Tag / politics

by nflanagan

How People Vote. How People Choose a “Good” School. Is it Common Sense?

When my son—a Korean adoptee—was in 5th grade, he had a student teacher who was Korean-American. Alex idolized Mr. Thacker, one of the very few Asian faces in our 96% white community. Mr. Thacker took him fishing. When the district hired Mr. Thacker to teach 6th grade, I requested that Alex be placed in Mr. Thacker’s class the following year.

Alex’s 5th grade teacher caught me in the hallway after school, at the end of the year. You know Mr. Thacker is a newbie teacher, she said—and there are some excellent choices among the 6th grade veterans. This will be his first year of teaching. Someday, he’s going to be a great teacher, but…

I’d already had that conversation in my head—and gone with my heart. What mattered most to me was having a great role model. Even if that role model was still filling his instructional toolkit and mastering the curriculum. Kids learn more when they’re seen, acknowledged for who they are.

I think that’s how people vote, as well. When the candidate—for County Commission, Township Supervisor or President—acknowledges YOU and your beliefs, rings your chimes, you’re going to vote for them. Even if they’re racist, traitorous and don’t make a lot of sense.

Some of this is partisan, some mere habit. But driving downstate, along the western Michigan coastline last week, through largely white, economically stressed communities, I was stunned by the number of Trump signs. These are the people who think they were better off when their loved ones were dying from COVID but gas, which OPEC couldn’t get rid of, was $2 a gallon.

A couple days after Trump was elected, in 2016, there was a dust-up in a middle school cafeteria in Royal Oak, Michigan, with kids shouting “Build That Wall.”  It was handled quickly by school personnel, but a video surfaced, and was widely shared by teachers.

Here it comes, we said to each other. Chaos and racism have been set loose.

For anyone who has spent lots of time in a classroom, it’s clear that the attitudes and speech and actions of the wider world (and especially parents) show up– quickly– in the things their children do and say in school.

The campaign to demean public schools and teachers, ongoing since 2016 (and put on steroids in the pages of Project 2025), is reflected in the despicable remarks of the right-wing commentariat. Despicable remarks about Gus Walz and Ella Emhoff—not going to link to those—and top-of-ticket candidates will draw some voters in.  And those remarks will harm kids. Kids in our schools.

It’s easy to label them low-information voters—they are, in fact. But they’re also responding to old beliefs and stereotypes. They’ve been explicitly taught to reject mainstream media and fact-checking. They go with their gut and “their own research,” such as it is.

From a great piece in New Yorker:

Scott, who works in private equity, stuck by his guns… “I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” 

Maybe “common sense” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Or easy to define.

Maybe “common sense” lies in a PR firm’s ability to give people license to embrace their biases, as well as their fantasies: Morning in America.  Boots, not flip-flops.  Make America Great Again.

With the wave of education ‘reform’ that started when Boots-not-Flipflops took office, and tried to recreate the Faux Texas Miracle nationally, lots of people who should have known better got on board. Tests! That’s the ticket! Now we’ll know how to identify a good school—data!

School choice orgs and spokespersons revved up the charters/vouchers machine. Every child deserves a good school—who could disagree? Not me, certainly.

But as the whole NCLB juggernaut lurched along, many of those reformers were dismayed to notice what choices untrained, garden-variety parents valued: Winning sports teams. Transportation. After-school childcare.  Programming for their kids that didn’t necessarily result in higher test scores, like an orchestra, drama club or robotics.

Maybe people choose schools—or teachers—the same way they vote. With their gut.

I taught school with guys like Tim Walz for more than three decades—the coach who taught Social Studies. Walz, as Jan Ressenger notes in this fine piece, is an unabashed apologist for public education:

What does it mean that after two decades of attacks—first with No Child Left Behind’s branding schools by their test scores as “failing,” and now since 2019, with blaming schools and teachers for school closures during COVID—someone running for Vice President of the United States just casually drops a comment celebrating public schools as America’s great contribution?

My favorite Tim Walz meme, making the rounds right now: This is a real thing that happened: Tim Walz was inducted into the West Mankato HS Sports Hall of Fame. He stuck around after the ceremony to help put the chairs away.

As I said—I know this guy. And thousands like him. The kind of teacher and coach who draws families to the local school, so their kids can have a role model. Someone who sees their kids and acknowledges them for who they are.

For those who think this is low-information, sentimental baloney: Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

So there’s your policy.

As for Mr. Thacker? Still teaching. Still taking kids fishing. Still the kind of guy who hangs around and helps put the chairs away.

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

 Welcome to the Three-month Campaign! Seriously. Welcome.

More than four years ago, in April 2020, I wrote this ridiculously optimistic piece: A Dozen Good Things that Could (Just Maybe) Happen as a Result of this Pandemic.

Every now and then, I pull it up, shaking my head over the concept that an unprecedented global pandemic could shake loose great ideas and get folks to—tick-tock!—act on them, a kind of “if you only had six months to live…” scenario for the nation.

In my own defense, I had barely been out of the house for weeks and had been fixated on the horrifying numbers and clown-show daily ‘briefings’ from the White House. Doom-scrolling and baking aren’t conducive to embracing political realities.

I still think they were good, actionable options for change, however. Where I was totally wrong: the communal lessons that might be learned from surviving a pandemic, together. In fact, I was most wrong about the “together” part, which never really got a toehold, even as the virus took its terrible toll.

Some of us are uniters. And some are dividers. Lately, the dividers have been winning.

Response to the blog could be summarized as: I wish. People wished that the pandemic would lead to better health care, better air and water quality, renewed friendships. But they didn’t see even a global catastrophe moving the needle here in the land of the brave. The one good thing that came from the pandemic where I live? A third of my county finally got the internet.

In April of 2020, Joe Biden had just been named the presumptive nominee for President. In the previous ten months, we’d been exposed to 11 debates, with so many candidates (20) that they were sometimes split into two groups, debating on different nights. It seemed pretty clear that a full year and a half of campaigning did nobody (except perhaps the 2020 incumbent) any good.

Here’s what I wrote, in April of 2020:

How about a complete re-do of American elections?  For once, the hype is true: this election matters more than any in your lifetime. If the Democrats hang tough (and they should), we might get national mail-in voting with other policies that make registration and voting easier for the November election. Americans overwhelmingly want this.

There could be even more, given a Democratic Congress and Executive branch in the fall. We could jettison or alter the Electoral College.  We could also pass a law limiting the presidential primary, given the headaches, unnecessary spending and ultimate results we got. Canada, our closest and most similar neighbor, elected its last prime minister in eleven weeks.

Thought experiment: Imagine that Congress passed a law limiting primaries to six months, still way longer than other first-world nations, and set a national primary date with top-three, rank-order voting. That would mean campaigning for November 2020 would begin next month! Knowing what we know now about the world—would debates be about more than the horse race and which state votes first and gotcha questions? If we overturned Citizens United, and set spending limits (again, like other nations), we might ultimately get ourselves a reasonable set of qualified candidates and a fair election.

Am I glad Joe Biden eventually prevailed in 2020? Absolutely. And I agree with all the commentary about his successful presidency and heroic decision to stand down.

But I am flat-out amazed at what has happened in the past week, with so little primary-like fuss and fanfare, soundbites, rallies and pounced-on gaffes. And I can’t help wondering why we haven’t shut down the perpetual campaign machine in favor of limiting the time and money spent, given the results we get. Is this about the media and revenue streams?

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone complained about TV ads, mailings, yard signs and repellent messaging. And if I had a dollar for every voter who didn’t pay attention to politics, I’d be in the Forbes 500.

The three-month campaign ahead of us feels positively refreshing. It will be intense—it should be—but it will be over soon. Michigan voters can send in their ballots 40 days before November 5th. The end of September.

There’s been some talk about how risky the Harris candidacy is, floating the possibility of a mini-primary or reasons to re-think promoting the Vice President. But I think Rebecca Traister gets this exactly right in this column: The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been. The thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris.

 Our national political narrative [is] finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, under-polled, creative measures to change, grow and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us.

The word I like most here is “urgent.”  Things can go wrong with a long, leisurely primary season where a party eventually settles on just the right candidate. (See: 2016.) They’ve gone wrong in any number of elections, convention or primary, over two centuries plus. Sometimes, making a good-faith choice and jumping off the electoral cliff works out.

In the meantime, listen to Keb Mo. He’s got the right idea.

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

I am a Patriot

I am a patriot and I love my country. Because my country is all I know.

Jackson Browne

Of all the things manifested by the upheaval dividing this nation politically, the appropriation of the concept of patriotism by the right wing troubles me the most. Why? Because my country is all I know–and I am loyal to its virtues and principles, while fully recognizing its many tribulations.

I’m sure that every citizen registered to vote in November feels the same way: they’re voting to save the country from sliding into despotism, to secure freedom, the blessings of liberty, yada yada. The fact that the two distinct roads to said patriotism diverge in a black forest of confusion, even violence, is terrifying, however.

Who’s the patriot? And who deserves to have their lives and values suppressed?

Watching the news, and reading—one laborious, revolting chapter at a time—Project 2025, it’s pretty clear that the authors of that document feel that their activist zeal to change the nation is driven by patriotism, their love of country, And if that drifts over the line to white nationalism, well… many of our leading Senators are down with that, too.

It’s funny. One of the things I was never uncomfortable teaching or promoting in the classroom was an explicitly pro-America, patriotic point of view. Musically, and culturally, I endorsed patriotic traditions and celebrated the musical innovations that sprang from so-called melting pot.

Kind of ironic, considering how I felt about the Vietnam war, and the arguments I used to have with my father, a WWII veteran. My country, right or wrong, was his modus operandi. But I thought then, back in the 1970s, and even now, that loving the place where you live, where your ancestors settled, where you’ve put down roots and built community, means you can also be clear-eyed about mending  its every flaw.

I am a patriot. And I love my country.

I love the idea that it took decades of discourse for the early, 18th century Rebels (by no means a majority) to organize in resisting colonial rule, fighting the imposition of taxation without representation (which still resonates today). I think all children in America should know the truth about our Founding Fathers, and their multi-racial legacies.  I think elementary schools should hold mock elections and HS Social Studies teachers should organize voter registration drives. I think flying the national flag—right side up—is everyone’s prerogative.

I also think the Superintendent of Schools in Norman, Oklahoma, who declared “We’re not going to have Bibles in our classrooms”—after a memo from Ryan Walters, their moronic State Superintendent specifying that all OK classrooms will offer Bible-based instruction—is a patriot.

A patriot who understands our foundational principles–the separation of church and state, for example. Perhaps even a patriot who sees citizenship-building, not just job training, as a core purpose of public schools.

Can patriotism be taught?

E.D. Hirsch just published a book in which he states that we can:

 “…transform future citizens into loyal Americans.” Hirsch feels that “patriotism is the universal civil religion that our schools need to support on moral and pragmatic grounds as the glue that holds us together.” He believes the foundation of patriotism is in a shared knowledge base, which all citizens must have to participate together in a community or engage in communication. Hirsch states, “we can create specific standards, so each classroom becomes a speech community whose members all understand what is being said, because they all possess the needed relevant background knowledge.”

This is classic, evidence-free Hirschian blah-blah. If only everyone analyzed the Articles of Confederacy together, or memorized the Gettysburg address, or studied Julius Caesar in the 8th grade (using Hirsch’s handy-dandy curriculum guides, of course), we’d all get a boost of love-yer-country loyalty? Because we’d all be on the same academic wavelength?

Having spent decades hanging out with actual middle schoolers, who were taught a fairly universal set of ideas and skills, I can tell you that more standardization will not make anyone more aware of the virtues or drawbacks of real life in a diverse democracy. Furthermore, the whole idea is vaguely reminiscent of other, failed social movements.

You can model genuine patriotism. You can teach patriotic–and protest–arts and literature, to enlarge students’ perspectives on what it means to endure hardship and sacrifice in the service of one’s country. You can toss out provocative ideas—Should everyone be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance?—and your average fourteen year old will undoubtedly have an opinion, which you can then dissect and examine.

But you can’t make kids love the United States of America.

No T-shirt or baseball cap, let alone a traditional school curriculum, can do that. It comes from maturity, and the heart.

My Country ‘Tis of Thee (Land of Inequity)  Song by Reina del Cid

Oh, Canada!*

We went to see Come From Away this week, at the Stephenson Theatre, part of the Phoenix Art Museum complex. It’s a show I’ve wanted to see for some time, recommended by friends and—well, it’s a musical. It was stunningly good, a show about the 38 planes stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, diverted there after 9/11—and…

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Gifted and Talented Redux

I got my master’s degree in gifted education—actually, a master’s in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on identifying and serving gifted students, but whatever. At the time—the 1980s—I was focused on the ‘talented’ part, as a music teacher. What could I do, I wondered, to better understand and challenge the exceptionally proficient students who…

nflanagan's avatar by nflanagan

Sex Education, v. 2026.0

The Michigan State Board of Education approved a new set of guidelines for sex education in Michigan public schools late last year. They heard copious commentary from the public, worked with experts, teachers and parents, and settled on a revision that included informing students—just the facts—about varying ways that humans express their sexuality and gender.…

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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

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.

by nflanagan

Memorial Day, 2024

I’m not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote:

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

These days, perpetual criticism is essential. We are headed into dark times, redefining the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice. It’s easy to lose faith in our government and the grand experiment—all men created equal—that founded this nation. It’s easy to let hope die as we face another white-knuckle election.

Memorial Day has always seemed like a great lesson for public school children to learn: gratitude and civics.  

When parents would call, a few days before the parade, and say—hey, Jason won’t be at the parade Monday because we have company coming for a day at the lake, I never responded with anger or points-off punishments.

But I would feel sad about the missed opportunity for students and their families to take a couple of hours to honor our own history, our own heroes. Memorial Day services are one of the few chances we get to put our communal, democratic values on display, without glorifying war or violence.

I believe, heart and soul, in the shining but imperfect ideals of a democratic education –equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty-plus years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade.

For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in ’88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school.

There was never a budget for this–-middle schools don’t typically have marching bands–-but somehow there were always T-shirts, and cold drinks at the end of the parade route. We had a stunning handmade banner that two moms whipped up with lots of lamé and sequins. In my last year, we marched nearly 300 students, on a morning when the sky was a sapphire blue and Air Force jets flew overhead as we rounded the corner by the cemetery.

This took up a fair amount of teaching time. I would get on my knees and beg colleagues for 20 minutes on the Friday before the parade, to assemble five bands into a single marching unit and take a few spins around the parking lot. One year, as I was trying to get the back of the band to master pinwheel corners, the front rank (rambunctious 8th grade trombones) marched right up the sidewalk, opened the front doors, and led the band, playing America the Beautiful at top volume, through the school hallways. By the time I sprinted up to the head of the band (and the principal popped, red-faced, out of his office), marching through the school was a done deal–and became yet another annual tradition.

I was always clear with my students about the meaning and purpose of Memorial Day. They would occasionally whine about how boring America the Beautiful was–-Mr. Holland’s band played Louie, Louie, right? I explained that they were old enough to dedicate a morning to thanking local patriots and acknowledging the sacrifices made by Americans over centuries. Older people, watching them march by, would be pleased to hear traditional music. It was about respect.

We do this, I told them, to remember and honor those who made it possible for you to live in this beautiful little town, in this safe world. People like my Uncle Don, who died in February 1945, part of the Fourth Marine Division which stormed Iwo Jima. Or Ray Shineldecker and Joey Hoeker, two high school classmates who lost their lives in Viet Nam. I had lots of funny stories to tell about Joey, who lived around the corner in my old neighborhood–a big, goofy kid who was what guidance counselors in the 1960s called “not college material.”

On our last band trip to Washington D.C., after performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was loading tympani onto the buses as my students toured the Mall. A few girls came running up, calling “Mrs. Flanagan! We found him!” Found who, I asked.

Joey Hoeker, of course–on the Wall. And I lost it, right in front of all those kids.

I thank those who served and sacrificed so I can love my country, and criticize it, too. A hat tip to all the band teachers and student musicians who help make Memorial Day meaningful this weekend. And to hero teachers and band directors everywhere– donating yet another weekend to the community –please keep teaching, in spite of everything.

by nflanagan

Just Who is Trashing Public Education?

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get upset about. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country. So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school plays and songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

Occasionally, you’ll see someone put forth a visionary principle for public education, like the meme that wonders why schools don’t focus on their students’ strengths. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Small classes, focused on individual talents and gifts, kind of like Corey DeAngelis’s magnet school. A warm and welcoming community of learners. Ample resources. Ask yourself WHY we don’t have that in every public school (worth noting: some schools get pretty close).

It’s not because educators—or schools, if you will– don’t want to meet student needs. They do.

Just who is trashing public education—and what are THEIR ultimate goals?