When I was in third grade, I contracted the mumps. This was my final act in the 50’s-Kid Illness Trifecta: measles, chicken pox, mumps. Back then, pre-vaccine, this was considered No Big Deal. Polio was the thing to worry about—it was a killer. I had a cousin die, at age two, from polio, but nobody knew anyone who lost their life from the mumps.

Unfortunately, however, I developed encephalitis—a brain inflammation—from mumps. I don’t have a lot of information about how the illness was diagnosed or treated; my mother, who would have been the keeper of that knowledge, is long gone. I only know that I was out of school for nearly two months.

I have these distinct 8-year old kid memories: Going to the hospital for tests. Needle pokes. Terrible headaches and keeping my face covered by a towel. Bitter blue pills that I took in applesauce. And lying in bed, alone, for weeks on end, as winter turned into spring.

When I returned to school, I was sent for achievement testing. This was not to find out how far I’d fallen behind, but because all the other third graders had taken the test while I was absent. I was pulled out of class and given the test by a different teacher.

When I finished, she took a pencil and skimmed through the answer sheet. You’re a very smart little girl, she said. This made me incredibly happy–and is undoubtedly the reason why I remember a random remark made 60 years ago. Nobody in my family had ever called me smart. In fact, my mother worried because I spent too much time in the house, with my ‘nose in a book.’

And nobody, as far as I can tell, was stressed about how far behind I may have fallen. Kids got sick, they came back to school, teachers tried to catch them up. Sometimes they zoomed forward. Other times, not. Because that’s what learning was like—sometimes fast, sometimes slower. No big deal.

I read today that Australia has decided that when schools re-open, school attendance will be at parents’ discretion. Those parents who are able to work from home have the option of keeping their children home and using school-provided on-line resources. Parents who are essential workers and have out-of-home jobs to return to may send their children back to bricks-and-mortar schools.

My first thought was that schooling is hard enough when all the kids are there, or all the kids are remote. Expecting schools to smoothly adapt to a bifurcated instructional plan is probably another step toward outright chaos in public education. Leaving us even more vulnerable to astro-turf ‘Commissions’ like these people, waiting in the wings to scoop up funding and ‘create (profitable) solutions.’

My second thought was that hybrid home instruction/physical school might well happen here. We are, at the very least, a year and half away from a world where children are not only themselves safe from a virus, but unlikely to become adorable little vectors.

For all the good—and real—conversations about how invaluable school is in our national social and economic organization, there has been no solid, easily adopted plan for re-starting public education. We may end up with something that looks quite different at first, and we may morph—for much better or far worse—into a completely altered conception of how ‘school’ works.

Here’s an example: A friend posted the suggestion that students return to school in the classroom they were in when formal school ended, in March. That would, she argued, preserve teacher knowledge about students’ strengths and weaknesses and allow the most tailored, individualized instruction.

Immediately, her elementary-school colleagues started raising ‘buts’—but who will teach the new kindergartners? But what will the 7^th grade receiving teachers do—will middle school also have to stay at the same level with the same teachers? But what about seniors? But I don’t want to teach the next-grade curriculum!

All of these arguments are based on the idea that all important knowledge and skills can be divided into thirteen neat slices and all students should encounter, engage with and even master these slices, in order, based on their age, before they can successfully navigate to the next grade or higher education or the world of work.

Which is ludicrous. Everyone—and especially teachers—knows this is absurd.

Countless articles and books, and reams of scholarly research have confirmed this inescapable fact, which seems to have been the common (and accepted) wisdom when I was in third grade, 60 years ago: Kids learn at different rates, and those rates are variable throughout any school year or other formal period of learning. Also, they’re better at learning some things than others. That’s just the way it is. Do your best to move them forward.

Which leads to this question: How did we get to the point where everyone in the country agreed that certainly no child should be left behind—and then spend billions of dollars trying to precisely define what ‘left behind’ means, using questionable tests and multiple linear regressions?

If there is one good thing that comes out of this pandemic, in terms of public education, it might be an agreement that all children are potentially being ‘left behind,’ right now, in mastering ‘grade level’ concepts. So pricey common core curricula and the expensive standardized tests they support can be acknowledged as useless for the next few years, and perhaps forever.

Creative, compassionate teaching, hybrid schools, flexible schedules and a focus on needs-based, rather than standardized, learning might actually catch on. And we wouldn’t ever have to label a child as ‘left behind’ again.

Reading is my greatest pleasure in life. Well, one of my greatest pleasures.

There’s music, and the Lake Michigan beaches and my family and my daffodils and a few other personal items on that list. But I absolutely love to read.

My idea of a perfect afternoon is a good book and a glass of wine and either a toasty fire or a shady patio. We travel west every February for a few weeks of Arizona sunshine, and I usually log a dozen or more books that month, fiction and non-fiction. This year, I read 15, before a looming pandemic chased us back across the country and home.

So you would think I’d be buried in books during the enforced home stay, tucked up and cozy, in my quiet household. But no.

I am finding it incredibly difficult to read books. And I am not alone.

According to Christian Jarrett, PhD, a clinical psychologist based in the U.K.:  “Research shows that chronic stress affects the way the front of the brain works—the area…[that] normally controls our ability to concentrate and switch attention from one thing to another.” Simply put, during something as stressful as living through a global pandemic, “we lose our usual mental flexibility and become highly focused on the source of the threat,” making it difficult to lose yourself in another world.

Which makes sense. Because it is not that I am finding it impossible to read. It’s that I’m reading compulsively all day—news and articles and analysis and, damn it, Tweets, memes and blogs of varying quality. Short, disconnected bits of information and opinion. And 90% of it frightening to some degree.

When I sit down to read a book now, I am usually reading on my iPad. The library closed a month ago. We live so far out in the boonies that we are not within our library’s formal district boundaries, so we are not entitled to download books. Don’t helpfully suggest Overdrive or Hoopla—they’re for folks who reside in a library district.

I have read every hardcopy library book I took out before closure (upside: no late fines) and am stuck with buying books for my e-reader. Reading on an iPad means that checking out what I have missed in the last, oh, twenty minutes of focus is just two clicks away. Bye-bye historic fiction or mystery novel. Hello, rising death toll and political malfeasance.

And yes, I know perfectly well that these are the first-world problems of someone incredibly lucky and sequestered.

I have been looking for the perfect escape read. As it happens, I pre-ordered Sarah Kendzior’s new book  Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America,  a few weeks ago and it was delivered to my Kindle last week, just as I was casting about for something that would be so magnetic I couldn’t tear myself away.

Holy tamales. I have been a Kendzior fan since November 2016, when I read her piece We’re Heading Into Dark Times. It was one of those things that you read, and bookmark—in the hopes that someday it will be laughable and obsolete, that things will turn out better and all the angst will fade into obscurity. Sigh.

Kendzior has great credentials, and this book is an easier, more coherent read than her previous book, The View from Flyover Country.  Kendzior completed the book last fall, before the impeachment hearings and before the pandemic.

I have now read about 10 full-on books about Donald Trump and his administration—some with excellent insights into the man and his character and others simply more detailed reporting on what has happened since he announced his candidacy. But Hiding in Plain Sight is different. It rolls back the camera and history to the 1980s when Trump was a flashy New York wheeler-dealer, serial philanderer and con man, in and out of financial trouble. You see how he has, over time, made the US part of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.

Pieces of evidence I had never considered before fell into place, stunning the reader. But the beauty of the book is that it was not written by a left-wing political analyst whose parents paid for his Ivy League education. It was written by a woman who is currently taking her school-age children to state and national parks to see them, to know what our country was once like, before the friendliness and preserved grandeur fade.

It is a far better analysis of who we really are than your standard old-men-at-the-Waffle-House. And it gives the reader a lot to chew on.

Five stars for the book, the first to hold my undivided attention in the past month.

But now—I desperately need something light and amusing. Help me out here. Patio weather will be here in no time.

The NY Times launched a series of investigations and articles Thursday around this theme:

It may not feel like it now, but out of this crisis there’s a chance to build a better America: the America we need.

I look forward to reading every single one of the articles—yesterday’s were about our broken health care system and why the rich fear pandemics—but the introductory piece, which is rich in historical examples of sweeping change, made me ask: What good things might come out of this pandemic?

Certainly not the trust in our government that the German people have, the confidence that made them follow the rules, flatten their curve and listen to Mrs. Merkel.

You can already see the folks in power itching to return to the way things were six weeks ago. They’re restless, fretting about an economy that’s rewarded them and left the rest of the country one paycheck and one dangerous job away from disaster.

They are not going for a new normal, one that’s more equitable, with safety and reward spread across the population. They’re trying to figure out how to benefit from the crisis, play the angles.  From the POTUS, yesterday: Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten.

Well. I want to open up our great country, too, once it’s safe—but I want this horror to serve as a reminder, forever, of all the things that need changing. Out of this crisis, we really could get a better country, but only if we are willing to fight for it.

My ideas about things that might emerge and stick, if we’re lucky and if we hustle, from this pandemic:

1.  Science becomes sexy again and brings math along for the ride. Merely observing social media attempts to calculate the mortality rate of this virus is enough to give any math teacher a headache. Data analysis has become a daily life-vs-death task. And you have to love a world where Anthony Fauci is everyone’s new hero.  Coping with a virus is expanding vocabularies, building scientific literacies and a respect for genuine, factchecked expertise—for nearly everyone.  Every teacher now has a valid and compelling answer for: Why do we have to learn this stuff?

2. Better air and water quality. You may have seen the pictures of Venetian canals, deep blue and transparent for the first time in a century. You may have read about temporarily clean air over the smoggiest cities, or about citizens in India, now seeing the Himalayas for the first time. But did you know that breathing polluted air makes it more likely that you’ll get COVID-19, and less likely that you’ll survive? Wouldn’t it be great if we got used to cleaner air and water and decided to do whatever it took to keep it that way?

3. Renewed friendships. One of my husband’s oldest school friends just organized a one-hour Zoom meeting for the gang of guys who hung out together, in their madras shirts, in the 1960s. No special reason—just an hour of catching up, hearing about kids and grandkids, laughing. There is an underlying message, however, to every phone call out of the blue, every event planned for fall or 2021: You matter to me. Let’s make it through this. I love you.

4. A Complete re-do of American elections. This one is multi-layered and complicated. For once, the hype is true: this election matters more than any in your lifetime. If the Democrats hang tough (and they should), we might get national mail-in voting with other policies that make registration and voting easier for the November election. Americans overwhelmingly want this.

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

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

5. Return of the Post Office and other federal institutions that should not be privatized or replaced by for-profit services. I live in a remote area. ‘One-day’ deliveries from FedEx and UPS often go an extra day or two—and if something needs to be returned, it’s a 50-mile round trip. But the lady from the local Post Office, driving her own adapted car, comes up my driveway. I love the USPS. The Post Office—through no fault of its own—needs a debt bailout. The USPS is now incredibly important for vulnerable and sequestered citizens and will become, God willing, the centerpiece of the November elections. We could stop flirting with privatizing any number of public services (including prisons, schools and the military). We could fund them adequately, paying workers reasonable salaries and benefits. Some things are public, and need to stay public, that’s why.

6. Rethinking the purpose of schooling. I wrote another blog about this—here. Short summary: The attempt to move schooling online has revealed chasms of inequity, and made clear that what K-12 students need, first, is trust in their teachers, a human connection to learning. There are a half-dozen policies that could change—unnecessary testing, useless standardization, grading, uses of technology and so on—but all depend on a national change of heart, re: public education. Once we have generally agreed that the purpose of public education is to offer every child, no matter what they bring to the table, a free, high-quality education, then we can start re-shaping our practice.

7. Recognition that bandwidth and technological access are the 21^st century equivalents of electricity. The Rural Electrification Administration was created by the Roosevelt Administration in 1935 to bring electricity to rural areas. Only 10% of farmers and rural dwellers had access to electricity in the 1930s. Private companies didn’t want to spend the money to run lines to poor people. In 10 years, the REA had improved that statistic to 90%, connecting rural citizens and farmers to running water, refrigerators, modern sanitation and the radio. The Superintendent of Schools in Michigan just reported that a full third of our students do not have access to the internet or devices to use it. It’s time to recognize that access to the internet is equivalent to bringing electricity to farmers and rural areas in the 1930s.

8. The United States become united, rather than 50 competitors. Our president, of course, is operating on precisely the opposite principle: divide and conquer. The more competition and hostility he can generate—through supply theft, preferential distribution of necessities, and plain old nasty remarks—the more he thinks he’s solidifying his base. But there is significant evidence that states aren’t having it. Governors, Republican or Democrat, interviewed on TV, talk about the outstanding leadership of their gubernatorial colleagues without regard to party. They are sending critical supplies from their own stocks to where they’re needed. They’re stepping up, forming networks, generating trust and cooperation between states. It’s the states who are moving to build the unity necessary to federalize the response. Remember how it felt after 9/11? We could have that ‘one country’ feeling again.

9. Factual news becomes the go-to source for Americans. OK, this one’s a stretch—and depends on election outcomes. But even the Wall Street Journal, bastion of bankers and corporate interests, has sharply criticized the President’s fact-free daily rallies. VP Mike Pence backed down from his demand that CNN air all of the President’s baloney sausage, and not just the qualified public health authorities’ segments. Maybe facts matter now more than ever. Because when the lying stops working, we will all understand what is and is not fake news. And can go back to valuing a free and fair press.

10. Widespread inequality and economic hardship—one paycheck away from disaster—is finally brought home and understood. And addressed. From the NYT piece (above): Executive pay has skyrocketed, and shareholders have enjoyed rising stock prices, at least until recently, while most workers are falling behind. If individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, the extreme increase in inequality means every worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a worker in the top 10 percent.

It’s time Americans stopped thinking that a rising stock market and low unemployment represents prosperity. The safety net is shredded. Even social distancing is an economic perk. Our very fates—including whether or not we get dinner—are in the hands of underpaid and underappreciated workers. Income inequality is worse in America than any other first-world nation. (This is what Elizabeth Warren kept bringing up, by the way, when everyone was trying to decide whether she was a shrew or a schoolmarm.) That $12K extra per year figure keeps resonating—what would life be like if every lower-income American made another $12,000 per year? A completely different society, and lots more discretionary income pumped into the economy?

11. A rising social justice movement, led by young people. We’re just seeing the early evidence of this. The outsized American health crisis is grounded in residual white supremacy and xenophobia. The costs and agony of the pandemic will be unfairly borne by people of color and young people. And, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said, last night: The bill comes due, eventually.

12. America finally gets universal health care. This is the biggie, of course—the cornerstone of all these other hopes and dreams. We can lay our highest-in-the-world rate of COVID-19 transmission and unprepared health systems squarely at the feet of our inequitable, employer-funded policies. It will be painful and bitterly contested, but it must happen. It’s both ironic and tragic that universal coverage will be pushed into place, despite the kicking and screaming, not by political leadership but by disaster. But I simply cannot imagine Americans looking at how terrible our system is, compared to all other nations, and all the pain and heartbreak it’s caused, and not demanding something better. What that better is remains to be seen, but we will certainly see change.

All the ed bloggers during this pandemic are consumed with whatever we’re calling our frantic attempts to reach out to our students–to ‘keep them on track’—or (more realistically) provide whatever educational succor can be squeezed out of phone calls, emails and glitchy electronic platforms. Or, God forbid, packets.

The academic show, it seems, must go on–and the in-the-trenches edu-commentariat has done some great work, asking the right questions, sharing their tools and materials and philosophies, and warning us off predatory data capture and greedy education commerce. There’s also been a fair amount of righteous bitching. All of this is justified—and welcome.

It turns out that technology cannot, will not replace the human touch, when it comes to learning that is worthwhile and sticks in our students’ brains and hearts. We already knew that, of course. But it’s gratifying to know that school—bricks and mortar, white paste and whiteboards, textbooks and senior proms—is deeply missed.

Public education is part of who we are, as a representative democracy. We’ve never gotten it right—we’ve let down millions of kids over the past century or two and done lots of flailing. There are curriculum wars that never end and bitter battles over equity, the teacher pipeline and funding streams.

 But still. We need school.

It is at school where a kid who might otherwise be looking at a series of low-paying jobs gets interested in science when looking through a microscope for the first time. It is at school where a shy girl shares her first poems with a teacher who says ‘these show great promise’—so she keeps writing them.

It was at school, in my music class, back in the 1970s, where a boy first learned the words ‘a child is black, a child is white, together they grow to see the light,’ singing in my 6^th grade general music class. Thirty years later, he got in touch when he saw my name online and told me he was working in Lansing as a civil rights lawyer. I loved that song, he said. Do you remember? You gave us a little sermonette on human rights.

I remember precisely none of this. Here’s what I remembered about him: he had freckles.

If this disaster has taught us one thing, it’s that technology-based communication is and always will be limited. It’s been a lifeline, for sure—medically, socially, commercially—but it does not replace our human institutions. It does not replace the caring and affection that are part of every effective classroom.

Even the low-paying unskilled jobs that have become critical in keeping the world running are not dependent on the things that technology reinforces. Service to others, friendliness, courage and reliability are qualities that can’t be learned in a Zoom meeting or tested on a bubble sheet.

I have not been surprised by the things my fellow music teachers are posting during this lockdown. For them, the end-of-course assessments that will not happen this year are not dreaded standardized tests, final exams and grades. They are the Spring Concert, the Memorial Day parade, the Youth Arts Festival, and graduation, events that demonstrate community pride and pleasure, accomplishment, and even patriotism.

This is why you’re seeing that gallery of faces singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ and the orchestra offering us an Appalachian Spring. That’s why #PlayOnThePorch is so much fun–and families starring in their own home-bound musicals are all over social media.

Of all the heart-tearing stories of sickness and loss that I’ve read, the one that hit me hardest was about an adult choir in Mount Vernon, Washington that decided to go ahead and rehearse on March 10. About 60 choir members attended. Now, 45 are sick, three in the hospital, and two are dead.

The little church choir that I direct had our last rehearsal on the 12^th of March—there were 15 singers present. None of them are spring chickens; one lovely-voiced soprano is 92. The day after our rehearsal, the church council decided not to worship face to face for the foreseeable future. The anthem we worked so hard on, forgotten. But their voices rang in my ears for 14 days until I knew for certain all were well, sheltering in place.

This virus can scare us and ravage our communities, but it cannot damage our innate craving for the beauty and solace of the arts.

No matter what the circumstances are, no matter how bleak and despairing, human beings find ways to create and imagine, to sing and to play.

It’s what we were born to do.

At least three times in the past week, I’ve heard some variant of this statement:

I’ve noticed that those who are community-spirited and positive about life have become even more so, reaching out to organize helping systems and cheer people up—and those who are naturally whiny, critical and self-involved have now gone into overdrive.

It’s mostly true. Crisis brings out not just true strength of character, but leadership. Crisis also alerts you to who you wouldn’t want to be stuck with in, say, a bomb shelter.

Crisis has also laid bare the vast and growing distance between those whose primary goals center around more for me and mine—and those who mind the community.

If you’re an educator, you’re familiar with that gap. Maybe you work in a stressed school where lack of qualified staff, supplies and leadership is an ongoing predicament, while well-outfitted schools 25 miles down the road are passing out Chromebooks like peppermints to kids already connected at home. Or maybe your work life is a series of conversations with parents who want special treatment—for their child only.

One education professor I know calls this belief—that some kids are inherently more worthy of educational perks than others— ‘deservingness.’  There are other words: Privilege. Entitlement.

Since the founding of the nation, we have wrestled with the tension between mythic rugged individualism, Ayn Rand-style, making it ‘on your own’—and the reality that we’re all on this big national boat together, capitalizing (deliberate word choice) on the contributions of our forebearers.

And now—we have the horror of Florida Governor DeSantis shutting out citizens from states that are particularly hard-hit with COVID-19, by setting up checkpoints on the highway. The implication is that Florida, a state which used its beaches as commercial draws, spreading the contagion across the Eastern Seaboard, is now closing its doors to those seeking to escape that very illness.

They’re closing the gates to Florida—the federally built highways into a place with over seven million second homes. It all feels kind of medieval—pulling up the drawbridge, standing at the ramparts. Too bad about the taxes you pay on your winter getaway! See you next year, maybe. Now turn around.

I live in a county of twenty-two thousand residents, where the average age is about 55.  That’s right. Old folks. Retirees. The gap between rich and poor here is remarkable.

While the county (surrounded by Lake Michigan and Grand Traverse Bay, with other beautiful inland lakes) has the highest average real estate prices in the state, there are in-county schools where virtually all the children receive free and reduced lunch. There are tribal lands—the Grand Traverse Band— in my county. We have no hospitals but rely on a good regional hospital in the next county over.

If there were an influx of refugees from overwhelmed downstate hospitals, we’d be screwed. Rich and poor alike, we’d be competing for scarce resources and scarce medical care. All the entitlement of wealth, the second home and fat bank account, couldn’t secure us a hospital bed, private room and ventilator.

This is what scares people around the country—the raw, indiscriminate nature of the virus. Like the folks in this article on Door County, in Wisconsin, very similar to the place where I live, urging people to stay in their winter homes: We’re just trying to protect our own.

What about Newport, Rhode Island—or Martha’s Vineyard, where the year-round service workers who depend on wealthy part-timers’ business to stay afloat are ambivalent (to say the least) about their early arrival? Here’s what one of my favorite novelists said:

Geraldine Brooks, who has made her home on the island since 2006 and raised her two sons there, has had enough of the stay-away sentiment. She posted on an online forum, “Just asking fellow islanders: where is this marvelous community that has enough beds, enough respirators, enough masks, enough nurses? The lifeboats from the Titanic left half full and didn’t go back for fear of being swamped. This feels like that.”

One of Brooks’s novels, ‘Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague’, set in 1666 and based on a real incident, describes a remote mining village in England, where the bubonic plague is systemically killing village residents. It’s clear she’s wrestled with the morality of pandemics.

It’s hard to argue with people who are moving out of a dangerous situation into a place where the virus seems less prevalent. Like the people in remote areas, worried about sharing whatever safety and resources they have, they’re just trying to protect their own.

It’s also hard to argue with people who will do almost anything to get a better deal for their children—including filing a false residency so their child could attend a good public school.

If there’s one lesson we could all learn from this disaster, it’s that we’re all in the same boat, like it or not. Mind the community.

Remember Katrina? Remember when schools were closed and the students who went to public schools in NOLA fled, a diaspora, as the city tried to clean up and rebuild and restore?

My friend Jill Saia, who was teaching in Baton Rouge at the time, described days where batches of new students would appear, shell-shocked and sad, and teachers welcomed and made room for them. They didn’t have enough chairs or textbooks–or toothbrushes–but kids sat on the countertops and teachers bought pencils with their own money. Going to school was normal, and however imperfectly, those children were invited into functioning schools and classrooms for a bit of healing normality.

It certainly was one of those ‘Every Crisis is an Opportunity’ moments.

Unfortunately, we know what happened. Wipe out a school system (and, not coincidentally, remove a large number of its poorest and least protected students) and you’ve got yourself the opportunity to let the market create a profitable, PR-driven system of charters. We’ve spent the last 10 years arguing about the all-charter NOLA system, while those students’ schools open, then close.

It’s become abundantly clear that nothing will be the same after the COVID-19 pandemic abates: the economy, the obviously failed American approach to health care and pandemics, our goals in electing political leaders. And, of course, education.

Glass-half-full people (a subset of the population that includes a lot of teachers) have been proposing ways to make society better after we’re back on our feet. From their—healthy—perspective, the only way to see this global catastrophe as a moment that could have a silver-lining backside is to tap into our capacity to change, to make things better. Otherwise, we’re just surviving.

As Ali Velshi said:
We can take this moment to change the policies that have failed us…why not be the first generation that fixes wealth disparity, and income inequality, and universal healthcare, and poverty, and homelessness, and racial economic inequality?

Not to mention education.

My friend Mary Tedrow and I have been discussing this.  Mary spent many years as an award-winning teacher in Virginia, and she also has serious policy chops. Mary said:

I want to go on record. When Trump was elected, I said, “He is going to burn everything to the ground, so we’d better be ready to build an education system that makes sense.” So. The fires are raging. How can we come together to replace the test-and-punish, top-down system with one where reform happens close to students, because teachers are well-trained, work collaboratively, and are free to make informed decisions on how to extend student capabilities to the maximum? When there is a leadership vacuum, leaders step in. What is first on our agenda?

WE NEED A NATIONAL TEACHER PLAN. And we need teachers to help draft it. Here are some of our rough-draft ideas.

• First step: Get rid of mandated standardized tests at any point in 2020. (Should be easy–everyone agrees that the tests will tell us nothing, and we now have permission.) And then, lay the groundwork to demonstrate, clearly, that tests have never told us more than who the haves and have-nots were. The 2021 tests will only tell us who got supplementary instruction during the school hiatus—let’s scrap those, too. Instead, let’s focus on assessment expertise for teachers, who can use appropriate tools to do what assessment is supposed to do: Tell us what our students know so we can tailor our instruction appropriately, and give our students useful feedback.
• Second step: Focus on actual student needs instead of comparative, tested common standards. When kids return–in the fall, or whenever–the learning inequities, always present, will be endemic. There will be kids who had zero instruction, and kids whose teachers and parents did yeoman work to keep them moving forward. Let’s stop comparing them–forever. Let’s look, district by district, at where kids are, and start there in rebuilding our instructional models and curricula. Let’s use existing standards only voluntarily as broad frameworks—suggestions, possibilities– to guide custom-tailored learning.
• Third step: Let’s understand that technology–something that always should have been considered an interesting tool of highly varying quality in instruction–will never take the place of face to face instruction, and stop pretending that online schools are the answer to educating our people. We have data to show us that students in online schools do not do well. And we are currently running a national experiment in online learning which has already yielded gargantuan problems and revealed the resource chasm between well-off children and the poor. Let’s value and re-invest in bricks and mortar schools.
• Fourth step: Repurpose the testing dollars for teacher education, given the current shortages. All preK-2 teachers should be reading specialists, for starters. We can extend and improve field experiences. We can increase teacher pay and make teacher education more attractive. We can open schools of ed that are cutting-edge models of teacher education and provide a full ride to teacher candidates who then agree to work where they are needed. The answer is not making it easier to get into the classroom—it’s selecting good candidates and giving them in-depth training and experiences.
• Fifth step: Re-think grading as ‘normal’ required practice. There’s been a national brouhaha over directives to not grade on-line assignments. Not just because no access to the necessary tools and bandwidth cripples some students—but because teachers wonder how to ‘make’ students do the work without a grade hanging over their head. It’s a great question to ponder. If students are only working to get a grade, what does that say about the motivational underpinnings of learning in America? There are plenty of ways, absent grades, to provide feedback, encouragement and additional instruction to students. And for all the aspects of education that currently hinge on grades—who gets into what college, who gets to be valedictorian, who’s on the honor roll—maybe they all need to be re-thought, as well.

There are five, just off the tops of our heads.  Would you like to propose another? Would you like to participate in a conversation about our educator-sourced National Teacher Plan? Here’s the page where the conversation is just starting to bubble up: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1355753381300151/

 

My favorite teacher-blogger, Peter Green @ Curmudgucation had a good piece today. He writes about how school leaders often forget or ignore their core values and beliefs once they become focused on being managers:

A manager’s job– and not just the management of a school, but any manager– is to create the system, environment and supports that get his people to do their very best work. When it rains, it’s the manager’s job to hold an umbrella over his people. When the wind starts blowing tree limbs across the landscape, it’s the manager’s job to stand before the storm and bat the debris away. And when the Folks at the Top start sending down stupid directives, it’s a manager’s job to protect his people the best he possibly can.

Does your principal / superintendent / department chair /boss evidence those behaviors? Mine neither.

Although there are courageous administrators and titled leaders who do stand up to idiotic and counterproductive directives from above, they are infrequent. The best most teachers can hope for is a good Joe (or JoAnn) who doesn’t revel in their power–and understands or looks the other way when rules are bent or sidestepped for good cause.

It has long been my sincere belief that when teachers and school leaders get on the same page, vis-à-vis monolithic policies (like uniform core standards, high-stakes testing, or 3^rd grade retention for struggling readers) we will be able to push back mountains. When practice wisdom and skilled educational leadership join hands, the results will be transformative. When, of course.

Which is why it’s been so interesting to watch how school leaders have responded to statewide school closings, a completely unprecedented event. In a nearby district, while students were sent home from school indefinitely on Friday, teachers were ordered to report to work this week. For older and more vulnerable teachers, this was risky. For teachers at home with their own young children, it meant having to find also-risky child care, pronto.

This is an area where there are frequent snow and ice days, and teachers aren’t generally required to come in when driving to school is dangerous. ‘Act of God’ days are written into all our contracts. Why would a district require teachers to report?

Because someone, in Central Office, was afraid that teachers were going to get a vacation. Or get paid for hanging out in their pajamas, watching the news. Someone who wanted to be in control. To manage.

Having the school open at set times so teachers could pick up needed items? Yes, of course. And there was precious little time to meet and get input from teachers—the ones who know their students best—about how to handle a long period of social distancing, while keeping kids connected to school.

Maybe the first on-line instruction should be a building-wide faculty meeting, hosted by the school administrator, for that conversation: What are the best things we can do for our students, right now? What’s the appropriate platform, appropriate activities, appropriate…educational philosophy for school in the time of coronavirus? How do we want to handle this, together?

A virtual meeting like that would be a great—revealing—exercise in what it means to lead, to create the system and supports for an entirely unanticipated circumstance. There are plenty of administrators who think using technology is a matter of familiarity with a program—and hence, someone else’s responsibility. (There were plenty of professors in my graduate work, 10 years ago, who resisted using online discussion tools, preferring to meet in person once a week, rather than post interesting questions, responses and observations as we did the readings. What that usually boiled down to was discomfort in a) using the program and b) not being the resident expert.)

One of the most fascinating things we’ve seen in this crisis is just WHO has stepped up with ideas that make sense, made tough (often unpopular) decisions, grabbed the viral bull by the horns. Governors, working in partnership with regional colleagues. Senators and Representatives. Some State Education Superintendents (like mine) are doing the right thing and demanding a waiver on testing.

There is leadership out there.

But the leadership I’ve seen today that has flat-out humbled me is coming from classroom teachers, who are sharing their plans, ideas and expertise with complete strangers. Want to know how to use a particular learning management platform? Someone is available to teach it to you, even though they’re new to the tool themselves.  Want to join a discussion on the advisability of trying to stick to a schedule and standards? There’s someone who wants to talk about that, too. There are new friends and ideas you never thought of, everywhere. Want an idea that someone just tried for the first time—with success? It’s there for the taking.

Educational leadership is more than supporting and protecting people. It’s unleashing the creativity and generosity of those people. It’s believing in their integrity, their willingness to go above and beyond when the chips are down.

Late this afternoon, I heard that the teachers in the nearby district were no longer required to report for duty this week. Someone got a leadership clue.

And on we go.

Thursday night, at 11:00 p.m., Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered the closing of all K-12 public schools in the state, for at least three weeks, beginning on Monday. As of two hours ago, twelve states and numerous large urban districts have ordered shutdowns.

Good for them. I know that without COVID-19 testing, we’re flying blind, and the effects of school shutdowns may be negligible. But taking action—and responsibility—is what leaders do.

I was asleep and didn’t learn about the school shutdown until Friday morning.  Newscasters, parents and community leaders were all weighing in on how this would impact our daily lives. Teachers, on the other hand, were plotting to get to school early enough to get to the copy machine before the paper and toner ran out.

It’s not that teachers were caught by surprise. On-line chatter over the past month has been all about Will Technology Save Us? (no) and Is it Better for Kids to be at Home or School? Teachers are pragmatists. We have to be.

But this is another instance of teachers being foot soldiers, this time in a desperate war being directed by hideously incompetent generals, bent on hiding the terrible news of early defeats. Teachers are like those firefighters in Kirkland, Washington who came to transport extremely ill nursing home residents to the hospital, without gloves and masks. Just doing our jobs, just following directions.

Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who organized take-home packets and figured out how to get coursework online, even if they didn’t have a clue about how to do it before last week.  And thank you to those who pointed out, with considerable asperity, how incredibly inequitable virtual instruction will be, but went ahead and made plans to do it anyway. Thanks to all who sent home food or arranged for food pickup—or even made a single call to a single household, to make sure an adult was home.

Nobody knows how to do this well. Nobody. But schools and teachers are still trying.

Keeping a functional learning community together is job #1.  Meaning: every child, K-12, who is out of school involuntarily, knows for sure that the adults who have been his/her teachers, playground supervisors or joke-around buddies in the hallway, still care. Staying connected and checking in matter much more than reviewing fractions or watching a dissection video.

This may sound really wimpy and imprecise and touchy-feely to reformers and learning measurement types. And it doesn’t mean that teachers should abandon all attempts to build skills or (for lack of a better phrase) deliver content. Only this: the most important skills a child needs right now are empathy, curiosity and self-direction, kindness and civic engagement.

A child—either kindergartener or jaded teenager—who can discern truth from lies, identify gaslighting, find engaging and worthwhile things to read or watch, and be willing to help his/her family or community at an appropriate level will be learning plenty in the new few weeks.

The old ‘guide on the side’ idea applies here, in spades—teachers who have contact with students need not put on their lab coats and shoot dramatic videos. What they can do is help kids unleash and pursue their own discipline-based interests. They can stay in touch. They can listen.

Teachers have been describing their struggles and fears—whether to prepare for time away or push to get their state or district to close, NOW—eloquently. They are wondering whether they will see their students again, and when. One teacher described yesterday as ‘surreal.’ There is lots of black humor, and also lots of tears.

They are wondering if this global pandemic will be a turning point in our national understanding of how we are—and will forever be—global citizens. Will this experience finally bring the United States into line with other first-world countries in strengthening the safety net and providing universal health care? Teachers—first responders, in so many ways– want to know.

From a teacher in New York City (who believes she must remain anonymous):

Many teachers and staff feel like guinea pigs and disposable right now during a global pandemic because our society didn’t have protections and a safety net for young people in poverty, in this failed healthcare system. We teachers know this every day as we go teach and do our jobs and serve young people, which I love doing and which has been my calling since I was six. Teachers do everything, and this is yet another case where everything we do isn’t enough, AND we are expected to carry the burden for a larger society that won’t carry the burden.

Stay safe. Stay in touch. Wash your hands, teachers. We see you.

For more than a dozen years, I took my 8^th grade bands on an extensive field trip, near the end of the school year. The trips were always out-of-state (or out of the country), involving two or three nights in a hotel, plus a symphony performance, cultural experiences like museums, university-based skills clinics, plays and musicals, a formal, white-tablecloth dinner out–and someplace for my students to play a concert.

We selected the destination (Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, St. Louis, Washington D.C.) in the fall, and raised funds all year. Lots of parents paid to chaperone. The destination became a kind of instructional theme—we studied the blues in our Chicago years, and all-American composers and patriotic music in the D.C. year.

Nothing I’ve done since has ever been a worthier use of instructional time, or a better learning experience, than taking 135, more or less, 13/14-year olds and perhaps 25 parents out in the wider world for a musical adventure. Playing in a Chicago jazz club (at 2:00 p.m., with pitchers of Coke), wandering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, putting on a concert for veterans in St. Louis, the Phantom of the Opera in Toronto—all good.

The Band Boosters made sure, financially, that everyone went—and one year, we took a virus along with us.

It was some kind of norovirus, according to the local health department, which got into the act after we returned, contacted by a worried mother who thought perhaps her child had been poisoned. But no. All 164 people on the trip got to experience the rapid spread of a virulent virus, up close and personal.

We weren’t 30 minutes out of town, when Bus B (the second of four motor coaches) radioed that one of my flute players was vomiting in the bus bathroom. Her brother had been sick the night before. She said she ‘felt better now.’

My assistant principal was on the trip (on Bus B) and he thought we’d be OK. He isolated her, lying down on the back seat of the bus. Nobody wanted to lose an hour by turning back, and she begged us not to make her go home.

We’d left school around 7:00 p.m. The plan was to drive through the night (approximately a 12-hour drive), have breakfast, then play a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the next morning, followed by time to explore the Vietnam Memorial, before checking into the Washington Hilton in the afternoon to dress for a seafood dinner at the Baltimore Harbor, followed by a Symphony concert in the evening.

Of course, even though the bus lights were turned out at 10:00 p.m. and students instructed to snooze or at least rest, that didn’t happen. Kids were keyed up (musician joke). They ate snacks and goofed around and lowered their resistance right to the ground. The concert in the morning was the only thing that went really well all day. I have a great photo of the three bands together, in red, white and blue T-shirts, playing their hearts out, with Lincoln benignly watching them from the shadows behind.

By the time the buses arrived at the Baltimore Harbor, a couple dozen Bus B kids were sick. In the grass, in the water. And—during dinner—in the bushes outside the restaurant. My assistant principal offered to take all the sick kids back to the hotel (an hour away). The bus driver got lost and ended up driving aimlessly around Washington D.C. as students were violently ill, an experience my AP described as similar to being in a Fellini movie.

Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, kids who’d felt fine during dinner were rushing up the aisle at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall to despoil the bathrooms there. We did another triage on the three remaining buses. At that point—before anyone had been confined to a hotel room—all the sick people were Bus B students and parents. But by the next morning, the virus had spread to Bus C. At this point, perhaps 50 people were ill, both students and parents.

For the next couple of days, as more people got sick (and some recovered), the field trip became improvisatory. We took healthy kids outdoors, to the Mall, for games and walks. Our bus drivers bravely took those who were well on driving tours to see the White House, Ford’s Theatre, Arlington Cemetery and monuments. Half the chaperones stayed at the hotel and tended the sick.

We cancelled whole-group, ticketed activities in favor of hanging out, on buses or outdoors. The weather was beautiful, which really helped, and we were in Washington D.C. after all. It was a better solution than putting dozens of actively queasy kids on buses to share their symptoms all the way to Michigan.

The hotel and its staffers were incredibly nice. They brought trays of ginger ale to infested rooms. They offered free long-distance phone calls to kids who wanted to contact their moms—this was in 1998, before kids had cell phones. I was carrying a cell—’for emergencies’– but it worked only sporadically in reaching Michigan. I had to call a couple of parents of seriously ill kids, as well. Chaperones kidded: First the Reagan shooting, and now this—but I have strongly positive feelings about the so-called Hinckley Hilton, to this day.

By the 4^th day, close to 100 people were sick or had been sick. While it was a nasty bug, it passed through (sorry) expeditiously. Most people were asymptomatic after 24 hours or so, moving into the ‘limp dishrag’ phase of the disease. We decided to stop on the way home, as planned (and paid for), to see Luray Caverns.

I hadn’t been in favor of seeing the caverns initially—not really a cultural thing—but the stop was a godsend. It was something to do together, and the caves were strangely beautiful. Even though there were a few sick kids who opted to stay on Bus D while we toured underground, it felt like we had survived something together, as a group.

Observation: the disease spread predictably. While everyone on Bus B eventually fell ill, and most of Bus C did, about half of Bus D was affected and only one person on Bus A got sick (and she was the mother of a boy who was riding on Bus B). Kids were housed four to a room—and roommates rode the same bus. If you were in the room with a sick person, you got sick.

Pretty much textbook for viral transmission. Which is why you have to feel sorry for the people who were innocently caught on a cruise ship with the corona virus.

Once we were home, most parents were just glad to coddle their kids who had lived through an intense illness without them and listen sympathetically to their horror stories. There was underground conversation about the decisions we made, I know (and I was very happy that the assistant principal had been on the trip, to deal with the more out-there accusations). There were unkind things said about the girl who was ill first. But we got through it.

At the Honors Assembly at the end of the year, students and parents presented me with a hand-painted bucket labeled ‘Washington, DC, 1998,’ which drew lots of laughs.

But—I have to say that surviving a cluster virus with a large group of students is no laughing matter. As the COVID-19 epidemic rolls across the country, there will be lots of low-information speculation on what schools and teachers should have done differently, no matter what decision is made.

This is where campaigning against public education becomes a public health issue. For some kids, school may well be the safest place to be, virus or no virus. We need to trust our schools and teachers to do their best. We need to hope for better information from our government. This will, I fear, soon become a matter of ultimate concern.

This is a very personal story.

There are a thousand reasons to admire and support public education—beginning with the idea itself: a free, high-quality public good, offered to all children, a societal building block. There are community schools, with wraparound services and creative magnet schools to nurture special talents and interests. There are new pilot programs and old-faithful heritage programs and Friday night lights. There are special services for kids with a range of disabilities. No one can be turned away. It’s all good.

When the neighborhood is sinking rapidly, businesses leaving and families fleeing, there is good old Oak Avenue Elementary, its playground and parking lot fenced and gated—but still open. Public schools are often the safest places for children, where they can be warm, fed, and cared for, and read a story. Public education may be messed up and threatened these days, in the land of the free, but its noble genesis and its persistence make it one of our best ideas.

This, however, is MY story, the reason why I will defend public schools until my last breath.

My allegiance to public education came first from my dad, who—ironically—received nearly all of his formal education in a Christian school. Not a Catholic school (they’re two different things, where I come from)—a Betsy DeVos-type, all-white Christian school, in western Michigan.

This was a long time ago—in the 1920s and 1930s. My grandparents, who had five children and not much money, scrimped and sacrificed so their children could go to school with the children of other Dutch immigrants, a school with rigid discipline, and very specific expectations.

My grandparents had no compunctions about a school where the children of Italian and Polish immigrants–likely Roman Catholic–or children with dark skin weren’t welcome, a school that used the Bible as text and began each day with prayer. No school dances. No movies downtown. No getting out of your church clothes on Sunday afternoons because you were going to church again on Sunday evening. Better-off families expected to offer Christian schoolteachers a nice chicken dinner on pre-arranged Sundays.

My dad transferred to the public high school in 9^th grade and dropped out at the beginning of his senior year, going to work full time and never returning to school. He’d skipped a grade in elementary school, so he was barely 16. It wasn’t a big secret around our house—he claimed he left school because he found it too easy and boring, and he didn’t like being bossed around. My mother used to say that he was the smartest person she knew, and also the touchiest—so perhaps it was true.

My cousins went to Christian school. My brother, sister and I went to public school. When I was in kindergarten, my grandparents offered to pay tuition for me to go to Christian school, but my parents were adamant: their kids were going to public school.

My mother, also from a Dutch immigrant family, went to public school. There was some tension between the two families, centered mostly around who was holier and more upright. It seemed as though letting your children ‘mix’ with God knows who in public schools was irresponsible. Dangerous.

Eventually, my folks moved us to the less prosperous outskirts of town, where there was a K-8 school but no high school. They joined a committee to raise local bond monies to build a high school. I remember my mother canvassing the neighborhood, encouraging neighbors to vote yes, so my baby boomer posse, riding our bikes on the new sidewalks, could have our own neighborhood high school.

I graduated from that high school—with its beautiful auditorium, two gymnasiums, a bowl stadium and a courtyard—in its seventh graduating class. My mom was active in the PTA, and my dad ran the chains beside the field at football games.

My mother also spearheaded a drive called ‘Dollars for Scholars’ which provided no-interest loans to graduates who went on to post-secondary education. Although neither of my parents went to college or saw a college degree as necessary or even desirable–they thought I should go to beauty school–they co-signed when I took out a loan to supplement the scholarships I got from Central Michigan University. Two hundred dollars—a figure that seems ludicrous now, but was the extent of my college borrowing, easily paid back on my generous $9050 salary when I got a teaching job.

It was my teachers who were adamant—I had to go to college. My band teacher, especially, convinced me that I had talent and smarts and belonged on campus, away from home.

Throughout my K-16 career, and even my graduate degree—all in public schools and universities—I got a good, comprehensive education. Most of my teachers, in the 1950s and 1960s, were caring and enthusiastic—and the ones who weren’t taught me other lessons. A small fraction of my HS classmates was college-bound, but that didn’t mean our teachers weren’t demanding. They were. I went to a blue-collar high school, but I was well-prepared for college work. And all of us were educated to be productive citizens—basic skills, a work ethic and the requirements of civic engagement.

At the university, I don’t remember a single graduate assistant teaching any of my classes; my professors were degreed and tenured, and generally worth paying attention to. Friends who went to more prestigious universities joked about undergraduate classes being taught by unqualified, green TAs, while their famous professors were remote, standing in front of massive lecture halls. That was not my experience.

Those were different times, however, and I went through K-16 as part of a huge same-age, post-war bubble. But I clearly remember decades when public education was respected and affordable, and K-12 schools were the center of tens of thousands of communities across the nation.

So what happened?

Jan Resseger says:

If you haven’t been paying such close attention to the education wars, you might not realize that policy around education and the public schools has for two decades been the locus of experimentation with the power and reach of billionaire philanthropists seizing a giant public sector institution from the professionals who have been running the schools for generations. The billionaires’ idea has been that strategic investment by data wonks and venture philanthropists can turn around school achievement among poor children.

There have always been students in our schools for whom English is a second language. There are chronically under-resourced schools, as well as serious inequities between schools for white children and those in neighborhoods where black and brown children live. There have been failed busing schemes and teacher shortages and Why Johnny Can’t Read. We’ve been tinkering with the structural problems in public education since Horace Mann. Everybody thinks they know how to ‘fix’ public schools.

But only recently has the general public been subjected to abject crapola like this: Public Schools are Teaching Our Children to Hate America. (Short version: Well-known and well-funded education gadfly blames American students’ lack of skills and knowledge on a single NY Times supplement.)

I hate to use the phrase ‘War on Public Schools’–but here we are. We may be losing the war, too, as parents choose ‘new and different and heavily advertised’ over repairing and refurbishing a foundational institution once functional, even beautiful. We have ample evidence of the destruction.

Still. I owe who and what I am to public education—and know the same is true for the thousands of students I taught, and the millions who are learning in classrooms, well-equipped or derelict, as I write this.

Love your public schools, and they will reward you.