I have to say this: the left side of the aisle has WAY better memes than the right side. From the bold, white-on-black “I Dissent” to the Martha Gelhorn quote—“If we mean to keep any control over our world, we must be interested in politics”—Dem-flavored bon mots have more wisdom and wit (“Come celebrate our last Fourth of July!”) than bible-verses-with-guns Tweets from the right.
But damn. This has been a rough few days for those of us who believe Martha Gelhorn was right.
Anne Lamott is right, too:It’s so horrible to have to deal with last night etc without Molly Ivins, but I know exactly what she would say: “Sweetpea, let’s have this conversation in a week or two.”
And for most of us, that’s about the best we can do. Right now.
Wait and see.
Choices will be made. We can decide to live with them, and act accordingly. Or not.
I was in the classroom for a long time. And many times—many, many times—we rode rough political waves, and I would think (after a third millage loss, or the Governor establishing our state-based employees as Right to Work, etc.) that All Was Lost.
I remember thinking, more than once, that we had reached rock bottom as a school district. Maybe it was when the Superintendent hired armed guards to hang around and threaten picketing teachers? And some of those freshly trained armed guards were our recent graduates?
I also remember being pregnant in the 1980s, and having a conversation with a similarly pregnant mother about our reservations at bringing children into the kind of world that would elect Ronald Reagan.
I’d call what I thought was disastrous then, compared to what’s happening right now, a failure of imagination.
That pregnant friend? We had healthy political discussions, once our girls were born, about how to resist the greed and trickle-down economy by teaching our children and students about diversity and equity, the things that made our country great. OUR schools were going to make a difference in kids’ lives. Give them skills—and hope.
But the trick is not losing hope. Thinking creatively, rather than defensively.
Otto von Bismarck said—Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable… We have certainly been shown what is attainable, this week—overturning centuries of precedent to save one man. But there are possibilities for the left, as well. We need leadership.
What can Joe Citizen do, right now?
Stay informed. Read selectively. Express yourself to friends, with receipts. Stay calm—take your vacation and unplug, and come back ready to pitch in, whatever you can spare, to ensure a safe election. Because this one really matters.
My best friend and I drove down to Washington D.C. in January of 2017, for the Women’s March, to be part of history and to fan the flames of hope. To think: We are not alone. Four years later, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and a few thousand friends broke into the Capitol. I am guessing they were there to feel connected as well.
Piper is a Missouri educator (among other things) whose commentary on teaching in a bright red state, and having been raised in a fundamentalist church, rings my chimes, again and again. She ran for a position in the MO State Legislature in 2022, and lost—but her blogged reflections on that experience amount to an answer to the question uppermost on my mind in 2024: How can people vote for a confirmed liar and obvious scam artist? Who are these people?
I told them the truth. I told them the US Capitol was under attack. They asked by whom? Again, I told them the truth. By Americans.
My students wanted me to turn on the news, but I decided against it, fearing they may see something they would never be able to unsee. I am of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster generation, and I was always overly-careful about what they saw in my classroom.
I don’t remember how much 7th hour accomplished that day, but I’d say it was minimal. I think we talked about what our country was experiencing…the division.
And next, of course, came the classic example of chickenshit leadership in schools: A warning from the Superintendent not to discuss the biggest news story of the year, a story that has had an impact on everyone in the United States for the past three and a half years.
Her story resonated with me. I’m considerably older than Piper, and I can remember many times when teachers in my school were directed by an administrator not to talk about a headline story—stories that were easily, overwhelmingly available and playing constantly via whatever media was being piped into our students’ homes and brains.
I remember discussing Anita Hill—I believed her—in the teachers’ lounge, and watching my male colleagues smirk about Clarence Thomas and a certain Coke can. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky—something happening on TV, day in and out–was similarly verboten.
A friend teaching in my district was written up for responding to a question from a student about the Jonestown Massacre, when 901 Americans died by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, influenced by cult leader Jim Jones. And the Flint Water Crisis, happening 20 miles up the road from my school, was “not in the curriculum” and not to be mentioned in class.
In November of 2000, when the outcome of the Presidential election hung in the balance for more than a month, the room across from mine was occupied by an 8th grade social studies teacher. Every morning, we would stand together in the hallway—bus duty—as students streamed into the building and went to their lockers, talking under our breath about What Was Going on in Florida, the Brooks Brothers riot, and so on.
She’d been directed by administrators not to discuss the election results. I don’t believe I was so warned, but that’s likely because someone thought teachers only talked about things that fell into the realm of their assigned disciplinary standards, and 8th graders took American history.
It was absurd. We were making history, but teachers had to wait until ‘the facts’ had been approved and inserted into textbooks. And you know what they say about who writes history.
There are, of course, times when students aren’t mature enough to process terrible realities and should be shielded. It would be difficult to share stories of what’s happening in Gaza with a class of preschoolers, for example, although children of the same age are tragically losing their brief lives there. There are political, religious and psychological reasons to keep kids innocent of global horrors and inappropriate sexualization.
But even small children are impacted by the Big Issues and Big Stories. If we can teach first-graders what to do when there’s a shooter loose in their school, we can talk—age-appropriately—about why terrible things happen. We should think about devices and platforms—but the only way for children to interpret news stories is via dialogue with an educated adult.
In April of 1994, when Kurt Cobain was discovered dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, word of his death was being shared during homeroom, and many of the girls in my class were crying. It would have been an easy call for a traditional band teacher to silently sniff about Nirvana, and steer around any discussion of suicide by starting class.
I wasn’t sure the girls could articulate why they were crying, but it seemed appropriate to say something kind about Cobain’s music, and note the pain he must have felt to contemplate taking his life. Then I stopped talking—and they talked. I think it was a shock to be 13 and have someone’s music speak deeply to you—then learn that the music’s creator didn’t want to live any more.
I don’t remember how long we talked about his death—10 minutes, maybe—before turning to our usual band class. But I do remember the absolute silence in that very large class, when I mentioned Cobain’s name, and how simply acknowledging students’ feelings was a better way to start class than pretending nothing happened.
Jess Piper resigned, after 16 years of teaching English, in February 2021. She was planning to run for office, and you can’t teach school and run for office in Missouri.
…that isn’t in the regular, designated curriculum.
So many things, right?
You’ve undoubtedly seen the memes: Why aren’t schools teaching personal finance, including credit cards and taxes? What about home and car repairs? Insurance? First aid? Time management? Study skills? Stress relief? How to find a job, feed yourself and do your laundry?
Frequently, the post will draw supportive comments, ranging from unwarranted criticisms of what schools actually DO attempt to teach, to nostalgic memories of the days when all the boys had to take woodshop in 9th grade. There was never a shortage of handcrafted birdhouses in those days, by golly.
A friend just posted a meme reminding us that 100 years ago, students were learning Latin and Greek in high school, and now, high school graduates are taking remedial English in college.
There are multiple responses to that one, beginning with an accurate explanation of just who went to high school in the 1920s—and what percentage of students go to college today.
The utility of studying Latin and Greek (or Logic and Rhetoric) in 2024—as opposed to, say, Spanish or robotics—is debatable, as well, but everyone understands the underlying purpose of such a meme: Schools today are failing. Tsk, tsk. Discuss.
If you’re a long-time educator, you learn to take these comments in stride. Just more evidence that everyone’s been to school, and thus believes they understand what schools and teachers should be doing. It’s an evergreen cliché that happens to be largely true.
But there are a couple of points worth making:
The required curriculum is overstuffed already. Way overstuffed, in fact. Michigan—which has a tightly prescribed “merit curriculum” for HS students– just added a requirement that all students take a semester-long course in personal finance. This can take the place of a math course—or a fine arts course, or a world languages course. Every time a requirement is added via legislation, students who want to take four years of a foreign language, or play in the orchestra for four years, have to juggle their schedules and make unpleasant choices.
There simply isn’t enough time in the day to cover everything—and it’s maddening to have someone at the state Capitol directing your path by limiting your choices.There are lots of important things to know about adulting, and you only get so much time to go to school for free, in the U.S. Expecting schools to teach things that used to fall squarely into the purview of parent responsibilities, without providing additional time and resources, is unfair.
This is educators’ professional work. Let’s take Mrs. Jones, the 4th grade teacher who decided to incorporate an SEL program into the daily life of her class. She’s doing that for a reason, I can assure you. Either these techniques have worked in the past to create a happier classroom atmosphere, or this class is particularly conflict-prone. She’s trying to make it possible for students to learn the other (required) things, by focusing first on communication and techniques that calm students, helping them focus.
Do educators sometimes get students’ curricular and personal needs wrong? Sure. But they are the first line of defense, and best positioned to incorporate non-disciplinary work (like time management, stress relief and how to properly thank someone) into the classroom. And all of them appreciate these things being reinforced at home.
You can’t get away from teaching things that fall into the wider scope of how to be a successful adult and citizen, as a schoolteacher. You’re always, always modeling, correcting, observing and suggesting behaviors, whether your students need help getting into their snowsuits or help in getting over a failed romance. Even if you’re teaching AP Calc, there will be inadvertent lessons in addressing challenges, persistence and the value of studying something so abstract and elegant.
There is a prevailing belief, especially in the past couple of decades, that the only way Americans can compete in the global economy, maintaining our preeminent position, is to “raise the bar.” This usually translates to harder coursework, required earlier in a student’s academic career, monitored by increased testing. More top-down control. More competition.
When you drill down far enough, what’s missing is a clear objective for public education. Are we, indeed, trying to help every child reach their full potential (in which case, bring on the handcrafted birdhouses and mindfulness)—or are we trying to strengthen the economy by creating skilled and compliant workers?
So—I’m a retired teacher, with more than three and a half decades of classroom practice under my belt. Supposedly, I should be sitting at home, enjoying sunsets and repeating how glad I am that I’m no longer in the classroom.
I actually know a few retired teachers like that—glad to be golfing, disinterested in educational politics—but not many. For those of us who invested our lives in public education, what’s happening in public schools right now is an insult to the low-paid, little-understood work we did to build good citizens in divergent communities; it’s a betrayal of our commitment to our students.
Every aspect of becoming truly educated depends on our students’ ability to comprehend and evaluate information. To think that students aren’t negatively impacted by the unfiltered digital stew surrounding them is worse than naïve. We have not served our students well, offering up their test data (legally mandated, of course) to corporations, or letting them zone out digitally, while in school with their fellow humans.
I remember, back in the 1990s, my colleagues’ collective consternation over Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, when they were the hot ticket with our middle schoolers. Does spending six hours a day in front of a screen, shooting things or wrecking cars, have an impact on students’ curiosity or kindness or any other pro-social habits? Guess we were going to find out.
The NYTimes recently ran a feature article on a family whose 13-year old daughter was spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.
The benefits of learning to live without dependence on social media seemed pretty obvious to me. Communication with her family would happen the old-fashioned way: letters, via snail mail. A school year like that—this was a boarding school, in the Australian wild, hundreds of miles from home—could shape a personality, even a lifetime. A year at this school also costs $55,000.
We used to argue, back in the day, about the advisability of using white boards, if the ability to ‘publish’ student work online would make them more motivated, and whether calculators would render students unable to, well, calculate. One-to-one devices were going to be the saving grace.
But it turns out that corporations were way ahead of us—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, X, Tik-Tok—and pretty much in control of what our students see and potentially think. For better and for (much) worse, schools are now fighting for their share of the attention economy.
Social media outsources the monitoring and managing of this colossal data load to poorly paid workers in Africa and Asia. Ever had your innocent Facebook post taken down as “inappropriate?” That’s why. Mis-information and dis-information are now central to public life.
No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.
Sounds good, no? I’m less sanguine than the CEO of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt Jr.. about the prospect of a citizen-led withdrawal from the addictive hold social media has on American adults, and especially on American kids. McCourt says we need great stories to turn this around, and reclaim the power of the internet—and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that teachers and schools have been trying to tell great, non-digital stories about our history and values for decades, and it’s an uphill battle.
You may have noticed that this semi-elderly retired teacher has so far avoided the topic of AI. I’m only too familiar with being pitched on the magical powers of a developing technological marvel to make things “easier” for schools, teachers, learning, etc. etc. Peter Greene has posted a number of great blogs on the folly of believing AI is what we educators have been waiting for.
What gets marketed as “artificial intelligence” is plagiarism: scraped off bits of real people’s ideas, devoid of context or credit.
Google’s AI Overview is worse, though. It seems set on killing you.
“How many rocks should I eat each day?” people asked Google. AI Overview responded that people should eat at least one small rock per day because they contain healthy vitamins and nutrients. The source was an Onion article, but AI cannot discern satire.
I’ve always been of the opinion that teachers get so few routine perks in their professional lives they deserve every random treat or award that meanders their way–from sticky little misspelled mash notes to free use of a leased SUV.
After all, there aren’t many workplaces where professionals end up providing their own materials, cleaning services and professional development. There aren’t many college-educated specialists who gladly share their expertise for free–or attend a weekend conference on their own dime, then arrive at work on Monday morning, without a thought for “comp time.” Because if they didn’t show up, someone would have to pay. And it shouldn’t be the teacher next door, or their students.
For these reasons, and a hundred more, nobody begrudges teachers the tokens of appreciation that come their way this week, from the handmade construction-paper cards to the potluck lunch from the PTA. I love it when teachers invite their former students to check in on Facebook–or when they post their stats (years of experience, states/countries/schools, degrees, subjects and so on). It’s good to see colleagues reclaim their honor or share a few points of pride.
But it’s time we asked ourselves just who gets ‘appreciated’ once a year–and whose work is considered vital, essential, and fully professional year-round, with no need for annual symbolic gestures. There’s something about Teacher Appreciation Week that smacks of a pat on the head for being willing to go the distance without adequate compensation or support. We’re supposed to persist and excel ‘for the kids’–a phrase that teachers rightfully perceive as specious and manipulative.
It doesn’t help that National Charter Schools Week is scheduled right after Teacher Appreciation Week (not an accident, folks). The Center for Education Reform, an organization that promotes charter schools, posted the following about Teacher Appreciation week:
‘Rather than evolve and adapt to changes in the 180-year-old factory model system of education, rather than create a new path for teachers that supports their growth over mandating uniformity and lock step acceptance of rules, [teacher associations] have dug in their heels and decided character assassination and anti-charter propaganda is best.’
So much for boosting the spirits and self-respect of teachers during their special week, eh?
Actually, I don’t know a single teacher who isn’t interested in growth–or doing a little rule-breaking, evolving and adapting. In fact, the current walk-outs, anti-voucher campaigns and eloquent education blogs are evidence that teachers are no longer satisfied with flowery sentiments or coffee mugs.
Teachers are telling their communities and state leaders that they’re sick of being underpaid do-gooders and want not only adequate salaries but control over their professional work. They want the resources necessary to succeed—but also a measure of autonomy, acknowledgment of their acquired expertise.
Perhaps teachers are tired of waiting for policymakers to speak to the fact that their working conditions and public respect–measured by classroom authority, as well as wages and benefits–are diminishing every year. Maybe teachers are ready to demand what they need and deserve, rather than hang around hoping to be ‘appreciated’ every May.
Here’s a few crucial but often forgotten facts: In number, teachers are the largest profession in the United States. And collectively, they have the power to demand and win changes to funding and salaries. It’s a stark reminder in our post-Pandemic revival of labor influence.
Policymakers have long relied on teachers’ hearts growing three sizes through the magic of watching children light up with the joy of learning, yada yada. But as the Grinch himself might say–magic doesn’t pay the rent.
Cleaning out some files, I came across these questions (in a file creatively labeled Ten Questions). I have no clue where/when they originated. It was either answer them or plunk myself in front of, you know, the Trial, on TV.
Grande Soy Green Tea Frappuccino with Extra Whip or House Blend Black?
(Sing to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy”):
Coffee, coffee, coffee. Praise the strength of coffee.Early in the morn we rise, with thoughts of only thee.
If you were going to write a book, what would its title be?
“The Genuinely Professional Teacher: Way Overdue”
Rate graphic novels on a scale of 1-10, with 1 representing “useless” and 10 representing “simply amazing.”
Two or three. Just not worth the effort to scale down the words in favor of stylized art. I realize this is not a popular opinion and the fault may lie with me, as geriatric reader.
What member of your digital network has had the greatest impact on your professional growth?
There are an awful lot of people I see only online who have made me a better thinker, writer and activist, and their impact has waxed and waned (and sometimes waxed again) over time. Blogging for Ed Week where I had a good editor helped tighten and tone down my writing, and helped me understand the difference between well-supported opinion and simply venting. When it comes to education blogs, Jan Ressenger’s writing is what I aspire to, if I had to name someone.
How do you feel about the holidays?
Which holidays? Oh—those holidays. It’s the most wonderful time of the year? What is the best gift that you’ve ever gotten?
A piccolo. Completely unexpected. And an item I would prefer to pick out myself. But–in one of those rare, grace-filled moments–I got the perfectly chosen present that I didn’t even know I wanted.
If you had an extra $100 to give away to charity, who would you give it to?
Choosing to follow my principles rather than a paycheck, on a couple of memorable occasions.
What was the worst trouble that you ever got into as a child?
My parents bought me a two-wheeler for my 6th birthday, and I was afraid to ride it without training wheels. My mother told me if I didn’t work up the courage to ride it, they’d take it away. So I got up on the bike, went forward about 25 feet, then had to turn, to stay on the sidewalk. The bike wobbled, tipped, and I fell, hitting my head on a large rock placed at the corner of the sidewalk and driveway, giving myself a concussion. In my first grade school photo, you can see the bruising—and the shiner.
What was the last blog entry that you left a comment on? What motivated you to leave a comment on that entry?
Peter Greene’s Curmudgucation–he’s written 5000 blogs, a ridiculous number, especially considering he wrote most of them while teaching full time (and parenting twins). And his blogs have only gotten sharper (and funnier). He’s an excellent role model for teachers who want to write about what happens every day in their classroom—and why public education is worth saving. Peter also serves as Curator in Chief for Ed-Blog World, at the Network for Public Education. If you want to read a selection of great education writers, check out NPE’s Blog Post of the Day.
Feel free to share your own answers—all ten or selected queries.
Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and control the finances. Reinforcing patriarchal norms and glorifying the satisfying and ‘natural’ role of housewife.
If you’re hearing a touch of cynicism there, well—I lived through a time when the tradwife, even if she was working, could not get a credit card or substantial business loan. While I certainly defend any woman’s right to stay home and support her children and spouse in places other than an outside workplace, the whole “tradwife” schtick (especially combined with the rollback of Roe) makes me itchy.
It also strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.
Nearly all of the folks who taught me were tradteachers, using trad methods, and when I entered the classroom, many of my teaching colleagues were 100% traditional-minded as well: Straight rows, direct instruction, textbook-based, daily homework, and off to the principal should you disobey orders. And some of those folks were effective teachers.
But lots of the opinion writing I see from Moms4Liberty, NYT columnists, conservative politicians and ed-bloggers focuses on how different education looks and feels from the classrooms they remember, decades ago—classrooms that may have been racially and economically monolithic, and headed by a series of teachers who did things in the same way.
Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.
Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.
Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself. She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. Merriex developed materials and approaches of herown, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.
For many, perhaps most, teachers, their first years in the classroom might look very much like the way those newbies themselves were taught. It was certainly that way for me, wanting to be the World’s Greatest Band Director and following the exact procedures and ideas I had experienced in bands and at music camp in high school. For many years, I too was a competent-but-not-exceptional teacher, like Ms. Merriex.
I also broke out of the traditional mold, and while not all of the things I tried were big successes, I was able to redefine what I wanted students to take away, for the rest of their lives, from being in my classroom. I accomplished many of those goals. I read social media for music teachers now, and I see great changes in thinking about the Big Ideas—from competition to creativity—in music ed.
Traditional teaching—and like tradwives,the definitions are murky—is not always or even often the best bet. Especially if that teacher’s goal is to move every student under her watch forward.
Stanford Professor Jo Boaler is something of an iconoclast in non-traditional math education, and recently–no surprise–there’s been yet another dustup over Boaler’s ideas.
She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking.
Right there in the first sentence, there are three uber-traditional practices—tracking, timed tests, and doing a series of problems to iron in an algorithm, to get the right answers rather than seeking to understand the concepts underlying the calculation. And who’s out to get Boaler? Well, men who have been the beneficiaries of understanding and excelling at traditional mathematics.
It’s an enormously complex endeavor, teaching. Sticking to the habitual, and ignoring students who check out, only works for awhile. BUT—listen to legislators and parents talk about schooling, and a lot of what you’re hearing is somewhere between nostalgia and flat-out misinformation. The book-banning, faux CRT, Tik-tok blaming, skeptical-of-teachers crowd hasn’t got a clue about what it’s like to teach kids in 2024, beginning with some clarity about the purpose of public education.
None of us is safe so long as there are folks living in states that are unsafe. They will roll over us first, and you next. The billionaires are using my state AG and other regressive state AGs to file suit to dismantle public schools. They sue to ban abortion and the medicine for self-managed abortions. They sue to stop college loan forgiveness. They sue to overturn civil rights and anti-discrimination policies.
As Piper says—hey, we can’t all move, or teach in a private school where we can craft our own processes, research and convictions. But returning to traditional methods isn’t the policy answer. You have to move forward. It’s the way of the world.
You’re going to say it as many times as it takes to sink in, and even then, compliance and understanding are iffy.
Here’s my essential truth: It’s been close to 1500 days since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. And we still haven’t perceived just how transformative it was, dealing with a global threat while trying to keep the things we value most safe. Those things being our health and well-being, our children and families, our communities and livelihoods.
That simple fact, alone—the United States, the place where we brag about having the “best” health care on the planet, was unable to suppress transmission. Once a vaccine was available—lightning fast!—getting folks to embrace medical science and stay on top of protection that might save their lives has been thoroughly politicized and divisive. Those things, on their own, were enough to make one realize that maybe our all-American political thinking was out of whack.
So I repeat: The pandemic has really done a number on us. On our economy. On our family gatherings. On what we expect from our employees, as well as our employers. On health care. On the way we feel about government. The things we value most–including our schools.
Call it The Great Re-ordering of Priorities.
It’s become a habit of mine, when reading stories about education: running the topic or issue through the filter of how they may have been impacted by the pandemic. Here’s one: absenteeism.
What’s interesting is that schools with dismal, not-getting-better attendance rates aren’t always the ones you’d expect—absenteeism seems to be impacted by local conditions and initiatives, kids and parents re-ordering their priorities. Not up for school today? Go ahead—take a mental health day. Or five.
Schools struggling with attendance after a world-shaking event? Go figure. It’s going to take some time to fix that, and misinformation about how “unions” “closed” schools, abandoning kids to Zoom, doesn’t help. From an article on school absences, in the NY Times:
School leaders, counselors, researchers and parents…offered many reasons for the absences: illness, mental health, transportation problems. But underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic.
Re-ordering the priorities. And not in a good way.
In her excellent blog, Jess Pipertalks about the decline in civility at local school board meetings, among other things, triggered by a pandemic:
Recently, I saw this bad behavior up close and personal when I attended a BOE meeting at a school district outside of St Louis. Though I had an awful interaction with a parent or two in my tenure, I hadn’t witnessed the decline in civility and the outright disrespect shown in public. The lack of couth wasn’t just reserved for teachers, but was also aimed at administrators, board members, audience members, and community members.
One of the first to speak was a woman who brought her daughter to stand next to her while mom called the Superintendent names and defamed teachers. I was upset that the young girl had to stand there while her mother went over her time, refused to stop speaking when told her time was up, and still spoke, even raising her voice, when her microphone was eventually muted. She just kept going.
How did this young girl learn to treat her teachers? She learned disrespect and inappropriate behavior will be rewarded with a slew of applause.
It was a nice moment for him, thinking about the word trust—how long it takes to re-build simple neighborly trust, especially when it’s been shattered by transformative events. Expecting our public institutions to remain unchanged or “bounce back” is happy talk. We’re in the midst of some pretty significant shifts.
The Spanish Flu greatly affected the world economy, wiping out large numbers of healthy 18- to 40-year-olds. In Britain, during the Summer of 1918, in a single day 80 out of the 400 workers of a spinning factory perished. In many countries which had seen their male population decimated by the war, the pandemic left even fewer young men to run the farms and factories.
The resulting labor shortage enabled workers to demand better living and working conditions, public health care, as well as better wages. These became major demands of workers not only in Europe and the United States but in many other countries around the world.
Once again: We are underestimating the impact on the nation, and especially our children. of living through a global catastrophe Let’s put our focus on the right priorities. In spite of all the challenges to public education, it’s still the best bang for your tax buck, in perpetuity. Good schools make for good communities.
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.
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.
Teacher in a strange land 