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….

“Homeroom” for most high school students is the equivalent of the starting blocks in a track meet. They touch base, listen to (or maybe ignore) morning announcements, and, when the bell sounds, dash off to class. In truth, “Homeroom” is important to school administrators because it gives them a head count. It’s a meaningless perfunctory exercise for kids.

For them, “Homeroom” is just a room, about as far from actually being a home as one can imagine.

That has to change. America’s teenagers desperately need more “Home” in their lives, more opportunities to connect with others, more moments that tell them they matter. The rigidity of today’s high-pressure school schedules makes matters worse, not better. 

This has always been true, but during the pandemic, when many public schools were closed, students’ mental health deteriorated, and their problems skyrocketed, as measured by visits to hospital emergency rooms.  Adolescent girls, a 50% increase! 

A CDC survey covering the years 2011-2021 does not report on the full impact of COVID, but its findings are nonetheless disturbing.

• In 2021, more than 4 in 10 (42%) students felt persistently sad or hopeless and nearly one-third (29%) experienced poor mental health.
• In 2021, more than 1 in 5 (22%) students seriously considered attempting suicide and 1 in 10 (10%) attempted suicide.

There’s a simple fix—not easy, but simple: make “Homeroom” more of a HOME, not just another room. The essential step is to extend Homeroom from a few minutes to at least a half hour and perhaps more. 

Next, work with teachers to convince them that this new time period is an opportunity for them to expand their own professional repertoire of skills to include their students’ social and emotional growth. The challenge may be to train teachers to listen and not react, in order to allow young people to identify and share their feelings. NewsWeek magazine reports that Tacoma, Washington, schools are doing this, training not only teachers but also parents and school bus drivers.

In each of these new extended Homerooms, the teacher and his/her students will have to work together to figure out how they want to use this time. Some students may want to finish homework, or sleep, but the teacher could steer the conversation in the direction of “team building.”  (See #3 in this series for suggestions.)

Perhaps one day a week could be set aside for discussion of some interesting questions (“If you could meet one figure from history, who would it be, and why?”), even trivial ones (“What questions would you like to ask Taylor Swift?”). 

One ground rule I hope all would adopt: NO phones or electronic devices allowed! 

Ideally “Homeroom” will turn into a safe space where students can learn to share and will agree that what’s shared there stays there. No bullying allowed. 

Extending Homerooms is neither a new idea nor a pipe dream. The late Ted Sizer preached and practiced this in his Essential Schools reform, and I recall seeing how well it could work. Didn’t always work, of course, because some teachers either weren’t fully committed or skilled enough, and some kids were unwilling or unable to shed their tough outer skins. 

Like many promising reforms, the expanded Homeroom sputtered and died, the victim of 1) test mania, 2) administrative indifference, and 3) the unwillingness of some teachers to do the necessary work. 

I observed a fourth factor: outright vicious hostility from guidance counselors, who felt that teachers were “invading their territory” by tending to the emotional needs of students. To them, turf meant more than the well-being of young people. Ironically, that shouldn’t be a problem this time around…because guidance counselors have all but disappeared from most public schools.

If you want to help America’s young people recover from Covid, and if you want them to reconnect, give them time and space, expand Homeroom now!

(The first six steps in this series are here: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve ‘Outsiders,‘ and More “Talent Nights” If you share my commitment to public education, please share these ideas with others.)

I need to start with a story.  About 20 years ago the State of Virginia adopted a school reform strategy called ‘Turnaround Schools.’   To their way of thinking, the right way to turn around ‘failing’ schools was to recruit experienced and dedicated administrators and spend a summer teaching them ‘Turnaround Tactics.’  These newly-minted ‘Turnaround Specialists’ would then be assigned to lead ‘failing’ schools. 

Because to education reformers, “failing” meant low test scores, the Turnaround Specialist’s mission was straightforward: Produce higher scores on the state’s annual tests during his or her three-year tenure.  

Stuff like that was catnip for journalists, and so we went to ‘Turnaround Training Camp’ and recruited a promising candidate, an idealistic veteran principal named Parker Land, to follow throughout his Turnaround Years at Boushall Middle School in Richmond.  

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the series on the PBS NewsHour website, but I can tell you that it didn’t turn out well. Standardized test scores didn’t go up, attendance did not improve, and most teachers rebelled against the increased pressure to ‘teach to the test.’  After just one year, Mr. Land was reassigned to a different school.

But what has stayed with me over the years was how he inadvertently hit upon a sure-fire way to connect with families–”Talent Night”–but unfortunately failed to recognize what he’d discovered. I don’t fault him, because making close connections with parents wasn’t an essential Turnaround Strategy. 

Here’s what happened: Early in the fall, Mr. Land scheduled ‘Talent Night,’ and he made it a big deal: Lots of performances by eager middle-schoolers, plenty of free food, live music, and even baby-sitting services provided by older kids–everything to make parents feel that Boushall was their school.  His goal was to make parents feel at home, and it worked spectacularly well. The pleasure was palpable, and I recall that it jumped off the screen in the segment we aired on The NewsHour.  Mr. Land was pleased, and we fully expected that he would make ‘Talent Night’ a regular event.  Why wouldn’t he, after seeing how happy and comfortable parents were in ‘their’ school?  What better way to get parents behind his effort to improve their school?

The right question, unfortunately, turned out to be Why Would He Even Bother?, because in public education, then and now, parent involvement is just a one-off, check-the-box activity, not integral to the system. 

I am not singling out Parker Land for criticism; he was a dedicated educator and a decent man.  Public education’s collective mentality is the villain here; it’s what needs to change. For 41 years I heard professional educators speaking in public forums describe parents as “our greatest asset” and “invaluable partners,” but I also heard their private conversations, or I caught them off guard…and on those occasions the message was pretty much the polar opposite: “Most parents are a pain in the neck!”

Don’t take my word for it–just  examine how most schools treat parents.  It seems to me that most schools make parents ‘outsiders’ in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  There’s the once-a-year “Back to School Night” and perhaps a “Parent Involvement Committee’ or a “Parent Advisory Board” that meets occasionally with the Principal.  Many administrators expect parents to hold bake sales, auctions, and fundraising drives, but that’s not treating parents as partners in their children’s education.  

Why this negative attitude toward parents?  Some educators feel that low income parents do not have the time or energy to get deeply involved in their children’s schooling.  But even if their dismissal of parents is rooted in empathy or sympathy, it adds up to the same thing: the exclusion of parents.  

As evidence of parental detachment, these administrators and teachers often cite the low turnout at Back to School Night, concluding from the large number of no-show parents that they don’t care.  But look carefully at Back to School Nights: They’re scheduled when it’s least inconvenient for teachers, and they consist of a quick series of show-and-tell presentations by teachers, one-off lectures that may make parents feel like visitors, strangers who happened by. Parents will be told to make sure their kids do their homework assignments and don’t spend too much time on social media.  Why would most parents bother to attend more than once?  What’s about appealing about being talked down to?

Unfortunately, it’s the rare educator who says “We cannot do a good job of educating your child without you,” actually means it, and then proves it by his or her actions.

Perhaps administrators and many teachers hold parents in low regard because they are hoping to elevate their chosen field into a high-status profession.  “After all, you wouldn’t expect a heart surgeon to consult with a child’s parents about the best way to replace a ruptured valve to save the child’s life,” the thinking goes, as if the work of educating a child were the equivalent of complex surgery.

But schooling isn’t heart or brain surgery,  Moreover, schooling and education are not synonymous.  Education is more comprehensive (24/7/365 if we are lucky).  Schooling (only 180 days a year for 12 or 13 years) should be team effort, with teachers and parents on the same side  

Very little–if anything–is done to make parents feel that the school is theirs, but there’s actually an easy way to start to change: Do what that Turnaround Specialist in Virginia failed to do: Schedule frequent ‘Talent Nights’ with pot-luck meals, performances by students, live music, with child-care provided by other students. 

Once parents feel that it’s their school too, consider offering short classes teaching the skills necessary to help their kids become better readers or more proficient problem-solvers. No lectures, no ‘parent involvement committees,’ no window-dressing, but a genuine partnership that invites openness and commitment from everyone.

Because some parents have grown accustomed to educators saying ‘Leave the education to us,’ they’ll need help learning to accept their new role and responsibility.  Because some teachers have grown accustomed to holding parents at arm’s length, they will have to learn ways to acknowledge that parents are essential.  (They’ll have business cards to hand out!)

A big part of public education’s problem is its failure to recognize that most parents want their children to succeed but may not know how to contribute.  Turn that around by accepting parents as valuable assets. Partners, not ‘outsiders.’  

(I invite you to take a look at the five previous steps, which endorse Looping, Play, Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, and Involving Outsiders.   Share them with others if you are so inclined.  And please stay tuned for more steps….)

The “small steps” I am recommending in this ongoing series take on increased urgency with the spread of Education Savings Accounts, which now provide money for private school tuition in nine states.  Even though the dollars are nowhere enough to pay the full tuition and even though most recipients are already enrolled in private schools, the ESA dollars come from public school budgets. And pro-ESA campaigns generally use inflammatory language about giving parents “the chance to escape failing schools….”

While most public schools aren’t failing, they simply aren’t doing enough to nurture ‘the uniqueness of every child.’  Simply put, public education needs to fight back. All of the ‘small steps’ in this series are simple–although not always easy–to take.

Here’s the next one…..

The problem with the truism “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” is that most villagers have no direct connection to children or to the schools they go to. Only about 25 percent of homes have school age children, and in some communities that number drops into the teens. Even if one includes households with grandparents, the percentage probably won’t reach 40.  And although support for local public schools is at an all-time high (54%), that may not be high enough to withstand the vicious attacks on the institution by “Moms for Liberty” and other radical right groups.  Educators need to do more to win the support of ‘outsiders.’

The 60-80% of households without a strong connection to public education will determine the future of public schools.  Because they vote on school budgets, their opinion of schools, teachers, and students matter.  That’s why educators must develop and adopt strategies to win their support.  It’s not enough for good things to be happening in schools; ‘the outsiders’ need to be supportive, and a good way to win their support is to get them involved.

Because students who are engaged in their work are the best advertisement for public education, adults need to do two things:  1) Make sure the work is engaging and 2) that it involves the world outside the classroom.  Substitute “Production” (meaning that students are actually producing knowledge) for “Regurgitation” (where students parrot back what their teachers have told them).

Start with a public website and a YouTube Channel that features student productions done outside of school–in their community.  Whatever their ages, kids should work in teams, because it’s safer and it’s also how the adult world functions.  Every smartphone is also a great video camera, and so young people can interview adults in their community, then edit those interviews to create oral histories of people and places in their neighborhood–a sure crowd pleaser because everyone loves talking about themselves. When students know that their work is going to be out there for everyone to see, they will go the extra mile to make them as good as possible.  Adults can help set high standards, of course.  

The possibilities are endless:

*Students can create a photo gallery of the residents of their apartment building or their street and then post portraits on the web for all to see and talk about. Include photos of how the neighborhoods have changed over time.

*Art students can sketch portraits of business storefronts, or workers and bosses, also to be posted on the web.

*The school’s jazz quintet can perform at community centers and post the recordings on the YouTube channel.

*Video teams can interview adults in senior citizen centers around a chosen theme (best job, favorite trip, et cetera), to be edited into a short video for the web. Producing short biographies of ordinary citizens will teach all sorts of valuable skills like clear writing, teamwork and meeting deadlines.

*Music and drama students can rehearse and then present their productions at retirement homes and senior centers — but with a twist: involve some of the adults in the process (a small part in the play, a role in selecting the music, and so on).

Projects like these will help adults without connections to public schools appreciate the value of supporting public education. At the same time, young people will be developing skills that will serve them well throughout their lives:

1) working together with peers;

2) communicating across generations;

3) making value-based judgments, and;

4) meeting ‘real world’ professional high standards.

Real work makes school more valuable and interesting, and students’ enthusiasm will carry over into other aspects of their school experience. They will become better and more discerning consumers of education precisely because they are now producers.  And because “We are what we repeatedly do,” these young people will be well on the way to becoming productive adults.

The fun–and the rewards–ramp up when productions are posted on the school’s YouTube channel–and perhaps broadcast on local news as well.  That’s when these adults who do not have kids in school will start talking, sharing the link, and pulling out their smartphones and showing it to friends and customers.  They’ll be saying, “Did you know what they’re doing in school these days? Sure makes me wish I could go to school all over again.”

That’s one way to turn outsiders into strong supporters of public education.  

Please take a look at Steps One, Two, Three, and Four, which endorse Looping, Play,  Democracy, and Business Cards for Teachers.  Share them with others if you are so inclined.  

And please stay tuned for more steps….