Tag / education

by nflanagan

Some Thoughts about National Board Certification

I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan.

The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, that there could ever be a valid, reliable way to evaluate quality—or inadequate—teaching. I thought it was like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it.

Remember—this was before NCLB, and the advent of mandated testing for all public school children, beginning in the third grade. Some states (mine, for example) had been using statewide assessments for years, but nobody was talking about identifying or comparing teacher effectiveness by their students’ test scores– a ridiculous thought, given all the variables.

I was intrigued by the NBPTS process, and signed up to sit for certification as an Early Adolescence Generalist, paying my own fee ($2500, if I remember correctly) and (kind of recklessly) jumping in. The National Board, in 1995, did not offer an assessment for music teachers, so I decided to teach my 300 middle school band students ‘generalist’ lessons in math, language arts, science and social studies. I would NEVER recommend this, knowing what I learned, but I scored well and became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT).

Most people, including ed policy experts, university educators and teachers who have not experienced certification do not fully understand the National Board process (although many think they do). It’s difficult to explain, especially to educators and researchers whose entire careers have been shadowed by our national love affair with standardized testing.

The National Board asks teachers to hold their practice up to a set of teacher-created pedagogical and content-based standards, custom-written for various disciplinary and developmental levels. Teachers then reflect on how well their practice aligns with these standards, using videotapes of lessons, student work products across time and written self-evaluation. They also sit for on-demand examinations of their relevant content knowledge. Candidates’ portfolios and content exams were scored by teachers who taught the same subjects, at the same level.

It’s rigorous, and grueling—and often confusing for teachers who have never been asked the deep questions posed by the process: What is your convincing evidence that Student A understands ____? What misconceptions are evident in Student B’s remarks about ______? What other strategies have you tried to build competence in ________? Why is it important for students to have fluency in ______________? And so on, 12-20 pages for each of multiple portfolio tasks.

Many teachers—myself included—say that going through the National Board process was the best, most useful and personalized, professional development they ever had. I became a true-blue believer in the process. I then worked as a Teacher in Residence for NBPTS for two years and was part of a national team that devised the music assessment.

I was working for the National Board in their Outreach and Teacher Leadership departments when NCLB passed, 25 years ago. You could immediately see how NCLB’s foregrounding standardized testing would clash with the things most valued by the NBPTS principles and standards (again, established by actual teachers, not lawmakers, data-crunchers or education publishers).

The NBPTS standards were built on the idea of teacher expertise—knowing their students deeply, mastery of their subject discipline, possession of a full pedagogical tool bag—and continuous reflection on evidence of what was going well and what needed changing in their day to day practice.

NCLB, on the other hand, put faith in test scores as the only valid means of comparing schools (and, eventually, teachers)–and allocating carrots and sticks. There were lots of new rules to follow: the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements, for example, wiped out my NB certificate (Early Adolescence Generalist) which honored the classic middle-grades teacher who taught all subjects.

NBPTS was in the process of rolling out a number of new certificates, recruiting teachers to sit for certification, and building financial rewards for NBCTs into state policy and local contracts. They were becoming more corporate, changing a number of policies to streamline the business, something they probably needed to do to stay alive in the new political milieu.

One of the things that was proposed: machine scoring of teacher portfolios and/or content exams. NBCTs were adamantly opposed to the very idea. Many NBCTs, having had the positive experience of going through the process, had become scorers (a job only practicing teachers were allowed to do) in the summer. Others became candidate support providers, working with colleagues to examine their practice, building little communities that studied the standards, videotaping each other’s lessons and having productive conversations about teaching and learning.

The thought of saving money by machine-scoring parts of the assessment was a betrayal of the teacher leadership piece of NB certification—helping colleagues to understand and improve their own practice. Who would embrace an assessment that was evaluated by a bot?  Not teachers whose work had been fairly judged. The National Board later eliminated their Teacher Leadership department. It was not a money-maker.

I left the National Board when they moved to Washington, DC, and returned to my music classroom, but continued, for a while, to help candidates and do workshops with schools or teacher associations that were interested in the NBPTS process. I have many NBCT friends who still do NB work, in spite of changes to NB certification that were less than teacher-friendly. I am now an outside—albeit informed—observer.

Recently, on a candidate support page, the question of using AI to write portfolio briefs emerged. A candidate had shared a draft analysis of her own teaching to an NBCT, who worried that the piece was so ‘well-written’ that it appeared to be composed by ChatGPT. The NBCT encouraged the candidate to think about ways that might make her writing seem more… human.

Now—writing skill is NOT assessed in the National Board process. Clarity of thought, presentation of believable evidence, convincing analysis of student progress—all of these are important, but smooth prose and impeccable syntax, not so much. I was struck by the idea that someone might think about using AI to write what’s supposed to be one’s own rationale and justification for things done as a teacher. The product could only be incoherent, if grammatically sound, slop.

Even worse—and here we have to, unsurprisingly, travel to Texas—some states are now questioning the National Board’s core contribution to teaching and learning: professional standards.

As Peter Greene reports:

 NBTC hasn’t been hugely successful in Texas– only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that’s 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because “tolerance.”

That’s correct. The NBPTS standards, for all ages and subjects, encourage equity and inclusion of all kids and embrace the diverse range of students taught in American public schools. In Texas, they’re trying to yank the very modest stipends given to TX teachers who have achieved National Board Certification.

Because money talks. Not all states offer a financial reward to NBCTs or contribute to certification fees. And many NBCTs are like me—curious about defining the markers of good teaching, convinced that all kids deserve an accomplished teacher. The money is seldom enough to make the 200-400 hour intensive challenge of certification worthwhile.

In earlier days, NBPTS got a lot of bipartisan support—a way to reward hard-working, demonstrably effective teachers that wasn’t graduate credit hours or seniority. Right to work states were fans of paying a handful of excellent teachers a little more cash, knowing that teachers are capitalists, too.

It’s ironic that it might be right-wing politics and AI that damage a worthwhile endeavor to improve teaching. Or maybe the word is predictable.

by nflanagan

This Guy Used to Be My Congressman

And now he wants to be my senator. Again. Meet Mike Rogers.

I spent most of my life and nearly all of my teaching career in Livingston County, Michigan—a ruby-red, rural-turning-suburban area in the ring outside Detroit. My first principal used to refer to our school district as the far edge of white flight—folks with enough resources to move to a bucolic county with lots of land for their ten-acre dream homes, an hour-long commute into the city, and a population that is 94% white and less than 1% Black.

Although I have always identified as a Democrat, I used to vote in the Republican primary, because it was the only way I had some say in who was representing me in local offices and the state legislature. Beginning in 1995, Mike Rogers was my state senator, and later, my representative in Congress. He was, at the time, very much a country club Republican—bland, moderate, uncontroversial and generally well-liked. I never voted for him, but I knew lots of people who did. I also didn’t fear him.

Rogers’ family was well-known in Livingston County. His dad was a public school administrator and football coach, and his mother ran the Chamber of Commerce. One of his brothers was in the state legislature. He won local elections by wide margins, but when he decided to run for Congress, in 2000, squeaked into office by 111 votes. It was redmap gerrymandering that made his subsequent elections ironclad.

Rogers and I lived in the same small town for most of his political career. I used to see him in Meijers and at local events, shaking hands. Once, we were both on a panel at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast where the topic was education policy. Mr. Rogers’ take on education, as a congressman, was that the feds had no business making or even influencing education policy—he was Mr. Local Control. He asked me, his designated foil, what purpose a federal Education Department served.

My answer was two-fold: First, a national Ed Department can serve as center for policy research on best practices and ideas in public education, economies of scale. Why re-invent the wheel in 50 states?

But far more important was the federal role in promoting and ensuring equity and protecting civil rights. I reminded him that the original ESEA, passed in 1965, was designed to provide resources for our neediest students, to help level the playing field for millions of baby-boomer students whose states or districts weren’t particularly interested in equity.

Not Michigan! he scoffed, ignoring the obvious example of Detroit Public Schools, 50 miles down the road, a city that many of his constituents escaped, after the auto industry built enormous wealth on the backs of immigrant laborers. But who cares about children in a city whose resources have been extracted? Not his problem.

After the panel dispersed, Rogers was surrounded by obsequious local businessmen—and I hurried back to my 3rd hour class, which a colleague was generously covering until my return.

In 2015, Mike Rogers decided not to run for Congress anymore. He launched a career in radio—a kind of mild-mannered Rush Limbaugh—and moved to Florida, where he was happily ensconced in Cape Coral for nearly a decade, starting new businesses, and serving as a defense lobbyist and National Security expert for CNN. He occasionally put out feelers to see if there was a possibility of becoming President.

But. Rogers has miraculously rediscovered his Michigan roots,and is now running—for the second time– for an open Senate seat in the mitten state. He has always been a pro-NRA, anti-abortion guy, but he’s moved hard to the ugly Trumpian right; in his last senate race in 2024, he castigated his former employer, the FBI, claiming they were on a witch hunt to take down Trump for political purposes. He called the DOJ “corrupt.” 

That, of course, was two years ago. Now, he’s All Trump, All the Time.  He’s an election denier. He’s trying to raise doubts about the MI senate election he lost, in 2024. What he said two years ago about the DOJ—well, that no longer applies. They’re good guys now.

As for public education, he’s also changed his tune, now endorsing federal influence over creeping wokeness, saying that  “schools care more now about social engineering than, as my father used to say, readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.”

Expect to hear that little bon mot often on the Rogers campaign trail this fall, along with finger-pointing about DEI and the weaponization of empathy. Plus a whole lot of anti-Muslim, free-floating racism.

Remember– Mike Rogers used to present as a country club Republican, hometown boy made good, moderate conservative, ex-FBI, and deficit-cutter.

But what happens to sort-of moderate Republicans, these days? They get primaried after one term. They get criticized by Tucker Carlson.They can’t maintain leadership in the House. Or Senate. They get the message: move rightward, appease Trump, sometimes by groveling–or get out of the way.

Mr. Rogers is perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to please The King. In 2024, he bought a tear-down lakeside cottage in Michigan, moved in with his sister-in-law in his old hometown to run his campaign, and started building a new home on the lake. Which could be his Michigan address should he win, but an easy, lucrative place to sell should he lose. No risk, reward either way.

He still owns the Cape Coral mansion.

There are lots of reasons to distrust Mike Rogers, beginning with his “go as the wind blows” beliefs and policies (and place of residence). There are lots of Republicans who fall into that camp—Tommy Tuberville springs to mind.

But I keep thinking about that Chamber of Commerce breakfast, where MY sitting congressman didn’t see why children in Michigan deserved equity.


by nflanagan

Ridiculous Headlines about Public Education

I’ve been writing about education policy and practice for more than 25 years, in my local newspaper (gratis), for an education nonprofit (paid), for Education Week (the journal of record for ed policy, also paid) and in my own personal blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, where I am definitely Not Paid.

When I started, back in the late 90s, I actually thought that we were living in hard times, from the standpoint of informed practice and useful education policy. What I see now, of course, is that I didn’t have a clue as to how messed up things could get. Or how the intersection of public education and politics could destroy so much good work and good will.

We have reached the point where the Onion-esque Eyes on Meme might be the most accurate representation of the daily lives of teachers:

$38,000 Master’s Degree Finally Pays Off with $61 More per Month

Parent Asks About Extra Credit at Meet the Teacher Night, Nine Days Before Anything is Assigned

And so on. Hilarious.

But shouldn’t teachers be soaking up critical commentary about ed policy, the destruction of the federal Department of Education, the latest trends and promising practices?

Well, maybe not. I am still routinely scanning the mainstream education press (such as it is). Here’s a sampling of recent headlines:

Talking About Menopause Is No Longer Taboo. Here’s Why That’s Good for Teachers

Quote: “Menopause is being recognized not only as a women’s health issue but as one that affects all of society—including the teacher workforce—three-quarters of whom are women.”

Kind of has that college freshman-term paper feel to it, no? And–good for teachers? How?

How about: Test Scores have Plunged, but Voters Aren’t Making Schools a Top Political Issue  

Missing subtitle: Like Chalkbeat wants them to.

Or: Chronic Absenteeism is Linked to Slower Academic Recovery in Math, Reading

Well, duh, say teachers everywhere.

Then there’s this: Can the Prospect of 3rd Grade Retention Improve Early Literacy? Yes, Study Says 

Response: No, Another Study Says.

Next up: Principals Can’t Manage Teacher Morale Alone. Enter the Go-Between

The thrust of this piece seems to be that managing the usual emotional, daily-grind aspects of K12 school administration (personal conflicts, new programs, novice teachers, etc.) should be outsourced to assistant principals and ‘teacher leaders’ because principals have too much important work to do. Those teachers and APs apparently can squeeze even more on to their plates, because there’s no associated plan to pay them more or reduce their workload in order to be a ‘go-between’—my nomination for the worst title you could bestow on a dedicated teaching colleague.

And this: The Ed. Department Calls for a Crackdown on Teacher Sexual Misconduct

So—is sexual misconduct on the rise? Of course not. But while they’re demolishing the oversight of public education, it’s always good to, you know, flood the zone with scary claims. “Parents should never have to wonder whether their kids’ school employs and protects sexual predators,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a (wildly ironic) statement.

This is a good spot for me to talk about working as a teacher blogger for Education Week. My experience there was a good one, but I used to hear all the time from friends who sent me EdWeek op-eds they disagreed with, charging EdWeek with being right-wing or bought off by publishers.

Education Week—like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal—is a business. They accept ads. They promote (and sometimes host) commercial programs. And they also invite a wide range of commentary, from teacher unions to pro-voucher politicians. In 2026, if you want to read one side of any educational issue, you’ll need to explore blogs, newsletters and substacks. I printed what I wanted to print, when blogging for Education Week. In nine years, I never had a piece pulled or even edited, beyond the occasional comma or headline.

The state of education journalism has not improved—better innovations, more useful research, informed commentary from practitioners–over the last 25 years. It’s become more divided, operating on the principle of “he who has the power and grant money makes the rules.” And lately, it’s been overwhelmed by stories about AI.

Here, without commentary, are a collection of AI-related headlines in the education press:

How to Use Paper to Teach About AI and Cutting-Edge Tech

Can AI Help Students Learn Social-Emotional Skills?

How an English Teacher Helps Students Find their Voices in the Age of AI

In the Race to Build Smarter AI, We Forgot to Build Smarter Humans (Opinion)

How Educators Can Encourage AI Skill-Building Without Being Tech Cheerleaders

Taken together, what do these headlines tell us? Isn’t the point of AI to trust large language models to answer our questions, without having to develop a unique voice, use paper-and-pencil methods of communicating or calculating, or spend countless hours learning to play nice with our peers?

Smarter humans via AI? Doubtful.

by nflanagan

Boys Should Go to Music Camp

I was a middle and high school band teacher for more than 30 years. In my school, band was an elective; students were mostly in my class because they wanted to be there, year after year. More than once, clinicians and adjudicators remarked about the large numbers of boys in my middle and high school bands.

Usually, boys and girls in my concert bands were fairly balanced. Jazz band was 2/3 boys—and lots of rowdy fun. I didn’t really give it a lot of thought, until I heard it again: How do you get boys to stick with band?

I just read Kate Manne’s excellent Substack on why boys should be theatre kids:

‘It is likely that gendered socialization is pushing boys to flee from certain activities… these patterns are a microcosm of broader trends in the US that are genuinely concerning. Boys participate far less in music, dance, and other lessons, by about ten percentage points, according to recent US census data comparing children in 1998 to children in 2020. Very little has changed during this period in terms of the gender divide for children aged between six and seventeen.’

Rang true to me. As did one of the suggested reasons: Girls join clubs and go out for the school play, chorus and orchestra. Boys go out for sports.

Manne’s point was that boys who rejected music, dance and drama were genuinely missing something: a community that made things, beautiful and emotionally moving things, together. (Pause for an amen.) Boys should be able to try those things, enjoy them, perhaps excel at them, without being labeled or pigeonholed.

The boys that I taught in instrumental music classes, 5th graders to seniors, dealt with being—what’s the right word here? Harassed?  Teased? Bullied?—about being in band. I know they did. We had conversations about it, every year, reviewing the reasons that being called a band fag by Joey Halfback was, in the end, meaningless. It was harder for younger kids, trying to find themselves.  

You would never be able to imagine this, when you’re in the 7th grade, but when you’re retired, you’re unlikely to be playing football, or any other sports requiring strength, speed and good wind. You might, however, think about how much you liked playing trumpet in the 8th grade band, and pick one up.

I know this, because I spent last week at the Interlochen Center for the Arts on their beautiful wooded campus, at flute camp. This was an adult ensemble workshop, 35 flutists from all over the country, polishing their skills and playing in groups, for fun. Summer music camp was going on as well—we ate lunch in their cafeteria—with hundreds of middle school and high school singers, dancers and cellists. Girls and boys, lugging cases and stretching out on the dance building porch.

You didn’t need to have years of experience as an educator to see that these kids were in their happy place. A long stretch of time where everybody was like you—a musician or a dancer—and free to be themselves. Nirvana for some teenagers.

So yes—boys should be theatre kids, and maybe run cross country, too. The arts are for everyone.

There were 35 flute players at flute camp; two were men. Make of that what you will.

A quiet moment on Interlochen’s campus. Students inside, due to hazardous smoky air.

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by nflanagan

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

One of the most enduring truisms about public education is the existence of The Pendulum—the belief that trends in curriculum and instruction tend to repeat themselves, swinging back and forth over time between two distinct, even opposing models.

The most obvious example is the Reading Wars—both the binary presentation (there are two ways to teach reading, and my way is best) and the free-floating hostility toward anyone suggesting that teaching reading isn’t a matter of adopting The One True Way. 

The Reading Wars—a term I loathe—have been heating up periodically for the last century. It’s not surprising that veteran educators who have had measurable and observable success in teaching reading really hate being told that their go-to instructional strategies, honed by trial and error, are wrong.

Here’s the thing about that pendulum: it’s not precisely the right metaphor. Education should embrace experimentation, observation and change. Because students change, and the world changes. What goes around comes around—but maybe with a new twist, or new insight. Not much is “settled science.”

If teaching were a true profession (a topic for another blog), it would be understood as a practice, founded on core principles and knowledge, but built by individual skills and strengths within a particular context.

 Just as with any other profession, there would be the presumption of mastery—that a teacher’s experience is valuable, their judgment based on having fine-tuned their understanding of instructional issues and how to solve learning problems. But in real life, teachers are more likely to be subject to trends and laws and commerce and even political winds.

For example: When everyone was excited about new Chromebooks for all, third grade teachers were told that cursive writing was obsolete. Keyboarding was the future. But—then there was positive research on brain development via cursive writing, and ka-boom. Cursive is back. Unless it’s not.

When teachers are directed what and even how to teach, they are not using that well-honed judgment. And more teacher judgment means less pendulum, waiting around for what you know works in your classroom to be OK again, or sneaking cursive lessons to your 3rd graders because you saw it help your previous 3rd graders, practicing their cursive in letters to grandparents.

I was amused to see the headline “Charter School Finds Looping Strategy Benefits Youngest Students,” in Education Week. The video article suggests that looping (combining two grades in one classroom, with older half leaving as a new, younger half comes in) is an innovative idea. These are preschool students—3 and 4 year olds—so there’s a lot of happy talk about how the 4 year olds have an extra year of school under their tiny belts, and act as leaders for the incoming 3 year olds.

Especially with very young children, having the same teacher for two years—in a true looping or multi-age setup—could have some benefits. But there was the sense that the folks in this school had found an entirely new instructional concept with amazing benefits.

In the 1990s, I got involved in a one-year experiment in a multi-age/looping classroom in the district where I taught, and my kids went to school.

I learned about multi-age classrooms from Dr. Ellen Thompson, whom I met at a Teacher of the Year conference—she was Vermont’s Teacher of the Year in 1993. Ellen was a strong proponent of flexing the age groupings of elementary students, of really getting to know kids and their families instead of one-and-done. She had been teaching in a three-grade classroom for years and did an amazing, research-substantiated presentation on the benefits of multi-age classrooms.

Back home, my son’s first grade teacher had also been reading about multi-age classrooms and looping (which is how you get multi-age classes embedded in a traditional, grade-by-grade setting). She wanted to try it–and had a 2nd grade teacher who would partner with her.

Now, I loved this teacher. My son was doing really well in her classroom. The idea of having her again next year, in a Grade 1 / 2 looping classroom was really appealing. But there was a great deal of pushback from administrators (because they were in charge of any change) and from the union. Mainly—and this is a very important point—because they’d been trying for years to get rid of split-grade classrooms to even out class sizes.

But they agreed to try a one-year pilot of two multi-grade 1 /2 classrooms. And we were in, although more than one second grade teacher expressed regret they wouldn’t have my son in their class. What happened next was surprising to me.

Parents (who had to agree to place their student in a deliberately structured multi-age setting) shied away from the idea, seeing it as just another split, something they’d been told to avoid if possible. The assumption was that the 2nd graders in the 1 /2 split were “behind.” A mother in the Little League bleachers told me that the multiage classroom was for 2nd graders who couldn’t read, which I personally knew was far from the truth.

None of my son’s friends were in his class. And he never talked about being a leader for his first grade classmates. It turned out to be just another year of schooling. And it made me understand that context—the settled-in assumptions made by an education community—trump lots of innovative ideas. The pilot lasted one year.

So it was interesting to see looping swing, like a pendulum, across the radar again.  I wish them every success.

by nflanagan

Dirty Pool and other Metaphors

I was going to title this blog American Cesspool but then Public Notice beat me to it. And when all the good titles are taken, you know you’re talking about a national obsession.

Like all other left-leaning Americans, it seems, I feel a sense of outrage over the Reflecting Pool. Which, upon some deep reflection (get it?), isn’t perfectly rational. The Reflecting Pool is only one of dozens of strikingly memorable landmarks in Washington D.C., and it’s over a hundred years old. It’s been rebuilt and repaired numerous times, including other occasions when algae marred its surface. Maintenance of aging monuments is normal and expected, part of why we pay taxes.

What is there about the current Reflecting Pool debacle that has captured national attention? There’s the no-bid contract corruption, of course.  And the current President’s lies about vandals, somehow, causing chunks of its epoxy liner to break off—rather than acknowledging the job wasn’t done right, and needed to be done over:

‘The Reflecting Pool fiasco is of a piece with other major Trump corruption cases of the moment: the Kennedy Center renaming, the $1.8 billion slush fund, and the Epstein files. Each of these four breakthrough scandals follows the same autocratic playbook: abuse power, make a mess, then dodge accountability.’

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s current state is a metaphor for something done wrong, under fishy circumstances, ordered by someone who should be a trusted leader. The reason so many people find this particular example worth commenting on—and I confess to posting a few swamp monster “photos” myself—may be because of its limited, concrete (literally) parameters.

It doesn’t impact our national security. It’s not a war. It doesn’t address our dangerous economic inequality or inflation. It’s not the result of congressional malfeasance, or the damage to free, fair and trusted elections. It’s not the obliteration of democracy. All of which are currently Big Issues, but far more complicated, both to understand and address.

The Pool is something that everyone understands can eventually be fixed. Because it’s been fixed before. Democracy, on the other hand…

Jonathan V. Last just posted a remarkable piece about what the Trump base thinks about democracy. Based on a national ethnographic study, it goes some distance in explaining why campaigns (like Kamala Harris’s) promoting constitutional values make no impact on a significant chunk of Americans:

‘14 out of 21 participants in this study had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy. The people in the study describe a remarkable consistency about why they dislike democracy. It’s not that they’re misled, or mistaken. They have a coherent worldview.

It’s just not very nice.

They believe that there is a cultural schism in America, with good, God-fearing people like themselves on one side and the wicked majority on the other. They detest this imaginary majority and fear that “democracy” would allow that majority to gain political power.

They very explicitly do not want majority rule.

They want minority rule.’

It’s a great piece. Recommended. Worth repeating: They fear that democracy would allow the majority to gain political power. And democracy, done right, is a complex, multi-layered concept, difficult to define or comprehend. So the President’s fearful fan club go back to mysterious underwater vandals slicing a 350 foot gash into a pool liner, requiring the National Guard and 4000 feet of wire fencing to protect our national honor.

Or something like that.

 I now know more about pool liners, adhesion, and how to nurture single-cell organisms than I did last month. Because—like half the people in this country– I’m caught up in the simple, low-hanging fruit of yet another administrative failure, laughing at social media memes. But also knowing that the pool will eventually recover, unlike the East Wing or trust in the media.

As a veteran educator, I’ve seen this many times: Take a many-faceted problem with school organization or student learning, and reduce it to a single cause or solution, one that’s easy to understand and talk about. Then cling to that limited explanation for test scores going down or up 2-point-something percent. Or whatever.

Kids in 3rd grade not fluent readers? Well, it must be the reading curriculum, plus the outdated teachers teaching that curriculum; fix it with Science! Or—better yet—threaten kids with failing the third grade, a public humiliation that some of them never recover from. Just two of those silver bullet solutions to a far more complicated and actually important issue: creating literate citizens.

We are all drawn to the small and the specific—the problem that can be solved, or at least made fun of. Right now, however, we’re facing a host of massive, thorny problems, many of which have emerged in the past year and half. It’s not about the pool—the pool is just a metaphor for the real trauma.

Keep your eyes on the prize, not the pool.

by nflanagan

The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

There’s been a robust edu-discourse bubbling up over an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled My Students Can’t Read. The (ahem) tl;dr: college students can no longer sustain attention to and comprehension of 20-page articles, so the professor-author of the article has to break such articles into  pieces and spoon-feed comprehension strategies to college freshmen.

My first thought: secondary teachers have been dealing with this syndrome for a long, long time. The author (Tyler Jagt) asks this question: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

There are other questions to ask, when musing about a generational collapse in literacy, but my take on this is that admitting a student (and taking their tuition money) presumes that the institution is willing to provide both the curriculum and instruction that serves those students. Caveat emptor, when the buyer is choosing which students to enroll.

K12 public schools, of course, have no option of turning non-readers away. When I was in charge of assisting ESL students in middle school with their homework, there were individual teachers who used the excuse that they didn’t know how to teach kids to read, so struggling readers were not their problem. But there weren’t many teachers like that. Most K-8 teachers know that students are going to come to them with all levels of reading proficiency. They don’t have the luxury of deciding not to serve those students. They have to figure it out.

It’s actually a pretty good article (although it’s behind a paywall). Jagt resists blaming his students’ lack of understanding and reading stamina on the K-12 teachers who came before, and provides some research on how smartphone use changes the brain:

‘When a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.’

There’s also some well-supported evidence that the use of AI (as catch-all phrase to describe ChatGPT, Ask Gemini and other LLMs) has weakened the ability and willingness to write:

‘This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time.’

Jagt also blames the Common Core—which I think is not precisely accurate, although many curricula packages were adopted, K-12, in an effort to align with the Core and boost test scores, such as ‘the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding.’

Dr. Paul Thomas reminds us that ‘there is at least some correlational association between the “science of reading” era of reading legislation (starting approximately around 2012-2014 and then spreading over the last decade) and a decline in students reading for fun, reading whole texts, and reading diverse texts as well as some of the so-called declines in test scores.’

This is not a matter of ‘kids today’ being more indolent than previous generations. We are clearly doing something wrong, beginning with prioritizing phonics in an attempt to boost 3rd grade scores over the slow pursuit of making meaning, and the pleasure of being a reader.

There are other explanations for the collapse of literacy (if, in fact, that’s what it is): the pandemic, the return of orality (what we had before literacy), and what might be called hero worship of cultural figures who see reading and books as pointless. When the POTUS prefers his daily security briefings in video form or, failing that, bullet points, it’s a tough task to convince your average seventh grader that reading a YA novel (183 pages!) is worthwhile.

But some things will always depend on the ability to comprehend the written word, the most reliable, portable and convenient source of information and analysis—and, for my money, entertainment. Won’t they?

We need to focus on the utility and pleasure of being a fluent reader, when the children we’re teaching are ready. Which may not be kindergarten or even first grade. It is the responsibility of pre-school teachers and Composition 101 teachers and all the teachers in between to invite students into the world of literacy. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, refusing to read makes you dumber.

Here’s an example, from local social media. A new restaurant opened up nearby and had not been open for a week when a vigilante group, dressed in black hoodies and backwards ball caps showed up, claiming to be looking for an employee who had been convicted of molesting a child. (This is something they do all over the state, apparently.)

After wandering around in the restaurant, disturbing patrons eating there for the first time, they were asked to leave. The police were called. The vigilantes posted on social media about being prevented from removing scum from the face of the earth. The restaurant posted back, saying nobody working there had a criminal record. And—when I stopped reading, there were 1700 comments discussing the event.

I confess—I was fascinated. I went to the restaurant’s page to see what the menu looked like and ended up getting a good look at how people perceive young men who think they’re improving society by tracking down sex abusers and humiliating them in public.

The comments were mostly laudatory for the vigilantes (#TeamJake!!!)—and short. A couple of words or maybe a sentence. Lots of repetition. Very little logic or thoughtfulness, but lots of inchoate rage at those who are hurting children.

Commenters who took a more restrained approach—What was the vigilantes’ evidence? Had they considered the impact on the new restaurant?—were scolded and accused of being child molesters themselves. Early in the comment thread, a man presented what I thought was a good case for letting trained law enforcement deal with convicted offenders. His comment was three paragraphs long, clearly written and clearly argued.

What happened next was interesting. Commenters went after the reasonable man: You expect me to read all that? Who do you think you are?  Blah blah blah. You probably have a record, too.

At least two dozen people accused him of being too smart for his own good, one of those pointy-headed liberals who think they know it all. People who read books and use big words, rather than relying on common sense.

It was proof to me that we have a lot of work to do if we want a literate nation.  

by nflanagan

LIFTing Kids Higher

I am a volunteer in a homegrown program to support middle and high school students in my (small, rural) county. Entitled LIFT—Leelanau Investing for Teens—it’s a program designed to give middle school and HS kids something valuable: a safe (free) place to hang out, stuff to do and friends to talk to, in the long and sometimes empty hours after school.

I was attracted to this idea because my own band room was frequently a place for secondary band students to hang out after school, jamming on the drum set and spreading snack detritus all over the floor.  I quickly recognized the idea that elementary children need childcare after school, but 6th graders are fine on their own was baloney. Maybe even dangerous baloney. A safe, supervised place to go could, in the long run, be a life saver for young teens.

I generally volunteer on Wednesdays, which is Homework Day. Kids with missing assignments can drop by for help in getting them completed. I’m one of the few volunteers who isn’t intimidated by MS math, having taught it for two years. HS students can also get community service hours (20 required, in my district) by volunteering to help the MS kids with their homework—and MS students definitely prefer working with HS kids. You’re role models, we tell the HS students. And they like that.

All good. A program that started in one school has expanded to all four public schools in the county. Entirely funded by grants and donations, there are paid coordinators in every school, and a host of adult volunteers like me who show up as evidence that we care about teenagers in our community.

I was thinking about LIFT when I read Peter Greene’s piece, How You Made Them Feel. He makes a salient point: it’s not a teacher’s job to make kids feel good—it’s our job to make them learn something. If they feel good about that genuine accomplishment, great—and if a teacher keeps pushing and handholding and (jargon alert!) scaffolding to get them there, also great. But we’re not responsible for their self-esteem, beyond what new skills and being part of a learning community yield.

If we’re encouraging anything at LIFT, it’s being part of a community—the LIFT program at my school lets kids check their phones after school (which restricts phone use during the academic day), for a half hour. Then—programming begins and phones are stowed until pickup time. What I have been noticing is that, more and more, kids prefer to chat—IRL, person to person—during that first half hour. Snacks are also free and readily available, often donated by community members. Kids loaf on the donated couches and beanbags, to decompress and make jokes. It’s pretty much perfect, when you’re 13.

I’ve been volunteering in this program for two school years (and one summer). We have not had disciplinary issues, beyond horseplay and the occasional rude remark, which are par for the course with middle schoolers (and addressed by volunteers, who are trained). According to EdWeek, student misbehavior tops the list of things—a long list—that are currently stressing teachers out.

Misbehavior tops educators’ stressors:

‘For novice and veteran teachers alike, student misbehavior is the most common cause of stress, according to new RAND Corp. data. More teachers consider behavior management among their top three stressors than any other aspect of the workplace.’

Maybe it’s just this particular school but speaking as a person with decades of experience in disruptive student misconduct, the two and a half hours of LIFT go by swiftly and smoothly, whether there is a craft to make, a game of Uno, a movie to watch, a bike ride or catching up on homework.

I know, in my gut, that it’s good work, a lifeline for kids who need activities and peers. When one of our LIFT kids tells us they won’t be coming for a while, because they got a part in the play or decided to go out for softball, it feels like a victory.

As a retired teacher, it’s also a good way to use my own skills. I think, all the time, about retired teachers and how they can support public schools in substantive ways.

On my last day of volunteering this year, the craft for the day was making pipe-cleaner flowers. You might think this activity would not appeal to jaded middle schoolers, especially boys. You would be wrong. Turns out that making stuff is fun, and an avenue for wacky creativity.

We spent 90 minutes bending pipe cleaners, directed by three super-cute HS girls who exemplified role modeling and laughed with their pupils when things fell apart. I had to clip a LIFT kid out of the photo below, per privacy rules, but trust me—they were having a blast.

Such a simple idea. Such good work.

by nflanagan

Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Please?

Here’s the actual headline: Teacher-Parent Meetings Can Be Tense. Can AI Simulations Help?

If you’ve waded around in mainstream edu-media lately, you don’t really need to read the article. Its bottom line is predictable, first chastising teacher preparation institutes for not teaching novice teachers how to handle ‘challenging’ P-T conferences, then suggesting that a little practice with a specially designed chatbot will make you ready for Jason’s Mom when she comes in, loaded for bear

To presumably add weight to the core message of the article, the first example shared is that of a former insurance litigator-turned-teacher who finds that simulated parent conferences upped his game, when real parents came in and said their child was misbehaving because he was ‘bored.’

The novice teacher was stunned at how close to reality the simulation was—and (bless his heart) found a way to genuinely listen to parents rather than pointing out that ‘bored’ was not the correct descriptor. Unruly, maybe. Rebellious. Even pre-delinquent.

But of course, being professionally tactful and actually hoping to make classroom interactions better, teachers don’t share their darker thoughts with parents. If they have to give unwelcome news, they use the ‘sandwich technique’ of surrounding unpleasant feedback with positive observations and hopeful solutions.

I couldn’t help wondering, in reading the article, if Former Insurance Litigator had not handled malicious lawyers on either side of insurance claims. Part of becoming a teacher (or a lawyer, nurse, pastor, or the guy behind the register at the 7-11) is dealing with unpleasant feedback.

Speaking personally, the most nerve-wracking parent-teacher conferences I had were very early in my career, when I was 23 and most of the parents I was meeting were a couple of decades older. My experience in professional skills before that was limited to waiting tables and working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, unlike someone who had been practicing insurance law.

But I learned how to listen without judgment. And I learned how to face unhappy parents, and believe in myself as the fully qualified teacher in the exchange. Back-of-envelope calculation of how many P-T conferences and IEPs I was part of, in 30+ years: somewhere between seven and ten thousand (music teachers have lots of students).

Not all of them were warm and fuzzy, but an overwhelming majority were, at the very least, cordial. And perhaps a dozen were memorably awful—way more than ‘tense’—although never in ways that an AI simulation could anticipate.

I actually liked meeting my students’ parents, a lot. Meeting parents is insight into how to teach their children better—it often explains a great deal about why particular kids behave as they do in the classroom. Outsourcing problems in communicating with parents to AI-created examples and model answers is a fool’s game.

What I’m waiting for is the AI-only conference, with parents accessing teacher avatars who give them a synopsis of what’s in the gradebook, and run surveillance film of the kid’s behavior in the classroom.

So efficient! So cheap! And that’s what we’re going for, right?

by nflanagan

Maybe There Really Is a Learning Recession. But It’s Not What You’re Thinking.

You know how sometimes a headline will catch your eye and you’ll engage in a brief wrestling match with your intelligence and judgment: Is this clickbait? Is this AI? Could this, in any sense of the word, be real?

Here’s the headline that triggered that response in me: Who’s Responsible for Toilet Training? Schools or Families?

Here’s the gist, from an Education Week survey: Most [teacher] respondents agreed that, compared with two years ago, students are struggling more with basic skills and tasks—from following instructions to tying their own shoes and, in some instances, personal care, including toileting.

Mind you—we’re not talking about children with significant disabilities or the occasional kindergarten accident. We’re talking about the expectation that children will handle their own bathroom needs when they’re five years old vs. the prospect of teachers dealing with toilet assistance for 30 children, some of whom are still wearing pull-ups.

In addition, of course, to literacy, numeracy and putting on their snowsuits.

I have lots of teacher friends. Those in early childhood classrooms have been concerned about those basic skills and tasks for more than a few years now. They’re not calling it a learning recession—which is a stupid label—but they are noticing downward trends in the markers of independence that students bring to school. They’ve got stories.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, commenting on the “learning recession” designation in a new report gets this exactly right: Teachers and professors nationwide have been sounding the alarm for some time about the declines in student skills, knowledge, and behavior they’ve been seeing firsthand, much of which can’t be measured by standardized tests. But test scores are all that many political and educational leaders heed when it comes to school success.

I’m old enough to remember the rollout of No Child Left Behind—the dismay, once we realized that third grade would become the first year when children would be defined annually by their test scores. We were accustomed to standardized assessments—Michigan was giving the statewide MEAP test in 1970, in 4th, 7th and 10th grades—but it was easy to see that the general public would soon rely on test scores as the only reliable indicator of student progress.

It was also easy to see that those annual tests would begin to drive instruction, re-focus curriculum and put pressure on schools to raise scores. What we didn’t foresee, initially, was the long tail: statistical voodoo that calculated an individual teacher’s ‘value added,’ for example. Or closing down schools, often community centers in poor neighborhoods, with low test numbers. Or the pre-test pep assemblies, the frantic search for curricula that would boost scores, the third grade flunk rules.  Not to mention the cheating.

What I find interesting in the “learning recession” talk is the approximate date that the test scores began going down: around 2013. Which would be the time when all K-12 students had experienced the Brave New World of NCLB and its subsequent federal incarnations.

Seniors graduating in 2013 would have taken all the standardized tests and experienced all the efforts to <cough> raise the data bar. From that point on, it should have been a steady upward climb. But no.

It was also, of course, just about the time 7th graders began asking for their own phones and one-to-one Chromebooks were district selling points. There is resistance to blaming sagging test scores on technology—when you spend a huge percentage of a district budget on tech hardware, software and training, it’s hard to admit you’ve been bamboozled.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, again: The problem with this phraseology [learning recession] is that it frames the crisis as one not of culture or human systems but one of business and economics. A key legacy of the accountability regime and its heavy reliance on standardized testing is the inability of politicians and pundits to see or discuss the work of schools in other terms.

Bingo. We might begin by admitting that test scores aren’t truth. And if test scores peaked and then diminished, it might have something to do with that fact. Nobody—including 3rd graders—wants to be defined by a number. When you’re old enough to understand that your test scores are more important to your school (and, perhaps, your teacher) than you, motivation for trying hard might diminish as well.

But that’s a cultural issue—like five year-olds who have not mastered toileting yet. If there is a recession, it touches many ordinary skills that are part of growing up and self-management, and it reflects on the world our youngest schoolchildren inhabit.

A culture fraught with disrespect, parental indifference to schools and learning, a lack of healthy play and human relationships. A country where AI memes serve as news, and political leaders lie and lie and lie. Where teaching is no longer defined as a profession.

If there is a learning recession, fixing it won’t happen by ratcheting up the stakes, once again. It calls for a new vision of which learning is important, and a new commitment to the children of this nation, as well as public education, which is—or used to be—America’s best idea.