Category / public-education

by nflanagan

The 18th of April…

 Does â€œthe 18th of April” ring any bells for you?

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.

I learned â€œO Captain, My Captain” (speaking of anniversaries) in 8th grade.

And the prologue to â€œRomeo 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.

by nflanagan

Trust (Pandemic, Day #1475)

One of the essential truths in getting a message across is repeat, repeat, repeat. Like the mothers of toddlers, teachers are well aware of this fundamental veracity. No matter how the message is delivered—Pay attention! I’m only going to say this once!—well, no. You’re not.

You’re going to say it as many times as it takes to sink in, and even then, compliance and understanding are iffy.

Here’s my essential truth: It’s been close to 1500 days since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. And we still haven’t perceived just how transformative it was, dealing with a global threat while trying to keep the things we value most safe. Those things being our health and well-being, our children and families, our communities and livelihoods.

Transformative is a neutral word for all the changes wrought by living through a crisis that killed an estimated seven million people, around the globe. Well over a million of those deaths have happened in the United States, making us the nation with the most COVID-19 deaths, world-wide.

That simple fact, alone—the United States, the place where we brag about having the “best” health care on the planet, was unable to suppress transmission. Once a vaccine was available—lightning fast!—getting folks to embrace medical science and stay on top of protection that might save their lives has been thoroughly politicized and divisive. Those things, on their own, were enough to make one realize that maybe our all-American political thinking was out of whack.

So I repeat: The pandemic has really done a number on us. On our economy. On our family gatherings. On what we expect from our employees, as well as our employers. On health care. On the way we feel about government. The things we value most–including our schools.

Call it The Great Re-ordering of Priorities.

It’s become a habit of mine, when reading stories about education: running the topic or issue through the filter of how they may have been impacted by the pandemic. Here’s one: absenteeism.

Student absences from school rose precipitously during the pandemic, peaking in 2021-22. Attendance rates are improving, overall, but are still higher than 2019.

What’s interesting is that schools with dismal, not-getting-better attendance rates aren’t always the ones you’d expect—absenteeism seems to be impacted by local conditions and initiatives, kids and parents re-ordering their priorities. Not up for school today? Go ahead—take a mental health day. Or five.

Schools struggling with attendance after a world-shaking event? Go figure. It’s going to take some time to fix that, and misinformation about how “unions” “closed” schools, abandoning kids to Zoom, doesn’t help.  From an article on school absences, in the NY Times:

School leaders, counselors, researchers and parents…offered many reasons for the absences: illness, mental health, transportation problems. But underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic.

Re-ordering the priorities. And not in a good way.

In her excellent blog, Jess Piper talks about the decline in civility at local school board meetings, among other things, triggered by a pandemic:

Recently, I saw this bad behavior up close and personal when I attended a BOE meeting at a school district outside of St Louis. Though I had an awful interaction with a parent or two in my tenure, I hadn’t witnessed the decline in civility and the outright disrespect shown in public. The lack of couth wasn’t just reserved for teachers, but was also aimed at administrators, board members, audience members, and community members.

One of the first to speak was a woman who brought her daughter to stand next to her while mom called the Superintendent names and defamed teachers. I was upset that the young girl had to stand there while her mother went over her time, refused to stop speaking when told her time was up, and still spoke, even raising her voice, when her microphone was eventually muted. She just kept going.

How did this young girl learn to treat her teachers? She learned disrespect and inappropriate behavior will be rewarded with a slew of applause.

Bingo. All the footage of parents pushing into buildings, upset about masking or sports or vaccinations hasn’t been conducive re-building respect and trust. And trust is a core resource in successful public schools.

Lucian Truscott has a great piece (link here) on realizing, in the grocery  store, that his fellow shoppers  weren’t masked—that he himself, in fact, had stopped routinely masking. He acknowledged that he trusted himself and his neighbors to take responsibility for protecting themselves from COVID.

 It was a nice moment for him, thinking about the word trust—how long it takes to re-build simple neighborly trust, especially when it’s been shattered by transformative events. Expecting our public institutions to remain unchanged or “bounce back” is happy talk. We’re in the midst of some pretty significant shifts.

After the pandemic of 1918:

The Spanish Flu greatly affected the world economy, wiping out large numbers of healthy 18- to 40-year-olds. In Britain, during the Summer of 1918, in a single day 80 out of the 400 workers of a spinning factory perished. In many countries which had seen their male population decimated by the war, the pandemic left even fewer young men to run the farms and factories.

The resulting labor shortage enabled workers to demand better living and working conditions, public health care, as well as better wages. These became major demands of workers not only in Europe and the United States but in many other countries around the world. 

Once again: We are underestimating the impact on the nation, and especially our children. of living through a global catastrophe Let’s put our focus on the right priorities. In spite of all the challenges to public education, it’s still the best bang for your tax buck, in perpetuity. Good schools make for good communities.

Trust is a cornerstone. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

by nflanagan

DIS-Information in Schools

You may have heard the story, a couple days back, about a Republican legislator in Michigan posting a photo of buses at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, claiming the buses were transporting “illegal invaders.”  News stories politely suggested that he was erroneously referring to undocumented immigrants—after all, Representative Matt Maddock is still in the Michigan House—before confirming that the buses were, in reality, transporting four men’s basketball teams competing in this weekend’s Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games in Detroit.

Was Maddock (whose wife, Meshawn, was recently Co-Chair of the beleaguered Michigan Republican party) simply misinformed? Doubtful that he was hanging around a major metropolitan airport (which is not, by the way, in his district), watching planes and buses come and go, and simply, you know, got the wrong impression about a few dozen young men—tall ones– getting on buses.

Nor has he apologized for what might have been a dangerous trigger, inviting local yahoos to saddle up and head for the airport. In fact, he’s continued to post:

“We know this is happening. 100,000’s of illegals are pouring into our country. We know it’s happening in Michigan. Our own governor is offering money to take them in! Since we can’t trust the #FakeNews to investigate, citizens will. The process of investigating these issues takes time. The whole nation knows about the Democrat illegal invasion human trafficking criminal enterprise. Why does the media only work to cover it up?”

Welcome to Detroit, college athletes.

Back in the day, as part of what used to be called a ‘unit,’ my 7th grade English teacher, Alison Olding, taught us the difference between misinformation (when you think you know something, but it’s wrong) and disinformation (when you deliberately plant known falsehoods). There were plenty of examples to share with a group of 7th graders, back then, and now. Spreading misinformation in middle school (a daily occurrence) is always wrong, but making stuff up to harm someone else is a special kind of reprehensible.

And yet, here we are, hip-deep in AI deepfakes and college professors hosting far-right websites protecting “the American way of life”  and government interventions to suppress social media and—God help us—Russian disinformation about their insatiable, immoral war in Ukraine:

 â€œThe strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics.” 

Kinda makes you wonder: Didn’t any of the Republican congressmen on the pro-Putin side learn about misinformation and disinformation in school? How to sort out fact from fiction? How to research questions around information that may or may not be true—and how to accurately evaluate sources that may be biased, or flat-out lying?

It’s a serious and critical education question. There are, indeed, public schools where media literacy is a formal part of the curriculum. There are outstanding digital literacy resources for students, supported by high-quality research. What’s missing is the will and the urgency of the need to educate kids about distinguishing between truth and whatever it is they’re getting on TikTok.

Or, unfortunately, at their kitchen tables or their church or on the bus. Misinformation—can you remember Things You Used to Believe?—has always been a factor in growing up and becoming educated. Disinformation is a darker thing altogether. Especially when it comes from people who should, theoretically, represent integrity. Legislators, for example.

Discussing this with one of my favorite cyber-colleagues, Barth Keck, he said: I teach these very strategies in my Media Literacy class. Sadly, I fear most adults nowadays – including the people on this platform – lack the patience or interest in employing them. I just discussed this point with a colleague who teaches Speech & Debate. He’s seeing kids parrot talking points rather than thinking deeply about issues. Whom are they parroting? Many adults are a lost cause; it’s the kids who need to learn to think critically.

A short piece in the Michigan Advance made this point simply: Disinformation makes our communities less safe. We are not powerless in this plight. Disinformation pulls apart our communities, and community itself is key to fighting back.

Even when it’s uncomfortable or not neighborly or involves a guy you may have enthusiastically voted for, once. When someone is spreading disinformation—even if it’s disinformation that faintly echoes your beliefs about the southern border, federal lawmakers or who deserves a handout—it’s wrong, and they need to be called out. For the sake of your school and community.

Disinformation IN schools is often disinformation ABOUT schools. All of those laws nominally designed to “protect” students from things that make folks uncomfortable—like classroom discussions about lynchings or honest talk in health class about sexual preferences—only open the door for students to absorb misinformation and disinformation when they don’t get the truth in school.

Here’s a heartbreaking and lethal example. My school used to offer, as part of community education, a hunter safety class. You had to be a certain age, produce appropriate licensing, learn about (and be tested on) the safe use of firearms, including keeping them secured when not in use.

Michigan is a hunting state. Opening Day in deer season is often a school holiday. We weren’t thinking about guns as evidence of masculinity or patriotism—or revenge. Our parents weren’t giving us handguns as an early Christmas present.  Our legislators weren’t posing with the whole family carrying assault weapons.  That’s the disinformation part.

From a piece on the 2022 school shooting in Oxford, MI:

What’s particularly hypocritical here is that the most strident defenders of this [gun] culture skew conservative and talk a lot about what isn’t appropriate for children and teenagers. What they think is inappropriate often includes educating kids about sex, about the fact that some people are gay or transsexual and about racism. It’s a perverse state of affairs: Exposing children to simple facts is dangerous but exposing them to machines designed to kill is not. You can’t get your driver’s license until you’re a teenager, or buy cigarettes and alcohol until you’re 21, but much earlier than that, kids can, with adult supervision, legally learn how to end someone’s life.

In Michigan, the shooter’s parents are going to prison for providing their son with disinformation; families and a school district are forever torn.

Once more: communities are the key to fighting disinformation. Start now.

by nflanagan

Dissecting Republican Messaging, 101

There it was, in my local newspaper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Headline: Michigan kids are in crisis and the governor’s new budget only makes it worse.

You can practically hear the exclamation points, can’t you? Don’t bother trying to read it—it’s paywalled, and not worth 99 cents. In fact, it’s Republican sludge, a perfect example of how to use meaningless scary-talk, unsubstantiated by anything resembling reason or fact.

The author, Beth DeShone, is Executive Director of the Great Lakes Education Project.  Don’t bother going to their website, either—because up top, the organization is described by a boldfaced lie: a bi-partisan, non-profit advocacy organization supporting quality choices in public education for all Michigan students.

That’s some expert wordsmithing right there, as if an organization founded and funded by Betsy DeVos —a fact you will find nowhere on GLEP’s website–could ever be “bi-partisan.”  I haven’t been to GLEP’s website in some time, but there’s not much there anymore.

No staff listed (beyond DeShone), no Board to guide their editorial choices—just a bunch of right-wing blah-blah about Our Public Schools are Failing. Plus a side helping of Thanks Republicans for Trying to Retain Rigorous Standards! (By which they mean the rigorous standard of flunking third graders who aren’t reading at grade level.)

There’s a Twitter account (don’t bother) and a Facebook page where the big news is that GLEP is apparently being spanked for using copyrighted images. GLEP, which once put out a lot of negative editorial content about public education, now seems to be a Potemkin Edu-Village, trying to keep up anti-public school appearances online, while the rest of us are, you know, teaching and learning and actually trying to improve the education system that built Michigan.

So it was a surprise to see GLEP pop up in my local daily. Here is DeShone’s first sentence:

A devastating new report from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities showed Michigan’s kids have lost nearly half a grade level in reading and math education since state officials and public school bureaucrats ignored medical science and locked them out of the classroom in 2020 and 2021.

Test scores from kids around the world have dropped after experiencing a global pandemic. That’s no surprise. What’s less often reported is that American kids, relatively speaking, did better than many other first-world counterparts:

American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

So much for ‘ignoring medical science’ and ruining kids. Besides—here in northwest Michigan, several schools remained open, because families did not have access to the internet. The Traverse City public schools arranged for a day off and health department priority in getting their teachers vaccinated. Local schools were paying attention, listening to parents, doing their best under crisis circumstances. Did everyone agree with every decision? Of course not. It was a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” situation.

DeShone then pivots to some spurious data: How is it that 86% of Black fourth graders in Michigan aren’t proficient in reading? How could our kids be so far behind?

Well. Perhaps it’s because, under a Republican governor, and after adjusting for inflation, Michigan’s education funding in 2015 was only 82 percent of what it was in 1995 — worse than any other state.We’ve been playing financial catch-up for the past six years, and having a pandemic interrupt school as normal didn’t help. And that’s not even factoring in the Republican plan to take over ‘failing’ districts, then proceeding to fail them even further. Or the fact that “proficient” doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

Here are a few more bon mots from Ms. DeShone:

The Governor’s budget spends public school dollars to pay for the lunch for the children of millionaires.

Our students have fallen faster and farther behind in reading and math than ever imagined.

Governor Whitmer’s brand-new budget request for the coming year is only going to do more damage. A lot of it. It’s time to empower parents.

Here’s the thing: Governor Whitmer has been a positive force for public school funding. It’s been a relief to have an education-friendly governor in Lansing. Education budgets have been stable, and her initiatives focused on non-punitive policy, like getting rid of mandated retention for third graders who are behind in reading. The budget has provided funding for all kids to have breakfast and lunch at school, if their district chooses. Per-pupil expenditures have been creeping upwards.

The Repubs have pushed back against Whitmer’s plan to fully fund universal Pre-K, and they really hate her idea of free community college, an attempt to raise education levels in a state where working on the line at GM used to provide a family wage and maybe a cottage up north.

If you really want to dissect the proposed education budget and its priorities, and not just call names and throw out baseless (and, frankly, weird) accusations, try this link.  

There are probably worse states to be in, right now. We aren’t worried about our next Superintendent executing Democrats, for example. But I am still infuriated by DeShone’s editorial. There’s a whole paragraph about the alarming increases in “schools in crisis” that fails to define what a school in crisis is or looks like. There are punches to parents’ guts mentioned; also–parents who “care deeply.”

And that’s the thing that bothered me most—the cozying-up to parents and suggesting it’s time to “empower” them. It’s a column—theoretically—about the upcoming Education budget. The people who are making decisions about what to spend on education are in the State Legislature. The way to get influence over those decisions is to call your legislator or run for office. We’re not empowering parents to craft an education budget.

Maybe it’s because I just read Rachel Bitecofer’s Hit ‘em Where it Hurts, but I immediately recognized that “empower parents!” message, the centerpiece of Republican education politics in 2024. It’s a short, emotion-driven sound bite.  It can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Kind of like that editorial in my newspaper.

by nflanagan

Political Messaging, Schools and Republicans

I just finished Rachel Bitecofer’s feisty, punchy book on political messaging, “Hit ‘Em Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.”

Recommended—although not, as the subtitle suggests, to beat Republicans at their own despicable, even shocking, game. Recommended because we’re in crisis, and being smarter and nicer is no longer cutting it.

In December of 2020, I wrote a blog entitled Republicans. Up until that point, in my political perspective, there were country-club Republicans who were conservative, in the traditional sense of keeping things that preserved beneficial aspects of their lives in place. And there were the rabid right-wing crazies who emerged like locusts after Barack Obama was elected. But the two were merging, and the outlook for keeping two distinct parties that counterbalanced each other’s policy goals, for the good of the nation, was dim. The Republicans were ruining democracy. On purpose.

I took some grief for that blog, from die-hard moderate Republicans (who are thick on the ground where I live and work), and also from some Democrat friends who thought it took me way too long to outright reject and stomp on anyone who voted Republican in the past two decades.

From the standpoint of March 2024, and Rachel Bitecofer’s crisp and direct prescriptions for saving democracy, however, my hardcore Dems friends were right: You don’t get anywhere with a mushy message, a bunch of facts, and reaching across the aisle. And you can’t share those great policy ideas unless you can get elected.

I blame my 32-year career as a public-school teacher for this habit of equivocating and looking for points of agreement. I spent most of my time trying to reduce conflict, banish name-calling, find common ground, and build functioning communities in my middle school classroom.

So many communities. I was partially successful at this, more so toward the end of my career. If kids don’t get along, after all, they can’t make music together. This is the single most important reason I stopped having chairs and challenges, and tried to avoid unnecessary competition. Teachers everywhere want their students to be able to work together despite differences. It’s what we do.

Bitecofer’s take on political messaging is that Republicans have zero interest in working together to solve problems. They just want to retain power. It’s time for Democrats to boldly claim the high moral ground, she says, rather than using data and reason to present their detailed policy plans, no matter how forward-thinking and appealing they may be to Democrats.

We’re getting beat up, she says, by sophistry. Time to call a lie a lie. To fight back. To take back the word freedom, for starters. We are clearly the party that supports freedom, around the globe, and here at home. Why aren’t we claiming that? The losses that we are suffering now—reproductive freedom, the freedom to vote, the freedom to breathe clean air—have not come from Democratic actions.

She points out that education has generally been seen as a Democratic issue, back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s (along with minority rights, infrastructure and health care), but the 2021 Gubernatorial election in Virginia turned that around—with a big fat passel of lies about what was happening in public schools.

You remember— charges that teachers were making white kids feel guilty via CRT, encouraging transgenderism and putting out kitty litter for the furries. The kinds of things Dems responded to by politely explaining that critical race theory was an advanced concept, first introduced by Kimberle’ Crenshaw, interrogating the socially constructed role of race and institutionalized racism in society, yada yada.

All true. But completely overridden by the Republicans’ simple, dishonest message: Schools are taking away parents’ rights! (Even though parents have always had rights.) Bitecofer, lurking in the background, would say: Don’t bring reality and truth to a Republican messaging war, because Republicans trust feelings, not facts.

Democrats have, for decades, rallied around more resources and equity for public education. They have gone to schools and registered newly minted 18-year-old voters. They have defended the wall between church and state, pushed back hard against vouchers for the wealthy. Time to claim credit.

America is a uniquely apolitical country, Bitecofer says, with little civic culture. This benefits Republicans, who count on people to vote out of old partisan habits, not new information.

Occasionally, someone will claim that more or better Civics classes would improve engagement in electoral politics in the United States. I seriously doubt that, especially since the things that make the study of Civics engaging and sticky are precisely the things that Ron DeSantis is passing laws against. Kids learn to be good citizens by watching adults—a statement worth pondering, in this election year.

Pick up Bitecofer’s book—it’s a short, easy to digest read. Then pull on your metaphorical boxing gloves.

by nflanagan

In Defense of School Sports

Confession: I have never been a huge fan of school sports programs.

Mostly, this stems from 30+ years of being a school band director, and the various slings and arrows sent my way (and toward my student musicians) by irrational coaches and egotistical student athletes.

Maybe I should expand my confession, to something like this: School sports have the potential of great benefits for students, in terms of their physical health and confidence. Kids can learn how to be both good winners and good losers and fill their after-school time in worthwhile ways. When this happens, school sports are a bonus for both student athletes and the student body. But (and this is a big but)—school sports also have the potential to do great harm. They can impair health, destroy fledgling confidence, and suck up more than their share of resources for a small subset of students.

Also—for all of the potential problems in school programs, when sports are made free for all students they offer kids a platform for growth that is not available elsewhere and can build community within a school district.

Several summers ago, my family hosted a French foreign exchange student. Our summer daughter, Elodie, was an accomplished and award-winning gymnast. During the time she was with us, my district opened a brand-new middle school. We went for a visit, as the physical education teacher was inventorying new equipment, ordered as part of the bond issue. Elodie was stunned at the parallel bars, balance beam and rings—and so much more– and wondered who would be using this equipment. Standing in the middle of the new gymnasium, she asked if all the school buildings in our little town had a gym—yes. All seven of them, including four elementary schools.

On the way home, she noted that none of the public schools she’d attended had a gymnasium. Her gymnastics career was accomplished in a for-pay local gym, with for-pay coaches. As were all sports played by secondary students in France. My friends all do sport, she said—but not at school.

It didn’t seem like the right time to comment on the costs of HS football stadiums in Texas.   

The biggest problem with school sports is that they’re not what they used to be. The era of the three-sport, varsity-letter high school athlete, and the math-teacher coach urging students to go out for cross country to stay in shape for basketball is fading, supplanted by expensive private travel teams and “professional” coaches, for those who can afford them.

Jessica Grose had a great piece in the NYT last month: Why So Many Kids are Priced Out of Youth Sports. Grose notes that private youth sports are now a $30–$40 billion dollar industry, and the pandemic has made things worse, with parents now feeling that their kids have “fallen behind”—seriously– in their potential sports careers:

According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, in fall 2022, the average amount spent on a single child’s primary sport per season was $833. For families with household incomes at or above $150,000 a year, the average is $2,068. No wonder that around half of those who’ve played or have children who’ve played youth sports say they’ve struggled to pay for it, according to a 2023 Project Play report. That doesn’t even address the difficulty parents have getting their kids to practice, particularly in families where all the adults work outside the home. The difference between the haves and have-nots when it comes to youth sports are bracing: 34.1 percent of kids from the poorest families were on sports teams or had coaching outside of school, compared with 67.7 percent of the wealthiest families, according to the 2020-2021 National Survey of Children’s Health.

I recently dropped into a conversation between several parents of student athletes. All of them were part of the Athletic Boosters organization for a mid-sized school. They were talking about how to best use the funds they were raising (which seemed like a lot of money to this retired band director, whose entire career and school programs were accomplished via fund-raising).

One of the suggested uses of the money was to allow all students in the district to take part in sports without having to pay to play. In Michigan, only 41% of schools currently charge for participation in sports—down from 57% in 2013-14, but that’s still a lot of student athletes having to come up with some scratch to do something that ought to be offered free to all kids.

It was heartening to know that the parents in this group included some very good athletes, including my niece Ashley, a full-ride volleyball player at Kent State, now a mom of three budding athletes. All of these folks saw the benefit of a school sports program open to all students and were willing to raise the cash to make that happen. Thumbs up.

When you boil this down, however, it’s just another question of resource allocation in public education.

If school sports are good for kids, they need to be based on the right values and funded in a way that provides benefits to students across the board, from wealth or poverty, with elite-level skills or just a good attitude and willingness to learn.

When kids drop out of school programs, in favor of private instruction and competition, it weakens public education. It has an impact on parent support for all the things a public school is supposed to offer—quality academics, the arts, a safe and welcoming facility, and a range of extra-curriculars.

The number of public schools struggling to keep programs afloat ought to be a national embarrassment.

by nflanagan

Woke/Not Woke

A few years back, in 2016, I read a blog post from a national teachers’ union leader, a white woman, proclaiming that she was now woke. I’ve met this woman a few times and have no doubt that she is sincere and well-meaning and totally on the right side of social justice issues, but the blog, about her aha moment, struck me as tone-deaf.

Most of the time, white educators who care about justice are working on opening their minds, at being better humans. Maybe the best white people can do is increase their understanding and awareness of all the injustices that are built into living in the home of the brave. Closer to woke, maybe, but always gazing at justice and equity from a layer of privilege. Doing their best until they can do better, etc. It’s not for us to decide, yup, we’re woke now.

When I read that blog, however, I never anticipated a US Governor would proclaim that his state is where “Woke goes to die.”  As a campaign strategy, no less—a campaign based on freeing people of privilege from any guilt about exercising their biases, discriminatory actions, and outright bigotry against everything from Gay Days at Disney World to telling high school students ugly truths about Black history.

And now, Florida lawmakers are moving full-speed ahead to push minors off social media. They’ve empowered schools to ban cell phones, remove books and limit history lessons, with more restrictions on the way.  Students interviewed in the linked article are incensed—they understand that it’s their learning that’s being limited, not their social lives. They don’t feel protected—they feel cheated.

How did we go from striving for more equity and inclusion as a nation–to proudly announcing that the last thing we want our children to feel is responsibility for the well-being of others? What was the turning point?

Spoiler alert: It’s no coincidence that the Governor who wanted to excise woke-ism thought that strategy would resonate with a particular group of American voters. Having stirred that Group4Liberty up, Desantis is now reaping the consequences, politically, in Florida. Bad ed policy will always catch up to you, with increasing teacher shortages and hollowed-out libraries. And so many headaches and complaints.

When you’re stirring the pot, to get political mileage out of parent anger, you’re doing a grave disservice to the foot soldiers who are teaching in your state, the ones who are trying to put together functioning classrooms full of diverse kids–and then teach them something worth learning.

And, as Peter Greene points out, succinctly: It’s a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it’s a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it’s a luxury that many teachers don’t have.

Stripping critical topics and materials out of the curriculum because they may be interpreted as ‘woke,’ makes that curriculum sterile and empty. Trying to keep students from accessing their own answers on the internet is futile. And attempting to control teacher behaviors via professional development is downright creepy.

Teachers who are experiencing all of these anti-woke procedures can feel isolated and angry, understanding that the very reason they chose to become teachers—building the next generation—has been abandoned by school leaders with feet of clay.

There are a lot of ways to interpret ‘woke’—but it’s a factor in every school building in America: Who accepts whom? Who is comfortable and able to learn? Who is expected to do well—and who is given short shrift? How do we get along, and respect each other’s differences?There are systems of oppression, however subtle, in every school, public and private.

Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them,” according to DeSantis’ general counsel, as reported by The Washington Post.

Denying that there is systemic injustice, instead substituting the systemic practice of avoiding unpleasant truths, ducking issues that cause conflict and barring critical thinking by students, is the worst possible basis for making education policy.  Instead, ed policy is now based on chasing test scores, cutting economic corners, and presenting a mendacious view of the world to our future leaders.

If anybody needs to pursue wokeness, it’s school leaders and education policymakers. Because—guess what—there ARE systemic injustices in American society. And one of the purposes of American public schools has traditionally been forming a more perfect union through education. Carol Burris:

In the beginning, the purpose was to create a literate American citizenry to be able to participate in democracy. Our founders realized that if they were going to give citizens the ability to actually shape government through elections, they had to have some knowledge base on which to make decisions.

Returning to the critical question here—how and why did wokeness become something to sneer at, to stamp out of school discussions and materials?

I keep thinking about the video shot at a middle school in Royal Oak, MI right after the 2016 election, with students chanting “Build that wall!” Or the lawsuit filed in 2022 against another Michigan middle school for suppressing the first amendment rights of students, by forcing them to take off their “Let’s Go Brandon” hoodies.

Add in a pandemic, which tilted many perspectives—equity, safety, privilege—and it’s easy to see how the past eight years have caused a political abyss to form. Teachers who forthrightly proclaim they are woke, in 2024, risk being fired.

It’s time for action. Step one: voting.

by nflanagan

Do Public Schools Suck?

Some years ago, John Dubie, then a high school senior in Vermont, posted a very personal, autobiographical blog entitled “Big Picture Saved My Life.” John meant that statement literally—the Big Picture curriculum and program at South Burlington HS was the thing that kept him going when he was thinking about checking himself out.

I was stunned by the aftermath of the piece, which was picked up, reprinted and dissected in a number of other blogs. I was especially surprised by those commentaries that suggested John’s life was saved by leaving traditional public school.

The irony? Dubie spent much of the blog describing the first eight years of his education in a Catholic school, where he was generally seen as a disruptive loser by the faculty. And– the Big Picture Learning program he credits with making all the difference was housed in a traditional public school, in Burlington, Vermont,

Because I was the person who suggested John tell his story in public, this re-interpretation of his autobiography made me see red. I said as much, in the comments, noting that his generosity shouldn’t become a cheap excuse to slam public education again. I said: What I’m worried about here is protecting a young man who graciously shared a deeply personal reflection having his story–and his face– used to promote the idea that public education sucks.

The response I got: Seriously? Of course public education sucks.

Do public schools suck? Is that the conventional wisdom, the reflexive, global response these days? Do we have to start with the conviction that public education has failed, before we can transform or improve, regenerate or revitalize a fully public system?

I say no. In fact, the best time to change public education is now, while its strengths, resources and merits still exist.

What questions should we be asking about public education, before reflexively tearing it down? What facts shape the argument that public education, as a concept, is well worth saving?

  • All governance models–public, chartered, independent, parochial—have produced exciting schools and disastrous schools. There are plenty of students who thrive under direct-instruction, highly structured, traditional content-delivery models. And others who learn best through self-directed exploration of ideas and subjects that interest them. There is no one best way to learn.
  • Public education remains the Big Kahuna of governance models in the U.S. Why would you tear down the considerable and historic infrastructure of a system that has educated–however imperfectly–generations of (successful) Americans, instead of updating it, repairing its cracks and flaws and outright malfunctions? Other nations have retrofitted their public systems, using both research and imagination. Why wouldn’t we?
  • When and where public education is not meeting the needs of students, why is that so? Public education has been radically re-shaped in the last two decades, driven by “reform” policies and experiments that clearly aren’t yielding the expected results (and that’s a very sanguine assessment). If public schools suck, we certainly haven’t found the magic formula to fix them. Probably because the answers involve hard work, multiple strategies and serious investment.
  • Public education is the only “choice” when other options are exhausted, so public schools are filled with our poorest children, those whose parents cannot provide transportation or uniforms or help with algebra homework. Some of those schools are creatively addressing problems, building communities and family relationships, persisting even if testing data remains low. Do they suck?
  • Who’s saying that public education sucks–and why are they saying it? For some parents, the fact that their child doesn’t get a custom-tailored learning experience or enough attention is reason enough to believe that all public education is substandard. For others, there is a knee-jerk assumption that the only good education is a series of competitive-admission, high-ticket private schools. Much of the anti-public education drumbeat springs from a politicized, media-fed conviction that public schools have failed, based on testing data alone. You have to ask: What’s in it for the most vocal and persistent public school critics?
  • You don’t really know what a particular school or classroom is like until you’re there. We’ve all read the polling data that shows parents generally think the schools in their community are pretty good; it’s the schools in other places–scary urban places, or maybe just the next district over, or public schools across the nation–that are terrible. I’ve been in plenty of classrooms in Detroit Community Schools where there was order, curiosity, learning–and joy (and usually, about twice as many kids as there should be). In the middle of poverty, there are pockets of triumphant accomplishment.

Shouldn’t we be shoring up public education, as America’s best idea? Shouldn’t we be investing in repair, enhancement, innovation? Let’s stop with the facile pronouncements on the failure of public education–they reveal failure of imagination and democracy.