School Choice and Tuition Inflation

I graduated from Allegheny College, a medium fancy small liberal arts college in NW PA back in 1979 at a cost of about $4,000/year. My oldest child (VP of an Institute Field Office) graduated from Penn State--a state school-- in 2008 at considerably greater cost. 

The cost of college has ballooned by tens of thousands of dollars for any number of reasons, but a popular culprit among conservatives is federal largesse--that the willingness of government to hand out that free federal and state money has encouraged colleges and universities to just raise their rates in tandem. Really, conservatives have been kvetching about this forever-- here's Bill Bennett back in 1987 calling colleges greedy. Bennett's idea, often tested since then, was not that college tuition hikes were directly caused by aid increase, but that colleges and universities could increase their costs and expand their services confident that aid packages would cushion the blow. Hence the Field Office VP's dorm room with internet, a microwave, and a daily newspaper. 

It's not a theory I'm prepared to argue against. College tuition costs are complicated, and colleges themselves, whether institutions of higher learning, sports businesses with some classes attached, or financial institutions with some classrooms in their portfolio, often defy clear explanation. 

All that aside, it's not hard to get the feeling that working up the mandatory financial aid info package doesn't put one in the position of a used car buyer walking on the lot carrying a huge sign listing just how much he has to spend. 

But it doesn't so much matter if I believe it as much as many conservatives believe it. And if they're right, then why are they not expressing concern about similar inflationary pressures in a school choice ecosystem? Because some evidence of just such a phenomenon has cropped up.

The Diocese of Des Moines is raising tuition rates around 7-10%. This is to increase teacher salaries, they say, as well as hiring more staff and maybe increase programming.

In Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, some hefty increases as well (like 40% in one case). Some of the increases will only apply to Catholic school students who aren't Catholic. KCRG reports:

Phil Bormann, who is the Chief Administrator, for Holy Family Catholic Schools in Dubuque, said it’s seeing a “bump” in enrollment at all levels due to the voucher in an unlisted YouTube video. He also said the school will increase tuition over three years to improve the school because of the funds from the state.

“We’re going to be able to leverage some of those funds to improve programming for our kids to do things that we’ve never been able to do in the past,” Bormann said. “...We’re going to be able to pay faculty and staff, even more, a more just wage. This is something I think we all can agree they absolutely deserve. And so these things are going to come in time, but to get there we’re gonna have to make some adjustments to our current tuition model.”

Iowa has universal vouchers for anyone making less than 300% of the federal poverty level, meaning that many families who have already enrolled their children in private schools and paid tuition themselves will get a sweet kickback from the state. In many cases, the $7,600 education savings account voucher will cover more than the tuition.

So with all this free state money floating around, why wouldn't private schools up the ante-- particularly parochial schools, where the church is providing a subsidy to cover some costs--that means an increase in tuition can mean a reduction in the church's subsidy, which would mean vouchers not just directing money to church-related schools, but to the actual church itself. 

I cannot blame the voucher-accepting schools for not wanting to leave money on the table, but I do expect vouchers to create an education ecosystem mimicking colleges. Parents borrowing more and more money for the "opportunity" they believe the "right school" can give their child (provided that child can get accepted into school). Schools using the available money to expand their programs and offerings or profits. And of course the folks on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder being squeezed out of much of the market--unless they're willing to go in serious debt or settle for getting conned by opportunistic profiteers.

Free marketeers argue that the market will correct itself, and that the "forced funding of government schools" provides less freedom than what they propose. It's a puzzler-- the free market education system that sorts students out depending on what they can afford is somehow supposed to fix the free market system of housing that sorts students into districts depending on what their parents can afford. The injection of government subsidies into the college marketplace has caused distortions and inflation and that's bad, but injecting government subsidies into the K-12 marketplace would be a good thing. Of course, the college market is different because not everyone enters it.

It only makes sense to me if I assume that the through line is to get government out of the education biz, so that the well-to-do don't have to pay taxes to fully finance the education of the poors, replacing it with a free market system in which everyone is on their own, free to get their kid as much education as they can afford to buy, with just enough taxpayer subsidy to take the sting out of it and maintain the illusion of freedom.

How not to fight book bans

Illinois is aiming the first state to "ban book bans" by passing a new bill;.

It's a bad idea.

I get that it means well. And at least the bill's authors leaned on the work of the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, rather than concoct something from scratch on their own. 

Nevertheless, if I were a legislator contemplating HB 2789, I'd have to say no. Here's the pertinent language from the bill:

In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.

I have several issues here. 

First, all libraries have to make choices, because all libraries have limited space. All libraries make choices about which books not to acquire, which books not to give a slice of the valuable and limited shelf space in the library.

So libraries are going to say "no" to certain books. This language invites folks to imagine what the motivation for the book's rejection might have been. I'm betting that one of the most common reasons to not procure a book is "we didn't think of a good reason TO purchase a copy," which just starts an argument in which I say, well the reason I think you should have that book is a political one, so if you didn't see that reason, that's a sign of political bias on your part. And on and on--we can run in circles all day because ultimately this hinges on what is in the hearts of the librarians making the decision.

I'm betting this bill is aimed mostly at library boards that might have been "captured" by the anti-reading folks. However--

Second, legislators do this thing where they imagine how a certain legal tool could be used by their team while failing to anticipate what it would look like in the hands of other teams. So some folks may be imagining that this bill could be used to thwart boards that want to block any LGBTQ penguin books; however, it would be equally useful in thwarting a librarian who had objections to stocking books from Aryan Pride Publishers. 

Okay, so I think those are real concerns, but I also suspect that--

Third, this results in one of those policy policies. The library board adopts a policy so that they can check that box on the paperwork for the state, and then they go back to conducting business as usual while the policy languishes in the dusty volume of policies and procedures.

So what should be done?

The best policy for managing a well-curated library collection is two steps:

 Step 1) Hire trustworthy people and let them do their jobs.

Step 2) Because reasonable people can disagree about suitability of some resources, have a formal procedure in place for challenging library contents. 

That's definitely a better process than the one currently be used in far too many public school libraries these days, which consists of this conversation:

One angry adult: I am angry that [copy and paste book title from activist's list] is in the library. You'd better fix that right now, because I'm upset.

Spineless administrator: Eeek! (Runs off to get rid of offending book.)

I have little faith that we can legislate our way into equitable and free access to a wide and wonderful bunch of reading in a library. Trying to rewrite the rules so that they reflect every nuance and detail of your own personal moral code is not, as the forces of reactionary culture panic are now demonstrating, useful or healthy. Better to speak up, en mass, and let the library board know where you stand. The ideal scenario remains this one--

Library patron: Oh, I don't think I agree with what's in this book. (Walks on by and doesn't check that book out.)

But until we get there--well, I get saying "This is 2023 and we shouldn't have to be fighting people who want to ban books," but here we are. We can't pick the times we live in, and we can't ignore them, either. Stand up, speak out-- many times, if necessary. Listening is also helpful--short of the radical extremes, there's a lot of room for disagreement on this topic. But trying to legislate what librarians must have in their hearts and minds as they try to do their job--that's not the way.

ICYMI: Teacher Appreciation Week Edition (5/7)

So, the explanation is that Teacher Appreciation Day is the first Tuesday in May, but Teacher Appreciation Week is the first full week in May (starting on a Sunday), so that's why they're separate this year. Last week teachers got their day of appreciation, but today we kick off the week. Hope that clears it up for you.

Lots to read this week, on a tour across the country.

Unhappy meals

At Popular Information, a look at one striking child labor case as well as the current wave of discoveries about such shenanigans.

Christian activists are fighting to glorify God in a suburban Texas school district

In Texas, a microcosm of how competing versions of conservatism (as well as big dollar political interests) duke it out. From NBC News

The Conservative Scholar Who Convinced GOP Lawmakers Civics Conceals CRT

Asher Lehrer-Small at The 74. Yes, I know, but sometimes they publish some useful pieces of journalism. Stanley Kurtz is a name you should know, Like Koch or DeVos. Because he's one more busy rich guy.

Texas guts ‘woke civics’. Now kids can’t engage in a key democratic process

Another Lehrer-Small piece, looking at how Texas just threw away a key part of civics education.

Against teacher censorship

Paul Bowers speaks out against an impending teacher gag law in South Carolina.

Selling Denver’s Portfolio Model by Confusing Correlation with Causation

Thomas Ultican takes a look at how that whole portfolio model thing (the one where you treat schools like investments) is working out for Denver.

Virginia students aren't showing up to school, putting accreditation for many at risk

The whole attendance thing is an issue, though perhaps not drawing the attention it would if anyone could figure out how to weaponize it. But they're starting to feel it in Virginia.

The parents’ rights movement keeps ducking parental responsibilities

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post makes a good case for renaming the parental rights movement the "make this not my parental problem any more" movement.

Mrs. Drummond, You Are Appreciated

I'm not going to fully endorse all the teacher appreciation ideas included in this Natalie Dean piece, but the appreciation itself is nice.

Iowa Students Outsmart GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds at Scholar Ceremony

Smartass students manage to inject some youthful rebellion into Governor Reynolds's student appreciation photo op.

GOP governor rejects funding for PBS because Clifford the dog "indoctrinates" kids

Not the Onion, and while LGBTQNation has put the worst possible spin on this story, they aren't lying. Clifford showed some lesbians. Add this to the file of stories to pull up when the culture police say they're just trying to keep pornography away from five year olds.

Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom

Conor Friedersdorf is nobody's idea of a fuzzy liberal, but it takes a conservative to come up with "anti-woke nanny state" to describe DeSantis's Florida.

Stories About How Charters Profit and Suspect Statistics from a Charter School Lobbyist

Meanwhile in Florida, charter lobbyists are spreading fertilizer in hopes of growing one more money tree. Sue Kingery Woltanski would like to correct the record. 

Will Chicago Be Able to Climb Out of the Deep Hole Dug by Neoliberal School Reform?

And speaking of fertilizer, Jan Resseger takes a look at the long tale of neo-liberal damage inflicted on Chicago schools.

Teen shelves half empty at Hamilton East as library conducts $300K board-pushed book review

Meanwhile, in Indiana, it turns out that comply with book freakouts can be really expensive.

Essex/Westford School District parents speak to support gender-neutral terms

It's a small story from Vermont, but it really highlights the contrast between the nationally-based culture attack and the actual taxpayers and parents in the district.

Tennessee Goes Back to Looking Back Texas

Come for Tc Weber's Al Kooper stories. Stay for his take on the newest changing of the guard in Tennessee's education chief, a job you apparently can't get if you don't have ties to the reformster movement (ties to Tennessee are optional).

Jeb Bush and Reed Hastings' New TN Commissioner of Education

Schools Matter has a take on the Tennessee shuffle.

Here's what AFT’s Randi Weingarten said about reopening schools during COVID-19

The misrepresentation of what teachers and their unions wanted during the pandemic (spoiler alert-- it was NOT to keep school closed--which it wasn't--in order to extort a big payday), so here's a quick fact check from Politico for what Randi Weingarten actually said. You can believe it or not, but here's the record.

When Our Students Leave Us

Steven Singer talks about those moments when your grown students surprise you with the rest of their story.

Me, Aladdin, and 110 Newcomers

What a cool outing. NYC Educator takes a huge raft of students to their first Broadway show.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and my Middle School Band

Nancy Flanagan reflects on how a band arrangement and an unusual pop hit sparked a worthwhile lesson.

Ed Sheeran Wins Lawsuit Alleging Copyright Infringement of Marvin Gaye’s "Let's Get It On"

You may not have been paying attention to this suit, but musicians were, because being able to lay claim to a vaguely similar chord progression would have been disastrous. But no-- you can't copyright, say, a twelve bar blues progression. Phew.

School principal unlocks dumpster, finds bear inside

You've almost certainly seen this this week, but I would hate for you to miss it. Proof that any principal's bad day can, in fact, get worse. 

Over at Forbes, my teacher appreciation post for this week.

Sign up for my substack. It's free, and it's one way to be a bit more sure that you'll get my stuff.

Five Hard Truths About The Big Standardized Test

Christopher Tienken (Seton Hall) has done some especially valuable research work with the Big Standardized Test, that state-level test that supposedly tells us how well students are learning and teachers are teaching. 

In one of my favorites, from way back in 2016, Tienken and his team showed that with just three pieces of demographic data-- percentage of families with income over $200K, percentage of people in poverty, and percentage of people with bachelors degree-- you can pretty accurately predict what the BS Test results for a district are going to be. If you want solid evidence that BS Tests primarily measure socio-economic factors rather than educational ones, Tienken is your guy.

So this piece, which dropped quietly in January, is well wort the look. Tienken has put together an invaluable and brief listicle-- Five Things Educators Should Know About Standardized Tests. I could have just put this on the weekly Sunday digest of Good Things To Read, but 1) it requires a couple of clicks to get there and B) I really, really think you should see this. Also C) it makes me want to add my two cents.

The five hard truths about the BS Test:

1) State tests are not diagnostic

Since Day One of the rise of the BS Test, critics have pointed out repeatedly that a single standardized test cannot be used for a dozen different purposes. A test that is used to measure achievement is not useful for diagnosing student needs. Tienken can explain this in more professional terms, but for laypeople, there are many analogies. You can't measure water temperature or volume with a yardstick. A tool that ranks students according to height does not tell you how tall any given student actually is. If you want a test to diagnose what students need to plug holes in their understanding, test experts can tell you how to design it, and the BS Tests do not meet those design specs.

2) State tests are predictable.

See above. Tienken has repeated and repeated versions of the earlier research in state after state. The fact that test results can be predicted by using demographic factors strongly suggests that, at a minimum, we are spending way too much in time and resources to get information we could easily elsewhere. Also, maybe that information isn't really telling us what we were promised it would tell us.

3) State test results are influenced by family income and background knowledge.

Teachers assess how well students learn and how well they taught by aligning tests to the actual lessons that preceded them. This is not exactly a radical notion. State tests don't do that, and so they favor students who have a bigger background of general knowledge, vocabulary, and reading.

State tests and other standardized assessments have included questions that uses passages, contexts, or situations based on a famous violinist, visits to a state park, pioneer life in the 1800s, ecology and environmental topics, life on the farm, space exploration, travel and vacations, contemporary suburban life, roller coasters, life in Japan, and other contexts and topics that require students to have varied life experiences and background knowledge to successfully navigate and understand the passages and contexts to answer the question.

4) Standardized tests disadvantage English Language Learners

It's not just trying to navigate a second, new, language, but the use of idiom, slang, and "white middle class situations." 

Look at 3 and 4 together this way-- imagine I give you a series of questions about 11th century slavic language development or Central African culture in the 500s, and then declared that the results of those questions showed your reading comprehension skills.

5) Standardized tests disadvantage students with individualized education programs.

An IEP is supposed to mean that you get an education crafted to meet your particular strengths and weaknesses. A one-version-for-everyone standardized test does not do that. As Tienken puts it, "Standardized testing for a student with an IEP makes as much sense as having a left-handed person create a writing sample in cursive with his right hand and then making a determination about the quality and skill of his handwriting and his readiness for college and careers based on that sample."

What standardized tests promise us is a frictionless measure of student skill, achievement, smartitude, whatever. It's supposed to be like giving a runner a clear, flat open track so that we get a "pure" measure of the runners true, best speed. 

But what Tienken and others repeatedly remind us is that the standardized test track is not level, not flat, not smooth, and is littered with all manner of obstacles, so what we end up measuring is not the runners speed, but their ability to navigate that particular set of obstacles. Instead of a frictionless measure, we get a measure of how well students manage the friction itself. That makes them lousy tools for the many purposes for which they've been sold.

Gods and Parents

In my corner of the world, the wall between church and state is pretty flimsy. Our schools still have Christmas concerts, and it's not unusual for school officials to offer a little Jesus prayer before a public event, despite a couple of high profile lawsuits in the region, brought by students who didn't want a Christian prayer at graduation (and who were vilified by many in the community after siccing the ACLU on local officials). 

So it was no surprise to pick up my newspaper earlier this week and find a whole front page story about a Bible club at a local high school, complete with a picture of the teacher-advisor of the club praying with a student in a classroom "during a break in classes." That may be as much a feature of a newspaper photographer asking "Can I get a picture right now" as the regular conduct of Bible business during the school day. But what I found even more striking was the part about a prayer locker--the school has given the Bible club a few lockers to paint and use as a place for students to drop prayer requests. Afterschool use of school facilities for club meetings is one thing; the contribution of school resources, however small, is another. Wonder what would happen if students went to the administration and demanded a Hindu locker or an atheist locker or a Satanic locker.

Again, none of this is a shock or a surprise, but times being what they are, I wondered-- do members of the Bible club have to get permission slips from their parents? Is the school required to notify parents that their child is involved in a religious activity? 

I remember years ago a Jewish student talking about the elementary teacher who tried to convince her of the error of her ways. She wasn't swayed, but what if she had been? Would the school have been required to report her change of heart? 

We're not just talking about atheists or non-Christians. What if a Catholic student decided to join a Baptist Bible study, or vice versa? 

And there's the Satanic Temple, which never tires of getting federal courts to rule that, yes, if your school allows an after-school Christian club, it has to allows a Satan Club, too. If your child decides to join that club, should the school let you know?

The interface between public school and private religion is always fraught. Here's another story: Girl gets caught sneaking out, and her angry religious (non-Christian) father shaves her head. Sends her to school and instructs the school that she is not to be allowed to put on a hat to lessen her public shaming, because it's a faith and obedience thing. What should the school do?

Let's try something easier. Consider these two scenarios:

Sam is raised in an atheist home, but Sam decides to join a Christian Bible and Worship Club after school.

Pat is raised in a church-going home, but Pat decides to join an after-school Satan Club.

Should parents be told? Should the child be free to join whatever club they like, and it's up to them to communicate with parents or not? Is your answer the same for both, or is your answer that Sam's parents shouldn't be allowed to stand in the path of Sam's salvation, but Pat's parents need to get involved. If so, can you explain why the public school should subordinated to a particular faith?

There are a couple of issues in play here. One is the issue of having a public school pick sides in religious debates. Texas has decided to stick the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and the legislators involved don't seem to understand the implications of this. That includes not realizing that there is not a single agreed-upon version of the Ten Commandments; right off the bat, Texas school officials (or the legislature) will have to decide which church's version gets posted. 

The Christian church has not gone more than fifteen minutes in two millennia without having a debate about one thing or another; historically these debates have been settled either by schism or violence or both. It's unclear how injecting government into the equation.

The other issue at play is the rights of the students themselves. There is no way for schools to keep this kind of information secret if the student wants to tell their parents. 

Do students have the right to keep secrets from their parents? Plenty of religious folks seem to believe the answer is no, never ever. And there are folks who will argue that their children are their property (how their property is going to transition to a functioning independent adult is unclear). I'd argue that any policy that safeguards teacher or parental rights at the expense of student rights is problematic. 

So should students have a free hand to explore their religious options in school? Should parents be looped in to all such decisions? Should religion be strictly left to the home, with schools not getting involved at all? 

It's a complicated conversation, and unfortunately far too many people are skipping it entirely and going straight to "Anything that promotes Christianity is good and should be allowed to just roll on unhampered in any way." That's not a real answer, and no serious school administration should allow it to stand as an answer, and thoughtful people of faith shouldn't accept it either. Otherwise we get closer to a place where your local school board decides whether your church is real enough to qualify for district benefits, and I'm pretty sure that's a place none of us want to be.

Can We Fix Civics and History Education

So, let's take a moment to freak out over the NAEP history and civics scores.

They dipped in a manner reminiscent of the math and reading scores, and some folks are going to provide reruns of previous cries of alarm. "Students' understanding of history and civics is worsening," hollers the Washington Post (and they'll go on to do the standard failure to explain what "proficient" means for NAEP). 

There are several possible reasons. The pandemic resulted in far less time being spent on training students to take multiple choice tests, and that's crucial. Just because you Know Stuff, that doesn't mean you can automatically apply that knowledge to the very specific activity of taking a multiple choice standardized test. 

And because states all put emphasis on the standardized reading and math Big Standardized Tests, that's where much of the "catch up" energy went. 

Responses to the scores have not been particularly useful. Education Secretary Cardona released a short statement that dovetailed with his team's talking points, saying essentially, "Look at that! This is no time to banning books and cutting education budgets." Cardona's words were cherry picked and used as a talking point for folks like the head of reformster group 50CAN who accused him of saying that red state book bans were responsible for the drop in scores. Others correctly pointed out that once again, the lowest scoring students were the ones who had the biggest score drop. Others used the occasion to bemoan the sad state of K-12 civics and history education. Can't we do better?

We can. We should. I don't know if we can in the current atmosphere. And suggesting that history and civics education can cure what's ailing our country right now is absurd, 

To begin with, history and civics education is hard, for many reasons.

One is simply the matter of reaching students. For most of my career, I asked students to reflect on their own education and classes and talk about what was and wasn't working for them. The hands down winner of the "Why do we even have to take this class" award was history. When Lauren Boebert says she never learned the three branches of government, I believe her--but I don't assume that's because nobody tried to teach her.

Students hate history class because the typical high school history class is stripped of every appealing part of history. History is stories. History is a conversation, not a declaration. Likewise civics is a constantly ongoing debate about what our government is supposed to do and how it's supposed to do it. But if you are committed to keeping all of those discussion out of the classroom, then you're left with nothing but dates and locations and verifiable events and that is A) barely the point and B) supremely boring. But we insist on cutting away all the complicated, controversial parts, like butchers who throw away the meat and keep the gristle.

There are ways to do it right, and most all of them involve bringing all of the various points of view into the classroom. The basic model is not complicated. "Some people view this like X, but other folks view this like W. Research, explain, and discuss." And that model has to be regularly updated and amended, because there is virtually no piece of history on which we have had absolutely the last word. The beauty of this model is that it fosters not only content knowledge but also critical thinking, building arguments from evidence, and just a generally nuanced view of the world (I deeply believe that reality has a bias toward nuance). 

But that's not where we are right now. Where we are right now is promoting the idea that proper history and civics education is designed to turn every child into a patriot. We have folks scrambling around to erase even the mention of certain types of citizens; yes, Oklahoma's governor wants to defund PBS in part because Clifford the Big Red Dog and Work It Out Wombats (a less-known by superior show) showed lesbian characters (not doing anything sexual- just showed them).

Real, serious study of history and civics requires a variety of viewpoints. That doesn't mean the viewpoints must be required for adoption but they have to be available for discussion. The discussion has to have guardrails--it's not okay to declare "All wombats are evil and don't deserve to live" when there are wombats sitting in the classroom. And my experience says that it can be tough to work through the barriers of a student whose position is "This is right because I say so and that's all the evidence I need." 

History and civics is hard to teach if you come at it with a belief in One Correct Answer, which is currently the stance of way too much of our public discourse. We're in a place where, for some people, it's not even acceptable to encourage empathy for all fellow human beings. But if you want to teach that there's only One Right View of history and only One Correct Answer for all civic questions, you're teaching something that is neither history nor civics.

This is why the Everyone To Their Own Silo approach is not an answer. A model of choice in which everyone sorts themselves out according to their One Right Answer does not make this pluralistic scrambled salad of a nation work better. 

How do we navigate all this? I don't know. I don't know how you get people to stop feeling so fragile that even exposure to an idea they don't like is more than they can bear and especially more than they think their children can bear. I don't know how you get people to develop a better plan for dealing with those with whom they disagree than to somehow just make all those Wrong People shut up and go away. 

Americans are not very good at history. Never have been. If you get to be a certain age, you can marvel at how many people spring up with arguments and viewpoints and policies that are not, in fact, bold and new, but just the same old time-worn trappings of an earlier age, while at the same time holding fast to the notion that certain historical ephemera (like, say, fashion signifiers of gender) have somehow existed since the dawn of time. 

I don't know how you help people set down their fear and anger long enough to catch hold of the desire understand. The public spaces are filled with so many very loud people who have no real interest in understanding--just label it as "my team" or "their team," mark all opponents as evil or stupid, and treat every new event and piece of information as something to be fashioned into a cudgel for Our Team. As they say, I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people. I don't know how to get someone to be curious.

It may seem like my wailing and moaning has now expanded far past the point, but I don't think so. To imagine as some do that by strengthening history and civics curriculum we can cool the fever in our society are simply imagining that we can change the color of the ocean with a thimble full of food coloring. Schools exist downhill from the rest of the culture, and right now our culture is too full of contempt and derision for those who disagree with us. The most effective teacher of citizenship is what adults model.

We can do better. We should do better. We won't agree on exactly what the process should be, and how we manage that disagreement will be the first lesson we teach students about history and civics. If the lesson we try to teach is "Everyone who is Wrong must be silenced and stamped out," well, that's going to leave a mark. If we move on to lessons like "You're a child and you can't handle the truth," that will stick, too. 

We can do better. We should do better. Step one is to give up the dream of a world in which everyone is Right (aka thinks the same way we do). And yes, I do recognize that my belief in the need for pluralism could be framed as my own One Right Way--except that my way leaves room for all the other ways. It's complicated. People are complicated. History is complicated. But we can still do better.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day

There have been better days for the profession. 

In Oklahoma, State School Superintendent Dudebro called the teachers union a "terrorist organization" while suggesting they want to "sabotage our kids," because, as we all know, the teachers union kept schools from opening as a way to extort more government funds (maybe he meant funds for things like making schools safer to operate during a deadly pandemic). If that seems like a bad way to recruit teachers, well, he is offering a signing bonus for newbies. You know what doesn't help you apply for a car loan or a mortgage? A one-time bonus.

That was awful, albeit predictable. Maybe not as awful as the school district lawyer in Virginia, where the  teacher who was shot by a six year old is suing the school district that failed in so many ways to keep her and other students safe. The lawyer's argument? Getting shot is just part of what teachers should expect when they sign up for the job. So a simple worker's compensation claim is all that's needed. 

The brief glowing period of March-April 2020, during which people appreciated the Heroic Teachers doing their best to McGyver some sort of education in the midst of general pandemic panic--it now looks the really high initial hill on a roller coaster, the one you climb so that when gravity finally catches hold, it can wreak maximum havoc.

And at this point it doesn't even count as news when the indoctrination or groomer charges are leveled. Just another day in educationland.

Teaching has always had an appreciation problem. Everybody thinks they know how to do a teacher's job; mostly they're wrong. And the appreciation week you do get was created by the PTA; it's not like some folks completely outside the education ecosystem thought, "Yeah, teachers should have a week for appreciation." 

And to be fair, it's not just teaching--for whatever reason, we are in a cultural period marked by a serious lack of generosity of spirit, a meagerness of grace. Appreciation is a scarce commodity, and when it appears it is too often simply a slightly dressed up version of "I appreciate you for being on my team."

Nevertheless. Teachers deserve some appreciation. 

I did the job for 39 years, and with the exception of a brief dark period, I didn't regret it for a minute. But it was hard. It was time and labor intensive; on the list of things people don't understand about teaching, we can include just how many hours of the day it eats up. And I don't mean just the obvious stuff, like the stacks of papers and forms and lesson plans that get carried home, or the hours and hours of time spent in the classroom outside the contracted hours. There's also the sheer head space--one of the big adjustments of retirement is that (even with Board of Directors navigating toddlerhood), I didn't have nearly so much stuff taking up space in my head. You think through the day's interactions with students, you think through individual student issues, you mentally rejigger your schedule for maximum efficiency ("If I grade those papers while I eat supper, I could carve out twenty minutes to go walk outside").

Nor do people get the weight of compromise, the hard part of teaching where you have to make decisions about what needs to be done that you are not going to do, because you are human and you have limits. And then making peace with those decisions. And then not talking about it because talking about the hard parts of teaching just sounds like whining to people who haven't been there. 

Teaching is not for just anyone. It's not for folks who are slow on their feet. It's not for people who have limited grasp of the subject matter. It's not for people who can't be self-motivated and self-directed, because for much of the time, it's an isolating job, and when you do encounter adults in your work, they're after something. The cavalry is not coming (and if something cavalry-like shows up, they may very well be shooting at you). 

Teaching is a profession (the second oldest one), with all the training and professional skills and knowledge that implies. But it's also a very blue collar type of job, where you have to roll up your sleeves, dig in, and flex whatever muscles you have. And unlike other professional jobs, it's one where you have very little control over your environment or the flow of your day. I've known lots of medical folks, and their experience of time is completely different from teacher time. Doctors and nurses do work in the time it takes to get it done and done right. Teachers work with dozens of deadlines every day. 

And in a society that is ever-increasingly organized around profit and gain and ROI and increasing shareholder value, teaching remains largely work of service--service to students, service to families, service to communities. Despite widespread and concerted efforts to make schools run like businesses, teachers remain largely focused on service to the point that the tension between teachers; mission of service and demands that schools function like (or converted to) businesses that crank out useful meat widgets--that tension is one of the major sources of personal stress for the modern teacher.

Teachers do the work, day after day, student after student. Well, actually not student after student, because they are handling umpty-ump students simultaneously. I'm not partial to billowy shining writing about teaching as a calling and a gift because, for me, that glosses over the sheer hard work that goes into teaching, the degree to which teachers gut it out. They are climbing that mountain, hand over hand, skinned knees knocking another rocky outcrop; they are not floating up to the top like some kind of feathered angels. And while they climb that mountain, they are helping dozens of other fledgling humans and fellow sherpas make the climb as well. If it all seems that effortless and natural, that is only one more mark of how much skill and technique and experience and sweat that teacher is putting into the work.

Teachers are real people, with the whole range of real people weaknesses and flaws, and they do the work anyway, which, for me, is far more meaningful and impressive than if they were all some sort of superhuman beings walking on clouds and magically imbued with some sort of teacher power. Real people, and--as we've been learning for the past few years--real people who don't have to stay in the classroom if they don't want to.

So God bless everyone who is still in there, still doing the work, still climbing the mountain, still helping hold up your little piece of the human race and society, helping as many as you can climb that mountain, too. Thank you for everything you've done and everything you're about to do.