It seems early to be thinking about what we’ll be doing in Fall 2121. But that is when experts are predicting that all students may return to school. If we want that to go well, we need to start planning now.

Hope seems so close yet so far away. Vaccines are on their way, but it isn’t always clear when teachers will get them — let alone the majority of our students. …

Over the summer, a flood of stories about entitled white women turned “Karens” into a type and a meme. The term “Karen” emerged partially from African-American communities as a way to discuss how white women can perpetuate racism, use it as a shield and a weapon, and benefit from racist power structures while simultaneously claiming to be unaware of their privilege. Karens are defined as middle class, middle-aged, white women, usually mothers, who are aware of their privilege and weaponize it to use it against people of color. But more broadly, it denotes any time when privileged white women use…

Often, the arguments for basing school funding on test scores has been based on the premise that schools that cannot demonstrate their effectiveness should not receive government funding. Within this capitalistic, zero-sum-game reasoning, test scores become the “bottom line,” serving as a proxy for businesses’ ledgers tallying profits and losses. Test scores — and only test scores — should measure school quality. Schools that cannot demonstrate “success” by this one measure should not continue to be funded.

This argument is tied to efforts to re-segregate schools via charter schools and vouchers for private schools. Many fine churchgoing people have supported…

Red-lining is the practice the FHA and banks used for decades to decide on which neighborhoods were worthy of home loans. In the early-mid 1900’s, they also viewed melanin as contagious, so they identified any neighborhoods with African-American people in red and wouldn’t provide loans for homes in those neighborhoods. Some of those neighborhoods were even later declared “blighted” and seized for freeways, parks, baseball stadiums, etc., through eminent domain.

We often don’t think about how much of the American Dream has to do with access to capital, but Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a strong argument in his already-classic 2014 “The…

“Welcome to McDonalds. Can I have your order please,” my cooperating teacher used to ask facetiously, back when I student taught in 1998, as we discussed parents who seemed to make endless demands. But the analogy isn’t fully apt. Public schools aren’t really like McDonalds. They’re more like Costco.

Like Costco (and unlike McDonalds), public schools excel at providing decent or even high-quality items at the most affordable prices. As with public schools, some products are better quality than others, and some prices are more competitive than others. But overall, Costco provides one of the best ratios of quality to…

The Tragedy of The Commons — When Teachers Are The Commons

“The tragedy of the commons” describes situations in which people share a common resource. Often, since it is in each individual’s best interest to use more than their share of the resource, a resource gets over-used and diminished over time, often to the point where it is no longer useful for anyone. This was originally described in 1833, by William Foster Lloyd, who described a common pasture that was shared by several families. As each family optimized their own economic gain by bringing more cows, the pasture became overgrazed…

I taught 8th grade my first year of teaching. And my mom had cancer. She made it through Christmas, which made for a very fraught and not-at-all-restful Winter Break. Then she lost her battle in late January. On top of that, a persistent injury from working on a trail crew the previous summer meant that I was sometimes teaching in wrist braces on both hands. It was also a strange year at that middle school. The district was building a new K-8 that was going to result in liquidating half the school — but they didn’t tell me this (and…

Look out, you may have missed it. While we teachers have been working overtime to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve just agreed to yet another work speed-up.

We’ve been “stepping up” and “doing what it takes” to continue to provide educational services, even when there has been NO funding for PPE, sanitation, or the technology we’ve been expected to use. We’ve been working unpaid overtime to pivot the classrooms we’d spent years and often thousands of dollars of our own money to convert from desks and bare walls into vibrant learning spaces over to online instruction — sometimes literally…