Musicians Aren't Hatched

Nobody had a bigger impact on the trajectory of my life than Miss Gause.

She was my fifth and sixth grade music teacher. She was not, it should be said, the kind of teacher who had a warm, fuzzy lifelong Mr. Chipsian teaching career, and she made some dubious choices (like the three and a half hour music program she put on one year). But she did not let the boys sitting in the back being too cool for singing simply drone-mumble away, but confronted us in sometimes-agonizing moments of demanding that we actually listen to the pitch and try to match it. The year before her arrival, I took the usual music aptitude test used to screen students for an instrument and flunked. The next year, I qualified. 

Every high school program produces some future music teacher and professional musicians, but my high school band director Ed Frye fostered not only pros but people like me--people who would never be professionals, but who would always follow music as an avocation. I've played in bands, worked in community theater, led a church choir. Most of the significant relationships in my life came via music. 

So we're clear here. I was an English teacher, but I'm a huge proponent of arts and music education.

We have a weird, dichotomous relationship with music in this country. On the one hand, we consider it a necessity. We'll shell out money for streaming services, require a sound system in our cars, and readily embrace each new advance of technology that allows us to include more music in our personal bubble. Some of us pay big bucks to hear music live. And we expect music to enrich everything else--television, movies, gaming, advertising, every public and private occasion. Most of us do not go a day without it; many of us don't even go a waking hour without it.

And yet, we continue to treat music education as some sort of extra, like a lace doily to set under a piece of cake, and not the cake itself. It is always treated as expendable, as something that's not so necessary. Sometimes the cutting is truly non-sensical. I've heard more than one tale of a district that doesn't want to hurt its high school marching band program, so they cut back on elementary programs instead, as if marching band members will somehow just magically appear from the ether.

That's just our society's attitude writ small--we like music, so we like musicians, but we don't really understand where they come from. They just sort of appear, people who have been struck by musical lightning, or maybe hatched at the musician hatchery. 

This belief that musicians just sort of appear manifests in many ways, including the notion held by many that musicians should just sort of work for free, and that we should have the benefit of what they create without actually paying for it. It also manifests in the belief that music education isn't really necessary--the people who are "born" musicians will just somehow hatch anyway, and the people who were born to be music consumers can pick all that up by listening to the radio or spotify or whatever. 

Every other field that is fundamental to human existence-- language use, understanding the makeup and operation of the world, the stories of how we got here-- is deemed essential for inclusion in education, but somehow music--the soundtrack, heart and soul of everything else--somehow that is considered a frill, an extra.

I reject the notion that music programs should be defended because they improve student performance in other areas. Music has huge, incalculable value of its own and should not be viewed as a second-class educational citizen. Music connects and lifts us, speaking to part of what makes us human. Music programs give back to their communities forever. Look around you--every local music group, from bands to church choirs to community theater, is filled with people who are the product of school music programs. 

My school district is preparing to cut a music teacher position; the previous teacher last year lost her battle with a long term illness, and they plan to not fill the position (the shrink-through-attrition trick is a favorite; when I retired, I wasn't replaced which means I guess that I was either irreplaceable or unnecessary). Remaining staff will be stretched to fill the gaps, and students will get less. As someone deeply invested in local music and who has two children entering the system this fall, I think this plan stinks. 

Musical is integral to the human experience; therefor, it is integral to education. Don't let anyone tell you differently. A school without a full music education program is as incomplete as a school without a library or a science lab. 

Can We Finally Have The Necessary Debate About Charter Schools

Charter school advocates are pushing back hard against proposed rules changes in a federal charter school grant program. Having failed to make any headway during the public comment period for the proposed rule changes, they are now lobbying Congress hard to overrule the administration. 

It's important to remember that the rules under discussion are not rules actually governing charter schools, but rules about how new charters can score points when trying to grab a federal grant-- a single source of funding in a multi-source world. 

Still, this is important for a variety of reasons, but especially because it's the closest we've ever come to having the necessary conversation about what charter schools are supposed to be. 

Are charter schools public schools, or private businesses?

The pitch has always been that charter schools are public schools, that they are "laboratories of education" that would enrich the entire "education ecosystem." But that promise has existed beside the reality that charters have conducted themselves largely like businesses, holding onto their "proprietary information" and opening and closing for reasons that have more to do with business decisions than concern about the local education ecosystem.

The proposed rule changes highlight this dichotomy. To increase their chances of getting a chunk of grant money from the federal Charter School Program (CSP), new charter schools would have to do the following. 

Refuse to use a for-profit to run the school. This closes an old charter loophole; almost everyone says "Yeah, for profit charters are a bad idea" and virtually every state forbids it, but many states still allow a non-profit school to be owned and/or operated by a for profit business, which is clearly a violation of the spirit and intent of the rule. Charter advocates are not trying to push back on this point, either because they don't disagree or because they recognize it's not a winning argument.

Build and maintain a connection to the community. This includes doing a needs assessment in the area from which the school would draw students. The rules point out that "teachers, parents, and community leaders have expressed concerns about not being included as active participants in charter school decision-making." So the new rules say charters can score points through regular engagement with the community as well as regular engagement with current and former educators, reflecting the original idea that charters could be used by teachers to move outside the box. Charter advocates have tried to portray this as very limiting, saying that it would keep schools from starting in "saturated" markets. 

Collaborate with public schools in the community. To score points, the charter would have to develop at least one point of collaboration with a public school. Exactly the sort of positive relationship that the laboratories of education promised would benefit the education ecosystem. Instead, charter advocates are arguing that they should not be required to give up trade secrets to the competition 

“That’s like getting Walmart to promise to partner with the five and dime down the street,” says the Washington Post editorial board.

“This is like letting General Motors veto where Honda can sell cars,” says Robert Maranto in The National Review.

Address diversity. New charters should match the match the demographics of their community, putting an end to white flight charters. Advocates say it also interferes with charters that intend to set up charters that focus on, say, Black students, and have tried hard to make the story that the Biden administration is trying to deny charter opportunities for Black and Brown students, which is an interesting PR spin on what is essentially an anti-segregation rule.

The thread running through all of these rules and all of the objections to them is the question of charter school functional identity. Is a charter a public school or a private business?

The charter advocate arguments against the rules change all boil down to "This hampers our ability to function freely as a business in the marketplace."

In some cases, it's obvious. The "Walmart doesn't collaborate with other stores" argument is framed with charter schools as a commercial enterprise. But the objections to needs assessment also reject the notion of charter schools as public schools. Think of it this way; if your local school district announced they wanted to open an additional school building in the district without doing any needs assessment or community outreach, the taxpayers would revolt over such a thoughtless spending of their money (and in fact that exact scenario has played out in some public districts). The assertion by charter advocates here is that they should not have to do any of that, that they should be able to set up shop wherever they feel it makes sense or they think they could get a slice of the market.

The diversity issue is also a business issue. One of the fundamental parts of a business plan is deciding which slice of the market you intend to target, as opposed to public schools, which are expected to find ways to accommodate whatever students fall within their community. 

I don't believe that business is inherently evil. But business operations and public institutions like education and health care have fundamentally different values, different ways of deciding what is a good idea, different factors they weigh when making decisions, even different decisions that they make (public schools do not ordinarily weigh whether or not they should stay open another year). 

Those two sets of values cannot be combined to run one institution. Modern charter schools have tried to have it both ways, but they can't. They are either public schools or businesses, and in their opposition to these rule changes, they've come down hard on the side of being businesses.

This is not a surprise. Much of modern ed reform has been about trying to graft business values and practices onto the world of education. What has made the whole process particularly ungainly and contentious is that this has been done without ever really having a national conversation about it. We've been living through an attempt to change the very nature of public education in this country, but we have never had a real national conversation about it or ever asking people if they really want to replace the promise of public education with the business of business.

It might well be a conversation worth having, and there are valid good-faith arguments that can be made on either side (though I know what side I find more convincing), but the debate over these rule changes are one more example of our American habit of having a conversation about things other than what we're really having a conversation about, particular, this time, the charter advocates who are tossing out every argument except "Come on! These rules really get in the way of operating our charter businesses!"

What Joe Biden Actually Said (Or: How To Distort News By Omitting One Word)

After Joe Biden delivered some marks at the reception for the Teacher of the Year, and some on the right were quick to claim a gotcha, and it has continued to spread. Even if it takes active misquoting to do it. 

The RNC kicked things off with a tweet:

Biden to teachers: ‘They're not somebody else's children. They're yours when you're in the classroom.’"

The Daily Wire had things both ways. The body of the article gets the quote right, but the headline says 

Biden Tells Teachers: Children Are ‘Yours When They’re In The Classroom’

While that quote is not technically inaccurate, it's not the truth, either. The idea, of course, is to play to far right assertion that the damned government thinks it owns your children when in fact you do (even as teachers and parents are mostly aware that children are not actual property). But that talking point has turned up at the Gateway Pundit, and from there metastasized into this terrible op-ed by Jerry Newcombe at Christian Post with the headline saying "I only wish it were a gaffe." Newcombe is a God and Country guy, a buddy of D. James Kennedy, and an author of works like How Would Jesus Vote. This Christian Post piece is a fine example of the kind of moral panic being sown on the religious right these days.

Biden said to teachers: “They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re yours when you’re in the classroom.”

Excuse me? Teachers suddenly supplant the children’s parents when the school bell rings?

The left doesn’t get it. They really do think the state owns the children.

Except, of course, that Biden didn't say that. This is one of those cases where altering a quote by removing just one word and also stripping the quote of context allows you to make it mean what you want it to mean. Here's a fuller quote:

We always talk about 'these children.' They're not someone else's children. They're our children. And they are the kite strings that literally lift our national ambitions aloft in a literal sense. Think about it. If you got to do one thing to make sure the nation succeeded in the next two generations, what would you do? You'd want, I would say, literally, have the best-educated public in the world. Have our students gain confidence enough to know what they can do, to reach in. We have an obligation. We have an obligation to help them teach and reach their potential.

You've heard me say it many times about our children, but it's true: They're all our children. And the reason you're the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They're not somebody else's children; they're like yours when they're in the classroom. You represent a profession that helps them gain the confidence — a confidence they believe they can do anything.

Emphasis mine, because I didn't want you to miss that word that so many just skipped over.

As one commenter on the Newcombe piece suggested, this does raise a question. Don't you want to have teachers treat your child as if the child were their own, as opposed to saying, "Hey, you're not my kid, so if you want to flunk math or take a nap or skip class to go chase squirrels through traffic, that's not my problem."

But the current rhetoric is aimed at gutting trust for teachers and public institutions, and this fills the bill nicely. It's one more way that portions of society are currently determined to tell teachers that they are bad for students. Terry McCauliffe offered a perfect quote to hand victory to Glenn Youngkin, but when your political opponents don't say exactly what you need them to, you can always just manufacture the quote you want. 

ICYMI: Mothers Day Edition (5/8)

Also, Prom weekend and the closing weekend of our production of Nunsense. So lots to do. And here's your reading for the week. Remember to share the pieces that you think deserve more audience. Everyone can be an amplifier.

Follow the money...

Stephen Dyer takes a look at Ohio charters and discovers that they spend a hell of a lot more on administration that public schools do. Some spend more than half their funds on administrators!

Teens catfish teacher, share his explicit images

From Michigan, the story of a teacher who got catfished in the worst possible way. He's not in trouble, but come on people-- do not send nudes!

Pedagogy, Lesson Plans, Instructional Materials-- and Politics

Nancy Flanagan looks at the tools of the trade and the politics of transparency.

Oakland community schools worked, district shut them down anyway

Jeff Bryant in the LA Progressive with the story of Oakland's initiative to close a bunch of schools. IT seems as if maybe effectiveness was not a deciding factor in the shutdowns.

"The Hate Is Too Much"

Minnesota is losing school board members in record numbers. The 74 has the report on this trend.

WV state charter board's first director advocates using culture war to advance school choice

West Virginia's school choice programs are just getting started, and their first chief thinks talking about the awful indoctrinators in public schools is the way to go. Just in case you had any doubt about what all the vilification of public school was about.

Youngkin's ed secretary says her goal is preparing students for jobs

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the ed boss argues that schools are just there to crank out meat widgets for corporations. 

How to lose the culture war

Robert Pondiscio offers a right-tilted history of the culture war, explaining where ed reformsters went wrong. You may disagree with a bunch of this (it's in the Washington Examiner), but it's a perspective worth reading.

Kansas Democrat Threatens to Recruit Parents to Sue Schools For Lack of Honest History Lessons

Do you want a law that gives parents the right to sue schools over educational discomfort? Fine, says a Kansas Democrat--I will round up parents of every marginalized group to sue when their story isn't told in history class. A discussion involving extensive misquoting ensued. From The 74.

Last time, the religious right told us not what we can teach but how to teach it

Alfie Kohn takes a look at one of the previous iterations of the culture wars--back in the 1970s when the religious right was all upset about Whole Language.

Alabama losing large numbers of new teachers within first three years

Another study outlining the hemorrhaging of teaching positions, this time in Alabama.

#HateRead: Admissions, testing and the media

Akil Bello takes a look at the ins and outs of media coverage of college admissions news. Bonus: a list of sources that he trusts on these issues.

Pa’s K-12 school nurses treat more than scrapes and bruises. And they’re asking lawmakers for help

A look at the push to update nurse staffing requirements in PA. Includes a map that will allow you to be surprised at how few states do not have any staffing requirements for nurses at all.

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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