Cleaning out some files, I came across these questions (in a file creatively labeled Ten Questions). I have no clue where/when they originated. It was either answer them or plunk myself in front of, you know, the Trial, on TV.
Grande Soy Green Tea Frappuccino with Extra Whip or House Blend Black?
(Sing to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy”):
Coffee, coffee, coffee. Praise the strength of coffee.Early in the morn we rise, with thoughts of only thee.
If you were going to write a book, what would its title be?
“The Genuinely Professional Teacher: Way Overdue”
Rate graphic novels on a scale of 1-10, with 1 representing “useless” and 10 representing “simply amazing.”
Two or three. Just not worth the effort to scale down the words in favor of stylized art. I realize this is not a popular opinion and the fault may lie with me, as geriatric reader.
What member of your digital network has had the greatest impact on your professional growth?
There are an awful lot of people I see only online who have made me a better thinker, writer and activist, and their impact has waxed and waned (and sometimes waxed again) over time. Blogging for Ed Week where I had a good editor helped tighten and tone down my writing, and helped me understand the difference between well-supported opinion and simply venting. When it comes to education blogs, Jan Ressenger’s writing is what I aspire to, if I had to name someone.
How do you feel about the holidays?
Which holidays? Oh—those holidays. It’s the most wonderful time of the year? What is the best gift that you’ve ever gotten?
A piccolo. Completely unexpected. And an item I would prefer to pick out myself. But–in one of those rare, grace-filled moments–I got the perfectly chosen present that I didn’t even know I wanted.
If you had an extra $100 to give away to charity, who would you give it to?
Choosing to follow my principles rather than a paycheck, on a couple of memorable occasions.
What was the worst trouble that you ever got into as a child?
My parents bought me a two-wheeler for my 6th birthday, and I was afraid to ride it without training wheels. My mother told me if I didn’t work up the courage to ride it, they’d take it away. So I got up on the bike, went forward about 25 feet, then had to turn, to stay on the sidewalk. The bike wobbled, tipped, and I fell, hitting my head on a large rock placed at the corner of the sidewalk and driveway, giving myself a concussion. In my first grade school photo, you can see the bruising—and the shiner.
What was the last blog entry that you left a comment on? What motivated you to leave a comment on that entry?
Peter Greene’s Curmudgucation–he’s written 5000 blogs, a ridiculous number, especially considering he wrote most of them while teaching full time (and parenting twins). And his blogs have only gotten sharper (and funnier). He’s an excellent role model for teachers who want to write about what happens every day in their classroom—and why public education is worth saving. Peter also serves as Curator in Chief for Ed-Blog World, at the Network for Public Education. If you want to read a selection of great education writers, check out NPE’s Blog Post of the Day.
Feel free to share your own answers—all ten or selected queries.
Years ago, in a graduate seminar in education leadership (full of would-be superintendents working on PhDs at my well-respected university), our professor entered the room, struck a dramatic pose and said…
“On the 18th of April” (long pause, class attentive)
“In seventy-five” (long pause, dead silence)
“What?” (gray-haired Prof scans the room)
In a small voice, I say,
“Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.”
(another pause, Professor smiling, nodding) I clear my throat and say…
“It’s the one that begins ‘Listen my children…’”
(blank faces)
“and you shall hear…”
(still nada)
“of the midnight ride…”
(a couple of people are getting it now)
“of…?”
(muttered) “umm, Paul Revere?”
Prof points to me and says “Don’t answer!” Then he asks: “Who’s the poet?”
When nobody–not one of the 20-odd people in the room– could answer, or would even try, he lets me tell the class. Longfellow.
“When did you learn that?” he asks. Fifth grade. And I only know an abridged version. But still.
And the prologue to “Romeo and Juliet” in high school. Still with me, along with memorized King James scripture, lots of Cummings, Dickinson and Frost and an embarrassingly large cache of song lyrics.
Why aren’t we using poetry to teach history?
Well, two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
And we chose easily measured standardized test questions.
Sometimes, Facebook bubbles up a worthy glimpse of the past. This awesome quote– from 12 years ago– appeared on my page this morning, causing me to reflect on how much we’ve lost in the past decade. Wood is reflecting here on a remarkably different era– where Michelle Rhee was on the cover of TIME magazine, brooming out “ineffective” teachers, and Teach for America was growing, not shrinking and re-branding. His school was building on the reforms of the 1990s, with student-focused programming and the valuing of teacher expertise. If nothing else, it rebuts the tired cliche’ that “factory model” schools have not changed in the past century– schools have changed radically in just a dozen years. George Wood’s school was in Ohio, where “reformers” see their #1 goal as expanding private school vouchers.
“For the past 18 years, I have worked as a HS/MS school principal alongside a dedicated staff and a committed community to improve a school. In that time, we have increased graduation and college-going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior Project and Graduation Portfolio).
But reading the popular press and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools. You see, we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.
Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
But—cutting to the chase—The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory is a fantastic book. Highly recommended, even though the burgeoning Christians-are-what’s-wrong-with-this-country crowd may be irritated by Alberta’s persistent, conservative choir-boy insistence that the church is a force for good.
I should mention here that I had a front row seat for the rise of the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian juggernautin Brighton, Michigan (nothing like your mainstream Presbyterian, btw). We moved to Livingston County around the same time as Richard Alberta, long-time pastor at Cornerstone and Tim Alberta’s father. When we were looking for a church, we heard repeatedly about the great things going on at Cornerstone, which was just a few miles down the road—the rapid growth of the congregation, the inspiring sermons, the youth group with 100 members. Pretty soon there would be a school, too—ultimately, there would be six major building expansions in 30 years.
One Christmas Eve, we decided to give Cornerstone a try. My son was three or four at the time and had zero capacity for quiet behavior in a strange place. When heads began turning, my husband took him out into the narthex. After the service, he was holding our coats and standing by the door. We’re not coming back here, he said.
Out in the car, he pulled a fistful of brochures and monographs out of his pocket, collected as he chased our son around the lobby area. Take a look, he said. There were predictable anti-abortion pieces—but also literature supporting capital punishment, and the usual Old Testament scourges against divorce, dark (Harry Potter) magic and homosexuality. We’re not exposing our kids to this, we agreed. We found another church.
But Cornerstone, which eventually grew to 2000 families, held a lot of power and influence in Brighton. Richard Alberta enjoyed stirring up local controversy—when a downtown coffee shop put a tiny rainbow sticker on its door, he wrote a letter to the newspaper, suggesting customers who were willing to order coffee in such a sinful place consider going to “Sodom and Gomorrah” (his too-clever name for Ann Arbor, 25 miles south), instead. The shop closed a few months later.
At Christmas time, when many churches collected gifts for needy families, he declared that there really was no excuse for being needy in well-off Livingston County. Instead, his church filled up a semi-truck with evangelical goods and household items and shipped them to Russia, to support struggling Christians there.
Alberta broke up the Brighton Ministerial Association because he refused to meet with a local gay minister. He brought in “security” specialists when my church, St. Paul’s Episcopal, called a Black rector, claiming that criminals “from Detroit” (code language) would now be getting off I-96 and endangering congregants in Brighton churches’ parking lots.
He went after my church, probably the most liberal mainstream congregation in town, repeatedly and viciously —in the newspaper and any other media outlets he could find, pre-social media. When a reporter at the local newspaper asked for an in-depth interview, he had a putting green set up in his office, and spent the interview nonchalantly practicing his short game, as she sat and took notes.
Many of my students attended Cornerstone and went on mission trips to save the unchurched of West Virginia or wherever. One of my band students’ father was an associate pastor at Cornerstone; at Parent-Teacher conferences, this pastor asked me to call the fees for his son’s upcoming band field trip a “donation” for tax purposes. He came with a typed-up statement for me to sign (I didn’t).
There’s much more, but you get the picture.
Tim Alberta’s book begins with the death of his father, in 2019, and his surprise at learning formerly dedicated congregants were leaving Cornerstone for more MAGA churches. Funeral attendees criticized Tim for his openly non-MAGA thinking (a well-deserved potshot at Rush Limbaugh). Followed up, of course, with the righteous assurance that they were praying for him to see the real truth.
My thought: The Buddhists were right about karma. You reap what you sow.
Which is, bottom line, where Tim Alberta is going in this book. He takes the reader through right-wing congregations, colleges and organizations around the country, a wide-ranging array of appalling examples of religious malfeasance. Mercedes Schneider posted some hot quotes from the book in her blog, if you want to get a sense of the flavor of his writing, and the practices he explores and condemns.
Alberta is careful to note that Trump was merely an accelerant, a permission-giver for bad behavior in the name of the Lord, not the root cause of what has happened to the Evangelicals. But he pulls back the curtain on some distinctly repellant, un-Christian conduct and people, both the globally famous and the local yahoos in Brighton.
He resists passing judgement on more inclusive, mainstream churches, although his conservative perspective is never hidden. He also has the scholarly and personal background to dissect theological and biblical questions raised by the commercialization and politicization of the spiritual. He writes with great confidence and clarity, relishing the opportunity to counter every lazy iteration of “Well, the Bible says…” He spends a half-dozen pages on abortion that are well worth reading.
I learned a great deal from the book. For starters, I began to understand where MAGA and its tribal beliefs and actions come from, how conservative Christians moved rightward—the triggers, the entitlements, the power-hoarding. This was personal for me, too, a look at how all the nice white kids from nice white families in my school district shifted their world-framing and let casual racism, sexism and xenophobia emerge.
Alberta ends the book with some signs of hope—the most convincing of which, ironically, come from women who have been sexually abused and actually fought back—Jennifer Lyell and Rachel Denhollander. Aside from Paula White, Trump’s hottie “spiritual advisor,” the main characters in this book’s framework are men. White men. When Alberta travels, as research, he visits men—genuine pastors, scoundrels posing as clergy, insufferable jerks, the egomaniacal, the greedy and the scheming. Women take a subordinate role in all of the churches and organizations. This is so obvious, in all 500 pages, that it feels like a blind spot. He thanks his wife for essentially raising their three boys in his absence, in the acknowledgements, but it feels like an afterthought, the cookies and coffee after the meat of an intelligent sermon.
Nonetheless, Alberta seems to have had a religious epiphany, taken a well-researched and critical look at what evangelical Christians have become, and bravely wrote about what he’s observed. When I read about mega-churches, pastors living in mansions and castigating their fellow citizens who believe differently, as the donations roll in, I always think “Not all Christians are like that.”
I am certain that Tim Alberta holds out hope that we’re on the crest of a religious revival. In the meantime, he was harrowingly honest about what he saw. Everyone—believers and non-believers should read the book. Five stars.
There’s a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.
Barbara Kingsolver, from the Poisonwood Bible.
So—we are a dog family. Always have been. Before we had kids, my husband and I had a dog. A secondhand dog, like most of our subsequent dogs. In 44 years of marriage, we’ve had six great dogs, with divergent personalities and backstories. Two of our dogs were named Blue (neither was named by us). One dog thought she was a cat—you know, aloof and entirely self-interested. Another flunked out of leader dog school, and one was a beautiful golden retriever named after a Supreme Court Justice. One died, of a snakebite, about 15 minutes before my son’s 6th birthday party.
And the last dog we had was named Atticus. Putting that in the past tense is still hard, although we had to put Atticus down—over the Rainbow Bridge, as they say—in July.
Atticus was cleaned up and civilized by a wonderful woman named Jean, then entered the RP training program. As it happens, my husband, a criminal defense lawyer, had a client at Lakeland. At a visit, his client, a leader in the dog training program, asked if we might be interested in a great dog. We were in that sweet spot of not owning a dog, where you can travel and go out for the day without worrying about your pet, having lost Annie (the cat-dog) a few months earlier. We hadn’t yet discussed getting another dog.
What’s the dog’s name? my husband asked. Atticus.
And that was that.
We picked Atticus up from Jean’s house. She showed us how good he was at chasing balls, and gave us a thundershirtbecause Atticus was terrified of storms. She told us he had some “trust issues” but was, at heart, a very good boy. The vet that donated time to Refurbished Pets thought he was about three years old. Thinking about Atticus on his own, riding out storms and scrounging for food, broke our hearts. He was instantly, and irretrievably, our boy.
For the next eleven years, Atticus slept on a cozy bed in the corner of our bedroom and traveled with us—seven times—from Michigan to Arizona, an excellent backseat traveler. Whatever trust issues he had melted away, although he still whined from his bed when there was thunder and lightning.
Of all the dogs we ever had, Atticus was the most food-driven. We got in the habit of storing things in cupboards and the microwave, because anything left on the counter, or the kitchen island was bait. Once, my son and some of his friends bought some gourmet, $$$ cookies while touring northern Michigan, and left them in bags and boxes within striking range. When they returned home, Atticus had eaten most of them and hidden the rest. For the next year, we found cookies under couch cushions, in a bookshelf, and in a laundry basket.
About a year ago, Atticus (probably 14 by now) was showing signs of age: He panted constantly. He paced, all night long. It obviously hurt to lower his back end to the ground, and steps were problematic. The vet said his heart was enlarged, and gave him a medication that caused indoor accidents, something he’d never had before, and made him feel terrible. Plus—he had a collection of symptoms that might be called “acting weird.”
It was time. We were both there, petting him, feeding him treats, holding his paw, as his tail slowly thumped, then stopped. Afterward, I didn’t feel like sharing the news, or posting a photo. It was, as Barbara Kingsolver says, so very quiet.
He was our dog from the wrong side of the tracks, 100% dog, prone to drifting off during walks in the woods (but always returning) and always—until the last year or so—down to pursue a ball or chew up a stuffed toy, especially one that belonged to another dog.
After we made the appointment with the vet, I took a dozen photos of Atticus panting and pacing around the living room, his last afternoon on earth. Here’s one.
I have been celebrating the coming of the light in eight different decades now—in ways considered sacred, secular, and even pagan—and don’t remember any end-of-year condition worse than the place where we find ourselves on this Winter Solstice, 2023.
Recently, Atlantic writer Tim Alberta shared his—very painful, very personal—story about being the son of a conservative, Trump-supporting minister, senior pastor in a church of over 2000 families, in southeastern Michigan. It’s a thoughtful but disturbing story, one very familiar to me, as my own family lived just down the road from this church, before we moved north. Many of my students were in the youth group there, absorbing conservative ideas about abortion, capital punishment and how the lazy don’t deserve handouts.
For the religiously skeptical, it’s churches like Cornerstone that illustrate how Christianity has crossed a line between serving our neighbors with compassion, because Jesus asked us to–and accruing power and riches because being a “Christian” means we’re entitled to them. For all my friends who are non-believers, or adherents to different traditions, or fed up with Christians whose lives are on centered on dominion rather than devotion —yup, I see you.
But I want to share one tiny spark of warmth—of hope, joy, peace and love—that still flickers here in the Little Finger of Michigan’s mitten. For five years, beginning in 2017 (and pausing for COVID in ’20 and’21), my church, Trinity UCC of Northport celebrates an Advent Afternoon, on a Sunday in December.
We invite the whole community to share their music, a kind of local holiday talent show. There’s a pick-up choir, comprised of singers from local churches and community choral groups. There are vocal solos and instrumental ensembles. Ministers from local churches do invocations and benedictions. All followed by cookies and wassail punch and talking over the local news, at crowded tables.
I want a house with a crowded table And a place by the fire for everyone Let us take on the world while we’re young and able And bring us back together when the day is done.
If we want a garden We’re gonna have to sow the seed. Plant a little happiness, let the roots run deep If it’s love that we give, then it’s love that we reap.
There were handbells, a clarinet playing Faure’, an old-time gospel quartet, a recorder ensemble and heartfelt solos. A trombonist accompanied himself in a pre-recorded trombone quartet, and a fiddle, bass, drum and superb accompanist played along with the singing, in this creaky, 150-year old sanctuary, as the day faded into twilight. There was jazz (Chick Corea) and 92-year-old Hugh Willey played a rip-snorting version of Jingle Bells.
What is striking to me, four years later, is how good a job Biden has done. And—yeah—maybe credit goes to the qualified people he selected to handle the business of the presidency, but the man himself has gone here, there and everywhere to move the country forward and make the nations of the world see us, once again, as a reliable ally.
I give Biden high marks, far higher than I would have expected, back in 2021, when he was inaugurated, two weeks after an insurrection. His job—patching the nation up after a global pandemic and economic collapse, and undoing the damage wrought by Trump—has been beyond challenging.
He’s made some missteps, but not many. Obama was vigorous and articulate, but no friend to public education, and too cautious in rebuilding the economy that Bush II crashed. America is great at seeing leaders through a haze of partisan nostalgia, however, and really bad at discerning what is fact and what is something you just read on Facebook so it must be true.
I know better than to wring my hands over polls. Those focus groups that the NY Times assembles—He’s too old and I feel poor!-– are a reminder that people seldom vote on policy questions, hot-topic issues or an accurate record of the incumbent. They pick the person they like the best, the guy they’d like to have a beer with, the one who looks most like their neighbor or friend. The one whose promises they’d like to believe.
Boots—or flipflops? Or old-man bedroom slippers?
Ronald Reagan, our oldest president before Biden, was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’sfive years after leaving office. I remember thinking he was too old to be president—but I was a lot younger then.
Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”
That sums it up for me. I wish Biden were younger. Or—I wish he’d followed through on his suggested agenda, and announced that he would, in fact, bow out after one rather amazing term. But wishes aren’t horses, and the best we can do is hope that Biden maintains his health and his marbles for another five years.
I thought I would ask my friend Julia how she feels about Biden’s age. Julia is coming up on her 97th birthday (for which, she’s asking for a donation for a local group dedicated to equity and the environment). She’s already a decade beyond the age Biden would be, at the end of his second term, and she’s one of the wisest and most grounded people I know.
On Veterans Day, I usually put up a Facebook photo of my Dad while he was serving in the Army Air Corps, WW II. I have a handful of them–in front of planes, in his radio gunner seat on the plane, in his flight suit and helmet, and so on. In each of them, he looks young and handsome, and determined– a man I didn’t know, just starting what would become his imperfect adult life.
My dad enlisted in the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor, early in 1942. He was 20 years old, and had been knocking around in Muskegon after dropping out of high school at 16. He did the usual entrance screening and tests, and was pulled out of the pack and offered a chance to be part of the Air Corps, which would involve special training to fly combat missions. The Air Corps was transitioning at the time, to what would become the Air Force, and my dad was thrilled to be going off into the wild blue yonder. In this case, the Pacific theater.
His leaving school at 16 to go to work wasn’t a function of academic failure, by the way. My father was one of the smartest people I know, a quick and canny intellect. He was also belligerent and impulsive and emphatically did not like being told what to do. He told me many times that the only teacher he respected and the only class he loved was his band director and playing in the Muskegon HS Band. He quit school because, other than music, he wasn’t learning anything. (Yes, I see the irony.)
The picture of my dad, with his younger brother, Burt, was taken on my grandparents’ back stoop after he returned home: the admiring younger brother and the Man Who Has Seen Too Much. The photo says it all.
Today, on Veterans Day, I want to honor all the men and women who came home, bringing all the trauma of war with them. The folks who tried to forget, but couldn’t. The ones whose wives warned their children: Don’t ask Dad about the war.
Our country was built on sacrifice. It would serve us all well to remember that, every day.
Thirty-five(ish) years in public education—you’d think I would have attended dozens of professional conferences, coming home with a branded tote bag and a ream of stapled, shovel-ready ideas for my classroom. That’s the way principals in my experience used to frame attendance at a conference: If we choose to give you a $300 stipend to attend a conference, you’d better bring back materials and lessons for your colleagues. Because that’s why we have conferences: to give teachers new tips and tricks.
Teachers know this, but education-related conferences are almost always done on the cheap. Teachers–even teachers who are conference presenters–often pay part or all of their own expenses, get a rollaway bed so three of them can share a hotel room, split up and attend different sessions to absorb the maximum number of ideas, then maybe pop for a margarita before calling home at bedtime. The high life.
In my 30+ years as a school music teacher, my request to get a day off to attend a conference was turned down repeatedly. The reason was usually because I was the only music teacher in the building, so anything I learned would not be shared beyond the band room. There was very limited money in the budget for conferences (or, for that matter, professional memberships or subscriptions) so STEM or Reading Recovery events were prioritized, as being more likely to impact kids scores.
Administrators also go to conferences, leaving their favorite teacher in charge; presumably they’re expected to bring back “results,” as well. Still—going to a conference, even if you are paying your own mileage, lodging, meals and registration fee, is a perk for teachers.
And not for the new materials or lesson plans.
The value of conferences for educators—as with any gathering of professionals—is in structured opportunities to mingle, to learn, to have long, uninterrupted conversations, to build networks of colleagues with similar values. The purpose of any conference is (or should be) inspiration. The big picture. Hanging with a bunch of people who care as much as you do.
In the age of the internet—where most of us can examine materials and swap lesson plans fluidly—the absolute advantage of a face-to-face conference is the talking and listening, in person. Three decades of communicating on-line (and one godawful pandemic), plus all the tech-bro videos and social platforms—and what have we learned? That you miss something when the person you’re talking with isn’t in the room.
I thought about all of these things while attending the Network for Public Education’s 10th anniversary conference in Washington D.C. last weekend. It was a gorgeous fall weekend—the kind of walking weather where a stroll down to the White House might feel preferable to sitting in sessions centered on countering rabid school board races or hostile state takeovers of ‘failing’ schools.
But no. Every one of the six sessions and five keynotes I attended was both stimulating and encouraging. I heard the inimitable Gloria Ladson-Billings speak, and was stunned by what is happening in Florida and Arizona. I got some tips on running for school board in my local district (#2024Goals) and heard stories of redemption, as well as hideous state-based power plays. What reformers used to call ‘disruption’ now feels like intentional destruction, driven by a single, grasping political party. All over the country.
In the 10 years NPE has been meeting, the tenor of this annual conversation has shifted from the corrosive impact of excessive testing and charter school scandals—So. Many. Scandals.— to outright, in-plain-sight privatization of our best national idea: a free, high-quality public education for every child.
For starters, the fact that the NPE is still meeting, 10 years after its founding, funded largely by individual donations and relatively modest foundational contributions, is reassuring. Many of the conference attendees were still paying their own way—or were attending on the dime of another organization created to defend public education. Money is still how things get done, laws get passed, and ideas take root. Knowing that there are articulate and passionate spokespersonsorganizing to protect public education is heartening.
The second thing I noticed was the number of sessions led by women and people of color. The foot soldiers in the war on public education are teachers, nearly 80% of whom are women. I have been to too many education conferences and symposia where the talking heads were white men with terminal degrees (who were not paying for their own registration fees and babysitters).
Don’t misunderstand—some of my most impressive edu-friends are smart and outspoken white men. But education has long been seen as women’s work, and when I look at the dangers looming—vouchers, religious charter schools, well-funded campaigns against “CRT” and sexual and reproductive autonomy—I see white men, clinging to money and power.If we’re going to stabilize and enhance public education, women need to be at the forefront. One of the most impressive keynotes at the conference: Diane Ravitch moderating a discussion with the two of the most influential labor leaders in the nation—Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Becky Pringle of the NEA (who preached a blistering sermon on those who would deny the value of a public education for all our children).
We built some sight-seeing (and crab-cake eating) into the D.C. journey, including a visit to the Holocaust Museumbefore heading to the airport. I last visited the Museum shortly after it opened, but its power has not faded. What I found interesting, in 2023, was the three-deep crowds at the display around the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s in Germany.
Twenty-five years ago, that display addressed the eternal question of how so many good German citizens were drawn into a horrendous scheme to conquer their national neighbors and eliminate “undesirables.” It seemed like a temporary madness, driven by economic instability and inherent German nationalism, not to mention a charismatic leader who appealed to a third of the population.
Now, the photos, speeches and commentary feel like a warning.
Public education is not the only thing endangered. It will take hard work and passion to keep the idea of public goods alive and thriving.
Teacher in a strange land 