Category / People You Need to Know

by nflanagan

Band Kids. They’re the Best.

I can’t add anything to the outpouring of love and respect for Dolly Parton. She was phenomenal, in dozens of ways. As a musician, I appreciate her melodic genius and as a writer, I admire her gift for lyrical story-telling and poignancy. But what I’ve loved most, this week, is that black and white of photo of Dolly Parton, class of 1964, in her Sevier HS band uniform.

It reminds me that so very many of the admirable people in our world developed their gifts and talents in a public school classroom. Dolly was the first in her family to graduate from high school; most of her 10 siblings who made it to adulthood dropped out, to work or to marry.

And she was in the band. She also supported underfunded school band programs across the South, for decades. We all know about Dolly’s Imagination Library program (you can donate here) and the hundreds of other ways she gave money and recognition to people who truly needed a boost.

But when we think about the roots of a spectacular career in the arts—they all started somewhere, and Dolly’s did not spring from early identification of extraordinary talent, private lessons or expensive summer camps. They started at home, and were burnished at her garden-variety TN public school.

My personal children played in the band (percussion and trombone)—and both of them expressed impatience with my barely suppressed opinion that band kids were a breed apart. Several of their good-kid friends weren’t in the band—and they could both point, accurately, to some band kids who were not, in school vernacular, good citizens.

However. I built my professional career, and my life before and after that career, on what I learned as a school-aged musician—in band, and choir and youth symphony. School music programs literally sent me to college, the first in my family.

They gave me the skills to offer my services on Saturdays at a community center, as a teenager, giving private flute lessons and earning pocket money. My music teachers—in an ordinary blue-collar public school district—steered me toward scholarships at several levels, membership in the local professional wind ensemble, and opportunities to perform in public (which is one of the big benefits of playing in a school band, BTW—dealing with performance nerves and understanding the necessity of rehearsal).

When Clinton was elected, I hung a poster of him, playing the tenor saxophone, on the band room wall. The point was not political—it was that band kids grew up to do amazing things, from comedy (Tina Fey, flute) to professional sports (Walter Payton, percussion) to walking on the moon (Neil Armstrong, euphonium).

Band kids sometimes face derision from their peers, especially in schools where instrumental music is low on the coolness totem pole. It takes some maturity to get past the name-calling, and that maturity develops on a continuum, assisted by parents and other adults in a student’s life.

Doing things for pleasure, building a community of friends, developing your own opinions—these are adulting skills. The band room can become a home for kids, the place at school where you can hang for hours (and dump your belongings and snack wrappers everywhere, driving your band teacher crazy). Simultaneously, these kids are being challenged to learn complex musical literature and skills, express powerful emotions, entertain their peers and work as a team, with every member’s contribution being important.

And it’s not easy! A couple of years ago, I was contacted by one of my former school administrators. As a retiree, he had decided to learn to play the guitar. He bought a guitar and started taking lessons. And it was frustratingly difficult.

He said that he always assumed learning to play a musical instrument was easy. After all, sixth graders in his building started band in September (in classes of 60 students) and put on a concert in December. How hard could it be?

As satisfying as that was to hear, what matters even more is the number of middle school band kids who push through the difficulty and experience the reward of performing together. That’s the real lesson.

Just ask Dolly.

by nflanagan

Some Thoughts about National Board Certification

I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan.

The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, that there could ever be a valid, reliable way to evaluate quality—or inadequate—teaching. I thought it was like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it.

Remember—this was before NCLB, and the advent of mandated testing for all public school children, beginning in the third grade. Some states (mine, for example) had been using statewide assessments for years, but nobody was talking about identifying or comparing teacher effectiveness by their students’ test scores– a ridiculous thought, given all the variables.

I was intrigued by the NBPTS process, and signed up to sit for certification as an Early Adolescence Generalist, paying my own fee ($2500, if I remember correctly) and (kind of recklessly) jumping in. The National Board, in 1995, did not offer an assessment for music teachers, so I decided to teach my 300 middle school band students ‘generalist’ lessons in math, language arts, science and social studies. I would NEVER recommend this, knowing what I learned, but I scored well and became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT).

Most people, including ed policy experts, university educators and teachers who have not experienced certification do not fully understand the National Board process (although many think they do). It’s difficult to explain, especially to educators and researchers whose entire careers have been shadowed by our national love affair with standardized testing.

The National Board asks teachers to hold their practice up to a set of teacher-created pedagogical and content-based standards, custom-written for various disciplinary and developmental levels. Teachers then reflect on how well their practice aligns with these standards, using videotapes of lessons, student work products across time and written self-evaluation. They also sit for on-demand examinations of their relevant content knowledge. Candidates’ portfolios and content exams were scored by teachers who taught the same subjects, at the same level.

It’s rigorous, and grueling—and often confusing for teachers who have never been asked the deep questions posed by the process: What is your convincing evidence that Student A understands ____? What misconceptions are evident in Student B’s remarks about ______? What other strategies have you tried to build competence in ________? Why is it important for students to have fluency in ______________? And so on, 12-20 pages for each of multiple portfolio tasks.

Many teachers—myself included—say that going through the National Board process was the best, most useful and personalized, professional development they ever had. I became a true-blue believer in the process. I then worked as a Teacher in Residence for NBPTS for two years and was part of a national team that devised the music assessment.

I was working for the National Board in their Outreach and Teacher Leadership departments when NCLB passed, 25 years ago. You could immediately see how NCLB’s foregrounding standardized testing would clash with the things most valued by the NBPTS principles and standards (again, established by actual teachers, not lawmakers, data-crunchers or education publishers).

The NBPTS standards were built on the idea of teacher expertise—knowing their students deeply, mastery of their subject discipline, possession of a full pedagogical tool bag—and continuous reflection on evidence of what was going well and what needed changing in their day to day practice.

NCLB, on the other hand, put faith in test scores as the only valid means of comparing schools (and, eventually, teachers)–and allocating carrots and sticks. There were lots of new rules to follow: the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements, for example, wiped out my NB certificate (Early Adolescence Generalist) which honored the classic middle-grades teacher who taught all subjects.

NBPTS was in the process of rolling out a number of new certificates, recruiting teachers to sit for certification, and building financial rewards for NBCTs into state policy and local contracts. They were becoming more corporate, changing a number of policies to streamline the business, something they probably needed to do to stay alive in the new political milieu.

One of the things that was proposed: machine scoring of teacher portfolios and/or content exams. NBCTs were adamantly opposed to the very idea. Many NBCTs, having had the positive experience of going through the process, had become scorers (a job only practicing teachers were allowed to do) in the summer. Others became candidate support providers, working with colleagues to examine their practice, building little communities that studied the standards, videotaping each other’s lessons and having productive conversations about teaching and learning.

The thought of saving money by machine-scoring parts of the assessment was a betrayal of the teacher leadership piece of NB certification—helping colleagues to understand and improve their own practice. Who would embrace an assessment that was evaluated by a bot?  Not teachers whose work had been fairly judged. The National Board later eliminated their Teacher Leadership department. It was not a money-maker.

I left the National Board when they moved to Washington, DC, and returned to my music classroom, but continued, for a while, to help candidates and do workshops with schools or teacher associations that were interested in the NBPTS process. I have many NBCT friends who still do NB work, in spite of changes to NB certification that were less than teacher-friendly. I am now an outside—albeit informed—observer.

Recently, on a candidate support page, the question of using AI to write portfolio briefs emerged. A candidate had shared a draft analysis of her own teaching to an NBCT, who worried that the piece was so ‘well-written’ that it appeared to be composed by ChatGPT. The NBCT encouraged the candidate to think about ways that might make her writing seem more… human.

Now—writing skill is NOT assessed in the National Board process. Clarity of thought, presentation of believable evidence, convincing analysis of student progress—all of these are important, but smooth prose and impeccable syntax, not so much. I was struck by the idea that someone might think about using AI to write what’s supposed to be one’s own rationale and justification for things done as a teacher. The product could only be incoherent, if grammatically sound, slop.

Even worse—and here we have to, unsurprisingly, travel to Texas—some states are now questioning the National Board’s core contribution to teaching and learning: professional standards.

As Peter Greene reports:

 NBTC hasn’t been hugely successful in Texas– only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that’s 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because “tolerance.”

That’s correct. The NBPTS standards, for all ages and subjects, encourage equity and inclusion of all kids and embrace the diverse range of students taught in American public schools. In Texas, they’re trying to yank the very modest stipends given to TX teachers who have achieved National Board Certification.

Because money talks. Not all states offer a financial reward to NBCTs or contribute to certification fees. And many NBCTs are like me—curious about defining the markers of good teaching, convinced that all kids deserve an accomplished teacher. The money is seldom enough to make the 200-400 hour intensive challenge of certification worthwhile.

In earlier days, NBPTS got a lot of bipartisan support—a way to reward hard-working, demonstrably effective teachers that wasn’t graduate credit hours or seniority. Right to work states were fans of paying a handful of excellent teachers a little more cash, knowing that teachers are capitalists, too.

It’s ironic that it might be right-wing politics and AI that damage a worthwhile endeavor to improve teaching. Or maybe the word is predictable.

by nflanagan

This Guy Used to Be My Congressman

And now he wants to be my senator. Again. Meet Mike Rogers.

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 never voted 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. It was redmap gerrymandering that made his subsequent elections ironclad.

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 was Mr. Local Control. He asked me, his designated foil, what purpose a federal Education Department served.

My answer was two-fold: First, a national Ed Department can serve as center for policy research on best practices and ideas in public education, economies of scale. Why re-invent the wheel in 50 states?

But far more important was the federal role in promoting and ensuring equity and protecting civil rights. 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 baby-boomer students whose states or districts weren’t particularly interested in equity.

Not Michigan! he scoffed, ignoring the obvious example of Detroit Public Schools, 50 miles down the road, a city that many of his constituents escaped, after the auto industry built enormous wealth on the backs of immigrant laborers. But who cares about children in a city whose resources have been extracted? Not his problem.

After the panel dispersed, Rogers was surrounded by obsequious 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 anymore. He launched a career in radio—a kind of mild-mannered Rush Limbaugh—and moved to Florida, where he was happily ensconced in Cape Coral for nearly a decade, 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 miraculously rediscovered his Michigan roots,and is now running—for the second time– for an open Senate seat in the mitten state. He has always been a pro-NRA, anti-abortion guy, but he’s moved hard to the ugly Trumpian right; in his last senate race in 2024, he castigated his former employer, the FBI, claiming they were on a witch hunt to take down Trump for political purposes. He called the DOJ “corrupt.” 

That, of course, was two years ago. Now, he’s All Trump, All the Time.  He’s an election denier. He’s trying to raise doubts about the MI senate election he lost, in 2024. What he said two years ago about the DOJ—well, that no longer applies. They’re good guys now.

As for public education, he’s also changed his tune, now endorsing federal influence over creeping wokeness, 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 bon mot often on the Rogers campaign trail this fall, along with finger-pointing about DEI and the weaponization of empathy. Plus a whole lot of anti-Muslim, free-floating racism.

Remember– Mike Rogers used to present as a country club Republican, hometown boy made good, moderate conservative, ex-FBI, and deficit-cutter.

But what happens to sort-of moderate Republicans, these days? They get primaried after one term. They get criticized by Tucker Carlson.They can’t maintain leadership in the House. Or Senate. They get the message: move rightward, appease Trump, sometimes by groveling–or get out of the way.

Mr. Rogers is perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to please The King. In 2024, he bought a tear-down lakeside cottage in Michigan, moved in with his sister-in-law in his old hometown to run his campaign, and started building a new home on the lake. Which could be his Michigan address should he win, but an easy, lucrative place to sell should he lose. No risk, reward either way.

He still owns the Cape Coral mansion.

There are lots of reasons to distrust Mike Rogers, beginning with his “go as the wind blows” beliefs and policies (and place of residence). There are lots of Republicans who fall into that camp—Tommy Tuberville springs to mind.

But I keep thinking about that Chamber of Commerce breakfast, where MY sitting congressman didn’t see why children in Michigan deserved equity.


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.