Before signing off for 2023, I have a short message: Our public schools are under attack, but they are stronger and more resilient than their enemies assume…and more effective than you are being told.  

THE CRUSADE AGAINST PUBLIC EDUCATION: Unfortunately, the right-wing anti-public education crusade has been effective, as witnessed by a recent Gallup poll showing that just 36% of the general public report being ‘satisfied’ with public schools.  However, those who know the schools best–the parents–give their own children’s schools and their teachers high marks: 76% say they are “completely or somewhat satisfied” with their oldest child’s education. That’s similar to pre-pandemic poll results.  The crusaders appear to be reaching more Republicans than Democrats or independents, because Gallup reports a particularly steep decline in satisfaction among the GOP: it fell from 49% in 2020 to only 25% this year.

The Crusade is multi-faceted and highly charged, with anti-transgender, anti-’woke,’ and anti-Critical Race Theory language spewing from every Crusader’s mouth. As Politics NYU noted recently, “With newer, more progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and overall societal dynamics becoming more prevalent in the academic space, conservative sects of society, including the GOP, feel attacked. The symbolic figurehead of the modern Republican party, Donald Trump, put it quite succinctly when he stated in Iowa this past March that he would, “prohibit the teaching of ‘critical race theory’, ‘transgender insanity’ and ‘any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.’”  Previous Republican presidents focused on educational outcomes, choice, and ‘bureaucracy,’ but not today.

THE CRUSADERS:  So how large is the army of Crusaders?  Not so big, it turns out.  Earlier this year the Washington Post analyzed the data regarding attempts to ban books and found that just 11 (eleven!!) ‘hyperactive adults’ were responsible for the majority of the challenges.  “Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings.”  

There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy here. Most of the books being challenged dealt with all aspects of human sexuality, and many of the challengers were associated with Moms for Liberty, whose co-founder was just outed for her participation in a 3-way sexual affair with her husband and another woman.

It’s actually a rag-tag army marching under many different banners.  Some Crusaders are motivated by a desire for dollars.  The US spends close to $800 billion a year on preK-12 public education, money that’s available to those running for-profit charter schools, expensive tutoring programs, and private schools in states with voucher programs, to name only three of the ways to turn a buck.

Some Crusaders are motivated by libertarian ideology–nothing that is ‘public’ makes sense to them.  Others believe that children ‘belong to their parents,’ who may not want them vaccinated, tested, or exposed to any ideas and beliefs counter to their own.  And some–most of them politicians– are opportunists.  For instance, the Covid pandemic shutdowns, prolonged in some places, brought out the naysayers in full force; the failure of ‘virtual learning’ in many places created a tidal wave of our teaching force.  

There are two ways to defeat this rag-tag but highly motivated ‘army’ of Crusaders: 1) shout from the rooftops the good news about public schools; and 2) work even harder to make them better.

Let’s start with the good news about our schools: David Wallace-Wells, writing in the New York Times, recently wrote a thoughtful analysis of American public education. He did a deep dive into the results of the Programme in International Assessment (PISA) test, pre- and post-Covid, testing 15-year-olds around the globe. Because the essay is behind a paywall, I will quote from it at some length here.

“(W)hat it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

The performance looks even stronger once you get into the weeds a bit. In reading, the average U.S. score dropped just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. Across the rest of the O.E.C.D., the average loss was 11 times as large. In Germany, which looked early in the pandemic to have mounted an enviable good-government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Britain, the country most often compared with the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many metrics, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the darling of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.”

Tell this to the Crusaders and anyone else who seems inclined to believe them!

Elsewhere in his essay, Wallace-Wells makes two telling points about absenteeism and mental health: “Chronic absenteeism, for instance, is up significantly since before the pandemic and may prove a far more lasting and concerning legacy of school closure than learning loss. And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national mental health emergency — language that has been echoed by the American Medical Association.”  

One conclusion: If you are serious about improving public schools, find out why so many kids skip school regularly–and do something about it.  Hint: absenteeism and mental health are directly connected, the through line being bullying, cyberbully, and cellphones.

2) Making schools better: I’ve been writing throughout the fall about ways to improve public schools.  You can find those suggestions on my blog, TheMerrowReport.com.  I learned only recently that the American Federation of Teachers has been at this throughout 2023, in an impressive campaign called “Real Solutions for Real Kids and Communities.”  Some of our ideas overlap, and some of what they have already suggested are on my drawing board. I urge you to take a deep dive, because it’s good stuff.

Happy Holidays, and keep the faith.

(Because gift-giving season is when many grandparents shower their grandchildren with stuff, I am reposting this warning about the harm that well-intentioned “personalized” gifts represent. Please share it.)

The adult and child walking in front of me were complete strangers. The man, who looked to be in his early 30’s, was casually dressed. He was holding the hand of a young girl, probably about five years old. Perhaps the girl, Sophie, was his daughter and they were on their way home from school or a music lesson.

If you’re reading carefully, you may be thinking, “Hold on a minute!  You said they were complete strangers, but you knew her name?  That doesn’t compute, buddy.  You’ve lost your credibility….big time.”

I did what I have done on other occasions.  I called out, “Excuse me, sir,” and the man stopped and turned around.  “Hi, Sophie,” I said, and the man looked at me sideways, probably wondering why an old man with white hair was striking up a conversation.

“Do I know you,” he asked, somewhat suspiciously?  

“No,” I said.  “We have never met, but I know your daughter’s name is Sophie.  I probably shouldn’t know it, but I do–and so does everyone else who sees her backpack.”

He seemed uncertain as to how to respond to my blunt, even rude, comment, and so I continued talking.

“I reported on children’s issues for 41 years on public television and radio,” I said. “And a story I did on child predators back in the 1980’s has stayed with me.  I spent a day with cops searching for a suspected pedophile, and at one point they hauled in a man who was lingering outside an elementary school.  He hadn’t done anything, so they couldn’t charge him, and he denied being a predator.  But he did tell them—and me, the reporter–how pedophiles are successful in persuading children to go off with them.”

The father was now paying close attention.

“The biggest gift,” this (probable) predator said, “is clothing or a backpack with the child’s name printed on it.”  All he had to do to win their trust, he told me, was call the child by name.  The 5-year-old won’t recognize or remember him, but children see many adults throughout their day and this man did know her name, so she’d assume that she must have met him. He went on, “Of course, most parents teach their children not to talk to strangers, but because I know her name, she lets down her guard.”  

I have not been able to erase from my memory his next words: “Game over.”

Unfortunately (from my point of view), personalized backpacks like the one Sophie was wearing are big business. A Google search turns up 43,100,000 hits.  That’s 43 MILLION!   A search for personalized lunch boxes– another gift to predators–produces 10,000,000 hits.  Disney will gladly sell you all sorts of stuff with your child’s name emblazoned on it, as will hundreds of other large companies.  

(Ironically, searching for the combination of ‘personalized backpacks’ and ‘predator’ produces references to the movie, “Predator.”  And there’s even a pedophile brand of backpack!

Perhaps I should be embarrassed to break into people’s conversations, but I am not, not any more.  It seems that old age reduces inhibitions, and so when I see parents walking with young children wearing their personalized backpacks or carrying personalized lunch boxes, I speak up. So far, anyway, nobody has punched me out or cursed me, and quite a few parents have expressed their gratitude.

That chilling interview with that (probable) predator took place in the 1980’s, long before Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  Today those Apps are a gift to those who are attracted to children. And again it’s the adults who are creating the problem, because many parents post photos, with names, of their children on their Facebook page, and those pages are often open to anyone surfing the web.  I know parents who do this almost daily,  and it seems to me that this amounts to an invitation to men with evil intentions.  Too many photos allow strangers to display deep familiarity with children they decide to target.  There’s no better example of TMI–Too Much Information–than splashing one’s family life all over Facebook.

I am not alone in my concerns about endangering children.  The website Bella Online has a clear warning. Here’s another.  But, unfortunately, most advice–even good advice like this and this– does not include warnings against personalized clothing or information sharing on Facebook.

Because the data reveals that only about 10% of child abuse is committed by strangers, all children must also be taught about the sanctity of their bodies; they must be taught to be wary of overly friendly family members who want them to keep secrets.  But 10% of the millions of children who will be sexually abused before the age of 18 is a big number…..

So why not cut back on posting on Facebook or Instagram about everything your children and grandchildren do? Gift-giving season is here, so please do not give your grandchildren or children personalized clothing, backpacks, et cetera.  

Let’s all stay safe…..and help keep our children and grandchildren safe.

Some years ago when I was visiting a high school classmate in a small town in Ohio, he showed me some benches near a bus stop and a small park.  “Our high school kids built those and installed them,” he told me, “because the senior citizens told them they needed benches.”  “Ah, community service,” I responded, but he corrected me.  “We call it ‘Serving Your Community,’ and not ‘Community Service,’ because they are not synonymous,” he told me.  A school cannot serve its community unless the people in the school are connected to the community and its members, which means knowing the ‘who, what, when, where, and why’ of its members.  

I learned from my friend that Community Service, though admirable, can be a check-off-the-box-and-satisfy-the-graduation-requirement activity.  For example, the New York City Board of Education approaches Community Service with a list of what’s acceptable, and what’s not:

• volunteering to an outside group – this can be done at educational centers, religious institutions, nursing homes, animal shelters, soup kitchen, food pantry, homeless shelter, other non-profits, etc. MOST of these examples provide a letter from their institution to indicate # of hours provided and SHOULD be uploaded as documentation.
• RUNNING a drive or fundraiser event- coat, blood, clothing, toy, etc. Remember, donating the item is not, but working/organizing event is (hours)
• a run/walk (because it provides the time into the cause)
• writing letters to nursing homes, veterans, orphanage, etc
• Habitat for Humanity
• cleaning a highway/park/ocean or water source
• service periods in the library, an office, a classroom, etc (so to clarify the example of “currency” with this example- let’s say a student organizes 100 books in an hour…. they receive an hour of community service, not 100 hours because they sorted 100 books. it is about service HOURS, not currency.)

Other sites list ‘acceptable’ activities that qualify as Community Service, including picking up trash while taking a walk.  Students are given a list, make a choice, and then keep records of their activity.

In contrast, the process of Serving Your Community is thoughtful, deliberate, proactive, and open-ended that young people own, from start to finish.  Students must first figure out what their community wants and needs, which can only be determined by reaching out to community members and groups.  It requires energy and intelligence and a commitment of whatever time it takes to survey the community, and then design and complete the project (which the students also might have to raise funds for and get official approval of).  

Serving Your Community actually has deep roots. There’s an official name, “Service-Learning,” and even a federal definition, “Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that connects academic curriculum to community problem-solving.”  The initial federal legislation passed in 1990, and the website asserts that about 20% of schools have participated over the years.

The three words in the phrase Serving Your Community are instructive. Serving is an active verb form—you’re doing something for others when you are serving. Being productive enhances one’s sense of self-worth. The two other words, your and community, convey membership–belonging–which is something we humans need and aspire to.  

This is not trivial. A lot of American students feel alienated from school. Many of those who attend school regularly are literally present but not engaged.  Their bodies are there, but their minds and hearts are elsewhere. And huge numbers of our kids skip school; more than 25% were chronically absent during the school year 2021-22, the latest data available, meaning they were absent at least 10% of the time.  A recent New York Times editorial noted that even in affluent school districts absenteeism is a problem, citing New Trier Township High School in Illinois, where 38% of seniors were chronically absent.

Some in power want to get tough on these truants, but, even if harsh policies could force young people back into schools, that wouldn’t do anything to engage them.  The opposite, more than likely.  Pity the poor teachers with rooms full of hostile young people!

What’s required are changes that make school more interesting, more challenging, and more enjoyable for young people (and their teachers).  Serving Your Community is one route to engagement, and I believe that many of my other suggestions, such as “Make Stuff,”  will also help young people become productive participants in their own development.

Here are links to the other steps: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, Ask the Right Question, “Education Grand Rounds”, and Looping (revisited).

Please share these widely.  Public education is under attack from right-wing ideologues, whose voucher policies threaten to bankrupt public schools. Apparently these wacky but powerful people intend to starve public education and then condemn it because it’s not ‘effective.’  

Supporting public education isn’t charity, because it’s in your own self-interest to give all young people maximum opportunities to grow and learn!  Keep in mind that 90% of our children attend public schools, meaning that high school graduates are maintaining the airplanes you and your grandchildren fly in; monitoring your spouse’s IV drip in the hospital; and repairing the gas main leak in your neighborhood. 

I put quotation marks around “SAFE,” because school safety has three overlapping and perhaps inseparable aspects: physical, emotional, and intellectual.  Most public attention is on physical safety—school shootings, ‘Active Shooter’ drills, arming teachers, ‘hardening’ school entrances to keep shooters out,and so forth–but a ‘fortress mentality’ is insufficient and, from my perspective, harmful.  A school that devotes its energy to keeping all ‘the bad guys’ out without paying sufficient attention to what goes on inside its walls is probably not much more than a prison.

Of the three aspects of safety–physical, emotional, and intellectual–the easiest to address is the last one. In a school that is intellectually safe, it’s cool to be smart, and even cooler to be curious. In these schools no one is embarrassed to say “I don’t understand,” because intellectual safety means it’s OK to admit ignorance and ask for help. What’s discouraged is hiding one’s confusion or ignorance, because curiosity is a great virtue.     

Inside an intellectually safe school, ‘smart’ is not narrowly defined by grades or test scores, and neither is ‘excellence.’  In many schools, the focus is on achievements–doing well at what others expect of you–but in intellectually safe schools, the focus is more likely to be on accomplishments, reaching goals that matter to the individual and that may also benefit others. 

Making it safe to be smart and eager to learn happens best if the adults in charge are committed to continuous learning.  But, in my experience, many educators seem to feel that their job is to pour knowledge into their students’ heads, not to engage in discovery and growth, their students’ and their own.  

So adults have to model the appropriate behavior–but not just the educators.  An anecdote makes the point.  One spring day quite a few years ago, my friend Kathleen stopped by on her way home from retrieving her 12-year-old son’s backpack, which he had accidentally left in his classroom at school. She told me that her son Joey, a bright, thoughtful, somewhat quiet boy, was the target of relentless bullying by the jock majority on campus, who picked on him because he loved to read and was often seen carrying a book.  So, in that school, it wasn’t cool to be curious; in fact, it was unhealthy.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “That’s too bad, but isn’t a little bit of bullying a normal but unfortunate part of growing up? Isn’t it something that kids work through, and maybe even manage to build some character in the process?”  In other words, isn’t this natural behavior, no big deal?

Well, there’s more to the story.  When Kathleen was in the school, she ran into the mother of one of Joey’s classmates, who noticed  that Kathleen had only her younger child with her. “So where’s Joey?” quipped the woman. “Home reading War and Peace, or something?”

So the bullying that Joey was enduring wasn’t ‘the natural cruelty of children,’ but learned behavior modeled by a parent.  

Learned behavior can be unlearned,  but adults must step in and actively work to stop bullying.  When they fail to do the right thing, they are enabling the bad behavior, and their enabling becomes a serious–and sometimes deadly–part of the problem. At the very least, their willingness to ignore bullying creates a vacuum, in which a vulnerable child stands alone, and into which a bully (or a gang of them) easily steps and begins to fill the void with cruelty.

The fact is, most bullying between students is verbal, rather than physical. It’s the so-called “normal” teasing that kids inflict on each other. So how does bullying begin? Usually it starts in an atmosphere lacking in emotional and intellectual safety.  As a reporter, I met students all the time who talked openly about being teased:

“They call me stupid, stuff like that, because I get nervous and start stuttering,” said Carlos, a Maryland high school student, describing how other students reacted when he tried to read aloud.

“I’m just sick of some people making fun of me because of the color of my skin, or because of what I wear,” said Jessica, a young white girl in a nearly all-black middle school in New York City.

“Kids would make fun of my ears, because they’re big, and I just hated it,” said Charles, 17 years old and about 6’2”, recalling painful years of merciless teasing by classmates.

“They’d go ‘Hahaha, A.D.D. boy, you can’t do anything right. You’re so stupid,’” said John, who’d been diagnosed with ADHD and was on Ritalin.

I often asked, “What happens if you complain to teachers or to your parents?” The usual response from adults: “Get tough. That’s just normal, so get used to it.”

Deborah Meier, founder of the world-renowned Central Park East Secondary School, told me that most teachers and adults dismiss teasing as something children just have to adapt to. “We turn our backs,” she said, “because we don’t know what to do about it.”

Meier believes that non-violent teasing and other emotional cruelties are directly connected to physical violence. Adults have a duty to become involved and to intervene on behalf of those being harassed, she said, because “a truly safe school is willing to tackle the tough issues.”  In emotionally safe schools, she said, “Teachers are confident enough and powerful enough to say ‘Stop everything! We’re not going to move until we have made sure this isn’t going to happen again.’”

The internet and the ubiquity of cellphones have made bullying more pervasive, unfortunately. So-called ‘cyberbullying’ is harder to spot, but, once detected, adults are compelled to act, just as they must when the bullying takes place in their presence.  In other words, on-line behavior that causes a significant disruption at school or makes some students unsafe is actionable.  Cyberbullying, often combined with in-school behavior, often results in academic failure, student withdrawal, and in extreme cases, suicide.  As the NIH has reported, “Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults in the United States. In-person bullying is known to raise the risk of thoughts of suicide and attempts for both victims and perpetrators.”

In early November the Washington Post reported that it had found nearly 200 incidents in recent years when a bullied student took his or her own life. Some schools are paying out millions and changing policies, the Post reports. The article is worth your full attention, because it’s clear that schools are not doing enough, despite Title IX, despite anti-bullying laws in most states.

For clarity, think of bullying in all its forms as child abuse, and act accordingly. 

The awful paradox that it’s not safe to be smart and curious in many schools should give us pause.  If schools don’t celebrate learning, who does!   The fact that many of us look the other way when we detect emotional abuse is deplorable, and here we need leaders to model and reward doing the right thing.  School leaders cannot split hairs and decline to get involved. It’s their job, like it or not. How they respond matters, and the key is to be proactive, not wait until something awful happens.

America is an increasingly diverse country, and many schools enroll students who do not “look like us.” Now more than ever, adults must protect those who are different. They must not turn a blind eye toward teasing and harassment of any sort, but particularly not to the kind that involves a student’s faith or ethnic background. Passions run high today, and ignorance must not be allowed to rule the classroom or the playground.

In public schools today, physical safety is the tail wagging the dog. 

That has to change. Physical safety becomes far more likely–perhaps almost inevitable–when schools are intellectually and emotionally safe. 

(The Previous Steps: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, Ask the Right Question, “Education Grand Rounds”, Looping (revisited), and “Making Stuff”)

The footstool in the pictures below was made by my paternal grandfather, John G.G. Merrow, probably in 1900 when he was 14 years old.  Pegged and meticulously carved, it now holds a place of honor in our den

It’s more than 120 years old and still useful, although someone (my father?) put in some screws at some point, probably when some of the pegs began wearing out.

Gramp went on to finish high school and college, not all that common in those days, and now I find myself wondering what role his Woodshop class might have played in his development. It gave him the satisfaction of designing and creating something tangible and useful, and I’m assuming he was in charge of every step, A-Z.  Perhaps he brought it home and gave it to his parents.

That’s what I remember doing with the wood pump-house handle lamp that I built in Woodshop class in 7th or 8th grade sometime in the 1950’s.  That lamp is long gone, alas, but it looked something like this (except I remember that I put the column dead center, not in a corner):

Like my grandfather, I was in charge of the whole shooting match (under supervision of course). Nobody told me to build that object; nobody gave me the pre-cut pieces, etc etc. I wasn’t competing with other students for better grades or more praise from teachers; I was focused on trying to do the best job I could.  If I did everything right, it would work, and it would be useful at home.  What’s more, I was never ‘separated from the fruits of my labor,’ the way most students and workers are today.  More than 65 years later, I can still recall the satisfaction of being productive. I had ‘made stuff’ that mattered.

Public schools have many self-inflicted problems these days, usually the result of foolish policies (such as over-emphasizing standardized testing) which essentially reduce children and teachers to numbers. In this series of suggestions, I’m putting forth for your consideration some small and simple (though not necessarily easy) steps that would, I believe, make schools more interesting, valuable, and challenging for our young people.  Most of them entail treating students and teachers holistically–like real human beings–empowering them to become more self-sufficient, more productive, and–paradoxically–more willing to be vulnerable.

“Making Stuff” doesn’t mean simply bringing back Woodshop.  Students can also “make stuff” in other classes, including Home Economics (now often called ‘Culinary Arts’), Automotive Technology,  Horticulture, Building Trades, Ceramics, and even Marine Studies. 

The granddaughter of a friend of mine is a college-bound junior, but she’s taking a carpentry class at her high school. My friend tells me she’s already built two Adirondack Chairs and a bench on her own, and working with a team of other young women, a shed. (She’s almost as proud of her work as he is!)

Pamela Paul, an Opinion writer for The New York Times, wrote a fascinating piece on this subject early in October.  I urge you to read the entire article, and perhaps these excerpts will push you to read it in its entirety.

She writes: “First, to state the obvious: Kids need a break. The advantages of getting up from one’s desk — standing, walking around, going outside, taking 15-minute breaks — are well known to adults, especially for people who spend much of their days on screens. Yet we don’t extend the same courtesy to schoolchildren. An hour or two each week grappling with wood planks or mixing batter can leaven a long and monotonous school day.”

AND

“Educators may extol the value of collaboration and its desirability in today’s workplace, but in school, those lessons rarely extend beyond the confines of a Google Doc. Whereas in home economics, collaboration means taking turns cleaning up and requires social skills to determine who does what and how. Working with one’s hands also rewards patience. Kids accustomed to immediate results and instant gratification must grapple with the tedium and rewards of slower processes; even the best math and chemistry students don’t automatically bake a bread that rises.”my

My friend Tony Wagner, the distinguished scholar, sent me an interesting and important piece about career readiness in other countries by Sam Abrams of Teachers College, Columbia, with particular attention to Finland. It’s well worth your time. Among the points: “U.S. vocational education does not compare to the Finnish version. While 40 to 45 percent of students at the upper-secondary level in Finland attend vocational schools, only 5 percent do so in the U.S. While Finland spends 1 percent of GDP on job training, the U.S. spends only 0.1 percent.”

Our children live under intense pressure today, which many try to escape by consuming–social media, video games, fast food, alcohol, and drugs. Why not teach them the joys of producing, not consuming?

Making stuff–whether it’s an Adirondack Chair or a Soufflé–those are accomplishments, which should be understood as the successful completion of an activity that one has chosen to undertake–i.e. your choice, your challenge, your risk, your possibility of failure, and your success. Unfortunately, many young people today are under intense pressure to compile a list of achievements, to build a resumé that will impress others. As Adam Gopnik puts it, “Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.“

When Henry David Thoreau observed that ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ he meant that their empty lives were a result of unfulfilling work, lack of leisure time, and misplaced values. Today, rather than railing against the modern world, let’s do something about it.…in our schools. With some simple changes in public school curricula, we can enable young people to take control of their lives, by creating opportunities for them to ‘make stuff.’

(Here are links to the previous steps: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, Ask the Right Question, “Education Grand Rounds”, and Looping (revisited).)

Back in mid-August, I began recommending concrete, specific, small, and doable steps that would, I believe, improve public schools. My first recommendation was for Looping, the practice of keeping an elementary school class with its teacher for at least two years.   The logic is pretty straightforward:  Would you change your child’s pediatrician, music teacher, sports coach, et cetera, every year?  Of course not, because you want them to know your child in order to be better able to help him or her.  That logic applies to teachers as well.  Looping assumes that teachers are professionals, determined to help each child achieve to the maximum.  Time matters.

A few days ago in the pages of the New York Times, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, made the case far more eloquently than I, and I urge you to read what he wrote. His essay, “What Most American Schools Do Wrong,” strongly endorses Looping, and he backs up his endorsement with hard data from Finland, Estonia, and the United States.

Here’s part of the essay:  In North Carolina, economists examined data on several million elementary school students. They discovered a common pattern across about 7,000 classrooms that achieved significant gains in math and reading performance.

        Those students didn’t have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher at least twice in different grades. A separate team of economists replicated the study with nearly a million elementary and middle schoolers in Indiana — and found the same results.

        Every child has hidden potential. It’s easy to spot the ones who are already sparkling, but many students are uncut gems. When teachers stay with their students longer, they can see beyond the surface and recognize the brilliance beneath.  Instead of teaching a new cohort of students each year, teachers who   practice “looping” move up a grade or more with their students. It can be a powerful tool. And unlike many other educational reforms, looping doesn’t cost a dime.

        With more time to get to know each student personally, teachers gain a deeper grasp of the kids’ strengths and challenges. The teachers have more opportunities to tailor their instructional and emotional support to help all the students in the class reach their potential. They’re able to identify growth not only in peaks reached, but also in obstacles overcome. The nuanced knowledge they acquire about each student isn’t lost in the handoff to the next year’s teacher.

I’m certain your first question is “What if a child gets stuck with an ineffective teacher?”  Grant addresses that issue: (I)n the data, looping actually had the greatest upsides for less effective teachers — and lower-achieving students. Building an extended relationship gave them the opportunity to grow together.

He makes the point that I have been stressing in my series: No single step is going to fix everything, but that proverbial journey always begins with a single step.

The Times invited readers to comment, and 677 people weighed in.  Most interesting to me are the comments from teachers, including one from “Maestraz,” somewhere in New England: “I taught in a middle school that operated on a looping model for 7th and 8th grades. As a Language Arts teacher, it made so much sense to me. It saved me so much time in the second year, not having to reorient my kids to my classroom routine. I really enjoyed being able to nurture my kids as readers and writers over two years, except when there were hideously awful kids in the mix, whose parents were total enablers of their behavior and disruption.”

“Shimr” in Spring Valley, a 40-year veteran teacher, also weighed in: “The quiet student will open up as familiarity breeds more than contempt; it breeds comfort to the student who shyly fears being ridiculed with an unknown teacher, but not with the teacher who knows him/her.”

Grant concludes that Finland and Estonia have the best public school systems in the world, but not just because they practice Looping: Finnish and Estonian schools don’t invest just in students who show early signs of high ability — they invest in every student regardless of apparent ability. And there are few better ways to do that than to keep students with teachers who have the time to get to know their abilities.

Here are the other eight steps that I believe will improve public schools, with hot links to each: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, and Ask the Right Question. Please share these links with others.  The war on public education is real, and in some places the bad guys are winning. It’s time to fight back, and an important part of that fight is making schools better.

About six years ago I was in a New York hospital recovering from a near-fatal bout of sepsis when a large group of people, all dressed in white, came into my hospital room and gathered at the end of my bed.  I was groggy from drugs and had no idea about what was going on. In fact, the next day I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened. Perhaps I had been hallucinating?  I asked a nurse, who told me it was part of ‘Grand Rounds,’ when doctors, residents, interns, and medical students go from room to room to talk about the condition and treatment of patients with that particular condition, and about the larger picture: how that condition is treated elsewhere, its causes, the prognosis for survival, and so forth.  Teachable moments, created by those in charge of education.

I later learned that Grand Rounds may be live-streamed, sometimes with actors standing (lying in?) for patients because of complaints from actual patients about insensitive treatment. (IE, they didn’t like lying there hearing their condition discussed openly by strangers.)

But the idea of information-sharing appealed to me.  How could it be applied to public schools, I wondered?  Could teachers systematically and routinely share relevant information about how they were getting through to certain students….and having trouble connecting with others?  And then I flashed back to a series I had done for the NewsHour somewhere around 1990.  We followed two rookie teachers in a Maryland school district for a year, one in a public high school, the other in a public middle school.  While it wasn’t a particularly memorable series, one segment stayed with me: We filmed all the 7th Grade teachers getting together to talk about individual students.  Basically, they shared what seemed to work with particular kids, and what didn’t.  Some openly voiced their frustrations with–even dislike of–certain students, something I don’t remember being able to do when I was teaching, but a healthy way of ‘clearing the air,’ it seemed to me. 

What we discovered was that, at that middle school, teachers met weekly, by grade, to share insights, ask questions, and express concerns.  It was a team-building exercise focused primarily on improving student outcomes, something that made sense then and makes even more sense today. I’m calling this Education Grand Rounds….but hope someone will come up with a better name.

I think we filmed 10 or 15 conversations about individual kids during that time period.  I’m guessing that their shared insights resulted in more effective teaching, more satisfying results with students, and in some cases close attention to a student’s problems.  Because no teacher wants to be continually disciplining students and putting out fires, and because teachers are willing to share success stories, what I think of as Education Grand Rounds make educational sense.  

Absent Education Grand Rounds, information sharing is left to chance, during a lunch break perhaps.  A retired teacher, a good friend, told me this story, which I know is representative of what happens all too often: “Leodardis was a child from El Salvador in my class. No one had done anything for him in his life, but he loved my class. He couldn’t see without his glasses, and that’s when he would act out, which is why I always made sure he had his glasses.  I even bought him a string to hold them around his neck, like mine.  When Leodardis went onto the next grade, the teacher asked me if he was always so badly behaved. ‘Does he have his glasses,’ I asked?  The teacher didn’t even know he wore glasses. It was all written up in the report I had filed, but she had never read it.“

While many private school faculty meet routinely to talk about individuals, it will be tougher for public schools, whose teachers are, in restaurant parlance, ‘fully booked,’ with perhaps only one free period a day, plus a few minutes for lunch.   Asking teachers to work longer hours–IE, meeting after school–probably won’t work. Schedules have to be redesigned.

As with creating extended homerooms, making Education Grand Rounds part of a school’s routine will involve reworking the daily calendar.  Like other changes I’m suggesting, this won’t be easy, but it can be done, because I saw it in action, albeit only a few times in my 41-year career as an education reporter.

(Interestingly, an Education Professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Dr. Jennifer Gore, and a colleague have developed what they call “Quality Teaching Rounds,” where groups of teachers watch each other teach and then share their thoughts about the pedagogy. Its focus is on improving teaching, not getting to know students better. I’m indebted to Professor David Imig of the University of Maryland for this information.)

Here are the other steps that I believe will improve public schools, with hot links to each: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, and Ask the Right Question

I’m hoping you will share the links with people who have the power to change public schools, because it’s not enough to fight against those who would destroy public education. The system itself must improve, and that happens best at the level of the individual school.

The campaign to undermine public schools has taken a new turn with North Carolina’s passage of Education Savings Account legislation. Passed with support of enough Democrats to make it veto-proof, the law will provide up to $7500 per child, depending on family income, to pay for private school tuition.  According to The 74, a right-leaning on-line education site, “Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia now have ESA programs open to all. Oklahoma has a universal tax credit program. Ohio has a universal voucher program and in Indiana, the family income ceiling for a voucher is set so high that it’s nearly universal.”

Even strong supporters of ESA’s agree that the amount available doesn’t cover tuition and that most beneficiaries already enroll their children in private schools; however, every dollar for every ESA comes from public school funds.

So what can public schools do in the face of deep hostility from many state legislators and activist groups like Moms for Liberty?   A strong clue comes from an ESA advocate, who told The 74 that “We know that parents are hungry for an education system that recognizes the uniqueness of their children…”

Sadly, those words should be the mantra and guiding philosophy of every public school educator, who could and should ‘recognize the uniqueness’ of children by asking one essential question about every child entrusted to their care, “How is he or she intelligent?”  Unfortunately, the system they work in, and perhaps their own training, leads most public educators to ask a very different question, “How smart is he or she?”

And then systems rely largely on scores on standardized bubble tests to provide the answers. That leads to sorting, stratification, inappropriate competition, humiliation, and more. 

So the simple (but not easy) step is to always ask the right question about every child: “How is he or she smart?”  Rephrase it if you wish: “What is this child curious about, and how can we harness that curiosity to achieve the core goals of helping him/her become literate, numerate, capable of working with others, and confident?” 

This step would be easier if reasonable class size limits were policy. Treating children as individuals is difficult enough with, say, 25 students; it’s probably impossible with 38.

The same people (Moms for Liberty, Christopher Rufo, for-profit Charter Schools, etc)  who are complaining that public schools don’t recognize the “uniqueness” of their children are also working overtime to undermine and underfund public schools. 

But it’s not enough to fight them. Public schools need to be proactive, and they need to get better. That’s why I hope at least some of you are taking these small steps seriously and sharing them with educators and others in a position to make changes.

Here are links to the seven previous steps, which endorse Looping, Play, Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involving Outsiders, Frequent “Talent Nights,” and Expanded Homeroom.   Share them with others if you are so inclined.  And please stay tuned for more steps….