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On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 5

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient public servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

What are ethics? According to dictionary.com, ethics are “the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.” Also, “a system of moral principles.”

Most states have ethical codes for teachers. You can find Florida’s here. It’s subdivided into three categories regarding obligations to students, the public, and the profession.

Florida’s code of educator ethics is based upon the model code developed by the NEA (National Education Association.) It’s based upon an educator’s obligations to students and the profession.

Among the ethical obligations are not to restrain the freedom to learn even that experienced through independent action, to ensure equal opportunity for all, allow access to varying points of view, and not to suppress or distort subject matter so as not to impede a student’s progress in learning.

Living through these dystopian times, aren’t we seeing the subversion of quality education as these ethical obligations are plowed under much as a Deere harvester machine mows, threshes, and leaves the residue behind for a plow to turn under the ground?

Public schools, despite all the attempts to end them, have stubbornly held on. Much of that has come as educators have resisted the reforms that have worked to park students in front of computers for the entire school day (independent action NOT,) resegregate schoolhouses through the use of charter schools and targeted marketing (equal opportunity NOT,) script curriculums and assign test preparation that steer students to the one allowed answer (varying points of view NOT,) and remove books from school libraries, suppress Black history courses, and eliminate anything other than Lost Cause-inspired views of history (suppress or distort subject matter YES.)

“When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.” Educators following the ethical code must maintain their ethical commitments and follow through as necessary.

No one is saying this is easy, but no one is saying that it means being combative or self-righteous as an educator goes about her daily work. Every educator has to determine how to navigate the path they are on. Authoritarians come in many guises and they work on many levels in a district’s bureaucracy. The first thing an educator can do is learn how to recognize them.

Then, resist. Don’t be an obedient public servant. What form and action that takes depends upon an educator and their circumstances. But don’t become complicit and a tool of the forces decimating public education. The ethical commitment to students and the profession demand it.

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On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 4

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and other symbols of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so. (Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, Chapter 4.)

The symbols of hate are around you because our students are as divided as we are. Do not look away.

I’m not going to define for you symbols of hate. You know what they are. But I will share a few memories from my teaching career that show division.

Black Lives Matter did not begin with the killing of George Floyd. The movement came into being after the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Sometime afterward, the clapback began with Blue Lives Matter (police.)

This played out in one of my classes. One boy felt strongly about supporting the police, wore blue silicon bracelets, and other items that made his feelings clear. Other students took exception and muttered in the back of the classroom about how they were offended. It became one more problem for classroom management and keeping the peace.

We were supposed to be the safe school, the one where a large LGBTQ+ community existed and teens could find their people. Yet, there were students on the other side of that culture war. I was always on the lookout for brewing trouble.

Teenagers have a talent whereby they can say things to their peers just loud enough to be heard by their target, but not the teacher. They can act in passive-aggressive ways to stay out of trouble. There was an incident in another classroom where a LGBTQ student was getting more and more upset. The alert teacher realized she was being bullied by the student next to her and moved to intervene.

I have had a student complain about bits of pencil being thrown at him. The offenders were careful to do it in a way that I would not see. Being alerted, I then caught them at it.

The symbols of hate that show up in school are not always tangible. We, as educators, have to be on the alert and not look away. We cannot dismiss divisiveness in our classrooms as not belonging in our subject area, for example, math or science. We have to address it.

Sometimes, that means taking a student aside for a quiet conversation about what they are doing and that it won’t be tolerated. Sometimes, that means a conference to facilitate communication and provide a means for students to understand one another. Sometimes, that means consulting with the school counselors to get a bigger picture. If there’s one adult in the building who has knowledge about the undercurrents, it’s the counselor.

It can mean setting the tone for the classroom and making it a place of mutual respect. At the beginning of every school year, I worked to establish my mathematics classroom as a place where it was okay to make mistakes, even encouraging students to make mistakes because that is how humans learn: experimentation, failure, and reflection on better or different ways to approach a problem.

Students would put solutions to problems on the whiteboard. I never said right or wrong. I asked the class to give feedback. “Do we agree on this solution? Or does someone have an alternative to propose?” The best classes happened when students disagreed on the solution and through the back-and-forth came up with the correct answer.

Hate is best met with openness and discussion with others. This is the approach of restorative justice, a process that some unfamiliar adults condemn, because they do not understand it and what it can and cannot do. That makes it ripe for culture war issues.

The culture wars, a neat little euphemism we’ve used for decades to we can avoid the reality of the division and hatred inherent in the phrase, attitudes, and actions of those who engage.

“Take responsibility for the face of the world.” What we do today sets the stage for what people do tomorrow. If we are to put aside the divisiveness and hate, which is not to say that we cannot disagree on matters of little and great importance, we know what we need to do: tone down the rhetoric, stop trolling on social media, and talk reasonably with others, not hyperbolically.

School is a good place to start.

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On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 3

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Beware one-party states. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. (Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, Chapter 3)

I suppose I could write this post in one word: FLORIDA.

Florida, a state now suffering under super-majority Republican rule, which means the Democrats still in office cannot use the few privileges of a minority party to stop bad laws.

Combine that with a governor who pushed the power and reach of his office to unprecedented levels, who cowed the super-majority into supporting his policies and ambitions, and you have a state beyond the control of the people because the radical Republicans have hopelessly gerrymandered the state into an enduring network of fiefdoms. This despite the fact that Florida has Fair Districts Amendments in its constitution. See here for an explanation of how the amendments work and the shenanigans that followed.

I am disappointed in the impotence, ineffectiveness, and incompetence in the current Democratic leadership to form an effective opposition to Republican steamrolling both nationally and statewide. I have been ready to switch my registration back to NPA, but then I thought, if I live in a one-party state, maybe I should grit my teeth and register Republican because the real choice to be made is in the primary.

But I cannot stomach that thought or take that action. In the afterlife, I don’t want to have to explain why I got into bed with devils.

What has been the effect of this one-party state, one with the most extreme of radical educational reformers destroyers?

  • Unlimited vouchers most of which now go to people who already were paying for the children to attend private or parochial schools.
  • Book-banning in which the school library is restricted to only those books that contain the correct thinking.
  • Abstinence-only sex education for adolescents, which has been shown to impair health and increase unwanted pregnancy.
  • A testing regime that goes on and on even when it has lost its purpose.
  • The casting aside of elected officials on the flimsiest of excuses, a phenomenon that cannot have escaped the notice of elected school board members.
  • A state school board made up of sycophants and toadies, whose only purpose is to serve coffee and donuts and receive marching orders written on napkins.
  • A take-over of universities, all for the purpose of purging academic freedom that goes back 1000 years to the first centers of education and for pillaging the finances and rewarding presidents, whose only qualification consists in shouting, “Hear, here,” to the governor.
  • A state mired in mediocre or worse academic achievement in its schools no matter how loudly it blasts the success of the Florida model.

Beware one-party states, America. Don’t be Florida.

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On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 2

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Defend Institutions. It is institutions that help us preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after another unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about–a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union–and take its side. (Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, Chapter 2)

Snyder teaches us from history that authoritarian leaders who have come to power through institutions seldom eliminate them. They change them from within to support their program.

Isn’t that what’s happened to public education? Men like JEB! Bush, Ron DeSantis and Richard Corcoran (in your own state, you will find suitable names to substitute,) organizations like the Heritage Foundation, Fordham Institute, and other think tanks (too many to list them all,) did not set out to abolish public schools. They sought to change them into something different, something that would support their ideas about how education should be delivered.

First, they changed the environment in which public schools operated. They took a developing institution that was meant for experimentation to find better ideas for schools and turned it into a profit-churning machine. I’m speaking of charter schools.

They convinced the parents and society-at-large that public schools were failing and then, when charters performed and still perform worse, they shifted to convince everyone that parents should have a choice, but a choice funded by taxpayer dollars who then had no choice over how their money was spent.

It was not a pivot; it was a developing narrative to achieve change from within and to transform the institution of public education into supporting the greater aims of the reformers, which we are now only seeing in such efforts as Project 2025.

Once parents and others believed that they had the right to choose and the right to force taxpayers to fund their choice, they moved on to their next steps. You might think I’m talking about vouchers for private schools, but I’m not. That’s part of the plan, but they have something greater in mind.

They were coming for the schools; they were always coming for the schools. Schools are places of learning, where children learn their history, learn about others, and discover themselves. Schools instill values, it’s inherent in what they do, and across the many decades of existence, those have been the values of democracy.

If the authoritarians and throw-back-to-antebellum years thinkers were to be successful, they had to convert schools into teaching their values. So first, they came for the teachers.

They introduced VAM scoring, a complicated formula that no one understood and created a mess that brought lawsuits and suicides. Not that they were bothered by that.

They mandated that teacher performance would be determined by a flawed-at-best testing system dominated by corporations trying to turn a buck out of the demand for accountability.

They undermined the longstanding system of school accreditation, a system that might have needed reform but did not need annihilation.

After convincing too many people that teachers were lazy and greedy, they moved on to call them indoctrinators and groomers.

First they came for the teachers, because teachers were the first and most fervent defenders of the institution of public education. But individuals were well regarded by parents, so they turned their fire upon teacher unions, as if those unions were anything more than groups of individual teachers organized to look out for their interests.

As everyone does.

Next, they came for the curriculum. CRT, DEI, all red herrings to disguise the real purpose–that public schools, still the runaway choice of most parents–of determining what children will and will not be taught.

The institution of public education remains under attack, but not for demolition. They seek to convert it into a tool of their means.

Defend it as if the next generations depend upon it. They do.

NPE, the Network for Public Education, will gather in Columbus, Ohio next month. They are the greatest collection of the defenders of the institution. If all works out, I’ll be able to post in real-time what’s taking place.

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On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Do Not Obey In Advance. (Yes, unless you spend no time on the internet and social media, you are well aware of this sentence. But if you are not, then you can’t possibly be reading this.)

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. (Emphasis mine.)

At the beginning of this series, we must go back to the beginning and that takes us back to the test. First, there were the standards and then there was the test. The standards were meant as a guide and tests to check how well the standards were working. But a chain by any other name is still a chain and that’s how that story turned out.

It wasn’t long until the tests became known as high-stakes, a term perhaps borrowed from a poker game, which would be appropriate as annual test results made or broke careers not only for teachers, but for administrators and superintendents as well. As time went on, because students showed little interest in these tests, they were made the basis for promotion and graduation.

Then, JEB! Bush (May his name live in infamy) used the tests to grade schools. Schools shifted their focus from student learning to student test results, a movement they disguised by calling it student achievement.

Some teachers resisted; others gave in. They didn’t have to, but there’s something about the prinicipal–when extension 103 comes up on the classroom phone and you know it’s a direct call–calling and we go back to our own school days when getting called to the office was the scariest thing ever.

It’s easy to collapse. What do ‘they’ want? I have to give it to them. They want high test scores? I’ll do what I need to without being asked. But a citizen teacher who adapts in this way is telling power what it can do.

I knew of a teacher once who came from a state far away from Florida. When she first arrived, her attitude was ‘what the hell is wrong with you people and your state and your obsession with testing?’ Yet a year later, that was her focus. If you walked through the hallway with her, she would comment on students, “He’s a 2. She’s a 4. There’s a 1.”

The students no longer had names. They had become numbers to her, numbers derived from test results.

When I arrived at the school a year earlier, the principal came for his post-observation conference. Every teacher new to a school, no matter how long their years of experience, must have an observation within 30 days. They were also enrolled in the new teacher mentorship, no matter how long they had worked in the district, until dismissed by power that they did not belong there.

I was not going to have any of this groveling before the Big P. I set the stage by welcoming his feedback but as an equal, a co-educator interested in true student learning. He did his part by explaining how I could achieve a highly effective rating in his school. As the conversation went on, he began to grasp that I did not give a damn about that rating, that my reflection on my teaching practices and my assessment of my performance was what mattered, but I also welcomed honest feedback from others that would help me be a better teacher.

Two years later, he told me in a conference that I was one of the few teachers in his building who truly cared about the craft of teaching.

This is not supposed to be a brag piece. It’s easy to game the system, show power what it can do, and produce phony-baloney numbers.

Math is vulnerable to this especially with multiple choice answers. Algebra 1 students excel at the beginning of the year before they have learned any algebra in getting test questions correct because they have learned the plug and chug: try out the answer choices and find the one that works. They have no idea how to solve an equation and in their view, they don’t have to. Plug and chug works just fine.

ELA, under the vaunted Common Core that lives on under various new brands, became as bad. Over the years, I observed students taking the state test not bother to read the passages or sources. They went right to the questions to see what they needed for a response, and then scanned through the material to find their response.

From a student viewpoint, why not? After all, when an end-of-course exam score of 28% is a pass, why bother doing the hard work?

When a student does no work in a class, learns nothing, and fails authentic assessments and the teacher thereby fails him/her for the class, but the student games their way to a pass on the state test so the district changes their course grade to a Z*, why resist?

*A Z means the F remains a part of the GPA calculation, but they have received the credit for the course they need to count to their graduation requirement.

A lot has gone wrong with education over the last 30 years, much or most of it began with the test. Teachers must recognize the test is meaningless. Oh, it’s easy when a teacher does well and wants to say, “The test is bad, but I played power’s game and I beat them using their own rules.”

But did they? Or are they validating power’s methodology? Power wins regardless.

I’m not advocating for teachers to ignore the chains of the educational reforms that have strangled the profession. We all have those moments of our lives where we are vulnerable to financial disaster if we lose our jobs.

But we can teach power, i.e. districts and state authorities, what it cannot do and that is that they can make us have a concern about test results, but they cannot make us engage in educational malpractice. We can teach authentically and enrich the lives of Marco, Shaniqua, Tho Bien, Jerry, and Sharon. Yes, they have names.

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Catfight

Control of the litter box is very important.

When there’s a change in power on a school board, the hope of the electorate is that they have chosen serious people who will focus on issues of importance, the ones on which they based their vote.

Sometimes, it doesn’t work out that way.

In the latest news from Duval County, FL, the school district where I worked for 18 years before retiring and still live, the school board members are feuding over travel reimbursements.

In December, the Board approved the travel of five members to the School Boards for Academic Excellence conference. Much has been written about the SBAE and there’s no need to rehash it. Suffice it to say they are another start-up group with right-wing views and cultural grievances. To read a little about what the conference was like, check out Accountabaloney’s report on her attendance.

It was a controversial decision. Here’s the screenshot from the Board minutes:

Interestingly, SB Member Blount voted against the reimbursement even though he was one of the members registered to attend the conference.

At the latest meeting, Member Willie asked for approval for travel to attend the Council of Great City Schools, an organization with which the school board has a long-standing relationship and has recently appointed Mr. Willie to its executive committee.

While most boards would celebrate the recognition of one of its members as worthy of a leadership post, Chairperson Joyce disagreed. She announced she would vote against all travel for Mr. Willie to attend meetings.

We call this tit-for-tat. While this petty behavior is disappointing for the top leader of the school system to indulge in, it is not surprising. Ms. Joyce ran her first campaign as the friend of public education in the race stressing her employment in a local middle school versus her opponent who was an outspoken supporter of charter schools.

However, when Ms. Joyce was elected, one of her first votes was to authorize a new charter school that was woefully unprepared to operate a school. Her explanation? Her husband told her to vote yes on the application.

As she continued down the path of public bad, private good, she explained it’s what her voters wanted. (Gotta call BS on that. It’s not what THIS voter wants; I live in her district.)

Now, not satisfied with denying Mr. Willie’s travel, she plans to end the district’s participation in the Council of Great City Schools altogether. She will vote no in the coming months against renewing the membership.

This is Level 4 conflict, a concept that needs a full post of its own. Suffice it to say, she won’t be satisfied with winning on the issue leaving Mr. Willie the loser, she wants to pull the district out of the Council altogether.

With a $100,000,000 budget shortfall, building closures and resetting neighborhood boundaries, crowded schools and schools under 50% capacity, schedule changes, class size issues, and more, it is strange for the board to get caught up in ‘spat about travel.’ (I put the words in quotes because it is the headline for the article that prompted this post.)

Parents, students, and community members deserve better.

Posted on by grumpyoldteacher · 3 Comments

Cold As Ice: Update #2

The contagion spreads. Last week, I described a new policy issued on a pre-emptive basis for what Duval County (FL) Public Schools should do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows up at the door. Then, the School Board’s attorney explained his reasoning for issuing his memo establishing the new policy, which resulted in an update. But it seems this will be the never-ending story and thus, a never-ending series.

From Florida Today, as reposted by the Florida Times-Union: Six central Florida school districts have issued their own policies regarding what to do if ICE shows up. Spoiler alert: it’s worse than Duval. The six districts are Brevard, Orange, Volusia, St. Lucie, Osceola, and Seminole.

  • Verify ICE agent’s identity via badge, photo ID, or business card. (Business card?! As in all it takes is a trip to a local print shop in order to gain access to schoolchildren?)
  • Warrants are not needed for ICE to gain access to a campus, although agents must sign in and out following visitor procedures in the front office.
  • Administrators should attempt to contact parents before agents interview their child, but if the agents tell the school not to, they shall comply with the order.
  • Administrators should attempt to remain in the room during the interview, but if the agents order them to leave, they shall comply with the order.
  • If a child is arrested, the parents should be informed immediately, except in Brevard, which says that is the responsibility of the law enforcement agency, which in this case would be ICE. In St. Lucie and Osceola, if ICE directs the school not to notify parents, that should be documented.
  • St. Lucie, Volusia, and Seminole districts warn employees that they are subject to arrest or other legal consequences if they do not follow the directions given to them by ICE.
  • A subpoena or court order is needed for ICE to access student records.

Credit to Finch Walker of Florida Today, who investigated and wrote the story. (Sorry for the paywall, but the USA Today chain does not give subscribers the ability to gift articles like the New York Times or Washington Post.)

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooo, school employees are told to follow ICE orders even if not legal or they will end up in the slammer themselves. As for the children, they have the right not to answer questions and request a lawyer, but, as an ACLU lawyer notes, that’s really hard for someone so young to do as they are conditioned to follow the directions of adults and answer questions, especially on school campuses.

It’s hard to say where this is going. Most of what’s been done and publicized by the new administration has been for show. In reality, detention centers are full, the Trump-derided-as-catch-and-release (a fisherman’s conservation principle) policy is still being followed, and ICE lacks by magnitudes the resources needed to carry out what the Trump campaign bragged what it would do on its first day.

However, it is alarming that these school districts are falling into line ahead of an actual need. They signal they are ready, able, and willing to help deny the rights of children, all children regardless of immigration status, to a free and appropriate public education.

As for now, due to a 1990 court case between the Florida State Board of Education and various advocacy groups, schools are not allowed to ask immigration status when enrolling children, schools may not refer students to ICE, and, as noted, may not deny educational services based upon immigration status.

I wonder how long that will last.

Posted on by grumpyoldteacher · 3 Comments

Cold As Ice

Long before ‘Ice, Ice, Baby,’ this was the quintessential song:

Please, please, Facebook algorithm, I’m sharing a YouTube video, not impersonating.

What a field day we could have with the lyrics! But this piece is about the legal advice recently given to principals in my local school district, Duval County Public Schools (FL), and while this post may embarrass them, which the Board is turning into a fireable offense, I am retired and beyond their reach.

What should school officials do if ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) show up at the door demanding access to students?

The legal department issued a memo that outlined the approach school employees should take: ICE agents are law enforcement officers; therefore they should be accommodated no different than what the school system would do for JSO (Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office) officers.

  • Allow them to come onto school property. They do not need a warrant.
  • If they ask to speak to a specific student, accommodate them but remember to notify the student’s parents immediately, stay with the student until the parents arrive, and remain present during the interview.
  • If they ask to speak to a group of students, call the legal department.
  • If they ask for access to student records, protect student rights. Call the legal department.
  • Do not give an exclusive listing of ELL/ESOL students. Any requests must include all students whose parents have not opted out of public directory listings.

Soooooooooooooooooooo, pretty much, go into a CYA approach and notify the legal department. There are no assurances about what actions they will or will not take.

To date, we are reassured, there has been no ICE activity in our county’s schools. But if you think that Stephen Miller and his minions haven’t figured out the schools are a weak point when it comes to resisting unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, we still have some worthless Florida swamp land for sale.

As with the tariffs, even the threat of ICE action has a detrimental effect. Canadians have pulled American imports off their store shelves as they refuse to purchase them. If you want a historical parallel, think back to 1983 when the Soviets shot down a South Korean plane that strayed over Sakhalin Island and, in response, American bars poured their stocks of Stolischnaya vodka down the sink.

Teachers across the land are reporting that some students have stopped coming to school out of fear of ICE arrest or detention or that while at school, their parents will be taken and they will come home to an empty house. (I’d love to show social media screenshots or cite sources, but well, you know that in cases like these anonymity is best. Do your own research if you don’t trust me.)

Is it time to cue the biennial NAEP hysteria about falling test scores and American students falling behind? It’s hard for children to learn when they don’t feel safe. Since January 20, there have been mistakes including challenging the citizenship of Puerto Ricans on the mainland because they were overheard speaking Spanish. But we are told that “there are no free passes anymore.”

It’s not a new problem. We are hearing about ICE deporting U.S. citizens, but this has been happening for a while. “Oops, my bad,” is not sufficient for getting this wrong. What child carries a copy of their immigration papers daily into school just in case? Are we becoming Soviet Russia, where every one of us has to carry an internal passport to leave our houses?

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me; hinder them not for to such belongs the Kingdom of God.”

What would he say today? Perhaps this: “You’re as cold as ice, you’re willing to sacrifice our love. You never take advice, someday you’ll pay the price, I know. I’ve seen it before …”

Someday we’ll pay. It begins with the children. What’s missing in that DCPS memo is what the principal should do when ICE says this child is illegally in the United States and we’re taking them with us. But hey, call legal.

Addendum: Since the original publication of this post, more has been learned:

Update : Duval County School Board attorney explains his rationale.

Update : Six Central Florida school districts have issued their own policies.

Posted on by grumpyoldteacher

Burn! (as That 70s Show Used to Say)

Wry humor, but with a kernel of truth. Often overlooked, safety is a huge consideration when parents try to choose a school for their children.

As we move into the third (or is it fourth) decade of school degradation and the end goal comes in sight, the charter wars have transmogrified into the voucher wars. Neither option is good for the preservation of a free and appropriate education for all children, but this is where we are as the second Trump administration takes hold of the levers of federal power.

As public education advocates continue to point out the issues and problems with using public money, that is, your tax dollars, to pay for private education that not all children can access, which include bankrupting state treasuries, first amendment issues as state resources are handed over to religious institutions, and the quality of education being provided … strange how the calls for school accountability die down when it comes to private education … all of which is appropriate and necessary, but are we forgetting a basic precept? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

No English teacher will sleep tonight as they hash over whether the above paragraph is a run-on sentence or not.

But that’s not Maslov. It’s a joke intended to make you smile before we dive into the gist of this piece.

I remember days gone by when parents would come into the school office griping about the school grade, “Wow. They have really bought into that BS.” And then trying to tell them about why the school is a good place for their children. Chief among those reasons are that we keep them safe.

I can’t speak for elementary, but when it comes to making the middle school transition, parents care less about academic quality, testing, and school grades than they do safety, fairness and equality (all kids are treated the same,) transportation, and food.

If you are on a level or in a stage of life where you can battle over funding and who’s getting it, I applaud you. You are doing good work to demand that states stop defunding public education.

But if you are a local teacher, administrator, or a low-level district staffer whose job is always on the chopping block of budget shortfalls, focus on that bottom level of the pyramid.

  • Will my child be fed or go hungry?
  • Will you provide reliable transportation?
  • Will my child be safe from bullying, fights, and other hazards of gathering hundreds of children into a building where only a few dozens of adults provide supervision?

If you can provide satisfactory answers to questions like these, parents will flock to your school to enroll their children. The fight to save public education will not be won at school board meetings, legislative town halls, or in the many avenues of opining.

It happens with each parent, one by one, to assure them that we care for their children as much as they do.

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The Five Musketeers

One for all and all for one … and in a modern update, One in Five, a Texas-based foundation that grew out of the Uvalde tragedy to help patrol schools and head off problems that show up on the sidewalk outside.

Musketeers without muskets, they want to patrol the perimeter of schools to stop violence.

They have a full mission, which can be found here. It’s well worth the two minutes of your time to click on the link and acquaint yourself with their desire to do it all when it comes to preventing school violence and dealing with the aftermath, not to mention their agenda and the laws they want passed.

This piece deals with this part of their self-assigned mission: “The Foundation works as well to actively provide additional security and safety training resources to enhance a schools individual security; for example situational awareness & uniquely, student organized, active shooter training & prevention.”

Why? Because they are coming to Duval County Public Schools, uninvited and unbidden, to address gang violence in high schools, in particular, Ed White and Mandarin High Schools. This is a response to recent fights taking place among groups of students.

According to the One in Five Foundation, “This in an effort to address the seemingly rising gang activity and to increase student safety throughout campus district neighborhood & provide additional community support for students, faculty, parents & school. Foundation officials say that it believes gang conflicts amongst several students of at least 4 separate district schools, including Ed White HS, are increasing off Campuses and spilling into campus conflicts and must be addressed immediately.“

Unfortunately, although this group may have a sincere desire to help, they are taking this action unilaterally. Neither the school district nor the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office have had any contact with them. Efforts by school officials to contact the group and find out what they have planned have been unsuccessful.

No one knows what a group of unknown individuals, dressed in some type of uniform, think they can do standing outside a school on a public sidewalk. But they believe they can do some kind of good never mind the fact that most students arrive on campus via bus or car and they will be on the campus, not crossing the sidewalk or that, without some type of official recognition or established relationship with students, the adolescent mentality will wonder, “Who were those creepy, weird-a$$, mofos on the sidewalk?”

As for the adults, we will wonder why they are bothering. If they have not been invited by district officials and are unknown to local law enforcement, doesn’t that make them vigilantes?