Memo To Non-Teachers The Day After Teacher Appreciation Week (Plus Betsy DeVos)

Did you do something nice for teachers last week? Say some supportive words. That's great. What are you going to do next week?

With any luck (well, it's not luck that is required), you're avoiding boneheaded moves like the district that gave its superintendent a 14.47% pay raise since December of 2020 and, during that same period, raised staff pay an embarrassing 1.11% raise--and then layered on that by gifting teachers an appreciation gift of a shiny pen. Then--then!!--offered a non-apology apology by pointing out that, hey, they'd also given teachers peppermint patties and bags of chips in previous months. Teacher appreciation all year round!! Woohoo!

So maybe you did something more appreciative than a shiny pencil this week. Maybe you said some nice words, or posted a nice teacher meme, or even gave a teacher something more thoughtful than a shiny pencil. And that's nice, I guess. Nicer than a kick in the pants, anyway.

But the real question is, what are you doing to day? What are you going to do next week? What are you going to do the other fifty-one non-appreciation weeks of the year?

Do you continue to be supportive of teachers in big and small ways, or do you figure that once Appreciation Week festivities are dispatched, you can take teacher support off of your plate? Do you go back to arguing that teachers are overpaid, lazy and incompetent, the root cause of everything wrong with education? Are you sitting silently when someone claims that teachers are just a bunch of groomers? 

It's not that I think that you should be worshipping at the altar of teachers fifty-two weeks a year. Life is big and you have lots of things to think about and fold into the layers of your daily life.

But teaching today is not like it was years ago. Teaching always went on against the background buzz of dissatisfaction, but nowadays that has swollen to an angry roar directed at teachers. The polls tell us time and time again that parents mostly like their children's schools and the teachers in them, but those aren't the people making the noise. 

In the current atmosphere, what you did last week takes its meaning from what you do next week, and the week after that. If you're a school board member who issued a proclamation about how much you value your teachers last week, and next week you're going to sit down at the bargaining table to argue that teachers shouldn't get a raise, your proclamation is meaningless. And if you're an administrator-- will you be respecting staff boundaries and trying to lighten their load, or will you just keep piling duties on them and taking more and more of their hours with no regard for them having a life? 

We humans have a short attention span. We opine that Every Day Should Be Christmas, but by December 26, we're over that. We make resolutions on January 1 that we have dropped by February. But if you are in a relationship with someone who's nice to us one week out of the year and treats us lousy the other fifty-one, that's not a healthy relationship destined to stand the test of years. 

I don't mean to make a big deal out of this. Teachers mostly get that along with fame and fortune, they aren't going to get a lot of public acclaim. If you're unhappy with teaching because you don't get enough applause, you have entered the wrong profession.

I just want you to get that, particularly in the current world, what you did last week isn't the main thing. The main thing is what you do next week. It doesn't take a lot. Fifty-two weeks of respect beats a shiny pencil any day.

(And really--this kind of thing...)

Celebrating all of America's excellent teachers this #TeacherAppreciationWeek! THANK YOU for everything you do to inspire, challenge, and guide the rising generation! I especially appreciate my favorite, and first, teacher -- my mom. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/NxR2Qq7p2p

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 6, 2022

Additionally,  Betsy's mother taught for just a couple of years, before Betsy was born or old enough to remember, so this tweet comes with the usual DeVos message subtexted-- parents are the real teachers, and all you people working in the "dead end" public school system are not. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week indeed.

Appreciating Teachers In May

There's a certain irony in parking teacher appreciation in the Month of May when teachers are absolutely hammered and don't even have five minutes to run to the teacher lounge and pick up one of those celebratory donuts that the administration brought.

I remember most of my Mays, when the gauzy September promise of "Here are the things we'll get done sometime this year" burned away under a harsh sun of "There are now sixteen class periods left in which to handle this list of 157 objectives." I was never one to count down the days, but I did sit down by May 1 to plot out exactly what I would aim for every day left in the year. Every time the office would announce some event to interrupt the flow of the days, meaning I would lose a period (or fifteen minutes out of it) I would curse and, like a cranky educational GPS, start recalculating.

So maybe it makes sense to appreciate teachers now, when they are up against it, trying to convince students that there are, in fact, more school days left even though the Big Standardized Test just finished. Maybe teachers need that extra boost during May, when only teachers are praying for cold, miserable days that do not make students shift into summer gear. Maybe now, as everyone is lurching toward the finish line, particularly in this pretend-post-pandemic year (which, according to most of my teacher friends, is actually worse than last year), is the perfect time to holler some attagirls at teaching staffs.

But many times, I have wondered if a teacher appreciation week in September would be far better.

It's nice to hear "Ya did good" at the end of a run, but a hearty "Thanks for showing up to take this on. We'll be with you every step of the way," would be great, too. Being appreciated at the end of your run is a nice thing, an expression that people think you did a good job. Appreciation at the start shows some trust and confidence without waiting around to make sure you really did do a good job. 

There's never a bad time to appreciate teachers, particularly in the current climate. Teachers, we hear repeatedly, are commie-sympathizing, child-indoctrinating, enemies of the state who got into the profession either because they hate children and America (or for darker purposes). The current atmosphere can make Teacher Appreciation Week ring a little hollow. 

At this point, teachers are keenly aware of just how much they are appreciated (or not). From gag laws to stagnating wages, appreciation has been shown. And while it may seem like ages ago to the culture at large, for teachers it has not been that long since the fifteen minutes of You're All Heroes praise was replaced with You're Our Servants--Get Back In There. As various memes point out, you know who doesn't have appreciation weeks-- people who are well paid and respected year round.

If the school year is people throwing tomatoes at you every day, Teacher Appreciation Day in May is someone handing you a hand towel. How much better if, in September, someone handed you a raincoat and an umbrella. Instead of saying, "Sorry that happened," how much nicer to get a pledge of "We are going to work to make sure it doesn't happen in the coming year."

Any teacher appreciation is better than no teacher appreciation. Some appreciation in September would be nice. Appreciation all year round would be great. 

Teacher Appreciation Bingo

 

Feel free to play this week. Sadly, there are no squares for "extra $$$ bonus" or "administrator offers to take over class so you can take a break." But there is an extra column so you have more chances to win

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PA: The Voucher Bill Advances

A few weeks ago I warned you that Pennsylvania's latest attempt at a super-voucher bill was progressing through the legislature. Last week it took one more step forward.  

HB 2169 is an education savings account bill, a kind of voucher that involves handing parents a stack of money that they can use for any of several sorts of education-flavored items, from private religious school tuition to tutors to education supplies. They can even bank a few bucks to spend for college later on.

I wrote about the bill here, but let me re-hit some of the main points to keep an eye on.

The bill's authors (whoever they may be--the far-right Commonwealth Foundation has certainly been following the bill's progress very closely, and they're part of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing thinky tanks that has been doing the ALEC-like job of creating legislation for states to pass) have followed the usual playbook of starting small. Advocates of the bill have taken great pains to point out that the vouchers are only available to students in failing schools, and that they will only take one-third of public school's per pupil funding (sort of).

Note, however, that by defining "failing schools" as "schools that scored in the bottom 15% on last year's PSSA or Keystone," they are guaranteed access to 15% of the schools, because no matter how well everyone does, somebody is going to be in the bottom 15%. This is standard foot-in-the-door language. Voucher bills always start small, and then just keep expanding.

Also note that the one-third claim is smoke and baloney. The voucher amount will be the state's average cost per-student for the whole state. The "one third" comes from the fact that, on average, the state only provides about one third of school funding, the rest being provided by local taxpayers. So not only will these vouchers stake state funding away from the local districts, but since the figure is based on a state average, about half of all schools will lose MORE per-student funding than they would have gotten from the state. The poorer the district, the worse this is going to hurt.

As with other super-voucher bills, this one provides little protection for either families or taxpayers.

The bill has a clause saying that parents who "engage in fraudulent misuse" of the account will be thrown out of the program. How will anyone know they've done that? The bill requires the Auditor General to "conduct random audits" of accounts annually. How many? Up to the AG apparently. Advocates will tell you that parents will provide ultimate accountability (voting with their feet, etc etc), but it's worth remembering that the parents were not elected by the taxpayers and are not answerable to them. "Just trust them" is never a good accountability plan for taxpayer dollars.

There is no accountability for the vendors themselves. Since the whole rationale of the bill is that students need to escape from their "failing" public school, you'd think there would be some mechanism for making sure that they didn't end up in some failing private school or failing tutor system, but there's nothing at all along those lines. Nobody--not the state, and certainly not taxpayers--will ever know if the students ended up getting a better education than they would have had they stayed put. And if parents discover they've been defrauded of their voucher dollars by some lousy vendor? Too bad. A central premise of all voucher programs is that once the state has handed you some money, you are no longer their problem.

While the bill may not demand accountability of the vendors, it offers them protection. The bill includes explicit language to make clear that the state cannot tell the private school or tutor or other vendors how to run their business. Religious schools can keep on being as religious as they like, and private schools are still free to accept only the students they want to accept. Just because you've got a voucher, that doesn't mean you can pick any school you want. It's up to the school, not the family.

The bill has now passed the House 104-98, mostly along party lines with some turncoats on either side. Call or write your Senator. Complain that the bill robs public schools to pay private businesses, and that it provides no accountability for taxpayers. You can throw in a note to Governor Wolf telling him to veto the hell out of it if it makes it to his desk. 

Nobody Is Pro-Abortion

Here's the thing. Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody's position on the issue is "We need more abortions in this country." Women are not out there thinking, "I hope I can get pregnant so that I can get an abortion again because that was super-awesome." 

In other words, at the heart of one of our most contentious issues is a pretty solid agreement that fewer abortions would be a good thing.

Just a couple of things get in our way.

Most obvious is a disagreement about methods. The thing is, we already know what works and what doesn't. Criminalizing abortion doesn't work. When abortions were illegal, all that meant was that women with resources could get safe abortions, women without resources would resort to back alleys and horrifying self-inflicted abortion attempts, and women facing serious complications (the kind of things that prompt people to say, "Well, surely it wouldn't be illegal in that situation" even though it would be) just died. 

What works is comprehensive sex education along with readily and easily available contraception and birth control. 

But for some reason, opponents of choice are largely opposed to these solutions as well. A report from The 74 shows that 13 states poised to criminalize abortion post-Roe also have no sex ed at all. It's reminiscent of the Rush Limbaugh flap; Sandra Fluke testified in favor of insurance coverage for contraceptives and Rush called her a slut and a prostitute and said that women getting this kind of contraceptive coverage should post videos of all the sex they were having so that "we can all watch."

It's one of the details of the debate that suggest something else is going on.

There is a sincere point of contention at the heart of debates about abortion, which is the question of when a human life begins. Birth? Conception? The truth is that we do not know. We may have really strong opinions, but we have zero evidence to back them up. Personally, I find the idea of a human soul taking seat at conception hard to accept (and it raises some serious questions about my twins, who were not twins until well after conception--so do they share a soul, did the soul sub-divide somehow, or do souls arrive sometime after the fetus hits a certain number of cells?)

But if you believe that life begins at conception, wouldn't taking steps to make sure conception didn't occur make sense?

That's another thing that gets in the way of this debate. All the ifs.

If you thought the tiny life was incredibly important, would you fight for a pre-natal and birthing level of spending and support that would rival our military spending (and all free to mothers)? If you believed that the tiny life were hugely important, wouldn't you be doing something about the fact that our nation has the worst laws for new parent leave? Why, if this tiny new life is so important, does legislation say that the need of a new parent to spend time parenting in those first critical months is less precious that an employers need to get their employees back to work ASAP? 

Put another way-- if abortion is murder, does that mean a society that fails to provide all necessary support for expectant and birthing mothers is guilty of murder? 

And why, if young humans are of such great importance, are we not moving heaven and earth to create the best education and support system in the history of the world?

There are a lot of calls of hypocrisy against the pro-life crowd, and honestly, some of them are disingenuous; the answer in many cases ("why should a woman's autonomy be sacrificed for a fetus") is "because we believe that a fetus is also an actual live human being." 

But there is also a lot of rhetoric that suggests that, for some people, abortion and contraception are just a way for women to escape consequences for having sex (particularly for having sex for reasons other than procreation), and this is about making sure those naughty women don't Get Away With Something. This appears to be yet another great American debate in which we don't talk about what we're really talking about. 

That's particularly troubling this time because of the implications in Justice Alito's leaked opinion, which suggest that LGBTQ marriage and Brown v. Board of Education are also in jeopardy under the same reasoning. It's impossible not to see the opinion as an attempt to roll the clock back--way, way back-- to days when white guys were in charge and women and minorities knew their place. For beleaguered public education, this opens up one more front for attack.

The short version of all this:

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. It will put the lives and health of many women (mostly poor ones) in jeopardy. There are other things we could do that would be far more effective at reducing the number of abortions, but first we have to decide whether we want to reduce abortions or punish women for behavior we don't approve of. 

The decision to have an abortion is rarely an easy one, and often a very rough one. Pete Buttigieg's response to a question about third trimester abortions remains one of the best statements on the subject-- it's a hugely difficult decision, but there is no way the choice would be improved, morally or medically, by having the government step in to dictate the choice. It's a sensible answer and, ironically, exactly then answer I would expect from a small-government conservative.

I'm Not Agitated About Book Bans

First, as angry as we may get, it's not humanly possible to ban a book, really. We keep using the term "ban" as a kind of shorthand for attempts to shoo certain books away from places where they might be encountered by young humans (the same humans who carry pocket computers with internet access to Two Girls One Cup and stills from the Human Centipede--and no, I am not linking to either).

These attempts are doomed. For one thing, a ban on a book has, since the days Mark Twain thanked the Concord Library for banning Huck Finn, a superlative level of marketing that cannot be bought. Try to find a copy of Maus right now. Hell, try to find a non-backordered copy of Everywhere Babies. In my little corner of the world, our local theater was hosting a production of La Cage Aux Folles, and local conservative church people spread the word that this Awful Thing was happening, so of course the show sold out. A few years later I was directing a production of Best Little Whorehouse; having learned their lesson, they again tried to spread word through local churches and didn't send letters to the editor of the newspaper, but the newspaper got ahold of the letter they were circulating and ran a front page story. Do you know how often we get front page coverage of a current community theater production, huge and free of charge? That one time. Priceless. If only conservatives would protest every show we put on.

Second, as a classroom teacher I could play whack-a-mole all day. There's always another book that can take the place of the one you just removed. It's irritating and sometimes costly, but oh well. 

Mind you, as a classroom teacher I'd rather not. I taught more than a few edgy texts in my career, and while I've laid out my approach elsewhere, the key pieces are building trust, providing plenty of context, and respecting the preferences of students and parents who would rather not deal with such texts. If, as a teacher, you clumsily slap your students in the brain with a text that includes items that may shock or alarm, you've earned any serious scoldings you get. 

All of that may only go so far in an age in which people seriously want to yank Everywhere Babies and a book with sexy seahorse pictures. But there are plenty of books. Take one away, and after explaining that "This book right here is one the authorities say you shouldn't be allowed to read" to the students, we can find other books instead.

There are aspects of this banning business that I do get agitated about. 

For instance, weaselly administrators.

Virtually all school districts have, as they should, a procedure by which concerned parents can challenge a particular text. That's important, as is school transparency about what texts are being used. 

But what we're seeing over and over again, in the vast majority of this wave of attacks on texts, is administrators circumventing that entire process. Administrators who just quietly go and pull books from the library, or, as one administrator at my old district did, just announce to teachers "You aren't using that book any more." Or yanking a book because of one phone call. Or fear about a phone call that might come.

All of this points to larger concerns than just the yanking of that text. Every teacher wants to know that administration has their back. Not that administration will back them even when they're wrong, but if administration will stand between them and the hundreds of differing forces converging on classrooms every day. Just like students in a classroom, teachers in a school want to know that there is some sort of order and fairness, and not just ever-shifting winds that change direction at the whims and moods of the person with power. Teachers want to know that they work for someone with convictions and courage to back them up. This kind of fearful reaction to book controversy is bad news for all of that.

Book ban attempts are also agitating as part of the larger landscape of Don't Trust Teachers, which is part of the larger landscape of Don't Trust Anyone Except Beloved Leader. The continued work of eroding trust in schools is bad for schools, bad for children, bad for society at large, but good for demagogues and political opportunists, who don't really care what books we're talking about as long as they can hammer home the message, "Those damned teachers are Up To Something and we'd better catch them and make them pay and pull down the building!"

Teachers work for the public, but pulling a book because of one phone call (or an feared future imaginary phone call) is not working for the public. It's inviting policy whiplash-- if you pull this book today because you got one phone call, will you put it back tomorrow because you get two phone calls going the other way? Should working for the public mean that one parent can decide for all parents what should be taught? Is the mission statement for the district "We will avoid doing anything that might make anyone uncomfortable ever"? Because that's a lousy mission statement for a school.

"But parents should be able to express their concerns about particular texts." Yes, yes they should. Absolutely. And that's why the district has a thought out procedure to do just that. Use it.

If people want to show up at school board meetings waving around lists of terrible books, that is certainly their right. As many folks have noted, calling for a book banning (or burning) is never a good or heroic look. And while I, as a parent, get the impulse to avoid exposing my children to certain images or ideas, trying to control what everyone else can see is different impulse entirely. As media intrusiveness has grown, we have tried harder and harder to raise children in bubbles, and it's not going well.

If you are trying to raise your children in a bunker so that you can retain complete control of what they know about the world outside, you are doomed to failure and will probably do some damage in the process. You certainly can't erase particular books from existence, nor can you identify every single book out there that might challenge your world view. 

There are two ways to deal with problematic, challenging, difficult stuff in the world. You can A) try to build a safe space where you'll never have to face the Scary Thing, or B) you can develop the strength and support to deal with the Scary Thing. Try to raise your children to be strong and capable and wise, and keep the lines of communication open so that they will ask your opinion and advice when they need it. That will be far more effective than fruitlessly trying to play whack-a-mole with books that contain Scary Words and Pictures. 

ICYMI: Late Edition Edition (5/1)

Last week was tech week for the local production of Nunsense for which I'm music director. I also had about 400 essays to read through a couple of times for a county-wide high school essay context I run. And the last two days I've spent in Philly at the Network for Public Education conference. The CMO (chief marital officer) for the Institute and I left the Board of Directors with their maternal grandmother, and we had our first childless outing in a couple of years. As a result of all that. things here at the Institute have been a little slow, and you are getting your reading list for the week a bit late. But you're still getting it, and here we go. 

Also there was a race this morning, meaning we could go stand in the street for a perfect angle.

The education culture war is raging, but for most parents, it's background noise.

If you only read one item on the list, make it this one. A new NPR poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans are not at all ready to come after their teachers with a pitchfork and torch and, in fact, actually think their teachers are doing pretty well. 

Kansas City area district bans teachers from having safe space signs for LGBTQ kids

One more item for the "this is what these gag laws look like on the ground. Coverage from the Kansas City Star.

I'm a gay kindergarten teacher in Florida. These are the questions I'm asking myself.

From NBC, for that same file.

The Best Question During Today’s School Prayer Arguments Came From … Brett Kavanaugh?

Mark Joseph Stern is covering the latest school prayer case that was argued before SCOTUS this week, and yes, though it's no sign that he'll decide correctly, Justice Kavanaugh had the question that cut to the chase. This article also provides a good summary of how the case arrived in front of the Supremes.

DeSantis and DeVos have a school voucher online town hall.

Kathryn Joyce wrote about it for Salon; this link takes you to non-paywalled Alternet copy. Only for the strong of heart.

That Infiniti Commercial

You know--the one with cute kids playing terribly. Nancy Flanagan, retired music teacher, has some feelings about that.

The School Privatization Movement’s Latest Scheme to Undermine Public Education

Kalena Thomhave at In These Times has this great explainer/background piece about education savings accounts--the newest, worstest version of school vouchers.

Texas and its teacher supply problems.

What a mess-- on the one hand, Texas's major teacher-producer turns out to be a mess and gets it plug pulled. At the same time, some genius decides that Texas should make it harder to become a teacher (not to mention trying to revoke licenses for teachers who want to leave a bad job).

16 tricks to stretch out an essay

McSweeney's with some tips that many teachers will recognize.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I reviewed a book about the evolution-in-schools by Adam Laats (spoiler alert--I highly recommend it).