Tag: Elementary Education

Hypocrisy Is Winning

The same parents arguing that they should control what their children read and learn want to control what all children read and learn; they will not accord other parents the same rights they’re fighting for. That’s complete hypocrisy!

As a teacher, I have always supported parents who want to be involved in their own children’s education. When some of those parents expressed concerns over book choices and curriculum, I worked with them. I remember a parent’s apprehension over the suicides in Romeo and Juliet given the death of her son’s older brother by his own hand. I offered alternatives. In the end, however, assured that we would talk about the tragic foolhardiness of the two protagonists’ making such an irrevocable choice, she chose to let him participate and made sure to follow up with conversations at home. I felt good about that whole experience.

I do not support the banning of books and courses or the rewriting of books. I find the present push by parents and parent groups to make decisions not just for their own children but for everyone else’s children both unfathomable and unacceptable.  If teachers and schools afford those parents a role in their own students’ education, who are they to deny other parents the same option? Yet the current push to rewrite and/or forbid different works (and even entire courses, like Florida’s response to the AP course in African-American history) would deny others the very freedom those parents are seeking. That’s wrong.

Emily Style, founding Co-Director of the national SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) describes curriculum as a window and a mirror: “education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world” (wcwonline.org). While she supports parents’ involvement for their own children, she writes, “I draw the line, however, at their insisting that their values, which limit the perspectives their children can consider, must be universal. Parents who want their children to understand history as it really occurred should have equal rights” (nationalseedproject.org).

This push for censorship and control not only limits rights of families who think differently, but it cripples our ability to understand and learn. “The possibility of a more just future is at stake when book bans deny young people access to knowledge of the past” (theatlantic.com). Our students will face a global context; they will live and work with people of varied perspectives. Our nation needs these students to be better prepared for that context. The philosopher George Santayana wrote, ““Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If our youth study a fully sanitized history, how will they learn from the past in order to forge a better future? If any potentially offensive terms are cleansed from books, how will they fully understand the past? “With lessons from the past, we not only learn about ourselves and how we came to be, but also develop the ability to avoid mistakes and create better paths for our societies” (mooc.org).

Furthermore, this push to limit access to multiple perspectives and to address unsavory realities of our shared history comes from a minority of parents that would force their views on all others. A 2022 Harris poll showed just 12% of respondents wanted books on divisive topics banned, and upwards of 70% of Americans, including both Democrats and Republicans, oppose such bans (Time.com). “In the name of vindicating their ‘rights,’ parents with special interests are pursuing tactics that the overwhelming majority of parents and citizens reject” (Ibid.).

So will we continue to allow minority rule to limit our options?

These arguments apply not only to the choice and availability of books, but to the revision of books as well. Megan McCardle reminds us that the sanitized version of Shakespeare’s work by Thomas Bowdler, the version that removed all profanity, was for a time the best-selling version until people realized what great writing had been removed. She calls Inclusive Minds’ revisions of works by Roald Dahl “lobotomies”; instead, we should “give children a window into the real past, as the people living there saw it, rather than compress their reading material into an eternal now. If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train children to recognize the past’s mistakes” (washingtonpost.com). Washington Post books columnist Ron Charles acknowledges the value in Aunt Jemima’s syrup losing its racist icon and Dr. Seuss books losing offensive illustrations but writes, “The absolutist position against tinkering with dead authors’ works is generally the best one. And right-wing efforts to ban swaths of stories about Black Americans and LGBTQ+ people make all efforts to ‘fix’ literature sound sinister” (Washington Post Book Club newsletter 2.24.23). PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel warns that “[r)ewriting novels — like efforts to rewrite history — has origins in authoritarian playbooks. We need to learn from the perspective of the past, not eliminate viewpoints we no longer accept” (Ibid.). She urges us to support children’s development of autonomy and critical thinking, to help them test their own opinions and beliefs.

This concerted effort to cleanse both libraries and curricula along with individual books has librarians and educators fearful and uncertain. “Over the past three academic years, legislators in 45 states proposed 283 laws that either sought to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history; to change how instructors can teach about gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ issues; to boost parents’ rights over their children’s education; to limit students’ access to school libraries and books; to circumscribe the rights of transgender students; and/or to promote what legislators defined as a ‘patriotic’ education”[washingtonpost.com2). Teachers find themselves self-censoring and restricting what they say “about race and the darker parts of U.S. history” (Ibid.). At least 160 educators have already resigned or lost their jobs because of fights over the appropriateness of instruction on race, history or LGBTQ issues (washingtonpost3). Armed individuals terrorize school board meetings, while librarians face harassment and threats (Ibid.). Hannah Allen of The Washington Post warns:

The goal, extremism monitoring groups say, is to spread the ideology at the grass-roots level by taking on — or taking over — school boards, city councils, sheriff’s departments and other local institutions. In the case of libraries, they say, book bans are only a first step, followed now by legislation to weaken librarian control over collections, moves to strip libraries of legal protections and, in some examples, efforts to defund libraries altogether (Ibid.).

Adults who demand wholesale banning of books and rewriting of offensive passages in a desire to protect their own children cripple the learning of all children. Books like Maus, a graphic Holocaust novel that “show readers how personal prejudice can become the law. The irony is that in banning books that make them uncomfortable, adults are wielding their own prejudices as a weapon, and students will suffer for it” (theatlantic.com2). It is time for the rest of us to support not only the rights of these parents, but also our own. We must demand the same respect for our values that they demand for theirs and end this tyranny of the minority. Only then can we hope to raise enough citizens with an understanding of multiple perspectives and the chance to live well in an ever more diverse and challenging world.

Enough!

It’s happened again. And again. And again and again and again. On Monday, February 13, 2023, gunshots erupted at Michigan State University. Three dead, five injured. “For a generation of young Americans, mass shootings at schools or colleges once considered sanctuaries for learning have become so painfully routine that some of them have lived through more than one by their early 20s. People a few years older grew up with active shooter drills. Their younger counterparts have become repeat survivors of traumatic violence.” (nytimes.com). Michigan State students include survivors of the Sandy Hook and Oxford High shootings.

We know our youth are struggling. Mental health issues, many of which predate the pandemic, were exacerbated by it. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control warns “of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel ‘persistently sad or hopeless,’ and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide, according to the results of a survey published last year [washingtonpost.com].

The threat of school shootings and the shooter drills compound these anxieties. More than 100,000 American children attended a school at which a shooting took place in 2018 and 2019 alone (Cabral et al., 2021), and researchers are finding “evidence suggesting a deterioration in shooting-exposed children’s mental health” [stanford.edu]. These experiences have direct, deleterious consequences.

High school students exposed to a shooting at their school were:

  • 3.7 percent at the mean less likely to graduate from high school
  • 9.5 percent less likely to enroll in any college
  • 17.2 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college
  • 15.3 percent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree by age 26
  •  6.3 percent less likely to be employed
  • had $2,779.84 (13.5 percent) lower average annual earnings between the ages of 24 and 26 suggesting a reduction of $115,550 (in 2018 dollars) in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings per shooting-exposed student. With approximately 50,000 children per year affected in recent years, the aggregate cost may be $5.8 billion per year in terms of lost lifetime earnings among survivors. [Ibid.].

The statistics should frighten us:

  1. Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America. Another 32 are shot and injured.1
  2. Guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens. 1 out of 10 gun deaths are age 19 or younger.2 
  3. In fact, firearm deaths occur at a rate more than 5 times higher than drownings.3
  4. Since Columbine in 1999, more than 338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school.4 
  5. There were more school shootings in 2022 [46] than in any year since Columbine.
  6. In 2022, 34 students and adults died [sandyhookpromise.org].

It’s no wonder that our students are anxious. “Perhaps the most disturbing effects of school shootings are the feeling of on-going danger that permeates schools where they have occurred. The school’s climate and sense of community are profoundly damaged” [https://violence.chop.edu].


In a country with more guns than people (about 120 guns for every 100 Americans) [cnn.com], in a country where mass shootings and violence also occur outside school walls, our kids cannot feel safe. As of February 14, 2023,  there have been 366 school shootings since Columbine [washingtonpost.com]. The Center for Homeland Defense and Security reports that in 2021 alone, there were 240 incidents in which a gun was either brandished or used in a school.

Although nearly 75% of all US school shootings in 2018 and 2019 had no fatalities, they still left students traumatized [pbs.com].

And the data excludes hundreds of incidents every year that don’t technically qualify but that still terrify and traumatize tens of thousands of children: shootings at after-school sporting events, for example, or gunshots fired just off campus. “In a country where gun violence is now the leading cause of death for kids and teens, millions of children must walk through metal detectors or run through active-shooter drills meant to prepare them for the threat of mass murder” [washingtonpost.com3].

 Steven Schlozman, a Dartmouth associate professor of psychiatry, analyzed school shootings over the last five years: “We have very good data that children in proximity to frightening circumstances, such as those that trigger school lockdowns, are at risk for lasting symptoms. These include everything from worsening academic and social progression to depression, anxiety, poor sleep, post-traumatic symptomatology, and substance abuse” [dartmouth.edu]

Our youth deserve better, yet we continue to fail them by allowing politics to prevent change.

We must be more proactive in identifying and responding to potential shooters. Just look at Richneck Elementary School in New Jersey, where teachers warned administrators that a six-year-old boy was disturbed and making threats. Nothing was done until he shot his teacher with a handgun [washingtonpost.com2].

Everytown Research and Policy provides a clear blueprint for making schools and communities safer:

  1. “Enact and Enforce Secure Firearm Storage Laws
  2. Pass Extreme Risk Laws
  3. Raise the Age to Purchase Semi-automatic Firearms
  4. Require Background Checks on All Gun Sales
  5. Foster a Safe and Trusting School Climate
  6. Build a Culture of Secure Gun Storage 
  7. Create Evidence-Based Crisis Assessment/Prevention Programs in Schools
  8. Implement Expert-Endorsed School Security Upgrades: Entry Control and Locks
  9. Initiate Trauma-Informed Emergency Planning
  10. Avoid Practices That Can Cause Harm and Traumatize Students” [everytownresearch.org]

So it’s up to us. We have a road map, and we need to fight for it. Write your congresspeople and push for change. It’s long overdue.

A Brave New World?

Chat GPT concerns continue to escalate, and the industry is moving very quickly. Google is about to release Bard, its own AI chat, which Google will not only release to the public for free but also begin using to generate search results. Just today Microsoft “said it would ‘reimagine’ its Bing search engine with technology mirroring the model from ChatGPT creator OpenAI” [washingtonpost.com]. Even as articles warning of disaster from AI multiply, innovators are suggesting way to use AI productively. I will write more about this, but right now I feel an urgency about sharing a recent Washington Post article.

Entitled “Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. Schools tell teachers” it describes the impact of Florida House Bill 1467, passed last July, which “mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and ‘suited to student needs’” [washingtonpost.com2]. The new law requires qualified school media specialists who have undergone a state training program to approve all books in the school library and in the classroom. Because that training didn’t occur until last month, the law’s impact is now causing teachers to strip their bookshelves of books or cover them with paper.  

Because an older Florida law makes the distribution of “harmful materials” to minors a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine, these new rules have a chilling effect on book selection and student access. A spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education warned that teachers who violate the law may face penalties on their teaching certificates as well. And “because of uncertainties around enforcement and around what titles might become outlawed, school officials have warned teachers that their classroom libraries may expose them to the stiffest punishments” [Ibid.].

At least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have already directed teachers to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries. Many educators and teachers have expressed outrage. Students have shared their frustration as well. According to Broward School Board member Sarah Leonardi, Florida “is a state that seeks to limit access to knowledge and resources that don’t fit in a conservative ideological box. … It is a state that is making it more and more difficult to educate or parent a child without constant fear of retribution” [news4jax.com].

This initiative is chilling for so many reasons. As a teacher, I believe my responsibility is to develop critical thinking skills. How can students think critically if they aren’t exposed to multiple ideas? As an educator I feel great concern over the burnout and frustration of those currently in the classroom, especially when we already can’t fill all those shoes and when the pipeline of new teachers is grossly inadequate. How can we expect teachers to do their jobs well when we keep threatening them and questioning their professionalism? As a co-founder of my school district’s Gay Straight Alliances and of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, I fear for the well-being of sexually minority youth when their resources are among those being removed. How will they manage without support?

I come to this with a clear bias. My parents allowed me to read anything as long as I would talk about it with them. When I outgrew the Cherry Ames series and other books in the children’s department of our library, they helped me get an adult card when I was still in grade school. I read Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy well before my teens. Was I traumatized? I was growing up during the panic over bomb shelters, and Shute’s novel gave me a way to discuss fear of the apocalypse with my parents. Saroyan fed my curiosity about the human condition and dealing with loss. And when I took a paperback considered racy back then [though pretty benign by today’s standards] on a sleepover and finished it that night, my girlfriend asked to read it. Her mother sent it back to my mother in a plain brown wrapper, clearly appalled. My mother’s reaction: “Everyone has to make their own decisions about what’s appropriate. You did nothing wrong, but she has every right to decide differently for her daughter.” I still support that vision.

As an English teacher, I always offered alternatives when parents expressed concerns, but I do believe that students should be exposed to a variety of ideas so they can make their own evaluations. Depriving students and teachers of books that foster critical thinking is backwards. I wonder how many of the books I so loved teaching, precisely because they challenged student’s understanding of the status quo and provoked thought and discussion, will pass the test in Florida. Will students miss books like Catcher in the Rye because of its profanity and references to sex? Or Lord of the Flies because it reveals undesirable human tendencies? Fahrenheit 451 or Animal Farm because they show the dangers of authoritarian governments? To Kill a Mockingbird because of its portrayal of systemic racism? Beloved or The Color Purple  because of the current backlash against “anti-racism”? How do we teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn responsibly without exploring Twain’s use of the n-word and whether his treatment of Jim is racist. Each of the books included above has been challenged repeatedly. Each of these books was also a critical piece of my curricula as I worked to help students explore and navigate a world bigger than the one they knew.

Banning books is not new. This level of control, however, frightens me. We cannot have an educated populace equipped to make good decisions and deal with the evolving challenges and changes in our country and in the world. These culture wars will destroy our culture if we don’t fight back.

Befriending AI

Columns and comments about emerging AI continue to abound, and I find myself “going down the rabbit hole” as I try to determine which predictions are most likely and what changes will occur. Free artificial intelligence apps are widely available. What do we do about them for education?

I’m old, old enough that my youth predates not just computers, smart phones, TV streaming, and virtual reality. I remember the revelations of ATMs, email, fiber optics, robotic surgeries, solar energy, bar codes, and MRIs. I didn’t get my first calculator until college [not that I ever really mastered using a slide rule…], I typed my high school and college papers on a manual typewriter after drafting them on legal pads longhand, and long-distance phone calls were an absolute luxury. I have often pondered the way technological innovations have changed my own life, and the way they changed my teaching.  The one thing I’m sure of is that, for better or worse, tech innovations will continue. It’s up to us to figure out the “for better.”

Free AI, through sites like https://openai.com/ and https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ , will impact teaching. That’s a given. But artificial intelligence, at least so far, is only as good as the data it’s fed. Since it is generative rather than creative, it cobbles together writing from the data sets that have been inputted into “large language learning models” [LLMs], the same tools that allow auto-complete in apps like Microsoft Word and most email apps. These LLMs are, however, much more powerful: “It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt” [nytimes.com]. That means AI can generate the kinds of essays and technical writing we too often ask our students to produce.

Does that make AI the end of teaching content area writing in schools as we know it? I hope so. I’ve long thought our focus on the formulaic three-part, five-paragraph essay stifles meaningful thought. We have an exciting opportunity here: AI can transform the teaching of writing if we let it. If we discard our traditional approach of parroting back ideas in favor of asking deep prompts that require original and personalized thought, we can not only beat the system of having AI replace students’ own writing, but we can make teaching and learning more powerful at the same time. For example, my final exam question for some of my more advanced classes was to trace the evolution of one significant idea throughout the literature we’d read all year along with how the student’s own vision of that idea evolved from the readings. How can AI answer not only questions like what it means to be a good citizen or what our responsibility as humans is to each other but also provide the student’s personal response? I suspected that AI cannot give a profound reply, so I asked it the following prompt: “Based on the books we read, what does it mean to be a good citizen and what do I believe?” As I expected, the generated paragraph was superficial and grossly inadequate:

Being a good citizen typically means being responsible, law-abiding, and actively engaged in the community. This can include things like paying taxes, obeying laws, participating in the democratic process, volunteering, and treating others with respect. Ultimately, what it means to be a good citizen may vary depending on the individual and the context, and what you believe may depend on your personal values and beliefs. [written by openai.com]

My students, on the other hand, grappled with this question with specificity that showed their thinking and their learning.

Issues remain. AI is flawed: “Some skeptics argue that the software is capable only of blind mimicry — that it’s imitating the syntactic patterns of human language but is incapable of generating its own ideas or making complex decisions, a fundamental limitation that will keep the L.L.M. approach from ever maturing into anything resembling human intelligence… Other critics believe that software like GPT-3 will forever remain compromised by the biases and propaganda and misinformation in the data it has been trained on, meaning that using it for anything more than parlor tricks will always be irresponsible” [Ibid.]. Furthermore, our legal system lags behind technological developments, and we have work to do about intellectual property and plagiarism.

But AI isn’t going away, and we need to decide how best to harness it. Kevin Roose, author and technology columnist for the New York Times, argues that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults” [nytimes.com 2]. He argues that banning AI won’t work: even if schools block openai.com, learners will find ways to access it. He also assures readers that AI can be a valuable teaching tool, writing about its effectiveness in helping students work through their outlines, helping teachers work though their lesson plans, and serving as a debate sparring partner and an after-school tutor. Roose writes, “Even ChatGPT’s flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often wrong — can become fodder for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me that they had instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s” [Ibid.]. He even sends us to Ditch that Textbook [ditchthattextbook.com], which offers 20 specific strategies to make AI an ally for learning.

Going back to my advanced age… I find myself remembering the controversy about other technological innovations: would calculator use render us unable to do math in our heads, would online translation obliterate the need to learn other languages, would internet research make plagiarism inevitable and hard to spot, etc. Over time, learning from each other, we have managed to harness the potential of other technologies while limiting its harm somewhat. We need to approach AI with that mindset. I expect the journey will be challenging, but if it leads to deeper questions and more hands-on learning, it will be worth it.

Note: The image was generated by Dall-E, but all the writing except the indented paragraph is indeed my own!

AI Is Here!

AI [Artificial Intelligence] has the potential to impact teaching writing in a number of ways. For example, AI-powered writing assistants can help students improve their writing skills by providing real-time feedback and suggestions on grammar, spelling, and style. AI-powered tools can also help teachers grade written assignments more quickly and accurately, freeing up time for other activities such as providing individualized feedback to students. Additionally, AI can be used to create personalized learning plans for students, helping them to progress at their own pace and improve their writing skills more effectively.

While AI has the potential to greatly improve the teaching of English, there are also some potential dangers to consider. For example, relying too heavily on AI-powered tools could lead to students becoming overly reliant on technology and losing their ability to think and write independently. Additionally, AI tools are only as good as the data they are trained on, so if they are not trained on a diverse range of writing styles and voices, they may not be able to accurately assess or improve students’ writing. Finally, the use of AI in education raises concerns about privacy and the potential for bias in the technology. It is important for educators and policy makers to carefully consider these potential dangers and take steps to mitigate them when using AI in the teaching of English.

Bet you thought I wrote those first two paragraphs. Nope! I asked open-source artificial intelligence [https://chat.openai.com/chat] to write them. The prompt for the first was “how will ai impact teaching writing” and the second, “the dangers of ai for teaching English.” Both paragraphs are well written and informative. How many students would offer a more clear and effective expression of the issues?

What does this mean for education? Because each generated block of text and image is unique, plagiarism becomes impossible to identify through an internet search. Students can turn in essays and submit college essays written by AI, and no one would know the difference. What do schools do to adjust to this new reality? Making all writing happen within the classroom period penalizes students who take time with their writing process and prevents true polishing of written drafts. We need to rethink how we teach and evaluate writing.

Artificial intelligence now can also generate unique, free, uncopyrighted images with Dall-E. To make Dall-E work, researchers feed images to a computer, matching them with word descriptors. AI is trained to make connections and then use them to produce new images, but the images are only as good as the input and training. “Bias found on the internet can show up in results, such as a prompt for a “CEO” that produces only white men” [washpost.com].Researchers then overlay “noise” in terms of visual static and teach AI to remove the noise to reveal a clear image. AI generates the images based on the words used as input. Dall-E generated the image accompanying this blog after I requested “a water color image of a computer screen with AI generated images” [https://labs.openai.com]. As a blogger, I no longer have to pay to use images or worry about avoiding copyright issues. Where, though, does that leave visual artists?

Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering, warns that “Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake. We will not be able to believe anything” [washpost.com2]. Such image generation poses clear risks. “Each evolution of image technology has introduced potential harms alongside increased efficiency. Photoshop enabled precision editing and enhancement of photos, but also served to distort body images, especially among girls, studies show” [Ibid.]. AI can generate the kind of “deep fakes” that have been misused politically. Companies that offer and use AI have struggled to build in safeguards, but the technology is progressing more quickly than those efforts. AI researcher Maarten Sap said “asking whether OpenAI acted responsibly was the wrong question. ‘There’s just a severe lack of legislation that limits the negative or harmful usage of technology. The United States is just really behind on that stuff’” [Ibid.].

Hand wringing won’t help. Teachers need to focus on process more than output. New Zealand education technology expert warns that AI will transform teaching: “it’s going to require an awful lot of work from teachers and institutions. Teaching that looks at a completed product only – an essay for example – is finished” [the spinoff]. And, since “AI doesn’t know or care about truth” [Ibid.], educators will need to find strategies to evaluate for truth and teach students those strategies.

Whether we like the advent of AI or fear it, we need to figure out how best to work with it. AI does provide opportunities. For example, “teachers could generate a set of AI ‘essays’ on a topic, then set students (individually or in groups) to critique them and write their own better version” [Ibid.]. AI may even prompt long overdue changes in pedagogy. Perhaps we will finally focus on “better ways to assess for learning, such as constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback” [Ibid.].

This is all fairly new to education. In the summer of 2020, OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 [GPT-3]. Even if “GPT-3 seems to be manipulating higher-order concepts and putting them into new combinations, rather than just mimicking patterns of text” [nytimes.com], we face a sea change in communication and education. We are behind the 8 ball in thinking about how to adapt and even thrive with this new world order and how to regulate it fairly and effectively. But we must, for a continuously increasing ability of computers to generate text and images is already happening. AI is here now.

The Kids Are Not All Right

The stats are in and confirm what we already knew: academic achievement is in trouble.  This crisis parallels the mental health crisis students face.

We already knew that student mental health struggles dramatically increased during the pandemic; I’ve written about this often enough. Suicidal ideation and completed suicide rates have both risen. New data from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 34, and the rate for people aged 15 to 24 rose 8 percent. Last July nationwide hotline for mental health emergencies experienced  a 45 percent increase in calls, texts and chats in its first month after changing to a simpler phone number [washingtonpost.com]. The stats from the Center for Disease Control offer little hope:

  • From February to March 2021, the number of hospital emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts jumped by 51 percent for girls and 4% for boys compare to that period in 2019.
  • Provisional data for 2021 showed an increase in the national rate from 2020 to 2021, especially for people ages 15 to 24.
  • Nearly 45 percent of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities.
  • Almost 1 in 5 high school students seriously considered suicide.
  • 9 percent of teenagers surveyed by the CDC tried to take their lives during the previous 12 months.
  • The percentage of gay, lesbian, bisexual, other and questioning students reporting a suicide attempt is even higher.
  • Nearly 30 percent of students said an adult in their home had lost a job, and 24 percent said they went hungry for a lack of food.
  • More than 230,000 U.S. students under 18 are believed to be mourning the ultimate loss: the death of a parent or primary caregiver in a pandemic-related loss, according to research by the CDC, Imperial College London, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Cape Town.
  • The loss for Black and Hispanic children was nearly twice the rate of White children.
  • Schools don’t have enough mental health professionals. Professional organizations recommend one school psychologist per 500 students, but the national average is one school psychologist per 1,160 students, with some states approaching one per 5,000, well below the recommended rate of one for every 500 students. Similarly, the recommended ratio of one school counselor per 250 students is not widespread. [washingtonpost.com]

Now layer that with the disappointing test results for academic achievement. The National Educational Assessment of Progress scores released in April show stark declines, especially in math. “Math scores for eighth grade fell by eight points, from 282 in 2019 to 274 this year, on a 500-point scale, and in fourth grade, by five points — the steepest declines recorded in more than a half century of testing.” These declines come on the heels of a pre-pandemic decline in both math and reading for 13-year-olds [washingtonpost.com]. Many 2019 scores were bad, and current scores are even worse. And the declines play favorites: low-income students and students of color fared far worse [nytimes.com]. Older students – with less time left in their public education to make up learning losses – are recovering more slowly than younger children [washingtonpost.com]. Support for virtual learning during the pandemic varied dramatically among communities, and students who were in virtual learning longer fared worse as well [Ibid.]. I live in Illinois, where schools were closed for a long time. That choice may have supported how much better Illinois did with Covid than many states, but our state’s children now pay the price.

Expressions of concern and hand-wringing over troubling scores will not move us off the dime. I support the call for a historic investment in education published by leading educators in an opinion piece for the Washington Post entitled “To help students shoot for the moon, we must think bigger and bolder” [washingtonpost.com]. Their metaphor of a moonshot is apt; we must support a major effort to address these losses that is both immediate and effective. Under President Kennedy, NASA realized they would need a much bigger rocket to reach the moon than we’d ever built, and major investment allowed the development of the Saturn V that took us to the moon. Research offers several solutions to our current crisis in education:

  • Providing students with three hours of tutoring, with three or fewer students per teacher — each week can produce a year’s worth of additional growth.
  • Summer school provides an academic quarter of growth.
  • One additional period of algebra instruction can teach a semester’s worth of algebra [Ibid.].

 I would add a number of other strategies:

  • Offer classroom teachers more support and professional development.
  • Offer parents/guardians specific work that they might help their students accomplish.
  • Increase the teacher pipeline so we don’t have classrooms being combined and supervised by non-teachers, a serious problem now. We need teachers to feel valued and supported, not exhausted.
  • Increase mental health services on site for both students and faculty/staff.
  • Increase the mental health pipeline.
  • Find a way to limit political attacks on school board members so that they can focus on the urgent issues we all face.

None of this will be inexpensive. As a nation, though, we need a 21st century work force of critical thinkers, collaborative workers, and quality producers. We need a comprehensive approach to mental health issues, behavior, and academics. That won’t happen unless we seize this opportunity for another “moonshot.”

Becoming a “Lighthouse”

This week I had the privilege of attending a Special Education Eligibility Hearing for a student for whom I’m a Guardian ad Litem. I drove a fair distance to an unfamiliar school; there I was welcomed and made to feel included.
 
Eleven of us gathered around a conference table to explore how best to support this student. An innocent victim of a tragic accident, this student has very specific needs for services to support vision and hearing. I have attended hearings like these as a teacher, but my perspective at this hearing felt so different. As a teacher, I might have worried about how to manage the required accommodations, but as a guardian I worked to be sure those accommodations would be made available.
 
My first teaching job in 1970 preceded any kind of special education for students like this. Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, wasn’t signed into law until late 1975.The EHA guaranteed a free, appropriate public education to each child with a disability in every state and locality across the country.  It has been renamed and amended since then, but the purpose remains: to guarantee an appropriate education for every student, at no cost to parents, in the least restrictive environment, with an “Individualized Education Program” that identifies each student’s individual needs and how they will be met.
 
Our group included the DCFS Caseworker, the foster mother, and eight staff members, including teachers, the school psychologist, the vision support specialist, the speech therapist, the social worker, and the chair of Special Education. As I listened to these committed, compassionate adults develop an action plan, I thought about what would have happened to this student in the early days of my teaching, before 94-142. My student would have faced untold struggles and been unlikely to achieve a fulfilled and independent adult life, yet this is a resilient youth whose struggles were caused by others and who deserves assistance to achieve success in school and build a full life.
 
When I was still teaching, I enjoyed collaborating with our Special Education Department. I worked with special ed English classes on creative writing, I helped them produce a newsletter as well as a performance where they read their work to family members, and I co-taught an American Literature inclusion class for juniors with six to eight special education joining other students to be team-taught by the special ed department chair and me. I thought I was a supportive enough advocate, but this week’s hearing strengthened my resolve. Providing special resources and accommodations like extra time on tests or different kinds of printed materials certainly is a burden on already overloaded schools and teachers. But it’s necessary and right, and I remain in awe of a team like this that is not only making it happen, but that also works on how to make it acceptable for a student like mine who desperately wants not to be seen as different.
 
That would have been epiphany enough for this week – smile – but yesterday reinforced it when I got to hear Steve Pemberton speak. Pemberton wrote A Chance in the World, his personal memoir of being raised in a series of abusive foster homes and what helped him find his way to a fulfilling adult life. His follow-up book, The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World, shows how ordinary people can become “human lighthouses” for those in situations like those of his childhood. Yesterday Pemberton spoke about the three lighthouses who changed the trajectory of his life; then he encouraged us to continue to be lighthouses for others. His talk, delivered with humor and without a trace of self-pity, inspired me to recommit to my guardian work. It made me want to share his perspective with the people who sat around that table, each and every one of whom is a lighthouse. Last night I had a wonderful call with the foster mother of my student, and I explained to her why she is a lighthouse. When I finish the book, I’ll pass it on to her – she’s earned it! And I will continue to push myself to be a lighthouse for the youths in my cases. Every child deserves a fair chance, and we all can make a difference.

Education in Crisis

Image from printersrowlitfest.org

Last Saturday I had the privilege of selling my teaching memoir, Tales Told Out of School: Lessons Learned by the Teacher, at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Not surprisingly, the majority of my customers and visitors were teachers. Everyone who had not yet retired reported the same concerns:

  • The kids are not all right. The pandemic and the dysfunction in our country have taken a huge toll.
  • The kids are not behaving as well as they did pre-pandemic. They are less cooperative, less engaged, and less friendly.
  • We aren’t going to help kids make up academic deficits until we address their mental health issues.
  • The controversies swirling around so many districts about what can and cannot be taught are disempowering to teachers and make them question their willingness to stay in the profession.
  • Teachers are tired, too. They’ve paid a heavy price during the pandemic, too.
  • There’s just too much micro-management.
  • The pressure on current teachers to cover empty classes on top of their own load is too great a burden.

I recognize that this is a small group of anecdotes, not a vetted research study. But on Wednesday, when I was joined a group of former colleagues for a tram ride through the spectacular Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, I shared that feedback with them. The woman seated directly in front of me turned around and said, “Both my grown daughters are teachers. They’re in two different states and teach different grades, but that’s exactly what they say!”

Research studies about mental health issues for young people abound. I’ve written about them before, and I’ll write about them again. And we already have a serious teacher shortage and a grossly inadequate pipeline of teachers in training. The response, to let college students [Arizona and potentially Michigan] and veterans [Florida] teach without proper training and certification is not the answer. Even in the best of times, teaching has always required commitment, content knowledge, classroom management skills, and training in effective methods and best practices. Yet teaching may never have been more challenging than it is today, so teachers really need good preparation. We cannot help teachers and students recover unless we make significant changes:

  • We need to work on a culture that too often doesn’t value teachers or treat them with respect. Imagine, for example, if the media did more news stories about classrooms that are working well.
  • We need to empower teachers to do the decision-making for which they were trained instead of having screaming adults at school board meetings force administrations to surrender decision-making.
  • Every teacher needs a living wage and a workable class load.
  • We need to expand and develop programs that help teachers-in-training with college tuition in exchange for some years of service teaching in under-served areas after graduation.
  • We should provide mentoring for new teachers.
  • We must staff mental health positions in schools. The NASP has long recommended a ratio of one school psychologist for every 500 students, yet the national ratio average is 1:1211 and approaches1:5000 in some states [nasponline.org].  The need has never been greater, and classroom teachers have neither the time nor the training to fill it.

I felt so lucky to teach for over 30 years, to know so many students, to work with communities of colleagues. Let’s make sure those still in the classroom get to feel that way. Let’s invest in changes that support both teachers and students. That’s our best hope for retaining teachers and reaching and supporting students.

Out of Africa

In 2010, when we were on our second safari in Tanzania, we again splurged on a posh yurt village in the Serengeti. This time we met a wealthy couple from England, pompous name-droppers who claimed to be friends of David Cameron, then the Prime Minister. I knew we held different values when she appeared at dinner in a flowing white linen shirt and palazzo pants, knowing full well that locals would have to try to wash them in water heated over an open fire. At dinner one night, she confirmed that sense when she started denigrating zoos. Another guest and I pointed out that zoos were responsible for significant conservation efforts, like the Amsterdam Zoo’s program for black rhinos, and that many people could only learn about animals through zoo. “Oh, no,” she replied blithely. “They should just all come to Africa to see animals for themselves.” Clueless and out of touch, she failed to see the value of empowering people to learn about the world beyond their own lives.

I have been thinking of her attitude a lot lately as I continue to read about the attacks at library board and school board meetings as people fight to curtail access to books for readers. Yet reading is an invaluable way for each of us to expand our awareness of worlds hitherto unknown to us. As a teacher, I always accommodated parents who had concerns about works in our curriculum. As an educator, parent, grandparent, and citizen of this country, I am appalled at the efforts of conservative individuals and groups to limit not only their reading of their own family members but of everyone. They would remove so many books from libraries and schools that many students would never see themselves reflected in their reading, much less learn about others who are different.

Consider this passage from Reading is Fundamental [scenicregional.org]:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.

I am somewhat comforted, though, by Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am relieved to see many organizations actively working to support those of us who would fight such censorship. These include the following:

If I were still in an English classroom, I would depend upon the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of English. Their “This Story Matters” initiative provides rationales to defend books under attack. Their position says it best:

The right to read is one of the foundations of a democratic society, and teachers need the freedom to support that right so their students can make informed decisions and be valuable contributors to our world. A story can encourage diversity of thought, broaden global perspectives, celebrate unique cultures, and motivate the reader to achieve their dreams. This right matters. This Story Matters.

Tennessee Leads the Way!

Image from governorsfoundation.org

Like so many states, Tennessee is concerned about the “COVID Slide,” the estimated learning loss for students from the pandemic’s school closures and disruptions. Their Department of Education recently released data that projects an estimated 50% decrease in proficiency rates in 3rd grade reading and a projected 65% decrease in proficiency in math. This is about 2.5 times higher than the learning loss students can experience during a normal summer break” [governorsfoundation.org].

Such data is not news, but Tennessee’s approach to this harsh reality is news. The Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation [GELF] addresses this problem: “The mission of Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation is to strengthen early literacy in Tennessee. Our vision is a Tennessee where all children have access to the resources, guidance and support they need to become lifelong learners” [tn.gov/education]. In January of 2021, GELF, in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Education, “announced a statewide rollout of Ready4K, a research-based text messaging program to help parents support their students in learning at home” [Ibid.]. Their research confirmed that 97% of parents had smart phones and texted [Ibid.]140,000 families with children enrolled in pre-K through third grade received, at no charge, “three weekly text messages with facts, easy tips, and activities on how to help each child learn and grow by building on existing family routines. Text messages match each child’s age, with simple, engaging facts and suggestions for building on existing daily routines, such as getting dressed, bath time, or preparing a meal” [Ibid.]. 

“’Tennessee is taking a leadership role in providing families with accessible, evidence-based family engagement text messages to help foster child development and bridge the gap between home and school during a time of unprecedented challenges,’ said Ben York, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Ready4K. ‘With more than 15 million children in the U.S. living without adequate internet access or devices, the use of texting addresses the country’s digital divide and enables even the hardest-to-reach parents to access high-quality information and resources for their children’” [Ibid.]. 

An evidence-based program, Ready4K is continuously being evaluated and improved through ongoing partnerships at Stanford, Brown and Notre Dame universities. It “has been shown to increase family engagement at home and school and increase child learning by 2-3 months over the course of a school year” [Ibid.]. 

Last week GELF announced its second year of Its K-3 Book Delivery program. Partnering with Scholastic Library Publishing, it will deliver half a million books to teachers and students all over Tennessee, including to every first grader in the state. The high-quality and age-appropriate books will be delivered directly to homes at no charge [businesswire.com]. Encouraging students to read through the summer improves their literacy and reduces learning loss.

Participants agree. A survey by GELF showed a positive response to the program from caregivers, teachers, and students of 94-97% [Ibid.]. 

This program builds on Dolly Parton’s incredible leadership for childhood literacy. “Since 1995, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program has delivered meticulously chosen, personalized, age-appropriate books every month to children up to five years old — all free of charge” [rollingstone.com]. Initially a very local program, it kept expanding and, by February of 2021, had distributed nearly 155 million books [Ibid.]. Now the state of Tennessee is following her lead.

The pandemic has brought about lots of handwringing about learning loss, and I myself have written about it often enough. Here, though, is meaningful good news. Here is a state, one not necessarily known nationwide for leadership in education, that offers a concrete solution to address the COVID slide. Their leadership makes me hopeful for the children of Tennessee. Now may other states follow suit, developing programs like these or their own alternatives, so that our students catch up and become literate adults!