Category / NCLB

by nflanagan

Dark Headspace—and Teaching

From a great column, by Darrell Ehrlick, on paying attention to the news, in the Michigan Advance:

 I understand the dark headspace a person can occupy after consuming a steady diet of news that seems to indicate a growing danger of authoritarianism; of a broken political system that continues to perpetuate dysfunction instead of listening to a public hungry for cooperation and solutions; of one global crisis after another; and of a global climate catastrophe so profound it threatens the very existence of the human species.

Yeah. That dark headspace.

For several years, since retiring, we have temporarily escaped harsh Michigan winters, spending the month of February in Airbnbs in Arizona. None of them had cable TV packages, so news-watching was limited to MSM, and sometimes, not even that. And eventually, we began to notice how agreeable it was to avoid what was happening in the Trump administration, dodge endless outrage over the January 6th insurrection, and reduce the non-stop anxiety of COVID spikes and variants.

No news, apparently, is good news.

Ehrlick’s point was—as you may have guessed—that it’s now incumbent upon all comfortable Americans to pull their heads out of their sulky discontent over restaurant wait times and gas prices and re-engage with civic responsibility. A republic, if you can keep it, and all that. The title of the piece is: Democracy is on fire. Consider this your wake-up call.

We’re seeing this wake up! language everywhere, lately, and not just in rabid, perennially anti-Trump commentary. As we round the corner into 2024, and the Election Where Nobody Wins gets closer, our obligation to choose wisely looms. Ehrlick is right—when the former leader of the free world is calling his enemies “vermin,” and pre-planning his political revenge tour, and the Speaker of the House can’t distinguish between facts and lies,  we’re in a bad headspace, indeed.

What was once considered hype, rhetorical overkill, playing the fascism card, etc. etc. is beginning to feel important and very credible. To political writers and news analysts, like Darrell Ehrlick—but also to invested citizens, like me. The old saw about being condemned to repeat a past one can’t remember is newly fresh and relevant—and omnipresent in the media.

And—surprise!—our older students are impacted by the same real and important political instability, as well. I think a whole lot of the ugly blah-blah promulgated by Moms for Liberty types is generated by parents’ wishes to keep their children from experiencing that dark and questioning headspace. There are plenty of “cultural chaos agents” ready and willing to help helicopter moms with that goal, then cash in after the election. It also helps to explain why the most zealous M4L acolytes are those with the most to lose by pursuit of diversity and equity. Keeping calm and carrying on while trying to solve problems that impact us all is not a way to preserve privilege.

All they have to do is convince anxious parents that the K-12 sky is falling. That their kids can’t read competitively by age eight, because their instructors are incompetent. That environmental science is promoting clean energy, undercutting the fossil fuel industry. That elementary school teachers are urging first graders to reconsider their gender, when the curriculum actually prescribes a foundation of respect and understanding for other people. That it might be a good idea to totally defund public education, and throw in public libraries and museums as well.

So many manufactured crises. So much to lose.

And although teachers are my favorite people on the planet, I have to admit that a lot of us are also inclined to—cliché alert—close our doors and teach, as policy and negative media opinion swirl around us. I get it. I am intimately familiar with the most pressing concern for teachers, especially novice teachers: What am I going to do tomorrow? And how will it prepare my students for their diverse futures while keeping their standardized test scores up?

Mostly, this is a matter of limited human time and energy. We are firefighters, dealing first with the urgent, and later with the important and long-term issues. Studying worst-case news and opinion—the dark headspace in education—can lead to a kind of paralysis for educators.

Things like choosing the perfect books to expand students’ minds and imaginations– see Mandy Manning’s photo illustration, a mélange of horror books, light and love–become minefields. If we’re not letting our students safely wrestle with the idea of a dark headspace through literature, history, drama and current events, how will they learn to cope?

Shortly after No Child Left Behind (the law to permanently fix all our public schools) was passed, I took a sabbatical—a perk in our local contract—to work for a national non-profit. While there, I spent a lot of time dissecting the new law, and its impact on highly qualified teachers, both the ones who were labeled highly qualified under the law, and the teachers who actually were exemplary, according to their school leaders, parents and students. I went to D.C. and spoke with folks in the Education Department, who were trying to figure out the laws’ outcomes, as well.

When I returned to the school where I taught, I was in a union meeting where the local Communications VP was cluing members in on the new legislation, which he called the ‘Adequate Progress’ law. But don’t worry, he said. Our contract prevents administrators from transferring us because we don’t have the right credentials. I raised my hand and gave my colleagues a quick summary of NCLB—the HQ teacher part, the adequate yearly progress part, the testing part, and more.

Our good contract won’t protect us from requirements of federal law, I explained. There was silence in the room. The idea of federal law mandating testing as early as 3rd grade, of tests determining a teacher’s value, of a district losing control over who is best positioned to teach a grade or subject, of national curricular standards—those were new and terrifying ideas.

Ideas, I might add, that teachers have pretty much absorbed in the intervening 20-odd years. Which ought to be a cautionary tale.

Living in a dark headspace is a call to action.

by nflanagan

This Guy Used to be my Congressman. Now He Wants to be my Senator.

I spent most of my life and nearly all of my teaching career in Livingston County, Michigan—a ruby-red, rural-turning-suburban area in the ring outside Detroit. My first principal used to refer to our school district as the far edge of white flight—folks with enough resources to move to a bucolic county with lots of land for their ten-acre dream homes, an hour-long commute into the city, and a population that is 94% white and less than 1% Black.

Although I have always identified as a Democrat, I used to vote in the Republican primary, because it was the only way I had some say in who was representing me in local offices and the state legislature. Beginning in 1995, Mike Rogers was my state senator, and later, my representative in Congress. He was, at the time, very much a country club Republican—bland, moderate, uncontroversial and generally well-liked. I didn’t vote for him, but I knew lots of people who did. I also didn’t fear him.

Rogers’ family was well-known in Livingston County. His dad was a public school administrator and football coach, and his mother ran the Chamber of Commerce. One of his brothers was in the state legislature. He won local elections by wide margins, but when he decided to run for Congress, in 2000, squeaked into office by 111 votes. Gerrymandering made his subsequent elections ironclad, however.

Rogers and I lived in the same small town for most of his political career. I used to see him in Meijers and at local events, shaking hands. Once, we were both on a panel at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast where the topic was education policy. Mr. Rogers’ take on education, as a Congressman, was that the feds had no business making or even influencing education policy. He suggested that it was time to shut down the Department of Education. He spoke admiringly about local control—and asked me, his designated foil, what purpose the federal Education Department served.

My answer was two-fold: First, an Ed Department serves as clearinghouse for research on best practices and ideas in public education, economies of scale. But far more important was the federal role in promoting and ensuring equity in sharing available resources. I reminded him that the original ESEA, passed in 1965, was designed to provide resources for our neediest students, to help level the playing field for millions of students whose states weren’t particularly interested in equity.

Not Michigan! he said, ignoring the obvious example of Detroit Public Schools, 50 miles down the road, a place that many of his constituents escaped, after the auto industry built enormous wealth on the backs of immigrant laborers.

After the panel dispersed, Rogers was surrounded by local businessmen—and I hurried back to my 3rd hour class, which a colleague was generously covering until my return.

In 2015, Mike Rogers decided not to run for Congress. He launched a career in radio—a kind of mild-mannered Rush Limbaugh—and moved to Florida, a place where he has been happily ensconced for eight years, starting new businesses, and serving as a defense lobbyist and National Security expert for CNN. He occasionally put out feelers to see if there was a possibility of becoming President.

But. Rogers has recently rediscovered his Michigan roots, and is now running for an open Senate seat in the mitten state. He has always been a pro-NRA, anti-abortion guy, but lately, he’s moved hard to the right, castigating his former employer, the FBI, claiming they’re on a witch hunt to take down The Former Guy for political purposes. He’s called the DOJ “corrupt.” The Michigan Advance says:

His former service as an FBI agent and CNN commentator may not be popular with MAGA voters, many of whom view the federal law enforcement agency as complicit in targeting Trump as well as the cable news outlet that is often a target of his ire.

He’s also made clear that he doesn’t need votes from the UAW, or—evidently—non-union workers and auto industry leaders rapidly building EV and battery plants in Michigan.

As for public education, he’s also changed his tune, now endorsing federal influence, saying that  “schools care more now about social engineering than, as my father used to say, readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.”

Expect to hear that little witticism often on the Rogers campaign trail.

This Mike Rogers is a far cry from the dude who praised Barack Obama for taking swift action on allegations that the IRS intentionally scrutinized applications for tax-exempt groups with references to “tea party” or “patriot” in their names. As I said, Mike Rogers used to present as a country club Republican, hometown boy made good, moderate conservative and deficit-cutter.

What has happened to sort-of moderate Republicans? They get primaried after one term. They get criticized by Tucker Carlson. They can’t maintain leadership in the House. They get the message: move rightward, or get out of the way.

How did this happen? Theda Skocpol, on Politico, says this:

It was never about cutting the deficit. The popular side of the tea party was about anger and fear of a changing country in which a guy with ‘Hussein’ as his middle name and black skin could be elected president. The tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction — and this is the perfect expression of it. This is where it leads.

Donald Trump didn’t create all this. He’s just been very good, ever since 2015, at giving it permission and focus.

Any political leader or candidate who changes their expressed core beliefs because they now have ‘permission’ doesn’t deserve to be elected.

by nflanagan

The Highly Unqualified Teacher

Remember the early days of No Child Left Behind? When everyone was trying to figure out precisely who was a ‘highly qualified’ teacher, under federal regulations?

Here is a sample state document—15 pages’ worth—of the required coursework, majors and minors, certifications, licensure tests and ongoing professional development credits that a classroom teacher needed to be deemed highly qualified, under NCLB. Your mileage, in other states, may vary—but not much. The feds were all about making sure the most capable and knowledgeable folks were in front of our public school classrooms.

Or so they said.

At the time, the education community protested: WE should be the ones to determine whether someone (a certified someone, with a college degree, of course) is qualified to teach X! We have seen that person in action!

But federal guidelines, and states that rolled over for them, caused havoc in public schools across the country. In my middle school, it meant that a beloved veteran– but elementary-certified–8th grade English teacher found himself teaching 3rd grade, one of many personnel shuffles.

Teachers with advanced degrees went back to take courses they could have taught themselves. Rural districts, where one Science teacher covered Biology, Earth Science, and Chemistry and Physics in alternate years, found themselves with a host of ‘unqualified’ teachers who’d been on the job, doing yeoman work, for years.

An avalanche of irritated hoop-jumping ensued.  So that all teachers could be highly qualified. Professional. Experts in their fields. On paper, anyway.

That was then.

There’s been a lot of press lately about the lack of qualified substitute teachers as we navigate a raging global pandemic. States are lowering—really, seriously lowering—the bar to get temporary but warm bodies in classrooms, to keep school doors open.

But chronic substitute shortages have been around (poorly-paid canaries in the teacher preparation coalmine) for decades. I spent three full (non-consecutive) years of my life substitute teaching, in addition to occasional sub gigs as a retired teacher. It usually takes an adult beverage for me to share the details of how those year-long stints came about, but my experience is confirmation that substitute teaching on a day-by-day basis is pretty random.

Some days, the kids are actually moving forward—the teacher has left solid plans and it’s clear that you’re in a place where order is the daily norm. Other days? I once was assigned a 5th grade and arrived to find these plans: ‘Reading—groups. Math—division. Science—rockets.’ That was all—six words.  Try to imagine a well-meaning school bus driver-turned-sub attempting to make lemonade out of that for seven hours.

It’s not the substitute teacher pool I’m worried about right now, however. It’s last-ditch moves (after more than a decade of warnings) to fix the leaky teacher pipeline during a pandemic that are really scary. Worth pointing out: if there were ample trained teachers available to work, and acceptable conditions for them (including compensation), the substitute problem would shrink and vanish.

But first, teaching, as a career, must be reconceptualized. We’re rapidly moving in the wrong direction on that score.

It is entirely possible to create an effective and enthusiastic teacher workforce, state by state. It would take time, money and research-based pedagogical expertise, but we, too, could have a uniformly professional teacher pool.  State and school-based leaders have proposed viable plans to begin doing just that.

We could also find alternative ways to bring job-changers and other school staff into the classroom, by dedicating real money and programming into mentoring, on-the-job professional learning, and skill/content development for those who want a longer-term career in teaching.

What doesn’t help is uninformed legislation to get highly UNqualified teachers into schools right away—and highly publicized hand-wringing over the pandemic-driven ‘crisis’ of unstaffed classrooms. It’s a crisis, all right, but it’s a temporary crisis (and one produced by bad education policies over time, more than COVID).

Speaking of bad policy, there’s a bill currently in the MI legislature to allow college students studying education to become teachers of record. These are not student teachers or even students who have been admitted to candidacy in a selective teacher training program. They’re just college students who wish to teach one day, maybe:

The bill differentiates these aspiring teachers from “student teachers.” The uncertified teachers allowed under the new bill would be paid for their work, and, unlike when working as a student teacher, the bill would allow them to teach completely on their own, without a mentor present in the room.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Pamela Hornberger (R) (ironically, a former art teacher) said this:  

“We’re at the point where we’re voting to put anyone with a pulse and breathing in a classroom to sub. We need to do something.”

Well, yeah. We needed to do something decades ago, but we followed our usual ‘starve public education’ modus operandi, and it caught up with us during an unanticipated public health crisis. So now we’re hoping ‘aspiring’ 19 year-olds will bail us out?

Bad policy on top of bad policy.

But this feels like more than another dumb idea from a Republican legislator (the MI Department of Ed, the teachers’ unions, universities and Democrats are all adamantly opposed, by the way). It feels like just another strategy to weaken and compromise public education by further de-professionalizing teaching.

Lower the bar into teaching, because EMERGENCY! Then, demand that new and inexperienced teachers share a years’ worth of lesson plans, assignments and ‘topics’ so they can be scrutinized by fired-up parents, or cost their district five percent of its already meager state funding.

Kind of makes you wish for the good old days when the bad policy was at least nominally trying to do the right thing by building some highly qualified teachers.