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

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

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

What do we know?

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

These are not the easy problems of physical infrastructure, such as not enough classrooms or outdated HVAC systems.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

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

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

In recent months, I added a fourth response. 

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

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

A case in point – achievement gaps in reading.

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

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

Gaps in math achievement.

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

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

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

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

Other problems and school sorrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you prepared to do?

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

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

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

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

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

Many Teachers Try To Teach As They Were Taught – Stop Doing That!

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If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then many teachers of yore are buttered with adulation.  When people decide to become schoolteachers, they often do so thinking they will teach like their favorite teachers taught them.  You see it in the eyes of an interviewee when asked “Tell us about your favorite teacher when you were in school”.  Imitation later is demonstrated as a new teacher settles into patterns of mannerisms, classroom layout, and, most significantly, interacting with students.  Vestiges of a favorite teacher try to appear in a new teacher constantly. 

Stop doing that!  Most of what we admired in a favorite teacher was personality and charisma not teacher effectiveness.  Teach as you were taught to teach not as you were taught as a student. 

What do we know?

There is art to teaching.  Most favorite teachers touched us with their artful teaching, their personality, and their caring for each student.  They proved the statement that children do not care what a teacher knows until they know that a teacher cares.  Good teaching is an art form of connecting with children. Remembering a favorite teacher is like having that person’s arm around you or basking in her smile.  It is an emotional, affective warm feeling, often of kindness and support.  It grew from all the “atta-boys and atta-girls” she showered on students.  Children, as people pleasers, will do most anything to get a smile or a nod or a note to take home from a favorite teacher.  “How many books do I need to read?  I’ll read every day after school!”.  And the warmth of her smile gains even greater emotionality over time.

We would like to think that every teacher is a “favorite” to some students, but truth be told, there are some teachers who do not create adoring followers.  The art of teaching is not distributed equally among all teachers.

Favorite or Most Effective

An equally telling question for a teacher interview is “Tell us about the teacher who most effectively challenged you to learn”.  Effective teaching is causing children to learn and causation lies in the science of teaching.  Children may learn to please a favorite teacher; they learn from highly effective teachers due to an application of best teaching strategies. 

Highly effective teachers are not simply born.  They are the product of their study of theories and practices of pedagogy that consistently cause children, or anyone for that matter, to learn.  These theories and practices include –

  • Motivation.  Every child responds to positive triggers that encourage them to engage in learning.  Effective teachers pull those triggers.  They make learning personal by referencing a student’s name and that student’s high interest in the subject or skill as they introduce a lesson.  They make the new learning sound unique and special.  They attach new learning to recent successful learning.  They create a mystery children are to solve.  Effective teachers understand the need to continue to motivate throughout the lesson and unit not just as its beginning.
  • Direct instruction, inquiry-based instruction, and problem- or project-based instruction.  These three strategies are the arsenal for effective teachers, and they are masters of each.  Any lesson can be taught by one of these three strategies, yet there always is a most appropriate strategy for the nature of the learning.  Effective teachers provide variety in classroom work by rotating among these strategies. 
  • Practice and reinforcement.  Effective teachers understand that practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent.  They use immediate and massed practice and interval and distributed practice.  They don’t practice just to practice but for strategic reinforcement to build short- and long-term memory.  Effective teachers avoid the drudgery of drills while knowing that learning will erode and be lost without practice over time.  Reinforcement over time is a mantra.
  • Assessment and corrective teaching.  Effective teachers pre-assess, teach in chunks, model, practice, and use formative assessments to check the accuracy and strength of student learning.  They understand that very few lessons will immediately cause all children to be successful learners.  They use assessments to tell them “Correct this now before uninformed practice makes it harder to unlearn”.  They unteach, reteach, and teach differently based on assessments to move children from early errors to later success.  Effective teachers also are very good at observing student proficiency without testing; they have a mental rubric for the level of proficiency children need to achieve.
  • Extended and advanced learning.  Effective teachers know that some children will grasp and master new learning accurately and quickly.  Those children will need extended and advanced learning rather than corrective teaching.  Effective teachers plan enrichments and accelerated learning for children who need these to stay connected to the classroom.
  • Lesson planning.  Effective teachers are immaculate lesson planners understanding the steps of a plan that causes learning to happen.  In the 1980s school districts taught teachers to use Madeline Hunter’s Model of Mastery Learning.  Hunterisms became standard operating procedure for more than a decade.  Splashback against No Child Left Behind caused some educators to consider Hunter too mechanistic.  However, in the decades since, a Hunter lesson design rebounds as best practice.

https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/Holle-Lesson-Planning.pdf

  • Curricular design.  Effective teachers understand that some children really respond to direct instruction while others jump aboard for inquiry-based teaching and still others are excited by problem-based and project-based instruction.  These teachers strategically use all three strategies to engage children as active learners.  They also use Universal Design thinking in their curriculum to ensure learning is not hindered by avoidable barriers. 

The Big Duh! 

Teacher preparation programs teach us how to be effective in causing children to learn.  Effective teachers remember their favorite teachers from their school years and emulate many of those veteran teachers’ mannerisms.  Beyond that emulation, effective teachers are masters of the science of teaching and use all the tools they have been taught to cause all children to be successful learners of their annual curriculum. 

Sharpening Teaching Tools – Getting Ready for Day 1 Means Getting the Rust Off

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Teachers and Tiger Woods face the same challenges as professionals.  When Woods returned to the PGA tour after time away his game was not what it once was.  When precision skills are not used frequently enough to remain honed, they develop rust.  Summer vacations and time in general have the same effect on teaching skills.  Before re-entering the teaching season this fall, all teachers need to sharpen their teaching tools to get rid of summer rust.

What do we know?

Summer is a cherished time for teachers as well as children.  Ten weeks or so away from the classroom is exactly what it is – an absence away and a setting aside of the teaching skills used in classroom work.  As teachers decompress from the stress of daily teaching in the nine months of school, the mental acuities of teaching slumber during the summer weeks.  This has been an aspect of the nine months on and three months off in an educational calendar for decades.  It is one of the reasons school leaders schedule professional development days before the first day of school.  Like their riding a bike, teachers don’t forget how to teach over a summer’s vacation, but they do profit from time back on the pedals before children enter their classrooms.

Getting ready for the first day of school is not just arranging a classroom to receive children.  Getting ready also is shaking loose the summer slumber/rust by clinically considering how a teacher will teach the first curricular units of the year.

Explicit Instruction

One of the most frequently used instructional strategies is explicit teaching, a step-by-step approach that purposefully connects teaching strategies with learning outcomes for children.  Direct instruction is one of the primary methods in explicit teaching.  Direct instruction teaches a chunk of content or skills, checks for student understanding and accuracy, and then teaches a next chunk.  Explicit teaching also entails an examination of the critical attributes of the content and skills to be learned, scaffolding those attributes into a sequence that leads to student proficiency with the content and skills, the use of formative and summative assessments of student learning, and the ability to reteach what students did not learn correctly.  And explicit instruction focuses on the children as learners, understanding that every group of children arrives with differing learning backgrounds and learning needs.

https://education.ky.gov/curriculum/standards/kyacadstand/Documents/EBIP_3_Explicit_Teaching_and_Modeling.pdf

While it is possible for a teacher to walk into a classroom on the first day of school and begin teaching from the rote memory of their first day one year ago, it is better practice for a teacher to review and consider all the steps and processes of instruction before day one.  Getting the rust off means a teacher expends the time and effort to reconsider the first curricular units of the new school year in terms of what the teacher needs to do each class session to cause all children to learn.  Reconsidering the uses of explicit instruction is a good way to rub off the rust.

Key questions:

What do children already know?  The purpose of direct instruction is not “how to tell students what they are to learn”, but determining what students already know, what they need to learn, and the best way to deliver that new learning.  Decisions about telling, demonstrating, inquiring about, or experiencing individually or in groups come after determining what needs to be learned.

Who are these children?  What are their strengths and challenges as learners?  Which children are new to our school and need social acclimation as well as instruction?  What assumptions about these children can a teacher make with confidence?

How will new learning be chunked into teaching/learning in small enough amounts so that all children can successfully process their instruction?

How much engagement time is needed for all children to successfully learn a chunk of instruction?  This is pacing.  Most teachers and students want to “get at it” quickly in the first days of school.  Pacing new learning is essential to assure that getting at it creates successful learning.

How will I know that all children are proficient in their new learning?  Much of formative assessment is observational – seeing and hearing children in the processes of their learning.  Some of formative assessment is quizzing.  Getting the rust off is rebalancing a teacher’s confidence in observing students at work to know if they are being successful or need reteaching or different teaching to be successful.

The Practice of Rehearsal

We rehearse many things consciously and unconsciously.  I would not make a golf shot without taking several practice swings to understand the terrain of the ground, the lie of the ball, the bottom of my swing arc, and the way I want to hit the ball.  I mentally phrase many responses to questions prior to speaking or writing to ensure I am focused on the question, have facts to support what I say or write, and can deliver my words in a tone that fits the occasion.  Rehearsals, physical, cognitive, and emotional, provide assurance that what is to be done or said is targeted and purposeful.

The theory of rehearsal says that when a person reviews what is needed and preliminarily practices a delivery of what is needed, the delivery may not be perfect, but it will be a faithful representation of the best the person can deliver.  And that is what getting the rust of teaching skills is all about.

Last school year I stood in a classroom doorway watching an elementary teacher prepare for teaching a lesson.  She talked aloud but softly as she told herself the objectives of the lesson, what she and her students had done the days before, and the new instruction she would teach this day.  She checked her laptop to assure the presentation of new information was queued up.  She checked a stack of handouts she would give to students.  She repeated the outcomes she would look for by the end of the lesson.  Lastly, she said the names of two students she needed to check frequently and give more assistance.  She was in a rehearsal zone and unaware she was being watched.  At the end, she smiled; she was ready.

I have observed chemistry teachers laying out a lab, writing teachers keying in on a complete versus incomplete sentence structures, PE teachers rehearsing the flexibility exercises they would teach, and math teachers reviewing problem solutions on a screen – each one practicing purposeful rehearsals before students arrived for instruction.

The Big Duh!

As it is true that we get what we settle for, the quality of student learning we get is a direct reflection of the quality of teaching we provide.  Teachers are professional educators with the skills to deliver high quality lessons.   Rehearsing instructional skills prior to teaching better ensures the opportunity to use very sharp teaching skills.

Liberal Arts: The High School Curriculum for Our Future

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A college liberal arts education is a dinosaur, a creature of the past.  Because the cost of college today means an earned degree must pay for itself quickly after graduation, college is not about learning for life but for a livelihood.  Our last best chance to assure future adults acquire the broad knowledge needed for life and lifelong learning is a high school curriculum designed as a liberal arts education.

High tuition costs and the prospect of lengthy debt payments is the number one cause for current declines in college and university enrollments.  The value of a college education is not what it used to be; no longer is college the gateway to the American Dream.  Marketability is more important than a major.  Thus died the liberal college education, a broad and balanced course of study.  Because a major now begins in the college freshman year, high school curriculum is the foundation and last bastion of a liberal arts education.

School boards need to pay attention for this essential reason: the last instruction our future adults will receive in US history, US government, world history, the general sciences, non-technical mathematics, non-technical writing and speaking, literature, the arts, and so-called soft skills will be in your high school classes.  A high school education, more than ever before, will be the common denominator for Americans to understand America and what it means to be an American.

What do we know?

Our Founding Fathers valued an educated and informed population.  Thomas Jefferson emphasized the need for a literate and informed voter if the United States experiment in democracy and representative government were to succeed.  Correspondingly, America’s first colleges and universities, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virginia, emphasized a liberal and rounded education.

“The liberal arts college model took root in the United States in the 19th century, as institutions spread and followed the model of early schools like Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.  The model proliferated in the 19th century; some 212 small liberal arts colleges were established between 1850 and 1899.  As of 1987, there about 540 liberal arts colleges in the United States.”

“Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional or vocational curriculum.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college#:~:text=The%20liberal%20arts%20college%20model,as%20liberal%20arts%20colleges%20today

For many years, Wisconsin had one of the finest public-university systems in the country.  It was built on the Wisconsin Idea: that the university’s influence should not end at the campus’s borders, that professors and the students they taught should ‘search for truth’ to help state legislators write laws, aid the community in technical skills, and generally improve the quality of life across the state.

But the backbone of the idea almost went away in 2015, when Governor Scott Walker released his administration’s budget proposal, which included a change to the university’s mission.  The Wisconsin Idea would be tweaked.  The ‘search for truth’ would be cut in favor of a charge to ‘meet the state’s workforce needs’”.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/the-liberal-arts-may-not-survive-the-21st-century/577876/

“As faculties and administrators become more and more uncertain about the value of knowledge for its own sake and about what a curriculum should include, the colleges’ dependence on the whims of their late teenager clientele is not only increased, but the very reason for the continued existence of the liberal arts college is being whittled away.”  “In the decades since, fears about the demise of liberal arts education have been routinely reiterated, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession, as college applicants grew increasingly concerned about the number of job opportunities yielded by their degree.  Advances in technology have also spurred predictions about the decline or death of the liberal arts — ChatGPT being the latest.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-problem-facing-liberal-arts-education-is-not-subject-matter-its-application/

At a micro level, “Kovach (a student considering an English major as a preparation for a career in theater and the arts) will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all and ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major

The problem of indebtedness after graduation and a new concept as to the purpose of a collegiate education radically changed the perception of and interest in a liberal arts education.

What is a liberal arts education?

“The goal (of the liberal arts) is to become broadly educated, well-rounded members of society that can understand lots of different domains of knowledge, learn how to learn, and have a specialization of sorts,” says Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO of Great College Advice, a college admissions consultancy with offices across the U.S.

Most liberal arts colleges do not offer separate professional education programs, such as business and engineering schools, which are designed to give students specialized training for specific professional practice.”

A liberal curriculum includes many academic disciplines, especially the skills of communications, writing proficiency, analytical thinking, and leadership skills.  Often, a second or third language and courses in the humanities are included.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018-12-07/what-a-liberal-arts-college-is-and-what-students-should-know

In the 1950s and 60s when ex-servicemen enrolled in college under the GI Bill and growing numbers of women found opportunities for a college education, a liberal arts education was a popular course of study.  Graduates were proud of their BA with a major in the liberal arts.  English majors provided insurance that company communiques were correctly written.  History and political science majors provided insight into community and state leadership.  The liberal arts also were a foundation and springboard for graduate studies.

In past US Census reports most people reporting a college education were graduates of liberal arts colleges or liberal arts programs in state universities.  A broad college education, their last formal education, gave them a basis for understanding America and the world.

Instead of a liberal arts education.

Today the trend is changing.  “According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, US colleges and universities awarded two million bachelor’s degrees in 2018-19.  More than half of these degrees were concentrated in just six fields of study.  Plentiful job opportunities and high entry-level salaries make certain fields more attractive.  For example, business and health degrees account for nearly one-third of all undergraduate degrees.”

The 10 Most Popular College Majors

What is general information?

There is no consensus on what constitutes the basic information of an education.  Every discipline of study has its own answer.  Given this lack of clarity, we can build an understanding of the information a 4K-12 education must generate from the purpose of education and examples of what a lack of correct information looks like.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, “Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex, cooperative activities with other members of their community.”  “Americans are different from Germans, who are in turn different from Japanese, because each group possesses specifically different cultural knowledge.  The basic goal of education in a human community is accumulation, the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or polis”.

A public education should, among other goals, educate children to understand the history, culture, and working mechanisms of their country, state, and local community.  If not, children are aliens in their own land.

The following are examples of what a lack of or misunderstanding of general information looks like.

• More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the Constitution. 

• More than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington, or President Obama. The quote is from Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.” 

• More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and half of respondents believed that either the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the War of 1812 occurred before the American Revolution. 

• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of popular resistance to British colonial rule. 

• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote. 

• More than half misidentified the system of government established in the Constitution as a direct democracy, rather than a republic – a question that must be answered correctly by immigrants qualifying for U.S. citizenship.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/americans-vs-basic-historical-knowledge/340761/

Some may consider general information to be trivia or clues on TV’s Jeopardy show.  But accurate and complete understanding clears up so many misinterpretations and misstatements that populate everyday conversation.  For example, children cannot speak about global warming without background of the earth’s atmosphere, the world’s geography, and how nature replenishes oxygen and cleans carbon dioxide from the air we breathe.  They cannot engage in conversation about global warming without analytical thinking and problem-solving skills, filters for fact and non-facts, and civil conversation and communication skills.  These are part and parcel to what Hirsch considers our cultural literacy and abilities to use knowledge in engaging with our world.

Drive the point with this fact.  Just 39 percent of American adults can pass a multiple-choice test required for US citizenship.  The passing score is 60 correct out of 100 questions.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-10-12/2-of-3-americans-wouldnt-pass-us-citizenship-test#:~:text=Just%2039%20percent%20of%20Americans,a%20passing%20score%20of%2060.

The big Duh!

Rousseau wrote that children learn best in a natural environment where, as they encounter the need to know, they engage and begin to understand.  Our world is not that natural environment and our children do not exist in Rousseau’s theoretical garden.  Responsible adults must create a public education that prepares all children for adult life and that preparation includes a firm foundation of the knowledge and skills that are within the liberal arts. 

High school is the last opportunity for all children to gain a Jeffersonian education for an informed citizenry.  High school graduation requirements are the last stipulation for ensuring all children have a broad yet appropriately deep knowledge and use of skill sets in literature, history, the sciences, mathematics, the arts, second languages, and the soft skills of reading, writing, analytical thinking, reasoning, and argumentation.  These four years set the foundation for what a graduate will say “I was taught …” for the next 80+ years of life.  Almost all graduates will engage in training and professional development related to their chosen occupations and avocations.  Equally, almost none will re-engage in the curriculum of 4K-12 education.  That door closed.  We must ensure that when a high school graduate closes her 4K-12 door, she possesses a liberal arts foundation that will serve for the rest of her life.

We are what we appear to value.  Reading Proficiency and Censorship.

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Simultaneously the Wisconsin legislature is considering a bill to improve reading instruction for all children and a bill to limit what schools can provide for children to read.  Two bills each with its own perspective on how the state should fulfill its commitment to educating children.  One bill attempts to apply the best practices of the science of reading to ensure all children can be proficient readers.  One bill tells schools to limit what they provide for children to read and see.  Each bill uses the power of the state to transform how schools impact children.  Each bill is an expression of what we value.

What do we know?

Our WI constitution says the state is responsible for establishing and supervising public education.  State statute 118.01(2) outlines the state’s educational goals.  These include instruction in 118.01(2)(a) the basic skills of reading, arithmetic, listening, writing, and speaking, analytical skills to think rationally and solve problems, a body of knowledge in literature, fine arts, and the natural sciences, skills and attitudes for lifelong intellectual activity, and knowledge in computer science including the social impact of computers.

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

What is being proposed?

Representative Joel Kitchens is spearheading Assembly Bill 321 to improve child literacy by creating an Office of Literacy, focusing teacher prep programs on science-based reading instruction, establishing and funding literacy coaching, and standardizing early literacy screening through grade 3 assessments.  Equally important to the use of phonics-based reading is the ban on schools from using three cueing strategies in teaching children to read.  Every child in 4K-grade 3 will be taught how to decode words and encode sounds – to read and write independently.  Each child will be taught the mechanics of literacy and strategies for building vocabulary.  A child’s ability will no longer be determined by her school’s reading program preferences but by best practice. 

The bill institutes change in teacher education and professional development to ensure that teachers know how to teach phonics-based reading.  Today most teachers do not teach phonics as it was not part of their baccalaureate preparation or their school district’s PD.  Most teachers learned to teach whole language or blended reading strategies dominated reading instruction.  Teachers will learn to teach and be accountable for teaching all children to read using the science of reading concepts and skills.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/related/proposals/ab321

State Senators Andre Jacque, Romaine Quinn, and Cory Tomczyk presented a bill that would cause schools to remove books and material that are “deemed harmful or offensive to minors from public schools and libraries” and “enact policies that ensure minors do not view harmful materials on public computers”.

Under the guise of parent rights to supervise what their children learn, the bill requires schools to publish their curricular materials so that parents may object to what they deem harmful and/or remove their child from that class instruction. 

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/proposals/sb10

One bill supports our educational goals and the other subverts those goals.

I fully agree with Joel Kitchens when he says “Students will succeed by returning to the way most of us learned to read.  I truly consider this to be the most important thing that I ever worked on in the legislature”.  AB 321 advances the educational goals of our state by improving how we teach all children to read. 

Senate Bill 10 contradicts our educational goals to provide all children with opportunities to consider, think, and become intellectual problem solvers.  It ignores or does not trust the authority of school districts to supervise the materials they provide for children to read and see and experience in school.  Instead, this bill creates a new right for a parent to make that decision not just for that parent’s child but for all children.

SB10 is Wisconsin’s effort to keep up with other conservative-dominated state legislatures with book banning.  If successful, the bill ensures that schoolbooks and materials can be censored by a single parent or small group of parents.  It also places school boards in the bullseye of the issue to ban or not ban books.

https://www.wortfm.org/following-national-trend-wisconsin-lawmakers-introduce-book-ban/

Where is our educational high ground?

As a former school superintendent and school board president, I applaud Assembly Bill 321 and shun Senate Bill 10.  The high ground of public education is to teach children how to think and to resolve issues.  It is low ground to tell children what to think and to insulate them from issues they should, with appropriate instructional support, be able to consider. 

Our state constitution explains the educational goals of a public education in Chapter 118, section 118.01.  118.01(d) says “Each school board shall provide an instructional program designed to give pupils: (8) Knowledge of effective means by which pupils may recognize, avoid, prevent and halt physically or psychologically intrusive or abusive situations which may be harmful to pupils including child abuse and child enticement.  Instruction shall be designed to help pupils develop positive psychological, emotional, and problem-solving responses to such situations and avoid relying on negative, fearful, and solely reactive methods of dealing with such situations.  Instruction shall include information on available school and community prevention and intervention assistance or services and shall be provided to pupils in elementary schools.”

The high ground for our state is to implement the goals of its statutes.  Schools must constantly improve how we teach children while we constantly are vigilant regarding the educational materials we use for that education.  The state constitution gives schools the authority and responsibility to do these, and the role of legislation is to enhance not impede schools.  The constitution commends parents to work with local school boards to understand and advocate for the education of all children.

The high ground for local school boards is to constantly supervise the materials and experiences used to educate its students.   When a challenge arises the board can engage in an appropriate conversation with the conviction that the district has and is meeting its responsibilities for the entirety of our state’s educational goals.  We teach all children to become proficient in basic skills and to consider, think, problem solve and make decisions regarding their school experiences.  We do not teach them what to think or how to value their experiences.