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 This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: teacher leaders.
Education
Opinion
Fifteen Years Later: Have We Learned Anything About Unity and Community?
This seems to be the long-term outcome of being attacked on our own soil: more division, self-indulgence, and deepening racial fault lines. Winners and losers. To hell with unity or even civil behavior--dominance has become our national goal, our trickle-down response to all conflict.
School Climate & Safety
Opinion
Colin Kaepernick and Every Marching Band Director in America
Every school music teacher in America has wrestled with the national anthem. Hard to sing (covering an octave and a fifth), written in an unfriendly key signature, lyrically confounding and attached to a disreputable tune, it nevertheless maintains a strange hold on public sentiment. We expect to hear it, for some hard to trace reason, every Friday night at football games, and a raft of other occasions. We expect citizens to show reverence for this music (although singing the words is considered optional, even embarrassing).
Teaching Profession
Opinion
The So-Called Right to Teach
There is no "right to teach," in a public institution, for compensation. None. Nobody has the right to decide--hey! I think I'd like to work with children, mold their little minds. I'm smart! I'd probably be great--with no preparation or experience whatsoever. The "right to teach" and "teacher shortage" blah-blah masks a darker truth. We're not willing to solve problems--health care, clean water, racism, rampant childhood poverty, neglected schools--with hard work and investment in our collective future.
Teaching
Opinion
10 Non-Standard Ideas About Going Back to School
One teacher spent days preparing for the first day. Her husband wouldn't prepare at all. It's hard to say who was the better teacher.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
The Glass Ceiling in Education
Women are role models for each other in all fields, including those that are supposed to be open to females. We've got nobody else. It was downright heartening to see a woman my age who successfully made it all the way through a grueling presidential nomination, the ultimate glass ceiling in America, because she was just that stubborn--no matter what you think of her politics.
School & District Management
Opinion
Is Plagiarism Really a Big Deal?
It's difficult to teach young people the concepts of generating original ideas, combining multiple ideas into a coherent whole or rationale, making a point using the researched or time-tested ideas of others, or extracting those ideas and rewording them. It's even harder to get them to acknowledge that stealing other people's creative products is unethical.
School Choice & Charters
Opinion
Destabilize & Replace
It seems--again--patently obvious that opening a glitzy new school will automatically change the education market (whether you call that disruption or destabilization) surrounding it. Every child that previously attended a public school will become a unit of displacement. How soon does this negatively impact public systems?
School & District Management
Opinion
Advanced-Stage Charter Syndrome: What "Maturity" Means to the Charter Movement
All the good intentions in the world cannot override the conversion of a long-established public good into a profit-making commodity. I no longer believe that there is a magic legislative formula that will allow "good" charters to exist harmoniously with public schools. I now understand that the end game of unfettered charterism: privatization and exclusivity.
Teaching
Opinion
Teachers, Tragedies and Politics
It's times like this that I'm glad not to be in the classroom on a daily basis. It would be hard for any teacher to pretend to be calm, neutral and gracefully able to push the world out of the classroom in favor of the spelling list and converting fractions into decimals. Like all teachers, I've experienced days when the curriculum was--whether you chose it or not--about what was going on in the world, your town or your school.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Rx for Teacher Burnout
The role of teacher-leader supports an individual's own self-image as an efficacious person. Teacher-leaders see themselves, first of all, as teachers. They are educators who want to continue to work as teachers rather than as managers. They also want to invest their know-how and energy beyond the classroom in ways they feel will help improve their school and its instructional effectiveness, their school/community relationships, and the profession at large.
Curriculum
Opinion
Memorial Day
Instead of providing the programs that students find most compelling, we're on a path to strip public education clean of richness, culture and (yes, I'm going to say it) fun. Over 125 people participated in our local Memorial Day service today-- and virtually all of them learned the essential skills of making music, public speaking and patriotic customs in a public school someplace. They still use these capacities to make their lives more enjoyable and meaningful, to take a day away from work, to think about honoring those who died to preserve democracy.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Opinion
Another Brick in the (Data) Wall
We used to believe, as public educators, that our product was our students--their eventual contribution as advanced scholars, civic-minded community members, and part of the labor force. All of that has changed. Our product now is publicly displayed test scores. Our data.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
Raising the Common Core Bar Until Nobody Can Get Over
The Common Core is just another set of standards. We can raise and lower, tweak and replace standards until the cows come home, but until other things are in place (clean, safe classrooms, say--or books, supplies and experienced teachers), it's an exercise in blah-blah over reality. Most important: if we're going to dump everything we've been working on, let's put the rebuilding back in the hands of educators, not politicians.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Public Education vs. Charter Schools: A Tale of Two Cities
Why are the papers and the policy-makers all over those protesting teachers in Detroit--while the white-collar crime in charter world goes virtually unnoticed?