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Does it Matter What Other Nations Think of Us? Why?

Here’s something I might ask middle school and high school students:

What do we, as Americans, think about other countries? Suppose I asked you, right now, what you think about, say, Germany? Or Nigeria? Or Thailand? Are there better countries and not-good countries? How do we judge? Where do we get our information?

And further—what do other countries think of us? Why?

On the question of what people in other countries think of Americans:

Two weeks ago, we were in Lisbon. On our last night, we went to the top floor of our hotel to see the city spread out below us, red tile roofs and undulating hills. Only one of the six elevators in the hotel went all the way up to the Skydeck, so we had to wait several minutes for the elevator to come to take us back down. One other person — an attractive 50-ish woman— was also waiting.

Hearing us talk, she turned to us and said ‘Where ya from?’

Assuming from her accent that she was also American, we said ‘Michigan. And you?’

I’m Canadian, she said. And I want to know—do you approve of your president? Because he’s ruined my life.

She said her husband was in the oil and gas industry and tariffs had caused their business to wobble, then fail. They built a new house (for more than two million dollars) and could no longer afford the payments. She was about to lose her new dream home. She was angry, and got angrier as she talked— she would never buy an American product again, never trust an American again, etc.

Finally, she said: Do Americans have ANY idea how much the world hates him— and Americans for voting for him TWICE? I mean, really. It begs belief. We told her we were working hard on flipping Congress in the midterms, and she cut us off, sharply. I don’t care about your midterms, she said. He has to go now. The world can’t afford two more years of his bullshit.

Our elevator arrived, and she refused to get in with us. We kept apologizing. She stood there with her arms folded across her chest and her mouth pinched, shaking her head.

I have thought often about getting into this kind of conversation while traveling, and what I would say, and it all seemed like weak sauce in the moment. Her take was: you’re hurting the rest of the world by accepting him. And it’s YOUR fault for not stopping him. Immediately. Waiting two years for an election that may or may not happen is just an excuse.

We were both rattled by it. We had just come from a lovely dinner, where we ate Portuguese food and drank their awesome wine, and were happy not to turn on the TV or doomscroll the evening away. We had the means to take a vacation from the daily chaos of life during the Trump administration. We have not been threatened by ICE or lost our Medicare.

Canada is—or was—Michigan’s largest trading partner. Most Michiganders don’t perceive Canada as a ‘foreign’ country. I have friends who teach in Detroit but live in Windsor. Last year, there were joint protests with people waving signs at each other, across the Detroit River.

Most of the folks we met in Portugal and Spain were polite and friendly and willing to discuss anything. On one English-speaking tour, an American asked our guide about Portuguese politics.

He gave us a thumbnail sketch, beginning with Prime Minister/Dictator Salazar (1932-1968) and the three largest parties jockeying for power currently: the fascists, the socialists, the democratic socialists. He expressed worry that fascism was growing across Europe and relief that the democratic socialists had just returned to power in Portugal. His use of the phrase ‘democratic socialists’ caused some Americans in our group to gasp, however.

All of this made me wonder: If a European visitor to the United States asked a guide about our politics, what would he say? Where do we learn about the goals and aims of political parties? We talk about civic engagement—but what about accurate information?

When the current administration is hawking public school educators to ensure they don’t discuss politics—and 59% of Americans get their political information from social media—how are Americans supposed to understand how the world sees them?

Just asking.

Rossio Square, Lisbon. My photo.

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Information vs. Knowledge vs. Application

Let me cut to the chase: You should read Peter Greene’s piece, Teachers Should Know Stuff, if you’re involved in education in any way. Actually, you should subscribe and read all his work, because there is no more articulate observer-explainer of what actually happens in classrooms in American public schools. Plus, he’s funny, in a not-trying-too-hard way.

And teaching school is funny, in addition to being personally rewarding, critical to the health of democracy, and much harder and more intellectually complex than most people think. It’s an intrinsically human job, one that requires adaptability and a sense of humor.

Greene’s piece walks us through any number of Big Questions around modern pedagogy, including teacher preparation (good v. bad), the crushing impact of standardized testing on actual learning, and the vital importance of context expertise. He tosses in a few bits about the fallacy of believing AI is having a positive impact on learning, and the test-driven focus on Skills That Can be Measured vs. Concepts That Students Understand and can apply to their worldview and actual lives.

And he’s right. Teachers have to have deep content knowledge.

I can’t tell you how often, in my own 32 years of classroom practice, I was the Sage on the Stage, rather than the Guide on the Side. Happily, and correctly, so.

I was, after all, the best musician in the room, the person who knew how to shape a musical phrase, how to execute a dotted eighth-sixteenth pattern in various musical styles, and how to illustrate fingering options for an in-tune high F# on the flute. Plus buckets full of other musical and technical knowledge that my students needed to make a piece of music come alive, the whole point of being in band class.

I knew stuff. Things that could be demonstrated. Things that a method book or even a video could never explain. I could lead a lively discussion on how ragtime led to swing led to cool jazz and how the rhythms driving the music my students listened to were born in other places and spread by (voluntary and involuntary) immigration.  

Every year that I taught, I knew more stuff. I remained curious about better ways to teach what I knew—both the technical skills as well as the impact of music on American culture and human relationships.

I also—and this is important—spent time thinking about what my students were taking away from my class (besides the actual location of 5th position on the trombone), into adulthood. I’ve met plenty of younger teachers whose own K-12 experiences and college training have left them believing that we can actually measure useful learning in real time, via computer-delivered tests, and that’s our job.

Not so. We can measure short-term retention of skills and bits of information. But the thing about knowledge is that it is applicable and adaptable. It’s not embedded knowledge unless it’s useful to you in some way, over time. It’s just information, to remember or regurgitate, or not.

In addition to teaching band, choir and general music, I also spent two years teaching 7th grade math, one of the places where teachers were encouraged to be guides on the side, facilitating problem-solving using the algorithmic skills students had been taught to replicate.

I can still hear my students’ dismayed voices as they turned the page and saw (dunh dunh duh)… story problems! We were using a constructivist math curriculum, and I also heard from parents on the regular about how they couldn’t help their kids with word-based problems. (Usually because they “weren’t good at math.”)

But word problems ask students to apply the skills we all (sort of) learned. They are about the usefulness of math. Teaching students how to analyze what a word problem is asking them to do is way more difficult than having them replicate an algorithm.

And putting them in small groups to struggle with that process is not likely to yield knowledge, no matter how many facilitating questions you ask. It’s a time-intensive process, nudging them along. Good math teachers (and I wasn’t particularly good) need to know how to turn information plus skills into useful knowledge.

Worth noting: Repeated testing, scripted curricula and pacing charts–the central tools of standardization– often get in the way of developing useful knowledge, the stuff that 7th graders will still be using when they’re in their 40s.

I used to have a principal who, at every staff meeting and public event, would identify himself as the “lead learner” in our school. It was a private joke among the faculty that he found the phrase in some textbook for school administrators and kept repeating it because it seemed cool. In fact, he had a limited vision for student learning, centered around data, rather than enthusiasm, imagination or even the utility of what we were teaching.

 Peter Greene is right: Teachers need to know stuff, especially in an era where information is suspect, misleading and paywalled. When teachers are not seen as experts—or don’t see themselves as experts—we’re in trouble.

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Defining the Future We Want

I was recently contacted by a group of civic-minded folks working on a project through one of those nonprofits you’d be keen to believe can actually change the world. Fund MI Future is a joint effort of nonpartisan community organizations, unions of working people, and policy experts striving to create shared prosperity for all Michiganders by fully and fairly funding our public services like schools, roads, access to care, and clean water.

What’s not to love, right?

This particular initiative is called “It Takes a Millage–Getting local campaigns to pass” and the bright and articulate voices in our Zoom meeting wanted to know how to engender support for schools and other public essentials, like libraries and parks. How could we build campaigns that gave citizens a voice in improving their own communities?

I wish I had a scrapbook of victories to share, stories where clusters of vocal citizens used the power of organizing, sharing information, then voting to better fund schools. But no.

In my long career as a public school teacher, I’ve been a part of at least two dozen campaigns to improve schools via taxation—millages to build much-needed new buildings or playgrounds, millages to support programming that the community wants or already loves. I’ve done school open houses, phone banking, and door knocking with other teachers to spread the word about what that extra $138/year would yield for kids in our community. Not to mention meeting with other districts who had successfully run school millage elections to figure out what their secret sauce was.

Spoiler alert: there is no sure-fire way to build support for something that benefits the community in general, including necessities like emergency services and fire-fighting. School districts that routinely pass millages don’t have a winning formula that they roll out at each election. What they do have is consistently good leadership and a sense of community: It’s our school. We like it here. Voting yes is good for kids and for long-term property values.

People’s willingness to spend a little more money on common benefits largely depends, I think, on how they’re feeling about their life circumstances and prospects at the moment. And in 2026, I’m not sensing a lot of confidence in current leadership or optimism about America’s future. And that hopelessness… trickles down. So to speak.

My new friends in the “It Takes a Millage” (smiling) campaign were not put off by my gloomy memories, however. They were looking for stories about times when The People decided to create their own future, piece by electoral piece. And those stories are out there—communities like mine, for example, that tax themselves to fund installation and pickup of bins for recycling. Zohran Mamdani is currently running a masterclass in providing community services and cohesion, in New York City. It can be done.

Again—it takes leadership. But also a vision of what we want—how we could improve our personal futures, as well as our neighbors’, in the places we live and work. If we want to use our collective power to make [Your Town Here] a better place, what does that look like, precisely?

Subhead from a recent piece by Jennifer Berkshire: The left has no vision for public schools – and that’s a big problem. (It’s an awesome piece.)

Berkshire is thinking about the lack of attention to public education in the current political discourse. The Right has “choice,” culture war memes, and the dismantling of public education via various means and narratives.

But who’s championing positive, future-focused change and equity in K-12 schools?

Which is why I found the idea of local initiatives, locally funded, so appealing.

I’ve had enough experience in education funding to know that, when it comes to schools, Americans are often welded to two ideas. Neither of them is particularly honorable:

  • It’s my money and I don’t want to share it with my community
  • I don’t want my children to go to school with “them” (whoever your own personal “them” is)

If we want a better future for our schools—and our parks, roads, libraries and public clinics—we need to build support for common goals. And we need to clearly define those goals for a better future.

What changes would you vote for, to improve your local schools?

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Drop Boxes and Other Election Observations

We have entered the Three-Ring Circus phase of the midterm elections.

There’s that Sheriff in California who confiscated 650,000 ballots in an (illegal) snit, after a special election gave Californians permission to change their maps to counteract Trump’s Big Ugly Gerrymandering Scheme. (As of this morning, the Sheriff has to give them back.)

There are the states who have blatantly gerrymandered districts, without citizens’ approval, and the plethora of unsigned/signed court decisions at all levels that have rendered the new districts OK/Not OK/Unconstitutional/Racist.

There is the whole mail-in ballot ball of confusion— plus the Supreme Court’s decision, yesterday, to let election officials use the crummy, error-ridden SAVE data base to decide who gets to vote:

‘The potential impact of the Supreme Court’s decision for the upcoming midterm elections is likely to be limited, as federal law bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their voter registration lists within 90 days of an election. The Nov. 3 general election is less than 40 days away.’

And there is whatever the hell is going on in Missouri, where voting has actually started.

Chaos. But that’s the point, no? And guess who is not paying attention to what federal law says, as you might expect the leader of the free world to do?

When I moved to northern Michigan in 2010, I took a photo of myself voting—in another midterm—on Election Day. (I went looking for that photo, but that was four phones ago, alas.) I was absolutely charmed by the idea of voting in our little whitewashed Township Hall, meeting my fellow citizens, thanking the workers who were diligently following all the rules that governed free and fair elections.

Or so I—naively—thought.

Maybe it’s because Baby Boomers were taught that America was the greatest nation, and our elections were the envy of the world—but my faith in elections, no matter which party is running them locally, has seriously eroded since that day in 2010.

Part of this is because more than half of Americans now get their political news and information from social media, and a lot of that is crapola. The only site I trust, for election information, is the Secretary of State’s. And that’s only in my state.

If you’re going to say that you’re suspicious about the validity of election results, you have to have real, concrete reasons (speaking of crapola on social media), not just passed-along accusations or rage-bait. So—here are mine:

In 2024, after election results were announced and printed in the paper, my Republican County Clerk discovered that more than 3100 votes had, somehow, not been tabulated. That may not sound like much, but this is a county with just under 22,000 registered voters.

In 2024, there were 17,840 voters, an 89% turnout (another rather amazing figure), so 3156 missing votes is about six percent of the results—a not-inconsequential segment. And the newly discovered votes flipped a half-dozen local seats from Democrats to Republicans, although we’ve been an increasingly Blue county for the past decade.

You know how whatever media you consume has been urging you to mail early (before October 20), or—better yet—drop your absentee ballot into a drop box, or personally bring it to the Township Clerk’s office?

You can’t do that here, in my jurisdiction.

My Township Clerk works out of her home and does not keep hours. If you want to drop a ballot off at her house, you have to call for an appointment. There’s a photo of her home, below, with its Sacred Heart of Jesus sign (which people in my largely Polish-Catholic community use to indicate their opposition to abortion, which is legally protected—again, by voters—in Michigan). There is an American flag on the porch, but this does not feel like a public space, one that welcomes all citizens.

In 2018, Michigan passed a major voting reorganization initiative, including mail-in ballots for everyone, days for early, in-person voting, and providing each voting jurisdiction with a free drop box. Although we have that whitewashed Township Hall, with a large, lighted parking lot, the Township Clerk opted not to install it. Instead, she put a mailbox on her enclosed front porch. That’s the drop box. There’s a photo of that, too.

Would you feel comfortable entering an enclosed front porch to drop your ballot (and, apparently, any other important documents) in the box below? By the way, dropping your ballot in another jurisdiction’s drop box invalidates it.

In case you’re wondering, I have been trained and worked as poll challenger and absentee voter tabulation observer, putting time and money where my mouth is. I vote in every election. I’m still grateful for people who work at the polls.

But I have been disabused of the notion that our elections procedures are better, that our people are fairly represented, and that everyone in America gets a say.  

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Educational Guilt

From a piece by Steven Mintz:

[Yom Kippur is] a very different conception of moral responsibility from the one modern liberal societies generally favor. We tend to think guilt should track individual action and intention. I am responsible for what I did, you for what you did.

Yom Kippur preserves an older idea — that human beings are also implicated in families, institutions, communities, and histories, and that moral responsibility may extend beyond the narrow boundary of personal culpability.

As a teacher—a middle school teacher, primarily—I am fascinated by the concept of moral responsibility in an educational community. Occasionally, I read (OK, usually in the comments of some “self-researched” social media post) that teachers should teach, you know, content and only content.

It’s our job to drop facts into brains, then test those brains to see how the facts are holding up. Not to consider values or, God forbid, moral responsibility. To stay in our facts-only lane.

Leaving aside the obvious truth (to teachers, anyway) that knowledge without a place to apply it has a short shelf life and not much utility, I would suggest that all classroom interaction and all learning are impacted by our collective sense of right and wrong.

Everything that happens in schools reflects the prevailing norms and beliefs of that classroom, that school and that community. From scientific research to understanding literature to world history, right down to the playground and bus behavior—it’s all value-based. Students learn in context. It’s never about a disconnected bunch of facts.

Which means that even unpleasant emotions—shame, guilt, fear, ambivalence, boredom, anger, loneliness—will be present in the classroom, and dealing with them is part of the process of both teaching and absorbing new knowledge and skills. You cannot run a guilt-free classroom; every now and then, bad behavior will pop up and will impact the rights of the (edu-word alert!) learning community. Feeling remorse will be an essential step in regaining equilibrium.

The party line pushback against DEI is that white kids should not be made to feel guilty because their great—times five or six—grandfathers kept slaves or slaughtered the tribal folks who lived on the land where their subdivision now sits. Because they are not (to quote Mintz) personally culpable.

I belong to a handful of local organizations which begin their meetings with a land acknowledgement. And yes—it’s easy to let a spoken paragraph or two feel rote or performative. But—like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Lord’s Prayer, which nobody seems to find problematic—it feels right to me to include this at every gathering, especially in a state that had functioning Indian Schools until the 1980s and contains a dozen reservations, with their own tribal governments.  

There are plenty of non-historical things to critically examine for opportunities to balance the moral scales, and the current zeitgeist—where school board members openly fret about “weaponizing empathy”– is, IMHO, moving us rapidly in the wrong direction. And this unwillingness to take moral responsibility for the community will impact everyday life in the classroom.

Here’s an example: Vaccination rates are dropping precipitously here (and elsewhere in the U.S.). Sifting through the data, it’s clear that private schools and charter schools lag far behind public schools, where basic immunizations used to be mandated upon entering kindergarten. Vaccination protects your child—but also the unfortunate child who is medically unable to tolerate a vaccine.

Do people understand this? Is vaccinating your child who will (probably) survive measles just too much empathy? We’re certainly not getting any moral responsibility from our nominal political leadership.

I have many friends who are also retired teachers. And speaking of guilt, a frequent topic of conversation is whether we were too circumspect around what were considered “controversial” topics. Most teachers I know were careful—very careful—about expressing political beliefs and taking sides on moral questions.

But maybe that was wrong. Maybe we should have been standing for justice, modeling moral responsibility, channeling MLK’s observation: He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

So—a belated Shana Tova. And consider the idea presented by Yom Kippur—we’re in this together.

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Labor Day. Happy Birthday to Me.

So—I just had a birthday. A big, round-number birthday.

All my life, my birthday has taken place in and around Labor Day weekend, and—fairly often—happened on the first day of school. For my entire elementary school career, my new school shoes, binder and pencil box were ‘birthday presents.’ (Sad trombone.) Kindergarten:

But I didn’t mind. The whole Labor Day weekend–in my experience–represents the new year, academically and seasonally, a fresh start. One year older, one year wiser, roll up your sleeves. A day to honor my personal antecedents, who were Dutch farmers and hands-on laborers. Country builders. People who truly appreciated the respite of a long weekend and family barbecue.

When you turn 75, your past divides neatly into thirds (and lets you plan, as Gloria Steinem did, to live to 100). Although neither of my parents (58, 73) celebrated their 75th birthday, my grandmother (also named Nancy) made it to 103, so a century does not seem out of reach.

I do not remember most of my birthdays. Who does? But I do—clearly—remember #25 and #50. Thinking about them is a good way to reflect on what I’ve accomplished and what I have left to do.

I turned 25 in Aspen, Colorado with my then-boyfriend, now husband. I had already been married at 19 and divorced, returned to school to finish the degree and started my first big-girl job as a middle school band director, although it took at least two dozen humiliating interviews followed by rejections. Mostly because who ever heard of a woman band director?

It was a fun birthday, camping at Maroon Bells in the Snowmass Wilderness area. On my birthday eve, we went bar-hopping in hippie-town Aspen. Things are a little blurry, but we had five days to drive across the country and get back in time for teacher report day, the Tuesday after Labor Day. It felt as if my life were finally falling into place. Adulthood. In Colorado:

The chunk from 25 to 50 was all about family and professional goals. We were married, had two children, and I learned what it meant to be fully engaged in both motherhood and putting equal energy into becoming an accomplished teacher. We bought a house and lived there for 10 years. Then we bought another house and lived there for 20 years.

I both earned (National Board Certification) and won (Michigan Teacher of the Year) some awards for teaching. Early on, I completed a master’s degree in education at Michigan State. We took some amazing vacations, seeing at least 20 National Parks. A month before I turned 50, we went to South Korea for two weeks and Maui for another week.

I turned 50 on September 2, 2001, just nine days before 9/11. My sister and brother, spouses and kids came for a Labor Day weekend picnic. My sister wrote a snarky poem about how old I was, and there was a paper crown.

But 9/11 was a turning point. I had been teaching for more than 27 years, same job, no formal advancement (teachers everywhere, I see you nodding your heads). I felt restless. I took a Teacher in Residence job with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for two years—then, because the grass isn’t always greener, went back to the same school district.

I was welcomed back with open arms by parents and my colleagues. But not administrators, who suddenly saw me as Too Big for my Band Director britches. I got politically involved. I helped plan the Save Our Schools rally. I got bounced from job to job in the school district; I was a person who could no longer be trusted to put her head down and cooperate.

This third quadrant of my life has been—creaky knees excepted—by far the best and most rewarding. I retired, and launched into a PhD program in education policy. I did the coursework, but stalled, ABD, when my advisor (a famous educator) blocked my proposed dissertation topic. Instead of diligently working through this conundrum, I thought about how much more I knew, having been a target of education policy for 30+ years, than my doctoral cohort of 20-something Teach for America dropouts.

So I quit, something I hadn’t allowed myself to do for 60-odd years.

Since then, we have moved to paradise, aka the Little Finger of the Michigan mitten. I’ve had a half-dozen part-time jobs teaching, writing and directing church musicians. We have traveled every year, and spend February in Arizona. We attend lectures and go to concerts.

Best of all, I have been able to pursue the thing that got me into college, the first in my family to do so: music. I play in multiple community groups. I have time to practice. My new friends are mostly musicians.

And I muse about the maiden/mother/crone sequential archetypes in the lives of women—I am now the third, the wise woman who cares little about what others think, pursues important goals, advocates for long-term change. Also: hangs around the house, drinking wine and binge-reading.

In the past month, three of my role models have died—Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem. It was Steinem who got me out of that first, disastrous marriage, by starting MS. Magazine, a revelation to me, and my first magazine subscription, because it was not available at the drugstore.

The NYT called Steinem “the personification of the Women’s Movement”—and I think that’s right. I read all her books, checking them out of the library. Revolution from Within was my favorite, but each of them reminded me that my voice mattered. And also that I deserved to have a credit card and my own checkbook.

I was born on the same day as Mark (still delicious) Harmon. Chrissie Hynde turns 75 today. There are plenty of us still kickin’ and taking names. And—it has to be said—trying to get us out of the ugly morass we find ourselves in. I hope to be part of the movement that sees him and his sycophants gone, although I know it will take more than 25 years to cleanse and re-direct the nation.

Here’s Steinem, again:

Four days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, she wrote an entry called “Staying Hopeful: One of the uses of a long life is remembering when things were worse, and also remembering that when bad times do come, so does an outpouring of community and energy amongst those dedicated to justice.”

Amen. (Below, Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany.)

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Unsubstantiated Things People Say about Public Education

There are plenty of unsubstantiated clichés people have traditionally expressed—and probably believe– about education: Private schools are better than public schools. Sports keep kids in school who would otherwise drop out.  We should flunk 3rd graders who struggle with reading. Public education is broken, and choice is the only solution.

I could go on. And on. One of the problems with improving schools—and every school could serve students better—is the time-worn observation that because everyone’s been to school, they think they accurately recognize the problems in public education and know what would fix those problems.

Nine years ago, in the summer of 2017, I was part of a project that canvassed Democrats, Lean-Dems and Independents in the county where I live. We knocked doors and asked folks about the 2016 election—what their issues were, and what they’d like to see Democrats focus on in the 2018 midterms. We didn’t ask who they voted for, but plenty of them told us.

One very elderly gentleman we visited invited us into his spotless home and offered us coffee. When asked about issues, he mentioned that his grandson was a senior at the local public HS and had never taken shop class. He was genuinely outraged, and that was his primary education issue—the local HS didn’t even offer shop class anymore!

I explained that the regional CTE Center now offered two dozen courses in machining, auto repair, welding and building construction. All public school students in the county could access a half-day of up-to-date instruction in the hands-on trades, for free.

He was not impressed. When he went to school, they had shop class, in the building, and it was the best part of his day. He pointed to his kitchen cabinets, which he’d built by hand in the 1960s. He also told us he’d voted for Trump. Maybe Trump could get shop class back in schools, because the woman he ran against certainly would not care what boys learned in public high schools.

Imagine my surprise at seeing the candidate for Senate in Michigan, Mike Rogers, advance pretty much the same argument as a centerpiece of his education plan.

Rogers titles the piece “Education Crisis is the Civil Rights Issue of our Time,” a direct rip-off of Obama Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s catch phrase. He also references Martin Luther King a few times, as if that could erase his tight connection to the most racist president in modern history.

The rest of the piece reads like it was written in the1990s. There are a few menacing statistics from a literacy organization in Australia, re: how many kids will end up in prison because they can’t read, and the phony assertion that nobody teaches phonics anymore—’Getting kids reading again also means going back to the basics: teaching phonics to help students understand how letters and combinations of letters sound.’

Well. We’ve been trying to get kids “reading again” for decades, via a range of strategies including phonics, dude. (See: Dolly Parton.) Rogers also misinterprets the NAEP “proficiency” caption (which, to be fair, lots of education journalists don’t fully understand—it doesn’t mean grade level). And he’s completely onboard with flunking third graders until they learn to read, damn it.

And then Rogers comes down hard on the need for shop class:

 “Putting shop classes in every high school can make a real difference. Shop not only exposes students to skilled trades and high-paying jobs, but it also gives them a reason to apply math outside of the classroom. Measuring materials, calculating angles, and working with fractions help students apply math skills.“

Rogers mentions fractions (and the inability to read a measuring tape) multiple times in the column, which makes me wonder if he’s been in a public school math classroom since he graduated from Howell High School. My 7th grade math students—back in 2005—were using graphing calculators and doing single-variable equations. All of them, not just the advanced track.

And shop class, like a lot of other coursework, has been streamlined. Exit the birdhouse, and enter home construction, from rough carpentry to wiring and plumbing. Not to mention courses in cyber security and aviation, and so much more. I checked, and both the MI county where Rogers has just moved, in time to campaign, and the county where he’s lived for the past decade, in Cape Coral, Florida, have extensive career and technical education offerings in their public schools.

My friend and super education writer Jennifer Berkshire has been on a useful quest lately, in her writings— Education is a winning issue for Democrats: ‘Democrats once preached college-for-all, and were too soft on school privatization. They need to reverse course on both these positions—and make an unapologetic case for education as a public good that benefits all kids.’

Bingo. Especially if the folks running against Democrats can’t offer anything more exciting than retaining third graders, emphasizing fractions and retrofitting schools so they can offer woodworking again.

A recent survey from the Michigan Future, Inc. concluded that what communities and parents now want as takeaways from our public schools are critical thinking skills, facility in communication, and the habit of life-long learning.

We’re not going to get those with Mr. Rogers’ outdated and unsubstantiated ideas.

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Band Kids. They’re the Best.

I can’t add anything to the outpouring of love and respect for Dolly Parton. She was phenomenal, in dozens of ways. As a musician, I appreciate her melodic genius and as a writer, I admire her gift for lyrical story-telling and poignancy. But what I’ve loved most, this week, is that black and white of photo of Dolly Parton, class of 1964, in her Sevier HS band uniform.

It reminds me that so very many of the admirable people in our world developed their gifts and talents in a public school classroom. Dolly was the first in her family to graduate from high school; most of her 10 siblings who made it to adulthood dropped out, to work or to marry.

And she was in the band. She also supported underfunded school band programs across the South, for decades. We all know about Dolly’s Imagination Library program (you can donate here) and the hundreds of other ways she gave money and recognition to people who truly needed a boost.

But when we think about the roots of a spectacular career in the arts—they all started somewhere, and Dolly’s did not spring from early identification of extraordinary talent, private lessons or expensive summer camps. They started at home, and were burnished at her garden-variety TN public school.

My personal children played in the band (percussion and trombone)—and both of them expressed impatience with my barely suppressed opinion that band kids were a breed apart. Several of their good-kid friends weren’t in the band—and they could both point, accurately, to some band kids who were not, in school vernacular, good citizens.

However. I built my professional career, and my life before and after that career, on what I learned as a school-aged musician—in band, and choir and youth symphony. School music programs literally sent me to college, the first in my family.

They gave me the skills to offer my services on Saturdays at a community center, as a teenager, giving private flute lessons and earning pocket money. My music teachers—in an ordinary blue-collar public school district—steered me toward scholarships at several levels, membership in the local professional wind ensemble, and opportunities to perform in public (which is one of the big benefits of playing in a school band, BTW—dealing with performance nerves and understanding the necessity of rehearsal).

When Clinton was elected, I hung a poster of him, playing the tenor saxophone, on the band room wall. The point was not political—it was that band kids grew up to do amazing things, from comedy (Tina Fey, flute) to professional sports (Walter Payton, percussion) to walking on the moon (Neil Armstrong, euphonium).

Band kids sometimes face derision from their peers, especially in schools where instrumental music is low on the coolness totem pole. It takes some maturity to get past the name-calling, and that maturity develops on a continuum, assisted by parents and other adults in a student’s life.

Doing things for pleasure, building a community of friends, developing your own opinions—these are adulting skills. The band room can become a home for kids, the place at school where you can hang for hours (and dump your belongings and snack wrappers everywhere, driving your band teacher crazy). Simultaneously, these kids are being challenged to learn complex musical literature and skills, express powerful emotions, entertain their peers and work as a team, with every member’s contribution being important.

And it’s not easy! A couple of years ago, I was contacted by one of my former school administrators. As a retiree, he had decided to learn to play the guitar. He bought a guitar and started taking lessons. And it was frustratingly difficult.

He said that he always assumed learning to play a musical instrument was easy. After all, sixth graders in his building started band in September (in classes of 60 students) and put on a concert in December. How hard could it be?

As satisfying as that was to hear, what matters even more is the number of middle school band kids who push through the difficulty and experience the reward of performing together. That’s the real lesson.

Just ask Dolly.

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We Love Billionaires!

As a middle school teacher, I spent a fair amount of time talking with kids—mostly 8th graders, going into high school—about what you might call their life plans. Were they thinking about college? Or the workforce? What should they focus on, as they reached the last phase of their free public schooling?

Most of the kids I taught were going to college—their (white, suburban) parents were planning on it. But very few kids in the 8th grade are settled on a career—and if they are, it often turns out to be the Wrong Thing.

More and more before I retired, my students (mostly boys) talked about wanting to be a billionaire. Didn’t seem to matter much how they got the money—professional sports or inventing a killer app, whatever. What was important was having a lot of money. To spend on cool things.

I have to believe that this desire to be rich has not abated among adolescents, given their current role models in Congress and the White House. It’s no secret that Americans admire the rich and famous, assuming they deserve their power. A look at the accrued wealth of US Senators will confirm: money gets people into office.

One would assume that in a time of rapidly rising prices, informed citizens—yup, the kids I had a hand in teaching—would understand that wealth inequality is driving many of our most egregious economic problems.

They’re grown up now. They understand that there are more important values than being filthy rich, right? Do they know that hoarding enormous wealth is not something to be admired?

Recently, a billboard went up on a well-traveled county intersection, here in NW Michigan. People Over Billionaires, it said. Vote Blue.

And it started a furious local conversation around just what it meant–always the sign of an effective message. There were letters to the editor claiming that billionaires paid more than their share of taxes (!) and “gave back” to the community.  (Spoiler: not true.)

Billionaires were our most productive citizens, the letters said–and we needed to respect them! There were also letters that pointed out, in much calmer and more elegant language than I’m using, that this thinking was pure bullshit.

I was kind of stunned by this—who thinks billionaires are rooting for the little people to enjoy better, publicly supported lives? Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Larry Ellison? The Waltons? One could go on and on. The word oligarchy might be used.

Last week, there was a widely shared cartoon floating around social media: An elderly gentleman is pushing a grocery cart. He says: ‘Tell me I’m wrong, but a country isn’t doing well if seniors can’t afford groceries, after working their whole lives.’

Seemed like a straightforward critique of steady inflation, to me, without getting into the weeds about tariffs or the national debt. I get groceries, like most Americans, and I know that prices have gone up significantly, and folks of both political persuasions on fixed incomes are hurting, on several fronts. But the comments were weird.

Leaving aside the usual flotilla of “you dumocrat libtards” remarks and obvious bot observations, there were dozens of people who claimed that they hadn’t found prices going up at all. Lots of accusations about greedy seniors wanting “free stuff” and spending younger generations’ money. Imagine having 45 years to save for retirement, then not doing so. Lazy!

Well, gee. Imagine going after the folks who built the middle-class economy, rather than the ones who destroyed it.

There’s been occasional talk, especially from those who study our history, about current parallels with the Gilded Age, c. 1870–1913. Trump frequently idealizes the late 19th century as America’s economic high point, especially embracing control of the economy with tariffs. Nobody in the Trump administration talks about soaring wealth inequality, dangerous corporate influence, or rampant corruption.

What gave people the idea that a plutocracy was a viable, even desirable, way to run the United States?

A couple days ago, Heather Cox Richardson had an excellent daily letter about the manifestations of wealth inequality—lack of accessible health care, loosening of regulations to benefit the very rich, etc. As she often does, she shared an historical publication that illuminates issues we are facing today: In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published ‘What Social Classes Owe to Each Other,’ concluding that the answer was: nothing.

“Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.

At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”

Apparent cruelty is what I found reading Project 2025, which has lots of–updated–language like Sumner’s.

But in the end, what will save us as a functional democracy is… people over billionaires. Right?

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Some Thoughts about National Board Certification

I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan.

The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, that there could ever be a valid, reliable way to evaluate quality—or inadequate—teaching. I thought it was like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it.

Remember—this was before NCLB, and the advent of mandated testing for all public school children, beginning in the third grade. Some states (mine, for example) had been using statewide assessments for years, but nobody was talking about identifying or comparing teacher effectiveness by their students’ test scores– a ridiculous thought, given all the variables.

I was intrigued by the NBPTS process, and signed up to sit for certification as an Early Adolescence Generalist, paying my own fee ($2500, if I remember correctly) and (kind of recklessly) jumping in. The National Board, in 1995, did not offer an assessment for music teachers, so I decided to teach my 300 middle school band students ‘generalist’ lessons in math, language arts, science and social studies. I would NEVER recommend this, knowing what I learned, but I scored well and became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT).

Most people, including ed policy experts, university educators and teachers who have not experienced certification do not fully understand the National Board process (although many think they do). It’s difficult to explain, especially to educators and researchers whose entire careers have been shadowed by our national love affair with standardized testing.

The National Board asks teachers to hold their practice up to a set of teacher-created pedagogical and content-based standards, custom-written for various disciplinary and developmental levels. Teachers then reflect on how well their practice aligns with these standards, using videotapes of lessons, student work products across time and written self-evaluation. They also sit for on-demand examinations of their relevant content knowledge. Candidates’ portfolios and content exams were scored by teachers who taught the same subjects, at the same level.

It’s rigorous, and grueling—and often confusing for teachers who have never been asked the deep questions posed by the process: What is your convincing evidence that Student A understands ____? What misconceptions are evident in Student B’s remarks about ______? What other strategies have you tried to build competence in ________? Why is it important for students to have fluency in ______________? And so on, 12-20 pages for each of multiple portfolio tasks.

Many teachers—myself included—say that going through the National Board process was the best, most useful and personalized, professional development they ever had. I became a true-blue believer in the process. I then worked as a Teacher in Residence for NBPTS for two years and was part of a national team that devised the music assessment.

I was working for the National Board in their Outreach and Teacher Leadership departments when NCLB passed, 25 years ago. You could immediately see how NCLB’s foregrounding standardized testing would clash with the things most valued by the NBPTS principles and standards (again, established by actual teachers, not lawmakers, data-crunchers or education publishers).

The NBPTS standards were built on the idea of teacher expertise—knowing their students deeply, mastery of their subject discipline, possession of a full pedagogical tool bag—and continuous reflection on evidence of what was going well and what needed changing in their day to day practice.

NCLB, on the other hand, put faith in test scores as the only valid means of comparing schools (and, eventually, teachers)–and allocating carrots and sticks. There were lots of new rules to follow: the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements, for example, wiped out my NB certificate (Early Adolescence Generalist) which honored the classic middle-grades teacher who taught all subjects.

NBPTS was in the process of rolling out a number of new certificates, recruiting teachers to sit for certification, and building financial rewards for NBCTs into state policy and local contracts. They were becoming more corporate, changing a number of policies to streamline the business, something they probably needed to do to stay alive in the new political milieu.

One of the things that was proposed: machine scoring of teacher portfolios and/or content exams. NBCTs were adamantly opposed to the very idea. Many NBCTs, having had the positive experience of going through the process, had become scorers (a job only practicing teachers were allowed to do) in the summer. Others became candidate support providers, working with colleagues to examine their practice, building little communities that studied the standards, videotaping each other’s lessons and having productive conversations about teaching and learning.

The thought of saving money by machine-scoring parts of the assessment was a betrayal of the teacher leadership piece of NB certification—helping colleagues to understand and improve their own practice. Who would embrace an assessment that was evaluated by a bot?  Not teachers whose work had been fairly judged. The National Board later eliminated their Teacher Leadership department. It was not a money-maker.

I left the National Board when they moved to Washington, DC, and returned to my music classroom, but continued, for a while, to help candidates and do workshops with schools or teacher associations that were interested in the NBPTS process. I have many NBCT friends who still do NB work, in spite of changes to NB certification that were less than teacher-friendly. I am now an outside—albeit informed—observer.

Recently, on a candidate support page, the question of using AI to write portfolio briefs emerged. A candidate had shared a draft analysis of her own teaching to an NBCT, who worried that the piece was so ‘well-written’ that it appeared to be composed by ChatGPT. The NBCT encouraged the candidate to think about ways that might make her writing seem more… human.

Now—writing skill is NOT assessed in the National Board process. Clarity of thought, presentation of believable evidence, convincing analysis of student progress—all of these are important, but smooth prose and impeccable syntax, not so much. I was struck by the idea that someone might think about using AI to write what’s supposed to be one’s own rationale and justification for things done as a teacher. The product could only be incoherent, if grammatically sound, slop.

Even worse—and here we have to, unsurprisingly, travel to Texas—some states are now questioning the National Board’s core contribution to teaching and learning: professional standards.

As Peter Greene reports:

 NBTC hasn’t been hugely successful in Texas– only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that’s 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because “tolerance.”

That’s correct. The NBPTS standards, for all ages and subjects, encourage equity and inclusion of all kids and embrace the diverse range of students taught in American public schools. In Texas, they’re trying to yank the very modest stipends given to TX teachers who have achieved National Board Certification.

Because money talks. Not all states offer a financial reward to NBCTs or contribute to certification fees. And many NBCTs are like me—curious about defining the markers of good teaching, convinced that all kids deserve an accomplished teacher. The money is seldom enough to make the 200-400 hour intensive challenge of certification worthwhile.

In earlier days, NBPTS got a lot of bipartisan support—a way to reward hard-working, demonstrably effective teachers that wasn’t graduate credit hours or seniority. Right to work states were fans of paying a handful of excellent teachers a little more cash, knowing that teachers are capitalists, too.

It’s ironic that it might be right-wing politics and AI that damage a worthwhile endeavor to improve teaching. Or maybe the word is predictable.

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This Guy Used to Be My Congressman

And now he wants to be my senator. Again. Meet Mike Rogers.

I spent most of my life and nearly all of my teaching career in Livingston County, Michigan—a ruby-red, rural-turning-suburban area in the ring outside Detroit. My first principal used to refer to our school district as the far edge of white flight—folks with enough resources to move to a bucolic county with lots of land for their ten-acre dream homes, an hour-long commute into the city, and a population that is 94% white and less than 1% Black.

Although I have always identified as a Democrat, I used to vote in the Republican primary, because it was the only way I had some say in who was representing me in local offices and the state legislature. Beginning in 1995, Mike Rogers was my state senator, and later, my representative in Congress. He was, at the time, very much a country club Republican—bland, moderate, uncontroversial and generally well-liked. I never voted for him, but I knew lots of people who did. I also didn’t fear him.

Rogers’ family was well-known in Livingston County. His dad was a public school administrator and football coach, and his mother ran the Chamber of Commerce. One of his brothers was in the state legislature. He won local elections by wide margins, but when he decided to run for Congress, in 2000, squeaked into office by 111 votes. It was redmap gerrymandering that made his subsequent elections ironclad.

Rogers and I lived in the same small town for most of his political career. I used to see him in Meijers and at local events, shaking hands. Once, we were both on a panel at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast where the topic was education policy. Mr. Rogers’ take on education, as a congressman, was that the feds had no business making or even influencing education policy—he was Mr. Local Control. He asked me, his designated foil, what purpose a federal Education Department served.

My answer was two-fold: First, a national Ed Department can serve as center for policy research on best practices and ideas in public education, economies of scale. Why re-invent the wheel in 50 states?

But far more important was the federal role in promoting and ensuring equity and protecting civil rights. I reminded him that the original ESEA, passed in 1965, was designed to provide resources for our neediest students, to help level the playing field for millions of baby-boomer students whose states or districts weren’t particularly interested in equity.

Not Michigan! he scoffed, ignoring the obvious example of Detroit Public Schools, 50 miles down the road, a city that many of his constituents escaped, after the auto industry built enormous wealth on the backs of immigrant laborers. But who cares about children in a city whose resources have been extracted? Not his problem.

After the panel dispersed, Rogers was surrounded by obsequious local businessmen—and I hurried back to my 3rd hour class, which a colleague was generously covering until my return.

In 2015, Mike Rogers decided not to run for Congress anymore. He launched a career in radio—a kind of mild-mannered Rush Limbaugh—and moved to Florida, where he was happily ensconced in Cape Coral for nearly a decade, starting new businesses, and serving as a defense lobbyist and National Security expert for CNN. He occasionally put out feelers to see if there was a possibility of becoming President.

But. Rogers has miraculously rediscovered his Michigan roots,and is now running—for the second time– for an open Senate seat in the mitten state. He has always been a pro-NRA, anti-abortion guy, but he’s moved hard to the ugly Trumpian right; in his last senate race in 2024, he castigated his former employer, the FBI, claiming they were on a witch hunt to take down Trump for political purposes. He called the DOJ “corrupt.” 

That, of course, was two years ago. Now, he’s All Trump, All the Time.  He’s an election denier. He’s trying to raise doubts about the MI senate election he lost, in 2024. What he said two years ago about the DOJ—well, that no longer applies. They’re good guys now.

As for public education, he’s also changed his tune, now endorsing federal influence over creeping wokeness, saying that  “schools care more now about social engineering than, as my father used to say, readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.”

Expect to hear that little bon mot often on the Rogers campaign trail this fall, along with finger-pointing about DEI and the weaponization of empathy. Plus a whole lot of anti-Muslim, free-floating racism.

Remember– Mike Rogers used to present as a country club Republican, hometown boy made good, moderate conservative, ex-FBI, and deficit-cutter.

But what happens to sort-of moderate Republicans, these days? They get primaried after one term. They get criticized by Tucker Carlson.They can’t maintain leadership in the House. Or Senate. They get the message: move rightward, appease Trump, sometimes by groveling–or get out of the way.

Mr. Rogers is perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to please The King. In 2024, he bought a tear-down lakeside cottage in Michigan, moved in with his sister-in-law in his old hometown to run his campaign, and started building a new home on the lake. Which could be his Michigan address should he win, but an easy, lucrative place to sell should he lose. No risk, reward either way.

He still owns the Cape Coral mansion.

There are lots of reasons to distrust Mike Rogers, beginning with his “go as the wind blows” beliefs and policies (and place of residence). There are lots of Republicans who fall into that camp—Tommy Tuberville springs to mind.

But I keep thinking about that Chamber of Commerce breakfast, where MY sitting congressman didn’t see why children in Michigan deserved equity.


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Ridiculous Headlines about Public Education

I’ve been writing about education policy and practice for more than 25 years, in my local newspaper (gratis), for an education nonprofit (paid), for Education Week (the journal of record for ed policy, also paid) and in my own personal blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, where I am definitely Not Paid.

When I started, back in the late 90s, I actually thought that we were living in hard times, from the standpoint of informed practice and useful education policy. What I see now, of course, is that I didn’t have a clue as to how messed up things could get. Or how the intersection of public education and politics could destroy so much good work and good will.

We have reached the point where the Onion-esque Eyes on Meme might be the most accurate representation of the daily lives of teachers:

$38,000 Master’s Degree Finally Pays Off with $61 More per Month

Parent Asks About Extra Credit at Meet the Teacher Night, Nine Days Before Anything is Assigned

And so on. Hilarious.

But shouldn’t teachers be soaking up critical commentary about ed policy, the destruction of the federal Department of Education, the latest trends and promising practices?

Well, maybe not. I am still routinely scanning the mainstream education press (such as it is). Here’s a sampling of recent headlines:

Talking About Menopause Is No Longer Taboo. Here’s Why That’s Good for Teachers

Quote: “Menopause is being recognized not only as a women’s health issue but as one that affects all of society—including the teacher workforce—three-quarters of whom are women.”

Kind of has that college freshman-term paper feel to it, no? And–good for teachers? How?

How about: Test Scores have Plunged, but Voters Aren’t Making Schools a Top Political Issue  

Missing subtitle: Like Chalkbeat wants them to.

Or: Chronic Absenteeism is Linked to Slower Academic Recovery in Math, Reading

Well, duh, say teachers everywhere.

Then there’s this: Can the Prospect of 3rd Grade Retention Improve Early Literacy? Yes, Study Says 

Response: No, Another Study Says.

Next up: Principals Can’t Manage Teacher Morale Alone. Enter the Go-Between

The thrust of this piece seems to be that managing the usual emotional, daily-grind aspects of K12 school administration (personal conflicts, new programs, novice teachers, etc.) should be outsourced to assistant principals and ‘teacher leaders’ because principals have too much important work to do. Those teachers and APs apparently can squeeze even more on to their plates, because there’s no associated plan to pay them more or reduce their workload in order to be a ‘go-between’—my nomination for the worst title you could bestow on a dedicated teaching colleague.

And this: The Ed. Department Calls for a Crackdown on Teacher Sexual Misconduct

So—is sexual misconduct on the rise? Of course not. But while they’re demolishing the oversight of public education, it’s always good to, you know, flood the zone with scary claims. “Parents should never have to wonder whether their kids’ school employs and protects sexual predators,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a (wildly ironic) statement.

This is a good spot for me to talk about working as a teacher blogger for Education Week. My experience there was a good one, but I used to hear all the time from friends who sent me EdWeek op-eds they disagreed with, charging EdWeek with being right-wing or bought off by publishers.

Education Week—like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal—is a business. They accept ads. They promote (and sometimes host) commercial programs. And they also invite a wide range of commentary, from teacher unions to pro-voucher politicians. In 2026, if you want to read one side of any educational issue, you’ll need to explore blogs, newsletters and substacks. I printed what I wanted to print, when blogging for Education Week. In nine years, I never had a piece pulled or even edited, beyond the occasional comma or headline.

The state of education journalism has not improved—better innovations, more useful research, informed commentary from practitioners–over the last 25 years. It’s become more divided, operating on the principle of “he who has the power and grant money makes the rules.” And lately, it’s been overwhelmed by stories about AI.

Here, without commentary, are a collection of AI-related headlines in the education press:

How to Use Paper to Teach About AI and Cutting-Edge Tech

Can AI Help Students Learn Social-Emotional Skills?

How an English Teacher Helps Students Find their Voices in the Age of AI

In the Race to Build Smarter AI, We Forgot to Build Smarter Humans (Opinion)

How Educators Can Encourage AI Skill-Building Without Being Tech Cheerleaders

Taken together, what do these headlines tell us? Isn’t the point of AI to trust large language models to answer our questions, without having to develop a unique voice, use paper-and-pencil methods of communicating or calculating, or spend countless hours learning to play nice with our peers?

Smarter humans via AI? Doubtful.

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Boys Should Go to Music Camp

I was a middle and high school band teacher for more than 30 years. In my school, band was an elective; students were mostly in my class because they wanted to be there, year after year. More than once, clinicians and adjudicators remarked about the large numbers of boys in my middle and high school bands.

Usually, boys and girls in my concert bands were fairly balanced. Jazz band was 2/3 boys—and lots of rowdy fun. I didn’t really give it a lot of thought, until I heard it again: How do you get boys to stick with band?

I just read Kate Manne’s excellent Substack on why boys should be theatre kids:

‘It is likely that gendered socialization is pushing boys to flee from certain activities… these patterns are a microcosm of broader trends in the US that are genuinely concerning. Boys participate far less in music, dance, and other lessons, by about ten percentage points, according to recent US census data comparing children in 1998 to children in 2020. Very little has changed during this period in terms of the gender divide for children aged between six and seventeen.’

Rang true to me. As did one of the suggested reasons: Girls join clubs and go out for the school play, chorus and orchestra. Boys go out for sports.

Manne’s point was that boys who rejected music, dance and drama were genuinely missing something: a community that made things, beautiful and emotionally moving things, together. (Pause for an amen.) Boys should be able to try those things, enjoy them, perhaps excel at them, without being labeled or pigeonholed.

The boys that I taught in instrumental music classes, 5th graders to seniors, dealt with being—what’s the right word here? Harassed?  Teased? Bullied?—about being in band. I know they did. We had conversations about it, every year, reviewing the reasons that being called a band fag by Joey Halfback was, in the end, meaningless. It was harder for younger kids, trying to find themselves.  

You would never be able to imagine this, when you’re in the 7th grade, but when you’re retired, you’re unlikely to be playing football, or any other sports requiring strength, speed and good wind. You might, however, think about how much you liked playing trumpet in the 8th grade band, and pick one up.

I know this, because I spent last week at the Interlochen Center for the Arts on their beautiful wooded campus, at flute camp. This was an adult ensemble workshop, 35 flutists from all over the country, polishing their skills and playing in groups, for fun. Summer music camp was going on as well—we ate lunch in their cafeteria—with hundreds of middle school and high school singers, dancers and cellists. Girls and boys, lugging cases and stretching out on the dance building porch.

You didn’t need to have years of experience as an educator to see that these kids were in their happy place. A long stretch of time where everybody was like you—a musician or a dancer—and free to be themselves. Nirvana for some teenagers.

So yes—boys should be theatre kids, and maybe run cross country, too. The arts are for everyone.

There were 35 flute players at flute camp; two were men. Make of that what you will.

A quiet moment on Interlochen’s campus. Students inside, due to hazardous smoky air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured by nflanagan

 Lay off the Democrats

Full disclosure first: I am a Democrat. I sit on my county party’s executive board. I ran for county office as a Democrat in a ruby-red district (and lost but learned a lot). I have been a Democrat since my first presidential election (George McGovern, 1972), so I have seen the ups and downs of a two-party system for ages.

Here are some things I believe about partisan politics in 2026:

  • One of the two major parties better represents most Americans, a diverse bunch if there ever was one—economically, ethnically, politically, religiously, gender-wise.
  • Having multiple candidates to choose from in a primary makes parties stronger, although it can be harrowing when primary candidates go after each other.
  • Democrats are actually the party of the Big Tent, although Republicans occasionally suggest that their tent crosses boundaries.
  • We are in big trouble in 2026 on a number of fronts; counting on well-run—free and fair—elections is no longer a guarantee, for starters.
  • We need a new generation of leadership, but the way to get those new leaders elected is not to turn on the only party likely to provide support for progressivism.

Theoretically…in the midterms, we can appreciate all flavors of Democratic candidates, from avowed Democratic Socialists to outspoken Christians—because they’re being elected statewide or locally. If primaries work the way they’re supposed to, the most popular candidate perspective *in that context* will emerge as the favorite.

Here’s the thing: it may not be your preferred perspective. Which lets you choose—stick with the party you usually vote for, or decide to cross the gulf and vote for another party’s candidate who seems better, or decide not to vote. What flies in New York City may sink like a stone in, say, Iowa.

Win some, lose some. The goal is to get strong, attractive Democratic candidates and equally attractive Democratic policy ideas—then get them in office. And, as they said in The Music Man, you gotta know the territory.

Now, I am fully aware of a new generation of Democrats rising up, reaching out for things that have been pushed aside for decades: Universal health care. Affordable housing. Fair wages and worker protections. Family leave and childcare. Policies that other first-world nations have enjoyed for decades, stabilizing their workforce and making them happier.

I want those things, too. In fact, about two-thirds of Americans want universal health care, which includes plenty of Independent voters and even some Republicans. And three-quarters of Republicans—who skew older, anyway—like Medicare. I don’t think what we’re seeing in this super-heated primary season is about policy specifics, however. It’s about a desperate hope that we can stop the right-wing mutilation of the land of the free.

It makes me—as a local Democratic leader—happy to read about young, energetic candidates, willing to take on the sacred cows (both policy and human) in Congress or their statehouse. Here in Michigan, we have lots of exciting primary races. I hope we have a record-setting turnout in August, and Democrats tell us clearly what and whom they want.

Because we’re their support system—financially and in a dozen other ways. Democrats are looking for someone to take on the guy who’s fecklessly destroying the country, with his spineless minions. People want someone to fight for them, traditions be damned. But first—that someone must run. And running demands partisan support and funding.

If you only support one Democratic candidate, and your candidate loses, so you look around for someone to blame or refuse to vote for the alternate—well, may I remind you that Texas Republicans have already lined up and opened their checkbooks for a loathsome, despicable guy they impeached a few years ago?

I spend a lot of time perusing local conversations on social media—which, I realize, represent only a subset of voters.  I have been shocked by the number of posters who support a particular Democrat but are more than willing to trash the party, and in the process, trash every other candidate for that office. My guy, or bust.

I have even seen candidates—viable candidates with large followings—trash the Democratic party that they’re counting on to support them, should they make it through the primary. That boggles my mind. It’s like turning your back on family.

Robert Reich had a great column yesterday on the Common Goods we have enjoyed as Americans:

  • How we deal with disagreement
  • Truth
  • Trust
  • World leadership
  • Understanding what we owe each other as Americans
  • Political equality

Going after your preferred party damages these things. If you’re on the side of those who believe the ship can still be righted, please stop.

Featured by nflanagan

Dirty Pool and other Metaphors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s just not very nice.

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

They very explicitly do not want majority rule.

They want minority rule.’

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

Or something like that.

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

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

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

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

Keep your eyes on the prize, not the pool.

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The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

There’s been a robust edu-discourse bubbling up over an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled My Students Can’t Read. The (ahem) tl;dr: college students can no longer sustain attention to and comprehension of 20-page articles, so the professor-author of the article has to break such articles into  pieces and spoon-feed comprehension strategies to college freshmen.

My first thought: secondary teachers have been dealing with this syndrome for a long, long time. The author (Tyler Jagt) asks this question: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

There are other questions to ask, when musing about a generational collapse in literacy, but my take on this is that admitting a student (and taking their tuition money) presumes that the institution is willing to provide both the curriculum and instruction that serves those students. Caveat emptor, when the buyer is choosing which students to enroll.

K12 public schools, of course, have no option of turning non-readers away. When I was in charge of assisting ESL students in middle school with their homework, there were individual teachers who used the excuse that they didn’t know how to teach kids to read, so struggling readers were not their problem. But there weren’t many teachers like that. Most K-8 teachers know that students are going to come to them with all levels of reading proficiency. They don’t have the luxury of deciding not to serve those students. They have to figure it out.

It’s actually a pretty good article (although it’s behind a paywall). Jagt resists blaming his students’ lack of understanding and reading stamina on the K-12 teachers who came before, and provides some research on how smartphone use changes the brain:

‘When a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.’

There’s also some well-supported evidence that the use of AI (as catch-all phrase to describe ChatGPT, Ask Gemini and other LLMs) has weakened the ability and willingness to write:

‘This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time.’

Jagt also blames the Common Core—which I think is not precisely accurate, although many curricula packages were adopted, K-12, in an effort to align with the Core and boost test scores, such as ‘the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding.’

Dr. Paul Thomas reminds us that ‘there is at least some correlational association between the “science of reading” era of reading legislation (starting approximately around 2012-2014 and then spreading over the last decade) and a decline in students reading for fun, reading whole texts, and reading diverse texts as well as some of the so-called declines in test scores.’

This is not a matter of ‘kids today’ being more indolent than previous generations. We are clearly doing something wrong, beginning with prioritizing phonics in an attempt to boost 3rd grade scores over the slow pursuit of making meaning, and the pleasure of being a reader.

There are other explanations for the collapse of literacy (if, in fact, that’s what it is): the pandemic, the return of orality (what we had before literacy), and what might be called hero worship of cultural figures who see reading and books as pointless. When the POTUS prefers his daily security briefings in video form or, failing that, bullet points, it’s a tough task to convince your average seventh grader that reading a YA novel (183 pages!) is worthwhile.

But some things will always depend on the ability to comprehend the written word, the most reliable, portable and convenient source of information and analysis—and, for my money, entertainment. Won’t they?

We need to focus on the utility and pleasure of being a fluent reader, when the children we’re teaching are ready. Which may not be kindergarten or even first grade. It is the responsibility of pre-school teachers and Composition 101 teachers and all the teachers in between to invite students into the world of literacy. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, refusing to read makes you dumber.

Here’s an example, from local social media. A new restaurant opened up nearby and had not been open for a week when a vigilante group, dressed in black hoodies and backwards ball caps showed up, claiming to be looking for an employee who had been convicted of molesting a child. (This is something they do all over the state, apparently.)

After wandering around in the restaurant, disturbing patrons eating there for the first time, they were asked to leave. The police were called. The vigilantes posted on social media about being prevented from removing scum from the face of the earth. The restaurant posted back, saying nobody working there had a criminal record. And—when I stopped reading, there were 1700 comments discussing the event.

I confess—I was fascinated. I went to the restaurant’s page to see what the menu looked like and ended up getting a good look at how people perceive young men who think they’re improving society by tracking down sex abusers and humiliating them in public.

The comments were mostly laudatory for the vigilantes (#TeamJake!!!)—and short. A couple of words or maybe a sentence. Lots of repetition. Very little logic or thoughtfulness, but lots of inchoate rage at those who are hurting children.

Commenters who took a more restrained approach—What was the vigilantes’ evidence? Had they considered the impact on the new restaurant?—were scolded and accused of being child molesters themselves. Early in the comment thread, a man presented what I thought was a good case for letting trained law enforcement deal with convicted offenders. His comment was three paragraphs long, clearly written and clearly argued.

What happened next was interesting. Commenters went after the reasonable man: You expect me to read all that? Who do you think you are?  Blah blah blah. You probably have a record, too.

At least two dozen people accused him of being too smart for his own good, one of those pointy-headed liberals who think they know it all. People who read books and use big words, rather than relying on common sense.

It was proof to me that we have a lot of work to do if we want a literate nation.  

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LIFTing Kids Higher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misbehavior tops educators’ stressors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a simple idea. Such good work.

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Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Please?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Memorial Day, 2026

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

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

These days, perpetual criticism is essential. We are immersed in dark times, I think, redefining the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice. It’s easy to lose faith in our government and the grand experiment—all men created equal—that founded this nation. It’s easy to let hope die when our rights have been systematically eroded by power-hungry politicians. When our children are not able to read certain books or study our actual national history, we’re in trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thank those who served and sacrificed so I can love my country, and criticize it, too. A hat tip to all the band teachers and student musicians who help make Memorial Day meaningful this weekend.

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

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The Rule of the Free Market in Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was then.

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

What changed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 What Has Your Mother Given You?

Confession: I appropriated this prompt from Steven Bechloss, who provides such a thought-starter most Saturdays. He wrote about Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother—inspiring—and, in what can only be described as striking contrast, the mothers of Lee Harvey Oswald (angry, controlling) and Nixon (per Nixon, a saint).

I’ve never been very excited about Mother’s Day. For starters, I disagree with the stylebooks’ use and placement of the apostrophe. What if you have two moms—and you love ‘em both the same? Why not just Mothers Day—acknowledging mothers without possessing one? But I digress.

Which may be something I got from my mother, who could turn a five-minute straightforward narrative into a half-hour of (amusing) verbal wandering around in backstory.  She also had a wicked sense of humor—she was Class Cut-up in her Muskegon (MI) HS yearbook, 1945.

My most memorable moments with my mom were not classic mother-daughter rituals. She never helped me pick out a wedding dress, and wasn’t present when I married my husband, in a judge’s chambers. She wasn’t there when I was in childbirth. She seldom commented on my major life decisions. We didn’t have long, rambling phone conversations because they would have been long distance—and her monetary meter would have been running.

But when I was in college, and came home late from summer jobs, we lay on either end of the couch eating ice cream and watching Johnny Carson and laughing at nothing much until tears ran down our cheeks. I always knew my mother loved me, and was proud of me, and that was enough.

The last words I said to my mother were “Love you,” and she replied, “Love you too, honey,” and then I hung up, and got on an airplane to Florida, for an education conference. I was awakened by a phone call early the next morning, telling me she was gone, at age 73, of a cerebral hemorrhage. It seemed like the final injustice, gone so soon, for a woman who lost her father at age seven, her husband at 52, and suffered a catastrophic health event a couple of weeks after she retired at 65, one that kept her hospitalized for months.

I know lots of people who have Mother Stories—adventurous moms, politically savvy wine moms of either party, domineering moms, crazy moms. I’ve heard people say that their mother was their biggest cheerleader, or nit-picky, never satisfied with their children’s life outcomes.

But not my mother. She never bailed me out, but she never made me feel like a failure, either. Instead, she was… steadfast. And kind of low-key and snarky. Fun to hang with, someone who took life as it came.

I think Steven Bechloss was looking at three typical models of mothers—the ones who shaped their sons for better or worse. During my 35 years in the classroom, I saw mothers who were high achievers and expected the same of their children. I saw bitter and controlling moms—and some who thought their sons could do no wrong, even when the evidence was flashing red, right in front of them.

But it always seemed to me that children are not possessions or projects or even direct reflections of their mothers. Good parenting helps, of course, but in the end, kids are born with self-determination, their own temperament and personality.      

I’m glad my mother let me be myself. I think it’s a practice worth considering, on Mothers (no apostrophe) Day.

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I Write the Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

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

Subtitle: EdWeek Readers have some thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bummer.

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It’s Not about Cheating

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

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

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

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

Me: What do you mean by cheating?

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

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

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

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

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

———–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

When I first heard about influencers, I thought—in my predictable Baby Boomer way—that the whole idea was ridiculous. People whose ‘career’ was influencing other people, paid for by subscriptions and sponsorships? Shallow people, famous for being famous, possessed of zero actual expertise, espousing fake ideas and images to make (lots of) money?

But it turns out that influencers are in it for something more than money: actual influence.

In politics, they have become ‘an infestation’:   “The internet is teeming with thousands of micro- and nano-influencers looking to make a name for themselves. These smaller influencers still have very engaged and loyal followers—making them important communication tools for campaigns. But they often lack an understanding of how politics works—or, more specifically, an appreciation for the tradeoffs that often must be made—and tend to spread content that revolves around conflict and misinformation.”

That’s what happens when you try to buy clout. You get what you pay for.

Over the past couple of years, I find that I have mostly stopped watching or reading the daily news in its conventional forms—newspapers, television, radio. I’m still consuming huge quantities of news, op-eds and information, but I like to think I’m paying for the most credible and valuable online content, verified facts and analysis.

Are my curated news providers giving me reliable information, and multiple trustworthy perspectives? Or are they just trying to influence me?

Here’s an example, from one of my daily reads, Bridge Magazine, a centrist, Michigan-focused news outlet:

“Schools are in trouble. Test scores don’t lie: Michigan ranks 44th for fourth-grade reading; less than 1 in 3 high school graduates are considered ready for college.”

First of all—it should be ‘fewer’ than one in three graduates. And that figure is erroneously measured by the SAT scores of all the HS juniors in Michigan, who are mandated to take the test whether they’re college-bound or not. Those scores are then compared to a subset of seniors in other states who are preparing to attend colleges that require a good SAT score for admission. Apples and oranges.

More importantly—test scores do lie, all the time. They’re also misinterpreted by journalists, some of whom probably mean well, but are being paid to make a particular point. Influencing your average reader to believe that Michigan public schools are failing, for example, tossing off context-free “data” as if it were God’s honest truth.

I am old enough to remember the first time I watched Fox News and began thinking about a future where there was no mainstream POV, and ordinary Joes could purchase the media stream that fit their beliefs. It seemed shocking at the time—but look. Here we are. At a point in history where the President of the United States gleefully posts an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and flying an airplane that drops shit on his constituents.  

“Republicans are known to be far more aggressive at paying off social media influencers than Democrats. Pay-for-post schemes have been rampant throughout the conservative commentariat during the Trump years (as studiously documented by Will Sommer). One reason being that there is just a lot more money at play.”

What do educators do when the students whose intellectual growth they are entrusted with believe things that are false and dangerous—because the influence of the internet has led them there? When the most important content and character-building discussions in school are suspect—or banned?Or when, God help us, the President’s “Special Advisor” suggests that we shouldn’t be teaching undocumented students at all?

What is our moral obligation to the kids we teach, when it comes to truth—and how they form their own opinions and civic engagement?

There’s a growing movement to expose lies and fact-check what gets circulated via social media. But how do we teach our students to be wary and cautious, to look at the background and motivation of those who put content out into the universe we share?

Also this: some influencers are doing good, sharing content that mainstream media is prevented or discouraged from programming. Some of my Facebook friends have had an amazing impact on my tiny northern Michigan community, simply by sharing their anger over what’s happening in the White House. There are days when I think we may get through this yet, just on the strength of local truth-tellers and people who act as social connectors.

Thoughts that make me feel better about where we get our news and how we interpret that news, both national stories and education stories:
“A funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of a whitewashed authoritarianism. The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been.”                                Heather Cox Richardson

“You need to tell your story. If you are not telling your story, someone else is telling your story for you.” In an era where school choice has increased competition in K–12 public education, that statement has never been more relevant or more urgent.                                                                        Greg Wyman

What are you reading? Who do you believe?

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The Pentagon Buys a Flute

Tucked into the horrific informational gusher of Just How Much This Unnecessary and Ill-Advised War is Costing Us–an analysis of where the Department of Unwanted War has spent last month’s end-of-fiscal-year budget. 

Most of the reporting deals with steaks, Alaskan King crab legs and Herman Miller chairs—maybe Pete Hegseth sits in one, in his newly-installed makeup studio?—rightfully contrasting the $93 billion year-end military splurge with cuts in SNAP benefits and school lunches. But there were some other purchases that caught my eye:

“Musical instruments joined the shopping list. A $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 handmade Japanese flute were among $1.8 million spent on instruments.”

Anyone who’s ever had to monitor a line-item budget for a school program knows about spending it all, to ensure that nobody will think they gave you too much. Buying cautiously or retaining part of this year’s budget to make a big purchase next year, sound like fiscal responsibility but can end up biting you when the red pencils come out.

I say this as a person who knows how much musical instruments cost, and who once tried to use two years’ budgets combined to purchase a very modest used student model tuba. Unsuccessfully.

For many years, my all-in school band budget (for somewhere around 300 students) was $500, all of which had to be spent in the first few weeks of the year. I was fund-raising year-round, but spent the school-provided money first, to ensure there actually was a band budget in upcoming years.

Maintaining a music library and functional instrument inventory—crucial to a successful band program—doesn’t sound so essential when teachers are being laid off or the social studies texts are 20 years old. And demanding an adequate budget figure could (and occasionally did) lead to a decision to eliminate the band program altogether, as a belt-tightening measure.

So yeah—I was deeply curious about how the Department of Defense spent $1.8 million on musical instruments. The Steinway grand piano went to the Air Force Chief of Staff’s home, but a fair amount of googling hasn’t revealed who got the violin or the handmade flute (a Muramatsu). I’d like to think they went to deserving students in Department of Defense Schools—but who knows?

A friend, after reading about the drunken-sailor spending, laughingly commented on how I probably wished I had a $21,700 flute. Thing is, I have more than that invested in my flute, two head joints and two piccolos. A $21K Muramatsu is a nice axe, all right, but it’s easy to spend over $100,000 on a flute with all the bells and whistles and gold. 

The most expensive violins in the world—the precious Stradivarius and Guarneri masterworks that can never be duplicated—run $20 million and up. So, while $1.8 million in instruments could buy some really nice stuff, the question remains: who’s using them?

Earlier this month, I paid a visit to the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale, AZ, to see their Magical Flute exhibit.  

This was a kind of holy pilgrimage for me; I took over 50 photos of various flutes and walked around goggling the diamond-encrusted James Galway flute (also a Muramatsu) and various owned-by-the-famous instruments.

The most remarkable historic flute was a faceted crystal and silver number belonging to Napoleon. After his decisive military and political defeat at Waterloo, friends gave Napoleon the crystal flute as a kind of consolation prize. His brother, Louis, who was king of Holland, got a similar flute made of cobalt glass.

There is no evidence that Napoleon ever played any flute, let alone the crystal beauty. I hope whoever is in possession of the $21.7K Department of Defense flute is playing their heart out.

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Hate Definitely Has a Home Here

If there’s one question on the minds of my friend group these days—old friends, fellow teachers, new acquaintances, anyone paying attention—it’s this: How can anyone, let alone a third of the population, look at current events in the United States in the past year, and believe that we are on the right track, doing OK, making our people and nation stronger?

I don’t really have to spell it out, although I am mindful of Rachel Bitecofer’s principle: repeated negative messaging works in elections—because voters will  only be mad about what we tell them to be mad about.

So here’s the bottom line: we are in real trouble, as a nation, on dozens of fronts, beginning with the fact that we are being lied to—vicious lies, filthy lies, heedless lies—on the regular. Even teaching the truth about history and science in ordinary classrooms, museums and national parks has been explicitly forbidden, plaques removed, educators silenced.

Teaching has never been easy, but it’s really a miracle that so many fine teachers are still in the classroom and finding some satisfaction in their work there. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey on teacher morale, teachers described their feelings about teaching as a very lukewarm positive—a +13 on a 200-point scale, ranging from -100 to +100.

Last year, teachers were slightly more positive, at +18, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the world’s most important and rewarding profession. Interesting nugget: teachers in Arkansas reported the highest morale (+24); Pennsylvania, the lowest (+1). Make of that what you will.

Which is why I loved reading Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy.  Macy, who also wrote Dopesick, a book that helped me understand opioid addiction, travels to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, once a thriving town with good schools and a solid middle class. She was looking for reasons that people there voted—three-quarters of them—for Trump.

Among her heroes, the people who are still seeking to preserve what’s good and healthy in a failing Midwestern town, are teachers. The teachers she interviews, and whose work with and dedication to Urbana’s public school students is fierce and clear-eyed, are one of the last walls between kids making headway in life, and disaster. 

Macy also remembers the teachers who helped her get away from a working-class background with the help of Pell grants, talent and a lot of luck. Her siblings were not so lucky—one of the most painful parts of her narrative are conversations with her brother and sisters, and her niece who suffered from a stepparent’s abuse.

It is through these conversations and seeing how despair and the empty promises of preachers and politicians impact the down and out, that I began to understand who votes for powerful liars, and why.

It also helps explain why Americans hate each other:
The Pew Research Center finds that 53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”). In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92% say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% say they’re bad.

Macy does a superb job of weaving anecdotes and memoir about growing up in a town that feels very familiar to me, also a Midwestern girl. She analyzes just what went wrong, much of it having to do with international trade, the dangerous equity gap, decades of negative political messaging about welfare queens. The demise of empathy, and the rise of right-wing pole-barn churches with fundamentalist men at the pulpit. Greed. Racism. Sexism.

Although the book won a number of awards (and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books in 2025), I found the comments from readers enlightening. Either people loved it, finding that it deepened their understanding of just what is happening in the forgotten little towns across the country—or they hated it, believing Macy is encouraging people to talk to the enemy.

Which is a strategy that has not worked, commenters say. Unless we fight back—the “pound the negative message” model—we keep losing ground. Forget people in your past, your family. They’re the ones who voted him in. The enemy.

Who’s right?

I looked for a photo of Beth Macy and discovered she’s running for Congress in a ruby-red district in Virginia. It’s apparent to me (if not to her readers) that she’s willing to fight hard against the damage to our democracy.

She’s also right about teachers—especially those with the courage to stand up for truth, for the kids they serve, no matter their prospects. Donation sent.

Here in northern Michigan, an elderly gentleman who’s spent his life working for progressive causes was so upset about seeing Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as apes that he called his neighbor, offering to fund signs to place around our small county, saying HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. She honored his request, designing and ordering signs.

During this process, the gentleman died. The signs will be ready next week, and planting one at the end of my driveway will be both advocacy and memorial. What I’d really like to see is a couple of those signs posted around our local school. Because that’s one of the few places where hate speech and hate actions are actively discouraged and prohibited.

Read Paper Girl.  If you’re like me, you’ll love it.

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Oh, Canada!*

We went to see Come From Away this week, at the Stephenson Theatre, part of the Phoenix Art Museum complex. It’s a show I’ve wanted to see for some time, recommended by friends and—well, it’s a musical. It was stunningly good, a show about the 38 planes stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, diverted there after 9/11—and the resonant after-effects of the good care Gander gave to nearly 7000 bedraggled and frightened strangers for five days.

We arrived early enough to have a glass of wine in the crowded lobby. There were no empty tables, but a table for eight had a couple of empty stools—and a “May we join you?” drew a nod. There were two couples, the women dressed in Scottsdale Expensive and the men in those slippery golf shirts. Like pretty much everyone there, to see the matinee, they were clearly retirees—and they were talking about the State of the Union address.

“Best State of the Union speech ever! Absolutely inspiring!” said striped golf shirt. His wife chimed in with “I loved it when he really gave it to the Democrats. They deserve it.” White golf shirt added—“And then, when he recognized the Olympic Hockey Team…well, USA! USA! And when he gave the goalie the Presidential medal that just made my day…”

It was noisy in the lobby and the foursome turned to other topics, but I was bemused. I am used to thinking that Trump enthusiasts fit certain stereotypes—the kinds of people you see Jordan Klepper interviewing. The MAGAverse. Not people who paid good money to see a joyful musical about… the kindness of Canadians, on what was arguably the worst day in American history.

The show was great—you could actually hear people in the audience (OK, me too) sobbing near the end. See it somewhere, if you can. It’s a celebration of how human beings across the globe can rise to nearly any occasion, with humor and grace.

You’d think, if bus drivers and schoolteachers and shopkeepers in Newfoundland can open their hearts and homes to the world, our president could occasionally show some class, rather than sending out an AI video putting ugly, nationalistic words into the mouth of Arizonan and Olympian Brady Tkachuk– who plays for the Ottawa Senators.

But no. In fact, the American government has used the Olympics, theoretically another opportunity to rise to human greatness, to embarrass us with sexist comments, wasted resources, and 40 sport utility vehicles clogging ancient streets in Milan.

Doesn’t matter how many medals we win, when our government—NOTE: not our Olympians—humiliates us on the world stage. Again.

I have lived in Michigan all my life, and know that, until recently, most Michiganders didn’t even think of Canada as a foreign country. You can see Canada, right over the Detroit River—and trips to Windsor (drinking age: 19) were a kind of rite of passage for kids who grew up in the area, for better or worse.

When I was in college, moving to Canada to escape the draft was a real thing. I have friends who live in Windsor, and teach in Detroit—and last year, there were joint Detroit-Windsor cross-river rallies protesting the Trump presidency

Now, that same president is trying to keep us apart by shutting down a new, $4 billion bridge, because—well, because of vindictiveness and grift. Why else?

I guess winning a gold medal in hockey—men’s hockey, anyway—was a juicy, easy-to-understand soundbite-level platform for a corrupt government to use as incentive to praise manly American victors by giving them some hamburgers and inviting them to be on TV. As Steven Beschloss says:

“That same evening, most of the members of the gold-medal-winning men’s U.S. hockey team tarnished their achievement and its power to unify the nation by attending the [SOTU] speech as Trump’s guests after meeting him earlier in the day at the White House. Their participation signals support for his lawless authoritarian regime, be it consciously or foolishly. (It should be noted that five players chose not to attend, including four who were born or grew up in Minnesota. Likewise, the gold medal-winning women’s hockey team declined an invitation.)

We are not living in normal times.”

Understatement of the year. And now, we’ve alienated all our allies—the ones who invoked Article 5 after 9/11 on our behalf– and sent our military to blow up schools in Iran.

Thanks, Canada. Hope we can be friends again. Soon. Very soon.

*BTW, I do know the national anthem is O—not Oh– Canada.

There are English lyrics, French lyrics, Bilingual and Indigenous citizens’ versions.

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all of us command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

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Gifted and Talented Redux

I got my master’s degree in gifted education—actually, a master’s in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on identifying and serving gifted students, but whatever. At the time—the 1980s—I was focused on the ‘talented’ part, as a music teacher.

What could I do, I wondered, to better understand and challenge the exceptionally proficient students who showed up in my band room? There had only been a handful, at that time, students who leapt over my pedestrian instruction, right into credible Mozart concertos in the 6th grade, relying on recordings and (this sounds so quaint) library books about the great composers and their style characteristics.

I had many thoughtful conversations with people in my master’s classes, in my building, and fellow band directors (whose advice was generally directed toward private lessons and summer camps–the ‘better teacher/better cohort’ theory). But overall, takeaways on who was gifted and what to do about it were murky.

One person’s budding genius was another teacher’s ho-hum. A lot of it had to do with perceived student effort, and very little was about digging gifts and talents or even preferences and goals out of kids who were content to skate by.

Also, lots of kids who had exceptional natural talent in playing instruments were not so gifted in other areas, and therefore not interesting to the guy teaching Algebra II to 7th graders. Just because you can flawlessly pick up salsa rhythms with all four of your limbs or produce a crystalline high C on the trumpet doesn’t mean you’re… gifted. Or so it seemed.

I’ve written many pieces—here, here, here, here and here, for example—about giftedness. Invariably, they draw nasty comments. It’s very much a tender spot for parents of bright children who worry that their children are not being adequately challenged. Or are ignored by their teachers because so many other kids are struggling or misbehaving. I get it.

But I also know that talents and gifts are randomly distributed across school populations and have to be developed over time, with the cooperation of the identified GT student. I was struck by this quote from a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, reflecting on the mayoral decision not to test kindergarteners to determine who’s gifted:

This administration does not believe in G. & T. evaluation for kindergartners. But that’s not the same as eliminating advanced opportunities across all grades. 

My thoughts, precisely.

I recognize that NY City is unique—such a diverse population, so many school options, such hot politicking and parent-pleasing—but I fully agree with the mayor (or his advisor, more likely): Testing five-year olds for giftedness is ridiculous and bound to siphon off disadvantaged kids before they’ve really had a chance to, you know, go to school and learn stuff.

It’s the ultimate, rigged-end game: the outcomes of inequality, right out of the chute. Dividing the herd, yet again. Why? How does that help us?

If I had faith in any test to identify extraordinary, socially useful intelligence, skills, or creativity, I might feel differently. But I don’t. What I do believe is that all children deserve a rich and challenging education, whether a test identifies them as potentially brainy or sub-par. You just never know what role they might play, eventually, in making the world better.

Since more than half of American teens now admit to using chatbots to do “research” that they may not be able to evaluate for veracity, to write and calculate for them, it’s going to get harder and harder to distinguish students who produce genuinely brilliant work from those who are merely good at disguising where that work product originated.

We still need brilliant original work—not to feed the AI maw, but to enlighten ourselves, cure diseases, prevent wars, create peace, to explore, entertain and inspire. We need the indisputably brilliant kid who plays salsa rhythms but forgets to turn in his social studies worksheets for some reason. Because he has gifts to share.

We need a new definition of ‘gifted’—and maybe one for ‘talented’ as well. We need to stop accepting the assertion that machines are helping students learn better than human interaction and judgment. And most of all—we need to stop cutting kids off at the pass, sorting and labeling them when they’re in kindergarten.

Photo:sanbeiji (Creative Commons)

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Sex Education, v. 2026.0

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

As a parent and veteran teacher, I’ve been through many iterations of sex ed curricula, local and state, decades’ worth of changes and hot issues, explosive board meetings and muttered accusations. I’ve heard many parents express worry that their precious children—no snark—might be learning something that they don’t talk about at home.

They don’t express it like that, of course, but that’s what it usually comes down to—fear. Fear of other peoples’ values, fear of change, fear that their own child will not follow a single, approved track into adulthood. As if avoiding exposure to things we don’t approve of will mean our children won’t be tempted by them. (Snorting.)

Speaking personally, I was always grateful that my kids had a no-nonsense health and sex education teacher. I was glad that they discussed embarrassing things, boys and girls together, in a factual way. And that their teacher had a sense of humor in addition to good information.

IMHO, sex ed is one of those “takes a village” things, especially when kids are utterly surrounded by—even drowning in—graphic sexual images, language and concepts, many of them inappropriate, to use a teacher word. What is appropriate is bringing these ideas up in a classroom full of other 7th graders and dispassionately telling kids the truth.

I read through the revised version—skimmed it, noting the places where the language I was familiar with from back when my kids were in 7th grade had changed (this was the first revision in over 20 years). It all seemed pretty normal, developmentally appropriate, and so on. What hadn’t changed was the parental right to opt students out of all sex education lessons—guaranteed. In addition, every school district needs a parent advisory committee to tailor the curriculum or address questions.

What’s different in 2026? Sex education has become partisan. It’s always been politicized, with opinions across the spectrum on the value of reproductive health and sexual hygiene as school subjects vs. family prerogatives. But now, there’s a Republican POV and a Democratic perspective:

At an Oversight Committee meeting, House Republicans questioned Interim State Superintendent Sue Carnell about how many genders there are and the reasoning behind the department’s proposal [to update sex education guidelines]. 

This time-wasting challenge to a standard policy revision all seems to be rolled into a right-wing pushback on what they call ‘woke’– the US Department of Education’s proscription on ending anything to do with diversity via “Dear Colleague”  letter, for example, or FL Governor Ron Desantis vacating the Board at New College. The new MI sex ed guidelines passed 6-2, on party lines, as MI State Board members are elected rather than appointed—an option that Republicans (perhaps too optimistically) have endorsed in the past.

 But wait! you might be saying—didn’t that letter threatening schools (and, natch, school administrators) with funding cuts if DEI programs (to be defined by ED) were discovered on campus get struck down? Here’s one take on that:

Trump’s Department of Education conceded defeat on its unconstitutional directive to cut federal funding from any school with DEI programs. After the National Education Association and the ACLU sued, a federal court permanently invalidated the order—it can’t be enforced against anyone, anywhere, ever again.

As a lifelong educator, however, I agree with Peter Greene—this is a minor setback for the anti-woke Russ Vought types, perhaps, but there are many more ways for the feds (and compliant states) to stick their lily white fingers into the running of our nation’s schools. So many things to mess with, flooding zone after zone, dividing the resistance, blurring lines.

You could require Bible readings in public schools, for instance.

You could gut decades of work from actual K-12 history teachers by creating a junky, misleading History Rocks curriculum. From the NYT’s Jessica Grose:

I spent the last week talking to public school parents who were not excited to hear that the Secretary [Linda McMahon] was coming to Alabama, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut because of the extremely conservative, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. and Christian makeup of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. They were concerned that this tour was part of a larger Trumpian effort to whitewash American history.

Bingo. But it’s just one large drop in the anti-woke bucket.

This week, they came after Michigan’s new sex-ed guidelines:

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into three Michigan public school districts — Detroit Public Schools, Lansing Public Schools and Godfrey-Lee Public Schools, a small district in Kent County — for inclusion of “sexual orientation and gender ideology” content in the districts’ K-12 curricula. 

Here’s the letter they sent to these districts. It’s filled with lofty language about parental rights, vague but intimidating threats—we’re launching a federal investigation into your school!—and pages of demands for a truckload of specific documents and verifications, all due in six weeks.

I can’t figure out how ED (what remains of it) chose these districts to torment. Detroit and Lansing are large, urban districts where a diligent attempt to meet the federal investigation requirements would be incredibly onerous, to say the least. Godfrey-Lee is a small district (1700 students) in a suburb southwest of Grand Rapids. Ninety percent of its students are minorities; most of its students are living in poverty.

The superintendent told the press that there have been no charges, and they’ll cooperate fully—but what the hell? Was there a complaint? Is it just random harassment? Or perhaps their state legislators were the real target, since the feds couldn’t get to the State Board of Education and punish them for doing what they were elected to do: revise policy.

Bottom line: this is none of the US Dept of Education’s business.

Sex education—the reality of teaching it, not what pages of policy prescribe—is always going to happen in classrooms, shaped by teacher discretion and students’ questions. The best we can hope for is a no-nonsense, caring teacher with a sense of humor and good information.   

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Does Love Really Make the World (or Classroom) Go ‘Round?

Some years ago, when talk radio ruled the discourse, I was listening to a national teacher union leader talk with a right-leaning—and nationally recognized—radio host. The topic was teachers as catalysts for improving public education.

The union leader mentioned National Board Certification as a model for identifying teacher leaders, the kinds of folks whose classroom expertise was validated, whose ideas about advancing public school achievement could be valuable.

Radio host: So what do these so-called nationally certified teachers have to do to prove they’re good?

Union leader: Well, they are assessed on five core principles of pedagogical excellence. The first one is knowledge of their students, and what they need to succeed. Teachers need to be committed to their students and their learning.

Radio host (full of snark): So good teachers just have to love the kids? Hug ‘em until they drop out?

That conversation—which could have featured any of the podcasters grabbing the public ear in 2026—is familiar. Lots of media figures seem to feel that the cure for “fixing” public schools is coming down hard on kids, raising the bar, forcing them to pull up their (nonexistent) bootstraps and get to work, damn it.

I thought about that conversation when I read this headline:

‘Valentine’s Day events around Minneapolis take on the ‘horrors of the world’in the Minneapolis Star.

Tag line: After a heavy start to the year, some Minneapolis residents are using Valentine’s Day to love thy neighbor.

Bingo. ‘Love thy neighbor’ is currently working in besieged communities like the Twin Cities. It works in the classroom. In fact, getting along is Job #1 in classrooms.

Kindness. Patience. Respect, a two-way street.

And then—and only then—engagement. Communication and collaboration. Joy, even. Deep learning.

Why is that so hard to believe—or understand? Human beings seldom respond to fear, threats, isolation or humiliation. They shut down—or fight back. People who relish the idea that the modern-day equivalent of smacking kids’ hands with a ruler is a productive idea are wrong.

From the National Education Policy Center newsletter:

…70% [of surveyed U.S. principals] said that “[s]tudents from immigrant families have expressed concerns about their well-being or the well-being of their families due to policies
or political rhetoric related to immigrants.” These impacts on schools across the nation are shockingly pervasive, and those impacts can be devastating, even for those students not directly targeted. “Fear undermines the ability of public schools to foster a civic community,” [survey author John] Rogers told Education Week last month.

This is unsurprising—and none of this is new. The ecology of school success has always centered on relationships. When everyone—and this includes teachers—feels comfortable and part of the community, stuff gets done.

In fact, Herbert J. Taylor created a set of ethical guidelines for the Rotary Club in 1932 that might be useful for anyone concerned with kids’ well-being in 2026. It consists of four questions to guide all our decisions:

  1. Is it the TRUTH? 2. Is it FAIR to all concerned? 3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? 4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

Is our government using any of these old-fashioned, even corny, principles to guide their actions around immigration? Or election security? Or ethical business practice?

Do we have to love our students? No. That’s not reality—or practical.

But caring for each other may be the only thing that will save us, in these dark times.
Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Dispatch from New Mexico

We are in Carlsbad, New Mexico at 5:30 on a Saturday night, hoping to grab a quick dinner at a Chili’s that seems to be THE happening place for families. There are kids running around outdoors—it’s a balmy 70 degrees—while their parents wait for a table. We grab the only two seats at the bar.

It’s clear that this is also the place where the working men of Carlsbad relax. All of the stools and tables in the bar area are filled with big, tattooed dudes. If we were in Michigan, they’d be in Carhartt, but here, it’s baseball caps and faded black T-shirts. The friendly, attractive bartender—who’s also wearing a black T-shirt with “Just Dump Him” surrounded by a heart–is taking drink orders in English and Spanish. She seems to know everyone in the place.

The guy sitting next to me is on his phone—speaking Spanish—in intense conversation, for maybe 10 minutes, punctuated by laughter.  A teenager carrying a bucket of ice appears to refill the bar supply and the guy hails him. Cruz! the kid says—and they hug over the bar and chatter some more. It feels like we’re guests in this place, with the regulars just carrying on around us.

Then the guy next to me says—Do you mind if I ask something? Sure, I say (wiping my mouth—Chili’s does have great ribs). How long have you been married? he asks. Forty-seven years, we tell him. I knew it, he says. I’m jealous. I’ve been watching you interact. You have what I wanted, but I am divorced.

We chat for about 15 minutes, occasionally looping in another guy, sitting next to my husband, who has an artificial leg. They’re mine workers. We tell them we’re going to Carlsbad Caverns, a bucket list thing, and they offer (good) advice. We hear about their kids and see adorable photos. I show them photos of the dog we adopted, Atticus, a stray who was reclaimed and trained by inmates in a Michigan prison.

My husband asks for the check and the bartender says it’s already been paid—by Cruz. I turn to protest and he says he does this all the time (the bartender nods, yup, he does). I’m not rich, he says—but I have plenty. More than enough. My pastor showed me how giving comes back to you. I thank you for showing me that love can last for 47 years.

The next morning, we go to Carlsbad Caverns and they’re spectacular indeed. That evening, in another New Mexico hotel, we watch a fabulous half-time show, full of color and love. It’s also in Spanish.

And the next day, we read all the wonderful (and alas, despicable) comments on Bad Bunny’s loving tribute to Puerto Rico, its history of oppression, his celebration of a unique culture, the importance of joy and love.

Fact: There are over 50 million Spanish speakers in the United States, and half a billion world-wide. We’re one of the few countries where speaking a second language is not considered essential, and where many states and school districts do not emphasize the value of learning to address the world through more than one language lens.

My own pastor, Reverend Lynne Fry, wrote this, which summarizes the point beautifully:

I’m hearing many people saying, “I just wish there were translated subtitles or some English lyrics”….

This is the point.

Where else in the everyday white American experience are we asked to be in a situation where we don’t know the cultural code, don’t speak the language, we feel like we are missing something?

This is frequently what it feels like to be an immigrant, a foreigner, an outsider, a minority. This is what many of our grandparents or great grandparents dealt with. This is what millions of Americans still experience every day.

Those who are white, English-only speakers were invited to experience it for 15 minutes. For many, the discomfort was intolerable. Many didn’t even try.

When invited to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, even if the fit is uncomfortable, will we?

What can—should—educators do to teach our children the beauty of other cultures, other languages, other faces? How can we reach over and share with the stranger?

Carlsbad Caverns, the Big Room. My photo.
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The Fault Line in American politics?

I’ve spent a lot of time considering this graphic.

IS education the fault line in American politics?

First shock: There are 33 states with more-educated people than (purple) Michigan, where there are world-class colleges and universities. What makes us an under-achiever?

2nd: Consider Trump’s mouth-blabber remark: “I love the poorly educated.” As well he should. They’re his base.

Digging deeper– what makes someone with a college degree more likely to vote Democratic? Does a college education make someone more broad-minded, more aware of the social and political factors influencing their well-being? Or is this all just about economics– being able to afford a college degree?

And personally–something I have been wrestling with since 2016–is there something I could have done, as a teacher, to model that broad-mindedness to my students?

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ICE: Not your friendly neighborhood cops

I was talking with an acquaintance, and made a comment about ICE being reported in Leelanau County. Don’t you want to see illegal immigrants gone? she asked. Besides, they’re only picking up the ones with a criminal record.

I was dumbfounded. I knew she was likely a Republican; our points of contact have nothing to do with politics. But still– it came as a shock to know that she felt ICE was doing good, justifiable work– keeping her safe, here in nearly all-white Leelanau County.

This didn’t feel political. It felt personal. How could anyone who’s paying attention to the news support an out-of-control federal agency, ripping families apart and harming American citizens, with our tax dollars? Could you be a good person while accepting government-sponsored violence against innocent people?

There were lots of questions I could have asked, researched and validated arguments to be made, beginning with data about the non-criminals and citizens who have been detained. But–shamefully, I admit–I said nothing, just changed the subject to the reason we were meeting.

Thinking it over, I resolved not to just ‘let it go’ anymore. It’s true that many of these folks have made up their mind and are impervious to facts. And, at this moment, nobody is out in the streets when the wind chill is 25 below.

But–thinking people, actual good citizens, care about the people who live in and serve their communities. We are not seeing public safety being played out. We are seeing the base of a presidential posse–men with vicious grudges and biases empowered to destroy public services and schools. We all need to speak up.

Even when it’s socially awkward or unlikely to change minds.

Why? Well– read the article below. It’s a gift article, so you can read the whole thing.

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Put Teachers in Charge of Their Own PD?

It feels weird to be opining about professional development when teachers in Minnesota are dealing with the effects of mayhem in the street, poisoning the normal ebb and flow of public schooling.

Is it exam week in the Minneapolis Public Schools, I find myself wondering—how will they handle that on-line, with a significant chunk of kids missing? Friends who teach in Minnesota share heartbreaking stories or ask me to donate $10 toward a project their students put together: getting food to families too frightened to shop. Incredible stressors for educators and also retired educators—thank you for all you are doing to keep schooling as safe as possible.

Coincidentally, it was a group of dynamic teachers in the Twin Cities area who first showed me what it really could look like to be in charge of their own professional learning. More on that later.

First, let me say the obvious. Teachers actually are, and always will be, in charge of whatever they decide they need to improve their teaching. For some, it will be a career-long quest to learn and try new things, building a practice with what works best. Others might be less enthused about the latest mandated program. You can lead a teacher to PD, but you can’t make them believe it’s useful.

The question is not what teachers need and want, to grow. It’s what administrators think they need, in the time set aside for professional development.

When principals and central office leaders are making the decisions (and hiring outside consultants)? EdWeek Research Center found that almost half of the respondents said the PD they are required to take is irrelevant. By contrast, 41% of the more than 650 school leaders surveyed at the same time said the PD they provided was “very relevant.”

This is an evergreen issue, of course. My district dabbled in a ‘choose your own PD’ model for a few years, giving teachers the choice to work in their own rooms or attend planned presentations. The lure of hours of uninterrupted time to plan lessons, run copies, review new materials, catch up on grading or chat with a partner teacher was irresistible.

Going home without a tote bag full of work? Priceless. But when only a handful of people showed up for the paid presenter? Embarrassing for the administrator who did the hiring. I say this having been one of those presenters once, setting up for 35 attendees and then having only four show up for a half-day workshop on National Board Certification.

In fact, it was a group of National Board Certified Teachers from a public high school in Minneapolis who proved to me that teacher-led professional development could be incredibly exciting and precisely targeted to the work of teaching specific students.

The name of the HS is not important—but it was a school with a high percentage of immigrant students, so there were ESL issues and poverty issues and old-building facility issues. Sometimes the assigned curricula just did not work for the students they had.

A progressive principal bought into the idea of genuine teacher leadership and re-arranged the classic HS schedule so that he was teaching classes daily, opening up time for teachers to take on traditional administrative tasks. Like professional development.

Teachers surveyed their colleagues—What do you need to know to teach your students well? What issues do you want to talk about?—and set up weekly brown-bag lunch chats and after-school gatherings at a local restaurant, with snacks paid by the school budget. There was intensive mentoring for new teachers and regular time set aside for teachers to tweak curriculum, as they were teaching it. Peer observations and conversations were built into daily practice.

A lot of what they were doing was around the use of time, shaving it off here and adding it there—only an experienced teacher can understand the difference adding 20 minutes to lunch makes, where some of the best professional development happens spontaneously.

The most impressive thing was not that teachers were ‘in charge of their own PD’—but that teachers were collaborating to build professional learning and conversations that made sense to them, on the fly.

The first question from the audience (of teachers): Did everyone in your building buy into this new, ongoing PD model? Answer: No. A couple left the building for what they saw as greener pastures. But several skeptics stayed and eventually became converts. And now, they said, when we hire, we let new teachers know they will be surrounded by support in that first year. It’s who we are—a team.

I’ve been thinking about that school, a lot, as we watch Trump’s quasi-militia wreak havoc on blue cities. Is there such a thing as professional preparation for having your teachers and students harassed? Are there materials that might help explain the chaos to kids? Will there someday be ed-conference sessions on the intersection of civic education and government coercion?

We didn’t start this fire. But teachers—beaten down and dissed by our own government—will have a role to play in rebuilding the idea of representative democracy. Right now, that’s our best hope.

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Where Do Kids Get Their Information?

Their music and media tell them individualism will pull them out of squalor. The people behind those messages shove the economic ladders from underneath them.   (Jose Vilson)

One of the most stunning bits of clarifying data I’ve seen in the past few weeks is this chart from Media Matters, with data from February 2025:

It’s a graphic of most listened-to online news and commentary shows, color-coded and sized to represent the magnitude and political leanings of the American audience. It’s year-old data, remember—but it goes some way toward answering the question I’ve spent the past year obsessing over: Who ARE these people and how could they have re-elected the corrupt man who led the insurrection against their pretty-good government?

I’m old enough to remember 2008, when Barack Obama’s online media savvy and fund-raising prowess was attracting voters and the envy of the other party, stuck in Walter-Cronkite land. Kids who were primary consumers of social media then, are in their 30s now, and apparently have shifted to eating up Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes.

But what are kids listening to in 2026?  I think the JLV, in two sentences, above, sums up what I’m thinking: They’re young. They’re being bamboozled by glitzy media and music, convinced that their own swagger will save them. And then it doesn’t. In fact, they’re a generation that almost certainly will experience less prosperity and fewer prospects than their parents’ generation.

I volunteer in an after-school program for middle-schoolers, usually on afternoons dedicated to homework (or missing assignments). It’s no secret to any teacher that a lot of incomplete and missing work happens because the students don’t know how to do it. They will finally tell you—I don’t get this—after making excuses and going to their locker or the bathroom three times. This happens a lot with math, but also with conventional Q & A, end-of-chapter reviews and short writing assignments.

Our kids have their own Chromebooks and most of the teachers provide several vetted information sources beyond the textbook, which is great. But only if students go there, and wade around. Unfortunately, chatbots have now given them a get-out-of-jail quick option.

These students are—I emphasize—not dumb (or any similar but less insulting word). After homework is completed, we often play board games or cards. They understand and can negotiate things that the games require—similes and other wordplay, strategy and logic, memory. Some are also readers (passing around personally owned books that I never ask to see). There are conversations full of humor and current music and YouTube video references.

But at age twelve or so—where are they getting their information about the world at large? On the day after the 2024 election, our coordinator stopped by to remind volunteers NOT to speak about the election. Not that any of the kids mentioned it. It was as if it hadn’t happened.

A couple of days ago, there was a local protest in town about the Venezuelan invasion, and Indivisible posted photos on their Facebook page. This drew a flood of bot comments and an irritated response from protest organizers. Bots have taken over the normal give-and-take on many social media advocacy platforms. We are no longer getting honest news from legacy sites, and right-wing frat-boy videographers get millions of eyeballs on their dishonest grift.

If we can’t count on legacy media, who’s going to sort through those red and blue bubbles of independent media? It’s going to take more than hope and good will to teach kids to be critical consumers of media and music, to discern the difference between glittering generalities and sometimes unpleasant truth.

Somebody needs to clue them in to the fact that not all elected and appointed leaders can be trusted, and actors and musicians run the gamut from good guys to sleaze . There are malignant forces in the world,  people who are capable of extreme evil, which, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is typically characterized by mediocrity. 

Of course, teachers are proscribed from sharing their opinions on the best sources of accurate and unbiased information, lest they be labeled DEI or woke. Makes you wonder how the public opinion on DEI and woke, two ideas that were once debatable if not accepted, solidified into broadly understood negative concepts. Where did that “information” come from?

Because I hang out with middle schoolers on the regular, I don’t think it’s too late to take a stand for discretion around the truthfulness of media sources. But simply letting the red bubbles win is a mistake.

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TIASL Good Books of 2025

I’ve read a lot of books this year—114, according to my Goodreads account (more on that in a minute). Interestingly, not many of them were five-star reads. Kind of like the discourse around 2025 in general: a whole lot going on, little of it particularly enlightening or inspiring.

I tried to focus on fictional books, because the large bulk of what I read, day to day, is newsletters and newspapers, op-eds and social media posts, as we collectively watch the Great American Dismantling. Fiction serves as escape, and even medicine for the disheartened soul. Quality fiction, that is—books that have something to say while entertaining the reader.

I’m sharing eleven good books I read in 2025—two non-fiction, nine fiction, plus two series that I’ve come to love.

But first, a question: Is anyone using Storygraph to record your reading? I’d like to disengage from Goodreads—it’s a Jeff Bezos thing, plus there are now some irritations around their features. I got a Storygraph account but found it confusing and cluttered.

One of my dearest friends, with whom I exchange book titles regularly, finds all on-line book-reading apps confusing and unnecessary, and still records her reads and to-reads in a spiral notebook. At the end of the year, she counts. Or doesn’t. Because how many books doesn’t matter—it’s about how much you enjoyed the books, where they lead you.

I wish I could go full-blown purist, too. But I like tracking not only how many, but whether I’ve already read something (series titles will fool you, when they all sound the same). Any advice on book apps?

So here are my best 2025 reads—some new books, some merely recent. If you want to read my reviews (they’re short), click on the bolded title.

Non-fiction

I only read two memorably great non-fiction books this year, and both were memoirs written by women I deeply admire. I’d put Atwood on my list of ten favorite authors, and while her memoir is endlessly detailed, it’s also full of snark and deliciously tart observations. I wrote a whole blog (linked below) on Ravitch’s book, a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a personal education hero.

Book of Lives (Margaret Atwood)

An Education: How I Changed My Mind about Schools and Almost Everything Else (Diane Ravitch)

Fiction

It wasn’t a great year for fiction reading. Maybe it was the heavy lifting fiction had to do to drop me into another world without being lightweight or predictable. I have collected a couple dozen promising books on my e-reader to take on a winter vacation, because it’s clear we’re in for another year where reality is intolerable. In the meantime, here are nine—very different–books I could recommend.

The Heart of Winter (Jonathan Evison)

The Frozen River (Ariel Lawhon)

The Wilderness (Angela Flournoy)

Heartwood (Amity Gaige)

So Far Gone (Jess Walter)

The Jackal’s Mistress (Chris Bohjalian)

James (Everett Percival)

The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley)

The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden)

I’d also like to mention two book series that have reached must-read levels for me, like the books of Louise Penney, Donna Leon, John Sandford or others whose latest installments are anticipated returns to familiar worlds and characters.

Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman)

I found the first book in the 5-book series cute and cozy, but unremarkable. But with each outing, I added stars, and the fourth book was outstanding. The most recent—The Impossible Fortune—was just as good.

At Midnight Comes the Cry (Julia Spencer-Fleming)

I was pleased to see that Spencer-Fleming’s 10th outing in her small-town cop-meets-Episcopal priest series made the NYT list of best mysteries of 2025. It may be Spencer-Fleming’s last book, so if you want to set off on a series, give it a try.

And now—talk among yourselves. What did you read and love? Disagree with my list?

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Most  Depressing Blogs of 2025

“A generation raised under the [moral tone set by FDR] went on to build the modern middle class, defeat fascism, and help construct a postwar world that valued democracy, human rights, and shared prosperity.

Contrast that with the bigoted, hateful, revenge-filled claptrap children have heard for the past decade from the emotionally stunted psychopath currently occupying the White House.”                                                                                                          Thom Hartmann

My goal in blogging—something I’ve been doing for almost 25 years—has always been to write about what it’s like to be a teacher in the United States. I wanted to focus on teacher leadership, to write about the ‘inconsistencies and inspirations, the incomprehensible, immoral and imaginative, in American education.’

Because—back in 2001, when I got my first paid gig writing on the internet (there were unpaid local newspaper columns before that), there were many inspiring things to write about, from my own experience as a classroom teacher. There were also important questions about instruction, thorny policy issues and curricular problems to solve, but it really felt as if public school educators were on the same page—valuing democracy, human rights, shared prosperity, as Thom Hartmann says.

You could see a turning point coming. Topics from my December 28, 2016 “best blogs” review when I was writing for Education Week: Charters aren’t the answer. Women are disrespected even in a field where they’re a huge majority. We still don’t know what “teacher leadership” looks like—or might accomplish. Standards may shape practice, but they don’t automatically raise achievement. Competition and marketing aren’t the answer, either. And the future of public education is in serious jeopardy.

Going through the blogs I wrote this year was an exercise in dismay. Although I had many rewarding experiences volunteering in schools, in 2025, pulling the camera back to see where we’re going in pubic education is – no other word—monumentally depressing.

Here are 10 blogs from 2025 that I think represent our current trajectory, such as it is. Wish I could offer readers better news:

Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

You might say that teachers’ observations and informal experiments—Teach it this way? Or that?—are the most valuable action research data to build a successful practice. But don’t say it too loud, because research is tied tightly to the source of the money that funds it—and the commercial products and politics that drive educational change.

“Progressive” Schools

Speaking as a person who has spent decades working in public schools and with public school teachers across the country, schools are generally among the most conventional and cautious institutions on the planet, subject to pressures and opinions from a wide range of (often clueless) critics. And likely headed by someone who adamantly does not want to get phone calls from honked-off parents.

Moral Clarity in the Classroom

If we were to sit down together over a cup of coffee, I could tell you dozens of stories from my teaching career that illustrate both moral clarity in my classroom, as well as times when I absolutely failed at establishing a trusting, collaborative ecology. It’s probably enough to say that I got way better at it, over 30+ years.

What I Still Believe about Public Education

Why would we abandon public schools’ infrastructure and experienced personnel? Crushing public education is not policy—it’s vandalism. It makes no sense.

Maybe the question is not: Is Public Education Over? Maybe the question is: What’s worth saving in public education?

Political Violence in the Classroom

Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.

The Good News in August and Why It’s Baloney

 This is not just another start of school. This is (among other things) the first school year since 1979 when there hasn’t been a functional Department of Education. It’s a year when there’s now concrete evidence that addressing equity and appreciating diversity can get you fired. It’s a year when federal funding —especially for the neediest schools—can disappear overnight. Maybe never to return.

What’s Better than DEI?

Actually, if you’re taking away (via federally approved punishments and reduced funding) inclusion, equity and diversity, what you’ve got left is exclusion of non-preferred students, discriminatory distribution of resources, and separation of student groups based on physical characteristics. In other words, Arkansas in 1957. What happens when a latter-day Orval Faubus emerges?

Boys

While it’s important for boys to have personal agency in their learning, and be trusted by their teachers, boys need to have role models, as well. Who are we offering up as heroes, men whose lives and actions are worthy and admirable? Men worth emulating, who care for their spouses and children, men whose values serve as guardrails, men who are civically engaged?

Boys are growing up in schools where their neighbors on the school board worry about “weaponizing empathy.”  Where men at the highest levels of government power are uninformed bullies, careless in their actions but never held accountable.  

Five Things Your Child’s Teacher Accomplished Last Week

When I first heard about Elon Musk’s email blast to over two million federal employees directing them to submit approximately five bullet points of what they accomplished in the previous week, I was reminded of a couple of school administrators from my past.

Eugene Robinson called Musk’s scheme “an exercise in contempt”—also a great description of some of the so-called professional development teachers routinely endure. When a principal doesn’t trust their professional staff to know what they’d like to do with time available for their own learning or planning, you end up with meaningless exercises like “five things I did last week.”

Ultimately, it’s about control.

Who’s in Favor of Authoritarianism?
For the current administration, bent on “saving” federal dollars for their own preferences, breaking up this monolith will be a giant display of power that impacts some 50 million students and their families. Think you’re in charge of your local school, your classroom? Think again. Easy peasy.

No, the federal government–and supporting Republicans and conservative courts–say. No, we don’t want your media literacy classes. No, we don’t want kids nosing around in issues like fairness and equity in our recent history. No speaking Spanish. No arts classes or events to help students make sense of the world they live in. No vaccines to protect them, or accurate health information.

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O Christmas Tree

… A Fox host said this weekend that more Americans need to buy artificial Christmas trees because tree farms are needed for AI data centers: “There will be transmission lines that have to go through developments and farms. That’s the nature of a growing economy. Everybody needs to get on board. Buy a fake tree.”  (Meidas)

I live in northern Michigan. Michigan is the third highest producer of Christmas trees in the U.S., harvesting around 2 million trees each year. We have over 500 tree farms, most concentrated in the upper half of the Mitten.

Friends of mine, growing up, had low-paying summer jobs trimming the little firs and pines into their eventual iconic triangle shapes. It’s a crappy job in early summer—dangerous and scratchy—but hey. Lots of teenagers have crappy jobs. It’s America.

I have never had an artificial tree. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, have beautiful artificial trees, for all kinds of reasons—convenience, cleanliness, allergies—and I am seriously Not Judging.

But learning from Fox News that I should buy an artificial tree—presumably to make tree farming, a local industry, fail so that the devalued land could be looted for an AI data center—made my holiday blood boil.

Tree farms—like this one—do not despoil the rolling, wooded terrain of northern Michigan, unlike AI data centers. Most are family businesses, employing local people, investing for decades in trimming and watering, for an annual end-of-year payoff. Unlike AI data centers.

As it happens, a proposed AI Data Center in nearby Kalkaska was withdrawn after resistance to the project was quickly organized. I was surprised—Kalkaska is the quintessential up-north town, with pine-paneled bars and pot shops as the main business thrust, plus a giant trout fountain in the middle of town.

You’d think they’d jump at the chance to build a huge data factory—construction jobs in an uncertain economy when unemployment is rising?  But no. They knew that “the nature of a growing economy” was going to come back to bite them with ugly power lines, jacked-up utility prices and the loss of 1500 acres of state-owned land.

When Fox News decides that fake trees are patriotic, urging us to buy plastic trees mostly made in China, to support the modern economy, something is very wrong.

But you already knew that.

We have purchased beautiful live trees from three different local sources—two of which have gone out of business in the past decade. We are scaling back this year, with a 9-foot Fraser Fir (the photo, a 12-foot Fraser, is from two years ago). Neither of us wants to get on anything higher than a stepstool anymore.

The tree cost $60, a $10 increase over last year, with the elderly, babushka-ed lady at the cash register apologizing to each and every customer. They have to charge more, she says, to stay in business. There are lots of post-teens working—hard—in the miserable cold, probably the same ones who had summer jobs trimming trees with machetes.

Our tree was cut less than 24 hours before we took it home, bundled and tied into the back of our pickup by those same local guys. It can eventually be chipped into mulch. It smells nice.

Best of all, it’s a subtle strike-back at the wave of Artificial “Intelligence” rolling toward us.

O Tannenbaum. Wie Treu sind deine Blatter.

Happy Holidays to all Teacher in a Strange Land readers.

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Are Schools the Problem?

I was somewhere between irritated and curious when I saw the headline: America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem? The subhead: From A.D.H.D. to anxiety, disorders have risen as the expectations of childhood have changed.

Well, yeah. A.D.H.D. is now better defined and diagnosed. And I certainly believe that anxiety is on the rise with our youngest people—their world came crashing down five years ago with a global pandemic.

Although I don’t think the subhead writers were thinking of this, anxiety must be through the roof for children of the undocumented, attending school while praying that their mom will come home after work and that they will still be citizens after the Supreme Court gets another whack at the Fourteenth amendment.

But have our expectations of children really changed? And are schools at fault?

Annoying headline aside, there’s a lot of alarming data in the article:

‘One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016. The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31. Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.’

It’s actually an informative read. Diane Ravitch deftly reviewed the piece in a blog post entitled Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood. In fact, people have been writing about the ever-growing pressure on kids to excel for decades (especially those in high schools where getting into the Ivies or considering a gap year is common).

A couple of decades ago, ironically, we were talking about high-pressure Asian schools and why Singapore topped the international test scores. Was that what our kids needed—a literal kick in the pants? More competition? And why wasn’t the school providing that?

Here’s the thing: Schools in general—more about that word in a minute—aren’t the cause of students’ mental health issues. Schools do what they can with what they’re given, and what they are directed to do, for the most part.

First, a “school” is not precisely defined. Let’s say a good school has competent teachers, capable and cooperative support staff, thoughtful administrators, a clean and safe facility and enough resources to serve the kids assigned there. Those features can all be undone by bad policies and the social factors surrounding the school.

When the halls are lined with buckets catching snowmelt, when there is no library or science equipment, when one of the children hid a gun in his backpack—where do we place blame? On voters who turned down the school bond issue? On the beleaguered principal? The careless parents who set a bad example? State legislatures that take money away from high-poverty public schools and give it to those who can afford private schools?

To say that “schools” are responsible for an uptick in mental health issues for students is not only unfair—it’s not accurate. The world—especially in 2025—is a scary place. For many (not all, but many) kids, school is the safest place for them to be, and I include in that number children who live in nice houses and have plenty to eat.

Have our expectations for children changed? Yes, and often in damaging ways.

Just talk to teachers. They’ll tell you that kindergarten is the new first grade. They’ll share stories of kids whose behavior is driven by shame and frustration. They’ll tell you that 15 minutes of outdoor play is a benefit, not a waste of time better used on worksheets. They’ll testify that building a cooperative community is always the first step toward learning, in pre-school and in chemistry class. They can tell stories about seeing kids work through an academic roadblock, with patience and humor—not shaming and blaming.

Veteran teachers will also pinpoint the time at which screen time and access to inappropriate, even dangerous, content began to change the way kids talk to and about each other.

Maybe we start addressing mental health issues by understanding just what it is that is making children anxious and distracted, and putting our attention and resources there.

 Don’t misunderstand—I’m not saying that schools (in addition to all the other jobs they’re expected to do) can “fix” a child with failing mental health. But schools can be a significant factor in contributing to a child’s sense of security, belonging and worth.

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Youth. For Christ? At School?

I should probably preface what I’m about to say by noting that I self-identify as a liberal Christian. Without getting too far into the theological weeds—or alienating those who are rightfully skeptical about some current Christian churches’ lack of commitment to feeding the poor, etc.—I have been a church member and/or employee for decades, off and on.

All the way back to the 5th grade, in fact, playing “Angels We Have Heard on High” on my flute and swapping out my little-kid animal ears for a white robe and tinsel halo in the church Christmas pageant. Good times.

Or maybe—not so good. I’ve dealt with the insertion of religious tunes into public school holiday programs for my entire career. It’s the evergreen issue for music teachers in December. Bottom line: Public schools need to tread lightly, when it comes to the separation of church and state, even at times when you are hearing angels on high in your local grocery store or used car lot.

I retired—for good—from my last church music director position after Easter, and have since had the pleasant experience of being asked to play in several local churches, which are always looking for free talent.

Last summer, I was surprised to play a service and see two dozen teenagers seated together. There was a junior trad-wife fashion sense for the girls, all with long, curled hair and cute summer dresses. The girls were mostly carrying Bibles; the boys, with their llama-head haircuts, were carrying phones (and scrolling on them during the sermon).

Later, I learned that they were a newly organized chapter of Youth for Christ, meeting with their leaders (an attractive, early-20s married couple), in their home for coffee and prayer before school. Several of them had been baptized by that couple in Lake Michigan, earlier that month.

The guy sitting next to me at the service whispered that he was hoping that these kids were associated with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which claims over 1000 chapters in high schools across the country: ‘Turning Point USA is also getting an assist from Republican leaders. The U.S. Department of Education announced it was partnering with the organization, along with dozens of other conservative groups, to launch a coalition to produce educational programming for schools and universities in advance of America’s 250th birthday next year.’

Eek.

I can’t tell you, precisely, what made me most uneasy about seeing perhaps 25 teenagers attending a conservative church en masse. None of the small, rural churches in this county have dozens of HS-aged members, for starters—so their organizational point was obviously somewhere other than an actual church. And the occasional teenager who showed up at the church where I worked never came dressed like a candidate on Bama Rush or looking like a Department of Labor poster boy.

It turns out that the Youth for Christ leaders are salaried, and were posted here to start a chapter, a task they accomplished by volunteering at a local school district. They got some help from a friendly uncle (real estate here is sky-high), and found a place downtown to meet, then began recruiting the kids they met while volunteering as tutors and cafeteria supervisors.

And, miracle of miracles, parents in this conservative community didn’t like it. There were 78 non-consent forms, representing 109 minor children, filed with the Youth for Christ leaders and their organization, saying, essentially: Hands off our kids. If we want them to have religious experiences, we’re in charge of that.

It’s a small school—109 minor children represent a third of the school population. YFC is undeterred, planning to establish a ‘teen hangout’ in the tiny resort downtown, courtesy of Generous Uncle. And downtown merchants, perennially cramped for space, parking and business have turned this into a zoning issue. They might actually win—as I noted, this is a conservative, business-friendly town.

But I want to return to the Christianity—if that’s the right word—inherent in recruiting members for your religious club from a public school setting. When I think about all the angst about not referencing equity, inclusion or diversity in school curricula, and all the book-banning Moms 4 Censorship types showing up at school board meetings, shouldn’t there have been outrage over paid recruiters “volunteering” and proselytizing during lunch?

Not long after Charlie Kirk was killed, CA Governor Gavin Newsome remarked on his goal of organizing young men as effectively as the TPUSA model does. He asked why left-leaning young men have not collectively fought the ‘epidemic of loneliness’ with liberal activism. I don’t have an answer for that, but it’s a good question.

In the season where Jesus sneaks into the daily life of families and communities—Joy to the World!—I am in favor of parents’ careful attention to who’s recruiting their kids.

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Gratitude and Canned Goods—Teaching Children to Care

From one of my must-reads, Culture Study, on November 12:

‘If you’re not on TikTok, you might not have heard about the woman who’s been calling religious organizations to see how they respond to a mom’s request to source formula for her two-month-old daughter, whose cries you can hear in the background. (Nikalie does not have a two-month-old daughter; she plays a recording of a baby’s cries in the background).

Nikalie records the conversations (Kentucky, where she lives, is a one-party consent state, so this is legal) and then posts them to TikTok, along with a tally of how many organizations have offered to help and how many have declined. You can see all the videos here, but viewers have been compelled by the overall stats: only a quarter of the religious organizations she’s called have offered direct assistance. The larger the organization, the less likely it is to help.‘

Even if you’ve seen the Tiktok, I recommend reading the Culture Study piece, wherein Anne Helen Petersen deftly dissects this kind-of experiment, pointing out that some of the organizations that did not offer formula or money sent the caller to another resource, where they did.

She also raises the right questions: How do we help the needy efficiently, elevating proven logistics above feel-good impulses? Should religious institutions have serving the poor as an ongoing mission? (Yes.) And—why are there so many needy folks right now?

As a veteran teacher, in a relatively well-off suburban school system, I’ve been part of any number of school-based community service projects. My middle school used to have a canned goods drive around Thanksgiving.

Homerooms competed to see who could bring in the most cans, with the winning class getting donuts and cocoa. Piling the cans into an edifice—you can make a fairly impressive structure with hundreds of them—then plunking a few students in front of the Great Can Pyramid—well, there’s a shot for the monthly newsletter.

But it always bothered me. There were the rabid competitors—Come on! Just go where your mom stores cans and put a few in your gym bag!—who were definitely in it to win it. I mean, free donuts! From the bakery! There were also plenty of well brought-up girls who wanted to feed the poor (and maybe get their photo in the newsletter), counting and re-counting the cans.

The people who didn’t get mentioned: The Student Council advisor who had to transport a thousand-plus cans to the food bank. And food bank volunteers who had to organize the donations, throwing out outcoded or bulging cans of beets and butterbeans.

Not to mention the folks who depend on food banks, getting there early to get what they actually needed (formula, perhaps) and not be left with stuff that had been sitting in suburban cupboards for years, unused.

For several years, I was advisor to the National Junior Honor Society, the stated mission of which was acknowledging scholastic excellence in middle schoolers. Hey, I was always down to honor academic effort, and lots of my band kids were in the NJHS. It was one of those “make of it what you will” volunteer jobs, and I thought it was a place where some smart kids could wrestle with the idea that they were more fortunate than—well, the rest of the world. A middle school kind of noblesse oblige.

One year, we raised money by hosting a dance, then sent those proceeds to a homeless coalition in Detroit. It was a pretty bloodless project—the only outcome for us was a nice thank-you note from the nonprofit—but it was a good opportunity to talk about just who the homeless were, and how you get to be without shelter in the richest country in the world.

Another year, we “adopted” a family through the local Salvation Army (this was before their stance on LGBTQ folks was questioned), to provide a nicer Christmas. The first order of business, after raising a few hundred dollars, was discussing the word “adoption,” relative to extending charity to folks who are less well-off, but live in the same community. We were not adopting anyone; we were providing temporary, anonymous assistance.

Then, we went shopping. There were two cars full of 8th graders, with lists provided by the Salvation Army, pushing carts around Meijers, picking up a holiday dinner and gifts for everyone in our assigned family. What was interesting to me was the assumption that “the poor” weren’t like the kids in the NJHS; they should have to live with less expensive, less attractive products and even be grateful for them.

In our assigned family was a girl (14), who needed a warm winter jacket. The kids debated: the cheaper, ugly one or the acceptable style that was $20 more? This took a lot of time, standing in the aisle. I asked: Would YOU wear cheaper/ugly? No. Never in a million years. So—why should she? The answer (a good answer): because then we could get frozen macaroni and cheese for their Christmas dinner.

In the end, the chaperone mom and I kicked in extra cash, and we got them both. But life isn’t always like that.

I don’t think you can teach kids to care for their neighbors via school projects—but you can teach them to think about inequity and compassion. Just because SNAP benefits returned this month does not mean the less fortunate will be well fed in the long term. And the misfortunes of rising unemployment, rising food prices and rising social uncertainty will not be ending soon.

The foundations for eliminating food insecurity are cracking. The best gifts: Money and time. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Absence Makes the Smart Go Wander

Recently, Bridge Magazine—a Michigan-focused news venue—ran a series of articles on the appalling numbers of absences that Michigan schoolchildren have been racking up since (and, let’s be honest, before) the pandemic.

Last year, more than a quarter of Michigan students, nearly 388,000, were considered “chronically absent,” which includes excused and unexcused absences — everything from sickness and appointments to skipping school without parents’ knowledge. Before the pandemic, there were 290,000 chronically absent students, or 19.7% of public school students. 

The definition of chronically absent? Ten percent of the school year, or 18 days. There’s a handy little infographic where you can see how your district ranks, and how their absence rate has fared in the past six years. I was happy to see that the suburban school where I taught for more than 30 years, and the district where I now live and volunteer have low absence rates, generally a mark of an economically secure community. Kind of like test scores.

Also—like test scores—high rates of absenteeism are something that outside observers (read: Bridge Magazine) seem to want to pin on school districts. Here’s a headline: Unlike Michigan, Indiana got tough on missing school. It’s already working. Bridge features a story about the low absence rate in Fremont, Indiana, just across the border, with a photo of a motherly kindergarten teacher and her (white) students.

‘New [Indiana] laws standardize school response to absences, threaten criminal action against students and families and create a reporting system that streams data daily from individual classrooms to state officials.

Fremont has fewer economically disadvantaged students (about 40%), which researchers tie to increased absenteeism, but district leaders say they also have stepped up effort to help get kids in school. Small buses pick up homeless students, schools offer telehealth and dentistry care and a countywide “teen court” serves as a first accountability step for some truant teens.’

Well, bully for Indiana—especially for picking up homeless kids and offering wraparound services for those who might be inclined to skip school because they can’t get there, or their clothes are dirty, or their tooth hurts. I’m guessing that if Michigan schools could lower their rate of disadvantaged students our absence rates would also drop. As for threatening criminal action—truancy has been a recurring issue since forever, and carrots work better than sticks in encouraging positive habits and behaviors.

In one of Bridge’s articles about the Shocking Absence Crisis, this interesting tidbit appeared:

‘Last year, 162 school districts — 59 traditional and 103 charters — faced potential financial penalties for school days when fewer than 75% of students showed up. In five districts, all charter schools, the 75% threshold wasn’t met at least 22 days, according to data provided to Bridge Michigan by the Michigan Department of Education.’ 

There are about 540 fully public (not charter) school districts in Michigan, and around 300 charter schools. Data is murky—but thumbnail math says that just over 10% of fully public school districts (which includes many large urban districts and small, remote rural schools) have serious attendance problems. Meanwhile, over a third of charter schools (which are smaller and more select) are struggling with absences—and the most egregious rates (the ones dragging down the statewide numbers) come from charter schools.

Bridge did not provide that analysis. Interesting.

When thinking about the results of so many kids missing school, Bridge naturally turns to test scores. I’m not even going to summarize, because it’s exactly what you’d expect: kids who don’t go to school very often get lower test scores and struggle to learn to read. But that doesn’t mean they’re dumb, or unworthy. It means we’re not digging into the real roots of the problem.

The more essential questions are why kids aren’t attending, and how to bring them back into the gotta-go-to-school fold. What people and programs might fill their needs, invite them into a safe community?

With elementary students, absences are tied to parent behaviors—so Fremont, Indiana has the right idea: buses, free health and dental care, after-school programs, etc. With older students, building communities—sports, clubs, co-ops, supervised hangouts—are lures, but in the end, teenagers come to school to learn, to let their minds wander. When that doesn’t happen, if there’s nobody dragging you out of bed in the morning, why bother?

Here’s a footnote to the discussion: Should Kids Miss School for Vacation? Parents Say Yes, Teachers Aren’t So Sure. Synopsis: Parents are defensive about getting better prices on a Disney or skiing vacation and pulling their kids from school for family fun. Teachers are resentful about being required to rustle up packets and other busy work while Kid misses classroom discussions and contributions to group projects. Grades become an issue.

Speaking personally, I’ve never flipped out over kids missing a few days, especially if you get advance warning and a request for work that comes back completed. Learning is never uniform and predictable, and learning (not filling boxes in the gradebook) is the ultimate goal. Right?

I’ve been asked to excuse a two-month absence for a boy traveling to Egypt with his energy engineer father, and dealt with a championship snowboarder who missed most of a marking period but came back with Olympic and career goals, and a fistful of medals.

The first boy was an A student. He couldn’t make up what he missed—but the life experience more than made up for that. The second boy read at a 2nd grade level, a fact reinforced by several teachers when his parents told us about the tour of events he’d entered. Finally, his mother said: So we shouldn’t let him do what he’s so great at—we should make him stay here and fail all his assignments? How does that help him?

I have thought about her many times. Partly about the privilege well-heeled white parents have in managing their children’s absences—but also in considering why students stop coming to school.

If kids aren’t showing up to school, maybe it’s not about better data streams or legal threats, or texting their parents at the right time.

Maybe they don’t want to stay in school and fail their assignments, convinced that nobody cares much. What should we be doing about that?

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Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

The world of education research is replete with studies that feel… unnecessary to folks who have spent their careers in front of K-12 classrooms. Primarily because so much good research is ignored in practice, and so much bad research becomes conventional wisdom.

For example—scientific inquiries  affirm that the best age to begin formal reading instruction would be about seven years old. Ask any early childhood teacher what our literacy success rate would be were we to initiate two-hour formal reading blocks in second grade, leaving room in kindergarten and first grade for lots of read-alouds, rhyming, picture books, letter-sound correspondence activities and development of oral language.

It’s more than that. Teachers with a few years under their belt have well-developed opinions about the best special education placements, the benefits of free play, and why taking your students outdoors yields physical and intellectual growth. Teachers can speak articulately about the post-pandemic changes in student behaviors.

How do they know about these things? Experience. Paying attention to what happens in their daily practice.

You might say that teachers’ observations and informal experiments—Teach it this way? Or that?—are the most valuable action research data to build a successful practice. But don’t say it too loud, because research is tied tightly to the source of the money that funds it—and the commercial products and politics that drive educational change.

There are lots of reasons why education research is suspect—or products are published to great fanfare, then sink like an oversized silver bullet:  An analysis of 30 years of educational research by scholars at Johns Hopkins University found that when a maker of an educational intervention conducted its own research or paid someone to do the research, the results commonly showed greater benefits for students than when the research was independent. On average, the developer research showed benefits — usually improvements in test scores —  that were 70 percent greater than what independent studies found.

Hmmm. I’d put my money on teacher perspectives about instructional strategies and materials, especially if teachers were in charge of their own professional work and offered ongoing opportunities to assess worthy curricula and teaching techniques.

Keeping the problems with ed research in mind (a book-length topic), I was amused to see this headline in Education Week this morning: Teachers Value ‘Patriotic’ Education More than Most Americans.

(Dangerous but brave) subheading: The findings stand in contrast to conservative rhetoric about ‘indoctrination’ in the social studies. And surprise! The polls themselves were conducted by EdChoice, a nonprofit advocacy organization supporting school choice, and the Morning Consult Public Opinion Tracker.

‘More than 80% of K-12 teachers thought it was “very” or “extremely” important to teach students about the Constitution’s core values, and 62% found it similarly crucial to teach that America is a fundamentally good country. In both cases, teachers were more likely than parents or the public at large to favor teaching these concepts.’

Least surprising education research result, ever. Kind of shoots holes in the ‘teachers practice leftist brainwashing’ theory that the privatizers and public school vandals keep advancing. The study showed that 57 percent of parents thought schools should overtly teach patriotism and loyalty to the United State—the exact same percentage as teachers.

There’s more: ‘Both Democratic and Republican teachers were less likely than similarly affiliated members of the public to think it important to teach students to question government actions and policies.’

Again—totally predictable. Schools are inherently moderate and cautious, politically. Your teenager is far more likely to become radicalized—in either direction—via their online presence. Online—where there isn’t a caring and educated adult moderating the decontextualized content they are reading.

I am a retired teacher, but I spent more than three decades explicitly teaching my students about being an engaged citizen, and appreciating the cultural mix that is America. I am a patriot.

Like most teachers, I am grateful to be an American. I didn’t need research to tell me so.

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Who ARE these people? Part II

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about people whose core political beliefs represented the sincere hope that the country would radically improve under the second Trump term. It was titled Who ARE These People?

It represented a sentiment I hear all the time: I can’t believe there are people who think Trump is the second coming. Who in their right mind could see him as a transformative leader? Who does not perceive the grifting, the rank incompetence, the prejudice, the lies—and the danger to a functioning democracy?

Companion questions: What percentage of the population understands and genuinely embraces Trump and the cadre of people surrounding him, currently disassembling our government? Who ARE the people who think it is Trump’s right to tear down the East Wing of the White House? Who ARE the people who believe that dangerous crime is surging, that food prices are dropping, that cutting SNAP benefits and Medicaid will teach those lazy slackers a lesson? Oh—and don’t use Tylenol!

And—key point—where are those folks getting their information? How do we counter obvious lies? Including lies published on official government websites and broadcast in airports?

Yeah—I know. You read this stuff, too—eye-popping, outrageous stories—and ask the same questions.

Maybe you’re wondering if teachers—underpaid and overworked—could have done more to establish the habit of questioning authority, discerning which evidence and rhetoric are reliable. Examining biases, looking at turning points in history, and so on.

Where were the people that Lucian Truscott calls yabbos educated? Who suggested to them that racism, sexism, and deceit were OK, if they were means to an end?

It’s exhausting.

This week Jonathon Last wrote this on The Bulwark:

‘Some large portion of voters do not appear to understand elementary, objective aspects of reality. We have jobs and lives, too. If we can understand reality, then they should be able to as well.

It does seem as though the last Democratic administration focused like a laser on economic issues. It managed the economy well, avoiding a recession and achieving a soft landing. It passed major, bipartisan legislation around Kitchen Table Issues like infrastructure spending. It kept the economy strong, with historically low unemployment and real-wage growth. It did not try to ban assault weapons but instead passed a gun-reform bill so sensible that it received bipartisan support. It successfully negotiated the most hawkish immigration reform bill in American history, only to have it sabotaged at the last minute by Donald Trump. These are actual things that happened in the real world over the course of 48 months.

Yet somehow all of this activity was invisible to voters? While these same people were highly attuned to the number of times LGBTQ appeared in the Democratic platform?

Which is it? Are the voters oblivious? Or are they discerning? Or does it depend on the situation: Willfully blind to some facts, but hyper-attuned to others?

Another theory is that voters are largely incapable of discerning reality, so expressed policy preferences matter much less than atmospherics and vibes. This theory holds that voters will respond more to entertainment or projections of strength than to a policy-based focus on the Real Issues.’

Whew. But probably—yes. Incapable of distinguishing reality from wish fulfillment. Rumor from news. Fool me once, twice, keep on fooling me, but it’s easy to vote (if you vote at all) by habit, not by analysis:

‘In fact, research into voting patterns in America suggests that it honestly doesn’t matter that much who or what a candidate looks like. When people go into the voting booth, they vote Republican or Democrat. When push comes to the ballot box, that little R and D matter more than all the Bud Light in the world.’

So. Here’s the real nub. If a third of American voters can’t tell fact from ugly fiction, or actually prefer to be governed by racists, quacks and the mentally diminished, if they are Republicans, what are we to do? Is this a permanent shift in American politics? Or are there ways to rebuild trust in our neighbors, our institutions, our national pride?

We can’t turn away if we want a just society. We can’t rely on the hope that seven million citizens singin’ songs and carryin’ signs will be enough. Because the destruction is too speeded up and too dangerous.  Rachel Bitecofer reminds us of a single line from a Warsaw Ghetto diary:

‘The writer had already lost his home, his livelihood, and most of his family. Rumors were spreading that deportations east meant death, and he wrote “We hear that being deported East means they are going to kill us, but there’s just no way the Germans would do that.”’

Lately, I have tried to focus on ways to reconnect with those who might regret their vote, or whose habitual partisan roots might finally seem like a bad habit. People who are becoming increasingly alarmed at seeing Bad Things happen, even though they remain safe and unharmed. Two thoughts:

(from Colorado organizer Pete Kolbenschlag):

‘This is the Ditch Principle: Your ditch neighbor may disagree with you about everything except keeping the water running —  so you start there. The neighbor who might pull you out of a snowbank doesn’t stop being your neighbor when you disagree about politics. Rural communities practice interdependence because isolation kills.’

(from Philosophy Professor Kate Manne):

‘How has Mamdani, an unapologetic socialist—and progressive Muslim and advocate for Palestinian rights—pulled off the feat of likely winning against the odds, against the tide, and against all early predictions? In part, I think, by calling forth the best from voters, rather than kowtowing to existing polling data.’

As a veteran educator, I hate saying this—but I don’t think this is something learned in required coursework, no matter how great your Civics curriculum is. Schools are a kind of stage, where society plays out its biases and beliefs, bad and good. Incorporating content standards into becoming a more responsible and caring human is something that can be modeled—but not tested and ranked.

There is no class syllabus that prescribes pulling your neighbor out of a snowbank—but if your dad pulls over on a snowy day to get a speeding classmate out of the ditch, you’ve learned an important lesson in interdependence. Likewise, there are teachers who call forth the best from students, by integrating facts and skills with compassion and curiosity.

I wish I had answers for these questions. What do YOU think?

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Diane Ravitch Sums It All Up

My introduction to Diane Ravitch: I can’t remember precisely which education conference it was, but I was in graduate school, so it was between 2005 and 2010. Ravitch had just begun writing her Bridging Differences blog with Deborah Meier at Education Week, a sort of point-counterpoint exercise. I had also just read her book The Language Police for a grad class, and—although she’d always been perceived as a right-wing critic of public education—found myself agreeing with some of her arguments.

She was on a panel at a conference session. I can’t remember the assigned topic, but after the presentation was opened up to questions, they were all directed to her. And she kept saying smart things about NCLB and testing and even unions. Finally, a gentleman got up to the microphone and said:

Who ARE you—and what have you done with Diane Ravitch? The room exploded in laughter. Ravitch included.

Ravitch has published two dozen books and countless articles. She is a historian—making her the Heather Cox Richardson of education history, someone who can remind you that when it comes to education policy, what goes around comes around. Her previous three books were, IMHO, masterpieces of analysis and logic, describing the well-funded and relentless campaign to destroy public education here in the U.S.

And now, at age 87, she’s written a kind of expanded autobiography, An Education: How I Changed my Mind about Schools and Almost Everything Else. She tells us how her vast experience with education policy, across partisan and ideological lines, has left her with a well-honed set of ideas about how to build good schools and serve students well. How, in fact, to save public education, if we have the will to do so.

You get the sense, as Diane Ravitch wraps up “An Education,” that she is indeed wrapping up– she sees this as her last opportunity to get it all out there: Her early life. How she found happiness. Mistakes and regrets, and triumphs. It’s a very satisfying read, putting her life’s work in context.

For her followers and admirers (count me in), the book explains everything about her beliefs. Her working-to-middle-class roots and her family’s loyalty to FDR and what the Democrats stood for, during post-World War II America, go a long way to explaining how she eventually (with some major diversions) became an articulate proponent of public education.

I’m glad she included a nostalgic portrait of growing up in TX with a hard-working mother and feckless (and worse) father. The glimpses we get into public education in TX in the post-war years resonated with me–and it’s easy to see how going far away to an Ivy League college shaped her entire adulthood. Her classmates at Wellesley, like Ravitch, were ambitious and curious; I’m old enough to remember a time when female ambition was suspect.

The most fascinating part of the book, for me, was the middle third, where she wrote about researching the history of public education and being asked to sit on prestigious boards and serve as Assistant Secretary in the George H. W. Bush Department of Education. There’s a whole chapter on Famous Education Opinion Leaders (many of whom are still working to suppress full public education) taking Diane to lunch, tapping into her work ethic and offering her opportunities to be part of the power structure, to write and speak (and—big point—learn what they’re really up to).

N.B.: Award-winning teachers are also often asked to become part of the education establishment by sitting on boards, writing op-eds, and serving on task forces– and it can be easy to feel as if you’re contributing, at a higher level, when what you are actually doing is giving credence to people who have a very different, but hidden, agenda.

The final third of the book is the Diane Ravitch most educators know and respect. Her observations come from swimming in the ocean of education policy for decades– and they’re accurate. I expect Ravitch to continue to blog and write and speak, as long as she is able. She is the rare voice in education that has examined education ideas across the spectrum and found many popular notions weak or dangerous.

The book is a fine testament to a life spent searching for the truth about public education.

Five stars.

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The Legislature Goes to the Bathroom

I remember the first time I encountered unisex bathrooms.

I was traveling, with a backpack and not much money, in Europe, staying in youth hostels and tourist rooms, often in the homes of women I would meet at train stations holding up signs saying Zimmer zu vermieten. 

Near the end of the trip, an eight-week journey which I funded with just under $1000, I was in Munich, trying to find a cheap (really, really cheap) place to stay. Someone told me about a hostel camp, maybe an hour’s hike from the train station—a field outside the city where you could stay in a huge tent. If you got there early enough, there was also food.

I schlepped out there and stayed the last two nights of the trip, also visiting Dachau on my final day. It was bare bones—BYO sleeping bag and ground pad. There were unisex flush toilets in wooden cubicles, in a single concrete building of the type you’d find in any state park campground today. There were also warm-water showers, in a large room with no dividers for males and females. BYO towels and soap, as well.

The hardest part of adjusting to this was trying to act casual, as if I were used to waiting in line to use the toilet between Hans and Karl, or nonchalantly showering with a couple dozen mixed-gender strangers. Everyone else seemed pretty blasé about it. The vibe at the camp was international, friendly and very safe.

The year was 1976, the 200th anniversary of the home of the brave, land of the free.

Now, nearly a half-century later, some people have their knickers in a twist over newly remodeled unisex bathrooms in Michigan State University’s Campbell Hall, a beautiful dormitory on the oldest part of campus, which houses the Honors College.

The retrofitting took traditional community baths and turned them into lockable, fully enclosed private stalls, each with a shower, toilet and sink.  For a quick hand-wash or teeth brushing, there are also community sinks.

Apparently, the MSU Board got a letter of outrage from a parent, although students (who had to apply to live there) seem to be fine with the plan. There were some comments at the Board meeting about walking around after showering in a towel, but I chalk those up to people with too much time on their hands, wallowing in trad-nostalgia or perhaps sexual fantasies.

Back in the1970s, I lived in a co-ed dorm with community bathrooms. There were four floors—two community baths for women, two for men—although the dorm rooms alternated between men and women. I can’t tell you how many times I went to the women’s bathroom and found some dude walking out of a stall, because he didn’t feel like going upstairs. Lockable stalls with all you need sound vastly preferable to stumbling upon your roommate and her boyfriend showering together in the community bathroom.

Makes me wonder why Republican legislators always bring up bathrooms when they want to gin up fear around gender expression. There really isn’t anything moral or magic about using the bathroom, with either gender.

There’s this: ‘Opposition to transgender inclusion has become a rallying cry for many conservatives. The debate is at the heart of a bill advancing in Michigan’s Republican-led House that aims to restrict bathroom use at schools and colleges on the basis of biological sex. 

Sponsoring Rep. Joseph Fox, R-Fremont, suggested Wednesday that allowing transgender students to use bathrooms of the gender they identify with is “traumatizing little girls.” He called it a “safety issue.”’

Then there’s this: “Michigan must stop making references to gender identity in sex educational materials provided to schools or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding, according to President Donald Trump’s administration.” 

The State Board of Education is also currently hearing testimony on a new set of standards for sex education in Michigan:

“A recommendation that schools include instruction about gender identity or expression and sexual orientation by eighth grade has prompted criticism from several parental rights groups and Republican politicians. 

“These proposed standards cross into deeply personal and spiritual territory, normalizing behaviors that many families find harmful and contrary to their faith.’”

Traumatizing little girls? Normalizing behaviors that contradict families’ religious beliefs? And not being allowed to talk about it, in eighth grade sex ed classes, even if your parents say it’s OK?

It’s all about what’s happening in American bathrooms, evidently.

Gender-neutral bathrooms are commonplace in Europe.  Why is that? What do they understand that we don’t?

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“Progressive” Schools

I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan hosting General Electric Theater, on Sunday nights, when he would look sincerely into the camera and say “General Electric, where progress is our most important product.”

Presumably, progress was both inevitable and desirable—a mashup of American technologies and innovation, bringing (GE again) good things to life. On television, anyway.

Who would stand in the way of progress? Certainly not schools, who were educating rapidly increasing numbers of Boomer kids, using the modern look-see method of reading instruction, and embracing New Math.

According to family legend, my first grade teacher sent home a note asking my mother to stop letting me read to her, in case she said or did something wrong, impeding my literary progress with pre-approved books about Dick and Jane. She stopped immediately. Teacher knew best.

Stephen Bechloss, on this Indigenous Peoples Day, shared a fine essay on progress:

“Examples of progress are all around us. I carry in my pocket a computer that gives me access to almost all the existing knowledge in the world. That same device allows me to instantaneously connect with family and friends thousands of miles away. I can flip a switch and light my kitchen. If my heart gives out, I can get a new one. I can fly in the sky and travel almost anywhere on the planet. Nearly everywhere I may go, I will meet people who know how to read.

The world is a wonder. Let’s not doubt it. The creative power of humankind has yielded a modern world that is safer, richer, more connected, more mobile and full of opportunity for more people than our ancestors could have imagined.”

Where did all this progress come from? In addition to the inherent creative power of humankind, progress is nurtured by education, wherein creativity and curiosity turn knowledge into progressive action: Machines. Ideas. Institutions. Literature and art.

Maybe even better government. Countries, for example, where everyone has health care, and citizens embrace collective efforts to address global issues like climate change. Progress—if you define progress as moving forward to solve problems, bring good things to life.

Possibly you’re raising your hand right now, itching to tell me that there are multiple definitions of progress and progressivism, or that the opposite of conservative is not liberal, but progressive. I would suggest that what we’re seeing now—the movement to damage public education—is not conservative. It’s authoritarian vandalism. But let’s try to agree on a definition of what it means to be progressive.

Miriam-Webster: A left-leaning political philosophy and reform movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere.

It was not surprising to read this, in a must-read piece by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica: “In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.”

Progressive control of schools? Seriously?

Speaking as a person who has spent decades working in public schools and with public school teachers across the country, schools are generally among the most conventional and cautious institutions on the planet, subject to pressures and opinions from a wide range of (often clueless) critics. And likely headed by someone who adamantly does not want to get phone calls from honked-off parents.

I also say this as a person who taught fourth graders about systemic racism, in a general music unit from our REQUIRED music textbook, a collection of songs (Follow the Drinking Gourd; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; Bring Me Little Water, Silvie and others) plus some pretty neutral fourth grade-appropriate text about the African formal and rhythmic roots of American popular music.

We were sitting on the big, round rug and one of the fourth graders asked why so many African-American songs (again, songs in our traditional music series) were about God. If their lives were so bad, he asked, why did they believe in heaven? It was a good question and led to an equally good discussion about what happens when people are oppressed—how they maintain cultural traditions, and hope.

If progressivism is about advancing the human condition, who’s against it? Besides the handful of people running the fatally compromised US Department of Education? The very people to whom diversity, inclusion and equity—progressive values– are anathema.

Convincing people that public school educators are a) raging leftists and b) persuading their students to defy their parents and adopt outrageous worldviews, then calling that progressivism is a fool’s errand. And 70 percent of the people who have first-hand experience with that—parents—generally believe that their public schools are doing the job they want them to do.

But societal shifts happen when false and unsubstantiated statements are repeated so often they become common knowledge. So be prepared to hear a lot of blah-blah about “progressive” public schools in the near future.