I’ll bet they do. Fortunately, the readers who responded to EdWeek’s LinkedIn poll obviously had some experience in teacher compensation, not to mention common sense. Because the answer to this question is obviously that teachers ought to be paid fully professional salaries, since it’s a professional job. Starting now.
Back in 2007, I took part in a teacher-led consortium that explored teacher pay. We followed the time-honored education practice of saving the world one white paper at a time, and produced a thick, glossy report filled with suggestions on how to pay teachers for their special skills and performance, enhancing recruitment and retention. We firmly rejected the common belief that paying teachers for their students’ test scores would do anything good for education–but allowed that the single-scale salary schedule had some flaws and might be tweaked.
Mostly, we were looking for ways to pay experienced, proven educators enough to honor their hard-won expertise and, over time, give them additional leadership responsibilities without forcing them out of the classroom. There were 18 “recognized” teachers in the group, union and non-union, and we didn’t agree on all aspects of what professional compensation looked like, other than the fact that teachers were significantly underpaid for the service they provided to their communities.
There was one thing we all agreed on, however: teaching is not, never has been, a 9 to 5, punch in and out, job. Teachers generally get extra compensation for teaching an extra hour (giving up contractually granted planning time)–or for coaching, and other after-school programming.
But–as commenters on the EdWeek piece noted–if we were to, say, offer teachers money for staying late to read 150 essays and provide written feedback, or to grade dozens of constructed-response math tests, districts would run out of money by October. Or, as one cynical commenter noted, teachers would quickly be forbidden to do anything above and beyond, because it would be deemed too expensive. So–counterproductive.
It’s worth noting that our report on changing teacher pay for good reasons was written nearly 20 years ago, and while there have been a handful of alternative compensation models since (and also plenty of glossy reports), even EdWeek–seriously, one assumes–is still asking readers if teachers should get overtime.
If there’s one question on the minds of my friend group these days—old friends, fellow teachers, new acquaintances, anyone paying attention—it’s this: How can anyone, let alone a third of the population, look at current events in the United States in the past year, and believe that we are on the right track, doing OK, making our people and nation stronger?
Teaching has never been easy, but it’s really a miracle that so many fine teachers are still in the classroom and finding some satisfaction in their work there. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey on teacher morale, teachers described their feelings about teaching as a very lukewarm positive—a +13 on a 200-point scale, ranging from -100 to +100.
Last year, teachers were slightly more positive, at +18, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the world’s most important and rewarding profession. Interesting nugget: teachers in Arkansas reported the highest morale (+24); Pennsylvania, the lowest (+1). Make of that what you will.
Which is why I loved reading Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy.Macy, who also wrote Dopesick, a book that helped me understand opioid addiction, travels to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, once a thriving town with good schools and a solid middle class. She was looking for reasons that people there voted—three-quarters of them—for Trump.
Among her heroes, the people who are still seeking to preserve what’s good and healthy in a failing Midwestern town, are teachers. The teachers she interviews, and whose work with and dedication to Urbana’s public school students is fierce and clear-eyed, are one of the last walls between kids making headway in life, and disaster.
Macy also remembers the teachers who helped her get away from a working-class background with the help of Pell grants, talent and a lot of luck. Her siblings were not so lucky—one of the most painful parts of her narrative are conversations with her brother and sisters, and her niece who suffered from a stepparent’s abuse.
It is through these conversations and seeing how despair and the empty promises of preachers and politicians impact the down and out, that I began to understand who votes for powerful liars, and why.
It also helps explain why Americans hate each other: The Pew Research Center finds that 53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”). In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92% say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% say they’re bad.
Macy does a superb job of weaving anecdotes and memoir about growing up in a town that feels very familiar to me, also a Midwestern girl. She analyzes just what went wrong, much of it having to do with international trade, the dangerous equity gap, decades of negative political messaging about welfare queens. The demise of empathy, and the rise of right-wing pole-barn churches with fundamentalist men at the pulpit. Greed. Racism. Sexism.
Although the book won a number of awards (and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books in 2025), I found the comments from readers enlightening. Either people loved it, finding that it deepened their understanding of just what is happening in the forgotten little towns across the country—or they hated it, believing Macy is encouraging people to talk to the enemy.
Which is a strategy that has not worked, commenters say. Unless we fight back—the “pound the negative message” model—we keep losing ground. Forget people in your past, your family. They’re the ones who voted him in. The enemy.
She’s also right about teachers—especially those with the courage to stand up for truth, for the kids they serve, no matter their prospects. Donation sent.
Here in northern Michigan, an elderly gentleman who’s spent his life working for progressive causes was so upset about seeing Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as apesthat he called his neighbor, offering to fund signs to place around our small county, saying HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. She honored his request, designing and ordering signs.
During this process, the gentleman died. The signs will be ready next week, and planting one at the end of my driveway will be both advocacy and memorial. What I’d really like to see is a couple of those signs posted around our local school. Because that’s one of the few places where hate speech and hate actions are actively discouraged and prohibited.
Read Paper Girl. If you’re like me, you’ll love it.
I haven’t written much about AI and education, for several reasons.
First, there are already many people writing compellingly and with considerable expertise about the uses and misuses of AI in the classroom. Some of those people will show up in this blog. Follow them. Read what they write.
This came to a head when I was invited to be part of an online panel on ed technologies. Presenters sent me the language they planned to use to introduce me—did I approve? I confirmed, and then they messaged back: the bio had been created by ChatGPT. Ha-ha.
Finally, I haven’t written much about AI because I just find it hard to conceptualize how it could be useful in the classroom. In other fields, perhaps—with a lot of caveats, oversight and suspicion—but it runs contrary to the essential purpose of teaching and learning. Doesn’t it?
It’s never seemed right to let machines do the ‘thinking’ or ‘creating’ that is better done, or at least attempted, daily, by children. In short, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been enlightened? So—shut up already?
For starters, who’s cool with Big Data collecting info on our public school kiddos’ engagement with their products? NEPC Report on digital platforms:
‘While educators may see platforms as neutral tools, they are in fact shaped by competing interests and hidden imperatives. Teachers, students, and administrators are only one market. The other market involves data on performance, usage patterns and engagement—data flowing to advertisers, data brokers and investors, often without users’ knowledge or consent.’
“AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced that will be “privately owned and sold to us.”
Why not take a pause—let’s call it a shutdown—on the race to embed AI in our schools? Why not sort through those competing interests and hidden imperatives? We’ve been bamboozled by climbing on attractive but ultimately damaging educational bandwagons before. Just who wants us on this one?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to approach this transformative technology with great caution, holding fast to the evergreen principle of teaching and learning being a social endeavor? To look at the available research before being bedazzled by something new?
‘Participants, mostly undergraduate and graduate students, who constructed essays with the assistance of ChatGPT exhibited less brain activity during the task than those participants who were asked to write on their own. The AI-users were much less likely to be able to recall what they had written and felt less ownership over their work. Independent evaluators who reviewed the essays found the AI-supported ones to be lacking in individuality and creativity.’
If you want to read better pieces on AI, many are hyperlinked in this blog. But here are a few folks whose words and thoughts come from places of deep knowledge and experience: Audrey Watters, the best Ed-Tech thinker on the planet, for my money.
Pete Buttigieg, who thinks ahead of trends. Stop worrying about when he’s going to run for President and start absorbing his ideas on politics and relevant policy. Including AI.
Lucian Truscott, who writes about many things and made me understand why AI may ultimately fail: The men who run the big AI companies would do well to think through what they are doing with all those big buildings and all that electricity they consume. The “answer,” such as it is, to what they are seeking to accomplish may not exist, or it may be simpler than they think.
My friend Peter Greene does a better job of debunking AI crapolathan anyone I know. I credit this to his decades of classroom experience, during which he Paid Attention to Things—things more important than launching new products and making the big bucks.
So why should anyone pay attention to what a tech skeptic writes about AI in schools?
Because we’ll all be lured into making photos come to life, or relying on a questionable AI answer to an important question, or laughing at Russ Vought as Grim Reaper. Sticky and fun, but ultimately shallow, inconsequential. Not what school-based learning should be.
Earlier this year, on a day when I made a (delicious) strawberry pie, I clicked on a song-writing app. Give us some lyrics, and a musical style, and we’ll write a song for you.
As events of the last week unfolded, it struck me that the blurry kids in the video would now be about the same age as Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk. Were they now part of the cluster of young white men who spend all their time online, getting radicalized? Do they follow Nick Fuentes or hang out on 4Chan?
Or—best case scenario—had they merely been immature, clueless, early-adolescent jerks whose irresponsible, harmful “prank” of insulting and perhaps scaring classmates of color, was made clear to them by a community of teachers and parents? In one of the news clips from 2016, the Royal Oak Superintendent talks about how the perpetrators will be dealt with summarily, keeping in mind that youthful mistakes can be learning experiences.
Because—despite the persistent myth that teachers should just spout content and inculcate skills, nothing more—learning happens in context. When some part of your class feels rejected, afraid or angry about being harassed in the cafeteria, nobody learns. Much of what we absorb in school are lessons about right and wrong. Civility and respect.
Things that weren’t on the lesson plan–no matter how old your students, or which subject you’re teaching. School is where students learn to deal with personal differences, taking turns and not always getting your way. And teachers—witness the illustration for this blog, just posted by a friend in a series of photos of her classroom—create materials, lessons and discussions to that effect, right out of the gate, even though it’s often considered not their job or, any more, none of their business.
We are at a point, this week, where teachers in twelve states have been fired or suspended for making remarks online about Charlie Kirk’s murder. In some states—you can guess which—state officials are inviting anonymous tips on teachers who may have said something in class that offended somebody, although the veracity of who said what, reported by students, then routed through parents, has to be uncertain at best.
Not to mention a giant waste of time at the beginning of the school year, as teachers are trying to build community and trust. Nor is any of this reducing the likelihood of the most politicized and terrifying violence in our classrooms: school shootings.
While teachers should absolutely keep their partisan loyalties to themselves, speaking about political violence is speaking about current events. As Brittany Page says:
“Political violence” isn’t just a conservative activist getting murdered.
Political violence is a Supreme Court that gives the green light for people to be stopped and detained based on their perceived race or ethnicity, what language they speak, where they work, and where they happen to be standing.
Click on the link. It’s a powerful piece, proof that we are all wading around in political violence every day, no matter how much they want us to shut up about it. It’s evil. To pretend it doesn’t exist makes it even more dangerous for all of us, including children.
‘Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Times change; people change.‘
The best part of that quote comes at the end. Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.
Robert Reich: ‘If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.
The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity.‘
Every clause in that last paragraph ought to be taught every day in every classroom in America. It’s the antidote to political violence.
A few years back, I was facilitating a day-long workshop of self-identified teacher leaders in a western state. The topic: Blogging as a Tool for Change. It was a room chock-full of smart, feisty, articulate educators, eager to share their experiences, to let the world know how complicated and important their work was.
There were teachers whose students’ families were largely undocumented—they talked about student registration cards where there were no listed addresses or phone numbers. Some of them taught in districts where all the homes cost more than a million dollars; some of them taught on an Indian reservation. All of their stories were powerful.
Then a prospective blogger asked: Where will we get our ideas for what to blog about? How will we frame our experiences as part of a bigger picture? (I told you they were smart.)
It won’t be a problem, I assured them. Not if you follow the news, read education journalism, and think every day about the world our children will live in, what things you can teach them that they will use for their whole lives. I told them I kept an always-full folder on my desktop, where I dumped articles, quotes, links to reports, ideas to develop.
I told them there was plenty to write about. Start with provocative questions—something like Is this the end of public education?(hearty laughter around the room)
Besides, all teachers with a few years under their belts are familiar with the education pendulum. First, we “all” (OK, some) believe in one immutable pedagogical fundamental, then a new way comes along, and we shift (or are involuntarily shifted) to new practice. Until the Next Big Thing comes along.
Moral: Be wary of the silver bullet. And understand that every new administration brings its own bag of ideas designed to ‘fix’ all the existing problems.
Remember when personal devices were dubbed the Library of Congress in every HS student’s pocket—and now entire states are banning cell phones in the classroom? New Math? Grit? Americans seem to be susceptible to the latest and (frequently not) greatest. There are things of value in almost every trend or program. But no education trend is the One Best Way.
Five years later, I actually wrote a blog titled The Demise of Genuinely Public Education: You might think I would be applying the evergreen ‘this too will pass’ theory to what’s happening today, confident that the pendulum will swing, the pandemic angst will fade,and we’ll be back to our highly imperfect normal: public education under siege, but still standing. It’s taken some time for me to come to this opinion, but I foresee the end of what we currently call public education.
That was a hard thing to write. I think public education is genuinely America’s best idea: a free, high-quality education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.
One of my favorite education writers and thinkers, Jennifer Berkshire, recently posted this piece: Is Public Education Over? It’s a terrific, wide-ranging read that pulls no punches in listing a number of blockheaded, failed education reforms that we seem to have learned nothing from (sometimes, both ends of the pendulum are disasters):
Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers’ unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.
Berkshire mentions that major media outlets (not that they are bastions of truth and integrity anymore) are routinely posting op-ed content about the end of public schools as we knew them—despite the fact that upwards of 80% of all American kids still go to public schools.
Why would we abandon public schools’ infrastructure and experienced personnel? Crushing public education is not policy—it’s vandalism. It makes no sense.
Maybe the question is not: Is Public Education Over? Maybe the question is: What’s worth saving in public education?
Things to salvage from public education: Neighborhood schools. Honoring diversity. World-class universities. Scholarship and community. Music and art. I could list 100 things.
We have entered a whole new phase of threat to public education. Many things that seemed impossible—like quasi-military forces marching on Chicago-–are now daily news. Education funding is threatened (or yanked) and will remain iffy for some time.
Not a great way to start the 2025-26 school year. And yet—I was in a classroom last weekend, two days before school started, and there were all the names of kids in the new class, taped to their desks. By a teacher, getting ready.
I still believe that public education is the answer to the rising tide lifting all boats.
And I pray that it survives.
Photo: My grandmother, in front of her public school, 11-2-1900. She’s 4th from the right.
I’ve been more or less off the grid for the past two weeks, vacationing in Alaska and determined not to let the repellent Epstein Saga or other assorted travesties spoil the snow-capped mountain vistas. Which means that a whole lot of education-related stories have been waiting in my mailbox.
Makes you wonder where this unsubstantiated condemnation comes from—that’s the disappointing part. These articles (and more just like them, hacking away at our public schools) are from Bridge Magazine, a fairly centrist, nonpartisan publication that focuses on issues in the Mitten State.
I interviewed its founder, eminent journalist Phil Power, shortly after Bridge launched, in 2011, and invited him to speak to the Michigan Teacher Forum, where he proclaimed his undying support for public education and especially for the hard-working teachers in Michigan public schools. Bridge seems to have moved on from those ideas, however, adopting a common politicized perspective: Oh no! Our state is falling behind other states!
There’s a lot to debunk in the series of Bridge articles (wherein I found precisely one veteran teacher quoted, mildly suggesting that the silver-bullet “Science of Reading” prescription was only one of the ways that students learned to read), but I am too jet-lagged to tackle these, point-by-point, at the moment.
“While I won’t denigrate Mississippi’s efforts to improve its academics, the picture being painted by at least one Michigan publication that Mississippi is outperforming Michigan on the NAEP reading test (“The Nation’s Report Card”) is MISLEADING.
While Mississippi has *scored higher than Michigan ONE TIME over the past decade on the Grade 4 NAEP reading test . . .
Michigan has *scored higher than Mississippi EVERY TIME over the past decade on the Grade 8 NAEP reading test.
The assertion in the Michigan publication that Michigan “abandoned” our 3rd grade read-or-flunk law to our detriment is not supported by test score data.
It’s not surprising that states that flunk their “worst” 3rd grade readers achieve elevated results ahead of the Grade 4 NAEP reading test, but these elevated test scores tend to flatten over time (by Grade 8 NAEP reading), like they do with Mississippi.
This is borne out in NAEP data from other states as well, like Florida, which also flunks its worst performing 3rd grade readers.”
What all these pieces have in common might be called uninformed–or “lazy,” take your pick–journalism. Education data is not easy to interpret, nor is it truth. One example: A NAEP score of “Proficient” doesn’t mean “on grade level”as most people (including some education journalists) seem to think it does.
Worse, relying solely on test scores doesn’t tell us how successful schools actually are. For that, we need to look at a wide range of factors. It’s interesting that, two weeks before Bridge launched its so-called Moment of Reckoning, they published a piece noting that only 9% of the state’s public schools currently have a full-time librarian.
Think that has anything to do with our faltering reading scores?
In the end, schools are comprised of people and programming. The more instruction is tailored to the students in that school, the more dedicated and skilled the personnel are, the better the results. Score competitions with other states are pointless.
There are hundreds of ways to improve student learning: Universal free preschool attached to high-quality childcare. Smaller classes, especially for our youngest learners. Recruiting, training and paying a long-term teaching force. Stable housing and health care for all children. A hot breakfast and lunch, plus plenty of recess time. Government supports for public education.I could go on.
None of these are free, or likely to come down the pike in Michigan or anywhere else in the near future.
I read it because I couldn’t really think of anything “better” than DEI, as a values template for effective teaching and learning. More on what the author thinks is better, in a minute.
I am of the opinion that DEI no longer can be defined as three important values: the desirability of diversity in making an organization and its goals stronger, the principle of providing equitable resources instead of a dangerous gap between haves and have-nots, and the human need to be included.
As a teacher in a (mostly white) school, long before DEI was something that could be positioned as wrong and against the law, let alone “replaced,” I would have to say that inclusion, equity and valuing student diversity were and remain cornerstones of good classroom practice.
But I realize—and this is what I hoped to understand in reading the article—that policies loosely grouped as “DEI” (affirmative action springs to mind) were maybe a topic that hadn’t been discussed enough to be clarified. Maybe there are other ways to create policies that acknowledged the worth of every student, no matter what they brought to the table, and the struggle to give them resources, including knowledge, tailored to help them live productive lives.
As if.
The author begins with a quote from John McWhortertaken out of context, then lays out his thesis: Linda McMahon signaled she wants to replace DEI with individual student agency, enabled by strong families and schools. He then proceeds to explain how he rose above his working-class station, even though he was forced to attend mediocre public schools, because his family instilled character and a work ethic into their children.
Unlike, of course, other—let’s call them ‘diverse’—families and children, who got into trouble and didn’t achieve. He pushes the success sequence (college, job, marriage, children) as his “something better” alternative to his skewed conception of DEI. As for student agency—something I heartily endorse and practiced for 30 years–he seems to confuse actual agency with a concept right-leaning educators raved about a decade ago: student grit (which leads to hard work, obeying orders and school success).
The whole piece feels like a narrow-vision essay on who deserves to succeed, buttressed by quotes from political leaders and deliberate lies about what teachers are telling students, topped with a light frosting of racism.
So—what should replace DEI?
Actually, if you’re taking away (via federally approved punishments and reduced funding) inclusion, equity and diversity, what you’ve got left is exclusion of non-preferred students, discriminatory distribution of resources, and separation of student groups based on physical characteristics. In other words, Arkansas in 1957. What happens when a latter-day Orval Faubus emerges?
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a great piece on the anti-student inclusion groups and initiatives forming around the country—this goes way beyond Moms for Exclusion—and (important) who’s funding them: Together, these groups represent a growing trend: weaponizing public outrage and social media virality to enforce a narrow vision of education. Their strategies of harassment and public shaming have injected fear into discussions around race, gender and equity in the classroom.
So—one thing that can happen is resisting that fear, teachers intentionally developing collegial trust, clarifying their mission to serve all children well. And yes, I spent more than three decades in the classroom, most of those in a single district, and fully understand just how difficult that prescription would be. But still—courage and persistence are essential when you’re resisting something malign. And the anti-DEI movement is definitely malign.
I was taken by this piece by James Greenberg, shared by one of his Facebook friends:
“This dislocation isn’t imaginary. It’s rooted in real structural shifts. The collapse of industrial jobs, the erosion of social mobility, the fragmentation of public education, the disappearance of local media—all contribute to a pervasive sense of loss. Add to that climate disasters, housing precarity, and the stripping of rural and working-class communities by extractive economics, and you get fertile ground for stories that promise a return to order—even if that order is cruel.
The “stolen America” narrative—amplified by cable news, talk radio, and algorithmic social media—offers a simple explanation: you are losing because others are taking what’s yours. It’s a lie, but a compelling one, because it replaces confusion with clarity. It locates blame. It gives identity to those who feel erased.”
I would add to Greenberg’s analysis—the COVID-19 pandemic. But I like his characterization of public education as fragmented. Because that is precisely what has happened to our public schools, even those who rode the COVID wave, then dug into repairing the damage it did to trust in our teachers and school leaders. The voucher craze isn’t about giving parents choices—it’s about breaking up successful school districts attempting to serve all students as best they can.
What can replace DEI? Nothing. If we lose our framework of serving all kids equitably, we go backwards 75 years.
I remember learning–perhaps in a grad class or professional development session, years ago–that boys didn’t like to read about girl things. You know—relationships, communication, emotions, the finer points of making a home or enriching family life. Boys wanted to read stories about adventures, we were told. Starring, naturally, other boys.
Ergo, if we wanted to turn boys into enthusiastic readers, we needed books where boys did boy stuff—creeks, animals, cars, fights, danger, you name it. Write it and they will come.
I thought about this when re-reading A Separate Peace this month. My book club is doing a “Books You’ve Already Read—or should have read” month, and I thought it was time to re-read a book that I put on my Top Ten list for decades.
(Seriously—I kept continuously updated top ten lists of books, movies and LPs until I had both children and a full-time job. There are still some gems on those lists—but also some really embarrassing stuff.)
I wouldn’t, however, call Separate Peace an embarrassing pick. I read it in high school, although not as a class novel. In the late 60s, my public high school adopted a choice-based language arts curriculum. Instead of English 9/10/etc, there was an array of semester-long courses. I took journalism, speed reading and Great Books, a totally wonderful class where students did nothing but read books, then journal their impressions.
There was a list of great books (SP was on it), but you could also deviate, with the teacher’s permission. It was that teacher—Mrs. Palmer—who introduced me to Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, and Madeleine L’Engel.
It’s hard for me to put my finger now on why I loved Separate Peace so much. Partly, it was the boarding school setting—what it would be like to live in dorms, with other students whose parents weren’t scraping to pay the mortgage, for whom college was a certainty, not a stretch.
Mostly, though, I think it was because—spoiler—there’s a death in the book, under unusual circumstances, leading the reader (this teenaged reader, anyway) to muse on Big Meaningful Issues. In case you’re wondering whether I noticed the homoerotic flavor of the relationship between the narrator and his best friend, the answer (1969) is no and (2025) yes.
But here’s what really jumped out at me, some 50+ years later: there are no women in this book. Aside from a couple of sentences mentioning a screechy school nurse, and a sentence describing a classmate’s mother as kindly, there is zero female presence in this book. There’s plenty of adventure, danger, scrapes and disobedience. Even a student-led tribunal, and a World War. But not a single woman, or girl.
Cook said the publishing landscape has changed “dramatically” over the past 15 years as a reaction to the “prevailing toxic male-dominated literary scene of the 80s, 90s and noughties”. Now, “excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction is around female authors – and this is only right as a timely corrective”.
“This new breed of young female authors, spearheaded by Sally Rooney et al, ushered in a renaissance for literary fiction by women, giving rise to a situation where stories by new male authors are often overlooked, with a perception that the male voice is problematic,” he said.
Hunh. I wasn’t really paying attention to any toxic literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, due to the aforementioned family and job. But I was still reading a lot—and was deeply involved in whether and what my students were reading. Or not reading.
It was a time when getting any kind of reading material—from comic books to Captain Underpants— into kids’ hands was the prescription for reluctant readers. There was a rolling bookshelf in my band room, filled with books about music and musicians. Some had some vaguely naughty photos. I purchased all of them, and they were well used.
My take on any reduction in male readers in the 21st century is that omnipresent screens, not problematic masculine voices, are responsible.
Still. What I notice about this (well-meant, I assume) announcement is that it only took a couple of decades for men to perceive that women were “ushering in a renaissance,” then set up their own literary clubhouse, no girls allowed.
There’s also this: Less than half of parents find it fun to read aloud to their children, new research shows. Only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 agreed that “reading books to my child is fun for me”, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen and publisher HarperCollins. The survey shows a steep decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0- to four-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012.
A significant gender disparity was identified, with 29% of 0- to two-year-old boys being read to every day or nearly every day compared with 44% of girls of the same age.
Plus this, ominously:Many parents focus on the literacy element of reading, seeing it as a skill, rather than encouraging a love for reading in their children.
So—who’s not reading, and why?
If you talk to the Science of Reading crowd,boys’ reading difficulties and reluctance to read can be laid at the feet of teachers who were never taught the only correct protocols for reading instruction, or—worse—fail to use them with fidelity, a word I have come to loathe when applied to pedagogy.
And since the overwhelming majority of early-grades teachers are women, this can be construed as another way in which women are not paying attention to the needs of boys. But it’s so much more complex than phonemic awareness, yada yada.
The Great Books class at my high school only lasted a few years, then fell when the “cafeteria curriculum” became outmoded, in favor of … what? I forget. Back to Basics? One of our cyclical returns to The Canon—in which white male-authored books have literally always been deemed more worthy of study?
All children deserve to be read to, daily, even when they’re able to read themselves. Stories about both boys and girls. Because that’s how they learn to be curious about the real world.
I can remember the first time I heard about ADHD. It was in the early 1990s—and the person who was educating me was the mother of one of my students. His teachers—six of us, plus an admin—were sitting around a table, meeting to discuss his classroom behaviors (not good), when she whipped out stapled packets of articles on ADD.
He’d been officially diagnosed, and she was part of a parent support group, which provided materials for teachers. The packets she gave us were thick—maybe 50 pages—and filled with scientific-sounding information about diagnosis and treatment of this disease, then thought to apply to perhaps three percent of all students.
Reading through it (rather than round-filing it, as a couple of colleagues did), you could see what was coming. The Attention-Deficit Era had begun. He wasn’t hyperactive or oppositional-defiant, or a troublemaker. Not anymore. He had ADD.
Let me say, upfront, that I believe ADHD is a real thing, and using medication judiciously to treat it is often a lifesaver for parents and teachers. Let me also say that the way some classrooms operate is not conducive to deep learning for a range of students who need lots of movement and hands-on activities. And—side note– this is often not their teachers’ fault, given our increasing national focus on testing, compliance and narrowing the curriculum. Raising the damned bar.
I was horrified to read in Paul Tough’s excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?that nearly a quarter of 17-year old boys in the United States have now been diagnosed as having ADHD. Tough does a good job of tracking the factors—drug treatments, specifically—that have made one in four boys unable to focus in a quiet classroom without chemical assistance.
He rightfully notes that ADHD symptoms also look like a lot of other things: anxiety, head injury, lead exposure and many other traumas.
But the piece ends on a hopeful note, with lots of testimony from young adult men who have found the right jobs and life circumstances and seldom experience troublesome ADHD symptoms. Which makes me ponder what there is about school that makes the kids we used to call hyperactive need drugs to get by every day, even though the medicines don’t improve their learning.
“Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”
The kid whose mother insisted he had a disease, rather than merely being disobedient? He was, in fact, hyperactive and prone to (cheerfully) destroying order in a classroom. Once, while I was moving band equipment, chairs and stands across the hall from the band room for an assembly in the gym, I instructed him to load percussion equipment on a flat pushcart. (Teacher tip: Always give restless students an important job.)
Instead, he assembled the drum set on the cart, then had another kid push him down the hall while he pounded out a little Metallica. Down the hall—and past the office. It didn’t end well for either of us. He wasn’t a bad drummer, by the way. According to mom, it was his favorite class.
I looked him up on internet, and he’s now a multimillion-selling real estate agent. Go figure.
I taught for two more decades after that day I first heard of ADD. Lots more students were diagnosed with ADD, over time—then, ADHD. My colleagues and I talked often about accurate language, and accurate diagnoses, and the differences in kids when they were medicated. Sometimes, parents let teachers know their child had been diagnosed—sometimes, they didn’t.
I took kids to camp and on field trips where I had to administer their ADHD medications, or have conversations with their concerned parents about behavior issues when they were unmedicated—at an evening performance or band camp.
And I often felt grateful that I was teaching band, with 65 students at once, all holding noisemakers. There was a lot of stimulation in the band room, plenty of activity. There was also discipline (because otherwise there would be chaos), but my attention-deficit kids could tolerate rules and procedures, as long as they were moving and doing things. Mostly.
I also taught 7th grade math for two years. I found that maintaining student focus with 28 students in a desks-and-chalkboard setting was often way more difficult than keeping 60 band kids on track.
Read Paul Tough’s piece, if you get a chance. It’s nuanced and layered with contradictions, like most things about schooling, and raising healthy children. We could be doing lots more for kids who are immersed in screens and entertainment daily, and have difficulty staying on task when that task involves paper and pencils.
But then—we could be doing a lot more for many kids, who bring their various backgrounds and issues to school. If only we had the resources. And a genuine commitment to the next generation.
I am just back from the Network for Public Education conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is an eight-hour drive from my house, and we arrived at the same time as ongoing flood warnings. But—as usual—it was well worth the time and effort expended.
For most of my career—35 years—I was a classroom teacher. Garden-variety teachers are lucky to get out of Dodge and attend a conference with their peers maybe once a year. Teachers don’t get airfare for conferences in other states and often end up sharing rides and rooms, splitting pizzas for dinner. They go with the intention of getting many new ideas for their practice toolboxes—lesson plans, subject discipline trends and tips, cool new materials—and to connect with people who do what they do. Be inspired, maybe, or just to commiserate with others who totally get it.
In the real world (meaning: not schools), this is called networking. Also in the real world—there’s comp time for days missed at a weekend conference, and an expense form for reimbursements. Conversely, in schools, lucky teachers get a flat grant to partially compensate for registration, mileage, hotel and meals. In many other schools, nobody goes to a conference, because there’s just not enough money, period.
When you hear teachers complaining about meaningless professional development, it’s often because of that very reason—there’s not enough money to custom-tailor professional learning, so everyone ends up in the auditorium watching a PowerPoint and wishing they were back in their classrooms.
Back in 1993, when Richard Riley was Secretary of Education, his special assistant, Terry Dozier, a former National Teacher of the Year, established the first National Teacher Forum. (In case you’re wondering, the Forums lasted just as long as the Clinton administration, and Riley, were in the WH.) Teachers of the Year from all 50 states attended. The purpose of the conference was to engage these recognized teachers in the decision-making that impacted their practice. In other words, policy.
It was probably the most memorable conference I ever attended. I took nothing home to use in my band classroom, but left with an imaginary soapbox and new ideas about how I could speak out on education issues, engage policymakers, and assign value to my experience as a successful teacher. The National Teacher Forum literally changed my life, over the following decades.
But—the idea that teachers would start speaking out, having their ideas get as much traction as novice legislators’ or Gates-funded researchers, was a hard sell. Education thinkers aren’t in the habit of recognizing teacher wisdom, except on a semi-insulting surface level. In the hierarchy of public education workers, teachers are at the lowest level of the pyramid, subject to legislative whims, accrued data and faulty analyses, and malign forces of privatization.
Which is why it was heartening to see so many teachers (most from Ohio) at the conference. The vibe was big-picture: Saving public education. Debunking current myths about things like AI and silver-bullet reading programs. Discussing how churches are now part of the push to destabilize public schools. New organizations and elected leaders popping up to defend democracy, school by school and state by state. An accurate history of how public education has been re-shaped by politics. The resurgence of unions as defenders of public education.
Saving public education. A phrase that has taken on new and urgent meaning, in the last three months. Every single one of the keynote speakers was somewhere between on-point and flat-out inspirational.
Here’s the phrase that kept ringing in my head: We’re in this together.
The last two speakers were AFT President Randi Weingarten and MN Governor Tim Walz. I’ve heard Weingarten speak a dozen times or more, and she’s always articulate and fired-up. But it was Walz, speaking to his people, who made us laugh and cry, and believe that there’s hope in these dark times.
He remarked that his HS government teacher—class of 24 students, very rural school—would never have believed that Tim Walz would one day be a congressman, a successful governor and candidate for Vice-President. It was funny—but also another reason to believe that public schools are pumping out leaders every day, even in dark times.
In an age where we can hear a speaker or transmit handouts digitally—we still need real-time conferences. We need motivation and personal connections. Places where true-blue believers in the power of public education can gather, have a conversation over coffee, hear some provocative ideas and exchange business cards. Network.
Teacher in a strange land 