Category Archives: Blog

Are You Volunteering for an AI Dope Slap? 

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I know we don’t use physical violence in education, but if there ever was a time for a good old-fashioned dope slap it is now.  2001 Space Odyssey’s Hal in the form of generative AI is across the street from our campus and, if you are not prepared for Hal not only telling when the school day starts or perhaps analyzing student achievement scores or handing you a virtual pink slip, then prepare for a virtual dope slap.  AI is not coming; it is here.  Oh, “Hi, Hal.  Let’s talk about some creative lesson planning.” 

Two C words: certainty and change

Shakespeare’s Antonio (The Tempest) taught us “the past is prologue to the future”.  We can learn from Antonio.  Educators act the part of traditionalists in most scenarios.  We prefer the certainty of yesterday and today and aver change in the unknowns of our future.  This is a stereotype perhaps, but accurate.  If we consider the past half century, it safe to say that most teachers do not deal well with uncertainty or loss of control.  They like and lock in on a six-period day, a nine-week quarter, and a four-quarter school year.  Children are to be at their desks and ready for instruction when the class bell rings.  Keep your cell phones in your pocket or I will confiscate it!  Suggesting changes to the school day and school year or class structure disturbs the institutional status quo and school is an institution.  We like lateral change, if there is to be change at all.

Like adults in other occupations, when educators feel change is being done to them rather than by them, they become even more change resistant.  A diagram of change theory shows that there always is some initial resistance, a bump in the graph line, to the installation of change.  Teacher attitude toward change is that bump.  Also, there is a pecking order in a school and teachers have status in that order; change risks their loss of standing.  Change also raises issues of insecurity.  Change too often is viewed as a determination that things were not going well or even were going badly.  If not, then why change?  Lastly, change often necessitates new learning and veteran teachers frequently resist going back to school.  In our institution of public education, change happens but it has not always been a happy time. 

https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-10-reasons-your-educators-are-resisting-your-change-initiative/2011/05

Moore’s Law and AI

Gordon Moore posited in 1965 that “the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every decade.”  In 1975, he modified the observation to “doubling every two years”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

We use Moore’s Law simply as a statement that the rate and degree of change in technologies is ever increasing.  When applied to generative artificial intelligence, the rate and degree of change can be measured monthly not in two years’ time.  What AI could do last summer is now history to what it can do this winter.  And, if the past is prologue to the future, generative AI’s reach into our culture is growing exponentially.  Consider reading these sources among so many others on the Internet.

Generative AI – the pace of change

https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-generative-ai-is-changing-creative-work

The explosive rise of generative AI and how it will change everything

I am an educator.  I am not a technologist.  I rely upon my capacity to read and listen and study.  I encourage all educators to do the same.  As my thoughts about generative AI are constantly changing, I dabble in the uses of AI for educational purposes.

In my role as an educational consultant for teacher preparation programs, I write courses to teach teacher candidates how to teach.  I am using Chat GPT 3.5 to start the writing process.  Chat never is the finished product, but it is remarkable how, with carefully worded prompts appropriately loaded with the names of instructional leaders and the titles and key concepts of their works, Chat prints a respectable outline in seconds of time.  A better prompter no doubt would cause a better outline.  However, the act of using Chat GPT moves me to wonder not only how can classroom teachers can use generative AI but how can they teach children to use generative AI to propel their learning of our grade level and subject content curricula?

21st century skills and AI in the post-pandemic

Although the 21st century began 23 years ago, most of our public-school curriculum is written for 20th century goals.  The Common Core standards were a 2010 recapitulation of curricular objectives at the time.  Reformers of education and student learning strove to create new strategies to bring all children to common benchmarks of performance of 20th century curricula.

As devastating as the pandemic was to national health (1,000,000-plus deaths), the economy, state and national politics, and our understanding of truth and lies, it does pose one very positive educational opportunity.  We can use the pandemic as a 20th to 21st century skills divide.  In the post-pandemic, we can make 21st century skills the focal outcome of a 21st century education not the vehicle for carrying 20th century skills into a next century.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills prepared by the OECD/CERI (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation/Center for Educational Research and Innovation) listed the following as learning and innovation; information, media, and technology skills; and life and career skills for children around the world.  These are the skills, they said, that will make the learning of core subjects (all that we teach in school) and core themes meaningful in the 21st century.

21st Century Skills:

  • Critical thinking
  • Creativity
  • Collaboration
  • Communications
  • Information literacy
  • Media literacy
  • Technology literacy
  • Flexibility
  • Leadership
  • Initiative
  • Productivity
  • Social skills

https://www.oecd.org/site/educeri21st/40756908.pdf

AI as a rough draft

Generative AI is the right tool at the right time to make each of these twelve skills come alive for children.  More than Googling the Internet, AI allows a student to craft a creative and intelligent product through the use of well-phrased prompts.  The product of AI is not the final product of student learning, but just the beginning.  Standing upon the shoulders of AI, students then make the product their own – they refine the AI rough draft.  And that is the power of the AI tool.

Whether it is an essay, an architectural rendering, a drawing of a bowl of fruit, the solution to a mathematical problem, a summation of the history of Rome, or the creation of a next Rubik’s Cube, the work process is the same.  Student prompts create an AI output that is the rough draft for student refinement.  We want children to learn how to prompt and then learn how to refine.  It is the refined product of generative technology and student talent that is submitted to a teacher at the end of the day.

Easy?  No way.  There is a boatload of instruction children need in order to be prepared to use AI.  There is a world of context that must be constructed in order for generative AI to be used appropriately and for its rough product to be understood.

Simple?  Not.  Veteran teachers today will remember the learning curve for teachers and students when hand-held calculators were introduced in schools.  Veterans will remember the learning curve required before desktop computer stations were placed in classrooms – one station per classroom was a big deal.  There was a learning curve required for laptops, notebooks, and IPad usage in classrooms.  Cell phones?  We still struggle with how that technology fits into teaching and learning.  AI is just another in the long line of innovations that require teacher and student learning. 

Don’t get in the line for dope slapping

NPR’s Car Guys taught me the term “dope slap” decades ago as a way to signal to another person that their stupidity is reaching the top of the stupidity gauge.  In the years since, I developed a virtual dope slap that is part facial part verbal and a whole lot visual.  No one gets slapped, but someone gets a clear wake up call. 

In the past fifty years of working in public education, I observed teachers who bragged about being Luddites.  I observed teachers move to the back of the room because they did not embrace change.  They are the Doubting Toms who believe the change will fail or go away.  I observed teachers as pioneers who did not run from change but stood in place and diligently worked with it until, over time, they developed new skills.  There are pioneers in every new innovation.  And I observed pathfinders who eagerly embrace change and are out in front of the rest of us in trying to understand and use features of the change.  Given every new technology innovation in education, there have been Luddites, Toms, Pioneers, and Pathfinders.

In a 21st century school, there is little room for Luddites.  They made their name and reputation in Britain’s textile industry two centuries ago; they failed then as they fail now.  AI is not coming; it is here.  Don’t get in the line for dope slapping and don’t be a Tom.  21st century children need 21st century teachers; be a pioneer or a pathfinder.  Be a teacher.  

Because Transparency Has Become Opaque Require Integrity

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Each generation has its own edu-speak, those coined words used by educational professionals that are spoken so often and in varying contexts that they soon have no meaning.  These are not the acronyms that abound in school conversations.  We have long abused parents and the public with IEPs, RtI, and BIPs; educators love their acronyms.  I point to the whole words, single stand-alone words, that are used to convey a universal understanding of a concept or value that once stated assumes an end to the conversation.  The word transparency has become one of these and it is meh!  We say “Our decision-making processes will be transparent to the public” as if “transparency” is the end all.  The word is uninformative, uninspiring, unexceptional, and too often is a slight of hand or mouth.  “If I say we are transparent, we are transparent.”  Meh and more meh!

I read of a school board who touts transparency yet when the administration removed two dozen book titles from the school libraries, no board member could provide a rationale other than “we support the administration”.  End of conversation.  They lived their version of transparency.

Another school board claims transparency yet when the administration announces a multi-million-dollar post-pandemic shortfall coming in the next several years’ school budgets, there are no explanations of the decisions that led to gross expenditures over revenue in the recent past.  The task force delegated to create a solution to the huge shortfall is hand-picked and, by design, there will be little voice for the community who sit in school board meeting audiences governed by a very restrictive public participation policy.  Transparency up to a point but no further.  One has to appreciate the complicity of a person who says, “It is transparent to me”. 

I know a school administration that grieves over the drop of student achievement scores in the post-pandemic yet will not make achievement data available to the parents beyond the statewide school report card.  School leaders declare they are being transparent about the continued school ratings of “This School Does Not Meet Expectations” yet there is no accountability for low achievement year after year in the same grade level and classrooms.  It is a personnel supervision problem more than a student achievement problem.  This is an example of being transparent about what does not matter and not transparent about what does.

Stop using the word transparency.  Another way to explain the need for changing this word is that people today say transparent, but they mean translucent.  The clarity of truth and facts has given way to lies and non-facts that are spoken so openly and freely that no listener can take the words of a person in authority at face value.  We have come to expect if not accept cloudy translucency.  This is wrong.

Start using the word integrity, as in “We make all decisions with the integrity our students, parents, and community deserve”.  Integrity, meaning the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, is not meh.  Integrity describes the direct, honest, data-based, straight-forward answer that a person who asks an honest question deserves.  While there may be a shading in information that claims transparency, a response to a question or problem either is made with integrity, or it is not.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrity

I know a superintendent who told his faculty and staff first and then his parents and community, “… regarding the teaching of reading, we have been doing it wrong.  For the past 30 years we have taught children about reading but not how to read.  We did not use a phonics-based, literacy creating instructional program.  Instead, we asked each child to look at the pictures or listen to an adult read and asked children to memorize words hoping that these three strategies would cause a child to become a reader.  And we did this year after year.  Today, we stop that nonsense and are beginning to teach each child how to read.  I invite you to come to school and watch us make these changes”. 

Transparent, yes.  But more to the point, his declaration has integrity.  Communicating and acting with integrity is easier and less stressful than the work needed to obfuscate and maintain an obfuscation. 

We find examples in our daily communications about children and school that are simple and factual and relatable.  As listeners and observers, we must thank and applaud clear and uncompromised communication and actions.  And we must be more stalwart in calling out “Nonsense” and “Bull Roar” when we are treated to an episode of translucency.  At the end of the day, it is better to deal with bad news than with a lie.

Learning Loss – Yesterday is gone, let it go!

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Enough of the complaining about learning loss!  Our children will be okay.  Our second-hand adult worry about what children did not learn in the covid school years ignores the realities of the first-hand teaching and learning that successfully brought children back into school life that is preparing them for their future.

I watch the traditions of September unfold in our local school.  The school website shared faces and names of new teachers; each brimmed with excitement for their new school home.  Elementary grade newsletters shared information about the start of the school calendar so parents could plan ahead and be prepared.  Banners in the school yard welcomed children to the “23-24 year of learning”.  Our school celebrates the beginning of a new school year with all the excitement it deserves.

Athletic seasons give secondary students a quick blast of school in late August.  Football, boys’ soccer, girls’ volleyball, and both cross country teams practice and have their first competitions before the first day of classes.  There is a special strut to teams on the first day of school who already have wins in games, matches, and races.  Cockiness, maybe.  Pride, assuredly.

It is against this reality of September and a new school year that discussion of past learning loss needs to be put in a proper context.  To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “School is as school does”.  Our local school is active and forward-leaning.  It is known1 widely as offering a private education of small class sizes and maximum opportunities in a public-school setting.  Few, if any children in our school, look backward worrying about what did or did not happen in recent years.  They, their teachers, and their school start new learning in September based upon each child’s “readiness to learn” assessments and focused new instruction.  Forward leaning for forward learning.

In hindsight, life and learning took hits from the disruptions of pandemic mitigations.  Every child now in school will have lifelong memories and stories to tell about when schools were closed, and classes were zoomed.  They will talk of being quarantined and wearing masks, even in their sports.  They may tell stories of what they did while not in school or how they played hooky and “unplugged” from zoomed classes.  What they will not talk about is what they did not learn due to the pandemic because it will be have been inconsequential in the big picture. 

We are two school years-plus past those events: two school years of renewed schooling.  The swarm of academics, activities, arts, and athletics of school life embraced children on their first days back in their re-opened schools and few children ever looked back.  Adults, on the other hand, gather their worry beads and fume about lost learning.

Stop worrying and get in step with your children or grandchildren and their 23-24 school year.  For them, every day brings something new to learn and do and they are growing their learning not from what they missed or lost but from what they know and can do.  It is our proper role to assist them as we can and as they will let us.  Children are all about today and tomorrow; let’s join them and start moving forward.

Parent Demands in Public Education are not Parent Rights.

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Hot button:  an emotional and usually controversial issue or concern that triggers immediate intense reaction.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hot%20button

Public education in the United States is a long story of hot button issues.  Emerging from a pandemic fraught with hot buttons – vaccines, school closures, remote education, quarantining, information and disinformation, lost trust in public schools – we may want a calmer educational environment.  But we are not getting calm.  The hot button today is parental rights in education – red hot!

What do we know?

Parental rights in education begin with two constructs.

  1. The US Constitution does not include any statement of parental rights in education.  The late Justice Scalia labeled parent rights in education as “unenumerated”.  As such, there is no basis for shaping law or policy based upon what the Founding Fathers wrote.  Specific rights to determine a child’s education are not extended to parents nor protected by the Constitution.
  • Nature abhors a vacuum.  In the absence of substance in a defined space, surrounding and denser matter will invade the space until the defined space looks and acts like its surrounding.  So, it is with parental rights in education.  In the absence of a legal basis, parental rights are whatever parent activism can carve out of the undefined space of law.

Why are these constructs important to understanding parental rights in education?  In any dispute regarding an act of the state, in this case a school district or school board, the argument is first reviewed under the Constitution.  Because education is not enumerated, attention is given to the 14th Amendment that ensures due process and establishes concepts of equal protection under the law. 

Although education is not a function of the federal government, Congress has taken action to ensure the rights of citizens within public education.  For example, the 14th Amendment provided for equal access to education and the end of racially segregated schools.  It also pointed Congress to pass PL 94-142 protecting the rights of, meeting the individual needs of, and improving the educational results for children with disabilities and their families.  PL 94-142 may be as close as the federal government has come to stipulating that parents and schools are equal partners in determining the best educational placement for their child.

Further, we know.

The US Constitution implies that each state government is responsible for the establishment of public education in its state.

In the WI Constitution, chapter 118.01(1) – Purpose establishes the authority for the creation of public schools.  “Public education is a fundamental responsibility of the state.  The constitution vests in the state superintendent the supervision of public instruction and directs the legislature to provide for the establishment of district schools.  The effective operation of the public schools is dependent upon a common understanding of what public s hooks should be and do.  Establishing such goals and expectations is a necessary and proper complement to the state’s financial contribution to education.  Each school board should provide curriculum, course requirements and instruction consistent with the goals and expectations established under sub. (2).  Parents and guardians of pupils enrolled in the school district share with the state and the school board the responsibility for pupils meeting the goals and expectations under sub. (2).”

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/118

Eight goals for public schools in Wisconsin are enumerated in WI Stat 118.01(2).

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/118/01/2

The duties and powers of a local school board are enumerated in the state constitution.  In 118.001 Duties and powers of school boards; construction of statutes, the legislature says “The statutory duties and powers of school boards shall be broadly construed to authorize any school board action that is within the comprehensive meaning of the terms of the duties and powers, if the action is not prohibited by the laws of the federal government or of this state. 

So, what do we know?

The US Constitution does not address education.  The responsibility for education is implied to the various states.

The WI constitution authorizes the state superintendent to supervise public education and local school boards to implement public education.  The constitution enumerates goals and expectations for public education in WI and authorizes school boards to create policies and rules to achieve these goals and expectations.  Parents and guardians “share” responsibility with the state and school board for assisting children to meet goals and objectives.

There is no constitutional or statutory discussion regarding the rights of parents.  Parents “share” in the responsibility to achieve the state’s goals in educating children.

What changed?

Educational policy is no longer about children but about adults.  Very few educational policies today are designed to improve or enhance teaching or student learning and achievement.  There are exceptions such as Act 20, Wisconsin’s new literacy and reading proficiency law.  Most policies today are written and enacted to achieve the political goals of adults.  The simple version of this story is that children in school don’t vote, their parents vote.  So educational politics focuses on satisfying adult voters.

Conservative populist politicians can build constituencies based on attacking social and cultural institutions, like schools, libraries, museums, and public media.  They exercise elected authority to shape public education in ways that appeal to voters and donors.  While they are not able to affect federal policy, they use gerrymandered state houses to affect state legislation, state departments of education, and policies at the local school district level.

Education is a soft target because everyone is a product of childhood education and from their experiences is a self-made expert about schools.  Public education is a soft target because it is large and statewide and a problem in one school district can be implied as a problem for all school districts – it is easy to generalize.  And public education is funded by tax dollars, and everyone favors reduced taxes.  Lastly, public education is attacked by those who want this most public of state institutions to give them as individuals what they want as individuals and to codify their specific wants into laws for everyone.

Governor Walker (WI) used Act 10 to diminish the connection between teacher unions and the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.  The Act had other ramifications for school operations, but its origin was to decrease the political power of public employee unions. Although the legislative slogan implied shifting power from collectively bargained contracts to school board decision-making, the realities of school financing changed very little over time.

Governor Youngkin (VA) campaigned on promises of empowering parents and restoring excellence in education.  With a Republican-led legislature, he banned critical race theory discussion in schools and retracted accommodations for transgender students.  His legislature also passed a pro-education budget to placate those opposed to his policy changes.  Youngkin empowers parents to be active in pushing conservative values at their local school board level with a “we support what you want” encouragement.

Governor DeSantis (FL) has gone beyond policy to enforcement with threats of incarceration and loss of teaching license for educators who do not comply with his mandates.  He states that “Florida is where woke goes to die” and “We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to be optional”.  Parental rights in Florida are only for parents who agree with their governor.  Rights are restricted for those.

Governor Reynolds (IA) moved the state legislature to significantly change school financing.  Now every child represents an amount of state aid regardless of enrollment in public, private, or parochial school.  Every student is a voucher, and every school is a voucher school.  It does not jive with the Founding Fathers’ separation of church and state, but it passes muster with Iowa’s Republicans, and they are the votes who matter to Reynolds’s.

The pandemic re-taught Americans that all politics are local.  School board meetings are open to public participation and typically have less than a dozen residents in attendance.  Parents with a pandemic-based purpose found that a school board confronted by a vocal handful could either command board members to approve their policy demands by their loud and in-your-face presence or cause boards to shut down and adjourn meetings without enacting the posted agenda.  Neither outcome was good for the school district but accomplished the goals of selected parents – give me what I want.

While most school boards did not experience a capitulation or shut down, board meeting confrontations were common enough to shift the traditional relationships between parents and board members.  Parents who disagreed with pandemic masking disenrolled their children seeking a school with more favorable policies.  Parents who disagreed with quarantining and school closures disenrolled in favor of home schooling.  And parents who disagreed with masking and closures and kept their children enrolled in the school became constant voices at school board meetings and in local media.  Goodwill and traditional trust were eroded on both sides by what was said and written by both sides.

The relational upshot from the pandemic is that growing numbers of parents want and demand an active voice in the daily operations of their local school.  Voice no longer is about masking, but is about the books in classrooms and libraries, the curriculum that is taught, and the language and dispositions that teachers use in daily teaching that are subjected to parental review.  It is about partitions between genders.  It is about diversity and inclusivity.  A new status arose from the pandemic – a parent has the right to determine school policy and rules regarding her child. 

The Big Duh!

There is no legal authority in our public law for parental rights in education.

There is a growing charismatic authority in political leadership that wants to give specific rights to parents relative to public education in exchange for the political support of those parents.

The dichotomy between the public and parents lies in the fact that public education is created to achieve the public’s goals in educating children not the goals of individual or groups of parents.

Rights and demands are two different things.   Politics has the capacity to give legitimacy to parent demands, turning them into legislated parent rights.  This is a changing landscape with an unknown future.  What the pendulum swing of one partisan legislature approves may be disapproved when the pendulum swings again.

At the end of the day, public schooling is about children not about parents.  Parents choose the school in which to enroll their children and share with teachers and school leaders in the responsible assurances that all children will achieve the school’s educational goals.  Excepting the provisions of specific laws, such as PL 94-142 and approved 504 plans, that is the extent of parental rights.

Are We Prepared To Do What Needs To Be Done?  Sometimes But Not Always!

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“What are you prepared to do?”, gasped the dying Sean Connery character in The Untouchables.  His cut-to-the-bone question begs answers as educators struggle today with meaty problems.  We know the problems facing educators; they are abundantly clear.  We even know viable resolutions.  The real issue is this – are we prepared to do what is required to achieve what we want?

Take your pick of these:  How should schools fill the gaps in student achievement, some attributable to the pandemic?  How should schools treat diverse gender identification?  How should schools respond to the politics of book banning and curricular pruning?  What is public education’s response to state funding of church-based schools?  How should a school respond to racism, prejudice, and discrimination in its community?  What are parent rights in the education of children beyond choosing a school for their enrollment?  How do we re-instill trust in local public schools?

What do we know?

These and other problems exist, and they afflict our ability to successfully prepare all children for adult life.  Most are tangential to teaching and learning yet their presence gets in the way of our daily work with children.  Each begins with school governance and filters it down to affect classroom application. 

These are not the easy problems of physical infrastructure, such as not enough classrooms or outdated HVAC systems.  Once difficult to resolve, we would take on several of these old facility problems in place of one that is new.  The new problems are social-cutural-political-economic swamps buttressed by special interest activism.  No politely discussed hammer and nail solutions will resolve today’s issues of in-your-face demands of “I want what I want regardless of what you say” confrontations.

Our history reflects three responses when public education perceives a significant problem.  These responses are listed in the order of their usual employment, most often to seldom ever.

  • Complain about the problem, draw attention to it, then acquiesce to the status quo, accommodate the status quo, and do nothing.
  • Ignore the problem.  Continue doing what schools usually do hoping the problem will either go away or some other authority will resolve it.
  • Find a high ground position to resolve the problem, create a consensus stakeholder solution, and move from the current status quo to a new, hopefully improved status.

In recent months, I added a fourth response. 

  • In the face of personal attacks on school leaders shaping policy and program as demanded by public demonstrators knowing they do not represent most of the community nor what is best for educating children.  Avoid trauma at cost!

I believe that our traditional school board governance with professional educational leadership knows what they should do to resolve contemporary, hot issues.  George Orwell told us “All issues are political issues”.  Once again, he got it right.  Knowing what should be done in the face of “all things are political” is a new and troublesome quandary for our apolitical school leadership.  “What are you prepared to do?”, is the question of our day.

A case in point – achievement gaps in reading.

If prepared to do what is necessary, we can.  Gaps in student achievement in reading and math preceded the pandemic and were worsened by the pandemic.  The answer – stop doing what is not working and start doing what will work.  Our state history of dealing with reading achievement gaps was to acquiesce to traditional reading association lobbyists keen on retaining whole language, blended language, and “three cueing” techniques.  Historically, we chose to complain and then do nothing when the same old reading instruction did not move the reading gap needle.  Instead, our legislature passed a bipartisan reading bill, Act 20, that makes the science of reading principles the official reading curriculum for all children.  The Act directs the DPI’s new Office of Literacy to improve new teacher preparation, veteran teacher professional development, and install regional coaching systems to ensure all children all children are being taught using the science of reading principles.

Kudos to Rep. Joel Kitchens and others for authoring the bill and persisting against traditional opposition to passage of Act 20.

Gaps in math achievement.

A similar fix is available for filling traditional and post-pandemic gaps in math achievement.  Stop hiring teachers who were good at math as students.  Hire teachers who are proficient in pedagogies for teaching math and mathematical reasoning.  Too many veteran math teachers were intuitive math students in school.  They can demonstrate and explain how they solve math problems, but they cannot explain the mathematical reasoning in ways that non-intuitive children understand and need to apply. 

Principals have observed the difference in these two types of teachers for decades and cherish their pedagogically proficient teachers. 

Our problem is that while high school math teacher licensing requires a baccalaureate major in mathematics, 4K-8 teachers are generalists requiring minimal post-high school study in mathematics.  As instruction in algebra and geometry concepts creeps further into elementary school, few teachers are prepared to explain the math reasoning behind the concepts.  Students are then underprepared in understanding why solutions for algebra and geometry problems work when they sit in secondary school math classrooms.  As math becomes more complex, their programmed responses to simpler math result in failed test questions.

Are we prepared to insist that every teacher of mathematics must be prepared to teach mathematics not just do mathematics?  Complaining or ignoring the problem is not an answer.  Creating a high ground consensus of IHEs, local school leaders, and parents can cause a viable resolution to a problem that currently is stuck in the same old, same old.  We know what to do and how to do it, if we are prepared to fix the problem of gaps in student math achievement.

Other problems and school sorrows.

The solution story for Act 20 resembled a physical infrastructure problem.  We identified a problem, studied solutions, presented, and debated a proposal, ironed out points of disagreement, and concluded with a positive, consensus resolution.  Other contemporary problems are not so easy.

School is a complex social, cultural, political, economic, and sometimes educational, organism.  It is authorized by our state government and run by a local government, our school board.  Once the most even keeled of governance venues, grass roots school board meetings have become battlefields.  This is especially accurate for social, cultural, political, economic-blended issues.  Consider these:

  • Requests to ban books and materials in school libraries and classrooms.
  • Non-traditional gender identification.
  • Access to school restrooms and locker rooms by students requesting non-traditional gender identification.
  • Non-traditional gender identifying and gender-changing student participation in gender-based athletics and activities.
  • Use of flags and other identifying symbols other than the US flag, state flag, and other official symbols.
  • Assertions of a parental right to override school board policy or school regulations based upon personal demand.

During the pandemic and afterward we observed school boards mired with social, cultural, political, economic issues brought by parents in conflict with CDC guidelines, local health departments rules, and school policies.  No one had a game plan or standing policies and in their absence every ruling a school applied was subject to protest.  Heated arguments were common, and few settled for “we agree to disagree” settlements.  The pandemic grew activism based upon personal points of view.

In the post-pandemic, arguments about vaccines and mitigation shifted to gender identification and gender-based books and school materials, gender transforming student participation in school sports, and the use of non-national and state flags and symbols in school.

Individual school districts used one or more of the four problem responses listed above, some with more success than others.  With the start of the 2023-24 school year, conflict on these issues will not dissipate and it will grow.

What are you prepared to do?

“We are a country based on the rule of law” is a statement being used at the national level to discuss resolution of significant challenges to our representative form of democracy.  The “rule of law” statement also holds for local school district challenges.

We elect members of our community to represent local interests in the governance of our schools.  Much of that governance is the application of federal and state regulations and statutes.  It is challenges that are not addressed by legislation and court ruling that create the targets for heated arguments.

The rule of law requires those authorized to establish and execute laws to do so.  It also requires those under the jurisdiction of these authorities to comply with their laws and execution of laws.  Secondly, the rule of law creates pathways for those in disagreement with the authorities to either bring forward their complaints and/or exercise their lawful opportunities to remove members of the authority through recall or replacement at the next election.  Beyond these, the rule of law does not abide authorities who ignore or fail to fulfill their duties or citizenry who choose to defy the established rules or act in ways that prevent the authorities from doing their duties.

“Being prepared to do” means school boards and school leaders cannot complain without action or ignore problems in the hope they will go away or cave in the face of personal attack on the singular demands of activists.  Instead, “being prepared to do” means taking all possible action to create higher ground, consensus resolutions and in the absence of full consensus make decisions in keeping with “best practices”. 

We have good examples of how “being prepared to do” leads to success in our schools.  In memory of a mentor from decades ago, “it is time to pull up our socks and do what needs to be done” and “more than Trix, school is for kids”.  There are few problems we cannot resolve when we maintain the integrity of our institutions and act upon best and informed practices.  There always may be disagreement, but then that is inherent in a representative democracy.