Tag / learning

by nflanagan

Are Schools the Problem?

I was somewhere between irritated and curious when I saw the headline: America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem? The subhead: From A.D.H.D. to anxiety, disorders have risen as the expectations of childhood have changed.

Well, yeah. A.D.H.D. is now better defined and diagnosed. And I certainly believe that anxiety is on the rise with our youngest people—their world came crashing down five years ago with a global pandemic.

Although I don’t think the subhead writers were thinking of this, anxiety must be through the roof for children of the undocumented, attending school while praying that their mom will come home after work and that they will still be citizens after the Supreme Court gets another whack at the Fourteenth amendment.

But have our expectations of children really changed? And are schools at fault?

Annoying headline aside, there’s a lot of alarming data in the article:

‘One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016. The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31. Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.’

It’s actually an informative read. Diane Ravitch deftly reviewed the piece in a blog post entitled Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood. In fact, people have been writing about the ever-growing pressure on kids to excel for decades (especially those in high schools where getting into the Ivies or considering a gap year is common).

A couple of decades ago, ironically, we were talking about high-pressure Asian schools and why Singapore topped the international test scores. Was that what our kids needed—a literal kick in the pants? More competition? And why wasn’t the school providing that?

Here’s the thing: Schools in general—more about that word in a minute—aren’t the cause of students’ mental health issues. Schools do what they can with what they’re given, and what they are directed to do, for the most part.

First, a “school” is not precisely defined. Let’s say a good school has competent teachers, capable and cooperative support staff, thoughtful administrators, a clean and safe facility and enough resources to serve the kids assigned there. Those features can all be undone by bad policies and the social factors surrounding the school.

When the halls are lined with buckets catching snowmelt, when there is no library or science equipment, when one of the children hid a gun in his backpack—where do we place blame? On voters who turned down the school bond issue? On the beleaguered principal? The careless parents who set a bad example? State legislatures that take money away from high-poverty public schools and give it to those who can afford private schools?

To say that “schools” are responsible for an uptick in mental health issues for students is not only unfair—it’s not accurate. The world—especially in 2025—is a scary place. For many (not all, but many) kids, school is the safest place for them to be, and I include in that number children who live in nice houses and have plenty to eat.

Have our expectations for children changed? Yes, and often in damaging ways.

Just talk to teachers. They’ll tell you that kindergarten is the new first grade. They’ll share stories of kids whose behavior is driven by shame and frustration. They’ll tell you that 15 minutes of outdoor play is a benefit, not a waste of time better used on worksheets. They’ll testify that building a cooperative community is always the first step toward learning, in pre-school and in chemistry class. They can tell stories about seeing kids work through an academic roadblock, with patience and humor—not shaming and blaming.

Veteran teachers will also pinpoint the time at which screen time and access to inappropriate, even dangerous, content began to change the way kids talk to and about each other.

Maybe we start addressing mental health issues by understanding just what it is that is making children anxious and distracted, and putting our attention and resources there.

 Don’t misunderstand—I’m not saying that schools (in addition to all the other jobs they’re expected to do) can “fix” a child with failing mental health. But schools can be a significant factor in contributing to a child’s sense of security, belonging and worth.

by nflanagan

Absence Makes the Smart Go Wander

Recently, Bridge Magazine—a Michigan-focused news venue—ran a series of articles on the appalling numbers of absences that Michigan schoolchildren have been racking up since (and, let’s be honest, before) the pandemic.

Last year, more than a quarter of Michigan students, nearly 388,000, were considered “chronically absent,” which includes excused and unexcused absences — everything from sickness and appointments to skipping school without parents’ knowledge. Before the pandemic, there were 290,000 chronically absent students, or 19.7% of public school students. 

The definition of chronically absent? Ten percent of the school year, or 18 days. There’s a handy little infographic where you can see how your district ranks, and how their absence rate has fared in the past six years. I was happy to see that the suburban school where I taught for more than 30 years, and the district where I now live and volunteer have low absence rates, generally a mark of an economically secure community. Kind of like test scores.

Also—like test scores—high rates of absenteeism are something that outside observers (read: Bridge Magazine) seem to want to pin on school districts. Here’s a headline: Unlike Michigan, Indiana got tough on missing school. It’s already working. Bridge features a story about the low absence rate in Fremont, Indiana, just across the border, with a photo of a motherly kindergarten teacher and her (white) students.

‘New [Indiana] laws standardize school response to absences, threaten criminal action against students and families and create a reporting system that streams data daily from individual classrooms to state officials.

Fremont has fewer economically disadvantaged students (about 40%), which researchers tie to increased absenteeism, but district leaders say they also have stepped up effort to help get kids in school. Small buses pick up homeless students, schools offer telehealth and dentistry care and a countywide “teen court” serves as a first accountability step for some truant teens.’

Well, bully for Indiana—especially for picking up homeless kids and offering wraparound services for those who might be inclined to skip school because they can’t get there, or their clothes are dirty, or their tooth hurts. I’m guessing that if Michigan schools could lower their rate of disadvantaged students our absence rates would also drop. As for threatening criminal action—truancy has been a recurring issue since forever, and carrots work better than sticks in encouraging positive habits and behaviors.

In one of Bridge’s articles about the Shocking Absence Crisis, this interesting tidbit appeared:

‘Last year, 162 school districts — 59 traditional and 103 charters — faced potential financial penalties for school days when fewer than 75% of students showed up. In five districts, all charter schools, the 75% threshold wasn’t met at least 22 days, according to data provided to Bridge Michigan by the Michigan Department of Education.’ 

There are about 540 fully public (not charter) school districts in Michigan, and around 300 charter schools. Data is murky—but thumbnail math says that just over 10% of fully public school districts (which includes many large urban districts and small, remote rural schools) have serious attendance problems. Meanwhile, over a third of charter schools (which are smaller and more select) are struggling with absences—and the most egregious rates (the ones dragging down the statewide numbers) come from charter schools.

Bridge did not provide that analysis. Interesting.

When thinking about the results of so many kids missing school, Bridge naturally turns to test scores. I’m not even going to summarize, because it’s exactly what you’d expect: kids who don’t go to school very often get lower test scores and struggle to learn to read. But that doesn’t mean they’re dumb, or unworthy. It means we’re not digging into the real roots of the problem.

The more essential questions are why kids aren’t attending, and how to bring them back into the gotta-go-to-school fold. What people and programs might fill their needs, invite them into a safe community?

With elementary students, absences are tied to parent behaviors—so Fremont, Indiana has the right idea: buses, free health and dental care, after-school programs, etc. With older students, building communities—sports, clubs, co-ops, supervised hangouts—are lures, but in the end, teenagers come to school to learn, to let their minds wander. When that doesn’t happen, if there’s nobody dragging you out of bed in the morning, why bother?

Here’s a footnote to the discussion: Should Kids Miss School for Vacation? Parents Say Yes, Teachers Aren’t So Sure. Synopsis: Parents are defensive about getting better prices on a Disney or skiing vacation and pulling their kids from school for family fun. Teachers are resentful about being required to rustle up packets and other busy work while Kid misses classroom discussions and contributions to group projects. Grades become an issue.

Speaking personally, I’ve never flipped out over kids missing a few days, especially if you get advance warning and a request for work that comes back completed. Learning is never uniform and predictable, and learning (not filling boxes in the gradebook) is the ultimate goal. Right?

I’ve been asked to excuse a two-month absence for a boy traveling to Egypt with his energy engineer father, and dealt with a championship snowboarder who missed most of a marking period but came back with Olympic and career goals, and a fistful of medals.

The first boy was an A student. He couldn’t make up what he missed—but the life experience more than made up for that. The second boy read at a 2nd grade level, a fact reinforced by several teachers when his parents told us about the tour of events he’d entered. Finally, his mother said: So we shouldn’t let him do what he’s so great at—we should make him stay here and fail all his assignments? How does that help him?

I have thought about her many times. Partly about the privilege well-heeled white parents have in managing their children’s absences—but also in considering why students stop coming to school.

If kids aren’t showing up to school, maybe it’s not about better data streams or legal threats, or texting their parents at the right time.

Maybe they don’t want to stay in school and fail their assignments, convinced that nobody cares much. What should we be doing about that?

by nflanagan

Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

The world of education research is replete with studies that feel… unnecessary to folks who have spent their careers in front of K-12 classrooms. Primarily because so much good research is ignored in practice, and so much bad research becomes conventional wisdom.

For example—scientific inquiries  affirm that the best age to begin formal reading instruction would be about seven years old. Ask any early childhood teacher what our literacy success rate would be were we to initiate two-hour formal reading blocks in second grade, leaving room in kindergarten and first grade for lots of read-alouds, rhyming, picture books, letter-sound correspondence activities and development of oral language.

It’s more than that. Teachers with a few years under their belt have well-developed opinions about the best special education placements, the benefits of free play, and why taking your students outdoors yields physical and intellectual growth. Teachers can speak articulately about the post-pandemic changes in student behaviors.

How do they know about these things? Experience. Paying attention to what happens in their daily practice.

You might say that teachers’ observations and informal experiments—Teach it this way? Or that?—are the most valuable action research data to build a successful practice. But don’t say it too loud, because research is tied tightly to the source of the money that funds it—and the commercial products and politics that drive educational change.

There are lots of reasons why education research is suspect—or products are published to great fanfare, then sink like an oversized silver bullet:  An analysis of 30 years of educational research by scholars at Johns Hopkins University found that when a maker of an educational intervention conducted its own research or paid someone to do the research, the results commonly showed greater benefits for students than when the research was independent. On average, the developer research showed benefits — usually improvements in test scores —  that were 70 percent greater than what independent studies found.

Hmmm. I’d put my money on teacher perspectives about instructional strategies and materials, especially if teachers were in charge of their own professional work and offered ongoing opportunities to assess worthy curricula and teaching techniques.

Keeping the problems with ed research in mind (a book-length topic), I was amused to see this headline in Education Week this morning: Teachers Value ‘Patriotic’ Education More than Most Americans.

(Dangerous but brave) subheading: The findings stand in contrast to conservative rhetoric about ‘indoctrination’ in the social studies. And surprise! The polls themselves were conducted by EdChoice, a nonprofit advocacy organization supporting school choice, and the Morning Consult Public Opinion Tracker.

‘More than 80% of K-12 teachers thought it was “very” or “extremely” important to teach students about the Constitution’s core values, and 62% found it similarly crucial to teach that America is a fundamentally good country. In both cases, teachers were more likely than parents or the public at large to favor teaching these concepts.’

Least surprising education research result, ever. Kind of shoots holes in the ‘teachers practice leftist brainwashing’ theory that the privatizers and public school vandals keep advancing. The study showed that 57 percent of parents thought schools should overtly teach patriotism and loyalty to the United State—the exact same percentage as teachers.

There’s more: ‘Both Democratic and Republican teachers were less likely than similarly affiliated members of the public to think it important to teach students to question government actions and policies.’

Again—totally predictable. Schools are inherently moderate and cautious, politically. Your teenager is far more likely to become radicalized—in either direction—via their online presence. Online—where there isn’t a caring and educated adult moderating the decontextualized content they are reading.

I am a retired teacher, but I spent more than three decades explicitly teaching my students about being an engaged citizen, and appreciating the cultural mix that is America. I am a patriot.

Like most teachers, I am grateful to be an American. I didn’t need research to tell me so.

by nflanagan

Moral Clarity in the Classroom

We need to make sure our coverage is rooted in enduring principles and values. We need to make sure we don’t “both sides” the issues when it comes to objective truths. We need to speak and deliver news with moral clarity.       (Ben Meiselas)

I would imagine that most sentient people—red- or blue-leaning—would agree with Meiselas, an activist attorney and founder of Meidas Touch news network. To be more specific—most teachers would acknowledge that there are objective truths, common values upon which we have built our most enduring institutions, including public schools.

Anyone who’s spent considerable time in front of a classroom knows that dispensing assigned content is only a small fraction of the job. The easiest part, in fact. It’s much harder to get students to care about that content and agree to practice useful skills that will serve them well as adults.

In addition, classrooms serve as involuntary communities, places where kids will spend somewhere between 180 and 1000 hours together over the course of a school year. And functional communities have common values.

Any teacher who’s ever posted her list of classroom rules (or, God forbid, the Ten Commandments) and then been surprised when her students blithely ignore them, understands this principle. It takes time to establish what you might call moral clarity in a classroom.

How do you build a classroom community with common values? Some teachers initially rely on threats, fear and punishments to get what they want: compliance. Sound familiar?

Threats and fear will work on some kids, especially younger ones, for a time. But they don’t establish trust or a genuine sense of belonging, two enduring values in a classroom where everyone feels safe enough to learn (or disagree—or even act out).

It’s also way more than civility, although that may be a starting place. Here’s Roxana Gay on Charlie Kirk and “civility:”

‘In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.’

I like Gay’s word choice: respect. Classroom interactions built on respect will, over time, build communal trust, but only if the respect goes three ways: teacher to students, students to teacher, and students to students. Which means that every day, every lesson, is fraught with opportunities to build a functioning community that can actually absorb content, discuss Big Ideas and build skills.

Or tear it all down with a false remark, impulsive action or empty threat. Roxana Gay is right—if you don’t respect your students and what they bring to the table, don’t expect them to respect you or follow your rules, let alone learn what they’re supposed to be learning in your classroom.

What are the hallmarks of moral clarity in a public school classroom?

  • Mutual respect
  • Truth telling—kids are excellent lie detectors.
  • Purpose—Every teacher should be prepared to answer questions about why we’re doing this, and how it will be useful in the future. And that answer should never be “because it’s on the standardized test.”
  • Modeling behaviors that reflect intellectual curiosity, humility and forgiveness.

That last one? Admitting you don’t know everything and apologizing when you have wronged a student? Very humbling—and very important. I remember standing on the podium in front of 60 middle schoolers and apologizing for losing my temper the previous day and verbally castigating a couple of boys in the back row. I’m sorry, I said. This performance means a lot to me, but that’s no reason to jump all over somebody. I apologize.

There were several beats of shocked silence. I picked up my baton. And we proceeded to have an excellent, focused rehearsal. And after class, the two boys apologized to me.

Modeling.

In fact, if we were to sit down together over a cup of coffee, I could tell you dozens of stories from my teaching career that illustrate both moral clarity in my classroom, as well as times when I absolutely failed at establishing a trusting, collaborative ecology. It’s probably enough to say that I got way better at it, over 30+ years.

Moral clarity has been on my mind lately, as the country’s 250th birthday approaches, and the Department of Education launches its America 250 Civics Coalition with about 40 national and state organizations, including many conservative and religious groups, that will create curriculum for K-12 and university students in civics education.

Given the Trump administration’s trial balloon—the well-funded, highly partisan and error-filled 1776 Project—and the fact that they’ve ignored the federal proscription against creating any curriculum at the federal level, this does not bode well for actual civics education.

If there ever were a subject that requires moral clarity, truth-telling and purpose, it would be the study of our nation’s history, government and values.

by nflanagan

Political Violence in the Classroom

In November of 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, seventh graders at Royal Oak Middle School were captured on video shouting “Build that wall! Build that wall!”  in the school lunchroom. It drew immediate attention and media coverage, but like all once-shocking incidents, quickly faded from public view.

As events of the last week unfolded, it struck me that the blurry kids in the video would now be about the same age as Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk. Were they now part of the cluster of young white men who spend all their time online, getting radicalized? Do they follow Nick Fuentes or hang out on 4Chan?

Or—best case scenario—had they merely been immature, clueless, early-adolescent jerks whose irresponsible, harmful “prank” of insulting and perhaps scaring classmates of color, was made clear to them by a community of teachers and parents? In one of the news clips from 2016, the Royal Oak Superintendent talks about how the perpetrators will be dealt with summarily, keeping in mind that youthful mistakes can be learning experiences.

Exactly.

Clueless early-adolescent jerks are a regular feature in middle school teachers’ clientele. Kids do dumb things. In between teaching students about the Bill of Rights and single-variable equations, teachers do double duty as both role models and arbitrators of appropriate behavior.

Because—despite the persistent myth that teachers should just spout content and inculcate skills, nothing more—learning happens in context. When some part of your class feels rejected, afraid or angry about being harassed in the cafeteria, nobody learns. Much of what we absorb in school are lessons about right and wrong. Civility and respect.

Things that weren’t on the lesson plan–no matter how old your students, or which subject you’re teaching. School is where students learn to deal with personal differences, taking turns and not always getting your way. And teachers—witness the illustration for this blog, just posted by a friend in a series of photos of her classroom—create materials, lessons and discussions to that effect, right out of the gate, even though it’s often considered not their job or, any more, none of their business.

We are at a point, this week, where teachers in twelve states have been fired or suspended for making remarks online about Charlie Kirk’s murder. In some states—you can guess which—state officials are inviting anonymous tips on teachers who may have said something in class that offended somebody, although the veracity of who said what, reported by students, then routed through parents, has to be uncertain at best.

Not to mention a giant waste of time at the beginning of the school year, as teachers are trying to build community and trust. Nor is any of this reducing the likelihood of the most politicized and terrifying violence in our classrooms: school shootings.

While teachers should absolutely keep their partisan loyalties to themselves, speaking about political violence is speaking about current events. As Brittany Page says:

“Political violence” isn’t just a conservative activist getting murdered.

Political violence is a Supreme Court that gives the green light for people to be stopped and detained based on their perceived race or ethnicity, what language they speak, where they work, and where they happen to be standing.

It is found in a society that tells you to start a GoFundMe to pay for your life-saving healthcare so your family doesn’t go bankrupt when you draw the short stick.

Click on the link. It’s a powerful piece, proof that we are all wading around in political violence every day, no matter how much they want us to shut up about it. It’s evil. To pretend it doesn’t exist makes it even more dangerous for all of us, including children.

How did we get here? Jonathan V. Last, at The Bulwark, said this:

‘Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Times change; people change.‘

The best part of that quote comes at the end. Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.

In my time in the classroom, there have been regular encounters with politicized issues, from shootings to 9/11. In 1988, one of my students lost his father over Lockerbie Scotland, enroute to Detroit via Pan Am Flight 103, which was carrying a bomb planted by a Libyan citizen. Did we talk about that? Yes. I also know his pain was ultimately mitigated by the simple act of going to school each day.

Robert Reich: ‘If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.

The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity.‘

Every clause in that last paragraph ought to be taught every day in every classroom in America. It’s the antidote to political violence.

by nflanagan

What I Still Believe about Public Education

A few years back, I was facilitating a day-long workshop of self-identified teacher leaders in a western state. The topic: Blogging as a Tool for Change. It was a room chock-full of smart, feisty, articulate educators, eager to share their experiences, to let the world know how complicated and important their work was.

There were teachers whose students’ families were largely undocumented—they talked about student registration cards where there were no listed addresses or phone numbers. Some of them taught in districts where all the homes cost more than a million dollars; some of them taught on an Indian reservation. All of their stories were powerful.

Then a prospective blogger asked: Where will we get our ideas for what to blog about? How will we frame our experiences as part of a bigger picture? (I told you they were smart.)

It won’t be a problem, I assured them. Not if you follow the news, read education journalism, and think every day about the world our children will live in, what things you can teach them that they will use for their whole lives. I told them I kept an always-full folder on my desktop, where I dumped articles, quotes, links to reports, ideas to develop.

I told them there was plenty to write about. Start with provocative questions—something like Is this the end of public education? (hearty laughter around the room)

This was in the early days of the first Trump administration, when Betsy DeVos suggested that one reason guns were essential in schools was to shoot marauding grizzly bears on the playground. There are always lots of reasons to be snarky about or irritated by big-picture ed policy stories. But the demise of something as central to the United States’ stability and political dominance as public education felt like a bridge too far.

Besides, all teachers with a few years under their belts are familiar with the education pendulum. First, we “all” (OK, some) believe in one immutable pedagogical fundamental, then a new way comes along, and we shift (or are involuntarily shifted) to new practice. Until the Next Big Thing comes along.

Moral: Be wary of the silver bullet. And understand that every new administration brings its own bag of ideas designed to ‘fix’ all the existing problems.

Remember when personal devices were dubbed the Library of Congress in every HS student’s pocket—and now entire states are banning cell phones in the classroom? New Math? Grit? Americans seem to be susceptible to the latest and (frequently not) greatest. There are things of value in almost every trend or program. But no education trend is the One Best Way.

Five years later, I actually wrote a blog titled The Demise of Genuinely Public Education:
You might think I would be applying the evergreen ‘this too will pass’ theory to what’s happening today, confident that the pendulum will swing, the pandemic angst will fade, and we’ll be back to our highly imperfect normal: public education under siege, but still standing. It’s taken some time for me to come to this opinion, but I foresee the end of what we currently call public education.

That was a hard thing to write. I think public education is genuinely America’s best idea: a free, high-quality education for every child, no matter what they bring to the table.

One of my favorite education writers and thinkers, Jennifer Berkshire, recently posted this piece: Is Public Education Over? It’s a terrific, wide-ranging read that pulls no punches in listing a number of blockheaded, failed education reforms that we seem to have learned nothing from (sometimes, both ends of the pendulum are disasters):

Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers’ unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.

Berkshire mentions that major media outlets (not that they are bastions of truth and integrity anymore) are routinely posting op-ed content about the end of public schools as we knew them—despite the fact that upwards of 80% of all American kids still go to public schools.

Why would we abandon public schools’ infrastructure and experienced personnel? Crushing public education is not policy—it’s vandalism. It makes no sense.

Maybe the question is not: Is Public Education Over? Maybe the question is: What’s worth saving in public education?

Things to salvage from public education: Neighborhood schools. Honoring diversity. World-class universities. Scholarship and community. Music and art. I could list 100 things.

We have entered a whole new phase of threat to public education. Many things that seemed impossible—like quasi-military forces marching on Chicago-–are now daily news. Education funding is threatened (or yanked) and will remain iffy for some time.

Not a great way to start the 2025-26 school year. And yet—I was in a classroom last weekend, two days before school started, and there were all the names of kids in the new class, taped to their desks. By a teacher, getting ready.

I still believe that public education is the answer to the rising tide lifting all boats.

And I pray that it survives.

Photo: My grandmother, in front of her public school, 11-2-1900. She’s 4th from the right.

by nflanagan

Is There Really a Decline in Pleasure Reading?

The mainstream media has been full of the bad news: new study shows that reading for pleasure has declined! Fewer people are reading for fun: From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend.

It’s easy to feel depressed about declining—what? literacy? —in the American citizenry. Just one more piece of evidence that schools are failing, blah, blah—nobody reads anymore!

But Anne Helen Peterson, in her substack, Culture Study, has a great piece dissecting the study that these scary headlines are based on. Maybe we’re not reading less; in fact, we may be taking in much more information and storytelling via means other than books.

Peterson posits six interesting theories about the way the study’s questions were framed and interpreted, and why we may need to re-evaluate what it means to be fully literate. She’s also a big-time book-reading enthusiast—not someone who sees the death of book-reading as inevitable in a digital world. Reading for pleasure is worth preserving, for all citizens. It broadens perspectives, makes us more interesting.

I immediately felt better after reading the piece. People aren’t reading less, necessarily; they’re reading differently. But I keep thinking about this story, told to me by a veteran teacher:

She started her career teaching in an elementary school, with reading blocks every day. She went back, as teachers sometimes do, to get a master’s degree in media and library science, then moved to a position in a middle school. A big part of her job there was managing young teenagers’ quests for information about whatever, using the internet as well as print resources.

After several years of staffing her school district’s seven libraries, the money ran out, libraries closed, and she was transferred back to a fourth grade. She said the most shocking thing about returning to a self-contained classroom was how much the kids hated reading.

It had been nearly two decades since she taught reading in an elementary classroom, and there was a palpable difference. Not just in the official reading program and instructional practice, but in the way students–both solid readers and those who struggled–responded to reading, in general. She was directed to follow daily scripts and a pacing chart, whether the students were ready to move on, or not.

She told me that—having already been involuntarily transferred away from a literacy-based job she loved and did well—she was no longer fearful of reprimands, and taught reading in ways that made sense to her fourth graders, including lengthy daily read-alouds that connected them to interesting stories. Their scores (and there are scores, in every story about reading) improved.

Headline today, from the right-leaning Detroit News: Michigan’s Reading Scores Continue to Slide for Youngest Students:

‘The results of the 2025 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as M-STEP, showed only 38.9% of third-graders and 42.4% of fourth-graders statewide scored proficient on the state’s English language arts (ELA) test, down from last year’s scores of 39.6% and 43.3%, respectively.

Eighth graders performed best in reading, with 65.3% proficient compared with 64.5% last year. Students in eighth grade take the PSAT, a precursor to the SAT, for math and English. Their social studies and science results come from the M-STEP.’

Read the data again. What do you notice? For starters—in every damned story about the so-called ‘reading crisis’—the undefined word ‘proficient’ appears. What does it mean? Everyone thinks they know. But ‘proficient’ (according to the Nation’s Report Card) does not mean ‘on grade level.’  It’s an indicator of advanced skills.

So there’s that. But did you notice that the worrisome ‘slide’ is .7% for third graders and .9% for fourth graders? Less than one percent? And that—miracle of miracles—Michigan 8th graders’ scores are a whopping 26.4% more proficient than Michigan 3rd graders?

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the Detroit News merrily goes on, blaming the fact that Michigan is coming late to legally mandated ‘Science of Reading,’ which kind of makes you wonder about what was wrong with the reading programs that produced success in two-thirds of the state’s 8th graders.

MI 8th graders took the PSAT, a national test, and the rest of Michigan’s kids took the statewide assessment, the M-STEP. Which is the most trustworthy? And why are scores so wildly different? These are questions the Detroit News does not address.

Nor does their reporting on reading scores factor in where the COVID pandemic impacted student instruction. In fact, I have seen op-ed commentary (NOT going to link) exclaim that because the pandemic is ‘over,’  reading scores should have ‘bounced back’—which reveals nothing more than a profound misunderstanding of education and public health data, mixed with contempt for public education.

Last year’s third and fourth graders were in pre-K and kindergarten during the worst years of the pandemic. The things they were coping with—fear and loss– as very young children, have left traces of damage, from school absenteeism to the very thing my friend mentioned: her fourth graders hated to read.

Why? Because learning to read had been a disrupted and difficult process, focused on improving scores, rather than developing an appreciation for an essential skill that would provide an enriched life, in multiple aspects? Including enjoyment—reading for pleasure?

Alfie Kohn:

‘The fact is that students’ days will be spent quite differently depending on whether the primary objective is to make them memorize what someone decided children of their age should know, on the one hand, or to help them “make fuller, deeper, and more accurate sense of their experiences,”on the other.’

I would call reading for pleasure a fuller, deeper and more accurate sense of our experiences—what it means to be a fully literate human being.

by nflanagan

The Good News in August and Why It’s Baloney

It’s August. I admit that I am a sucker for the cute back-to-school photos—students holding little chalkboards, shiny floors and carefully stapled bulletin boards. Special props to veteran teachers, posing for their 26th year of sixth grade or new job as Dean of Students. Online, there are cheery little edu-pieces about team-building exercises and how to set work-life boundaries.

To which I say: Hahhahhahahhaa  (deep breath) hahhahahhahahah.

Because this is not just another start of school. This is (among other things) the first school year since 1979 when there hasn’t been a functional Department of Education. It’s a year when there’s now concrete evidence that addressing equity and appreciating diversity can get you fired. It’s a year when federal funding —especially for the neediest schools—can disappear overnight. Maybe never to return.

I can see you veteran teachers in the back of the room–surreptitiously writing lesson plans during the mandated PD–muttering about plenty of other terrible First Days, like the year they were on strike or the year the building had black mold–or the August when the district was short nine certified teachers and just who was going to teach those kids?

And that, actually, is my point. No matter what’s going on in the world, and how it impacts children (who actually are, as the songwriter said, our future), public schools open their doors every fall and teach children. All the children. Including those that the private school refused to enroll, and the charter school declared ‘not a good fit’ last year.

And teachers? Robert Reich: 94% of teachers have had to dip into their own pockets to buy school supplies. An estimated 1 in 6 have second jobs during the school year to make ends meet. The average Wall Street employee got a record $244,700 bonus last year. Something has gone terribly wrong.

With all due respect to Robert Reich, one of my personal top five political-thinker heroes, something went terribly wrong over a quarter-century ago. But—again, this is my point—nobody believes that the bus won’t come, the teacher won’t be meeting kids at the door, and school won’t start when they say it will. There may be too many kids, and too few resources, but our public schools will step up, one more time, and do their best. 

In short, the news about public education is both terrible—and steadily getting worse—while simultaneously heartening. No matter how punitive the policy, how insulting the rhetoric, public education is still reliably America’s best idea.

Jose Vilson made me think, this morning: ‘Not enough has been said about how our classrooms can be conduits for the societies we wish to live in.’ 

It’s a great piece, all about how kids learn to obey (or not) in our classrooms, and what that means in a city–or society–facing police and military suppression. Are public schools doing students a favor by insisting on authoritarian classrooms? There’s a great topic for educators: How we manage our classrooms has an impact on the world that we want to live in. Discuss.

Sherrilyn Ifill (also on my top five political thinkers list) called this our summer of discontent, saying:

We could use a little bit of magic – a dash of deus ex machina – to lift our chances of surviving this. But we can make what looks like magic happen by applying steady pressure. Magic is when your opponents defeat themselves. Pressure creates the conditions for self-defeat.

Fighting on multiple fronts exhausts our opponents (don’t believe we’re the only ones who are exhausted). Showing resolve makes your opposition doubt their invincibility. A sense of humor infuriates them. Creating beautiful things and showing love and compassion utterly confuses them. Remaining focused and strategic exposes their weak spots. Showing you’ll go to the wall increases their fear. Showing up with successive waves of troops confounds them.

And that’s my wish for teachers everywhere, headed back to school:

Make your classroom a conduit for the country you wish to live in. Create beautiful things for and with your students. Show them love and compassion and dedication. Ignore threats. Break rules. Show resolve and especially, a sense of humor. Generate steady pressure against the forces that would destroy your important world-building work.

Because the kids are worth it.

by nflanagan

A “Moment of Reckoning” or Just More Empty Hysteria?

I’ve been more or less off the grid for the past two weeks, vacationing in Alaska and determined not to let the repellent Epstein Saga or other assorted travesties spoil the snow-capped mountain vistas. Which means that a whole lot of education-related stories have been waiting in my mailbox.

Lurking bad news, for the most part (even Trump “returning” five-point-something billion to schools is tainted by the knowledge that we’ll see those cuts again—and more). Most of the bad news is cuts, in fact—or scams, like this voucher doozy in Arizona.

Can I just say that education journalists could do the citizenry a solid by continuously reporting all the resources—human and material—that have already been lost? Or by informing parents and communities about residual effects of a global pandemic or unwarranted attacks on public education?

Instead, we get idiotic headlines like this one: A Moment of Reckoning for Michigan Schools. (Cue disaster music.)

The headline is followed up with a series of articles with titles like Michigan spent big to fix schools. The result: Worse scores and plenty of blame. And Mississippi turned around its schools. Its secret? Tools Michigan abandoned.

The “effective tool” that Michigan abandoned? Our late-but-not-lamented Third Grade Flunk law, valid critiques of which centered on the damage done to kids by being forced to repeat a grade, the financial burden on schools as they are compelled to provide an additional year of instruction to large segments of their elementary population, and the complete lack of proof that these laws work.

Makes you wonder where this unsubstantiated condemnation comes from—that’s the disappointing part. These articles (and more just like them, hacking away at our public schools) are from Bridge Magazine, a fairly centrist, nonpartisan publication that focuses on issues in the Mitten State.

I interviewed its founder, eminent journalist Phil Power, shortly after Bridge launched, in 2011, and invited him to speak to the Michigan Teacher Forum, where he proclaimed his undying support for public education and especially for the hard-working teachers in Michigan public schools. Bridge seems to have moved on from those ideas, however, adopting a common politicized perspective: Oh no! Our state is falling behind other states!

There’s a lot to debunk in the series of Bridge articles (wherein I found precisely one veteran teacher quoted, mildly suggesting that the silver-bullet “Science of Reading” prescription was only one of the ways that students learned to read), but I am too jet-lagged to tackle these, point-by-point, at the moment.

State Senator Dayna Polehanki, a former teacher, did some debunking, however. From her Facebook post:

“While I won’t denigrate Mississippi’s efforts to improve its academics, the picture being painted by at least one Michigan publication that Mississippi is outperforming Michigan on the NAEP reading test (“The Nation’s Report Card”) is MISLEADING.

While Mississippi has *scored higher than Michigan ONE TIME over the past decade on the Grade 4 NAEP reading test . . .

Michigan has *scored higher than Mississippi EVERY TIME over the past decade on the Grade 8 NAEP reading test.

The assertion in the Michigan publication that Michigan “abandoned” our 3rd grade read-or-flunk law to our detriment is not supported by test score data.

It’s not surprising that states that flunk their “worst” 3rd grade readers achieve elevated results ahead of the Grade 4 NAEP reading test, but these elevated test scores tend to flatten over time (by Grade 8 NAEP reading), like they do with Mississippi.

This is borne out in NAEP data from other states as well, like Florida, which also flunks its worst performing 3rd grade readers.”

In fact, there are plenty of pieces debunking the “Mississippi Miracle,” from its deceptive gaming of the system, to right-wing blah-blah claiming that raising 4th grade reading scores isn’t enough—that Mississippi needs vouchers, immediately, to solve its poverty-related education problems.

What all these pieces have in common might be called uninformed–or “lazy,” take your pick–journalism. Education data is not easy to interpret, nor is it truth. One example: A NAEP score of “Proficient” doesn’t mean “on grade level” as most people (including some education journalists) seem to think it does.

Worse, relying solely on test scores doesn’t tell us how successful schools actually are. For that, we need to look at a wide range of factors. It’s interesting that, two weeks before Bridge launched its so-called Moment of Reckoning, they published a piece noting that only 9% of the state’s public schools currently have a full-time librarian.

Think that has anything to do with our faltering reading scores?    

In the end, schools are comprised of people and programming. The more instruction is tailored to the students in that school, the more dedicated and skilled the personnel are, the better the results. Score competitions with other states are pointless.

There are hundreds of ways to improve student learning: Universal free preschool attached to high-quality childcare. Smaller classes, especially for our youngest learners. Recruiting, training and paying a long-term teaching force. Stable housing and health care for all children. A hot breakfast and lunch, plus plenty of recess time. Government supports for public education. I could go on.

None of these are free, or likely to come down the pike in Michigan or anywhere else in the near future.

Are we reckoning with that?

by nflanagan

Teachers Work in Systems We Did Not Create

Back in the day, I used to go to ed-tech conferences, especially the Michigan Association for Computers Users in Learning (MACUL) gathering. Like everyone else, I was there to find that elusive app or device that would make my work easier.

For maybe a decade, MACUL was the hot ticket, worth burning a personal day, sitting in ballrooms looking at guys in logoed polo shirts and khakis, narrating fast-paced product-focused PowerPoints with amusing memes sprinkled throughout. The first question you got, wandering through the massive exhibits hall was “Are you in charge of tech purchases for your school?”

Nope, I wasn’t.

What I was looking for was new ways of thinking about education, specifically music education. It seemed to me that music, as a human endeavor, was way more than what I was teaching: how to play an instrument and replicate pre-written pieces, as accurately as possible. These were skills that were fairly easy to standardize and grade, but 180 degrees away from creativity and improvisation, the capacity to play with musical ideas, and evaluate your own results. Not to mention things like joy and fun.

I was working in a system that privileged the standard school band, including competitions evaluating fidelity to everything from instrumentation to tempo markings. The party line on music education is that it’s creative, but secondary music education often leaves little room for students’ imagination or original work. The teamwork and drive for excellence are valuable, but usually end when a student graduates.

Don’t get me wrong—learning to play a musical instrument and read music are useful, foundational skills in ways that many folks don’t see or appreciate. If I ran the world, all kids would learn to play an instrument, to understand and create their own music, and play daily with others.

But how could I encourage my students to try out their own musical ideas? To have fun, even jam, without a conductor and sheet music and—God forbid—weekly playing tests, speaking of pre-set system reqs… This seemed to be something that technology might do.

 Now, 20 years later, there are plenty of creative music apps to carry around on your phone or tablet. But what the techies were selling, back then, fell into three buckets:

The first was programs to make school administration easier— attendance, budgets, scheduling,etc. The second group were things to make teachers’ non-instructional duties easier—grading, standards, lesson planning, and so on. The third cluster was programs for students, most of which were usable by classes, in computer labs and directed by teachers.

There was lots of new! exciting! software, but nobody seemed to be interested in developing programs that let students experiment with the tools of music. At least, not for schools, where performing concerts and musical events for parents and the community were the ultimate curricular goals.

It was a system I didn’t create, and innovative technologies were no help in budging it. Even in ways that I knew would be good for kids, building their confidence and exploring their individual musicianship.

I thought about that today when I read this article in WIRED: Microsoft, OpenAI, and a US Teachers’ Union Are Hatching a Plan to ‘Bring AI Into the Classroom.’  The National Academy for AI Instruction will make artificial intelligence training accessible to educators across the country, a first-of-its-kind $23 million initiative funded by the tech companies to bring free training to teachers.

First thought: Do teachers WANT to bring AI into their classrooms? If so, for what purposes?

Second thought: Why is the AFT jumping on this bandwagon? To “get ahead” of some imaginary curve? To get “free” (and none of this is truly free) stuff?

Third thought: Since AI is essentially composed of stolen content, what does this do for teachers who still believe in nurturing students’ imagination? Somebody created all the literature, art and other media that goes into the giant maw of AI, so there are also ethical questions.

Final thought: Why are we ‘training’ educators to do what OpenAI thinks they should be doing? Did we ask teachers first—what would you like to know about AI? How do you think it could be useful in your classroom?

Once again, we’re forcing teachers into systems they did not create. And that’s never a good idea.