ICYMI: Presidential Birthdays Edition (2/18)

I am sure that Washington and Lincoln would have wanted their birthdays to be celebrated on the Monday most convenient for creating a three day weekend, so well done, us. 

If you're new around here, welcome to the weekly compendium of Stuff To Read. I read a lot, and these are the articles that I think are worth noting, but which I may not have addressed in postings this week. It is by no means exhaustive--there's a lot of stuff out there--but I am only human. This list goes up every Sunday. There is no quiz. And you are encouraged to share anything that speaks to you. It's tough to break through out there on the interwebs and every bit of amplification helps.

Do Public Schools Suck?

Nancy Flanagan offers some useful thoughts about how to process this eternal criticism.

Christian Nationalists Attack Newton Teachers Association

You may have heard that the Newton teachers' union is being sued for its naughty strike, but before reaching a conclusion, you may want to look at who exactly is behind the lawsuit. Maurice Cunningham has the real story.

Lewisville educator on leave after Libs of TikTok post shows him in dress for spirit day

I don't know if we live in the stupidest timeline, but it sure isn't the wisest or kindest. Libs of Tik Tok strikes again, but she couldn't do it without the help of a lot of troubled and troubling people.

I’m proud of my work as a principal and drag queen. Nothing will change that.

Oklahoma's Education Dudebro In Chief cheered when this career educator was driven from his job. Now Shane Murnan tells his own story.

8 states restricted sex ed last year. More could join amid growing parents' rights activism

Alia Wong reports for USA Today on this growing trend. Yeah, if we just don't mention sex and LGBTQ persons around students, they probably won't ever realize those things exist.

Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses

The Conversation teams up some researchers and journalists to create this tremendous story about one more way that some cities and states cut public education off at the knees.

They call it ‘school choice,’ but you may not end up with much of a choice at all

Pamela Lang is the mother of a student with special needs. For Hechinger Report, she writes about what school choice looks like on the ground, and how little choice she actually has.

It's You. Hi, You're the problem, It's You

TC Weber is a master of tracking the many players in Tennessee education policy, and this is an excellent example of his work, including some info about two of everyone's favorite choice evangelists.

Tim Alberta Challenges the “Single-Issue” Voter

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is working her way through Tim Alberta's new book about evangelicals and politics (and so am I, and so should you be), and provides us with a look into one chapter here.

Scripted early reading approach no substitute for real teaching

Some teachers in Massachusetts take a look at one of those super-duper reading learning systems (Appleseeds) and explain why they find it less than great.

North Carolina School Privatizers Are Subverting Democracy

Nora de la Cour writes in Jacobin about some of the shenanigans of North Carolina privatizers, for whom democratic processes are an obstacle.

Woman challenges over 150 books in DD2 schools despite not having a child in the district

From South Carolina, just one more story of where all these challenges to books are really coming from.

School Moms Battle for Public Education

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the new book School Moms by Laura Pappano.

Book Review: “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire”

While we're talking about books, there's also a new book about Gates out, and who better to review it than Anthony Cody, who previously wrote his own book about Gates.

Educators Get To Imagine Bigger, Better Too (On TED)

Jose Luis Vilson talks about the TED experience, how it can be useful for educators, and even offers a list of TED recommendations for us to sample.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

Paul Thomas talks about the terms that get tossed around during every skirmish in the reading wars.

Student Differentiation v. Alignment: Know the Difference and Set Children Free

How should teachers differentiate when the goal is to meet a standard? Nancy Bailey considers the question.

School Ratings and Rankings Cause Educational Redlining and Resegregation

Jan Resseger, spinning off an article by Ruth Wattenberg, explains another reason that rating and ranking schools is a bad idea.

Florida Legislature Poised To Give Preferential Treatment To Charter Schools With Conservative Political Agendas

Oh, Florida. Here comes a bill to favor "classical" charter schools, a small group in Florida, but one that involves several well-connected politicians' wives. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the details.

Cardinals honor injured teammate Donahue during game against Hayfield

High school sports story, here on the list because the writer is my nephew, who writes about college sports, but also does some local stringer work in his down time. There are a lot of writers in my family, but only one who actually makes a living at it, and he does some nice work.

Big Tech disrupted disruption

Cory Doctorow is a hell of a writer about tech. This is not directly about education, but disruption is certainly an education thing. Also, every time he points out what a scam Uber is, I think of all the people (like Betsy DeVos) who think Uber is a good model for how education should work.

This week at Forbes.com, where I write about education and get paid for it, I put up a widely read piece about a new paper covering what the Big Standardized Test really measures, and another about Florida's latest bad education bill aimed at future teachers.

You can subscribe to my substack and get all the stuff I write, wherever it may be. It's free and easy.

PA: Central Bucks Culture Panic Board Members Consider Their Options

Central Bucks School District suffered through a couple of years as a poster child for MAGA Moms For Liberty takeover of a school board. Now that the winds have shifted, some of the former board culture warriors are spilling tears and beans.

Central Bucks drew national attention for implementing a wave of conservative policies. They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute ("Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.") They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a "gender identification procedure". No student name changes allowed without a note from home. Both the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Education came after the district for creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students-- so they hired a noted anti-LGBTQ lawyer to do an internal investigation; the resulting report might not have been entirely forthcoming (but it was expensive).

The community responded by flipping the board big time in the last election, despite some heavy investment by right wing activists. Even then, conservative lame duck board members were not done with their shenanigans, voting their loyal right-wing superintendent a big fat severance package when he retired. 

So how have things been going since then? What options are the disempowered folks considering.

Well, one former member of the block is now a lot less coy about her connections while on the board. Leigh Vlasblom was board vp; now she's on the staff of the Leadership Institute as a school board trainer/researcher. The Leadership Institute is a right wing advocacy group focused on getting The Right People into elected positions. Moms For Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler worked in the LI school board leadership division until she resigned recently over some legal and moral issues with her husband and another woman.

Vlasblom's page on the Leadership Institute website notes many of her previous credits (US Department of Education, Elizabeth Dole campaign), and it also notes, in the paragraph about her school board tenure, that she "worked extensively with PA Family Institute, Independence Law Firm, Keeping Kids in School PAC, Hope 4 PA, and Bucks Families for Leadership." While lots of folks figured out that the culture panic board group was getting some of these outside organizations to write policy for them, this is one of the first times that anyone on the inside has been clear about the connections. Certainly not back when board members were stonewalling "Who actually wrote this" questions.

Meanwhile, the remaining conservative members, now in the minority, have been getting cranky about allegedly being on the receiving end of behavior they allegedly used to dish out. There's still work going on to undo some of their damage, like trying to claw back the huge bonus for the former super, and hiring a lawyer more in tune with the board's priorities.

After the last particularly contentious meeting, with members Debra Cannon and Lisa Sciscio refusing to take personnel matters to a closed door session. After that drama, witnesses say the two publicly quit the board (though they haven't yet turned in any official letters to that effect). 

If the dream is to get back to a board that focuses primarily on operating a school district that educates students, then Central Bucks seems to have a ways to go yet. I suppose taking their ball and going home is one way for the minority members to aid in the process. 

This is one of the problems of an authoritarian mindset focused on raw exercise of power-- it may work for you when you have the power, but you never get to hold onto that power forever, and if raw power is the only trick you know, then once you've lost it, you're pretty much out of options except either going home to sulk or getting a job with someone who works in the authoritarian raw power business. Best wishes to Vlasblom, Cannon and Sciscio as they try to work it out. 

Administrators and The Big Chill

The Washington Post just covered a Rand Corp. report that provides unsurprising data: 65% of K-12 teachers restricted their instruction on "political and social issues." The paragraph that really jumped out at me was this one:

Teachers’ most common reason for curtailing some forms of education, the report found, was their worry that school or district leaders would not support them if parents expressed concerns — and teachers working in politically conservative areas were more likely to censor themselves.

In fact, the Rand report found that the percentage of teachers self-censoring was double the percentage of teachers working in a state that has actual restrictive laws forbidding woke DEI CRT race gender divisive concepts etc etc etc culture panic teaching.

I don't know if the culture panic crowd figured this out or stumbled across it, but either way, culture panic  has hit on an important tactic-- all you have to do to get a big chill is scare the administrators.

Far too many administrators operate from a simple vision-- a good day is a day on which the phone doesn't ring. And if it does ring, the easiest way to get the problem to go away is to make the teacher stop doing whatever it is that made the phone calling parent sad.

This is not a new problem. Every teacher knows stories of that administrator that folded like a wet paper bag when a parent called. Most teachers have given that advice to a parent: "This is what we need to do next for your kid, and I can try to get the ball rolling here, but things will happen much faster if you call the office."

But culture panic has raised the amount of background noise and added to the list of possible offenses. So in states that don't even have Don't Say Gay laws, administrators are making teachers take down any room decorations that some parent might think are just too gay. Administrators are having staff meetings to deliver the message, "I hear that parents out there somewhere are freaking out over CRT/DEI/LGBTQ stuff, so do us all a favor and just don't come near any of those topics ever." 

And in way too many districts, teachers already know that when push comes to shove, they are working for administrators who will not have their back. They've already adjusted their classroom style accordingly (e.g. adjusting disciplinary requirements because they know that when it comes to problem students, they are on their own), so steering away from the new list of Controversial Stuff is just more of the same. 

It's a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it's a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it's a luxury that many teachers don't have. The Rand findings are just a reminder of that unpleasant truth. Administrators set the temperature for a building; if those classrooms are extra chilly, the problem lies in the front office.

IN: From the AG, Another Edu-witch Hunt Site

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has had a busy and varied political career, marked by a desire to go after targets. At the moment, at appears that he wants to go after public schools.

Most recently, Rokita won attention through his relentless pursuit and harassment of the Indiana doctor who performed a completely legal abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim who could not receive her medical care legally in Ohio. I mean relentless, going after her in every way conceivable and, according to the Disciplinary Commission of the Indiana Supreme Court, several ways that were not legal. 

Now Rokita has decided to join up the culture panic cause by setting up a witch hunt website. Didn't even touch base with the state's education department--just set up a website to allow anyone to report a school, district, or teacher doing Something Naughty. 

This guy

We've seen this movie before. In 2021, North Carolina rightwing Lt. Governor, gubernatorial candidate, and kind of a tool Mark Robinson set up a site to collect information about schools in the state. An awful lot of people contributed fake and/or unhinged reports, but by sifting through the remainder, Robinson's office was able to reach the exact panic-feeding conclusions they had planned to reach. In that same year, Idaho's Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin also set out to track down Naughty Indoctrinators with a task force and a website. 

Both of those official panickers were angling for the state's top office. Rokita already has a failed attempt behind him.

The site itself ("an official website of the Indiana State Government") is bold and imposing and full of--well, come choices were made here. "Eyes on Education" is the official title and only sort of sounds like "Big Brother Is Watching." There's a graphics attempt to combine IN (for Indiana) and a silhouette of the state with the slogan "Liberty In Action" but it ends up looking a lot like "Liberty Inaction." Also, "Office of the Attorney General Todd Rokita" appears as prominently if this were a campaign site.

The story behind the site is the standard-- "As I travel the state, I regularly hear from students, parents and teachers about destructive curricula, policies or programs in our schools," said Rokita via press release. Culture panic is always released per request of the masses, perhaps because that sounds better than "I calculated that there were political points to be made here." The website repeats the rationale-- "After our office consistently heard from student, parents, and teachers about objectionable curricula, policies, or programs affecting children, we launched the Eyes on Education portal." Because when people have concerns about school curricula, the state Attorney General's office is the first place they turn.

To turn in your local naughty district, all you have to do is click "submit to portal," fill in your totally not fake name and address, and attach the file image of whatever you're reporting. In this way, the portal collects and displays “potentially inappropriate” material in schools that are “real examples of socialist indoctrination from classrooms across the state.” 

When the site launched on February 5, there was nothing in place to insure against false reporting--you could attach any Indoctrinaty image you liked and claim it came from a particular school. Since that launch, the AG office has said that districts are allowed to respond to postings that are old or inaccurate or just plain fake, but apparently that is their problem and not the state's. And the AG will add the district's comments, but not remove the materials. Call me cynical, but I assume that's because it allows the AG to point at the sheer volume of postings as "evidence" that socialist indoctrination is rampant in Indiana schools.

The main point is not addressing culture panic; it's about creating more public distrust of public schools, the better to push dismantling public education. This is not the move of someone who is serious about public education in the state.

So far, the complaints on the site center on gender identity, a pride flag, DEI, CRT, BLM, 1619, and reading with sexual content. Much of it is unredacted, meaning the names of the teachers are still visible (in at least one case, the complainant's name, address, phone number, and email are also plainly visible), which in the current climate seems like a recipe for all sorts of harassment and intimidation. 

The site has improved slightly over the North Carolina and Idaho efforts in that it makes it marginally harder to clog the process with bogus and protest submissions, though you could certainly give it a shot right here at the submission page.

But mostly what this is going to do is add to intimidation of teachers, allow unsubstantiated slamming of schools, increase distrust of public ed, make some political hay for Rokita, and spread smoke without light. All that and waste the time of a lot of people working in public education (which school administrator will draw the task of doing the daily Check For Lies on the AG Website). What it won't do is improve the quality of public education in Indiana. 

I Was A Teenage Indoctrinee

Whenever the topic of naughty lefty teachers indoctrinating impressionable young minds comes up, I think of Lois Anthony.

It was the fall of 1972. Richard Nixon was up against George McGovern, and the election was all about Viet Nam, where things were not going so well. The draft was still in place (though it would be gone shortly), so the war felt pretty personal. There was political unrest in the country, and not the picturesque flowers-in-gun-barrels late-sixties type, but the ugly shooting innocent bystanders at Kent State type. We hadn't heard a whisper of Watergate, but it was still clear that some people hated--really, really hated-- Nixon.

In the fall of '72, I was a high school sophomore, and Lois Anthony was a fresh-out-the-package social studies teacher who somehow drew the short straw and got the 10th grade honors class. 

Every class has its particular challenges. The challenge of teaching sophomores is that they already know everything worth knowing and why are you, you old person, bothering them by trying pretend that you know things they don't?

But Miss Anthony was game. And boy was she a lefty. We studied the election as it unfurled, and she did her best to get us to understand that the war was wrong and we should get out as soon as possible, and Nixon was a bad, bad man and nobody responsible should vote for him. She even brought in speakers, including a local newspaper guy who had some Big Feelings about the war and the necessity of getting out. Of all the teachers I've known, not one tried harder to sell a particular point of view than Miss Anthony. 

I can't imagine just how frustrated she was by her complete and utter failure.

Nost of the students in the class brought their own set of beliefs from home, and while we would rather have died than admit that we were sticking to our parents' worldview, we were. Some tenderhearted folks were already in her camp. And then, well, she had me and a couple of my friends. We were, collectively and singularly, That Guy. 

We argued for the domino theory. We argued for American awesomeness. We were not far enough around the bend to adopt overtly racist stances, but mostly we were vocally supportive of everything Miss Anthony opposed. We argued just to argue. If she had argued against eating baby seals, we would have used our spare time after school to create a Baby Seal Cookbook. It wasn't that we had anything against her--we liked her just fine. But it was fun to adopt a stance and then charge hard at it, to turn ideas over and play with them. 

Miss Anthony tried really hard to infect us with a bunch of lefty ideas. She totally failed. Oddly enough, by allowing us to argue with her and by acting as if it were really, really important to convince us, and by not, as far as I recall, ever cutting our grades because we wouldn't agree with her, she gave us a certain amount of confidence and practice with a version of critical thinking, and all of that paid off down the line. I'm not sure that's what she meant to do, but it was a job well done, anyway.

I suppose we could have been indoctrinated by someone using other techniques or, more likely, by someone who saw us more often than 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I wouldn't argue that indoctrination is impossible. 

But when people argue that children are being indoctrinated just by being in a room with someone who has Certain Beliefs, I think of Lois Anthony. Indoctrinating the youths is a hell of a lot harder than culture panic folks imagine it is. I arrived at my own set of beliefs thanks to a long and complicated journey, and I know some cultural panic comes from the idea that I and others must arrive at certain destinations only if some underhanded pied piper is leading us down paths we would never normally travel. But I remain pretty sure that all the Lois Anthonys in the world can't lead students down paths they aren't willing to travel. 

New Anti-Woke School Board Association

Meet the newest culture war krew. It's the School Boards for Academic Excellence.

Their website, which is a bit sparse at the moment, presents a group that stands up for Really Good Stuff! Empowering school boards! A vision that is "focused squarely on academic excellence and student achievement, ensuring that every child, regardless of circumstance, is equipped to reach their highest potential." They believe that "the education of Americaʼs children is not a partisan issue" because Americans "across the ideological spectrum" all want an education system "focused on academic excellence and student achievement."

Education should be addressed at local level. Work with parents and teachers. Healthy, respectful debate! The "inherent dignity and value of all human beings." And for sure:

We value collaboration – regardless of political affiliation – to ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.

It all sounds great. And yet, their first big piece of press is an op-ed on the Fox News website headlined, "New school boards challenge woke bureaucracy that leaves kids behind." Well, let's dig a bit. Maybe we'll find something reassuring. Maybe their reasonable face isn't a bait and switch at all.

The "team" at SBAE consists of four individuals. 

Board member Lance Christensen is the VP of Education Policy for the California Policy Center, an affiliate of the State Policy Network, the web of right-wing advocacy and pressure thinky tanks. They put big pressure on the state to open school buildings and managed to create some NAACP infighting over charters. They brought a case to get a union thrown out as the bargaining unit in a district, and they run a "parents union" in four California regions. Christensen has also worked with the Reason Foundation and, according to the SBAE site, "was also one of the principal architects of the recent school choice initiative proposal in California."

Board member Ward Cassidy is on staff at the Kansas Policy Institute as the Executive Director for Kansas School Board Resource Center. KPI was founded by long-time Koch operative George Pearson; it hangs with the usual thinky tank advocacy groups like State Policy Network and ALEC. Cassidy served in the Kansas House of Representatives. Wasy back in the day, he was an actual teacher.

The board chair is Amy O. Cooke, Cooke was CEO of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, a post she took in 2020 after years as the executive vp of the Independence Institute of Colorado. She was also a senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. In other words, an entire career spent in right-tilted advocacy groups. The John Locke Foundation is tied to the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, State Policy Network, Franklin Foundation, Art Pope-- you get the idea. Her LinkedIn profile summarizes her years in Colorado fighting energy policies as "having more fun than the left allows." Her twitter handle is @TheRightAOC.

The executive director is David Hoyt. Hoyt has worked for the Heartland Institute, Young Americans for Liberty, America's Future Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and as volunteer manager for Ron Paul's 2008 campaign. He founded Liberty Development (a fundraising service for "liberty-minded" organizations) and the Cornerstone Classical Academy, a classical charter school, in Jacksonville, Florida. 

Yes, the board of SBAE runs the bipartisan gamut from A to B.

Hoyt is also the author of the Fox News piece, in which he talks about the genesis of SBAE as if he weren't the group's executive director. And the version of history that he employs will be familiar:

America's education establishment is slowly crumbling and the National School Boards Association’s public meltdown in 2021 paved the way. As the influence of NSBA wanes, a national network of reformist school board associations is rising to take its place, with a commitment to academic achievement and parents' rights.

Before its precipitous fall, NSBA worked behind the scenes for decades, quietly steering the nation's school boards to preach social justice, institutional racism, sexual nonconformity, and the "equitable" redistribution of students' grades, while remaining conspicuously unconcerned about student performance.

 The "meltdown: that he references is part of the standard narrative of culture panickists, that awful moment when NSBA asked the feds for some help with the out-of-control protestors at board meetings:

In NSBA's own words, criticizing critical race theory and mask mandates during school board meetings could be considered acts of domestic terrorism. As such, dissenting parents should be investigated under the Patriot Act by the FBI, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security.

Well, no, unless you consider threats of violence legitimate criticism of CRT.  Buit, says Hoyt, this led to a plummeting of NSBA membership and SBAE heard the call to help "reformist school board associations" in several states replace "the radical ideology of the NSBA network with an academically focused competitor" 

Yeah, we can kiss that bipartisan conversation among many viewpoints goodbye, I think.

So who's actually behind SBAE? And what are they actually doing? Hard to say. 

They have a Facebook page that was created on October 15, 2023, but seems to have awaken at the beginning of this year. They've got 12 followers (the list is "unavailable), and three posts. Minnesota Parents Alliance, another culture panic group, likes their posts. So did Jacob Immel, a teacher at a Christian school and local conservative politician in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

They have a LinkedIn page, listing their employees as 0-, but things are pretty quiet there.

On Twitter, we find that on October 24, 2023, Lance Christensen was asking

Want to lead a new organization that will help American schools be a model of academic excellence & student achievement? School Boards for Academic Excellence is looking for a bold leader to serve as the tip of the spear of a nationwide movement.

Plus a link to a now-defunct posting on Talent Market. Their twitter account (@SBAENetwork) has two posts to its name. Followers include Hoyt, Christensen, Terry Stoops (Personal account of "the most interesting man in the @GovRonDeSantis administration"), Minnesota Parents Alliance, and three other accounts. They are following 10 accounts, including Nicki Neily (Parents Defending Education), Matthew Nielsen (Education Freedom Institute), Dave Trabert (CEO Kansas Policy Institute), and  Carolinas Academic Leadership Network. 

There is a 990 file for an organization named School Boards for Academic Excellence that got their IRS non-profit wings in 2023; as a fresh group, there's no actual 990 form filed yet. However, to add to the mystery, the address is in Chicago-- Suite 1625 at 300 S. Riverside Plaza. That address is a large office building on Chicago's West Loop. That suite appears to be the home of both Bearing Tree, a company that manages "the operational complexities of running your mission-based organization," and Common Sense Reforms. Common Sense Reforms bills itself as a not-for-profit "dedicated to initiating conversations on the issues that matter the most to taxpayers, families and our communities" and has virtually no website beyond its plain front page4 (and no 990 page).

Bottom line-- School Boards for Academic Excellence is looking pretty dark, opaque, and mysterious at the moment. If Lance Christensen was an early hand in the launch--well, he's well-connected to a variety of right-tilted activist organizations that would be happy to astroturf themselves a tip-of-the-spear culture war movement to tear at public schools on another front. This direction of attack has been tried before, most notably in Florida, where Moms for Liberty future founders first whet their appetite for right-tilted disruption with an "alternative" school board group. 

That Florida attempt fizzled, and it would appear that SBAE is in the very early stages of its mission to disrupt, so it may be that they have a bunch of fizz in their future. But if they turn up in your neck of the woods wearing their special reasonable mask, do not be fooled. This is yet another bait-and-switch version of the right-wing, culture panic, let's burn down public education shtick we've seen elsewhere. 

The Jazz of Teaching

I grew up listening to swing and jazz thanks to a father who was slightly out of synch with the music of his own times. When I had the chance in fifth grade to start learning an instrument, I picked trombone, because that was what Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey played. 

When we started learning recognizable tunes in lessons, I started trying to "jazz them up." And I started trying to play tunes that I knew even though I didn't have music for them. I was fortunate to have a teacher encouraged this kind of unrestrained blatting, even told me that there was a name for trying to play a tune by ear-- faking it. 

I've been playing now for about 57 years or so, any kind of playing there was to do (my fifth grade teacher was also my middle school and high school band director and a regular working sax player, and one of the things he taught us was music is music and don't be a snob stuck in a particular rut and playing always leads to more playing) and my playing has always included some form of jazz, Mostly I have stuck to the traditional improvisational style, what folks who don't listen to it much reflexively call dixieland.

So when Larry Cuban ran this piece-- "Playing Jazz, Rebounding Basketball Shots, and Teaching Lessons: Instant Decision-Making"-- it spoke right to me. A month later I'm still thinking about it. Because teaching, on my best days, felt exactly like playing jazz, on my best days.

Improvisation is freedom, and it isn't. You can't just pick up an instrument you've never touched before and just start winging away. Learning to play an instrument is learning not only another language, but another way to speak, so that when you reach for a note, it is there. And what you play rests on an underlying structure of chords and progressions and musical lines (your relationship with that structure is a big part of what characterizes the style of jazz you're playing)-- even if you have control of the horn, you don't just honk randomly. And! On top of that, you're also working things out in relationship with the other people who are playing at the same time. And!! On top of that, even as you are racing forward into the next note, you are also casting back, an ear on what you just milliseconds ago did. All while in a feedback loop with your audience. 

Cuban focuses on the idea of decisions-- thousands of decisions made in an impossibly short period of time. Maybe we shouldn't say "decision" because for folks who aren't in it that conveys a slow consideration, and that's not it, exactly (though it can be), as much as it's just reaching a point of action and acting in one of dozens of available directions. Your brain is just firing--bam! bam! bam! bam!--so quickly and fluidly. Being in the zone often feels as if you've disappeared, you've become Emerson's transparent eyeball, and you are just a conduit and a powerful Something is flowing through you into the world.

As Cuban points out, neuroscientists have done some studying of musicians and the micro-decisions, and he ties it to basketball, though I think many sports fit (sports add an extra dimension with the addition of opponents). 

And teaching. There is certainly an underlying structure and order to what a teacher does in a lesson. But researchers tell us that there's a lot going on. From Cuban's piece:

*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

In short, teaching because it is a “opportunistic”–neither teacher nor students can say with confidence what exactly will happen next–requires “spontaneity and immediacy” (Jackson, p. 166, 152).

Nancy Flanagan, spinning off Cuban's article and a tweet from Ed Fuller, notes that this offers an explanation for why teaching requires so much mental energy. Those little micro-decision points come at you relentlessly in a way for which your college courses do not prepare you (college education students--play jazz or basketball or racketball). 

There are thousand strands running through that room, and your job is to stand at the intersection of them all, keeping them balanced and connected, and it takes a million little adjustments and movements, like riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling monkeys with your hands and balancing a broomstick on your nose. 

Teaching, as Flanagan rightly points out, is not the only profession like this, but it is certainly one of them.

The requirement for immediacy, spontaneity, improvisation, deliberate presence-- all of those are more reason that scripted lessons and demands to implement materials With Fidelity are just obstacles to better teaching. 

But wait, someone is about to say. Don't types of music that aren't jazz require players to just follow the notes as written, just like following a script with fidelity? Don't actors on screen and stage follow a script, with fidelity?

There's two answers here. First, there's way more improvisation involved (those Baroque players, for instance, rambled all over the place, just in a Baroquey way).  And no acting script gives you everything on the page; it is the job of actors and directors to fill in the rest.

But second, of course people don't just follow the marks on the page. If they did, there would be no difference between any two recordings of a particular work, or between recordings and live performances. Not every player is a technical whiz or an improvisational genius. Some are just what a friend of mine calls blue collar musicians--they're capable and they get the job done on a regular basis.

That's one more way the mental load of teaching resembles playing. Working musicians find themselves covering the same territory time and time again, and part of the mental discipline is clearing your head so that you can approach the thousandth time while staying fresh and immediate and deliberate and in the moment, true to the path you know well, but open to the opportunities and options that appear in the new moment. 

You can get tired and coast in your ruts. You can get over-excited and try too much at once and drop a bunch of monkeys. And some days you just can't quite connect with that sweet spot and so you fall back on some tried and true routine, which may not be exciting or surprising, but it can get you from Point A to Point B. As I've argued before, teaching is both art and science. But it definitely can be jazz.