Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Stand out. Someone has to. It’s easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Speak up for students. Someone has to. It’s easy to pretend they are data points and these days, it can feel strange to do or say something different. Do it anyway. Break the spell. Let others follow even as you know many will not. But why should that stop you?

Every teacher who has worked in a public school setting has sat through dreary meetings that endlessly chew over student test results (code word: data,) that promote the trick-of-the-month (code phrase: admin spent school money to go to a conference and has to justify the expense,) or that require teachers to do nothing more than keep their mouths shut as district personnel tell them what to do (code phrase: I hate kids. Never going back to the classroom.)

Speak up for the students. Keep it professional; don’t give in to the impulse to make it personal or get upset. Stay focused on what counts–>student learning and growth, true learning and growth, and dismiss the flawed proxy of test results.

As said in a previous post in this series, this doesn’t mean being combative or going postal. It means speaking up when it’s needed.

Many years ago, I sat in a shared-governance meeting and one of the topics was student tardiness to class. Lots of brainstorming took place along punitive lines. What do we do to students when they are late to class so they will be on time?

I wasn’t a member of the committee and sat silently until the debate reached a lull. Moreover, this was my first year at this school. My goal that year was to keep my head down and build relationships in the building. But I raised my hand. “Am I allowed to speak?”

The chair, a fellow teacher and building rep for the union, said yes.

“Let’s look at gym class. My building has planning that period. The P.E. teachers send the students into the lockers early enough to shower and change and then wait for the bell to signal the next class. Except we have turned off the bells.

“They don’t know when to go to class. There’s no clock in the waiting area. Some of them come into the building only to be yelled at that it’s not time yet and go back to the P.E. area. They comply.

“Waiting around, they do what kids do: play, gather in groups, talk, laugh, and horse around. They are not keeping track of time and again, there is no clock for them to look at.”

“Then, someone yells at them to go to class. They are late. Teachers grumble and threaten referrals for being tardy. But how are the students supposed to know that?”

It’s not easy for me to speak up and confront people. I’m not psychologically built that way. It’s a lot easier to write and post 🙂 But somebody had to say something.

My last principal took note how my nervousness showed through in the sound of my voice. But in his view, that gave me authenticity, what I was willing to suffer in order to speak an unpopular view. It gave me more authority, not less, as an educator speaking out for students.

When somebody has to say something, stand out. Be that person. You may not have an appreciative administrator, but do it anyway. Set the example, break the spell, and see those who will follow.

P.S.: After that meeting, many people came to me to express their appreciation for what I said regarding the tardy students. The most common comment was, “Awesome.” Others do follow.

Reflections on the short yet deep book of Timothy Snyder.

Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

I don’t know when School Resource Officers showed up in high schools, then middle schools. I do remember when my district’s SROs were given elementary schools to which they would pay random, unannounced visits. That was in the aftermath of Parkland, which took place in February 2018.

The role of the SRO is to enforce the law. In reality, the SRO has a wider role within the school. The best ones use their presence to be visible among the students and cultivate positive relationships. They work with the principal even though they have their own chain of command to answer to. They add another layer of safety when they are doing the job right.

SROs play a detrimental role when they do things like introduce themselves to the faculty by an email announcing that everyone is breaking the law in the way they make a left-hand turn into the parking lot with a citation of a non-existent city ordinance. Also, if they approach their job by sitting in their office all day.

As the law enforcement contact on property, they play a crucial role in determining when to arrest students and assessing threats.

However, because they possess a weapon of lethal force, they must be aware of when its use is necessary, how they would recognize those circumstances, and think ahead about how they would react. We assume that is a part of the rigorous training they undergo.

But what happens when they have to interact with other agencies? With the current administration authorizing ICE agents to go into schools, SROs have to be ready to say no and refuse cooperation if the agents are acting unlawfully.

A few short years ago, state legislatures were enacting laws to allow teachers to carry guns. For any teacher in one of those states who now carries, ponder the words of Timothy Snyder. Why are you armed? When would you draw your weapon? Under what circumstances would you fire your weapon and at whom?

Could you ever find yourself doing “irregular things?” Are you ready to say no?

Search deeply for the answers. There is no human deceit as great as that of self-deceit.

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.

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.