Category / Education Policy

by nflanagan

Diane Ravitch Sums It All Up

My introduction to Diane Ravitch: I can’t remember precisely which education conference it was, but I was in graduate school, so it was between 2005 and 2010. Ravitch had just begun writing her Bridging Differences blog with Deborah Meier at Education Week, a sort of point-counterpoint exercise. I had also just read her book The Language Police for a grad class, and—although she’d always been perceived as a right-wing critic of public education—found myself agreeing with some of her arguments.

She was on a panel at a conference session. I can’t remember the assigned topic, but after the presentation was opened up to questions, they were all directed to her. And she kept saying smart things about NCLB and testing and even unions. Finally, a gentleman got up to the microphone and said:

Who ARE you—and what have you done with Diane Ravitch? The room exploded in laughter. Ravitch included.

Ravitch has published two dozen books and countless articles. She is a historian—making her the Heather Cox Richardson of education history, someone who can remind you that when it comes to education policy, what goes around comes around. Her previous three books were, IMHO, masterpieces of analysis and logic, describing the well-funded and relentless campaign to destroy public education here in the U.S.

And now, at age 87, she’s written a kind of expanded autobiography, An Education: How I Changed my Mind about Schools and Almost Everything Else. She tells us how her vast experience with education policy, across partisan and ideological lines, has left her with a well-honed set of ideas about how to build good schools and serve students well. How, in fact, to save public education, if we have the will to do so.

You get the sense, as Diane Ravitch wraps up “An Education,” that she is indeed wrapping up– she sees this as her last opportunity to get it all out there: Her early life. How she found happiness. Mistakes and regrets, and triumphs. It’s a very satisfying read, putting her life’s work in context.

For her followers and admirers (count me in), the book explains everything about her beliefs. Her working-to-middle-class roots and her family’s loyalty to FDR and what the Democrats stood for, during post-World War II America, go a long way to explaining how she eventually (with some major diversions) became an articulate proponent of public education.

I’m glad she included a nostalgic portrait of growing up in TX with a hard-working mother and feckless (and worse) father. The glimpses we get into public education in TX in the post-war years resonated with me–and it’s easy to see how going far away to an Ivy League college shaped her entire adulthood. Her classmates at Wellesley, like Ravitch, were ambitious and curious; I’m old enough to remember a time when female ambition was suspect.

The most fascinating part of the book, for me, was the middle third, where she wrote about researching the history of public education and being asked to sit on prestigious boards and serve as Assistant Secretary in the George H. W. Bush Department of Education. There’s a whole chapter on Famous Education Opinion Leaders (many of whom are still working to suppress full public education) taking Diane to lunch, tapping into her work ethic and offering her opportunities to be part of the power structure, to write and speak (and—big point—learn what they’re really up to).

N.B.: Award-winning teachers are also often asked to become part of the education establishment by sitting on boards, writing op-eds, and serving on task forces– and it can be easy to feel as if you’re contributing, at a higher level, when what you are actually doing is giving credence to people who have a very different, but hidden, agenda.

The final third of the book is the Diane Ravitch most educators know and respect. Her observations come from swimming in the ocean of education policy for decades– and they’re accurate. I expect Ravitch to continue to blog and write and speak, as long as she is able. She is the rare voice in education that has examined education ideas across the spectrum and found many popular notions weak or dangerous.

The book is a fine testament to a life spent searching for the truth about public education.

Five stars.

by nflanagan

The Legislature Goes to the Bathroom

I remember the first time I encountered unisex bathrooms.

I was traveling, with a backpack and not much money, in Europe, staying in youth hostels and tourist rooms, often in the homes of women I would meet at train stations holding up signs saying Zimmer zu vermieten. 

Near the end of the trip, an eight-week journey which I funded with just under $1000, I was in Munich, trying to find a cheap (really, really cheap) place to stay. Someone told me about a hostel camp, maybe an hour’s hike from the train station—a field outside the city where you could stay in a huge tent. If you got there early enough, there was also food.

I schlepped out there and stayed the last two nights of the trip, also visiting Dachau on my final day. It was bare bones—BYO sleeping bag and ground pad. There were unisex flush toilets in wooden cubicles, in a single concrete building of the type you’d find in any state park campground today. There were also warm-water showers, in a large room with no dividers for males and females. BYO towels and soap, as well.

The hardest part of adjusting to this was trying to act casual, as if I were used to waiting in line to use the toilet between Hans and Karl, or nonchalantly showering with a couple dozen mixed-gender strangers. Everyone else seemed pretty blasé about it. The vibe at the camp was international, friendly and very safe.

The year was 1976, the 200th anniversary of the home of the brave, land of the free.

Now, nearly a half-century later, some people have their knickers in a twist over newly remodeled unisex bathrooms in Michigan State University’s Campbell Hall, a beautiful dormitory on the oldest part of campus, which houses the Honors College.

The retrofitting took traditional community baths and turned them into lockable, fully enclosed private stalls, each with a shower, toilet and sink.  For a quick hand-wash or teeth brushing, there are also community sinks.

Apparently, the MSU Board got a letter of outrage from a parent, although students (who had to apply to live there) seem to be fine with the plan. There were some comments at the Board meeting about walking around after showering in a towel, but I chalk those up to people with too much time on their hands, wallowing in trad-nostalgia or perhaps sexual fantasies.

Back in the1970s, I lived in a co-ed dorm with community bathrooms. There were four floors—two community baths for women, two for men—although the dorm rooms alternated between men and women. I can’t tell you how many times I went to the women’s bathroom and found some dude walking out of a stall, because he didn’t feel like going upstairs. Lockable stalls with all you need sound vastly preferable to stumbling upon your roommate and her boyfriend showering together in the community bathroom.

Makes me wonder why Republican legislators always bring up bathrooms when they want to gin up fear around gender expression. There really isn’t anything moral or magic about using the bathroom, with either gender.

There’s this: ‘Opposition to transgender inclusion has become a rallying cry for many conservatives. The debate is at the heart of a bill advancing in Michigan’s Republican-led House that aims to restrict bathroom use at schools and colleges on the basis of biological sex. 

Sponsoring Rep. Joseph Fox, R-Fremont, suggested Wednesday that allowing transgender students to use bathrooms of the gender they identify with is “traumatizing little girls.” He called it a “safety issue.”’

Then there’s this: “Michigan must stop making references to gender identity in sex educational materials provided to schools or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding, according to President Donald Trump’s administration.” 

The State Board of Education is also currently hearing testimony on a new set of standards for sex education in Michigan:

“A recommendation that schools include instruction about gender identity or expression and sexual orientation by eighth grade has prompted criticism from several parental rights groups and Republican politicians. 

“These proposed standards cross into deeply personal and spiritual territory, normalizing behaviors that many families find harmful and contrary to their faith.’”

Traumatizing little girls? Normalizing behaviors that contradict families’ religious beliefs? And not being allowed to talk about it, in eighth grade sex ed classes, even if your parents say it’s OK?

It’s all about what’s happening in American bathrooms, evidently.

Gender-neutral bathrooms are commonplace in Europe.  Why is that? What do they understand that we don’t?

by nflanagan

“Progressive” Schools

I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan hosting General Electric Theater, on Sunday nights, when he would look sincerely into the camera and say “General Electric, where progress is our most important product.”

Presumably, progress was both inevitable and desirable—a mashup of American technologies and innovation, bringing (GE again) good things to life. On television, anyway.

Who would stand in the way of progress? Certainly not schools, who were educating rapidly increasing numbers of Boomer kids, using the modern look-see method of reading instruction, and embracing New Math.

According to family legend, my first grade teacher sent home a note asking my mother to stop letting me read to her, in case she said or did something wrong, impeding my literary progress with pre-approved books about Dick and Jane. She stopped immediately. Teacher knew best.

Stephen Bechloss, on this Indigenous Peoples Day, shared a fine essay on progress:

“Examples of progress are all around us. I carry in my pocket a computer that gives me access to almost all the existing knowledge in the world. That same device allows me to instantaneously connect with family and friends thousands of miles away. I can flip a switch and light my kitchen. If my heart gives out, I can get a new one. I can fly in the sky and travel almost anywhere on the planet. Nearly everywhere I may go, I will meet people who know how to read.

The world is a wonder. Let’s not doubt it. The creative power of humankind has yielded a modern world that is safer, richer, more connected, more mobile and full of opportunity for more people than our ancestors could have imagined.”

Where did all this progress come from? In addition to the inherent creative power of humankind, progress is nurtured by education, wherein creativity and curiosity turn knowledge into progressive action: Machines. Ideas. Institutions. Literature and art.

Maybe even better government. Countries, for example, where everyone has health care, and citizens embrace collective efforts to address global issues like climate change. Progress—if you define progress as moving forward to solve problems, bring good things to life.

Possibly you’re raising your hand right now, itching to tell me that there are multiple definitions of progress and progressivism, or that the opposite of conservative is not liberal, but progressive. I would suggest that what we’re seeing now—the movement to damage public education—is not conservative. It’s authoritarian vandalism. But let’s try to agree on a definition of what it means to be progressive.

Miriam-Webster: A left-leaning political philosophy and reform movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere.

It was not surprising to read this, in a must-read piece by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica: “In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.”

Progressive control of schools? Seriously?

Speaking as a person who has spent decades working in public schools and with public school teachers across the country, schools are generally among the most conventional and cautious institutions on the planet, subject to pressures and opinions from a wide range of (often clueless) critics. And likely headed by someone who adamantly does not want to get phone calls from honked-off parents.

I also say this as a person who taught fourth graders about systemic racism, in a general music unit from our REQUIRED music textbook, a collection of songs (Follow the Drinking Gourd; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; Bring Me Little Water, Silvie and others) plus some pretty neutral fourth grade-appropriate text about the African formal and rhythmic roots of American popular music.

We were sitting on the big, round rug and one of the fourth graders asked why so many African-American songs (again, songs in our traditional music series) were about God. If their lives were so bad, he asked, why did they believe in heaven? It was a good question and led to an equally good discussion about what happens when people are oppressed—how they maintain cultural traditions, and hope.

If progressivism is about advancing the human condition, who’s against it? Besides the handful of people running the fatally compromised US Department of Education? The very people to whom diversity, inclusion and equity—progressive values– are anathema.

Convincing people that public school educators are a) raging leftists and b) persuading their students to defy their parents and adopt outrageous worldviews, then calling that progressivism is a fool’s errand. And 70 percent of the people who have first-hand experience with that—parents—generally believe that their public schools are doing the job they want them to do.

But societal shifts happen when false and unsubstantiated statements are repeated so often they become common knowledge. So be prepared to hear a lot of blah-blah about “progressive” public schools in the near future.

by nflanagan

How about a Pause on the Race to Embed AI in Schools?

I haven’t written much about AI and education, for several reasons.

First, there are already many people writing compellingly and with considerable expertise about the uses and misuses of AI in the classroom. Some of those people will show up in this blog. Follow them. Read what they write.

Also, some years ago I developed a reputation for being a cranky Luddite. I wrote pieces about the downside of the ubiquitous online gradebook, accessible to parents 24/7, and other uses of computer programs that added to teachers’ workloads and didn’t fit with the important content and skills I was teaching students (lots of students) the old-fashioned way. The real costs of “free” programs and apps, no matter how glittery and hip, seemed obvious to me. Why didn’t other educators see this?

This came to a head when I was invited to be part of an online panel on ed technologies. Presenters sent me the language they planned to use to introduce me—did I approve? I confirmed, and then they messaged back: the bio had been created by ChatGPT. Ha-ha.

Finally, I haven’t written much about AI because I just find it hard to conceptualize how it could be useful in the classroom. In other fields, perhaps—with a lot of caveats, oversight and suspicion—but it runs contrary to the essential purpose of teaching and learning. Doesn’t it?

It’s never seemed right to let machines do the ‘thinking’ or ‘creating’ that is better done, or at least attempted, daily, by children. In short, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been enlightened? So—shut up already?

I think many, if not most, practicing educators are in the same boat: Unclear about what AI actually is, and what use could be made of AI tools in their vital mission to make children independent thinkers, evaluators and creators.

For starters, who’s cool with Big Data collecting info on our public school kiddos’ engagement with their products? NEPC Report on digital platforms:  

‘While educators may see platforms as neutral tools, they are in fact shaped by competing interests and hidden imperatives. Teachers, students, and administrators are only one market. The other market involves data on performance, usage patterns and engagement—data flowing to advertisers, data brokers and investors, often without users’ knowledge or consent.’ 

A pretty good synopsis of what AI is, from Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

“AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced that will be “privately owned and sold to us.”

Doesn’t sound like something that schools need to quickly embrace, what with all our other problems, like teaching kids to read, rising absence rates and budgets stripped of our ability to feed children a nutritious breakfast and lunch.

Add in the environmental concerns and rampant intellectual property theft to teachers’ uncertainty about dumping more new, unvetted toys into an already-crammed curriculum. So I was thoroughly surprised to see the AFT get on the “AI in the classroom!!” bandwagon.

Why not take a pause—let’s call it a shutdown—on the race to embed AI in our schools? Why not sort through those competing interests and hidden imperatives? We’ve been bamboozled by climbing on attractive but ultimately damaging educational bandwagons before. Just who wants us on this one?

Well, scammers. And the folks who turned DEI into something to be avoided. Clueless Tik-Toking middle schoolers could up their game with AI. And right-wing edu-site The 74 says educators can save six hours a week by using AI to make worksheets, tests and exit tickets. Really? That’s an awful lot of worksheets.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to approach this transformative technology with great caution, holding fast to the evergreen principle of teaching and learning being a social endeavor? To look at the available research before being bedazzled by something new?

‘Participants, mostly undergraduate and graduate students, who constructed essays with the assistance of ChatGPT exhibited less brain activity during the task than those participants who were asked to write on their own. The AI-users were much less likely to be able to recall what they had written and felt less ownership over their work. Independent evaluators who reviewed the essays found the AI-supported ones to be lacking in individuality and creativity.’

If you want to read better pieces on AI, many are hyperlinked in this blog. But here are a few folks whose words and thoughts come from places of deep knowledge and experience:

Audrey Watters, the best Ed-Tech thinker on the planet, for my money.

Pete Buttigieg, who thinks ahead of trends. Stop worrying about when he’s going to run for President and start absorbing his ideas on politics and relevant policy. Including AI.

Lucian Truscott, who writes about many things and made me understand why AI may ultimately fail: The men who run the big AI companies would do well to think through what they are doing with all those big buildings and all that electricity they consume. The “answer,” such as it is, to what they are seeking to accomplish may not exist, or it may be simpler than they think.

Educator Alfie Kohn, who points out that those most receptive to this technology are the people who know the least about it. This piece made my skin crawl.

My friend Peter Greene does a better job of debunking AI crapola than anyone I know. I credit this to his decades of classroom experience, during which he Paid Attention to Things—things more important than launching new products and making the big bucks.

So why should anyone pay attention to what a tech skeptic writes about AI in schools?

Because we’ll all be lured into making photos come to life, or relying on a questionable AI answer to an important question, or laughing at Russ Vought as Grim Reaper. Sticky and fun, but ultimately shallow, inconsequential.  Not what school-based learning should be.

Earlier this year, on a day when I made a (delicious) strawberry pie, I clicked on a song-writing app. Give us some lyrics, and a musical style, and we’ll write a song for you.

Here is my song: Strawberry Pie. Sticky and fun, but not much effort on my part.

by nflanagan

Moral Clarity in the Classroom

We need to make sure our coverage is rooted in enduring principles and values. We need to make sure we don’t “both sides” the issues when it comes to objective truths. We need to speak and deliver news with moral clarity.       (Ben Meiselas)

I would imagine that most sentient people—red- or blue-leaning—would agree with Meiselas, an activist attorney and founder of Meidas Touch news network. To be more specific—most teachers would acknowledge that there are objective truths, common values upon which we have built our most enduring institutions, including public schools.

Anyone who’s spent considerable time in front of a classroom knows that dispensing assigned content is only a small fraction of the job. The easiest part, in fact. It’s much harder to get students to care about that content and agree to practice useful skills that will serve them well as adults.

In addition, classrooms serve as involuntary communities, places where kids will spend somewhere between 180 and 1000 hours together over the course of a school year. And functional communities have common values.

Any teacher who’s ever posted her list of classroom rules (or, God forbid, the Ten Commandments) and then been surprised when her students blithely ignore them, understands this principle. It takes time to establish what you might call moral clarity in a classroom.

How do you build a classroom community with common values? Some teachers initially rely on threats, fear and punishments to get what they want: compliance. Sound familiar?

Threats and fear will work on some kids, especially younger ones, for a time. But they don’t establish trust or a genuine sense of belonging, two enduring values in a classroom where everyone feels safe enough to learn (or disagree—or even act out).

It’s also way more than civility, although that may be a starting place. Here’s Roxana Gay on Charlie Kirk and “civility:”

‘In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.’

I like Gay’s word choice: respect. Classroom interactions built on respect will, over time, build communal trust, but only if the respect goes three ways: teacher to students, students to teacher, and students to students. Which means that every day, every lesson, is fraught with opportunities to build a functioning community that can actually absorb content, discuss Big Ideas and build skills.

Or tear it all down with a false remark, impulsive action or empty threat. Roxana Gay is right—if you don’t respect your students and what they bring to the table, don’t expect them to respect you or follow your rules, let alone learn what they’re supposed to be learning in your classroom.

What are the hallmarks of moral clarity in a public school classroom?

  • Mutual respect
  • Truth telling—kids are excellent lie detectors.
  • Purpose—Every teacher should be prepared to answer questions about why we’re doing this, and how it will be useful in the future. And that answer should never be “because it’s on the standardized test.”
  • Modeling behaviors that reflect intellectual curiosity, humility and forgiveness.

That last one? Admitting you don’t know everything and apologizing when you have wronged a student? Very humbling—and very important. I remember standing on the podium in front of 60 middle schoolers and apologizing for losing my temper the previous day and verbally castigating a couple of boys in the back row. I’m sorry, I said. This performance means a lot to me, but that’s no reason to jump all over somebody. I apologize.

There were several beats of shocked silence. I picked up my baton. And we proceeded to have an excellent, focused rehearsal. And after class, the two boys apologized to me.

Modeling.

In fact, if we were to sit down together over a cup of coffee, I could tell you dozens of stories from my teaching career that illustrate both moral clarity in my classroom, as well as times when I absolutely failed at establishing a trusting, collaborative ecology. It’s probably enough to say that I got way better at it, over 30+ years.

Moral clarity has been on my mind lately, as the country’s 250th birthday approaches, and the Department of Education launches its America 250 Civics Coalition with about 40 national and state organizations, including many conservative and religious groups, that will create curriculum for K-12 and university students in civics education.

Given the Trump administration’s trial balloon—the well-funded, highly partisan and error-filled 1776 Project—and the fact that they’ve ignored the federal proscription against creating any curriculum at the federal level, this does not bode well for actual civics education.

If there ever were a subject that requires moral clarity, truth-telling and purpose, it would be the study of our nation’s history, government and values.

by nflanagan

What I Still Believe about Public Education

A few years back, I was facilitating a day-long workshop of self-identified teacher leaders in a western state. The topic: Blogging as a Tool for Change. It was a room chock-full of smart, feisty, articulate educators, eager to share their experiences, to let the world know how complicated and important their work was.

There were teachers whose students’ families were largely undocumented—they talked about student registration cards where there were no listed addresses or phone numbers. Some of them taught in districts where all the homes cost more than a million dollars; some of them taught on an Indian reservation. All of their stories were powerful.

Then a prospective blogger asked: Where will we get our ideas for what to blog about? How will we frame our experiences as part of a bigger picture? (I told you they were smart.)

It won’t be a problem, I assured them. Not if you follow the news, read education journalism, and think every day about the world our children will live in, what things you can teach them that they will use for their whole lives. I told them I kept an always-full folder on my desktop, where I dumped articles, quotes, links to reports, ideas to develop.

I told them there was plenty to write about. Start with provocative questions—something like Is this the end of public education? (hearty laughter around the room)

This was in the early days of the first Trump administration, when Betsy DeVos suggested that one reason guns were essential in schools was to shoot marauding grizzly bears on the playground. There are always lots of reasons to be snarky about or irritated by big-picture ed policy stories. But the demise of something as central to the United States’ stability and political dominance as public education felt like a bridge too far.

Besides, all teachers with a few years under their belts are familiar with the education pendulum. First, we “all” (OK, some) believe in one immutable pedagogical fundamental, then a new way comes along, and we shift (or are involuntarily shifted) to new practice. Until the Next Big Thing comes along.

Moral: Be wary of the silver bullet. And understand that every new administration brings its own bag of ideas designed to ‘fix’ all the existing problems.

Remember when personal devices were dubbed the Library of Congress in every HS student’s pocket—and now entire states are banning cell phones in the classroom? New Math? Grit? Americans seem to be susceptible to the latest and (frequently not) greatest. There are things of value in almost every trend or program. But no education trend is the One Best Way.

Five years later, I actually wrote a blog titled The Demise of Genuinely Public Education:
You might think I would be applying the evergreen ‘this too will pass’ theory to what’s happening today, confident that the pendulum will swing, the pandemic angst will fade, and we’ll be back to our highly imperfect normal: public education under siege, but still standing. It’s taken some time for me to come to this opinion, but I foresee the end of what we currently call public education.

That was a hard thing to write. I think public education is genuinely America’s best idea: a free, high-quality education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.

One of my favorite education writers and thinkers, Jennifer Berkshire, recently posted this piece: Is Public Education Over? It’s a terrific, wide-ranging read that pulls no punches in listing a number of blockheaded, failed education reforms that we seem to have learned nothing from (sometimes, both ends of the pendulum are disasters):

Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers’ unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.

Berkshire mentions that major media outlets (not that they are bastions of truth and integrity anymore) are routinely posting op-ed content about the end of public schools as we knew them—despite the fact that upwards of 80% of all American kids still go to public schools.

Why would we abandon public schools’ infrastructure and experienced personnel? Crushing public education is not policy—it’s vandalism. It makes no sense.

Maybe the question is not: Is Public Education Over? Maybe the question is: What’s worth saving in public education?

Things to salvage from public education: Neighborhood schools. Honoring diversity. World-class universities. Scholarship and community. Music and art. I could list 100 things.

We have entered a whole new phase of threat to public education. Many things that seemed impossible—like quasi-military forces marching on Chicago-–are now daily news. Education funding is threatened (or yanked) and will remain iffy for some time.

Not a great way to start the 2025-26 school year. And yet—I was in a classroom last weekend, two days before school started, and there were all the names of kids in the new class, taped to their desks. By a teacher, getting ready.

I still believe that public education is the answer to the rising tide lifting all boats.

And I pray that it survives.

Photo: My grandmother, in front of her public school, 11-2-1900. She’s 4th from the right.

by nflanagan

Is There Really a Decline in Pleasure Reading?

The mainstream media has been full of the bad news: new study shows that reading for pleasure has declined! Fewer people are reading for fun: From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend.

It’s easy to feel depressed about declining—what? literacy? —in the American citizenry. Just one more piece of evidence that schools are failing, blah, blah—nobody reads anymore!

But Anne Helen Peterson, in her substack, Culture Study, has a great piece dissecting the study that these scary headlines are based on. Maybe we’re not reading less; in fact, we may be taking in much more information and storytelling via means other than books.

Peterson posits six interesting theories about the way the study’s questions were framed and interpreted, and why we may need to re-evaluate what it means to be fully literate. She’s also a big-time book-reading enthusiast—not someone who sees the death of book-reading as inevitable in a digital world. Reading for pleasure is worth preserving, for all citizens. It broadens perspectives, makes us more interesting.

I immediately felt better after reading the piece. People aren’t reading less, necessarily; they’re reading differently. But I keep thinking about this story, told to me by a veteran teacher:

She started her career teaching in an elementary school, with reading blocks every day. She went back, as teachers sometimes do, to get a master’s degree in media and library science, then moved to a position in a middle school. A big part of her job there was managing young teenagers’ quests for information about whatever, using the internet as well as print resources.

After several years of staffing her school district’s seven libraries, the money ran out, libraries closed, and she was transferred back to a fourth grade. She said the most shocking thing about returning to a self-contained classroom was how much the kids hated reading.

It had been nearly two decades since she taught reading in an elementary classroom, and there was a palpable difference. Not just in the official reading program and instructional practice, but in the way students–both solid readers and those who struggled–responded to reading, in general. She was directed to follow daily scripts and a pacing chart, whether the students were ready to move on, or not.

She told me that—having already been involuntarily transferred away from a literacy-based job she loved and did well—she was no longer fearful of reprimands, and taught reading in ways that made sense to her fourth graders, including lengthy daily read-alouds that connected them to interesting stories. Their scores (and there are scores, in every story about reading) improved.

Headline today, from the right-leaning Detroit News: Michigan’s Reading Scores Continue to Slide for Youngest Students:

‘The results of the 2025 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as M-STEP, showed only 38.9% of third-graders and 42.4% of fourth-graders statewide scored proficient on the state’s English language arts (ELA) test, down from last year’s scores of 39.6% and 43.3%, respectively.

Eighth graders performed best in reading, with 65.3% proficient compared with 64.5% last year. Students in eighth grade take the PSAT, a precursor to the SAT, for math and English. Their social studies and science results come from the M-STEP.’

Read the data again. What do you notice? For starters—in every damned story about the so-called ‘reading crisis’—the undefined word ‘proficient’ appears. What does it mean? Everyone thinks they know. But ‘proficient’ (according to the Nation’s Report Card) does not mean ‘on grade level.’  It’s an indicator of advanced skills.

So there’s that. But did you notice that the worrisome ‘slide’ is .7% for third graders and .9% for fourth graders? Less than one percent? And that—miracle of miracles—Michigan 8th graders’ scores are a whopping 26.4% more proficient than Michigan 3rd graders?

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the Detroit News merrily goes on, blaming the fact that Michigan is coming late to legally mandated ‘Science of Reading,’ which kind of makes you wonder about what was wrong with the reading programs that produced success in two-thirds of the state’s 8th graders.

MI 8th graders took the PSAT, a national test, and the rest of Michigan’s kids took the statewide assessment, the M-STEP. Which is the most trustworthy? And why are scores so wildly different? These are questions the Detroit News does not address.

Nor does their reporting on reading scores factor in where the COVID pandemic impacted student instruction. In fact, I have seen op-ed commentary (NOT going to link) exclaim that because the pandemic is ‘over,’  reading scores should have ‘bounced back’—which reveals nothing more than a profound misunderstanding of education and public health data, mixed with contempt for public education.

Last year’s third and fourth graders were in pre-K and kindergarten during the worst years of the pandemic. The things they were coping with—fear and loss– as very young children, have left traces of damage, from school absenteeism to the very thing my friend mentioned: her fourth graders hated to read.

Why? Because learning to read had been a disrupted and difficult process, focused on improving scores, rather than developing an appreciation for an essential skill that would provide an enriched life, in multiple aspects? Including enjoyment—reading for pleasure?

Alfie Kohn:

‘The fact is that students’ days will be spent quite differently depending on whether the primary objective is to make them memorize what someone decided children of their age should know, on the one hand, or to help them “make fuller, deeper, and more accurate sense of their experiences,”on the other.’

I would call reading for pleasure a fuller, deeper and more accurate sense of our experiences—what it means to be a fully literate human being.

by nflanagan

The Good News in August and Why It’s Baloney

It’s August. I admit that I am a sucker for the cute back-to-school photos—students holding little chalkboards, shiny floors and carefully stapled bulletin boards. Special props to veteran teachers, posing for their 26th year of sixth grade or new job as Dean of Students. Online, there are cheery little edu-pieces about team-building exercises and how to set work-life boundaries.

To which I say: Hahhahhahahhaa  (deep breath) hahhahahhahahah.

Because this is not just another start of school. This is (among other things) the first school year since 1979 when there hasn’t been a functional Department of Education. It’s a year when there’s now concrete evidence that addressing equity and appreciating diversity can get you fired. It’s a year when federal funding —especially for the neediest schools—can disappear overnight. Maybe never to return.

I can see you veteran teachers in the back of the room–surreptitiously writing lesson plans during the mandated PD–muttering about plenty of other terrible First Days, like the year they were on strike or the year the building had black mold–or the August when the district was short nine certified teachers and just who was going to teach those kids?

And that, actually, is my point. No matter what’s going on in the world, and how it impacts children (who actually are, as the songwriter said, our future), public schools open their doors every fall and teach children. All the children. Including those that the private school refused to enroll, and the charter school declared ‘not a good fit’ last year.

And teachers? Robert Reich: 94% of teachers have had to dip into their own pockets to buy school supplies. An estimated 1 in 6 have second jobs during the school year to make ends meet. The average Wall Street employee got a record $244,700 bonus last year. Something has gone terribly wrong.

With all due respect to Robert Reich, one of my personal top five political-thinker heroes, something went terribly wrong over a quarter-century ago. But—again, this is my point—nobody believes that the bus won’t come, the teacher won’t be meeting kids at the door, and school won’t start when they say it will. There may be too many kids, and too few resources, but our public schools will step up, one more time, and do their best. 

In short, the news about public education is both terrible—and steadily getting worse—while simultaneously heartening. No matter how punitive the policy, how insulting the rhetoric, public education is still reliably America’s best idea.

Jose Vilson made me think, this morning: ‘Not enough has been said about how our classrooms can be conduits for the societies we wish to live in.’ 

It’s a great piece, all about how kids learn to obey (or not) in our classrooms, and what that means in a city–or society–facing police and military suppression. Are public schools doing students a favor by insisting on authoritarian classrooms? There’s a great topic for educators: How we manage our classrooms has an impact on the world that we want to live in. Discuss.

Sherrilyn Ifill (also on my top five political thinkers list) called this our summer of discontent, saying:

We could use a little bit of magic – a dash of deus ex machina – to lift our chances of surviving this. But we can make what looks like magic happen by applying steady pressure. Magic is when your opponents defeat themselves. Pressure creates the conditions for self-defeat.

Fighting on multiple fronts exhausts our opponents (don’t believe we’re the only ones who are exhausted). Showing resolve makes your opposition doubt their invincibility. A sense of humor infuriates them. Creating beautiful things and showing love and compassion utterly confuses them. Remaining focused and strategic exposes their weak spots. Showing you’ll go to the wall increases their fear. Showing up with successive waves of troops confounds them.

And that’s my wish for teachers everywhere, headed back to school:

Make your classroom a conduit for the country you wish to live in. Create beautiful things for and with your students. Show them love and compassion and dedication. Ignore threats. Break rules. Show resolve and especially, a sense of humor. Generate steady pressure against the forces that would destroy your important world-building work.

Because the kids are worth it.

by nflanagan

Men Who Like Books Start Out as Boys Who Read

Maureen Dowd, in a NYT article entitled Attention, Men: Books are Sexy!:

Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.”

The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading.”

It’s enough to make me re-up my abandoned Instagram account.

I also sincerely hope that Maureen and I are not a dying breed, older women (we are the exact same age) who find Men Who Read attractive. I once experienced a tiny swoon when I read that Stephen King carries a paperback with him, wherever he goes. You know, in case he has to wait 10 minutes in line at the post office.

This is more than just my elderly romantic fantasy, however. I think Men Who Read are—or should be—a national education goal. Not men who can decode, nor men who can type fast with their thumbs or pass tests about content. Men who actually enjoy reading.

Reading to use their imagination, rather than seeing prepackaged ideas on video. Reading and—important–evaluating information. Using the language they absorb, via reading, in their daily interactions with others. Reading for pleasure.

Personal story: When I met my husband, he told me about working third shift at the Stroh’s factory in Detroit, while he was in law school. His job involved dealing with a machine that flattened cardboard beer cases and needed tending only at certain times. The rest of the time he filled with reading, hours every night. He would take two books to work, in case he finished the first one. He read hundreds of library books, mostly popular fiction.

He is still that person, 46 years later. Swoon-worthy.

When I read (endlessly) and think about how we’re teaching reading these days, it strikes me that the discussion is almost entirely technical: Do we really have a “reading crisis?”  Why? Is it the fault of a program that was once popular and taught millions of kids to read, but is now being replaced, sometimes via legislation crafted by people who haven’t met first graders or stepped foot into their classrooms?

I recently had a conversation with a middle school teacher in Massachusetts who is a fan of phonics-intensive science of reading curricula, largely because she gets a high percentage of non-readers into her Language Arts classes, kids who have big brains but no reading skills. She’s had some success in getting them to read, using sound-it-out instructional materials they should have experienced in early grades.

Good for her. And good for all teachers who are searching (sometimes in secret) for the right strategies to get their particular kids to read. But I’d like to point out that if the technical skills of reading aren’t matched by reasons for reading, it’s like any other thing we learn to do, then abandon. I’m guessing my friend’s students want to learn to read, because they like her, and they find what she’s teaching them interesting.

From an Atlantic piece: ‘The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.

A teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home.

There you have it. We’re looking, once again, for a one-size-fits-all solution to a technical, easily measured “problem”—reading scores—when what we really need is honest reasons for people to pick up a book. Or a newspaper. To enjoy a story, or a deep dive into current issues.

My dad, who didn’t graduate from HS and had a physical job all his life, came home from work every afternoon and read the newspaper. He was more literate than many college grads I know.

He had reasons for reading. He was not carrying a smartphone and had only three TV channels, undistinguished by political points of view. He read TIME and LIFE magazines. I disagreed with my father on almost every issue, back in the day, but he could marshal a political argument. Because he was a reader.

So why are reading scores dropping? Curriculum and poor teaching are lazy, one-note answers. If we want a truly literate population, we need to make reading and writing essential, something that kids can’t wait to do. Because it’s a passageway to becoming an adult, to succeeding in life, no matter what their goals are, or how they evolve.

We currently have a president who doesn’t read his daily briefings, and bases his critical viewpoints on hunger in Gaza on what he sees on TV. But we used to have a president who published an annual list of his ten favorite books.

Which one of them is a (sexy) role model?

by nflanagan

A “Moment of Reckoning” or Just More Empty Hysteria?

I’ve been more or less off the grid for the past two weeks, vacationing in Alaska and determined not to let the repellent Epstein Saga or other assorted travesties spoil the snow-capped mountain vistas. Which means that a whole lot of education-related stories have been waiting in my mailbox.

Lurking bad news, for the most part (even Trump “returning” five-point-something billion to schools is tainted by the knowledge that we’ll see those cuts again—and more). Most of the bad news is cuts, in fact—or scams, like this voucher doozy in Arizona.

Can I just say that education journalists could do the citizenry a solid by continuously reporting all the resources—human and material—that have already been lost? Or by informing parents and communities about residual effects of a global pandemic or unwarranted attacks on public education?

Instead, we get idiotic headlines like this one: A Moment of Reckoning for Michigan Schools. (Cue disaster music.)

The headline is followed up with a series of articles with titles like Michigan spent big to fix schools. The result: Worse scores and plenty of blame. And Mississippi turned around its schools. Its secret? Tools Michigan abandoned.

The “effective tool” that Michigan abandoned? Our late-but-not-lamented Third Grade Flunk law, valid critiques of which centered on the damage done to kids by being forced to repeat a grade, the financial burden on schools as they are compelled to provide an additional year of instruction to large segments of their elementary population, and the complete lack of proof that these laws work.

Makes you wonder where this unsubstantiated condemnation comes from—that’s the disappointing part. These articles (and more just like them, hacking away at our public schools) are from Bridge Magazine, a fairly centrist, nonpartisan publication that focuses on issues in the Mitten State.

I interviewed its founder, eminent journalist Phil Power, shortly after Bridge launched, in 2011, and invited him to speak to the Michigan Teacher Forum, where he proclaimed his undying support for public education and especially for the hard-working teachers in Michigan public schools. Bridge seems to have moved on from those ideas, however, adopting a common politicized perspective: Oh no! Our state is falling behind other states!

There’s a lot to debunk in the series of Bridge articles (wherein I found precisely one veteran teacher quoted, mildly suggesting that the silver-bullet “Science of Reading” prescription was only one of the ways that students learned to read), but I am too jet-lagged to tackle these, point-by-point, at the moment.

State Senator Dayna Polehanki, a former teacher, did some debunking, however. From her Facebook post:

“While I won’t denigrate Mississippi’s efforts to improve its academics, the picture being painted by at least one Michigan publication that Mississippi is outperforming Michigan on the NAEP reading test (“The Nation’s Report Card”) is MISLEADING.

While Mississippi has *scored higher than Michigan ONE TIME over the past decade on the Grade 4 NAEP reading test . . .

Michigan has *scored higher than Mississippi EVERY TIME over the past decade on the Grade 8 NAEP reading test.

The assertion in the Michigan publication that Michigan “abandoned” our 3rd grade read-or-flunk law to our detriment is not supported by test score data.

It’s not surprising that states that flunk their “worst” 3rd grade readers achieve elevated results ahead of the Grade 4 NAEP reading test, but these elevated test scores tend to flatten over time (by Grade 8 NAEP reading), like they do with Mississippi.

This is borne out in NAEP data from other states as well, like Florida, which also flunks its worst performing 3rd grade readers.”

In fact, there are plenty of pieces debunking the “Mississippi Miracle,” from its deceptive gaming of the system, to right-wing blah-blah claiming that raising 4th grade reading scores isn’t enough—that Mississippi needs vouchers, immediately, to solve its poverty-related education problems.

What all these pieces have in common might be called uninformed–or “lazy,” take your pick–journalism. Education data is not easy to interpret, nor is it truth. One example: A NAEP score of “Proficient” doesn’t mean “on grade level” as most people (including some education journalists) seem to think it does.

Worse, relying solely on test scores doesn’t tell us how successful schools actually are. For that, we need to look at a wide range of factors. It’s interesting that, two weeks before Bridge launched its so-called Moment of Reckoning, they published a piece noting that only 9% of the state’s public schools currently have a full-time librarian.

Think that has anything to do with our faltering reading scores?    

In the end, schools are comprised of people and programming. The more instruction is tailored to the students in that school, the more dedicated and skilled the personnel are, the better the results. Score competitions with other states are pointless.

There are hundreds of ways to improve student learning: Universal free preschool attached to high-quality childcare. Smaller classes, especially for our youngest learners. Recruiting, training and paying a long-term teaching force. Stable housing and health care for all children. A hot breakfast and lunch, plus plenty of recess time. Government supports for public education. I could go on.

None of these are free, or likely to come down the pike in Michigan or anywhere else in the near future.

Are we reckoning with that?