If you have raced with men on foot
and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage
in the thickets by the Jordan?
—Jeremiah 12:5
Despite what my title might suggest, today’s essay is not about the educational costs of the pandemic. I have already written extensively about that topic (see the LoC Archives page for anyone interested), and if you want the most recent data, I suggest checking out the NYT’s article available in the references. In fact, the only thing I will lift up about the latest findings is that we now know that all the school closings had nearly zero impact on slowing the spread of the virus; we could have kept them open and avoided nearly all of the learning damage.
No, what I want to focus on today are some recent developments in the world of education that are worth bringing to everyone’s attention because as I ended my last posting pointing out: we are all in this together. So here goes.
The most recent item to cross my attention was an article this past week about the expense of repairing the educational costs of the pandemic, as well as the—yet again—absence of political will to address it. As all Marylanders (and my regular readers) know, our state has recently legislated and initiated a massive 10-year, eventually $3 billion dollars per year education reform movement called the “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.” In it are requirements to expand public Pre-K schooling for all children ages 3-4 and to provide all schools with high-quality and diverse educators (with an emphasis on National Board Certification). In addition, there are requirements for preparing students for college and career readiness, more resources for low-income students, and the necessary governance and accountability programs to oversee the entire effort.
However, in a state already facing a teacher shortage of 2,000 unfilled positions and now facing a projected revenue shortfall of $255 million dollars in the coming fiscal year, teachers and educational leaders are currently being asked to triage their biggest challenges in implementing the Blueprint before the process has even started. Here we are, in one of the richest states in the richest society in the history of humanity, and we are already shorting the necessary investment in our children because no one wants to state the obvious: you get what you pay for, and in this case, that means additional taxation—America’s “third rail” in politics.
Not that Maryland is alone. The same morning that I read the Blueprint article, NPR had a story on the negative impact that losing the $190 billion dollars in pandemic emergency relief funds from the Federal government will have on schools across the nation. As John Gies, a high school principal in rural Ohio put it, “while those pandemic dollars are running out, the problems the pandemic exploded, like missed learning and a student mental health crisis, are still here…we just really need some help from the government.” Help that all interviewed for the story openly acknowledged is not likely to come, leaving reporter Cory Turner musing at the story’s end:
So what happens now? It seems unlikely that Congress will be in the mood to agree on even more funding for schools. Which means in the coming months, districts across the country will face some hard choices about whether they can afford to keep giving students all the help they need.
All the help they need. Need. Not “help-full.” Not “beneficial.” Not “useful.” Need. As in necessary, critical, vital to their well-being. I know I have written before about how fundamentally anti-child our society is, but as both these news items came to my attention this past week, I was reminded once again of a quote of Barbara Kingsolver’s that bears repeating here: “if it takes a village to raise a child, our children are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home…where we seem to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil” (pp. 102 & 100). Until we see our children in a different light than we currently do, then we will reap what we sow, and right now, I fear we are sowing our own dissolution.
And we seem to be doing so in more ways than one when it comes to what’s happening in the world of education. Another recent item in my in-box was Jessica Grose’s op-ed about a middle school in California where students have employed AI technologies to manufacture false pornographic photos and short videos of their female classmates by taking head shots from existing, decidedly non-pornographic on-line photos and combining them with nude photos and videos from other sources. Of course, the students involved then shared these digitally constructed items with others—making them a permanent part of the lives of both the victims and the victimizers (as well as violating numerous laws)—and all because these children don’t yet have pre-frontal cortices developed enough to know how truly stupid, irresponsible, and harmful they have been. Yet legislation at any level can’t seem to get out of even committee to put guardrails on such technology, let alone simply acknowledge the danger it poses—especially the threat to our children’s very capacity to become healthy adults.
Not that all adults in children’s lives are themselves of sound and rational mind. While we might consider as “sins of omission” the failure to adequately fund schools across this land and to protect developing minds from digital technologies that trigger the same neural pathways as cocaine does, the actions of Escambia County in Florida (home to Pensacola) most definitely could be considered “sins of commission.” There, elected officials have taken upon themselves the “obligation” to “protect young minds” from such “dangerous material” as the following: The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. All of which have now been removed from every school library in the county and placed into storage along with “eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records.”
Fortunately, some sanity still exists in Florida, and two parents in the county—yes, 2! out of a population of 322,390 as of the 2021 census—have joined in a lawsuit against the county school board to return these alleged “hazards” to their schools’ libraries. Hopefully, as Heidi Stevens puts it, “the children of Escambia County [will soon] once again [be] allowed to look upon words.” But even more importantly, they will hopefully be allowed to learn that “definitions are not the enemy. Dictionaries are not the enemy. Thesauruses are not the enemy. Encyclopedias are not the enemy. Knowledge is not the enemy” (my emphasis). What is the enemy is ignorance, “and it should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t: A child is far better served looking up a word—any word—in a dictionary than typing that word into Google, where a world of images, videos and misleading garbage awaits” (Stevens).
Which brings me to my last disheartening development of the past few weeks. This one is strictly anecdotal, but I do not think that makes what happened any less compelling. It was during one of my scheduled meetings with my advisory, and we were playing Pictionary as a way of unwinding right before spring break. It is a favored game of ours, and to make it a little competitive, I divide the group into two teams, with the winning team allowed to decide which confectionary treat I bake for them—which is itself an inside joke because the winning team always chooses my lemon bars—but nevertheless, they can still get quite competitive about it.
Well, on this occasion, the competition was a little more intense than usual, and both teams were trying to pick particularly challenging words for the other to draw. Or more accurately, they were googling on their phones for challenging words to use, and when I saw the terms they were picking, I was stunned. These are 10th graders, most of who are at least 16 years old, and they were needing an on-line search engine to find words that were part of my basic vocabulary by the time I was in 5th grade—vocabulary that I was expected to know and assessed for by the time I was 12. I knew my students of the past decade were not developing the same long-term memory storage banks as in the first two decades of my career, and I had seen the practical consequences of this reality in my classroom. But here, that ignorance—and the degree of it!—was staring me existentially in the face in a way it never has before, and the despondency that settled over me for the rest of the day was profound.
However, it was not my final outcome, nor can it ever be. No matter how disheartening the recent developments in schools, none of us in our society can afford to ignore them nor to be ignorant of them. Anyone who has read my project updates since their inception in the spring of 2020 knows that I regularly use these essays in part to process the realities of teaching in the 21st Century, in part to share these realities to challenge others to action, and in part as an act of hope. The truth is: dispelling the darkness is never easy. But if we do not know the nature of its current character, we cannot know what type of flame to bring to the task. Thus, if any of this essay’s revelations have sparked a response in you, I encourage you to determine how you can fan it into a fire to light your own way forward.
I will keep offering these reflections to keep fanning mine.
Coda
Since I first drafted this essay, two things have happened that bear on it. The first is the tragic collapse of the Key Bridge into the Baltimore harbor. In addition to the pain of the families who lost their loved-ones that morning will come the economic pain that will reverberate in my adopted home for years to come. The region is losing $15 million dollars a day in revenue for every day the port remains closed, and even once re-opened, the impact of rerouting over 10 million cars and trucks annually will be felt for at least a decade (one woman interviewed shared that her commute is now an hour longer, and she will not be alone). The new reality is that in a state already struggling with how to pay for school reforms before this catastrophe, that $255 million shortfall is going to look like a pittance.
Yet, amidst this tragedy, I received an e-mail from a former student of mine from the class of 2010, informing me that her lab team was just selected to build the seismometers going with the astronauts to the Moon on the Artemis III mission in 2026. She was writing to thank me (as well as another friend and former colleague), and in her own words, “you both are the most influential teachers I have had over a *very* long time spent in school, so I wanted you to be the first of my non-space community to know other than my parents. Thank you for getting me here, even if it has been a while. :)”
Now, I do not wish to suggest that these two events are even remotely on the same scale. However, I share them because together they are intimate reminders that life’s journey is fundamentally the paradox of BOTH tragedy AND triumph, and if we spend too much time consumed with one or the other, we lose the necessary balance to navigate our “4,000 weeks” successfully. The same is true of teaching; if I cannot find ways to harmonize the heartening with the disheartening, I lose the ability to engage authentically in the classroom. It is a lesson worth relearning; it is a lesson worth remembering.
I suspect the same could be said of us all.
References
Grose, J. (March 2, 2024) A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/deepfakes-teenagers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.
Haidt, J. (March 13, 2024) End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The Environment in Which Kids Grow Up Today is Hostile to Human Development. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/.
Kingsolver, B. (1995) Somebody’s Baby. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. New York: HarperCollins.
Mervosh, S.; Miller, C.; & Paris, F. (March 19, 2024) What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/upshot/pandemic-school-closures-data.html.
Price, L. (March 20, 2024) School Leaders Outline Effort: Implementing Blueprint Law is Going to be ‘Herculean’ Task. The Baltimore Sun, pp. 1-2.
Schmitz, R. (March 19, 2024) Standardized Test Scores for Teens in Germany are Down. Teachers aren’t Surprised. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1239388574/standardized-test-scores-for-teens-in-germany-are-down-teachers-arent-surprised.
Stevens, H. (Jan. 21, 2024) Now Dictionaries? Do Better, Grown-Ups. The Baltimore Sun (Life & Travel), p. 6.
Turner, C. (March 20, 2024) The $190 billion in Emergency Funds Given to Schools During the Pandemic is Ending. NPR Morning Edition.https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239609135/the-190-billion-in-emergency-funds-given-to-schools-during-the-pandemic-is-endin.
Light a Candle 