The Conservative Argument Against DeVos

It's not just progressives who have been up in arms about the nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education. The same network of conservative parent activists that raised an effective fuss over Common Core are exceedingly unpleased about the big-money donor and lobbyist being given the reins for education. The pressure to reject DeVos won't be coming just from the left and it won't be landing on Democratic senators.

The calls started with petitions like this one, calling for Bill Evers or Larry Arnn or Sandra Stotsky as Secretary of Education. And demanding that the new USED Secretary be a warrior against Common Core.

That promised warrior is not, of course, what folks got.

Here's Joy Pullman (The Federalist) at Conservative Review hitting the ground running with the reasons that DeVos is a bad pick.

First and repeatedly foremost in conservative circles is DeVos' deep love of the Common Core. Plenty of people remain unfooled by DeVos' attempted backtrack. DeVos would have been a perfect Secretary of Education pick for Jeb Bush, with whom she has a long history of partnering and contributing to his favorite policies. And as Pullman indicates, the anti-Common-Core parent network could react to DeVos quickly because they already knew her name, having come up against her money and her astro-turfed groups and her political connections in many of the states where the standards battle raged.

Christian conservative mom Jenni White (Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment) parses this quote form the DeVos website:

I do support high standards, strong accountability, and local control. When Governors such as John Engler, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Pence were driving the conversation on voluntary high standards driven by local voices, it all made sense.

White replies:

The first sentence contains the insidious, using-buzzwords-to-make-sure-I-get-everyone-from-every-ed-camp-into-mine, rhetorical nonsense. You simply can't have "high standards" and "strong accountability" at the federal level and get LOCAL CONTROL. You just can't. That sentence alone should be deadly in the confirmation hearings for Mrs. DeVos.

That and guys like Mike Huckabee are not exactly hard critics of the Core.

White's raising of the local control issue is also a repeated conservative theme. I have waited for decades to see more conservatives get this-- you cannot have government money without government strings, and vouchers stand to be the gold-covered trojan horse that brings government regulation to private and religious schools across this country. Here's how White puts it:

The term "school choice" - like the term "education reform" - means something different to everyone, but usually encompasses the idea that a benevolent federal dictatorship should 'allow' parents to move from one education facility to another (charter schools), hopefully dragging along public money (vouchers), in order to provide their children with a better education than that offered by their failing district school.

The local control issue goes hand in hand with the issue of purchased policy. DeVos is right in there with guys like Bill Gates and Jeb Bush in using her personal fortune to do an end run around the democratic process-- in particular to turn education into a worker training program for their particular private concerns.

Then there is the whole attitude issue. Sandra Stotsky herself bemoans the lack of parent voices in the ongoing discussions about education. And here's Pullman again:

The DeVos family are part of the new-money ruling elite who look down their noses at “rubes” like Heather Crossin [Hoosiers Against Common Core], who do things like oppose Common Core and vote for Donald Trump. These are not the kind of people to whom Trump promised Americans he’d delegate our power.

Indeed, conservatives, like progressives, can recognize the problem with DeVos's utter lack of public school experience.

Bottom line: Senators should be hearing objections to DeVos from across the perspective, and when you are calling your senator (there is no if-- you should be doing it, and soon, and often), you can take into account what sort of Senator you are calling. Your GOP senator needs to hear that DeVos's nomination breaks Trump's promise to attack Common Core and to get local control back to school districts. Your GOP senator needs to hear that you are not fooled by DeVos's attempt to pretend she's not a long-time Common Core supporter.

As was the case back in the days when Common Core was being shoved down our collective throats, the DeVos nomination can bring together folks with different agendas (Pullman, for instance, would like the Department of Education to go away entirely). It's rare that Presidential cabinet picks are axed, but we've been saying lots of "it's rare..." sentences lately, and with the Democrats planning to make hearings challenging for DeVos and seven other proposed Trumpistan mini-czars, at a very minimum, the new administration could be forced to burn some political capital to get their choice in office. Who knows-- conservative anti-Common Core moms were under-estimated before.

ICYMI: Kicking Off the Year

Let's get ready for another round. Remember to share the pieces that speak to you-- amplifying voices is the very least we can do.

The Great Unwinding of Public Education

One of the better explanations of what has happened in Detroit and how Betsy DeVos shares blame for it.

Carolina Coup and the Fight for Public Education

Jeff Bryant does a great job of connecting the dots between North Carolina's history with education and Jim Crow and the current GOP attempt at a coup.

The Attacks on Teacher Tenure Still Don't Make Sense

Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) has been on a roll lately. Here's the news on campbell Brown's most recent attack on teacher tenure, and why it's just as senseless as the last.

Teacher in a Strange Land 2016 Retrospective

There are plenty of "best blogs of the year" lists out there, and they are all a great chance to get a quick feel for that blogger's work. But this recap of the year from Nancy Flanagan might be my favorite.

3 Simple Ideas Every Educator Should Work on in 2017

Okay, so Peter DeWitt cheats a bit here (with sub-divisions there are more than three ideas) but it's a good list to check out and consider as we renew for the new year.

The Whole Child

Jamaal Bowman with an impassioned, articulate call to educate the whole child, even in these trying times. This is the piece to read to get yourself ready to leap back into it.

2017: 9 Wishes

It is easy when you're in the pro-public education camp, trying to call out and push back against the many and varied attacks on public education-- it's easy in that place to get wrapped up in No and forget to articulate what you want to see. So as a sort of New Year's palate cleanser, let me lay out what things I do want to see happen in the world of public education in the year ahead.

I should note that this is an ideal wish list, and I recognize that it's a really long journey to get from where we are to these goals. But even if we can't get there, these are the stars we should steer by, the harbor we should navigate toward. I'll be happy to talk details and specifics another day. This is strictly New Year's Eve wish-mongering.

1) The end of the Big Standardized Testing.

We are achieving literally nothing by these tests, other than wasting huge amounts of time and money and twisting the entire sense of public education's purpose. If I could only achieve one wish on this list with a wave of my magic wand, it would be this one. Test-centric education is a poisonous acid, eating education from the inside out.

I'd settle for some sort of initiative to find systems of accountability that would give taxpayers the assurance that their money is being well-spent, to replace the test-centric system that does not actually deliver anything that it promises. Other goals for the test, like comparing students across state boundaries or informing teacher instruction-- those are either a waste of time or unachievable through broad standardized testing.

2) Fair and equitable funding

Reformsters are often correct in pointing out that some school districts are failing to educate all their students. They then leap to an incorrect solution for the issue, when in fact we know exactly what we need to do (in fact, charter fans propose to do exactly those things, but only for a handful of students)-- make sure that every single school in the country has the resources, support, fiunding, staffing, and leadership necessary for success.

We know how to do that, because we already do it for many schools in this country. We just have to decide that we want to do it for Other Peoples' Children, too. We do not need to come up with clever ways to provide public education on the cheap for just a few children. We just need to do what it takes as easily as we decide to drop a few trillion on endless wars.

3) Democratic control of school governance.

Every school district should be run by an elected board of local taxpayers. Period. I know this gets tricky in some places-- I strongly suspect that several of our largest urban districts need to be broken into smaller districts. But every school in this country should be transparently owned and operated by the local community through board members-- elected stewards of local resources.

There is some place for some oversight by state and federal authorities, to make sure that certain lines are not crossed and that funding is handled reasonably fairly (I have limited faith in the federal ability to identify fairness, but perhaps with clear guidelines...).

But local democratic control with total transparency. Period.

4) Teachers installed as authorities in the education field.

Much of the damage done in education has been done by self-appointed amateurs, while the voices of actual experts and practitioners have been ignored. Done with that. You can't serve as a teacher without proper training (I'll spend a whole other day on what that means, but it sure doesn't mean five weeks of summer camp or a weekend training session), and you can't serve in major positions of oversight without teaching background. You can't do teacher preparation on the college level without ongoing renewal of your classroom experience, and you can't set up a college teacher prep program without approval by a board of working teachers (not some bunch of state-level bureaucrats).

Did I notice that in #3 I demanded that local elected amateurs run the local school district? I did. There has to be a place for the voice of the public in education.

5) Any standards that exist are generated and spread from the bottom up.

Yes, I have plenty of friends who disagree with me on this, but I do not see any practical, useful way that national standards can be established-- and certainly not enforced. The only useful way to spread pedagogical ideas and standards for learning is for teachers who have developed and tested their craft in the field to share what works. You may find it messy and inconsistent, but I will argue that nothing else works better, and that national uniformity is not a desirable goal anyway.

6) Technology serves teachers and students, not vice versa.

It is still still still the same old refrain. "If you just change the whole way you do your job, this technotool will be really useful for you (and profitable for us)."

Thank you, no. I love my technology. I use it all the time-- when it helps me accomplish my job or opens up new opportunities for me to get things done in a new and interesting way. Happy to check around and see what's out there; heck, we even have a technology coach who does a lot of the looking around for us. But don't call us-- we'll call you. I want ready and easy access to new tools, new software, new approaches. I can't do that when you're trying to shove your sad junk down my throat.

7) No secrets. Total transparency.

I just interrupted writing this post to get in a twitter discussion about the interests of parents, and I'll get into that in depth in a future post, but the short answer is that the education system should be absolutely transparent so that parents can get whatever information they believe is important, and not what someone else is telling them is important.

Transparency also addresses a world of reform issues. School boards and administrations and teachers, too, should be free to pursue whatever they think will be positive and effective, but they should also feel the need to make a case for what they want to do. There may have to be some practical limits to this; I don't want to see a superintendent's six-year-old being stalked at T-ball practice. But in matters of policy and procedure and results, school districts should be fishbowls. Individual humans in the district, however, should enjoy perfect privacy. Yes, I know that's hard. Stars to steer by, people.

8) Schools are safe places that address the needs of the whole child while protecting and valuing that individual human being. 

I think that explains itself. No child should fear school for any reason. Every child should feel safe and loved and supported at her school. Schools have to have the support, flexibility and breathing room to do it.

9) Schools should be all about learning, and helping all students become their best selves.

Everything else is just the how. This is the what. Students should walk out of graduation, not like toasters rolling off an assembly line or like sneaks who slipped through the system, but as strong, confident men and women who know who they are, know what they want, and feel equipped to at least start the process of achieving their dreams. They should be taught the full depth and breadth of learning across all disciplines; they should get a taste of what it means to be fully human, fully themselves.

Every student in America should get this. Actually get this-- not get the "opportunity" for this. Will some students refuse or reject this education? Probably. But we should do everything in our power to make it happen for every single student in America, and if some student walks away without it, that should be their choice, not ours.

Every student. Not the chosen few, the wealthy few, the privileged few, the profitable few. Every student.

That's my wish list. Granted, it may take more than just a year to get there (probably more than four, given the current political situation), but this the constellation that I want to steer by.

The 2017 Dozen: What Can I Do?

All right. So some folks are pretty upset about 2016.

There was certainly lots to not love about the year on many scales. Some of that is real (Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds gone in two days??!!), and some of it is just heightened sensitivity to what is not really news (What?! America still has racism!?). There's a veritable cornucopia of reasons for folks to be dissatisfied with the year. On the other hand, personally, my son got married, my daughter delivered her second child, my wife and I made a cross-country trip I've always dreamed about, and we are expecting twins next summer. Plus I still have one of the best jobs in the world.

 So as we've all been trying to answer the question of how to move into 2017, I've been thinking about the space between the personal view and the larger picture. The larger picture can seem loaded with lots of frustration and despair and helplessness, but on the personal level...? On that level I get to choose what I do, how I react, what steps I take . It's where my greatest power lies, and so, my greatest responsibility.

So here's what I tell myself going into 2017.

1) Be present and pay attention. It is easy to get wrapped up in the To Do List of the classroom teacher. Well, easy for me, anyway. But our students need to be present and paying attention, to hear what they say and see who they are even when they aren't explicitly trying to be seen and heard. Nothing that I do in a classroom is more important than finding the connection to each student.

2) Do not wait for someone else to stand up. Do not count on someone else to advocate for what I care about. Do not leave it to someone else to call a Congressperson or a state official about the issues that matter. Especially don't say, "That's what I pay union dues for. They can handle it." Call. Write. Speak up. Stand up.

3) Don't waste energy. Don't waste energy getting worked up about things that haven't actually happened yet. Pay attention, but don't mistake your predictions and fear for true future history. React to what actually happens. You know you've lost the thread when you are angry at students, colleagues, friends, and elected officials for things they haven't actually done.

4) Read up. Study up. Know what there is to know about the work of teaching, and keep trying to learn more.

5) When the door opens, say yes. If it's the teachable moment, don't reject it because it's not in the plan. If it's the moment someone needs you, don't turn your back because you have other things to do. If it's opportunity, don't close the door because the timing is inconvenient. Mostly you don't get to choose when the door opens, but you do get to choose whether or not to say yes. Say yes.

6) Be honest. There isn't anything more important. Even if it bothers members of your own tribe. Even if it isn't what was true to you yesterday. Even if you are afraid to be seen by those who may strike back.

7) Give the students more feedback more often more soon. I make this pledge every year. It's possible I will not ever be satisfied with my results.

8) Remember that while you share fundamental human qualities with every other human being, you have vastly different experiences. Your normal is not everybody's normal. In particular, remember that other people may be struggling on a hill that you never even had to climb. Do not confuse a difference in experience for a difference in basic humanity; if you imagine that the hill they are struggling on would never have stopped you for a second because you are stronger or grittier or better, you probably don't understand either yourself or that hill as well as you should.

9) Value people. Value people. Value people. Money and power and privilege are only important insofar as they help you take care of other people. The circumstances of your life, particularly the circumstances of your profession, have put a whole bunch of people right in your path. Start by looking out for them.

10) Advocate for what you want, not what you don't want. You already know this from the classroom-- it is infinitely more useful to tell a student what you want him to do instead of what you want him not to do.

11) Always say what you mean, and say it like you really mean it. Never stop considering the possibility that you may need to change your mind.

12) Never let tradition, authority, systems, habit, or other people's power substitute for using your best fresh judgment. Start the question from scratch; if you were in the right place before, you'll be lead right there again. Don't just grab last year's unit plan-- ask yourself how you, right now, would teach that unit. And always make sure your best fresh judgment includes consideration of the ideas and words of other smart people.

That's my dozen for this year-- which should be an exciting year indeed.

TX: Education Savings Accounts & Vouchers 2.0

Yesterday the Dallas News gave Mack Morris "Special Contributor" some space to plug Education Savings Accounts. ESAs are often called another way to do vouchers, but they are actually worse. Still, folks can be excused for misunderstanding-- the Dallas News includes headline art of a cap-and-gowned woman holding a giant $100 bill, suggesting that even the Dallas News has confused vouchery ESAs with the other Education Savings Account meant as an instrument for collecting money for college.

Morris is actually the Texas deputy Director for Americans For Prosperity, one of the Koch brothers astroturf groups that has crusaded against Obama, Democrats, and government (you know-- that big organization that takes your money and gives it to Those People when you know darn well that if God wanted them to have money they wouldn't be poor). The AFP helped launch the Tea Party and was the single biggest spender on political advertising in 2014.

Morris's pitch is the one currently preferred by privatizers of public education-- families must have choices so that they can escape zip codes where their children are "trapped" in failing schools. As always, this does not lead us to consider what the state's role is in the "failure" of those schools, or what the state could do to help. Instead, Morris wants you to know that there are these cool ESAs happening in other states like Florida and Nevada. Morris spends a whole paragraph talking about the failings of Texas education-- low test scores, high drop-out rate-- as if these things make a case for vouchers and not for a case that Texas should maybe fund and support its school system.

As proof that vouchery goodness would help, he cites University of Arkansas Distinguished Professor of Education Policy Patrick Wolf-- oops! Somehow Morris omitted Wolf's full title "Distinguished Professor and 21st Century Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform." So perhaps not an objective academic here (and if you want to be slightly more depressed, look at how much time Wolf has spent working in the USED). He's a go-to guy for pro-voucher press.

He estimates that if Texas adopted an education savings account program that went into effect in the fall of 2017, a total of 11,809 additional students would graduate by 2022 — and that number would likely increase over time.

Man-- that "11,809" is so awesomely specific that you just know it's a product of True Science and not just a number he pulled out of his butt. Personally, I estimate that 643,311 students will have more trouble completing school because of the funding their school will lose through ESAs. See? I can estimate my way to science, too!

But Morris is ahead of me. ESAs would totally boost performance in the schools that students quit, because reasons. He also claims that there are twenty-nine studies that show traditional schools improve because of choice programs. He does not link to, name, or cite any of these studies. There are twenty-four national studies that show that Morris is making shit up.

"But hey," you ask. "What are Education Savings Account and how are they both the same and different from vouchers? You said they were worse. What's up with that, anyway?"

In a voucher system, families are given a... well, voucher, like a coupon good for (usually) around $7-10 at any state-approved school. But in an ESA, families are given a small stack of money and told, go spend this on education or, you know, whatever. You could go to a public school, or hire a tutor, or take educational field trips, or even just bank a bunch of it to help pay for college. Hell, buy a Playstation and play "educational" games all day.

ESAs typically take about 90% of the cost-per-pupil of the school district. In Texas that amounts to about $7,800 per student (special needs students usually get more money, but since Texas has made the bulk of its special needs students mysteriously disappear, that may present a special Texas challenge).

$7,800 is not a heck of a lot of money to send your kid to a private school. However, here's a thing we know about how voucher systems tend to work-- a bigger-than-half percentage of voucher students were never in public schools in the first place. With a voucher system, the school gets money from the state and depending on how much they were scraping to pay tuition, families get to keep money for other stuff. With ESAs, families get a stack of money which they can then just spend on whatever. It's like a special taxpayer-paid bonus for sending your kid to private school.

So private schools (particularly religious ones) benefit. Families that could already afford to send their kids to private schools benefit hugely. People who wanted to wash their hands of any obligation to make sure that non-wealthy non-white kids got a decent education-- well, they'd be able to say, "Look, we gave you your ESA money. If you still got a crappy education, that's not our problem. We've done our part. The rest is on you." It also creates a whole new ethical dilemma for the poor-- you don't have money for food, but you have your ESA money, so do you choose half-day school so you can put some food on the table? ESAs represent a whole new market for bottom-of-the-barrel education providers.

ESAs also dovetail nicely with next generation choice on steroids, a future envisioned by some in which families get their child's education from a variety of specialized vendors. Team that up with "personalized" on-line education, and you can imagine ESAs as your on-line credit. For just ten tokens you can unlock the next level of your Calculus I training!

That's because what ESAs do best is bust up the binding on education funding. The first problem for privatizers was to disrupt the pipeline than ran straight from taxpayers to public schools, to break that pipeline open so that all that sweet sweet tax money could go to other places. The second problem is to break the bundling-- all that money tends to travel in large chunks, so that if you want to grab some of it, you need an enterprise large enough to attract one of the big bundles, like a national testing company or an entire school. But if privatizers could break those bundles of cash up, they could nickle and dime themselves into decent revenue streams.

That's what ESAs promise-- instead of voucher customers who have to spend all their money on just one thing, ESAs promise customers who can spend any amount of money on pretty much product. ESAs also promise to absolve the state of its obligation to actually educate its children, which could liberate wealthy Texans from having to suffer a tax bite to help Those People.

It's a big win for everyone except, of course, students and poor families.

Texas has several other details to work out, and a lot of people to sell on this idea for gutting public education. Let's hope that Texans get to hear from people other than Mack Morris, or else a whole generation will end up paying a huge price for this foolishness.

Reading Reformsters

Earlier this week I created a big ol' reading list of edubloggers. Today, I'm going to offer a supplement-- a list of recommendations to read from the Other Side.

Not all reformsters can be taken seriously. Some are simply PR hacks, doing their best to sell a product and doing it badly. Some are blindly attached to their product, either because they have limited vision, because they don't bother to try, or because they're paid to do one thing-- shill. And there are reformsters who suffer from an astonishing helping of hubris (no need for self-examination when you are just so freaking awesome).

But some of these folks are worth taking seriously, either because they do some thinking or because they are willing to examine their own side's behavior or because they articulate clearly the other side's argument. As I've said before, you can't defeat or even dialogue with people you don't understand.

My list here should not be taken as an endorsement. I disagree with most of these guys almost all of the time. But they are worth reading (and most of them can even carry on a civilized conversation) for a view of what reformsters are thinking, even if I don't think it, too. It should go without saying that you may get riled up by some of what these guys write, and you may have already developed opinions about some of them. My advice-- don't read what you don't want to read.

Mike Petrilli

Petrilli is the head honcho at the Thomas Fordham Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank that has often served as a hired gun to help promote Common Core and charters. Petrilli can come across as cocky; I guess the upside of that is he rarely gets angrily defensive. He mostly reminds me of that kid in class who likes to argue, and doesn't really care what side he's on-- he just likes to argue. I remain curious about how much he actually believes the things he says and how much he's just doing his job. Not afraid to step outside of reform orthodoxy now and then, and will also occasionally say shitty things just to provoke.

Andy Smarick

Smarick as attached to Bellwether Education Partners, but he also turns up on the Fordham blog and in other spots. Smarick's specialties are an interest in the structure and function of urban districts, but he also returns often to the questions of traditional conservative thought and how it fits with the reform movement (and he concludes at times that the fit is not necessarily a good one).

Robert Pondiscio

Another conservative writer in the Fordham axis, Pondiscio's work turns up in a number of places. He has the distinction among reformsters of having actually taught (four years of fifth grade in the South Bronx). A big crusader for the importance of actual content in education (as opposed to the "skills" beloved by Core fans). He also touched off a big intra-reform contratemps by suggesting that social justice reformsters were not playing well with the conservative wing of the movement.

Rick Hess

Hess is with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank that loves itself some free market thinking. But while there's never any doubt what side Hess's bread is buttered on, he is usually intellectually honest and willing to call baloney on other parts of the reform movement. There's no question he does it from a standpoint of "This is what we need to fix so we can win more," but he's got a good eye for some folly.

Jay P. Greene

Greene (no relation, so far as I know) has a feisty style, but he has an extraordinarily keen eye for the various divisions and tribes within the reform movement, and like Hess, in the name of strategy, will call out those tribes that he thinks are screwing up. Greene is Tribe Parent Choice, but he has delivered some brutal smack-downs to other tribes.

Neal McClusky

McClusky is education point guy for the CATO Institute, which means he is an excellent source for the purebred Libertarian point of view. He can be fun to follow on twitter because, generally speaking, everyone else is too liberal for his tastes.

Now that I'm writing this, I can see that my list skews rightward, and as I think about it, I realize that there are far fewer allegedly left-leaning reformsters that I take seriously. Not only that, but I generally find them far angrier and meaner and more likely to start name-calling (maybe it's me). But if you want to get a feel for that side of the reformster argument, I can make a couple of recommendations.

Derrell Bradford

Last time I checked, Bradford was heading up NYCAN, but he's moved around reformy circles. But he wrote what I still consider one of the better articulations of the lefty side of the charter argument. And we've managed to have some respectful decent conversations.

Dmitri Melhorn

I've had some interesting, productive conversations with Melhorn. On the other hand, I've also seen him go off on people with scathing personal attacks. Maybe some people just shouldn't use Twitter. But he's a reliable articulator of the whole "unions are trapping poor minority kids in terrible schools" argument.

If you can stomach it, Peter Cunningham's website it a reliable source of reformy rhetoric. I've actually met Cunningham in person, and he was pleasant. But he has a job that he's been hired to do, and his website (heavily funded by folks like Eli Broad and Bill Gates) is set up to do that job-- functions like a campaign war-room to manage and disseminate for the reform "campaign."

Campbell Brown's website, on the other hand, has settled into an odd mixture of actual journalism, clickbait, and full-on-biased advocacy (which, in all fairness, is what she promised). Read with caution.

You don't have to read any of this stuff. But if you are interested in getting a picture of what's happening across town, where people get paid to worry about this stuff instead of writing about it during lunch breaks and vacation, these writers are a place to start.

Life Is Too Short

2016 is not winning any kind of popularity contest lately. The list of celebrity deaths is staggering; I thought maybe we were all just over-reacting so I looked at lists from previous years and, no, this year really does carry an extra celebrity death punch.

But of course, people die every day.

This week, while we were reeling form the loss of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, two of my old friends died as well.

One was my former pastor's wife. Her children were former students; she came to town when her husband was assigned her and when he passed, many many years ago, she decided to stay. Marlene was involved at the church and in community theater as well as education for littles. Her daughter still lives here in town and was here to help her mother as Marlene slid into dementia. That was a big challenge, but then just a week ago, doctors discovered that some physical problems were related to widespread cancer. Very soon after, she passed quietly, her daughter at her side.

Last night, my ex-wife's sister passed away after a five-year battle with cancer. Ann was the very definition of a good-hearted person, kind and decent and yet stronger than people sometimes gave her credit for. She pressed on through marriage, divorce, single parenthood, getting on her own two feet, remarriage, career changes, location changes-- wherever she landed, that place was better for her being there. She was a devoted mother, a loving grandmother, and an exceptional aunt. Her own mother died when she was a teenager; she and my ex-wife have always been the ideal picture of close sisterhood, closer than mere friends could ever be.She had one of the biggest, kindest hearts I've ever known, and she brought love into every room she entered.

These were good women, women who made the world better by being in it.

This week I've been thinking of them. I've been thinking of George Michael and how he turned out to have been a quiet philanthropist, a doer-of-good-deeds in silence. I've been thinking about Carrie Fisher and how her willingness to live her life loud and honest and in public ("I think with my mouth, so I don't lie" is one of my many favorite Fisher quotes) helped make the world a better place. I've been thinking of my friend Susie, who died after her second cancer battle, and how she kept working as long as she could as a high school choral director. She was exhausted and would step outside between classes to throw up, but her feeling was that she would keep living rather than start dying.

I've been thinking of the students I've had who have died, and how they never got to live their lives "later."

People die. The finiteness of our lives is important, because we do not have infinite opportunities to live all the lives we can imagine. At some point we run out of time, out of opportunities to get things done, to invest time and effort in things that matter. At some point we'll be done and people can look at how we've spent our time and render a judgment-- was this a life well-lived or not?

I am always humbled in the face of deaths like these, where we can say, "She died too soon, and she should have had more time, but she made great use of the time she had. She lived her life well. She made people better. She made her part of the world better." That's the goal, the point, the purpose.

You can't take it with you, so you have to pay attention to what you leave behind. That was the horror confronting Scrooge in Christmas Future-- that he would die and leave nothing behind, nothing of value or importance.

Life is too short to tell ourselves that we can be all about grabbing power or money, that we can be miserably rotten people now, but somehow, later, we'll turn it around and start living like a decent person who treats others well. Life is short and "later" is not promised. "Later" is not the time to do better; that is for today, now.

So Godspeed Debby and Carrie and George and Prince and David and Marlene. Great blessed Godspeed, Ann. Thank you for being here and making the best of your time. May we all think of you and take inspiration to make the best use possible of today.