Category / Election 2020

by nflanagan

Legislators’ Guide to Making Useful Education Policy, v. 2.0

I recently attended a virtual kickoff rally for Betsy Coffia, who is running for the MI State House, in the newly drawn 103rd district. I first met Betsy after she ran—unsuccessfully—for the old state House seat, more than eight years ago. We met on-line, and she wanted to meet face to face, over coffee.

Betsy asked lots of questions; we had a great conversation. Although she had worked briefly for Head Start, she admitted there were lots of theories and ideas in education policy she found murky. Personally, I was charmed by a candidate who was still hungry to know about ed policy from the perspective of a veteran teacher. In the next cycle, Betsy ran for County Commission and won—twice.

Betsy said (in 2014): “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a guide for legislators to making useful education policy?” So I sketched out one and put it up on my Education Week blog—and from there, it was picked up by Phi Delta Kappan, among other media outlets. It drew lots of commentary—mostly positive.

I just pulled it out. And wow. You wouldn’t think things would be all that different, in eight years. The 2014 version below. Comments about changes in education policy-making—the 2022 version—follow the list of ten.

#1. You don’t know education just because you went to school.

Even if you were paying attention in high school, your perspective as a student was extremely narrow and is now obsolete. Study the issues, which are more complex and resistant to change than you think. Here’s a brief list of things that, in my experience, legislators don’t know diddly about:

  • A cooperative classroom and how to achieve it
  • Formative assessment
  • Effect of class size on daily practice (not test scores)
  • Difference between standards and curriculum
  • Special education
  • Research-based value of recess and exercise
  • Differentiation vs. tracking
  • What quality teaching looks like in practice
  • The fact that ALL learning is socially constructed.

And on and on.

#2. Plan to pay many non-photo op visits to lots of schools. Do things while you’re there. Read with 3rd graders. Sit in on a high school government class or small-group discussion about Shakespeare. Play badminton in a coed gym class. Take garden-variety teachers out for coffee after your visit; let them talk, and just listen. Resist the urge to share the “good news” about legislation you’re cosponsoring. Ask questions instead.

#3. Take the tests that kids have to take. Then you’ll understand why “achievement data” and what to do with it are sources of high anxiety for public schools, teachers, and students.

#4. Be picky about what you read, listen to, and believe. Media is not fair and balanced. In an online world, information and sexy, upbeat story lines are for sale. At the very least, read both sides, with your crap detector on full alert. Consider that media often enshrines flat-out lies in the public consciousness simply because they’re a good headline or the deliverer is charismatic.

#5. Examine your assumptions. When teachers roll out unsubstantiated chestnuts (“No wonder he’s the way he is—just look at his parents!”), it’s teacher lounge talk. But, when elected officials say clueless things, voters pay attention. For example: “Incompetent teachers are being allowed to teach, and substandard service is being tolerated.” Whatever your deepest convictions about unions, teacher pay, urban poverty, or kids today, check those biases at the door. Represent everyone in your district, not just the people who agree with you.

#6. Follow the money, not the party. A lot of what’s happening in education “reform” today is centered around taking advantage of the large, previously untapped market of K-12 education. Before you get on any partisan policy bandwagon just for the thrill of passing a law, ask yourself: Who really benefits from this? Who loses?

#7. Remember you were elected to represent your constituents’ goals and desires, not some special interest group. Even if the prepackaged legislation is slick and convenient and the Koch brothers are willing to fly you someplace warm with golf courses, do the work yourself. Looking yourself in the mirror will be a lot easier in the morning.

#8. Be like Rob Portman. Change your mind and your public proclamations when the evidence is convincing. Changing your mind — if you do it publicly, and don’t try to sneak the shifts past voters with tap dancing and weasel language — makes you stronger, demonstrating that you have confidence in your own core values and leadership. After all, Diane Ravitch altered her views and earned herself a few million devotees.

Corollary: Admit when you don’t understand value-added methodology, the reason STEM is so hot, or constructivism in mathematics education. There is nothing more pathetic than a legislator trying to act like he knows something by tossing out a few buzzwords.

#9. Big and bold gets headlines, but tinkering around the edges gets results. Want to raise teacher quality? Don’t endorse firing the “lowest” quintile, publicly rank-ordering them in the newspaper, or bringing in untrained but photogenic Ivy Leaguers. Do it the old-fashioned way: careful recruitment, building teachers’ skills and knowledge, investing in their capacity and leadership over time.

#10. Honor our democratic foundations. Public education is the most democratic of our institutions, one of our best ideas as Americans. Public schools may be tattered and behind the technological curve, but systematically destroying the infrastructure of public education is profoundly selfish and immoral. Don’t be that legislator.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

From the perspective of 2022:
Some of these are evergreen–#10 especially, but I could add a half-dozen bullet points (the so-called Science of Reading, for example) to #1, as things around which most legislators have zero expertise. The invitation to visit classrooms (#2) once a foundational strategy of reformy organizations like Teach Plus, is defunct in the time of COVID.

Suggesting that legislators take statewide assessments (so they can learn about the tests’ irrelevance and weaknesses) seems downright quaint now. We’re using admittedly bogus test data from 2021 to proclaim that poor kids suffered more under remote learning (which may have also saved their lives, but oh well… learning loss!) Because hundreds of non-profits would have to close if there were no giant data sets to analyze—testing went on, under conditions rendering the results invalid.

Actual policy-making skill, tailored to real needs rather than outside organizations’ agendas—numbers 4, 5, 6 and 7—has grown considerably worse. This is a result of four years of Betsy DeVos, increasingly divisive rhetoric in the media, a poorly managed pandemic, unregulated social media, and the fact that one of our two major political parties has decided that winning is the only thing that matters and to hell with the public good. Public education is now, essentially, for sale.

I’m trying to imagine any teacher cheerily saying to any Republican representative: Check your biases at the door! Those days are over—and the way Glenn Youngkin used deceptive education policy promises to win an election ought to be a cautionary tale for all of us. So much for civic engagement and community-building. So much for re-thinking and all the other blah-blah about improving schools. The action now is locked and loaded, standing on the Capitol steps.

I was really stunned to re-read #9, to remember that there was once a time when ‘big thinkers’ in education were talking about lopping off the lowest-achieving teachers. Now, of course, we’re inviting bus drivers and lunch ladies to substitute teach.  As Peter Greene notes:  It is amazing how quickly some folks have pivoted from “We must ensure teacher and educational quality” to “We must get students into a building with the word ‘school’ in its name no matter what actually happens once we’re inside.” It turns out that an awful lot of that big talk about educational excellence and quality was insincere posturing and as long as we can get schools open and students stuffed inside with something resembling a probably-responsible adult with a pulse, that’s good enough. 

I am optimistic enough to think that writing ten new talking points for writing good education policy is something that might be useful—at some point in the future, if not today. One thing I learned from reading Ibram X Kendi is that most social beliefs and practices are, when you dig deep enough, driven by decades, even centuries, of policy. And, of course, money.

Plus ca change…

by nflanagan

The Pastor, the Speaker of the House—and a Christian Academy Education

Perhaps you remember, back in 2020, when Donald Trump invited the MI Senate Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey (R) and the Speaker of the MI House, Lee Chatfield (R) to Washington, D.C.?

It was a couple weeks after the election, and their pictures were everywhere, including two-story projections on the front of Trump’s hotel, with the text ‘Voters Decided—the World is Watching.’ Chatfield and Shirkey were evasive about the actual purpose of this little rendezvous—but hey! When Trump says jump…

It’s also likely this was just one of So Many Stories about Trump’s desperate behavior, post-election, that it has been eclipsed in the national memory, but on November 20, 2020, lots of Michiganders were pretty sure that Shirkey and Chatfield weren’t sitting in the hotel bar discussing truth and justice.

So–the former MI Speaker, Lee Chatfield, has found himself in a bit of a pickle lately.

A police investigation for allegedly sexually assaulting a young teenager, for starters. The story is appallingly greasy: Chatfield groomed and abused a teenager from a ‘broken home’ when he was a teacher in a private Christian Academy founded by his father. Later, she (urged on by Chatfield and his father, ‘Pastor Rusty’) married Chatfield’s younger brother, Aaron. Who later became Chatfield’s driver on trips to Detroit to sow sexual wild oats.

As I said—greasy.

Chatfield became Speaker of the House at age 30, and was term-limited out in 2020. He is now 33. He is married to his HS sweetheart, with five children. He claims his relationship with the victim (which began when she was 14 or 15) was ‘consensual.’ In MI, the age of consent is 16—18 if the older person is an educator.

Lots of hand-wringing by his fellow Repubs, of course. And disgust from people who have always perceived Chatfield as a hard-right lightweight, not worthy of the responsibility of making policy for almost 10 million citizens in Michigan.

What interests me in this story, however, is not the salacious details (and there are way more than the summary, above). It’s the fact that Chatfield was– it pains me to say this—a teacher. Not in any sense a conventional teacher (certified, licensed, prepared, ethical)– but a teacher nonetheless (and, every story reminds us, also a coach and the Athletic Director).

In fact, Lee Chatfield is kind of the poster child for why we have laws in education—why public schools must have elected boards, qualified and vetted staff, new-teacher mentoring and supervision, ongoing professional learning, teacher evaluation, and so on.

At the private, K-12 Christian school where he ‘taught’—a young man in his early twenties, who attended an unaccredited Bible College—the administrator was his father, and the curriculum was unabashedly Bible-based (check it out). Parents at the school must sign an affidavit promising not to engage in destructive criticism of the school and its staff in the presence of their children. It’s cheap, too—you can send all six of your kids there for about what MI gives public schools for one child.

Sounds like a great place, exactly the kind of home-grown school that Betsy DeVos wanted to favor with vouchers. You have to wonder what they’re paying their teachers (and for that matter, their ‘Athletic Director’).  

Chatfield’s district is not far from where I live—and I know that a small K-12 Christian school in the rural woods of northern Michigan might be appealing to parents looking for ‘choice’ and made fearful by the media-fed blabber about how their white children would be made to feel guilty in public schools.

They wouldn’t be terribly concerned about vetting the teachers—they’re Christians, right?—or investigating the curriculum.

(In fact, even though we had a curriculum night every year, wherever I was teaching, parents seldom struck me as being deeply concerned about finer point of disciplinary benchmarks and content outlines. They came to see the face and hear the voice of the person in front of the classroom. Which makes the whole anti-CRT crapola inexplicable, except as a politically motivated and funded scam.)

Sometimes, the person in front of the classroom is an entitled, over-confident predator.  

There are plenty of lessons for policy-makers here, ironically, beginning with a reminder that almost everything we do in public education is controlled by well-worn laws and policies.

Genuinely ethical practice protects and nurtures children. And he who makes his own rules can’t be trusted.

by nflanagan

The Demise of Genuinely Public Education

“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice

There is no more local-politics issue than public education.

From Mom gossip about teachers, watching Little Leaguers play, to intense competition for valedictory honors with all the teenaged strivers loading up on useless AP credits—any community’s buzz continually includes trash-talking the local public schools.

The charter school movement tried to take advantage of this, co-opting public education by taking its best features (it’s free, it’s local) and blending them with private school features (selectivity, glossy PR). This has resulted in more waste, fraud and abuse—the very things public schools were accused of, before charters were even invented. In the process, charters drew significant resources away from genuinely public schools.

This is, of course, old news. Charters, vouchers, unhappy parents, ‘education savings accounts’ and court decisions shifting resources away from common schools have been with us for more than a century.

My first political activity, in fact, was phone-banking against a voucher initiative in MI in 1978 (it went down, 3 to 1—like two subsequent voucher proposals). The first time I went to a heated school board meeting, to defend my district’s well-designed sex education curriculum, was even earlier.

Public education has always been under-resourced, contentious and subject to the community it serves. The people who work in public education have always been underpaid, but generally aspire to improve society by helping kids. There are exceptions, of course, but years of history and research bear this out.

You might think I’d be used to this, what with all the banned books, slashed programs (often my own) and vehement parent rhetoric in my personal past. 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.

The tipping point is a global pandemic—but the great, battered ship of public ed has been taking incoming fire for a long time. Chunks of its initial purpose and mission—an educated citizenry, democratic equality, a broad introduction to the real world and the humanities—have been regularly chipped off. Something new and malevolent, however, has taken root: an overt push to use public education and already pissed-off parents to win elections.

Today, NPR posted an article entitled ‘Teachers are on the Front Lines in January 6th Culture War.’

It’s a pretty good piece, featuring an array of teachers and curricular experts discussing the difficulties of teaching current events on the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, after the nation and the Republican party has had a year to, you know, just get over it.

There are brave teachers in MA and MT who are planning to show news videos and discuss the root causes and eventual outcomes. But there’s also a special ed teacher (and regional chapter chair of Moms for Liberty) in Indiana, who’s sticking to math and English, in an effort to be ‘unbiased.’

Unbiased against what? Protecting the rights of camo-clad faux-military marauders to despoil the U.S. Capitol and threaten the lives of Members of Congress? Not willing to sway student thinking about the peaceful transfer of power? Trying to stay neutral on the topic of domestic terrorism?

Just whom are we censoring here? And whom are we protecting?

The story ends with a quote from a middle school teacher, Dylan Huiskan: Not addressing the attack is to suggest that the civic ideals we teach exist in a vacuum and don’t have any real-world application, that civic knowledge is mere trivia.

Veteran public school teachers like me have spent decades developing real-world content discipline applications for our students. We have fought against sterile data-driven education, the relentless pursuit of test scores, the pushing Science and Social Studies and the Arts out of the curriculum. We’ve been trying to DE-trivialize education, professionalizing our own work in the process.

But now we’ve got teachers who think their colleagues are indoctrinating students, by showing them actual live news footage, or discussing an event that happened within their short memory and has huge impact on their own futures as American citizens.

Things are falling apart. We have been crushed by an unexpected medical disaster. One of our two political parties has gone off the rails.  Civility is dead—and oh yeah, the planet is fighting back after years of heedless neglect.

And now, we’ve decided to warn teachers—teachers! –not to tell the truth.

As a blogger, I have repeatedly asserted the truism that American schools, often the target of political and media scorn, merely reflect the communities they serve. If that is true—and if democracy is indeed threatened by the events of 2020 and January 6th, then our public schools are threatened as well.

Once, years ago, I wrote a blog using the phrase ‘data Nazis’ and a friend I respect, and trust, chastised me. Use logic and facts, he said. You weaken your arguments when you oversell and hype the danger.

 But maybe the next Civil War is here. Maybe public schools will become a tool for the wrong side:

 Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.

On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.

Is that overkill? Unclear.

But if it’s not—what are our weapons against losing genuinely public education?

by nflanagan

Should School Staff Be Charged in the Student Shootings in Michigan?

I waited for the headlines, and here they came: Oxford School District Likely to Be Sued Over Shootings.  Further tart media observations: What does it take to get suspended from Oxford High or searched after violent scribbles? And: Red flags the superintendent blandly describes as “concerning drawings and written statements” that alarmed his teacher.

If I were only seeing these remarks on right-leaning media (where public schools are all presumed to be guilty of So Many Things—including blandness), I wouldn’t be surprised.

But I’m also seeing remarks trying to pinpoint blame for this shooting  posted on teacher/education/lefty sites—by teachers blaming weak-on-discipline administrators, university professors going after mush-mouthed PR-driven superintendents, and school leaders saying their hands are legally tied, when it comes to searching backpacks and booting kids out of a public school without due process.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen lengthy descriptions of what happened, including a detailed timeline provided by the district superintendent, who keeps stressing that the Oxford Schools want to be transparent.

And frankly, my take-away—this is incredibly sad—is that school folks did what they reasonably should have in this instance, and that nothing will cause real change (including metal detectors, more school resource officers, tripling the number of guidance counselors and requiring clear plastic backpacks), until there is a national, minds-and-hearts shift. Gun control, yes, but also a different political ecology.

There’s a whole complex of reasons why American students are surrounded each and every day by allowed, even encouraged, violence.

I was a classroom teacher for more than 32 years, most in the same district, all but one year in secondary schools. I have had students who committed grisly murders. I have students who are currently in prison for major crimes (including one dude who scratched an epithet into a brand-new tuba when he was in the 7th grade). I had kids who sold weed and pharmeceuticals. A handful of my former students took their own lives, or the lives of others, in various ways. One of my students burned down his own house. On purpose.

Each and every one of these students was white, and attended school in a small-town-values kind of place.

Sometimes, there are obvious signs. Sometimes, not. Some kids grow up and out of their worst behavior. Others, who appear to be quiet or moody, turn out to be capable of unspeakable actions. Contrary to what some believe, there is no infallible ‘check for mental health’ procedure.

The worst-behaved student I ever had—a daily pain in the ass who disrupted the entire school building with his rambunctious and hostile behavior —is now a multi-million dollar real estate salesman.

Many years ago, a HS student in a nearby district brought a gun to school, and showed it to a friend. This was in the zero tolerance/punk prisons era—and he was expelled and sent to Juvie. It was in the local newspapers. Because he was a minor, his name was never printed.

A month or two later, I got a new student in the HS band, a tenor sax player. I asked where he went to school previously, and he told me: the next district over. He was a good player, and quickly made friends. The more I got to know him, the more I appreciated his wit, kindness and intelligence. I took him on a band trip to Toronto. He graduated.

Later, of course, the school counselor caught me in the hallway and informed me that he was the kid who brought the gun to school. Thought you should know, she said. You weren’t here when we had the meeting about accepting him.

Social media comments proclaim that any kid who sketched weapons with blood dripping, or penned a self-doom/anti-social message in gothic lettering that caught a teacher’s eye, should be searched immediately then sent home. Pronto.

But–kids draw and paste all kinds of stuff in their notebooks and on their homework—everything from swastikas to oversized anatomical features. Think: video games.

Are we seeing incipient violent tendencies—or teenage boredom? Who gets to judge? The fact is, we don’t generally kick kids out of school for their immature drawings or weird teenage behavior—unless there’s a pattern, over time.

The fact that two teachers reported ‘concerning’ drawings and cell phone use to find ammunition, over the space of a couple of days, means that the adults in school actually were tracking this child. They asked his parents to take him home, and get him immediate counseling. They shared their fears. And the parents refused.

I was struck by one of the superintendent’s remarks—that if they had forced the child out of the building, when the parents refused to take him, the boy would have been home alone. Hanging behind that remark is another fear educators are dealing with during a mental health crisis: What happens when depressed children are home alone, and there are weapons?

I had a student once, a 7th grade girl, who wrote little notes to me, about her feelings of being ugly, a dork, not having friends, and so on. I tried to pay special attention to her, but the language became more frightening– ‘What will they think when I’m gone?’ I took the problem to the school counselor. She asked: Do you think this girl would harm herself, or is she just seeking attention?

I honestly didn’t think she would. I thought she was just lonely. But I still wanted a referral to the counselor, and a parent call. The counselor agreed, but said that parent calls of that nature often didn’t go well. The school might be seen as high-handed and intrusive, telling a family their child had talked about suicide.

Still, she was willing to do it. Because it was the next step. There are protocols for this kind of thing, she said. We follow them.

Would that all parents tried to do the right things, too.

You’ve probably noticed that there are Moms for Liberty organizations and now, faux legal strategies for parents to demand the rights they already have,  popping up like mushrooms, to keep those high-handed, mask-demanding schools in their place, to press forward on incendiary social issues. The climate for productive school-parent conversations (never a given), has been negatively impacted by living through a highly stressful pandemic and its emotional aftermath.

The core resource for well-functioning schools is—and always has been—trust. All good school practice—public/private/rich/poor—hinges on relational trust.

When parents don’t trust schools to have their kids’ best interests at heart, we’re all in trouble. When there is a deliberate push to de-stabilize school boards and overrun safety rules, the trouble gets worse. Without some measure of trust, we can never help the kids who need our help most.

My heart goes out to all the educational staff in the Oxford Schools, working through the worst that can happen in a school community.

Thank you, as the saying goes, for your service. I wish you and your school healing.

by nflanagan

Nice White–Resentful–Parent Syndrome

I worked in the same school district for more than 30 years. Mostly, I taught music—band, choir, elementary music—but occasionally other things: Seventh grade Math (two years), English as a Second Language (for which I was totally unqualified), and a class called Homework Hall.

This was a kind of holding cell where kids who had lots of missing assignments were sent–pulled from elective classes–to receive coaching toward filling in the empty boxes in their teachers’ grade books. A second chance to pass classes they would otherwise fail. A way to protect their permanent record, so to speak.

Back then, the county was a cluster of pretty little all-white towns, interspersed with farmland. When I applied for a teaching position, in the mid-70s, the principal called the village where I got my job “the far edge of white flight.” He was right. More and more people were pushing outward from Detroit, claiming they were looking for a more bucolic setting, and then being surprised when they had to provide their own water, septic and garbage pickup.

Still, it was a good job, and they were hard to come by in 1975. Parents—many of whom had grown up in the area—came to concerts and parent-teacher conferences. They took their kids to the library and volunteered to lead scout troops. They rented band instruments for their children and coached Little League. For a long time—decades—I thought teaching there was ‘easy.’

True, there were worrisome things—the town where my cute, second-floor Mary Tyler Moore apartment was had a reputation as the home of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan. There was lots of local trash talk about Flint (30 miles north) and Detroit (50 miles to the east)—although the area’s transition from rural farmland to outlying suburb was driven, economically, by the auto industry, centered in those two cities.

White flight, indeed. My middle school students occasionally made unfiltered, racist remarks—things they’d likely heard at home—but I was never afraid to call them out. That was then.

Here’s a one-minute video that will tell you all you need to know about this town in 2021, shot earlier this week: Click here.

If you haven’t listened to the NY Times podcast series ‘Nice White Parents’, I heartily recommend it. The tagline captures it all: If you want to understand what’s wrong with our public schools, you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in shaping them: white parents.

I no longer live in that town. I moved four hours north several years ago. And guess what? There are lots of ‘nice’ white parents here, too. The stakes are now higher, and student actions are no longer limited to random, clueless remarks. There is outright cruelty—and stormy, ugly school board and county commission meetings.

Sometimes, a kind of common sense prevails—but nice white parents have experience in complaining and getting some action and relief. As a veteran teacher, I can think of dozens of issues that brought angry parents to school board meetings, from sex education to the math curriculum, from bus routes to which neighborhoods got to attend the new, high-tech elementary school (the well-heeled ones, naturally—because those are the parents who showed up to demand access to the new building).

Homework Hall—that class where students got to make up missing work—was created when nice white parents approached administrators, worried that their kid might be doing a second year in the 7th grade. Nice white parents know how to get what they want. And they’re resentful when they do not succeed.

Here’s what I want to know, in 2021: Who is driving the current pushback against honest, warts-and-all American history and civics in the classroom? Who wants to send their unvaccinated children to school unmasked? Who is demanding that teachers scrap their own, self-acquired libraries—the books teachers buy to provide engaging texts for their students?  

Sarah Schwartz of Education Week: In the months after the 2020 election, former Trump administration officials and allies built up a network of think tanks and donor groups dedicated to continuing to advance his policy agenda. Critical race theory has become a central issue for several of these organizations.

Nice white parents, in other words, are organized and funded. There are partisan threads running through this anger, and differences between parents with a college education and those without. Religion plays a role, as does race and gender.

Political scientist David C. Barker summed it up this way:  The populist/anti-intellectual right absolutely believe that the intellectuals are not only out of touch but are also ungodly and sneaky and therefore think they must be stopped before they ruin America. Meanwhile, the intellectual left really do believe the Trumpers are racist, sexist, homophobic (and so on) authoritarians who can’t spell and are going to destroy the country if they are not stopped.

At the base of all the fury over education policy, however, is the fact that white parents have historically had way more success in shaping school programs and practices. And most of the stories in education journalism come from white journalists.

As Ray Salazar writes:  When journalists come from backgrounds where they usually found success in traditional systems — systems that perpetuate inequality — they report from that worldview, bypassing the insights that would be meaningful to people with a different reality.

That different reality is endangered, along with democracy. Those think tanks and donors supporting Trump’s education policy agenda are made up of nice white parents, not the parents of students who are struggling to learn without adequate broadband, materials and well-trained teachers.

Final point: This isn’t getting any better. Most Republicans now believe the Big Lie. State legislatures are working to limit voter access. Trump is still relevant, the overwhelming favorite in 2024.  The anti-democratic political crisis is worse, not better, than it was in January.

It’s a crisis in public education leadership as well.

by nflanagan

What is this World Coming To? No. Seriously.

Does it seem to you as if the logical world has tilted on its axis? Does there seem to be an inordinate amount of destructive mania loose upon the land—shattering norms and making citizens on both the political right and left jumpy? And nasty? Even murderous?

Critical questions: Why? And why now?

I started thinking about this while reading about the TikTok ‘Devious Licks’ campaign, which has sent kids into their public school bathrooms to, you know, steal shit. The soap dispenser, the TP holder, the sink. You name it, if you can rip it off the wall and–key point–videotape the stunt to share on TikTok, you are officially cool. And next month, you’ll get to smack your teacher. What fun. Until you get arrested.

I’ve been bemused by the angst over TikTok’s influence on kids’ behavior. Ridiculous pranks are something teachers are accustomed to—all the way back to stuffing kids in phone booths. From the Tide pod challenge to those goofballs falling off milk crates last summer, there’s always some Stupid Human trick to attract school-age kids. Part of the fun (for kids) is scaring their parents and teachers.  You could put an eye out with that BB gun, son—and so on.

Some would like to pin the blame on TikTok, which now has a billion users per month. But here’s what I thought about: those kids in that Michigan middle school shouting ‘Build that Wall!’ on the day after the 2016 election.

If the elected leader of the Western World is openly promoting lies and cruelty, it shouldn’t be surprising that loosening the lug nuts on your principal’s car seems like a fun and even justifiable caper. After all, he’s annoying and gets in the way of what you and your fellow seventh graders feel like doing.

So many norms—from patient care during a pandemic to moderation in political viewpoints to practicing simple and considerate behaviors to protect ourselves and our neighbors—have been bent or shattered in the past 18 months.

Teachers I know have addressed the roiling surf of tamping down student misbehavior during a pandemic with some low-key, on-the-fly brilliance. A friend reported that his school is encouraging kids to post TikTok videos of random kindnesses—like a crew of high school kids repainting a bathroom wall after the paper towel dispenser took a walk. That kind of thing.

Others have reported deep and serious conversations with their students about issues you would think are universal: Respect for everyone. Stewardship of communal resources. Building a better world.

Some of my best moments as a 30-year classroom veteran, came when there was a crisis—a missing instrument, or someone whose dignity had been damaged by another student. You really can build students’ humanity and kindness by modeling it and talking about it.

But now there are parent organizations and reporting forms to track ordinary classroom exchanges, turning students into—for lack of a better term—snitches. State legislatures are trying to figure out how to prevent students from even talking about race and gender.

As a long-time teacher of teenagers, I say: Good luck with that. You can pass all the laws you want, but kids need adult role models, people who are able to build communities of disparate teenagers, and do some work and learning together. And that’s going to happen a lot less when teachers are threatened by legal or local forces.

Here’s one small and local, but telling, example that I found interesting:
In Hudson, OH, high school some seniors are taking a college course in writing, part of an Early College program. They use a book of writing prompts that includes, in over 600 prompts, perhaps a dozen that are not appropriate for high school students—things about drinking and sex, mostly. A parent sees these, and forms a group that wants to see heads roll: school board members, building administrators and teachers. There’s a Facebook post, and suddenly tens of thousands of people are posting their wrath—This is why we have to pass laws! These teachers exposed my child to filth! Fire ‘em all!

Turns out, however, that the book in question has been used for five years at this school, with no problems, largely because every child who took the course had to have a parent sign-off on a statement acknowledging that the college-level materials used in the course might be considered inappropriate. That’s right—parents had to grant written permission for their child to be exposed to writing prompts about drinking and sex. For five years. But in the divided climate of 2021, it suddenly became a Big Issue, worthy of terminating public employees.

Why? And why now?

 Why do you think kids all over America are destroying public property, then sharing videos of themselves rampaging in the restroom of their local middle school? Where have they seen behavior like this before—adults despoiling a beautiful public building, then posting videos of themselves as ‘patriots’?

It’s hard to say what kind of crisis this is—what’s making people show up at meetings and organize demonstrations? So many social factors, including a pandemic, are making people twitchy.

Still, I’m tired of hearing about the schools ‘failing to teach Civics,’ when the same critics show up at Board meetings to complain about discussions of racism in society. What do they think civics is?

We have a lot of work to do to heal the country, in every sense of the word. Public schools and community colleges could be instrumental in that. Schooling has always reflected what’s going on in the nation—and that’s what all those parents and lawmakers are afraid of, and trying to prevent.

by nflanagan

School Boards and Other Political Targets

In general, I believe elected school boards are a foundational aspect of public education and democratic citizenship. And yes, I worked in a district where an unbalanced school board made my work life unpleasant at times. I have experienced the power-mongering Board president who brings aboard a whole crew of yes-men and yes-women—neighbors and sisters-in-law– in an effort to crush both Superintendent and the teachers union. And even worse.

I also understand the essential aspect of having a reasonable Superintendent who, in turn, is able to communicate effectively with a board made up of people whose primary goals sometimes center around their personal children’s needs and wants. I am familiar with the anti-Whole Language Board, the Back to Basics Will Save Money Board, and the Sports are More Important than Calculus Board.

But still. Those Boards were duly elected (even the elderly farmers who thought spoiled kids today don’t need a school play or orchestra). There’s always another election in a couple of years, when the community gets hot and huffy about whatever the current Big Issue is. It means someone has to step up and run for public office, developing a vision of what locals schools should look like, but civic engagement is a fine thing.

Let me re-state that. Thoughtful, responsible civic engagement is a fine thing. An essential thing.

All the way back to the Scopes Trial, public debate over hot-button issues has incrementally, over time, shifted opinion about the right way (often labelled the democratic way) to do things. Public institutions, like education, are always subject to political environments and trends. And these days, everybody is simultaneously constitutional scholar, curriculum expert, epidemiologist and Clarence Darrow wannabe.

I’ve been working in and watching public schools for 50+ years and can attest that controversy is both unavoidable and cyclical. Every school has issues that light people up. But in 2021, the stakes are higher than ever—we’re subjecting kids to a scary, unpredictable disease. We made a collective decision—school must go on—and now every local educational jurisdiction must wrestle with student safety vs.  political expediency.

I would be wrong if I said elected Boards most often act on behalf of their students’ well-being.

But I am stunned by the vicious nature of the anti-mask, anti-vax protests—like this one in Oregon, which left the veteran superintendent, who simply followed state law, weeping as he was fired. Or this one—where parents literally pushed their unmasked teenagers past school administrators blocking the way.

How do parents expect their children to respect the rules and authority necessary for safe and productive schooling when those same parents are physically pushing the students to disobey?

The answer is: They don’t, anymore.

And it’s gone way beyond hot tempers at a school board meeting. There are firings and shouting and pushing and shoving. There are also death threats and other aggressions. There’s been a national paradigm shift around who to trust, and who’s in charge.

Reformy types who have pushed for data and more data to ‘fix’ schools in various ways might be interested in knowing this, from a survey of MI parents:

About 78% of Republican parents opposed a mask mandate and about 18% supported it. Most Democratic parents who were surveyed, 87%, support a mask mandate and 10% oppose it. 

For white parents, 41% support a mask mandate and 53% oppose one.  Whereas a strong majority of Black parents — 94% — support a mask mandate.

Like every other issue—how to teach history and social studies honestly, for example—student safety (which really is a life and death matter) has become not merely ‘politicized’ but reason for disrespectful, even violent behavior. As Peter Greene notes, ‘”don’t do anything that will get me a phone call” is a terrible administration policy, especially in times when some folks are intent on whipping up controversy for their own political gains.’

The locus of this behavior? Well, Republican state legislatures—and not just Texas and Florida—now seem to feel as if every issue is black and white, us vs. them, win-lose, without nuance or room for dialogue. It’s the worst of bare-knuckle power struggles.

It’s ugly, and a terrible example to set for children: scream and scheme until you get your way.

The funny thing is: The PDK Poll, the trusted annual assessment of parents’ views on public schooling recently reported that 84% of public school parents felt their schools were ready to open during a pandemic, and 82% felt it could be safe to do so. Three-quarters of parents felt schools would be able to help their children catch up on missed learning, and more than two-thirds thought schools could also mitigate the social-emotional stressors the pandemic created for students.

Those are big numbers, representing a strong vote of confidence for public schools.

I ask again: Where is all the angst at school board and county commission meetings coming from?

What political events have inspired uncivil, hostile behaviors across the country? Are we letting a small minority of previously entitled people run roughshod over the democratic structures of our public institutions?

by nflanagan

Local Control over Schools: Good or Bad?

As the new school year started in 2020—last year, before a whole boatload of scientific information was confirmed, or vaccinations rolled out—I got into a Twitter spat with a man whose thinking and scholarship I respect.

He was advocating for all public schools in the United States, or at least his state, to be closed, all instruction taking place online. This was never going to happen–remember who was President a year ago?—but his point was that mandating remote education would save countless lives, many of them children and their teachers.

An excellent point. My counter point was that the case numbers and infection rate were low in my county—and internet connectivity and infrastructure even lower. Lots of students had no access to devices, and even if districts purchased Chromebooks or iPads, there was no broadband to run them. The previous spring, when schools were closed by gubernatorial order, teachers here distributed stapled-together work packets to students along with five days’ worth of breakfasts and lunches.

We Twitter-argued, back and forth, for days, about who should be making these decisions.

He would say: Your state or county should make affordable broadband a priority. I would say: We have been working on that with our recalcitrant, pro-privatization County Commission for over a decade. In the meantime, until that problem is solved, kids won’t have access to school or their teachers.

He would say: School buses with wi-fi! I would say: District is 168 square miles of hills and valleys—not even close to enough school buses!

Other educators would drop into the ongoing squabble. Mostly, they were teachers who felt that widespread, mandated remote learning was the only thing that would keep kids safe.

It seemed to me, then, that local decision-making was key to flattening the curve while balancing the needs of schoolkids. That assuming what was right for your school division or state would not necessarily be right for a school on the other side of the country. That we needed to trust school leaders to make the right choices, with input from their unique communities.

Today, I’m not so sure.

Because I grew up in a pro-union household in the flagship state of the UAW, I assumed, when I started teaching, that locally controlled and negotiated policies were ideal. We should be able to determine things like curriculum, testing, hiring and firing, whether to allow baseball caps, etc. etc. We knew best how to use the resources raised by taxing the citizens of our community.

Ironically, the few things that were state-mandated back then were mostly health- and safety-related: Annual TB tests for teachers. Vaccinations for kids before they were admitted to kindergarten.  Teachers’ legal obligation to report signs of abuse or self-harm. Seat belts and load limits on buses.

If something was critical enough to public well-being, you’d find it in the Michigan school code. The rest was up to school officials and a locally elected board. As it should be.

The person who disabused me of that notion was Renee Moore, an exemplary educator who taught in Detroit before moving to the Mississippi Delta. She pointed out that many local officials and educators did not have the best interests of all students in mind—that in fact, state and federal policies were essential to the pursuit of equity for traditionally underserved public schools and their students. And always had been.

This was a moment when my own clueless privilege smacked me upside the head. If the government didn’t establish rules around school safety, adequacy and equity, who would?

As Heather Cox Richardson noted:

For all that Republicans today insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s with their own ancestors, led by Abraham Lincoln, who wrote: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

Clearly, relying on state and federal government is not the key to student safety and well-being in August 2021—because some state leaders and state legislators are feckless and our window for tapping into federally provided guidance, resources or unity was slammed shut in 2020.

All the devils are loose, and we’re dependent on those separate and individual capacities, plus the relevant evidence and a big dose of courage. The feds can’t save us. We don’t have a policy problem; we have deliberate misinformation and compliance problems.

We’re dependent on people like this guy, a school superintendent in mid-Michigan who is mandating masks even though he’s received irate and threatening phone calls:  ‘I do not have the same scientific skills as some people who work in the state health department. But if somebody else is uncomfortable making a decision, if I have a reasonable support group around me who believe the same way, I don’t have a problem making that decision.’

Good for you, sir—and thanks for taking the heat, and demonstrating local control at its core: Should I make an unpopular decision if I believe it may save lives? Yes.

Local board-meeting meltdowns make clear that good school policy is more than majority-rule. But effective top-down policy also depends on who is at the top.

by nflanagan

What Happened to All the Caring Parents?

Were you in the classroom when Reye Syndrome was a thing schools were worried about?

Here’s a hint: it first emerged about 45 years ago, a rare but very serious condition that causes swelling in the liver and brain. Reye’s syndrome most often affects children and teenagers recovering from a viral infection, most commonly the flu or chickenpox.

The worst year for Reye (or Reye’s) Syndrome was 1980, when 555 cases were identified, nationally. The numbers dropped precipitously once scientists connected the use of aspirin in children with a viral illness to the onset of the disease. Since 1997, the United States has averaged somewhere around two identified and reported cases per year.

The reason I remember Reye Syndrome so clearly: one of my students had it. A sixth grade girl who was out of school for several weeks. She recovered, thank goodness.

The TV and radio stations and newspapers—state and local—ran stories with boxed and bolded advice: If your child does not recover from the flu or chicken pox, take them to the doctor—or the hospital, if they have a high fever, are vomiting or incoherent. NO ASPIRIN! It was an alarmed topic of conversation at the grocery store, PTA and staff meetings. Caution was the watchword.

That was then.

This week, I read that the large district to the south of the one where I taught was going to require masks for all kids—and that there was concern parents would pull their kids out of Large, Cautious District and send them north to my old district, where masking is, per their website today, completely optional, vaccinated or not.

What happened to the cautious parenting? Damned if I know.

It’s the same overwhelmingly white, middle class suburban district it was, back in 1980. Last year, there were over 300 confirmed COVID cases in the district (so—probably actually way more than the official numbers).

It’s a bright red county, for starters (unlike Large, Cautious District to the south, which is in a blue county). I taught there for 32 years, and lived there for 20. I was always aware that most of my neighbors were Republicans. They were also college-educated and very concerned about their children’s well-being, not to mention their education. I used to think it was an easy district to teach in.

Used to. There’s no reason to doubt that the parents who live there still want the best for their children. It’s just that the definition of what’s best for their children has seriously morphed.

Or maybe it’s because I’m seeing such a place—white, well-educated, focused exclusively on their children’s comfort and happiness—through a different lens. The lens of It’s Not About You, and It’s Not About Little Tyler, either. It’s the lens of community.

If you think that masking children—to keep themselves and others healthy—is an imposition on them, or you, it’s pretty clear what/who matters to you. And if you’re not taking your seventh grader to get a jab, you’re not thinking of your community, or even keeping your family safe.  

About 35% of kids 12-15 are vaccinated or partially vaccinated in this county—the number rises to 48% of teens 16-19. Which is a start, but pales in the face of the potentially lethal variant: Up to one-third of children admitted to our hospital have required critical care — including oxygen delivered through high-flow nasal cannula, noninvasive ventilation, and intubation with mechanical ventilation. More than 300 children across the United States have died of covid since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This indifference and opposition to the best available solutions for protecting kids is not the norm across Michigan, by the way. Here’s a cheery story out of East Grand Rapids (another town that is 95% white, upper middle class and well-educated): According to the county, 95% of people age 12 to 17 in East Grand Rapids are vaccinated and 96% of people over 16 in the district have gotten their shots.

I have to say—I’d sure feel a lot better sending my kid to that middle school. But I would still want everyone to mask up. The most important content teachers could be teaching this year is: Why Masking Saves Lives and Respects Others—science, math and civics in one lesson plan.

We could also teach about the prevalence of irrational behaviors and resistance.

I still have lots of friends (and their children, and their children’s children) in this careless school district. I am fond of them. I am heartily sick of covid-related anger and judgment (and yes, I know that this blog has been laced with anger and judgment).

But this statement feels right to me: We can direct our rage not at lost individuals but at systems of power that made our grim national death count the only plausible outcome. Is it so shocking that a caste-based society that exalts individualism and prioritizes profit above wellness — one of the only industrialized nations without universal health care — would fail to rise to the challenges of a collective health crisis?

I still wonder what happened to the nice parents who insisted that the elementary and middle schools send home urgent letters about Reye Syndrome. Systems of power intervened. The blinders are off.

by nflanagan

Forty Minutes

After a delightful holiday weekend, everyone rejoicing in the qualified return to things we love about an American summer, it may feel like a downer to post this. But.

It’s been six months since the Capitol was breached by insurrectionists. You’ve probably heard about the 40-min video, much of it new footage, that was created by the NY Times.

And you’ve probably thought: Forty minutes? I don’t have that kind of time. Besides, I’ve seen all the carnage and violence. No need to wallow.

Well, I’m going to recommend 40 minutes of focused watching. What happened on January 6 wasn’t a one-off accidental mutiny, spontaneous. It was planned, nurtured and carried out by people from all 50 states. People who sincerely believe that the election was fraudulent, who wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence.

Some 500 of them have been arrested–but all are still out there, communicating underground, re-grouping.

Watching the video, for the first time, I felt genuine fear. There were things on the video I’d never seen or even contemplated. ‘Assault on democracy’ is an apt descriptor, not at all a rhetorical flourish.

It is very like us, the nation that calls itself ‘blessed’ and ‘exceptional,’ to see ourselves as beyond rioting in the streets. We see ourselves as entitled to peace, sunshine, picnics on the beach and concerts in the park.

It’s time to remember that the exceptionality and safety we enjoy was hard-earned, over centuries, and often came at the expense of people of color and immigrants.

It’s time to have those conversations about what we truly value, and who the ‘real’ Americans are. This video is an excellent starting place.