Category / family

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

Political Violence in the Classroom

In November of 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, seventh graders at Royal Oak Middle School were captured on video shouting “Build that wall! Build that wall!”  in the school lunchroom. It drew immediate attention and media coverage, but like all once-shocking incidents, quickly faded from public view.

As events of the last week unfolded, it struck me that the blurry kids in the video would now be about the same age as Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk. Were they now part of the cluster of young white men who spend all their time online, getting radicalized? Do they follow Nick Fuentes or hang out on 4Chan?

Or—best case scenario—had they merely been immature, clueless, early-adolescent jerks whose irresponsible, harmful “prank” of insulting and perhaps scaring classmates of color, was made clear to them by a community of teachers and parents? In one of the news clips from 2016, the Royal Oak Superintendent talks about how the perpetrators will be dealt with summarily, keeping in mind that youthful mistakes can be learning experiences.

Exactly.

Clueless early-adolescent jerks are a regular feature in middle school teachers’ clientele. Kids do dumb things. In between teaching students about the Bill of Rights and single-variable equations, teachers do double duty as both role models and arbitrators of appropriate behavior.

Because—despite the persistent myth that teachers should just spout content and inculcate skills, nothing more—learning happens in context. When some part of your class feels rejected, afraid or angry about being harassed in the cafeteria, nobody learns. Much of what we absorb in school are lessons about right and wrong. Civility and respect.

Things that weren’t on the lesson plan–no matter how old your students, or which subject you’re teaching. School is where students learn to deal with personal differences, taking turns and not always getting your way. And teachers—witness the illustration for this blog, just posted by a friend in a series of photos of her classroom—create materials, lessons and discussions to that effect, right out of the gate, even though it’s often considered not their job or, any more, none of their business.

We are at a point, this week, where teachers in twelve states have been fired or suspended for making remarks online about Charlie Kirk’s murder. In some states—you can guess which—state officials are inviting anonymous tips on teachers who may have said something in class that offended somebody, although the veracity of who said what, reported by students, then routed through parents, has to be uncertain at best.

Not to mention a giant waste of time at the beginning of the school year, as teachers are trying to build community and trust. Nor is any of this reducing the likelihood of the most politicized and terrifying violence in our classrooms: school shootings.

While teachers should absolutely keep their partisan loyalties to themselves, speaking about political violence is speaking about current events. As Brittany Page says:

“Political violence” isn’t just a conservative activist getting murdered.

Political violence is a Supreme Court that gives the green light for people to be stopped and detained based on their perceived race or ethnicity, what language they speak, where they work, and where they happen to be standing.

It is found in a society that tells you to start a GoFundMe to pay for your life-saving healthcare so your family doesn’t go bankrupt when you draw the short stick.

Click on the link. It’s a powerful piece, proof that we are all wading around in political violence every day, no matter how much they want us to shut up about it. It’s evil. To pretend it doesn’t exist makes it even more dangerous for all of us, including children.

How did we get here? Jonathan V. Last, at The Bulwark, said this:

‘Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Times change; people change.‘

The best part of that quote comes at the end. Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.

In my time in the classroom, there have been regular encounters with politicized issues, from shootings to 9/11. In 1988, one of my students lost his father over Lockerbie Scotland, enroute to Detroit via Pan Am Flight 103, which was carrying a bomb planted by a Libyan citizen. Did we talk about that? Yes. I also know his pain was ultimately mitigated by the simple act of going to school each day.

Robert Reich: ‘If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.

The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity.‘

Every clause in that last paragraph ought to be taught every day in every classroom in America. It’s the antidote to political violence.

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

What I Learned from my Dad about Politics and How it Applies to 2026

I am a big fan of Jess Piper, a veteran teacher from Missouri, who left the classroom to run for office, and has since reshaped the conversation around why red-staters vote against their own interests. Piper writes often about a childhood spent bouncing around the south, and the family values that influenced her.

When people (including myself here) shake their heads and wonder how so many citizens–despite glaring, flagrant evidence to the contrary–can still stubbornly believe that Trump is leading the country  on the right track, it’s helpful to read Piper’s blog. She gets it.

Mostly, I read Piper for her insights on working-class voters–because my own father, were he still alive, would (despite many years of voting for Democrats, post-War) probably be a Trump supporter, voting against his own interests.

Not a careless, “protect my wealth” country-club Republican. But a grievance-driven voter who resented those he believed were simply and unfairly handed benefits and perks, things he would never enjoy, no matter how hard he worked.

Fear and resentment—and the overwhelming conviction that the little guy never gets ahead—were deeply embedded in his character. That doesn’t mean he was not a good father; he absolutely was, caring for his family and living up to his responsibilities as a hard-working adult and citizen who never missed an election. He was a proud Teamster, a church-goer, and the man who drove me 90 miles one-way to take flute lessons at the university.

My dad served in World War II, in the Army Air Corps (later the US Air Force) in the Pacific theatre. His plane was shot down, in 1944, over the Sea of Japan, and the crew was rescued by an Australian sub. He lost his 19-year old brother Don in the first wave of Marines taking Iwo Jima in February of 1945. I wrote more about these things here, explaining why my dad really never got over the war. But it was more than his wartime experiences that molded his character.

He often expressed the sense that he’d been cheated—that other, less-deserving people were moving ahead, because they had money, or were currying favor, while he (a realist from the poor side of the tracks) was left behind. He voted for George Wallace in 1968, because Wallace claimed there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties: both were corrupt and run by elites. Sound familiar?

Thom Hartmann’s new piece– Culture Is Where Democracy Lives or Dies, Because Politics Always Follows the Story a Nation Tells Itself—goes some way to explaining what’s happening today, but also why my dad, surrounded by protests against the Vietnam war and girls burning their bras, turned to a man who supported segregation and repudiated progressivism: ’ Like no candidate before, Wallace harvested the anger of white Americans who resented the progressive changes of the 1960s. Wallace supporters feared the urban violence they saw exploding on television. With tough talk and a rough-hewn manner, Wallace inspired millions of conservative Democrats to break from their party.’

Like many of Trump’s supporters today, my dad saw Wallace as a truth-teller, an advocate for the working man, someone who would work to defend cultural norms around race, gender, authority and social policy. Even when those norms were outmoded, unjust or morally repugnant.

Today, I know better than trying to talk an irrational, ruby-red voter out of their convictions. I really do understand how pointless, even damaging, it is to accuse Trump voters of destroying democracy and erasing progress. Because I spent, literally, years of my life trying to (cough) enlighten my father, who treated me like other fathers of the era treated their know-it-all college-student kids: as spoiled brats who needed to let the real world take a whack at them.

My father died in 1980, of a brain tumor, at the untimely age of 58. I never changed him, but he never changed me. He thought a college education was a waste of time and money, although when I graduated, he came to commencement exercises and danced with me at the Holiday Inn afterward.

 Later, it dawned on me: the fact that he and my mother couldn’t contribute financially to my college education, and couldn’t help me navigate enrollment, might have been part of his insistence that college was for the privileged, not families like ours.

All of this happened in a time when news and opinion came from three mainstream TV channels and the Muskegon Chronicle. Who do Trump  voters turn to now for news? Is that source supporting their racism, sexism, xenophobia and bitterness? Is it filled with fact-free resentment?

Where do we start in changing minds and hearts? I wish I knew.

by nflanagan

What’s better than DEI?

It was the headline that made me read the piece: Let DEI Practices Die. Replace Them With Something Better. I didn’t recognize (and won’t name) the author, but his position as Chair of Ed Reform at the University of Arkansas was a tip-off to what I was about to be served.

I read it because I couldn’t really think of anything “better” than DEI, as a values template for effective teaching and learning. More on what the author thinks is better, in a minute.

I am of the opinion that DEI no longer can be defined as three important values: the desirability of diversity in making an organization and its goals stronger, the principle of providing equitable resources instead of a dangerous gap between haves and have-nots, and the human need to be included.

As a teacher in a (mostly white) school, long before DEI was something that could be positioned as wrong and against the law, let alone “replaced,” I would have to say that inclusion, equity and valuing student diversity were and remain cornerstones of good classroom practice.

But I realize—and this is what I hoped to understand in reading the article—that policies loosely grouped as “DEI” (affirmative action springs to mind) were maybe a topic that hadn’t been discussed enough to be clarified. Maybe there are other ways to create policies that acknowledged the worth of every student, no matter what they brought to the table, and the struggle to give them resources, including knowledge, tailored to help them live productive lives.

As if.

The author begins with a quote from John McWhorter taken out of context, then lays out his thesis:  Linda McMahon signaled she wants to replace DEI with individual student agency, enabled by strong families and schools. He then proceeds to explain how he rose above his working-class station, even though he was forced to attend mediocre public schools, because his family instilled character and a work ethic into their children.

Unlike, of course, other—let’s call them ‘diverse’—families and children, who got into trouble and didn’t achieve. He pushes the success sequence (college, job, marriage, children) as his “something better” alternative to his skewed conception of DEI. As for student agency—something I heartily endorse and practiced for 30 years–he seems to confuse actual agency with a concept right-leaning educators raved about a decade ago: student grit (which leads to hard work, obeying orders and school success).

The whole piece feels like a narrow-vision essay on who deserves to succeed, buttressed by quotes from political leaders and deliberate lies about what teachers are telling students, topped with a light frosting of racism.

So—what should replace DEI?

Actually, if you’re taking away (via federally approved punishments and reduced funding) inclusion, equity and diversity, what you’ve got left is exclusion of non-preferred students, discriminatory distribution of resources, and separation of student groups based on physical characteristics. In other words, Arkansas in 1957. What happens when a latter-day Orval Faubus emerges?

How did we get to this place? And what can people who understand and support the genuine purpose of public education do prevent erosion of genuine diversity, equity and inclusion—not “DEI”– in our schools?

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a great piece on the anti-student inclusion groups and initiatives forming around the country—this goes way beyond Moms for Exclusion—and (important) who’s funding them: Together, these groups represent a growing trend: weaponizing public outrage and social media virality to enforce a narrow vision of education. Their strategies of harassment and public shaming have injected fear into discussions around race, gender and equity in the classroom.

So—one thing that can happen is resisting that fear, teachers intentionally developing collegial trust, clarifying their mission to serve all children well. And yes, I spent more than three decades in the classroom, most of those in a single district, and fully understand just how difficult that prescription would be. But still—courage and persistence are essential when you’re resisting something malign. And the anti-DEI movement is definitely malign.

I was taken by this piece by James Greenberg, shared by one of his Facebook friends:

“This dislocation isn’t imaginary. It’s rooted in real structural shifts. The collapse of industrial jobs, the erosion of social mobility, the fragmentation of public education, the disappearance of local media—all contribute to a pervasive sense of loss. Add to that climate disasters, housing precarity, and the stripping of rural and working-class communities by extractive economics, and you get fertile ground for stories that promise a return to order—even if that order is cruel.

The “stolen America” narrative—amplified by cable news, talk radio, and algorithmic social media—offers a simple explanation: you are losing because others are taking what’s yours. It’s a lie, but a compelling one, because it replaces confusion with clarity. It locates blame. It gives identity to those who feel erased.”

I would add to Greenberg’s analysis—the COVID-19 pandemic. But I like his characterization of public education as fragmented. Because that is precisely what has happened to our public schools, even those who rode the COVID wave, then dug into repairing the damage it did to trust in our teachers and school leaders. The voucher craze isn’t about giving parents choices—it’s about breaking up successful school districts attempting to serve all students as best they can.

What can replace DEI? Nothing. If we lose our framework of serving all kids equitably, we go backwards 75 years.

by nflanagan

Teach Your Children Well

It used to be fairly common in Traverse City, Michigan—a Michael Moore sighting. I once stood in line behind him at a Coldstone Creamery on Front Street (no longer there, alas). During the summer TC Film Festival (also no longer in existence), he was everywhere, leading panel discussions and walks around TC’s beautiful, turn-of-last-century downtown neighborhoods.

Michael Moore’s star has faded here, for various reasons. He’s never been an easy person to watch on TV, full of himself and, sometimes, an explosive but unreliable narrator of what’s happening in this country. You certainly know where he stands—but he can be a grating spokesperson.

Nevertheless, I read his free newsletter and found his April 30 column on the Vietnam War—where he points out that we’ve never as a nation, admitted our guilt or apologized–moving and worth deep consideration:

“They kicked the ass of a military superpower — and sent 60,000 of our young men home to us in wooden boxes (nine of them from my high school, two on my street) and hundreds of thousands more who returned without arms, legs, eyes or the mental capacity to live life to its fullest, forever affected, their souls crushed, their nightmares never-ending. All of them destroyed by a lie their own government told them about North Vietnam “attacking” us and the millions of Americans who at first believed the lie. This past November 5th showed just how easy it still is for an American president, a man who lies on an hourly basis, to get millions of his fellow citizens to fall for it. 

I think we need to do this for our children’s sake, for our grandchildren, for the sake of our future if there still is one for us. We should take just one day every year and participate in a national day of reckoning, recollection, reflection, and truth-telling, where together we actively seek forgiveness, make reparations and further our understanding of just how it happened and how easy it is for the wealthy and the political elites and the media to back such horror, and then to get the majority of the country to go along with it… at least at first. And how quickly after it’s over we decide that we never have to talk about it again. That we can learn nothing from it and change nothing after it. 

Teach our children this truth about us. About our history. Give them this knowledge and with it comes the opportunity for us to change and make different choices for our future. To be a different people. A peaceful people. The Germans did it. The Japanese, too.”

And here we are, again, creating an unnecessary war—this time on our own city streets. And the question bubbles up: Are we teaching our children the truth about the place where they live? And, even more important, what will happen if/when they believe the lies their government is peddling?

I was interested in this observation from the new National Teacher of the Year, Ashlie Crosson, from Pennsylvania: “Teachers shouldn’t shy away from using challenging texts and conversations in their classrooms, even if they touch on divisive topics.“

It’s a reasonable statement you might expect from any accomplished teacher—but one that could now get you fired in some states and districts. Chaos and fear and flooding the zone are part of media assessments of public education in June 2025, along with smiling photos of HS graduates and end-of-year academic honors.

Robert Reich said it well:
“Why is Trump trying to cancel “Sesame Street,” which has helped children learn to read and count for over half a century? Why is he seeking to destroy Harvard University? Why is he trying to deter the world’s most brilliant scientists from coming to the United States?

Because he is trying to destroy American education — and with it, the American mind.”

Is there anything teachers can do to stop the ongoing attack on becoming genuinely well-educated? To not be fearful of ideas or painful truths?

Individual teachers are seldom visible enough to draw widescale media-fed wrath (which is why I found the new National TOY’s remarks brave)—political opponents of public education generally target teacher unions, well-endowed universities, and programs that provide free breakfast and lunch or wraparound healthcare for kids who need it.

With the upcoming NO KINGS National Protests, I’ve seen lots of social media memes urging people to do what they can. To march and carry signs, of course—but also to speak to those in their circle of influence, to write, to model democratic principles. To behave as engaged citizens—and to teach their children the truth about our history, with the goal of becoming a peaceful people.

Let’s teach our children well. (click—it’s worth it)



by nflanagan

Book-banning, Book-burning, Book reading—and Truth

Cue (the 1970s): Nervous young candidate for a job teaching music steps out of her dad’s car—she doesn’t own a car, yet–in a small Michigan town on the rural outer ring surrounding Detroit, where little villages are interspersed with working farmland. The town is charming, full of old houses and 19th century buildings. The principal she’s meeting proposes they take a walk around the town while interviewing.

He gives her a thumbnail history of the Hartland Music Hall, the cemetery and the “1921 Building”—the first high school in the county. They end their walk at the Cromaine Library, the crown jewel of this little village. It’s exquisite—built in 1927, before the Wall Street Crash that sent the country spiraling into Depression—with beautiful Georgian windows, and a working fireplace. Every child in the Hartland Schools comes to the Cromaine Library and gets a library card, the principal tells her—it’s part of the school district.

Of course, I got that job (and bought a car)—and raised my family in that little town, taking my personal children to that library hundreds of times. My husband served on the library board, for a time. It was (beautifully) expanded in 1980 and has remained, for nearly 100 years, the heart of the community, a hub for both kids and adults—and for learning.

I was sickened to read that the Cromaine Library Board (like, unfortunately, the Hartland School Board) has now been co-opted by right-wing morality scolds. Serving on library boards—like school boards and other civic oversight jobs for volunteers—is a thankless job, but also a power-grabbing opportunity for those who’d really prefer to live in an anti-DEI town. In an anti-DEI world, in fact.

“For the Hartland Cromaine District Library in Livingston County, the conversation on labeling books started in 2022. Over time and with the election of new library Board of Trustees members, the conversation became much more pointed.

Much of that had to do with the election of Bill Bolin, the pastor of the FloodGate Church in Brighton, and his elevation to the president of the Cromaine District Library board in January. Bolin and his church have been written about by various publications, including Tim Alberta detailing Bolin’s mixture of right-wing conspiratorial politics and Christianity. Bolin also features throughout Alberta’s 2023 book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.”

Bolin:
“I desire to protect children from the harm that can befall them over coercive behavior. The approach I am suggesting, along with certain colleagues, is a commonsense approach to changing the sexual tone and nature of some library policies and practices.”

Bolin said the Board [under his leadership] would discuss controversial items on the agenda, including the removal of June LGBTQ+ Pride displays, labeling certain books that may be deemed controversial, moving books to an age restricted area, providing supervision in the teen area to monitor “behavior” and returning the Pledge of Allegiance to monthly meetings.

Bolin then recited a potential warning label he had created warning adults of the dangers of providing such material to children. But Bolin wasn’t talking about dirty magazines in a seedy retail store: he was talking about books within the community’s public library. Bolin added that a list of books that could be recommended for labeling was being compiled with at least 80 titles, minimum.

The article goes on to say that the Board was advised by the ACLU and their own law firm that they’re setting themselves up for legal pushback. A meeting gets heated and the Sheriff is called to escort those endorsing leaving the books on the shelves out of the room. It’s shocking—and nauseating. I loved this library.

Several attendees note that Bolin hopes this case will be the showcase legal action in front of the Supreme Court. Bolin muses on his belief that: “legal discourse was changing in America, indicating that courts in the era of Trump might be turning the tide to support measures much like the one being discussed by the Cromaine District Library board.”

And maybe that’s the saving grace—this is not just happening here, in small towns in the Midwest. When Georgia high schools can no longer present classic theatre like “The Crucible”—which is how I learned about the McCarthy hearings, as a HS student—then we all need to rise up. Show up at board meetings. And speak.  

Free choice of reading. It’s right there in the Bill of Rights. Remember?

In a previous column, I wrote about the moving experience of standing in the Square where—on May 10, 1933—students (students!) supporting the emergent Nazi party burned books. Thousands and thousands of books that the party said were too Jewish (including classic works of literature and philosophy) or not German enough: In 1933, Nazi German authorities aimed to synchronize professional and cultural organizations with Nazi ideology and policy (Gleichschaltung).

That’s precisely what’s happening in what I used to think of as my little town: synchronizing professional and cultural organizations with Trumpian ideology and policy.

Only engaged citizens can stop this.

by nflanagan

What Europeans Think of Trump

Just got home from a two-week vacation in the Czech Republic and Germany, including a week in what used to be East Germany. All of us learn from travel, of course, but this trip—planned long before last year’s election—was an incisive tutorial on how the rest of the Western world sees where we’re headed.

As of today, there are warnings against travel to the United States for citizens of Canada, Germany, England, Denmark, Netherlands, and France—probably the easiest and most accessible nations for Americans to visit.

I grew up in Michigan, where Canada hardly felt like a foreign country. I have friends who live in Windsor, but work in Detroit. College students in Michigan have routinely made pilgrimages to Ontario, where the legal drinking age is 19. Losing that easy camaraderie is huge—and that’s without taking into account the auto industry’s dependence on Canadian-made parts and trade.

I was interested and a little anxious about what the vibe would be in Europe. I’m too old for rail passes/backpacks/hostels travel—we’d be staying in hotels and led by English-speaking guides—but if you pay attention, in between historic dates and landmarks, you can hear and see what daily life is like in places that used to be Russian-controlled territories, how they see themselves in the world, and their fears for the United States.

I was also curious about my fellow American travelers. Would they agree with Jim Acosta, who said: Think of the damage done to America’s standing in the world, in the minds of young people across the globe. They see a president who is often out of touch with the real world, thoroughly corrupt and vengeful, beginning his second term launching a crypto scheme and turning government against vulnerable migrants as well as his enemies, both real and imagined.

We began our journey in Prague, a gorgeous medieval city that has been overrun by competing rulers for centuries, part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Kingdom of Bohemia. The old core of the city was almost untouched by WWII, but our local walking tour guides–find ‘em on the internet–occasionally pointed out architectural anomalies, calling them Communist buildings, which (local joke) come in three colors: light gray, medium gray and dark gray.

Because the walking tour groups were nationally diverse, the focus was on the enchanting city and its rich history—including the Velvet Revolution of 1989, wherein the Czechs reclaimed their own heritage and autonomy.

Traveling into Germany—the former GDP, East Germany—was revelatory. Guides were excellent—they all knew the historical markers but would often tuck bits of human perspective in their remarks.

  • Our guide in Wittenberg was born in the 1950s and grew up there. In secondary school, she said, she studied Russian. It was the only “foreign” language available. She also studied Russian in college. When she was in her 30s, and the Wall came down, she decided she wanted to learn English—and did. I never wanted to speak another word of Russian, she said darkly.
  • In Potsdam, we visited the estate where the Potsdam conference was held and the iconic photo of Truman, Stalin and Churchill was taken, before Germany was carved up. Potsdam is a beautiful town, including the upscale neighborhood where Vladimir Putin and his KGB comrades lived, in the1980s, considering what other beautiful villages and terrain they might appropriate.
  • In Dresden, we got a quick tutorial on how much of Dresden was bombed into smithereens, in February of 1945. American woman (who should, IMHO, know better) asks the guide: Who bombed this city? The allies, he replies, tactfully. You mean us? She says. Why would we do that? Well, the guide says— revenge, maybe? Later, I hear the woman ask her husband if the Germans are communists, leaving me to wonder just what we are teaching in World History classes.
  • In Torgau, where the allied armies met the Russian army, effectively shoving the tattered German army out of their homeland, April 25, 1945, five days before Hitler took his own life in a bunker. We looked at the site where the armies met, on the Elbe river. Flags from the United States, Russian and Germany have flown there for 75 years, in a memorial. The flagpoles are now empty—and have been since earlier this year, when Germany decided the peace agreement no longer applied.

Our guide in Torgau pointed out that there were a few things—free child care, for one—that made living in East Germany easier (these kindergartens were shut down as “too socialist” after the reunification). On the other hand, the omnipresent occupying Russian soldiers were brutes. His great-grandmother was shot dead in the town square, for resisting the attentions of one of them. He reminded us that Hitler came to power peacefully, and stayed there, courtesy of the Nazi party.

  • Berlin, of course, is a kind of living museum. Most powerful moment in Berlin? The square where, in May of 1933, the Nazis held their first book-burning. There’s a memorial there. Our guide said, quietly: First they burn books. Then, they burn people. But there is a little free library in the square, with hammocks and beanbag chairs. It was a chilly day—but there were children there, reading. Hope.

Everywhere we went, people were kind and hospitable. And honest. Aware of how long it takes to overcome the destruction of a great nation.  As Jen Rubin wrote, this morning:

Other countries, much older than the United States, have gone through grim, even disastrous years, decades, or centuries. And yet in Europe, the spirit of liberal democracy (however imperfect) remains alive and well. A sense of the public good still thrives, and millions of people strive to keep the achievements of Western Civilization from the clutches of fascism, xenophobia, know-nothingism, and conspiracy-mongering. The world is carrying on, albeit with dismay, as Americans struggle through its Dark Age.

Amen.

by nflanagan

Are Women the Cause of Reluctance to Read?

I remember learning–perhaps in a grad class or professional development session, years ago–that boys didn’t like to read about girl things. You know—relationships, communication, emotions, the finer points of making a home or enriching family life. Boys wanted to read stories about adventures, we were told. Starring, naturally, other boys.

Ergo, if we wanted to turn boys into enthusiastic readers, we needed books where boys did boy stuff—creeks, animals, cars, fights, danger, you name it. Write it and they will come.

I thought about this when re-reading A Separate Peace this month. My book club is doing a “Books You’ve Already Read—or should have read” month, and I thought it was time to re-read a book that I put on my Top Ten list for decades.

(Seriously—I kept continuously updated top ten lists of books, movies and LPs until I had both children and a full-time job. There are still some gems on those lists—but also some really embarrassing stuff.)

I wouldn’t, however, call Separate Peace an embarrassing pick. I read it in high school, although not as a class novel. In the late 60s, my public high school adopted a choice-based language arts curriculum. Instead of English 9/10/etc, there was an array of semester-long courses. I took journalism, speed reading and Great Books, a totally wonderful class where students did nothing but read books, then journal their impressions.

There was a list of great books (SP was on it), but you could also deviate, with the teacher’s permission. It was that teacher—Mrs. Palmer—who introduced me to Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, and Madeleine L’Engel.

It’s hard for me to put my finger now on why I loved Separate Peace so much. Partly, it was the boarding school setting—what it would be like to live in dorms, with other students whose parents weren’t scraping to pay the mortgage, for whom college was a certainty, not a stretch.

Mostly, though, I think it was because—spoiler—there’s a death in the book, under unusual circumstances, leading the reader (this teenaged reader, anyway) to muse on Big Meaningful Issues. In case you’re wondering whether I noticed the homoerotic flavor of the relationship between the narrator and his best friend, the answer (1969) is no and (2025) yes.

But here’s what really jumped out at me, some 50+ years later: there are no women in this book. Aside from a couple of sentences mentioning a screechy school nurse, and a sentence describing a classmate’s mother as kindly, there is zero female presence in this book. There’s plenty of adventure, danger, scrapes and disobedience. Even a student-led tribunal, and a World War. But not a single woman, or girl.

From a recent article in The Guardian, about a newly formed publishing house that intends to publish only books by men: 

Cook said the publishing landscape has changed “dramatically” over the past 15 years as a reaction to the “prevailing toxic male-dominated literary scene of the 80s, 90s and noughties”. Now, “excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction is around female authors – and this is only right as a timely corrective”.

“This new breed of young female authors, spearheaded by Sally Rooney et al, ushered in a renaissance for literary fiction by women, giving rise to a situation where stories by new male authors are often overlooked, with a perception that the male voice is problematic,” he said.

Hunh. I wasn’t really paying attention to any toxic literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, due to the aforementioned family and job. But I was still reading a lot—and was deeply involved in whether and what my students were reading. Or not reading.

It was a time when getting any kind of reading material—from comic books to Captain Underpants— into kids’ hands was the prescription for reluctant readers. There was a rolling bookshelf in my band room, filled with books about music and musicians. Some had some vaguely naughty photos. I purchased all of them, and they were well used.

My take on any reduction in male readers in the 21st century is that omnipresent screens, not problematic masculine voices, are responsible.

Still. What I notice about this (well-meant, I assume) announcement is that it only took a couple of decades for men to perceive that women were “ushering in a renaissance,” then set up their own literary clubhouse, no girls allowed.

There’s also this:
Less than half of parents find it fun to read aloud to their children, new research shows. Only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 agreed that “reading books to my child is fun for me”, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen and publisher HarperCollins. The survey shows a steep decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0- to four-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012.

A significant gender disparity was identified, with 29% of 0- to two-year-old boys being read to every day or nearly every day compared with 44% of girls of the same age.

Plus this, ominously: Many parents focus on the literacy element of reading, seeing it as a skill, rather than encouraging a love for reading in their children.

So—who’s not reading, and why?

If you talk to the Science of Reading crowd, boys’ reading difficulties and reluctance to read can be laid at the feet of teachers who were never taught the only correct protocols for reading instruction, or—worse—fail to use them with fidelity, a word I have come to loathe when applied to pedagogy.

And since the overwhelming majority of early-grades teachers are women, this can be construed as another way in which women are not paying attention to the needs of boys. But it’s so much more complex than phonemic awareness, yada yada.

The Great Books class at my high school only lasted a few years, then fell when the “cafeteria curriculum” became outmoded, in favor of … what? I forget. Back to Basics? One of our cyclical returns to The Canon—in which white male-authored books have literally always been deemed more worthy of study?

All children deserve to be read to, daily, even when they’re able to read themselves. Stories about both boys and girls. Because that’s how they learn to be curious about the real world.

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by nflanagan

A Veteran Teacher’s Thoughts about ADHD

I can remember the first time I heard about ADHD. It was in the early 1990s—and the person who was educating me was the mother of one of my students. His teachers—six of us, plus an admin—were sitting around a table, meeting to discuss his classroom behaviors (not good), when she whipped out stapled packets of articles on ADD.

He’d been officially diagnosed, and she was part of a parent support group, which provided materials for teachers. The packets she gave us were thick—maybe 50 pages—and filled with scientific-sounding information about diagnosis and treatment of this disease, then thought to apply to perhaps three percent of all students.

Reading through it (rather than round-filing it, as a couple of colleagues did), you could see what was coming. The Attention-Deficit Era had begun. He wasn’t hyperactive or oppositional-defiant, or a troublemaker. Not anymore. He had ADD.

Let me say, upfront, that I believe ADHD is a real thing, and using medication judiciously to treat it is often a lifesaver for parents and teachers. Let me also say that the way some classrooms operate is not conducive to deep learning for a range of students who need lots of movement and hands-on activities. And—side note– this is often not their teachers’ fault, given our increasing national focus on testing, compliance and narrowing the curriculum. Raising the damned bar.

I was horrified to read in Paul Tough’s excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?  that nearly a quarter of 17-year old boys in the United States have now been diagnosed as having ADHD. Tough does a good job of tracking the factors—drug treatments, specifically—that have made one in four boys unable to focus in a quiet classroom without chemical assistance.

He rightfully notes that ADHD symptoms also look like a lot of other things: anxiety, head injury, lead exposure and many other traumas.

But the piece ends on a hopeful note, with lots of testimony from young adult men who have found the right jobs and life circumstances and seldom experience troublesome ADHD symptoms. Which makes me ponder what there is about school that makes the kids we used to call hyperactive need drugs to get by every day, even though the medicines don’t improve their learning.

“Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

The kid whose mother insisted he had a disease, rather than merely being disobedient? He was, in fact, hyperactive and prone to (cheerfully) destroying order in a classroom. Once, while I was moving band equipment, chairs and stands across the hall from the band room for an assembly in the gym, I instructed him to load percussion equipment on a flat pushcart. (Teacher tip: Always give restless students an important job.)  

Instead, he assembled the drum set on the cart, then had another kid push him down the hall while he pounded out a little Metallica. Down the hall—and past the office. It didn’t end well for either of us. He wasn’t a bad drummer, by the way. According to mom, it was his favorite class.

I looked him up on internet, and he’s now a multimillion-selling real estate agent. Go figure.

I taught for two more decades after that day I first heard of ADD. Lots more students were diagnosed with ADD, over time—then, ADHD. My colleagues and I talked often about accurate language, and accurate diagnoses, and the differences in kids when they were medicated. Sometimes, parents let teachers know their child had been diagnosed—sometimes, they didn’t.

I took kids to camp and on field trips where I had to administer their ADHD medications, or have conversations with their concerned parents about behavior issues when they were unmedicated—at an evening performance or band camp.

And I often felt grateful that I was teaching band, with 65 students at once, all holding noisemakers. There was a lot of stimulation in the band room, plenty of activity. There was also discipline (because otherwise there would be chaos), but my attention-deficit kids could tolerate rules and procedures, as long as they were moving and doing things. Mostly.

I also taught 7th grade math for two years. I found that maintaining student focus with 28 students in a desks-and-chalkboard setting was often way more difficult than keeping 60 band kids on track.

Read Paul Tough’s piece, if you get a chance. It’s nuanced and layered with contradictions, like most things about schooling, and raising healthy children. We could be doing lots more for kids who are immersed in screens and entertainment daily, and have difficulty staying on task when that task involves paper and pencils.

But then—we could be doing a lot more for many kids, who bring their various backgrounds and issues to school. If only we had the resources. And a genuine commitment to the next generation.

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