Category Archives: Blog

Non-Academic Attributes of a K-12 Education Last Longer. We Prioritize the Wrong Data.

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The correlations of a child’s ability to read by grade 3 and proficiency in Algebra by grade 8 to late life success are well documented. These attributes cause a variety of midlife advantages. But are those the later life qualities that really matter? Instead, evaluate each child on the non-academic attributes of education. The correlates of non-academic traits with later adult life quality are far more important than we acknowledge. It is time to re-center our priorities of what constitutes a quality K-12 education and begin looking at core life values. Forget academic assessments, grade point averages, and class rankings.

What don’t we know? – Core life values

I usually open with “what do we know?” but that is the wrong question today. We know about the predictive value of a child’s academic achievements, or lack of achievement, on adults’ early and career-long earning power, incarceration rates, and socio-cultural status. Learning to read early and to think algebraically have predictive earning power. Yet we do not discuss the reality that these academic assets fade out over time. Early advantage does not translate into later life satisfaction. Early abilities to read and do algebra are not the attributes we use to measure a high-quality adult life.

What we do not measure and know much about, or at least we do not discuss, are the core life values that sustain a person throughout their life span. Ironically, these values are developmental, we see them early in childhood, and they continue throughout life. Also, they are measurable throughout the K-12 grade span, but not with tests. These values often are recorded in teacher notes and comments, but are eliminated from transcripts, the record that counts. They are lost to us because of our stubborn reliance on the numbers of test scores. Americans love hard data.

What are core life qualities? They are:

  • Self-regulation, the capacity to monitor, manage, and adapt your internal mindset to meet new challenges, changing demands, and long-term goals. It is the ability to adjust to your life.
  • Conscientiousness, a fundamental personality trait noted for orderliness, thoroughness, strong impulse control, goal-directed, and feeling a deep responsibility for one’s commitments.
  • Perseverance, the ability to sustain a purposeful effort to achieve long-term and high-value goals over time, to weather setbacks, fatigue, and repeated failures.
  • Self-control, the ability favors deferred gratification over immediate, the override of impulses, immediate urges, and temptations, and not follow others away from your priorities.
  • Emotional stability, the psychological ability to keep a steady temperament, not dissolve under pressure, and control stress and anxiety.
  • Empathy, the mental and emotional ability to perceive, understand, and share another person’s life experiences.
  • Conflict resolution, the mental and emotional skills to navigate competing interests and to cause others to accept mutual agreements.
  • Collaborative problem solving, the ability to be synergistic by causing others to consider a complex problem from different perspectives, use unanticipated skills, and reach solutions they could not reach individually.

These were labeled were labeled “soft skills” in the industrial age of America when the rugged individualist was a national hero. That era’s “hard skills” the time-proven academics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. In this century, core life qualities are the organizational skills that move people, production, and society from point A to point B.

One who believes that humankind walked on the moon because of the science of rocketry alone is ignorant of human work using all eight of the above core life qualities that put an astronaut there.

What should we know and value?

Core life values are not just an academic discussion; they correlate with the quality-of-life people feel and know after they have forgotten their high school gpa and class rank. The self-regulation and conscientiousness children learn and display in their K-12 years are among the most reliable psychometric predictors of adult physical health and lifespan.

Adults with developed qualities of self-control present lower rates of substance abuse, stress-related illness, midlife problems of high blood pressure, abnormal blood sugar, and obesity.

Adults who learned conscientiousness, perseverance, and emotional stability as a child have higher rates of financial security and career stability. They have lower rates of underemployment, longer job tenure, and steady financial growth, no matter their high school gpa or test scores.

Adults who have stronger K-12 school connections show greater emotional resilience during life’s ups and downs. They report increased later life satisfaction and lower issues with psychiatric distress.

And adults with developed qualities of empathy, conflict resolution, and cooperative problem solving also have fewer court appearances, lower rates of family break-ups, and are more civically involved.

The Big Duh!

The valedictorian/salutatorians, and honor roll students are typically honored at every high school graduation. Not mentioned are the graduates whose pictures in the class yearbook list them as the

  • Friendliest
  • Most likely to succeed
  • Most school spirited
  • Did the most for the class
  • Most well-adjusted

and all the other “soft qualities” that distinguish classmates.

When the class gathers for its 50th anniversary reunion, what will matter most – a classmates K-12 academic status or the high core life values that sustained them for half a century of living? I am betting on high core values.

We measure and honor the wrong attributes of an education.

Our PISA Scores Are Low Because PISA Is Meaningless to Our Students

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The 2026 PISA international education scores are published, and we once again wring our hands because the achievements of our students stay low or declined. Asian and Nordic children continue to dominate achievement on international assessments. We wail that – Low achievement is due to the pandemic! Low achievement is due to failed instruction! Low achievement is due to too much screen time in school! Low achievement is due to too many immigrant children in our schools! We have been bemoaning these same red herrings for years. These are not the reasons why US students do not score well on international assessments.

The Big Duh!

I usually leave “The Big Duh!” for my conclusion, but not today. The causation for the low status of the United States on PISA assessments is this – our children are transactional and they perceive no benefit for giving their best efforts on the PISA. What matters to our children gets their attention and PISA test results do not matter. If we want to increase our students’ achievement on the PISA tests, we need to make the test results important to our children. If we cannot do this, then our nation needs to stop fretting about the PISA. It does not matter.

How do we know this?

Test analysis. US children spend less time considering and answering questions on the PISA tests than their international peers. And US students guess at more responses. And US students show more test fatigue with shorter response times and more guessing in the latter parts of tests.

The time a student commits to reading a question, reading the possible answers, considering the possible answers, and selecting a response to the question is their response time on each question. The PISA is computer-based. Not only does the system record student demographics and student responses to questions, the psychometrics of the test also records the time lag between when a student clicks to open a question and then clicks their selected answer. This is thinking time when a student considers the question, reads the possible responses, assesses what she knows about the responses, weighs the responses that are partially correct or seem correct, and clicks the answer she thinks is the single correct answer.

High performing international students spend an average of 100 to 110 seconds before responding to a question. If 100-110 is the average, many are taking even longer to parse out the correct answer. US students spend 80 to 90 seconds before responding. Also, responses in less than 5 seconds are termed “blind guesses” and US students make many more blind guesses than higher performing students. And test response analysis shows that US students begin to make more blind guesses in the latter parts of tests than do higher performing international students.

Being personally engaged with a test says that the test and its results matter to the test taker. The test analyses say that students in the United States are not engaged in taking the PISA. Why is that?

There are several reasons. Children in the US are over-tested and under-instructed. Every year a child takes mandated state assessments of reading, ELA, and math. At least twice and often more often a child takes progress monitoring assessments to evaluate the child against normative expectations for a grade level or age. And every unit and chapter is tested. Instruction in the United States stresses knowledge and understanding of facts packaged into shorter, more concise units and every unit has a test at the end. We also conclude units of instruction before all children have accomplished unit learning goals. One reason for ending instruction before all children have learned is our false assumption that our spiraled curriculum will teach them what they did not learn now in a later unit or grade level or course. But the real reason is that the school clock demands that “we move on” to teach all that is packed into a grade level or course curriculum.

American educators have studied Asian and Nordic schools to learn from their systems of education. From Asian schools we learned that education is much more important in their culture than in ours. Performance in school connects with the opportunities open to children out of and after school. Better performance opens better opportunities. Performance in school connects with family identity and Asian parents closely check what their children do in school each day. Education is status.

Nordic schools, especially those in Finland, approach education with less stress than in the United States. Units of instruction are more protracted in both breadth and depth. Where instruction in our schools is satisfied with factual answers, their instruction asks why the answers are correct and why some answers are more correct than other findings. And their model of instruction does not accept “you’ll learn this later;” no children are left in the lurch of unfinished learning. Students take fewer tests and their tests require a higher level of critical thinking. Finally, teachers in Nordic schools enjoy a much higher community and public respect than teachers in the United States. A teacher’s instruction and correction matter more there.

Finally, students never see their scores on the PISA tests. There is not prep for the test, no fanfare, and no explanation that “the pride of all children in the United States rests on how well you achieve on this test.” On the other hand, our students know that PSAT test results connect to scholarships and ACT and SAT test results decide the colleges and schools they are admitted to after high school graduation. The PSAT, ACT, and SAT matter because they connect to reality. PISA tests do not matter to schools, students, or parents in the United States.

In Conclusion

We know what we know. Because we know that the PISA tests do not matter to our schools, our students, or our parents, we should not fret about the published PISA test results. There are too many other and more worrisome things in public education for us to fix than PISA. Let’s get at those!

Ethical or Transactional. Which Will Our Children Be?

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“When you have the chance to do what is right, try to do it.” We listened to late-night radio back in the 70s and 80s and this was the sign-off statement of one of the after-hours talk shows. We all hear innocuous phrases that float on the airwaves but this one stuck with me. It stuck because the number of life occurrences when events present choices of expediency, self-interest, conformity, and ethics never ends. In those moments, the congruence of choice, what is right, and the action to do it belong to everyone, and the choice made matters more than we know.

What do we know about right?

When I was growing up in the 1950s Disney presented a TV series on the American folk hero Davy Crockett. I can still hear Fess Parker, as Crockett, give his personal advice – “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” For a long time, Crockett’s words told me to pause in front of every decision to take a breath and consider the rightness of my options. It may have been easier in the last century; things may have been less fuzzy. Why are principle-based decisions so hard to make today?

When I was a child everyone I knew went to a church on Sunday. Kids went to Sunday School and then sat with their parents for a church service. I cannot say that everyone knew their Bible. Most churches, mine included, made two obligatory recitations of Old and New Testament verses as part of the weekly service but gave no interpretation or application. Sunday School followed our denomination’s published curriculum that included child-adapted Bible stories, but nothing about Bible-based living. The 23rd Psalm, Lord’s Prayer, the story of the Good Samaritan, and Sermon on the Mount were the heart of our religious education. I was raised in a Christian household with little knowledge of what it meant to lead a Christian life.

The Golden Rule from the Sermon on the Mount was as close to Crockett as I got.

Folklore provided children with stories of people doing the right thing. We heard Parson Weems’ fabricated story of George Washington chopping down one of his father’s cherry trees. When challenged, young George said, “Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The lesson of not to lie was a lie in the telling.

Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac served as guidelines for how children should behave. “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” “Don’t throw stones at your neighbors, if your own windows are glass.” “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” Most Franklin verses were easier to quote than to practice.

The concept of true direction was not easy to discern. Early in our history, the North Star became a symbol for directing people. Frederick Douglas published an abolitionist newspaper in 1847 under the banner, North Star. Douglas used Polaris, the celestial marker of north on a compass, as a directional target for enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. To follow the North Star became synonymous with moving from slavery to freedom. Harriet Tubman was our hero leading runaways to freedom using the Big Dipper and North Star.

The North Star returned to our vernacular in this century. In 2007 Bill George, a former CEO, wrote True North. He argued that every individual and organization needs an internal moral compass based on a set of core values, ethics, and purpose. Without a moral compass, leaders and people in general are swayed by short-term pressures, greed, and self-interest. George gave us the reference point for figuring out Crockett’s “Be sure you are right” – follow the ethics of your true north.

But principled decision making still eludes us.

Being right and being transactional.

Being right today has become a matter of transactions. When faced with a question of a right or wrong thing to do, a person reduces the decision of what is universally right to a decision of what is self-benefiting. The transaction is – “If I do this, what do I get in exchange? And the more I get in exchange, the better the decision.” Transacting deals make a successful outcome the justification of a self-proclaimed right decision. For the transactional person, justification for a decision is idiosyncratic not principle based. This person uses the royal “we” as in “we won” or “we gained” to generalize and popularize the personal benefit that their decision brought them, but that is only a matter ego bloat. “Me” is the most important person in transactionalism.

How is this different from ethical decision making? An ethical framework treats people as an end in themselves with every person having inherent value. The first lines of our Declaration of Independence are based on such ethics. An ethical person aligns daily decisions with their values, the promises they have made, and to act without deception. An ethical person respects the rights of others and treats them fairly and honorably. And an ethical person accepts responsibility for mistakes and honestly tries to correct their errors.

Transactionalism reduces every person to the means of an end. People only have value if they can be used for useful leverage to achieve a personal goal or profit. Friends, colleagues, and others are only tokens to be used, they are not valued. Moral duties become conditional – keeping a promise is only worth doing if the return on investing in the promise is personally beneficial. If not personally beneficial, transactionals break promises with impunity. They treat their good deeds as bank accounts in which one good deed can be paid against a bad deed. Social trust is a quid pro quo proposition.

What to do.

We do not teach children what to think, we teach them how to think.

The first part of the above sentence is politically contentious. Today, more than ever before, every topic can be approached from multiple perspectives, especially political perspectives. Also, now more than times past, free-thinking people must honor different perspectives. This honor is in our national DNA. We defend every person’s right to speak, write, join with others, and publicize their ideas. In public education, we honor these by teaching about topics and their perspectives not teaching to inculcate a particular perspective on any topic.

To teach about a topic is to teach how to think about it. Children in school learn to think as historians and to understand human stories that tell us how perspectives about a topic developed. Children learn to think mathematically and to consider a topic quantitatively, statistically, and proportionately. They learn to think scientifically and to analyze the classifications and properties of things and how they work in a natural world. And children learn to think literally and figuratively. They learn to consider an idea for what it really is and means as well as how the idea can be interpreted and applied in different contexts.

Public education is not parochial. We do not teach a limited or dogmatic point of view. Public education also is not partisan, at least it is not supposed to be. Totalitarian states dictate what their people think, control what they write, and restrict their public meetings. Public education opposes mandated thinking, that is why those who mandate oppose public education.

With the caveats of our Constitutional rights and public education policies, we can teach about ethical and transactional thinking. Through literature and history, we can use human stories to illuminate examples of each. And we can extend their thinking with problem-based scenarios. The more they think about thinking, the better they will understand their thinking.

We can teach children the value of developing personal value systems within the mores of our society and with their informed perspectives how to evaluate life decisions.

The Big Duh!

Not to be too simplistic, we can teach children to be Crockett-like in considering the implications of and responsibilities for the decisions they make. This curriculum will not display on their transcript but will be noted in the proverbial book of life. We can teach them that a “True North” is either an ethical process for decision making or it is the endgame goal to be achieved regardless of process. It is their decision to make.

In 2026 educating about ethical and transactional decision making extends not only to children but also to the crafters of artificial intelligence. AI makes decisions that impact humans and our children will be the next crafters of AI.

Build Self-Reliance Not Conformity

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was the consummate influencer of his time. “Say, who?” Emerson is not a name that many children know today. To paraphrase people of my age, Emerson is a white, intellectual dead man, and was among the writers and poets whose works dominated academic study from the 1840s to the 1970s. Yes, but – what he wrote and talked about is more important today than it was in antebellum America. If students do not know Emerson, they should and we must teach them.

In the face of today’s 24/7 social media and insidious mind-bending noise of self-announced prophets who want to tell children what to think, how to think, and who to believe, Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” is an eye-opener for a person who will take the time to think and reject being talked “at.”

What do we know?

Ask a child this foundational question. “Who do you trust to tell you what you should know?”  The answers surprise because research in the question tells us that children’s trust is very contextual – trust depends upon the topic. As a group, children trust

  • Their parents for questions of personal well-being and safety,
  • Teachers and academic text for formal facts, knowledge, and scientific information,
  • Research organizations like Pew and Common Sense for large, global issues,
  • Google and Wikipedia for quick, non-depth answers,
  • Peers and friends for social and cultural ideas like music, clothing, entertainment, and peer dynamics. They do not trust friends for facts, yet commonly misconstrue opinions for facts, and like many adults, “go along to get along” with their peers.
  • Do not trust mass media organizations – television, radio, and print – for the factual and unbiased news.

As children move into middle and high school, peer pressure, social dynamics, and school environments begin to change and refine how they perceive their parent and family views.

The answers also surprise because very seldom does a child say, “I trust my own judgements and intuitions. I trust me.” Where are children on their self-reliance? Is self-reliance relevant today?

What should we know?

This is where Emerson and his essay, “Self Reliance,” become highly relevant today. First, understand that “Self Reliance” was an essay written in 1841. Whereas Emerson used “Self Reliance” to extol his generation to separate itself from copying European perspectives and Eurocentric thinking, his essay is a primer for every generation of young Americans beginning their own era of adulthood.

These are the key points Emerson made about the self-reliant man.

  • Be an original not an imitator. A person who only repeats what he is told prevents his own intellectual growth. Instead, listen and watch, consider and think, compare and contrast, and then give your thoughts your own informed interpretation and personalization. A self-reliant person does not repeat slogans to make himself resemble another person and what that person says. Blind imitation of what others think is intellectual suicide and too many kill their personal thinking by imitating

America in the 1840s was rapidly moving west, receiving millions of immigrants every year, prospering with new inventions and pre-industrial energy. “New” was happening all the time and the increased opportunity for being new begged for originality, invention, and reinvention.

  • Resist social conformity. Society wants to narrow the range and diversity of thinking and behavior to make communities of people more manageable. And to make them more compliant. Political and social leaders use subconscious encouragement that shape speech and attitudes around policies and rules that restrict non-conformity. Emerson believed in non-violent protests, and he talked of personal and community resistance to public policies, laws, and rules that constrained individualism. Though educated as a New England minister with the region’s conservative traditions, her resisted dogmatic thinking and a prescribed life.
  • Growth requires change and adjustment not blind consistency. Emerson’s generation was on the move, and the multi-sides of dynamic change needed new economic, political, and social models. New territories, new businesses and industries, new populations, and unfamiliar problems needed innovative solutions. Old answers did not solve new problems. Emerson urged America to shed traditionalism in favor of contextual adjustment and change. In all questions, he did not hold with “blind” repetition of familiar and safe responses but urged innovative experimentation and thinking.
  • Trust your internal intuitions and convictions. As a transcendentalist, Emerson spoke of the laws of nature that humans cannot break or bend. He watched migratory birds and animals that knew when and where to make an annual migration necessary for their survival. As extension, each person has an immutable intuitive power, an inner voice that tells him what to do and how to do it. Emerson told his generation to believe in their intuitions and their convictions based upon an inner voice.

Consider the writing and thinking of Thoreau, a friend and student of Emerson’s, who moved to Walden Pond into nature, to contemplate the social, economic, political conditions of his time. His writings and personal lifestyle were shaped by his intuitive power and self-determinism.

With strong beliefs in originality, non-conformity, change, and self-determinism, Emerson was not a revolutionary. He did not espouse recklessness or selfish behavior or a rejection of community and social mores. The core of Emerson’s image of a healthy society is based on self-directed, critical thinking, innovative individuals who rely on their natural intuitions and convictions rather than unconscious repetitive habits.

Finally, Emerson and his peers, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, authors and poets, became the gold standards of American literature. Their names and their writings were known, and read, and quoted. Emerson and this group were the influencers of their times.

What does Emerson tell young adults today?

The Bible’s Solomon tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Young adults in the 1840s and young adults in the 2020s face many of the same fundamental problems of how to confront sociocultural, politico-economic, and moral questions. A different prophet, Bob Dylan, tells us that “The times, they always a-changing,” and each generation must find its fresh solutions for Solomon’s recurring problems.

How interesting it would be if those annoying pop-ups on our smartphone, tablet, and laptop screens told young people today –

  • Be original not a copycat of the self-serving slogans of today’s leaders.
  • Do not conform for conformity’s sake; do not be a human clone of other’s ideas and lifestyles.
  • Be contextually innovative and create original changes; inconsistency can break bonds to tradition.
  • Be intuitive and follow your internal convictions that comport with the laws of nature.

Compare and contrast these four Emersonian ideas with the messages of our political, economic, technological, and cultural leaders today. As Emerson urged a new day in America in the 1840s, his ideas urge a new day for young adults today.

The Big Duh!

Parents are correctly alarmed at the power of social media to influence, distort, and misdirect the thinking and behaviors of their children. While most influencers are driven by the monetary rewards and status of their follower count, we could substitute Emersonian ideals that would build the inner selves of children and prevent their blind conformity with others’ external subservience.

This is not just the work of parents and educators. It is a messaging from conscientious and thinking adults to help the next generation to be conscientious and thinking adults. Young people need our role modeling not just our words.

It starts with us.

The August Itch of Preparing to Teach

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Every day I notice, read, and often print out a featured recipe in the New York Times. Today it was an amended recipe for no knead bread. One of the first things I look at is the prescribed preparation steps and the time it takes to prepare a recipe for serving at the table. Prep steps and time are non-negotiable.

It is August and for public school classroom teachers the August itch has begun. The itch is the realization that the number of days until the first day of school is decreasing and it is time to prepare to teach. As the days pass, the itch becomes more severe. For some, there is remorse over the end of the summer vacation and a return-to-work life. Others appreciate the natural cycle of classroom teaching – teach for nine months, not teach for two months – and prepare to teach for the first month of school. For all teachers, there is a tipping day, the day they awake and know it is time to prepare.

What do we know?

For the uninformed, on the first day of school when a teacher and children begin their teaching and learning year, teachers do not walk into a classroom and begin teaching. They prep. The August itch is all about being prepared for the first day and week of teaching. Or being ready to teach the first unit instruction. To be clear, for an elementary teacher readiness means preparing a unit in ELA/reading, a unit in mathematics, a unit in social studies, and a unit in science. For a secondary subject area teacher this means a content and skills rich unit for each course they teach; secondary teachers often teach two or three different courses every day. Every teacher has a lot to prepare.

Using the analogy to the prep steps and time for baking bread, research tells us a teacher spends 30 hours to create 1 hour of aligned direct instruction. Like bread baking, the creation of a lesson from scratch ingredients takes considerable time. The ingredients are the learning needs of each student taught, the curricular standards students need to learn, the curricular materials that support the standards, and the learning environment. Only beginning teachers and teachers given completely new teaching assignments begin from scratch ingredients. Veteran teachers have prior knowledge that shortens the planning process. But aligning preparation still takes critical time. Alignment is the key word because it means that teaching meets student learning needs and specific curricular standards. Unaligned teaching is like teaching to the desks in a classroom without students; it is meaningless.

Prep time for one hour of instruction is still a lot of hours, if teachers taught for full, uninterrupted hours at a time. They do not. In practice, most elementary teachers spend 15-17 minutes of each class hour directly teaching. Secondary grade level subject area teachers spend 20-25 minutes of each class period directly teaching. Parsed out, teachers commit about three to four hours of prep for each teaching day. This planning and teaching cycle, 3-4 hours for each teaching day, continues every week for the 36-week school year.

The August itch is the transformation of a teacher out of the classroom for the summer to a teacher back in the classroom for a school year. The itch, like a person awakening from a long nap, requires predicted scratching that prepare a teacher to do what a teacher knows how to do – cause children to learn.

Digging deeper – prepping the unprepared.

The August itch has a deeper meaning for school principals who will employ people who are not fully licensed to instruct children in their school. The predictions for the 2026-27 school year are that almost 400,000 classrooms in September will NOT have licensed teachers. Students in those classrooms will be taught by people on emergency licenses, long-term substitute status, or who are prepared to teach but not the subjects or the children in their new classroom. That is 1 in every 8 classrooms. Worse, almost 40,000 classrooms will not have any teacher because none could be found. Children assigned to these classrooms will be bundled into other classrooms.

Principals scratch their itch twice. The first scratch is finding someone to be a classroom teacher. The second scratch is helping that emergency teacher to be “trouble free.” Trouble free means managing a classroom of children so there are few disciplinary problems, communicating satisfactorily with parents, collaborating satisfactorily with other teachers, and meeting the school’s calendared timelines for grade reports and staff meetings. If an unprepared teacher satisfies these two scratches, the principal will consider the teaching assignment to be successful!

The itch for the unprepared teachers in these classrooms is completely different. Most of these teachers will be hired on emergency licenses. Their most valid knowledge of a school classroom will be their memories of when they were students. They will try to instruct children just like they were taught when they were children. They will mirror their memories of teacher personalities and teaching strategies. They “fake it until they make it.”

Some of these emergency teachers will be enrolled in state approved teacher preparation programs and will complete foundational education courses during the school year. They will learn to teach while simultaneously instructing children. Miraculously, this works. In fact, after two years teaching with an emergency license those enrolled in educator preparation courses will complete a valid licensing program and receive a professional teaching license. By their third year of employment, newly licensed teachers readily slip into the cadre of veteran teachers.

The Big Duh!

Preparation for the 2026-27 school year will make 3.2 million public school classrooms ready for 49 million children. In numbers only, this annual migration of teachers into school classrooms is ginormous. But it also is usual business for public school professionals. The public is completely oblivious to the August itch. Teachers actually go about prepping like any pre-season professional. Prepping takes time and effort, and it all happens invisibly.

Thank you, teachers for scratching your August itch. Thank you, principals for scratching your school’s itch to put a teacher in every classroom. Thank you, emergency teachers for answering the call to be a teacher.

Next August, we will do it all again.