by nflanagan

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Five Decades of Ed Reform

Four days ago, I wrote a Blog of Despair—all about the forthcoming demise (or destruction, take your pick) of America’s best idea: public education. I’m not backing down from that conviction; I think the more or less permanent downfall of public schooling is inescapable, unless there are major, sudden shifts in public and political opinion.

One of my former students, now a mother with two school-aged boys, commented on the blog: If we could start over and build education from scratch, what would it look like? 

First—I have to admit that I’m proud of Kendra for asking the kind of question that doctoral students at research universities have been noodling over (without transformational results) since forever.

While there are optimistic legislative packages and snazzy new tools, most real change in education feels sluggish, rather random and exceedingly difficult to analyze. The idea of starting from scratch lies under most reform—charter schools were originally touted as a way to get rid of red tape and innovate. (Pause for cynical laughter.)

The thing is: transformational change involves determination and investment. It’s uncomfortable, expensive—and it takes time. Most change in public schools is driven by forces—financial, technical, social—outside of education. We’re not very visionary or intentional about education.

Education policy thinkers tend to be Stephen Covey-esque in the upbeat, step-wise way they approach change: anticipate, arrange, administer and assess. That’s how we got No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to be the Grand Strategy to identify inequities, raise and equalize standards (a word meaning different things to different stakeholders), harass teachers into somehow teaching better, and then test diligently to ensure accountability.

But– no plan on such a scale succeeds unquestionably. NCLB may have changed the tenor of the conversation, but over two decades of No Child, in various incarnations, have come and gone– and we’re still considering why the results are proof that you can spend billions and not improve education in any meaningful way.

I have been a teacher in five distinct decades, each with its own policy slogans, public perceptions and real problems. We’ve been “at a turning point” more times than I can count. We have surfed the rising tide of mediocrity and been embarrassed by the soft bigotry of our low expectations.  But what has really changed in classrooms? What’s the net impact on actual practice?

My–admittedly ultra-personal and non-scientific–report on Five Decades of American Education:

The Seventies: Got my first full-time, regular-paycheck teaching job in 1975–something of a miracle, as there was a teacher glut in Michigan. Was hired because the principal needed someone right away and we were on the same humor wavelength in the interview.

Soon learned that there was no district curriculum for music or any other subjects. Chose my own teaching materials from catalogs–wasn’t that a curriculum? Taught whatever and however I wanted–no instructional oversight, no mandated materials and nothing resembling “professional development.”

Heard “don’t smile until Christmas” about 50 times from other teachers, sum total of any “mentoring” I got.  Saw teachers smack kids (still permitted by law)–and heard lots of lounge talk about chaos that would happen if the right to paddle was taken away.

I was pink-slipped in Years Two, Three, Four and Six. Was always called back–once because of a lawsuit, after registering for unemployment. All of this was tied to precarious, locally voted school funding.

Gave statewide tests–the MEAPs, then a basic-skills check–but nobody considered them a big deal. Was happy that Jimmy Carter instituted a cabinet position for education–about time! Had a few friends who taught in Detroit–envied their superior facilities, resources and paychecks. Teaching seemed like a fulfilling, creative, and very autonomous job. Most days, it was lots of fun.

The Eighties:  Economic downturn in the early 80s meant further pink-slipping and annual changes of building/teaching assignment necessitated by constant personnel shifts. Had daily loads of up to 400 students in two buildings and–since any certified MI teacher could teach any subject to 7th and 8th graders–a year of teaching math. All of this change was oddly invigorating, if exhausting.

Finished a masters degree in Gifted Education, a popular cafeteria-style ed specialty (like Career Ed, Distance Learning, etc.). Got serious about teaching. Read many books, took fake sick days to observe admired teachers in other districts. Sought leadership roles in Music Ed organizations. Downright hungry for professional conversations.

None of this was required, encouraged or even noticed by the district, which did institute its own curriculum benchmarks in the 80s. Teachers called these curriculum guides “the black notebooks.” Problem: not enough time, staff or resources to teach all the good things in the black notebooks.

Reagan’s release of “A Nation at Risk” interpreted by colleagues as rhetorical excess and unionized-teacher bashing, an imperialistic extension of right-wing momentum gained in the air traffic controllers’ strike. Hoped it would blow over, but having to listen to Bill Bennett’s nostalgic morality fables was nauseating. Still giving the MEAPs, which got harder in the 80s. Took leadership roles in the union–since they were the only teacher leadership roles available.

The Nineties: Decade opens with some optimism. H.W. Bush’s Goals 2000 are kind of inane–First in the world in math and science! –but there’s the sense that policymakers are paying attention, and the belief that public education can and should improve.

Visit Detroit, shocked to see decayed and racially polarized schools–what happened in the last 15 years? Outstate Michigan residents, tired of seeing wealthy suburban schools funded at four times the rate of rural and urban-rust schools, pass a funding bill to get rid of property taxes as source, using sales tax instead. Outstate schools ecstatic as times are flush–auto industry will last forever!

Real and substantive school improvement begins to impact daily practice. There are national standards and benchmarks in most subjects, and teacher committees to update, align, discuss. Required mentoring for new colleagues. Performance assessments, and portfolios of student work. Required professional learning as opposed to blow-off in-service days, although the quality is still iffy.

Further upgrades in the MEAPs, including hands-on tasks for kids, new constructivist tests for science, social studies and writing. Better assessments begin to drive instruction. New teacher hiring done by colleagues. Plus–fab new instructional toy arrives in classrooms: the computer, full of infinite possibilities for teaching and learning. Some teachers begin experimenting immediately; others are intimidated.

Best Secretary of Education ever–Dick Riley–provides eight years of continuity of purpose and coherent policy. Education is still a local-control thing; Feds just there to ensure equity, promote innovation. National certification identifying accomplished teaching becomes reality. Next stop: real leadership roles for exemplary teachers, whose expertise will help policymakers solve problems. Nagging worry: all of this still takes money–and a growing number of poor kids are still completely underserved.

The Naughts: A slow U-turn in policy and conventional wisdom. We’re not gradually improving, after all–in fact, we’re an international educational joke.  All public schools (not just poor/urban schools) are bad. Decidedly awful–and the people who work and believe in them are intellectual dimbulbs who care only about their inflated salaries. How would they handle this in Singapore? China? India? We must compete!

Buzzword of the decade: data. Every person with a computer sees data analysis as the solution. In the lunchroom, colleagues express skepticism about the Texas Miracle even before it’s exposed as just another Data Hustle. Some of the best teachers in the building discover they are not Highly Qualified. Meanwhile, the worst teachers in the building–genuine stinkers–look good under NCLB regs.

We begin administering tests to third graders–and relinquish development of performance assessments that tell us real things about kids’ writing, number sense, comprehension, familiarity with the scientific method. No time for that now–the data-driven race to the top has begun even before it’s formally named.

Saw well-regarded suburban districts become defensive and start advertising as schools of choice. Urban and rural districts were shamed. Teacher preparation institutions–even the good ones– scorned. Paradox of the decade: We must have the smartest teachers! But should they bother studying the science of teaching? Or stay in the classroom for more than a couple of years? No. With data, we can replace teachers as often and as efficiently as we replace technologies.

The Twenty-Tens: The decade begins with the depressing realization that the Obama administration has fully bought into the privatizing, standardizing “accountability” movement, where no child can go untested. There are tweaks to NCLB, but the idea that we can accurately measure teaching/learning excellence through data becomes embedded wisdom. Federal policy demands grow—and competitive financial incentives are dangled in front of states to meet questionable regulatory goals that do little to innovate or improve schools.

The Common Core State (sic) Standards are launched, adopted, fleshed out with assessments and aligned instructional materials during the first half of the decade. Teachers have lots of complaints, but are knocked down by the big systemic wave of federally-driven homogenization. Mid-decade, however, community pushback against the Common Core strengthens—another silver bullet with no results—and its trajectory rapidly descends. Baby Boomer teachers, like me, the core of the profession (for better and worse), leave the field; the conventional teacher pipeline begins to dry up, along with the concept of teacher professionalism.

Now retired, I visit classrooms every week, as substitute, volunteer, special instructor or teacher coach. Every school I visit still looks and feels familiar—the crowded hallways, the marginal hot-lunch pizza, the goofy Things Kids Say. Things have changed since the 1970s, and not for the better, but school is still school.

And then, there’s an election.

The day after the 2016 election, a group of middle schoolers in Royal Oak, Michigan is videotaped shouting ‘Build That Wall!’ to a cluster of Hispanic kids, in the lunchroom. Four years of destroying useful education policy and practice ensue, led by a cartoonishly incompetent Education Secretary and newly emboldened, racist policy-makers. Things in public education go from bad to So Much Worse.

And then came the pandemic.

In April of 2020, I wrote a wildly optimistic blog titled A Dozen Good Things that Could (Just Maybe) Happen as a Result of this Pandemic. I mention this, because I have often, like Kendra, asked myself how I would change public education, if I could start from scratch. I genuinely believed that a pandemic could serve as a cleared slate, a turning point, for our social institutions. Maybe it’s too early to give up on that idea—a reclamation of public education’s mission—but I’m not optimistic.

I would sketch the last 50 years of public education as a bobbling, but slowly rising curve through the 70s, 80s and 90s, with a downturn at Y2K, falling gradually until the last five years, after which the line plummets due south, rapidly. Way south.

A long, strange trip indeed.

by nflanagan

The Demise of Genuinely Public Education

“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice

There is no more local-politics issue than public education.

From Mom gossip about teachers, watching Little Leaguers play, to intense competition for valedictory honors with all the teenaged strivers loading up on useless AP credits—any community’s buzz continually includes trash-talking the local public schools.

The charter school movement tried to take advantage of this, co-opting public education by taking its best features (it’s free, it’s local) and blending them with private school features (selectivity, glossy PR). This has resulted in more waste, fraud and abuse—the very things public schools were accused of, before charters were even invented. In the process, charters drew significant resources away from genuinely public schools.

This is, of course, old news. Charters, vouchers, unhappy parents, ‘education savings accounts’ and court decisions shifting resources away from common schools have been with us for more than a century.

My first political activity, in fact, was phone-banking against a voucher initiative in MI in 1978 (it went down, 3 to 1—like two subsequent voucher proposals). The first time I went to a heated school board meeting, to defend my district’s well-designed sex education curriculum, was even earlier.

Public education has always been under-resourced, contentious and subject to the community it serves. The people who work in public education have always been underpaid, but generally aspire to improve society by helping kids. There are exceptions, of course, but years of history and research bear this out.

You might think I’d be used to this, what with all the banned books, slashed programs (often my own) and vehement parent rhetoric in my personal past. 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.

The tipping point is a global pandemic—but the great, battered ship of public ed has been taking incoming fire for a long time. Chunks of its initial purpose and mission—an educated citizenry, democratic equality, a broad introduction to the real world and the humanities—have been regularly chipped off. Something new and malevolent, however, has taken root: an overt push to use public education and already pissed-off parents to win elections.

Today, NPR posted an article entitled ‘Teachers are on the Front Lines in January 6th Culture War.’

It’s a pretty good piece, featuring an array of teachers and curricular experts discussing the difficulties of teaching current events on the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, after the nation and the Republican party has had a year to, you know, just get over it.

There are brave teachers in MA and MT who are planning to show news videos and discuss the root causes and eventual outcomes. But there’s also a special ed teacher (and regional chapter chair of Moms for Liberty) in Indiana, who’s sticking to math and English, in an effort to be ‘unbiased.’

Unbiased against what? Protecting the rights of camo-clad faux-military marauders to despoil the U.S. Capitol and threaten the lives of Members of Congress? Not willing to sway student thinking about the peaceful transfer of power? Trying to stay neutral on the topic of domestic terrorism?

Just whom are we censoring here? And whom are we protecting?

The story ends with a quote from a middle school teacher, Dylan Huiskan: Not addressing the attack is to suggest that the civic ideals we teach exist in a vacuum and don’t have any real-world application, that civic knowledge is mere trivia.

Veteran public school teachers like me have spent decades developing real-world content discipline applications for our students. We have fought against sterile data-driven education, the relentless pursuit of test scores, the pushing Science and Social Studies and the Arts out of the curriculum. We’ve been trying to DE-trivialize education, professionalizing our own work in the process.

But now we’ve got teachers who think their colleagues are indoctrinating students, by showing them actual live news footage, or discussing an event that happened within their short memory and has huge impact on their own futures as American citizens.

Things are falling apart. We have been crushed by an unexpected medical disaster. One of our two political parties has gone off the rails.  Civility is dead—and oh yeah, the planet is fighting back after years of heedless neglect.

And now, we’ve decided to warn teachers—teachers! –not to tell the truth.

As a blogger, I have repeatedly asserted the truism that American schools, often the target of political and media scorn, merely reflect the communities they serve. If that is true—and if democracy is indeed threatened by the events of 2020 and January 6th, then our public schools are threatened as well.

Once, years ago, I wrote a blog using the phrase ‘data Nazis’ and a friend I respect, and trust, chastised me. Use logic and facts, he said. You weaken your arguments when you oversell and hype the danger.

 But maybe the next Civil War is here. Maybe public schools will become a tool for the wrong side:

 Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.

On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.

Is that overkill? Unclear.

But if it’s not—what are our weapons against losing genuinely public education?

by nflanagan

The Not-So-Discriminating Reader’s Guide to 2021

For the last decade, I’ve set a goal of reading (at least) 100 books per year. I have accomplished that goal nine out of ten years (missing the boat only 2017, when I clocked in at 97).

I started logging my reading in 2012 with a goal of 135 books a year, mostly because my friend Claudia Swisher was reading 135 books a year. I, however, am no Claudia Swisher—more’s the pity—and have had to convince myself that two books per week, with the elasticity of a nice, round-number goal is Good Enough.

Great, in fact. According to Pew Research Center, the average person reads 12 books per year. There’s even a little speed reading test to see how many books you could read if you read 30 minutes a day.

But I have my doubts about that statistic. Not that people aren’t reading—they are, probably more than ever. They’re increasingly sharing their thoughts about their on-line reading, as well. Books, not so much.

The whole ‘Do Your Own Research’ schtick is based on reading. The January 6th Insurrection was organized via social-media reading and writing. Spelling, no—but being a good speller is usually the result of doing lots and lots of reading (of correctly spelled and reasonably accurate text, of course).

I am a sucker for ‘best of’ lists, especially when I respect the (non-snooty) creator of said list. Here’s Barack Obama’s ‘best of 2021’ list (I’ve read three)—and a really great list of 2021 books from NPR staffers. But I also like lists—like mine, below—that loop older titles into the mix.

These are my five-star, recommended reads from the 110 novels and non-fiction titles I read in 2021. Eight fiction, six non-fiction. Fiction first, plus a disclaimer that I read voraciously and indiscriminately, and five-star my favorites, even if they’re not (ahem) literature.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) It’s a difficult book to get into–and it’s long. You have to have faith that there will be an emotional payoff; it took maybe 100 pages before I started to feel like I was living in five stories simultaneously. There are moments in the book that are shattering–and poignant, and meticulously written (like the scenes during the Korean War, or the building of a cannon before the siege of Constantinople). And again, and again, the book makes us understand the terrible times we live in–that there’s essentially nothing new under the sun, just stories and human foibles.

Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone (Diana Gabaldon) I am a major Gabaldon fan—the only series that I regularly re-read—and it’s been more than seven years since her last ‘Outlander’ book. If you have only seen the TV show (which I also like, but feels pale next to Gabaldon’s writing and sense of time and history), you owe it to yourself to start with ‘Outlander’ (the weakest book in the series) and hang out with Jamie and Claire for a few decades, through the whole saga of nine. It’s a hard book to review (so much has Gone Before), but the book (all 888 pages) is loaded with small and lovely vignettes.

Early Morning Riser (Katherine Heiny) Jane, the protagonist is a second-grade teacher in Boyne City, Michigan (about an hour northeast of here) and all the local details ring absolutely true. The plot kind of meanders around, but every single one of the characters is uniquely drawn and…interesting.  And the writing is spectacularly good, ranging from wise through long stretches of amusing with bolts of flat-out hilarious. Heiny gets school teaching (something authors frequently mischaracterize) absolutely right. She also gets love and marriage and life right.

Lightning Strike (Cork O’Connor) (William Kent Krueger)  A Cork O’Connor ‘prequel’ where we learn some things about Cork’s boyhood, in a small northern Minnesota town, in 1963, where open racism was a daily occurrence.

Like all of Krueger’s books– his two standalones were also written from the POV of a boy–it’s easy to appreciate his flair for realistic dialogue. I spent 30 years teaching middle school boys, and Krueger gets their boy-boy smack-chatter just right. There’s one scene, in the last 25 pages of the book, of three boys sitting around a campfire, that feels like the dialogue from the movie ‘Stand By Me,’ which was adapted from a Stephen King story–half goofy, half profound. The book touches lots of subjects, especially growing up and understanding the world. It’s a well-written gem.

Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell) Shakespeare is a very flawed husband, in this fictional account, and his creative, intuitive but illiterate wife is the one with strength of character, grounded in her village and close-to-nature way of life. The most wrenching parts of the book, however, are the life/death rhythms of living in the time of plague, the fragility of life. They make the book both beautiful and heart-breaking.

Firekeeper’s Daughter (Angeline Boulley) I live in Michigan, have been on Sugar Island, know the U.P. territory (rural poverty) and trust that Boulley has the language and setting and events right. Her desire, which took years to reach, was writing a book from the POV of an enrolled Tribal member, for teenagers. It seems right to me. Boulley shares the tensions between Native Americans and white people, and Daunis’s enrollment, in a way that feels authentic to me.

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) The book is about reversing changes to the biosphere and what happens if we don’t, so it’s a book about all of the lives of all of the people on the planet. It is wide-ranging, covering economic systems, political systems, technologies, crypto-currency and carbon sequestration, the internet and terrorism, just for starters. As soon as I started reading it, I looked at the world and the United States differently.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (V.E. Schwab) When you boil away all the historical references and characters (which I liked, a lot) and the romance, the story is one more Faustian fable–the devil cuts a deal and lets yet another clueless human live the life of what she believes are her dreams–with the moral being that nobody outsmarts the devil. Maybe. The story ends in a way I didn’t expect, but tilts the playing field and left me smiling, because Addie uses the oldest tricks (word chosen deliberately) in the book.

NON-FICTION: Two titles about racism (and a third that illustrates why white people have a great deal to answer for and understand); Two titles about sexism (and a third that loops in historic sexism around the topic of adoption).   

 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Clint Smith) This is the perfect book to read NOW. And by now, I mean in this stunning era, where states are passing laws to prohibit K-12 students from knowing about the bruising, wounding realities this book reveals. One short quote, from the chapter on Galveston Island and Juneteenth:

“Had I known when I was younger what these students were sharing, I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis–a paralysis that arose from never knowing enough of my own history to identify the lies I was being old: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today.”

American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption (Gabrielle Glaser) There’s a lot of good information in the book–and things I’ve not put together, like the money-making aspect of the adoption industry and why their ‘evidence-based’ policies were created. But what makes the book memorable is Glaser’s case study, woven through the facts and figures. The end of the book, while sad, is also powerfully hopeful. As an adoptive parent, I’ve read lots of books about adoption. This is one of the very best.

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Kate Manne) I would estimate that 75% of the facts, cases and statistics in the book were things I’d read before, but even if the book were a mere pastiche of Famous Misogynistic Stories, it would be useful, just to see all the evidence in one place. It’s more than that, however. I really appreciated Manne’s perspective on Elizabeth Warren: she was undeniably the most community-building, smart plan-crafting candidate for president, and why because of (not in spite of) that, she failed.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (Heather McGhee) This may well be–like “Caste” in 2020–the best book of 2021, the book that helps white people understand how centuries of racist policy have hamstrung ALL of us (not just people of color) and made our world poorer and weaker. And it’s based on a nationwide array of examples of just how racist policy has not only left a legacy of inequity, but continues to shape our thinking and our prospects and opportunities.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer) Kimmerer is a lively writer, who weaves stories around data, and honors her Native ancestry and beliefs. I took lots of ideas away from the book, beginning with the fact that indigenous people lived in harmony with the earth for eons longer than the white people who make fun of their ‘primitive’ culture. It’s a book to make you re-think everything you believed about ritual and religion, fear of dying, the morality of climate change, even living through a pandemic.

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America  (Ijeoma Oluo) A sober and research-based work, covering a disparate set of topics–politics, sports, education, media and women in the workplace. Oluo’s observations are intersectional in nature, demonstrating how things that seem ‘natural’–things ranging from salaries, power structures, health and welfare–appear that way because policies have been designed to keep them that way. By white men.

by nflanagan

Six Gigantic Problems, Six Wrong Solutions in Public Education

So here we are, at our local schools, trying to stay afloat, with daily crises incoming.

The adults who are still bravely teaching, teaching, teaching (+ making administrative and child welfare decisions) in spite of the fact that the world seems to be on fire around them, need help. Don’t take my word—just read pretty much any educator-written blog from 2021.

When we have massive social problems, how do we generate and roll out solutions?

The answer is: Policy.

Policy is how we mounted a successful response before, during and after World Wars, developed and refined sequential national transportation and communication systems, and came back from significant economic depressions. We can point to any number of policy-driven transformations in these United States.

Once policy is put in place, and implemented, we can see its real-world effects. Optimally, the policy will be tweaked until it does what it’s supposed to do: solve the problem. Or at least move things in the right direction.

Yes, it’s infinitely more complex than that—designing good policy is way more than guesswork and a good feeling about how to fix the trouble.  And yes, policies sometimes make things worse. Way worse.

I would argue that public education is one area where terrible policy is now endemic—and sometimes, after clear failure, overlaid with even worse policy. The sheer dispersal of decision-making responsibility is part of the reason. There are legislative levels—federal/state/local—and a whole array of other organizations (the PTA) and people (the Athletic Director, the Union president) who have policy-making roles, assigned as well as assumed.

In fact, it’s hard to think of an education-related policy that has effectively and sustainably worked, beyond the granddaddy of all ed policy: a free, high-quality, fully public education for every American child, no matter what they bring to the table.

Lately, this wrong-policy trend in education has been on steroids—both the frightening gravity of the problems as well as the foolish, even ludicrous suggestions to address them.

A few examples:

PROBLEM: School shooting in Michigan

WRONG SOLUTION: (from a member of the State School Board, no less)—eliminating the attendance requirement for children to go to school in Michigan. State Board of Education member and Republican Tom McMillin posted this suggestion on Facebook last week, saying the “state needs to stop dictating terms of education of our kids.”  You may wonder how McMillin construed this as a solution to mass shootings, but he claimed parents could improve their children’s mental health by keeping them home for as long as they chose.

PROBLEM: Underfunded schools, leading to low salaries and lack of resources

WRONG SOLUTION: A Cash Stampede with teachers on their knees, grabbing dollar bills, in competition with other teachers.  I’ve seen this horrible video compared to the Hunger Games, but to me–with the cheering audience teachers on their knees, scrambling to pay for the tools they need to work– I am picturing the Christians and the lions, at the Colosseum in Rome. So amusing!  BTW, you don’t have to be a policy expert to see what the only real solution to this problem is.

PROBLEM: Student mental health crisis, due to the isolation and uncertainty of being a child during a global pandemic

WRONG SOLUTION: Deciding that Social-Emotional Learning initiatives, whether they be commercial programs or merely a group of educators trying to help kids get through the first worldwide crisis in their lifetime, are somehow tied to Critical Race Theory, and therefore should be formally banned in our classrooms. Or that SEL is a ‘perilous’ waste of time and money, stealing time from Algebra. There are many viable ways to address the mental health crisis. All will be multi-faceted, and involve an array of attentive and thoughtful adults, determined to buoy the children in their care.

PROBLEM: Not enough teachers, not enough subs, not enough bus drivers

WRONG SOLUTION: Lowering the bar to get warm bodies in classrooms or behind the wheel. Or hiring year-long unqualified substitutes because the requirements for subs are less. Once again, there are many viable policy options to fix this. Suggesting we throw up our hands and let anybody in our classrooms is not only counterproductive—it’s dangerous.

PROBLEM: Student scores on standardized tests remain stagnant, or go down

WRONG SOLUTION: Fix the teachers, through rigorous evaluation of their behaviors and ‘success,’ including those same test scores. If this solution feels convoluted—well, the idea that a mountain of data could serve as a spur to improve practice has never worked particularly well, anywhere. It’s a data-focused non-problem, with a data-focused solution, neither of which matter much, in the real outcomes we want from public education.

PROBLEM: As COVID numbers rise, merely coming to school is stressful. Widespread absences and anxiety.

WRONG SOLUTION: Adding more half-days to the school schedule. This one started out on the right track—less time exposed to unvaccinated children, pre-planned time away from face-to-face learning. But, as most districts have learned, asking for Wednesday afternoons off is not likely to endear you to parents, who have pushed for full-time school in a pandemic, because they need to work.  Less time in school and more technology-focused interaction is probably where we’re headed anyway, like it or not. Four-day weeks. Virtual conferencing. On-line lessons. The new normal. But let’s not worsen the child care crisis in the process.

There have been some good suggestions for addressing issues bubbling up in 2021, the best of which are coming from those closest to the work. And there have been some heavily recycled, proven-wrong policy frameworks that the same old policy creators having been pushing for two decades now, thrown out to see if they’ll stick, when everyone’s distracted by the ongoing dumpster fire.

Where should policy-creators get their ideas about solving big problems?

Because we are living in a completely different world now than we were two years ago, we should look first at the proposed solutions from people who are up close and personal with the problem. The people who are still, in spite of the danger and frustration, willing to be public school educators.

One last thing, for those who would like to tailor solutions to ‘the marketplace’ rather than the common good: Problems in public education are also problems in private and quasi-private (read: charter) schools. School violence, student mental health, the empty teacher pipeline, lack of resources—they’re apparent across the country, in all kinds of schools.

I got a heart-tugging message from a friend who is Principal in a small Catholic elementary school on the border of Detroit, a couple days after the shooting in Oxford. Local police had alerted her to threats that were ‘terrorist in nature,’ suggesting the school close down. But in consultation with her staff, they thought students (who had lost many relatives and caregivers over the past year) would be safer in school.

She said it was a fairly normal day, although she couldn’t wait for the dismissal bell. Then, she went home and threw up.

She wrote:

I am so done with all of this. My job is no longer one of an educational leader. I am an emergency manager around pandemic, school safety, bad weather conditions that flood our school or knock the boiler out… It is rare, very rare to have anything to do with education. I want to return to overseas international schools where the innocence has not been stolen from children. What we have here in the USA is worse than when I fled Sudan due to a revolution. I could understand a revolution. This I do not understand.

Me, either.

by nflanagan

Should School Staff Be Charged in the Student Shootings in Michigan?

I waited for the headlines, and here they came: Oxford School District Likely to Be Sued Over Shootings.  Further tart media observations: What does it take to get suspended from Oxford High or searched after violent scribbles? And: Red flags the superintendent blandly describes as “concerning drawings and written statements” that alarmed his teacher.

If I were only seeing these remarks on right-leaning media (where public schools are all presumed to be guilty of So Many Things—including blandness), I wouldn’t be surprised.

But I’m also seeing remarks trying to pinpoint blame for this shooting  posted on teacher/education/lefty sites—by teachers blaming weak-on-discipline administrators, university professors going after mush-mouthed PR-driven superintendents, and school leaders saying their hands are legally tied, when it comes to searching backpacks and booting kids out of a public school without due process.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen lengthy descriptions of what happened, including a detailed timeline provided by the district superintendent, who keeps stressing that the Oxford Schools want to be transparent.

And frankly, my take-away—this is incredibly sad—is that school folks did what they reasonably should have in this instance, and that nothing will cause real change (including metal detectors, more school resource officers, tripling the number of guidance counselors and requiring clear plastic backpacks), until there is a national, minds-and-hearts shift. Gun control, yes, but also a different political ecology.

There’s a whole complex of reasons why American students are surrounded each and every day by allowed, even encouraged, violence.

I was a classroom teacher for more than 32 years, most in the same district, all but one year in secondary schools. I have had students who committed grisly murders. I have students who are currently in prison for major crimes (including one dude who scratched an epithet into a brand-new tuba when he was in the 7th grade). I had kids who sold weed and pharmeceuticals. A handful of my former students took their own lives, or the lives of others, in various ways. One of my students burned down his own house. On purpose.

Each and every one of these students was white, and attended school in a small-town-values kind of place.

Sometimes, there are obvious signs. Sometimes, not. Some kids grow up and out of their worst behavior. Others, who appear to be quiet or moody, turn out to be capable of unspeakable actions. Contrary to what some believe, there is no infallible ‘check for mental health’ procedure.

The worst-behaved student I ever had—a daily pain in the ass who disrupted the entire school building with his rambunctious and hostile behavior —is now a multi-million dollar real estate salesman.

Many years ago, a HS student in a nearby district brought a gun to school, and showed it to a friend. This was in the zero tolerance/punk prisons era—and he was expelled and sent to Juvie. It was in the local newspapers. Because he was a minor, his name was never printed.

A month or two later, I got a new student in the HS band, a tenor sax player. I asked where he went to school previously, and he told me: the next district over. He was a good player, and quickly made friends. The more I got to know him, the more I appreciated his wit, kindness and intelligence. I took him on a band trip to Toronto. He graduated.

Later, of course, the school counselor caught me in the hallway and informed me that he was the kid who brought the gun to school. Thought you should know, she said. You weren’t here when we had the meeting about accepting him.

Social media comments proclaim that any kid who sketched weapons with blood dripping, or penned a self-doom/anti-social message in gothic lettering that caught a teacher’s eye, should be searched immediately then sent home. Pronto.

But–kids draw and paste all kinds of stuff in their notebooks and on their homework—everything from swastikas to oversized anatomical features. Think: video games.

Are we seeing incipient violent tendencies—or teenage boredom? Who gets to judge? The fact is, we don’t generally kick kids out of school for their immature drawings or weird teenage behavior—unless there’s a pattern, over time.

The fact that two teachers reported ‘concerning’ drawings and cell phone use to find ammunition, over the space of a couple of days, means that the adults in school actually were tracking this child. They asked his parents to take him home, and get him immediate counseling. They shared their fears. And the parents refused.

I was struck by one of the superintendent’s remarks—that if they had forced the child out of the building, when the parents refused to take him, the boy would have been home alone. Hanging behind that remark is another fear educators are dealing with during a mental health crisis: What happens when depressed children are home alone, and there are weapons?

I had a student once, a 7th grade girl, who wrote little notes to me, about her feelings of being ugly, a dork, not having friends, and so on. I tried to pay special attention to her, but the language became more frightening– ‘What will they think when I’m gone?’ I took the problem to the school counselor. She asked: Do you think this girl would harm herself, or is she just seeking attention?

I honestly didn’t think she would. I thought she was just lonely. But I still wanted a referral to the counselor, and a parent call. The counselor agreed, but said that parent calls of that nature often didn’t go well. The school might be seen as high-handed and intrusive, telling a family their child had talked about suicide.

Still, she was willing to do it. Because it was the next step. There are protocols for this kind of thing, she said. We follow them.

Would that all parents tried to do the right things, too.

You’ve probably noticed that there are Moms for Liberty organizations and now, faux legal strategies for parents to demand the rights they already have,  popping up like mushrooms, to keep those high-handed, mask-demanding schools in their place, to press forward on incendiary social issues. The climate for productive school-parent conversations (never a given), has been negatively impacted by living through a highly stressful pandemic and its emotional aftermath.

The core resource for well-functioning schools is—and always has been—trust. All good school practice—public/private/rich/poor—hinges on relational trust.

When parents don’t trust schools to have their kids’ best interests at heart, we’re all in trouble. When there is a deliberate push to de-stabilize school boards and overrun safety rules, the trouble gets worse. Without some measure of trust, we can never help the kids who need our help most.

My heart goes out to all the educational staff in the Oxford Schools, working through the worst that can happen in a school community.

Thank you, as the saying goes, for your service. I wish you and your school healing.

by nflanagan

Violence and Threats in Schools: Who’s Responsible?

It’s been a terrible week for teachers in southeastern Michigan. A terrible week for students and families and school communities as well. Early yesterday morning, school districts—by my count, at least 60, but that was an early tally*—began announcing that out of the proverbial abundance of caution, they were closing down for two days.

They’re not closing due to COVID (although Michigan’s school-based infection rates are ghastly at the moment). They’re shutting down because of spiraling threats of in-school violence, spread on social media.

School leaders are terrified. Not one of them wants to be the next school where an angry, disaffected kid shoots off more than his mouth.

I have dozens of friends who teach near Oxford, site of Tuesday’s massacre in Oakland County, and know many others who have children or grandchildren in the district.

I have been reading their social media threads: First, the reassurance that they’re fine. Then, sharing of how they knew the students who were injured or killed: a friend of their daughter’s, their babysitter, the boy who was in their second grade class, years ago. Sometimes, anger over the words and actions of the shooter’s parents. Photos of the dead, and #OxfordStrong hashtags.

Then, inevitably, the conversation turns to blame. Copies of the two messages of reassurance sent by Oxford school administrators to parents earlier this month—saying hey, we know about these threats and we’re doing something—are shared. There are repeated acknowledgements that the school followed all the recommended safety protocols. So how did this happen?

Two things—true things—are repeated endlessly in these dialogues. The first is that the nation exposed its true values nine years ago after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary, choosing unrestricted gun ownership over the lives of children. The second is that we need a greater understanding and focus on mental health. In our schools, of course.

What is often missing from these heart-wrenching discussions is the fact that schools are just like malls and movie theatres and churches and political rallies—stages for playing out what it means to be an American citizen in 2021, our deepest principles and beliefs.

Despite selfless and heroic actions, despite good parenting and good teaching and due diligence on the part of school administrators and counselors—we live in a pretty ugly country right now.

We live in a country where Kyle Rittenhouse walked free. Where senators and governors boldly lie about election results. Where parents, urged by astro-turf organizations, mob board meetings to protest the teaching of facts and requiring masks in a deadly pandemic. Where thousands of brutal insurrectionists attacked our most sacred building and democratic processes, led by the President of the United States.

Also this: the Oxford HS shooter lives in a state where a gang of angry young men conspired to kidnap and execute the Governor, fantasizing about taking her to a remote location and ‘putting her on trial.’

None of this mitigates the reprehensible behavior of this teenager. He is fully responsible for what he did. But it’s worth thinking about the unique context of growing up in America, the people respected as leaders in this nation, the ruthless tactics used to acquire and maintain power and ‘freedom.’

As Eugene Robinson said: I wonder if the people of Oxford, Mich., feel they have more freedom today than they did before Tuesday.

There are kids like [Ethan Crumbley] in high schools around the world. But only in the United States do we enable them to express their teenage angst by bringing guns to school and opening fire on the students, teachers and administrators they see as their tormentors. Only in this country do we make it easier for youths to get their hands on a handgun or an assault rifle than to work up the courage to ask a classmate out on a date.

This is not new. Kids have been threatening violence, mayhem and self-harm in schools for decades. My (nice/white/suburban) school district was plagued, off and on for years, by a series of bomb threats.  Legislation alone is ineffective, although strong restrictions on possession of firearms would be a good start.

That leaves us with the broad recommendation that we need more attention to mental health, everyone’s favorite ‘solution’ to the problem of social violence. I always wonder just what people think enhanced mental health services look like, in schools. Who’s in charge? What do they do?

I am a strong believer in school counseling, but anyone who’s worked in a school knows that counselors—if they even exist—are stretched over multiple responsibilities and way too many students.

The urgent, squeaky wheels for counselors are often standardized test administration, scheduling and college applications, not dealing with individual students’ bitterness or rage. If we had ten times as many qualified counselors, it would only be a band-aid on mental health for children. Compared to other nations, we have miles to go.

However. Riled-up parents now see social-emotional learning as just another intrusion into their parental rights.

Rick Hess and Robert Pondiscio portray social-emotional learning efforts as ‘perilous’—pointing out that teachers aren’t trained therapists. They fret about all the trigonometry and Brit Lit that won’t be learned, all the drooping test scores, as teachers strive to nurture their students’ emotional health, before tackling the periodic table.

I would argue that public school teachers in America understand the simple fact that kids can’t learn when they’re anxious, depressed, or hostile. Everyone’s running their own informal, ad hoc SEL program, all the time.

It’s called caring about your students.
* Per Bridge Magazine, over 150 school districts in Michigan shut down, as a precaution.

Flyover in SE Michigan yesterday–4 jets in the ‘missing man’ formation.
by nflanagan

That Old Time Religion Saves the World

Probably the best, most challenging, book I read in 2021 is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s not great literature, but it’s an integrated compendium of thinking on how we could save the planet—ecologically, politically, and economically. If that sounds, well, deep—it is. But it’s still fiction and therefore both story and speculation.

Early in the book, Mary, who is chair of The Ministry for the Future (a kind of ongoing fictional offshoot of the actual Paris Accord and COP26) and her most trusted lieutenant are discussing this question:

What would it take to get the entire planet to commit to necessary sacrifices that could, once and for all, turn climate change and civilization around, practices that would save us all? Mutual assured survival, even mutual thriving?

A new religion, her aide says. A newly conceived religion, based on environmental equity, justice and peace, adopted globally.

Mary (and, I am assuming, Robinson’s readership) snorts. A religion. Yeah. Right.

But. What other organized, cross-national movement would support the changes and sacrifice necessary to hold down global temperatures, keep the coastlines from flooding and wildfires from blazing? What kind of collective might be dedicated to the equity and safety of all cultures?

We don’t want to accomplish a sustainable planet by means of war. Or experience horrific loss of life due to unchecked disease or heat, because we cannot agree on how to consume less. We don’t want change to be spurred by questionable but charismatic leaders, or by rigid legal control over human rights, or by terrorism.

We want people to see the need, and make changes voluntarily, to understand the rising tide lifting all boats as metaphor, not terrifying reality.

Maybe this can’t be accomplished without a touch of the supernatural. Or at least the communal.

I know lots of intelligent folks who have decided that religion is unnecessary and too often, corrupt. Not to mention unscientific, and populated by people like Jerry Falwell, Jr. or (God help us) Michael Flynn. When it comes to a higher power, they are either skeptics or content to let the mystery be.

And of course, religions have not traditionally done a such a great job of positive social organization, to say the least. Lofty religious doctrine seldom matches its practical human outcomes. Especially the dominant American religion, in all its multiple flavors.

Religion and its varying doctrinal rules and customs have historically been the cause of, not a balm for, conflict. Kind of makes you wonder why parents aren’t mobbing school board meetings demanding that we excise the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition from the study of world history, because they might make Catholic kids feel bad.

This argument, however—we need a new religion to generate commitment to developing environmentally critical beliefs—can’t be easily dismissed by a joke. I am tempted to suggest that the answer lies in education, the systemic study of belief systems and their commonalities—and agreeing that there are some immutable truths and public goods: Justice. Equity. Respect for all life.

History tells us that the most successful societies match their customs and beliefs to the environment surrounding them. Why can’t the worlds’ teachers, our scholarly trust, unite to point out that the clock is ticking, and our behaviors now will determine the future of our descendants?

For a time, I was a Unitarian Universalist, because they seemed to be focused on valuing nature and human accomplishment, on doing good, promoting peace and staying open to new ideas. It was a heady experience at first—a church that welcomed everyone, focused on intellectual questions, encouraged its members to craft their own faith. Plus hymns and a coffee hour with vegan treats. What’s not to like?

What I discovered is that problems with churches, from the fundamentalist to the loosey-goosey, were centered on the human beings who attended or led those churches. Religious denominations and holy texts are ignored in the face of the power struggles that happen in all organizations. Education is not immune—even the best-resourced schools, on tree-lined neighborhood streets and replete with the newest curricula, are subject to ‘concerned moms’ and their anti-science, anti-literature campaigns.

The question remains: If we want to sustain life, across the globe, we must work together. How can we do this? If we don’t trust our churches and we don’t trust our public schools, and believe our government is on the wrong track, who will lead us toward a vision of sustainable life on the planet we share?

Beats me. Which is why I keep thinking about a new kind of religion. One without a clearly defined God figure, but anchored by a belief in the power of community and good will.

Churches are closing all over the nation, and have been, for decades. I have been a church musician for most of my life, and worked for churches where people were loving and non-judgmental, as well as deeply conflicted congregations. I have also seen, over and over again, people turn to a church when their lives are falling apart, and find comfort.

Maybe what we need is Kurt Vonnegut’s Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Its two precepts: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God. If God is not going to help us clean up this beautiful world, maybe we’d better get on it.

by nflanagan

How World War II Shaped My Dad

My father has been gone from this world for more than forty years. And as adult children are wont to say—there are so many things I should have asked my dad, things I’ll never know.

What’s even more maddening is that much of what I ‘know’ about my dad is likely to be somewhat inaccurate, dependent on faulty memory and well-worn family stories. Still—I am certain that World War II was the experience that made him a man, and left him with some lifelong wounds.

My dad enlisted early in 1942. He was 20 years old, a high school dropout (another long story) who lived at home, contributing to the family income, knocking around his hometown. He was tested and put in what he described as a ‘special group’—men that would be part of the Army’s young Air Corps. Did he want to be part of a new air force, to fly? You betcha.

He was sent to Chicago to train, staying at the Palmer House Hotel. From the time I was a child, I knew that the Palmer House was the most beautiful hotel in the world, because my dad swore it was true. When I first visited the Palmer House, as an adult, I imagined my dad, a first-generation American, walking into the impressively ornate lobby, big-eyed but trying to be cool, like all the other 20-somethings going off to war, still safe but up for adventure.

He trained as a radio gunner, and became part of a combat team that stayed together through most of the war. Well into the 1970s, my mother exchanged Christmas cards with the other members of his flight crew, an annual reaching out to acknowledge their once-intense wartime bond. He was our pilot, a smart guy, my dad would say—and Dick lives in Indianapolis now, what a good guy he was, and this guy, he was a radio gunner, like me.

The crew was assigned to the Pacific theatre, and flew numerous missions in a big, ungainly aircraft where my father was seated in an exposed bubble on the side of the plane. In one intense air battle, their plane was shot down.

All of the crew bailed and survived, floating in rafts, until they were picked up by a submarine. Until the sub surfaced, they couldn’t identify its origin: enemy or ally? It turned out to be an Australian submarine, not the symbolic Japanese rising sun they feared it would be.

There are so many things I don’t know: when this happened and precisely where, for example—or how long they floated on open water before they were rescued, although I know that night fell, at least once. Did they go up again, in the same kind of plane? How many missions did they fly after being shot down? And how do you go up again, after that?

Most of what I know came from things my mother told us, often as an excuse for why my father was so touchy. My dad had a cardboard box of war memorabilia that we weren’t allowed to open—it was taped shut—and he kept his feelings taped shut, too. Most of the time.

When my brother was in high school, he interviewed our father about his wartime experiences for a school assignment. My mother took notes and typed up the paper. (As an older sister, my first response to learning this was: I hope she got a good grade.) When my brother mentioned this, some 35 years later, I was shocked. Dad talked to you about the war?

It turned out that what my brother wanted to know was details about the plane (he knew the exact model and could show me the pictures online), the gun, the radio system, the parachute and rescue gear. The war tools. He said my dad remembered lots of concrete details. My brother didn’t remember what happened to his paper. And now, my brother is gone, too.

On February 28, 1945, my dad’s own beloved younger brother, Don, a Marine, was killed on Iwo Jima. At that point, Dad had been in the military for three years. He had seen, done and lost so many things—and now, he’d lost the most precious thing ever. He went AWOL, to try—my mother said—to locate Don’s grave, so he could confirm what he didn’t yet believe, that his brother was dead.

He had risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant. When he returned to his unit, he was busted down to Private, and was honorably discharged, several months later, at the end of the war. My mother told me he had been diagnosed, if that’s the word, with battle fatigue.

Shell shock, PTSD, battle fatigue. What war does to men.

A post-war job where he would be autonomous and not cooped up in an office was recommended by the US Army, upon discharge. His high school girlfriend had graduated and gone on to university, in Kalamazoo. She was sure he could get a GED and enroll at WMU—there would be federal money. But he declined both her and the suggestion, taking a job delivering bread that he kept for the rest of his life.

Shortly after returning home, he met my mother. He was 25 and she was 19. She says he was handsome and seemed like a man of the world. He liked to dance. He taught her to smoke and drink. Within a year, they were married.

But my father, tight-lipped as he was, never completely left the war behind. It was, I believe, both the best and worst period of his life.

He said he’d seen all he wanted to see of the world, when I went backpacking in Europe—that he wouldn’t leave this country for the rest of his life. When I bought my first car—a Toyota Corolla—he wouldn’t let me park it in his driveway, muttering about ‘the Japs.’

In many ways, he was forever stuck in the thinking and prejudices of 1942. But he always loved to fly, that moment of liftoff, wheels up, grinning. When I think of my dad now, I picture him in the wild blue yonder. It’s where he’d want to be.

Thanks for doing your duty, Jay. Another story from the greatest generation.

by nflanagan

‘Self-Care’ vs. Sustainable Leadership

I once was on a panel at a Governors Summit on Education in Michigan. The topic was ‘teacher leadership.’ It was the usual format—each panelist gets a pre-determined number of minutes to pontificate (which they invariably overrun)—and then (theoretically) there is open discussion among the panelists, and questions from the audience. The line-up was: A state legislator, a representative from one of Michigan’s two teacher unions, and me.

I was the first speaker and started with the premise—copped from Roland Barth—that if all students can learn, then all teachers can lead. I fleshed that idea out, a bit—that practicing teachers need a voice at the policy-making table, that teachers’ control over their own professional work would enhance their practice and enthusiasm for teaching, as well as their efficacy. And so on.

Legislator was the second speaker and he strongly disagreed. He asserted that his role, over so-called teacher leadership, was oversight. Teachers are public employees who need to be kept on a tight rein; their work rigorously evaluated. If they want to lead, they can lead their second-graders out to the playground for recess (audience laughs). He and his colleagues were the rule-makers and goal setters, not teachers.

Then the union guy spoke. And he, too, felt that ‘all teachers can lead’ was a falsehood. Teachers had no business sticking their nose into policy. That was the union’s job. And it was an administrators’ job to lead a district or building—and suffer the consequences of failure. He knew plenty of teachers who were excellent classroom practitioners but didn’t have the skills, desire or moxie to lead. If they wanted to lead, they should run for a position in their union, or get administrative certification. Applause.

Because the Summit was on a weekday, the hundreds of people sitting in the ballroom were mostly legislators or their staffers, heavily from the Governor’s party, plus university and Department of Ed folks, and reporters. Not teachers.

Although I enjoyed a delicious, expensive banquet lunch afterward, I met nobody whose thinking was aligned with mine, re: organic teacher leadership.

Not a great experience. But telling.

Now, many years later, I still believe that experienced teachers want to lead, and are well-positioned to inform the conversation around education policy.

In fact, I think a lot of what happened to Democrats in Virginia—in a race they should have won handily—had to do with suppressing the threat of genuine teacher voices around what gets taught in real classrooms, maybe taking down public education in the process. Plus the utter disruption of a pandemic–and racism, of course.

Teachers are under siege. It’s not surprising that free-floating angst, generated by a highly disruptive pandemic, has been aimed at public schools. It happens cyclically—everything from rising pregnancy rates to chronic illiteracy in poverty-ridden neighborhoods is blamed on educators.

Because–you know what’s coming–everyone went to school and thinks they understand schooling. A pandemic that shuts the entire system down, however, is exponentially catastrophic, impacting everyone. Anger at public schools, even for made-up reasons, is inevitable. It’s the nearest target.

For the last century or so, teachers have been an increasingly female workforce, seriously underpaid and subject to increasingly rigid control from government and on-site leadership. Pretty much the model my co-panelists understood and defended: Some of us make the decisions, others do the work. And hey—enjoy your summers!

But it’s a relatively young and inexperienced teacher workforce now, and the frightening stories about teachers leaving, in droves, with nobody to replace them, ought to force the education community to ask themselves: What would keep the EXPERIENCED TEACHERS WE ALREADY HAVE (sorry) in the classroom for a couple more years, until we rebuild a leaky pipeline?

Well, it isn’t the ‘Wellbeing’ worksheet (see photo, below), which feels like one of those make-work reproducible masters teachers used to pull out on a sub day. Self-care dittos.

Here—fill this out. Feel better! Clearly, whoever designed this worksheet does not understand the relationship between drinking more water and the one three-minute window per day when peeing is possible.

Look, I understand that there’s no easy remedy for the conditions teachers are working under: Angry parents. Lies about the curriculum. Anti-vaxxer moms and virus daredevils. What could a school leader who really wanted to support her staff do?

Grow a backbone. Support public education. Here’s a list of 14 viable suggestions for doing that.

Hiring the best possible people, paying them fairly, giving them time to work collaboratively, honoring their expertise, and releasing their creativity? How does that sound as a recipe for school-based self-care?

What do teachers want? What all professionals want: Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.

by nflanagan

A Halloween Story

I took this Halloween photo on our deck, around 6:15 p.m. For about 10 minutes, there were these shocking pink clouds, and then–in less than minute–they were gone.

I am always introspective on Halloween. Since we moved here, we haven’t had trick-or-treaters (might have something to do with the 750-ft uphill driveway and not being able to see the house from the road). But the night is always filled with a kind of sorrow for me; I resonate more with All Souls/All Saints–the thin time of year–than costumes and candy.

In 1972, 49 years ago today, I was living in Mio, Michigan. I was newly married (may he RIP), and had a job at the drugstore in town. I worked with a teenaged boy, Jerry, who came in after school to sweep and clean up before we closed at 5:00 p.m. It was a boring job, but I liked Jerry, who was learning to play saxophone in Mio’s new band program.

I heard, from neighbors and teachers in town, that Mio kids went on a rampage every Halloween. The owner of the drugstore boarded up his windows, as did many other businesses. I was a little skeptical of the stories I heard, which seemed to be many levels above soaping windows and rotten egg-tossing. More like smashing windows and spray-painting buildings and slashing tires.

I made myself some coffee (a new pleasure for me) and waited with candy but nobody came. I could hear kids screaming in the streets. And then, around 9:00, sirens.

We didn’t hear the story until the next morning. A group of kids (five or six of them) stole a car. None of them had a drivers license. A 15-yr old boy drove the car a few miles out of town and hit a tree, while going at a ridiculous speed. All but one of his passengers (a younger sister) were killed in the crash.

I have looked for the story since, in newspaper archives, but could never find it, to clarify my old memory. I believe four kids (the oldest 15) were killed and the youngest girl survived.

One of the kids who was killed was Jerry.

I have had many happy, joyous Halloweens since 1972, especially when my children were young and we lived in a family-friendly neighborhood.

Tonight, seeing the beautiful sky, I was reminded that if Jerry were still alive, he’d be old enough to retire.

Stay safe out there, everyone. It’s a beautiful world. Stick around as long as you can.