Tag / teachers

by nflanagan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by nflanagan

Dirty Pool and other Metaphors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s just not very nice.

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

They very explicitly do not want majority rule.

They want minority rule.’

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

Or something like that.

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

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

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

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

Keep your eyes on the prize, not the pool.

by nflanagan

LIFTing Kids Higher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misbehavior tops educators’ stressors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a simple idea. Such good work.

by nflanagan

Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Please?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by nflanagan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by nflanagan

Memorial Day, 2026

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 immersed in dark times, I think, 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 when our rights have been systematically eroded by power-hungry politicians. When our children are not able to read certain books or study our actual national history, we’re in trouble.

I still believe, however, 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-odd years of teaching school gave 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 another hat tip to community bands, providing the same service. I’ll be in Northport, Michigan on Memorial Day–settling in the cemetery to play the National Anthem, Sousa marches–and a tribute to the Armed Services. Join us at 10:30 a.m. You won’t be sorry.

by nflanagan

The Rule of the Free Market in Education

I spent 30-odd years teaching in a medium-sized school district that nearly doubled in size during that time period. Which meant that we kept outgrowing our facilities, asking for new schools via bond issues, and moving kids around to accommodate their educational needs.

In fact, the first year I taught in this district, our overcrowded middle school (grades 5-8) was on split sessions. I arrived at school at 6:30 a.m. and taught from 7:00 a.m. until noon. The guy who shared my classroom taught from 12:15 until 5:15 p.m.

Classes were 42 minutes long, with a 20-minute “nutrition break”—supervised by teachers—between 3rd and 4th period. Every teacher shared a classroom, all their textbooks and equipment. This was in the era before Xerox machines in every building, so making copies for instructional materials happened at the lone ditto machine (take a deep, alcohol-and-acetone scented breath) in the office. None of this was good.

Still, it often took multiple tries to get a millage or bond issue passed to build adequate space. And when those new buildings were completed, it was obvious that parents would want their children to enjoy the outcomes of their YES vote and send little Jason to the new school, the one with the computer lab.

There were no charter schools and the nearest Catholic high schools (one for girls, one for boys) were 35 or 40 miles away. You’d think we had a educational monopoly and could do what we wanted. But we were firmly under the control of the school board, as conservative and traditional a group of dairy farmers and local business owners as you can imagine.

The school board’s m.o.: How much does this cost? Can we get it cheaper? Is this some new-fangled educational fad, or something our students really need? Couldn’t we squeeze a couple more years out of the Social Studies series, and just have teachers tell the students that the USSR doesn’t exist anymore?

Every single board member ran on fiscal responsibility, with their own personal definition of ‘frills’—things that may have been nice but would cost more. Things like music, art and in-building libraries. The theory was: just because there was supply didn’t mean we should demand. As long as there was a football field and a big gymnasium, the rest of the programming we offered was on a “don’t ask for more or we’ll cut you completely” basis.

That was then.

We were a total free-market district with deep local control, run by large landowners and businessmen, supported by the taxes they (and all our modest rural families) paid. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a school board member or cranky old farmer say we were offering “just a basic education” at a board meeting.

What changed?

Technology, for starters. There was a long stretch of time beginning in the 90s when every millage election promised computers as irresistible selling point, giving kids ‘what they need for the future.’ Federal policy also ramped up grade 3-8 testing a quarter-century ago, simultaneously introducing a kind of fear-based ‘accountability.’

But the biggest change was the introduction of ‘choice’—a word that demands quotes. I would argue that my early experiences– school board members in overalls worried about overspending–was actually a kind of choice.

If you chose to live there, back then, you were either a farmer, or living on what used to be farmland, sold for development because the taxes were too high. You had to accept the fact that your rural school had shortened days, leaky buildings and overcrowded classrooms.

Three foreign languages and AP courses and 8-hour secondary days with time for an orchestra? Not here. Go back to those greedy, high-tax big-city districts around Detroit. So, yes, there was also a racist thread running through all the free-choosing.

Peter Greene sums up this attachment to the idea of unleashing free market forces and choice in education, the myths behind this tunnel vision, in this terrific piece. He covers all the things I came to see, teaching in one district for decades: We don’t want to share resources. We’re afraid of what ‘those kids’ would teach our kids. Competition is how to make schools and student learning better. People can realistically vote with their feet. The free market always works.

The idea that you can always get what you want, if you have enough money and power, has exponentially multiplied in the past couple of decades, supported by policy and legislation. It has nothing to do with improving student learning or innovations in teaching or curriculum, things that should change over time. As my friend and Michigan State School Board member, Dr. Mitchell Robinson asks:

Why is “zero government interference” right for some families, but “strong accountability” is demanded for those who send their kids to public schools?

Has any of this resulted in improvement, to any metric of school success, from parent satisfaction to (unreliable) standardized test scores? No.

Peter Greene gets the last word: School choice doesn’t have to be constructed on a framework of market dynamics. In fact, school choice could be done much better without those things– provided we accept the notion that the goal is to get the best possible education to every student, regardless of zip code. We could do it, if the goal were actual educational choice and not the conversion of a public societal good into one more commodities market.

This is the building where I interviewed for the job that lasted four decades.

by nflanagan

I Write the Songs

As a music educator, I was always interested in having my students create music, a goal that gets a lot of lip service in the profession (including being one of the four pillars of the National Music Content Standards).  It’s a seductive idea—you’ll see music labeled as a  creative art in all the curriculum literature.

In real-life music classrooms, it’s a lot more complicated. A whole lot of music education (often the kind preferred by administrators and parents in the community) might best be described as rehearse-rehearse-perform, with the goal being precisely accurate and thoroughly impressive reproduction of already-published music.

There are concerts, parades and halftime shows, maybe an elementary school musical or graded contests. Not a lot of time for messing around with the tools of music, let alone thinking about the cultural importance of music in students’ lives—or even pure enjoyment. In some secondary schools, music is all about competing.

I had some success with students creating their own music (more on that later), but one basic fact I taught all of my students, over more than 30 years, was that there are entertainers and there are songwriters and they are not always one and the same.

If you ask a kindergartener who Beethoven was, chances are he’ll say, “A famous piano player.”  And when Michael Jackson died, in 2009, it drove me crazy when the media talked about his greatest hit songs—Thriller!—many of which were written by other people. Of course, there are superstars who write and perform—but there are also music creators whose considerable body of work is interpreted, for better or worse, by other musicians.

I am old enough to remember when folks started talking about intellectual property as something we needed to pay attention to, in schools. (About the time when schools got Xerox machines and the internet.)  If you’ve ever been at a middle school talent show, watching kids lip sync and groove to pop tunes, you can identify the urge to copy something fun and sticky. The trick for educators is to get past copying, into generating your own ideas.

Acknowledging songwriters and composers is easy and worthwhile when you’re teaching K-12 music—their names are there on the printed page. Credit where credit is due is a great way to start students thinking about the music in their world and how much fun it might be to produce their own.

I am aware of co-writing credits where any performer’s suggestions about a piece of music turn into recognition (and probably financial reward). Maybe it’s impossible to tease out just who made the notes and lyrics so catchy in a simple, three-chord song. Songs—like recipes—feel like templates for creative exploration. A faster tempo and minor 2nd chord replacing that subdominant and voila! Take a sad song, and make it better.

Old bottle, new wine. But still. Carole King wrote some of her best hooks when she considered herself a grind-em-out songwriter, before she sat down at the piano on stage—and then became one (according to the New York Times) of the thirty greatest living American songwriters, with an incredible, innovative catalog of songs.

The NYT piece is fascinating. If you haven’t read it, try naming some of the greatest living songwriters before checking their list. (Confession: there were three of the 30 songwriters I’d never heard of.) Several famous performers were asked to name their favorite songwriters—I found my list corresponded most strongly with Bonnie Raitt’s picks. There’s a quiz to see if you know who wrote some of your go-to songs, and sound samples.

Here’s a free link. It’s a delicious wade into the craft of making sonic art.

So how did this go in my very ordinary middle school band room?
At first, it had to do with technology, when kids had access to audio and video recording at home, and their compositions (solos or groups) could be submitted to me via cassette or disc, then email. The assignment was always broad, and I listened to a lot (and I mean A LOT) of meandering drum solos. But they were creating.

Middle school students were often surprised that ‘songwriters’ didn’t mean people who put music on paper, necessarily. Getting past that, to the idea of trying out an original melody on your band instrument, maybe having your friend the euphonium player drone some long notes underneath. Fooling around, then recording. The rubric for success was “sounds good to you.”

Then we got new warmup books that had blues scales in them and I started to do some of what might be called instructional scaffolding with second- and third-year band kids. We learned the basic twelve-bar blues progression, and kids started improvising blues riffs, using the notes in the chord sequence. The key was not being afraid to make mistakes—the exact opposite of how we usually teach musical performance.

I should repeat that, because that’s what creativity is, in a nutshell: not being anxious about trying something, trusting your own judgment, editing and listening to criticism. Trying again. Starting with a classic template—then making it your own.

One observation: once you encourage kids to create their own music, they’re going to want you to listen to any number of pieces they write. Nothing to do with grades or assignments—just fun.

We spend way too much time pursuing right answers. Isn’t it ironic?

by nflanagan

Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

The title of the article made me laugh out loud: Should Teachers Get Overtime?

Subtitle: EdWeek Readers have some thoughts.

I’ll bet they do. Fortunately, the readers who responded to EdWeek’s LinkedIn poll obviously had some experience in teacher compensation, not to mention common sense. Because the answer to this question is obviously that teachers ought to be paid fully professional salaries, since it’s a professional job. Starting now.

Back in 2007, I took part in a teacher-led consortium that explored teacher pay. We followed the time-honored education practice of saving the world one white paper at a time, and produced a thick, glossy report filled with suggestions on how to pay teachers for their special skills and performance, enhancing recruitment and retention. We firmly rejected the common belief that paying teachers for their students’ test scores would do anything good for education–but allowed that the single-scale salary schedule had some flaws and might be tweaked.

Mostly, we were looking for ways to pay experienced, proven educators enough to honor their hard-won expertise and, over time, give them additional leadership responsibilities without forcing them out of the classroom. There were 18 “recognized” teachers in the group, union and non-union, and we didn’t agree on all aspects of what professional compensation looked like, other than the fact that teachers were significantly underpaid for the service they provided to their communities.

There was one thing we all agreed on, however: teaching is not, never has been, a 9 to 5, punch in and out, job. Teachers generally get extra compensation for teaching an extra hour (giving up contractually granted planning time)–or for coaching, and other after-school programming.

But–as commenters on the EdWeek piece noted–if we were to, say, offer teachers money for staying late to read 150 essays and provide written feedback, or to grade dozens of constructed-response math tests, districts would run out of money by October. Or, as one cynical commenter noted, teachers would quickly be forbidden to do anything above and beyond, because it would be deemed too expensive. So–counterproductive.

It’s worth noting that our report on changing teacher pay for good reasons was written nearly 20 years ago, and while there have been a handful of alternative compensation models since (and also plenty of glossy reports), even EdWeek–seriously, one assumes–is still asking readers if teachers should get overtime.

Bummer.

by nflanagan

It’s Not about Cheating

Recent conversation with a contemporary (a man who worked in sales all his life, and whose grandchildren attend a Christian school):

Him: So what do you think about AI? How will your public schools deal with the fact that AI is going to control all jobs in the future?

Me: AI will certainly have an impact on the job market, but I don’t think the future of work is written in stone. As with all technologies, experience will tell us whether AI is actually useful in enhancing learning in any way. Lots of things that sound good in education turn out to be oversold or hype. Or even counterproductive.

Him: But isn’t AI going to make it impossible to tell who’s cheating? That’s what I’d be worried about if I was a teacher.

Me: What do you mean by cheating?

Him: Well, kids will get AI to write their papers and do their assignments. And teachers won’t know who wrote the paper and will be forced to give it a good grade. And if everyone gets good grades, there will be grade inflation, so it will be hard to pick out the really smart students for the top colleges.

Me: It’s not about cheating. It’s about actual learning. Students learn by doing the work, including making mistakes—whether that work is putting two blocks with three blocks to make five blocks, or testing pond water samples, producing an original haiku in class–or writing a research paper. When people talk about AI and cheating, they’re usually thinking about writing assignments—but there are many more paths to learning, K-12, than writing a paper or answering questions on a worksheet. Besides, teachers who know their students well, and have seen their skills in action, will understand how an AI-constructed response would compare to an actual response.

Him: (dubious) I suppose sharp teachers can catch them that way. Besides, you’ll have more time to ferret out cheaters when AI starts grading student work and writing your lesson plans.

Me: Only someone who knows the students and knows the usual flow of content and skills at that level can write useful lesson plans. And assessing student work is how teachers observe what their students have learned, and what they need next. I personally don’t see AI as being particularly useful in developing instructional materials, either. It certainly can’t develop relationships with kids or inspire them.

Him: Of course, this would all be different for you, as a band director—AI will change everything for regular teachers but maybe not for you. If band even exists as a class any more.

———–

Sigh. This conversation actually happened. And the man I was talking to was not an idiot. He had some magazine-article background knowledge about AI, saw its impact as inevitable and teachers as unfortunately unionized Luddites, unwilling to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

He was also right about musical performing groups—as a K-12 musical specialist, I have been having these conversations about electronic alternatives to learning to play an instrument or sing for three decades. Who would want to go to the trouble, a well-meaning friend who teaches English asked me, to learn to play the bassoon? Or even worry about singing in tune, now that auto-tune is available to fix hot musical stars’ vocal uncertainties?Why not grab a bunch of keyboards and software? Isn’t that all the instruction musicians need to, you know, put out musical content?  

The great danger of using the range of AI products in the classroom has nothing to do with cheating, per se. Fact is, students have been cheating—in the ways we usually perceive as academic cheating—forever.

From writing dates on a shirt cuff to paying someone to take your SATs, cheating is deeply embedded in academic practice. If there is a potentially positive outcome here, it might be disconnecting old ideas about plagiarism and cheating. Instead, we might be teaching our students to assess information they are presented with, comparing it to different analyses, perhaps rooting out alternative facts that aren’t really factual.

Fact is: plagiarism is ill-defined, in an era when students have access to the Library of Congress in their raggedy jeans pockets: “Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock. One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own. Plagiarism is not a crime. It is a sin.’”

Here’s another fact: Large language models that support the kinds of AI K-12 teachers and students are being urged to adopt are constructed of plagiarized, if you will, content. Speaking of cheating.

But it’s the original point that matters most here: AI in its various platforms robs students of doing the actual work of learning: absorbing, comprehending, analyzing, synthesizing and so on. I would like to think that this is the reason that states and school districts are banning the use of cellphones in the classroom—to prevent students from believing that graded products represent actual learning.

I would also assert that learn-by-doing classes that require groups of learners (like band and choir, debate, drama and so many others) reward students for all the right habits: working together, interdependence, ongoing skill building toward a clear goal, aesthetic pleasure. Creativity, the antithesis of AI use.

Philosophy professor Kate Manne wrote a terrific piece about preventing her university students from using AI, and how it all worked out:  “I feel strongly, as I explained, that their AI use will prevent me from doing my job in helping them to grow as thinkers and writers.” Spoiler alert: students produced such superior work and thinking that she cancelled the final exam. Read the piece. It’s solid evidence.

Pushback against AI is not and never has been about cheating. It’s about genuine learning.