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Kathleen West: I’m Having Some Thoughts About Teaching

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2025 //
5

Thanks to Robert Reich, who posted this excellent commentary by veteran Minneapolis teacher Kathleen West. In addition to teaching, West is a novelist.

I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner.

At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.
Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting.

My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow.

Categories Guns in Schools, Teachers and Teaching

Denis Smith: What I Learned at the NPE Conference in Ohio

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2025 //
6

Denis Smith retired from his position at the Ohio Department of Education, where he oversaw charter schools (which are called “community schools” in Ohio). In this post, he describes what he saw at the Network for Public Education Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in early April.

He wrote:

When It’s About Hands Off! That Also Applies to Public Schools

The Hands Off! demonstrations at the Ohio Statehouse that drew thousands of protestors wasn’t the only gathering of activists last weekend in downtown Columbus. Just a short distance away at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, a smaller but equally passionate gathering of concerned citizens from across the nation came to Ohio’s capital city to attend the Network for Public Education’s National Conference and affirm their support for the common school, the very symbol of democracy in this increasingly divided nation.

That disunion is driven in part by the rapid growth of universal educational vouchers and charter schools, where public funds flow to private and religious schools as well as privately operated charter schools and where public accountability and oversight of taxpayer funds is limited or even absent. In many states, including Ohio, those public funds in the form of vouchers are drawn from the very state budget line item that is earmarked for public schools.

Of particular concern to the conference attendees is the division in communities fueled by vouchers, which have been shown in some states to subsidize private and religious school tuition exceeding 80% of those enrolled. In Ohio, according to research conducted by former Ohio legislator Stephen Dyer, the figure is 91%.Several speakers referred to this situation as “welfare for the rich” and “an entitlement for the wealthy.” 

The research shared at the conference also confirmed the findings of the National Coalition for Public Education that “most recipients of private school vouchers in universal programs are wealthy families whose children never attended public schools in the first place.” So much for the tired Republican rhetoric of vouchers being a lifeline of escape from “failing schools” for poor inner-city children.

Another strong area of concern shared at the NPE event was the growing intrusion of religious organizations like Life Wise Academy which recruit students for release time Bible study during the school day. While attendees were told that school guidelines direct that such activities are to be scheduled during electives and lunch, the programs still conflict with the normal school routine and put a burden on school resources, where time is needed for separating release time students and adjusting the instructional routine because of the arrival and departure of a group within the classroom.

One presenter, concerned about students receiving conflicting information, said that his experience as a science teacher found situations where there was a disconnect between what he termed “Biblical stories and objective facts.” In addition, he shared that a group of LifeWise students missed a solar eclipse because of their time in religious instruction.  

Some Ohio school districts, including Westerville and Worthington in Franklin County, had to amend their policies in the wake of HB 8, which mandated that districts have religious instruction release time policies in place. The district policies had been written as an attempt to lessen the possibility of other religious programs wanting access to students and the further disruption that would cause to the school routine. 

The recent legislative activity about accommodating religious groups like Life Wise is at variance with history, as conference chair and Network for Public Education founder Dr. Diane Ravitch pointed out in her remarks about the founding of Ohio. As part of the Northwest Territory, she noted that Ohio was originally divided into 32 plots, with plot 16, being reserved for a public school. No plot was set aside for a religious school.

Ohio became the first state to be formed from the Northwest Territory, and its provision for public education would become a prototype for the young republic. The common school, an idea central to the founders of the state, would be located such “that local schools would have an income and that the community schoolhouses would be centrally located for all children.”

Unfortunately, the idea of the common school being centrally located in every community is an idea not centrally located within the minds of right-wing Republican legislators. From the information exchanged at the conference, that is the case in the great majority of statehouses, and a matter of great concern for continuing national cohesiveness.

The theme of the NPE National Conference, Public Schools – Where All Students Are Welcome, stands in marked contrast with the exclusionary practices of private and religious schools where, unlike public schools, there are no requirements to accept and enroll every student interested in attending. While these schools are reluctant to accept students who may need additional instructional support, they show no reluctance in accepting state voucher payments.

Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Photo: Texas House of Representatives

Texas State Representative Gina Hinojosa, one of the keynote speakers, told the audience about her experience in fighting Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher scheme and the double meaning of the term school choice. “School choice is also the school’s choice,” she told the audience, as she estimated that 80% or more of state funds will go to kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Her battle with the Texas governor, who has defined the passage of voucher legislation in the Lone Star State as his “urgent priority,” is a tale of his alliance with Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher Pennsylvania billionaire who has donated $12 million so far to Abbott’s voucher crusade. 

Hinojosa was scathing in her criticism of Abbott and his fellow Republicans and of a party that once “worshipped at the altar of accountability.” Now, she told the attendees, “they want free cash money, with no strings attached.” 

“Grift, graft, and greed” is the narrative of appropriating public funds for private purposes, Hinojosa believes, a tale of supporting “free taxpayer money with no accountability.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Photo: Denis Smith

The NPE conference ended with an address by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee. With his background as a former teacher and coach, Walz had a strong connect with an audience comprised mostly of educators and public school advocates. His folksy language and sense of humor further endeared him to the conference attendees.

Based on the continuing bad behavior of Jeff Yass and other affluent actors in the voucher and charter wars, greedy bastards is a better descriptor than oligarchs, he observed. From the reaction of the audience and what they heard previously from Gina Hinojosa and other presenters, the language offered by Walz was a more accurate definition of welfare for the wealthy. 

At the end of his remarks, Walz encouraged educators not to despair but to accept their key place in society. “There is a sense that servant leadership comes out of serving in public education.”

Attendees at the NPE conference included educators, school board members, attorneys, legislators, clergy, and policy makers – a cross-section of America. Their presence affirmed a core belief that the public school, open to all, represents the very essence of a democratic society. And there is no debate about whether or notthose schools are under attack by right-wing legislatures intent on rewarding higher-income constituents with tuition support to schools that choose their students as they exercise the “school’s choice.”(As a devotee of the Apostrophe Protection Society, I applaud this distinction.)

So what are we going to do about this? Attendees left the conference with some strong themes.

The choir needs to sing louder.

Hope over fear. Aspiration over despair.

The road to totalitarianism is littered with people who say you’re overreacting.

Who are the leaders of the Democratic Party? They’re out there. On the streets.

It’s not just don’t give up. Be an activist.

As the loudness about the subject of what is more aptly described as “the school’s choice” gets louder,” you can bet that servant leaders like Diane Ravitch, Gina Hinojosa, Tim Walz and others are making a difference in responding to the challenge of servant leadership to ensure that the common school, so central to 19th century communities in the Northwest Territory and beyond, continues to be the choice of every community for defining America and the democracy it represents.

                                                                   

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Ohio, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: Teachers Must Be Heard!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
3

Nancy Flanagan is a retired veteran teacher. Her blogs are always insightful because she sees the issues from the perspective of her long career in the classroom. In this post, she explains why some conferences work and some don’t. She wrote it after returning home from the Network for Public Education conference.

She writes:

I am just back from the Network for Public Education conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is an eight-hour drive from my house, and we arrived at the same time as ongoing flood warnings. But—as usual—it was well worth the time and effort expended.

For most of my career—35 years—I was a classroom teacher. Garden-variety teachers are lucky to get out of Dodge and attend a conference with their peers maybe once a year. Teachers don’t get airfare for conferences in other states and often end up sharing rides and rooms, splitting pizzas for dinner. They go with the intention of getting many new ideas for their practice toolboxes—lesson plans, subject discipline trends and tips, cool new materials—and to connect with people who do what they do. Be inspired, maybe, or just to commiserate with others who totally get it.

In the real world (meaning: not schools), this is called networking. Also in the real world—there’s comp time for days missed at a weekend conference, and an expense form for reimbursements. Conversely, in schools, lucky teachers get a flat grant to partially compensate for registration, mileage, hotel and meals. In many other schools, nobody goes to a conference, because there’s just not enough money, period.

When you hear teachers complaining about meaningless professional development, it’s often because of that very reason—there’s not enough money to custom-tailor professional learning, so everyone ends up in the auditorium watching a PowerPoint and wishing they were back in their classrooms.

Back in 1993, when Richard Riley was Secretary of Education, his special assistant, Terry Dozier, a former National Teacher of the Year, established the first National Teacher Forum. (In case you’re wondering, the Forums lasted just as long as the Clinton administration, and Riley, were in the WH.) Teachers of the Year from all 50 states attended. The purpose of the conference was to engage these recognized teachers in the decision-making that impacted their practice. In other words, policy.

It was probably the most memorable conference I ever attended. I took nothing home to use in my band classroom, but left with an imaginary soapbox and new ideas about how I could speak out on education issues, engage policymakers, and assign value to my experience as a successful teacher. The National Teacher Forum literally changed my life, over the following decades.

But—the idea that teachers would start speaking out, having their ideas get as much traction as novice legislators’ or Gates-funded researchers, was a hard sell. Education thinkers aren’t in the habit of recognizing teacher wisdom, except on a semi-insulting surface level. In the hierarchy of public education workers, teachers are at the lowest level of the pyramid, subject to legislative whims, accrued data and faulty analyses, and malign forces of privatization.

Which is why it was heartening to see so many teachers (most from Ohio) at the NPE conference. The vibe was big-picture: Saving public education. Debunking current myths about things like AI and silver-bullet reading programs. Discussing how churches are now part of the push to destabilize public schools. New organizations and elected leaders popping up to defend democracy, school by school and state by state.  An accurate history of how public education has been re-shaped by politics. The resurgence of unions as defenders of public education.

Saving public education.  A phrase that has taken on new and urgent meaning, in the last three months. Every single one of the keynote speakers was somewhere between on-point and flat-out inspirational.

Here’s the phrase that kept ringing in my head: We’re in this together.

The last two speakers were AFT President Randi Weingarten and MN Governor Tim Walz. I’ve heard Weingarten speak a dozen times or more, and she’s always articulate and fired-up. But it was Walz, speaking to his people, who made us laugh and cry, and believe that there’s hope in these dark times.

He remarked that his HS government teacher—class of 24 students, very rural school—would never have believed that Tim Walz would one day be a congressman, a successful governor and candidate for Vice-President. It was funny—but also another reason to believe that public schools are pumping out leaders every day, even in dark times.

In an age where we can hear a speaker or transmit handouts digitally—we still need real-time conferences. We need motivation and personal connections. Places where true-blue believers in the power of public education can gather, have a conversation over coffee, hear some provocative ideas and exchange business cards. Network.

Then go home–and fight. 

Categories Courage, Creativity, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: This Worked in My Classroom

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
6

John Thompson retired after many years as a teacher in Oklahoma. Although he usually writes about politics, he has recently been writing about what he learned in the classroom.

He wrote:

If we want to prepare our students for the 21stcentury, educators, patrons, and politicians should relearn the lessons of history as to why classroom instruction is only one of the education tools we need to develop. 

After more than two decades of failures, the corporate reform belief that individual teachers can transform public schools has been disproven. But, holistic learning requires a team effort where we bring students out of the school, as well as bringing members of diverse communities into the school. This narrative describes the learning that my young friends and I shared when exploring nature.

The first time I took inner city kids camping and fossil hunting, a couple of minutes into the first lesson I became hooked by my new career. A third grader shouted that she had found a “real live dinosaur nose! It still has blood on it!” 

Sleepy Hollow Camp was the type of progressive institution you would expect from the veterans of the civil rights campaign “Freedom Summer” who helped lead the program. Sleepy Hollow was committed to positive behavioral reinforcement.  We received marvelous professional development for picking up on warning signs before misbehavior escalated, for disengaging when necessary, and for re-engaging kids in a constructive manner. The data from the families’ applications for the program gave us extremely valuable information. Outstanding social workers helped us to interpret the students’ records.  Professional development included cooperative games and culminated in a “ropes course” for building teamwork. 

Sleepy Hollow’s professional development for environmental education was fantastic.  We were provided the hands-on materials about our camp in the Arbuckle Mountains, where “twice this ancient mountain range had been worn away.  But three times it rose from the sea.” We identified plants and animals that flourished “where the American South met the West, and as a result we had as much biodiversity as anywhere in the United States.” 

When teaching such lessons to adolescents, it did not take long for them to recognize them as metaphors for their lives. The children first raised the issue of respecting the diversity of people, as well as biomes. And kids sought the reassurance that people who have been beaten down, like mountain ranges, can rise again. 

After each long day of adventures, an evening campfire was always perfect for celebrating new friendships, reflecting on the day’s discoveries, and contemplating the meaning of life.  

Rashad, one of the teen leaders at camp who was well-known at his middle school for political protests involving Black Nationalism, took charge of the evening talent shows. He excelled at satire, and my lessons often inspired the jokes and dance numbers. In such a setting, the power of children’s moral consciousness in driving the intentionality required for deep learning was clearly illuminated.    

August offered extraordinary meteorite showers as the campfires were dimming.  Walking back to the cabin or the tent, the kids were quiet and contemplative knowing that they were sharing something profound. Those night- time reflections borrowed the language of the Black church.  We were all lying silently in our bunks one night when the cabin’s leader, Tyson, volunteered an account of a family tragedy.  He asked if we knew the story behind the song “Amazing Grace,” and told his cabin mates about the slave trader, John Newton’s, conversion at sea and his becoming an abolitionist.  Tyson then sang for us an incredibly beautiful version of the hymn.

I came to know Richard a bit more intimately after violence broke out after a turtle was killed. Members from another street gang knew how devoted Richard was to wildlife, so they provoked a fight by killing a turtle he had adopted. 

The wiry and high-strung 8th grader began our most intense conversation with a calm account of the death of his grandmother along with six others in a boiler explosion at an Oklahoma City school. Summing up the lessons he learned through mourning, he spoke in a low voice, “I think about things – deep things,” while his eyes darted back and forth, frantically, on high alert for danger.

Richard switched the subject to tales about his days in California living with a rich uncle, an “O.G.” (Old-time Gangsta.) Richard talked about how he would plan ways to invest the family’s wealth to help the underprivileged.  Pumping his fists and striking out for emphasis, Richard repeated again, “I think of things – deep things.”

But everything changed for Richard when his uncle was busted on drug charges and all their money was lost.  He claimed to not being upset by all of that. It brought him closer to real suffering and prompted new ideas for helping the poor.  By this point in our conversation, he exhibited the explosive force of a television evangelist, proclaiming, “I think of things – deep things!”

Back home, his once-powerful uncle still had enemies, and Richard was now more vulnerable and afraid. But that just made him identify more with people who never had power and made him wish he could do good – not just for people, but for all of the earth.  That is why the turtle’s death upset him so much. Again subdued, Richard wrapped up his sermon, “I think of things – deep things.”

Richard’s peers confirmed that his uncle had had money, power, and a reputation, and that I would understand when we returned to the city and saw his family.  It was on the bus ride home that I fully grasped the trauma and fearfulness that dominated Richard’s home life. In those two weeks away, the camp had become a safe zone for him and he grew more and more agitated the closer we got to the inner city.  He sat pensively, practically glued to me for the ride home.  

Richard’s suffering was also apparent to the other students and I was struck by the empathy that they expressed. Even the kids who were the most “down” with the “Crips” — the gang that rivalled his uncle’s “Bloods” — started to treat him with kindness. Something transformative had happened over the course of the two weeks at camp.  

Richard was picked up by his uncle. Someone who had once displayed power and inspired fear was now a broken man and clearly an alcoholic. Richard made a point of introducing me as his friend, and the uncle earnestly voiced appreciation. Though we had just met, the former gang leader grasped my hand and forearm and made it clear that he needed to communicate his deep appreciation for helping his nephew. Like many others, O.G. grieved for the pain he had inflicted upon his family.

This, and countless other poignant conversations, illustrates the challenges faced by children and educators alike in trying to overcome the legacy of poverty. But it also points to solutions. Simply put, there is no substitute for honest and painful discussions with young people about the troubles and transgressions of their past, and often grim and anxious aspects of their present. Long after high-profile tragedies are forgotten by society, trauma endures for many survivors. Despite such stress and tragedy, Richard, his friends, and even his uncle, managed to hold onto their moral core. 

This could be the rock upon which school improvement in the inner city is founded. 

Categories Character, Creativity, Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: Will We Ever Get Free of NCLB’s Mandates and Let Teachers Teach?

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2024 //
36

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wonders if the days of authentic teaching and learning will ever return. After a quarter-century of NCLB mandates, are there still teachers who remember what it was like in the pre-NCLB days. John does.

He writes:

Our public schools are facing unbelievable threats. We need to unite and fight for culturally meaningful, holistic, teaching and learning. To do so, I believe educators must remember the divisions that took off after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which mandated test-driven, competition-driven instruction. So, I believe we need cross-generational discussions about both – the weaknesses and strengths of urban districts before the NCLB.

Corporate school reformers used top-down, accountability mandates to rapidly transform schools serving our poorest children of color, but in my experience, those were the students who were most damaged by their output-driven reforms that forced teachers to be “on the same page” when teaching the same lessons.

However, thirty-plus years ago when I started teaching in the Oklahoma City Public Schools, teachers’ autonomy was respected. Teachers in our 80% Black John Marshall High School were urged to build on students’ strengths, not just remediation. Many teachers failed to use that freedom, but we were encouraged to frontload the semester with lessons the students would love in order to turn them onto “learning how to learn.”

On the first day of school in the mid-1990s, I held up a copy of the old Oklahoma history textbook, Panorama of Oklahoma.. The book wasn’t as bad as the curriculum and the video that State Superintendent Ryan Walters is now mandating. But it pushed “inspiring” passages about our state. According to the curriculum guide, the book could be used to explore themes such as “The Spirit of Oklahoma” and “Oklahoma as the Heartland.” One suggested lesson was watching the video Oklahoma by the Department of Tourism.

When the laughter subsided, I showed my students the newly approved book we would use, The Story of Oklahoma, by the late Danney Goble and James Scales.  My job was to help the students “read the authors’ minds” and understand the most important information and concepts that they sought to communicate. I explained Goble’s sales pitch to the OKCPS where he admitted that his book was written on a higher level than other texts, but he demonstrated how students would be able to follow a lesson if it were told as a compelling story.

Goble chose the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (as it was called back then) as one of the pivotal moments in the book. This massacre happened during the post-World War I panic known as “the Red Scare,” when immigrants and people of color were often seen as threats to America’s way of life, and when up to 300 died as a white mob burned the section of town known as “Black Wall Street.”  The text included a photograph of the burning of Mount Zion Baptist.

The lesson concluded with Goble’s closing words on Mount Zion:

All that was left was a shattered hull, an ugly hole – and an $84,000 mortgage that would have to be repaid … In a remarkable display of courage, tenacity, and will, Mount Zion’s congregation proceeded to rebuild the church.  Not only did they rebuild the church structure but they also paid off the original mortgage. …”

Goble concluded:

“Let that serve as our point. Those anonymous black Oklahomans endured and triumphed over momentous times.  Like others – nameless roustabouts, oil millionaires, tired housewives, …, even Tulsa’s white rioters – their lives were the stuff of which history was made.”

The end-of-class bell rang. Nobody moved or made a sound. Will, a baritone in his church choir, stood solemnly and said, “Please tell your friend, Dr. Goble, that we appreciate what he is doing.” The rest of the class remained seated, watching Will clasp my hand as if I were a preacher after a Sunday sermon and, then, the entire class lined up and shook my hand as each filed out of our room.

Similarly, our curriculum director encouraged me to start classes with the 20th century to get the kids hooked on history, and then double back to the first years covered in the classes. In World History, that meant we started with a scene from Cry Freedom with Denzel Washington, playing the role of the South African hero Stephen Biko, explaining imperialism.

As required, I would put each day’s learning standards on the blackboard, in addition to the day’s “History in the News.”  That meant that students would come in early to see what  contemporary topic would be discussed, and make suggestions for other topics, as well as report on conversations they had had at lunch about yesterday’s lessons. This was doubly meaningful when seniors visited when younger students were coming to class and got sucked into these higher level conversations.

One day, the older students previewed scenes in Marc Levin’s award-winning movie, Slam. It portrayed a Black rapper who used poetry to defuse conflict in the inner city. Before the start of the first-hour class, a crowd gathered to watch a gripping scene where the rapper used free verse to extract himself from a jailhouse situation.  As older students crowded around the television, the freshmen had to squeeze in closer to see.

Mike, a tall, impressive senior, was a perfect role model. His first-hour teacher knew he would quickly catch up on whatever he might miss in class, and freed him to guest-teach a lesson on Slam.  He gave a motivational lecture on the power of satire and metaphors.  He closed, as usual, by citing a line from Dalton Trumbo’s Spartacus, “I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen of Rome.”

We should remember the lessons learned by listening to students, and together building a culture where they share insights about topics ranging from Keynesian economics to Ralph Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City’s “Deep Deuce,” to Clara Luper leading the 1969 Oklahoma City Sanitation Strike march. They saw those lessons as a sign of respect. For example, a militant Black Nationalist and I got caught up in an after-school discussion of a New York Review of Books article on the history of Black families. When we realized that more than two hours had passed, he said, “You are the coolest white man I’ve ever known. You respect my brain.”

Again, I want us to move beyond the last two decades of teach-to-the-test, which almost all of my students saw as a sign of disrespect, treating them like a test score. We all need to participate in cross-generational conversations on how we can do both  – defeat the attempts by Ryan Walters to impose rightwing ideologies on our students, and build on their strengths and moral compass in order to prepare our kids for the 21stcentury.    

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: How the Federal Mandate for Testing Destroyed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
24

John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He remembers the time before George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” took control of the schools away from educators. Data-driven accountability, he writes, polluted the culture of learning. After more than two decades of failure, educators and students need a better way forward.

He writes in Oklahoma Voice:

When I first walked into John Marshall High School in 1992, I was stunned by the exceptional quality of so many teachers.

It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high schools. Yes, there were problems, but each year, our school would make incremental improvements.

Then, the Oklahoma City Public Schools system (OKCPS) would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains — or worse.

I remember when OKCPS was first forced into policies that were later dubbed “corporate school reform.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by former Republican President George W. Bush, increased the federal government’s influence in holding schools accountable for student performance.

During the first years after the passage, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then doubled-down on harsher, more punitive policies.

They ordered everyone to “be on the same page,” and even today press educators to “teach to the test.”

I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all philosophy was disastrous for schools, teachers and students. And decades later, it still remains so.

It doesn’t take into account the difference between situational and generational poverty. It ignores that some students are seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And, it fails to factor in that children, who may have reading or math disabilities, have the potential to become student leaders.

The tipping point for me was when school staffing became driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty receiving free and reduced price lunches as opposed to children living in extreme poverty with multiple ACEs.

Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students.

I had classes with 60 students.

Data-driven accountability pollutes our learning cultures.

School segregation by choice combined with test-driven accountability creates a culture of competition, winners and losers, and simplistic policies that ignore poverty and Adverse Childhood Experiences.

It is a policy imposed mostly by non-educators who ignore educational and cognitive scientific research.

As these quick fixes failed — just like educators and social scientists predicted they would — the “blame game” took off, fueling an exodus of teachers and driving out the joy of teaching and learning. The change in culture particularly affected the poorest children of color.

In order to improve our learning environment and our children’s outcomes, we must first get back to building on our strengths rather than weaknesses.

For instance, if we agree on a culture where we use tests for diagnostic purposes, rather than determining winners and losers, we could go back to the time when our curriculum committees included teachers, assistant principals, and parents.

Those meetings frequently ended in compromises that brought out the best in all sides and made our schools a desired place to learn and work.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Curriculum, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim

The NY Times Published a Story about a Social Studies Class in Nebraska in 2008

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2024 //
15

This is quite a remarkable story. Samuel Freedman wrote in the New York Times in 2008 about a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska. He wrote about a world geography class in 1993 where students learned about genocide. Their teacher was Tim Walz.

After studying the circumstances that set the climate for horrific mass murder, Mr. Walz gave a final exam in which the students identified a country where genocide might happen. They picked Rwanda. Mr. Walz was a good teacher.

The story in 2008 begins:

In 1993, when Travis Hofmann was a freshman of 15, he had traveled little beyond the sand hills that surrounded his hometown, Alliance, Neb. He was the son of a railroad engineer, a trumpeter in the high school band, with a part-time job changing the marquee and running the projector at the local movie theater. 

In Travis’s class in global geography at Alliance High School, however, the teacher introduced the outside world with the word and concept of genocide. The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

Mr. Walz had already taught for a year in China, and he brought the world into his classroom in the form of African thumb pianos and Tibetan singing bowls. For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been — the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

So Mr. Walz took his students — Brandon Bell, the wrestler; Beth Taylor, the cheerleader; Lanae Merwin, the quiet girl always reading some book about Queen Elizabeth; and all the other children of mechanics, secretaries and a town dentist — and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

“It was different and unusual, certainly not a project you’d be expecting,” Mr. Hofmann, now 31, of Phoenix, remembered recently of the class. “The biggest part was just the freedom to explore things. No matter how abnormal or far-fetched an idea might sound, you can form an opinion. Instead of just going in and having a teacher say, ‘Here’s information, learn it, know it, you’ll be tested on it,’ it was, ‘Here’s an idea, run with it.’ ”

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online. 

Most, like Mr. Hofmann, had spent their entire lives in and near Alliance. A few had traveled to Washington, D.C., with the school marching band. A few had driven four hours to Denver to buy the new Nirvana CD. Mostly, though, the outside world was a place they built, under Mr. Walz’s tutelage, in their own brains. 

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide.

Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.

Then summer arrived and school let out. The students did what teenagers did in Alliance over the summer. They water-skied at the reservoir, swam in the Bridgeport sand pits and mostly “cruised the Butte,” endlessly driving up and down Box Butte Avenue.

THE next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. He told himself at the time, “This is not going to end up good.”

It did not. Over the next three months, militant Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The reports reached even The Alliance Times-Herald, the local daily newspaper. Mr. Walz’s students, now juniors, saw their prophecy made into flesh and blood.

“It was terribly chilling,” Lanae Merwin, now 31, of Hastings, Neb., recalled in a recent interview. “But, to us, it wasn’t totally surprising. We’d discussed it in class and it was happening. Though you don’t want a prediction like that to come true.”

Mr. Hofmann remembered having a similar reaction. “It was just strange to know that something was discussed not too long before that could actually happen,” he said. “Just a surreal feeling. To everyone else, it’s 8,000 miles away — no one cares. How can you grasp it? But to us, it was, we talked about it. For us, it was something that reached us directly.”

Years have passed. Mr. Walz left Alliance and moved to his wife’s home state, Minnesota; he is the only active teacher now serving in the United States Congress. His former geography students have moved as adults to Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New York. Ms. Taylor lived in Poland for a while.

Now, in 2008, April has come again. It is, among other things, the month for genocide remembrance — the month when Rwanda was convulsed, when the Khmer Rouge conquered Cambodia, when Armenians commemorate what they call the Great Catastrophe, when Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day, almost always falls. (Though this year, because of the Jewish lunar calendar, it will be observed on May 1.) The lessons of a classroom in Alliance 15 years ago still matter.

“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”

Categories Elections, Extremism, History, Nebraska, Teachers and Teaching

Bob Shepherd: The Most Important Burden on Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2024 //
35

Bob Shepherd—author, editor, assessment developer, textbook writer, classroom teacher, and all-purpose polymath, wrote this comment. After a long career in education publishing, Bob closed out his career by teaching school in Florida.

He wrote:

THIS is the most important thing about teaching, at least at the middle- and high-school levels. Teachers have far, far too many students and a laughably small amount of prep time (that is, laughably small to anyone who actually bothers to prepare significant lessons for his or her classes), and literally impossible amounts of add-on work in the form of mandates to watch other teachers’ classes, oversee car or bus line or cafeteria sittings, do test prep, proctor tests, fill out (often in duplicate) ridiculous amounts of paperwork (grades, attendance, IEP and 501 reports, evaluation materials, lesson plans, bellwork professional development paperwork, and so on). If anyone ever bother actually to sit down and sum up the number of hours required of middle-school and high-school teachers, he or she would soon see that these requirements exceed the amount of hours in the day or week, and so, the fact is, that people are fudging the work, submitting bs material whenever they can, thrown together rather than reasoned out. A high-school teacher might have 180-200 students, and he or she is supposed to give each individual, differentiated attention.

Right. MIGHT AS WELL REQUIRE TEACHERS TO FLAP THEIR ARMS AND SO FLY. Or to locate objects by remote viewing. Or make sense of any proposal by Donald Trump. Or enter that parallel dimension and recover the lost ships and airplanes of the Bermuda Triangle. Or bring back a golden apple from the tree at the edge of the world. Or net the Salmon of Doubt.

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: How to Ease the Burden of Teachers Who Are Overworked

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
43

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.

He writes:

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching
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