I.

Early this past summer, I came home to my 3-year-old son twirling around his bedroom in a dress. It was the pastel blue dress that Elsa wears in Frozen. He also wore a tiara, elbow-length satin gloves, and pinned to his hair was a platinum braid with a bow on the end. “Let it Go,” the delightfully irritating theme song from the movie, played on our little speaker.

Just as I walked in, the braid became unfastened, sailed off his head, and landed squarely at my feet.

I was not shocked to see Jude1 wearing this dress. For a long while Jude had adored a burgundy tulle skirt that our neighbor’s four-year-old daughter had donated him from her own collection. Early on, he had confidently declared purple as his favorite color because it was “beautiful.” After he watched Frozen, he had talked about it even more than the space rockets that had been his first true obsession, and later in the summer, on a long road trip, we listened to the soundtrack no fewer than 25 times.

But I was shocked at my own discomfort at the sight of Jude in that dress. I didn’t fly into a rage. I didn’t fear, suddenly, he would grow up to be gay. I knew I would not forbid him from wearing the dress or hide it somewhere and play dumb when he asked for it. I just felt uncomfortable. There was a tension in my shoulders. My jaw was tight.

And I had no idea why.

To start, none of my social, political or religious beliefs suggest I would have the slightest issue with a son in a dress. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I live in Brooklyn and drive a Subaru. (And it’s a hatchback.)

I’m not exactly the picture of traditional American masculinity, either. This is not to imply that if a man watches UFC he’s bound to harbor retrograde views of gender. Just, for whatever reason, I have never been drawn to the traditional trappings of masculinity, and, in fact, have always felt a little self-conscious/inferior around other so-called guys’ guys.

In other words, the Elsa dress was not forcing me to challenge my closely held beliefs about what it meant to be a “real” man.

So when I honestly asked myself why Jude’s dress bothered me, I had no answer. Literally none. I was confused and not a little embarrassed. But I just thought this would be one of those moments in life when you stumble upon an abhorrent version of yourself — you feel glee when your best friend’s marriage implodes, you find a lost wallet and pocket the cash, you discover you rather enjoy a particularly debased flavor of sex — and memory hole it, never to think or talk about it again.

A couple weeks later the answer came to me.

I was rummaging through Jude’s closet and came across a shamrock green t-shirt with a stegosaurus skeleton emblazoned across the front. Bad to the Bone! it read in bone-y typeface. I had remembered pulling it out of his drawer a few weeks ago when I was getting him dressed, wincing at it and throwing it to the back of the closet.

II.

Now, many things have surprised me about becoming a dad — how much fun it is; how much I dislike Dr. Seuss — but what has surprised me more than anything is how much I worry about my two sons being, well, boys.

Though three years apart, both of my sons were born during the period when this country began to reckon with the myriad ways men and boys had fallen behind in school, at home and in the workplace. There has been an explosion of books, articles and podcast appearances by economists, journalists, academics and feminists drawing a direct line between how we raise our sons and the depressed, disaffected, uncoupled, undereducated and under-employed men those boys often become.

As an educator, I had long known that the academic disengagement and dourness of my male students were not biologically determined, but I had only had a partial understanding of what the social, familial and technological influences causing their ennui might have been. As a middle-aged man, it was slo-o-o-owly dawning on me that a number of factors in my own upbringing — divorced parents and quasi-absent father, middling academic expectations, early exposure to hard-core pornography and, in general, way too much TV — might have been responsible for the anger, philandering, drinking, and vocational listlessness that afflicted my early adult life more than I had previously considered.

The bright neon sign in my mind that had started blinking minutes after Jude was born changed from YOU ARE A FATHER to YOU ARE THE FATHER OF A BOY.

These authors’ findings about boys’ educational declines, employment woes and social dislocation confirmed trends I had long noticed with my own students, and which anyone who chose to pay attention could see beset American society.

But it was these authors’ claims about boys’ slower social, physical and cognitive development relative to girls’ and how much more susceptible boys were than girls to environmental stressors that startled me. It was the insight that our cultural beliefs around masculinity exacerbates young boys’ innate fragility that horrified me.

The result was nothing less than a radical re-assessment of what I thought fathering boys would be.

Before Jude, I imagined fatherhood would be not so different from a life insurance commercial: we’re kicking the soccer ball under autumn leaves, we’re reading at bedtime, we’re learning how to tie a tie. Father claps proudly as son delivers valedictorian speech.

After Jude, I realized that fatherhood more closely resembled The Road: I’m shepherding my sons through the toxic wasteland that modern boyhood has become, shielding them from the massively addicted video games, widely available hard-core porn and the all-around low expectations for boys that threatened to transform them into petulant, misogynistic dead-enders.

Or, I thought to myself more than once, just like me.

My sons are still young, so most of these sinister forces lurk in the far distance. Still, reconfiguring your view of boyhood as a gauntlet of threats and slippery slopes can make a father sweat the small stuff.

I became a little iron-fisted.

I was maniacal about manners, table or otherwise. I treated screens like fentanyl. I developed strict criteria for the children’s books we read, carrying out secret purges of Jude’s shelves lest any kompromat had been smuggled over the border. (Goodbye, Llama Llama Red Pajama.) I announced to my wife apropos of nothing one day when Jude was probably as about one that there “would be no B’s in our house” to which she reacted with predictable horror. I was steadfast in my insistence that Jude learned to ride a bike before we got him a scooter for the sake of learning grit and resilience. After realizing in a midnight panic that NYC’s peculiar enrollment window would make Jude one of the youngest students in his grade, I scrutinized the district’s enrollment policy to find a way to red-shirt him for kindergarten even though he exhibited no development delays. (No luck.)

I also forbade Crocs (they were slovenly) and what I came to think of as Boys-Will-Be-Boys clothes.

As Jude grew out of onesies, I had noticed that an inordinate number of t-shirts and sweatshirts handed down to us came in these distinctively robust shades of blue, red or green. They were emblazoned with growling bulldozers or rompin’ stompin’ dinosaurs. They said things like Wild One, Nuthin’ But Trouble, Mama’s Hot Mess.

I hated these shirts. They reinforced the stupid stereotype that boys were rough-and-rowdy troublemakers whose recklessness wasn’t only adorable— it was immutable.

It was no coincidence that the sudden appearance of these shirts in Jude’s and other boys’ wardrobes coincided with a growing weariness I was feeling toward the parents who simply shook their heads and laughed that “boys will be boys . . .” when their sons brandished giant sticks on the playground or threw organic fruit snacks at each other at birthday parties. That it wasn’t obvious to these otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful parents how much that odious truism lowered expectations, permitted misbehavior and perpetuated a biological determinism that, in another form, we would not hesitate to call out as racist/homophobic/sexist was a mystery to me.

To be sure, I did not think today’s Bad to the Bone tee was tomorrow’s AR-15, but I did think to myself often that if our base assumption about little boys was that they were untamable wild animals then we should not be terribly surprised when large numbers of them become dour and disaffected adolescents.

But also mysterious to me was the sudden appearance at Jude’s school and on the playground of girls in pink princess dresses.

Wasn’t it a settled matter that frilly princess dresses and fuchsia tutus conveyed the pernicious stereotype that girls’ chief purpose in life was to look pretty? That to be female was to be a beautiful coquette? Was it not obvious that, despite Frozen’s departure from the usual anti-feminist princess narrative, Elsa and Anna still looked like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders?

Isn’t the inverse of the hardy blue sweatshirt with the snarling monster truck a Disney princess dress?

And so . . . why would I allow my son to wear a dress that I would never allow my daughter to wear?

There it was.

Far from being a latent sexist or homophobe, my discomfort with the blue dress was actually a noble and enlightened instinct to shield my son from harmful messages about women.

III.

Thus redeemed — thus virtuous — I was prepared to make my case to my wife, who, naturally, had spotted the tension in my shoulders whenever Jude frolicked across his bedroom in the Elsa dress this summer and started asking what “my deal” was. I had kept her at bay with sanctimonious grumblings about the perils of undeserved gifts and wearing cumbersome costumes outside for long enough, but once I finally discovered the origin of my discomfort, I was less restrained showing it. Jude put on the dress, and I would literally harumph.

When she asked me again what was going on I launched into a righteous farrago about the troubled state of the Post-Industrial American Man, and destructive influences of video games, and the manosphere, and the tacit stereotypes that even the most thoughtful parents transmit to their children in unsuspecting ways like dinosaur t-shirts, and red-shirting Jude so that he could get a leg up, and the rank hypocrisy of the Disney princess dress in neighborhoods where schools refer to children’s parents as their “adults” or “grownups” and where parents apologize so fervently if they misgender your baby that you would have thought they’d dropped the thing, and my sisters were overachievers but no one ever made sure I did my homework, and my dad was around but he also kind of wasn’t, and I still remember by very first porn search, and I barely talk to any of my guy friends anymore, and it should be noted here that in the years since we met my poor wife has not only learned to endure my petty contrarianism — recycling was a boondoggle; live music was boring; there’s nothing unethical about stealing stealing umbrellas from that little bucket near the restaurant door — she has also learned how to parry it, and so she listened patiently to my rant and waited for me to run out of gas and then she shook her head and said, simply, “But he loves it.”

A friend of mine recently sent me a headline from a satirical news site that read MAN BASKS IN TENDER WARMTH OF BEING TECHNICALLY RIGHT.

So. I was not wrong to be vigilant against the perils of modern American boyhood. I was justified to second guess certain parenting beliefs that were apparently beyond reproach. I was definitely not wrong to reflect on my own upbringing as a new dad.

But my wife’s simple observation about Jude’s affection for the dress helped me see pretty quickly that there are two features — you might even call them fallacies — of modern parenting that complicated all of that.

The first is that you can cultivate a flourishing life. If you read the right books, cook the right food, say the right words, wear the right clothes, and choose the right schools then your child’s happiness and prestige is assured.

Everyone does this and everyone talks about this.

The second one is that your kid is your own second draft. Your parenting is a response to how you were parented. Some practices you consciously retain (family dinners), others you consciously discard (yelling) and some you continue without even realizing it (piano lessons.) The idea is that you will be a better parent than your parents and so your kid will be better than you.

Everyone does this but no one talks about it.

Both are noble but also naive and arrogant. They elevate nurture over nature. They presume your kid is as sensitive and receptive to their environment as an orchid. As such, their interests and needs are subordinated to your own. You don’t even consider that those substituted needs and interests aren’t right for your kid because, well, you are a smart person who is thoughtful about the world; you’ve read The Whole Brain Child and talked about your mom in therapy.

IV.

One quiet summer morning a couple weeks after all of this, Jude abruptly stood up from his trains, walked over to his costume box and pulled out the dress. I purposefully kept my attention on my book. He came over to me, asked me to help him into it, told me to please play the Frozen soundtrack and then said, “You leave. I will stay here. But don’t come back in, okay?”

Puzzled, and not without a rising sense of guilt, I left.

Minutes later, I peaked my head around the corner. Jude was lying on his side, singing along to “Let it Go” and doing a peculiar fingerplay across the floor. He suddenly jumped up, danced around the room, and then lay back down again, resuming the fingerplay and singing along to the song. Jude wasn’t simply immersed— he was enchanted. Nothing outside of that room existed for him. The room didn’t exit. He was elsewhere.

For me the dress had never been just a dress. Nor had it ever been just stupid beauty standards or the messages we send our boys. It had also been my own dissatisfaction with myself.

But for Jude, that dress had never been just a dress either.

Sometimes I hear other parents jokingly quote the first line of Philip Larkin’s famous poem, “This Be the Verse:” They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

The more important line is the second: They may not mean to, but they do.

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I’m happy to announce a second guest post for Holly Korbey’s very popular Bell Ringer, a newsletter dedicated to the science of teaching and learning. (Previously I wrote about the obstacles to assigning and reading books in class.)

In this most recent post, I write about my experience looking for a school for my oldest son. The search — as it does for most parents in New York City — started on the playgrounds talking to other parents where I soon discovered that many had very different ideas of what a “good” school is or is not. Vibes are in, it seems, and academics are out. They hypocrisy and short-sightedness rankles me, tbh.

Head over to The Bell Ringer to read the post, along with a nice introduction from Korbey, and recaps of her other recent posts.

You can also read my essay in its entirety below.

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The very first step every single parent in New York City takes when they start searching for a school for their child is to eavesdrop on conversations at the playground. Where, as luck would have it, 99% of conversations are currently about school, were just about school or will soon be about school.

This is due in large part to the nature of the city’s public school system, which is as vast and as impenetrable as an ice planet. The seemingly infinite number of schools, and the city’s density and diversity render the usual process districts use to assign kids to schools (attend the school closest to your home) unwise, while also confounding the usual logic parents use to choose schools (nice neighborhoods = good schools). Then there’s the application process, which includes 1) admissions requirements that vary from school to school and 2) a devilishly complex lottery number that is expressly designed to prevent anxious parents from deciphering it, and therefore lamenting that their kid’s number is low, but nevertheless has prompted every single parent I know to insist they understand the number enough to lament that their kid’s number is “low.” (My kid’s number is 5B1920AF-F1C6-40EC-8E9A-3E1E50CB13BB. Seems low?)

The prospect of finding a good school for your kid reduces normally put-together individuals into nervous wrecks, and at the Brooklyn playground I frequent most with my kid, I can spot when two moms have begun to tailspin when they start nervously tapping their Blundstones against the rubber tiles.

And even though I’ve worked in the public schools here for almost fifteen years and have a better understanding of the system than most parents, when it came time for me to start thinking about schools for my oldest, I took to the playgrounds on my own recon missions, too.

But a funny thing happened. I started to notice that the same few schools came up again and again, with one in particular — let’s call it the Union Street School — spoken of with an odd reverence, as if it were both a holy site and a trendy restaurant that one should be so lucky to get reservations to.

Eventually, I stopped eavesdropping and started asking parents why they liked those particular schools.

They liked the school, they’d say, because it was a good school.

What makes it a “good” school? I’d ask.

Because the principal is great, they’d say. Or because the teachers are great. Or, my friend loves it. Or, it’s very child-centered. Or — my personal favorite — it’s just a great school.

Partly because I was genuinely curious, and partly because I have a teacher’s habit of never accepting someone’s first answer, I could never resist pressing the parents just a little bit further. Invariably, the answers remained vague, and just like my former students when I’d implore them to be more specific (“The story is sad because sad stuff happens.”), the parents began to squirm a little. I was never sure if their discomfort grew out of the sudden realization that they didn’t know, actually, what they meant when they said a school was “good” or if they were simply embarrassed to be put on the spot. Either way, I knew better than to ruin a perfectly good morning at the playground. So if they hadn’t already extracted themselves from the conversation in order to “help” their kid down the slide, I’d quickly change the subject and we’d soon be boring each other with gripes about our respective kid’s sleep habits.

Every conversation about how “good” a school is is, at its foundation, actually a conversation about what the purpose of school is.

Parents who prize a school because it has robust extracurriculars have a different idea about the purpose of school than parents who like a school due to its prestige. Parents can, and do, have healthy disagreements about whether a school is “good” or not, but what struck me as odd about these conversations I was having was that not one parent ever brought up a school’s academics. Not a single one. Nothing about the curriculum. Nothing about the books students read. Nothing about instruction. And certainly never a word about the school’s test scores.

In the case of the venerated Union Street School, I first heard about it at a Christmas party when a fellow dad whose daughter went there stated rather matter of factly that the school didn’t “put much emphasis” on academics, focusing instead on creating curiosity and instilling a sense of social justice in their students. Now, this was December 2022 in deep-blue Brooklyn, mind you, where even a chortle about a Lenape land acknowledgement would guarantee you’d never be invited to a Christmas party again, and so I ignored what sounded like clear political bias and asked this dad, instead, if it wasn’t possible, maybe, to teach math well and create curiosity? (Leaving aside the specifics of whatever that statement means.)

He informed me that “there are more important things in a child’s education than tests.” Indeed there are, I remember thinking. I also remember thinking: huh? This was a well-educated man, and I could assume he was representative of other Union Street parents. Hadn’t they themselves been the beneficiaries of schools putting “much emphasis” on reading and math?

The remark rang through my head for the rest of the night. When I went home, I poked around online until I found the school’s academic data. New York City Public Schools, just like every other district in the country, is required by federal law to create a “report card” for each of its schools that must list, among other things, the school’s performance on state reading and math tests broken down by grade and sub-groups (like race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.).

To my disbelieving eyes, Union Street had no test results. None. And the dad’s haughty comment suddenly made perfect sense: the parents opted out of the reading and math tests New York State administers each year, — for all elementary school students.

I was so nonplussed by this, given the school’s wild popularity and its vaunted reputation for righteous progressivism, that thereafter whenever I met a parent whose kid went there or had gone there I asked them about it with the same lurid curiosity I might have had had I learned they’d been a former prisoner of war.

But Union Street School was far from the only surprise.

From then on, every time I heard (or overheard) a parent at a playground crowing about a school, I looked up its data. I found that a lot of the shiny schools in nice neighborhoods with slick websites that glowed with platitudes about child-centered learning and posted photos of racially diverse children urban farming, and which I suspected parents loved not only for those reasons but also because other parents who talked like them and dressed like them sent their kids there, too, were, in fact, academically middling.

Test results showed stagnation or underperformance, considering the student population. Zero pandemic recovery. Unaccountably low math scores. In some cases, the schools were leaving behind critical groups of students, like students with disabilities or English Language Learners. Alternately, I discovered a number of unheralded schools quietly doing amazing work in spite of what their student demographics might suggest.

The data was all there in the school report card on the city and state’s education websites. Plain as day for anyone to see. You didn’t need years of experience in education to understand it.

I began to share this with parents whenever the playground chats inevitably turned to the subject of schools. You know, I’d say, that school’s not as strong as its reputation suggests . . . Parents treated these revelations with a shrug, or they’d freeze me with a fake smile, as if I were an inveterate nerd trying to sit with the cool kids in the cafeteria. Before long, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d gained the reputation as a know-it-all, quick to ruin the rah-rah about a beloved neighborhood school with a persnickety, “Well, actually. . ..”

I accepted that I’d officially become persona non grata when I found myself more often than not at the edge of the playground with the weird dad who secretly drank hard seltzers and talked about Bitcoin a lot.

None of this made any sense to me.

When I became a public school teacher well over a decade ago, it was Tea Party-adjacent parents who, worked into paroxysms by Common Core curriculum shifts and Obama Derangement Syndrome, opted their kids out of standardized tests.

But now? It’s apparently progressive parents who turn their noses up at them. Some have been seduced by the erroneous idea that the mere presence of standardized tests on a school’s calendar transforms the entire curriculum into a test prep death march. For others, the position is a virtuous one, like composting. Others, still, have quietly subscribed to the luxury belief that as long as your kid has heard his necessary 30 million words before he turns 3 and his mac ‘n cheese is Annie’s brand, he can caper his way through elementary school on nothing more than vibes. In other words, tests are for those kids— you know, the ones who go to schools with uniforms and metal detectors and phone bans.

The point of this essay is not to make fun of well-meaning parents’ gauzy ideas about school, and nor is it to point out the ideological inconsistency (to put it charitably) of parents who advertise their support for the latest cause with a tasteful lapel pin or hashtag but fail to see that standardized tests are a necessary mechanism to identify and correct the achievement gaps which harm the very groups those causes ostensibly exist for.

Nor is the point of this essay to remind parents that academics matter . . . even for second graders. I know most parents believe that — over 85% of Americans, in fact, say “teaching subjects like reading, writing and math” is the central purpose of school — even if the ones I have talked to on the playgrounds seem reluctant to say so.

Rather, the point of this essay is to inform parents that a belief in academics is irreconcilable with a dismissive or agnostic position toward standardized tests, and, what’s more, a dismissive or agnostic position toward standardized tests is irreconcilable with a belief in the common good.

Standardized tests are not perfect, most especially the ones administered by the states. They’re probably too long. They’re not as precise as they should be. They can be logistical headaches. The move to digitize them is questionable.

But in most cases the results from those exams tell parents if their child is on grade level in reading or math, plain and simple. This should be obvious. (Despite conventional wisdom, teachers’ grades are poor indicators of grade level proficiency for two big reasons: they include non-academic measurements, like effort and behavior, and much of the work students are assigned is below grade level. And this isn’t even taking into account the scourge of grade inflation.)

Less obvious is that positive school wide results on standardized tests (particularly when subgroups of students show growth or when there’s growth from year to year), far from being evidence that the school has turned into a Dickensian abattoir of childhood innocence dominated by drill-and-kill instruction are, instead, a reliable indicator of an equitable and supportive school culture with high expectations, good teachers, competent leadership, and evidence-based curricula filled with lots and lots of science, history, math, literature and art.

Who doesn’t want that?

And yet, there seems to be little appetite to double down on the rigors of school at precisely the time when the educational landscape in this country could not be bleaker. Student achievement at almost every level in nearly all subjects continues a decline that began over a decade ago and shows little sign of reversing. We’ve been teaching reading the wrong way for years, with catastrophic results. A once narrowing achievement gap has burst open again. Children barely read for fun anymore, report being “almost constantly” on their phones and, unsurprisingly, are miserable. Enormous numbers of students have stopped regularly attending school and we don’t have enough teachers, especially in critical areas. Trust and satisfaction with public schools is lower than it has been in a generation.

Most of the solutions to this education depression are out of parents’ individual hands, but every parent, wherever they live, can do a few very simple things, starting with questioning vibes-based elementary schools.

We should pay heed to the test results of our children’s school or the schools we’re thinking of sending our kids to.

Then, ask questions based on what we see — Why are nearly half of the 4th graders below grade level in math? Why do reading scores decline as students progress from grade to grade? Seeking answers to these questions from the school or other parents will lead to yet more questions — how much reading and writing do students do? How much time do they spend in front of screens? What is the name of the school’s math curriculum? Before long, we may just stumble across a few Potemkin villages.

Further, when we hear other parents talk about a school being “good” or “bad,” we must ask what they mean, and we must be wary of answers that elide academics. (The assumption, nearly always unspoken, that a school is “good” or “bad” by virtue of who goes there is at best naive and at worst morally repugnant.)

Asking these questions does not make you a Tiger Mom nor does it imply you don’t care about field trips or music class or any of the things that are crucial to a well-rounded and joyful school but fall outside core instruction.

These questions simply cut through the noise to address what matters most for our own kids, and for us all.

And if you burst some bubbles? You can find me at the edge of the playground.

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After some spring break time at the beach this week, I’m tan, rested and ready to get back to bringing you the best reporting on the science of teaching and learning! Want to know everything about the science of learning? Consider becoming a paying subscriber…

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A couple days ago the Wall Street Journal published an article with the headline, “The Small Town Tearing Itself Apart Over Preferred Pronouns.”

You can guess what the entire piece is about even without reading much beyond the sub-head (“Elizabethtown, Pa., has become a microcosm for America’s latest culture wars.”) and the requisite chiaroscuro photographs of parents or teachers standing solemnly in doorways that inevitably accompany stories like this.

Here it is in a nutshell anyway: the school board of a small town in Pennsylvania recently voted to ban transgender athletes from contact sports and require parental consent for name or pronoun changes for students. Some parents liked this. Some parents did not. Demonstrations and rancor have ensued.

That’s it.

This is a stupid story.

It’s stupid not simply because in this town of 12,000 people there are zero transgender athletes who play contact sports or because it is unclear how many transgender students will be affected by the pronoun rule (or how).

It is a stupid story because it feeds into the media narrative that our country is so riven with ideological partisanship that no place, no matter how quaint — not bakeries, not knitting circles, not little houses on the prairie, not the North Pole, not under the sea, and certainly not schools — is safe from the culture war.

It is also stupid because it contributes to this idea that school boards are strictly political entities composed of petty HOA types who watch too much cable news and are convinced they can save the soul of America one school board seat at a time.

The story has no interest in the bigger questions that the controversial votes present.

Such as, how much influence should school board members’ religious views have on their votes? (A number of board members belong to a local evangelical church, Lifegate, that is also active in local politics.)

Or, how much influence should outside groups exert on local school boards? (A controversial Christian law firm drafted the proposals the board voted on. They’ve worked with other school boards in Pennsylvania on similar issues.)

Or, how necessary is it for local school boards to change rules related to national, culture war issues when the number of students affected by them in their district is close to zero and when the school district is facing more pressing issues, such as, in Elizabethtown’s case, low student achievement?

The district’s results on the state tests that 11th graders take are not great. An enormous percentage of students with IEPs, and economically disadvantaged students, are not proficient in Algebra I, Biology and Literature. Almost half of all students aren’t proficient in Algebra I and Biology, and over one third are not proficient in literature.

The results on the state tests the students take in 3rd - 8th grade are not much better. Again, an enormous number of students with IEPs and who are economically disadvantaged are not proficient in English or math.

At least one third of all students are not proficient, and in some grades, it’s closer to half.

Elizabethtown is not a poor district, and it’s tiny—3,600 students. What explains these results? Are there staffing issues? Bad curricula? Is the superintendent up to the task? What about the principals? Are the districts finances in order?

The Wall Street Journal is uninterested.

Is the school board, too? We’re not told.

Without providing this information — it would have taken a paragraph or two; I found this data in 10 minutes — the story ennobles the school board’s pointless votes; robs the reader of a civics lesson in what school boards actually do (govern school districts and ensure students have access to excellent and equitable education); and contributes to the ever-growing body of stupid education stories about the endless “culture war.”

Schools and school boards are only political if we allow them to be.

Update 2/26/25: A clarification is needed on the above district data. I made those tables by pulling Elizabethtown’s data from the state website, filtering out negligible sub-groups (the district has tiny Asian, ELL, Black and Hispanic populations) and, for simplicity’s sake, adding Basic and Below Basic together. The state uses four performance levels: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. The descriptors are here.

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I suppose it was inevitable. After a good year of coverage about how behind boys are in school and struggling nearly everywhere, we were bound to start seeing stories telling us, well, actually, it’s the girls who are behind.

Recently the Wall Street Journal published “Long the Star Pupils, Girls are Losing Ground to Boys,” claiming that, since 2019, according to “15 nationally representative exams,” girls’ scores in reading and math have decreased more than boys’ scores.

And it’s all boys’ fault. And it started during the pandemic with school closures.

At least this is what the story tells its readers. The first possible reason for this reemerging achievement gap is that boys’ behavior in school has been so bad since the pandemic that teachers haven’t been able to give girls the attention they need.

The second possible reason is that school closures disproportionately hurt girls.

The third possible reason is that because girls shouldered more household responsibilities during the pandemic, they lost ground academically and haven’t been able to catch up.

The article cites no evidence to support these claims other than couple sensational quotes from indignant moms (“If my child was wild and throwing desks around the room, somebody would pay attention to them,” one says, understatedly) and a single quote from a professor who studies gender gaps in education. (“Girls have a comparative advantage in school and you take schools away, they’ll suffer more,” he said.)

The article doesn’t even consider the other likely factors: phone use at home, phones in school, Chromebooks in schools, or the fact that we have effectively abandoned school accountability. Might any of these be partly responsible for this gap, as they have certainly contributed to others? The reporter is, evidently, not curious.

Bizarrely, the article also omits the larger story about math scores in this country, which improved dramatically for pretty much all groups starting in the ‘90s but, around 2011, fell again. Kevin Mahnken wrote about this last month at The 74, as did Chad Aldeman. The Journal article pins the declines to the pandemic, but they precede the pandemic.

Also left out is the larger, incredibly distressing picture of declining school achievement in this country everywhere we look. As Tim Daly avers: “we are living through an education depression.” History, civics and science scores are down. Reading scores have been dropping for years, and children are barely reading for fun anymore. College enrollment is approaching a cliff. Chronic absenteeism is out of control. Overall student mental health has been worsening for over a decade. (Indeed, the American populace as a whole appears to growing stupider, as do adults everywhere. So much for the Flynn Effect.)

Without that broader context and with no honest consideration of other factors at play, this article, amazingly, manages to pander to liberals and conservatives at once— it blames girls’ travails on toxic masculinity and pins academic doldrums on COVID school closures.

It’s a Well, Actually and a Told You So all in one.

To be sure, the Journal article presents readers with a troubling data point: the gap between girls’ and boys’ math scores is growing. But though boys’ scores declined as well, the article, in blaming boys for the gap, frames the issue in a pernicious and divisive way.

But gender equality is not zero-sum.

We rise together, as Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men has reminded us.

And as Journal’s own data shows, we fall together, too.

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Above image: Italy (A), 1946-1948, Boy and Girl with Books, Richard Avedon.

I’m honored to have written a guest post for Holly Korbey’s The Bell Ringer newsletter this past week. My post is a sort of response to Korbey’s own “TL;DR” which weighed in on the recent conversation around why high school and middle school students, in particular, aren’t reading more books in school. If you haven’t read the piece responsible for starting this discussion — The Atlantic’s “The Elite Students Who Can’t Read Books” — it’s worth a look (as well as the trenchant response of one of the high school teachers who was interviewed for the piece, “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty”).

One of the thing that irks me about so much commentary and reporting around education is how little the journalists and authors understand the day-to-day realities of schools and classrooms, which are in some ways far simpler than people realize and in others far more more complex. And if they do bother to actually visit a classroom or talk to a teacher, it’s usually one that is entirely non-representative of the average experience. (The Atlantic piece makes broad claims about American education based on what a few professors at hyper-selective colleges have reported seeing with their students, who probably comprise, what, 5% of the total college-going population? Give me a break.)

My piece isn’t so much of a disagreement with what has already been written about why (or if!) students aren’t reading as much as they used to as it is an attempt to shed light on what is actually possible in high school classrooms and reveal what actually happens. I’m confident my experience is fairly representative, but I also have little doubt there are teachers and administrators who think I’ve got it all wrong. I welcome their dissent, and hope to hear from them, or anyone else for that matter.

I’m posting the first few paragraphs of the piece below before sending you to The Bell Ringer’s page. Let us know what you think. Enjoy!

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The death of the novel arrived in my 9th grade English class some years ago. We had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird and had approached the dramatic courtroom scenes where the reader finally learns what actually happened between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson. As is customary when doing a “novel study”—as English teachers call them—I set aside a few minutes to review the major plot points and characters before we settled in to read. I hadn’t planned longer than a few minutes for this when, shortly after I asked students to give a short synopsis of the book so far, an astonishing debate ensued about who Tom Robinson was.

Tom Robinson was the sheriff, one student asserted.

No, that’s Lennie, corrected another.

Lennie’s from a book we read last semester, stupid, someone politely corrected. Tom Robinson is the character who never leaves his house.

The class erupted. That’s Boo! Above the din, someone shouted, Tom is Scout’s classmate, the boy with no lunch!

On it went.

I remember watching silently, in complete shock and not a little despair, until I finally berated my class for not having kept up with the reading, crisply described exactly who Tom Robinson was and what awful predicament he was in, and then commanded them to grant one of the most moving novels in American literature a measure of respect by reading quietly at their desks for the rest of the period and that, yes, there would be a freaking quiz. It was not my finest moment.

I never taught that novel again. Subsequent years saw me teaching increasingly shorter novels —Things Fall Apart, The Stranger—that I was able to actually get through without relying on students reading for homework (a lost cause) until, for a solid 2-3 years, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I abandoned teaching books altogether. I made peace with this fate by knowing two things: my students were still reading a lot of good quality texts and, equally important, my students were writing a lot, too. . .

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Tuesday morning I woke up in a foul mood.

A nor’easter threatening to dump 6 inches of snow on New York City forced the powers that be to call a snow day, which here does not mean snowmen and sleds and hot cocoa— it means online school.

I hate online school. I hate Zoom. I hate the way my apartment feels at 10:37 on a weekday. I hate sweatpants.

And despite all of the preparations I had made — those aforementioned powers had graciously informed us of the “snow day” the morning before — and in spite of how adept I had become at managing a school remotely and foreseeing snafus, I knew that at precisely 7:30 a.m. the accelerando of notifications would begin and would not cease until at least 9:00 a.m. There would be questions and requests from the school aides, the office staff, teachers, the paraprofessionals, parents and students, all of them time-sensitive, some of them stupid, few of them grammatical, and none, evidently, able to be answered by anyone else but me.

During the pandemic, somewhat against my will and almost entirely because I was the only administrator under 50, I had emerged as my school’s CIO, CTO and CLO1. I was the one who had figured out how to get the kids online, how to count them when they were, and how to ensure teachers were truly teaching.

I learned more in that year-and-a-half than I had in the previous ten, but I the experience fundamentally transformed me. I wouldn’t say I had become cynical, but my mien became as serious and stoic as a Major League baseball coach. For I had become acutely aware of a depressing and frightening reality that I had either chosen to ignore or had not had a high enough vantage point to see: that too many of our most vulnerable children’s futures depended not on the efficacy of systems — on policy — but on the altruism of adults. That the only thing that prevented us from descending into anarchy was that enough people chose to do the right thing. Returning to “in-person” instruction either concealed that truth, or at least made it seem less likely that we’d descend into that anarchy. Either way, I very much wanted to get back in the building.

The one time we’d gone online since the end of the remote era — when smoke from the Canadian wildfires rendered the city’s air unbreathable — I reluctantly dug out my old spreadsheets and protocols like a retired assassin called to do one last job. I finished the day catatonic from exhaustion, even though I’d only sat at my kitchen table working at my laptop (well, three).

I vowed I would quit before I did remote school again. 

Yet there I found myself again this past Tuesday morning, sitting at that same kitchen table with my three laptops and the snow falling in fat wet flakes outside my window.

I was not in a good mood, but I was ready. 

It did not begin well. good morning mine is not working was one of first messages I received. The following two hundred were effectively the same.

“Intermittent outages” prevented most students and teachers from logging on or joining Google Meets or even accessing their email. IBM was evidently responsible. Students and teachers saw an error message accompanied by the image of single burning candle. On closer inspection I realized it was actually a tiny person standing on a gray column that was emerging — or sinking into — a black hole. Exactly.

By 9:00, I knew there was nothing I could do. I sent out a school-wide message to keep trying. I slammed my laptop(s) shut, announced to my wife that I was hereby forbidding our 2-year-old son from ever participating in remote school, and I took him outside to build his first snowman. 

You probably saw the New York Times headline later that day: N.Y.C Revived Remote School for a Day. It was a Mess. The article is the typical pessimistic bullshit you can expect from a Times education piece: quotes from irate parents, cynical educators and grandstanding politicians (most of which the reporter appears to have cadged from social media); nothing less than perfection expected from schools and a detectable glee that they didn’t achieve it; a forced “Even so . . ” paragraph; a hokey closing. 

The sub-text of the entire piece was that New York City Public Schools were foolish for trying to make kids go to school on a snow day.

The truth is that by about 11:00 am almost everyone was able to log into their classes and join Google Meets. And when I started visiting them shortly thereafter, here is what I saw in class after class: smiling teachers, real lessons, attentive students.

Yes, attendance was lower than usual, but many classes had close to 75% attendance, which I didn’t think was that bad, considering.

Yes, too many kids had their cameras off, but the chats were alive with constructive conversation, and the students I could see weren’t lying in bed, or obviously scrolling through their phones. They were sitting upright at desks. They had notebooks out. They were working. They were glad to be there. 

Kids were learning.

By the end of the last period, I felt hope and I felt joy. There are no other words for it. Hope. Joy.

I also felt ashamed by my earlier petulance, and I felt stupid for forgetting that for many students, remote school on a snow day, far from being “another indignity visited on childhood by the legacy of the pandemic2” is actually a brief respite from their disorderly or unstable lives at home.

I do not intend to portray these children as tragedy cases living meager existences deserving of our pity, and I abhor educators who essentialize students, but it is a simple fact that “snow day” for many of my students does not mean the same thing as the children of the readers of the New York Times (or even of those individuals who tend to get quoted in it.) Many of my students are burdened with caring for younger siblings while their parents bust their ass to pay the bills. Many have suffocatingly strict parents whose overprotectiveness is a necessary shield against neighborhood vices. Many spend every waking hour when they’re not at school gaming or scrolling online, partly because there’s no one to talk to. Many have indifferent or ill-equipped parents, and a few, still, endure outright abuse.

A snow day might have never meant making a snowman with dad. For them, a snow day might have meant another long, rotten day at home.

But now, for them, a snow day is just another day of school, which means structure, and purpose, and those smiling teachers.

What’s so wrong with that? 

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Above image: “Snow Shovellers, New York.” Clare Leighton. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 1929

1.

Khalil told me he could not find his backpack.

We are standing in the main lobby where the students enter each morning starting at 7:30. This is an important if not tedious part of my job. To greet students and stand sentry as the students file in one by one through the “scanners1,” depositing their phones first in a little labeled bin and then putting their backpacks, belts, etc. through the scanner before swiping their ID and making their merry way to advisory for check-in.

We confiscate what is not allowed and over the course of a few weeks I amass a tidy collection of iPads, cheap perfumes with names like Pleasures Intense, sherbet-hued vape pens, rolling papers, lighters, Arizonas and Frappuccinos (no glass), metal hair picks (no sharp objects), unidentifiable pills (no unidentifiable pills), basketballs, and once, to my great delight, a skateboard.

It is not uncommon for things to go missing in the scanner. A set of keys or a bag of chips will get snagged inside on its dark journey, and occasionally I will watch as a student and school safety agent peer into the scanner’s mouth, puzzled, the conveyor belt rolling and rolling but nothing emerging while the other students in line shift from foot to foot and throw their heads back with impatience — Bro. — knowing their loathsome advisors will deduct points if they miss check-in and it is already 8:08.

(It is also not uncommon hours later to spot a left AirPod or an unopened bag of Sour Patch Kids discarded beneath the scanner as if the machine had deliberated a long time before rendering its final judgement.)

But a backpack? An entire backpack lost in the machine? Impossible.

However, Khalil’s backpack is not a priority. Not at the moment. Disorder was assembling in the lobby. This was the first day of school.

The students were filing in one after the other and loitering in the lobby, as they do, chatting with friends they hadn’t seen since June, or scrutinizing their schedules, the girls clasping hands and jumping up and down while the boys did their little handshakes without looking at each other. Many awkward teenage one-armed hugs were exchanged. The 9th graders gaped like visitors from another planet. The teachers and school aides who were supposed to be helping direct the students to their advisories had also not seen each other since June and so were now chatting with each other. I bellow at the upperclassmen to go to their advisory — Good morning to you, too, sir, damn! — and pushed the 9th graders toward the teachers and catch the school aides’ eyes, snapping my fingers fastidiously like a majordomo.

Order prevails.

From the corner of my eye I see Khalil pacing. Khalil, I remembered, could get angry. So with order restored, I step over to see about this missing backpack.

Khalil is tall, maybe 6’2, and skinny, with broad shoulders, straight backed, pants perpetually low slung. One might call him svelte. His manner was wherever the Venn diagram of Jeff Spicoli and The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield overlapped. He had not been the easiest boy to deal with, and like many of his male classmates was at once laconic and surly, years behind where he should have been, with abysmal grades, spotty attendance and little interest in school. It was impossible to overstate the negative impact the pandemic and the legalization of marijuana had on him and boys like him, to say nothing of smart phones and the relatively recent meteoric success of his female peers, which unavoidably and tragically cast education as a zero-sum game. He had refused to join a boys group I had formed and when that group, much to my enduring shame, dissolved, and I found an outside organization to come in to mentor the boys, Khalil had refused to participate in that, too. In a fit I remember asking Why not? I think I literally stamped my foot. He ignored me. That group, composed of older, reformed versions of those very boys, had also fallen apart. All the boys got in turn were snazzy t-shirts and evasions from me about why there were no more meetings at lunch with “those O.G.s” or even me.

The boys haunt me. The sadness I feel thinking about their bleak futures is eclipsed only by the anger I feel thinking about the greater hypocrisy around their plight. Society tolerates, ignores or fears them until it is socially fashionable or politically expedient to do otherwise. And within the field of education it seems it is always the teachers with the loudest politics who bail after just a few years from the schools with the student populations who are the ostensible objects of their Nalgene stickers and sanctimonious hashtags.

But Khalil’s obstinacy infuriates me, too, and I am unfortunately in my worst moments at the mercy of my emotions as much as they are, despite appearances to the contrary. After school one day I watched him unwrap a candy bar and flagrantly toss the wrapper to the ground. I called after him to pick it up but he coolly walked on, wagging his finger in the air like Dikembe Mutumbo. He caught me on the tail end of a bad day, on a day I’d already dealt with his obstinacy over some other picayune thing, and so I ignored him for one month.

Last year I ignored a student for an entire 3 months because I couldn’t say a word to him about his (lack of) uniform, his (lack of a) bathroom pass, being late, head down, etc. etc. without him sneering at me and murmuring emasculating curses beneath his breath. The source of his anger was unclear and why I was the target of it was beyond me. Humor didn’t work. Stern orders were ignored. Entreaties were nonstarters. His defiance hurt. His armor, amazingly hard. What had I done? I cut my losses and determined he was a waste of time and sailed pass him in the halls and pointedly joshed with his friends while he stood nearby. Not my finest moment.

In the spring we passed each other in the empty lobby. A warm sun lit the marble floors. In an inspired moment of magnanimity I called after him and asked if everything was okay. He said Yes, Why? I said, You haven’t been at school for a few days. He said, Oh, I went to see my dad in Florida. Are you okay, he asked. I said, Sure, why? Because you haven’t talked to me all year, he said, and gestured like, duh. I made some sounds and said some words and he smirked and walked back to class, abandoning me in that bright lobby with my own shame. The students see you. Always. And that you work with children is not so difficult as remembering that you are an adult.

What color is your backpack? I ask Khalil.

Black.

I look at the backpacks of the students passing and note nearly all of them were black.

Anything else? Nike? Adidas?

I dunno.

You gotta give me more than “black.”

It had a… He drew a shape in the air with his fingers. A silver…

A triangle?

Nah, like… He redrew the shape.

A diamond.

Yeah. That.

Is…that it? I say this with a flourish, as if I were a magician who had made his card reappear across the room. I point to the table near the scanner where someone had left a backpack. A black backpack. I step over to grab it and walk back over to Khalil, holding it aloft by the top handle, victoriously. I was Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. True, this backpack did not have a silver diamond on it but it did have a white Adidas logo on it (the one with the 3 bars, not the flower) and if you squinted or perhaps had not done very well in Geometry last year as I had on good authority Khalil most definitely had not, then you could be forgiven for mistaking the trilateral logo for a diamond.

Khalil holds the backpack in his hands and studies it. He studies it for a long time. Too long a time. My hopes fall.

Nah, he says.

It’s no problem, I say, looking at my watch and noting 1st period is about to start. Simple mix up. Head to class for now. We’ll find your backpack.

I do not say this with confidence because confidence implies doubt and why would I have any doubt that we would find this backpack? This simple, silly backpack?

I mean, how hard could it be?

2.

Inside the Adidas backpack there is a composition notebook, a folder, a few pens and pencils. Everything is brand new. The notebook cracks when I open it. There is nothing identifying an owner. No name written on the inside in black Sharpie. The backpack looks fake. A prop you’d see in a play.

3.

The next step, then, is to make an announcement. This would summon the backpack from one of the 1st period classrooms.

Welcome back. A very quick announcement here: Someone picked up the wrong backpack at scanning this morning and left theirs behind. It is a black Adidas backpack. So if you’ve got the wrong backpack in front of you, or if you’re missing yours, make your way to the main lobby! Thank you! Have a wonderful first day back at school!

The PA-version of myself sounded like a youth minister.

I walk back to the lobby to oversee scanning and wait for some daffy student to come moseying around the corner with the backpack. Most likely a confused and repentant freshmen, holding out the backpack like a 5-year old who’s taken candy from the store without realizing he’d needed to buy it.

After ten minutes, no one appears.

I make another announcement and return to the lobby and wait. Late students straggle in and the shrink beneath the look I give them that only a school administrator could give, the one that welcomes them and rebukes them at once. But no students from classes with the wrong backpack.

By the third announcement, I sound less like that cheery youth minister and more like a father pleading with this child’s kidnapper to let his sweet baby girl go free.

I return to the lobby and wait for another 5 minutes. Nothing. I look down at that black Adidas backpack at my feet and sighed.

Fuck me, I whisper. Watts, the school safety agent sitting at the desk, looks up from her phone.

This is now officially a thing, and this is exactly how the days got real hectic real quick at school. It wasn’t even 8:45 yet. But one thing happens and then another thing and you had to deal with them with assiduousness because no matter how small or seemingly insignificant a thing is that thing demands immediate attention because a thing when left alone always transforms into a big deal and the last thing you ever want on your hands is a big deal because a big deal summons principals and parents and those are creatures who are safer for everyone when they are very very far away, like colossal squid.

Thus I have become very much annoyed, and very much annoyed with Khalil and whichever absentminded student is party to hijacking this morning and now possible the day.

At the end of every year I make a list of things I want to do better, learn to do, or read up on for the following year. Every single list, both as a teacher and an administrator, includes the exact same item at the very bottom: Boys.

Just that word. Tagged on resignedly like the last relative you add to your wedding’s guest list. The word is shorthand for all the ways I failed to show up for the boys the previous year. It means be patient, check in more, learn their names first, be affable, don’t take it personally, be there, just say what’s up, forgive, be patient, don’t take it personally, ask about their lives, be patient, don’t take it personally, take a breath, learn every single one of their names, forgive.

A cool avunicularity is what I aimed for, but instead by October I always reverted to a schizoid composite of schoolmarm, Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest and your dad gallantly bringing all the damned bags in from the car. My resting pose was baseball coach.

Related: a great loss of innocence happens during a teacher’s first year when they finally acquiesce to the reality that they cannot actually be themselves in front of their students. That in order for their students to learn they have to become an Authority Figure. Their face hardens, their back straightens, their register lowers. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Children’s ability to forgive makes them Enlightened Beings, but their natural instinct to detect and exploit lenient adults makes them demons who will turn your class upside down. And so you learn very quick that a functional classroom must be calibrated to the minute and requires a scrupulous insistence on mise en place bordering on psychotic. You develop a three-dimensional situational awareness that makes air traffic controllers look like parking attendants. You realize wearing t-shirts to work just won’t do.

You shock yourself the first time you stand in front of your class and with a gravity you didn’t know you possessed and a feeling of disappointment you have never felt so deeply in your entire life and tell them that the work they have turned in is “unacceptable,” that their “behavior” has been “atrocious” and that you know they are “better than this.” You dramatically drop all of their papers in the trash. Their faces freeze in shock and the lips of the girls sitting in front tremble but now you know they know you mean business, that your classroom is a place where they will work hard and learn and you will tolerate none of their Mickey Mouse bullshit. When the students pass you in the hallway they straighten up, bid you a somber good morning, and walk purposefully to class.

But something is lost when educators elevate academic achievement to their primary goal. Students become a constellation of data points which, paradoxically, are individualized but depersonalized. Their school work, daily attendance, lateness, GPA, test scores, literacy and numeracy levels, credits, post-secondary college and career plans are monitored. This monitoring invites analysis and this analysis invites theories. Every achievement-focused educator is also a psychologist, sociologist and policy wonk. The students themselves become objects of study. And in spite of the fact that so many factors which affect student achievement lie far beyond the school’s control, an achievement-focused educator does not give up but instead holds tenaciously to the view that a student’s achievement is a direct output of his or her own individual decisions at school, all of which are encouraged or discouraged by the right school and classroom culture and not one of which is so trivial — getting to class on time, remembering to put their name on their work, not losing backpacks at scanning — that the achievement-focused educator doesn’t see that decision as increasing or decreasing the student’s overall achievement index, however slight.

The students, in other words, are problems to be solved. Fires to be put out. Another thing to do among the millions of things you must do. And when you have a million things to do it’s hard to give proper attention to all of those million things you must do.

So it gets that you forget to pull a boy to the side and ask apropos of nothing how he’s doing. Like, just, how are you doing, Jaylen?

That’s all most of them need most of the time. Just that.

But complicating matters even more are the socio-economic, generational, racial, linguistic, cultural and (in certain cases) religious chasms that exist between me and these boys and the head spinning way in which the importance of these categories is not the same from boy to boy or even given the situation. We have sneakerheads and Jehovah Witnesses and boys who run the streets and manga nerds who don’t know drill from jazz, and the Marlon in the cafeteria saving face in front of his crew by dialing up the culturally and age-specific machismo with a Jamaican patois inflected with a Brooklyn slang I can barely parse when I rebuke him for calling Arianna a bitch requires a different touch than that same Marlon who levels with me in my office that the reason he is late to school every day and therefore in jeopardy of failing his science class (and possible not graduating in June) is that by decree of his mother he must drop his two sisters off at school every day and, no, sir, this is non-negotiable, say no to mommy, are you crazy, sir?

The guilt that comes from your failure to show up for the boys in the ways they need keeps you up at night. June comes again. Your write your list. You quickly write Boys at the bottom. Again.

4.

I go back to my office and toss the anonymous Adidas backpack onto the table already cluttered with busted laptops and two confiscated trucker hats still unclaimed from last school year (yes, trucker hats are in again) and various policy guidances I have neatly stapled and stacked to coax me into reading but which I know I won’t for another week at least, and also the folder labeled “Resumes - Foreign Language” that has remained empty since June since Foreign Language teachers are Yeti. Also: the Algebra teacher’s broken document projector which in approximately one day will become the subject of frequent, passive aggressive emails inquiring into the status of; a sample Physics textbook; a box of unlabeled Ziploc bags with keys to lord knows what; printer cartridges for the poster maker; and, most dishonorably, a few greasy Tupperware containers I keep forgetting to take back home and which in a fit of Marie Kondo-inspired nihilism and disgust, I will end up throwing away. I want to light this table on fire. I often tell myself there is a parallel universe in which I am sitting in a sleek office at a dark walnut desk that has, like, just a laptop and a glass of mineral water on it. My pants fit perfectly and I don’t have to pack a lunch every day or even carry keys. But I know this is a lie and that, hilariously, in all of the infinite universes within the multiverse, I am sitting in an office with a table heaped with the responsibilities of a harried school administrator. Even in the alternate universes where schools or tables don’t exist.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I sit down and check my email and then spin in my chair to look at the backpack. The annoyance I feel at realizing what I have to do next is only tempered by the relief I feeling knowing that this is what will bring the matter to a conclusion.

So, I wait for the second period to start and then take the backpack to every single classroom and say the following:

Whose backpack is this?

And when no one claims it, I then say this:

Everyone take their backpack and hold it out in front of yourself like this. Look at the backpack. Then ask yourself, Is this my backpack? If the answer to that question is no, please stand up.

I actually insist that every single student does this. There’s an edge to my voice, a slight condescension. I’m peeved they didn’t pay attention to the three previous announcements, but I’m also losing my mind. Someone has Khalil’s backpack. It has to be in one of these classrooms. The school has 25 classrooms on one floor. Not exactly a needle in a haystack here.

Most of the kids are confused but comply. The upperclassmen carp, as if I’m their dad who has made them go back to the kitchen to put their dirty glass in the sink. I riposte and say Oh I’m so sorry for interrupting your close reading of the class contract. This earns me an ambush of kissed teeth. A few students look intently at their backpack and inquire ironically Are you my backpack??? A few make kissy faces at their backpacks. In every single class one person stands up and then quickly sits back down, har har.

I have conscripted into my services my most loyal school aide, a former student named Rouse who, as a student was rather unindustrious (to put it lightly) but as a school worker is a workhorse. Whether it was the case that my class was so deadly dull that he couldn’t be bothered to so much as shift in his seat, or rather that he has found his life’s purpose in hourly remuneration of low-skilled quasi-grunt work, I do not know. I’ve never asked. But he gets the job done. He is invaluable to me.

I had sent Rouse on a recon mission to the gym and to the empty classrooms to search beneath the desks and bleachers and the backs of chairs for Khalil’s backpack — it is amazing how often students just stand up and walk away from all of their shit — and now he has caught up with me on my way to the very last classroom in the far reaches of the B wing. The school is not large but it is long. He’s practically jogging next to me. I slow down. I have not yet mastered the untroubled stride of a Person of Authority and instead still hustle from place to place like a batboy. It is undignified.

I look down at his hands: empty.

Nothing?

Nothing.

I chortle like a deranged man.

You good? He asks.

What are the chances this backpack is in this very last classroom? The laaaaast classroom we visit? Zero. So, like, where the hell is this thing?

He shakes his head consolingly, as if he just found out my sister had relapsed again.

Our walkies crackle as we turn the corner into the last classroom.

A roomful of 9th graders in vibrant yellow polo shirts immediately stop what they’re doing and look up at us. Mr. Munson, their Biology teacher, yields the floor but I detect a sigh. I have mixed feelings about these uniforms, but the argument that they engender a certain esprit de corps is especially difficult to refute in September when the polos are still so spectacularly crisp and clean, and the students still so eager to please. By June, these polos, just like the floors the custodians will wash and wax over the summer, will be so pallid, the students so thoroughly reprogrammed to follow all of the school rules and drink up the school culture that you can’t help but reconsider Nineteen Eighty-Four as a useful how-to.

I say my thing. This is literally the 25th time I’ve said it. I deliver it with a stripper’s detachment.

The students stay still.

Munson is impatient to resume class. I hear him capping and uncapping the dry eraser marker. He is one of those passionate teachers who so strongly believes in the sacrosanctity of his own subject that a student graduating without knowing what a mitotic spindle is surely qualifies as educational neglect. Thus his class is boring and he cannot see that it is boring and he rarely remembers to take attendance or complete any of the simple administrative tasks that teachers must do that are not directly related to instruction. He mainlines Diet Coke all day long. He is a pain in my ass.

Anyone? I say.

After a long beat, Munson steps forward to seize control of his class again. Okay, folks— he says. The age, ethnicity, gender and politics of a teacher determines whether he or she refers to the class as “guys”, “people”, “class”, “folks,” “my friends,” “peeps,” “children,” or the deeply irritating “humans” and “y’all.” While I roll my eyes, thinking, It’s the first day of school for goodness’ sake, something happens: a student stands up.

And sits back down again.

It happens so quickly anyone could miss it.

You see what I just saw, I ask Rouse in a low voice. Two cops on a stakeout.

Hmm-mm.

The student stands up again, hesitantly. He is a very large boy, but gentle and soft. Ursine is the appropriate word. His brow is furrowed. The backpack is black and has a silver reflective diamond on the front and I feel a rush of relief. Euuuuuurrrreeeeeeekkkkkkkaaaaaaa, I sing in my head.

Is that yours? I ask.

He is confused.

The class stares at him.

Is that backpack yours? I ask.

He says nothing and sits back down.

The class looks at me. They look at the boy. I look at Rouse. Rouse looks at me. Rouse is confused. Although I have become skilled at keeping my face fixed in one expression no matter what is happening, in this moment I have failed, and so I, too, show Oscar-winning confusion.

Can you come up here? Bring your backpack?

The boy lumbers toward us with his backpack and we step outside the class. He makes no eye contact and I can’t discern if the look on his face is one of vacancy or annoyance, as if I am TSA insisting on a thorough search of his carry-on for what he can promise me is just a wine opener. Almost all of your initial impressions of the 9th graders are wrong.

Munson resumes teaching immediately. Okay, folks . . .

I cannot for the life of me understand why there would be any confusion as to whether this backpack is this student’s or not but consider 3 rational explanations: 1) I saw what I wanted to see and upon closer inspection will find that the backpack is navy blue or does not in fact have a silver reflective diamond; 2) The student speaks another language and didn’t understand me; 3) He was too embarrassed in front of his classmates to admit he’d taken the wrong backpack.

All three are immediately ruled out.

It’s mine, the boy says flatly once we’re out in the hall.

His confidence throws me. It turns out he’s not quite the oafish naif I suspected he was, and for a half second I’m in high school again talking to one of the hulking hockey players whose unreserved masculinity I feared, envied and disdained. Transference is psychoanalytic term that describes the projection of your feelings related to one person in your life onto another, and it is not acknowledged enough as a phenomenon between educators and students in schools2.

(But which hasn’t teacher hasn’t subconsciously graded a student down to a B- when she easily could have given her a B simply because that student reminded her of the mean girl who once mocked her in the cafeteria?)

You’re sure?

He nods again.

I sigh. Okay then. Go back inside.

I look at Rouse and shake my head like What now? He doesn’t say anything. He just stands there and stares at me blankly like he used to in class when I would ask him to take his notebook out and get to work already. I hated that look.

5.

It is now lunch and I am standing in the cafeteria which after so many years still feels as chaotic and disorienting as an exotic city’s outdoor market. But it only seems frenzied. It only feels loud. Yes, there are shouts and explosions of laughter and the hyperactive boys for no reason jump a lot (when is the last time you jumped?) and there’s a lot of sitting down and standing up and then sitting back down again but it’s not that hectic. Not really. And this is one of the illusions of working with teenagers, this impression of madness and disorder where there is none. If they were paintings, they’d be Jackson Pollocks.

Most students are simply talking quietly at tables or standing in tight little groups or promenading arm in arm around the cafeteria like Victorian ladies at the park. Some students play Uno or draw. No one has brought their own lunch in the traditional sense, but some rip into room temperature deli sandwiches they’ve pulled from their bags. Some eat the free free3 off beige, biodegradable lunch trays, but more students daintily nibble at Sour Power Straws or Doritos or sip warm Sprite. The vast majority eat nothing still. How they are able to function all day by eating complete garbage or nothing at all is not quite the physiological mystery it seems once you realize that high school students spend most of their days staring at Google Slides and filling out worksheets. A student needs only so many calories when school is a crashing bore.

Khalil sidles up and stands next to me. He says nothing. I know the ways of the boys enough at this point to know it is incumbent upon neither of us to initiate conversation. Instead the conversation, whatever it is to be about, will emerge incidentally after a casual exchange of ‘sups or dabs or an undefined lapse of time.

This is what the boys do when they want to talk to me. They do not approach head-on or look me in the eye or indicate in anyway that they need to ask me something. They just cooly saunter up and stand there next to me, barely in my peripheral. It drives me crazy. Not necessarily because this reads to me as dodgy since I know in the world the boys move through the exact opposite is true. (See also, wearing hoods.)

No, it drives me crazy because it is perfectly emblematic of what can be so difficult about working with the boys. Which is that they are so blasé about what they need. They won’t tell you shit. They could have lost a leg in gym and they’d just balance on the other one next to you. A former honors student has to fail all of his classes and get into a shoving match in Global over a misplaced pencil before you learn his mom absconded to Virginia with her boyfriend over the summer, not to be heard of since. The quiet 12th grader who draws a lot lives in a shelter. The boys sometimes relay these pieces of information with an unsettling matter-of-factness that indicates not their own indifference but their youthful incomprehension of the magnitude of their trauma. What sends me back to my office with my head low lest anyone sees me with tears in my eyes is not the fact of their trauma but the knowledge that these boys will only really deal and feel the effects of it many years later. We see the explosion across the water before we feel it in our chest.

To help a boy requires the sensitivity and intuition of a horse whisperer. My ability to read them, honed after years but still not sharp enough, waxes and wanes depending on the busyness of the day and my mood and the boys’ moods and a thousand other variables that throw up noise (see above), and the pitiful irony that threatens the connection is the one that threatens all relationships: just when they need it the most I’m able to give it the least.

In this case, though, I know exactly what Khalil wants.

We haven’t found it, I tell him.

Bro, he says.

I wince and resist the urge to 1) remind him who he’s talking to and also 2) tell him don’t bro me bro it’s your fault you lost your backpack I’m the one trying to help and you don’t know how much time I have spent already this morning trying to find this thing as if I don’t have fourteen thousand other things to do you children can be just so exquisitely ungrateful sometimes it really is something and instead of standing here expressing your disappointment about how I do my job for you by. the. way. why don’t you take a quick stroll around the cafeteria where all of the students in the school are and see if you can find—

Let’s go, I say, suddenly inspired, and I’m off. After a few steps I look behind and see Khalil still standing there just staring at me.

Vamos, amigo! Let’s go! He trots after me and soon we’re side by side, briskly moving through the cafeteria.

Yo what are we doing?

We’re going to find your backpack.

He immediately gets it and falls in stride with me and we’re weaving through the crowd, two comrades on a mission. No one can stop us. He’s looking left. I’m looking right. I’m looking right. He’s looking left. No backpack escapes our scrutiny. Backpacks buried in the corners of the booths are exhumed for inspection. Students wearing backpacks are made to turn around. A group of students leaving the cafeteria for the library is briefly detained so we can inspect their backpacks first. Khalil actually holds his hand up to them, like a border guard.

We stalk through the entire cafeteria and finish our search in the 9th grade section. Along the wall I see the large boy sitting at a table with the black backpack in front of him. My hopes swell. My adrenaline spikes. Though the boy confidently stated the backpack was his I’m suddenly not so sure, and so I wait for Khalil to spot the backpack. There’s a final showdown feeling around this, an inevitability, a moment of truth — two boxers who’ve been talking trash for weeks finally stepping in the ring together. A conclusion is nigh.

Anything?

Nah.

Khalil has his hands in his pockets and looks out at the 9th graders like you might regard the available cars at a used car lot.

I look directly at the black backpack on the table and catch Khalil’s eye and pointedly look back at the backpack.

Nothing?

He shakes his head.

I give up the charade and point directly at the backpack.

Khalil, that’s not it?

Nah.

No?

Nah.

I sigh. The camaraderie is gone. We’re back to our natural states. Antagonists. Two people pulling in opposite directions toward the same goal. If he says nah one more time I’m going to scream.

That one? The black one with the silver diamond?

Nah.

He walks away.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Be patient, check in more, learn their names first, be affable, don’t take it personally, be there. . .

This, I realize, is not a search for a backpack. This is a search for truth. For what is known and not known. It is ontological. Or epistemological. Or whatever. Either way this search, by nature, then, is endless: a slow spiral downward toward THE BACKPACK which itself recedes further and further away, contingent as it is upon the answer to the question How do you know? which only invites yet more questions. This it is not so much a search as a free fall into an abyss. I have no choice but to embrace the nothingness. There is no backpack.

Liberated with this knowledge, I exhale and open my eyes just in time to see a crew of 10th grade boys simultaneously free throw apples into a trash can from 15 feet away. Most of them miss and the apples ricochet and roll in a thousand directions.

I smile like a guru and drift out of the cafeteria.

6.

When the final bell of the day rings, I am outside in front of the building.

The students stream down the stairs and out of the front gates pecking and scrolling through their phones, which they have picked up from labeled bins at the end of the day. My school has never allowed phones and in an interesting irony the metal detectors we were criticized for years ago as just another racist component of the school-to-prison pipeline have become in an entirely new way indispensable to maintaining a positive culture of learning.

A few teachers scamper out with the students and I think, You couldn’t wait 5 minutes? A few of the boys lean against the parked cars and I have the same conversation with them that I had with a different groups of boys yesterday and that I will have with a different group of boys tomorrow: Is that your car? Yeah, bro. What’s the make and model? Beemer, bro. Not in your wildest; get off of it4. Three of the girls set a phone against the gate, hit record, jump back and dance wildly. Like quick-change magicians, many of the students are already out of uniform, the boys in hoodies, the girls impossibly in black tights, a few in Crocs or slides. Among the throng of Nikes and Vans and daddish New Balances we have one iconolast who wears Hokas — a Ghanian boy named Adom — and he strides by, bidding me a droll Au revoir. More than a few of the boys still wear masks, but loosely over their chins, just a different version of a hood, a thing they use to hide themselves from the world. Students huddle in bunches at the bus stop across the street or walk slowly down the sidewalk, aimless and with no hurry; they don’t want to be in school but they don’t want to go home. A police car sits silently with its lights on at the four-way stop down the street.

From the corner of my eye I spot the large 9th grader as he trundles through the gate. He is wearing the black backpack with the silver reflective diamond. Since I have not thought of this backpack since lunch, I wince as if I’m looking at an exorbitant unpaid credit cart statement that I’d hoped would just go away.

I consider making one last ditch effort. I could make him stop and open his backpack. Just a double triple check to make double triple sure. It occurs to me that we never asked him to open the backpack. Students all of the time insist something is theirs — a jacket, a notebook — until you actually make them look at it, at which point they realize, Oh. The student recedes farther and farther down the sidewalk until he is gone.

Then Khalil and his crew walk past. They are the last of the students leaving the school. Khalil’s hands are in his pockets and he is, of course, without a backpack. I will call his mom and let her know. I will offer to pay for a new backpack. Not the worst thing in the world, but just not a good way to start the year. Stop draggin’ it, I can hear my students say. It’s not so deep.

I call out to Khalil. He turns around and is slowly walking backwards to keep up with his friends.

I’m not sure what I’m about to say but before I do he speaks.

I never had it, he says.

What?

Remembered I didn’t have it today.

I laugh nervously. Your backpack?

Forgot it at home.

You’re joking.

Nah, he says.

My mouth is open. He spins back around and catches up with his friends.

Nah. I think.

But it’s just a backpack.

Nah.

It’s despair, too.

Above image: Clifford Denim Backpack from National Museum of American History.

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Dear America’s News Editors, 

My appeal is simple: after every major school shooting, please publish graphic photos of the victim’s bodies. 

The main justification is equally simple: showing Americans unvarnished images of what actually happens when an individual walks into a school with a high-powered weapon and murders children is the only chance we have at this point to end what is this country’s preeminent shame and its most enduring crisis for the last generation. 

Refrain from running those photos you always run after a school shooting. The maudlin shots of students weeping in each other’s arms. The conga lines of children marching to safety. Those banal tableaus of schools surrounded by yellow tape and police vehicles. 

If a 10th grade boy has been shot in the chest with an AR-15, you should run the photo. 

I am aware how repugnant this idea is. I am aware that no one wants to see these images. I am aware that these photos would traumatize many people, most certainly the school community, to say nothing of the victim’s friends and family. I am also aware that publishing photographs of this nature seriously challenges the ethics and decorum of your news organizations.

(I am also aware, as no doubt you are in the wake of this weekend’s mass shooting in Texas, that if you do not publish these types of photos, some will likely find their way into the sewer system of social media where there is a greater likelihood that they will be used for malicious, lurid ends.)

But before you dismiss this idea for the above reasons (and for the reasons you have given in the past), allow me to remind you in the simplest terms what the basic facts are around school shootings in this country as it stands today: 

1. Barring a miracle, school shootings will continue indefinitely. And when you consider that 40% of the 3771 380 school shootings that have happened since Columbine have occurred since 2018, the yearly rate is likely to continue to rapidly increase. There were 11 school shootings in 2012. In 2022, there were 46. There have been 18 this year already.

2. There has been little to no progress to prevent school shootings since Columbine. If there had been, we would see fewer shootings, not more.

3. As long as we have one political party that absolutely refuses to compromise in any way on even the most no-brainer gun control measures, there will be no political solution to the problem. None. 

4. There is nothing the average American can do to end school shootings. The problem is super resistant to those regular levers of civic action — marching, petitioning, voting, social media-ing — in a way no other American problem is. 

5. Americans have become indifferent or numb. The frequency of school shootings plays a large role here, but your method of covering school shootings has become formulaic, which in turn produces within news consumers the same cycle of emotions after every shooting: shock, grief, anger, and soon thereafter, detachment. And many people simply see the large type headlines and go straight to detachment.  

Thus, since there are no other solutions, nothing anyone else can do, and you and you alone have the means to publish these photos in an ethical manner, you, news editors, are obligated to obtain crime scene photos of the victims of school shootings — especially children — and publish them for the public to see. 

This is a prisoner’s dilemma, no doubt, but whatever we lose or risk by the publication of these photos is far preferable to the alternative, which is permitting another 25 years of child murder. 

And after all, you have made this decision before:

In 1955 you published a photo of the mutilated face of Emmett Till as he lay in his casket in Chicago. 

In 1968 you published a photo of the public execution as it happened of Nguyen Van Lem in Vietnam.

In 1972 you published a photo of a naked and screaming 9-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi — known as “Napalm Girl” — as she fled a napalm attack in Vietnam. 

In 1994 you published a photo of a vulture stalking a starving child during a famine in Sudan.

In 1995 you published a photo of 1-year-old Baylee Almon’s bloodied body as firefighter Chris Fields held her in his arms after the Oklahoma City bombing. 

In 1999, you published a photo of 15-year-old Daniel Rohrbough lying dead on the sidewalk outside Columbine High School.

In 2004 you published multiple images of torture from the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq. 

In 2015, you published a photo of the drowned body of 2-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi after he washed up on a Turkish beach. 

In 2019, you published a photo of the drowned bodies of Salvadoran migrants Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 2-year-old daughter lying facedown on banks of the Rio Grande after they attempted to cross into the United States. 

And there is also, who could forget, the videos of George Floyd and Rodney King. 

The existence of these photos in the historical record refutes two arguments that I have read against publishing graphic photographs of school shooting victims. First, that it wouldn’t make a difference. Perhaps, but doubtful. Even still, without getting too deep into the weeds about what making a difference actually looks like and how you would measure it — marches? new laws? greater charitable donations? — it is hard to deny the emotional impact these images had by presenting to Americans what had been up until that point withheld from public view: the violence and dehumanization at the core of the photo’s respective crisis or emergency.

It is one thing to read the descriptions of school shootings, like this one from an AP story about the day jurors in the Parkland shooting trial were shown images from the massacre — “photos of bodies inside classrooms included one boy bent backward over his seat, his body almost forming a U-shape. Blood pooled beneath him.” — and it’s another thing entirely to see those photos.

Americans deserve to know what it looks like when (also from that story) “one girl had her head blown open, while another had the front of her right shoulder blade missing” and until we do, we are unable to have an informed debate about school shootings, and we cannot have an informed debate without the truth. Your core principle is revealing the truth. Such photos, however horrific, are the truth. Give us the truth. 

Which brings me to the second argument: that publishing graphic photos dehumanizes and disrespects the victims. I am not so cavalier that I cannot acknowledge there is a meaningful difference between the photo of a body mutilated by bullets and the photo of a drowned body, but in the range of photos above I cannot locate a coherent set of guidelines or even so much as a rule of thumb for what should be published and what should not. The decisions to publish those graphic photos appear to depend on a case-by-case calculation that factors in the ethnicity, nationality, gender and age of the victim, the location and time of the tragedy, the “type” of tragedy, and, of course, the aesthetics of the picture itself. I’m not criticizing this. But to dismiss out of hand publishing photos of school shooting victims because they are too gory or disturbing is contradicted by your previous editorial decisions. 

But beyond that, knowing what you know about what those photos have come to mean for our collective memory and the historical record would still argue that their publication dehumanized or disrespected the victims? If anything, the photos redeemed the victims and rescued their tragedy (and other’s) from a meaningless obscurity that so many human beings, caught in the pinions of history, are banished to while the rest of us continue to scroll or order in. Those photos turned each of those individuals from a statistic into an actual human being with a name that we can read, say and remember. 

Who among us can readily name even one victim of a single school shooting? And who among us can name at least one shooter? 

From an educator’s standpoint, the conversations you have with each other around the ethics and necessity of covering school shootings are infuriating to witness. A large part of that is how little (meaning, zero) agency educators have despite the disproportionate influence school shootings have on our psyches and profession.

I doubt few people who work in schools walk in every day fearful of a shooting, but I also doubt there are equally few for whom it is not far from their mind.

You find yourself scrutinizing the “weird” kid’s work. You pause a nanosecond longer after you hear a loud noise in the hall. You “laugh” when people ask you if you wear a bulletproof vest to school. You can’t even find the words when someone asks if you think teachers should be armed. You find yourself wondering where you could hide in your classroom. And in your darkest moments, you think about your own child and then wonder how far you would go to protect your students. 

I do not know of an educator who would not admit to thinking about at least some of these things.

Yet you tell us school shootings are exceedingly rare. That 99% of gun deaths in the U.S. are not school shootings, that most don’t involve semi-automatic rifles, and that most school shootings aren’t mass shootings anyway. (That the “rare” argument unwittingly lends credence to the delusional conservative position that guns aren’t the problem, culture is — and so ipso facto if it just so happens we have a few school shootings each year, then, well, it’s the school’s fault since they missed the red flags — simply adds insult to injury.) 

So we teach your children and hold our breaths waiting for the next school shooting and when it happens seethe at the depraved, ineffectual responses from lawmakers and numbly read the cut-and-paste coverage that, a quarter century on, has inured all of us to this shameful crisis that has left hundreds of children dead, and with certain death awaiting many, many more.

I can’t say specifically what will happen if you chose to publish graphic images from school shootings. Maybe enough Republican lawmakers would say enough is enough. Maybe the images would trigger a nationwide school walkout. Maybe more states will hold more frequent gun buybacks. Maybe the pictures would inspire a rash of copycats. Maybe video games companies would agree to tone down the violence. Two weeks ago I saw an otherwise very nice seeming father at the beach with his wife and two young daughters and was appalled to see that he was wearing a baseball hat with the silhouette of an AR-15 emblazoned over an American flag — maybe seeing on the website of his local newspaper what that weapon did to a child’s body his daughters’ age would help him see his gun idolatry for what it is — silly, paranoid, dangerous. And maybe, just maybe, he would say enough is enough.

Or maybe nothing will happen at all. 

But I doubt that. 

End our nightmare. 

Publish those photos. 

With respect,

Cafeteria Duty

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Above image: The Cry, Peter Hoag, 1955, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Last weekend, I was sitting at a coffee shop waiting for a friend when I noticed the teenager sitting at the table next to me was using ChatGPT to complete his Spanish homework. One by one he typed in the questions from the worksheet (Dónde está mi coche?) and then typed in the answer he needed (My car is near the hospital) and ChatGPT instantaneously spit out the answer in Spanish. 

In 5 minutes he was done and then he watched a music video.

Dumbass, I thought.  

But I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about his teacher, who I suspected would collect that work and return it with a check plus or muy bueno or whatever without having any idea that the student cheated, or if they had an inkling so, wouldn’t care. Yes, it’s entirely possible his teacher had devised a grading system that weighted homework far less than quizzes and tests, but in my years of confiscating work from huddled groups of students in the cafeteria and then later asking their teacher for work’s rationale given how eminently copyable the work was, that is rarely the case. 

And that is because too many students and teachers enter into an unspoken treaty we might call “mutually assured mediocrity” wherein as long as students basically follow directions and do the work that the teachers assign, teachers don’t ask too many questions. (It is this treaty that also gives us powerpoints, worksheets, stale curriculum, and group work for the sake of group work.) 

To be fair, teaching is intellectually, physically and emotionally exhausting to a degree few if any other jobs are, and it is that fact alone which explains why on the one hand teacher happy hours often resemble the first night of Rumspringa and on the other why even stupendous teachers allow their standards to occasionally slip.

Maintaining high expectations requires vigilance and stamina, and, what’s more, it is often a crashing bore.

Who among us hasn’t whispered fuck it as the next episode of Home Improvement Stranger Things autoplays and decided to wing the next day’s lessons? Who among us hasn’t been so tuckered out by the hamster wheel of planning-teaching-grading that, rather than grade the pile of student work on our desk, we’ve simply dropped it all in the trash? Few forms of malfeasance are as fun, and “A for effort” is more of a lifeboat for teachers than students.

So I get why teachers, noble thieves as they are, are also great corner-cutters and often gullible early adopters, eager to jump for any app or acronymic idea that promises to reduce their workload while achieving the same (or better!) results. 

Which is exactly why ChatGPT is a blessing for education. 

Now, most of the responses to this artificial intelligence tool have ranged from fatalism1 — “AI is the End of Writing;” “The End of High-School English” — to chipper accommodation — “No, ChatGPT Is Not the End of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers;” “Don’t Ban ChatGPT: Use It As a Teaching Tool” — to breathtaking ignorance about how students learn and what students need — “Socrates Never Wrote a Term Paper;” “Beneath the AI Hype;” “Don’t Ban Chatbots in Classrooms -- Use Them to Change How We Teach.” 

But there’s another response to ChatGPT that I haven’t really heard anyone else say: just ignore it. 

All arguments about what happens at school are essentially arguments about the purpose of school. So it seems critical to point out that in this year of our lord 2023 in these United States of America one of schools’ most basic responsibilities is to be both a citadel and a monastery — a place whose values and practices are a both a shield and a rebuke to the erosion of manners, common sense and mental health hastened by the rapid social, technological and environmental change that has not only normalized public displays of anger, idiocy and Crocs, but also inured us to the shameful rates of depression, suicide, addiction, loneliness and gun violence that would require you to be willfully dumb or stony-hearted not to be seriously worried about, or in the very least recognize are the dreadful consequences of the modern, materialistic, convenience-obsessed society we have built for ourselves.  

And though it is unfortunate that it has become passé to trumpet such old-fashioned virtues as diligence, kindness, humility, and erudition (among others), most people would quickly agree that those are precisely the traits they desire for their own children and welcome in their neighbors and would certainly appreciate a greater abundance of at airports. But what are we to do when the larger popular and political culture aggrandizes the exact opposite of those values and treats those who embody or promote them with contempt? What are we to do when bitching about manners and punctuality elicits eye rolls at the Christmas party? When questioning why any toddler needs an iPad or whether TikTok is the new Phillip Morris exposes you as, at best, a killjoy and, at worst, a prig?

It has been left to schools, then, to batten down the hatches and double down on those practices we know best improves students’ academics and in turn cultivates their character.

And it is educators, then, who must stand as sturdy and solemn as a sentry at the schoolhouse door and hold up their hands to say No thank you to every gewgaw and “innovation” and corrosive distraction the outside world tries to smuggle in under the auspices of equipping kids with “21st century skills” and for which we have seen time and time and time again have not, in fact, made our jobs of teaching children easier, and have not, in fact, made those children more literate or numerate. In some cases, they have had precisely the opposite effect.

It is teachers, then, who must continue to teach writing. But the old fashioned way.

To be sure, this is not easy (it never has been), and it will only get harder as AI continues to advance, and though ChatGPT is simply the latest iteration of a technology that both complicates teaching and makes us ponder the whole point of it all, it is not, as has been suggested, a death blow for that lovely old biddy, the 5-paragraph essay, and nor is it something we need to adapt to, like rising sea levels or a new missing limb. 

What’s more, shoehorning ChatGPT into our instruction for the novelty of it or because it makes things easier will not “transform” or “revolutionize” teaching, as many gleeful but naive educators have declared. Rather, it will simply fool teachers into believing they can sidestep the meat and potatoes of good writing instruction and achieve the same results when in reality they’d be depriving students of the academic and character-forming benefits that slowly accrete from the mastery and refinement of tiny, necessarily tedious skills like where commas go, or how to cite evidence, or when the word “famished” is better than “hungry” (and when it’s not).

It’s the journey, not the destination and in the wise words of Daisy Christodoulou: “if we want students to have advanced skills, they cannot leapfrog fundamental skills.” 

So, let’s ignore ChatGPT.

Let’s continue to do what we know works best in writing instruction, no matter the age you teach and no matter the subject. (Yes, all teachers are also English teachers.)

Make students write every day in class, both for learning and for assessment, for low stakes and for high stakes, for short periods and for long periods. Ensure that writing is mostly in response to rich texts that students have carefully read and talked about. (Them, not you.) Make sure some writing is timed, but ensure most is process (i.e. plan, draft, revise.) Write prompts that span genres, grow increasingly complex, and which build off previously taught skills. Give students scaffolds2 that you eventually remove. Assign more writing than you could possibly read. Give individual and class-wide feedback, but Jesus God do not write comments on even half of what they write. Conference. Use rubrics and checklists. Teach students to proofread and then refuse to accept anything that isn’t. Use models to teach, as well as direct instruction, and when possible, write every single thing the students do. 

Learning how to write well is the single most difficult academic skill students learn in school. It also just so happens to be the best, most efficient, and most scalable method for engaging students in rigorous work that cultivates thinking and, yes, improves their character. 

If schools insist on teaching writing, and teaching it the right way, it might just save us from ourselves.

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Above image: Vince Crash Dummy Costume Head, 1990s, National Museum of American History.

At the beginning of the month, education website The 74 published a story by Joshua Bay with the following headline:

The new data is from a report published by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in October.

Meanwhile, these are the headlines from NPR’s All Things Considered, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Axios, and Forbes, who also ran stories on that report: 

Notice the difference?

Same data, different lens. None of those stories mention the female drop in enrollment. Not because it’s wrong -- female freshmen did in fact decline at the rate of 3.2% vs. male freshman’s 1.3% since last fall -- but because it doesn’t show readers the whole picture, which isn’t half as bleak for women as The 74’s story declares. 

Here are the reasons why, in no particular order of importance.

Mind the Gaps

The NSCRC report only reflects enrollments at 62% of post-secondary institutions in 42 states. State by state, the volume of reporting varies quite a bit, too. California includes data from only 47% of its schools. New York, 66%. Texas, 70%. Florida, 60%. Virginia, 74%. Ohio, 80%. Also worth mentioning: there are 101 Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S. This report includes data from just 28 of them. 

The limited coverage of the data is not so limited as to obviate the data’s conclusions, but it bears mentioning if fully one-third of schools are omitted from the data . . . and if state reporting varies as much as it does . . . and if enrollment info from two-thirds of HBCUs are absent. Otherwise readers are left with the false impression that this data is comprehensive and thus The Truth.

Freshmen enrollment is not the same as overall enrollment

This female drop in enrollment is for freshmen enrollment, and the NSCRC data distinguishes overall enrollments from freshmen enrollment.

Freshmen enrollment fell across the board and, yes, the female freshman rate declined 3.2% vs 1.3% for men, but overall enrollment slowed to pre-pandemic rates. (College enrollment has been declining since 2012.) Additionally, when you widen the time window to compare fall ‘20 to fall ‘22, and slice up the data by institution selectivity, the enrollment disparity almost entirely disappears: “highly selective” public and private schools, “very competitive” public schools and “competitive” public schools actually saw greater declines in male enrollment. 

More women still attend college than men

Nevertheless, the overall enrollment rate for men between this fall and last fall fell 0.7%. For women, it fell 3.2%, which is three times the rate of men -- even greater than the freshmen enrollment decline.  

This seems to confirm The 74’s headline, yes? But these numbers obscure three basic facts about the gender dynamics of college that The 74 for some reason omits: 

1. Colleges lost more men at the beginning of the pandemic than women.

2. Over the long term men are skipping college at a faster rate than women.

3. Most importantly, far more women attend college than men. At last count, 58% of undergraduate students were female and 42% were men. (See figure.)

This discrepancy holds true across all race/ethnicity groups that the U.S. Department of Education identifies, and here’s a fact I’d wager most people aren’t aware of: there are now more Black female undergraduates and Hispanic female undergraduates than white male undergraduates. No, not combined. (See figure.)

When viewed in this context, the recent drop in women’s enrollment does not exactly, as the story declares, put women’s “long term economic security” at risk (especially when they are matriculating at faster rates at super competitive schools.) 

The dip is an aberration, not a pattern, and the article ignores the laudable progress women have made in education over the last 50 years. Pick almost any measure of achievement at any level -- reading levels, attendance, graduation rates -- and you will find women succeeding at higher rates than males, or rapidly on their way to closing the gap. 

The 74’s story ignores this by dramatizing the enrollment disparity with an interview with a female undergraduate at Texas A & M majoring in engineering who “discovered that only a fraction of her classmates were female.” As a result, she struggled in her classes.

Men are overrepresented in STEM fields. This is a fact. But, as Richard Reeves points out in his excellent 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, a decades-long push to achieve gender parity in those fields has been a remarkable success, with “women now account[ing] for 36% of all undergraduate degrees in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.” 

This isn’t total parity, but consider that, in 1970, women were a paltry 8% of all STEM workers. Quite impressive progress.

This alone does not nor should not negate any discomfort the Texas student felt in her engineering classes, but to use her story to corroborate an already specious claim is, quite frankly, emotionally manipulative.   

Statistics are snapshots. Focusing on individual numbers alone, without context, leaves the reader with false impressions which, in this case, masks the stunning progress we’ve made closing the gender achievement gap since we passed Title IX in 1972. 

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Bright spots

Lastly, The 74 ignores the good news nestled in the enrollment data. If you look close enough, this is what you’ll find: 

• Enrollment in degree certification programs is up. 

• Community colleges saw the smallest decline, with a rate of 0.04%. 

• Enrollment at HBCUs grew 6%. (But remember, fewer than a third of HBCUs reported data, so this could be much higher.)

• Enrollment among Hispanic students increased. 

• Enrollment among 18-20 year-olds increased. 

A few of the other outlets make note of these in passing, but you have to read pretty far down. You could picture any number of positive headlines resulting from these bright spots -- COLLEGE ENROLLMENT DECLINE SLOWING; NON-TRADITIONAL STUDENTS GROW or NEW ENROLLMENT DATA SHOWS PROMISING NEW TRENDS DESPITE DECLINES -- but only the Wall Street Journal’s headlines finds the silver lining. 

The stories are not only (yet more) evidence of journalism’s tiresome negativity bias but also its blinkered view on post-secondary education pathways. The unstated assumption in these stories is that a bachelor’s degree obtained on a campus with well-kept lawns is superior to any number of alternatives that many students and their families now prefer (or only have available to them) and which, more importantly, the labor market has been begging for. (Read this for more on that, but briefly: most jobs don’t require a B.A. and many that do actually shouldn’t; it is no longer guaranteed that a B.A. results in higher wages; college costs too much fucking money.)

Declining enrollments may look like bad news if you’re a provost, but to believe that an individual is destined for a life of privation if they forgo a traditional B.A. is as snobby as it is ill-informed. 

Beyond that, stories like The 74’s that eschew context, cherry pick data and disregard positive trends create false narratives that confirm the pessimistic view that the world is bad and getting worse. Education stories that spin data or isolate single statistics to overstate or misrepresent achievement gaps treat academic achievement like a zero sum game. This runs the risk of vindicating readers’ beliefs about society’s greatest injustices.

It’s also not overstating the case to say such stories incite tribal resentments at the exact moment when, thank the good lord in heaven above, they appear to be ebbing in this country. As Reeves points out in his book, conservatives will tell you there’s a war on boys while liberals will tell you there’s a war on girls, and depending on where you get your news, it’s not terribly difficult to find a story that confirms the position you most hold true. 

Girls’ outstanding success in education over the past 50 years has not come at the expense of boys. Neither does it appear to be in jeopardy.

We do not have to rob Peter in order to teach Paul(a). Stories that give that impression are irresponsible, and stories which claim that a brief dip in enrollment puts women in peril are inaccurate.

Above image: Young Woman's Graduation Photograph. 1905. Smithsonian.

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“Boring.” 

That’s what I say when people ask me how this school year is going. 

Are things back to normal? How are the kids? How’s school? 

“For the most part.” 

“Just fine.” 

“Boring.” 

At first glance, it’s as unbelievable to me as it is disappointing. Unbelievable because the 2021-2022 school year was such a footslog of malaise, anger, obstinance, doubt, policy farce and hygiene theater that even the cheeriest of teachers carried on as if they had a gun pointed at their head. 

“Normal” had become so mythical it may as well have been Eden. But that’s all educators wanted: normal. 

Eden, though, was an idyll, and the “normal” we thought we wanted we didn’t really want, we were repeatedly told. No, no. Not a week went by that educators weren’t reminded by people who wrote and thought about schools (but didn’t work in schools) that “normal” had not been working. The pandemic had exposed too many problems in American public schools. I won’t recite them here. To want “normal” was wrong. Unethical, even. 

What we actually wanted -- and needed -- was change. 

That a feasible S.M.A.R.T. goal does not exist for American public schools and that that fact itself partly explains our perennial disappointment in our schools is the subject of a different essay, but fine, on this we could all agree: American public schools fucked up. Mishandled the pandemic. Dropped the ball. Blew it.

And in an era of rancorous discord that reached its apotheosis in the middle of the pandemic, there was comfort in knowing even the neighbor with the yard sign you hated felt the same way you did about both your kid’s school. The one thing that unites Americans, Mark Twain once wrote, is our fondness for ice water. To that I’d also add “bitching about our schools.” 

But change was coming, we were assured. 

From the ashes of the pandemic we would see a “new approach” to schooling. 

The pandemic had “open[ed] a door for significant reforms that would disrupt decades or century-old practices and rituals.” 

We were at a “hinge moment in the history of our schools.” 

We had a “once-in-a-century” -- no, “once-in-a-millenium” -- opportunity “to reinvent our system of education.” (Emphasis not mine.) 

There was even a book dedicated to this entire idea, titled From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School for Every Child, that called “for the overthrow” of our schools.

Exciting stuff. 

What would these new schools look like? What would the kids learn? If you walked into a random classroom during 2nd period on a Tuesday what would the kids actually be doing? Would there even be a “2nd period” in this radical new future? 

Matter of fact, isn’t a classroom itself another relic of the pre-pandemic past? Do we need walls? What is a “classroom,” really? 

Wait, no, actually, we need classrooms because the fact that kids weren’t in classrooms is one of the reasons why math and reading scores plummeted. So, for now, let’s at least stick to teaching reading and math in classrooms. And supplement it with … tutoring. Yes, tutoring. But other than that? !Viva la innovación!

I kid. Kinda. 

I would be lying if I didn’t admit I was also eager for change. How could you not be? Even the most only-17-days-until-spring-break! kind of teacher stumbled out of the pandemic willing to slaughter a few sacred cows.

So what happened? This year is definitely not marked by radical change. Not much is different at all. 

In fact, the year feels a bit like that scene at the end of the war movie where the veterans, at last home safe, shop for groceries, make copies at work, watch TV with their girlfriend. But they wear a distant look. In spite of the unspeakable danger they faced on tour, they still miss the action, the brotherhood, the clear sense of purpose. They go about their everyday business and think Is this it? 

I doubt there’s a single student, teacher, administrator, custodian, school safety agent, secretary, paraprofessional, school aide, guidance counselor, social worker, school nurse and cafeteria worker who hasn’t found themselves at least once this year bent over a routine task quietly asking Why am I doing this again? 

To be sure, chronic absenteeism is a big problem this year, but claims that students are balls of anxiety struggling to readjust are overblown. 

The malaise and absenteeism is less a manifestation of trauma as it is the student version of quiet quitting. Students are hungry for purpose, but are as skeptical as ever that it’s to be found in the drudgery of 45-minute classes, five days a week. 

This is not particular to America’s schools, by the way, and it partly explains why hundreds of thousands of men have opted out of the workforce, why every industry is desperate for workers overall, why college enrollment continues to decline, and why “meritocracy” has become a dirty word.  

So, yes, the school year is kind of boring, pretty much normal, and I’m completely okay with that for now. All it takes is hearing “You’re muted…” to remind me of the miseries of Zoom school, and that those exceeded any excitement from its novelty and the noble satisfaction that came from educators’ clear sense of purpose during that time.

I only wish there was more of a recognition among the education media and the wonkocracy that for the time being this is where a lot of schools need to be, away from the inexorable churn of reforms. Far from suggesting that American public schools are above accountability, or that educators are so “exhausted” or “traumatized” to do their jobs, it is nevertheless worth mentioning that journalism’s inclination for negativity and novelty, to say nothing of a business model that incentivizes melodrama, will always prevent that DOG BITES MAN story from being written. 

Beyond that, our disagreement about what the purpose of our schools is; our stubborn adherence to the Education Gospel; and the shifting needs of a society dramatically reordered by social media, automation and major demographic shifts means that it is nearly impossible for public schools to ever live up to their promises. 

But “boring” isn’t always bad. Boring can be fine. If they look close enough, journalists might find an interesting story worth telling. 

And even more, “boring” may just allow schools the space to try to live up to their promises, however impossible they may seem.

Above image: Stephen Shore; Clinton, Oklahoma, July 1972. At the Tate.

There has been an exodus of families from public schools, we are told. Total enrollment this year is down 1.2 million students from 2020, with projected declines into 2030. Though declining birthrates appear to be the likeliest culprit, media reporting can’t help speculate about other possible reasons: mask mandates, prolonged remote instruction, they/them/their, and a right-wing campaign to delegitimize public schools. 

The anxiety coursing through the coverage is palpable, and it can feel like if you’re reading another story about the ever-shrinking Siberian tundra.

No essay evinces this anxiety more than Anya Kamenetz’s “Public School is For Everyone,” part of the Times’ “What is School For?” series they published at the beginning of the month.

Kamenetz’s argument is straightforward and familiar to anyone who’s gone through a teacher’s ed program: public schools unite Americans and are literally where democracy starts. As “hubs of togetherness,” public schools are “where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.” But their existence is under threat, Kamenetz warns. The pandemic reminded Americans how vital public schools were but also weakened their trust in them. This has only “emboldened a movement on the right that has for more than half a century sought to dismantle public education and the idea that Americans from diverse backgrounds should learn alongside one another.” Irate parents are yanking their kids out of local schools all over the country and, according to Kamenetz, this puts our democracy on life support: “If we lose public education, flawed as it is, the foundations of our democracy will slip. Not only the shared knowledge base but also the skills of citizenship itself: communication, empathy and compromise across differences.”

But how true is this? What is it specifically about public schools that make them more vital to democracy than, say, parochial schools? Is it the very fact that they just are public schools? Or is it their curriculum? Is it the demographics of their student body? Just how meaningfully different are public schools from non-public schools? What percentage of kids need to attend public schools in order to ensure our democracy persists?

I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions, but I do think they’re worth asking, however blasphemous they may first appear.

And full disclosure before I attempt to answer at least a few: I do not live on Park Avenue and send my child to Dalton. I am also not a Libertarian, or a school choice hawk, or a father pissed off that his kid’s school kept the mask mandate for too long or started teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre. Rather, I attended public schools, proudly draw my paycheck from one and always will, and am of the admittedly cynical opinion that many private or religious schools basically exist to satisfy parents’ status anxieties or provide cover for their race and class prejudices.

And yet. 

There was something about Kamenetz’s essay that didn’t feel true, and it left me wondering whether the claim that public schools are the “crucible of democracy” is actually little more than a bromide — at least in 2022 — and if all the handwringing about the general fitness of American public schools post-pandemic is yet another example of adults projecting their own anxieties about the condition of our country onto our schools (see also: every single book ban or curriculum fight ever, sex education, Sputnik, transgender bathrooms) and, in doing so, choosing to wield schools as tools to achieve their own desired political and social ends. And, at least in this case, the anxiety about public schools’ rosters distracts us from what actually matters, which is not where our students learn but that they learn, and in a manner that allows them to actually flourish and not just satisfy our own outdated notions of what a student should be.

To begin with, let’s take the premise that our public schools, with their spectacular diversity, prepare students to “learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.” I very much wish this were true, but, sadly, most American public schools are by no accounting diverse.

A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that one third of students attended schools in which 75% of the students were one race or ethnicity, and 15% attended schools where 90% of students were one race or ethnicity. A recent report from Stanford and the University of California found that, in spite of the growing overall diversity of our K-12 student population, school segregation has increased in the last 30 years, most especially in the largest 100 districts, which educate 40% of all public school students. And not by a little, either: economic segregation grew by 50% since 1991, and white-black segregation grew by 35%.

There is no place where this is more true than New York City, which despite its exceptional diversity, has the most segregated school district in the country. My own personal experience bears this out: in my ten years here, I’ve had two white students and zero wealthy or even upper-middle class students in spite of the fact that my school is blocks from multi-million dollar brownstones and grand mansions.

I have little doubt that public schools, on average, are probably more racially and socio-economically diverse than private or religious schools, but to claim they are “hubs of togetherness” in the racial and socio-economic sense is false, and to imply that parents who pull their kids from public schools are putting our democracy at risk by contributing to the atomization of our country fails to acknowledge that the homogenization of public schools isn’t just happening across districts — which suggests residential patterns heavily influenced by regional economic forces — it’s happening within districts, i.e. at the neighborhood level, which suggests that public school parents, even proudly progressive ones, quite skillfully deviously play the game of school choice in order to secure the “best” school for their kids. 

So while we should very much worry about the composition of our public schools, it’s not because the marvelous diversity of Roosevelt Elementary supposedly prepares students for the marvelous diversity of American society. That’s a platitude, and platitudes exist to affirm the virtuous beliefs we have about ourselves.

Rather, we should be foremost concerned with the more immediate consequences of segregated schools, which is that they widen the achievement gap for poor students and students of color, who are often left to languish in schools of concentrated poverty.

Running beneath the surface of Kamenetz’s essay is a critique of conservative parents. I am not wont to defend a group of people who are more frightened of books than guns, but those in glass houses. 

Second, with the exception of orthodox religious schools and off-the-wall progressive schools, what and how students learn in non-public schools is not terribly different than what and how they learn in public schools.

School is school is school is school.

With regards to curriculum, even though laws governing private schools differ from state to state, granting private schools significant leeway in what they teach, most are required to provide an education that is comparable to that of public schools. Even still, there is broad agreement that for K-12 education, a liberal arts education is ideal. Math, science, English, history, the arts, etc.

It’s so commonplace we don’t even question it, but if there are any schools you know of that eschew the 3 R’s for training young boys in the Spartan art of war, please email me here.

And though there might be disagreement from time to time about which aspects of American history we should teach or what books students should read in their English classes, the hysterical coverage of those disputes dramatically overestimates how much of an impact the inclusion or exclusion of a book or historical event or perspective has on an overall curriculum and on students’ learning. Some of this has to do with the staggering amount of content teachers are expected to cover (ask a U.S. history teacher how many class periods they spend on the Depression), but some of it also has to with the fact that as students grow older school becomes so stultifyingly dull that they barely know what’s happening in their classes. (More on that in a sec.)

Which is all to say that there are not competing doctrines of history or math or science (Creationism notwithstanding) we indoctrinate our students into the way there are competing doctrines of religion. A student who graduates from Concordia Preparatory School will not graduate with a significantly different understanding of U.S. history than a student who has graduated from Jemez Valley High School.

And in terms of how students are taught, studies large and larger have confirmed not just the sameness of American classrooms from one to the next, but also from one era to the next, which, unfortunately, means lots of “teacher talk,” as educators refer to it, and lots of students sitting a lot at desks, passively receiving information, bored to tears. Though most of those studies focused on public school, there’s no reason to suspect private or religious schools are exceptions to the rule since they tend to be more traditional in their curriculum and pedagogy.

To parents, a school’s philosophy or facilities or whether the kids wear uniforms or not may meaningfully differentiate it (to them) from the next school, but the broad contours of what school is as we’ve conceived it — age-graded classrooms, discrete subjects taught as such, credit accumulation based on seat time, teacher-centered instruction — determine what happens in classrooms more than any other factor and, in fact, have created a model of education so durable that no innovation (computers, e.g.) or reform (pick one) has really changed it all that much. Your grandma’s classroom probably wouldn’t look different from your kid’s and, what’s more, neither do the ones in private schools.

Ultimately, there’s but so much you can do when you’re responsible for teaching algebra to 27 students four days a week for 48 minutes at time for ten months out of the year, and every teacher comes to realize just how tight the restraints are when they experiment with various classroom set ups (stations, group work, project-based learning, etc.) or change schools or revamp their curriculum because they went to a workshop over the summer about trauma-informed teaching. Further constraints include non-teaching duties, instructional mandates from on high, teacher evaluations, and pressures for students to excel on external assessments (state tests, AP exams, etc.). These constraints exist for most teachers everywhere, and if not these exactly, then others, like pushy parents or a broken copier, which equally limit what you can and can’t do in a classroom.

School, basically, is Taco Bell: the same 5 ingredients, combined in almost infinite ways, yet still producing basically the same thing.

To take the wide socio-historical view, if there is another way to teach large groups of children year after year so that they can eventually function as adults and contribute to society, non-public schools aren’t doing it, and as far I know, another way doesn’t exist. Even classrooms in North Korea look like ours. They may learn their Great Leader was a god, but they also learn how to build bridges, too.

Essays panicking about the robustness of our public schools make the same mistake that endorsements of school choice do: both believe that the health and direction of our country will be largely determined by where our students sit. To some extent this is true, but not for the reasons Kamenetz fears, for the breach between public schools and non-public schools is not so wide as to create students who lack a “common reality,” and can’t speak to each other, or understand each other’s differences, and anyone who doesn’t believe in vaccination, or that Trump actually won in 2020, didn’t learn that in any school, and nor was their idiocy encouraged at one. Quite the contrary.

What’s of greater concern is the antiquated, academic-centric, one-size-fits-all education model that almost all our schools, public or not, still adhere to and which largely demands that our students sit hour after hour filling out worksheets or passively listen to adults talk. Course loads are mostly the same from Maine to California, though no one has ever convincingly explained to me why every single student needs to take algebra, or even why taking algebra supposedly makes you a better citizen than taking an HVAC class does. Other questions worthy of our concern and of greater consequence than whether students are in public school or not are why we still have a credit system based on seat time, or why so much learning has to happen at school (as opposed to at a hospital, or a factory, or an aquarium), or even between the hours of 8 and 3, or why every student needs the 12th grade, or why, knowing what we know about how critical early-childhood education is, we don’t just start schooling at 3. Or 2. Or 1.

The fate of our democracy depends less on the politics of where kids sit than on the how and what of what they learn, no matter where it is they learn.

Above image: “Afternoon Break, St. Elizabeth’s School.” Linda Rich. 1975. Smithsonian American Art Museum,

In the March edition of Commentary, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a well-known education writer, has a long essay called “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” As you might guess from the title, it’s not exactly a pick-me-up. 

He paints a dire portrait of American childhood today, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Social and political upheaval, rapid technological change, a global pandemic — these alone do not make growing up in 2022 such a drag.

Au contraire, Pondiscio’s own childhood growing up on Long Island in the 1960s was “marked by levels of domestic unrest and political violence that in retrospect stagger the imagination” — assassinations, war, race riots, terrorism — and still, the adults “seemed in charge and mostly competent.”

Today? Not so much. Everything is better, but we’ve made it worse for kids. “As adults and educators, we are not merely failing in our responsibility to be a reassuring presence in [children’s] lives,” he writes, “we seem perversely determined to normalize and even valorize their despair.”

Pondiscio has a real ax to grind with American schools. It is no longer a given that the United States “is a force for good in the world or an engine of freedom and prosperity.” No, “school culture seem[s] nearly to revel in the bad and the broken, suggesting to children that they have suffered the great misfortune to have been born into a country that is racist to its core, whose founding documents were lies when written, and where democracy is hanging by a thread.” This, he labels as the “pedagogy of the depressed” and it is “creating a generation of overwhelmed young people paralyzed into learned helplessness.”  

Pondiscio supports his thesis with the usual targets of conservative contempt (critical race theory, youth activism), along with a few unexpected ones (YA literature, the Parkland students), some impressive deep cuts (Paulo Freire, the National Council for Teachers of English), and a few bipartisan targets, just for good measure (excessive testing, the pandemic).

And he’s such an effective prose stylist, and writes with such persuasion and authority, that I suspect, like me, you might nearly miss it when he sneaks his solution to all of this past you, and which, it turns out, seems to be the entire raison d'être of his piece: “We see intriguing hints that parents are more willing than they have been historically to question their long-standing ties to public schools, and they may be searching for more edifying and enriching options for their children’s education.”

In other words, school choice. More charter schools, more Catholic schools, more homeschooling. Don’t make public schools better, give parents more choices.

You know, like a supermarket.

Pondiscio concedes that the recent decline in enrollments in district schools “may mostly be a reflection of new patterns of mobility driven by Covid.” But in the same breath he makes it clear that what he actually hopes is that they are more in “response to [a] long-festering dissatisfaction with the status quo in education and an inchoate sense that something is off about it.”

“A large and growing number of Americans,” he writes in the conclusion, “are either seeking or at least open to alternatives to the cultural habit of traditional public education as we have long known it. They want something different for their children.”

Perhaps. 

First, I will admit that I happen to agree with a bit of what Pondiscio writes in his essay, namely, that American schools need a hard “reset.” I just happen to disagree with this solution. As a fix for school quality or narrowing achievement gaps, school choice belongs in the graveyard with those other Reform-era ideas we were oversold on: smaller schools, stricter teacher evaluations, aggressive testing, obsessive accountability.

However, that’s not the most disappointing aspect of this essay. What’s most disappointing is that Pondiscio misidentifies what is most responsible for warping American childhood. It is not a philosophy of schooling dominated by leftist ideas. It’s not a generalized failure on adults’ part to play a “reassuring role” in children’s lives.  

It’s social media1. 

And yet, Pondiscio grants only two sentences to the possibility that social media might play an important role here.

Why?

I have no doubt that, like most people, he understands social media is a net bad for most kids. I have less doubt, however, since he does not work in a school and does not witness day after day (and year after year) the compounding negative effects of excessive social media use across hundreds of kids, that he truly understands the extent and reach of its harm — how swiftly and ruthlessly it undoes almost every single thing schools are designed to do (and often do very well.)

I don’t think it’s wild to surmise that most teachers, administrators, deans and guidance counselors would agree that Instagram et al. are at the origin of most beefs, meltdowns, and the generalized malaise pervading so many classrooms (to say nothing of how utterly impossible it is to get students to do homework anymore.)

And the panic and nausea most educators felt starting this school year was not only due to the uncertainty we were certain the pandemic would bring— it was also due to the knowledge that teens’ screen time had doubled to almost 8 hours a day.

To be sure, the “Kids Are Not Alright” genre of essay is nothing new, and Pondiscio’s entry makes the same mistake as most of the others, which is that it identifies a social problem, and then presents school (or a reformed version of it) as the cure.

This is called the Education Gospel, which is the belief that America’s social, economic, civic and moral problems can be solved through more or better schooling. Whenever there’s a crisis or moral panic, American schools are called upon to provide the remedy. It’s the rationale behind financial literacy classes, digital literacy classes, news literacy classes, sex ed, health and nutrition, and social and emotional learning. The belief is so pervasive — and on its face, intuitive — that we don’t even question it. 

But there are a few logical and practical problems with the belief — students spend the majority of their waking hours outside of school; schools have limited resources and expertise — and chief among them is the failure to admit that the forces outside the schoolhouse doors exert a greater pressure than the forces within those doors, as mighty as those internal forces often are. (Great teachers change lives. Curriculum matters. Etc.)

The paradox of the pandemic was that while it physically shuttered classrooms, it also brought them straight into our living rooms. Zoom, Pondiscio writes, “pried open the black box of the classroom” for parents, and they didn’t like what they saw.

But I might suggest that what parents were actually looking through wasn’t a window— it was a mirror. And that the feeling they had that something wasn’t right wasn’t only because they suddenly realized their local schools weren’t doing enough.

It was a pang that schools can only do so much. 

Those of us who work in schools have always known this, but we have long been trained not to say this out loud. To do so would, depending on the audience, expose you as a loafer counting down the days until summer vacation, a fatalist with low expectations, or a bigot with no understanding of history.

Even more broadly — and I’m not sure when exactly this happened — open discussions about parenting last only until kids turn five. After that, if you talk at all about parenting or values or working hard you may as well be Phyllis Schlafly. And the suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the welfare of children is the responsibility of society as a whole and can’t be shouldered by schools (or families) alone makes you sound hopelessly naive.

But why, exactly, are there more podcasts and books and YouTube videos and websites dedicated to raising babies and toddlers than one could ever possibly consume in one lifetime? New parents find those things pressed so fervently into their hands that they could be forgiven for wondering exactly how any human on this earth survived past the age of two without their parents having read those two sacred texts, Bringing up Bebe and Cribsheet.

Once kids enter kindergarten, all talk of parenting turns into talk about schools, and we expect all intellectual, emotional and social development of our children to happen between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., from September to June, Monday through Friday.

And if something’s not right with the kids, or if the kids aren’t learning enough, then there’s something wrong with the schools, and we have to change something about the schools.

Except that hasn’t worked. Not for a long time, and not by a long shot. Even Pondiscio notes we have little to show from the past two decades of reform. Jennifer Berkshire, writing in The Nation in an almost perfect negative image of Pondiscio’s essay, notes that the pandemic has only made the situation worse, exacerbating “the gap between what our schools can do and what they are tasked with doing.”

No wonder almost everyone involved — parents, teachers, students — are so unsatisfied.

Whether you prefer Commentary or The Nation, it’s high time we reject any discussion about improving schools that do not include in their solution, diagnosis (or condemnation) those external forces — social, economic, historical, technological, familial — that exert such inordinate pressure on what exactly happens within those schools. Any that don’t should be regarded as naive, and not to be taken seriously.

And so let’s begin by acknowledging that over the past decade social media has transformed much of American childhood and adolescence into an arid, darkened plain that we should be ashamed we have allowed our children to walk across unaccompanied. Let’s be radically honest about the cause of the sharp rise in depression, anxiety, suicide, and asocial behaviors. And if we won’t — or can’t — ask the companies responsible for creating this to take easy steps to make their products less harmful to children, then let’s take a drastic step.

An excellent essay in the New Yorker wonders if “the best way forward is to treat teen-age social media like teen-age smoking, and reorient our culture to discourage it altogether.” 

Sounds good to me.

We banned cigarettes for children.

Let’s ban social media, too.

Above image: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Children smoking. New York, NY" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1940 - 1979.

A version of this story appeared on Alexander Russo’s The Grade.

So, I guess we’re banning books again.

My first reaction is confusion.

Why would anyone complain about a YA novel that “depicts sexual activity” when the actual search history of any 13-year-old boy’s phone would make his parents’ eyes melt? And why are people so angry about the bans, which are clearly symbolic? (After all, no one’s starting bonfires.)

But most of all, the feeling I’m left with is dismay.

Dismay that, yet again, a major education issue dominating the news reveals just how little everyone understands or is willing to say out loud about what actually happens inside most American classrooms.

And the most common reaction from educators when they hear about another book banning isn’t indignation. It’s a shrug.

All that said, I’m no fool. As the pandemic occupies less and less of our collective attention, and as we near the midterms, there will be more book bans. And there will be more coverage.

That being the case, these stories might as well benefit from insights into how books in high school and middle school classrooms are actually taught. These insights might mitigate the alarmist tone that often inflects these stories.

But more importantly, they will also remind readers (and the reporters themselves) that some of the largest obstacles to learning in American classrooms are rather mundane.

As reporters continue to report on these bans, they should point out that not all of them are the same and that the complexity of novels, students’ tendency to avoid assigned readings, and the logistical challenges of teaching long books can complicate our romanticized notion of what actually happens in classrooms — and what presents a real threat.

1. Not all bans are created equal

To begin, reporters should distinguish between the two main types of bans: books yanked from library shelves and books struck from a curriculum.

The sheer volume of books in a library and the near certainty that any supposedly objectionable viewpoint or theme found in one book will be found on another shelf nearby (or online) means that bans that target library titles are more than likely symbolic and therefore probably politically motivated.

This might be a moot point to those who see all bans as existential threats, but practically speaking, banning books from school library shelves won’t achieve their stated ends, and as such, don’t warrant as much coverage as bans that target books from a curriculum.

2. There are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird.

Which is not to say bans that go after books meant for a curriculum — like the recent challenges to Toni Morrison’s Beloved — justify breathless coverage.

In these cases, reporters would do well to remember that, as poet Wallace Stevens reminds us, there are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird.

If a parent takes issue with a particular scene or theme in a novel, we should not assume that scene or theme is going to be taught. That is, how books are read in school — selectively, with great difficulty — is not the same as how we adults read them.

This insight is obvious to educators but probably odd or counterintuitive to everyone else.

Novels lend themselves to multiple interpretations — what English teachers fondly call “themes.” Novels may have dominant themes — the comprehensive destruction of slavery on the self in Beloved, e.g. — but no novel demands the reading of one theme to the exclusion of all others. 

How a teacher decides to teach a novel is a deliberate choice that depends on a constellation of factors: the teacher’s interest or capability; the age, skill level, interests, or background of the students; the learning goals of the unit; and the unifying theme of the curriculum, among others. Add time constraints and how little students actually read (more on that in a minute) and not every chapter or scene is discussed or even read because not every chapter or scene needs to be. No two teachers will teach To Kill a Mockingbird the same way, and as odd as this sounds, you could still do that novel justice without focusing on the racial theme, and many teachers do. (Whether that’s a good idea or not depends on the aforementioned factors.)  

So, when a parent mounts a complaint about a book, reporters would do well to investigate how or even if teachers will be addressing that theme.

Talk to the teachers or the department chair. The controversy may be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Stories should note that.

3. Kids won’t eat their broccoli.

Aside from the teaching of writing — which includes the exhausting (and, depending on how you do it, utterly pointless) task of providing meaningful feedback on student work — I would say that teaching a novel well in an English class is, logistically speaking, the most difficult thing a middle school or high school teacher will do.

This is due almost entirely to how little students read outside of class.

I cannot stress enough how enormous of an obstacle this presents to the successful execution of a book unit, or in the very least, one that doesn’t drag on for an interminable eight weeks, with the teacher force marching her bored captives to the very last page with entire periods of halting read-alouds and coerced silent reads.

And students’ obstinate refusal to read outside of class transcends class, race, skill, gender, age, and even time. And don’t blame the internet— there was never a golden literary age when most students did not find creative ways to fake their way through reading assignments. (When people tell me fondly that they read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I think, No, your teacher assigned it.)

What does this have to do with book bans? Many individuals — especially those of us who did well in school (present company excluded), and who often comprise the corps of individuals who grow up to write about school —  have a romantic notion of what happens in English classes. Still others have a mistaken notion about what happens in classrooms.

Individual books rarely change students’ lives. The reality is messier and less epiphanic than we remember, or what we see on TV. English classrooms are where great works of literature go to die. As a result, the specter of a book ban can seem worse than it actually is.

Reporters might talk to teachers, department chairs, or administrators about how novel studies in their school actually go. Reporters might talk to concerned parents, too, about how they think book units go. Or maybe talk to students about their experiences reading books for school that are now under threat of a ban of some kind. You might be surprised.

4. Don’t mistake the map for the territory

Teachers’ unit plans rarely go according to, well, plan. There are exactly 10 trillion possible things that can happen to interrupt the seamless progress of a unit, and at least 15,000 of them happen before the end of your first class.

What’s more, the variety and quality of units is pretty vast, so one class’s reading of Romeo and Juliet may amount to passively watching clips from the 1996 Baz Luhrmann movie while answering questions on a worksheet, while others may have them act out the scenes, while still another’s may engage students in a close analysis of the play’s punny language.

One idea for reporters is to follow up when a book has been targeted for a ban. Ask for the unit in question and observe a few classes of the book being taught. Are the classes following the trajectory planned for in the unit, or did the teacher change course?

Effective teaching is as much the result of careful planning as it is of flexibility. Good teachers know what they’re doing in two weeks, but great teachers don’t know what they’re doing tomorrow.

Look at student work and ask students about it. Then tell your readers what you saw or learned.

Pry open that black box.

All of this, then, is not to suggest that the messy, unpredictable dynamics of classrooms render book bans absurd because hardly any learning gets done and who cares about books, anyway.

On the contrary, these four points are to remind outsiders, especially journalists who write about education, that the messy, unpredictable dynamics of a classroom demand we question our impressions of what we think happens in classrooms.

The claims about American classrooms implicit within book bans oversimplify the reality. Our own memories of school can all too often romanticize that reality, too.

Classrooms are a black box, but reporters can pry them open, with care.

What they show us might worry us, but I can guarantee it’s never as bad as what the harshest critics believe. And we might see that there are actually bigger problems to solve.

Above image: Toni Morrison, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Helen Marcus, 1978

A version of this story first appeared on Phi Delta Kappan’s The Grade newsletter.

If you’re under the impression from reading news coverage that schools have become zones of anarchy this year, I don’t blame you.

A recent headline from the U.S. News and World Report informs us that As Students Return to School, So Does School Violence.

The Washington Post published a similar headline: Back to school has brought guns, fight and” — brace yourself, people — acting out.

Here’s Chalkbeat: Stress and short tempers: Schools struggle with behavior as students return.

The list of news outlets covering the story goes on and on, including Education Week, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.

Add to this mix the “devious licks” TikTok trend, countless local news stories about student fights, tantrums at school board meetings, and a record-breaking year for school shootings, and who could deny our schools have become Thunderdomes?

This year’s been rough, no doubt. On most days I leave school dreaming about a drab office job where the most stimulating part of my day is lunch with coworkers.

But news stories about widespread student unrest aren’t just overblown — they’re odious.

Here are 3 reasons why.

Reason 1: Weak evidence and overgeneralization.

First and foremost, the evidence behind the claims that schools are wracked by violence is weak.

Much of it relies on a form of deceptive, blanket attribution. You see it all over:

“School districts across the U.S. say…”

“Teachers and school administrators across the country say…”

“Multiple schools in Southern California and elsewhere have reported…”

“Teachers are reporting…”

“All over the country, teachers and school districts are reporting…”

“Schools across the country say…”.

Obviously, some generalizing is necessary. But it’s a problem when these stories can only substantiate their broad claims with cherry-picked incidents from across the country.

More than one of these stories sheepishly acknowledges that no national data on violence or misbehavior in schools actually exists.

More than one of these stories quotes the National Association of School Resource Officers without acknowledging an obvious conflict of interest.

A wave of student misbehavior is a theory in search of evidence.

Reason 2: Attributing behavior to pandemic trauma

In addition, the coverage is as assured that the wave of school violence as it is of its cause. Which is, of course, the pandemic.

“The behavior issues are a reflection of the stress the pandemic placed on children,” Chalkbeat claims.

The WSJ agrees, since the pandemic “upended” students’ lives.

U.S. News tells us the unrest was “actually expected” given the stress and isolation of remote school.

There are two major problems with this argument.

First, it has become an article of faith that the pandemic has “traumatized” America’s school children, leaving one with the impression that children have been permanently and manifestly changed for the worse by their experiences during the pandemic.

I feel comfortable speaking for most educators when I say this dramatically overstates the case. While it is undoubtedly true that a small percentage of students have been more than temporarily or irreversibly harmed by the last year or so, the vast majority of students have readjusted just fine.

We even have a bit of reliable data to confirm this: the website FiveThirtyEight conducted a poll asking students themselves how they were fairing and found, among other bright spots, that, overall, “America’s kids aren’t as downtrodden as they’re often made out to be.” Apparently missing prom is a bigger deal for adults than it is for high school seniors.

Second, the pandemic is being presented as an origin story for a rash of problems that existed long before March 2020. According to a recent Education Week story, “sexual assaults, physical attacks, and other hostile behaviors in schools rose significantly in several school years prior to the pandemic.”

A recent advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General acknowledges that much of the turbulence in students’ lives predates the pandemic – and has abated since then. And spiking levels of anguish do not mean students will be irreparably harmed, states the advisory. After a crisis, “most people cope well and do not go on to develop mental health disorders.”

The snapshot anecdotes and statistics that journalists use to build their cynical “sky-is-falling” stories are often invalidated by long-term trends and historical precedent.

Reason 3: Conflating misbehavior with violence.

The biggest problem with the coverage is how it conflates misbehavior with violence.

Students calling out in class is not the same as a fight. Fights are not the same as brawls. And online threats are not the same as students bringing guns to school. Yet most of the coverage has conflated rambunctiousness with wild violence, and barely made an effort to draw a distinction among the many forms of misconduct educators see daily because, you know, kids are kids:

The Post story reported that a high school in Maryland saw four fights in one day, that two New Mexico students were arrested for planning a shooting and then quoted a teacher who cried because “a student threw a bag of grapes.”

The WSJ story panned from “a series of brawls” at a high school in Louisiana that led to 23 suspensions to a district in Colorado that sent a letter home to parents because students were “leaving trash in halls, cafeterias, and outdoor spaces.”

The LA Times pivoted from gun threats at two California schools to describing “younger students [who] are having trouble acclimating to rules.” And a columnist for the New York Post was aghast that at her sons’ Brooklyn school children were “crushing chalk.”

All of the stories, too, referenced this year’s school shootings, which suggests there’s a spectrum of misbehavior that includes talking out of turn and murder.

Please. That children after a year of doing school horizontally in their pajamas are having difficulty adjusting to an excruciating regimen that most adults would never abide should not be surprising to anyone, least of whom educators, who understand that most students don’t easily follow rules and routines without constant hectoring and cajoling and a fair bit of bellowing.

The adults who are responsible for said enforcing are themselves exhausted and out of practice. The road’s going to be bumpier and longer indeed. This is precisely what’s happening this year.

As for fights— are there more? Maybe. But the vast majority of fights in school are nothing more than a burst of aspersions followed by a flurry of glancing blows that don’t warrant the lurid coverage local news outlets reserve for their racist obsession with urban crime.

What’s loathsome about the lazy conflation of standard-issue mischief with out-and-out violence is that it walks a fine line between quaint stereotypes about teenage rebelliousness and racist stereotypes that youth of color are a menace to society.

It’s important to note that moral panics about American kids surface whenever American adults are feeling insecure about the direction of our country. More loathsome, still, is that the conflation lets adults off the hook for the deadlier strains of violence and distraction that they alone are responsible for introducing into our schools.

Note also that precious few of these stories feature student voices, which leaves them open to perpetuating lazy, perennial adult-driven tropes about rebellious teens, fragile children, dangerous youths of color, and failing public schools.

Do better

I don’t claim this year’s been business as usual, or that schools have been as nimble as they should be when confronting challenges that arise from modern problems.

But I will insist we hold tight to our skepticism and, more importantly, our optimism. I will also insist that adults take responsibility for the problems in our schools, instead of blaming the kids.

The media can’t single-handedly eliminate narratives that are being promoted by adults, many of whom have their own agendas. But it is their job to get as close to the truth as possible.

Stories about American public schools that omit student voice, conflate flareups with school shootings, and rely on spotty, anecdotal evidence aren’t just weak. They’re shameful.

Above image: “Candy Cigarette,” Sally Mann, 1989.

This post was originally posted kappanonline.org’s The Grade.

At this point, we all know the broad outline of what happened. 

On Monday, Oxford High School (OHS) sophomore Ethan Crumbley met with a guidance counselor after a teacher found him searching for bullets on his phone. 

On Tuesday, he met with guidance counselors, the dean of students, and his parents after a teacher saw deranged illustrations and chilling words in his notebook. 

The school didn’t think he was a threat to himself or anyone else. His parents didn’t want to take him home.

He went back to class. Shortly thereafter, he walked out of a bathroom and killed four students with a semi-automatic pistol. 

These facts elicit despair.

The details elicit rage:

The juvenile text his own mother sent him later on Monday after she learned about the first meeting: “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.” 

The early Christmas present Ethan’s father bought him on Black Friday.

The photo of that present Ethan posted to Instagram. “Just got my new beauty today,” he captioned, with a heart-eyes emoji. 

The words discovered in his notebook, resistant to any but the most obvious interpretations, at least to anyone who’s been paying minimal attention since 1999: The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. Blood everywhere. My life is useless. The world is dead. 

Ethan’s explanation for the drawings and words? “I’m designing a video game.” LOL indeed. 

The near certainty that the gun was in the backpack at Ethan’s feet as he was speaking with school officials and his parents Tuesday and that no one thought to search that backpack for a gun. 

The fact that he went back to class.

The fact that — the unfathomable fact — that at no point were any of the three school administrators contacted about any of this.

Not the principal. Not the two assistant principals. 

//

These last two facts, arousing such rage and confusion as they do, have prompted a bit of finger-pointing, suggestions of criminal charges against OHS school officials, and appear to be the main reason — aside from, you know, the shooting itself — of the three-page letter the superintendent (who was retiring in a month) wrote defending “the events leading up to the shooting.”

But before we call for their heads, is it craven to remind outsiders what a tangle of complications school administrators’ year has been? 

The district’s unresolved mask mandate and their decision to close the high school for two days recently on account of staff shortages and COVID infections only begins to hint at the exhausting logistical obstacles those administrators have had to work around.

Behind the scenes, there have likely been any number of post-pandemic problems: student misbehavior, absenteeism, learning loss, instructional slack, generalized malaise, havoc wreaked by social media.

Since the first minute of the first hour of the first day of school, these challenges have exhausted resources, devoured time and necessitated stop-gaps to such an extent that on some days it probably feels like a miracle that the bells even ring. 

Maybe, perhaps, the breakdown in communication between guidance counselors, the (new) dean of students, and school administration doesn’t reveal rank incompetence as much as it reveals a system already stretched too thin. 

Who knows what else was happening at OHS that day? 

Even in the middle of all the anger and confusion, let us remember the lesson we forget again and again and again, and that most educators know in their gut, but that few of us are able to say out loud: our schools won’t save society from itself.

There’s no reading program that will close the achievement gap. No civics curriculum that will get out the vote. No evaluation system that will improve all teachers. No rejiggering of school funding or busing program that will level the playing field. 

Schools shape society with the tools society gives to schools. And there is no school safety protocol, or battalion of school resource officers, or number of active shooter drills that can save a school from two parents who on Black Friday, instead of buying their 15-year-old son a Nintendo Switch, bought him a semi-automatic handgun. 

Above image: Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964

Here’s something I’ve noticed that happens in education journalism rather frequently: a study, announcement or original piece of reporting comes out, causing quite a stir. A scrum forms around the issue. Major outlets provide additional reporting that either confirm or contradict the substance of the original item. Other journalists or academics take to the op-ed pages to provide commentary and counter-commentary and counter-counter-counter commentary. Twitter does its thing. Pissed off parents weigh in. And, just to round things out, a teacher or student pens a heart-forward first person piece. This goes on for about a week and a half, or at least until someone takes his shirt off at a school board meeting, or a prude wigs out over a novel, and then everyone starts talking about something else. 

Two of these scrums happened in September and October when New York City mayor Bill De Blasio announced he planned to end the city’s gifted and talented program, and when the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “A Generation of Men Give Up on College.” The various headlines about those two issues should give you a pretty good idea of the contours of the debates: 

It should be obvious why these two stories warranted so much coverage, yes? In the largest school district in the United States, an academic program for preternaturally intelligent children — which advocates tout as an engine of social mobility for poor students while opponents deride as another means to racially segregate students in an already shamefully segregated district — is on the chopping block. And at the college level, a record number of males are failing to graduate from college, and account for the lion’s share of an alarming enrollment decline that shows no sign of stopping. Most appear to view this widening education gap as a harbinger of future economic, social and political troubles, and some see this as the natural result of a public education system that works against boys’ impulses from as early as kindergarten.

Clearly, these are two important stories with consequences that extend far beyond the school house (or campus.)

Or not? Their import starts to fade once you do a little counting. Of the million plus children in NYC schools, about 425,000 are elementary students. Of that total, about 16,000 are in the gifted and talented program -- less than 3.5 percent. For perspective, consider that there are almost 5 times as many K-5 students with special needs city-wide (and -- here’s a fun one -- about as many Dominican-born ELLs who attend public schools in the Bronx alone.) Now, I’m not (strictly) suggesting that the amount of coverage an education story receives should exist in proportion to the percentage of students it effects — if that were the rule, we’d never know who won the national spelling bee — but when the research on gifted and talented programs reveals they don’t even work all that well, then this volume of coverage makes you wonder if there’s something else going on. 

The scrum around the college enrollment gap gets us closer to what that something is. The gap — women make up 60% of all college students, men make up 40% — and the inevitable outcome of that, should the trend continue — two females earning a college degree for every one male — appears less alarming when you count something else: the percentage of jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree, which appears to be at least 60%.

On its own, perhaps that data point doesn’t assuage concerns about millions more American men entering adulthood without degrees, given what we know about how much a bachelor’s degree is worth in terms of future earnings, and what it entails, more generally, for their quality of life.

But some rather astonishing recent findings from a study out Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce called “The College Payoff” complicates our long-held assumptions that more education automatically equals more earnings. From the report: “16% of high school graduates, 23% of workers with some college and 28% of associate degree holders earned more money than half of all workers with a bachelor's degree.” The report takes care to note that a constellation of factors including gender, race, industry and location also play a role in earnings, but states rather forthrightly: “The simple advice to high school students to ‘go to college’ no longer suffices.”

On top of that, the rising problem of “degree inflation” -- requiring a degree for jobs that don’t really need one, and never needed them -- and the millions of perfectly employable individuals the practice has left without work is finally permitting employers, and crucially, high school guidance counselors, to say what has been a heresy for well over 20 years: college degrees are overrated. 

That Georgetown study was published in October. Kind of a heartening report, don’t you think? Sort of casts the college enrollment gap in a different light, yes? After all, hordes of men forgoing college doesn’t appear so alarming when you recognize the labor market has provided other career pathways available to them (that also don’t require going into crippling debt.)

But guess how many of the media outlets with consistent education coverage ran a story about “The College Payoff” study.

One. Behold:

Pardon the cynicism, but it’s no surprise that the media paid such disproportionate attention to the gifted and talented foofaraw, and worked itself into such a lather over the college enrollment gap. Negative stories, as a rule, earn more clicks and shares, and negative stories that tap into rancorous culture war divisions that confirm your feelings about the loathsome fools living in the other half of America are also lucrative, especially if they “start a conversation” (read: generate more content), or even if they overstate a problem. And these two stories, touching as they do on current squabbles about gender parity, racial equity, income inequality, school segregation, our (supposedly) broken school system, and --  perennial tropes, both -- lost boys (who ultimately pose an existential threat) and brilliant ghetto kids (whose success will deliver us from our sins), provide no shortage of righteous dissatisfaction at what the other tribe’s up to. But as long as our for-profit journalistic model depends largely on ad revenue, that will never change. Say la vee. 

What’s a bit more surprising — but definitely fixable — is the other bias revealed by the lopsided coverage of September and October: the media’s blinkered, meritocratic view of education, which privileges college degree-attainment at the expense of other, perfectly viable — though less “respectable” — post-secondary paths such as military service, certificate programs, trade school and community college. This limited view undoubtedly comes from the college-for-all ethos (college-or-nothing?) that began during the No Child Left Behind era and has, to be sure, successfully produced many, many college graduates from historically marginalized groups who might never have even thought to attend college, but has also created many, many more students from those very same groups who have left college early with only a handful of credits and tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. And is it facile of me to speculate that this meritocratic view has become the default outlook of American journalists? And that this is the natural result of a profession that has transformed from a corps of working class schmos to a group of elites with fancy degrees? For whom the meritocracy has paid off in spades, and for whom the question — why wouldn’t you go to college? — might be as silly as its answer is obvious?

Balanced coverage of the myriad paths available to students — from kindergarten all the way past high school — might answer that question, and not just for those journalists, but, more crucially, for the readers. Gifted programs and selective high schools are fine and, yes, often boost poor kids up a rung or two on the socio-economic ladder (as do stellar scores on the SAT), but bright poor students who do not attend those are not fated to sit bored in chaotic, overcrowded classrooms taught by teachers who only have low expectations. They are not consigned to lead meager lives. A life lived outside elite institutions is still a life well lived, ICYMI. Nor are students who do not enroll in or finish a four-year degree necessarily destined for an unhappy, low-wage life. They are not failures. They are not a national emergency. But where are their stories? 

I’m not saying we shouldn’t concern ourselves with academically gifted children, or, for that matter, the social, political and economic implications of millions of men deciding to forgo college (and trying to determine the origins of why that path didn’t pan out for them in the first place), but even-handed coverage might allow us to worry a little bit less, and recognize that things aren’t so dire as they sometimes appear. 

Above image: “School’s Out”. Allan Rohan Crite. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Whenever a non-educator asks me how work is, I never answer honestly. I either respond with a demented “It’s good!!!” or a flat “Fine.” This is partly because I rarely think such open-ended questions are sincere, and partly because I’m not enough of a raconteur to make my work interesting for people who don’t also work with me at my work. But it’s mostly because, at best, speaking candidly about my job as an administrator in a city public school runs the risk of confirming people’s preconceived notions about how sweaty and miserable working in a school can sometimes be, and/or, at worst, their latent prejudices about black kids.

However, when another educator asks me how work is? We’re so unfiltered that if anyone with the even lightest concern for the welfare of children overheard us they would immediately demand that proper authorities revoke our licenses, or at least start homeschooling their own kids.

It’s called venting. Everyone does it. It’s necessary.

Especially this year. Because this year, let’s be honest — it’s been rough! “Rocky start” doesn’t begin to describe. But what’s struck me most about the candid conversations I’ve had with educators about how our “work is” is not so much how proudly inclusive we’ve been with the targets of our profanities, how sundry our gripes— it’s how banal the objects of our complaints have been.

After all, if your primary understanding of what happens in American schools comes mostly through social media or the news, then you might be forgiven for thinking that much of what educators have been struggling with this year have been the following: mask rules, quarantines, vaccinate mandates, traumatized students, school board fights, battles over readings lists, TikTok pranks, what Florida’s doing, what Texas is doing, the fate of gifted and talented programs, school violence, critical race theory, and/or, that old alliterative chestnut, learning loss.

Without diminishing the gravity of those aforementioned issues, I would like to provide a very subjective, very non-scientific list of the actual day-to-day problems educators have been wrestling with this year. A big nota bene: this is based on my own limited experience as an administrator, as well as that of my colleagues who work, teach and lead in other schools and districts whom I’ve had conversations with. It’s not exhaustive or definitive, and it skews toward institution-wide issues as opposed to the classroom-level problems teachers have been dealing with, and it probably applies more to those of us who work with adolescents, but I’d like to this it’s somewhat representative of educator’s daily tribulations. My hope is that this serves as a counter to the media narrative about what school has been like this year, and why it’s (actually) been so — what’s the term — fucking hard.

1. There’s just more slack in the rope. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the main adjective I’ve seen applied to American students is “traumatized.” Are they? Some, sure. Many? Well, I think two things are at work here around the usage of that term: one, news stories have simply overstated the case and, two, a bit of rhetorical creep has set in where the term has morphed to refer to almost any adverse state of being or negative response to detrimental circumstances, however severe. The term has become diluted. Most students seem genuinely happy to be back in school. A few students arrived in September anxious and scared, but based on how quickly they settled in, it seems much of their trepidation was nothing more than first day jitters. Over all, I don’t think legions of students are traumatized, just simply taking longer to adjust to what educators like to call “doing school,” which are the habits, behaviors and attitudes we teach kids to adopt from kindergarten on that allow them to do the very hard, important, sometimes dull work of learning academic content (and other stuff, too) and ultimately becoming decent, hard-working adults. “Doing school” refers specifically to getting there on time; knowing where your classes are; following rules even when many of seem arbitrary or unfair; paying attention to (let’s face it) somewhat or very boring lessons for many hours each day, day after day; speaking up and speaking clearly; ignoring distractions; being nice; being patient; learning how to organize all of your stuff; remembering due dates; managing your time, etc. No student really had to do that for over a year (you’d be shocked by the variety of academic experiences students had last year based on which school they went to), so they’re out of practice, and even during a normal September, it takes a while to get students back into the swing of things. As a result, this year, it’s taken a lot longer, and a lot more effort from all of the adults in the building to get them to settle into the rhythm of school. I am 100% not saying there aren’t many students out there who weren’t traumatized by the social isolation of the pandemic, and who don’t have serious mental and emotional health needs that we are legally and duty bound to address, and indeed, for those whose home lives were not comfortable or even safe, last year was hell, but I think those cases are far less frequent than we have been led to believe by much of the coverage, and I think many of the student-related issues teachers and administrators have dealt with students have simply been students readjusting, and readjusting hard.

2. Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole. There’ve been more than a few stories about how many more fights and how much more student misbehavior has occurred year, but the data on this is largely anecdotal since we have no reliable way of counting incidents across districts. The brief, sensational panic over TikTok pranks has also lent legitimacy to the claim. And also with this issue we see another rhetorical sleight of hand: though there have been more incidents involving weapons in schools, there’s an enormous difference between that kind of thing and students acting out, or even getting into petty fights. (I’ve also noticed that a few of those stories have quoted Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, as if that proves anything but, honestly, what would we expect him to say?) But, plot twist: I do think there’ve been more student disruptions this year. I mean, see what I wrote above re: readjusting. However, I don’t think it’s for many of the reasons given: increased gun sales nationwide, unstable economy, an uptick in violence in general, pandemic-related isolation, political tribalism. (Schools mirror society, but not in the ways adults sometimes think, and that’s mostly because of how endearingly self-absorbed children are, especially teenagers. My favorite example of this is the morning after a certain surprising election result left most of the staff utterly despondent. Our students caromed from class to class with their usual exuberance and had no idea why any of us were upset.) Again, the cause is more banal. Social media. I cannot stress enough how disruptive social media is to the culture of schools and how erosive to student well-being it has been for well over a decade (to say nothing about Netflix, Hulu, et al.) Ninety percent of problems among students can be traced back to something that was posted on some social media platform. They are the seed of nearly all drama and the root of many self-esteem issues among students, but if you don’t work in a school I don’t think you would know the extent to which that was true and though it was true before the pandemic it’s worse now, and I’ve been disappointed and surprised by how little attention has been paid to this. So, that there may or may not be more fights and classroom misbehavior this year is to me less important than why.

3. More of the same... What happened to not reverting to the way things were? What happened to acknowledging that schools weren’t serving all students’ needs? What happened to all the ideas we were going to try? What happened to the will to do that? This is perhaps the biggest complaint among educators. Not only does the first semester of 2021-2022 feel about the same as the first semester of 2019-2020, there appear to be few big changes on the horizon. Here is a list of things all of us were hoping might change, or at least start to change: how schools and teachers are evaluated, standardized testing, graduation requirements, how and when and where students go to school (seat time, the length of the school day/year, remote or asynchronous options), what students learn, how schools are funded, teacher schedules, student schedules, parent engagement, community-based organization engagement. No one was expecting the 50 million public school students in this country to suddenly attend beautiful, well-lit schools of highly individualized learning that also happen to serve a huge democracy’s 21st century civic and economic needs and are fully staffed with jolly, well-compensated adults who have ample time to collaborate and have bitchin’ playgrounds and delicious cafeterias and treat all students equitably and are funded fairly and don’t necessarily have to start at 8 and end at 3 and go Monday - Friday from August/September to May/June, but, for chrissakes, can anyone point to any state or large district that has made or is moving to make one meaningful change to the basic DNA of schooling that’s not just a stop-gap to address learning loss or an annex grafted onto the existing system?

4. …and more with less (or, um, fewer.) We don’t have enough staff. There actually has been a lot more coverage of this recently, but I still think this is worth noting. But contrary to what you’ve heard, there has not been a mass exodus of teachers or support staff from the profession, but there are more teaching and staff positions available (especially in districts that serve high needs populations) and those positions remain unfilled probably for a lot of the same reasons every other industry has been struggling to fill vacancies for months now. Every educator I know has talked about their school desperately needing office staff, paraprofessionals, schools aides, and/or a couple extra teachers. Even short a few people in key areas puts strain on the system, especially when that system runs on a series of unremitting bells that tell children when to start, move and stop, and when all of the important things have to happen at certain moments in between the ringing of those unforgiving bells, or they don’t happen at all. On top of that, because students and teachers need so much more support and attention this year, current teachers, staff and administrators are exhausted to their limit.

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Just some thoughts. If you work in a school, I’d love to hear yours. What am I missing? What did I get wrong? What would you add? Comments are open below. And if you know someone who works in a school, forward this to them. I’d love to hear their thoughts, too.

Above image: Watusi (Hard Edge) by Alma Thomas. Smithsonian.

Above is the tone of education news for the month of October. I grabbed every education-related headline from the above publications in October and categorized its language as either positive, negative or neutral. A more in-depth rationale/explanation of all this is here, and also here.

Notes and stray observations

• I added four publications this month: Wall Street Journal, WBEZ Chicago, Boston Globe and LA Times.

• I also decided this month to include every story Chalkbeat published — Chalkbeat Tennessee; Chalkbeat Colorado; Chalkbeat Grand Rapids (jk) — as opposed to just their national stories. This amounted to 162 stories, 151 more than last month, when I just pulled their national stories.

• Lots and lots of coverage of school board elections, CRT (yawn), staff shortages, and mask/vaccine mandates.

• “McDonald's to treat teachers to free breakfast starting Monday”

• Stray thought: I think there's something to be said about the correlation between distance and tone. The further away from the classroom reporting is (and most seems to be from a desk), the more negative the tone is. What would coverage look like if more journalists were embedded (so to speak) in schools or districts, and didn't over-rely on data and reports and press releases? Desk reporting, it appears, is the enemy of nuance. Schools become a political battlefield. Student groups are monolithic, parents all mad, teachers overworked, no one can read, no one can add, everything is terrible. The tone simply doesn’t match my own experience in education, my students’ or the experience of other educators I know. Granted, not sure what an “embedded” ed journalist would look like, but sure there are some models out there, somewhere. (Updated 11/12/21)

• What do you see? What do you notice? If you’re an educator, does the tone of education news for October align with your own experience? What are reporters missing? Reporters, what do you think? Is there another way to cover schools? Is there a difference between covering schools and covering “education?” Is this a pointless exercise? Or just naive?

Are things getting worse?

That’s the question I keep in the back of my head as I’m reading, watching or listening to the news. It’s the only way I can keep myself from sinking into a slough of despond.

It’s the question I hope you’ll ask yourself as you look at the above chart, which represents the tone of education news for the month of September.

This is a continuation of something I started in August. A breezy rationale for the exercise can be found here, along with my methodology, which, if your initial reaction to all of this is that it’s silly or unfair or misguided, I encourage you to read that original post. (A full list of the headlines is here.)

If you can’t be bothered, here’s the Cliff Notes version:

• I grabbed every headline of every education story from 8 major news outlets that produce significant reporting (>10, sorry Wall Street Journal) for the month of September and categorized it as positive, negative or neutral based on its tone. This is a crude version of something called “sentiment mining.”

• Headlines that included words/ phrases that evoked discord, anxiety, turmoil, stress, fear, anger or sadness = negative.

• Headlines that included words/phrases that evoked comity, happiness, success or striving = positive.

• Neutral is neutral.

• Categorizations are (to the best of my ability) non-partisan and content-neutral.

• I focus on headlines for two reasons: 1) I am not a computer and so could not have read and categorized the tone of every article; 2) As news consumers in 2021, we mostly read only headlines, and so our perception of the world is shaped by the headlines we scroll past daily.

• I did not include local headlines. I also did not include cable news. I did not include higher education news.

• I have an agenda. I’m an educator, but I’m also an optimist, a skeptic, and an evangelist for public schools. The coverage of schools simply does not comport with my own experience, nor the experience of many of my friends and family who also work in education or send their kids to school. Thus, the purpose of this exercise is to encourage people to place their own experience alongside the tone of education coverage and ask themselves, Are things so bad? Mindset matters. So does the truth.

Takeaways

• The tone of education news is still very negative. Almost or more than 50% of every publication’s headlines, save one, were negative.

• USA Today, at 72% negative, was by far the most negative.

• Hechinger, at 33%, was the most positive. By luck or design, they achieved a perfect balance among positive, negative and neutral headlines.

• A quarter of Education Week’s headlines were positive . . . but over half were negative.

• Chalkbeat and Washington Post had no positive headlines. None. I triple-checked this, so if I missed something, please let me know. (One caveat: I did not include Chalkbeat’s coverage of its local “Communities:” Colorado, Chicago, Denver, Tennessee, Detroit, Indiana, etc.)

• There appears to be a positive correlation between an outlet’s prestige and its negativity.

As compared to August

What do you notice about both charts? Anything surprising? Anything reassuring? Comments are open on this post, so please feel free to share your (civil) thoughts, or simply send me an email.

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