nation now have similar policies—and politicized policymaking has made other states feel they need to crack down on those lazy eight year-olds.

It’s a terrible policy, for dozens of reasons, beginning with its target audience and punitive nature. In six years, it hasn’t yielded anything beyond angst and anger, much of which has been directed at teachers and schools, not clueless (or, sadly, vindictive) lawmakers.  

The good news here is that MI Governor Whitmer seems poised to sign a bill repealing the third-grade retention mandate. Nevada’s repealed theirs, too. The MI bill’s sponsor, Senator Dayna Polehanki, is a former teacher. A Michigan Teacher of the Year, Leah Porter, testified in hearings.

There’s a role for teachers in examining and fine-tuning education policy—and a strong need for teachers to run for public office to share their experience and expertise. As we said, at the 1993 National Teacher Forum: Honor what we know.

by nflanagan

Who is Indoctrinating Whom?

A few years back, I got an email from a recognizable family name in the district where I taught for over 30 years. The man sending the email graciously introduced himself and provided the year that he thought I may have been his sixth grade music teacher. Doing the math, I realized it was my first year of teaching.

Once I confirmed that yes, I was the Nancy Flanagan he was looking for, he sent a rather remarkable second email. He was working for the State of Michigan, as an attorney in their Civil Rights division. And he wanted to thank me for my influence on his life, back when he was in the sixth grade, in my general music class.

While large segments of my career as a music teacher are blurry in my memory, I do remember bits and pieces of that first year—I was teaching several sections of sixth grade music, and saw the kids perhaps twice a week. There was no set curriculum, no standards, no published materials to guide me. I was literally making it up, day by day. It was an all-white school, in a charming little town on the outer ring of suburban Detroit—and my job seemed to be keeping the kids busy for 40 minutes, and my head down.

In his email, the man said he remembered singing Black and White, a then-current hit song by Three Dog Night, in music class. You talked to us about it, he said— kind of a little sermonette (his word) about equity and integration. None of my other teachers and nobody in my family ever talked to me about race or civil rights, he said. But the song made me curious. In high school, I started asking questions. And in college, I took a course in African American studies. And then I went to law school, with the intention of doing something good with my education.

The key thing about this story is that I didn’t remember any of it—not singing the song, and especially not talking to sixth graders about the meaning of the lyrics:

The ink is black, the page is white. Together we learn to read and write.
A child is black, a child is white. The whole world looks upon the sight–a beautiful sight.

And now a child can understand that this is the law of all the land.

I have since learned that the song was originally written in response to the Brown decision, in 1954, and first recorded by Pete Seeger. A verse that was part of the original lyrics was left out when Three Dog Night recorded it:

Their robes were black, their heads were white,

the schoolhouse doors were closed so tight.
Nine judges all set down their names, to end the years and years of shame.

How would Ron DeSantis feel about Black and White? Or any of the other things millions of teachers have unwittingly said, done, shared, read aloud and even thought in recent decades? Where does ordinary classroom discourse end—and “indoctrination” begin?

A good way to think about that question is to reflect on what you learned in school—remarks that teachers made, class discussions, books that lingered in your mind. Your mileage may vary, of course, but a lot of what I remember is not “content,” per se—but the odd comment, classroom habits, kindness or lack thereof.

My biology teacher, Mr. Fry, used to show us movies from the Moody Bible Institute on Fridays, 100% creationist in nature. Mrs. Wildfong, fifth grade, let me skip the SRA kit and read whatever I liked from a shelf in her classroom. My HS physical education teacher, Mrs. Firme (yes—that was her real name), once asked me if I had polio as a child, because of the way I ran the 50-yard dash, making me self-conscious about running for the rest of my life.

Was I indoctrinated by my teachers? Nearly every teacher I had subtly changed my academic and life trajectory, from kindergarten to graduate studies, and not all of them had my personal well-being as an educated person in mind. Some wanted to save my soul, others wanted to influence my political beliefs. When William Kunstler came to speak on my college campus, my philosophy professor said his speech was “garbage.” I don’t remember a great deal about introductory philosophy, but I remember that.

Was the Professor right? I had to wrestle with that question—challenging intellectual work, actually, during a time when campus unrest was the hot political issue.

In yet another excellent blog, Jan Ressenger says this:

For several hours in December, as I watched a televised hearing of the Ohio House Education Committee, I was struck by so many lawmakers who seemed to define the role of teachers as mechanical producers of standardized test scores—and who conceptualize schools as merely an assembly line turning out workers who will help attract business and manufacturing to Ohio. I listened to a conversation filled with standardized test scores—numbers, percentages, and supposed trends measured by numbers. The only time human beings appeared in the discussion of education was when legislators blamed teachers for the numbers.

As I watched the hearing, I realized again something that I already knew: Many of the people who make public education policy at the state level don’t know what teachers do. Few people on that committee seemed to grasp that teaching school is a complex and difficult job.

Ressenger gets this absolutely right–read the blog! Teaching has never been about content delivery, effectively measured by tests, where students repeat what they’ve memorized. Good teaching has always been –even if unacknowledged– about applying new knowledge and challenging beliefs.

It’s a complex and difficult job, all right.

Were you indoctrinated by your teachers? Who’s in charge of the indoctrination dialogue right now—and what’s their goal?  Good questions to ask.

by nflanagan

Parents’ Rights vs. Reality

I am always bemused by the phrase “parents’ rights,” when utilized by right-wing culture warriors in our current education climate. Because—seriously—parents have always had the right to control pretty much anything around what their child was learning or doing in a public school. As long as it was in general alignment with the school’s mission, of course, and didn’t impact the education of other students.

I have been a public school teacher in five separate decades, beginning with the 1970s—and have seen parent demands and outrage issues come and go, from Sex Education (a perennial sore spot in the curriculum) to The Math Program (aka, Why don’t I understand my kids’ homework?) to Pay to Play Athletics. My friends who taught literature were always willing to substitute one book for another, if parents preferred not to have Jason read Huckleberry Finn or The Bluest Eye.

I could name dozens more instances of parents being upset about something “the school” did—or a teacher said—or how a particular policy was enforced.  In fact, one of the reasons to put your children in public schools is the knowledge that you can complain, even organize a group of complainers, and there is a duly elected school board you can address, if school administrators don’t give you what you want.

What if what the parent wants is not in the best interests of their child, let alone all the other students in her class?

Your mind may jump here to the use of pronouns—or acceptance of realities (historical and current) that some parents find threatening–but over time, teachers run into many legitimate reasons not to trust parental requests or judgment (pay attention to that word, judgment…).

For example, I once had an Albanian student who had only been in the country for a few months. The class was a pull-out, called Homework Hall, where kids who had lots of missing assignments were sent with the hope that taking away their gym or computer privileges would cause them to buckle down and make up all the work. I was supposed to stand over them, keeping their noses to the academic grindstone.

Homework Hall was based on a flawed theory to begin with—but this girl was struggling with speaking/reading/writing English, and not completing most of her written work because it was written in a language she barely understood. I tried negotiating with her teachers to significantly reduce her assignments—answering the three most important questions instead of ten, or giving her a buddy who could read things to her, discuss the content to help her form answers with the vocabulary she’d mastered—but not all of her teachers were willing to do that.

In the meantime, her father kept coming to school. After getting a quarterly grade report, showing that she had not turned in some of her work, he wanted daily reports. He didn’t speak English, either—but his teenaged translator said if the girl was “lazy” then she would be punished. Swell.

This girl was the polar opposite of lazy. She worked hard. She was persistent. She just needed school-based adults in her corner. Her father had the right to ask for information about her progress, undoubtedly. And probably it was his prerogative to continue slapping her and verbally abusing her in a language she did understand, which seemed to be his cultural norm for how to deal with bad grades.

It was one of those judgment calls. Stand up for the kid–or decide it’s none of your business and confirm that she actually had failed to turn in assignments, because they were just too difficult?

In fact, every one of the kids in that class was a judgment call—the brilliant boy who simply refused to copy definitions from a glossary or do other pointless work, the child whose parents had just split up and couldn’t concentrate on equilateral triangles, the girl who was hinting at suicide in her English class free writes (which she never turned in, leading her to Homework Hall). Judgment calls, all of them.

What if you wanted to encourage parent-school dialogue—would passing laws requiring schools to post copies of existing legislation guaranteeing parental rights really be the solution?

Or what if you reported a child for seriously threatening behaviors—repeatedly—and nobody came to help? 

And sometimes—angry parents are absolutely right to speak their minds about what’s happening in the school their child attends.

Parents do have rights—and they should. Public schools are obligated to acknowledge and address parents’ input. The best thing we can do to ensure parental rights are honored is to invite them to speak their minds and express their beliefs and wishes, calmly, with the relevant adults in the room.

What we are seeing now—nominally “parents’ rights”—is not about parents expressing their beliefs about serious education policy or even personal issues involving their child. They are politicized grievances, often based on nothing more than rumor. And they’re often quietly funded by groups that have no personal interests/issues with the school in question—only in damaging public schools.  

The Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, recently met with a group of parents, some from the district where I taught for 30+ years, to discuss education issues. Here’s what a man (whose son I taught, back in the 90s) had to say:

“The biggest issue I see is just the lack of respect…the Republicans feel that anybody can be a teacher these days, which is the craziest damn thing that you can think of. We recently elected a lot of new school board members who are anti-school. I don’t know any other way to put it. The slates that ran out here are just not going to be supportive of public education. So I think that’s the biggest problem that we see. There are school board members who actually believe, and it just astounds me, that there are litter boxes in the bathrooms. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

Whitmer agreed and made a point to debunk a right-wing conspiracy theory circulated by podcaster Joe Rogan and Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock that kids are identifying as “furries” and are using litter boxes in classrooms. This has been used to push anti-trans policies in schools.

Thank you, Governor—and all of the other education officials who are carrying on as if culture warriors had legitimate things to talk about, letting the system work as it is supposed to. But in all these school board meetings—especially those that become hostile encounters, it’s good to keep in mind that not everyone is set on building good community schools.

The Network for Public Education has a new (free) publication– Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and their Funders. Find out who’s really got a legitimate beef and who’s out to take down America’s best idea, a fully public education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.

by nflanagan

Keep Your Hands Off My Curriculum

There is a certain irony, I realize, in a music teacher writing a piece called ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Curriculum.’ Music education is generally one of those areas that Moms for Faux Liberty types ignore (unless—and this comes from personal experience—it’s critiquing the tunes chosen by the marching band whose entire existence, to some people, hinges on supporting football players).

Who cares what they’re learning? It’s just music! There’s a lot wrong with that assumption, beginning with the universality of music—as human beings, we’re swimming in it—but first, I want to talk about all everyday curriculum, across the K-12 spectrum–and who controls it.

My pitch here is about the individual teacher voice in selecting materials and designing lessons for students, and it’s based on two fundamental teacher competencies: *
1. Knowing your students well, and being committed to their learning.

2. Having deep and always-growing knowledge and pedagogical expertise in the subjects and developmental levels you teach.

The second of these is something that can and should be continuously improved, across a teaching career. It’s the point (if not the actual outcome) of what we call professional development.

The first, however, depends on the individual teacher’s character and temperament, their belief that all students have a right to learn.

Now—I’m not opposed to standards or other common agreements, whatever each state or district calls them, the big buckets of what students should learn and when. Broad standards can organize and sequence curriculum; outlining disciplinary essentials and giving all educators a framework for what students should know and be able to do, at the end of their schooling, is undeniably important.

What I’m saying is that site-specific agreements– what all 9th graders in the district should read, for example, or how to teach the life cycle of a butterfly–ought to be made by those on the front lines. The ones who know the kids, and are committed to their learning.

This idea ought to be glaringly self-evident—to educators, to parents, even to Joe Lunchbucket who watches Fox News. Kids who live in Flint, Michigan may need to know and be able to do different things than kids who live in Dallas—or Anchorage. Who is best positioned to choose engaging materials, develop concepts, deliver instruction, lead discussions and check for learning?

Certainly not Chris Rufo, who seems to be everywhere these days, merrily inserting his personal beliefs into college syllabi and waging gleeful war on beleaguered K-12 public schoolteachers trying dutifully to teach things, it must be noted, prescribed by others.

It was the linked article on Rufo—and this piece–that inspired this blog. The story is about an Ohio administrator who interrupts a teacher reading Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches during a recording session intended for an NPR podcast.  A third grader makes a very astute comment; the teacher (Mandy Robek) continues reading, but the admin (Amanda Beeman) shuts that whole thing down:    

“It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … Like, disrespected … Like, white people disrespected Black people…,” a third grade student is heard saying on the podcast.

Robek keeps on reading, but it’s shortly after this student’s comment is made on the podcast that Beeman interrupts the reading.  

“I just don’t think that this is going to be the discussion that we wanted around economics,” Beeman said on the podcast. “So I’m sorry. We’re going to cut this one off.”

(NPR reporter) Beras tried to tell Beeman that “The Sneetches” is about preferences, open markets and economic loss, but Beeman replied, “I just don’t think it might be appropriate for the third-grade class and for them to have a discussion around it.”

I actually have some empathy for the administrator. She’s totally wrong—kudos to the teacher and the reporter for choosing the book and understanding the relevance of the child’s comment—but I’m sure Beeman envisioned her job security disappearing in a wave of rabid, sign-waving Moms for Control Over Everything at the next school board meeting, and panicked.

But that’s the point here: Educators need to be prepared to defend their curricular choices, with passion, conviction, and carefully considered rationales. Rolling over for the likes of Chris Rufo, the Hillsdale crowd, and dark-money funded and fully politicized organizations who wish to take down public education is not professional behavior.

Once they control what gets said and read in the classroom, the next target will be public libraries. All publicly funded services, the things that build healthy civilization and make diverse communities strong, will be on the chopping block. Ironically, this is about what the Sneetches were trying to teach the kids in Ohio: preferences, open markets and economic loss. What students learn, even in 3rd grade, matters, it seems.

This is a huge issue, wrestling over curriculum and parents’ desires, and it’s been part of public education since the very beginning. No matter how many standards are imposed, or school board meetings disrupted, however, the most critical aspect of instruction remains the individual teacher’s understanding of what is useful and important for the students in their care, and their personal knowledge and skill in delivering those things. 

Here’s a story:

In 2008, I was e-mentoring some first-year teachers in an alternative-entry program (in other words, not traditionally trained). They were white teachers, assigned to an all-Black district in eastern North Carolina, country that was once endless tobacco fields. Most of them came from elite universities, and all were laboring under the misconception that they were ‘giving back’ to society. A lot of their conversations were about raising the bar, making a difference, blah blah blah.

It was also the Fall of 2008, when Obama was closing in on the presidency. Students in the school were wild with excitement. One of my mentees, teaching Civics and Government, kept sending me long emails pouring out his concern over the ‘unprofessional’ teachers–the ones who had been there for years. They allowed students to disregard the official curriculum! They spent classroom time talking about this miracle that was about to happen, even letting students campaign. Unethical!

He, of course, maintained that he was sticking to standards and remaining neutral about the race. After all, the students would be taking statewide exams next spring, and he wanted them to score well.  He went so far as talking to the principal about his concerns.

I tried to suggest that he was teaching during events that could make history—and incorporating real life into lessons made them more meaningful. I asked if he had conversations with his veteran colleagues, about why they thought abandoning the prescribed curriculum was sometimes okay. Our dialogue got more and more strained, until he basically stopped communicating with me.

This young man had always considered himself an outstanding scholar in the social sciences. His lesson designs (debates, short-writes, small-group discussions, film clips) weren’t bad at all, especially for a newbie. He had some ideas about how to be a good teacher, and passion for the subject matter. What he was missing was knowledge of students and commitment to their learning. When the principal had a pep assembly to celebrate Obama’s victory, he was disgusted. For a public school, this is totally wrong! he wrote.

I have thought of him often—I’m fairly sure he’s not teaching any more. Which is too bad. Because being a master at custom-tailoring worthy curriculum to the students in front of you is a skill that takes time and confidence. It really cannot be outsourced.

* If you sat for National Board Certification, these principles will look familiar. If they resonate with you, check out the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ Five Core Propositions. Good stuff.