What Schools Still Need To Learn About Recruiting And Retaining Teachers

The stories have graduated from a steady drip drip drip to an ongoing drizzle. Across the country, states are confronting a huge number of unfilled teaching positions as the teacher exodus, well under way long before the spread of COVID and the conservative attacks on public education, continues unabated.

And yet many school districts, particularly medium-sized and small districts, have failed to adjust.

Many are still using the old recruitment model, which consists of posting a job opening and then waiting for a bunch of applications to come in. This is not working any more, and I am seeing districts where administration literally does not know what else to do. 

Contrast that with schools like Haines City Senior High School, in Florida of all places, or Lamberton High school in West Philly. In these schools, the principal has recruited teachers by building relationships with future teachers while they are still students in the school, and then grow those relationships with support. Consequently, these two schools, located in hard to staff areas, somehow have staff.

As has been noted at great length, the teacher pipeline is busticated. Here in PA, a decade ago the pipeline produced 45,000 newly certified teachers. Now the number is closer to 15,000. Just sitting in your district office dangling a posting while singing, "I have a job here...." will not cut it. 

Districts need to build, starting with their own students. They need to do outreach to college teacher prep programs. And they need to develop a pitch. When prospective hires ask, "Why should I want to work here?" the answer "We have a job" is not sufficient. Administrators, do you know why a teacher should want to work in your district and not at some other district, because if you can't answer that question, you are a step behind. 

The other piece that schools are missing is the retention piece. Much has already been written about what should be obvious-- pay and respect. But for new teachers to be successful, support is essential.

And yet new teacher support often depends on crazy strokes of luck. Which teachers do you share lunch period with? Who do you meet regularly at the copier because you have the same work period? Who teaches in the room next door? Who feels inclined to occasionally check in with the new teacher?

Some states, like PA, require new teachers to have "mentors," but that job can end up being another matter of scheduling convenience. In other words, nobody in the office is asking, "Which teacher would make a good pairing of style and technique with this new person?" Instead, they're just checking to see whose work period lines up. 

But that initial support is critical. I was fortunate enough to be in a grad program. The same prof who saw me almost weekly through student teaching came to observe monthly in my first teaching year. I took education courses with a dozen other first year teachers in my program. I had a whole support system for that first year (and I was lucky to have useful supportive colleagues who ate lunch the same shift). Schools should be thoughtful and deliberate in providing support for those beginning teachers and pick a mentor who's a good fit (which means, of course, that administration has to know their people well) for the newbie--even if it makes scheduling inconvenient for the front office.

Many districts don't offer that kind of support, but just hand teachers a key and directions to where their textbooks are stored, leaving first year teachers to fend for themselves. This leads to a great deal of frustration and failure-- and not just failure, but failure that's hard to process and learn from. It leads to lots of first year teachers asking, "Did I make a terrible mistake by going into this profession? Do I just suck?" Because teaching, no matter how good your prep was, is hard for most people to get good at. In all my years of teaching and having student teachers, I've met two "naturals" who were great teachers right out of the box. Everyone else had to ride the struggle bus, or as I have consoled more than a few sobbing student teachers, "If you don't cry at least once during student teaching, you don't understand the situation."

And yet in those first few critical years, what most districts offer as support is... nothing. There are dozens of ways to put a support program in place. And as a bonus, such a program would make a great recruiting tool ("We are going to work with you every step of the way to make sure you succeed!" would be such a powerful pitch). 

If your district does not have a plan for recruitment and retention, they are depending on dumb luck These days that's a bad bet.

OK: Buy Yourself A Secretary of Education

There's more than one way to privatize education.

Ryan Walters graduated from Harding University ("Faith, Learning, Living"), a private Christian university in Arkansas. The school was founded in 1924, and maintained advocacy of pacifism and political neutrality until the cold war, when it came out hard for free-market capitalism (they even produced some animated cartoons to help defend against Godless Communism). 

Harding's record on segregation is not great. Then President George Benson was a big crusader against communism, but he didn't much like integration, either (Black folks, he thought, were inferior because of that whole Curse of Ham thing). In 1957 a petition circulated on campus saying that Harding was ready to integrate; 75% of students, faculty and staff signed it, and Benson dismissed it as youthful idealism. They finally accepted three Black students in 1963. They hired their first Black faculty in 1980. By 2019, 4.7% of the student body was Black. To their credit, many students and alumni pushed the school to do better.

Benson also founded the college's National Education Program, which was based on three principles: belief in God, belief in the Constitution, and belief in the free enterprise system. In short, good old Christian nationalism. It gave Benson his fifteen minutes of national fame in forties, but NEP had to be spun off from the college (it got in the way of Harding's accreditation). Benson remained head of NEP long after he retired from the college in 1965.

So Ryan Walters graduated from Harding in 2010 with a Bachelor's degree in History. He returned to his home town of McAlester in 2011 to teach high school history, where he did well enough to be named McAlester Public Schools Teacher of the Year in 2015 and draw a finalist spot for Oklahoma's TOY award in 2016.

That put him in touch with folks at the state level. In 2018 he was appointed to the Oklahoma Community Service Commission, and the next year, newly elected Governor Kevin Stitt to the Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability. 

In 2019 he gave up his teaching gig to serve as the executive director of Oklahoma Achieves, the state Chamber of Commerce initiative that pulled big bucks from, among others, the Walton Family Foundation. Oklahoma Achieves would soon transform itself into Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, a "new education reform organization" that wants to give everyone "access to quality education." EKCO has been especially reluctant to provide their required IRS disclosure forms, but The Oklahoman did pry some info loose; donors include the Waltons, Yes Every Kid (a Charles Koch operation).

Walters was offered the top job for EKCO in March of 2020. In May of 2020 he went to work. March of 2020 was also the month in which President Biden Trump* signed the CARES Act, which included the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER). Oklahoma started pulling its money out in July of 2020, feeding a chunk of that money into a voucher program that would be handled by newly created Bridge the Gap, a program funded by GEER money but operated by Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, who in turn would hire ClassWallet, the Florida-based ed voucher management company. In August of 2020, Michael Rogers, who was serving as both Secretary of Education and Secretary of State, stepped down from the education post.

In September of 2020, Governor Stitt announced that Walters had been appointed to fill the spot of Secretary of Education, while also declaring that the post would be an individual cabinet position. In his mid-thirties, Walters is the youngest to ever serve in the post.

Walters hit the ground running. Already well-connected, he made an appearance at Jeb Bush's Edu-palooza in a presentation about how to launch a voucher program in just four weeks; the spot was sponsored by ClassWallet. It was such a hit that ClassWallet had him do it again for their Youtube channel in February of 2021.

And once Walters decided to run for state superintendent of public instruction ('proven record of winning the fight for our strong, conservative agenda"), he started singing from the culture warrior hymnal. He had previously dabbled in writing for The Federalist, but in 2022, candidate Walters really stepped it up.

He warned textbook publishers not to put any of that nasty CRT stuff in their books (and took flak for it). He "urged" a school district to prohibit students who were born "biological males" from using female bathrooms, claiming they had misinterpreted Title IX. As reported in the Stillwater News Press: "The US Department of Education’s rules, that your school board claims ordered this travesty, simply allowed school districts to choose their own path – and Stillwater has chosen poorly,” Walters wrote. “You have chosen radicals over your students, ideology over biology, and ‘wokeness’ over safety.” 

And he contributed a piece to Fox News: "Listen up, teachers: stop going woke." Walters, who is apparently still teaching at least one course, declared, "I will continue to teach my students the United States is the greatest nation in the world." Also, "The far-left's attempts to destroy our nation's history and indoctrinate our children must be stopped." And he has a busy Twitter page where he sometimes posts videos railing against any of the far-right shibboleths of the day. 

Walters has run into trouble for failure to disclose campaign finances. And that voucher program that he whipped together in just four weeks has turned out to be a mess. A federal audit gave the program lowest marks all across the board; digging by The Oklahoman revealed that federal GEER money ended up being spent on everything from Christmas trees to gaming consoles, with virtually no oversight by... well, anyone. ClassWallet, which had landed the contract for running the program without having to bid, quickly ducked responsibility (We were just following the rules we were given). Dems called for Walters' removal from office, to which Governor Stitt said, "Nope. He's swell."

Stitt has no reason to want Walters gone from the job, but now there's some question about Walters' real day job might be. Remember that executive director job that Every Kid Counts Oklahoma that Walters took months before his appointment to state education chief. He's stayed busy there; EKCO has advocated for education privatization, charter expansion, voucher growth-- all the usual. And Walters was well paid for the work.

Exactly how well paid has been fuzzy, largely because Stitt just vetoed a bill (passed by both sides of the legislature) that would have required state officials to disclose outside revenues and salaries. But according to The Oklahoman (Clifton Adcock, Reese Gorman, and Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier have been all over this story), Walters was hired for a $100,000 salary, with a requirement that he had to be paid at least 20% higher than the second-highest paid employee. His original contract called for an option of a minimum $20K raise after the first year.

So he's likely making at least $120,000 from EKCO.

His salary as secretary of education from the state of Oklahoma is $40,000.

Let me say that again. 

The Oklahoma state secretary of education has, as his primary source of income, at least $120,000 from a darkish money education reform group funded by, at least, Walton and Koch money. The state pays him a mere $40,000. 

So who is Ryan Walters' main employer? Not the state of Oklahoma. But his job with the state certainly puts him in charge of certain decisions about which his primary employers have a big interest.

Quoted in the Oklahoman piece is Delaney Marsco, senior attorney for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit government watchdog group:

If you are responsible for making decisions in a certain area of the government and you are being paid by an outside organization that has an interest in that, that absolutely can be a conflict of interest. If you are a public servant, your duty is to the public, and anything that kind of calls that into question, even raises the appearance of a conflict of interest, is a problem.

That sounds about right. There are lots of ways to privatize education, but buying state education officials is certainly one of the more direct ones. Never mind sneaky money slid under the table; just put him on the payroll.

The Oklahoma primary will be on June 28; Walters is running against three other GOP candidates for the post. 

John Cox is a long-serving educator, most recently a school superintendent. His platform includes reduced class size, eliminating A-F school evaluations, and making public education a priority. Yes, he's really running as a Republican (but he ran in previous cycles as a Dem). April Grace is a long-time educator as well; she's running as anti-CRT, anti-bureaucratic red tape, and anti-school closures. William Crozier has run for state office before; way back in 2006 he ran for state superintendent with his campaign committee "Crozier for Superman" (that was four years before "Waiting for Superman" came out, so I'm not sure what he was thinking) and proposed bullet-proof textbooks (there is a video of him demonstrating his idea--really). I'm no Oklahoma political expert, but I have a feeling that Crozier is not a strong contender here.

Will Oklahoma stick with a chief official who actually works for someone else? And how much money will his employers put into the race to keep him somewhere that is handy for them? Stay tuned, folks. 

*Originally I mis-attributed the Presidency in 2020

ICYMI: Older And No Wiser Edition (5/22)

I was really hoping this would be the year in which I had a birthday and finally found substantially wiser as I entered a new era. Sadly, after a few days, the evidence suggests that my wisdom has not suddenly advanced with my age. Bummer.

I can, however, still pass on this reading list for the week.

Why a New Jersey teacher has kept an empty chair in his classroom for 52 years

Let's start with something encouraging. First, fifty two years. Second, this story about the chair.

The Long and Winding Road

Grumpy Old Teacher offers a stream of consciousness to float us on through testing season.

This Miami Dade teacher married a woman. Now she's not a teacher anymore.

From Yahoo News, one more story about how that whole Don't Say Gay thing is working out.

Senator demands parental blocking for gay/trans characters

How far do these folks plan to go? US Senators push for blocks for shows that so much as mention gay or (maybe) trans characters. 

When kids ask for books they're too young to read

Carolyn Hax operates a popular advice column, and she just took a question that prompted plenty of teacher response. Note: this is one of several Washington Post links this week.

School voucher bill has dire consequences for PA public schools

This op-ed at State College . com from a PA school board member lists just three of the ways that Pennsylvania's voucher bill is bad news.

Durham GOP's board slate soundly defeated

One of many positive stories from current elections, NC Policy Watch tells us about a failed conservative attempt to take over a school board.

State of Revolt

The Have You Heard podcast took a trip to Croydon, NH, where libertarians tried to defund education and got soundly spanked. Bonus: Jack Schneider debunks that infamous chart that shows cost increasing and test scores remaining flat.

What is the Koch-funded Buckeye Blueprint's education plan?

Jan Resseger takes at the latest plan to privatize public education in Ohio.

I'm a Black male educator. PA needs more people who look like me.

At the Penn Capital-Star, a guest op-ed bu Durrell Burns underlines the crazy huge lack of Black teachers in PA.

What Biden should say to charter school supporters now attacking him

Valerie Strauss imagines when a god response from this administration could be, pushing back against the charter supporters who are freaking out over proposed grant rule changes. This is thorough, and good. Also at Washington Post.

PA's richest person has spent $18 million on the 2022 primary

Jeff Yass is really rich, and he doesn't like paying taxes or public education. In fact, my sources tell me that the reason a voucher bill zipped out of the PA house is because he told a certain house leader that they'd better give him either a voucher bill or a tax cap bill, right now, or else. Oligarchy is so much fun. Some background info on the wealthy gambler (really-that's how he got rich) in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Why Gov. Youngkin is wrong about student NAEP stores

For the gazillionth time-- NAEP "proficiency: does not mean what your favorite public school basher says it means. Valerie Strauss gives space to James Harvey for an explanation (you might want to bookmark this one) in the Washington Post.

Six terms transforming public schools to the all-tech end game

Nancy Bailey offers a lesson in some ed tech jargon. Beware!

When we speak with children as people

Teacher Tom offers an insight that shouldn't come as a shock. And yet...

Social. Emotional. Learning.

Nancy Flanagan reflects on what SEL really looks like in a classroom.

Who will be tomorrow's public school teachers

At Live Long and Prosper, some good thoughts about the great teacher exodus.

Alligator on the sidewalk

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider was just having one of those days.

Meanwhile, this week I was also writing about Croydon, NH and the attack on education there for Forbes.com. Over at The Progressive, I wrote about the false promises of school choice and parent empowerment.

19 Rules for Life (2022 edition)

I first posted this list when I turned 60, and have made it an annual tradition to get it out every year and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place (it is also a way to give myself the day off for my birthday). I will keep my original observation-- that this list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence. Also, I'll note that it gets longer every year; if you think you see a book, feel free to contact me with a publishing offer. In the meantime, I exercise a blogger's privilege to be self-indulgent.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. Sometimes conflict and struggle appear, and there is no way out but through. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly true in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress. Be kind.

2. Do better.

You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better.

3. Tell the truth.

Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue. I'll extend this to social media as well: if it's not the truth, don't post it.

4. Seek to understand.

The necessary companion to #3. Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not helpful. Understand that this is a journey you will never complete, and it's not okay to quit.

5. Listen and pay attention.

Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important. Also, love is not a thing you do at people-- to say that you care about someone even as you don't actually hear or see them is a lie.

Also, pay attention to things and people who contradict your cherished beliefs about yourself, because there may be something there that you really need to hear.

6. Be grateful.

You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful. That's important because gratitude is the parent of generosity.

7. Mind the 5%

95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%. The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%, and sometimes the path to honoring and loving that other person is to indulge their 5%.

8. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is a dumb question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones). Nobody is in a better position than you are to take care of the people right in front of your face.

You are never too young for your first tin hat.

9. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment gets up and gets on with it on the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly. 

10. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could do the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," ask yourself why not.

I've thought a lot about this one this year. It has occurred to me that one of the side effects of social media is that not only do we curate and craft our lives, but we want lots of other people to participate in and confirm the narrative that we're creating. "You're canceling me," often means "You are refusing to corroborate my preferred narrative." We don't just want an audience; we want pliable co-stars. 

11. Assume good intent.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world. 

Also, this: when you paint all your opponents as monsters, you provide excellent cover for the actual monsters out there. 

12. Don't waste time on people who are not being serious.

Some people forget to be serious. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness. Beware: One of the great tricks of not-being-serious people is to get you to waste time on them, to spend time and energy thinking, fretting, arguing acting about shiny foolishness, leaving them free for larger abuses that go unchecked.

13. Don't forget the point.

Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose. And don't try to shorthand it; don't imagine that you know the path that guarantees the outcome you want. Focus on the point (even if it's a goal that you may never reach) because otherwise you will miss Really Good Stuff because you had too many fixed ideas about what the path to your destination is supposed to look like.

14. People are complicated (mostly)

People grow up. People learn things. People have a day on which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs. Awful people can have good moments, and good people can have awful moments-- it's a mistake to assume that someone is all one thing or another. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game.

And make sure you don't get things backwards. Don't decide that someone is a Good Person or Bad Person and then waste energy trying to fit all of their actions into your predetermined definition.

15. Don't be misled by your expectations.

Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for.

16. Make something.

Music, art, refurbished furniture, machinery. Something.

17. Show up.

The first rule of all relationships is that you have to show up. And you have to fully show up. People cannot have a relationship with someone who isn't there, and that includes someone who looks kind of like they're there but who isn't really there. You have to show up. In the combination of retirement and parenting again, I'm reminded that this also means nor just being fully present, but remembering to show up at all. You put your head down, do the work, and then a week or two later you're suddenly remembering that it's been a while since you checked in with someone. Rule #2 applies.

Part B of this rule is that when you show up, you may suddenly find out that the place and time requires something of you. Showing up means answering that call.

18. Refine your core.

Know who you are. Strip the definition of yourself of references to situation and circumstance; don't make the definition about your car, your hair, your job, your house. The more compact your definition of self, the less it will be buffeted and beaten by changes in circumstance. Note: this is good work to do long before you, say, retire from a lifelong career that largely defined you. 

19. How you treat people is about you, not about them.

It's useful to understand this because it frees you from the need to be a great Agent of Justice in the world, meting out rewards and punishments based on what you think about what people have done or said. It keeps you from wasting time trying to decide what someone deserves, which is not your call anyway. It also gives you power back that you give up when your stance is that you have to wait to see what someone says or does before you react to it. Treat people well because that's how you should treat people, not because you have decided they deserve it. But don't be a dope; if someone shows you that they will always bite you in the hand, it's prudent to stop offering them your hand.

When The Treadmills Stopped

We've been cranking the treadmill (or, if you prefer, the hamster wheel) for years. One of the through lines of No Child Left Behind and the imposition of Common Core was that schools had become havens of laziness. Teachers were lazily allowing low expectations to let students languish, lazily, on the curbs of the highway of education.

So part of every solution involved cranking up the treadmill. Turn kindergarten into the new first grade! No, make it the new second grade!! Check to see that eight year olds are on the college track! Get those kids off the playground and back into the classroom for more educating! Test every year, repeatedly, so that we can see results NOW NOW NOW! Make middle school the new high school! Get high school students to take college courses (because if you don't go to college you'll end up broke and in a crappy job living in a tiny apartment eating cat food warmed up on a hot plate so for God's sake get to college now)! Let's get 4 year olds--no, 3 year olds-- into academic settings.

Plus one of the oddest things to bleed through from the business-minded approach to education-- the enterprise must grow from year to year. So we must somehow socially engineer each class of students to be smarter, faster, stronger, more highly achieved than the last. 

So the treadmill has gotten faster and faster and faster. And the effect on our children has been visible and sometimes heartbreaking. They grow up thinking they're on a razor's edge, one wrong move away from some disaster that "proves" how unworthy and weak they are. I wrote about this all the way back in 2015 and it's still a worthwhile, applicable read. Instead of building strength and confidence, the treadmill was grinding it down. 

And then COVID dragged the treadmill to an abrupt halt. 

Not a careful gliding slow-to-stop, but in many places as abrupt as a railroad spike through the drive shaft. People stumbled, fell, smacked their faces off hard surfaces. 

Then the panic-- we've got to get you running again, somehow, even a little. Maybe--I don't know--a virtual treadmill. Just get up and wipe that blood off your face. Walk it off. Maybe we can get you into a private treadmill.

Then many people--both young and not-so-young--slowly realizing "Hey, running like a crazy person on a cranked-up treadmill was hard, and I'm not even sure why I was doing it, and just sitting here resting and running at my own pace in my own direction--that all feels pretty good." Followed by, in the case of many adults, "I quit."

But of course while adults were free to join the Great Resignation, children were not. And pretty soon adults were pleased to announce that the treadmills were up and running again, and children had better Get Back To It. So they've been put back on the treadmill, and the treadmill has been turned back on, and the speed has been ramping up. 

Folks still in the trenches tell me that this last year has been the worst one so far. That's anecdotal. Meanwhile, articles about teen mental health decline and why teens are so sad and college students are not okay and behavior problems are rampant and, incidentally, teachers are having a rough time-- they're all over the place. 

For five minutes there was a dream that while the treadmills were down we could maybe rethink the whole treadmill thing and tweak or even replace the whole approach. It seems pretty clear that those five minutes are up, and we are shoving children (who, in many cases, have been through three or four levels of mess) back up on the treadmills and spitballing ways to get things cranked up again (maybe if we give more standardized tests, we can better figure out how to get the treadmills up to maximum speed). Even as a generation of students consider their bruised and bloody not-yet-healed knees and think, "I don't really want to get back on there."

Not only did we miss the opportunity to be better, but we have failed to learn critical lessons about how easily the treadmills can break down and crash to a damaging halt. 

When the treadmills stopped this time, we failed to do better. Unfortunately, we'll probably have another chance. 

NH: Hillsdale Is Coming To Town

In 2020, the Monadnock Freedom To Learn Coalition was formed in Hancock, NH, apparently for the sole reason of launching a local charter school. So far, they're doing pretty well.

MFTLC's leadership team includes Leo Plante. Plante is an immigrant to the state, having retired from the investment banking business. In 2020 he ran for the legislature, taking the pledge of no new taxes. He has particular taxes in mind.

“Education is kind of my main issue, and education reform is what I desperately want to see in this state,” he said. Taxpayers are being charged too much per student, Plante said, and lawmakers need to find new ways to make the K-12 experience more beneficial and efficient for students.

Plante has made friends with the Free State crowd (you can read more about their approach to public ed here). He claims the "zeal of a convert" and says “This whole ‘Live Free or Die’ motto, to a lot of people, doesn’t mean anything — but to people who are transplants here, it means a lot.” When running for office he promised to push for a charter school in Dublin.

Also on the team is Richard Merkt. Merkt is a former New Jersey pol who served in the legislature, mounted an unsuccessful campaign for governor, and, for his day job, served as legal counsel for various corporations. He retired and moved to New Hampshire, where he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the legislature in 2020 (he came in dead last out of eight candidates). His campaign themes included "lower taxes and smaller government" (also, his favorite book is the Lord of the Rings trilogy). 

Other members of the group include Augusta Petrone, whose husband was a US ambassador to the UN. She was the 1984 chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in Iowa. They've been involved in several GOP campaigns, and were Honorary New Hampshire Co-Chairs for the Rudy Giuliani campaign in 2007. There's also Fred Ward of Stoddard, who once wrote a letter to the editor complaining about illegal migrants being bused and flown to settle in New Hampshire. 

The chairman of MFTLC is Barry Tanner. Tanner is a CPA whose work has been in the "private equity-backed healthcare services sector" biggest job has been as CEO of Physicians Endoscopy, LLC located in PA. All in all, the group seem like an interesting assortment of folks to decide to get into the education business.

In July of 2021, Tanner submitted an application on behalf of the Coalition for Lionheart Classical Academy, stating the intent to open in 2022 with 148 students K-5 and expanding by 2026-27 to 355 students K-9.

The school, the application states, will provide students "a full and complete liberal arts education that will challenge them to excel both in learning and in character," producing students who are "highly literate" and also "virtuous." They cite E.D.Hirsch. And they planned to collaborate with Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative. They would use Core Knowledge, Literacy Essentials, and Singapore Math, combined with "traditional" teaching methods. Students would receive explicit phonics instruction, explicit English grammar instruction (including sentence diagramming), ability grouping, and the Socratic method. The application covers extensive details of a fairly transparent governance model.

The application (53 pages) is an interesting look at how a classical academy expects to run, but it's a deeper rabbit hole than I want to travel down today.

The application was accepted, and Lionheart Academy acquired a location in Peterborough, and it will be a Barney Charter School Initiative School.

Hillsdale is a Very Religious college located in Betsy DeVos's Michigan; you can find a compact history of the school here. They're an old school and always explicitly Christian, but in recent years they have become increasingly Trumpy and MAGA. The Barney Initiative was their earlier foray into charter schooling.  

The Barney Charter School Initiative, started in 2010 to help 20 charter schools based on classical curriculum. The Barney mission statement used to include the goal "to recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” They also turn out to use a religious curriculum. Hillsdale also offers materials that can be used to supplement education plus a whole raft or resources for home schoolers.

Literacy Essentials, one of the resources that the charter says it will use, is produced by Hillsdale, which calls it "a comprehensive literacy program for grades K-3 that combines the sound linguistic theory of an Orton-based literacy program with an easy-to-use format and a beautiful style." With phonics. The website also lists The Rigg's Institute program, which emphasizes phonics and learning styles.

One concern with a Hillsdale charter program is the school's emphasis on Christian content, but Lionheart's executive director (and member of MFTLC) Kerry Bedard says the school will not be "using the religious or faith-based aspects of the curriculum. In other interviews, she has explained that the curriculum will call for a “centrality of Western tradition” and “a rich and recurring examination of American traditions.” It will focus on classical education, which has a focus on virtue and moral character. "Maintaining that separation seems... challenging. But New Hampshire, at least for now, prohibits spending public tax dollars on religious schools, so the distinction has to be made.

Lionheart is looking for a solid start, having scored some big bucks from New Hampshire's slice of the federal Charter School Program--reportedly a full $1.5 million. Meanwhile, Bedard has been going to bat for the school in the press, arguing that they are transparent, cheap, and effective. In an interview, she told a reporter, regarding the school's classical curriculum, “It is going back to the way education was done for thousands of years. It’s an education that frees us to be fully human." There will be uniforms, and Latin for third and fourth graders.

The school has received permission to increase its initial enrollment, after holding an enrollment lottery. It has a principal: Elizabeth Wilber, who previously spent a decade as teacher and administrator at the New England Classical Academy in Claremont, NH (coincidentally, the town where I spent my single-digit years). It has hired part of a staff, and its marketing leans heavily on the "tuition-free" aspect of this "entrepreneurial, educational venture." The school's location, a 56,640+ square foot industrial and office site listed at almost $3 million, but apparently sold for $900K--that conversion job is apparently near completion. Soon Lionheart will be New Hampshire's first Hillsdale-connected charter school.

It remains to be seen how much of the school's work, funded with federal and local tax dollars, will be free of Hillsdale's religious influence, and given the Maine charter case before the Supreme Court, it may not matter. If SCOTUS says that charters must be allowed to include religion on the taxpayer's dime, Hillsdale, both in New Hampshire and elsewhere, is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the freedom to indulge in its own brand of indoctrination. Buckle up, New Hampshire. 

What Do We Do About Increased Student Violence and Misbehavior?

Anecdotally, we know something is happening. We see more stories like this one from Bettendorf, Iowa, about a middle schools that is descending into chaos because students are "out of control." We see more "trending" stories treating student disruption as an oncoming issue. And if you talk to teachers, you hear stories. You hear phrases like "I've never seen it so bad." We even have some attempts to try to collect some hard data on what exactly is happening.

Most every seems to sense, anecdotally, that something is happening, and it's not good. 

But--and I cannot stress this enough--the most useful response to this particular moment is not to automatically reach for the script for our favorite analysis of good guys and bad guys. In the few months, I've seen all of the following proposed as the root the current wave of behavior issues.

* After two+ years of pandemic pause, students have lost much of the skill of Doing School, including the part about functioning socially in a group of other small humans.

* The general atmosphere of hostility toward public schools and the teachers who work there has now percolated down and is manifesting itself in students' disrespectful behavior.

* Too much Restorative Justice.

* Too much Restorative Justice implemented badly. 

* Too little Restorative Justice.

* The pandemic has generated unprecedented trauma in young humans and they are now bringing that trauma to school with them.

* Teachers are big babies who get upset over every little thing kids do.

* Teachers are big fascist whose desire to control students is finally being justly thwarted.

* Parents won't let their children suffer the appropriate consequences of bad behavior and demand that administrators do the same.

* Permissive progressive policies.

* Repressive ed reform policies.

* Administrators are so scared of parents with lawyers that they won't draw any line anywhere.

And of course...

*Blah blah blah blah kids these days.

In most cases, what I'm seeing is people pulling out there pre-existing "This is what's causing trouble in education right now..." and slapping it onto the student behavior issue. That strikes me as a big mistake. Here are the things I believe are useful and true about this issue.

* Most of the problems are both complex and local. Therefor, there will not be a single solution that can be applied on any sort of scale. What works in East Egg this year may not work in West Egg--or in East Egg two years from now.

* Talk to--and listen to-- the students. They may not be loaded with deep insights about the human condition, but they are the ones closest to the problems. 

* Talk to-- and listen to-- staff. They are also right there on the ground where it's all happening.

* School climate is complex. If leaders are not taking deliberate steps to shape it in positive directions, it will drift wherever the winds take it, and in case you haven't noticed, the weather is pretty rough right now.

Maintaining a positive school climate is always a challenge, an attempt to hit a moving target from fifty yards with a feather in a snowstorm. It almost always requires a balance between extremes, and yet it is the extremes that somehow end up dominating too many of these conversations. Maintaining a safe and functional school requires firm, well-maintained boundaries, but keeping students (and staff) crushed under the administrative thumb is not good. 

Mostly what this moment needs is the people in charge to ask, seriously, "What is going on here?" with a willingness to look for the answer and not just confirmation of their favorite policy ideas. This kind of disorder in schools certainly isn't helping hold on to teachers, and it's not good for students at all. Anecdotally, we need school leaders to get a handle on this.