Education on the Rocks

On past episodes, George and I have talked about how happy most people are with their schools on the local level. Students and parents love their teachers and feel like their schools are headed in the right direction, but that love shifts when they talk about the state of the public school system on regional or national scales. Today, we’re going to talk about the people at the center of that discussion, the classroom teacher. In August, PBS reported that upwards of 20% of all teaching vacancies in the US for this academic year are due to educators leaving the profession entirely. While some attribute this to the “great resignation” that’s affecting the entire workforce, today we’re going to try to understand why teachers in particular are leaving the classroom, as we ask, “Where’s everyone going?”

Off air, George and I have often reminisced about the countless high school teachers who told us in no uncertain terms This will be the most important class of your lives. While we’re sure…if we could remember anything from any of those classes…that we would have ended up in vans down by the river if not for those teachers’ wisdom and, often, strict discipline, for this episode we’re interested in what really prepares students for success as college students. After spending four or more years preparing for college by taking classes, doing homework, creating projects and taking tests on repeat, many students enter college with good grades and good test scores, but they find themselves struggling when they get on college campuses across the country. So, get out your notebooks, create a dialectical journal, and yes, we’re going to need you to find your colored pencils because we’re wondering what schools need to do to prepare students for the realities of their college years.

While George and I remember tasting the paste as we muddled our way through arts and crafts in kindergarten, most people’s school culinary memories are of sitting on benches in crowded cafeterias, trading PB&Js for chocolate pudding, partaking in real or imagined food fights, and, of course, doing battle with the proverbial lunch lady. As the vast majority of American students are headed back to in-person school this fall, we want to open our fourth season talking beyond the classroom as we explore the importance of school lunch programs. Today, despite film depictions of trays of brown sludge and tiny milks, we’re going to discuss how the school lunch is integral not only to fueling our students’ bodies but also their minds.

With Memorial Day behind us and mid-June upon us, students across the country at various levels of education are donning their gowns, decorating their caps, and heading to the biggest arenas on their campuses to graduate. So, for those of you who just graduated or are about to graduate, George and I want to congratulate you and wish you the best of luck on your next steps, whatever they may be. Today, however, we’re talking about what goes on after the ceremonies and after the final bells ring in the summer for students and teachers. Today, we’re talking summer school in all its iterations, as we ask, “Is summer school such a bad thing?”

If, like George and I, you are a product of the American public school system, at one point or another you’ve probably heard of GATE or TAG. While these programs are administered in different ways in different places, they all have one thing in common: they’re tasked with identifying and serving students in our system who are deemed “gifted and talented.” Today, we’re going to talk about these programs and try to understand how they fit into the fabric of our education system as we ask: do we really need a GATE that lets some in and keeps some out of our educational programs?

As we’re coming out of spring break and into the home stretch of academic years across the country for students, teachers, administrators and parents from pre-K to BA, we thought it would be a good time for a thought experiment. Since the enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century, knowledge has become increasingly compartmentalized. In fact, in big high schools across the country, many faculty members may not know teachers outside their departments let alone what those teachers in other subject areas are teaching. Despite efforts to balance student workloads, our children often ping from the most important class of their day to the most important part of their day, which can be overwhelming, disorienting, and exhausting even while it’s inspiring. We’re not sure that’s the way to prepare students for our increasingly complicated world. So today is about wondering what would happen if our education system thought about knowledge holistically as we ask, “what if there were no more math or English or history or science classes?”

Three seasons into Education on the Rocks, we realized that we haven’t spent a moment talking about what happens when teachers aren’t in the classroom. Regardless of our educational experiences, we’ve all spent periods of entire days with substitute teachers. Often these teachers were nameless, their sole titles being any descriptor plus sub. The tired sub, the coffee-drinking sub, the newspaper-reading sub. We’re sure that you’re picturing someone from your educational past who came in to turn on the projector, press play on the VCR, insert the DVD, or started doing magic tricks to prepare for their night gig.

Today, because of increases in teacher absences, substitute teachers are in the news because the country has a shortage of people who can or want to do what we see as one of the oldest, if not the oldest, gig economy jobs in our culture. Today, we’re talking about what happens when the teacher’s gone and the sub’s in-charge and what happens when there aren’t enough subs to staff teacher absences, as we ask: “Is it the cool sub?”

Today, George and I are sitting down to record our 30th episode, and we wanted to thank all of you who listen in as we muse on the nuances of education, education policy, and what it means to be part of the American school system.

As we rang in yet another new year in the shadow of Covid, the Omicron variant, which a couple of months ago we probably would have thought was one of the minor evil superheroes in a Marvel movie, is changing the face of public education. Some schools are wide open. Some are fully remote. And that’s in the same town! In this episode, we’re going to ponder what we should do, as students, as teachers, as administrators in the midst of yet another wave of coronavirus infections, as we ask: how does the American school system recover from the pandemic, even as we’re still living in the pandemic?

Back in the day, George and I spent many nights in our acid-washed jeans with our bleached bangs dancing in our rooms…by ourselves…and one of the songs we loved was “Vacation” by The Go-Go’s. In fact, vacations were “all we ever wanted,” we dreamed about having that “time to get away.”

I know, you’re probably thinking what does your John Hughes film teenage fantasy have to do with education? While you’d be right to think that we often reminisce about our times as students in the 80’s on the pod, today we’re connecting our tangent to our theme.

Between the end of November and the New Year many schools have over 3 weeks of vacation, today we’re talking about what happens when school’s out as we ask, “What’re you doing for vacation?”

Whether in digital or paper form, books have always been a major part of what drives education in the United States. Whether those books are novels or entire curriculums marketed to state assemblies for adoption, books and education are often commingled with politics. Historically, we’ve seen districts and states ban books from classrooms in ways that bring politics and faith into our students’ classrooms. We’re going to take up the knotty issue of reading in schools and how it’s about a lot more than simply worrying about how many pages there are for homework. Today, George and I talk about our experiences with books and schools, the books we’ve read and didn’t read, and the books we’ve taught or elected not to teach, as we ask, “What’s on the syllabus?”

Context:
Today’s episode is inspired by an November 3rd article in The New York Times Education Briefing by Amelia Nierenberg that details the role that Toni Morrison’s Beloved may have played in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial race. Also, we’re drawing on an ongoing campaign by Rep. Matt Krause to inventory over 850 titles in Texas schools, as they might cause students to feel “discomfort.”

Key Questions:
What’s the strangest reading experience you’ve had in school?
What’s the best book you were assigned to read in high school?
What’s the best book that you didn’t read in high school?
Let’s talk about textbook adoption - don’t schools just fill out a scholastic book order as we did in elementary school?
As an educator, have you ever been questioned about readings on your syllabus?
From your experience, why do people choose to challenge reading lists or books?

As children of the ‘80’s, George and I were barraged with images of the shopping mall in movies and on the 5 TV channels we got - the mall was the place to go to see and be seen, and to find everything you needed, all under one massive roof. So, the mall offered a place to socialize, to find the durable goods one needed from corduroys to bestsellers to the latest releases from U2 and Run-DMC, and to eat something deep fried in the food court. Getting in our hot tub time machines, we’re going to teleport back to 2021, a time when one could argue that the mall has been replaced by our public schools. Where schools have always been about more than just the learning, today they are restaurants, transportation hubs, community theaters, sports stadia, vaccine clinics, health centers, and yes there are dances and they even have classrooms. So, today, we wonder about the role of public schools in American society when we ask, “Are our schools trying to do too much?”

Sometime between elementary and high school in the United States, all of us went to middle school. Or did we? Some of you are probably thinking that you went to junior high or that you moved from a lower to an upper school. Or, like my co-host, you found the years so trying that you’ve erased them from your memory. Today, we tackle the middle years in the American public school system, and we’re particularly interested in thinking about what it means to be in 9th grade. For many of us, our 9th-grade year was our freshman year in high school, but in some systems, 9th grade is the final year in middle school, so unlike many aspects of our system, there’s a lot of variability concerning how we should place our 14 and 15-year-olds. Today, we tackle the middle years, as we ask, “You’re in 9th grade, so you’re a freshman, right?!?!”

With Labor Day behind us, schools around the country are welcoming students back to their campuses. Over the past two seasons, we’ve spent a lot of time talking through what it means to be a part of the American public education system during a pandemic, but today we’re going to share the in’s and out’s of starting an academic year. In no other industry that we know of is there a new start every year, and these new beginnings offer their gifts and challenges. Today, we talk about what it’s really like to get the educational machine up and running every fall, as we ask: can we really do this again?

Over the past year-plus, we’ve talked a lot about the challenges our school systems face and how our students are learning and will continue to learn in classrooms both remote and in person. At the heart of all these discussions are the professionals who work with young people across the country. Today, as we approach Memorial Day Weekend, the “finish line” of the academic calendar, we want to talk about those people, our teachers. So, we hope that you join us in conversation, as we ask: who would want to become a teacher?

As spring rushes quickly towards summer, students across the country are trying to figure out what to do with summer months that are likely to be a bit freer than last year, but far from normal. To meet students’ needs, schools are in the process of designing summer opportunities to enrich student learning and to, if we’re being honest, fill in potholes that COVID school has left in their education. This is leaving a lot of people involved in K12 education wondering how they’re going to pull off new programs on very tight timelines, which leads us to think about how innovation functions in the American public education system. So today, we think about the what, when, and how of schools re-inventing themselves as we ask: how do individual schools and entire school systems innovate to meet the ever-evolving needs of their students?

Over the past year, George and I have spent a lot of time discussing how schools and students’ learning have been affected by the pandemic. Today we’re going to think about our schools not so much as places where students learn academic skills and earn grades, but as places that will be vital to helping our students navigate worlds that have been turned upside down for the last 13 months. With so much local and national attention on getting schools open, we want to pause to think about the evolving roles that schools will play in young people’s lives as we ask: how will school balance students’ wellness needs with learning and growth targets?

With the relatively widespread availability of the COVID vaccine in the United States, more and more colleges and universities are making plans to open up in the fall. After having shuttered in-person education for the entirety of the 2020-2021 academic year, college administrators are trying to figure out how to safely bring back tens of thousands of students to campuses across the country. Late last week, Duke University announced that it’s planning to require all students to show proof of vaccination. In a letter to that effect, Vincent E Price, the university president, writes: “With this in mind, we plan to require all new and returning Duke students to present proof of vaccination to Student Health before they can enroll for the Fall 2021 semester. This policy will cover all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students—in all degree programs—who intend to be on the Duke campus for any period of time starting with the Fall 2021 semester. Documented medical and religious exemptions will be accommodated.” So, with this in mind, today we’re going to discuss the connection between vaccination and education, as we ask: should schools require students to be vaccinated in order to attend classes in the fall of 2021?

Almost exactly a year ago, George and I launched this podcast in hopes of talking through, as much for ourselves as for our audience, the myriad factors that shape what public education looks like in the United States. At the time, we were just getting used to platforms like Zoom, platforms that have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. As we’ve passed the one year mark of the COVID pandemic, and while there have been countless educational interruptions and pivots, and business has been anything but usual for everyone in and beyond our schools, students are still going to school and graduating and going to college. So, today, with many of the country’s seniors facing choices about which college they should attend and our juniors, the class of 2022, looking hopefully towards their graduation dates, we’re talking college as we ask: what does it take to “get into” college? And then, even more importantly, what does it take to be a successful college student?

Believe it or not, George and I haven’t always been educational professionals. In fact, we’re both products of the American public school system. While I grew up in the Oregon system and George in California, we both started and ended our K-12 experiences in public schools. Today, we’re going to test our memories as we jump in our mental Deloreans and head back, way back into the 1980s to think about the highs and lows of our lives in public schools. And then, we’ll take those memories and speculate on the future of public education as we ask: Remember when That happened???