Tag / education

by nflanagan

“Union Mouth”

So—when we’re immersed in the pre-election floodwaters of political revenge speech, it’s easy to snicker at the misfortune, if that’s the word, of right-wing social media edu-star Corey DeAngelis.

DeAngelis is—was?—the real deal, in education policy world. Not the kind of education policy that would re-build or energize our public schools, of course, but an attractive and even charismatic mouthpiece for the anti-union/school choice/privatization movement.

If you’re unclear on what happened to DeAngelis, last week—here’s the story.  (And here’s an interesting, even kind, response, from another one-time school choice advocate.)

If this were, say, 2014, when Corey DeAngelis was pursuing a skeezy “alternative career” that eventually became public knowledge, lots of folks would see it as an inside-baseball kind of chuckle—conservative education spokesperson gets caught being himself, ho-hum.

But the nature of public discussion about our schools has changed.

There have always been—going back to Thorndike vs. Dewey—vigorous arguments about the right way to do public education. Most people (including people who work in actual schools) don’t pay attention to these theories, philosophies and policies, unless they’re directly impacted. They focus on other aspects of schooling. And parents, by and large, are happy with the public schools their kids attend.

One of the things Corey DeAngelis contributed and honed, in these verbal ed skirmishes, was nastiness. The kind of unsubstantiated nastiness that we’re now hearing every day from political candidates on the right. Words like lazy, dumb, failing, greedy, groomers, socialists—and, of course, unions as root cause of all that is wrong with America and her children.

DeAngelis is one of the leading spokespersons, on social media, in the wave of anti-public education discourse we’ve experienced in the past eight years or so.  I wrote about some of the things he’s said, in respected publications, last May.

I posted a tweet about that blog post, asking WHY DeAngelis and others are trashing public education? What’s in it for them? Because this onslaught of anti-public education blather is not doing the nation and its children (no matter where they go to school) any good. This WHY was a serious question, BTW.

I got lots of tweeted responses, from DeAngelis’s army of followers, to whom I would ask the same question: What, actually, are you fighting for, when it comes to education?  Here are a few of those tweets:

Union Mouth! (followed by a string of vomit emojis)

I took my kids out of the gladiator academy/commie indoctrination center. Best choice I ever made.

Staffed by mediocrities (sic) who act like martyrs

Corey is bringing the future of education. Say goodbye to your current paradigm of croneyism and union interference.

The govt “school” system is nothing more than a taxpayer pipeline to labor union coffers, used to then (re-)elect politicians who promise more money for the pipeline. Education was never the point.

Public schools are a Dredge (sic) on society. Teachers are even worse.

And—my personal favorite:

Retire, you old hag.

I found myself blocking responses from people with names like—and I’m not making this up—Sexy Fart Bubble. Also wondering how school policy went from being a question of qualified staff and resource allocation to taking ugly potshots at teachers, school leaders and the millions of families who rely on public education.

I know better than to sputter about—or worse, respond—to random on-line vitriol. It’s acceptable now, evidently, to lie on public platforms; calling attention to falsehoods (or snickering at a messenger’s personal problems) is a distraction from focusing on what matters in debates about our schools.

Because—contrary to what Corey DeAngelis’s followers expressed, education has always been precisely the point. For better and worse, for everyone involved. Education has never been settled science. Our children are exposed to different influences and technologies than the previous generation of students; likewise, educational practice has to evolve.

Serving children’s educational needs adequately will—must—shift over time. And change is hard. Working through the changes, especially after a global disruption, demands civil discourse. Professional judgment. And an appreciation for facts.

Not lies.

So—no schadenfreude over seeing someone, whose minions called me “Union Mouth,” be exposed and having his name quickly erased from an array of education non-profit websites. There are far bigger fish to fry at the moment.

When one of your options for Leader of the Free World is seriously threatening to deport 30 million people, a large percentage of whom are children, it seems wrong to fuss over books somebody’s mom doesn’t like. Or spend a lot of time and effort trying to persuade people that teachers’ organizations, with their focus on working conditions in our schools, are harming children.

With all the free-floating fear and loathing in the American zeitgeist right now, it’s harder than ever to establish a classroom where students can develop the confidence to be a community. I am 100% on the side of educators who declare that students can’t learn unless they feel safe. The corollary to that is that teachers can’t learn and grow unless they feel safe, as well.

We are living in unsafe times.

If you want to influence policy change in public education, bring your best ideas and an open mind. Leave the nastiness behind.  

by nflanagan

Are You an Instruction Geek?

I generally don’t pay much attention, anymore, to the rightwing young guns who dominate edu-social media. Mostly this is because they’re not providing any new content about what you might call school improvement—genuinely interesting or useful ideas for making lessons interesting, building curriculum that makes sense in 2024, figuring out better ways to assess student work and encouraging students to get excited about learning.

You know, the things that support the people actually doing the work of teaching in the public schools—where 82% of our K-12 students are educated. Instruction.

In the five decades since I started teaching, reading and writing about all aspects of schooling and education policy, there have been hundreds of such new ideas. Some were genius, some fizzled out, some—annual standardized testing springs to mind—are now part of what everyone thinks is normal, maybe even essential. Even though these ideas may have harmed many children.

The yappy bow-ties posting on the regular about how public education is a big fat failure aren’t offering us genius ideas. They’re focused on vandalizing one of America’s great strengths: a free, high-quality public education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.

Prime example: Daniel Buck, whose X-label is “Instruction Geek.”

Buck actually did teach for a few years, shifting from public education to private, three schools in what looks like six years. Then he wrote a book and informed his following that he was, sadly, leaving the classroom to put his intellect to better use, writing blogs—as a ‘policy and editorial associate’ for a conservative non-profit.

For a guy who pretends to have cool, juicy ideas about instruction, lots of his posts seem pretty rigidly political and not about teachers’ professional work at all.  A sampling:

  • Conservatives need to start thinking about, building, and regaining control of our education institutions after school choice becomes the law of the land. Won’t do much good if all charter and private schools are stocked with teachers, curriculum, and policies out of ed schools.
  • Teachers, stop voting for Democrats. Their education policies sound nice but again and again just make our schools worse.
  • Once again, I repeat: MORE MONEY WILL NOT FIX AMERICAN SCHOOLS.
  • Students should be expected to obey their teachers. Seems pretty common sense to me but sadly, a statement that must be made.

The last one made me think that perhaps Mr. Buck’s former students had ideas of their own about, umm, instruction, but maybe I’m reading too much into his little outburst.

A couple of days ago, Mr. Geek Buck posted something that’s actually about instruction:

Sorry but one teacher cannot differentiate every lesson for 27 different kids whose reading level ranges from 1st to 11th and account for 6 different IEPS. The inclusion/no-tracking push is simply unworkable.

There were a few affirming responses—because clearly, classroom teaching is impossible; the only way to give each individual child precisely what they need is one-to-one tutoring. And, by the way, that doesn’t work so well either.

I started thinking about differentiation in my own classroom. My typical class size hovered around 65 middle school students. Their reading levels ran the K-12 gamut, and I frequently had a dozen or more special education students (with varying disabilities and strengths) in a class. Some students were inclined to disobedience, things that couldn’t be remedied by mere expectations. Oh—and they were all holding expensive noisemakers.

My job was teaching them to make pleasant and accurate musical sounds, then combine those sounds, using an entirely new symbolic language, into music, with regular performances for their parents, their peers and the community. I also had to weave some cultural and historical information into the instructional mix—things that would help them see the beauty and value and joy of what they were (inexpertly) crafting.

Everyone was included. Nobody was tracked (beyond being in the band with their grade-mates). Some of my band-teacher colleagues had auditions and sorted their students into a top ensemble, and lesser-light bands. The drawback to painstakingly dividing groups by “ability” is that ability is really hard to measure, and students who are deemed sub-par often drop out. Students also learn at different rates. The kid who’s way behind in September may be caught up in January and at the top of the class at the end of the year.

I’m fully willing to admit that there are many ways to teach kids important content, but I never met anybody who made 27 lesson plans for a single class. Most differentiation happens across the instructional cycle—presenting new material multiple times in multiple ways, offering different forms of an assignment, assessing work based on what you know about that student. Student choice can be a big part of differentiation.

And sometimes, of course, they all take the same 10-question quiz, so you can get a handle on who’s got it reasonably well, and whose understanding just isn’t there. That’s OK, too. You don’t have to divide them into tracks. They already know who’s smart and who is struggling.

I love nothing more than talking about instruction. Pedagogy is my jam. And I resent people self-appointing as instructional leaders and experts, when all they’re doing is using public schools for target practice.

Here’s one more from the iGeek:

Advocates are trying to retrofit schools to do all that families should / used to — from feeding three meals a day to teaching basic behavioral norms. They are failing at doing so. No public institution can correct for the breakdown of the family.

Be wary of the word “should”—always—but take a look at what teachers are accused of here: teaching good behavior and feeding kids. Maybe no public institution can truly fix the breakdown of families. But don’t schools get credit for at least trying?

by nflanagan

Bomb Threats in Schools

Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced a bomb threat in your school.

I have, perhaps a half-dozen times over the span of a few years, teaching at both a middle school and a high school. The first time was mostly confusing. There was a P.A. announcement, and—following fire drill procedures—we led our classes to the far edge of the parking lot, where they stood in ragged lines. Most of the students were nervous and joking about who might have called in a bomb threat. The police came, with dogs, and went through the building. Nada.

The next time it happened, that year, it was cold and snowing. Kids went outdoors without coats. Buses were dispersed as soon as the drivers could get there, and 600 shivering kids were sent to the HS, two miles away, and sat in the auditorium for a couple of hours. They were bored and restless and had to go to the bathroom NOW because it was AN EMERGENCY.

Teachers clustered in the aisles, quietly sharing the names of kids who were absent and speculating. Someone found a VCR in the projection booth and put on a G-rated movie, which acted as an ineffective numbing drug.  We ended up losing close to three hours before the building was cleared and we could go back.

Then it happened again. Kids were bused again. But this time, the Superintendent came in and tried to scare them straight. We WILL find the culprit, he said. He WILL be expelled, and maybe spend time in Juvie. If you’ve heard anybody say they know who did this, tell us. We’ll protect you and it’s the right thing to do. Just tell the principal or one of your teachers.

Now—I taught in a nearly all-white, suburban school, where most parents had college degrees and came to parent-teacher conferences. They didn’t want their kids to lose learning time because a couple of delinquents thought it was funny to call in what amounted to terrorist threats.

I mention that it was an all-white school not because Black or Hispanic parents would expect or tolerate bomb threats – they wouldn’t, then or now—but because there was no small, minority group of students to automatically blame (as, let’s be honest, would have happened, evidence-free). Whoever called in the threats was most likely one of our own white kids, living in a nice subdivision with their mom and dad.

The fourth time it happened, teachers were privately notified by notes sent from the office. See anything unusual in your classroom? Restrooms will be closed during passing time. There will be cops in the hall. There had been a bomb threat at the high school, too (where I was supposed to be headed, later in the afternoon). Rumors swirled.

In Michigan we take bomb threats very seriously. The worst school disaster in Michigan—the Bath School Massacre, nearly a century ago—killed 38 children and 6 adults, injuring 58 others. It was a homemade bomb, planted and set off by a school board member, angry about taxes. (Really.) Sometimes, tragedy set off by idiots actually happens.

The bomb threat caller at my school was eventually identified and known only to officials. Teachers were not informed, nor was the public, leading one to believe that the bomb caller was probably in the 7th grade or thereabouts. They disrupted learning, cost the district significant money and made a lot of people apprehensive. They made school leaders’ lives miserable, and spurred parent demands.

They metaphorically yelled FIRE! in a crowded theater. But nobody was injured or dead.  These days, when real-life school shooters have terrified, injured or killed more than 338,000 kids in the past quarter-century, that’s a success story.

Those calling in bomb threats to elementary and middle schools in Springfield, OH—not to mention a hospital and City Hall–are terrorists, all right. And the targets of their wrath are innocent children. They fall into the most dangerous category of would-be school bombers: Hate bombers. Those who would kill the vulnerable for ideological, racial, religious or ethnic reasons.

And, as the harried Mayor of Springfield correctly noted: It was their words that did it.

Whose words? Why, their own Senator from Ohio, who admitted he may have “created” the story of abducted dogs, cats and geese. And his blabbermouth running mate, who wants to run American Carnage Nation again.

Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s Press Secretary on the migrant pet hoax: What is happening here is an attempt to tear apart communities … maybe we should not have leaders who fall for fake internet conspiracy theories. We should think about that.

But, of course, Trump saw the pets-for-dinner story on TV. So it must be true.

I wonder if he saw the smashed windows and shutdowns. Or the Proud Boys.

Fomenting violence! Against children! What a disgrace.

If you’re still hanging around Twitter (and good on you if you’re not)—look up New York Times Pitchbot, authored by @DougJBalloon. Who may have made the most bitterly satirical post about the whole bomb threat situation in Ohio:

I have never been a supporter of Donald Trump. But if Democrats cannot keep his diehard fans from making bomb threats to schools, I’ll have no choice but to vote for him for a third time.

by nflanagan

Hysterical Women

Truth nugget: Education policy is 100% shaped and impacted by the fact that three-quarters of the education workforce is female.

Another truth nugget: After Trump was elected in 2016, over a million women descended on Washington DC to march against what he stood for.

And now, after the events of Summer 2024? Well, do your own math, draw your own conclusions. Maybe start your own organization and host a national call.

As the inimitable Dahlia Lithwick noted: The court granted itself the imperial authority to confer upon the president powers of a king, but although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said as much in their respective dissents, it fell to Big Daddy Chief Justice Roberts to intone to his readers that their aggregated dissents strike “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today.” Implying that the dissenters were overreacting, and without ever attempting to address the substance of their claims, Roberts accused them of “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.’”

In other words, sit down ladies. You’re hysterical. We don’t appreciate your chilling doom or your extreme hypotheticals. A President who feels empowered to violate federal law? Hahaha! That could never happen!

This type of response could come in handy for pacifying those whose policy/practice wheelhouse is education. It’s a familiar tone policing strategy for those of us whose professional lives revolve around the classroom, especially in public schools. You’re overreacting! It’s only bus duty! What’s one more kid in your class? Why can’t you maintain control over 24 second graders on Zoom?

But. What if women were united to push the ed policy envelope?   Connie Schultz, wife of the SENIOR Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, has some wise words about what happens when women organize: I know that something else—something glorious—often happens when women gather for a cause. I think of it as coming home.

More wise words, these from Kate Manne:

Many of you are now in the same position I am in: all in for Harris as the person who can beat Trump and head off the incalculable threat facing our country. We are terrified as/for girls, women, and any person who can get pregnant. We are terrified as/for the racially marginalized people who Trump has firmly in his sightlines. We are terrified for trans and queer folks who would face existential threats to their well-being and very existence under the next Trump administration. We are terrified for whatever semblance of democracy that remains and might perhaps be rebuilt. The list goes on. There is no question that Harris’s candidacy will open up a torrent of misogynoir, the intersection of misogyny and racism (particularly anti-Black racism, although Harris is also of course South Asian). It’s our job to fight it in our circles and even ourselves.

Do women have the power to transform thinking about the bedrock value of a strong public education system, in the face of Project 2025? Just a reminder:

Trump tells voters on his campaign site a few ways he would manage education:

  • Cut federal funding for schools that are “pushing critical race theory or gender ideology on our children” and open civil rights investigations into them for race-based discrimination.
  • End access for trans youth to sports.
  • Create a body that will certify teachers who “embrace patriotic values”.
  • Reward districts that get rid of teacher tenure.
  • Adopt a parents’ bill of rights.
  • Implement direct elections of school principals by parents.

That last suggestion is sheer folly, by the way —any teacher OR school administrator will tell you that it’s a recipe for never-ending chaos and enmity in schools. Besides, parents can run for the local School Board or elect people to that Board who will select appropriate school leaders for the community. I personally have seen, on multiple occasions, a group of parents make things hot for a principal, via a democratic process involving their elected board. I have also seen good administrators protected—by the same Board—from a single outraged, vindictive parent.

Kate Manne is right when she says we need to fight bad policy and reprehensible candidates “in our circles” and even in our selves. And nobody is going to fight against misogyny and racism more effectively than the people who are impacted. Therefore, protecting your public school may be most effectively accomplished by women, gathering for a cause.

Don’t want public education to be taken down by the slings and arrows of Moms4Liberty and Project 2025? Talk to your friends. Put up a sign. Donate. Volunteer. Organize in Zoom circles. Repeat vigorously for the next 82 days.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic points out, in a revealing column that …parties aren’t remotely united by gender. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America. When the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.

With a majority-female workforce, change will come only when women demand policy that invests in public education. Women teachers, often working mothers, value tenure. Women teachers do not want mandated certification of their “patriotic values.” And they don’t want a President or Congress that embraces the horror show of Project 2025, especially when it comes to education.

Reminder: The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court called his female colleagues “fear-mongers, on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” In writing.

by nflanagan

Critical Issues and Minutiae of Public Education

I have been fascinated, in the past 48 hours, by online conversations about the tumultuous political week we have just lived through—especially the comments and questions generated by teachers.

Non-teachers are heartbroken or thrilled or both, by the Biden step-down. They’re nosing out the negative PR and potential VP picks of the presumptive new nominee. There are running threads and analyses around the assassination attempt, a mass shooting where everyone knew the intended (again, presumptive) target, a change from the faceless victims—many children, damn it—of other mass shootings.

So much is in flux. So many building blocks of democracy, teetering on the edge. Including public education.

But we’re approaching (in many parts of the country) the beginning of the school year. Much of the ongoing cyber-conversation around public education centers on clearing back-to-school lists (i.e., teachers begging for essential supplies the school can’t afford), the futility of professional development for yet another silver-bullet reading program, why teachers aren’t paid for setting up their classrooms and other garden-variety School Stuff. The kinds of issues and beefs we see annually.

There are a hundred things that weigh heavily on teachers’ minds as they prepare for another year. What I’m wondering is if teachers are focused on the trees, rather than the destruction of the public education forest. Because focusing on bulletin boards and class lists instead of the section of Project 2025 that deals with education feels do-able, not overwhelming. Or terrifying.

Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax posted a letter about a “rude” teacher who created individual certificates for each of her students at the end of the year. The mother who wrote the letter was upset that individual kids were nicknamed Class Clown and Social Butterfly and–gasp!–her daughter was designated “Miss Manners.” So upset that she reported her ire to the superintendent, after the principal gently suggested these certificates were warm-hearted, not criticisms of children’s character.

Aside from the fact that many parents would be delighted or relieved were their child awarded recognition for having excellent manners—the letter bothered me way more than it should have. Because I have been that teacher, striving at the end of the year to recognize and acknowledge students’ achievements, but also their individual quirks, their signature traits, their contribution to the musical community we built.

Hax rightfully chides the mom for attacking a well-meaning second grade teacher, on the last day of school, no less. But what most folks—non-teachers—will miss is that the success of any teacher, broadly defined, lies in building honest relationships with kids who bring varying intellectual and emotional strengths to school.

Not everyone is an academic superstar or natural helper. Many students will need to be coaxed or cajoled into effort, participation and belonging. Those skills are just as important as content expertise, a full toolbag of instructional techniques and endlessly logged data.

My own end-of-year awards included every band kid. Now—decades later—I still hear from students who remember the last full day of school (after the instruments were all oiled and stored for the summer, the music sorted and filed, and the sink—yuck—cleaned and shiny): The thank-yous. The in-jokes for band members. The Jolly Ranchers. The camaraderie. I recently heard from a woman who remembered winning the “Most Improved Section” award—and she was the only oboe. She included a smiley face.

The Hax column drew hundreds of responses from teachers.

Today, I have been watching teachers on social media saying:  Be kind to the social studies teachers in your building. We’ll be working on overdrive!

Well, yes. You go, teachers. The world is on fire, and your job is to pretend that the only thing that matters is following the prescribed curriculum and keeping your head down in the classroom. We get it—and we love and support you.

But as we launch 2024-25, it is incumbent upon all of us whose livelihoods are not threatened by free speech to keep education policy and the very real threat to public education bubbling up every day on social media and in our friend groups.

 It’s been a wild couple of weeks. But keep your eyes on both the threat and the prize.

by nflanagan

Just How Bad are Things?

I have to say this: the left side of the aisle has WAY better memes than the right side. From the bold, white-on-black “I Dissent” to the Martha Gelhorn quote—“If we mean to keep any control over our world, we must be interested in politics”—Dem-flavored bon mots have more wisdom and wit (“Come celebrate our last Fourth of July!”) than bible-verses-with-guns Tweets from the right.

But damn. This has been a rough few days for those of us who believe Martha Gelhorn was right.

Anne Lamott is right, too: It’s so horrible to have to deal with last night etc without Molly Ivins, but I know exactly what she would say: “Sweetpea, let’s have this conversation in a week or two.”

And for most of us, that’s about the best we can do. Right now.

Wait and see.

Choices will be made. We can decide to live with them, and act accordingly. Or not.

I was in the classroom for a long time. And many times—many, many times—we rode rough political waves, and I would think (after a third millage loss, or the Governor establishing our state-based employees as Right to Work, etc.) that All Was Lost.

I remember thinking, more than once, that we had reached rock bottom as a school district. Maybe it was when the Superintendent hired armed guards to hang around and threaten picketing teachers? And some of those freshly trained armed guards were our recent graduates?

I also remember being pregnant in the 1980s, and having a conversation with a similarly pregnant mother about our reservations at bringing children into the kind of world that would elect Ronald Reagan.

I’d call what I thought was disastrous then, compared to what’s happening right now, a failure of imagination.

That pregnant friend? We had healthy political discussions, once our girls were born, about how to resist the greed and trickle-down economy by teaching our children and students about diversity and equity, the things that made our country great. OUR schools were going to make a difference in kids’ lives. Give them skills—and hope.

That was then, of course.

I never, ever would have predicted what has happened to public education—the organized and well-funded attacks, the false accusations—back then.

Nor, of course, would I have foreseen the outcomes of the Trump presidency:  the criminal indictments, the election denial, the January 6th insurrection, the collapse of the Supreme Court. The Covid deaths. The loss of reproductive rights, and danger to women’s health.

Yeah, it’s really bad.

But the trick is not losing hope. Thinking creatively, rather than defensively. 

Otto von Bismarck said—Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable… We have certainly been shown what is attainable, this week—overturning centuries of precedent to save one man. But there are possibilities for the left, as well. We need leadership.

What can Joe Citizen do, right now?

Stay informed. Read selectively. Express yourself to friends, with receipts. Stay calm—take your vacation and unplug, and come back ready to pitch in, whatever you can spare, to ensure a safe election. Because this one really matters.

My best friend and I drove down to Washington D.C. in January of 2017, for the Women’s March, to be part of history and to fan the flames of hope. To think: We are not alone. Four years later, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and a few thousand friends broke into the Capitol. I am guessing they were there to feel connected as well.

What happened in those four years?

by nflanagan

Ignoring the Real World in the Classroom

Are you reading Jess Piper? If not—start now.

Piper is a Missouri educator (among other things) whose commentary on teaching in a bright red state, and having been raised in a fundamentalist church, rings my chimes, again and again. She ran for a position in the MO State Legislature in 2022, and lost—but her blogged reflections on that experience amount to an answer to the question uppermost on my mind in 2024: How can people vote for a confirmed liar and obvious scam artist? Who are these people?

Today, her Substack blog described teaching on January 6, 2021, as the US Capitol was being overrun by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and assorted other rage-filled people with improvised weapons:

What would I say when I started class?

I told them the truth. I told them the US Capitol was under attack. They asked by whom? Again, I told them the truth. By Americans.

My students wanted me to turn on the news, but I decided against it, fearing they may see something they would never be able to unsee. I am of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster generation, and I was always overly-careful about what they saw in my classroom.

I don’t remember how much 7th hour accomplished that day, but I’d say it was minimal. I think we talked about what our country was experiencing…the division.

And next, of course, came the classic example of chickenshit leadership in schools: A warning from the Superintendent not to discuss the biggest news story of the year, a story that has had an impact on everyone in the United States for the past three and a half years.

Her story resonated with me. I’m considerably older than Piper, and I can remember many times when teachers in my school were directed by an administrator not to talk about a headline story—stories that were easily, overwhelmingly available and playing constantly via whatever media was being piped into our students’ homes and brains.

I remember discussing Anita Hill—I believed her—in the teachers’ lounge, and watching my male colleagues smirk about Clarence Thomas and a certain Coke can.  Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky—something happening on TV, day in and out–was similarly verboten.

A friend teaching in my district was written up for responding to a question from a student about the Jonestown Massacre, when 901 Americans died by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, influenced by cult leader Jim Jones. And the Flint Water Crisis, happening 20 miles up the road from my school, was “not in the curriculum” and not to be mentioned in class.

What happens when teachers can’t take questions about the daily news? It makes us look like idiots, for starters. Uninformed content-dispensers, unable to connect facts to causes or outcomes. What have our students learned from our unwillingness to discuss national crises, like 9/11? 

In November of 2000, when the outcome of the Presidential election hung in the balance for more than a month, the room across from mine was occupied by an 8th grade social studies teacher. Every morning, we would stand together in the hallway—bus duty—as students streamed into the building and went to their lockers, talking under our breath about What Was Going on in Florida, the Brooks Brothers riot, and so on.

She’d been directed by administrators not to discuss the election results. I don’t believe I was so warned, but that’s likely because someone thought teachers only talked about things that fell into the realm of their assigned disciplinary standards, and 8th graders took American history.

It was absurd. We were making history, but teachers had to wait until ‘the facts’ had been approved and inserted into textbooks. And you know what they say about who writes history.

There are, of course, times when students aren’t mature enough to process terrible realities and should be shielded. It would be difficult to share stories of what’s happening in Gaza with a class of preschoolers, for example, although children of the same age are tragically losing their brief lives there. There are political, religious and psychological reasons to keep kids innocent of global horrors and inappropriate sexualization.

But even small children are impacted by the Big Issues and Big Stories. If we can teach first-graders what to do when there’s a shooter loose in their school, we can talk—age-appropriately—about why terrible things happen. We should think about devices and platforms—but the only way for children to interpret news stories is via dialogue with an educated adult.

In April of 1994, when Kurt Cobain was discovered dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, word of his death was being shared during homeroom, and many of the girls in my class were crying. It would have been an easy call for a traditional band teacher to silently sniff about Nirvana, and steer around any discussion of suicide by starting class.

I wasn’t sure the girls could articulate why they were crying, but it seemed appropriate to say something kind about Cobain’s music, and note the pain he must have felt to contemplate taking his life. Then I stopped talking—and they talked. I think it was a shock to be 13 and have someone’s music speak deeply to you—then learn that the music’s creator didn’t want to live any more.

I don’t remember how long we talked about his death—10 minutes, maybe—before turning to our usual band class. But I do remember the absolute silence in that very large class, when I mentioned Cobain’s name, and how simply acknowledging students’ feelings was a better way to start class than pretending nothing happened.

Jess Piper resigned, after 16 years of teaching English, in February 2021. She was planning to run for office, and you can’t teach school and run for office in Missouri.

Think about that.

by nflanagan

What Schools SHOULD Be Teaching

…that isn’t in the regular, designated curriculum.

So many things, right?

You’ve undoubtedly seen the memes: Why aren’t schools teaching personal finance, including credit cards and taxes? What about home and car repairs? Insurance? First aid? Time management? Study skills? Stress relief? How to find a job, feed yourself and do your laundry?

Frequently, the post will draw supportive comments, ranging from unwarranted criticisms of what schools actually DO attempt to teach, to nostalgic memories of the days when all the boys had to take woodshop in 9th grade. There was never a shortage of handcrafted birdhouses in those days, by golly.

And—dipping into fantasy here—wouldn’t it be great if schools picked up responsibility for teaching all the life skills one needs to be a fully functioning adult? In addition to math, languages, history, sciences and literature, of course.

The ones that really get to me are the folks begging schools to teach good interpersonal communication and conflict resolution, with maybe a dash of leadership thrown in, but then picket the school board because Mrs. Jones has launched a social-emotional learning through mindfulness (SEL) program for 4th graders, and you know what that means.

A friend just posted a meme reminding us that 100 years ago, students were learning Latin and Greek in high school, and now, high school graduates are taking remedial English in college.

There are multiple responses to that one, beginning with an accurate explanation of just who went to high school in the 1920s—and what percentage of students go to college today.

The utility of studying Latin and Greek (or Logic and Rhetoric) in 2024—as opposed to, say, Spanish or robotics—is debatable, as well, but everyone understands the underlying purpose of such a meme: Schools today are failing. Tsk, tsk. Discuss.

If you’re a long-time educator, you learn to take these comments in stride. Just more evidence that everyone’s been to school, and thus believes they understand what schools and teachers should be doing. It’s an evergreen cliché that happens to be largely true.

But there are a couple of points worth making:

  • The required curriculum is overstuffed already. Way overstuffed, in fact. Michigan—which has a tightly prescribed “merit curriculum” for HS students– just added a requirement that all students take a semester-long course in personal finance. This can take the place of a math course—or a fine arts course, or a world languages course. Every time a requirement is added via legislation, students who want to take four years of a foreign language, or play in the orchestra for four years, have to juggle their schedules and make unpleasant choices.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to cover everything—and it’s maddening to have someone at the state Capitol directing your path by limiting your choices.There are lots of important things to know about adulting, and you only get so much time to go to school for free, in the U.S. Expecting schools to teach things that used to fall squarely into the purview of parent responsibilities, without providing additional time and resources, is unfair.

  • This is educators’ professional work. Let’s take Mrs. Jones, the 4th grade teacher who decided to incorporate an SEL program into the daily life of her class. She’s doing that for a reason, I can assure you. Either these techniques have worked in the past to create a happier classroom atmosphere, or this class is particularly conflict-prone. She’s trying to make it possible for students to learn the other (required) things, by focusing first on communication and techniques that calm students, helping them focus.

Do educators sometimes get students’ curricular and personal needs wrong? Sure. But they are the first line of defense, and best positioned to incorporate non-disciplinary work (like time management, stress relief and how to properly thank someone) into the classroom. And all of them appreciate these things being reinforced at home.

  • You can’t get away from teaching things that fall into the wider scope of how to be a successful adult and citizen, as a schoolteacher. You’re always, always modeling, correcting, observing and suggesting behaviors, whether your students need help getting into their snowsuits or help in getting over a failed romance. Even if you’re teaching AP Calc, there will be inadvertent lessons in addressing challenges, persistence and the value of studying something so abstract and elegant.

There is a prevailing belief, especially in the past couple of decades, that the only way Americans can compete in the global economy, maintaining our preeminent position, is to “raise the bar.” This usually translates to harder coursework, required earlier in a student’s academic career, monitored by increased testing. More top-down control. More competition.

When you drill down far enough, what’s missing is a clear objective for public education. Are we, indeed, trying to help every child reach their full potential (in which case, bring on the handcrafted birdhouses and mindfulness)—or are we trying to strengthen the economy by creating skilled and compliant workers?

by nflanagan

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read

I mostly stay out of the Reading Wars. Not because I don’t have opinions on reading instruction. I emphatically do.  I avoid the controversy because—as a lifelong music teacher—expressing that opinion inevitably leads to a pack of Science of Reading enthusiasts pointing out that I am not a reading teacher, and therefore what do I know?

This is deeply ironic, as those same SOR fans also spend lots of time criticizing experienced reading specialists. Also–I have taught in the neighborhood of 4000-5000 kids, over 30+ years, to read music, relying on a wide array of pedagogical techniques.  But that form of reading instruction evidently carries no water with the SOR bullies.

I was intrigued today by a story in NY Times Magazine about Benjamin Bolger:

Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Overall, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s.

Bolger, who is now 48, got off to a rough start, with a disastrous car accident when he was two years old that seemed to trigger the breakup of his parents’ marriage.

Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.

It would be easy to project the next part of the story—he somehow “learned to read” and then caught up to his classmates. But that’s not what happened.

At 11, he began taking classes at Muskegon Community College. Still reading below a third-grade level, Bolger needed his mother to read his assigned texts out loud; he dictated papers back to her. At 16, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, moving with her into an off-campus apartment. He recorded his lectures so he could listen to them at home; his mother still read to him. Majoring in sociology, he graduated with a 4.0. He was 19.

There were some failures (as we traditionally define failure). Bolger dropped out of law school at Yale due to the heavy reading load. But then, of course, he got back up on the academic horse, and pursued other degrees—including a PhD from Harvard, successfully completed. He also married and has two rather beautiful children, for whom he’s designed an experience-intensive home-schooling program.

What’s interesting to me is that the NYTimes Magazine article doesn’t dwell on Bolger’s inability to read well (whatever that means). Only on the fact that he has more degrees than only one other person in the nation (who’s also from Michigan, for whatever that’s worth).

Given the laser focus, in 2024, on determining which reading program yields the best test scores, I am surprised that a long-form article in a major publication does not explore the question of how one gets a master’s in the Politics of Education from Columbia, for example, without being an expert at deciphering complex texts, close reading.

But the “does he read or doesn’t he?” question—the one where we now expect to see evidence or data—never gets raised again. The article does say he has multiple master’s degrees in writing, obtained after his dissertation was completed.

Things that ARE apparent in this article:

  • Third grade is WAY too early to label ANY child a non-reader (or punish them by retaining them). It’s too early for labels, period.
  • When it comes to effective learning (the kind that sticks, and can be applied), experiences trump worksheets.
  • Continuously reading to your children, even when they are supposedly “reading to learn” at age eight, is absolutely the right thing to do.
  • Visual interpretation of text symbols is not more efficient or of higher value than hearing that text read aloud.
  • Many, many children are “bright but different.”

This is where we morph into wondering why every child in America doesn’t get the hothouse treatment Bolger did, with his own personal learning coach/secretary/guidance counselor/mom. Worth noting: Bolger’s mother, at the time of the accident, was a schoolteacher.

I would be the first to say that such an individualized education is far beyond what any public school could be expected to provide for a bright-but-different child. Given the ongoing strenuous campaign to strip resources from public education, we’re not likely to see public schools turn their limited energies and resources to meeting individual needs in whatever ways parents demand.

Nor is this a pitch for home-schooling. Most kids are educated in public schools, and if the hundreds of pictures on my social media feeds are any indication, kids in 2024 are graduating, going to college, working at summer jobs or finishing the fourth grade a little taller and smarter. Bolger, in other words, just got lucky.

This is a pitch for not writing students off, at any point in their academic career.

You may be wondering what Benjamin Bolger does for a living. He’s a full-time private college-admissions consultant, charging clients $100K for four years’ of services, which I was surprised to learn is kind of cheap in Admissions Consultant World.

I find Bolger’s story rather amazing, an exploration of what it means to be intelligent, and well-educated. Many historical figures bypassed traditional education models and found their way to greatness and influence via their natural smarts and leadership. Bolger embraced the traditional path to success— degrees from prestigious colleges—but got there without the benefit of the K-12 college rat race. Or the ability to read at “grade level.”

There should be a lesson for the SOR devotees in there somewhere.

by nflanagan

A Semi-Elderly Teacher’s Reflection on the Digital World and Education

So—I’m a retired teacher, with more than three and a half decades of classroom practice under my belt. Supposedly, I should be sitting at home, enjoying sunsets and repeating how glad I am that I’m no longer in the classroom.

I actually know a few retired teachers like that—glad to be golfing, disinterested in educational politics—but not many. For those of us who invested our lives in public education, what’s happening in public schools right now is an insult to the low-paid, little-understood work we did to build good citizens in divergent communities; it’s a betrayal of our commitment to our students.

Watching curricula being destroyed and public schools defunded by voucher schemes is soul-crushing. Maybe the most frustrating thing is the naïve belief that technology is going to save us, that students most need screen-delivered, standardized content, not face-to-face human relationships with well-educated adults, who can help them make sense of disciplinary knowledge.

Every aspect of becoming truly educated depends on our students’ ability to comprehend and evaluate information. To think that students aren’t negatively impacted by the unfiltered digital stew surrounding them is worse than naïve. We have not served our students well, offering up their test data (legally mandated, of course) to corporations, or letting them zone out digitally, while in school with their fellow humans.

I remember, back in the 1990s, my colleagues’ collective consternation over Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, when they were the hot ticket with our middle schoolers. Does spending six hours a day in front of a screen, shooting things or wrecking cars, have an impact on students’ curiosity or kindness or any other pro-social habits? Guess we were going to find out.

I thought of that when I read this headline: Uvalde families sue Instagram and Call of Duty maker over deadly school attack. ‘Unholy trinity’ of Instagram, Activision and Daniel Defense accused of ‘working to convert alienated boys into mass shooters.’

The NYTimes recently ran a feature article on a family whose 13-year old daughter was spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

The benefits of learning to live without dependence on social media seemed pretty obvious to me. Communication with her family would happen the old-fashioned way: letters, via snail mail. A school year like that—this was a boarding school, in the Australian wild, hundreds of miles from home—could shape a personality, even a lifetime. A year at this school also costs $55,000.

So—some people are willing to pay big bucks for their children to develop apart from 24/7 connectivity. And there seems to be a building wave of acknowledgement that digital media has done a number on teenagers. Not to mention our neighborhoods, civic organizations, schools and families.

Half of all adults in America get ‘at least some’ of their news from social media. And the results of that—the mistrust of mainstream media, the ease of delivery, the alternative facts—means that ‘truth’ is illusive in the political realm, a situation that matters greatly right now.

We used to argue, back in the day, about the advisability of using white boards, if the ability to ‘publish’ student work online would make them more motivated, and whether calculators would render students unable to, well, calculate. One-to-one devices were going to be the saving grace.

But it turns out that corporations were way ahead of us—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, X, Tik-Tok—and pretty much in control of what our students see and potentially think. For better and for (much) worse, schools are now fighting for their share of the attention economy.

Social media outsources the monitoring and managing of this colossal data load to poorly paid workers in Africa and Asia. Ever had your innocent Facebook post taken down as “inappropriate?” That’s why. Mis-information and dis-information are now central to public life.

No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.

I just finished reading (old-fashioned book) Our Biggest Fight, the in-print manifesto of Project Liberty: ‘leading a movement of people who want to take back control of their lives in the digital age by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.’ 

Sounds good, no? I’m less sanguine than the CEO of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt Jr.. about the prospect of a citizen-led withdrawal from the addictive hold social media has on American adults, and especially on American kids. McCourt says we need great stories to turn this around, and reclaim the power of the internet—and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that teachers and schools have been trying to tell great, non-digital stories about our history and values for decades, and it’s an uphill battle.

You may have noticed that this semi-elderly retired teacher has so far avoided the topic of AI. I’m only too familiar with being pitched on the magical powers of a developing technological marvel to make things “easier” for schools, teachers, learning, etc. etc. Peter Greene has posted a number of great blogs on the folly of believing AI is what we educators have been waiting for.

Here’s Sarah Kendzior’s take:

What gets marketed as “artificial intelligence” is plagiarism: scraped off bits of real people’s ideas, devoid of context or credit.

Google’s AI Overview is worse, though. It seems set on killing you.

“How many rocks should I eat each day?” people asked Google. AI Overview responded that people should eat at least one small rock per day because they contain healthy vitamins and nutrients. The source was an Onion article, but AI cannot discern satire.

And so it goes.