Category Archives: Blog

All Politics Are “Just Down The Street”

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One of the learned truths of governance is that all politics are local.  Thank you, Tip O’Neill, for the lesson.  Our local school board often gives credence to this wisdom and uses the phrase, “What will Sally down-the-street think of this?”, when considering a controversial issue.  O’Neill and Sally remind us to think locally, even on large and major questions.  (Sally is a non-gender term for a local citizen.)

There are 421 public school districts in Wisconsin.  Each district is founded by WI statute and each district is accountable to state statutes and DPI rules and regulations.  With a smile, no two school districts are exactly alike.  Each district today is the result of the actions taken overtime by its local school board to meet both the requirements of the state and the wants, needs, and interests of the local community.  Are these differences a strength or weakness in our public education system?  Neither, they are just a fact.

Sally down-the-street is a wonderful concept for a school member to keep in mind when contemplating a vote of the board.  These versions of Sally live in that ethos.

Does Sally know?  There are many questions about which Sally will say “I didn’t know” and that is both an okay and expected reply.  In our community, about 30% of households have a child attending our local school.  Less than 50% ever had a child a child attend our school.  Most Sallys have not had a direct connection with our school district other than paying their annual school property tax and hearing about school events in the news.  Sally will not know about most school board decisions.

Does Sally care?  Honestly, not much given the statistics.  However, the Sallys who are school parents care deeply.  This means that the care factor represented by Sally speaks for a minority of the households in the school district BUT may speak for a goodly number of those households with school children.  The care factor has two elements – school families and non-school families.  Each is a valid care factor.

Is this a loud Sally or a quiet Sally?  Welcome to local politics and a second proverb – “the loudest squeaky wheel gets the grease”.  Actually, the proverb is “the loudest squeaky wheel gets listened to” and the rest of the quiet wheels just roll along unnoticed.  The voice of a loud Sally cannot be ignored, but it can be understood with the history of who this person is and the nature of the Sally squeaks.  It is best to pay attention to loud Sallys but not let them overrepresent a constituency.

How many others does Sally represent?  Sally may be a solo or an ensemble voice.  Social networking puts Sally into instant and constant communication with all other Sallys.  They talk, listen, and reinforce each other.  When a Sally speaks, board members need to pay attention to the echoes from others and observe any virtual nodding of agreement.  Groundswells of Sallys can rise and abate quickly. 

How can we best inform Sally?  Communication is a two-way responsibility.  The fact that Sally may not know or care about an issue does not lessen nor negate the board’s responsibility to communicate with every Sally.  The best practice is to assume that no one knows everything about an issue or has paid attention to the board’s discussion of the issue, so over educate the public – 100% of the public.  And, keep informing the public.  An informed Sally regardless of opinion benefits school governance.

How will this effect Sally?  Sally “the parent of a current student” will understand and feel direct effects as a decision impacts daily school for a child.  Sally “the parent” will also feel the same community effects as all Sallys, but the immediacy of response make this Sally “the parent” as a primary concern.  The board needs to understand immediacy of effects in their decisions on Sally “the parent” and this Sally’s constant immediate and constant interaction with the board.  Sally “the parent of a graduate” will understand effects as a vestige of a former relationship with the school and as a non-parent community member.   Decisions that effect the Sally “who has never been connected to the school” will be felt in the general conversation of taxpayers and more generalized over time.  However, if a decision brings this Sally to a school board meeting, every board member needs to sit up straight and pay attention. 

The pandemic has provided school boards with everyday and repeated lessons that all politics are local and that the several versions of Sally-down-the-street are a good measure of how well local decisions are playing out.

Remote Education: Conditional Not Optional

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William Occam taught us to to reduce our assumptions and that the simplest explanation is often the best explanation.  As we evolve toward post-pandemic public education, we should not assume that our 2020-21 decisions will be the best decisions for 2021-22.  It is time for Occam’s Razor. 

Occam’s Razor is a good tool for sorting through confusion   The Razor acts to reduce all the conversation to its essential questions and then to a unique answer.  Life in the Time of COVID has been fraught with a new disease, roller-coasting daily news, fears and anxieties aplenty, and shotgunned solutions, some heroic and others pathetic.  These words characterized pandemic public education also over the past year bringing us to our next big question:  given what we have experienced and know, what is the best organization of daily teaching and learning to begin the 21-22 school year?

At the beginning of the 20-21 school year with increasing infection rates, climbing death statistics, and exploratory mitigation protocols, the Razor used best definitions of community safety to reduce the provision of public education to at-home teaching and at-home learning.  Many cogent arguments were made for in-person schooling last fall but were set aside in the face of health statistics.  The simplest and best explanation for the first semester of SY 20-21 was remote education.  Then, conditions changed and with new conditions the best explanation of how to organize for teaching and learning moved toward parent option for either a-home learning or in-school learning.  And, conditions continue to change. 

Given the past year, there are scores of “what ifs?” and “I wants” in the conversation of how schooling should be delivered in September 2021.  Respectfully, the discussion of educational delivery at school board meetings were very public and participatory early in the current school year.  Public and participatory school board meetings are well established in WI statutes.  Weighing all conditions and arguments, school boards directed their administrators to provide variations of remote, in-person, and hybrid strategies for the daily education of children.  Fundamentally, parental choice of strategy was a common feature within most school districts in the 2020-21 school year.

Conditions continue to change.  Vaccination was added to the protocols for masking, social distancing and hand-washing.  The legislature ended statewide health emergency orders.  Local infection rates declined.  Most school employees can choose and have chosen to be vaccinated.  In public, many in our communities are choosing to return to pre-pandemic social activities.  In school, we have maintained masking, reduced distancing, and hand-washing standards. 

This spring, many families have rechosen their school option.  Elementary children are returning to in-person learning.  In January, 40% of parents in our local school chose in-person learning and now 95% choose in-person learning.  Secondary children have been slower to return to in-person learning.  This is a matter of choice as the conditions of in-school learning are the same across all grades.

It is time to apply the Razor again; what is the best strategy for educating children in the fall of 2021?

Arguments still abound.  Some arguments are couched in health concerns.  Some retain political and economic points of view.  Some are slanted toward personal and family convenience.  Some want to retain the option to choose.

Occam tells us to focus on the essential question.   There are many tangential questions that may attach, but they are not the heart of the question.  In the absence a health emergency, the real question is how to best educate children within the 21-22 pandemic protocols.  Repeat – the question is how to best educate children.

Health data tells us that vaccination plus masks plus social distancing plus hand-washing protocols are reducing infection, hospitalization, and death rates.  Good news.  In the absence of a statewide health emergency, these protocols allow teachers and children to be in-school.

Health data reminds school leaders to take care in planning large group gatherings, such as school sports events, concerts, and ceremonies. 

Learning data tells us that at-home learning may have worked well for a few but did not work well for most.  On-screen teaching and learning is dependent upon adequate Internet connectivity.  The fact that too many children do not have such connectivity at home means that on-screen learning leaves too many children without consistent, quality, daily instruction.  This is not acceptable within public education.

Teacher observational data reports that elementary children were more attentive during on-screen teaching and learning and secondary children because increasingly inattentive.  Too many high school students simply clicked the “off” button.  Daily active participation rates of less than 50% for secondary children is not acceptable within public education.  While some may state that many secondary children are inattentive when seated at their school desks, the fact remains that they are at their desks.  The “off” button moves a tune out decision to a drop out decision that we cannot abide.

Instructional observational data demonstrated that many teachers were “super teachers” in their efforts to teach children seated and in-person in classrooms AND children at-home simultaneously.  When I personally watched teachers bobbling back and forth between students in the room and students on-screen, I was amazed at their professional dexterity.  Watching them week after week left me in awe at their resilience.  Considering them doing this in 21-22 causes, however causes me to set aside the ridiculousness of the ask.  Simultaneous in-person and on-screen teaching is an emergency response; it is not a continuing response post-emergency.  Continued simultaneous teaching is a pathway for teacher burn-out, acknowledged secondary student disengagement, and lower than acceptable educational outcomes. 

Occam then tells us to review our assumptionsand set aside those that do not apply to the question at hand.  A major assumption is the status of remote and at-home learning.

At-home learning is not a mandated parental option within public education.  At-home learning is an emergency option for school districts to meet their statutory requirements for educating children.  Health conditions in the early pandemic allowed school districts to extend this option during the health emergency.  The absence of a health emergency should withdraw the emergency educational option.

Home school enrollment is an option for parental choice.  School Choice in an option that allows parents to choose different school districts.  These are real options.

Teaching and learning have not changed.  We cause children to learn best when teachers and children can focus on daily instruction with physical and personal proximity.

Remote education has a proven place in public education, but it is a conditional place not an optional place.  Children whose individual and personal medical and learning needs require isolation will be taught within the educational modifications presented by remote education.  Remote education as a modified educational program is a conditional response to student needs.

Teachers are able to sustain simultaneous in-personal and on-screen teaching in an emergency but not as standard, daily work.  Teachers have proven their capacity to teach individual children remotely when the child’s personal needs require at-home learning.

Thank you, William Occam.  As we plan instructional delivery for all children in 21-22, application of the Razor tells us that a best decision, absent all unnecessary assumptions, is for teaching and learning to be conducted in-person in school classrooms.  Remote education should be conditional to student medical/learning needs; it is no longer a parent option.

Aaron Burr and Zooming Into the Room Where It Happens

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If you are not personally present when and where things are decided, how do you know what was decided and what was not and what were the critical considerations leading to a decision?  A good question. 

Aaron Burr spoke for many in his lamenting tirade to be in “The Room Where It Happens” in the musical Hamilton.  In the song by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Burr sings that he is an outsider to the group of leaders who make significant decisions during the Revolution and in formation of the new federal government.  He wants to be “in the room” where decisions are made.  If you are not in the room, you don’t know “… how the parties get to ‘yes’, the pieces that are sacrificed in every game of chess, we just assume that it happens…”, he sings.

Well, Mr. Burr, welcome to modern day local governance, the pandemic, and the Time of Zoom.  Since your day, the doors of backroom decision making have been thrown open.  Wisconsin Open Meeting Law says that “all meetings shall be publicly held in places reasonably accessible to members of the public and be open to all citizens at all times”.  Everyone can be in the room.  And, Mr. Burr, the pandemic and virtual technologies opened the doors further – you can sit at home or anywhere you choose to observe an open meeting on-screen.  In fact, local government officials also can be in the room virtually.  The room no longer has doors and walls.

You are in the room.  Anyone who wants can be in the room, but understand that you are not at the table.  There is a difference.  I will use School Board governance, the most grass root of local government, as my example.

School Boards sit at the table in the room where school policies are legislated, rules and regulations are debated and approved, and critical school decisions regarding local public education are made.  The room is open for an in-person and remote audience.  Access is being present.  Further, being in the room allows persons in the audience to make comments or raise questions to the Board regarding agenda items.  Access is the right to speak to and be heard by the Board.  Access is the ability to hear the debate of the Board as it deliberates on all aspects of the issue.  Debate of the agenda item, however, is conducted by the Board.  Voting on the agenda is reserved exclusively to the Board.  Being in the room is the ability to observe government in action, but it is not being able to make the decision.  Governing decision making takes place “at the table” not just “in the room”.  Perhaps, Mr. Burr wanted not only to be “in the room” but “at the table”.

“In the room” works well at the School Board and other local levels of government because the elected and the electors have proximity – they live and work in the same community.  “In the room” and “in the community” are almost synonymous for local government.  Distance makes “in the room” more contentious.  Distance is measured not only in the miles between home and the state or national capital but also in the number of people between a concerned citizen-elector and the elected.  The ability to speak to and be heard by an elected official becomes more difficult with the size of the government.  It also makes the vehemence of agreement and disagreement more acute.  Our recent national politics contain many Aaron Burr stories.

Let us remember our history.  Mr. Burr later held elective offices and as Vice President of the United States sat at the big table. 

Load-bearing Learning

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When something makes sense, pay attention to it. 

I recently read the terms “load-bearing learning” in our WI DPI publications and the words stuck.  They are not a new concept.  We have spoken in the past about essential learning, enduring concepts, and required instruction.  Those terms made and make sense.  Load-bearing, though, provides a new way of envisioning the importance of essential and required learning as building blocks for later learning.  Architecturally, load bearing structures, like footings, must be strong enough to support the weight and wear of designs that subsequently are built upon them.  Strength, solid security, and built to last characterize load-bearing structures.  And, selectivity.  Not everything is load-bearing.  The need to acquire load bearing learning helps to explain why some children are efficient and effective learners in the intermediate and secondary grades and some children are not. 

Let’s use literacy as a way to decide what is load-bearing.

A traditional definition of literacy is “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts”.  One of UNESCO’s goals is to grow and promote literacy in every country.

http://gaml.uis.unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/4.6.1_07_4.6-defining-literacy.pdf

For our purposes, let’s use a different definition.  “Literacy is a competence or knowledge in a specified area.”

https://www.yourdictionary.com/literacy

Using this definition of literacy, I posit there are five literacies in elementary education that are the load bearing learning all children must master.  These are

  • Reading and writing phonetically
  • Computing four mathematical operations
  • Reading music
  • Collaborating with others
  • Fine motor skills

A child who masters these five literacies, has achieved competency and knowledge in these specific areas, by the completion of grade 3 has a solid load bearing foundation for learning all school curricula in grades 4 -12 and beyond.  We can build wonderful structures of content knowledge, detailed skill sets, and elaborated pursuits of personal interests when a child is foundationally literate. 

How do we build load bearing learning?  By design, with unwavering commitment to its achievement, and with targeted resources. 

Reading and writing are not innate skills, like speaking and listening.  Because each child must be taught to read and to write, our design must create technically effective and efficient skill sets using a phonics-base.  Children who master the ability to translate sounds into letters and letters into sounds and both sounds and letters into meaning can learn to read anything.  The ability to read and write must not be left to chance, to the “let’s see how this develops over several years”.  Beginning in 4K, we must purposefully teach and ensure that each child learns a scaffold of phonics-based reading and writing skills that lead to a sold capacity to read and write by the end of third grade.  Certainly, reading and writing skills will continue to grow throughout grade 4 – 12, yet the evidence is clear and profound that children who have not established “load bearing” reading and writing by the end of third grade will be challenged to do so later.

Why would we create a design that leave any child with predicted challenges for later learning success?

The same approach to technical teaching and learning applies to each child’s mastery of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Mathematical numeracy and literacy are the load bearing basis for the math that follows.  I heard a retired neighbor speak about his career.  He said, “I was lucky.  My teacher taught me how to add, subtract, multiply and divide so well that Algebra and Geometry made sense to me.  Unbelievably, I used math and Geometry, specifically, almost every day I worked.”  He repeated, “I was lucky.”

No child should think that their education is a matter of luck.  We control the design by which each child builds their load bearing learning.

I add reading music, collaborating skills, and fine motor skills to the list of five literacies that result in a load bearing early education.

Music is not an elective in education or a special subject out of the mainstream.  Music is foundational.  Just listen to the world around you – music is everywhere.  Music and rhythm and tempo surround us, permeate us, and move our souls.  The choice of music may be a personal choice, but the core of what music is is universal in all of us.  Literacy in music begins with our teaching children to read music.  The ability to read music opens the doors of capacity to perform, interpret, explain, and create music. 

Stand in the crowd when the National Anthem is played and everyone is singing.  You will know who was able to read a note of music, interpret that note into sound, and repeat that sound with confidence and fidelity.  And, who cannot.  Not being able to read and perform music does not diminish our enjoyment of music.  It limits us to being consumers only.  We watch others who are able to do.

No child’s education should limit their future to one half of an experience when the whole is completely possible.

The succession of generations and evolution of networking that connects every part of our lives only makes collaborating skills more essential as load bearing learning.  While stalwart Baby Boomers touted individualism and personal initiative, Millenials and Gen Zers are defining the essence of community membership and collaboration.  Donne’s “… no man is an island…” has ever been more true.

“Playing fair in the sandbox” is not innate to a specie born with fight or flight impulses.  Some children are socially inclined and intrinsically motivated toward cooperation, collegiality, consensus, and collaboration.  Others bare their teeth.  Schooling should teach “out” individualism.  It should teach “in” the social constructs of togetherness.

We purposefully implement group activities in secondary education because we have learned that collegiality and collaboration are strong instructional models and cause improved learning.  A child in high school or college or in later career should not be caught up short in a group work project saying “I don’t know how to work with others.”  This is a load bearing skills that begins in 4K.

Lastly, fine motor skills are hugely load bearing and and just as hugely ignored in traditional school education.  A conversation about personal motor skills points us to physical education where they are drowned out by fitness, strength, and stamina and life-long recreational activity instruction.  Touch and feel and delicate movement are not units of instruction in elementary school.  Yet, students in art, technology education, “maker labs”, science labs, and baking and cooking labs need very fine motor skills.  Try painting with large muscle groups or creating slides for microscopic viewing or measuring ingredients without fine motor skills.  Or, try playing a music instrument without touch and feel.  If a child has these, it is not the result of schooling only their natural gifts.  However, we can assist every child to develop improved fine motor skills and be better prepared for education and life.

Wrongly, we don’t address fine motor skills in the mainstream, only as a specific therapy for children diagnosed with physical or occupational training needs. 

Fine motor skills, like phonics-based reading and writing, operational proficiency in math, reading music, and collaborating with others, create and expand learning opportunities for children.  Take any of these away from a child’s foundational learning experiences and that child is not equipped for new learning in the future.

Load-bearing learning is a powerful construct for envisioning the full extent of a school education and informing how and what we prioritize for every child’s learning success.  For one, the concept will change how I consider issues of elementary school teaching and learning and how I speak with parents regarding the most important outcomes of 4K to grade 3 education.

Leave No Child Unconnected

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Money and schools are in a constant dance.  It takes money to educate children in all the school-based programs our communities demand.  Of this there is no debate.  Schooling requires money.  Our dance with money begins and ends with governments.  How much will the state legislature allocate?  The state is the largest banker for school funding.  How many federal dollars will make it to local schools?  And, what amount of money will local taxpayers approve for the school board’s local levy?  Add together the monies contributed by these three levels of government and you have the revenue side of the annual school budget.   Although it seems that the “ask” is always larger than than the “get”, for the purpose of general education our schools are adequately funded.

Except.  There is one “ask” that has not been satisfied and now is the time to “get” this singular requirement of education successfully funded.  Internet infrastructure.  

Education is now married to the Internet.  The pandemic sealed those vows.  Every school and every child is an Internet user or needs to be.  In the post-pandemic, the requirement for students wherever they are to be connected to the Internet will not diminish – it will only grow larger.  Yet, we are nation of Internet patchworks that provide wonderful high speed connectivity for some and no connectivity to ineffective connectivity for others. 

If there was governmental funding power in Leave No Child Behind, we need to reword that charge into Leave No Child Unconnected. 

The Biden administration has opened the door.  Generally stated, the White House wants to provide significant economic relief that bridges all in our nation to a better post-pandemic economy, and, they want everyone in the nation to know that the federal government is providing that economic relief.  Infrastructure is large in their political-economic game plan.  The President has pointed to bridges and highways and dams.  Federal dollars dedicated to replacement and improvement of infrastructure will fuel business recovery and expand employment.  A great plan!  We have historical examples of this level of federal infusion succeeds, thank you FDR.

A part of the Roosevelt plan was rural electrification.  A part of the Biden plan must be rural Internet connectivity.

High speed Internet connectivity for every community must be one of our infrastructure outcomes.  Internet connectivity fits the White House’s agenda perfectly.  The Internet is the modern interstate highway of commerce, communication, and education.  Every person in the nation is directly or indirectly a user of the Internet.  Yet, too many are so far off the Internet grid that they are not within the economy.  We cannot raise everyone in our national economy without lifting those Internet connections into the economy.

And, the Internet is in dire need of governmental action.  The pandemic has taught us that a patchwork of local fixes to a national problem is ineffective and inefficient.  Cities and towns and villages and townships do not have the financial resources to create the Internet systems required.  We need to get the Internet off our telephone lines and power it through cables and towers and satellites.  A local tax levy cannot fund this level of infrastructural improvement.  We need big government to make a big difference.

Schools fit into this plan for infrastructural improvement.  When schools closed their campuses in March 2020, the Internet became the classroom.  Teaching and learning went on-screen.  However, children at home needed adequate Internet connection in order to be on-screen and too many had no Internet in their home or extremely poor Internet.  In the post-pandemic, remote and virtual education are not going away.  Remote education is the new option of parent choice of schooling for children.  The pandemic pointed out our extreme Internet inequity, an inequity that will only become more apparent with our increased uses of virtual teaching and learning.

A dredging up of the Bush slogan “Leave No Child Behind” makes this statement boldly evident – any child without adequate high speed Internet connection is left behind.

If I need to make more of an argument for this need to get a reader’s positive nod, then nothing I can write will succeed. 

We need universal high speed Internet connectivity in every household in every community of our nation and governmental funding is the only mechanism that will satisfy this need.  Our representatives in United States Senate and House of Representatives are the government that can make this happen.  They are the dancers on this singular dance floor and only they can create enough money to Leave No Child Unconnected.