Category / Music Education

by nflanagan

Who is in Favor of Authoritarianism? Are Schools Authoritarian?

In 2014, we went on a much-anticipated two week cruise—the Grand European, from Budapest to Amsterdam. On the first day, we took a day-long tour of Budapest, with a charming and articulate guide. First stop: Heroes Square.

Our guide was a proud and patriotic Hungarian, well-versed in her nation’s history, all the way back to Atilla the Hun. I am embarrassed to say I knew very little about modern-day Hungary, except for the fact that Hungarian citizens are universally musically literate, because of Zoltan Kodaly, whose method of teaching music to children is internationally renowned.

As the distracted touring group wandered around snapping pictures of the impressive statuary, our guide completed her thumbnail history and then, very quietly, said that Hungarians—so brave and bold—were losing their democratic independence to their authoritarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

Glancing around, she spoke for perhaps two minutes about how he was suppressing freedoms and dismissing the courts, stealing money and power from the people. It was clear that she was nervous, and that this was not part of her assigned guide-spiel. Most of the Americans in this heavily American group were not paying attention to her final, whispered words: You Americans are lucky.

That was 10 years ago. Today, from a piece entitled The Path to American Authoritarianism:

Democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term.

While this is a powerful statement, it is not difficult to find a dozen pieces, by credible authors, in credible publications, saying pretty much the same thing, over the last three weeks. We are headed toward Hungary (Global Freedom Score: 65) or perhaps Saudi Arabia (GFS: 8), where our President is now going to sell out Ukraine (GFS: 49).

It’s clear we are not the land of the free anymore. Nor are we the home the brave. We’re the home of the partisan cowardly and the feckless appeasers.

It is easy to point fingers at the clueless voters who wanted cheaper eggs (and, one hopes, a corresponding end to galloping and threatening bird flu). It’s a short distance from there to wondering why schools are turning out more and more dumb people. If people understood the importance of preserving our liberties, we wouldn’t find ourselves with a completely incompetent president. Again.

This—the ‘let’s blame schools’ rationale—is always popular when things are shaky politically. Richard Nixon blamed ‘bums blowing up campuses’ for political unrest, rather than his own disastrous foreign policy. Academic and political scholars spent decades comparing Johnny and Ivan, invariably coming to the same conclusion: our schools suck, when it comes to preparing upstanding and industrious citizens. That we are now preparing to aid Russia in its criminal intent to capture some or all of a struggling democracy, Ukraine, is the ultimate irony.

Schooling is actually one of those public institutions where a kind of benign authoritarianism—because I said so—is commonplace, even approved. When Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville suggested that kids who have ADHD don’t need medication—they need to be whipped with a belt—there were plenty of MAGA types nodding in agreement.

The rise in book-banning, the faux outrage over the fewer than 10 trans athletes (out of a half-million) in college sports, the equally faux outrage over “CRT” and “DEI” (both of which should require scare quotes)—these are happening because public education is funded and controlled by the government (as accountability requires).

There’s a reason why the Department of Education is being so quickly dismantled. It’s not a business (as everyone is fond of saying). It doesn’t make money. It’s entirely dependent on a mixture of public funding streams. There are accountability strings (state and federal) on nearly every aspect of the way public education runs, from where the money goes, qualifications for workers, rules for instructional materials and practices, punishments for low test scores, how to get kids to school, even when they prefer not to go.

For the current administration, bent on “saving” federal dollars for their own preferences, breaking up this monolith will be a giant display of power that impacts some 50 million students and their families. Think you’re in charge of your local school, your classroom? Think again. Easy peasy.

No, the federal government–and supporting Republicans and conservative courts–say. No, we don’t want your media literacy classes. No, we don’t want kids nosing around in issues like fairness and equity in our recent history. No speaking Spanish. No arts classes or events to help students make sense of the world they live in. No vaccines to protect them, or accurate health information.

No, we don’t want you out there teaching kids to ferret out the truth.

I think about our Hungarian guide all the time, especially recently, watching Tucker Carlson gush about what an amazing, transformative job Viktor Orban has done. At the time, she seemed a little desperate, sharing her political beliefs with American strangers.

Now, she seems like a prophet. Guard what you have. You never know when you’re going to elect a despot. Before our schools crumble, I hope every teacher will gather up their courage and speak truth to power, even to first graders.

As Steven Bechloss wrote: Despite this onslaught of gaslighting, aggression and attacks on facts, don’t assume we are powerless to respond. This is our duty to the future and the truth.

by nflanagan

Why Senate Cabinet Hearings are a Lesson for Schools

Here’s a reflective statement that will probably irritate—or enrage—my fellow music educators: When it comes to inappropriate behavior on the part of educators, performing arts teachers have a bad reputation. Often deservedly so.

Offhand—and I’m only one music teacher—I can think of a dozen instances of band, orchestra and choir teachers who have been accused of sexually unacceptable behaviors with students. Am I going to name them? I am not—although I have written about my own experience with a sexual predator/band director who used his power in that position in destructive, demeaning ways. For years.

Why are teachers in certain disciplines and grade levels more prone to sexually abusive behaviors? Opportunity. When you take students to camp, or on regular field trips—or when you are responsible for private lessons or after-school rehearsals—there are plenty of occasions when bad stuff can happen.

I kept thinking about this, watching the Hegseth hearings. Stuff that used to be distasteful and shameful is now, per Markwayne Mullins, a mere “mistake” up to and including criminal acts— Why did Hegseth do it? Because he could. Sound familiar?

Holly Berkley Fletcher has a great piece on the hearings in Bulwark: Mullin went on, “The only reason I am here and not in prison is because my wife loved me, too. . . I’m not perfect, but I found somebody that thought I was perfect . . . but just like our Lord and Savior forgave me, my wife’s had to forgive me more than once, too.”

Mullin’s mini-sermon was a lasagna of problematic messaging—the lauding of a woman for sticking with an abusive man, more generally giving women responsibility for men’s redemption, and calling longstanding patterns of behavior a “mistake.” Oh, and there was also the obligatory reference to Jesus—whom Hegseth also repeatedly invoked to get out of every jam free.

David Brooks, in the NY Times, had a hissy fit about all the ‘character’ questions lobbed at Hegseth, calling them “short attention span” and “soap opera” queries. He lists some undeniably concerning realities about our military and the global conditions it might be called upon to address—and hey, all of that is fine, and very relevant.

But. Character still matters in the application of expertise (which, it must be noted, Hegseth has pretty much none of, either). Being in charge of our military is the ultimate “opportunity for malfeasance” job.

As I watched the brand-new, low-information Senator from Montana—not naming him either—joke with Hegseth about how many genders there were and how many pushups he could do, I thought about how this works in my bailiwick—public school teaching.

What do we ask new teachers or principals, in hiring interviews? Questions that reveal character? Or questions strictly related to the disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical skills necessary for the job? More specifically, how did all those music teachers I’m not naming get hired?

(And yes, I do realize, that merely getting someone certified to teach is often the best many districts can do, in 2025, given teacher shortages.)

Not all that long ago, Michigan was a teacher exporting state. Recent grads, who would have preferred to teach near home, were actively recruited by other states, often in the south. Interviews and job offers were done by telephone—before Zoom, where you can at least see the person you’re talking to. A number of my former students moved out of state to begin their teaching careers after a couple of phone calls netted them a job.

I used to wonder how administrators or hiring teams felt they knew enough about a person to believe they would do a good job with the children entrusted to them, with only a phone conversation. One of my formers, on her way to South Carolina, told me that her interviewer said they were impressed with her local university’s reputation as a teacher-prep institute, and her resume’ (which, it must be noted, showed zero experience as an actual teacher).

As Fine Arts Department Chair for many years in my district, I sat on lots of hiring committees. A strong resume’ is a good reason to interview, as are references. But there are things—character things, maybe even “soap opera” things—that emerge in an interview.

The guy who’s too slick, and can’t meet your eyes. The person who makes promises when they have no idea whether they can keep them. Worst of all, the teacher who’s leaving their previous district because the principal is “dysfunctional.” Things like this emerge when you ask character-related questions. And you use your human judgment skills to observe and evaluate.

This week, we’ve had a front row seat for the most important and consequential job interviews in the nation. Every person being grilled by senators has a comprehensive, publicly available resume’. And each of them deserve to have the nation watching them squirm or deflect or repeat their pre-arranged, “anonymous smear” responses.

Who’s going to get hired? As always, the person the administrator wants. But establishing a public record of questions asked and answered—or avoided—is critical.

And no question—not a single one—is unfair or irrelevant.

by nflanagan

Whiplash: Worst Teacher Movie Ever

If you’ve been paying attention to the DOGE Brothers—Elon-n-Vivek—lately, as they explain their personal theories around the failures of American parents to instill tenacity and a work ethic in our young citizens, you may have seen Ramaswamy’s rant on our deficit culture: A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell” … will not produce the best engineers. More movies like “Whiplash,” fewer reruns of “Friends.”

Ramaswamy goes on at some length, all Tiger Dad, about the virtues of immigrant parenting vs. native-born slacker parenting. As a veteran teacher, and thus long-time observer of American parenting, I think he’s flat-out wrong. True, there are parents who simply want to make things easy for their kids. But there are also plenty of non-immigrant parents who run a tight ship, academically, pushing their kids toward competitive excellence, breathing down their necks. The idea of hard work leading to a better life is not exclusive to immigrants.

It’s tempting to ignore the DOGE boys’ blah-blah on Twitter, although our incoming President has anointed them fixers of the entire political economy. It’s hard to see how your average Trump voter will suddenly decide that it’s time to claw their way to STEM careers via choosing the right TV characters to admire, or deciding not to (Vivek’s words) venerate mediocrity any more.

But we’re not going to nurture talent and work toward genuine accomplishment via movies like Whiplash, which is possibly the worst movie about education ever produced.

OK, maybe not the worst movie ever. But a stylish, seductive acting tour de force based on All the Wrong Stuff. An excellent showcase for two major talents–J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller–but with precisely the wrong message, for young people who want to excel in spite of setbacks, for educators, and for anyone who ever hoped making music was a rewarding, life-affirming pleasure instead of just another competition.

Several years ago, I had a very talented drummer–call him “Zach”– in one of my middle school bands. Zach was a natural–great innate rhythmic sense, great unforced stick technique and most important, a kind of fearlessness you don’t often see in an 8th grade percussionist. When something went wrong in the music-reading process he–perfectly illustrating the cliché– never missed a beat. Zach was what teachers call a “good kid,” to boot–polite, friendly, and willing to let other kids have the spotlight often, even though he knew he was a better drummer.

Zach’s mother was a physician, and at our first parent-teacher conference, she let me know that my ace drummer’s biological father (someone he now saw only sporadically, once or twice a year) was also a musician. She was clear: her son’s formal musical education would be ending with 8th grade; it was “too risky” to have Zach get involved in the high school band program, even though he was interested in doing so.

Zach was bound for better things than music, she said, adding a few bits of folk wisdom about how musicians aren’t trustworthy, goal-oriented or even rational, and make terrible husbands and fathers. It was her story, and she was sticking to it.

When I saw Whiplash I remembered that conversation with Zach’s mother. Because Whiplash is pretty much a dishonest conflation of myths (the only way to pursue excellence is through cut-throat competition) and truths (a lot of music teachers embrace that myth, the blood-and-thunder school of music teaching). The artist as anti-social and single-minded, driven stereotype.

When I watched J.K. Simmons, playing Fletcher, the tyrannical jazz band director, scream “MY tempo! MY tempo!” I flashed back to all the petty dictators I’ve seen on the conductor’s box, over 50 years of being a professional musician and school music teacher. I’ve witnessed at least a dozen school band directors say the exact same thing, transforming into little Napoleans, using their baton as weapon, “proving” that students must be prodded into worshipful obedience in order to play well.

Here’s the thing: you can be a superb, meticulous, demanding music teacher without being a hostile jerk. You can also be a driven, determined, even obsessed music student, bent on creative brilliance and perfection, without being inhuman or ruthless.

In a movie supposedly about “what it takes” to achieve true excellence in performance, we never saw Fletcher teach, or drummer Miles Teller’s ambitious character, Nieman, learn anything about music via guidance, example or instruction. Everything that was accomplished happened via psychological manipulation: Terror. Lies. Tricks. Bodily abuse. Even, God help us, suicide.

It was a movie designed to prove Zach’s mother right: music is a rough, vicious game, filled with people whose talent means more to them than family or human relationships. It’s about ego–and winning.

Except–it isn’t, really. Music is available to everyone, from the supremely talented to the amiable, out-of-tune amateur. It’s what we were meant to do as human beings–sing and play and express our own ideas.

Let’s not turn anyone away, Mr. Ramaswamy.

by nflanagan

Christmas Music: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly

Music is my life. I play several instruments and sing. I majored (and double minored) in music in college and am active in civic groups and church music as participant and conductor. I even went to flute camp (for adults) last summer. And I spent 30-odd years as a public school music teacher.

So– I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas music. Mostly love. But.

December can be brutal for musicians—and for school music teachers, brutal on multiple levels including community expectations and endless rounds of kids-on-risers. Music teachers become de facto activity directors, lurching from frigid parade to caroling at the nursing home. 

But still—there’s the rich opportunity to teach excited kids something about their cultural inheritance and surround. Which includes a clear definition of the divide between music as spiritual practice and music as auditory clutter.

Because you really can’t get away from Christmas music in America in December (or November), hard as you might try. People of other faith traditions, people who don’t believe in any of the Christmas iconography (like Santa or Jesus), people who loathe the downtown decorations and the Hallmark channel—we’re all stuck when Santa Claus comes to town.

For many people, Christmas music becomes irritating aural wallpaper, especially if they’re tuned into one of the omnipresent satellite radio Holly-day stations, or actually paying attention to what’s on the PA system as they’re perusing cheese in the dairy aisle. Because most of the commercial Christmas music readily available in businesses and on Sirius is, frankly, somewhere between uninspired and dreadful. I don’t want to hear—to choose just one example—Burl Ives at any time of year, let alone at holly, jolly Christmas.

I started listening to Christmas music on my little portable record player (Christmas gift from my parents), beginning with the LP records from the gas station ($1 will Fill-up!), where Percy Faith and Ella Fitzgerald were interspersed with the Chipmunks and the NY Philharmonic. When I got my flute, in fifth grade, I was invited to play Angels We Have Heard on High for the church Christmas pageant, a gig I kept through junior high because I liked the wings and halo, as well as the tune. I was hooked.

So I started collecting (and studying) seasonal music as a teenager, eventually making yearly cassette tapes of my favorite cuts. Cassettes morphed into CDs in the 1990s. I made annual gift CDs for family and friends—then eventually, due to the magic of iTunes, custom-selected CD playlists and discs for my regular customers. I requested multiple catalogs from folk and jazz artists and ordered new CDs, unheard, in the fall. At one time, I owned 500 holiday CDs, and had a catalog of over 3000 digital cuts on iTunes.

 Yeah, I know—when does a hobby become a sickness?

The last year I made CDs was 2018, when I realized most people no longer had the equipment to play a CD. I still make my own annual December playlists on Spotify—there are still arrangers and artists creating beautiful new seasonal music. I love listening, but I am really picky about what I am listening to.

Here’s the thing, though, about so-called Christmas music: it’s familiar, or will become familiar in time. A tune you recognize, when you hear it again, come December. We don’t have a lot of those commonly remembered classic songs anymore, holding our culture together. Nostalgia is a part of cultural norms.

For centuries, there was mostly sacred music—all of which has cultural value, whether the listener is a believer in the divine, or not. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel dates back to the 9th century, for example. How often do young listeners authentically interface with such a different time, except through music?

Commercial music has been shaped by the march of new technologies and low-bar popular opinion (lookin’ at you, Frosty). Children no longer know folk songs sung around campfires in the 19th century—unless they learn in school to cross the wide prairie with Betsy from Pike. We are losing bits of our cultural heritage, including traditional carols.

Whatever you want to listen to today is immediately available on your phone. But if you haven’t explored the truly glorious—magnificent or austere or funky–songs and carols of the season, how will you know what to ask for, to know what musicians have created from a simple tune?

In collecting mountains of Christmas music, I have favorite versions of all the songs, of course. But when I want to relax on Christmas Eve, with a glass of wine, this is what I put on: https://open.spotify.com/track/5c0sQY87Iw7qUu46N31f3v. 

by nflanagan

Backward, in High Heels

If someone suggests a Women’s March, so help me… (Twitter comment)

I remember sitting in the teachers’ lunchroom at my middle school, January 2001, and having a woman I like and consider a good teacher exclaim–after Dubya was finally declared president-by-hanging-chad– “Doesn’t it feel good to have a nice, respectable family in the White House?”

It didn’t feel all that great to me–and that feeling grew worse and worse, as we rolled through 9/11, Abu Ghraib, the Iraq war and the financial meltdown.

Still–she was sort of right. It is undeniable that character matters in public leadership. Or should. Turns out, however, that good character—the kind of person whom we can trust to lead– is very much in the eye of the beholder. Welcome to 2024.

Nobody needs to hear what I think about what went wrong with this election. I would describe myself as bewildered. Sorting through the post-mortem will take time.

But I have to say that my one niggling worry, watching Kamala Harris run an energizing, upbeat, intersectional campaign through these last 100 days, was this: She’s a woman.

Backwards, in high heels, and all that. Please don’t let this be another case of a fully qualified woman passed over for a blowhard jerk.

The campaign downplayed the “firsts”—first woman, first Black woman—but mixed in with the horror of who got elected and what they promised to do, is the bone-deep conviction that this loss had a lot to do with sexism, coupled with racism. What America is “not ready for.”  

And lies. So many lies. If there’s anything the nation “isn’t ready for,” it’s the truth about our residual prejudices and historic power-hoarding.

It’s not just women and people of color who were betrayed by the election, of course. The Republican party dropped $215 million on anti-trans ads ($134 per trans person in America). And Capitol police officers, who put their lives on the line on January 6, 2021: “Why the f— did I risk my life on Jan. 6 to defend our elected officials, our government, from the mob that this person sent to the Capitol, only for him to be returned to power?”  The list of people who were betrayed—and have good reason to believe they will further lose ground—is endless.

So—I am only speaking for myself here. But as the meme says: We ask women why they don’t come forward when they are sexually assaulted. It’s because we live in a world where an abuser can become President.

In a must-read article in Atlantic, Xochitl Gonzalez says this:
Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. 

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

And here’s what’s making me saddest, right now:

Trump’s return to power—his imminent control over the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, the coming dissolution of the very idea of the government providing any sort of guardrail against corporate power, carceral violence, and environmental destruction—is the beginning of a political era that will likely last decades.

I’m not sure I have decades.

What seemed—last week—like a more equitable way of addressing (and I hate this phrase) the war of the sexes has melted away. And for me, it’s personal. Here’s my story—one I’ve shared before—about a very powerful man using that power to abuse women:

I did my student teaching in the mid-1970s. I was assigned to a male band director (they were 98% male, back then), who told me at our first meeting that he was accepting me as student teacher because he needed a free assistant. He had a top leadership position in the state organization for instrumental music teachers which took him to many conferences and meetings. He said that he never would have consented to taking a woman as a student teacher—the university had merely asked him if he was interested, and he assumed that, naturally, I would be a young man, ready and willing to do the things he didn’t have time to do for a semester.

He repeated those remarks to the audience at my first concert. By then, it had become a polished story–“I said yes–and then they told me it was a woman!” (Audience hilarity.) I, of course, was making the morning coffee, re-ordering his messy music files and writing his monthly columns–the man couldn’t construct a coherent sentence–for the state organization newsletter.

I was also being sexually harassed and bribed by the promise of a good evaluation and letters of recommendation, something that I very much needed to get a job in a male-dominated field.

I put up with it for about a month, making up excuses to leave early so we wouldn’t be alone together. He grew more aggressive. Finally, I went to the student teaching supervisor from my university. I have repressed a lot of memories about that time–but I can remember that meeting as if it were last week. The supervisor, behind his large polished-wood desk, was wearing a red ski sweater. Behind him, multiple holiday photos of his family, in front of a fireplace, the lovely wife and four children.

I told him my story, in detail. He leaned back, hands folded over his chest. “Are you sure you’re not leading him on?” he asked. Then he ticked off the reasons why he would not recommend another placement: It was too late and would cost me another semester in time and fees. Nobody would take me, once the story of my accusation became public–and it surely would, possibly all over the state given the man’s public profile.

I would be seen as a too-sensitive whiner in a male-dominated field. I thought you wanted to be a lady band director, he said. This is what it’s like. Either handle it yourself or drop out now.

So I handled it, as best I could. I can’t say I learned anything about being an excellent music educator during the remaining three months–the man never turned his classes over to me, not even for a single rehearsal. His pedagogy was best described as intimidation and humiliation. Plus openly flirting with high school girls.

I worked individually with students in the practice rooms (where I learned, from a sweet flute player, that Mr. Exemplary Band Director was also having sex with his students). The one time I was allowed to stand on his podium and conduct a number, he stalked around behind me, making faces and mocking my conducting.

I got through, by “ignoring” lots and lots of grabbing. I had proof that telling anyone what was going on would reflect badly on me–that I would be labeled the spiteful “nasty woman” who was seeking to take down someone who had earned his considerable fame.

After graduation, I got a job far away from the man, in spite of his mediocre evaluation (which specified that I would be best placed as an elementary music teacher, as secondary band directors needed more “stamina” than I had). I built a successful 30+-year career as a band director, including being named Michigan Teacher of the Year. When I saw him at music conferences, I avoided him.

Famous Band Director lost his job–very publicly–about a decade later, when a student finally came forward, supported by her parents, to report that he had lured her into a sexual relationship. He denied it, in the newspaper pieces, then pointed out that the school had one of the state’s top band programs–all because of him.

Mostly, I stopped thinking about him, after that. Then, a few years ago, after community band rehearsal, one of my colleagues, a man I deeply respect, caught up with me after rehearsal, asking “Did you hear that [Famous Band Director] died?”

The first words out of my mouth were: I hope he rots in hell.

Taking a deep breath, I mentioned I’d done my student teaching with the man. My friend already knew–the man had been having breakfast regularly with a group of retired band directors, and had talked about me. Explaining why this monster had been invited to the breakfast club, after being fired for sexually abusing students, my friend said: We took pity on him.

I realized that the Band Director’s breakfast companions, a kind of Old Boys Club, had probably been fed a fabricated storyline about me, too. I felt like I was going to vomit. And nearly 40 years had passed.

 — – – – – – – – – – –

We just elected a convicted sexual abuser BACK into the White House.  Anita Hill, who has also had plenty of time to muse on why people don’t believe women, is right–we should be focused on the victims of sexual assault, and not the perpetrators.  They’re not strongmen, or role models.

Because paying attention to bullies and sexual abusers feeds their megalomania. And lets them train a new generation of persecutors, the white men who feel they’re entitled to power and the women who hope to bask in their reflected glory.

by nflanagan

Are You an Instruction Geek?

I generally don’t pay much attention, anymore, to the rightwing young guns who dominate edu-social media. Mostly this is because they’re not providing any new content about what you might call school improvement—genuinely interesting or useful ideas for making lessons interesting, building curriculum that makes sense in 2024, figuring out better ways to assess student work and encouraging students to get excited about learning.

You know, the things that support the people actually doing the work of teaching in the public schools—where 82% of our K-12 students are educated. Instruction.

In the five decades since I started teaching, reading and writing about all aspects of schooling and education policy, there have been hundreds of such new ideas. Some were genius, some fizzled out, some—annual standardized testing springs to mind—are now part of what everyone thinks is normal, maybe even essential. Even though these ideas may have harmed many children.

The yappy bow-ties posting on the regular about how public education is a big fat failure aren’t offering us genius ideas. They’re focused on vandalizing one of America’s great strengths: a free, high-quality public education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.

Prime example: Daniel Buck, whose X-label is “Instruction Geek.”

Buck actually did teach for a few years, shifting from public education to private, three schools in what looks like six years. Then he wrote a book and informed his following that he was, sadly, leaving the classroom to put his intellect to better use, writing blogs—as a ‘policy and editorial associate’ for a conservative non-profit.

For a guy who pretends to have cool, juicy ideas about instruction, lots of his posts seem pretty rigidly political and not about teachers’ professional work at all.  A sampling:

  • Conservatives need to start thinking about, building, and regaining control of our education institutions after school choice becomes the law of the land. Won’t do much good if all charter and private schools are stocked with teachers, curriculum, and policies out of ed schools.
  • Teachers, stop voting for Democrats. Their education policies sound nice but again and again just make our schools worse.
  • Once again, I repeat: MORE MONEY WILL NOT FIX AMERICAN SCHOOLS.
  • Students should be expected to obey their teachers. Seems pretty common sense to me but sadly, a statement that must be made.

The last one made me think that perhaps Mr. Buck’s former students had ideas of their own about, umm, instruction, but maybe I’m reading too much into his little outburst.

A couple of days ago, Mr. Geek Buck posted something that’s actually about instruction:

Sorry but one teacher cannot differentiate every lesson for 27 different kids whose reading level ranges from 1st to 11th and account for 6 different IEPS. The inclusion/no-tracking push is simply unworkable.

There were a few affirming responses—because clearly, classroom teaching is impossible; the only way to give each individual child precisely what they need is one-to-one tutoring. And, by the way, that doesn’t work so well either.

I started thinking about differentiation in my own classroom. My typical class size hovered around 65 middle school students. Their reading levels ran the K-12 gamut, and I frequently had a dozen or more special education students (with varying disabilities and strengths) in a class. Some students were inclined to disobedience, things that couldn’t be remedied by mere expectations. Oh—and they were all holding expensive noisemakers.

My job was teaching them to make pleasant and accurate musical sounds, then combine those sounds, using an entirely new symbolic language, into music, with regular performances for their parents, their peers and the community. I also had to weave some cultural and historical information into the instructional mix—things that would help them see the beauty and value and joy of what they were (inexpertly) crafting.

Everyone was included. Nobody was tracked (beyond being in the band with their grade-mates). Some of my band-teacher colleagues had auditions and sorted their students into a top ensemble, and lesser-light bands. The drawback to painstakingly dividing groups by “ability” is that ability is really hard to measure, and students who are deemed sub-par often drop out. Students also learn at different rates. The kid who’s way behind in September may be caught up in January and at the top of the class at the end of the year.

I’m fully willing to admit that there are many ways to teach kids important content, but I never met anybody who made 27 lesson plans for a single class. Most differentiation happens across the instructional cycle—presenting new material multiple times in multiple ways, offering different forms of an assignment, assessing work based on what you know about that student. Student choice can be a big part of differentiation.

And sometimes, of course, they all take the same 10-question quiz, so you can get a handle on who’s got it reasonably well, and whose understanding just isn’t there. That’s OK, too. You don’t have to divide them into tracks. They already know who’s smart and who is struggling.

I love nothing more than talking about instruction. Pedagogy is my jam. And I resent people self-appointing as instructional leaders and experts, when all they’re doing is using public schools for target practice.

Here’s one more from the iGeek:

Advocates are trying to retrofit schools to do all that families should / used to — from feeding three meals a day to teaching basic behavioral norms. They are failing at doing so. No public institution can correct for the breakdown of the family.

Be wary of the word “should”—always—but take a look at what teachers are accused of here: teaching good behavior and feeding kids. Maybe no public institution can truly fix the breakdown of families. But don’t schools get credit for at least trying?

by nflanagan

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read

I mostly stay out of the Reading Wars. Not because I don’t have opinions on reading instruction. I emphatically do.  I avoid the controversy because—as a lifelong music teacher—expressing that opinion inevitably leads to a pack of Science of Reading enthusiasts pointing out that I am not a reading teacher, and therefore what do I know?

This is deeply ironic, as those same SOR fans also spend lots of time criticizing experienced reading specialists. Also–I have taught in the neighborhood of 4000-5000 kids, over 30+ years, to read music, relying on a wide array of pedagogical techniques.  But that form of reading instruction evidently carries no water with the SOR bullies.

I was intrigued today by a story in NY Times Magazine about Benjamin Bolger:

Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Overall, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s.

Bolger, who is now 48, got off to a rough start, with a disastrous car accident when he was two years old that seemed to trigger the breakup of his parents’ marriage.

Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.

It would be easy to project the next part of the story—he somehow “learned to read” and then caught up to his classmates. But that’s not what happened.

At 11, he began taking classes at Muskegon Community College. Still reading below a third-grade level, Bolger needed his mother to read his assigned texts out loud; he dictated papers back to her. At 16, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, moving with her into an off-campus apartment. He recorded his lectures so he could listen to them at home; his mother still read to him. Majoring in sociology, he graduated with a 4.0. He was 19.

There were some failures (as we traditionally define failure). Bolger dropped out of law school at Yale due to the heavy reading load. But then, of course, he got back up on the academic horse, and pursued other degrees—including a PhD from Harvard, successfully completed. He also married and has two rather beautiful children, for whom he’s designed an experience-intensive home-schooling program.

What’s interesting to me is that the NYTimes Magazine article doesn’t dwell on Bolger’s inability to read well (whatever that means). Only on the fact that he has more degrees than only one other person in the nation (who’s also from Michigan, for whatever that’s worth).

Given the laser focus, in 2024, on determining which reading program yields the best test scores, I am surprised that a long-form article in a major publication does not explore the question of how one gets a master’s in the Politics of Education from Columbia, for example, without being an expert at deciphering complex texts, close reading.

But the “does he read or doesn’t he?” question—the one where we now expect to see evidence or data—never gets raised again. The article does say he has multiple master’s degrees in writing, obtained after his dissertation was completed.

Things that ARE apparent in this article:

  • Third grade is WAY too early to label ANY child a non-reader (or punish them by retaining them). It’s too early for labels, period.
  • When it comes to effective learning (the kind that sticks, and can be applied), experiences trump worksheets.
  • Continuously reading to your children, even when they are supposedly “reading to learn” at age eight, is absolutely the right thing to do.
  • Visual interpretation of text symbols is not more efficient or of higher value than hearing that text read aloud.
  • Many, many children are “bright but different.”

This is where we morph into wondering why every child in America doesn’t get the hothouse treatment Bolger did, with his own personal learning coach/secretary/guidance counselor/mom. Worth noting: Bolger’s mother, at the time of the accident, was a schoolteacher.

I would be the first to say that such an individualized education is far beyond what any public school could be expected to provide for a bright-but-different child. Given the ongoing strenuous campaign to strip resources from public education, we’re not likely to see public schools turn their limited energies and resources to meeting individual needs in whatever ways parents demand.

Nor is this a pitch for home-schooling. Most kids are educated in public schools, and if the hundreds of pictures on my social media feeds are any indication, kids in 2024 are graduating, going to college, working at summer jobs or finishing the fourth grade a little taller and smarter. Bolger, in other words, just got lucky.

This is a pitch for not writing students off, at any point in their academic career.

You may be wondering what Benjamin Bolger does for a living. He’s a full-time private college-admissions consultant, charging clients $100K for four years’ of services, which I was surprised to learn is kind of cheap in Admissions Consultant World.

I find Bolger’s story rather amazing, an exploration of what it means to be intelligent, and well-educated. Many historical figures bypassed traditional education models and found their way to greatness and influence via their natural smarts and leadership. Bolger embraced the traditional path to success— degrees from prestigious colleges—but got there without the benefit of the K-12 college rat race. Or the ability to read at “grade level.”

There should be a lesson for the SOR devotees in there somewhere.

by nflanagan

Memorial Day, 2024

I’m not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote:

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

These days, perpetual criticism is essential. We are headed into dark times, redefining the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice. It’s easy to lose faith in our government and the grand experiment—all men created equal—that founded this nation. It’s easy to let hope die as we face another white-knuckle election.

Memorial Day has always seemed like a great lesson for public school children to learn: gratitude and civics.  

When parents would call, a few days before the parade, and say—hey, Jason won’t be at the parade Monday because we have company coming for a day at the lake, I never responded with anger or points-off punishments.

But I would feel sad about the missed opportunity for students and their families to take a couple of hours to honor our own history, our own heroes. Memorial Day services are one of the few chances we get to put our communal, democratic values on display, without glorifying war or violence.

I believe, heart and soul, in the shining but imperfect ideals of a democratic education –equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty-plus years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade.

For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in ’88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school.

There was never a budget for this–-middle schools don’t typically have marching bands–-but somehow there were always T-shirts, and cold drinks at the end of the parade route. We had a stunning handmade banner that two moms whipped up with lots of lamé and sequins. In my last year, we marched nearly 300 students, on a morning when the sky was a sapphire blue and Air Force jets flew overhead as we rounded the corner by the cemetery.

This took up a fair amount of teaching time. I would get on my knees and beg colleagues for 20 minutes on the Friday before the parade, to assemble five bands into a single marching unit and take a few spins around the parking lot. One year, as I was trying to get the back of the band to master pinwheel corners, the front rank (rambunctious 8th grade trombones) marched right up the sidewalk, opened the front doors, and led the band, playing America the Beautiful at top volume, through the school hallways. By the time I sprinted up to the head of the band (and the principal popped, red-faced, out of his office), marching through the school was a done deal–and became yet another annual tradition.

I was always clear with my students about the meaning and purpose of Memorial Day. They would occasionally whine about how boring America the Beautiful was–-Mr. Holland’s band played Louie, Louie, right? I explained that they were old enough to dedicate a morning to thanking local patriots and acknowledging the sacrifices made by Americans over centuries. Older people, watching them march by, would be pleased to hear traditional music. It was about respect.

We do this, I told them, to remember and honor those who made it possible for you to live in this beautiful little town, in this safe world. People like my Uncle Don, who died in February 1945, part of the Fourth Marine Division which stormed Iwo Jima. Or Ray Shineldecker and Joey Hoeker, two high school classmates who lost their lives in Viet Nam. I had lots of funny stories to tell about Joey, who lived around the corner in my old neighborhood–a big, goofy kid who was what guidance counselors in the 1960s called “not college material.”

On our last band trip to Washington D.C., after performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was loading tympani onto the buses as my students toured the Mall. A few girls came running up, calling “Mrs. Flanagan! We found him!” Found who, I asked.

Joey Hoeker, of course–on the Wall. And I lost it, right in front of all those kids.

I thank those who served and sacrificed so I can love my country, and criticize it, too. A hat tip to all the band teachers and student musicians who help make Memorial Day meaningful this weekend. And to hero teachers and band directors everywhere– donating yet another weekend to the community –please keep teaching, in spite of everything.

by nflanagan

The Return of the Tradteacher

Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and control the finances. Reinforcing patriarchal norms and glorifying the satisfying and ‘natural’ role of housewife.

If you’re hearing a touch of cynicism there, well—I lived through a time when the tradwife, even if she was working, could not get a credit card or substantial business loan. While I certainly defend any woman’s right to stay home and support her children and spouse in places other than an outside workplace, the whole “tradwife” schtick (especially combined with the rollback of Roe) makes me itchy.

It also strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.

I also see lots of pushback against untraditional teaching, curriculum and school organization models. The whole “Science of Reading” battle rings very familiar to those of us who started teaching in the 1970s, when teachers were pushing back against the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” –because teachers theoretically weren’t teaching phonics–crusade in the late 50s.

Nearly all of the folks who taught me were tradteachers, using trad methods, and when I entered the classroom, many of my teaching colleagues were 100% traditional-minded as well: Straight rows, direct instruction, textbook-based, daily homework, and off to the principal should you disobey orders. And some of those folks were effective teachers.

But lots of the opinion writing I see from Moms4Liberty, NYT columnists, conservative politicians and ed-bloggers focuses on how different education looks and feels from the classrooms they remember, decades ago—classrooms that may have been racially and economically monolithic, and headed by a series of teachers who did things in the same way.

Peter Greene recently had a good piece about Gloria Jean Merriex, a Florida teacher who broke out of her traditional mold and had some great success. A couple of lines jumped out at me:

Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.

Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself. She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her.  Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.

For many, perhaps most, teachers, their first years in the classroom might look very much like the way those newbies themselves were taught. It was certainly that way for me, wanting to be the World’s Greatest Band Director and following the exact procedures and ideas I had experienced in bands and at music camp in high school. For many years, I too was a competent-but-not-exceptional teacher, like Ms. Merriex.

I also broke out of the traditional mold, and while not all of the things I tried were big successes, I was able to redefine what I wanted students to take away, for the rest of their lives, from being in my classroom. I accomplished many of those goals. I read social media for music teachers now, and I see great changes in thinking about the Big Ideas—from competition to creativity—in music ed.

Traditional teaching—and like tradwives, the definitions are murky—is not always or even often the best bet. Especially if that teacher’s goal is to move every student under her watch forward.

Stanford Professor Jo Boaler is something of an iconoclast in non-traditional math education, and recently–no surprise–there’s been yet another dustup over Boaler’s ideas.

She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking.

Right there in the first sentence, there are three uber-traditional practices—tracking, timed tests, and doing a series of problems to iron in an algorithm, to get the right answers rather than seeking to understand the concepts underlying the calculation. And who’s out to get Boaler? Well, men who have been the beneficiaries of understanding and excelling at traditional mathematics.

It’s an enormously complex endeavor, teaching. Sticking to the habitual, and ignoring students who check out, only works for awhile. BUT—listen to legislators and parents talk about schooling, and a lot of what you’re hearing is somewhere between nostalgia and flat-out misinformation. The book-banning, faux CRT, Tik-tok blaming, skeptical-of-teachers crowd hasn’t got a clue about what it’s like to teach kids in 2024, beginning with some clarity about the purpose of public education.

As Jess Piper says, in a wonderful column called You Don’t Like It? Move!:

None of us is safe so long as there are folks living in states that are unsafe. They will roll over us first, and you next. The billionaires are using my state AG and other regressive state AGs to file suit to dismantle public schools. They sue to ban abortion and the medicine for self-managed abortions. They sue to stop college loan forgiveness. They sue to overturn civil rights and anti-discrimination policies.

As Piper says—hey, we can’t all move, or teach in a private school where we can craft our own processes, research and convictions. But returning to traditional methods isn’t the policy answer. You have to move forward. It’s the way of the world.  

by nflanagan

Ever Had a Student Like Taylor Swift?

Ever had a student like Taylor Swift?

The question I’m asking is not “Did you ever have a student who turned out like Taylor Swift after they were a full-grown adult—unbelievably well-known and well-off?”

It’s this: Did you ever have a student you felt was full of promise? A kid for whom you could foresee a big future—in any number of arenas, from business to politics to entertainment?

A kid who looked and acted like Taylor Swift in this video, when she was 16 and a sophomore at Hendersonville High School? You can see the talent, drive and ambition from a mile off, and you think the student will end up doing something remarkable with their one wild and precious life.

In the video, however, we see Taylor pledging allegiance, solving a math problem and sort-of mouthing off to her mom. Her comments on camera reveal an atypical mountain of 16-year-old self-confidence, something that can be annoying in a classroom. As it happens, the video was shot near the end of her time actually attending high school, as her career took off, and she finished high school via homeschooling. A practical solution. And, I have to say (quoting Paul Simon), her lack of education hasn’t hurt her none.

My follow-up question: What happened to your student like Taylor Swift—the ultimate prize-winning science geek, the creative senior whose novel you expected to buy in the future, the talented trumpeter headed off to Julliard? Did they rise to greatness? Fizzle? Run into a roadblock and blow all that talent and potential?

Speaking only for myself, I would say that of course some students show enormous promise, but nobody’s future is guaranteed—or even predictable. I have had many former students end up in positions of leadership and acclaim, even fame, in varying fields—just as their teachers expected. And others who made a wrong turn someplace, sometimes disastrously.

What’s more interesting to me is those students of whom little was predicted, who leapfrogged over a lackluster secondary school presence into a successful adulthood. I had a student in my 7th grade math class whose homework was perennially missing, and whose test scores were abysmal. We had tons of meetings around this kid with his beleaguered parents—how to get him to focus on schoolwork, benefit from extra tutoring, knuckle down and pass the seventh grade, etc. etc.

You know what’s next, right? By the time he was 21, Mr. Anti-math was a million-dollar real estate salesman, back when selling a million dollars’ worth of real estate meant something. His little headshot, with its cool haircut, appeared in every edition of the local news. Presumably, he had someone else doing his taxes, and drawing up contracts.

I also know that many of my middle school students’ future goals were centered on riches and fame. You don’t often meet a pre-teen who hopes to live their life humbly, in service to others. Self-effacement and altruism are difficult when you’re not really sure of who you are, to begin with. Besides, aiming high will please your parents and your teachers.

Celebrity, however, is not all that it’s cracked up to be:

When a celebrity is that prominent, they are always in danger of becoming the figurehead of cultural and societal frustrations. Which is one of the many reasons celebrities periodically recede from the public eye: no matter how many people love you, there comes a point when the structure of a star image cannot shoulder the weight of the star’s meaning and import. The history of celebrity is filled with examples of people who did not or could not protect themselves from this scenario — because of their youth, because of addiction, because of others’ greed, including our own as consumers and fans — and careers and lives that imploded because of it.

Taylor Swift’s ‘meaning and import,’ in 2024, have made her the target of a whole segment of American society:

She’s doing too much, except when she’s not doing enough, and she’s always doing it wrong… a pretty blonde dating a handsome football player should, at least for white people of a certain age, evoke all the simpler bygone vibes (Friday-night lights, milkshakes with two straws, letterman jackets) that conservatives could want. Except — oops! — the pretty blonde endorses Democrats. And Travis Kelce, the football hero, appears in commercials for vaccines (bad) and Bud Light (somehow worse).

And why does she hog the spotlight at his games? She’s Yoko Ono-ing him and jinxing his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, except when she misses a game — and is still, somehow, jinxing the team, which made it to the Super Bowl anyway, proof right there, somehow, of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Taylor even gets people like the execrable Jesse Waters claiming she is a left-wing asset.  And worse.

Here’s the thing about Taylor Swift: she is a genuine talent, who writes her own material. As a life-long musician and music teacher, that fact alone elevates her above many, if not most, popular music superstars, to me. Of all the amazing things she’s accomplished, I most admire her reclaiming her own music by re-recording albums released when she was younger, and under the thumbs of record producers whose goals centered on promotion more than artistry and message.

That makes her a role model for all girls who want to speak with their own, authentic voice.

And that’s a goal that teachers can get behind, with all their students. Wealth and glory are often fleeting, but knowing who you are and what you stand for can be accomplished by all students.

The picture below was shot at the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale, AZ, one of my favorite places on the planet, eight years ago this month. If you go on a weekday, you are likely to run into a field trip in progress. And even though there were Chinese drums to pound, and John Lennon’s Steinway (on which he composed “Imagine”) to reverently view, where were the students clustered? In front of Taylor Swift’s sparkly dress and banjo, mouthing the words to her songs.

Those kids are probably 20-something now. Let’s hope they’re claiming their own voices.