Tag / politics

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?

by nflanagan

What about Homeschooling?

Families who choose to homeschool their children have never been on my negative/activist radar, as a veteran public school educator. I have had both positive and not-so-positive experiences with students who were homeschooled–from a pair of shy, well-behaved sisters who fit seamlessly into the middle school music program due to years of independent music lessons, to a sweet boy who had never really learned to read in the 7th grade and tended to wander aimlessly around the music room, once his mother finally decided to send him to school at age 12.

My ambivalence about homeschooling is likely because I became a teacher in a time when homeschoolers were often young hippie parents who worried that schools would suppress their children’s natural gifts in favor of compliance and standardization.

This was the era of Paulo Freire and Summerhill, and—perhaps my favorite book about education— “Teaching as a Subversive Activity,” by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. The subtitle is worth mentioning:  A No-Holds-Barred Assault on Outdated Teaching Methods-with Dramatic and Practical Proposals on How Education Can Be Made Relevant to Today’s World. (1971)

Today, homeschoolers are often escaping what they see as Godless classroom chaos, or a curriculum that acknowledges certain truths about our diversity and honest national history. The pandemic and its aftermath pushed parents on both sides of the masking question into involuntary home academics, and left people frustrated.

So much for drama and relevance, letting children direct their own learning, at their pace and honoring their interests. Instead, as David Labaree and Deborah Malizia note:

Schooling moved from a shared learning and cultural experience that generated a sense of community and common purpose to an individual competition for the grades, credits, extra-curricular achievements and degrees that determine students’ future life chances.

Once college enrollments surged in the mid-20th century, the struggle became a contest to gain admission into the most selective college possible. Rising levels of income inequality have only intensified the competition. One result is the devastating increase in student stress and social disconnection, in a setting where every student becomes a potential adversary in the race for extrinsic achievement, and the relentless pressure hurts students at all levels. 

This is not how schools were supposed to evolve—they were supposed to be sites for building citizenship, democratic equality and opportunity. But here we are.

Still. If Mama wants to educate her little ones at home, I’m OK with that, as long as my tax dollars are not paying for skiing lessons or $500 LEGO sets, part of a misguided voucher scheme.

We are likely to see those kiddos at some point, in the public system, perhaps middle school or high school when the home-school teacher’s curricular expertise across the board founders. Or when one of the kids wants to play in the band, join the chess club or the public school basketball team.

Just as public schools have tried to adapt to their surroundings and unplanned events, like a global pandemic, families have tried to custom-tailor their children’s education. I’m not saying that I think all of those pull-your-kids-out choices were good ones –thinking here about that 12-yr old non-reader, or kids whose parents reject the idea of getting along with people who are very different from you, in a pluralistic society.

But–a strong public school system, built on quality teaching and rich curriculum, still can serve multiple perspectives in a healthy  community, including the desire to educate one’s children at home.

Where I get off the homeschooling train is when homeschoolers refuse to follow community-driven policies. Vaccinations, for example. If you want a free, high-quality public education, or the opportunity to use public schools, at any point, as a springboard for your children’s ultimate goals, you may have to follow a few rules.

The Michigan Legislature is currently considering a registry of all school-age children. Homeschoolers would have to, by law, notify the state that they were homeschooling their children. Beyond that—things like curriculum and testing, which are largely controlled by legislation, for example—there is a great deal of freedom for homeschoolers.

This feels like common sense to me, much like a census or licensing vehicles. Where are the kids being homeschooled—are there are large number in a particular district? Why? Can we expect to see them return to the public school and prepare for that? Where are the kids who are not being schooled at all, home or otherwise—and are they safe? Why do homeschoolers find a simple registry threatening?

It’s interesting how many homeschoolers see this as government interference. Given the increases in homeschooling, this seems like critical data to have: Michigan is home to roughly 1.7 million school-age children, and 1.36 million are in public schools, while 182,000 are in private schools, according to 2022 Census data. That would leave about 150,000 students who are either homeschooled or have dropped out.

That’s a lot of kids. I’d be willing to bet that not all of them are being lovingly homeschooled by teachers with the skills to help them move forward academically.

by nflanagan

The Return of the Tradteacher

Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and control the finances. Reinforcing patriarchal norms and glorifying the satisfying and ‘natural’ role of housewife.

If you’re hearing a touch of cynicism there, well—I lived through a time when the tradwife, even if she was working, could not get a credit card or substantial business loan. While I certainly defend any woman’s right to stay home and support her children and spouse in places other than an outside workplace, the whole “tradwife” schtick (especially combined with the rollback of Roe) makes me itchy.

It also strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.

I also see lots of pushback against untraditional teaching, curriculum and school organization models. The whole “Science of Reading” battle rings very familiar to those of us who started teaching in the 1970s, when teachers were pushing back against the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” –because teachers theoretically weren’t teaching phonics–crusade in the late 50s.

Nearly all of the folks who taught me were tradteachers, using trad methods, and when I entered the classroom, many of my teaching colleagues were 100% traditional-minded as well: Straight rows, direct instruction, textbook-based, daily homework, and off to the principal should you disobey orders. And some of those folks were effective teachers.

But lots of the opinion writing I see from Moms4Liberty, NYT columnists, conservative politicians and ed-bloggers focuses on how different education looks and feels from the classrooms they remember, decades ago—classrooms that may have been racially and economically monolithic, and headed by a series of teachers who did things in the same way.

Peter Greene recently had a good piece about Gloria Jean Merriex, a Florida teacher who broke out of her traditional mold and had some great success. A couple of lines jumped out at me:

Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.

Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself. She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her.  Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.

For many, perhaps most, teachers, their first years in the classroom might look very much like the way those newbies themselves were taught. It was certainly that way for me, wanting to be the World’s Greatest Band Director and following the exact procedures and ideas I had experienced in bands and at music camp in high school. For many years, I too was a competent-but-not-exceptional teacher, like Ms. Merriex.

I also broke out of the traditional mold, and while not all of the things I tried were big successes, I was able to redefine what I wanted students to take away, for the rest of their lives, from being in my classroom. I accomplished many of those goals. I read social media for music teachers now, and I see great changes in thinking about the Big Ideas—from competition to creativity—in music ed.

Traditional teaching—and like tradwives, the definitions are murky—is not always or even often the best bet. Especially if that teacher’s goal is to move every student under her watch forward.

Stanford Professor Jo Boaler is something of an iconoclast in non-traditional math education, and recently–no surprise–there’s been yet another dustup over Boaler’s ideas.

She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking.

Right there in the first sentence, there are three uber-traditional practices—tracking, timed tests, and doing a series of problems to iron in an algorithm, to get the right answers rather than seeking to understand the concepts underlying the calculation. And who’s out to get Boaler? Well, men who have been the beneficiaries of understanding and excelling at traditional mathematics.

It’s an enormously complex endeavor, teaching. Sticking to the habitual, and ignoring students who check out, only works for awhile. BUT—listen to legislators and parents talk about schooling, and a lot of what you’re hearing is somewhere between nostalgia and flat-out misinformation. The book-banning, faux CRT, Tik-tok blaming, skeptical-of-teachers crowd hasn’t got a clue about what it’s like to teach kids in 2024, beginning with some clarity about the purpose of public education.

As Jess Piper says, in a wonderful column called You Don’t Like It? Move!:

None of us is safe so long as there are folks living in states that are unsafe. They will roll over us first, and you next. The billionaires are using my state AG and other regressive state AGs to file suit to dismantle public schools. They sue to ban abortion and the medicine for self-managed abortions. They sue to stop college loan forgiveness. They sue to overturn civil rights and anti-discrimination policies.

As Piper says—hey, we can’t all move, or teach in a private school where we can craft our own processes, research and convictions. But returning to traditional methods isn’t the policy answer. You have to move forward. It’s the way of the world.  

by nflanagan

Trust (Pandemic, Day #1475)

One of the essential truths in getting a message across is repeat, repeat, repeat. Like the mothers of toddlers, teachers are well aware of this fundamental veracity. No matter how the message is delivered—Pay attention! I’m only going to say this once!—well, no. You’re not.

You’re going to say it as many times as it takes to sink in, and even then, compliance and understanding are iffy.

Here’s my essential truth: It’s been close to 1500 days since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. And we still haven’t perceived just how transformative it was, dealing with a global threat while trying to keep the things we value most safe. Those things being our health and well-being, our children and families, our communities and livelihoods.

Transformative is a neutral word for all the changes wrought by living through a crisis that killed an estimated seven million people, around the globe. Well over a million of those deaths have happened in the United States, making us the nation with the most COVID-19 deaths, world-wide.

That simple fact, alone—the United States, the place where we brag about having the “best” health care on the planet, was unable to suppress transmission. Once a vaccine was available—lightning fast!—getting folks to embrace medical science and stay on top of protection that might save their lives has been thoroughly politicized and divisive. Those things, on their own, were enough to make one realize that maybe our all-American political thinking was out of whack.

So I repeat: The pandemic has really done a number on us. On our economy. On our family gatherings. On what we expect from our employees, as well as our employers. On health care. On the way we feel about government. The things we value most–including our schools.

Call it The Great Re-ordering of Priorities.

It’s become a habit of mine, when reading stories about education: running the topic or issue through the filter of how they may have been impacted by the pandemic. Here’s one: absenteeism.

Student absences from school rose precipitously during the pandemic, peaking in 2021-22. Attendance rates are improving, overall, but are still higher than 2019.

What’s interesting is that schools with dismal, not-getting-better attendance rates aren’t always the ones you’d expect—absenteeism seems to be impacted by local conditions and initiatives, kids and parents re-ordering their priorities. Not up for school today? Go ahead—take a mental health day. Or five.

Schools struggling with attendance after a world-shaking event? Go figure. It’s going to take some time to fix that, and misinformation about how “unions” “closed” schools, abandoning kids to Zoom, doesn’t help.  From an article on school absences, in the NY Times:

School leaders, counselors, researchers and parents…offered many reasons for the absences: illness, mental health, transportation problems. But underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic.

Re-ordering the priorities. And not in a good way.

In her excellent blog, Jess Piper talks about the decline in civility at local school board meetings, among other things, triggered by a pandemic:

Recently, I saw this bad behavior up close and personal when I attended a BOE meeting at a school district outside of St Louis. Though I had an awful interaction with a parent or two in my tenure, I hadn’t witnessed the decline in civility and the outright disrespect shown in public. The lack of couth wasn’t just reserved for teachers, but was also aimed at administrators, board members, audience members, and community members.

One of the first to speak was a woman who brought her daughter to stand next to her while mom called the Superintendent names and defamed teachers. I was upset that the young girl had to stand there while her mother went over her time, refused to stop speaking when told her time was up, and still spoke, even raising her voice, when her microphone was eventually muted. She just kept going.

How did this young girl learn to treat her teachers? She learned disrespect and inappropriate behavior will be rewarded with a slew of applause.

Bingo. All the footage of parents pushing into buildings, upset about masking or sports or vaccinations hasn’t been conducive re-building respect and trust. And trust is a core resource in successful public schools.

Lucian Truscott has a great piece (link here) on realizing, in the grocery  store, that his fellow shoppers  weren’t masked—that he himself, in fact, had stopped routinely masking. He acknowledged that he trusted himself and his neighbors to take responsibility for protecting themselves from COVID.

 It was a nice moment for him, thinking about the word trust—how long it takes to re-build simple neighborly trust, especially when it’s been shattered by transformative events. Expecting our public institutions to remain unchanged or “bounce back” is happy talk. We’re in the midst of some pretty significant shifts.

After the pandemic of 1918:

The Spanish Flu greatly affected the world economy, wiping out large numbers of healthy 18- to 40-year-olds. In Britain, during the Summer of 1918, in a single day 80 out of the 400 workers of a spinning factory perished. In many countries which had seen their male population decimated by the war, the pandemic left even fewer young men to run the farms and factories.

The resulting labor shortage enabled workers to demand better living and working conditions, public health care, as well as better wages. These became major demands of workers not only in Europe and the United States but in many other countries around the world. 

Once again: We are underestimating the impact on the nation, and especially our children. of living through a global catastrophe Let’s put our focus on the right priorities. In spite of all the challenges to public education, it’s still the best bang for your tax buck, in perpetuity. Good schools make for good communities.

Trust is a cornerstone. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

by nflanagan

DIS-Information in Schools

You may have heard the story, a couple days back, about a Republican legislator in Michigan posting a photo of buses at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, claiming the buses were transporting “illegal invaders.”  News stories politely suggested that he was erroneously referring to undocumented immigrants—after all, Representative Matt Maddock is still in the Michigan House—before confirming that the buses were, in reality, transporting four men’s basketball teams competing in this weekend’s Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games in Detroit.

Was Maddock (whose wife, Meshawn, was recently Co-Chair of the beleaguered Michigan Republican party) simply misinformed? Doubtful that he was hanging around a major metropolitan airport (which is not, by the way, in his district), watching planes and buses come and go, and simply, you know, got the wrong impression about a few dozen young men—tall ones– getting on buses.

Nor has he apologized for what might have been a dangerous trigger, inviting local yahoos to saddle up and head for the airport. In fact, he’s continued to post:

“We know this is happening. 100,000’s of illegals are pouring into our country. We know it’s happening in Michigan. Our own governor is offering money to take them in! Since we can’t trust the #FakeNews to investigate, citizens will. The process of investigating these issues takes time. The whole nation knows about the Democrat illegal invasion human trafficking criminal enterprise. Why does the media only work to cover it up?”

Welcome to Detroit, college athletes.

Back in the day, as part of what used to be called a ‘unit,’ my 7th grade English teacher, Alison Olding, taught us the difference between misinformation (when you think you know something, but it’s wrong) and disinformation (when you deliberately plant known falsehoods). There were plenty of examples to share with a group of 7th graders, back then, and now. Spreading misinformation in middle school (a daily occurrence) is always wrong, but making stuff up to harm someone else is a special kind of reprehensible.

And yet, here we are, hip-deep in AI deepfakes and college professors hosting far-right websites protecting “the American way of life”  and government interventions to suppress social media and—God help us—Russian disinformation about their insatiable, immoral war in Ukraine:

 “The strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics.” 

Kinda makes you wonder: Didn’t any of the Republican congressmen on the pro-Putin side learn about misinformation and disinformation in school? How to sort out fact from fiction? How to research questions around information that may or may not be true—and how to accurately evaluate sources that may be biased, or flat-out lying?

It’s a serious and critical education question. There are, indeed, public schools where media literacy is a formal part of the curriculum. There are outstanding digital literacy resources for students, supported by high-quality research. What’s missing is the will and the urgency of the need to educate kids about distinguishing between truth and whatever it is they’re getting on TikTok.

Or, unfortunately, at their kitchen tables or their church or on the bus. Misinformation—can you remember Things You Used to Believe?—has always been a factor in growing up and becoming educated. Disinformation is a darker thing altogether. Especially when it comes from people who should, theoretically, represent integrity. Legislators, for example.

Discussing this with one of my favorite cyber-colleagues, Barth Keck, he said: I teach these very strategies in my Media Literacy class. Sadly, I fear most adults nowadays – including the people on this platform – lack the patience or interest in employing them. I just discussed this point with a colleague who teaches Speech & Debate. He’s seeing kids parrot talking points rather than thinking deeply about issues. Whom are they parroting? Many adults are a lost cause; it’s the kids who need to learn to think critically.

A short piece in the Michigan Advance made this point simply: Disinformation makes our communities less safe. We are not powerless in this plight. Disinformation pulls apart our communities, and community itself is key to fighting back.

Even when it’s uncomfortable or not neighborly or involves a guy you may have enthusiastically voted for, once. When someone is spreading disinformation—even if it’s disinformation that faintly echoes your beliefs about the southern border, federal lawmakers or who deserves a handout—it’s wrong, and they need to be called out. For the sake of your school and community.

Disinformation IN schools is often disinformation ABOUT schools. All of those laws nominally designed to “protect” students from things that make folks uncomfortable—like classroom discussions about lynchings or honest talk in health class about sexual preferences—only open the door for students to absorb misinformation and disinformation when they don’t get the truth in school.

Here’s a heartbreaking and lethal example. My school used to offer, as part of community education, a hunter safety class. You had to be a certain age, produce appropriate licensing, learn about (and be tested on) the safe use of firearms, including keeping them secured when not in use.

Michigan is a hunting state. Opening Day in deer season is often a school holiday. We weren’t thinking about guns as evidence of masculinity or patriotism—or revenge. Our parents weren’t giving us handguns as an early Christmas present.  Our legislators weren’t posing with the whole family carrying assault weapons.  That’s the disinformation part.

From a piece on the 2022 school shooting in Oxford, MI:

What’s particularly hypocritical here is that the most strident defenders of this [gun] culture skew conservative and talk a lot about what isn’t appropriate for children and teenagers. What they think is inappropriate often includes educating kids about sex, about the fact that some people are gay or transsexual and about racism. It’s a perverse state of affairs: Exposing children to simple facts is dangerous but exposing them to machines designed to kill is not. You can’t get your driver’s license until you’re a teenager, or buy cigarettes and alcohol until you’re 21, but much earlier than that, kids can, with adult supervision, legally learn how to end someone’s life.

In Michigan, the shooter’s parents are going to prison for providing their son with disinformation; families and a school district are forever torn.

Once more: communities are the key to fighting disinformation. Start now.

by nflanagan

Dissecting Republican Messaging, 101

There it was, in my local newspaper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Headline: Michigan kids are in crisis and the governor’s new budget only makes it worse.

You can practically hear the exclamation points, can’t you? Don’t bother trying to read it—it’s paywalled, and not worth 99 cents. In fact, it’s Republican sludge, a perfect example of how to use meaningless scary-talk, unsubstantiated by anything resembling reason or fact.

The author, Beth DeShone, is Executive Director of the Great Lakes Education Project.  Don’t bother going to their website, either—because up top, the organization is described by a boldfaced lie: a bi-partisan, non-profit advocacy organization supporting quality choices in public education for all Michigan students.

That’s some expert wordsmithing right there, as if an organization founded and funded by Betsy DeVos —a fact you will find nowhere on GLEP’s website–could ever be “bi-partisan.”  I haven’t been to GLEP’s website in some time, but there’s not much there anymore.

No staff listed (beyond DeShone), no Board to guide their editorial choices—just a bunch of right-wing blah-blah about Our Public Schools are Failing. Plus a side helping of Thanks Republicans for Trying to Retain Rigorous Standards! (By which they mean the rigorous standard of flunking third graders who aren’t reading at grade level.)

There’s a Twitter account (don’t bother) and a Facebook page where the big news is that GLEP is apparently being spanked for using copyrighted images. GLEP, which once put out a lot of negative editorial content about public education, now seems to be a Potemkin Edu-Village, trying to keep up anti-public school appearances online, while the rest of us are, you know, teaching and learning and actually trying to improve the education system that built Michigan.

So it was a surprise to see GLEP pop up in my local daily. Here is DeShone’s first sentence:

A devastating new report from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities showed Michigan’s kids have lost nearly half a grade level in reading and math education since state officials and public school bureaucrats ignored medical science and locked them out of the classroom in 2020 and 2021.

Test scores from kids around the world have dropped after experiencing a global pandemic. That’s no surprise. What’s less often reported is that American kids, relatively speaking, did better than many other first-world counterparts:

American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

So much for ‘ignoring medical science’ and ruining kids. Besides—here in northwest Michigan, several schools remained open, because families did not have access to the internet. The Traverse City public schools arranged for a day off and health department priority in getting their teachers vaccinated. Local schools were paying attention, listening to parents, doing their best under crisis circumstances. Did everyone agree with every decision? Of course not. It was a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” situation.

DeShone then pivots to some spurious data: How is it that 86% of Black fourth graders in Michigan aren’t proficient in reading? How could our kids be so far behind?

Well. Perhaps it’s because, under a Republican governor, and after adjusting for inflation, Michigan’s education funding in 2015 was only 82 percent of what it was in 1995 — worse than any other state.We’ve been playing financial catch-up for the past six years, and having a pandemic interrupt school as normal didn’t help. And that’s not even factoring in the Republican plan to take over ‘failing’ districts, then proceeding to fail them even further. Or the fact that “proficient” doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

Here are a few more bon mots from Ms. DeShone:

The Governor’s budget spends public school dollars to pay for the lunch for the children of millionaires.

Our students have fallen faster and farther behind in reading and math than ever imagined.

Governor Whitmer’s brand-new budget request for the coming year is only going to do more damage. A lot of it. It’s time to empower parents.

Here’s the thing: Governor Whitmer has been a positive force for public school funding. It’s been a relief to have an education-friendly governor in Lansing. Education budgets have been stable, and her initiatives focused on non-punitive policy, like getting rid of mandated retention for third graders who are behind in reading. The budget has provided funding for all kids to have breakfast and lunch at school, if their district chooses. Per-pupil expenditures have been creeping upwards.

The Repubs have pushed back against Whitmer’s plan to fully fund universal Pre-K, and they really hate her idea of free community college, an attempt to raise education levels in a state where working on the line at GM used to provide a family wage and maybe a cottage up north.

If you really want to dissect the proposed education budget and its priorities, and not just call names and throw out baseless (and, frankly, weird) accusations, try this link.  

There are probably worse states to be in, right now. We aren’t worried about our next Superintendent executing Democrats, for example. But I am still infuriated by DeShone’s editorial. There’s a whole paragraph about the alarming increases in “schools in crisis” that fails to define what a school in crisis is or looks like. There are punches to parents’ guts mentioned; also–parents who “care deeply.”

And that’s the thing that bothered me most—the cozying-up to parents and suggesting it’s time to “empower” them. It’s a column—theoretically—about the upcoming Education budget. The people who are making decisions about what to spend on education are in the State Legislature. The way to get influence over those decisions is to call your legislator or run for office. We’re not empowering parents to craft an education budget.

Maybe it’s because I just read Rachel Bitecofer’s Hit ‘em Where it Hurts, but I immediately recognized that “empower parents!” message, the centerpiece of Republican education politics in 2024. It’s a short, emotion-driven sound bite.  It can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Kind of like that editorial in my newspaper.

by nflanagan

Political Messaging, Schools and Republicans

I just finished Rachel Bitecofer’s feisty, punchy book on political messaging, “Hit ‘Em Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.”

Recommended—although not, as the subtitle suggests, to beat Republicans at their own despicable, even shocking, game. Recommended because we’re in crisis, and being smarter and nicer is no longer cutting it.

In December of 2020, I wrote a blog entitled Republicans. Up until that point, in my political perspective, there were country-club Republicans who were conservative, in the traditional sense of keeping things that preserved beneficial aspects of their lives in place. And there were the rabid right-wing crazies who emerged like locusts after Barack Obama was elected. But the two were merging, and the outlook for keeping two distinct parties that counterbalanced each other’s policy goals, for the good of the nation, was dim. The Republicans were ruining democracy. On purpose.

I took some grief for that blog, from die-hard moderate Republicans (who are thick on the ground where I live and work), and also from some Democrat friends who thought it took me way too long to outright reject and stomp on anyone who voted Republican in the past two decades.

From the standpoint of March 2024, and Rachel Bitecofer’s crisp and direct prescriptions for saving democracy, however, my hardcore Dems friends were right: You don’t get anywhere with a mushy message, a bunch of facts, and reaching across the aisle. And you can’t share those great policy ideas unless you can get elected.

I blame my 32-year career as a public-school teacher for this habit of equivocating and looking for points of agreement. I spent most of my time trying to reduce conflict, banish name-calling, find common ground, and build functioning communities in my middle school classroom.

So many communities. I was partially successful at this, more so toward the end of my career. If kids don’t get along, after all, they can’t make music together. This is the single most important reason I stopped having chairs and challenges, and tried to avoid unnecessary competition. Teachers everywhere want their students to be able to work together despite differences. It’s what we do.

Bitecofer’s take on political messaging is that Republicans have zero interest in working together to solve problems. They just want to retain power. It’s time for Democrats to boldly claim the high moral ground, she says, rather than using data and reason to present their detailed policy plans, no matter how forward-thinking and appealing they may be to Democrats.

We’re getting beat up, she says, by sophistry. Time to call a lie a lie. To fight back. To take back the word freedom, for starters. We are clearly the party that supports freedom, around the globe, and here at home. Why aren’t we claiming that? The losses that we are suffering now—reproductive freedom, the freedom to vote, the freedom to breathe clean air—have not come from Democratic actions.

She points out that education has generally been seen as a Democratic issue, back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s (along with minority rights, infrastructure and health care), but the 2021 Gubernatorial election in Virginia turned that around—with a big fat passel of lies about what was happening in public schools.

You remember— charges that teachers were making white kids feel guilty via CRT, encouraging transgenderism and putting out kitty litter for the furries. The kinds of things Dems responded to by politely explaining that critical race theory was an advanced concept, first introduced by Kimberle’ Crenshaw, interrogating the socially constructed role of race and institutionalized racism in society, yada yada.

All true. But completely overridden by the Republicans’ simple, dishonest message: Schools are taking away parents’ rights! (Even though parents have always had rights.) Bitecofer, lurking in the background, would say: Don’t bring reality and truth to a Republican messaging war, because Republicans trust feelings, not facts.

Democrats have, for decades, rallied around more resources and equity for public education. They have gone to schools and registered newly minted 18-year-old voters. They have defended the wall between church and state, pushed back hard against vouchers for the wealthy. Time to claim credit.

America is a uniquely apolitical country, Bitecofer says, with little civic culture. This benefits Republicans, who count on people to vote out of old partisan habits, not new information.

Occasionally, someone will claim that more or better Civics classes would improve engagement in electoral politics in the United States. I seriously doubt that, especially since the things that make the study of Civics engaging and sticky are precisely the things that Ron DeSantis is passing laws against. Kids learn to be good citizens by watching adults—a statement worth pondering, in this election year.

Pick up Bitecofer’s book—it’s a short, easy to digest read. Then pull on your metaphorical boxing gloves.

by nflanagan

Do Core Democratic Values Belong in Schools? Some Say No.

I try, when thinking about the path this nation is currently on, not to immediately jump to worst case scenarios or inept comparisons. The uptick in the language of fascism shouldn’t be ignored, however—comparing certain people to Hitler or bemoaning the loss of democracy might not be overkill in the political soup of 2024.

It’s been sneaking up on us, like the proverbial frog in hot water. When looking at curricular change over the past five years—immediately preceding the onset of the COVID pandemic—it’s easy to see that there were plenty of precursors to the anti-woke, book-banning, teacher-punishing mess we find ourselves in as we slowly recover from that major shock to the public education system.

The scariest thing to me about the abuse teachers are taking, across the country, is its impact on curriculum. Here’s the thing: you really can’t outsource teacher judgment. You can prescribe and script and attempt to control everything that happens in the classroom, but it doesn’t work that way.

Several years ago, my school district brought in a Big Famous Ed-Presenter to do an August workshop on lesson design. Because she was expensive, surrounding districts were invited to send interested teachers, those who wanted to learn how to craft engaging lessons and units with aligned performance assessments and instructional strategies. All the teachers would be creating their own curriculum using the MI Grade Level Content Expectations—the standards documents issued by the MI Department of Education.

Once we had been seated in rounds by subject area, the presenter asked us to come up with a common, overarching topic to turn into age-appropriate instructional sequences. We at the humanities table quickly settled on ‘Core Democratic Values’ which were part of the MI Social Studies standards. We then went around the room sharing our chosen topics.

The presenter held up a hand when she heard from our table. No—you’ve misunderstood, she said. I meant something like “Westward Expansion” or “Industrial Revolution”—a topic that’s a key concept in your state Social Studies standards. We all believe in core values, of course, but this is about disciplinary content.

All the K-12 teachers in the room hastened to assure her that Core Democratic Values were indeed a key topic in the state standards, pulling up documents and published units to prove it. The presenter conceded, saying that she did this work all over the country and had not yet encountered such a broad concept—open to a range of interpretation and uses in instructional practice—anywhere in the country.

It felt like a point of pride, really, having these core democratic values as an anchor in the Mitten State standards. I’m not even a Social Studies teacher, and I could think of a dozen ways to insert the core values into lessons in the band room.

Here’s the official definition: Core democratic values are the fundamental beliefs and Constitutional principles of American society, which unite all Americans. These values are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and other significant documents, speeches and writings of the nation.

And here’s a list of those identified values: Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, the common good, equality, truth, diversity, popular sovereignty, and patriotism.

Things we all agree on, right?

Not so much, anymore.

Speaking of precursors, when Michigan was updating its Social Studies framework, back in 2018, there was a major kerfuffle over Core Democratic Values (and a bunch of other hot-topic stuff):

References to gay rights, Roe v. Wade, climate change and “core democratic values” have been stripped from Michigan’s new proposed social studies standards, and the historic role of the NAACP downplayed, through the influence of Republican state Sen. Patrick Colbeck and a cadre of conservatives who helped rewrite the standards for public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade. “They had this term in there called ‘core democratic values,'” Colbeck said. “I said, ‘Whatever we come up with has to be politically neutral, and it has to be accurate.’ I said, ‘First of all, core democratic values (is) not politically neutral.’ I’m not proposing core republican values, either.”

This wasn’t only about rhetorical confusion between ‘Democratic’—the party—vs. ‘democratic’ (the time-honored. foundational principle of our government), although that’s the first thing that comes to mind with the protestors. In fact, reading the article would be a great classroom exercise for older students. The assignment might be: Read and discuss the diversity of opinions shared here, in a representative democracy with a free press.  Who should determine what students learn in a public school?

The proposed conservative edits went deep. They were about redefining concepts like equality, diversity, justice, the common good—and truth. ‘Civil rights,’ for example:

A high school standard about the expansion of civil rights and liberties for minority groups cut references to individual groups, including immigrants, people with disabilities and gays and lesbians. The new proposal includes teaching “how the expansion of rights for some groups can be viewed as an infringement of the rights and freedoms of others.” Colbeck told Bridge he added that phrase.

Surely, most public-school social studies teachers aren’t down with suggesting that not everyone deserves equity and civil rights, because granting those rights might infringe on someone else’s beliefs or “freedoms.”

After months of wrestling over these—yes—core values, the State Board adopted new Social Studies Standards in 2019. The changes they made were reasonable—you can compare the old and new. And core democratic principles and values are woven throughout the curriculum. Surprised that this story turned out OK? The battle is far from over.

The original definition and explication of core democratic values Michigan schools adopted were spot-on, nested in that most traditional American ideal: a free, high-quality fully public education for every child. One that would prepare them for active, informed citizenship. To become good neighbors, stewards of our collective environment, smart consumers and engaged voters. Community builders.

Aren’t core democratic values just about the only thing worth fighting for, in 2024?