Years ago, in a graduate seminar in education leadership (full of would-be superintendents working on PhDs at my well-respected university), our professor entered the room, struck a dramatic pose and said…
“On the 18th of April” (long pause, class attentive)
“In seventy-five” (long pause, dead silence)
“What?” (gray-haired Prof scans the room)
In a small voice, I say,
“Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.”
(another pause, Professor smiling, nodding) I clear my throat and say…
“It’s the one that begins ‘Listen my children…’”
(blank faces)
“and you shall hear…”
(still nada)
“of the midnight ride…”
(a couple of people are getting it now)
“of…?”
(muttered) “umm, Paul Revere?”
Prof points to me and says “Don’t answer!” Then he asks: “Who’s the poet?”
When nobody–not one of the 20-odd people in the room– could answer, or would even try, he lets me tell the class. Longfellow.
“When did you learn that?” he asks. Fifth grade. And I only know an abridged version. But still.
And the prologue to “Romeo and Juliet” in high school. Still with me, along with memorized King James scripture, lots of Cummings, Dickinson and Frost and an embarrassingly large cache of song lyrics.
Why aren’t we using poetry to teach history?
Well, two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
And we chose easily measured standardized test questions.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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?
Sometimes, Facebook bubbles up a worthy glimpse of the past. This awesome quote– from 12 years ago– appeared on my page this morning, causing me to reflect on how much we’ve lost in the past decade. Wood is reflecting here on a remarkably different era– where Michelle Rhee was on the cover of TIME magazine, brooming out “ineffective” teachers, and Teach for America was growing, not shrinking and re-branding. His school was building on the reforms of the 1990s, with student-focused programming and the valuing of teacher expertise. If nothing else, it rebuts the tired cliche’ that “factory model” schools have not changed in the past century– schools have changed radically in just a dozen years. George Wood’s school was in Ohio, where “reformers” see their #1 goal as expanding private school vouchers.
“For the past 18 years, I have worked as a HS/MS school principal alongside a dedicated staff and a committed community to improve a school. In that time, we have increased graduation and college-going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior Project and Graduation Portfolio).
But reading the popular press and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools. You see, we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.
Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work.”
I wrote the core of this piece a decade ago, but it feels evergreen. Back then, we were trying to improve reading scores by offering kids rewards. Including pizza. Have we left competitive reading behind—or are ‘supplementary’ programs to raise scores, like Accelerated Reader, now being supplanted by the Faux Science of Reading?
When my kids–now adults–were in elementary grades, their school participated in Pizza Hut’s Book It program. The idea was to promote reading by giving kids coupons for free individual pizzas if they read a specific number of books or were the “top” readers in their classes. Whole classes got pizza parties for reading the greatest number of books. Teachers and principal were solidly behind the program, promising public recognition for kids who read the most, silly adult stunts (from head-shaving to roof sitting) and assemblies if all classes achieved certain goals.
My daughter was immediately down with the Book It concept, strategically selecting and plowing through books to stay a volume or two ahead her classroom competitors. Soon, I was signing off on a dozen or more books per day–easy, short books–to keep her in the running for “best” reader. The free pizza coupons were piling up on the counter. It never was about the pizza, however. It was about the chart on the wall, where students tallied up their reading “scores.”
My son, on the other hand, was not a competitor. Both my kids–thank goodness–were early, fluent readers. He was reading a lot, at home, including car magazines and nonfiction books written for adults. But the Book It chart on the wall, the kids lining up every morning, excited to fill in the squares? Nope. He didn’t want to play.
He pointed out that his sister had taken to raiding the boxes of outgrown picture books in the basement, essentially juking her stats. Some of his buddies had only a couple of books listed on the chart (and they weren’t dumb). It was only suck-ups who were geeked about the long line of filled-in squares after their names. Another stupid contest.
After thinking about it for a few days, we agreed. I sent identical notes to teachers, saying that as a family we’d decided not to participate in competitive reading. Since I was also a teacher in the district, and not looking to make cranky-waves at my children’s school, I added some gently worded “I understand why you’re doing this–but no thanks!” language.
And that was that. Until I picked my son up one day and saw The Chart, with his name blacked out, and “Mom doesn’t believe in competition” carefully spaced out over all the empty boxes after the black mark. I asked the teacher why she wrote that–and she said she was trying to emphasize to the other 3rd graders that Alex wasn’t a poor reader or insubordinate. It was his mother who was responsible for Alex not being part of their rah-rah Book It team.
Whereas, of course, the kids with lots of empty boxes were incapable or defiant– not team players. You could tell, simply by looking at The Chart.
In the great scheme of reading instruction, Book It (which has changed its program in the meantime) is relatively benign compared to other reading-for-points programs. It’s just a cheesy (sorry) pizza-for-reading reward scam that gets “free” coupons with the Pizza Hut brand into homes and schools. It pushes kids to read for points and prizes, rather than pleasure and information. It emphasizes quantity over quality reading experiences, data over delight. It attaches a tangible (high fat) reward to an act that should be inherently exciting and deeply rewarding. And it slaps a big chart on the classroom wall so kids can readily identify winners and losers. It uses social pressure and food to force children to read competitively.
Substantial research shows that rewarding an intrinsically pleasant activity sends the message that the activity is not pleasant, and that nobody would do it without a bribe. AR might be convincing children that reading is not pleasant.
My friend Claudia Swisher, English teacher extraordinaire from Norman, Oklahoma taught a high school course called Reading for Pleasure. It was the antithesis of reading for points, pizza and pecuniary rewards. Claudia rejoiced when reluctant readers found enjoyment in reading and acted as book whisperer in helping them select engaging material. She talked with them about the books they read. She modeled reading herself, in every class. There were no tests. But her data showed that students grew, in measurable and immeasurable ways, from this experience.
Why aren’t all students reading for pleasure, every day?
A few years back, in 2016, I read a blog post from a national teachers’ union leader, a white woman, proclaiming that she was now woke. I’ve met this woman a few times and have no doubt that she is sincere and well-meaning and totally on the right side of social justice issues, but the blog, about her aha moment, struck me as tone-deaf.
Most of the time, white educators who care about justice are working on opening their minds, at being better humans. Maybe the best white people can do is increase their understanding and awareness of all the injustices that are built into living in the home of the brave. Closer to woke, maybe, but always gazing at justice and equity from a layer of privilege. Doing their best until they can do better, etc. It’s not for us to decide, yup, we’re woke now.
How did we go from striving for more equity and inclusion as a nation–to proudly announcing that the last thing we want our children to feel is responsibility for the well-being of others? What was the turning point?
Spoiler alert: It’s no coincidence that the Governor who wanted to excise woke-ism thought that strategy would resonate with a particular group of American voters. Having stirred that Group4Liberty up, Desantis is now reaping the consequences, politically, in Florida. Bad ed policy will always catch up to you, with increasing teacher shortages and hollowed-out libraries. And so many headaches and complaints.
When you’re stirring the pot, to get political mileage out of parent anger, you’re doing a grave disservice to the foot soldiers who are teaching in your state, the ones who are trying to put together functioning classrooms full of diverse kids–and then teach them something worth learning.
And, as Peter Greene points out, succinctly:It’s a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it’s a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it’s a luxury that many teachers don’t have.
Stripping critical topics and materials out of the curriculum because they may be interpreted as ‘woke,’ makes that curriculum sterile and empty. Trying to keep students from accessing their own answers on the internet is futile. And attempting to control teacher behaviors via professional development is downright creepy.
Teachers who are experiencing all of these anti-woke procedures can feel isolated and angry, understanding that the very reason they chose to become teachers—building the next generation—has been abandoned by school leaders with feet of clay.
Denying that there is systemic injustice, instead substituting the systemic practice of avoiding unpleasant truths, ducking issues that cause conflict and barring critical thinking by students, is the worst possible basis for making education policy. Instead, ed policy is now based on chasing test scores, cutting economic corners, and presenting a mendacious view of the world to our future leaders.
If anybody needs to pursue wokeness, it’s school leaders and education policymakers. Because—guess what—there ARE systemic injustices in American society. And one of the purposes of American public schools has traditionally been forming a more perfect union through education. Carol Burris:
In the beginning, the purpose was to create a literate American citizenry to be able to participate in democracy. Our founders realized that if they were going to give citizens the ability to actually shape government through elections, they had to have some knowledge base on which to make decisions.
Returning to the critical question here—how and why did wokeness become something to sneer at, to stamp out of school discussions and materials?
Add in a pandemic, which tilted many perspectives—equity, safety, privilege—and it’s easy to see how the past eight years have caused a political abyss to form. Teachers who forthrightly proclaim they are woke, in 2024, risk being fired.
The one thing non-teachers simply do not and cannot grasp is how MENTALLY EXHAUSTING IT IS TO TEACH ALL DAY. There are very, very few jobs that require the constant mental attention that teaching does. I’d love to see all the people criticizing teachers to teach for a week. (Caps are Fuller’s.)
There are over 750 responses, running about 30 to one some form of confirmation, most of which are from teachers or parents. The odd pushback (i.e., @Angrydocsx: Surgery, nursing, working on an oil rig, construction, being a lineman, etc… Teachers are great but get over yourself.) are either from people who feel their jobs are equally taxing, or your garden-variety anti-teacher/anti-union/you-suck-so-shut-up tweets.
Side note: I think surgery and nursing are also incredibly demanding and find @Angrydoc’s immediate shift to oil rigs and linemen in cherry pickers—dangerous, outdoor male-dominated jobs—telling.
Fuller (who, not coincidentally, was a HS teacher before moving into higher education) puts his finger on the thing that makes teaching exhausting—you’re on all the time, making decisions on the fly and—if you’re doing the job right—taking sincere responsibility for teaching…something, to students who may not particularly want to be taught.
He did not say teaching was the most mentally exhausting job in the world—there are others where you can’t take a break or turn your back—only that the need to constantly pay attention and adapt were factors that many folks did not perceive, when they thought about teaching. A number of the tweeted responses, in fact, were from people who thought they’d give teaching a try, but concluded that it wasn’t the job they thought it would be.
*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.
*Researcher Philip Jackson said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.
Cuban notes that those studies are older, and invites readers to share any newer research—but those figures ring absolutely true to me. Interactions, decisions, re-direction, pop-up questions, wait time, modeling, judgments. On and on and on. Teaching is all about an on-your-feet response to whatever crops up. It’s the essence of unpredictability, and every day is exhausting.
What Fuller’s tweet and the plethora of responses clearly illustrates: There is no such thing as successful scripted teaching or “effective” fidelity to pre-constructed lessons. Also: the more you teach, if you’re paying attention, the more fluid the decision-making becomes, and the more tools in your mental (and emotional) tool bag. Experience matters. Perception matters. Judgment matters.
When I had been teaching for more than 25 years, I took a two-year sabbatical to work at a national education non-profit. There was an opportunity to pursue an alternate career in our contract language, but even though I knew I could return to teaching, I was certain that this new job was my off-ramp.
At first, it was great. I had my own cubicle, with a computer and a phone and–get this–a secretary. We took an hour for lunch, occasionally going out to a restaurant (and, also occasionally, having a glass of wine). We could use the bathroom as often as we liked. I could pop into someone else’s office and have a long chat about some issue that had arisen. I could leave early to go to the dentist. We were doing a lot of conferences and workshops—on weekends, because our clients were educators—and if we were in another city for the weekend, we didn’t return to work until Wednesday or Thursday: comp time!
I found the workload easy and the pace relaxed. I liked the people I worked with. But after the first year, I started thinking about going back to teaching. It took a long time to work through the reasons. Teaching offered less money, less prestige and way more what might be called mandatory time on task.
What I finally concluded was this: When I left the school building at night, and walked across the parking lot, I could describe the good I had done that day, things students had learned, progress made. I didn’t get that daily confirmation at the non-profit (which was much-admired). Lots of days were focused on strengthening the business end of the non-profit’s work. I didn’t get to hang out with kids, either.
I taught a lot of subjects and varied grade levels during my career, speaking of mental exhaustion. I taught large middle school and high school band classes (65+ students), and 7th grade math in the first year of a new, “connected” curriculum that the old math teachers loathed. I taught vocal and instrumental music in every grade from pre-K to 12. By far the most mentally challenging class I ever taught was general music to a group of 12 Pre-K children, mostly four years old, in my last year in the classroom.
These kiddos were all over the place, maturity-wise. My biggest challenge at first was getting them all to sit, not sprawl or run around, on the circular rug in my classroom. I had them for 50 minutes, twice a week (yup—too long, I know, but that’s the way the schedule was set up), so the first time they came to my room, I prepared a lesson plan with seven different activities, from listening to marching. Seven!
They ran through that plan in about 20 minutes. I remember thinking: I’m supposed to be good at this! I hope nobody makes an unscheduled visit to my room.
Although I got much better at teaching very young children, thanks to the generous suggestions of my colleagues, it was a mental attention marathon, day in and day out. Did they understand that word? Why aren’t his hands coming together when he claps? How much time is left? Wait— is she actually spitting?
When we speak of teacher professionalism, we think of content knowledge, instructional expertise, being a respected contributor to a school learning community. But a big part of professionalism is accepting responsibility for what happens in your worksite, for expending the continuous mental energy to create a successful and skilled practice.
Over the last few decades, pundits and policymakers have derided the professionalism of teachers because “accountability” or whatever. No matter how many degrees and certificates they get, how many years of experience they accumulate, or student commendations they collect, American society looks at teachers and says “Oh, that’s nice!” but also, “How do you do it? Couldn’t be me!” “You and your union make the job easy, right?” and my personal favorite, “I couldn’t stand me when I was a child. How does that work out with 30 of them?!” In other words, even though many people think only a special set of people can do the job, they also think anyone can do it.
When I retired from teaching (after 32+ years), I enrolled in a doctoral program in Education Policy. (Spoiler: I didn’t finish, although I completed the coursework.) In the first year, I took a required, doctoral-level course in Educational Research.
In every class, we read one to three pieces of research, then discussed the work’s validity and utility, usually in small, mixed groups. It was a big class, with two professors and candidates from all the doctoral programs in education—ed leadership, teacher education, administration, quantitative measurement and ed policy. Once people got over being intimidated, there was a lot of lively disagreement.
There were two HS math teachers in the class; both were enrolled in the graduate program in Administration—wannabe principals or superintendents. They brought in a paper they wrote for an earlier, masters-level class summarizing some action research they’d done in their school, using their own students, comparing two methods of teaching a particular concept.
The design was simple. They planned a unit, using two very different sets of learning activities and strategies (A and B) to be taught over the same amount of time. Each of them taught the A method to one class and the B method to another—four classes in all, two taught the A way and two the B way. All four classes were the same course (Geometry I) and the same general grade level. They gave the students identical pre- and post-tests, and recorded a lot of observed data.
There was a great deal of “teacher talk” in the summary of their results (i.e., factors that couldn’t be controlled—an often-disrupted last hour class, or a particularly talkative group—but also important variables like the kinds of questions students asked and misconceptions revealed in homework). Both teachers admitted that the research results surprised them—one method got significantly better post-test results and would be utilized in re-organizing the class for next year. They encouraged other teachers to do similar experiments.
These were experienced teachers, presenting what they found useful in a low-key research design. And the comments from their fellow students were brutal. For starters, the teachers used the term ‘action research’which set off the quantitative measurement folks, who called such work unsupportable, unreliable and worse.
There were questions about their sample pool, their “fidelity” in teaching methods, the fact that their numbers were small, and the results were not generalizable. Several people said that their findings were useless, and the work they did was not research. I was embarrassed for the teachers—many of the students in the course had never been teachers, and their criticisms were harsh and even arrogant.
At that point, I had read dozens of research reports, hundreds of pages filled with incomprehensible (to me) equations and complex theoretical frameworks. I had served as a research assistant doing data analysis on a multi-year grant designed to figure out which pre-packaged curriculum model yielded the best test results. I sat in endless policy seminars where researchers explicated wide-scale “gold standard” studies, wherein the only thing people found convincing were standardized test scores. Bringing up Daniel Koretz or Alfie Kohn or any of the other credible voices who found standardized testing data at least questionable would draw a sneer.
In our small groups, the prevailing opinion was that action research wasn’t really research, and the two teachers’ work was biased garbage. It was the first time I ever argued in my small group that a research study had validity and utility, at least to the researchers, and ought to be given consideration.
In the end, it came down to the fact that small, highly targeted research studies seldom got grants. And grants were the lifeblood of research (and notoriety of the good kind for universities and organizations that depend on grant funding). And we were there to learn how to do the kind of research that generated grants and recognition.
There are heated debates around gender, race, and politicized curricula. These tend to turn on a crucial empirical claim: Right-wingers insist that classrooms are rife with progressive politicking and left-wingers that such claims are nonsense. Who’s correct? We don’t know, and there’s no research to help sort fact from fiction. Again, I get the challenges. Obtaining access to schools for this kind of research is really difficult, and actually conducting it is even more daunting. Absent such information, though, the debate roars dumbly on, with all parties sure they’re right.
I could tell similar tales about reading instruction, school discipline, chronic absenteeism, and much more. In each case, policymakers or district leaders have repeatedly told me that researchers just aren’t providing them with much that’s helpful. Many in the research community are prone to lament that policymakers and practitioners don’t heed their expertise. But I’ve found that those in and around K–12 schools are hungry for practical insight into what’s actually happening and what to do about it. In other words, there’s a hearty appetite for wisdom, descriptive data, and applied knowledge.
The problem? That’s not the path to success in education research today. The academy tends to reward esoteric econometrics and critical-theory jeremiads.
Bingo. Esoteric econometrics get grants.
Simple theoretical questions—like “which method produces greater student understanding of decomposing geometric shapes?”—have limited utility. They’re not sexy, and don’t get funding. Maybe what we need to do is stop ranking the most influential researchers in the country, and teach educators how to run small, valid and reliable studies to address important questions in their own practice, and to think more about the theoretical frameworks underlying their work in the classroom.
Teachers ought to name what theories mobilize their work into practice, because more of the world needs to hear what goes into teaching. Treating teachers as automatons easily replaced by artificial intelligence belies the heart of the work. The best teachers I know may not have the words right now to explain why they do what they do, but they most certainly have more clarity about their actions and how they move about the classroom.
In case you were wondering why I became a PhD dropout, it had to do with my dissertation proposal. I had theories and questions around teachers who wanted to lead but didn’t want to leave the classroom. I was in possession of a large survey database from over 2000 self-identified teacher leaders (and permission to use the data).
None of the professors in Ed Policy thought this dissertation was a useful idea, however. The data was qualitative, and as one well-respected professor said– “Ya gotta have numbers!” There were no esoteric econometrics involved—only what teachers said about their efforts to lead–say, doing some action research to inform their own instruction–being shut down.
Teacher in a strange land 