Category / People You Need to Know

by nflanagan

Diane Ravitch Sums It All Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five stars.

by nflanagan

Goodbye to the Department of Education

Lots of my fellow ed-bloggers are musing fretfully about what appears to be the imminent demise of the Department of Education (ED, in DC insider parlance). There’s a lot to say about laying off half the employees at a vital federal institution and crushing its ongoing critical functions. Some are hanging on to the idea that only Congress can disappear the ED, but I have my doubts.

Chasten Buttigieg, spouse of the former Transportation Secretary (and person who lives near me) suggested on Bluesky today: If Linda McMahon and the Department of Education believe in “efficiency and accountability” (after laying off half of the department), then I’m sure they’ll gladly publish a list of every position that has been eliminated and why that position is no longer needed.

As if.

Speaking as a person who was already four years into her teaching career when Jimmy Carter got the ED through Congress and running, I clearly remember the parade of Famous Political Operatives (including Reagan, the Republican party and various right-wing caucuses) who pooh-poohed the idea that education was important enough to have its own Department and Secretary.

They were all operating from the same standpoint: Too much tax money for public education, too much federal say-so on what should be state and local decisions. Classic conservative positions. The Detroit News has been referring to public education as a massive entitlement program for years.

Those reasons were not enough to take down the ED, however. And the Department went merrily on, as bureaucratic institutions do, making things better for kids with disabilities and establishing programs to continuously improve public education. Theoretically.

Some of those programs and laws administered by ED—NCLB, grandchild of the ESEA, springs to mind—were not popular with those staffing the 13,000+ public school districts in the U.S. But the ED had a core function that we all could get behind, beautifully illustrated yesterday by this AP headline: The Education Department was created to ensure equal access. Who would do that in its absence?

Without the department, advocates worry the federal government would not look out in the same way for poor students, those still learning English, disabled students and racial and ethnic minorities.

There was a time when I would entertain arguments about whether the Department of Education was entirely a force for good. I was disabused of this notion by Renee Moore, a brilliant and dedicated educator who taught in the Mississippi Delta. Without a federal force to protect public education, she pointed out, Mississippi could easily slide backward into the segregated, utterly neglected public schools that made up its past. We can’t trust states to equitably take care of the children who live there, especially those in poverty, she said. The federal government gives us a backstop.

I thought about Renee this morning, when I read this statistic: The share of K12 funding provided by the federal government ranges from 23% in Mississippi to 7% in New York. Overall, in 2021-22, average federal education spending was 17% in states that voted for Trump in 2024 versus 11% in states that voted for Harris.

Education Week also had an interesting piece up today, Can Trump Do That? Which Actions on Education Are Legal, and Which Ones Aren’t? It’s paywalled, but the gist is that in 11 federal education programs that Trump has indicated he will destroy, in some way, he’s on legal (but distasteful) footing in only one. The rest, he technically can’t do, via a wave of his magic Elon-wand.

But we all know where Trump and Musk are going. We see it with our own disbelieving eyes. Rules, schmules. And the states that are going to get hurt the most are his most loyal base.

Lots of Trump’s executive orders are easily reversible. Don’t take your Sharpie to the Gulf of Mexico. But destroying the Department of Education is a Category Five injury to the concept of a free, high-quality education for every American child, regardless of what they bring to the table.

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

The Amazing Power of Snowpants

It started out as a simple Facebook dispatch from Detroit Public Schools teacher Ann Turner (now retired), an early childhood educator, on the day after southeast Michigan’s first real snowstorm.

We were not able to go out and enjoy the REAL stuff today as only two of my students have snow pants and boots. I would love to gather enough so that all 16 of my students can enjoy and love Michigan winters and snow as much as I do. I have four pairs of snow pants that my own girls have outgrown and two that I picked up at a resale shop. If your child has outgrown last year’s snow pants and/or boots and you would like to donate them to my winter closet, I would be so appreciative. Thanks!

Within two hours, there were 25 responders–fellow teachers and friends, sharing information about sizes, bargain sales and where to drop off donations and purchases. Ann promised to pass any extras on to the other teachers in the building, all of whom have “winter closets”–and know about the restorative power of recess in a Michigan winter. Ann’s next post, the Monday following:

I was SOOOO excited to get to school today because I knew that this would be our first GREAT snow day with all of our new gear! I am not sure who was more excited–me or the kiddos!! After everyone got suited up (that was exhausting), we headed out and we played and we played and we played some more. Some of the kids were amazed at how they could roll around in the snow without getting wet or cold. We made snow cakes, we walked in sled tracks, we made snow angels, we threw the snow, we laughed and we played some more.

When everyone was good and tuckered out, we went in and made hot chocolate. Isn’t that just the perfect day? The first thing they told their parents at pick-up? All about their adventure–and the last thing they said to me is “Are we going out tomorrow?” Thank you ALL for making a difference in the lives of children! Thanking everyone is difficult because some of you were the messengers or middlemen. I hope that you will be able to convey our gratitude to those who assisted in getting these babes suited up!

There’s more–photos and stories–and then, the collecting of snow gear morphed into a full-scale Girl Scout troop project, with the girls shopping the post-Christmas sales with their cookie money.

It’s important, however, to look past the do-good/feel-good aspects of this heartwarming story.

  • Only two of Turner’s students had appropriate clothing for winter–and, trust me, snowpants are vital for kids in a Michigan winter. What other essentials are missing in their lives and learning? How do these missing elements contribute to the media-fed narrative of “failing” schools?
  • Children in Finland play outside for 15 minutes after every 45-minute lesson. Because the Finns structure their school day using research demonstrating the necessity of invigorating free play for young children. While Turner goes outside to monitor and play with her students, teachers in Finland take coffee and chat breaks with their colleagues. Pauses, movement and conversation consolidate learning and make it stick–anyone who’s ever tried to gather up participants to return to a workshop PowerPoint after a break recognizes this.
  • Playing outside in warm clothing, using sleds and snow toys–with follow-up hot chocolate– represented a special treat to the children at Palmer Park Academy in Detroit, courtesy of a dedicated teacher and her kind-hearted friends and colleagues. Kudos to Turner. But–the children in her class deserve free play and a refreshing drink every day, year-round, as part of best pedagogical practice for very young children. The research on this is iron-clad.
  • Inevitably, there were questions about whether Turner’s foray to the playground was approved by administrators as an “educational” activity. Since Michigan’s former governor once proposed pre-kindergarten testing as a means of determining whether Michigan was getting a bang for its pre-school funding bucks, this is a legitimate worry for early childhood teachers. Will this healthy exercise reduce test scores–is it more important to stay inside and do some more worksheets?

Anyone who looked at Turner’s photos would have an answer for that. But people making policy around early childhood education aren’t necessarily paying attention to snow angels, rosy cheeks and face-splitting grins.

by nflanagan

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

So—it was just one of those re-posted memes: a chalkboard suggesting that the “old days”—when the very rich built and named hospitals, schools and libraries—were preferable to whatever the very rich are doing with their money today.

There are a lot of ways to argue against that tossed-off sentiment: We shouldn’t have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy in order to have good public services, for starters. Some of that wealth was ill-gotten, and some philanthropists were Not Good People, as well. Why can’t everybody be like McKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos)?

On the other hand, I was born in a hospital named for a local benefactor. I was a card-carrying patron of a Carnegie Library and attended college where every damned building seemed to be funded by someone with lots more money than I’d ever have.

Furthermore, Forbes magazine reinforced my belief that the 21st century uber-rich aren’t very forthcoming any more with dough for public buildings and programs: How generous are the super-rich, really? Not very, according to Forbes’ research. The members of the 2023 Forbes 400 list have collectively given more than $250 billion to charity, by our count—less than 6% of their combined net worth.

Which gets to the point of why I originally posted the meme: The mega-affluent today are busy going up in space in rocket ships, abusing low-paid, NON-unionized employees, and controlling national elections with underhanded tactics.

I’d rather have the theatres, hospitals, academic buildings and libraries. Or—here’s a thought—what about someone with fabulous wealth funding a climate change initiative? Or ending poverty?

Andrew Carnegie funded the building of 2,509 “Carnegie Libraries” worldwide between 1883 and 1929. Of those, 1,795 were in the United States: 1,687 public and 108 academic libraries. Others are scattered throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. He also funded museums, established an endowment for international peace, supported scientific research, and other civic initiatives, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He bought or upgraded pipe organs in over 7600 churches.

And, yup, Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron in the most derogative sense of the word, using violence and ruthlessness in controlling the ill-paid and exploited workers who built his fortune. He was also an immigrant, who came to America penniless, and you know how Americans love a rags-to-riches tale. Biographers suggest he had an attack of conscience as he aged, and spent more and more of his wealth on civic projects.

In posting the chalkboard meme, I drew a lot of commentary because I mentioned Carnegie and all those libraries. Surprisingly, a lot of the negative feedback came from librarians, who popped up with passionate responses about Carnegie’s insider trading, sending goons to beat up strikers and trying to suppress the uprisings of the great unwashed by building them libraries.

It occurred to me that those librarians were universally well-read and not about to blindly worship old, filthy rich, controlling white men. Although, you know, thanks for the library.

Still. Although nobody can exactly defend the Titans of the Gilded Age, they left a lot of architecture and institutions for us to use, more than a century later. What have our still-living titans done with their immense wealth?

Bill Gates has funded the building of computer science centers at four universities (including, ironically, Carnegie Mellon), and purchased 40 square miles in the AZ desert west of Phoenix to build his own city of 200K residents, among other projects. From Salon:

There’s a deep-seated belief in libertarian-rampant Silicon Valley that the government and our political processes are slow and messy; to that end, many techies, mad with power, have attempted to start their own partially or fully-privatized cities. Gates’ entire philanthropic vision, exemplified by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is predicated on the idea that rich people and technocrats know best how to manage the levers of society, and the rest of us peons should sit back and let the rich techies run our lives. 

If you’re an educator, you will have felt the Gates Foundation’s impact, from Common Core standards to teacher assessments to breaking up big schools into smaller ones. Have money, will implement. Then declare many of these “promising” concepts failures. Maybe the teachers weren’t following the curriculum with fidelity?

Honestly? I’d rather have buildings and state-of-the-art equipment than Billionaire Ideas changing our fundamental institutions.

Which brings us to Elon Musk, who has promised his and Donald Trump’s  proposed economic policies could lead to “initial severe overreaction” and “temporary hardship” in the economy if Trump wins the election. Trump’s mass deportations and Musk’s $2 trillion cut to federal spending could disrupt industries, lead to labor shortages, and increase prices.

Hmmm. Couldn’t he just build us a nice hospital or school or library?

Carnegie Library in Howell, Michigan.

by nflanagan

Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform

When I first retired (from the classroom, not from working in education), I moved away from the school district where I had lived and taught. I’d been there for well over 30 years and had seen—up close and personal– the power of school boards to impact educational climate in a school district. I’d been watching through four decades of local policy-making— the good, the bad and the out-and-out malicious.

I’ve got stories.

And  I’ve written about the town where I lived and taught. In spite of its flaws, it was usually a good place to teach, if the definition of “good” is engaged parents, talented colleagues and kids who were encouraged at home to achieve.

The quality of school board leadership occasionally faltered over that time—with most of the squabbling over how to get by while spending a lot less—but there were long stretches where the school board served as a benign and supportive presence.

That was then. The Board now has morphed into something Christopher Rufo would be proud of. There was the podcast by Board members, sharing private information about student discipline. There was the “gender-affirming” bathroom policy. The anti-trans and anti-Pride policies. And so much more.

But I was dumbstruck on hearing this little clip from a recent meeting.

Board member says: This gets into the weaponization of empathy, where empathy is taught as the highest goal, the highest order. Do we teach empathy to the effect where students disregard parental authority—and accept anything and everything? Do we teach kids that any kind of judgment is bad?

Wait. What? Who is he accusing? And what is the weaponization of empathy?

Too much empathy leads to kids defying their parents, evidently. The moral ambiguity of school confuses students. That’s their big fear?

As a long-time classroom veteran who spent the beginning of every year working diligently to get kids to respect their peers, and care for other people’s feelings and property, this struck me as downright stupid.

Of course, empathy builds learning communities. It was right there in the (evidently outgrown) school mission statement:  “ …provide a positive environment for the development of productive and caring individuals of all ages.”

A social media convo developed around the clip, with commenters suggesting the end result of too much empathy was Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps.

Eventually somebody remarked:

It should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation has taken this term and used it as its own way of fighting against Social-Emotional Learning, and any other academic tools to help students.

If one of your school board members uses this term, they are in some way being educated by, or they are using talking points from the Heritage Foundation.

Then, the other shoe dropped. Aha. Weaponizing empathy is a Heritage Foundation thing, the concept of their plan, so to speak.

Click on this definition, from the Heritage Foundation’s own rhetoric.   It’s pretty vile.

EdWeek asks: Can Trump Force Schools to Change their Curricula? The Trump team’s best weapon for fulfilling this culture war campaign promise may be an under-the-radar office at the heart of the agency the once and future president has pledged to dismantle: The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which enforces laws barring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and disability status.

That’s a lot of legal wrangling—and yes, I understand that bureaucracies can change, when their leadership changes.

But hey—if right-wingers get control of a school board, they can micro-manage a district, with thousands of students, turning it into a place where empathy—caring for and about their fellow students– is forbidden or scorned.

God help us all.

by nflanagan

“Union Mouth”

So—when we’re immersed in the pre-election floodwaters of political revenge speech, it’s easy to snicker at the misfortune, if that’s the word, of right-wing social media edu-star Corey DeAngelis.

DeAngelis is—was?—the real deal, in education policy world. Not the kind of education policy that would re-build or energize our public schools, of course, but an attractive and even charismatic mouthpiece for the anti-union/school choice/privatization movement.

If you’re unclear on what happened to DeAngelis, last week—here’s the story.  (And here’s an interesting, even kind, response, from another one-time school choice advocate.)

If this were, say, 2014, when Corey DeAngelis was pursuing a skeezy “alternative career” that eventually became public knowledge, lots of folks would see it as an inside-baseball kind of chuckle—conservative education spokesperson gets caught being himself, ho-hum.

But the nature of public discussion about our schools has changed.

There have always been—going back to Thorndike vs. Dewey—vigorous arguments about the right way to do public education. Most people (including people who work in actual schools) don’t pay attention to these theories, philosophies and policies, unless they’re directly impacted. They focus on other aspects of schooling. And parents, by and large, are happy with the public schools their kids attend.

One of the things Corey DeAngelis contributed and honed, in these verbal ed skirmishes, was nastiness. The kind of unsubstantiated nastiness that we’re now hearing every day from political candidates on the right. Words like lazy, dumb, failing, greedy, groomers, socialists—and, of course, unions as root cause of all that is wrong with America and her children.

DeAngelis is one of the leading spokespersons, on social media, in the wave of anti-public education discourse we’ve experienced in the past eight years or so.  I wrote about some of the things he’s said, in respected publications, last May.

I posted a tweet about that blog post, asking WHY DeAngelis and others are trashing public education? What’s in it for them? Because this onslaught of anti-public education blather is not doing the nation and its children (no matter where they go to school) any good. This WHY was a serious question, BTW.

I got lots of tweeted responses, from DeAngelis’s army of followers, to whom I would ask the same question: What, actually, are you fighting for, when it comes to education?  Here are a few of those tweets:

Union Mouth! (followed by a string of vomit emojis)

I took my kids out of the gladiator academy/commie indoctrination center. Best choice I ever made.

Staffed by mediocrities (sic) who act like martyrs

Corey is bringing the future of education. Say goodbye to your current paradigm of croneyism and union interference.

The govt “school” system is nothing more than a taxpayer pipeline to labor union coffers, used to then (re-)elect politicians who promise more money for the pipeline. Education was never the point.

Public schools are a Dredge (sic) on society. Teachers are even worse.

And—my personal favorite:

Retire, you old hag.

I found myself blocking responses from people with names like—and I’m not making this up—Sexy Fart Bubble. Also wondering how school policy went from being a question of qualified staff and resource allocation to taking ugly potshots at teachers, school leaders and the millions of families who rely on public education.

I know better than to sputter about—or worse, respond—to random on-line vitriol. It’s acceptable now, evidently, to lie on public platforms; calling attention to falsehoods (or snickering at a messenger’s personal problems) is a distraction from focusing on what matters in debates about our schools.

Because—contrary to what Corey DeAngelis’s followers expressed, education has always been precisely the point. For better and worse, for everyone involved. Education has never been settled science. Our children are exposed to different influences and technologies than the previous generation of students; likewise, educational practice has to evolve.

Serving children’s educational needs adequately will—must—shift over time. And change is hard. Working through the changes, especially after a global disruption, demands civil discourse. Professional judgment. And an appreciation for facts.

Not lies.

So—no schadenfreude over seeing someone, whose minions called me “Union Mouth,” be exposed and having his name quickly erased from an array of education non-profit websites. There are far bigger fish to fry at the moment.

When one of your options for Leader of the Free World is seriously threatening to deport 30 million people, a large percentage of whom are children, it seems wrong to fuss over books somebody’s mom doesn’t like. Or spend a lot of time and effort trying to persuade people that teachers’ organizations, with their focus on working conditions in our schools, are harming children.

With all the free-floating fear and loathing in the American zeitgeist right now, it’s harder than ever to establish a classroom where students can develop the confidence to be a community. I am 100% on the side of educators who declare that students can’t learn unless they feel safe. The corollary to that is that teachers can’t learn and grow unless they feel safe, as well.

We are living in unsafe times.

If you want to influence policy change in public education, bring your best ideas and an open mind. Leave the nastiness behind.  

by nflanagan

How People Vote. How People Choose a “Good” School. Is it Common Sense?

When my son—a Korean adoptee—was in 5th grade, he had a student teacher who was Korean-American. Alex idolized Mr. Thacker, one of the very few Asian faces in our 96% white community. Mr. Thacker took him fishing. When the district hired Mr. Thacker to teach 6th grade, I requested that Alex be placed in Mr. Thacker’s class the following year.

Alex’s 5th grade teacher caught me in the hallway after school, at the end of the year. You know Mr. Thacker is a newbie teacher, she said—and there are some excellent choices among the 6th grade veterans. This will be his first year of teaching. Someday, he’s going to be a great teacher, but…

I’d already had that conversation in my head—and gone with my heart. What mattered most to me was having a great role model. Even if that role model was still filling his instructional toolkit and mastering the curriculum. Kids learn more when they’re seen, acknowledged for who they are.

I think that’s how people vote, as well. When the candidate—for County Commission, Township Supervisor or President—acknowledges YOU and your beliefs, rings your chimes, you’re going to vote for them. Even if they’re racist, traitorous and don’t make a lot of sense.

Some of this is partisan, some mere habit. But driving downstate, along the western Michigan coastline last week, through largely white, economically stressed communities, I was stunned by the number of Trump signs. These are the people who think they were better off when their loved ones were dying from COVID but gas, which OPEC couldn’t get rid of, was $2 a gallon.

A couple days after Trump was elected, in 2016, there was a dust-up in a middle school cafeteria in Royal Oak, Michigan, with kids shouting “Build That Wall.”  It was handled quickly by school personnel, but a video surfaced, and was widely shared by teachers.

Here it comes, we said to each other. Chaos and racism have been set loose.

For anyone who has spent lots of time in a classroom, it’s clear that the attitudes and speech and actions of the wider world (and especially parents) show up– quickly– in the things their children do and say in school.

The campaign to demean public schools and teachers, ongoing since 2016 (and put on steroids in the pages of Project 2025), is reflected in the despicable remarks of the right-wing commentariat. Despicable remarks about Gus Walz and Ella Emhoff—not going to link to those—and top-of-ticket candidates will draw some voters in.  And those remarks will harm kids. Kids in our schools.

It’s easy to label them low-information voters—they are, in fact. But they’re also responding to old beliefs and stereotypes. They’ve been explicitly taught to reject mainstream media and fact-checking. They go with their gut and “their own research,” such as it is.

From a great piece in New Yorker:

Scott, who works in private equity, stuck by his guns… “I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” 

Maybe “common sense” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Or easy to define.

Maybe “common sense” lies in a PR firm’s ability to give people license to embrace their biases, as well as their fantasies: Morning in America.  Boots, not flip-flops.  Make America Great Again.

With the wave of education ‘reform’ that started when Boots-not-Flipflops took office, and tried to recreate the Faux Texas Miracle nationally, lots of people who should have known better got on board. Tests! That’s the ticket! Now we’ll know how to identify a good school—data!

School choice orgs and spokespersons revved up the charters/vouchers machine. Every child deserves a good school—who could disagree? Not me, certainly.

But as the whole NCLB juggernaut lurched along, many of those reformers were dismayed to notice what choices untrained, garden-variety parents valued: Winning sports teams. Transportation. After-school childcare.  Programming for their kids that didn’t necessarily result in higher test scores, like an orchestra, drama club or robotics.

Maybe people choose schools—or teachers—the same way they vote. With their gut.

I taught school with guys like Tim Walz for more than three decades—the coach who taught Social Studies. Walz, as Jan Ressenger notes in this fine piece, is an unabashed apologist for public education:

What does it mean that after two decades of attacks—first with No Child Left Behind’s branding schools by their test scores as “failing,” and now since 2019, with blaming schools and teachers for school closures during COVID—someone running for Vice President of the United States just casually drops a comment celebrating public schools as America’s great contribution?

My favorite Tim Walz meme, making the rounds right now: This is a real thing that happened: Tim Walz was inducted into the West Mankato HS Sports Hall of Fame. He stuck around after the ceremony to help put the chairs away.

As I said—I know this guy. And thousands like him. The kind of teacher and coach who draws families to the local school, so their kids can have a role model. Someone who sees their kids and acknowledges them for who they are.

For those who think this is low-information, sentimental baloney: Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

So there’s your policy.

As for Mr. Thacker? Still teaching. Still taking kids fishing. Still the kind of guy who hangs around and helps put the chairs away.

by nflanagan

 Welcome to the Three-month Campaign! Seriously. Welcome.

More than four years ago, in April 2020, I wrote this ridiculously optimistic piece: A Dozen Good Things that Could (Just Maybe) Happen as a Result of this Pandemic.

Every now and then, I pull it up, shaking my head over the concept that an unprecedented global pandemic could shake loose great ideas and get folks to—tick-tock!—act on them, a kind of “if you only had six months to live…” scenario for the nation.

In my own defense, I had barely been out of the house for weeks and had been fixated on the horrifying numbers and clown-show daily ‘briefings’ from the White House. Doom-scrolling and baking aren’t conducive to embracing political realities.

I still think they were good, actionable options for change, however. Where I was totally wrong: the communal lessons that might be learned from surviving a pandemic, together. In fact, I was most wrong about the “together” part, which never really got a toehold, even as the virus took its terrible toll.

Some of us are uniters. And some are dividers. Lately, the dividers have been winning.

Response to the blog could be summarized as: I wish. People wished that the pandemic would lead to better health care, better air and water quality, renewed friendships. But they didn’t see even a global catastrophe moving the needle here in the land of the brave. The one good thing that came from the pandemic where I live? A third of my county finally got the internet.

In April of 2020, Joe Biden had just been named the presumptive nominee for President. In the previous ten months, we’d been exposed to 11 debates, with so many candidates (20) that they were sometimes split into two groups, debating on different nights. It seemed pretty clear that a full year and a half of campaigning did nobody (except perhaps the 2020 incumbent) any good.

Here’s what I wrote, in April of 2020:

How about a complete re-do of American elections?  For once, the hype is true: this election matters more than any in your lifetime. If the Democrats hang tough (and they should), we might get national mail-in voting with other policies that make registration and voting easier for the November election. Americans overwhelmingly want this.

There could be even more, given a Democratic Congress and Executive branch in the fall. We could jettison or alter the Electoral College.  We could also pass a law limiting the presidential primary, given the headaches, unnecessary spending and ultimate results we got. Canada, our closest and most similar neighbor, elected its last prime minister in eleven weeks.

Thought experiment: Imagine that Congress passed a law limiting primaries to six months, still way longer than other first-world nations, and set a national primary date with top-three, rank-order voting. That would mean campaigning for November 2020 would begin next month! Knowing what we know now about the world—would debates be about more than the horse race and which state votes first and gotcha questions? If we overturned Citizens United, and set spending limits (again, like other nations), we might ultimately get ourselves a reasonable set of qualified candidates and a fair election.

Am I glad Joe Biden eventually prevailed in 2020? Absolutely. And I agree with all the commentary about his successful presidency and heroic decision to stand down.

But I am flat-out amazed at what has happened in the past week, with so little primary-like fuss and fanfare, soundbites, rallies and pounced-on gaffes. And I can’t help wondering why we haven’t shut down the perpetual campaign machine in favor of limiting the time and money spent, given the results we get. Is this about the media and revenue streams?

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone complained about TV ads, mailings, yard signs and repellent messaging. And if I had a dollar for every voter who didn’t pay attention to politics, I’d be in the Forbes 500.

The three-month campaign ahead of us feels positively refreshing. It will be intense—it should be—but it will be over soon. Michigan voters can send in their ballots 40 days before November 5th. The end of September.

There’s been some talk about how risky the Harris candidacy is, floating the possibility of a mini-primary or reasons to re-think promoting the Vice President. But I think Rebecca Traister gets this exactly right in this column: The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been. The thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris.

 Our national political narrative [is] finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, under-polled, creative measures to change, grow and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us.

The word I like most here is “urgent.”  Things can go wrong with a long, leisurely primary season where a party eventually settles on just the right candidate. (See: 2016.) They’ve gone wrong in any number of elections, convention or primary, over two centuries plus. Sometimes, making a good-faith choice and jumping off the electoral cliff works out.

In the meantime, listen to Keb Mo. He’s got the right idea.

by nflanagan

Critical Issues and Minutiae of Public Education

I have been fascinated, in the past 48 hours, by online conversations about the tumultuous political week we have just lived through—especially the comments and questions generated by teachers.

Non-teachers are heartbroken or thrilled or both, by the Biden step-down. They’re nosing out the negative PR and potential VP picks of the presumptive new nominee. There are running threads and analyses around the assassination attempt, a mass shooting where everyone knew the intended (again, presumptive) target, a change from the faceless victims—many children, damn it—of other mass shootings.

So much is in flux. So many building blocks of democracy, teetering on the edge. Including public education.

But we’re approaching (in many parts of the country) the beginning of the school year. Much of the ongoing cyber-conversation around public education centers on clearing back-to-school lists (i.e., teachers begging for essential supplies the school can’t afford), the futility of professional development for yet another silver-bullet reading program, why teachers aren’t paid for setting up their classrooms and other garden-variety School Stuff. The kinds of issues and beefs we see annually.

There are a hundred things that weigh heavily on teachers’ minds as they prepare for another year. What I’m wondering is if teachers are focused on the trees, rather than the destruction of the public education forest. Because focusing on bulletin boards and class lists instead of the section of Project 2025 that deals with education feels do-able, not overwhelming. Or terrifying.

Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax posted a letter about a “rude” teacher who created individual certificates for each of her students at the end of the year. The mother who wrote the letter was upset that individual kids were nicknamed Class Clown and Social Butterfly and–gasp!–her daughter was designated “Miss Manners.” So upset that she reported her ire to the superintendent, after the principal gently suggested these certificates were warm-hearted, not criticisms of children’s character.

Aside from the fact that many parents would be delighted or relieved were their child awarded recognition for having excellent manners—the letter bothered me way more than it should have. Because I have been that teacher, striving at the end of the year to recognize and acknowledge students’ achievements, but also their individual quirks, their signature traits, their contribution to the musical community we built.

Hax rightfully chides the mom for attacking a well-meaning second grade teacher, on the last day of school, no less. But what most folks—non-teachers—will miss is that the success of any teacher, broadly defined, lies in building honest relationships with kids who bring varying intellectual and emotional strengths to school.

Not everyone is an academic superstar or natural helper. Many students will need to be coaxed or cajoled into effort, participation and belonging. Those skills are just as important as content expertise, a full toolbag of instructional techniques and endlessly logged data.

My own end-of-year awards included every band kid. Now—decades later—I still hear from students who remember the last full day of school (after the instruments were all oiled and stored for the summer, the music sorted and filed, and the sink—yuck—cleaned and shiny): The thank-yous. The in-jokes for band members. The Jolly Ranchers. The camaraderie. I recently heard from a woman who remembered winning the “Most Improved Section” award—and she was the only oboe. She included a smiley face.

The Hax column drew hundreds of responses from teachers.

Today, I have been watching teachers on social media saying:  Be kind to the social studies teachers in your building. We’ll be working on overdrive!

Well, yes. You go, teachers. The world is on fire, and your job is to pretend that the only thing that matters is following the prescribed curriculum and keeping your head down in the classroom. We get it—and we love and support you.

But as we launch 2024-25, it is incumbent upon all of us whose livelihoods are not threatened by free speech to keep education policy and the very real threat to public education bubbling up every day on social media and in our friend groups.

 It’s been a wild couple of weeks. But keep your eyes on both the threat and the prize.