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| Statue of St. George slaying a dragon. Sainte-Georges, Quebec, Canada |
Here then are eight dragons to slay this back to school season:
- Opening the year without acknowledging the horrific surroundings of our students and their families
Schools are very, very good at routines: we get the students in the building the same way, get them to lunch the same way, get them from place to place the same way, even say things the same way to students and their families.
While this is an effective way of managing groups of people, if we aren't acknowledging the enormous strain that (in particular) federal action is placing on students and their families, if we pretend that it isn't impacting their ability to learn and grow in school, then we aren't doing our job as educators. Kids need to know that we know the reality in which they live.
Families who are immigrants, whatever their status, are being targeted by the federal government. They are having difficult conversations with their children; they're sometimes keeping them home from school; and some are being taken in raids. Families are vanishing. Those are all recent links by the way; there are new ones every week. As I type this, Chicago is mobilizing around their schools under the expectation of federal activity. Los Angeles superintendent Alberto Carvalho has been particularly outspoken about this issue, and the California legislature has now passed bills designed to restrict immigration enforcement around schools.
From its earliest days in office, the Trump administration has been targeting trans students, and those students feel it. Every week, there is another post or two from the McMahon-led Education Department, trumpeting another district or state they are targeting for making provision for their students, in an ongoing weaponizing of the Office of Civil Rights directly contradicting the reason for its existence. They don't want trans students to even be mentioned.
And families and students know there continues to be no action on guns, despite this year already having the first school shooting of the year before we even got to September. It's the guns.
There is of course more. But those are touching every district in the country.
We cannot on our own in school communities fix these things. But we do ourselves no favors as educators if we act as if they are not things that surround our kids and their families.
As the old Yellow Pages commercial had it, "If it's out there, it's in here."
We need to acknowledge that. - Continuing to push attendance to school without doing more work on why's
We can roll out all the data we want to on how kids who miss more school don't do as well on MCAS, but there are a number of other things that are also true:
Sick kids shouldn't be in school. They don't learn as well; they don't get well as fast; and they make other people sick while they are there.
Parents keeping kids home when the federal government is making it clear that they intend to kidnap and deport kids, adults, and families makes sense.
Families that are working multiple jobs to keep a roof over their heads in one of the most expensive places to live in a country which operates with some of the smallest supports for families may be making the best of bad situations when it comes to transportation, health of others, weather, and a long list of other things.
Parents and guardians frequently are behaving in logical ways about school attendance. Continued chirpy ads and social media posts that act as if families don't know about why being in school is important are not only condescending; they're ineffective. It does not serve students to have posts, and posters, and contests, and more about the IMPORTANCE OF SCHOOL ATTENDENCE if we never bother to ask, let alone work on, why it is they aren't there.
If you want kids to be in schools, then talk to families to find out why they aren't! And then work to solve those problems.
And please, save us all the chipper posts. - AI being welcome, invited, demanded in schools.
I've of course been posting a lot about this, but it's clear that this is the fad that has eaten too many of the brains of people who are setting priorities for education. It is harmful to children and to all human life, not only directly but through further destroying the planet; it is created through the unknowledged and unremunerated work of millions of people; it absorbs and magnifies bias; it lies a lot; and it purports to do things that are the things we actually should be teaching students to do.
And the people who are behind the national push are there to make money, not for the good of children.
AI is antithetical to what we are about in education. Our students deserve so very much better from us on this.
If you're using AI, you should be ashamed. If you are pushing this into schools and into children, you should be doubly so. - Cell phones as ultimate evil
If I have to read one more article about how "we banned cell phones in school and everyone loves it and school became full of dancing rainbow unicorns," I may lose my mind.
Please review the above issues families are dealing with: parents disappearing during the day. Multiple kinds of work that make getting students to and from school complicated. Kids needing support that too often isn't being given at schools.
Students, in some cases, even being discriminated against and further harmed in schools.
Let's then add students of varying abilities using all sorts of easily accessible technology to, in some cases, literally survive their school days, and do so in ways that don't single them out as "the kid who needs help."
Oh, then let's consider the school district taking on the responsibility of either holding or somehow being the management of thousands and thousands of dollars of personal technology in school. Did anyone take out insurance on that?
The vast majority of students now have personal computers that are palm-sized. The research on the brain-melting of cell phone use (not of social media; and no, the two aren't the same) is weak and largely correlative.
And frankly, far too much of the tone on the objections that families and students have on having their communication devices absconded with have been so incredibly condescending.
If you don't want cell phones out during class, just like every other thing any teacher has ever in the history of the known universe not want out in class, fine.
Banning cell phones at district level, let alone state level (talk about being out of your lane), again discriminates against our most vulnerable--and least likely to be heard from--students and families. - Supply lists
Because I am an old person who is not on TikTok, I missed (until it made its inevitable way to Instagram) what apparently was a whole season of arguments and rebuttals between parents (first) and teachers (back) about student supply lists: the parents resented having to buy supplies for classrooms; the teachers noted the personal funds they already use in classrooms of their own.
Everyone here is talking to the wrong people!
We have a system of free education in the United States; that it is free (and appropriate) is backed up by federal law. To claim that the education is free without the supplies needed to access the education also being free means the education is not actually free.
The provision of education is made by the state in the United States, funded by combinations of state and local funding plus some federal funding.
And that is what should be funding school supplies.
Somehow--and this is, as best as I can tell, a phenomenon which has snowballed in recent years--it has become a commonly accepted practice not to fund the supplies need for school from actual school funds, and for those supplies to instead have to come either from teachers or from parents or both.
At the same time, discussions over the supply line in district budgets, when this is noted (which isn't often enough!) generally reveal that the supply budget allocated to schools isn't fully spent every year, and, if we aren't spending all we have, why would we increase it?
What we have here, folks, is a lack of communication. Clearly, if classrooms are calling for (even demanding) supplies, but the district funds aren't being fully spent each year, that call for supplies isn't getting to where the district funds actually are.
Kids do need "stuff" to learn. It should be provided as part of their education.
School supplies should be coming from districts. If they are not, those currently paying for them need to bring that argument to those who allocate school district funds.
Alternatively, those allocating funds should just fix it - Professional development that isn't pedagogically sound.
Yes, I was a teacher, and I know that complaining about PD is probably about as old as organized systems of education. But there are two places where we, no question, should be doing it right, and still somehow too often are not.
In the first, we're having teachers learn something that literally is not pedagogically sound. They are being made to learn (or at least sit through) something that is actually not good teaching or learning. Anyone who had to sit through a "using AI presentation" this back-to-school certainly falls in here, but there are plenty of times and examples of places where anyone who has had any experience in the classroom or has done a smidge of research knows better than what they are being told. I know keeping up with what works and what doesn't is time-consuming, but it is necessary.
The second is doing to teachers what we know doesn't work with students. Whether that's sticking them in a room and having someone talk at them for hours; pushing a new requirement on them without enough time to practice or implement (or worse yet, changing the rules midyear!); or otherwise creating bad learning situations, it's lousy professional development.
Teachers are professionals, and it does not serve our students well to treat them less than that.
Professional development should be pedagogically sound both ways.
Pro tip: download those first day Bingo cards and strive NOT to let anyone get Bingo. - Communication that substitutes clicks for engagement.
This is a fairly recent one, stemming I suspect from social media leading to more "communication professionals" (scare quotes intentional) getting hired by districts. As any survey given in any school district at any time will give "communication" as an "area to improve," it perhaps isn't surprising that districts have put money towards what is seen as a problem to make it go away. And so we have increasing numbers of professionally taken photos, carefully curated feeds, and pounded-flat quotes going out to the small amounts of remaining press in the name of "communication."
The first question that needs to be ask when anyone says "communication is an issue" is "communication to whom? and of what?" The response then should drive the answer first as to whose issue this is and then as to how it should be solved. And if districts choose to hire professional communicators (school districts are full of professional communicators, as it is what teachers do, but I digress), they should have very clear and specific statements of purpose.
Any communication, though, must serve the purposes of the district, which is to be the community's public education system. If the only response one can ever give to the communication of the district is a thumbs up, it isn't serving the district well. If schools are truly of the community, the most important engagement (for all that I hate that word) is going to take place offline at everything from budget hearings to concerts. If your "communication" never even includes the basic governance of the district by sharing when the public meetings are, that's looking for clicks and thumbs up, not for actual community engagement.
And districts? No, you don't talk only to families.
Public school communication is two-way and expects something of the community besides clicks. And students are much more than content.
Pro tip: districts probably violating members' first amendment rights if they still have comments on (as most set up auto-moderation); you also have created an open forum for anyone to attack anyone having anything to do with public education. The SCOTUS cases on this one are years old, all, and the only reason you're leaving comments are not positive. Turn 'em off. - Not caring about all kids' extracurriculars
Yes, I get particularly sensitive about this during football season, when I can easily find articles which delve into the positives and negatives of every high school football team in Massachusetts, but in general, the degree to which particular sports get attention and so much else doesn't stinks. Ask any kid on a track team, never mind the kids on robotics.
Maybe the school district can't fix the local news coverage, but you can be sure you're not worsening the issue. Every student has interests. Every student deserves support for those interests.
Share the spotlight and the time and attention. And the financial support!
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| New Yorker cartoon of May 30, 2019 |
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