Parental Roll of the Dice

The death of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hand of their son, is a terrible story. And it reminds me of too many other stories of children who have gone off the rails.

Yes, there are children who are raised by parents who simply aren't up to the task ("better off raised by wolves" we would sometimes say). Like any teacher, I can tell you stories that would break your heart, stories of parents who were simply unable to rise to the occasion of parenthood. 

But there are also the wild card children. Their parents did all the responsible things, gave them a good home, took care of them. Maybe they even grew up in a home with siblings who turned out just fine. And yet, somehow, somewhere, something happened, and that child ended up in a mess. 

Maybe it was something chemical or biological. Maybe just a wrong combination of peers and circumstances. Sometimes we really don't have a clue-- not a single damned clue.

Again, any teacher can tell you stories. Heck, as someone who taught in the same small town for almost forty years, I know stories where two generations of perfectly fine parenting somehow led to a sad and challenging outcome for one child. 

We look for simple explanations. If a child turned out to have big problems, then we blame the parents. If there's nothing obviously dysfunctional about the parents, we start to conjecture and whisper darkly-- there must be something bad going on in that home that we just don't know about. If the child turned out to be troubled, it has to be a parental screwup. 

It has to be something those parents did. Please, God, it has to be those parents. Because if it isn't the parents, if it's some wild roll of the dice that isn't completely under of the responsible humans, then we are all vulnerable. It could happen to any one of us. No no no no no no, no. It has to be the parents. It has to be something they did that I am definitely not doing.

This is where I sympathize with the parental rights crowd's distress. "We did everything right. We kept tight control of this child so that they would turn out the right way. And instead we got this!" I get the urge to cast about for someone or something to blame.

Some folks set the bar for a Child Turned Out Bad a lot lower than others. The child doesn't follow our religion, doesn't respect us the way we want them to, doesn't identify with the traditional gender roles. Others have tried their hardest and ended up with children who have actual challenges and dysfunctions, not just disagreements with their family of origin.

I get that some folks experience a powerful impulse to tighten control over your children, to force them to become the people you want them to be. I even understand how that desire can turn into a desire to control every other person who comes in contact with your child. 

I could argue that trying to exert this kind of control over another human being, even a human being for whom you are responsible, is not morally or ethically sound. But I think it's enough to point out that it is an unreliable approach, a parenting approach that is likely to end in failure. 

I like the work of Russell Barkley, a psychologist whose work is largely in the area of ADHD. "You do not get to design your children," he argues. 

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

Barkley suggests that parents think of themselves not as engineers, but as shepherds.  

You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything--everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them, and what they do, and if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong when in fact the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather you would stop thinking of yourself as an engineer, and step back and say "I am a shepherd to a unique individual." Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog. Ain't gonna happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do, all the time.

And sometimes, for reasons that nobody could have predicted or controlled, the sheep run out of the pasture and get in trouble-- maybe a little bit, or maybe a whole lot. 

Three things to remember, I think.

First, beware of guilt and blame. Parents blame themselves. Others blame them. Okay, sometimes the guilt is earned. But if you are manufacturing guilt, particularly based on some hypothetical alternate universe in which the parent said or did a magic something that Fixed Everything-- maybe a little grace is in order.

Second, remember that sometimes a dark chapter is not the end of the book. As long as it's possible to move forward, there is hope. Some people find their way out of the weeds, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The real tragedy comes when they do something unredeemable; until that happens (and sometimes even after), there is still hope.

Third, beware any person or system that claims that we can keep young humans safe by taking total control of their lives, their environment, their contacts. The fundamental argument for authoritarianism is always an appeal to fear, a claim that "If I have total control, I can guarantee that the Terrible Thing will never happen to you." That version of safety is an illusion; jailers do not keep us safer than shepherds. 

Sometimes the shepherd just isn't enough, despite all of their best intentions and efforts. Doesn't mean we should stop making out best efforts. But my heart breaks for the parents who did the best they could and still, somehow, lost their child to the dark. 

Whole Books and Slow School

Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simple referral to Dana Goldstein's New York Times piece about how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It's a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible). 

The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on "Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here]." Also variations on "Aren't books over, really?" and its cousin "I didn't read any books and I am just swell."

Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it's great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name). 

One problem is the Core's focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn't matter what or how much you read. If today's lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn't matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don't need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.

And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem. 

The Big Standardized Test doesn't just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o'writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work. 

To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.

If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading "skills," then you have to take the time to pursue it.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room). 

And look-- I don't want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it's worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren't even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don't read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy-- "Kids These Days don't remember the old songs and stories any more."

Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial "skills" over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read. 

If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world. 

The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.

Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we'll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.

Zeroing Public Ed

As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.

The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world. 

That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024

I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.

The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.

The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.

The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole "regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers" baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump's education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months). 

It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:

I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.

So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.  

It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education. 

 

Sandy Hook Etc Etc

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend. 

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."

And it wasn't.

"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children. 

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives. 

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.

That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself." 

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence. 

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children. 

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care. 

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry. 

ICYMI: Graduation Edition (12/14)

The CMO has finished another degree because she is both beautiful and smart, as well as exceptionally determined and hard working. The Board of Directors procured a most excellent and very chocolatey graduation cake, which we enjoyed yesterday in honor of the occasion.  

Hope people at your Institute are also accomplishing fine things. In the meantime, here's the reading list for the week.

The REAL Elephant in the Room

Sue Kingery Woltanski continues to provide chapters in the ongoing story of Florida's attempt to pretend that they are not hammering taxpayers by giving away the real estate they paid for (but still making them pay for the upkeep).

Florida's Wild West Voucher Scheme Loses Students, Runs $400 Million Over Budget

Some more details from the disaster that is Florida's taxpayer-funded voucher scheme.

Florida student holding clarinet ‘as if it were a weapon’ sends school into lockdown: report

Mind you, a clarinet in the wrong hands can create some terrible disasters, but this Florida school's super-duper security AI may have gone a bit overboard.

In Wisconsin, health care costs are overwhelming teacher salaries

Wisconsin Public Radio has this report that is just one more different way to illustrate how underpaid teachers are.

Ohio School Boards Association conference reveals growing reaction against vouchers and lawmakers

Just maybe some folks in Ohio have had enough. Denis Smith reports.

As New Hampshire education freedom accounts double, percentage of low-income recipients drops

New Hampshire is one more state where it turns out that taxpayer-funded vouchers aren't really saving poor students "trapped in failing schools."

Are Schools the Problem?

Nancy Flanagan saw the New York Times op-ed about the terrible troubles in the public school system, and she wanted to address some of the conclusions in that piece (which is not on this list because her response is way more read-worthy than the original column).

Charter Schools in a Racist Big Easy

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the history and data from charterized New Orleans.

Accomplishing Project 2025: K-12 Edition

Not for the faint of heart. Anne Lutz Fernandez runs down the Project 2025 checklist for the year, including education.

High Expectations and High Standards: The Chatter is Nothing New!

Nancy Bailey looks at the same old chicken littling that's making a comeback these days. Low expectations! Low standards! Oh nooooos!

Uncertainty and Arrogant Reformers

Larry Cuban talks about the things we know, sort of know, and don't know for sure, and why ignoring those categories makes for bad ed reform ideas.

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

Jan Resseger looks at a report about the conquest of Americas by billionaires, and what that means for education.

Randolph commissioners dismiss entire library board after book controversy

In North Carolina, local government nukes the whole library board because they don't like a trans character in one book.

Three simple steps to take to help protect NYC kids from damaging AI

Sure, Leonie Haimson is writing about New York City, but it's not like that's the only place kids need some protection from AI.

Groups made up of OU professors, college Republicans reject student's religious discrimination claim

A quick news report following up the flap. Spoiler alert: the college Republicans say her paper is terrible and she's wasting everyone's time that could be better spent on substantive issues.

Permission Structures

Matt Dinan on how AI-skeptic professors can still help students write papers.

ChatGPT’s Self-Serving Optimism

Every time soneone takes a closer look at ChatGPT, they find baloney. Here's Vauhini Vara at The Atlantic asking, among other things, what the chatbot thinks "objectivity" means.

Right-Wingers Are Winning The War On Vaccines

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost looks at how the culture panic playbook is being used to make schools less safe for children (but super for diseases).

AI is breakin' the law

The judge told him, "Using AI to bolster your self-lawyering is a really bad idea." He did it anyway. It did not end well. Ben Riley has the story.

I grew up watching these guys. They were the first album I ever bought with my own money. And yes, they were manufactured cheese, but they had their moments.

As always, you're invited to sign up for me newsletter. It's free, now and always. 

The Undemocratic School Primer

There are many ways to divide up the sides of the education debates. One is between those who believe in civic democratic ideals and those who do not.

We're talking about two very different premises, and how they result in entirely different educational approaches.

Premise 1: All human beings have equal worth and are equally deserving of autonomy, opportunity, power, and privilege.

Under this premise, the school system would exist to provide opportunity to all students. Each student would be entitled to the chance to pick a path and pursue it to the extent of their ability. The school system would exist for the uplift of all young humans, and one of our big challenges would be to get resources to all students, regardless of their socio-economic origins. That would include special resources for students with special needs as well as resources targeted for particular cultural and community settings. 

For much of US history, this has been our stated premise, even if we have had a hard time working through the implications of that premise and living up to them.

Premise 2: Some human beings have more value than others, and are more deserving of autonomy, power, and privilege. 

This premise takes us to a very different place. It envisions a society with various layers; some people are destined to be Betters, to live at the top, and others are destined to be Lessers, to serve as meat widgets or other specific functions in society. In fact, it argues, much of the discontent and difficulty in society comes from people trying to live outside their proper roles.

In that world, schools exist not for uplift, but for sorting, to help everyone find and settle happily into their proper place. Betters may learn arts and culture and what we think of as a broad liberal education. But future meat widgets need to learn marketable skills, job skills that will make them useful to their future corporate-boss Betters. Betters get privilege and power because they are entitled to it; Lessers must work and provide value (as determined by Betters) to "earn" every bit of privilege and power.

For Lessers, obedience and compliance are important. For the most extreme cases, children and women are automatically Lessers who are expected to comply and obey. Schools are supposed to reinforce that message, reminding students that they are under the sole and complete control of their parents and must never, ever question that control. It will be good practice for them when they enter the workforce.

Because individuals are of value, everything in life must be navigated on an individual basis. Every person should be "free" to take their proper place in society; to try to "help" them by lifting them above their station or providing them with privileges they haven't earned is wrong, a crime against God and nature, and will (some folks are sure) simply make those artificially uplifted person unhappy and dissatisfied (like all those women who pursued a career instead of taking their natural place as a home-staying baby-maker). 

That emphasis on compliance and obedience also manifests in a belief that there is one true correct answer to all questions, and so education is about transmitting the Correct Answers. That helps teach compliance to an outside authority as well as locking in one natural order with everyone in their proper place. 

When someone like Betsy DeVos argues for school choice as a way for each student to find their proper fit, they're talking about tiers of schools set up to handle the different proper natural tiers of society. Future meat widgets don't need to learn calculus or read Shakespeare. The DeVosian crowd definitely does not mean that there should be all sorts of different schools (like wacky lefty schools or Islamic academies), but just different layers of schools that teach the correct christianist truth appropriate to the place of that set of students in the social order.

For Betters, things go on much as always-- if you have wealth and privilege and power, that proves you deserve wealth and privilege and power, so carry on. For Lessers, the message is that you need to earn the right to even get by in your proper place.

Further complicating matters-- nobody believes that they are a Lesser. It's always Those People Over There.

None of this is new, but these days Betterism believers are enjoying plenty of power, and they are aggressively pursuing all the Lessers that they feel have snuck out of place. LGBTQ people should disappear. Women should get busy making babies. Young human future meat widgets should start working right now. Everyone ought to be properly worshipping the conservative christianist God. People from non-Caucasian countries should get to their proper place, which is Not Here. Everyone should stop invoking "civil rights" to move Lessers above their proper station. Tech world brogliarchs and other Betters should not have any restraints put on them. And schools should be telling students to always obey their parents in all things. 

There's not really any point to arguing that this is all undemocratic-- these folks don't particularly believe that democracy is a good idea. And it's not always easy to talk through the issues with them because some of the words have different meanings; we can all say that every child should get the education they deserve or that is best suited to them, but we mean different things. 

Nor are all school choice fans bettersists. I'm not even sure that some school choice fans really understand who they've teamed up with.

Betterists pose a real challenge to any sort of discussion or debate about education in this country, because they hold a fundamentally different view of the purpose of education, a profoundly different idea about how the country is supposed to work. I have met, personally and virtually, plenty of people I disagree with, but with whom I share some basic values. However, I don't see a bridge to the Betterists and their belief that some people deserve less than others. And I suspect that may be an education policy sticking point in this country for a few years to come. 

The Teacher Who Helped Launch An Entertainment Empire

If you watch the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (I'm a few seasons behind, because my tolerance for ick is limited), you may have noticed a new-to-tv face in the new season. It's a teacher, and she has some great things to say about teaching. Co-creator Ross Duffer explained the casting choice on Instagram

Miss Harris is played by Hope Hynes Love.
She was our high school drama teacher.

High school was rough for me and my brother. But Hope saw something in us we didn’t see in ourselves — and she helped give us the confidence to not only survive those four years, but to move to LA and chase our dreams.

Shoutout to all the teachers out there making a difference.

And please… let’s prioritize the arts in schools. ✌️

How cool is that?

Love is currently the artistic director at East Chapel Hill High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but she taught the Duffer brothers back when she was teaching theater back at C.E. Jordan High School in Durham Public Schools. 

Netflix Tudum interviewed the veteran educator, who explained how it happened:

The boys — that’s my phrase for [Matt and Ross Duffer] — and I have been in touch since they graduated. When Season 4 came out, I was like, “Guys, you’re amazing.” And they’re like, “Oh, thank you so much. We actually thought we had a cameo for you in [Season 4], but it didn’t work out. We had to cut it.” And I looked at my husband, and I was like, “Yeah, how nice are they? This is a lovely lie. They’re so gracious.”

And then — I’m going to say December 2023 or January 2024 — I got a little message from them. They’re like, “Hey, I know you’re really busy, but if you think you can make the time, it’ll probably be in the summer, and can we make it happen? We think we might have a small role for you in the next season. Do you think you could do it?”

I, of course, wrote them back and said, “Boys, listen. Yes, I certainly would make that work. But I have to tell you, you could put me on a stage anywhere in the world, and I’m confident. … But I haven’t done camera work since I put myself through graduate school. Who knows whether I’m up to snuff anymore. You might want to audition me. I’m happy if that’s the process I need to go through, but as long as you promise that you’ll fire me if I suck, as was the contract we had when you were my students, I absolutely trust you. Let’s see.” And they're like, “Yeah, whatever. Here’s the casting director. She’ll be in touch with you.”

I was hedging at the beginning, and they were all in, which is lovely of them.

Love did not actually audition, but she did call in an old acting friend and had to "take my own advice, which is the worst thing as a teacher." Asked what the appearance meant to her, she explained

It’s everything. You always want your students to look back on their time with you as a valuable use of their youth. That the things that they invested in you and your program have served them well. It’s lovely when they reach back and go, “I’m doing this cool thing. Do you want to come see if you think it’s cool?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” Why would that change just because you’re not 16 anymore, and you’re 30? Yes, I want to come see your cool thing. Isn’t that the deal between us?

Isn't that the deal, indeed. I'm also fully impressed by her explanation of her attitude toward educating her students. The interviewer asked if she was surprised by the Duffers' success, but her answer hits at the heart of educating students in any field:

I train all of my students so that if they ever are doing this professionally, they’re ready. I’ve always said, “I don’t teach high school actors. I teach artists who happen to be of high school age.”

What I often say at my beginning level is, “If you never do this, you’re going to learn some skills that will serve you well in your life. And if you do this for forever, I want to start you the way I wish somebody had started me” — with a solid foundation and with an understanding of what this takes and taking themselves seriously. Your work doesn’t [only] matter in graduate school or when you get your first Netflix gig.

The quality of your work and your reputation and integrity as an artist is now in how you’re showing up in class, how you’re showing up every day … how you talk about somebody who gets cast, and you don’t get cast. That’s who you are. It’s not somewhere in the future, it’s now. And you’re not an actor once you get a part on a Netflix show. You’re an actor if you’re showing up, and you’re doing the work every single day, period. You don’t need anybody else outside of you to tell you [that] you are something. You are it if you’re doing it. Full stop.

Yes. And that's true for teaching a writer or a scientist or a welder. One of the worst mistakes schools make is to treat students as if they are children just putting in time before they start the real work of their lives. That attitude excuses treating them as less-than-completely human. Their life isn't in the future-- it's going on right now. And students themselves often need to be reminded of that.

No mention in any articles of how Love's students did on their Big Standardized Test scores.