Teacher in a Strange Land
From January 2010 to September 2018, Nancy Flanagan, an education writer and consultant focusing on teacher leadership, wrote about the inconsistencies and inspirations, the incomprehensible, immoral and imaginative, in American education. She spent 30 years in a K-12 music classroom in Hartland, Mich., and was named Michigan Teacher of the Year in 1993. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: teacher leaders.
School & District Management
Opinion
When the School Becomes the Graduation Sheriff
Rude behavior is so deeply embedded, even rewarded, in American culture--just turn on cable TV--that making assumptions about who knows how to behave, and who doesn't, is pointless. I like a nice, dignified graduation ceremony as much as anybody. But the way you get that is by teaching appropriate, respectful behavior for more formal events, beginning in kindergarten. Not with threats and recriminations, and certainly not by pressing charges.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Six Questions About Teacher Evaluation
Recently, nearly every story about improving teacher evaluation begins with the Bad Old Days, where substandard teachers slipped through the cracks, due to thoroughly inadequate attention to and assessment of their work. If you believe these op-eds, teachers' core work was essentially carried out without scrutiny. Until--drumroll--new and rigorous evaluation protocols, always including lots of student testing data, turned everything around. Evaluations! The cure for both listless teaching and anemic test scores!
Education
Opinion
The Killer in My Classroom
Guest blogger Steven Singer writes about an experience failing as a teacher, and wondering what he could have done different.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
The Weird Juncture of Teacher Appreciation Week and Charter Schools Week
Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe some things--the Common Core, annual testing, charter proliferation, test-based teacher evaluation--are the new normal. Do I wish my own state had passed strong standards for establishing charter schools, twenty years ago? Absolutely. Would it have prevented the charter school corruption and fraud in my state? Who knows?
Teaching Profession
Opinion
The Network for Public Education. Repeat: Public.
When I say "movement" to save public education, what I mean is this: People, like me, who have no particular resources or organizational funding/backing, who got on a plane to be in a room with those like-minded compadres--because they're terrified that America might lose public education. People who think it's not too late. People willing to stake their professional energy on doing right by all kids, keeping democratic equality as critical and central goal of the education system.
School & District Management
Opinion
Why Aren't More School Leaders and Teachers Joining Forces to Get Rid of Destructive Policy?
If your district has a genuine professional collaboration model--different work, but same level of respect and influence for teachers and school leaders--that's admirable. So--are you working together to advocate for change? Or merely going through the motions of Schooling 2015? Why aren't teachers, parents and school leaders everywhere joining forces to put a stop to the worst of it--the selling off of public resources to for-profit CMOs, teacher evaluation by test data, and loss of local control over core work: curriculum, instruction, assessment?
Assessment
Opinion
Michigan Math Teacher: No Way Are My Children Taking the MSTEP Tests
To my students: I am so, so sorry. To their parents: please get informed about your options. My own children will not be taking this test. They will be opted out. I will not stand by as hours of instructional time is lost to a test that will not reveal any new information about my child.
Assessment
Opinion
1-800-Cheater: Power and Control in Test-Score Scandals
Let's be real. All of us who genuinely want the best for our students know what's moral, what's simply following orders, and what is done for personal gain, kids be damned. What happened in Atlanta was shameful in ways that had nothing to do with standardized testing, and everything to do with power, control, and scapegoating.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Four Things I Want to Say to Novice Teachers
Four things novice teachers should know: Welcome to a changed profession. Beware of media oversell. Act on your beliefs--but clarify them, first. Choose your heroes carefully.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Nancie Atwell Gets It Exactly Right
Teaching in America has been systematically de-professionalized. It's no longer a job where experience and creativity are valued. The evidence around that--beginning with test score-based teacher evaluation, and ending with federal funding for Teach for America-- is incontrovertible. We keep saying we want teacher leaders at the table, informing policy. But when Nancie Atwell was given a seat at a big, shiny international table, we're stunned when she tells her truth?
Assessment
Opinion
I Love My Job. Really.
You cannot measure self-esteem, self-worth, or readiness to face the world. You cannot quantify these teachable moments, ever. The more you try to do this, the more you tell me that my professionalism is equated to the scores that a set of my kids have received on a test that has no relevance to their daily life, the more you demean the battle against poverty, adolescence, and apathy that I fight each day.
School & District Management
Opinion
Those Amazing, Groundbreaking Schools of the Future!
There are major things about effective schooling that never go away: getting kids motivated, finding good materials, building a sense of community or relationships, nurturing persistence, quality staffing and how to cope with abundant mandated testing, state regulations, and the management of finite resources. Did I mention testing and subsequent uses of the data it generates? Oh yeah. The main reason that innovative, cage-busting ideas go bust. That and money.
School & District Management
Opinion
Garden-Variety Teacher Leadership
I worry that teacher leadership is being commodified--that teachers with exceptional talents in instruction, curriculum development, mentoring, analyzing district politics and influencing decision-making will not be seen as leaders unless they have a title or a stipend. I worry even more about how formal teacher leaders are "chosen"--just whose water they're expected to carry.
Curriculum
Opinion
The Four Things You Need to Create a Good School
It's a scenario that's been posited before, many times: If you could start over--no residual assumptions--and build an ideal school from the ground up, what would you keep? What would you discard? Thoughts: There are no silver bullets, but there are no fatal-flaw structures or technologies, either. When you come down to it, schools are mostly about getting the right people together.