I have lived in Michigan all my life. I never thought of myself as a Yankee until I started working for an education nonprofit based in the South and quickly picked up that nickname–as well as a reputation for being on the side of teachers’ unions (guilty), and outspoken in a way that was downright unladylike. Nobody ever said ‘Bless your heart’ to me.

In fact, it’s easy for folks who don’t live in the South to feel a little smug about being on the right side of the War Between the States, even though it happened more than 150 years ago. Northern educators are fond of pointing out that the lowest-achieving states tend to cluster across the south-eastern tier of the United States.

We are seldom encouraged, however, as teachers, to think about the range of historical and economic streams—or the policy wars—that led to such disparate outcomes. Worse, we’re not pressed to ask what we can do to address and support equity and justice nationwide in an economy that is increasingly global. We get let off the hook sometimes.

The recent outrage over Ralph Northam’s yearbook photo, and his fumbling response, is a case in point. As Teju Cole points out in a New Yorker podcast, white men of a certain age grew up in a deeply racist culture, and not much has changed since then. Since Reconstruction, blackface and minstrelsy have been used to belittle black Americans. We are nowhere close to reconciling our national shame over deep-seated scars of injustice.

The difference with Northam—what separates him from other political leaders who went to school in the 1980s– is that Northam got caught. And once caught, seemed to have no idea how to express shame, humbly ask for forgiveness, admit that he needs to be educated about his failures, past and present, use his own guilt to lead people in a new direction– and so on.

It’s not the call of non-Virginians, of course, but I think Ralph Northam should resign, even though by most accounts, he’s been a good governor. I also thought my previous governor, Rick Snyder, should resign in disgrace over decisions that led to poisoning the water in Flint, then withholding the truth from the citizens of Michigan. Somehow, however, white men of a certain age can survive insulting—or poisoning—black people. If that’s not insidious racism, I don’t know what is.

There’s been some recent conversation about the biased and inaccurate teaching of history and social studies, in the South particularly, which strikes me as just another way to point fingers at schools, rather than acknowledging that schools are a stage where society plays out its deepest values and goals.

Teachers in the North and the South have chronically bungled the topic of slavery, for starters, but it goes deeper than that. Schools are also a stage where assumptions and taboos and unexamined but common practices play out.

I personally have been warned by an administrator not to ‘focus’ on the African roots of the music my students were marinating in, for example, because parents might not like it. Teachers in all parts of the country tangle daily with politically incorrect ideas and forbidden issues—and not just in Civics class. You’d be surprised what first graders ‘know’ and want to share with their little friends.

Recently, a retired teacher buddy asked me if I remembered ‘slave sales’ being a part of Spirit Week at my school. My friend had been tracking a FB page where adults who went to high school together were lamenting the fact that the ‘fun’ things they did (including a ‘slave sale’ assembly) were now banned. Political correctness run amok was the consensus, among the dozens of commenters. It was all in fun. Wasn’t it? The teachers participated, after all, and the school allowed it. Even worse, there were black and white photos shared, including someone in a KKK hood, and a person in a noose.

A female classmate had called the commenters out, saying this is horrible now and was horrible then. She posted a link on hidden biases, asking folks to turn the conversation toward an examination of why this was considered OK behavior.  This led to a lot of irritated mansplaining and rationalizing and attempts to call HER out. (Who is she, anyway? I don’t remember her.)

Talk about discouraging.

The worst thing for me was that I did remember a ‘slave auction’ at my middle school, in the late 70s or early 80s. It had been a tradition there for years, as a fundraiser for something—the cheerleaders were offered up ‘for sale’ and did the bidding of their ‘owners’ for a day. The auction was shut down when a group of boys pooled their money to buy a cheerleader, then brought out a saddle and put it on her. The principal stepped into the mix (finally) and that was the end of ‘slave’ auctions.

So–let’s not get on our high horses about better behavior in any part of the country.

In the New Yorker podcast, Teju Cole was asked if the Northam affair might be a national tipping point, in our awareness, disapproval and extinguishing of racist behaviors. No, he said. We have no idea what conciliation or reparations look like. We’re currently living with the backlash against a black President. The best we can hope for is incremental growth toward equity.

Is Teju Cole right? 

Like many states, Michigan has a Third Grade Mandatory Retention law for students who are not reading at grade level in the statewide assessments. And like most states, the law is riddled with exceptions, loopholes and what you might call pre-existing conditions. In other words, well-connected parents who don’t want their child who struggles with reading to fail the third grade will be able to wiggle out of it. If you’re poor or attending a ‘failing’ school, you’re pretty much toast if your reading skills (or test-taking skills) are subpar–when you’re eight years old.

Much of the critique around ‘3^rd grade flunk’ legislation centers on the damage done to kids by being forced to repeat a grade, the financial burden on schools as they are compelled to provide an additional year of instruction to large segments of their elementary population, and the complete lack of proof that these laws work. If our goal is higher rates of genuine literacy, rather than punishing schools and vulnerable students, there are better ways to get there.

We could begin by noting that Finland, a perennial head-of-list country when it comes to international comparisons of literacy accomplishment, does not begin formal reading instruction until students are seven years of age—roughly second grade—because they believe that’s when a majority of students are developmentally ready to handle the complex intellectual tasks of phonemic awareness, decoding and making meaning of the symbols on the page. By age nine—4^th grade—Finnish students are ahead of ours, even though our 4^th graders have been subjected to formal reading instruction for five years at that point.

There’s something seriously wrong here.

Now we are witnessing the other consequences of the Third Grade Threat—pushing inappropriate instruction down to kindergarten, as anxious districts fear that students who are not reading at grade level (a murky goal, to begin with) will embarrass the district when letters go out to parents of third graders who are supposed to be retained. Because it’s the law.

Who’s to blame when students lag behind (arbitrary) literacy benchmarks, for whatever reason, from learning in a second language, an identified disability or merely being a late-bloomer? Teachers, of course.

Early on, much of the angst was directed at ‘those districts’—the ones where high numbers of students lived in poverty, the districts where 40% of kids weren’t reading at grade level, and teachers were presumed to be less-than (an absolute fallacy, by the way). But the dread over having to face public wrath around flunking 8-year olds has spread to alpha districts.

A disgruntled kindergarten teacher in Ann Arbor shared a memo that was sent to KDG teachers in Ann Arbor two days ago. It appears, in its entirety, including misspellings and grammatical errors, below. Ann Arbor is a large, well-regarded district with a diverse population that includes children from well-educated families as well as pockets of poverty. Most of its schools are highly ranked by the State Department of Education, and a couple of its neighborhood schools post test scores lower than the state average.

But Ann Arbor kindergarten teachers, it seems, are now part of a get-tough literacy accountability pipeline, where their personal beliefs about how children learn emphatically do not matter, and their coaches and administrators are taking them to task, including a ominously worded reminder that their instruction could and will be observed at any time.

They are reminded that ‘large’ numbers of kids—kindergartners, remember, three years before the hatchet falls—are failing.  And the boss wants to know why. In writing. Including a response to the question of how teachers are ‘demonstrating rigor’ in their ELA instruction.

It’s a crackdown, all right: ‘Student progress begins and ends with you. We cannot let borderline students get a pass.’

If this is happening in Ann Arbor—not a perfect district, but one that has demonstrated some progressive ideas and academic successes—how has this law negatively impacted reading instruction in other districts?

Are these unintended consequences? Or is this what the Third Grade Flunk law was supposed to do all along—wrest control of reading instruction from professional teachers?
—————————————————————————————

Memo of February 6 to kindergarten teachers in Ann Arbor (italics are mine):

“Good afternoon K teachers,

I hope that you all had a wonderful day off and stayed off of the slippery roads. The purpose of this email is to get the conversation started with you all ASAP and for us to better understand where are (sic) K students are and how we are going to ensure their success. In hopes for us to get the full picture of what we need to look at there are several questions and items that we need more information from you by Friday, February 8, 2019. (Note: email sent February 6.)

1. Please share with XX and I your reading groups (specifically name of students, days/times you meet with them and for how long). When we read them, these schedules should reflect at least 4-5 days a week with your lowest (below grade level) readers and fewer days for those at or above target. Please note that we may pop in during the time you give to see how a few friends are doing.
2. Please provide XX and I with a hard copy of your most current benchmark assessment that helped you to determine reading groups.
3. Questions that require honest answers…

How many of your kids be ready to read for 1st grade teachers at a level “E” by the beginning of next year? Please list them.

What literacy supports and strategies have you been offering students and families that go beyond the classroom?

What do you believe is your responsibility to students in the area of ELA?

This year we had a very LARGE number of students falling significantly below grade level.
What was the underlying cause for this last year?  What have you changed about your practice this year so that this does not happen again?
How are you demonstrating rigor with in your ELA practice?

As we dive into how our youngest and brightest look at this point, we must also remember that our personal views and opinions around developmental appropriateness may not match what the district is asking you to achieve. Nonetheless, each of you is still responsible for meeting and achieving the grade level outcomes set out by the district. Please remember that student progress and success begins and ends with you.

In addition, growth data is dependent on the level of success student have. As you go into the next round of evaluations do you have the evidence and data that will accurately demonstrate the appropriate reading growth. This year we will not be using “the standard error of deviation”, either students have made the necessary growth or they have not. With the NEW THIRD GRADE READING LAW we can not let borderline kids get a pass. These student will have to securely demonstrate success. (Caps not in original email.)

Thank you in advance for you thoughtful responses and speediness in getting this information to us. We will be setting up a mandatory meeting to discuss these points further for sometime next week. We will have XX join us as our Literacy Expert.

 

 

Hey, remember when Bill Gates and his disciples were pushing the Common Core and every day there was another info piece published in Ed World saying, emphatically and even snippily, that these were STANDARDS, not a CURRICULUM?

Remember those assurances that a national consensus on standards and reliable, aligned assessments evaluating student mastery of those core standards were merely a conceptual framework–the beginning and the end of their Grand Master National Make-Schools-Better plan. Remember when they claimed school districts and individual teachers were free to craft their own curricula? Because teachers knew the kids (duh) and how best to teach them to reach those standards–providing students continued to do well on the tests, of course.

Well, that was then. The headline now is ‘Gates Giving Millions to Train Teachers on High-Quality Curriculum,’ closing the instructional cycle: Standards—Curriculum—Assessments.

Grantees will work to improve how teachers are taught to use and modify existing series that are well aligned to state learning standards.

So–teachers won’t be using hand-selected materials or instructional activities they find relevant or engaging to their students’ lives. They won’t have the authority to ditch packaged materials that don’t work for their kids and create something that does. They will merely be trained—my least favorite word, when it comes to authentic teaching—to ‘use existing series.’  Series pre-approved by Gates and constructed by off-site by textbook writers. Whoopee.

You could see it coming, with the surfeit of dismissive articles on how teachers rely on Pinterest to create their lessons and wouldn’t know rich, rigorous curriculum if it dropped from the sky. This underlying disdain for teachers is often masked by chipper sentences like this one:

Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and instructional designers is one of the ways in which we push the job far beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.

I went to ed school a long time ago, but I left with the conviction that my job would be centered on creation of a relevant curriculum for my students and the pedagogical skill to deliver that curriculum. If teaching is not pedagogy and instructional design, what is it that teachers are supposed to be doing?

I do—unlike some of my colleagues—see the value of a loosely framed set of disciplinary standards to follow VOLUNTARILY, especially early in a teaching career. It helps to know how to sequence core learning objectives (some old-school language from the 70s that still applies). It helps to have a toolkit full of strategies to teach those objectives. What helps most is friendly, talented colleagues who provide running support when things don’t go well—another way to teach a key concept or go-to materials that aren’t in ‘the series.’

Sometimes, I think all the hand-wringing around teachers being unable to select, organize and teach a coherent curriculum comes mostly from those who are worried that teachers might choose learning materials and goals that they don’t agree with. It’s true that teachers have a lot to do, day in and day out, but taking their most critical responsibilities away from them means stripping them of what it means to be a teacher, turning them into technicians, record-keepers and disciplinarians enforcing work they don’t believe in. It’s demeaning.

I also don’t believe this is about Gates and Company making more money. It’s about control over a once-creative, socially essential occupational field.

A few years ago, I applied to become a ‘model lesson’ designer in a project launched by my State Department of Education. The money was not impressive, but the work was done over two weeks at a beautiful resort in northern Michigan, and several of my teacher colleagues were participating. The idea was to design exemplary lessons around topics and skills in the state grade-level curriculum standards (pre-Common Core). These lessons would then be available for all teachers in Michigan to use, to enhance their curriculum.

The work was done using a nationally familiar model of lesson design. Thousands of teachers across the country have read the book and undergone the training. Because this workshop was organized in a hurry (had to spend that grant money!) the sponsoring organization didn’t have a trainer available. Instead, they sent out two teachers to deliver the training and help us write the units.

These teachers were flat-out great. Both knew the lesson design process and material well but were pragmatic in assuring us that the ‘gourmet’ lessons we were designing were not the stuff of everyday teaching. They were ambitious and creative and used technology (one of the requirements) that lots of teachers didn’t have access to. A couple days in, there was a discussion about how the Department expected these lessons to be used.

One of the teachers leading the workshop admitted that he didn’t believe ANY lesson could be used, wholesale, by another teacher.  You might find a great idea or strategy, he said—but any smart teacher will tweak and modify. Tweaking and modifying are what teaching is. And creating your own lessons, custom-tailored to the kids in front of you—that’s what great teaching is.

There was applause when he said this, but the Department folks at the back of the room, scrolling through their phones, looked uneasy. The two teachers were gone in two days, replaced by a woman from the sponsoring organization, who made us discard the work we’d done already as ‘drafts’ and start over. To my knowledge, the lessons were never used.

So much for ‘high-quality’ curriculum. It’s hard to see how the millions Gates is dropping on this project will end up benefiting real kids. There is no such thing as a sure-fire, teacher-proof lesson. The person in front of the room always matters more.

Photo: Thammie Cascales

Maybe you don’t want to read another gush of outrage over those kids who tried—and failed—to humiliate Omaha tribal elder Nathan Phillips. I’ve seen at least two dozen full-scale editorial pieces, in the mainstream and alternative media, plus many more posted on social media with one of the many shaky iPhone videos and a few choice insults in the comments.

Perhaps you have decided that the news cycle for MAGA Boy and the persistently drumming Native American elder has run its course. Maybe you called or emailed the school in Kentucky to express your displeasure. Make a few comments on social media posts—and considering that the event is now over, it goes into the ‘Old Outrages’ file, along with the Hitler-salute Youth in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Stanford swimmer who got away with rape, pretty much. Not to mention Michael Brown, Tamar Rice, et al..

Perhaps there are just too many outrages to keep burning, burning, burning all the time. It’s exhausting. But maybe that’s the problem—we get angry, or sad, or sickened by all signs and signals that there’s something really appalling happening in this country. And we feel powerless to do more than comment.
More than that, we’re not really sure who or what to blame. We don’t know how to fix this.

Is this about a spoiled and entitled generation of kids? Is it about Catholic schools, sending teenaged boys on a mission to publicly protest a woman’s right to have control over her own body? Who thought that was a good idea? Or is it really about the adults—a response I’ve heard from many educators—and their failure to step in and stop the reprehensible behavior of the boys in their charge, to point out their disrespect, to yank them back?

I think the fact that virtually all the boys in the video were wearing MAGA hats answers that last question. Clearly, that was acceptable gear for a visit to the nation’s capital. They got off the bus with those baseball caps, their cell phones to document their manly actions, and their inclination to rumble.

The thing is—and I’m not the first to point this out—we’ve seen boys like this before. Boys like this have been part of our history, from Birmingham to Wounded Knee to Charlottesville. They sit in corner offices, the halls of power and the highest court in the nation.  To boys like this, life is a game of winners and losers. They want to be winners, to come out on top. And white boys think they have the advantage there.

The question now is not who’s most to blame— or whether the boys even understood the political and philosophical differences between the Black Hebrew Israelites, who were also protesting, and the cause of the Indigenous Peoples March.  Doubtful.

The question we need to be asking is what this incident represents about us, as a nation. What will we do next, how can this be mended, what does it mean to be ‘great?’

Perhaps the most on-point and frightening thing I’ve read came from Nathan Phillips himself:

Phillips said he recalled “the looks in these young men’s faces … I mean, if you go back and look at the lynchings that was done (in America) …and you’d see the faces on the people … The glee and the hatred in their faces, that’s what these faces looked like.”

So–let’s stop talking about this incident as proof that Catholic schools are missing the moral mark, or that teenagers are clueless jerks who don’t know their own history, or that parents need to take a firm hand and stop defending their kids (instead of hiring PR firms to clean up the mess).

This is about a malevolence sweeping across our country. We’re all involved here. This is about racism, in all its filthy and sordid flavors, shapes and forms.

It’s just more evidence that demons we thought had been tamped down, again and again, are on the loose once more. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and white nationalism, parading around in red hats. The cracks in our democracy widening. A new sense of who the natural winners and losers are—who ‘deserves’ to come out on top.

In one of the videos, Nathan Phillips says:

 “Let’s make America great. Let’s do that.”  After an exchange about “stolen land” one young person responds to Phillips’ group by saying, “And y’all stole it from the aboriginals. … Land gets stolen. That’s how it works. It’s the way of the world.”

There you have it. Not sure who told this kid that stealing property was the way of the world, but if this is what young men attending a school that purports to inculcate strong moral character believe, we’re in terrible trouble.  White teachers and parents need to take a good look at not only what happens on school trips, but in the curriculum, the athletic fields, at the dinner table and every other place that our kids look for role models and guidance. Because they ARE looking.

That doesn’t mean I’ve let these kids off the hook. I haven’t. Only this: if you were relieved that YOUR children/students/community would never behave like this, look at what’s coming down the pike.

 Decide for yourself what is causing this upsurge in hate and ugliness.

Nathan Phillips gets the last word:
Phillips said the students who derided him Friday were motivated by fear of different people. 

“The Black Israelites, they were saying some harsh things, but some of it was true, too,” Phillips said. “These young, white American kids who were being taught in their Catholic school, their doctrine, their truth, and when they found out there’s more truth out there than what they’re being taught, they were offended, they were insulted, they were scared, and that’s how they responded. One thing that I was taught in my Marine Corp training is that a scared man will kill you. And that’s what these boys were. They were scared.”

Yes. The title is sarcasm.

But the idea must be acknowledged. It sprang from the mind of one of most venerable Famous Educators, a hoary pillar of the never-ending education reform movement, Chester E. Finn, known to his fellow reformistas as ‘Checker.’ Checker is currently paterfamilias of the Thomas Fordham Institute group, one of whom, Michael Petrilli, recently suggested that the education reform movement has been so successful in accomplishing its goals that it was currently fading into media obscurity. As if.

I have never been a fan of Finn’s approach to school reform. (Click here, for example.) Finn, whose teaching career spanned one full year, is one of those private-school, private-colleges, wordsmithy edu-pundits who look down—way down—on fully public education, seeing it as a hopeless tax-funded entitlement program for subpar youth.

My favorite example of this comes from his book, Troublemaker, a very readable sort-of autobiography where he positions himself as an education policy rebel—a ‘gadfly’– poking at sacred public education cows. He talks about the difficulties he had teaching high school as a newbie, and blames them on the lack of a good syllabus. Because in working with ‘tough’ kids, with ‘few prospects,’ a rigidly defined curriculum rich with the classical canon is your ace in the hole as a novice teacher.  (Sarcasm again. Sorry. There’s something about Finn’s George Willesque writing that brings out the snark.)

Finn now writes the occasional op-ed at Flypaper (get it?), tutting about mistakes made by those who persist in defending public education and don’t see issues his way. His most recent one is ‘Rekindling moral education: A worthy challenge for schools of choice.’  If you’d like a get a flavor of Finn’s erudition and moral rectitude, you can read it, but I’ll summarize for you:

The nation is going to heck in a handbasket, and it’s time for schools to get on the stick and start teaching some values moral certainties, because ‘we’ are observing ‘an excess of selfishness, cheating, laziness, and willingness to be a burden on others.’

He (Finn) has read two excellent essays, comparing the views of Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau (a long-time favorite target for Finn), and thinks we could benefit from high-quality, philosophy-driven moral instruction in our schools, the kind of instruction that private and especially religious schools have always embraced.

In fact, it’s an ‘obligation’ for schools of choice to embark on this, right away. Regular public schools, which Finn has taken to calling ‘compulsory-education schools,’ however, shouldn’t even bother. They’re faceless bureaucracies, after all, and they dare not offend their ‘common’ constituencies by trying to ‘habituate certain values.’ Finn puts ‘Blaine Amendments’ in quotes, lamenting the fact that religion has been shut out of public education. Charter schools, on the other hand—well, there may be some ‘workarounds.’

Finn finishes the column with some high-flown blah-blah about teaching the Categorical Imperative to school-of-choice kindergarteners–trusting that TFA corps members could develop the curriculum, no doubt, doing their bit to hold back the ‘debased and unworthy society’ that’s coming down the pike.

Well. Speaking as a long-time compulsory-attendance schoolteacher, I can testify that character education has always been a part of public schooling. In fact, the foundation of most school discipline practice, K-12—from simple classroom rules, morning meetings and honor councils all the way to formal programs like Restorative Justice and (God help us) Canter’s Assertive Discipline—has been established to shape the character and behavior of students. The idea that public schools shy away from defining morally correct behavior and overlook genuine offenses is ludicrous.

In fact, if there is a societal force moving against teaching truth and justice in public schools, it might be our own legislatures. Here in Michigan, it took 18 public ‘listen and learn’ sessions to overturn right-wing edits to the state’s social studies standards:  People discovered references of the government’s role in guaranteeing freedom of religion, freedom of expression and freedom of press had been struck. So were references to the Underground Railroad, women’s rights activists and the suffrage movement as well as emerging civil rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

As I was reading Finn’s rapturous description of parochial schools and their long-time commitment to the inculcation of virtue, I thought about Brett Kavanaugh’s calendar of debauchery and phony, spitting outrage when his entitlement was threatened. Religious-based schools do indeed have the freedom to teach their preferred principles and models—and parents have the prerogative to pay for the privilege of having their kids attend school with similarly well-connected families—but none of that is a guarantee that Catholic schoolboys adopt a higher standard of moral behavior in adulthood.

It’s Checker Finn’s titular assertion that charter schools are the perfect place for character education to get a good toehold on changing society that’s most absurd. Perhaps Checker Finn hasn’t been following the endless (and I do mean endless) stories of charter corruption. Charter schools have been around long enough to have posted some solid evidence about their efficacy and outcomes—when Finn mentions that some of them have used their commitment to personal merit as a ‘brand,’ he does so without apparent irony.

Perhaps he hasn’t seen the videos, or understood that the adorable children in ‘Waiting for Superman’ have not been ‘saved’ from the debased and unworthy world he fears. If Checker Finn were to show up in my town, he couldn’t have a conversation with the ‘visionary’ charter school founder here, because he’s in prison for financial malfeasance, although he’s still collecting rent from his personal school of choice. Moral rectitude, indeed.

I don’t disagree with Checker Finn’s take that the world has grown colder, and less worried about honesty and integrity.  But I think there’s another reason why. It has to do with role models, not school governance models.

I often remind myself that my grandmother was 30 years old before she got the chance to vote. In my 20s, advocating for the ERA to pass (spoiler alert: it didn’t), I asked my grandmother if she considered herself a suffragette, back in the day. Was she champing at the bit, wondering when women would achieve parity with men?

Not exactly. She was happy to have the vote—and used it faithfully, right up until she died at 103, to vote mainly for Republicans, because her brother was a Republican and advised her to do so. But although she was a remarkably independent and self-sufficient woman, for her times, she was not a banner-waving feminist in her 20s.

My grandmother worked, full-time, after leaving school in the 8^th grade, in 1904. She lived with her parents, her older married sister and then alone, throughout her 20s. She bought a car with her savings, before she even knew how to drive, getting one of her other (also Republican) brothers to teach her. She didn’t marry until 33, after everyone had given up on her prospects. She was an old maid–until she eloped to Chicago with a 40-something cigar maker.

She was, however, civic-minded, participating in troop support during WW I, reading a daily newspaper and contributing to many charitable causes. She supported herself and her only daughter throughout the worst of the Depression, working at a grocery store after her husband died. She was never anywhere close to well-off, and her grandchildren made fun of her string-saving and vegetable-scrap soup-making. The family joke was that she put one chocolate chip in each cookie.

I think my deep love and respect for my grandma’s persistence in getting on with her life, no matter what, has something to do with my thing for Elizabeth Warren. I remember the big digital display at the Democratic Convention in 2016, when Hillary Clinton ‘cracked the glass ceiling,’ thinking that it was one thing to have finally nominated a woman. But another to actually get her elected.

I liked Clinton well enough (although I voted for Bernie in the primary), seeing her as the best-prepared candidate in American history.  But I did not identify with her or find her story compelling. She was the cool, confident girl at the top of the class who didn’t make mistakes. She was calculating, and shrewd. In retrospect, those are excellent qualities in a president—and I’d give up a lot to have her in the White House now. Perhaps her role in history is to have cracked the ceiling so others can take the escalator, although I’m certain that’s not what she was aiming for.

Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is relatable. For me, anyway. Her family was undeniably working class, prone to working-class prejudices (her mother’s ethnic background, for example), and frequently broke. Her brothers all joined the military, a common career plan for the guys who graduated from my blue-collar high school in the sixties. She dropped out of college at 19 to marry, then quickly regretted it and figured out how to get that degree, after all. She went to law school as a young mother. Whatever notoriety and accomplishments Elizabeth Warren has earned, they all belong squarely to her.

But–is relatable a valuable trait? How do we pick a candidate for president?  David Leonhardt has some good advice on that, in the NY Times today: 

First, think for yourself. Don’t try to figure out what kind of candidate some other hypothetical voter — a swing voter, say — is likely to want. Think about which candidate excites you.

The strongest presidential candidates usually are more than the sum of their demographic traits and résumé lines. In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump sure didn’t seem like the most electable Republican candidate — but he won. In 2008, a first-term African-American senator with the middle name Hussein didn’t seem like the most electable Democrat — but he won. If you find someone who legitimately excites you this year, there’s a very good chance that candidate will also excite other voters.

Leonhardt’s second piece of advice:  The Democrats should choose a candidate who understands the appeal of economic populism right now.

Bingo.

Aside from climate change, I think the rapidly expanding gap between the haves and the have-nots is the most critical issue in the United States today. It undergirds other major issues—racism, health care, education, housing and infrastructure, the well-being of the citizenry. And there’s nobody running for POTUS who understands better just how much—and in what ways– the middle class, working class and those in genuine poverty have been screwed by our economic policies and growing inequity than Elizabeth Warren. It’s her life’s work.

I remember clearly the first time I saw Elizabeth Warren on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  It was in 2009. She was clearly nervous—she says she threw up backstage—and very much the rattle-on, didactic professor. I learned, from her few minutes on TV, just who was responsible for the financial collapse that had negated my puny investments, and which Wall Street lawyers had been put in charge of ‘fixing’ the economy. She was blunt and bold. She ought to run for Congress, I thought.

I read her book, and was impressed. And I started following her career, beginning with her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its struggle to get established, with Obama ultimately deciding she wouldn’t have enough ‘support’ to be its first Director. She’s been speaking out for working families and populist economic values for a decade now, proposing solutions and identifying roadblocks to equity. She’s also routinely been underestimated.

Warren’s enormously popular in her own state. She even called out Hillary Clinton’s two-faced senatorial voting record on financial issues—a pretty gutsy thing to do. Later, once Clinton won the nomination, she supported her—as a team player, another role that winning politicians are compelled to play in a highly partisan system like ours. And now—she’s supporting the Green New Deal, working cooperatively with some of the most progressive new politicians in Washington.

So—just what is it that is preventing right-thinking Americans for backing Warren’s candidacy for President? Maybe it’s the fact that only 52% of Americans say they would feel comfortable with a woman president.  In Atlantic Monthly, Peter Beinart, after dissecting Warren’s flirtation with identifying her genetic heritage and her policy views, says this:

All this ignores the harsh truth that when women politicians—especially women politicians who embrace a feminist agenda—overtly seek power, many American men, and some American women, react with “moral outrage.” They may not express that outrage in explicitly gendered terms, just as they may not express their anxiety about a black candidate in explicitly racial terms. They may instead cite DNA testing or hidden emails or San Francisco’s cultural liberalism. Or they may simply say they find the candidate’s mannerisms off-putting. The media’s role is to dig deeper: to interpret these specific discomforts in light of the deeper discomfort that Americans again and again express with ambitious women.

The media, and those who don’t do that deeper digging can always find a reason here or there to pillory a candidate like Warren—something she said about charter schools 20 years ago, a discomfort with her earnest, opposite-of-aloof personality, or nailing her for challenging Trump’s disparaging label of ‘Pocahontas.’

I fully understand Tribal leaders’ irate clarification: being Native American is not a matter of DNA testing, but cultural identification. But I also understood Warren’s urge to tell her family story. Cross-cultural mixing is the story of America—and as recently as a generation or two ago, many a family’s unity was destroyed by prejudice and intolerance against those with different skin color, religion, ethnic background or class. Although it may have backfired, I thought it was Warren’s story to tell, her grievance to address. And, in the end, not really a big enough deal to knock her off the list of prospective national leaders.

After the 2016 election, I volunteered to go on a ‘listening tour’ for my county’s Democratic party. I went with a partner, and we knocked on doors of voters who were identified as independents and those who did not vote in the previous November. We asked what their most important local, state and national issues were—and what qualities their ideal candidates would have. It was fascinating.

We only found person who admitted to voting for Trump, here in a state that pushed him over the edge. Instead, people talked about how much they disliked Hillary Clinton, going all the way back to her tenure as First Lady, where she was ‘pushy’ and Not Elected President. Yeah, she was broadly experienced and smart, blah-blah—but they just did not like her. They couldn’t relate to her. Plus, they said, she was a liar. Many of them proudly told us (strangers, remember, who knocked on their door, and asked completely different questions) they didn’t vote for anybody as President.

All of this makes convinces me that we need to change the way we talk about women in politics:

 For the last two years, women have been standing up. We marched. We phone-banked. We canvassed. We fund-raised. And most importantly, we spoke up. We said, “Me too!”  We said, “I’ll run!” We said, “Enough!” And finally, we had an outcome that wasn’t soul-crushing. After two years of suffering through a relationship with our abusive country and thinking nothing was going to change, we had a reason to celebrate instead of mourn.

So naturally, the internet could not let it stand.

Amen. It’s time to look as seriously at women running for President as we do men. To see their gaffes as just that: gaffes. To investigate their background experiences, expertise and deeply held principles. To stop trying to find that one disqualifying incident or irritating characteristic. To see them as genuine leaders and professionals, with warts and strengths. If there’s anything that 2016 taught us, it’s that Americans have a tolerance for obvious warts, if they see something else they like.

My grandmother never raised a ruckus about not being able to vote because it never occurred to her that her gender had been systematically suppressed. Things just were as they were—men made political decisions and women fried eggs.  Change, like a woman in the White House—let alone a woman who genuinely came from blue-collar roots—would have been unthinkable. In 1920, Grandma was just happy to get the vote.

But a whole century has passed. It’s time for someone like Elizabeth Warren to be President. There are others—in fact, Warren is only one of my top five candidates. But all of them bring something new and energizing to the table. Let’s make change in 2020.

I try to read one hundred books per year. I arrived at that number after a few years of pursuing competitive reading, setting ever-higher unreachable goals and then ‘cramming’ in late December in an attempt to slide in under the wire. I was reminded, uncomfortably, of my kids, back in the day, reading easy-peasy picture books to juke the competitive-reading, Pizza Hut-driven stats on the charts posted on their classroom walls. Data, not delight.

My best reading buddy, Claudia Swisher, read 152 books this year, but I have now decided to simply admire Claudia from afar and try to hit three digits, with a mix of old and new, fiction and non-fiction, keeping a book or two (or five) going at all times. I log my reading at GoodReads, rating each book (one to five stars) and writing at least a couple sentences, if not a full-blown review. It took awhile to get into that habit, too, but now I really appreciate having a list of what I’ve read, especially series, wherein titles blur after a few months.

This was not a particularly great year for reading—for me. I read more one- and two-star entries than usual, and for the first time ever, logged two DNF (Did Not Finish) books. It might be my Calvinist upbringing, but I have always powered through books once I’ve read a few chapters.

Perhaps it’s an increased awareness that—tick-tock—I have only so much time left, but I’m done finishing stinkers, forever. And yes, some books take a while to gear up, then reward you generously at the end. But should I have to invest time while hoping things pick up? No. Unless someone I trust (see the aforementioned Claudia Swisher, or my best friend Sandy, or my husband Terry, also a prodigious reader) tells me to persist.

When I was just two books shy of my goal, I asked Twitter for some short but worthy suggestions and Monise Seward turned me on to a YA graphic series—The Amulet. The books are beautifully drawn and feature rip-snorting, mind-boggling adventure plots. I’d read only one graphic novel before, in my life, and decided I didn’t like graphic novels. So—thanks, Monise. You—and others—changed my mind about what to read next.

Here are the best, most thought-provoking things I read in 2018, in the order I read them:

Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)

The Power (Naomi Alderman)

Men We Reaped (Jesmyn Ward)

The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas)

The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)

Beartown (Fredrik Backman)

The Female Persuasion (Meg Wolitzer)

I read the Wolitzer in July—and since then, it’s been a long, dry stretch wherein I’ve read some fine fiction and some good nonfiction, but nothing that turned me around, emotionally or intellectually, like the seven books (one nonfiction, six fiction) I listed.

Each is hyper-linked to a good review, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

Looking at the list, I am pleased to see that six of seven authors are women. I also see that the central themes of the books are aligned with my most cherished core beliefs or deepest questions, from cross-cultural adoption to the unremitting wrongness of racism in the United States. The books look at male privilege (overt and hidden) and sports privilege and, strange as it sounds, Jesuits in space.

I read three books about our cracked, bizarre political situation this year, but didn’t think any of them had a firm grasp on what we have in store as a nation—how the Trump presidency will alter our future. I read some pretty good books on education, too, but didn’t encounter That One book that will be part of the educational canon of transformational thought.

Many of the four- and five-star books I read last year came from friends’ recommendations.

Would you like to recommend a book or two?  I appreciate all of your suggestions.

Also—posting this shot of sunrise on my deck, New Years Day.  (I took a picture on Christmas morning, too, at the exact same time, and it’s entirely different.) Happy New Year, fellow readers.

As I write, the TV pundits are out in full force on this four-day holiday weekend. I can hear their voices in the next room, saying: ‘Wall. Build the Wall. Steel-slat Wall. There will be no wall, wall, wall.’

It’s deeply ironic, isn’t it? As every other medium is sharing messages of joy and peace—caring for those with all kinds of needs, highlighting the season of giving and forgiving, yada yada—our duly elected President is using his incredible authority to reinforce naked dominance, even outright cruelty, over those same needy folks, at this moment. No joy and peace for you, asylum seekers!

The antidote, for me, has been (more irony) social media, seeing holiday memories, wishes and celebrations pictured on friends’ timelines. I don’t know how many dogs in Santa hats it takes to push the crisis at the border out of mind, temporarily—but I’m down to see them all. We need a little harmony and mirth, before returning to the cause of preserving democracy.

The most heartening things I’ve seen in the past week have come from the schools and classrooms of my educator friends—kids singing, jingle bells ringing, cookies being decorated, trips to the reindeer farm, and stories read. I know that each teacher, PK-12, is struggling with how much ‘holiday’ to inject into the daily life of their classroom—as if they had control over the commercialized Christmas madness that descends on the nation, mid-November.

It’s always a judgment call, for public school educators. How to honor all traditions, sacred and secular? How to walk the fine line between what ‘most people’ celebrate and what is actually happening in the homes of the children in our care, some of whom are decidedly not celebrating anything? How to determine whether a holiday-related story or activity or essential question is worthy of inclusion in a custom-tailored curriculum for our particular students? Probably most pressing: How to keep a lid on the mounting excitement (and dread) and keep kids moving forward?

It’s especially difficult for colleagues who teach music. I have often thought that there should be a whole required course in the university music education curriculum on incorporating cultural traditions respectfully and without running afoul of community expectations. The ACLU has some incredibly useful materials for educators and civic organizations on community celebrations, a widely misunderstood topic (see: The not-really-a ‘War on Christmas’).

Many music teachers, especially those at the elementary level, default to the secular (which often sprang from sacred roots, when traced back) and end up with a lot of Santa Claus music, of dubious worth, or weather-related ‘winter’ tunes which are wildly inappropriate in Arizona and Florida.

I’m not criticizing—it’s really tricky. The longer one teaches in a particular community, the easier it becomes to reconcile December programming with democratic values, but issues always bubble up. Two stories:

#1. I am mentoring a promising, enthusiastic first-year elementary music teacher in my district, although we teach in different buildings. She’s putting together a winter-themed program for December. It looks great to me. My son is in the building where she teaches, and he likes the songs he’s learning. A couple of weeks before the concert date, her principal (an overt born-again Christian) instructs her to end the program with ‘Silent Night.’ He pictures the whole auditorium singing along—and he’ll pop for those flickering fake candles.

She mentions this to other teachers in the lunchroom. They’re outraged. It’s against the law! Just tell him no!  (Note: there are lots of other issues with this principal, beyond separation of church and state.) She comes to me, her official mentor, asking for advice.

Has she had a conversation with him about how appropriate it is to end a program with such an iconic Christian tune? Has she mentioned how little time she has with each group, to explicate what ‘round yon Virgin’ means to your average first grader? Answer: Yes.  And he is adamant. It’s what he wants, and he has directed her to do this.

My advice? Perhaps first-year teachers, even those who know better, have to do what the principal directs.  Her colleagues should understand—they know him, plus they want to keep her on staff, because she’s talented and the kids love her.  Next year, or when she gets tenure, she will be in a better position to choose her own curricular materials and defend them.

That was then.  Today, I might give her different guidance. What do you think?

#2. I am teaching elementary music myself, in a K-5 building. We are preparing for a December assembly for parents and families, during the day—very casual and fun, just a chance to sing and jingle, on the day before winter break.

A first-grader’s father makes an appointment to see me.  I am prepared. I have met, many times, with parents who have different faith traditions, and have always been able to craft a satisfactory solution to holiday programming.

The father is a minister at a fundamentalist church in the district. He’s come to direct me not to mention Santa Claus in my classroom. No stories about Santa. No songs about Santa. No Santa hats or decorations.  He’s perfectly happy for us to sing ‘Away in a Manger’ (his suggestion), but please—no ‘Jolly Old St. Nicholas.’ He and his wife have always told their children The Truth about Christmas: there is no Santa Claus, and kids whose parents promote this myth are lying to their children.

Well. While making sure the first-grade songs don’t include Santa is not a problem, some of the other classes have started working on Santa-related songs, including the 5^th graders’ very clever rendition of ‘Mr. Santa’ to the tune of ‘Mr. Sandman’ with some cool bom-bom-bom-bom harmonies at the beginning, even a little half-baked counterpoint.

Fifth graders don’t believe in Santa Claus (unless it’s beneficial to their gift tallies), but they’re OK with singing about him. Nobody believes the Beatles lived in a yellow submarine, but we’re all willing to join in on the chorus. Right?

I tried to explain this to the minister; I would avoid directly mentioning or singing about Santa Claus in his daughter’s presence (nor did I want her to spill the beans to horrified Little Believers in her classroom, an evergreen issue for early childhood educators). But I couldn’t take Santa out of the entire program.

He smirked. He thanked me for my time and told me his daughter would not be attending the program. All in all, probably for the best, because—trust me—even when teachers try to excise symbolic representations of the holiday for the best of reasons, somehow Santa Claus keeps comin’ to town.

 

Several years ago, in an effort to make the building look festive as parents visited for various events, my middle school principal suggested mandated a Christmas door decorating contest in December. Each homeroom would choose a theme and embellish their classroom doors to match. Naturally, it was a contest—with the winning homeroom scoring donuts and cocoa.

I had some reservations about this. Competitive decorating—for a holiday that represents only one faith-ish tradition—is really not kosher, so to speak, in a public school. Even with a fairly uniform—middle class, non-diverse—student population, embracing a range of celebrations and ‘reasons for the season’ has always been my M.O., the way to meld parent expectations around a December concert, and teach students that mankind, in arctic and temperate zones anyway, has marked the Solstice as celestial turning point. Everything else, from Santa Claus to midnight Mass, came later.

Besides, enforced cheer can be anxiety-producing for many students in December, even in a school district where a very large majority of students celebrate Christmas in their homes.  There are always children whose grandmother is seriously ill, whose dad has lost his job, whose parents have split and are now experiencing two, or more, less-than-Hallmark celebrations, marked by tears and disappointment.

In fact, the longer you live, the more you realize that sweetness and light at the holidays happens only sometimes. When you’re genuinely mature, you can come to seriously appreciate the bittersweet holiday, the annual opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of life, the quiet pleasures of memory.

But not if you’re, say, twelve—and wondering why other kids get Force One hand-operated drones, and you’re just hoping to have dinner with someone who cares about you.

One year during the weeks leading up to the winter break, I asked my students to write about what they planned to do during their time off. Most wrote things like, “see my cousins,” “get a new gaming system,” and “go skiing.” However, one of my students turned in a blank piece of paper with just his name on it. When I asked him why he didn’t write anything, he reluctantly told me that he wasn’t excited for the break. He said all winter break meant to him was two weeks at home alone while his mother was passed out on the couch. No tree. No family dinners. Not even any presents.

I was discussing this minefield with three of my friends who are veteran teachers. One said:

The year I moved from elementary to HS remedial, I loved every minute until about Thanksgiving… I finally went into my principal’s office and admitted I was a terrible teacher and I wasn’t doing anything right. She gently explained the difference between what my littles were anticipating, and my bigs. How holidays were dreaded… It helped me right the ship and look at my students with new eyes.

And another wrote:

I taught homeless children for nearly two decades. There were two times a year when we’d see them cry as they left the building. One was Christmas and the other was the end of the school year! Having come from a supportive family with family traditions around the holidays, I can only imagine what these youngsters endured.

Lest you think this holiday stress is a function of poverty, here’s a comment from a teacher at a private boarding school:

The period between Thanksgiving break and winter break is one of the most stressful of the year here. Whatever the nature of the home life each kid may have, the adjustment on return from a break always takes some time as does anticipation of and preparation for an upcoming break. Additionally, some international students go out on a home stay here rather than returning to their home. All this means some kids feel they are in non-stop transition, which is really hard. Advisors and our school counselor, being aware of this, do what we can to make ourselves available to kids however they may need us.

 

When my homeroom of 8^th graders heard about the door decorating contest, they immediately recognized it for what it was: a sugar-laced bribe. While many of the doors in the building began sporting live greenery, battery-pack flashing lights and construction paper fireplaces, our door was blank and undecorated as the deadline approached.

Finally, one of the girls (it’s always a young woman who takes the lead on a project like this) covered the door in brown butcher paper and wrote ‘What Do You Really Want for Christmas?’ at the top. We left magic markers next to the door and invited everyone on the 8^th grade hallway to participate. *

What happened next was low-key but amazing. Students wrote about noble things—true peace on earth, healing the planet—but also their private needs:  No fighting at my house. My brother comes home from the hospital. I get to see my friends from my old school.

Students stuck things to the door with glue sticks—notes from friends, grades ripped from the top of assignments. It became a graffiti wall, untidy and the opposite of celebratory.

I wasn’t there when the teacher-judges came around but can only imagine their faces as they saw Mrs. Flanagan’s cop-out door.  So very un-Christmasy—but maybe not.

We didn’t win. But we had cocoa anyway.

*See commenter Cara’s remark below–she’s right, it was a sexist thing to say. And not accurate.

It happened maybe 20 years ago, but I remember it clearly—because it was so unusual.

I was teaching a middle school band class, and there was a knock on the door. I went to answer—and it was David’s mother, holding a big shopping bag.  I turned to call David to the door, assuming he’d forgotten something at home, and good ol’ stay-at-home Mom was rescuing him.  But she stopped me.

Keeping out of the class’s line of vision in the hall, she reached into her bag and pulled out a small pie. With potholders. “I don’t want David to see me,” she said. “But I was baking this morning, and wanted him to have pie, fresh out of the oven, for lunch.”

I took the pie, gingerly, and she set off down the hallway.  The pie smelled and looked fantastic. I carried it back into the classroom and set it on a bookcase. There were plenty of remarks: How come Mrs. Flanagan got a pie and they were stuck with cafeteria food? Could they have some? Whose mom was sucking up to the teacher?

I explained that it wasn’t for me. And because it would be obvious who’d be eating the pie in ten minutes, I told them it belonged to David—a quiet, cooperative trumpet player. David’s face got beet red, as I settled the class down for the final few minutes of instruction. When the bell rang, he picked up the pie—and the potholders—but waited until everyone was out of the room to leave.  He didn’t look like someone who’d just been given the best school lunch ever. In fact, he looked mortified.

In the teachers’ lounge, my colleagues were discussing another pie delivery, made to David’s sister.  It wasn’t a kindly, delighted conversation. In fact, the other teacher who had taken a secret pie drop-off was expertly mimicking Mom’s tiny, high-pitched voice: You know how pies are best when they’re warm? It’s her favorite kind!

The general—ruthless—conversation was around parents who can’t let their children go to school, damn it, like every other kid, and be unspoiled and un-special for seven hours a day.  Make them a pie at home. Don’t bring it to school. And the same goes for their mittens.

I tended then—and now—to agree. School is, by its nature, a group experience, where we learn more than long division and state capitols. It’s a place where we learn to take turns, take only what we need, wait for others to speak and tough it out when things don’t go our way. There’s a reason why Robert Fulghum made a mint by laying out why everything we need to know is learned in kindergarten.

In 30+ years in the classroom, I’ve met plenty of parents who wanted special favors for their children. Some seemed reasonable, others merely a way to excuse their children or mitigate their child’s very natural and productive struggle with difficult challenges. The parent who frequently runs interference for their child is not doing them any favors, in the long run.

This is, of course, generalizing. Some kids deserve and benefit from a break, or special treatment. These are judgment calls, case by case situations. This is why we want thoughtful and kind people working in schools—to decide whether Johnny needs a hand up or a kick in the pants in his journey toward becoming civilized.

Parent involvement in, and monitoring of, daily life at school, however, has undeniably increased. The ‘choice’ movement—where disgruntled parents can easily choose another (free) school for their child—has enhanced (or exacerbated, take your pick) helicopter parenting.  Don’t like the curriculum or the teacher—or your children’s classmates? Pick another school. Plenty of choices available.

I was stunned to read, in the Atlantic, no less, that schools are trying to decide how to deal with an influx of parents wanting to eat lunch with their children.

What could be wrong with Dad wanting to pop in once a month and chow down on sloppy joes and carrot sticks with his second grader?  School lunches last about 25 minutes, and it would be a treat for most elementary school children to see a parent’s friendly face. It could strengthen the school-home bond. Perhaps even improve behavior in the cafeteria, with a couple of extra adults around.

Then I read the story.

There were the parents who brought pizza for their kid and his friends, leaving other kids envious. The moms who worried about their kids being picky eaters and not getting optimum nutrition. The one who just wanted to know more about what goes in her child’s day:

“You see what people are eating, not eating, see which kids are throwing food, talking too loud, who is sitting by themselves. It’s a chance to poke in on your kids’ day that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t have lunch with them.”

It’s the very definition of helicopter parenting—all about the judging, the disapproval, the social arbitration, the inability to let a child make her own friends and choices. And woe to the school that tries to put brakes and limits on eating lunch with your child, as often as you choose.

There’s a shift happening here, toward individualizing education and a consumerist perspective on a public good. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a school lunch just a school lunch. But the story made me uneasy. Power and control over small things in public schools can lead to power and control over bigger things.  A little pie today, the whole enchilada tomorrow.